The man in white said something in the Yoruba dialect. It was soon clear to me that he was into Santeria, a combination of Christianity and Yoruba, an ancient people whose occult religion was named after the tribe itself. When a “child of the religion” sees her padrino— her religious godfather— she’s supposed to be nervous if she knows she’s done something wrong. They are the judges of your life.
In my country, you’re either a child of the religion or of the Revolution. Kassandra didn’t know whose baby she had had. This was not acceptable in any religion. But in Santeria, it could cost you your life. I knew the vernacular details of the religion by growing up with it all around me. But my mother never really practiced it, and neither did I. We had some general ideas about Catholicism, but the churches were either closed or in such a state of dilapidation that it was dangerous to be in them. My mother had almost forgotten the little her mother had taught her about Jesus Christ. We just believed in God our own way. Either through the saints of Catholicism or their equivalent in Santeria, we were sure that ultimately, the word that really mattered was God’s.
“Where is she? I want to see her.” Padrino asked the nurse.
“She was just put in an incubator.”
“So I can’t see her right now?”
“Padrino, she has to stay here a couple of days. You can take me home and her, too,” Kassandra said pointing to me.
The man looked puzzled. “Who is she?”
“She’s my friend. She’s been with me all these days. She has no one picking her up. I thought we could take her home.”
“Where do you live, muchachita?”
“La Habana Vieja,” I answered.
“That’s where we live. We’ll go to our house, eat something, then you walk home.”
“Thank you.”
We rode a very old but well kept Mercedes Benz. Kassandra and I sat in the back while padrino was in the passenger seat and a man with an overextended jaw drove us. I had only ridden a car a few times, never a Mercedes. Kassandra kept her face to the window, and every so often she wiped the tears on her cheeks with the back of her hand. I reached over to touch her leg.
“Back to my life,” she said, almost in a whisper. I could say nothing even though I wanted to take her by the hand and run out of the car. She knew what I was thinking and patted my hand on her thigh.
“You’ll be all right,” she said very low. “I’m the one that’s in trouble.”
I thought she was referring to the baby’s father and didn’t know what kind of trouble she was in.
The section of the city called La Habana Vieja was filled with eighteenth century buildings that were being held up only by the grace of God and hundreds of thousands of two by eight beams. The structural columns had not been touched in at least a century. The paint on some buildings was practically non-existent, and it looked as if the slightest wind would bring down the entire city. I knew these buildings all too well. Tia Susi had lived here all her life. My mother and I used to visit at least once a month. And for the past thirty days, it had been my home.
I didn’t say anything in the car ride because chances were that this family knew who my tia was, and they would know who I was. The word in town was that the dancer’s daughter was now living either with her aunt or in La Habana with a friend. Nobody knew for sure. My mom had instructed my aunt to do this, so the state wouldn’t come after me and send me to work in the sugar cane fields or the literacy camps the Revolution had established for the country folk. Ironically, one of the reasons my mother had not taken me with her was that she wanted me to finish school. I had not been able to go to school anymore and had had to stay indoors all the time.
Padrino lived in a huge but ancient house in such a state of obliteration that pieces of stucco collected on the floor exposing the skeleton of the structure. The paint on the walls had disappeared in big chunks, leaving only trails of what used to be a well kept home. It stood on crutches as the other buildings, with wooden beams holding it. The conditions inside were the same, but it was clean. The furniture was from Batista’s time, and even though I was too young to remember the previous dictator, I had been to other houses where the furniture was still standing in a time warp.
“Bienvenida,” Padrino said to me. “You are always welcomed here as long as you’re Kassandra’s friend.”
“Thank you,” I said, somewhat skeptical about his conditional politeness.
Kassandra smiled. “And when you’re no longer my friend, you may still come here, but you have to pay the fees.”
“Kassandra, you talk too much,” Padrino said. “That’s always going to be your problem.”
“Yes, well, I have to tell her the truth, no?”
I stood wondering why she felt she needed to tell me the truth about everything. I didn’t think it was my place to say a word. I hoped to have a few minutes by ourselves to ask Kassandra why things felt so tense with her padrino.
“Kassandra is a nice girl, but sometimes she has to bite her tongue,” he said as if telling me would make me a part of his disciplining team. “I hope you’re not learning all the wrong things from her.”
“No, Padrino,” Kassandra responded. “I promise I’ll teach her to be as good as I am.” She winked an eye at me.
The man in white excused himself and walked through a wooden door that had no handle. Kassandra grabbed my hand and pulled me onto the stairs.
“Come on, let me show you where I sleep when I stay here.”
“Don’t you live here?”
“No, Camacho and I usually stay in a room in La Habana at this little old lady’s house. We give her two hundred pesos a month because sometimes we don’t want to pay for a cab to bring us back here.”
“Camacho is your boyfriend?”
“Yep. He’s my Padrino’s nephew. I met him at my initiation into the religion. I was very young and fell in love with him.”
“Is he here?”
“I don’t think so, or he would’ve come down to see us already. He’s really pissed at me, so I don’t think I’ll see him for a while.”
The second floor was held by marble columns that in deep contrast to the rest of the house, were still in pretty good shape. We walked by a couple of rooms with open doors, they were bedrooms with colorful furniture, tables and chairs with kaleidoscopic colors and designs. The farthest room had the door closed.
“Yuk, what’s in there?” I asked when we passed by it.
“That’s where Eleggua gets his sacrificial lambs,” Kassandra answered.
Eleggua was one the most powerful saints of the religion and he liked to drink chicken’s blood and have their feet at his altar. When I was seven, we had a neighbor who was a high priestess, and she would tell me if I wasn’t a good little girl, Eleggua would have my long curls as a sacrifice. The sacrificial lambs were not real lambs, (real lamb was a rare delicacy) they were pieces of roosters, pigs, goats, and chickens.
We continued into a small hall, which led to narrow stairs into the attic. The walls were bare with old paint peeling from everywhere. There was a canopy bed in the middle of the room which was enveloped by a thick mosquito net, a luxury not everyone had in the island’s mosquito riddled summers. The bed had not been slept in for a while, and things looked as if no one had been in there for years. This was Kassandra’s room.
“I haven’t been in here since I found out I was pregnant.”
“How come?”
“We just stay in different places, and lately we’ve been with Lucia. She takes care of me. She cooks whatever I want to eat. She washes my clothes, and never asks any questions. I had no reason to come back here.”
“But isn’t this home?”
“This used to be home when I was a little girl. My mother and I slept in this room and when she went to work, I stayed with my padrino and his wife.”
“Did they know?”
“They’re the ones that put her to work as soon as she was old enough to do so.”
“How old was that?”
“She was fifteen.”
“And you started at twelve?”
“And they keep getting younger. The Revolution’s thirst for young girls is never ending,” she said taking my hand. “Let’s get out of here.”
We went down a set of stairs that led into the patio. There were wooden altars on every corner of the patio. One had a Chango, the other a Yemaya and in the corner closer to us there was Oludamare, the king of the orishas.
Kassandra crossed herself three times in front of Chango, which meant this was her matron saint, the orisha she was supposedly protected by. She took some stale bread that was in a bowl and dropped to her knees in front of the decorated coconut. The fruit had been given eyes and a mouth, hair and a nose, and it sat on a small wooden chair covered with a large red pillowcase. There were eggs with painted faces surrounding the bowl it sat in, where a bed of centavos had been made to accommodate the machete- flattened bottom. She offered the bread to the saint, prayed in the Yoruba dialect, then crossed herself again.
I had seen people praying to these saints before. They usually danced and whirled around in a demented fashion. Kassandra simply interlaced her fingers placing her chin on them as she closed her eyes. It reminded me of how my mother used to pray before she went on a trip.
An old black woman with a wrinkled face, hair pulled back and dressed completely in white stood at the door of the patio. She also crossed herself as she walked in front of one of the decorated coconuts, but not the same one Kassandra was kneeling in front of.
When Kassandra noticed her, she stood quickly and took a few steps and kneeled next to her. The old woman smiled but continued her prayers without looking sideways. A few minutes went by in silence while the nauseating smell of rotten flesh permeated the courtyard. My stomach suddenly went into painful contortions, and I had to dash up the stairs to what, during the walkthrough with Kassandra, I had narrowly made out to be the bathroom.
Once I was done emptying the already scarce contents of my stomach, I stepped outside the bathroom trying not to inhale too deeply for the putrid odor was pervasive, when I heard a man’s voice coming from the first floor. I took a step back into the bathroom and pushed one of the shades to look down.
“That’s what I like to see,” a man said. “Family sticking with family.”
The old woman and Kassandra were both still on their knees while the light-skinned mulatto stood close to them. Kassandra’s expression was the same it had been when she first saw her padrino in the hospital; an eerie mix of panic and surprise.
“Camacho, where have you been?” the old woman asked getting up to kiss and hug him.
“Ay, abuela, I’m a busy man. I have businesses to attend to. I can’t be coming here all the time.”
“I know you can’t come here all the time,” she responded. “Pero mi hijo, I haven’t seen you in over three months.”
“I know I know…”
“Ochun hasn’t seen you in a while either, Camacho. You cannot abandon your religion like that.”
“My religion’s captain is the American dollar, abuela.”
“Don’t speak like that in front of Ochun.”
I smiled at the old belief that saints could hear you. Camacho hugged his grandmother without taking his eyes off Kassandra.
“Where’s the baby?” he asked her.
“In the hospital.”
“Does it look like me or the Yuma you fucked?” He circled her like a hunting dog does to his soon to be prey.
“This might not be the best place to talk about that, Camacho,” she said, lowering her head submissively.
“This is as good a place as the streets of La Habana where you told me it might not be mine.”
“Might not be yours?” the old woman asked confused.
“She had a white Yuma at the same time she was with me, and now she doesn’t even know who the father is.”
The old woman looked at Kassandra, then back at her grandson. “You young people are all crazy. In my time, no one had babies without being married.”
“Yeah well, the women back then respected their men, abuela.”
“And men respected their women,” Kassandra said.
“You’re saying I didn’t respect you?” Camacho’s voice was louder now, angrier, and his eyes glowed furiously. Suddenly, he took a few steps toward her and grabbed the back of her neck pushing her face down to the floor.
Kassandra didn’t scream. She took a deep breath resisting, but not fighting back. The old woman let out two short cries. “What are you doing, Camacho?” she yelled.
He looked up, held on to Kassandra’s neck for a second longer, then let go but not before shoving her face onto the rough floor.
“That is not the way I taught you to treat women! What is wrong with you?” the old woman said running toward Kassandra who was trying to get back up. I stood behind the bathroom door. Fear cemented my feet. I felt complete repulsion for this man and instinctively knew he was dangerous. Kassandra’s overwhelming fear of staying in La Habana was no longer so puzzling.
“Camacho, get the hell out of here!” the old lady yelled. “Get out before I get your uncle to kick you out.”
“Ay, abuela, I’m going I’m going. But you don’t scare me with my uncle, he won’t do anything for a whore.”
“Get out of my house!”
“I’ll see you around el malecon,” he said to Kassandra and walked out.
I stepped out of the bathroom and ran down the steps. Kassandra was nervous but did not cry. On her face was the resignation that is common in the Cuban people, the knowing that no matter how much they want change, change is nowhere to be found.
“Ay mijita,” said the old woman holding on to Kassandra. “How I wish that grandson of mine and you had never met.”
“Are you okay?” I asked when I got to the bottom of the stairs.
“You talk to your padrino, you hear me,” the old woman ordered. “He’ll put Camacho in check. He’s always had to be that boy’s father and mother. He’s the only man Camacho respects. You tell him what he’s done to you.”
“Okay, abuela,” Kassandra said looking down.
“I have to lie in bed. My heart can’t take these scenes anymore; I think I’m going to die.” The old woman stood and headed up the stairs.
“She’s been dying for the last twenty years,” Kassandra whispered. “We should go.”
“But aren’t you going to say something?”
“To whom?”
“Your padrino!”
“My padrino loves me, but I’m not his blood so he won’t do anything about it.”
“What’s wrong is wrong; he has to do something about it.”
“What do you know, huh? You’ve known us a total of five minutes.”
“You have to do something about what just happened.”
“Running to my padrino is definitely not the answer. Trust me. Right now, we just need to get out of here.”
I followed her as we left the house without saying goodbye to anyone. Two blocks down, with the help of two men already hanging on, we jumped onto the back of a bus so cramped with people that inside you could not tell whose arm belonged to whose face.
At a major intersection, we jumped off saying thank you to the two guys who had helped us hang on. We had no money for a cab, so we had a choice. We either walked to Centro Habana or we hitched a ride from a tourist.
“Male tourists,” Kassandra explained, “love to help out young girls in distress. Who knows, we might even be able to make some money off of them.”