This Is Cuba by David Ariosto

Author:David Ariosto
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

15

RETURN TO GOTHAM

One must have a mind of winter

to regard the frost and the boughs.

—“The Snow Man,” Wallace Stevens

It was December 2010, a year and a half since I had packed up and left for Havana. As Antonina and Carlito had begun to sort out their plans, I was doing the same. My father’s health and a business school–bound fiancée had become my focus. And so I exchanged my seaside, three-bedroom house in Havana for a studio apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, coincidentally just as the city’s sixth-largest snowstorm dumped more than two feet of snow. Welcome to New York, cold and cramped. The fresh snowy blanket had brought with it an almost magical hush over an otherwise frenetic city.

Subways stalled and streets were covered over. Indeed, Manhattan’s some 3 million commuters had been forced to slow down, whether they wanted to or not. For a moment, New Yorkers seemed uncharacteristically at peace.

Though it wasn’t easy. I hadn’t seen a proper northeastern December in years. And the gray and ice doldrums that invariably enveloped the city’s concrete and glass pillars stood in stark contrast to my old sun-kissed home in Miramar.

And yet, though I earned far less in a city that cost far more, I also had something I was never quite able to capture in Cuba. In Havana, I was a yuma. An outsider. But in New York, I was a New Yorker. Whether you’re from here or just moved here, the city had a singular way of making people its own. There was a community to be had. Here, I had a fiancée, a father, and a sister nearby, with neighbors equipped with accents thicker than New Jersey traffic. And of course there was also Murray, a sixty-something-year-old Upper East Sider and Mets fan. I met Murray at H&H Midtown Bagel East on Second Avenue, between Eighty-First and Eighty-Second Streets. He was a regular, as I’d soon be, and he eventually took daily issue with my Yankees fandom, relishing the sort of baseball banter that the men in Havana’s Central Park would appreciate.

As different as the two cities could be, baseball had a way of connecting us.

“Heya.” He’d perk up over bagel, cream cheese, and a small coffee (his usual morning order) when I’d walk into H&H. “There he is.”

“How ya doing, Murray?” I asked, more in greeting than a question.

We’d chat a bit, him alternating between a far more graphic description of his ailments than I had ever wanted to know and the state of his beloved Mets: the pitching, and how rough the off-season recruitment had been. Murray was retired. And as such, he was rarely in a hurry, savoring his coffee and bagel, and opining in a way I wished I had more time for. Usually we’d chat while I was waiting for my own bagel and coffee pairing, before I descended into the first of two subways that would carry me to work.

And that was it. There was a quiet comfort to it:

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