La Americana Read online

  At some point I called Becky.

  “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t watch her like this,” I sobbed incoherently. “It’s too much for her to take. It’s too much for me to take.”

  She cried with me. “It’s OK, Mel, it’s OK,” she repeated again and again. “You’re not a bad person. You just need peace.”

  She was right, I did need peace, but to consider the equation minus Mom was anything but peaceful.

  The next day I got an email from Susan.

  From: Susan Main

  To: Melanie Bowden

  Date: Wed, 17 Jan 2001

  Melanie-

  I feel an urgency to write things down. I want your mom to know so many things that I feel about her, and I know a lot of other people do too.

  I want you to know how much knowing your mom has changed me—really changed me. She taught me to sacrifice for others, but to not sacrifice myself. She taught me to always find the humor in life. She taught me to honor the artist in me. She taught me courage—that I have the power to change my circumstances. She taught me to always work hard for those you love. She taught me to be accepting of all people.

  But most of all, I think her greatest achievement is you. She has raised a woman who is confident, and wise, and joyful and talented. She has raised someone who teaches me as much as she did, if not more.

  You are the best friend I have ever known. I love you so much—fiercely! I am sending my love, energy, and support through these wires. I am there for you—we all are! And I pledge to not leave you when you need me the most. I’ll be there to bug you—even when you want to be left alone!

  I love you, I love you, I love you.

  Susan

  I responded:

  From: Melanie Bowden

  Sent: Thurs, 18 Jan 2001

  Subject: Re:

  Thank you, sweet Sue.

  Beautiful note, made me cry. I’ll read to Mom in a little while. She has a couple of people visiting her now. They are laughing, telling stories, but I can’t seem to go in the room and join them. We laugh some, too, but other times I can’t seem to muster up the energy to be polite and gay. They also need their own time with her.

  Mom’s friend, George, is coming later today. He’s going to lose his mind. She looks dead. Her skin is yellow, her mouth hangs open, her teeth even look different. Her breathing is disconnected. No real pattern to it. It’s filled with fluid from her lungs. She exhales like she’s underwater. I find myself unintentionally breathing with her, pausing with her, wanting to take the breath for her. Sometimes she’ll breathe in, it doesn’t come out, we all hold our breath with her, she exhales after what seems an eternity, and we go back into the land of waiting. Every night I am amazed, impressed she’s made it through another. I tell her repeatedly that it’s OK, to let go when she needs to. We’ve all told her, even Jim, who keeps claiming that he’s going to go right behind her.

  But I know she hears us. Last night, late, I was holding her hand, talking to her, telling her I love her, and she opened her eyes, twitched her hand. Went back out in thirty seconds, but she heard me, acknowledged me. So I know she’ll hear your letter when I read it to her.

  I sound like a lunatic, but I just want to run around and tell those I love how much I love them, just in case anything ever happened to me like this. So please know I love you so much, for your spirit, your gigantic heart, your support, always. And for being a total, raving nut. I love it all. Give your family a big kiss for me.

  Love, Mel

  She responded:

  Dear Mellie,

  I heard an interesting story in my yoga class last night. The yoga teacher said that Michelangelo carried around a big lump of marble with him. And he knew that God had already created the statue of the angel—his only job was to chip away the excess stone—to liberate the angel within. He didn’t MAKE it, it was there all the time, underneath everything. It reminded me of you and your mom—that no matter what happened in your pasts, that bond between you has always been there, underneath everything. And now it’s been stripped down to its essence—to its “angel.” And that’s something you’ll always have.

  I hope that makes some sense to you. It did to me, but then again, I am a total, raving nut.

  I love you, I love you, I love you.

  Susan

  Mom died the next day. It was around eight at night. Jim, two of Mom’s oldest friends, and Leanne and I were in the room with her. My brother and aunt had already gone to rest at her house an hour away. I was holding Mom’s hand when she took that last breath in. Its depth gripped us all.

  “It’s OK to go, Mom,” I said, holding her right hand with both of mine, my face resting on hers. Next to meeting my children for the first time, it was the most intimate moment of my life. “Let go. Walter and I will be fine.”

  Her breath was still in, but her eyes were holding, holding, holding.

  I begged of her: “Please let go. It’s OK, it’s OK. Go. Go.”

  Her eyes looked at me and then locked. Earth opened right there in front of me, wrapped its arms around Mom, and took her. Her energy, her person, all of those combinations of life and love, marriage and motherhood that make people who they are, slipped. She escaped through a crack, and there was no time to reach out and pull her back. I couldn’t breathe.

  “Jim! Mom is gone!” I screamed in my head as I fell into him and latched on to his chest. I made a loud sound as I exhaled her unfinished breath onto his sweater.

  Eventually, everyone left me in the room alone. I crawled in the narrow hospice bed with her. She looked like my mom, but the sunlight had disappeared. I was left lying next to a beaten and bruised chassis. I concentrated on her hands, which I held with my own, as my head curled, childlike, into the side of her arm. My hands were hers, with precise reflection in the size and shape, down to the fingernails.

  After some time, I found the courage to look at her face. The grimace that had dominated for days had faded completely. She was beautiful and peaceful, something that I would have thought impossible. In my mind, the terror of resting beside my dead mother would have been overwhelming, yet there I was with her, flower to flower, wood to wood. Unfrightened. This was nature.

  We were organic matter, connected in a way that transcended everyday life. I still held life and she didn’t, but I experienced the passing of her life. It was larger, more beautiful even, than anything I could have imagined.

  Until then, I thought death would have been passive, an inactive kind of thing. In the everyday language of “so-and-so died in her sleep,” I assumed a level of disconnection, as if the actual act of it was quiet and unassuming. But Mom’s passing was active, a torrential force that drew us in and then like that, she checked out, but not without connecting with me first.

  There is no better way of honoring the person who brought you into the world than to be with her when she leaves it and carry her memory forward.

  Lying next to her, I distinctly remember wanting to hug the inside of her. That angel Susan talked about. The outside wasn’t my mother anymore. Her body became a casket to her disease, but not her soul. And it was right then that I fully grasped the essence, the real spirit of my mother, more precious than a pretty face or a great sense of humor. I wanted her. The real her. Desperately so.

  Chapter 30

  You’re Talking, But I Can’t Hear You

  It was June in Budapest and time for me to return to Cuba. I was having a hard time finding clothes that still fit me, as my girth continued to grow under the weight of daily fills of almás pites, the divine Hungarian combos of apples, sugar, and dough that were available on almost every street corner and called me by name. At a local market, I bought a pair of linen pants with a drawstring tie so I could be comfortable. But I still packed my bikini.

  My flight was about nine hours in all from Budapest to Paris, and Paris to Havana. I filled my time with books, magazines, movies, and finally, pacing, but it was too much to stand.

  When I
arrived I waited very impatiently for my bag and all but ran out to find Luis. This was a different terminal and the rooms were long and wide. I couldn’t find him. I looked everywhere, even around large potted plants. Where was he? From behind I was grabbed and hugged and then kissed. He had rather enjoyed my overly expressive concern from afar as I searched for him.

  He was with a friend, nicknamed Coco. (His head actually looked like a coconut, with tan-colored fuzz on top and all). Coco drove and Luis sat in the front seat. He slipped his hand in between the two front seats to the back and held mine, our fingers laced like a secret. I wanted him to sit in the back with me, but by then I understood that we might look like a paying tourist couple and that could create problems for Coco. It was uncomfortable, but I had come to accept that’s the way things were. Luis looked at me for a long time, neither of us speaking.

  When we got back to his apartment, he sat opposite me, our faces only inches apart, and placed his hands on my knees. He asked about Hungary and the minutia that we couldn’t talk about over email. I told him about my daily outings with Amy and teaching, which I had discovered was not my calling, but it was hard to concentrate on much else other than Luis.

  “You’re talking and I can’t hear you,” he said, repeatedly combing his right hand through my hair and running his thumb along the high point of my cheekbone and the edge of my upper lip. He pressed the fleshy underside of his to mine as two of his fingers played with the tip of my ear and the other set trailed down the back of my head, the fold of my neck, and the length of my spine. He drew me in closer and we were sharing the same breath as he moved a slow and deliberate trail of kisses from my mouth to just above my lip and along the outer edges of my cheeks. The narrow slope of his nose nestled into mine before resuming the languid series of kisses to each of my eyelids and the stretch of my forehead. When he pulled back, the brown of his eyes was marbled with tones of olive, as the late-afternoon sun streamed through his bedroom shutter. “It doesn’t seem real that you’re here.”

  I smiled. “I know.”

  Luis wanted to walk the Malecón, which we did in a limb lock, despite Havana’s fierce May afternoon sun. As we moved, I closed my eyes and pressed my nose deep into the crook of his neck. Luis veered left and pulled me into him as his back leaned against the concrete wall. As the sun faded and night rose we fell into each other, unaware of English or Spanish, Savannah or Havana. It was just us on the ocean’s sidewalk and the tsunamis of my dreams withered to waves that crashed against the wall where Luis and I sat with no clock demanding our attention.

  Chapter 31

  Viva La Revolución!

  The next morning, in my dream I was in water again. I rode waves in long strides, up and over and down again, with strangers, but peacefully so.

  Suddenly, I was jerked from my sleep by the sound of Fidel Castro’s voice, which came through our window in short, powerful bursts:

  “Socialismo o muerte!” he called. “Socialism or death!”

  My eyes fully opened. I imagined his index finger, nearly fifty years in command, pointed and firm, aimed at the sky, as I had seen him on TV so many times before.

  His calls were met with loud chants from the crowds of Cubans:

  “Venceremos!” We will succeed!

  Then: “FI-DEL! FI-DEL! FI-DEL!”

  Wrapped up in Luis, who remained unfazed and asleep, I looked at his brown skin. His long eyelashes curled upward as he slept. I freed one of my hands from under his arm and ran my fingers through his hair. I kissed his face, where the side of his nose met the beginnings of his cheek. He stirred, barely opened one eye, and put his ear into the air, taking in the rally outside.

  “Estúpidos,” he mumbled and fell back asleep.

  I rummaged at the base of the bed for a robe and pulled it on me as I banged my way into the hall and then through the bathroom door. The long, rectangular window above the toilet was swiveled open a good three inches, but Fidel had even captured the ocean’s attention that day; it wouldn’t offer even a hint of breeze. In mid-June, with no air conditioning, the house was an inferno.

  I stepped up onto the retired bidet to look out onto Plaza Martí, which sits along the Malecón. Normally, cars would have raced the narrow city track situated between the plaza and the seawall, but that day the streets were filled only with people.

  Castro must have been lifted high on the stage in the oblong plaza, though I couldn’t see him. My sight was blocked by hundreds of waving red, white, and blue flags and throngs of people lining the streets, as well as soldiers who had infiltrated the battered rooftops of surrounding buildings. If I were a painter, their dark green silhouettes would have become abstracts, laced into laundry wires roping through the sky.

  Fidel’s voice remained strong and loud, but it was difficult to decipher the echoes of anger. My Spanish language skills were light-years from where I had started, but Cuban dialect, I have learned after many years, is not an easy thing to conquer. Cubans like to snake off the latter half of words.

  “They do use the plural form here, don’t they?” I once asked Luis.

  “Yes, smart-ass,” was the only response I received.

  I stepped off of the bidet and went back to the bedroom. Just inside the doorway, I paused as Fidel called out:

  “Pioneros por el Comunismo!” Pioneers of Communism!

  In unison, only young voices responded: “Seremos como el Che!” We will be like Che!

  This was a far stretch from any pep rally I had ever attended as a kid. These were chants that Luis had memorized as a young boy. Perhaps they registered somewhere in his consciousness as he rolled over and slit an eye open. Luis put his arm where I should have been and I crawled back into place. He roped himself back into me as his caramel eyes sleepily looked up into mine.

  “Does this make you nervous?” he asked with a slight nod to the madness outside.

  “No,” I said. “Not now,” as if I were a seasoned professional in communist sport.

  I asked Luis what Fidel was going on and on about. He laughed and said that he was on a jaunt about Cuba’s Achilles heel—George Bush, Jr. (or Baby Bush, as one of my former bosses used to say). Bush had just added Cuba to Washington’s “axis of evil” list of countries, and Fidel, in turn, was pissed.

  “And here you are, an American in my bed,” Luis said, wrapping his arms around me and pulling me in closely. “La Americana.” He smothered me with small kisses all over my face, forcing me to burrow into his chest for safety.

  “La enimiga.” The enemy.

  “Vicious,” I returned, as my eyes widened. I laughed at my absurd attempt at terror.

  Fidel’s voice suddenly amplified, as if someone had cranked up the volume and it sounded slightly as if he were yelling at me, one of only a few Americans on the island. I all but jumped, but not Luis, who was stretched lazily and pulled himself out of bed, heading toward the bathroom. When he came back, he told me that we couldn’t go outside for hours.

  I had coloring books and pencils for Luisito. Luis grabbed them, brought them to the bed, and started coloring in one of them. I picked up the Mickey Mouse book and penciled my own version of a lion, which I later named Luis the Lion and gave to him.

  Eventually we roused enough to head downstairs. Ana sat on the sofa smoking a cigarette while she watched the scene below unfold on TV.

  “Mami, por Dios,” said Luis, snapping off the blurry vision.

  Outside of Luis’s apartment in Havana (courtesy of Melanie Simón).

  I learned that there were only two television channels at that time in Cuba and both were running Fidel and the masses. We hung out, sequestered for hours, until finally the rally broke and we were free to roam and gather a handful of things for Luisito and his grandparents.

  The next day we again met up with Coco and his wife, to make the trip to Santa Clara. Almost everything about Coco is loud—his movements, his gestures, his tone of voice. Everything about him is overt and a bit wild, so he’s not
one I would have pegged as a friend of Luis.

  They picked us up in their blue car, sans air conditioning on that fryer of an island. Turned out, Coco also likes his music loud. Nothing was particularly shocking about this, but to his credit, for most of the trip, he at least played good Marc Anthony salsa. An hour into the trip, it began to rain hard. There weren’t any windshield wipers on the car, and my body tightened as Coco continued to drive fast, as if unaware that there was a solid front of water just under our noses. Water began to queue up along the rim of the window to my left and I realized my door wasn’t fully shut. I knew it wasn’t a matter of pulling it taut. It simply wasn’t going to close. Water started coming in faster on my side. I’ll admit I was being a bit of a princess, but I didn’t want to get wet because I had on a decent pair of pants and top for my new introductions.

  With a clenched jaw, I was uncomfortable, but jolted by my built-in censor that reminded me that this was how Cubans lived. I moved my bag from the middle to the window seat and slid into its place.

  Luis was in the front passenger seat and began to cuff his right sleeve until it was above his elbow, then rolled down his window and began to use his front arm, a gray towel in hand, as a windshield wiper. At the same time, Coco furiously used a tissue to swipe the inside condensation on the glass. Finally, Coco’s wife asked him to pull over. I breathed a sigh of relief as he slowed to a stop under a bridge.

  Hyper Coco couldn’t handle any more than twenty minutes of refuge before he took off with the same furor as before. Again, I tensed, but remained quiet. At one point, Luis looked back at me and winked. He knew that the human windshield wiper and defrost system routine had me a bit rattled.

  Eventually the rain tapered and we stopped at a gas station. It was there that Luis unrolled a cigarette, exposing the tobacco. He got out of the car and smeared the dark brown mass all over the outside glass.