Jack felt a slight queasiness in his belly.

The phone rang. He stepped back inside and answered it. The woman spoke in Spanish.

“Are you lonely, handsome?”

It took Jack a moment to translate in his head, and he wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly. Then he chuckled and said, “Cut it out, Sofia.”

“My name is not Sofia. But I can be Sofia if you want me to be. I can be anyone at all. I can do whatever you want, whenever you want, however many times you want. Have you ever had a girl of sixteen? All you have to do is-”

Jack hung up. Obviously the bellboy or the doorman or someone had passed the word that an American man was alone in room 603. The desk clerk’s admonition-no locals in the hotel-echoed in his mind.

Yeah, right. And drugs are strictly prohibited in Miami Beach nightclubs.

Jack took a seat on the edge of the bed-the very edge. He wondered how many sixteen-year-old Cuban girls had lain across these sheets, and then he recalled those two pigs in the airport talking about how cheap and gorgeous the women were here. He grabbed the phone and dialed Sofia ’s room. She answered on the third ring.

“ Sofia, hey. It’s Jack.”

“What’s up?”

“I wanted to let you know: I’m checking out of here.”

“You don’t like your room?”

“The room’s fine. I just don’t want to stay here.”

“Where do you want to go?”

He didn’t answer right away. His mind flashed with visions of his grandmother living in some dumpy house for thirty-eight years with hardly anything to eat. He thought of Abuela saying good-bye to his mother, spiriting her away to Miami, unaware at the time that she’d never see her teenage daughter again. He thought of the rum-guzzling, shrimp-gorging, cigar-smoking tourists and the young girls who became whores.

But the one image Jack couldn’t conjure up was that of a little Havana suburb, the town in which the mother he’d never known had lived most of her too-short life.

“I’m going to Bejucal,” he said.

20

Two hours later Jack and Sofia were in a rental car approaching the outskirts of Bejucal.

“You didn’t have to come,” said Jack.

“How were you planning to get around without me?” asked Sofia.

“My Spanish is fairly functional.”

“I’ve heard you speak, Jack. And while it’s very impressive that you were able to learn Spanish while you were a drainpipe, it probably wouldn’t get you very far in a small town.”

“A drainpipe? Is that what I said?”

She smiled. “It’s okay. Your Spanish is really pretty good.”

“How good?”

“Probably just good enough to get you beat up and ripped off. Which is why I came along.”

“Oh, so you’re here to protect me, are you?”

“No. I came to watch you get beat up and ripped off. Beats the heck out of Cuban television.”

Touché, he thought.

The actual driving time from Havana was only thirty minutes, and they reached Bejucal around dinnertime. Abuela had often told him that it was the prettiest town in all of Havana Province, and she was probably right. There were colonial facades everywhere, and just enough of them were freshly painted to allow the imagination to color in the rest. In the heart of town was a quaint little square with an ocher-colored colonial church. It was precious enough in its own right, but for Jack, just the sight of the old church took his breath away. His mother had been baptized there. The Cine Martí was nearby, and Jack wondered if his mother had ever gone there with her friends, or maybe even a boyfriend, dreaming of being an American movie star. Then his gaze drifted toward a billboard at the end of the square that read, SOCIALISMO O MUERTE (Socialism or death), and at once he understood Abuela’s comment about Bejucal: It was exactly as it was forty years ago; and it was totally different.

“You okay?” asked Sofia.

Jack had been unaware, but they’d spent that last few minutes stopped at an intersection for no apparent reason. He’d been absorbing it all. “Yeah,” he said, shaking it off. “Just spacing out a bit there.”

“You hungry? The Restaurante El Gallo looks pretty good.”

“Sure,” said Jack.

Jack parked the car, and they walked to the restaurant and took a table near the window. The house specialized in criollo dishes, so Jack ordered roasted chicken and plátanos a puñetazos. The waitress was extremely friendly, and naturally she recognized them as tourists. She insisted that they visit Plaza Martí, which she claimed was the setting for the movie Paradiso, based on the novel by José Lezama Lima. Jack didn’t know if that was true or not, but it made him smile to hear it, as if it had been his own small town featured in a motion picture. In a way, it was his town.

Dinner was pleasant enough, and their waitress brought them mango slices for dessert. She seemed to take a genuine interest in making sure that they enjoyed their visit to Bejucal, so Jack thought he’d push his luck.

“Have you ever heard of a woman named Celia Méndez?” he asked.

She scrunched her face, thinking. “I know a couple of Méndez families. But not a Celia Méndez. How old is she?”

Jack pulled the old photograph of his mother and Celia Méndez from his pocket. It made him nervous to play this hand. All these years, he’d figured that Celia Méndez, his mother’s best friend in Cuba, would be his best source of information about his mother. But what if it didn’t pan out?

He showed the snapshot to the waitress and said, “This was taken over forty years ago. So I’d guess she’s probably close to sixty.”

The waitress shook her head, no recognition. “Sorry. Can’t help you. But there is a Méndez who runs a casa particular over on Calle Martí. That family has lived in Bejucal for years. Why don’t you stop by there? Maybe they can help you.”

“Thanks. We’ll do that.”

She wrote down the address for them. Jack paid the bill in U.S. dollars, the only currency that seemed to matter in “communist” Cuba, and they left.

The literal translation of casa particular was “private home,” and for many travelers there was no better accommodation in Cuba than to rent a room from a Cuban family. It had been illegal to rent housing in Cuba after the revolution, but all that changed with the fall of the Soviet Union and the Cuban government’s need to find a new “super-power” (read: tourism) to prop up its failing economy. A new law in 1996 allowed Cubans to rent out one or two rooms in their homes, and soon afterward thousands of casas particulares popped up across the country, providing a hefty sum in tax revenues to a dictator who was clearly more interested in self-perpetuation than communist principle.

La Casa Méndez was a simple but tidy house facing a cobblestone street. A plump woman with dark skin and a bright yellow headband in her hair greeted them at the door. She was at most fifty, Jack surmised, too young to be his mother’s friend Celia. She introduced herself as Felicia Méndez Ortiz. Rather than diving into his detective role with a slew of questions about Celia Méndez, Jack decided to break the ice with a simple business inquiry.

“Do you have a room available?”

“Yes,” she said in a pleasant voice. “Just one.”

“May we see it, please?”

“Of course. Come in.”

The room was in the back of the house near the kitchen. There were two twin beds, a dresser, and an old rug on the floor. The annoying glow from a lamp with no shade was the only light in the room. They had walked past the living room and two other bedrooms to get there. Jack counted eleven people in the house, seven adults and four children. The Cuban woman explained that the big advantage of staying at a casa particular was that you get to live with a Cuban family, but the big disadvantage was that you get to live with a Cuban family.

“We’ll take it,” said Sofia.