The Cat King of Havana Read online

  I froze.

  She broke away from me.

  The lights came back on.

  Ana’s smile was gone as if it had never been.

  A renewed coldness passed through me when I saw that. But Ana turned to face the audience and I followed suit. We bowed.

  The applause pulsed. There were a few whistles. Someone cried, “Wepa!” and I thought it was Flavia Martinez. Someone else yelled, “Nice moves, Rick!”

  Rick. Not Cat Guy.

  That made me stand straighter.

  When we walked off the stage, in the greenroom, Lettuce gave me a high five. “Nice job, man.” The band guys echoed him as they hurried onstage for their own gig.

  That made me grin like a fool.

  And then, as she wiped down her neck with a towel, Ana said, “That could have gone worse.”

  Now that . . . that was the sweet taste of victory.

  “Thank you for doing this.” I stood there drenched in sweat, clueless of the right thing to say. “Especially today.”

  “For a moment there, we were actually dancing,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard.

  “Do you want to hang out?” I asked. “I don’t need to stay until the end.”

  “Stay. I’m heading home.”

  I hesitated, then spoke all in a rush. “I’m here for you, if you need to talk.”

  “What I need is to go see if my mother is holding it together,” she said. “What I need is to crawl into bed and not talk to anyone. Okay?”

  I nodded.

  Something shifted in Ana’s face. “Thank you, Rick. You’re trying to help. I know. I wish . . .” She hesitated. “I’ll call you if I need anything.”

  With that she left.

  I spent the rest of the show thinking about those words. I wish . . . what did she wish for?

  The question retreated into the background once the concert ended. I had some viewer comments to field as I mingled through the bake sale crowd.

  “Good job, kid,” Dad said.

  “No need to sound so surprised,” I said.

  Then Flavia Martinez approached. “You need to loosen up your shoulders. You’re like a wood block.”

  “Oh.”

  “But, you know, that actually looked like dancing.”

  “I’ll take that,” I said.

  I definitely would.

  “I didn’t know you could dance,” said, well, a lot of people. A number of them girls.

  Last to approach me was Rob Kenna. I preened inside as I saw him ambling over, a sheepish look on his face. Would he finally—

  “Hey, cat guy,” he said. “That girl you danced with. Does she have a boyfriend?”

  I stared at him. I considered his question.

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, she does.”

  I didn’t lie because I was an asshole or possessive (Who? Me?). I lied because friends don’t introduce friends to Rob Kenna.

  “It really took me back, seeing you guys go,” Dad said on the way home as we waited for the streetlight by the Flatiron. It was a warm Friday evening, and we were lost in a mass of people out for the night. “You never saw Mom dance, did you?”

  I blinked. “Mom could dance?”

  “Boy, could she. Like a movie star. She didn’t much. She said it reminded her of home. But sometimes when she—” Dad glanced at me sideways. “When she got a bit tipsy, she’d start doing this thing with her hips. . . .”

  “Don’t use that tone when talking about my mother,” I said. “It’s creepy.”

  I tried not to show it, but it hurt, finding out Mom had been a dancer. I might be as good as Ana by now, if she’d taught me. But she’d kept it from me, as she had the many other secrets of her past.

  “What’s that girl’s name?” Dad asked, as if he hadn’t heard. “The one you danced with? I saw the way you looked at her.”

  “Ana.” Then, quickly, “And that was just for show.”

  “Bring her over for dinner sometime,” Dad said. “I’ll make my special schnitzel.”

  I gave him a look to cast fear into the hearts of men.

  “Something got in your eye?” Dad asked.

  “An older German guy.”

  “All I’m saying is, you looked good together. Like you belonged there, dancing with her.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Maybe one day you guys will dance together in Havana,” Dad said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

  I heard nothing from Ana for a week (dance class was on break). Then, late one evening, she sent me a Facebook message. Call me. If you’ve got time.

  I rushed to my room, shut the door, grabbed my phone, and then sat down on my bed for a minute to calm my breathing. And dialed Ana’s number.

  “Hello.” She sounded dull—not unfriendly exactly, but tired.

  “Hey,” I said.

  There was a silence. It stretched for many seconds.

  I didn’t dare to break it.

  She spoke at last. “So I came home today and my dad was there. Sitting at the kitchen table with my mother.”

  I blinked. Hadn’t Ana just buried . . . oh, her biological father. “What did he want?”

  “Said he’d come to help us out. In our time of need.” Ana paused. “He didn’t look drunk, but I could smell liquor on him.”

  “I’m sorry, Ana. Did you . . .” I searched for the right words. “Did you have any trouble with him?”

  Ana laughed. It was a short, humorless sound. “No trouble. He’s moving in.”

  “Huh?”

  “My mom said we need the help. Told me she needs a shoulder to cry on. I guess mine isn’t enough.”

  I closed my eyes. Breathed deep, trying to imagine what Ana was feeling. Recoiled from the result.

  I’d known in the abstract that all families weren’t like mine, nor all parents. But it was a different thing to be confronted with the reality.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, though the words felt weak, inadequate.

  “She could never say no to him,” Ana said. “She only left him because he stepped over the line one night and he . . . and now it’s been years, and he was always so convincing with his apologies. . . . I can’t do this, Rick. I can’t live in the same apartment with that guy. Not even for my mother’s sake.”

  “Then don’t,” I said, more confident than I felt. “Move out. Stay at my place for a while. I’m sure I can convince my dad. We’ll figure something out.”

  “Mom would never let me,” Ana said. “I won’t even turn seventeen until September. . . . She’s not stupid, you know—my mom. She’s just hurting, like, a lot. She’ll remember what kind of man my father is soon enough.” She paused. “I just don’t want to be there while she does. I’m sorry, maybe that’s selfish, but I don’t.”

  “You shouldn’t have to,” I said.

  In that moment, as I searched with all my heart for an exit from Ana’s conundrum, inspiration struck.

  Something Dad had said came back to me—words he’d spoken on our walk back from the school concert.

  Maybe one day you guys will dance together in Havana . . .

  My heart banged fast and hard in my chest and my mouth went dry, and I swallowed in a futile effort to clear my throat. But I said it.

  “Let’s go to Cuba for a while. Let’s spend the summer studying salsa in Havana.”

  Remember Mr. Porcelain, leaping for that bowl of cornflakes?

  We established this: you watch a video like that, you want him to fail. That’s what gets you excited. Instant success is boring.

  Except when Mr. Porcelain expects to fail. When kitty goes for this big, hopeless leap to the kitchen island . . . and makes it, and scampers about in wide-eyed celebration. He’s so startled at his own success, you don’t have it in your heart to hold it against him.

  Besides, you know he’ll be butting his head against the wall again soon enough.

  Naturally, Ana responded to my proposal with an enthusiastic, “Let’s do what now?”
>
  I could take a few chapters to outline how I convinced her. To tell you how we sold our parents on the idea, how we made arrangements, how we prepared and budgeted. But—let me double-check—no, this book isn’t called Logistics of Foreign Travel, 3rd Ed., With Updated Chapter on Parental Psychology.

  I’ll hit the highlights instead. Ana went through three stages.

  (Stage 1: Denial, later that night in a Facebook chat window.) Estás marea’o, man. One does not simply go to Cuba. She included with the last a GIF of Sean Bean’s Boromir.

  Of course one does not simply go to Cuba, I replied. One flies instead. Down to Cancún and across to Havana. Being half Cuban, I could have flown directly from the US—but even with the recently relaxed regulations, Ana’s situation was trickier.

  Isn’t that, like, illegal?

  So is holding hands in school in Tennessee, I wrote, after a bit of googling for a handy comparison. Doesn’t make it wrong.

  I knew Mom would have been scandalized. But I also recalled what Dad had said about the bloqueo. More than fifty years and Castro’s still there. Still feeding off his people, no matter how the rest of the world squeezed them.

  The point is, we can sell your mom on this, I wrote. Tell her you want to connect to your Latino roots—works great with my dad. And you’ll buy yourself a couple of months away from home. Time enough for your parents to figure things out.

  This is crazy, Ana wrote.

  Don’t you want to do something crazy occasionally? It felt brash and daring to write that. To get away and dance and forget everything and everyone for a while?

  Ana didn’t respond for a long time. To forget, she wrote at last. That would be nice.

  (Stage 2: Bargaining, the next day over lunch at Ess-a-Bagel.)

  “No way I can afford two months in Havana.” Ana bit into two slices of pumpernickel bagel separated by an ocean of cream cheese. “The flights, maybe. But hotels?”

  “We can stay with my aunt Juanita,” I said. “I’m dipping into my college fund for the rest.”

  Ana stared. “You what?”

  “Just a little.” I had eighteen grand saved from my site—I figured if I spent five, the remainder would still be more than most freshmen had. “Besides, I figure I can get into a good school. Full scholarship, you know. That’s total socialism. They take all your savings and cover the rest. So it’s a good idea to be poor when you apply.”

  “That,” Ana said, “is so stupid I don’t know where to begin. There’s no guarantee you’ll get into a great school, or that they’ll pay for you.”

  “I want to reconnect with my family,” I said. “Get to know the Cuba my mom grew up in. Isn’t that worth a little money?”

  Ana gave me a frank look. “Is that really why you want to go?”

  “Sure.” It wasn’t a lie, not exactly. I also wanted to help Ana—and, hey, get close to her—but there was no need to spell all that out. “I also want to get better at dancing.”

  A smirk tugged at the corner of Ana’s mouth. “I can hear them now. Rick Gutiérrez! The Salsa King of Havana!”

  I winced. “That sounds unlikely, I admit. But—”

  “I’m sorry,” Ana said quickly. “I was being mean. I’m sure you’ll get very good.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe we can shoot a film about salsa in Havana.”

  Ana’s eyes lit up. “Or combine it with my New York film, make it a compare-and-contrast thing, salsa here and over there. We could shoot at clubs, do some street scenes, maybe interview some timba bands . . .” She smiled. “I would like to finish a film this year. For my stepdad.”

  (Stage 3: Acceptance, on a sunlit bench by the East River.)

  “I suppose we could go.” Ana pulled her feet up under her. “Pero dime una cosa.”

  “Yes?”

  “You’re not doing this to get into my pants, are you?” She looked me in the eyes. “Because I’m not in a good place for that, not now. You understand?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  I still recalled that hug, close and tight, up on stage after our dance. Not now, she’d said . . . that didn’t mean never.

  I wouldn’t hit on Ana. We’d just go to Havana together. And sip piña coladas by the ocean. And dance in the surf. If she changed her mind . . . well, that wouldn’t be my fault.

  Rumba in Havana

  chapter six

  DUCT TAPE

  Somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico, between Cancún and Havana, I gave in to terror.

  Not that I’d been entirely calm all day. The flight to Mexico went fine, but the leg to Havana got delayed so we sat down to wait. And I made a strategic mistake.

  I googled our airline for this final segment of our journey—Cubana de Aviación.

  You know that happy excitement you feel when you google your airline and the related searches box suggests “air crash,” “air disaster,” and “air fatalities”? That burst of adventurous spirit, when you look up safety statistics and find your airline is last in the world—not among the bottom quartile, not worse than most, but last?

  “I thought you knew.” Ana spoke distractedly, fidgeting with her handheld camera. She turned the lens on me, red eye blinking. “Haven’t you been doing your research?”

  “I didn’t have time. I had to prepare two months of content for my site.” I looked straight into the camera. “CatoTrope.com, your one-stop catstination. Check it out today!”

  Ana rolled her eyes, lowered the camera. “When something breaks, the Cubans can’t replace it. They patch it up with duct tape.”

  “No way we’re flying on a duct-taped plane,” I said.

  “A Tupolev 204,” Ana said. “A classic Soviet bird.”

  “You sound like you’re looking forward to it.”

  Ana gave me a weighing look. There were dark circles under her eyes—a constant presence this past month—but her lips twitched with amusement. “I thought you wanted to get to know the real Cuba.”

  “I also want to survive,” I said.

  “Did you know Havana used to be run by the American Mafia? Before the Revolution?”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “We screwed up their country,” Ana said. “They got fed up and revolted, so we embargoed them. Now you complain they can’t afford to fix their airplanes?”

  Under normal circumstances, I would have sooner answered an email from a Nigerian prince than engage this question. But I needed the distraction from our looming trip aboard Uncle Lenin’s Death Machine. So we passed a lovely couple of hours debating whether Cuba’s problems were due to the bloqueo or theft by Castro’s government, or simply the inevitable failure of communism.

  “Communism has its problems,” Ana said finally. “But there’s something to be said for free rent and health care and education for everybody. If you’d grown up in Washington Heights, with a working mom and a drunk-ass deadbeat father, you might see it differently.”

  At which point she grew quiet and our conversation dropped off.

  When we bussed out to our plane, the sight of it was a relief. A gleaming white two-engine jet, it looked modern.

  “This isn’t so bad,” I said to Ana as we trudged up the stairs to board, buffeted by a warm breeze across the airfield.

  She only nodded at the nearest wing.

  There, wrapped around that finlike thing right under the wing, silvery gray, was that . . .

  Duct tape?

  Duct tape.

  From my first minutes aboard, snatches of overheard conversation caught my attention.

  “. . . sí, asere, pero sí que sí . . .”

  “. . . lo que yo metí fue candela . . .”

  “. . . tiene tremenda pinta, hermano . . .”

  Those half-swallowed vowels, that run-together cadence, they snapped me immediately to my aunt Juanita’s voice.

  Only half the passengers were Cuban, but each lumbered aboard with enough rollers and shopping bags to start a corner bodega in Havana, or to supply
an extended family with shoes, clothes, and kitchen appliances, which seemed more likely. One guy had somehow gotten an electronic keyboard through security, still in its box. He struggled for five minutes to jam it into an overhead bin.

  Soon I sat cramped in my seat, high over the Gulf of Mexico. Ana tried to distract me from the death roar of the Tupolev engines by telling me about her trip to her father’s village in Puerto Rico—a story that involved country dancing, mountains of pork, and extensive hours spent hugging a toilet bowl. I tried to listen to her, but my eyes were locked on the window.

  Maybe half an hour passed. It seemed like the trip had barely started. Then we banked and turned slightly, and I saw land.

  A stretch of white sand, then green, so much green—empty fields and then forest, and then fields again. Here and there patches of bright red soil, like some kid had stuck Plasticine pancakes to a rolled-out map.

  Cuba.

  That’s when I realized I was trembling. Not a mild tremor either. My hands shook visibly in my lap. My teeth chattered.

  “You all right, Rick?” Ana asked. “We’re safe, you know. It’s more dangerous driving on the New Jersey Turnpike.”

  But that wasn’t it. I wasn’t worried about a crash.

  In another twenty minutes, I’d be standing on Cuban soil.

  I’d step on the ground Mom last touched thirty-five years ago. I’d walk the streets she’d grown up on. I’d come face-to-face with the family she’d abandoned, the regime that drove her to exile.

  To exile and to silence. For fifteen years she’d kept her past from me. For fifteen years I’d had this vacuum in my life—not the simple absence of Cuba but an active lack of it, like an organ that should have been there but wasn’t.

  I didn’t know which possibility scared me more. That I would feel like just another tourist, with my Americanized Spanish and my Dockers pants, a camera around my neck—or that Cuba would seem like home.

  I watched the green fields and forests of the island pass by with a singular, undivided attention. Before I knew it, we began our descent. The fields gave way to concrete, a flattish grid of roads and buildings. The captain told the cabin crew to sit down. A few more minutes and the ground came rushing up at us.