The Hemingway Maid ('16 revision)

I sat across from her in the salon. I thought I would start simply. You know, like -- tactfully.

"Elise, would you tell me the story of your life," I asked. "Please?"

She looked bereft when my words hit, about to cave in on herself.

"I haven't the heart for that story, Mr. Jim, and I doubt very much if you would have the stomach for it, either." Elise now spoke with almost no trace of an accent, and her English vocabulary was obviously much more extensive than she had previously let on, so the mystery was going to go a lot deeper today. "What is it you want to know?" she asked me a moment later - now with almost no trace of emotion in her voice. Perhaps she heard the wings of poverty and hunger beating the air around her lost soul as she braced herself for the uncertainty of my questioning. But I could feel her pain in the air around me too, no doubt about that.

"Elise, it's more what I want you to know -- about me, okay?" She just looked at me and made not the slightest comment or motion. "There's a part of me, Elise, that feels very bad about having you work here on Sabrina. You do a very good job, and if I keep eating your cooking I'm going to explode; hell, I'm getting so fat so fast I can't believe it. But that's not the problem. The problem, Elise, is all of the people on the other side of the fence who are starving to death..."

"Mr. Jim," she interrupted.

"Just Jim, please, Elise."

"Jim," she paused, rolling the name around in her mind's eye, "Jim, you aren't going to fix the things in Cuba that are wrong. So..."

"But neither am I going to take advantage of other people's misery and misfortune."

"Jim, all people's lives are to some degree or another well-grounded in hypocrisy. Yours is a gentle hypocrisy, but surely you must understand that. You can not blame yourself for being an American, for the blessings of your material prosperity. If you were not here my brother would have less money to buy food. And there are many children that work here who are like Pedro, Jim. Desperate, nowhere to go. But they are the fortunate ones. The government disenfranchises many families, dissidents whose actions the government disapproves of are systematically exiled from whatever benefits that might normally accrue them in a communist state. So, in a land where homelessness and starvation are simply not allowed to exist, where medical care is a basic right, there are thousands of families starving to death in the streets, who die of diseases so easy to cure that it is simply a crime it is allowed to occur. But these people, people like Pedro and myself, do not exist, we have been erased. We must find our own way to survive, and it is through your blessings now that we might survive. So, Jim, I can appreciate your concern for Pedro and myself, but you must know, I mean really know, that without you our lives would be almost unendurable."

"Where do you live, Elise?"

With this question, Elise looked down to the floor. She was silent.

"I want to see where you live, Elise. Now. Let's go."

"No, Jim, that I cannot allow."

I was headed up the companionway, then turned to look at her, but how could I do this without implicitly threatening her. "Elise, please, come with me. I need to talk to you, tell you a story, please come and keep me company." I held out my hand, I reached out to help her make the leap -- to trusting another human being again.

She took my hand, walked with me into the cool morning air. We walked out of the marina, turned to the west as we exited the security gate, and I ignored the looks of the security people as we passed, and though I could feel Ron and Pedro and a host of other gringos looking our way, I unashamedly kept Elise's hand in mine. I told her of my trip through the Straits not so long ago, of the boy in the water, of the helplessness my father and I felt as we confronted so much unmourned misery. I talked of my father's life, encouraged her to talk about hers. I listened when she spoke, but in truth I think I talked the whole while - as we walked through the varied western suburbs of the city.

We walked a long way from the marina, first through small suburbs of modest beachfront houses and stores. We walked though the dusty, poor neighborhoods that lay further to the west. After several hours we came to the end of the outlying homes, and walked into a jungle of exposed mangroves and palm trees and fairly heavy undergrowth. The way ahead was sandy, full of mosquitoes and, I assumed, other less friendly creatures. Here and there I saw little houses scattered within the grasp of this forest, houses cobbled together from the of remnants of boxes and little scraps of wood, walls made of tarpaper, roofs made of crudely thatched palm fronds or rusty sheets of galvanized steel sheeting. We walked past starving children, their bellies bloated and their faces open wounds of insect bites. We walked to Pedro and Elise's home.

I stooped to enter the juxtaposed construct of shipping crates and tarpaper, and walked into a bare little space that was a little larger than a king-sized bed, the ceiling height a little shy of five feet. There were two little beds made of burlap sacks stuffed with palm fronds laying on the sandy floor, and a small stove that had obviously come from someone's boat was sitting on a flat wooden box in one corner. A half-burned candle in an old Campbell's Soup can provided the light that might keep the night away. If, that is, they had a match.

The space was clean, however, and did not smell of filth or decay, and I entered and sat on the sand floor. Elise followed me in, and she sat across from me on warm shaded earth. Her little black net sack hung on the wall from a nail; there was another shirt in the sack. That was, I presumed, the extent of her wardrobe. She looked at me with all the dignity my humanity lacked, and I looked into her care-worn eyes, but she was not ashamed, was not asking for my pity. And while I was appalled at my total unawareness of her circumstances, I too was amazed at the complete serenity I found in Elise's eyes. She had seen the depths of hell that man all too often visits on his fellow man, and yet had made her peace with that knowledge. Her's had been, I thought, a remarkable journey. A journey I wanted to know more about.

We had no food with us, and of course there was nothing to eat in her little house, yet we talked through the rest of the morning and on into the afternoon. We talked about her experiences in Paris, in that other lifetime, and we found that we had places and restaurants in common that we had loved. We had wandered the same corridors in the Louvre and D'Orsay, strolled, perhaps, under the same trees in the Tuilleries, looking at lovers and other strangers. Ours was a small world we discovered that day, and in the sharing of those distant memories we came to know each other in new, completely unexpected ways.

I listened to her tale of teenaged submission to the Cuban Minister with a mixture of revulsion and admiration, attentively cringed when she described her seduction by power and material greed. She recounted tales of debauchery that, frankly, scared me silly with the combination of erotic excess and moral depravity. She told me of her ambivalence to these activities, how she no longer viewed them as something she was ashamed of, yet she felt little desire to wander those byways of excess again. She told me she would never have children, described in nauseating detail how the Minister had forcibly had her surgically sterilized.

As afternoon gave way to evening, as our trust built in the shadow of experience, I learned of her desire to join Miguel in America, her frustration at her inability to help Pedro, and her gratitude for the job on Sabrina.

I expressed my desire to help, both her and her brother, in any way I could; I offered them food and shelter on Sabrina, money and clothing, yet Elise -- with all her hard won wisdom -- simply extrapolated the eventual outcome of such a move. I would leave eventually, and Elise and her brother would return to the mangroves little better than they were now. Her's was a grave calculus, the mathematics of uncertainty proving safer than the hollow certainties of my incremental compassions.

Compassion was, I learned that day, not something you doled out when and if it was morally convenient. Compassion was a choice no different than the choice to love. It must consume the soul to the same degree, or it is doomed to the placating hollowness of all such actions.

As the sun set, the feelings we shared for one another as a result of our wanderings that day gave way to the tiredness we felt, to say nothing of the hunger I now felt most acutely. Elise explained that this emptiness had been, for Pedro and herself, their daily bread before he found his way to the Marina Hemingway. Now that she had worked on Sabrina for a while, become re-accustomed to a regular diet, she feared more than anything else a return to this exile, to their poverty, and to the naked starvation of chance encounters.

Elise lay her body down on the rough surface of her burlap bed, and motioned me to her side. She had me lay beside her, my head in her lap, and I felt her fingers as they gently wound their way through my hair. She felt the contours of my heart through her fingers that evening, and as night came I listened to her breathing. Our heartbeats seemed to mingle and join in evensong, our hunger and uncertainty giving way to the gentle arms of sleep.

+++++

I got up in the middle of the night with some urgent business to take care of, and stepped outside of the little shack and into the cool night air. I made my way through the shantytown to the beach and saw Ron and Pedro lying on either side of a small fire, apparently asleep. I walked away from them down the surf line, and looked up at the Dipper glowing in the deep night sky. As I gave my water back to the earth, grateful for the sharing, I heard another stream join mine, and turned to see Ron there beside me, grinning like a ghost.

"So, Pudd-knocker, how stands the union," he said.

"Who's got the boats?" I replied, never one for sentimental chit-chat.

"Left the Two Amigo there. Gave 'em the keys to your liquor cabinet, some really dirty magazines and a fresh jar of Vaseline. When you get back, watch your step, and don't say I didn't warn you."

"Thanks. Helluva day, Ron."

"Yeah, relativity bites. Here we are in this world, all of us looking up at the same stars, someo f us are comfortable, our bellies full and we have money for rum, and all around us people are rotting in the sewers. I used to keep telling myself I'd fought my wars, paid my dues; but how do you look another human being in the eye when they're starving to death. How do you turn and walk away from that?"

We stood, looking to the north, across the Straits. I could just barely, away from the lights of Havana, make out the distant glow of Key West in this still night under the stars.

So close. An irresistible force.

Moths to the flame.

"She's a helluva woman, Ron."

"Don't I know it. A might too high class for my taste, though. Thought you might enjoy her company."

"Wasn't like that, Ron. We talked. All goddamn day. Fucking remarkable."

"Yeah, well, Pete and I brought you two some grub. I was gonna get you up before first light; I wanna get back to the reservation before the gomers start their rounds."

"Jeez, Ron, are you ever gonna leave Vietnam behind?"

"Hey, listen up, bro, this is Cuba, not fucking Puerto Rico. Technically we ain't supposed to be outta the marina after midnight. Just because some of us have decided to float the local economy by drinking ourselves to death, well, ya know, they cut us some slack. But this is the People's Paradise, Amigo, and they don't like it when we find things that don't mesh with the Propaganda Ministry's version of Marx. Okay? Man, you liberal pukes can be so fuckin' naive sometimes."

"What time is it?"

"See Arcturus?

"Yeah, so?"

"Four-thirty. 'Bout an hour and a half 'till sunup." Ron seemed to enjoy these games.

"I should've known," to which he replied with words I'd rather not repeat.

Ah, the ethology of pub-crawlers.

The evening's moral philosophy lecture thus finished, Ron sent Pedro to wake his sister. I tried to chew down some sort of jerky and gave up, and tossed down a Coke instead. Pedro came back a few minutes later; Elise followed a while later. Pedro unwrapped some fruit and gave it to her, and we all started the long walk back to the marina. If Ron and Pedro noticed Elise and I falling behind, they didn't make any remarks about it. Who knows, maybe they didn't notice when Elise took my hand in hers. Or the smile on my face when she did.

+++++

When the sun set that afternoon, the rhythm of life in the marina seemed to pause. As the outrageous aromas of Elise's cooking spread out over the surrounding boats, many eyes took in the scene. Pedro sat in Sabrina's cockpit, drinking a soda long after the time he and his sister usually left the marina for their long walk home. I was up on the foredeck, sanding a couple of boards on the teak decks that needed some touching up. All appeared simply, unjustifiably, clandestinely normal.

The very picture of domesticity. Marina style...

I guess the wandering eyes took in the three of us sitting in the cockpit a bit later, eating dinner together, trying our best to conceal the awkward butterflies that seemed to be hovering all around us. Maybe as it got darker they gave up trying to look at Sabrina, and didn't see Elise and I sitting in the cockpit, talking at first across from one another, then moving closer together, closer, but not yet touching. Maybe they listened to the tones of our voices as they drifted through the cool evening air. Could they have discerned that moment when casual conversation moved to the beat of distant times and ancient music -- and fell into the far more chromatic chords of intimacy?

Even I would have to admit that, later, as night took us in gentle embrace, it would have been hard to ignore the primal sounds that growled and sighed from deep within Sabrina's amber-glowing belly. Even I was surprised by Elise's gentle fury as years of horror and despair gave way to the simple honesty of one soul's ease basking in the warmth of acceptance. But there could have been little doubt as our still, waterborne air was pierced by arrows of need, that in the womb of this night love found new hearts in which to dwell.

As the night wore on, Ron, Rosalita, and Pedro sat in Blade Runner's cozy interior playing cards, trying to stifle laughs as moans and cries from the boat next door drifted through the air. In time, as quiet returned to the marina, Ron and Pedro took up their glasses and tipped them together, and in conspiratorial shadows made a quiet toast to their success.

+++++

When I look back on that first night with Elise from the perspective of so many years, the one thing that stands out most to me was the gentle, dreamlike quality of the time that passed between us. I remember the warm, gusty breezes the drifted through the palms that lined the Marina Hemingway, people sitting in their boats cooking, playing guitars and reading books. We, Elize and I, had passed from stranger to friend in the course of a days walk through the outskirts Havana, and in the quiet of her mangrove home we grew comfortable in each others company, we explored the unfamiliar terrain of trust and redemption. In the afterglow of our first real dinner together on my boat, we had tumbled little glasses of aromatic Port under our noses and continued our imaginary day wandering through the cool rose-petaled air of Paris, reveling in the perfection of lunch at Le Grande Vefour, and the simple joy of breathing in the timeless beauty of Monet and Sisley at the d'Orsay. We held each other's hands in the soft glow of evening; even now I remember feeling an almost adolescent sense of anticipation as we drew inward towards the union we could no longer deny.

It started so simply. She had taken my hand to her face, placed one of my fingers in her mouth, and swirled her tongue around the tip as she sucked on it. The cascade of electro-erotic impulses that coursed up my spine as our eyes met sent me reeling down unforeseen byways of memory; my body left its space on earth and drifted inward on the currents of instinct. Hers was a gentle reawakening.

We found our way into the sheltering warmth of Sabrina and shed our sweat-soaked clothes in hurried little heaps, then had fallen into the depths of moon-dappled shadows as we made our way to the forepeak berth. She had hopped up on the berth facing me, and I had dropped to my knees to worship on the altar of her need. As her thighs found their way over my shoulders, my mouth found her vagina bathed in shimmery moonglow. As I gently kissed her lips I looked up over her small belly at the silvered form of her pure femininity, her perfect breasts moving to a deepening flow. The lust I felt for her caressed the balance of eternity's gentle harmony, of time's dominion over the hearts of mortals, but the form of our lust gave way to the ancient dance of union.

I had buried my face in her warmth and felt the wetness of her first release, as she shuddered and bucked against the pressure of my tongue. Her fingers had entwined their searching grasp within my hair, and she pulled me deeper inside her need. I ran my hands up her belly to her breasts and took the jutting thrust of her nipples in my fingers. I drew feathery circles over each breast with the electricity that separated her skin from mine, and I felt the shivery response of her skin as she reacted with surprise to these sudden hidden impulses.

Just as quickly, her hips and back arced and she screamed in total release, and I slowly pulled back to ease off the pressure; she reacted by pulling my face back deeper into her spreading fire, bucking harder against my mouth. Elise had run into the rapids of almost perpetual orgasm, and as she bounced and swayed in her release she began to cry. I could not tell where her tears started, or where they might end, and she had just barely managed to gasp out words of love and encouragement when another implosive bolt hit her, and she thrashed into feral contortions.

I was a bit concerned, really.

It wasn't that I had never taken a woman into such extreme terrain before, but her convulsed reactions seemed to echo with contradictions. I moved up to her side, held her face to mine and kissed her. She looked at me with unexpected tenderness; while I had feared the resurgence of her past into our space, I was met with a frank expression of wonder, as she had not expected either my consumptive lust for her - or her need for release. Perhaps it was that the warm little cocoon of Sabrina's intimate spaces afforded her a shield from the prying eyes of memory.

Her hands moved to my loins, and she stroked me oh so softly with just the tips of her fingernails. She looked at me with a temptress's eyes, daring me to resist the pleasures she offered with each gentle stroke. I was soon drifting to the rhythm of her skilled fingers, lost in the music of moonbeams and the gently dancing waves on Sabrina's hull.

And oh, had I risen to the occasion!

With a sudden rush, Elise dropped down between my legs and made to take me in her mouth - and here I need to digress once again. I've been told my equipment is a little on the large side, but what's truly abnormal about my plumbing is the size of my testicles. They are, to put it gently, on the large side, and the net result of this is that when I cum, I come in buckets. I cum so much that never once has a woman been able to take it all - either in the mouth or in the vagina. Let's just say 'my cup runneth over' - and leave it at that.