Free The Best American Travel Writing 2014 by Paul Theroux

nodded. We were on the main street among sweaty men in dago Ts, old ladies with shopping bags, and girls with hair in netted ballerina buns. We passed under shaded colonnades that had been painted, vandalized, and repainted darker shades, a mottled patchwork of scratched-out signatures, expletives encased in bubbles, and declarations of love,
PR+SN
and
Yoser y Lulu
.
    Sandra shook her head and pursed her lips. “No,” she said. She laughed and, after a beat, nodded. “Of course I’d rather maybe be famous. You just keep doing your job. Yessica wanted to be godmother anyway.”
    Â 
    The day after Mia Jaqueline was born, yogurts were still stacked three-deep in Sandra’s tepid freezer. All nonessential furniture had moved outside to the shared patio. A crib had been assembled in the windowless bedroom, and the two twin mattresses on which Aboo, Gallego, and Sandra slept were piled one atop another. Fourteen plastic bottles on which Winnie-the-Pooh licked honey from a jar sat atop the old washing machine that was the kitchen counter between cleaning days. Sandra’s father had sent her a suitcase of baby goods from Florida, and she would sell the overstock.
    I sat in a rocking chair next to Sandra. The baby squirmed on her knees. She had stuffed her bra full of tissue paper and stowed a lighter between her swollen breasts, and she waved to gesture that I should light a cigarette for her. I grabbed the packet off the table, lit the cigarette, and handed it over; she kept one hand on the baby’s belly.
    The Cuban government almost never granted exit papers for children. The consequences of this fact hadn’t seemed real, I supposed, until Sandra had held Mia. This would be her life, she spat—these two rooms, these neighbors, motherhood. My presence in her home felt suddenly cruel. I sipped my coffee, nodded, and slipped away after 15 minutes or so.
    It was a few weeks before I went to San Miguel again. There always seemed to be a reason to postpone: I was interviewing other people; dealing with the logistics of settling into living in Cuba; she had run out of phone minutes and didn’t call me back when I left messages at her aunt’s. The afternoon I returned, uninvited but assuming she’d be home around two or three, tiny white baby linens hung thick as curtains on the patio’s laundry lines, one after the other. Aboo waved me inside, cheerfully brushing off my offers to help her hang the white gauze squares. She was nearly done anyway. Sandra was out, the baby was asleep in her crib, and I sat to wait. An army of ants carried thumbnail-size bread crumbs up the lavender wall. The room smelled tangy. When Sandra arrived a half-hour later, she bustled into the apartment with a
“Hooooooolia!”
She pulled open her black patent purse and asked if I wanted to buy air fresheners. I laughed.
    â€œSo that’s what you’re doing for money now,” I said.
    She shook her head and busied herself making coffee. “Nah, not for long. An
amigo
comes out this weekend from Spain—he’s Cuban but he lives in Spain—and I ran into his daughter around here last week. ‘
China,
he’s crazy to see you,’ she says, and I tell her that I’ve just given birth, so she comes to see the baby. Of course she said Mia was beautiful. Anyway, ‘You call me as soon as the
cuarentena
is done,’ the girl says. ‘You can see my dad as soon as you’re ready.’ See, he knows no one can do the things I can do.” So, she continued, she was cutting short the 40 days of staying sexually chaste. He wasn’t technically a new partner.
    Mia woke with a yowl, and Sandra asked me to grab her while she prepared a bottle of formula. She was trying to stop breastfeeding so she wouldn’t sag too much, she said. The silence that followed was swollen and barbed. I commented on how much Mia had grown. She had huge, chubby cheeks, and milky-blue,