He walked towards me, slowly and with his hands together. His brow furrowed and his gaze fixed on that piece of red fabric that, almost by chance, he stumbled upon while removing the dusty crevices of the old closet. As far as I remember, Cecilia was never one to cry easily. He has one of those firm faces and very rarely dares to cry in front of others. She is, by far, a beautiful woman. At almost seventy years old, she has the captivating expression of those glamorous ladies who make you fall in love with their eyes, and the wise and far-sighted verb of someone who has once been devastated by the stormy winds of life.
She has been in this world for seven decades and, one might say, she is a happy woman. He has 6 grandchildren, one of them that life put on his path, beyond those designated by biology. He was married twice. She is a strong woman and looks like one of those ladies who appear in Almodóvar’s films, with those velvety voices, wrinkles tracing trails under her eyes and lipstick on her cheeks to simulate that her blood still beats with the same force as at 25. Hispanic traits: strong, thick legs, tanned by hard work since youth, and very white skin, stained in patches by the cold blue of the varicose veins that Neither the morning walks nor the long hours of legs on high pillows anymore help.
Despite her evident ancestral Hispanicity, Cecilia is Creole. He was born in a small town in the interior of Granma, one of the easternmost provinces of the island of Cuba. Very red earth made into a fine powder that gets between the fingernails, and only really comes out after many consecutive baths. The land of the “Mirror of Patience”, one of the few places in Cuba where you can still smell the indigenous blood. The land of the rebellious maroon fleeing the whip of the Creole foreman, who was neither Spanish nor Indian nor African. A strange mixture of colonization. Where the sugar cane is sweeter and the bravest Santanillas protect the coffee plantations. The land of cocoa and coconut candy cones.
Manzanillo: she left there when she was barely 16 years old, very young, leaving behind a mother abandoned by the husband of whom Cecilia barely had memories in flashes, who gave her 5 children, she being the fifth. At that time, life in that land was not easy. Dressed in one of the two party dresses she had and a wooden suitcase, she left her house with the memory of so many nights that she went to bed after having eaten a piece of stale bread and three fingers of coffee – stale for the second time – because in those times of hunger and scarcity it was a luxury to discard the grounds from the first pour.
“Mom sometimes fed us as best she could, she worked hard sewing for the women of the town who could afford a patch or the ordering of a trousseau for a birth or wedding. We lived with that after Dad left us alone. We had dinner like kings and went to sleep quickly the next day, before hunger bit us in the gut and it was impossible to fall asleep,” she sometimes said, looking at the ceiling, as if the act of tilting her head up It held back the tears that, at times, wanted to escape from his eyes.
That night he approached me with that piece of red cloth in his hands. Mario’s slippery handkerchief, which got tangled in his fingers while he was digging through the scraps jealously kept for years in the closet drawer. Mario, her first boyfriend, had left it for her just before leaving for the Soviet Union to study engineering, along with a stainless steel ring and a wedding promise after his return. Sometimes she had spoken to me about him, under her breath, so as not to scratch with words the delicate and fragile memories she had left of that love affair.
However, his eyes bulged out of his face when he recalled detail by detail each encounter with Mario in the parks of Vedado, when he was barely 18 years old. At that time Manzanillo was already a simple—albeit harsh—memory of difficulties. She worked as a maid for an imposing Havana lady who looked at her out of the corner of her eye because “the little girl was too pretty and sweet”, she had to be kept in line.
The little he earned was jealously kept in a compartment of the old cookie tin that he divided with buttons and spools of thread. Sometimes she sent what she could for her mother and sisters, although after she met Mario most of her salary was allocated to buying the fabrics for her wedding dress: nothing pretentious, a white satin one with lace edges would be more than a dream. She would sew it herself.
I just needed to buy shoes, since the only pair I had to go out with had almost lost its soles from so much. rock and roll and swing in the party rooms where I went with Mario on weekends. That and his mother’s ticket. Mario would provide the rest, he was already working and after he returned from the Soviet Union he would surely have been able to raise enough for the party and a weekend in Varadero. Nothing else was needed.
One afternoon, while washing the lunch dishes at the landlady’s house, Cecilia received a phone call. “I hear.” It was Mario, it sounded broken, probably due to the distance.
“My mother told me that you are seeing a guy, Cecilia. He takes you to work every morning and picks you up in the afternoons. I’m not stupid. This is over. I would expect something like that from anyone, except you. May you do well in life.”
He hung up.
But Cecilia was still hooked on the receiver, with her hands still soapy from the detergent and her gaze fixed on the water that was running down the throat, at times contained by a grain of rice that was cutting off the flow.
“That man was the husband of my friend Rosario, who worked as a driver for a general who was a neighbor of my employer. He never made any advances to me. We never had anything. He simply gave me a bottle every morning. I was a girl, pamper. A girl in love, a little girl who left Manzanillo with nothing and who madly loved that man who seemed like a stranger to me from that phone. “It broke my heart,” she told me smiling, the laugh of someone who transforms the sadness of the past into a joke, as if they didn’t hurt, as if there wasn’t in them the weight of what is frustrated by so much absurdity. A real tragicomedy, that of her life.
“The last time we saw each other I was already about thirty years old. I had been jeans tight at the waist, a flowered blouse and Angela Davis hair. It was the 70s. I was hand in hand with Laurita, the eldest of my two daughters, we were late for school. Suddenly a man crossed our path and I recognized him instantly. It had been 12 years since he gave me this scarf. Mario. Fatter than I remembered, probably due to the tranquility of a happy marriage, my own house and a position as an engineer in the Ministry of Telecommunications, a hypothesis that I later confirmed when he called me at work.
That morning we exchanged phones after a long hug. Her son studied at the same school as Laurita and was married; with a pedagogical teacher he met at a reception at the Russian embassy after his return. They lived in Guanabacoa, but the boy studied in Vedado because it was his way to work. “I worked near there.”
Mario. Halfway between 30 and 40 and with the same mischief in his gaze that he had at the twenty-something. There was no other contact afterward. She divorced at 40, 10 years after that meeting, with two grown-up daughters whom she never wanted to give a stepfather. Many times he thought about dialing that phone number that he had left from that day, when loneliness penetrated his bones on cold nights. Or when she looked naked in the mirror and confirmed the presence of the urges of the flesh, which had not diminished over the years. But he hesitated.
The weight of the routine took its toll on her and, suddenly, one day she found herself in the shoes of a dedicated grandmother, the jeans The clothes she wore were no longer as tight and she opted for more pastel shades when she painted her lips. He does not know what will become of Mario, if he is still married or not, if he will live in Cuba or if he decided to emigrate out of filial force to the United States, or to Spain. “Maybe he’s still here, an old retiree like me.” Just another old man, without any transcendent life story, who allows himself to brew a strong coffee every morning and put on cologne in the afternoons to sit in the park, watching people go by. Perhaps, also, to remember.
I saw how he slowly folded the handkerchief into four parts, put it in the drawer, only this time in one of his nightstand, reserved by custom for some hand towels that he sometimes used to dry his face in the morning. He smelled like slivers of Lux soap when he returned to where I was gathering papers from the university. “¿Do you want me to make banana smoothie?” And we sat together without saying a word, she in the wooden chair in which she says she is going to die when she is 83, and I in the armchair in front of the television. Her mouth was muddy, forming a funny mustache from the foam of the milkshake, and her eyes were fixed on the novel, although from time to time I would sneak away, pretending that I didn’t see her when, at times, the trace of her skin was accentuated under the straps of her glasses. He smiled. Cecilia, my borrowed grandmother, smiled. God knows, thinking about what distant stories.
This text was published on the blog “Jugarme la boca”. Read the original.
