I nodded, amused. “Yes...” Rocky had warned me not to bother to correct the Cubans: They would insist we were Hawaiian, no matter what we said. And, in fact, it was almost dizzying. Everywhere we went, to whomever I was introduced, we were Las Hawayanas, over and over.
“So it’s actually hotter then, hotter than here, because a volcano would be spitting out fire, right?” the policeman cousin asked, smiling courteously as he puckered then extended his fingers outward. He turned off the fire and lifted the pot to take to the bathroom. He stood there, perspiring, waiting for my response as the steam rose. His face was so kind, it was nearly impossible to imagine him as a cop.
“Yeah, but it doesn’t work that way,” I tried again with my limited Spanish.
They nodded at me politely.
“We are on the same latitude, no?” Dionisio’s mother asked. The knife crisscrossed the air horizontally now.
“Yes, but it’s different,” I said, realizing even as I insisted that I would never convince them.
“Of course it’s different!” exclaimed a buoyant Tom Mahler, bounding into the kitchen for a glass of water for Mrs. Wu, whom he was entertaining in the living room. He’d obviously heard the tail end of our chat. “Hawai’i is an American colony, ripped of all its freedom and tradition. Cuba is a free and sovereign nation!”
“Look, Tom, you don’t know—” I started to say, but then Raúl excused himself and trotted off to bathe, bumping right smack into me.
“I am so sorry!” he said, the hot water having splashed him, not me. “Are you all right?”
I nodded as Raúl and Dionisio’s mother shrugged, both slightly chagrined.
In the meantime, Tom laughed, practically skipping back to Mrs. Wu with a cold glass of water.
I confess I was amazed in Cuba — not at Socialism’s wonders, even as Tom rattled off literacy rates (“The highest in the Western Hemisphere — even higher than the United States!” he exuded) and infant mortality rates (“The lowest in the Western Hemisphere — even lower than the United States!”). More precisely, I was astounded by how my sense of being an islander was constantly challenged. Nearly every Cuban I met happily confessed he or she couldn’t swim. This, of course, was nearly unheard of in Hawai’i, where learning to swim is no more of an option than learning to breathe. The Cubans sat on their weathered Malecón with their backs to the sea, unaware and undisturbed, chatting and drinking and sometimes even fishing, their lines dangling behind them as they continued their social dalliances. Just looking at them facing away from the water like that gave me the willies.
They wore shoes — flats and loafers but often heavy-soled shoes, more suitable for mountain climbing than anything else, and even better if the shoes were some brand they recognized: Mephisto, Doc Martens, and Prada of course. And they kept those shoes on all the time, even in their own homes, constantly wary of germs and viruses that, according to them, were both ubiquitous and lethal if they attached themselves to a naked foot.
“You don’t die from the virus,” Raúl explained, trying to reassure me, “but from the symptoms.”
These were said to be utterly extravagant. There was the patatú, an attack of undetermined origin completely undetectable by medical science, the sirimba (a milder form), and a whole series of weird medical conditions with no translations that even Rocky openly laughed about. What was crazy was that Dionisio — a medical doctor! — actually seemed to sign on to these diagnoses.
“You’re telling me that you really believe empachos can only be caused by eating too much Cuban food?” I asked.
Dionisio nodded serenely. He was less handsome than charming, with a gentility in his eyes that made my sister’s attraction to him completely understandable.
“But isn’t that just indigestion?” I asked, irritated. “Couldn’t you just get it from overeating anything?”
He shook his head. “No, no — this is particular. Malía, it doesn’t happen to people who don’t have a regular diet of Cuban food.”
Was he kidding me? I couldn’t tell. I was going to ask him about embolias, which I suspected, having killed his father, might take us down a more serious path, but then he started talking about serenos, a condition said to occur when you step outside and are enveloped in the night air.
“The night air? For real?” I asked, looking for cracks in his façade.
Dionisio shrugged. “And only old people can tell if you really have it.”
“That’s so mental! C’mon!”
Rocky laughed and laughed. “She’s not very Cuban, see?”
“Of course she is,” he said sympathetically, then reached out to touch the back of my head. His fingers dug through my hair to my scalp. “Absolutely she is.”
“What are you doing?” I snapped, pulling away from him. Rocky was holding her sides now, she was laughing so hard.
“Well, it’s as I suspected, somebody probably touched your mollera when you were born,” he said after his cursory examination of the spot at the very top of my skull.
“My what?”
“Your mollera.”
I looked at Rocky for clarification but she was bright red, tears streaming down her face. “Your...” She pointed at the back of her head between gulps and hysterics.
“It’s a soft cranial spot, very sensitive, much more sensitive on Cuban babies than on any other babies,” Dionisio said, still straight-faced. “You know, if it gets touched when you’re little — if it gets touched the wrong way — you can suffer irreparable harm, like losing your Cubanness. But yours—”
“Por dios!” I said in Spanish, naturally Cubed for once. “You’re just playing with me!”
And they both fell back on the couch, Rocky bubbling like lava and Dionisio finally erupting, slapping his thighs and his chest in the national fashion.
It wasn’t until later, alone in my noisy room writing in the travel journal I’d decided to keep for my parents, that I realized I’d never gotten a chance to ask about embolias.
As a result of the Cubans’ collective hypochondria, we had to watch for germs and viruses that could cause these things, and wear shoes — real shoes — all the time. To me, it was a real hardship not to go barefoot in the house. But my slippahs, which were the only things that really made sense to me day to day in the tropics, were a source of such embarrassment that one night, Dionisio’s mother asked Rocky to please suggest I not wear them as we headed out to a nearby casual restaurant.
“Just wear sandals,” my sister said, amused.
But it was all I could do to keep from laughing when Tom Mahler showed up that night with his feet encased in the dirtiest, most disgusting rope sandals I’d ever seen. Halfway to the restaurant, the left one came apart and he just chucked it to the side of the street (trash cans were virtually nonexistent, even in touristy areas like Chinatown, so that Rocky and I, our American habits ingrained, tended to walk around with handfuls of trash at any given moment) and kept going with only one sole protected.
“Oh, Tom, you can’t do that, it’s littering!” Rocky said, picking up the sandal remains between her thumb and index finger.
The entire family looked on in horror at each step Mahler took, warning him about upcoming dog feces, unidentified animal remains, vomit, and other revolting obstacles.
“You’re such gringas!” he exclaimed, motioning to the rest of the family for support with a flail of his arms. In response, they just nodded again.
“Tom—” I started to say, but Rocky elbowed me so hard, I almost lost my balance.