Hotel Cuba, page 7
It’s Isidro the peanut vendor, pushing his wooden cart, his face webbed with scars from an old bout with malaria. “Yes, yes,” she says, so moved that she briefly loses her breath. “Sí, sí, quiero . . .” Then she remembers the note in her pocket with the street names and shows it to him, pointing to her street. He laughs and shakes his head; she realizes he can’t read. Isidro says something else and starts wheeling his cart, giving it an extra push to get over a divot in the cobblestones. Turns to look at her, tilts his head in the direction he’s headed, so she follows.
He walks so slowly! Mr. Steinberg will think she’s dawdling on purpose and she’ll lose her job. Cubans are rarely in any hurry, though the thought of being late makes Pearl anxious to the point of nausea.
Though there’s no purpose in trying to converse, Isidro does it anyway, punctuating each run of sentences with an “Entiendes?” Understand? She shakes her head, but he laughs and goes on talking. She’s increasingly antsy each time he stops to sell a few cones of peanuts, first to a woman with bright makeup smeared on her face Cuban style, then to two men in white shirts and pants. “Son americanos,” Isidro says. She knows. The city is filled with Americans, all wondrously clean, coming and going from their country as they please. She wishes she could pin herself to their uniforms like a medal and float back to America. On a whim, Pearl says, “Howdy.”
The men look confused.
“Howdy,” she repeats.
They talk to each other in their language. What did she do wrong? She said the word just as Mr. Steinberg always says it. They salute her and keep on walking, taking America away with them.
When Isidro and Pearl turn a corner, she recognizes the street. “Gracias, gracias,” she says, so grateful she’s crying. Isidro waves away her thanks, and she dashes to the workshop, pushing the door open with her shoulder. She’s here, safe.
“Howdy, Pearl,” says Mr. Steinberg, perched on a stool and making a note in the little brown book he carries with him all the time.
Howdy, she repeats to herself. Isn’t that what I said earlier?
He gestures to the gold-and-black turban she’d been working on. “This is exceptional. Such talent. And to think it’s being wasted on me.”
No talent, she thinks. I’m just copying from a model. Even a monkey can do it.
“Thank you, sir.” She steals a glance at the clock. She’s not so very late, and he’s not mad. Don’t they say in English “Time is money”? But maybe that’s only a rule in America, not in hot countries like this one. Maybe here, a little late is okay.
Mr. Steinberg is preparing to leave. He’s got more workshops to visit. “Pearl, you’ve got magic in your hands,” he says.
“Yes, sir,” she says, but it’s a lie. Magic, she thinks. No such thing. It’s just me.
Four
AFTER LUNCH ONE APRIL AFTERNOON, MRS. STEINBERG pulls Pearl aside with a strange request: to make her a pair of pants. “For me, not my husband.”
“For you, ma’am?” Pearl asks.
“Yes,” says Mrs. Steinberg. “To wear at my next suffragist meeting. All the suffragists in America wear them.” Pearl doesn’t know this term, so Mrs. Steinberg defines it. “Cuban ladies must have the right to vote like American ladies now have.”
Pearl has never met a woman like Mrs. Steinberg, always so concerned with abstractions like justice, fixing the world, causes unrelated to her own life. The idea that any person, and a woman no less, would demand a say in choosing her ruler feels insolent to Pearl. Still, she listens as Mrs. Steinberg explains that to be truly free, women must have the vote. Pearl disagrees. For her, freedom is being able to live and work in peace.
What interests Pearl more than voting for men she’s never met is the technical problem of designing pants for a woman that don’t look like a workman’s uniform. She used to make simple boxy trousers for her father and brother, cut with straight lines. They’d lie on brown paper on the floor, and she’d pencil out the shape around their legs. But Mrs. Steinberg is not the type to lie on the floor. Also, her pants would need to accommodate a woman’s curves, and she wants them to have absurdly wide legs. She’s chosen an expensive black silk crepe de chine that would sway loose at her ankles like a dress. Oh, and a blouse to match.
“That’s not too hard, is it?” she asked Pearl. “Of course I’ll pay you.”
Flattered that Mrs. Steinberg recognizes her skill despite her general preference for Frieda in most things, Pearl says, “Not hard at all.” Mrs. Steinberg doesn’t sew much because of her eyes, though Pearl has seen some of the impressive dresses she’d made in her youth. Mrs. Steinberg did fine work in her day. She knows what good is.
Pearl visits Mrs. Steinberg several times for fittings. Always while her husband is out. “He’d poke fun at me,” says Mrs. Steinberg. “Then I’d lose the nerve to wear them.”
The idea of Mrs. Steinberg losing her nerve to do anything makes Pearl smile. She’s enjoying their fitting sessions. Now, after two months in Havana, she doesn’t mind going to the Steinbergs’ alone, since it’s not far. Also, she knows a few useful Spanish and English phrases to ask for help if she gets lost, even if her Yiddish accent is heavy and plodding. She’s mastered the art of walking right past strange men, avoiding their gaze. For further protection, she wears dowdy, roomy clothes that hide her figure.
Before each session, Frieda teases Pearl, saying, “Going to meet your boyfriend?”
“You know where I’m going,” says Pearl. “What boyfriend? This is Cuba.”
“The heart beats in Cuba just as it does anywhere,” says Frieda.
“Please,” says Pearl. “Stop teasing.”
She works in Mrs. Steinberg’s bedroom, which has a red carpet and pretty landscape pictures on the wall. To Pearl, the room always smells sweet, like orange blossoms. One afternoon, Mrs. Steinberg plays an album of opera arias on her phonograph, so exquisite that Pearl fights the urge to drop her pins and chalk to listen more fully to those surging voices. Father sometimes gave opera recitals with the choir, singing famous arias with such a tender, genuine, even vulnerable expression on his face, as if the song came from deep inside. He often said that in this life, you could rarely trust people, but you could always trust music. However, Pearl wants to trust people too.
Mostly, there’s no music, just the strange new intimacy of plucking material around Mrs. Steinberg’s body, which Pearl now knows with the familiarity of a lover: the thin shoulders, sharp elbows, and tiny calves. Was Mrs. Steinberg always this slender, or did something transform her body? Once Pearl caught Mrs. Steinberg with her hair down, loose from its usual chignon. It was lovely and wavy, with a silky texture. Pearl could imagine it turning Mr. Steinberg’s head as a young man.
At their last fitting, Mrs. Steinberg peers down at Pearl, kneeling and pinning up the cuffs. She asks, “What’s that tune you’re humming?”
“I was humming?” asks Pearl. She thinks for a second, then hums a few more bars. It’s a nursery rhyme she sang as a girl. She recites the words:
Bride, bride, beautiful bride, why are you crying?
Crying bitter tears, and already at the chuppah!
No one forced you to get married, to bury yourself alive.
Dry your tears, you chose this madness for yourself.
Mrs. Steinberg has a good long laugh, a rare sound from her. Usually she’s nervous and wound up, such a contrast to Cuban women in their bright dresses and costume jewelry, with their wide, painted mouths. There’s something mysterious and contradictory about her, Pearl can’t put her finger on it.
“May I ask,” says Pearl, “what is your first name?”
“Adela,” she says. A strange combination of sounds.
“One more question? What is it really like, to be married?” Pearl asks.
Mrs. Steinberg lowers her chin. “Tiring,” she says. “Husbands have to be trained at first, like dogs. Otherwise they’re forever and hopelessly spoiled.” Pearl thinks this over. Dogs are vicious, and Pearl hasn’t the faintest clue how to train one. “Why, Pearl?” Mrs. Steinberg asks. “Do you have some special beau?”
“Me? No, no.”
“Why not?” Mrs. Steinberg pours herself a glass of water. “You’re a bright, capable young woman. And nice-looking.”
Pearl notes the obligatory add-on of “nice-looking.” It’s the first thing people notice about Frieda, though they don’t use that word, “nice-looking.” They say pretty, charming, exquisite. “I’ve had bad luck,” Pearl says.
Mrs. Steinberg takes a long drink of water. Pearl would like some too, but she wants to be asked.
“Bad luck can’t last forever,” says Mrs. Steinberg.
Pearl snorts before she can stop herself. What can someone like Mrs. Steinberg know about bad luck?
“Would you tell me about Frieda’s young man?” Mrs. Steinberg asks.
“When we left Poland, they had an understanding,” says Pearl. “Today not. Tomorrow, it’ll be different. If his word was a bridge, I’d hesitate to cross it.”
“That’s an odd state of affairs.”
Pearl’s tempted to confide in Mrs. Steinberg. She seems to really understand, like a kindred spirit. Maybe if they’d met some other way, they’d be friends.
“You look as though you have something to say about it,” says Mrs. Steinberg.
“I want more for her than to marry her schoolgirl crush. But she won’t listen.”
“I see,” says Mrs. Steinberg, and Pearl believes that she does. “But what about you? What do you hope for, for yourself, if not marriage?”
Pearl has no answer. Her brother, Avram, and his friends used to sing Zionist anthems about hope and immigrating to Palestine. Pearl’s too busy trying to make it through her day to waste time hoping and dreaming. But if she did allow herself to hope, there might be one thing: Whatever her fate, single or married, she’d like to be her own boss, in charge. With no one to give her orders.
When the work is finished, Pearl’s sorry. Mrs. Steinberg tries on the finished pants. Though they’re well-made and fit her body, Pearl thinks they look wrong on Mrs. Steinberg, whose old-fashioned bearing doesn’t go with this modern outfit. Mrs. Steinberg, however, seems pleased.
A few meters of the black silk are left over, and Pearl asks for it. “Of course,” says Mrs. Steinberg, continuing to admire her new outfit. “Lovely work, Pearl. I’m not surprised.”
She pays Pearl, who hears the satisfying clink of the coins first in her palm, and then later in her pocket as she walks home, her cheeks sparkling with sweat.
* * *
AT NIGHT, PEARL uses the leftover silk to make herself a pair of pants too, for her private amusement. She loves this work, the feeling of the fabric, the way her thoughts disappear in the repetitive simplicity of hiding all traces of the human hand, the illusion of inevitability in a cuff or seam that are the result of hours of toil.
Pearl finishes the pants in two evenings. She thought she’d wear them around the workshop, or as pajamas, but they turn out too nice for wearing to bed. Imagine wearing these in public, Pearl thinks. I’d have to be a different person.
It’s Frieda’s idea for Pearl to wear the pants for a Sunday afternoon outing.
Pearl says it’s an outrageous idea, and the Torah forbids women from wearing men’s clothing, but Frieda argues that the pants are not in the least mannish. “They’re made by a woman for a woman, right? So it’s a sin for a man to wear them, not you,” she says.
“I’ll look like a fool,” Pearl objects. “Or worse.”
“If you walked about in Havana as I have, you’d see plenty of women in pants,” says Frieda. “We’re living in the modern age.” She pushes Pearl and her pants behind the frayed curtain. “Go on,” Frieda calls out. “Don’t be afraid.”
Pearl feels strange, stepping into one leg and then the other. Pants are for wealthy ladies wanting to make a sensation, not poor women like herself.
After putting them on, she sits upright on her bed, fingers laced, knees locked, eyes fixed on the wall facing east, toward Jerusalem. She’s hung an amulet there, a prayer saying: GOD DESTROYS SATAN, A WITCH SHALL NOT LIVE! For now, it works. Those evil voices have faded to a faint hum. Not silence, but close enough.
“Aren’t you ready yet? You know I’m no good at waiting,” Frieda calls out.
“Almost,” says Pearl, already deeply embarrassed.
“Let me see,” says Frieda. She pulls back the curtain and freezes, her eyes wide, the rough fabric of the curtain in her fist.
“I look ridiculous,” says Pearl. “I’ll put on a dress.”
“You don’t look ridiculous at all,” says Frieda. “Really.”
“No? How do I look?”
Frieda tilts her head. “Like you were meant to look. Pearl, you’re beautiful.” And Frieda’s tone is so sincere, Pearl knows she means it.
Pearl checks the mirror again. She can’t get used to what she sees there. You wanted to be a New Woman, she reminds herself. Here’s the result. The old proverb comes to mind: Stare in a mirror too much by day, and the image returns to choke you at night. “People will laugh. Like I’m Charlie Chaplin.”
“False modesty is a sin. That’s what you always taught me.”
Pearl looks again, sees how flattering these black silk pants are to her, much more natural than they looked on Mrs. Steinberg. They’re right for her. They make her body look different, feel different. It seems a lie to call them pants, because Frieda’s right: no man could ever wear them. The pants swell around her hips, then unfurl outward from her thighs to her calves, almost swallowing her decidedly feminine shoes, black ankle boots with chunky heels.
With the fabric around her legs, Pearl feels supported, strong. She’s the same inside, but by changing her outside, it’s affected what’s inside. The pants give her a freedom of movement she’d never have in a clumsy dress. It’s a strange, wonderful, uneasy sensation. Like when they first heard about the abdication of the tsar. No one could be sure the news was true until the next market day, when the constable appeared in the town square and ripped the badges off his uniform, throwing them in the mud.
Frieda tiptoes behind Pearl, fidgety, pretty, and fragile. In the streaked mirror, wearing her pale cream dress, she could be Pearl’s ghost.
“Don’t wear your ugly green hat, not today,” says Frieda. “Here.” She holds out a jaunty blue three-corner cavalier hat with an upturned brim. Its bold contour complements the shape of her head. Maybe I could be a hat person, Pearl thinks, in the right hat.
“Mr. Steinberg would be furious,” says Pearl, admiring it in the mirror. The hat is destined for a high-end ladies’ shop on Calle Obispo.
“He’s never furious,” says Frieda. “Not even after I spilled coffee on that velvet toque with the fur inside.”
“I won’t drink any coffee, then,” says Pearl, as if that solves everything. “We might as well go, get this over with.”
They lock up the workshop, then head west toward the open expanse of Paseo Boulevard, which is only occasionally visible through gaps in the striped awnings of shops or the pink and yellow arches of street arcades. She and Frieda step carefully over beggars and wicker baskets of dark-skinned dolls with exaggerated toothy smiles, a popular souvenir for American tourists that Pearl finds grotesque. Also popular are pawn shops promising DINERO in big letters, luring foreigners who’ve wasted their money drinking or gambling on horses.
Wearing her pants out on the street, Pearl feels exposed. She expects passersby to point at her pants and stare, but they’re more interested in the shouting men on every corner selling lottery tickets, waving signs posted with numbers. Though Pearl has ordered Frieda not to waste her money on the tickets, she isn’t sure Frieda has listened.
A short man with dark curls ambles alongside Pearl and Frieda, muttering, “What do you need?” in Spanish, English, and Yiddish. Pearl once mistook men like him for handymen offering their services. Now she recognizes them as dope peddlers.
“Te voy a pagar!” Pearl barks, and he moves on.
“Where did you learn that?” Frieda says, laughing.
“It means ‘Go away or I’ll slap you,’” says Pearl. “Isidro taught me.”
“That’s voy a pegar! You said pagar. That means ‘I’ll pay you.’”
Pearl resents being corrected, especially when she’s wrong. “Anyway, he’s gone, isn’t he?” Suddenly she feels self-conscious in her new pants. “I look like a man,” she says, stretching the material around her legs as if to transform it into a dress. “You shouldn’t have allowed me to leave the workshop in these,” she complains.
“Why, Pearl, I never knew you were capable of vanity,” Frieda says.
Across the trolley tracks is a bar filled with American tourists in sunglasses and newly bought cheap straw Panama hats, packed together like herring in a barrel. Desperate for alcohol, Americans stop here on their way into town from their ships. Some are still carrying their luggage. Peddlers offer them tiny bottles of liquor, trophies to smuggle back home. Pearl once witnessed an American drop a bottle of whiskey on the floor and get down on all fours to lap up the liquid like a dog.
They reach the wide boulevard of Paseo del Prado, paved with crushed stones and bits of hard pink coral. Like many other ladies in Havana on a Sunday, Pearl and Frieda stroll along and peep at fashions they cannot afford in the window displays of the finer department stores: the English Bazaar, La Belle France, El Encanto, and La New York, stores that Mr. Steinberg wishes would carry his hats.
The Cuban ladies wear thin, boldly printed dresses that expose shoulders and legs, and their nails are painted a slick, glossy red. Pearl smells their sweet perfume mixed with sweat. They laugh and whistle back at the boys who whistle at them. Pearl watches curiously, tries to imagine herself whistling at some insolent man.
She’s relieved to see several other young women wearing pants. Some women tuck their hair in boyish berets or wear neckties. One has cut her hair short, just below her chin, so it frames her face like a helmet. She walks arm in arm with a female friend in a dress. How confusing for the men, Pearl thinks. Well, good, let them be confused.
