The Maids of Havana by Pedro Pérez Sarduy

Author:Pedro Pérez Sarduy [Pedro Pérez Sarduy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781467005081
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Published: 2010-03-22T16:00:00+00:00

Laberinto, Slaughterer, Good Riddance

And they held his well-deserved repudiation rally at the very butcher’s store, even though he was no longer there. It was symbolic, more than anything. Most entertaining of all was when a woman, who everyone knew was his mistress, was the first to ask to speak to denounce Laberinto, even though, of course, she had taken full advantage of his cheating. People weren’t at all taken in by what she said and hissed so much she had to leave running.

From our barrio, many of my friends knew people who had left, but, thank God, nobody from my family, except for my sister Yolanda – though she’d left for up North with her husband and two of her three children some five or six years before, and the only contact I had with her was through the photographs that Rolandito, one of her sons who hadn’t been able to go with them because he was of an age to do Military Service, occasionally brought round to show me. The photographs were nearly all the same, always showing somebody’s birthday cake, with everyone very elegantly dressed, showing off their new patent-leather shoes, in couples or as a family, next to a car of the latest model, holding a can of Coca-Cola, because they knew that to find a soft drink in Havana was nothing short of winning the lottery, but then for years there’d been no lottery either. My poor nephew, who wasn’t able to speak well and was a little backward at school, sat down to contemplate the photographs of his parents and brothers living in a place called Jersey City, where there were many Cubans. But, well, among the people I knew well, who I dealt with every day, few had gone into the Peruvian Embassy or were trying to go up North, until that Sunday at the end of May, when at a little after ten in the morning Inesita, my old friend from my time as a maid, appeared. As soon as she saw me, she fell into my arms crying, and told me that Gracielita, her only daughter, had left the previous day with her boyfriend, who had a brother living in Miami who had come for them in a boat to the port of Mariel.

For many years Inesita worked for the Robledos, a family that left shortly after the triumph of the Revolution, going first to Puerto Rico. Señor Robledo, who had relatives in that country, had been the manager of one of the Coca Cola bottling plants, and not long after the nationalization of all the American businesses, the company offered him a good job in their central office in some city in the south of the United States, but, before settling permanently there, he wanted to be sure of things, and so decided to leave his family in Puerto Rico until he could establish himself. When señora Robledo y Albemar, as she liked to be called, because

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