I wrote this a while ago for a Writing Battle competition where you get dealt a set of cards with the genre, subject, and action that needs to happen in the story, a word count (1,000 for this one), and three days to complete it. This was my submission. I forget what the cards were…but I remember there needed to be a shovel in it. One of the anonymous judges called me racist for this story due to the use of Spanglish. I stopped doing the competitions.
“You’ve survived 634 attempts on your life Mr. Castro. What do you attribute this to? Luck, wit, providence?”
Fidel Castro puffed on his cigar. The thickness of the brown wrapped tobacco made his fingers seem frail. He had lost the physical vitality of the character I had grown up seeing in pictures and on television. The man who launched into hour long speeches, hung out of invading Jeep’s, threw opening pitches at baseball games, was now just a jaundice bird under a heavy blanket. There I was, thinking I’d be interviewing the great Castro, but it felt more like an afternoon conversation with my grandfather.
“Jyou know,” he said in broken English. “I ang a bery lucky man. I hab outlasted eleben Presidentes de Estados Unidos and mucho asesinatos intentos. I gib all glory to mi cocinero.”
“Your cook?” I asked.
“Si, claro. Without her I would be un dead man.”
Behind him was the cook. She was hard at work over a cast iron cauldron that rested over a small fire. I watched as she mashed the contents inside, tasting the brown liquid with the tip of her pinky, adding different colored spices with a small garden shovel from a myriad of plastic bowls on the grass around her. She wore no shoes and her dress, which was more of a smock, was all white. Her hair was wrapped in a white scarf. She couldn’t have been older than twenty and she was stunning to watch.
“She looks very young to have saved you from all those assassination attempts, Mr. Castro.”
His mouth moved into a smirk around the cigar.
“Ella es un alma vieja,” he said. “Un old soul.”
We sat under a large mamay tree. The smoke from his cigar sputtered out with less vigor than drool. When he breathed there was a small hiss from his lungs that could only be attributed to the twenty plus cigars he smoked per day for a lifetime. He had offered me one and it now sat lifeless in my fingers. I was nervous to ask him for a relight.
“What is she cooking now?” I asked.
“Ropa Vieja. Jyou know ropa vieja?”
“No, I don’t know that I do.”
“Slow cooked flank steak en un sauce de tomato. Olibs, onyons, peppers. Es el sabor de Cuba. Ropa es clothes, vieja es old. Old clothes.”
Embarrassment crept up my throat. I was still wondering why I was conducting this interview with the famous dictator. I knew little Spanish, less about Cuba, and couldn’t name a single dish at a Cuban restaurant. But it was the opportunity of a lifetime. Something you don’t say no to. When you’re working at a random newspaper in New Jersey and you’re the only Cuban (1/4th to be exact) employee and Fidel Castro decides to award your paper one last interview, you take it.
“¿Cuando esta la cena?” he yelled, trying to turn around in his seat to project his voice to the cook.
“Quince minutos mas,” she replied.
He turned back towards me in his chair.
“Yjou were saying?”
“We were talking about the many assas-”
I don’t know if my mouth had stopped working, or my mind had been wiped, but I could not continue my question as I watched the cook dig with her garden shovel into a pit of dirt. She looked like a dog shoveling back piles of brown between her legs. She dug and dug until she hit what I could only imagine was China. She took a small heaping of the darkest earth I’d ever seen, walked to the cauldron, and placed it in as if it were pepper.
“What is she doing?” I asked.
The smirk on Castro’s face turned into a grin and then a chuckle.
“Do yjou know what an Iyanifa is?”
Now that I’d heard of. A Santeria priestess. I nodded my head.
“This woman has many talents my friend. She es un chef, un lover, y un Iyanifa. And she has kept me alibe for all these years.”
“So, the dirt is…”
“Yo no se. Pero I don’t ask questions I do not want to know the answers. Jyou understand?”
He chuckled and puffed again on his cigar, this time blowing out a plume of smoke that washed over the table between us. I took a sip of the drink the cook had brought to us and wondered what was in it. Dirt? Insects? A sacrificed animal?
“Jyou know why I ang always at odds with el Estados Unidos?”
It’s a question I should have been interested in as a journalist. But I couldn’t keep my eyes off the cook. She was now using the butt of the garden shovel to mash what looked like a small dry chicken bone. She slid the mashed bone into the cauldron, whispered words with her eyes closed, and then slit her hand. I got up from my chair as she gripped her wrist. Blood dropped into the cauldron. I checked my pockets for anything to stop the bleeding as I ran over. Then she whispered more words and I thought, for a split second, that she had turned old. Her hair was wispy and grey, there were patches of bare skull, and her skin drooped. It retracted just as quickly. The skin reformed tight to her bones. Her mane of hair flowed a vibrant brown.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Claro que si. What do jyou mean?” she asked.
She was chopping garlic with a knife. There was no cut on her hand or garden shovel in site.
I felt heat and smoke at the back of my neck.
“Her blood is for my protection,” Fidel said “Your blood is for her.”
The cook’s knife had glided through my throat like butter and as my chin dropped to my chest, I watched my own blood flow into the cauldron.
“Viva la revoluciòn,” were the last words I heard.
Love the Spanglish. That transformation by the end was something sweet.
Haha that one was pretty great.