“No, qué va. It’s not far.” He stamped the hotel vouchers and handed Frank a guest card and a coupon for his complimentary cocktail at the patio bar.
Frank asked the bartender to make his mojito a double. As he drank, the muscles around his neck slackened. The Havana Club rum, the lime, the fresh yerba buena, and the sugar took him away to a place that was primitive and tropical. Exotic. The musicians fell into a soft romantic song about flowers and love. European perfumes and sweat and the smoke of a distant cigar blended into something reminiscent of his mother’s nostalgia for the Cuba of her youth.
Then a fleeting memory from his own childhood filled his head—playing catch with his father in the backyard, Rosa singing in the kitchen, the family gathered together in the living room. Filomeno laughing.
But it was too quick. The clerk’s words came back to haunt him: it’s not so far. Not so far. For Filomeno, Cuba had been a world away. No country could have been farther from Houston than Cuba, as a place or a memory. It had been Filomeno’s decision not to settle in Miami after escaping Cuba in 1959. He refused to contact his extended family. He badgered Rosa and trampled all over her nostalgia with his own ideas of what it was to be American: watching sitcoms, mowing the lawn and spending Sunday afternoons grilling hot dogs and hamburgers in the backyard. It was as if he were trying to live inside a television commercial, eating eggs over easy with too much Tabasco sauce and his hot dogs with mayonnaise. He smoked filtered Viceroys and loved chocolate ice cream.
Frank hated the charade, not because he was Cuban, but because he was American. To him Filomeno was a caricature of the other suburban fathers in the neighborhood—working at a refinery in Pasadena, hanging out at Ice Houses on Friday afternoons after work. He’d liked Gilley’s long before they made Urban Cowboy. He took his shoes off when he got home from work and ate dinner while watching Wheel Of Fortune, calling the words and phrases out loud to Susan Carney just like any other father. He argued with his wife, bought a Lotto ticket every Friday, snored, kept a bottle of Tums by his bedside and hated Swiss cheese.
But Rosa refused to give in to him. She loved Cuba and she hung on to it through her kitchen. She spent hours cooking arroz con pollo, boliche, picadillo, and ajiaco from scratch. She infused the house with the permanent aroma of sofrito.
For all his effort, Filomeno’s American style remained rough around the edges like the Spanish accent he couldn’t completely shake off. And there was always the silence.
What had hung over their little ranch house—the three bedrooms, two baths and a one-car garage with a live oak tree in the backyard—was more than the sadness that accompanies a life in exile. There was resentment. Anger. Filomeno’s hate for Cuba ran so violently in his veins, it was as if he wanted to erase the past completely. As far as Filomeno was concerned, he and Rosa would forget Cuba and become Americans if it killed him. And perhaps it had.
3
“I prefer my rice cooked with a few habanero peppers. Not just for a little spice, but for the familiar flavor of my mother’s kitchen.”
—Cuban heavyweight boxer, Téofilo Stevenson
after winning his third Olympic gold medal. Moscow, 1980
Frank moved quickly around his hotel room, looking for peepholes, microphones, bugs, cameras, anything suspicious. He mimicked the spy movies he had seen, running his hands over the plain wood furniture, the lamps, the curtains. He checked behind the mirror and under the bed.
Nothing.
He dug out the card where Justo had written his brother’s contact information and asked the operator to put the call through. After a few tones and clicks, she came back on the line or—as Frank suspected—had never left the line and informed him there was no answer.
He set down the receiver and stared at a faded photograph of the Morro Castle hanging on the wall. His mind spun like a pinwheel, thoughts and fears racing to catch up to the present. He unpacked his bag. He placed half his cash in the room’s safe deposit box and spread the rest between the pages of his soft cover copy of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which he had brought specifically for that purpose.
It was Monday evening. His flight out was on Sunday morning. That gave him five full days to get the recipe. He had no time to waste. He tried Justo’s brother’s number again, but there was still no answer.
The noise from the courtyard and the lobby filtered up to his room. It sounded like a party. He went downstairs and took inventory of the security guards in the lobby. They were big men in beige guayabera shirts. One was posted by the elevator, another at the stairs. Two stood by the hotel’s entrance and another near the patio bar where the trio was playing Guantanamera for what must have been the fifth time.
It was dark out. At the entrance to the hotel, the doorman was flirting with the same three women Frank had seen earlier. They appeared to be old friends, but as Frank approached, the doorman quickly separated himself and greeted him with a formal nod.
Frank’s gaze lingered on the pretty girl with the blue dress. In less than a second he took in the outline of her shoulders, her deep reddish skin and the arch of her back as it curved down her legs all the way to her magenta colored toenails.
She noticed him looking and smiled, but one of her friends had already moved past her and was reaching for Frank’s arm. The doorman pulled her back.
“Do you know the restaurant, El Ajillo?” Frank asked the doorman.
“Cómo no, would you like a taxi, caballero?”
“Oye,” the pretty girl in the blue dress said loud enough for him to hear. “Listen to him. He almost sounds Cuban.”
“Ya, Marisol.” The doorman waved her away. Then he stepped outside and signaled a man who was sitting on the hood of a turi-taxi parked across the street.
Marisol’s friend approached him again. “What’s your name, amigo?”
“Frank.”
“Español?”
He shook his head. The girl glanced past him at the doorman who was making his way back into the hotel. “You want company tonight?”
He had never been good with women. He was shy. In all his relationships, it had been the women who approached him. When he entered into a relationship, he hung onto it with mild apathy until it became obvious to both parties that love had never been part of the equation.
The doorman came back and shooed the girl away. “Yoselin, por favor.”
Frank stole a quick glance at Marisol, then walked out to the car.
“Oye.” Marisol caught up with him as he reached the taxi. “You don’t like my friend?”
“It’s not that—”
“You don’t think she’s pretty?”
Yoselin and the other girl were staring at them, waiting.
“Everyone thinks she’s pretty.” Marisol crossed her arms. “Italians in particular.”
There was something easy about her, like they’d been friends a long time ago. Frank leaned against the side of the taxi and crossed his arms over his chest. “I’m not Italian.”
“¿Entonces?”
“Americano.”
“No me digas. Yoselin has cousins in Miami.”
Frank smiled. He knew about jineteras, Cuba’s famous prostitutes. His first instinct was to walk away, but then he noticed every foreign man around the Sevilla had a pretty Cuban woman hanging on his arm. If he dined alone it might raise suspicion. And there was something else. He found her cockiness attractive. Challenging. Besides, she wasn’t trying to pick him up. She was trying to hook him up with her friend.
But then she took his arm and said, “Why don’t you take me to El Ajillo with you? No one likes to eat alone.”
In the street, people