Features » December 9, 2009

INSIDE CUBA: A Day in My Life (Any Day) (cont’d)

From my bunk, I see my mother gesturing at me, speaking gibberish. Since the ischemia she’s had trouble communicating.

“Do you want me to turn the TV on for you, is that it?” My mother’s TV, which used to be mine, has problems with the volume. I climb down and fix it for her.

I stand here and look around again; I don’t see anything on the ground. Maybe the wind blew the money away. I’m embarrassed to look. I pull my bag to my chest and count the money in the day planner. It’s all there. I sigh with relief.

But this relief reminds me of something else: Yesterday, I left my 2GB memory stick on my computer at work. There was another next to it, a 565MB. All my work materials, plus my novel, are on that stick. I hurry. A memory stick costs 35 CUCs–almost two months salary–when they even have them in the stores, which is infrequently. It isn’t the first time I’ve forgotten it, though, just like many of my co-workers; when I see they’ve left theirs, I don’t touch them, I don’t even put them in a drawer.

I open the door to the small government publishing house where I work. The air conditioning reminds me I’ve been walking under the scorching sun on Obispo Street between the local hustlers and foreign tourists. I go to the computer in the back, where my boss and co-worker, Félix, is writing. I check for my memory stick, but it’s not connected to the computer.

“Have you seen my memory stick?”

Félix pushes his glasses up on his head. “I didn’t see it,” he finally says. “I don’t think it was here.”

I look for it under the table. I look in bottles I find hidden under there. Nothing. I can’t believe a girl who doesn’t know me, in an office that’s alien to me, is more honest than my own co-workers. I look everywhere, but nothing.

“Eiko was here before me. He went home already,” Félix says.

Another co-worker has arrived. “Sandra, have you seen my memory stick?”

“I just got here. I don’t know anything.” She doesn’t even look at me when she answers. She sinks into the chair in front of a computer.

“For God’s sake”–actually, I don’t believe in God, I’m an atheist–“all my work is in there. If Eiko saw it, why didn’t he put it in the drawer?” I interrupt Félix again to look through it just as the door opens and Maite, the designer, and a technician come in from having lunch.

“Don’t get that way,” Felix says. “It’ll show up.” He gives me Eiko’s phone number.

I dial 9 to get an outside line and then the number. A woman answers.

“Eiko probably hasn’t had time to get home yet,” Felix says without looking up from the keyboard. And he’s right. I hang up.

Maybe it’ll be better if I go eat. I go to the secretary, who’s the person authorized to give me a ticket for lunch in the office cafeteria.

“Oh, I’m so sorry; I forgot to get a ticket for you. I thought you weren’t coming in today.”

I tell myself: I really needed those lucky elephant earrings today.

My stomach grumbles. Sometimes I come to work just to eat. The secretary sees that I’m making a face. She asks me something but … I’m so hungry, so hot, so in need of … I know I’m focusing on my memory stick because I need to repress my anger, but I barely manage.

I leave the secretary’s office with her apology rolling around in my head. I walk past the hallway between my office and the lunchroom. Without meaning to, I read the menu posted on the door: rice, peas, soy burger, bread and soda.

I go back to the phone and call Eiko. “Yeah, I took it,” Eiko says on the other end of the line. “I gave it to Maite. I told her that she should give it to you as soon as she saw you, whether you asked for it or not.”

Maite isn’t at her desk. I wait 20 minutes and then write her a note.

My eyes are irritated from trying to write under this yellow bulb. I’m tired of getting in and out of this bunk bed, but I decide to go get the soy yogurt. I look for the ration card so the grocer will give me what is due my family and me. But as I go out the door, the sun momentarily blinds me. I stop and wait to adjust to the heat and the light again. I glance at the ration card and realize we have already received all the yogurt we’re going to get this month.

I leave my office and go home. I take the bus, which is suffocating. I stand in the middle, where it bends like a worm, and hold on. I no longer give a damn about the muggers. Before leaving the office, in the note to Maite, I said something about “my apologies to Eiko.” My apologies. I don’t even know what for. Since I’ve started to work, it’s been an adjustment. I’ve become a hypocrite. I think that, at 39, I’ve finally begun to understand what that means. I’d always heard a certain hypocrisy was a sign of good manners.

The bus is entering Alamar. The man next to me has a spool of green thread on his finger, like it’s for sale. A large sweaty woman is on the other side of me. The man with the thread holds it out to her (yes, it’s for sale) and she shakes her head no.

“Driver, please stop!” yells out a woman with a baby in her arms. We can barely stand as he takes the curve. “Driver, please!”

The tree I spy out the window disappears in a flash, like my memory of the secretary who forgot my lunch ticket, ordinance #33, the note I left for Maite, the fight I’ll probably have with her later. Instead, I watch the woman with the baby, who’s slipping in his loose diaper.

“Driver, stop! Stop already!” I scream with a voice I hardly recognize.

We can feel the hissing of the brakes, the shudder of the chassis, the popping sound of the doors opening.