The Prince of los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood (22 page)

Day after day, she divulged more details of her life in bursts of three-minute conversations in the cereal aisle, the canned goods aisle, the soda aisle—wherever she happened to find me. She claimed her father had been a high-ranking official during the Batista dictatorship; that they lived in a ten-bedroom house in the Vedado district of Havana; that they had three housekeepers, a chauffeur, and a cook who served breakfast every morning on the terrace; that she could remember the sound of palm trees brushing against her bedroom window every night. I listened politely, but I didn’t believe a word she said. I thought she was just one more of those exiles Mamá criticized for embellishing everything about Cuba, including their own wealth and position. “If you add up all the farms and land that Cubans say they owned, Cuba would have to be
más grande
than the United States,” Mamá would joke.

But Raquel brought me proof of her life.
“Mira,”
she surprised me one afternoon, pulling out a square photo from her coin purse, “This was
mi casa,
” she said, grabbing the reading glasses she wore on a chain around her neck and parking them on her nose. “See that window on the second floor? That was my bedroom.” Indeed, there was her mansion, just as she had claimed, with a twelve-foot double door made of oak and wrought iron, the bougainvillea weaving themselves through the marble balustrades of her balcony, the palm trees at her window, no longer lies. And there she was in the photos too, a young lady in black-and-white, standing on the keystone walkway to her house. “I was pretty,
¿verdad?
You would’ve fallen in love with me in a second,” she joked, pointing at the image of her younger self in a chiffon dress down to her shins, her licorice-black hair straight to her shoulders, a smile as sensual as the arc of pearls between her collarbones. “
Mira,
I still have those
aretes,
” she said, pointing to the
azabache
earrings she wore in the photo, which she had on that very day. They dangled from her ears like black teardrops, still protecting her against evil eyes.

Now her earlobes were wrinkly, her hair gray at the roots and so thin I could see through to her scalp. She lived across the street from El Cocuyito, in a cramped two-bedroom, one-bath duplex, with her two sisters who were widows like her. No more mansion, no more palms, no more Cuba. Even though it was all true, it was all gone, including her son Riqui, as I learned during one of our tête-à-têtes in the aisle. “
Te lo dije,
he looked exactly like you. He would be fourteen this month,” she said, gazing at a photo of Riqui in her hand. There was some resemblance: his nose was long and narrow like mine; his eyebrows were thick and close, like mine; and he had dimples on his
cheeks, like me. But we didn’t look
exactly
alike, not as much as Raquel wanted to believe, wanting to see her son again in me. I felt I should ask what happened to her son, but hesitated. What did I know about death? What could I possibly say to this woman, this mother? Sensing my awkwardness, she changed the subject: “Why, you should come to my house for
almuerzo
.
Ven, ven,
I make the best black beans you’ve ever tasted. We’ll have time to talk—and more pictures.”

I accepted the invitation, and come lunchtime crossed the street to her house.
“Pasa, mi’jo
.
Pasa,”
she welcomed me, flinging the screen door wide open and kissing me on the cheek as if she hadn’t seen me just moments before at El Cocuyito. I followed her into the house, squeezing through the crammed living room. She kept two velvet sofas so plush they seemed bloated, tufted with silver-dollar-size buttons that looked as if they were about to pop. The coffee table was as big as a coffin, resting on legs carved into lion claws. Each of the four end tables was topped with a wrought-iron lamp holding up an umbrella-size shade. Nuñez had taught me a Cuban
dicho
most appropriate for this:
Quiere meter La Habana en Guanabacoa,
the equivalent of saying that she was trying to fit New York City in Key West. Everything was oversize, doubled, out of scale; every empty space filled, as if she had brought over all the furniture from her mansion in Cuba.

I felt like a king at the immense dining table, large enough for a medieval feast, facing the china cabinet crowded with dime-store figurines of eighteenth-century gentry in romantic poses alongside statuettes of Santa Bárbara and San Judas. Even the plates were big—as big as birdbaths. I had barely finished my first serving of black beans when Raquel asked,
“¿Más?,”
filling the bowl again before I could say no. The beans were indeed delicious, with pieces of ham hock and minced onions, but not as good as my mother’s, of course—too much bay leaf. But why tell her?
“¿Te gustan?”
she asked, as if I would say anything but
“Sí, sí. Exquisitos
.” “
Puedes creer
that I never had to cook or work until I came to
América,
” she explained proudly.

After I pushed the empty plate away, she led me toward the back of the house into the Florida room: “
Mira,
come over here. This is what I do all day now—make beautiful dresses for other women—just like the ones I used to wear.
Caramba,
now I can’t even buy the dresses I make!” The room was stocked with an assembly line of sewing machines, cutting tables heaped with fabric swatches, spools of thread arranged by color like a rainbow, rolls of fabric like giant Popsicles, and half-made dresses tossed around like unfinished paintings. In contrast to all that color and beauty, the walls were covered with black-and-white photos of people and places that had already come to pass. There were hundred-year-old baby pictures, yellow photos from old newspaper clippings, framed collages of small snapshots, and large hand-colored photos that looked realer than real. More proof that her life was her life.

“Who was this?” I asked her. “
Ay,
that was my father. He was handsome,
¿verdad?
” she said, her eyes fixed on the man in the photo. And indeed he was, standing a foot taller than her at a garden party, holding a flute of champagne, wearing wingtip shoes and a linen guayabera through which I could make out his strong shoulders and full chest of hair as dark as his pencil-thin mustache and his eyes, hypnotic as smoke. “He looked just like that the last time I saw him—when that
hijo de puta
killed him.” No one in my family had been killed by Castro’s regime. Feeling Raquel’s sorrow and anger as she took the photo off the wall and held it in her hands, I fully grasped for the first time the deep hatred so many exiles had for Castro, why his name was almost always followed by
that bastard
, or
that son of a bitch
.

Raquel continued from photo to photo like a docent, pausing at each one with a sigh or sad smile and captioning it with a story. “This was me and my husband, Ramiro, at Rancho Luna, our
favorite beach in Cuba. We went every year; this was the last time. Little we knew
lo que nos esperaba
.” There she was, floating in his arms, both of them up to their waists in a black-and-white ocean they’d never see again. “You never been to Cuba, so you don’t know, but this is what the park at El Prado looked like. Your parents must’ve told you about it. It was my favorite place
en toda La Habana
. I took Riqui there every Sunday for hours, feeding bread crumbs to
las palomas
.” There they were, mother and son framed by a colonnade of palms, surrounded by pigeons, fallen petals from a royal poinciana tree scattered like confetti at their feet.

“What happened to him?” I felt comfortable enough to ask. “
Ay, mi’jo,
you don’t want to know; you’re too young for such a sad story.
En fin,
Riqui is still here, and here, and here” she said, pointing to the photo, then to her heart, and then to her temple. What did I know about loss or despair? What did I know about anguish or loneliness? Nothing except for what I saw in Raquel’s photos, what I heard in her strained voice, what I felt in her long pauses. “This what I live on now—memories and pretty dresses—and my delicious
frijoles,
of course. Is like my own little museum,” she said half in jest, before changing the subject. “
Ándale,
you need to get back to your boxes and me to my dresses.
Trabajar, trabajar, y trabajar
—that’s all we do in this country—work. It’s a miracle I’m not dead yet.”

EVEN THOUGH I DIDN’T NOTICE IT THE FIRST SUMMER
, by that second summer I couldn’t help but see that Don Gustavo was able to do less and less around the store. Despite his airs as head honcho of El Cocuyito, he was past his prime. The heiress apparent was his daughter, my
tía
Gloria. She had learned the family business inside out and gradually transformed the bodega from a patriarchy into a matriarchy. She even checked up on Don Gustavo’s work, uncovering his mess-ups almost daily.
“¡Papá—caramba!”
she’d let out, outraged with the soup cans he’d mixed up once again:
Chicken Noodle
with
Chicken and Stars
with
Cream of Chicken
—to him they were all
sopa de pollo;
or the merchandise that he’d constantly misprice because he could barely read the numbers on the dial of the pricing gun: boxes of Pampers at $1.99 instead of $11.99; jumbo rolls of Bounty at $8.90 instead of $0.89. Then she’d bellow for me, “Riqui!
¿Dónde está
Riqui?” And I’d come to the rescue, sort out and rearrange the cans, scrape off the price stickers with my box cutter, and reprice everything, following her directions.

I had become quite the sharpshooter with the pricing gun, able to nail a dozen cans in less than five seconds. I could open boxes with my bare hands and tear them up like tissue paper. I could double-bag groceries faster than any cashier could ring them up. And
tía
Gloria noticed; she began calling on me to help her all the time. One Monday morning she handed me the order book from Associated Grocers and I followed the jingle of the keys she safety-pinned to her waistband as she marched down the aisles, poking through every item on the shelves, calling out orders for me to mark down:
Two boxes of Strawberry Pop-Tarts . . . One box eight-ounce Libby’s Peach Nectars . . . Five boxes of this . . . Three boxes of that
. . . and on and on for eight aisles. I could barely keep up with her as I strained to find the millimeter-size line in the book to scribble in a number in the quantity box. But of course, she checked the order book herself, twice. She was as direct, methodical, and commanding as her father, Don Gustavo—and my
abuela
.

But according to family stories, back in the fifties,
tía
Gloria was a pampered debutante in Cuba. She dressed in freshly pressed linen every day and took piano lessons well into her twenties; she was chauffeured to and from high school, and later, to the university where she studied political science. It was difficult to reconcile the once demure and sophisticated
señorita Gloria
with the
tía
Gloria I worked with every day at El Cocuyito. She wore athletic socks showing
under polyester pants hemmed an inch above her ankles; a faded polo shirt pinched under the elastic waistband, segmenting her body; her hair in a loosening bun jabbed through with a pencil; and a half dozen rubber bands tied around her wrist. A woman who never wore necklaces or earrings, never smelled like soap or perfume, never painted her fingernails or her face, except on special occasions. And yet there
was
something very feminine and enviable about her satin-black hair and her flawless skin that appeared poreless even under the unforgiving fluorescent lights of the store. She didn’t seem to fit any stereotype; maybe that’s why the two of us made a great team.

One Wednesday she called for me. “Riqui,
ven pa’ca,
I’m going to show you how to fix
los vinos
.” El Cocuyito was known for its wide selection of wines, catering to exiles of the Cuban elite and their nostalgia for the
buena vida
they could barely afford anymore.
Tía
Gloria, having once been a member of that elite, had dedicated an entire side of an aisle to spirits. El Cocuyito was the only Cuban bodega in Miami where you could pick up an eighty-dollar bottle of Dom Pérignon champagne along with a fifty-cent bag of home-fried pork rinds. As
tía
Gloria explained: “
Los miércoles
are always wine day.
La gente
come Friday to buy wine for the weekend. We must have what they want on the shelves.”

With a fresh rag in her hand,
tía
Gloria took inventory, inspecting every bottle row by row and cleaning the shelf with Fantastik as she went along, calling out the vintages to be restocked. I followed behind her, jotting down the names as best I could on scrap pieces of cardboard, which seemed too ordinary to hold such soft, beautiful words like
Pouilly-Fuissé, Sauvignon, Beaujolais Nouveau, Châteauneuf-du-Pape
. We also stocked vintages from Chile and Spain like
Casillero del Diablo
and
Sangre de Toro
, which sounded so poetic in Spanish, I thought, and yet so ghoulish in English:
The Devil’s Cellar; Bull’s Blood
.

Keeping the list in my back pocket, I pulled a dozen boxes from the special shelves
tía
Gloria had built above the freezers to keep the wine cool and returned with my cart stacked, a fresh blade in my box cutter, and my pricing gun loaded. One by one, I priced each bottle. “
El precio
goes on the back, below the label. Never on the front!” she instructed. I held each bottle, silently reading the label, pretending I could speak French—
Appellation Pauillac Contrôlée, mis en bouteille au domaine
—pretending I was more than a stock boy, that I was as sophisticated as the châteaus, the cursive lettering, and the fancy emblems on the bottles I handed to her.

She held each one like a baby in both her unmanicured hands, dusted off the face of the bottle with her palm, then held it up to the light to check the color and the cork before tenderly placing it on the shelf. “Every label has to face perfectly forward,
¿entiendes?
Every bottle must be perfectly behind the other,” she explained. Like pork rinds and champagne,
tía
Gloria was a contradiction I loved: chewing a wad of Juicy Fruit gum while teaching me the difference between Chardonnay and sauvignon blanc; a toothpick dangling from her mouth as she explained how a rosé is made by leaving the grape juice in contact with the skins. She rotated and moved every bottle around as if arranging a bouquet of flowers. By the time we finished, it looked beautiful, every sparkling bottle bathing the aisle with light, the colors reflecting in the linoleum tiles.
“Coje,”
she said, stuffing a ten-dollar bill in my pocket while I was tossing the empty wine boxes in the Dumpster. “You did good today.”