Free Cuba Diaries by Isadora Tattlin Page A

person who is exchanging down to your crummier house or apartment to make up the difference (without telling anyone, of course).
    Berti walks into Lola’s house, taking everything in. “But this is a
palace!
” she says. Lola beams. It
is
the nicest house I’ve seen a Cuban living in: spotlessterrazzo floors stretching to a patio overlooking a stand of royal palms, not a bit of grime anywhere, a terrazzo staircase with a molded-aluminum balustrade, polished glass louvers allowing breezes from every direction, a kitchen with a vast counter, a full stove with every burner working.
    Lola has giant breasts, a compact figure, smooth, hairless olive skin, and hair dyed a solid reddish brown. She moves slowly, duck-footedly, through the house, showing us its various features, paunch and breasts thrust before her like a trophy, and I am reminded of how the Arabs were in Spain for almost a thousand years. Lola walks as if she were in Moroccan slippers, kicking a caftan out of the way. I am reminded, too, of how 20 percent of Spanish words are Arabic, and of how nearly all words in Spanish relating to home comforts—the words for
rug
and
cushion
, for example—are of Arabic origin. I find myself thinking affectionately of an Arab friend, Iman, and her three refrigerators—one for drinks, one for meat and vegetables, and one for leftovers—their shelves with plastic doilies on them, lace borders gracing the edges. I have the feeling that Lola is basically an Arab woman, one who truly reigns at home, who raises housekeeping to an art form and cooking to the sublime and finds the power of the position she has attained in late middle age (her husband and children being utterly dependent on her, for where else would they find such a spotless home and such good food?) far more fulfilling than the willowy charms of youth.
    Lola serves us coffee, then leads us into a bedroom. Berti has been trying to explain to me what Lola does, but between the X——ian and the Spanish, I haven’t really made out what it is. Lola pulls gym bags out of a closet and sets them near the bed. She opens them, and a powerful smell of cedar and mildew fills the bedroom. She puts her hands in the gym bags and starts pulling cloth out of them, white cloth mostly, but tea-colored, too, and also pastel and black. We are soon able to make out embroidered sheets, pillowcases, tablecloths, napkins, hand towels, infants’ baptismal clothes, layettes, booties, coasters, place mats, runners, lace shawls, mantillas, antimacassars, bloomers, slips, and other oddly shaped bits of linen and lace, their purposes known only to the Creole chatelaine of the 1890s.
    Lola holds one item up, then another, for the light to shine through. “
Look
at the work,” Berti marvels, caressing them. They are antique, Spanish, and elegant, and they speak of a time light-years away yet lingering still in people’s closets, of nuns, plantations, slaves, high ceilings, endless corridors, giant families, and babies like precious icons, wrapped and rewrapped fourteen times a day by untiring
niñeras
(baby-sitters).
    Some of the linens are more than 150 years old, Lola says. The people who are selling them are trying to raise money to go to Miami.
I. 33
    We are on our way to the city of Trinidad on our first unescorted trip outside Havana, just Nick, me, the children, and Muna. It is dark. There is something in the road. It is orange and moving. There are many orange pieces, moving slowly on an orange road. Some pieces swivel in the beam of our headlights as we approach, while a current of other orange pieces streams through the mass slightly faster, away from us, pushing still other pieces out of the way. Nick stops, leaving the headlights on. We get out.
    They are orange crabs and they are on the road ahead of us as far as the eye can see. Orange crabs moving over orange crab bodies already flattened on the road by earlier cars. The living