#9 with Love from Cuba Missive
Matanzas, Cuba
November 8, 2011
Nails, twins, and a piglet
Last Saturday afternoon I passed by what looked like a nail salon and made an appointment for today. I forgot what street it was on and couldn’t find it and so I kept on walking, in a large circle, as I usually do when I’m just out exploring. On the next block I asked the first lady I saw standing by an open door, “Is there a lady around here who does nails?” She immediately pointed me a couple of doors further up the street, to where a man stood by another open door. There was a home-made (of course) wooden baby gate at the entrance. Inside, two young women, one black with huge rollers in her hair and one very pretty white woman, sat in rocking chairs, a little boy stood by them in front of a TV set with a DVD playing Ninja Turtles in Spanish. Beyond this small front room the same man had climbed over the baby gate ahead of me, and was now washing up at the kitchen sink. The pretty young white woman ushered me in to sit down and immediately began to gather her supplies and set up a table between the two rockers. She came back holding a baby and set him down on the floor. By then I had already asked more than my usual twenty questions, Lucia, and another really great thing about being surrounded by Cubans is that they all think it is perfectly normal and come right back at me with twice as many questions of their own! So I knew that the older boy was the same age as Riley and the baby boy was 11 months old and that he could already walk. The beautiful young mother calmly and efficiently got her two little boys set up in front of the TV and had set up all her supplies on the table and she was now ready to begin doing my nails. She started with my toenails, one foot at a time resting on her knees. All of a sudden I heard an odd sound, wondering if it was coming from the TV or from the baby, and turned around to see a piglet! It had come through a gap in another home-made gate at the other end of the kitchen. With the same calm efficiency she’d shown with her two sons, the young mother picks up the piglet, carries him back over his gate, and comes back to attend to my toenails.
(By now you are thinking, “She’s covered the nails and the piglet; what about the twins?”I just stuck that in because I realized I had to start a new paragraph and break up the story a bit. But you know how obsessed I am with babies of any kind, and especially with twins, so just wait.)
I was wondering whether this was one of the piglets I’d recently seen over the Seminary wall, but she told me, “Oh, there are lots of piglets all over the neighborhood…everyone keeps them inside, that’s why you don’t see them. This one came from a farm outside the city; my brother bought it…they are for special occasions…” I told her I assumed nobody grew much attached to them as pets, even though it sure looked like this piglet wanted to play with the two little boys, because he kept sneaking through that gate to join us. I forget her answer to that comment, but I think it was a small giggle and a shrug.
My next set of questions was about the rest of her family. By now I have learned that there are never fewer than 3 generations sharing one household. Sure enough, her mother lived with them. You’ll be proud of me to know that I did not need to ask about the father of the two boys. I had mistakenly assumed that he was the man I’d seen earlier, but she corrected me: “That’s my brother. The father and I had a fight.” She told me about an older sister who has twin daughters the same age as her older son, and who is expecting another baby. I asked if the cousins live nearby and she said, not really…but about five minutes later, the twins and their very pregnant mother show up at the baby-gate. The baby isn’t due till January and already looks like it might be triplets, but they already know it is only one boy. As I was getting ready to leave, I asked her to write down her information so that I could send others to her. She had another one of those made-up names beginning with a “Y”, so it’s a good thing she wrote it. Then she went into some long explanation about how the telephone number she wrote is for a phone a few doors up the street, and to just tell people to ask for “La Flaca—the thin one”. Turns out her twin sister, who lives right across the street, is “La Gorda—the fat one”. She just smiled and shrugged saying, “I guess twins run in the family.”
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