Miami
IN DECEMBER OF 2022, adrift (again) and staying with my parents, I found among my grandmother’s papers a sealed envelope addressed to me. She’d used my married name and a New York City address where I had not lived since just before the pandemic. That and the thin, shaky script told me she’d probably written it not long before her death. I turned it over. The letter was sealed, and across the back, the same uncertain hand had written something in Arabic. It was enough for me to guess at the contents, though I didn’t open it right away. I’m a little ashamed to say that my first thought was, What was Lala thinking, sending me a letter to New York flaunting that flourish of foreign script? And in the next moment a new kind of shame engulfed me. For I had not been able to see Lala when she became ill, and even when I spent time in her company, I had not paid proper attention to her. This is one of my regrets: that I didn’t listen better. But in those moments when she seemed so full of stories that it was almost like a possession, something kept me apart, some protective sense. The truth is that the memories Lala shared all contained a touch of madness, of the unreal. “You are a continuation of me,” she liked to say, a phrase that always chilled me. I wanted to believe I’d sprung spontaneously into my life, untethered to family history. I understand better now that she, meanwhile, saw us as sisters in a story that went back generations. How often did she beckon me with those thin hands, their flawlessly manicured red nails? “Come, I have something to tell you.”
Lala’s letter was inside one of those blue Danish cookie tins on a shelf in her closet. I’d gone looking for a button and had found instead a cache of old letters and photographs. True, it’s a bit grand to call this collection of crumbling notes and water-stained portraits her papers, but I smile even now, thinking that Lala—ever one to associate with “la high”—would have loved it. When I was a child, my grandmother told so many stories about “El Yacht” and the society of matrons who sent their kids to El Colegio de Belén and flaunted American Christmas trees in the foyers of their Havana mansions that for a long time I assumed she’d been one of them.
My mother had already gone through Lala’s things as best she could after her death, but she hadn’t made much progress. Lala collected things. A hoarder, Americans might say. But Lala was the immigrant daughter of immigrants, and possessions are dear to those who have lost much. When she moved in with my parents after my grandfather’s death, she brought three suitcases. One contained clothes. The other two overflowed with the contents of her idiosyncratic collection, which my mother was still sorting through: sewing things, of course, thousands of buttons in the blue cans, cassette tapes of radio shows she’d recorded, photographs, mostly of my mother when she was a little girl, and souvenirs from Spain, among them a tiny ceramic bullfighter and a flamenco dancer no bigger than my hand. When I brought the dancer closer, I realized that Lala must have crocheted the tiny black mantilla that covered her shoulders. There were also hundreds of newspaper clippings. Many of them were about Cuba, and a surprising number were newsprint photos of people’s faces. But I knew that Lala had also kept every newspaper article I had ever published and all the postcards I’d sent her from around the world. My mother had collected these in a big Ikea bag, which she handed to me almost as soon as I returned home, promising to stay only a few days. It sat now in the closet; I planned to go through it while I was here.
No one had stayed in Lala’s room since her death, and I had not planned on being the first. But it was December, and my brother had just arrived from Connecticut with his family, taking over both his old room and mine. To be fair, no one expected me to make it to my parents’ for the holidays. I had not managed it even once in the previous decade. I was relieved when my parents didn’t ask questions when I showed up in the Uber on December 23. Perhaps they assumed I had accepted Lala’s room in gratitude for their discretion. But the truth is, I didn’t have a problem with staying there at all. In fact, I was looking forward to it. The room sat apart from the house, accessible only through the back porch. I could shut the door, pull the blinds, and rest without distraction or worry. I could hide out from my parents and their unspoken concerns. And I could hide out from Marco and his family. I loved my brother intensely, as one loves a younger sibling, but I was afraid of his children. Had I stayed in the main house, I’d have been forced to spend hours evading their laughter and their little arguments. The three eldest had run to me as soon as I walked through the front door, nearly tripping me. They clung to my sleeves and pant legs like a single feral animal, milk teeth bared in laughter that carried me to the edge of ridicule and ancient scoldings. “Okay, kids, okay, let your aunt be,” Marco had said, pulling them off. He gathered me in a hug. But I had seen it, the hint of a frown so brief that, had I not been watching for it, I would have missed it. By the time he looked at me again, he’d managed to turn the frown into an expression of worry.
“Will you be okay staying there?”
I laughed. I wasn’t superstitious. Anyway, Lala had been gone for more than a year already, and my parents had redone the room, even putting in a new floor and replacing her bed with a pull-out couch, intending for the room, which they had built as a separate unit at the back of the house, to become a guest suite for us.
“I think Lala would be glad,” I said. “Maybe she’ll even visit—I’m sure she has a few new stories to tell me from the other side.”
This made Marco laugh. As children we always rolled our eyes when Lala started one of her convoluted yarns. She could come back from a fifteen-minute visit to Publix with a story that took half an hour to tell. She was attuned to every detail, imbuing them with significance and even portent. She’d linger over the description of the man walking toward the meat section with a limp that suggested he’d survived polio as a child. She’d rise from her chair to act out the way he retrieved a package of steak, hand shaking, and then used his leg to secure it—“so unhygienic!”—against the wall of the refrigerated case as he reached in for another packet and then another. Was he having a party? Were they on sale? And here my grandmother would cackle: “More likely, he had several girlfriends to cook for!” Another day she’d tell how she watched a woman leave her tiny baby in the grocery cart while she flirted and flirted with the baker across the plastic bags of day-old Cuban rolls. What new mother wears a full face of makeup, including false eyelashes, and fancy clothes (a gold belt!) to the supermarket? Don’t you think there was something else going on there? Had Lala been allowed to continue beyond fifth grade, she would have been a much better novelist than me. Maybe here lay the root of my resistance to her stories: I suspected that she was the superior storyteller and always would be.
Lala collected fears and anxieties as readily as she did stories. Perhaps the two skills were connected. She was afraid of the dark, of strangers, of lightning, and dogs. We all knew that after my grandfather died in 1993, Lala would not be able to live by herself. So my parents took some of his small inheritance and began building the spare room in the back while the flowers were still fresh on his grave. Lala finally moved in the following year when I started high school. I alternated great love for Lala with the supreme and self-obsessed annoyance that seems to be required of teenagers, at least in this country. Still, I somehow ended up in her room at least once a week, usually dropping off or retrieving some sewing I’d asked her to do for me. I felt good there. It always smelled of homemade french fries, not like a fast-food cafeteria but like some old inn run by kind people. Once during an electrical storm, she asked me to sit with her. She was telling me some story or other—something I’d probably heard before, and maybe we were both a little bored, when a sudden flash lit up the room and—amid the clanging of the whole world crashing to an end—swallowed us in darkness.
“Maria santísima!” Lala cried out. She sounded frightened. But as my eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness, her face emerged, shiny with a new layer of sweat. She was smiling.
The first night in Lala’s room, I slept better than I had in months, maybe years, not waking even once. The pull-out couch was a luxury model, steel-gray and sleek. My mother had helped me open the bed and dress it with new white sheets, cool and stiff and still creased from the packaging. The mattress was firm, the pillows all new. Off in a corner beyond the bed stood a little kitchen, the same one Lala had used, except for a new mini fridge that my parents had installed. They had also redone the bathroom, swapping out the old tub for a sleek marble shower. It was a cold December outside but comfortably warm in Lala’s room. I experienced the pleasure, which had so often filled me in my travels, of arriving in a new place, unsoiled by whatever memories had sent me running there.
I found the letter on Christmas morning. One of my brother’s little monsters had torn a button off a new silk blouse the night before during the Nochebuena celebrations, and by the time I noticed, the button had vanished into the growing disorder of the house. I was able to keep the children occupied for a few minutes with a game of find the button, but they soon lost interest, led by the eldest, who was on his way to being a sociopath, all smiles and smooth self-interest at the age of eleven. I liked him best, of course. The middle twins—my brother and his wife never admitted to IVF, but I had my suspicions—were bland little copies of their mother. And the baby. It was my first time meeting him, and I’d spent the last three days hoping that no one would ask me to hold him.
I set Lala’s letter on the dresser and continued looking for a button that would match my stupidly expensive blouse. After a few minutes of sorting through buttons in a different blue tin—Lala had left at least a dozen of them—I found a good match and set out in search of a needle and thread. Then it was time for breakfast, and then taking photos of the monsters opening their presents, and so it was nearly dark by the time I returned to the room to find the letter—which I’d half forgotten—glowing like a small ember amid alien shapes in the twilight.
I turned on the overhead lamp, returning things to their proper places. An ordinary dresser. An ordinary table. The single chair. For the first time since I’d been staying in Lala’s room, I noticed a very faint scent of french fries. Perhaps it still clung to the paper envelope. I see Lala sitting down at the small dining table with its collapsible leaves to write me. She’s just finished a plate of french fries and thinly sliced onions fried in olive oil. A nightly indulgence she hides from my mother.
I brought the envelope to bed and put on my glasses. There it was: my name in Lala’s shaky but unmistakable Palmer-trained hand. And the address on Fourteenth Street. Apartment 7F, where my husband still lived. Perhaps he was there even now, alone on Christmas night, standing at the window looking down Broadway as the lights shifted and flared in the frozen air. My family had been scrupulous about avoiding any mention of him. A temporary situation. After all we’d been through, we just needed some space—to use the therapist’s stupid phrase. When she said it, my husband and I had looked at one another and rolled our eyes, not caring if she saw us. And I, at least, was clinging to the idea that we still had something worth returning to, even if it was shared contempt for the bland vernacular of our times. But what if all times had their lazy phrases? Shortcuts, if one felt generous. Even a shared language. Didn’t these same worn phrases—one door closes, another opens; all for the best; time heals—also have the power to soothe when spoken by therapists and lawyers and doctors? Wasn’t it comforting sometimes to believe that the things that happened to us happened to everyone in the same way?
It was that alarming flourish of Arabic script across the back of the letter that led me to guess at its contents, taking me back to a fantastic story that Lala had told me almost a decade ago, after we’d returned from a retrospective of Wifredo Lam at a small gallery in the Gables. I hadn’t believed it then, and I didn’t believe her story now—the general outlines were too similar to a novel I had published a few years back. Still, blood rushed to my face and I began to sweat. I stuck my finger under the envelope flap. I was afraid of ripping it and destroying the Arabic, which I wanted to show to someone who could translate it. But the letter opened easily, its adhesive gone dry and yellow. Given Lala’s loquaciousness in real life, I was expecting a thick letter. Instead, I pulled out a single business card from the Miami Herald. I stared at it for a moment, caught in a kind of time vertigo. Why did it take me so long to recognize my own name? Was it the disconnect between the married name on the envelope and my maiden name on the card? The sudden sense that in fact these had been two different people and that those two women were likewise strangers to the one now holding the evidence of their separate existences? Mariam de la Vega, Little Havana Reporter. Did I ever know this person? I turned over the card. No note, not even Lala’s signature. Just an address, written by the same shaky hand in green ink:
Calle 3 #507 e/ 21 y 23 La Habana
I opened the envelope wide and peered in again in case I had missed anything. But that was it: an old business card with an address in Havana. I was no longer a reporter (was anyone?), and I’d only been one for three years. But that was long enough to inoculate me against the impulse to jump to conclusions. Assume makes an ass of you and me. Maybe it was just the address of a store Lala had loved as a young woman. Or a place she had once lived. Maybe there was a banal explanation. But I knew that Lala wasn’t one to reach beyond the grave just to illuminate the commonplace. I knew, without proof but with a certainty that shot through my spine, that this wasn’t just a sentimental address. And I knew it was at the heart of the story Lala had told me about her mother, Juana.
The next day I waited until my brother and his family were out of the house before showing the card to my mother.
“I found this in Lala’s nightstand,” I said, not sure why I had already started with a lie. “Do you recognize it?”
“What do you mean? It’s your business card,” my mother said.
“The address on the back, do you recognize it?”
My mother held her arm out, and I lent her my glasses.
She repeated it a few times and looked up to the ceiling.
“That’s in El Vedado. Close to the university, I think.”
“Did you live close by?”
“Oh, goodness, no. We lived in Regla for a time and then in Marianao.”
“Could it have been the house of some friends? Relatives?”
My mother laughed.
“Hija, we didn’t know anyone who lived in El Vedado.”
“What could it be, then?”
“God knows. It’s likely something Lala heard on the radio. You know how she liked to collect anything related to high society.”
“But why would she write it on my card?”
My mother turned the card over and stared at the name.
“Mari, I—”
I held up my hand.
“I’m fine, Mamita. I promise.”
“I was just going to say that your father and I are here to help you with whatever you need. You can stay with us as long as you—”
“I’m really fine. For real, for real, the honest truth.”
“You should allow yourself to rest. It’s been a lot. You can’t just keep working and working.” She stopped and looked at me. “You always drove yourself so hard. I don’t know why.”
“I’m fine, really. Everything’s good.” I was aware that it came out too fast. I took a few deep breaths and forced myself to slow down.
“Look,” I continued, quietly now, “Lots of people had it way worse than I did these last few years.”
My mother’s eyes filled with tears, and I reached for her hand.
Lala had recovered from the virus, but she’d continued to complain of shortness of breath for months after. She was my mom’s mother, but it was my father who brought her coffee every morning. He told us later that he knew what he would find as soon as he saw the blinds on the door still drawn.
I’d taken my grandmother to the gallery opening because I knew how much she enjoyed that milieu, though I assumed that she knew very little about art. She had talked about it for weeks before, letting all her friends know that her granddaughter had invited her to an exclusive exhibition. That wasn’t quite true—it was just the soft opening, where the real collectors would be. I knew the owner’s daughter from college, and she had helped me with the research for an essay I was writing about forgeries in Cuban art. This was the second gallery the family had opened. The first had received so many bomb threats in the 1970s that they had closed it and moved to Palm Beach for a while. They’d returned in the 1990s when they assumed the climate for art from Cuba would be more welcoming. They’d been partly right. No bomb threats these days, but also not much interest, which was maybe almost as bad, I thought as I walked in with my grandmother. We were both overdressed, my grandmother more flamboyantly so in an ankle-length dress with beading at the bodice and a long strand of pearls that gave her the vague air of a flapper.
“Aquí no hay nadie,” she said in a loud voice. I assured her the gallery would fill as the night wore on. If only for the free wine and cheese. But I was also surprised. Gallery openings in New York City were usually mobbed, and invitations dutifully scrutinized. Here no one was checking anything at the door, and we’d been standing near the entrance for a few minutes before a woman greeted us. It took me a few moments to recognize her—evidently she’d had some cosmetic surgery done.
“Querida!” she said, drawing me in for a kiss on the cheek. “And you’ve brought this beautiful date!”
I introduced Raquel to my grandmother and left them to chat while I searched for the wine.
It was an exhibit of some of the artists of the Cuban vanguardia. “Minor works of the major artists,” is how Raquel had described it to me with her good-natured laugh. Most of the works on display were small studies—charcoal or ink. There were what looked like preliminary sketches by Eduardo Abela and Antonio Gattorno and of course many delicate watercolors by Wifredo Lam, and some other artists I didn’t recognize. But Raquel had also hung some larger works, among them a luscious oil in red tones by Amelia Peláez. Bandeja de frutas—sweeter, more electric than an actual tray of fruits, its fat richness suggesting an abundance that suddenly seemed lacking in my own life. I forgot myself in front of it, and time.
In the glow of the Peláez, the distinction between “minor” and “major” struck me as a reductionist vulgarity—the kind of nonsense that only someone who had no notion of art-making would declare. Idiotic certainty of the amateur, I thought, as in a dream, before gradually returning to rationality. Which naturally led me to panic: Where was my grandmother?
I grabbed a plastic tumbler of wine and another of water from the circulating nymph in black and went off to retrieve Lala. I found her standing before a small charcoal study of a mother and child.
I handed her the cup and leaned in to read the description. “Ah, of course. Wifredo Lam,” I said. The previous year I’d seen La Jungla at the MOMA and had stood transfixed before the sinuous, haunting figures.
“He was probably the most famous of the artists of the vanguardia,” I said. “I just saw one of his best-known paintings at a museum in New York. He was born in Oriente in 1902 and studied in Paris, where he came under the influence of the surrealists and Pablo Picasso and—”
My grandmother squeezed my hand. “I know who Wifredo Lam was,” she said.
“Ah. Of course, Lala. Sorry.”
“Sorry for what?” she asked, though she had not taken her eyes from the canvas. “I’m glad that you know who he was. For a long time it seemed like nothing about Cuba interested you.”
I didn’t know what she could possibly mean.
“Did you see the Peláez?” I asked.
“The who?”
“Peláez. Amelia.”
Lala looked up at me.
“Are there more Lams?”
The exhibit included several other works, including two studies in colored pencil that I found far superior to the rough charcoal sketch that had so transfixed Lala. Even La Ofrenda, a larger work on charcoal, was more interesting, with its stark squares and rectangles balanced by the globe of the head and fruit. But she seemed to like this untitled study best, and as the evening went on she returned to it again and again. The gallery began to fill up, and I lost track of Lala, tiny in her jeweled flats. When I found her, she was again standing before it. She grabbed my arm and leaned in.
“Is it for sale?”
I laughed.
“You going to buy it for me, Lala?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Lala, I was joking!”
Lala finally turned from the painting and looked up at me. Her eyes were shining, not exactly with laughter, but with a kind of calculated mischievousness that flared in her now and then, especially when she was contemplating the punch line to one of her stories.
“Just curious to know how much people are willing to pay for a couple random pencil marks.”
Someone laughed, and to my embarrassment, I turned to find Raquel standing there.
“I’ll find out,” she said to Lala. Then, bending down (somewhat condescendingly, it appeared to me), she added: “You have very good taste. We believe this was an early study for his Mother and Child, a very important work that’s now in the Art Institute of Chicago.”
Lala nodded. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. A few moments later Raquel returned with the list.
“Let’s see, mi amor,” Raquel said, red reading glasses perched on her new nose. “Lam, Lam, Lam. Ah, yes. We have it listed at $3,065.” Raquel took her glasses off and held the list to her chest as she bent forward a little and whispered to Lala, “But we do layaway.”
I was renting a small apartment for the summer just a few blocks from the gallery, and we’d agreed that my grandmother would stay with me after the opening. I’d take her back to my parents in the morning. I only had a week left in Miami, and most of my things were already in suitcases. All that was left for me to do was pack up a few kitchen things and food, which I would bring with me to my parents. I hoped to get it done in the morning and was looking forward to getting to bed early.
“Go take a shower while I make us some tea,” Lala instructed. She was already washing her hands in the sink.
“No need to make us tea, Lala, thank you,” I said. “But we can sit together for a while if you want.”
“Go take a shower,” she said.
I laughed. “I took a shower this morning, Lala.”
“Take another one,” she said. “Todo el mundo te besuquio. Mwah, mwah, mwah. Everyone. Even the old men. So unhygienic.”
“It’s Miami, Lala. Everyone here kisses you.”
“You shouldn’t allow that. That’s how you get sick.”
“Okay,” I said, heading for the bathroom. It would take longer to argue with her.
Before I closed the door, I heard her call out, “How can there be no chamomile in this house!”
The shower revived me, and I was glad to emerge to find a steaming cup of tea waiting for me.
“Never heard of green tea,” Lala said. “Much less decaffeinated. But at least it’s warm.”
I dried my hair with a towel and smiled.
“Come, sit,” Lala said. “I have something to tell you.”
She had a good sense of timing, Lala did. And she waited a few moments, stirring her tea. I can still hear it—tink, tink, tink, like the opening notes of an opera. At last, Lala leaned across the table and said, “This Wifredo Lam, he knew my mother.”
It was the beginning of an impossible story that, in Lala’s fashion, stretched over several afternoons. And, as the address on the business card suggested, it was a story that she’d gone on telling, even beyond her death.
Ana Menéndez has published five books of fiction, most recently The Apartment (Counterpoint). Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies as well as in Vogue, Bomb Magazine, New England Review, and Tin House.
Photo by Persnickety Prints on Unsplash
