The Hemingway Maid ('16 revision)

Large American-style super-markets were not found anywhere in Cuba back then, but fresh produce, fish and meat were decent and plentiful if you hit the various local towns on market day. Havana was to be avoided, of course, as costs for tourists were high and all the best stuff was to be found on the 'off-limits-to-Gringos' black market. And that's where Pedro came in handy, Ron said, because the kid could arrange to get just about anything you wanted (wink-wink, nod-nod), on the black market or -- elsewhere, I suppose.

There were a couple of retired Pan Am pilots living in the marina on a huge, phallus-shaped Sea Ray, and together with Ron they constituted the evening variety show known as The Three Amigos. Known principally for their hallucinatory, off-balance antics when they returned from Havana each evening, typically howling at the moon, they had become something like a town council, of sorts. I figured Ron would have fancied himself Mayor of Marina Hemingway, if he'd taken to caring about stuff like that, but then again, no - he had a mean anti-authoritarian streak in him about a mile wide...

As that first evening approached, Ron invited me to join the Amigos on their evening rounds, and I nervously left Sabrina in Pedro's reputedly more-than-capable hands as we headed off for the car Pedro had arranged, and I had no idea that I was headed for an evening in Havana with three of the craziest human beings on this, or any other planet. I'll tell you about that night some other time, assuming I can remember some of it. You might think it funny - hell, maybe I will too.

Maybe, but then again...

Because the next thing I knew there was sun streaming though an overhead hatch, and I noticed a really foul taste in my mouth, and...

...then I felt Pedro standing over me, shaking me awake. Or trying to, I think. I had absolutely no idea where I was, or what day it was. For that matter, I was fairly certain I had no idea who I was, only that there were at least three elephants sitting on my head -- and one of them had an ass that stank to high hell. Slowly, however, the scene began to resolve into some kind of warped order: Sabrina seemed, well, Okay; the hands and feet I was looking at looked vaguely familiar; but there was a weird thirteen year old standing over me, shaking me...oh, yeah, The Three Amigos! Memories flooded back of rowdy street scenes, a rowdy girl from Hamburg, an even rowdier bar - with one scene involving mustache rides, and then the rowdiest car ride in human history. Then there was that taste in my mouth...a certain lass from Hamburg, maybe?

Well, you get the picture. Debauchery, if you know what I mean, hath no limits.

Pedro was soon shoving a plate of just fried plantains and fresh squeezed orange juice under my nose, and only then did I realize I was lying in Sabrina's cockpit with only a small blanket over my fetid form, and that's why my body felt like it had been trampled by stampeding cattle all night long. I felt this was reasonable because my mouth tasted like pure, dried bullshit -- and I was raised in Texas, so know the feeling well. Pedro was talking, and there were times when the words coming out of his mouth almost made sense, but then again, I was in the weirdest fog, like lost, only worse...

"Your boat is a mess, señor, so I have hired a woman to clean it for you today," he said in his thick Cuban accent. "She is also a cook, and will have breakfast ready in a few minutes. The hot water for your shower is ready too, so please, come now, Mr. Jim."

Sounded like a plan to me, but maybe that's because my middle name is "Go with the flow".

So, off to the shower I went, and yes, the water was indeed hot. Unless you've lived on a sailboat before, and for more than a few days, that statement is meaningless. Trivial, even. But at that moment I was pretty sure that this Pedro fella was Jesus Christ come back to earth. Hot water, and lots of it -- felt great after days at sea. Then it hit me -- a woman was on my boat, cooking and cleaning. I started to get a little antsy, and called out to Pedro.

"Just who is this woman -- on my boat, Pedro?"

"It is my sister Elise, Mr. Jim. Please do not worry, sir, she has done this kind of work before." Yeah, I'd had heard that one before. Like the little guy in Saigon who claimed he was selling you his pure virgin sister, and wouldn't you just know she'd been a virgin -- seven times that week already -- right before the little prick tossed a grenade in your bed...

So, I held my head under the water until it simply - stopped. If I'd wanted a longer shower, Pedro would have had to carry more to the rooftop tank, but no dice; he was gone -- yet fresh clothes, some toothpaste and a razor had magically appeared on a little stool outside the shower!

I wondered if the kid took dollars, then walked back to Sabrina in bare feet, and remembered to quickstep around the rusty nail heads that popped up as I walked along the rough old planks out the dock. As I approached my home I saw piles of my clothes on the dock, odds and ends stacked in the cockpit, and was just about convinced that I was being had, big time -- but no, there was Ron, semi-conscious in his way, holding a cup of coffee in one hand, his eyes half open with only the whites showing, talking with Pedro.

I guess I looked confused. Go figure.

So, let's recap here. I'm in the wastelands of the ultimate morning after, holding on to my head (stop spinning, damnit), hoping against hope I've stopped puking -- at least for a while -- and there's Pedro -- in animated discussion with Ron. My clothes are all over the dock, and Sabrina's cockpit looks like a yard sale is about to start. Ah, and as I get closer, I note that Sabrina is smoking down below, and that she smells -- almost -- like a West Texas BBQ joint...and that got me to thinking about the old Coopers down in Llano...

Yes, the day was beginning to look interesting.

But of course, the table was set up in Sabrina's cockpit -- and ready to serve - three?

Alright, take that, Mr Go With The Flow.

I hopped on deck and Ron followed a split second behind me, while Pedro walked off muttering expletives in a language I thought sounded grimly like Latin. I sat down on the far side of the cockpit, while Ron plopped down across from me, firing off a string of instructions (in Spanish, of course) down the companionway (that's the main hatch and ladder down into a boat). Thin arms stuck up out of the companionway, holding plates of eggs and bacon and more fried plantains, and Ron took it from the slim arms and put the pile in front of me. Another plate appeared, and Ron took that one, too. Then the arms came up the companionway, attached to a body, and lo and behold it was a woman -- holding a third plate.

That was the first time I saw Elise, by the by.

I'd love to go on about how drop-dead gorgeous she was, how it was love at first sight, and that it was an enchanted moment. But that wasn't the case. My eyes were locked onto this plate of food in front of me -- a platter that looked like it had just been flown down from the Culinary Institute of America. So shoot me, I'm an American, and can't help it, but I guess it dawned on me after a minute or three that there was another person eating with us, and I looked up.

Elise was a nice looking woman, maybe thirty years old, maybe more. Kind of long black hair -- parted down the middle, swooping bangs flanking deep green eyes, and light ivory skin everywhere I looked. She wore eyeglasses that might have been stylish -- when Eisenhower was in office; you know the kind, the round jobs, tortoise shell I think it's called, very studious. White cotton blouse, knee length navy blue skirt (on a boat!), white socks and old navy blue Keds. She was trim, almost flat chested, but appeared very well groomed - as simply clean wouldn't describe Elise. Not that day, and probably not ever.

And it was apparent that she was reserved, maybe even shy. Almost Catholic, I guess you could say. But in Cuba, a godless, communist state? Well, Fidel went to a Jesuit school, didn't he? And anyway, who knew the depths of human hypocrisy better than a Jesuit?

Ron introduced us then. He told me that Elise was one of the "good girls" who worked on boats. Did cleaning and cooking, and nothing else - so of course I met that comment with a blank stare.

Ron explained that outside the locked gates of the marina there was - on almost any given day or night - a queue of women who wanted to be engaged to clean and cook, and, uh, well, to be engaged in just about any other domestic chores the skipper wanted. All for less than a buck US a day. He also explained that Elise wasn't 'that kind of girl.' If I was interested she would come by and clean on whatever basis I wanted, or cook, or any combination thereof. Yet all I could think about, and I know this is really sick, was this plate of food in front of me.

Elise was, I felt certain, the Cuban goddess of culinary excellence.

I asked how much for her to cook all three meals a day, keep the boat clean and do my laundry. And I know what you're thinking . . . here comes another ugly American flaunting his wealth (Me, wealthy? You got to be kidding?), and exploiting this poor woman. Maybe you're right, but you weren't there, you weren't looking at this Renoir of a meal in front of you. Nor had you been living on a boat for over a year by yourself, and needless to say tired of cooking. And you can probably clean up after yourself better than I do, even on one of your bad days. And I hate, I mean really hate, doing laundry.

At any rate, Elise perked up hearing that. I didn't know it at the time, but I had just mentioned full time employment, under the table hard currency for someone struggling to survive in a black-market economy. I had just offered her a short-term ticket to security, Cuban style. She wasn't frowning, either. She'd just been dealt a pretty good hand, and she'd played it safe, hadn't had to debase herself by offering a devil's bargain.

A good meal will do the trick every time, I always say.

She didn't speak English too well, and my Spanish reeked, so Ron consummated the deal. Elise cleared the table, made the v-berth, and did the laundry - before lunch. Now I knew why all the boats around the Marina Hemingway were spotless, and why all they divorced-white-guys were sporting hefty paunches. Hell, for divorced-white-guys fleeing women's lib and the IRS, this place was fucking heaven.

So, I got to work changing the oil in the generator under the cockpit (you know, oil, grease - kind of a guy thing) and re-sewing a piece of hardware on a sail (sewing? Oh, well...). This marina gig was going to be all right with me.

Pedro returned before lunch with a small cart full of groceries, and passed them down to his sister. He told me Ron had given him money to get supplies for his boat and mine, and he gave me a receipt. I paid my half, about five bucks for a weeks worth of food. A quick run through the numbers and I was shocked at the results. It was going to cost less than a hundred bucks a month for a cook, cleaning service, laundry-goddess, groceries -- and rent -- at the marina.

I looked over at Blade Runner; the boat was bobbing up and down and there was a fair amount of moaning coming from down below, so I assumed Ron had one of those full service models down below. Yes, this looked like the perfect set-up, then I thought about that raft off Key West, and the little boy's lifeless arm in my hand.

Oh well, lunch anyone?

+++++

After a week in the marina I noticed that I was getting, well, a little full around the middle. I didn't have anything to do anymore. Elise was doing literally everything. Well, almost everything, and she always had a smile on her face, too. Occasionally she even had a song to sing while she worked away down below, and I began to fall in love with her lilting voice. She was always done by mid-morning, and would take off for a while, return to cook lunch, then be off again until evening. After she finished cleaning up after dinner she would pack up her things in a little net bag, say adios and be gone. Until the next gastronomic blowout the following morning, that is. She really seemed to enjoy cooking, too, but I soon wondered how much it was going to cost to get the waists on all my pants let out an inch or three.

Ron had pretty much the same deal going on, but like I said, his girl was obviously on a different meal plan, because Ron wasn't gaining weight like I was, so one morning decided to ask Ron what the score was. He did, in his roundabout way. He told me about all the different girls who worked in the marina, who was screwing whom, which girls didn't do that sort of thing, which situations were turning into Peyton Place dramas, and which ones were getting serious romantically. Quite a tale in itself, if you think about it, for American style suburbia had come to the workers paradise. Now all Cuba needed was a couple of BMW dealerships and cable TV...

Ron's girl, Rosalita, was acknowledged by all I'd talked to as the finest looking girl in the marina, and while not the best cook, she could hold her own in the galley. She didn't have to clean all that much because Ron was an obsessive neat freak, but from what I could tell they were screwing just about all the time anyway. And, Ron said, it wasn't a money thing, his girl wasn't in it for the bucks. Some were, he said, but oddly enough most weren't.

They kind of chose you, he told me, would offer to move in full time if you wanted them to.

Oh, I said, not really understanding.

Maybe it was their ticket out. Maybe it was better than taking their chances on a raft.

I couldn't get that little kid floating in the water out of my head after Ron clued me in on the Rosalita deal. Wasn't I just taking advantage of another person's misery, fucking this poor soul - in a figurative, if not literal sense? What if I got pangs of social conscience and booted Elise off the boat; would she be better off with a return to almost certain poverty? And what would happen to Pedro if I did?

In the end, I felt that by not screwing Elise I was at least not turning a socially awkward - and perhaps ethically neutral situation - into a morally repugnant one. Such was, at any rate, the course of my rationalizations. I'd always heard, thanks Dad, that a stiff dick has no conscience, but what did I know about empty bellies and the ethics of starvation?

Well, I was about to get my first real lesson in Third World ethics, and the limits of American interventionism.

+++++

Ron finally gave me the real scoop on Elise a few days later. She had, or so he'd heard, been the Minister of Something-or-other's mistress from the time she was a teenager. He related that she had been some kind of cute back then. Like any good communist, Comrade Minister had sent his main girl to Paris, to study history at the Sorbonne, then on to the Cordon Bleu to learn how to whip up a soufflé. Thus educated, she returned to Havana to take up life as Sugar Daddy's little secret on the side. Ron explained that she had moved with the privileged elite, had been her patron's favorite plaything, until Comrade Minister had fallen into disfavor. In case you've forgotten about what life was like in a Soviet client state, that meant Comrade Minister disappeared. Or was killed, if you just want the basics, and that had been accomplished with Elise in the room, looking on. Elise suddenly found herself a persona-non-grata in the aftermath, exiled to homeless oblivion, her parents murdered in retribution and most of the rest of her family ruined in consequence. Elise became a shell, she had been murdered - if not in a literal sense, then figuratively, perhaps, in a spiritual way.

Elise's older brother Miguel had managed to flee to Florida in the days that followed, and had been working in Miami ever since. He soon co-owned two successful Cuban restaurants in little Havana, as well as one in Naples. He had managed to get rich the good old fashioned American Way in less than two years, but the rest of his family had been left behind in Cuba, and there was no way to get them out. He couldn't even get money to them.

Word of their brother's success finally filtered through to Elise and Pedro, and this only served to drive them into complete despair. Pedro and Elise were starving to death, living in total misery in the mangroves outside the western fringes of Havana. They could see the lights of American towns looming over the horizon at night, taste forbidden opportunities through their hunger, dream sweet dreams of families that would never be.

Then, about a year ago, Pedro had managed to get a job at the marina washing boats, and found that he was good at dealing with the itinerant boaties that came and went. He was promoted to dock-boy, soon made friends with various gringos and became a fixture around the docks. He also made some hard cash, and at thirteen years old was taking care of his almost catatonic older sister. In a country with free medical care, Pedro could not get her help; as a persona-non-grata, Elise was refused all government services and assistance, and she deteriorated further.

One of the first long time residents of the marina Pedro had befriended was Ron, and through Ron's efforts Elise had begun to make a modest comeback. But it had been rough, Ron sighed, as she was really damaged goods. He had brought her to the marina to cook for him, and she had tried to cook for others, but she just hadn't been able to adjust to being around other people quite yet, especially men, single men. A lot of the guys in the marina were pretty rough, not the sort to take-in or care for a shattered soul, and Elise had just drifted in and out of the potential opportunities she found there.

And then Sabrina sailed into the Marina Hemingway. Ron had apparently been sizing me up that first day (and, I assume, that abominable first night) and thought Elise might find me tolerable. So, therein lies the tale - the tale that begins with things aren't always what they appear to be.

Elise had been spirited into the marina and onto my little boat while I had oozed into the cockpit that first night -- probably not the best first impression I ever made. At any rate, now I had a pretty fair grasp of what Elise had been through, and I felt even worse about my first rousing performance as The Ugly American. Ron tried to set me straight, tried to convince me that I was doing her a favor, but that didn't ring true to me -- not that day, and not once since.

One thing was certain, however. I was sure the next time I saw her I would try to find out more about her feelings; not just about her past, but about her working for me on Sabrina.

+++++

It was cool out the next morning, when Elise came walking down the dock toward Sabrina, and I guess she was attuned enough to her environment to figure out something was different. Maybe the smell of cooking coming from below as she stepped on board, or that the table in the salon was set for breakfast as she came down the companionway. Hell, just the fact that I was awake before ten in the morning must have come as a physical blow to the poor girl. Anyway, she was on guard, looked wary, not quite suspicious, not yet. I asked her to sit, then passed over plates of pancakes, eggs, bacon, and some juice. Not up to her standards, I'm sure, but it was the best I could do.

We ate in silence, passed the pitcher of juice a couple of times, but otherwise the tension must have been unpleasant, if the way I felt was any indication. I cleared the plates, washed the dishes, and asked her to sit there until I finished cleaning up. Then...