My father and mother are both on the phone, having just recalled that they forgot to call me on my saint’s day, December 2. For the past several years, it has taken them a day or two longer to remember. But for them--as for all Cubans, I am learning--it is more important to remember any anniversary later than not at all. This year, I was able to reply: “Well, yesterday was Santa Lucía, so it won’t be too late to call my baby sister!”
My father and my mother have been on my mind a lot over the last several days. I just realized that on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, my daughter Alice and I will be in Cienfuegos, which is where my mother was born and raised.
I spent all last week in Havana, surrounded by groups of people from all over the world who were participating in the 33rd Annual Latin American Film Festival. I met several people who live in the same town as my parents, and who plan to call them or to hand-deliver a gift. But the thing that made me not just think of my father, but to clearly see his grinning face and to hear his nearly unintelligible voice, as he always tells funny stories while laughing hysterically---I recalled one of his favorite stories.
Between December 2nd and December 11th, I watched no fewer than 20 feature-length films: two Cuban-made, two Italian, five Brazilian, one Polish, one Serbo-Croatian, several French-Canadian, one Argentinean, and one Ecuadorian-Bolivian. I only walked out of two, promptly walking into better movies at a different theater up the street.
The thing about Cubans is that they are loud and loquacious, even inside the movie theater. My husbands and my daughters and anyone who has ever had the misfortune to sit next to me in a movie theater will tell you that I never know when to shut up. So here was another one of those “it’s not my fault, I was born that way!” moments when I found myself shocked, I tell you, shocked, at the behavior of so many Cubans at the movies!
It’s like it is their right and their duty to shout out commentaries, to sigh audibly, to actively participate as the actual living, breathing spectators they are. There are shouts of fear, surprise, dismay, horror. No one tells anyone to shut up or even to silence their cell phones! There was one French-Canadian film that left the movie title until the very end, just before the credits, which would have been OK, if it didn't also have subtitles throughout the film. The entire audience, of course, took the film's first subtitle to mean that the movie theater had made a mistake and was showing us the wrong film, and everyone started to boo and make a racket!
The guy sitting next to me happened to know that there was no mistake, and he reassured me, so I turned around and reassured the people sitting behind me, who were still audibly voicing their concerns.
I’ll give you the famous punch-line of my father’s story first, since it’s in Spanish:
¡DALE LA TETA!
To do any justice to this story, you have to try to picture my father telling it and laughing hysterically so that you start to laugh along with him before you have a clue what it’s about---again, remember that in Cuba, the way you tell the story is more important than the story itself.
Imagine yourself now in a Cuban movie theater, surrounded by spectators voicing their questions and answers and delight and disgust at anything and everything that is going on in that theater, from the screen to the last row in the balcony and the projection room behind it.
You don’t need to go back that far into the cultural past to explain the presence of a few very young children or even babies on their parents’ laps, hopefully slumbering. Cubans don’t hire babysitters to go anywhere; they just drag the kids along. Even when the kids are home with three generations of adults to watch over them, many young Cuban parents are the first to admit that their babies and young preschool children have no schedules; they stay up until all hours of the day and night. This does not necessarily contradict what I wrote earlier about docile Cuban babies in public.
Back to my father’s story; but now that I can practically see and hear it, I want to ask him to tell me the name of the exact movie theater. Was it any of the ones I walked to from the house where he grew up—the Riviera, the Yara, or La Rampa, or the Charles Chaplin, or the 23 y 12? What film was being shown? Had I or my sister been born yet, or had my mother been his date that night?
Have you noticed the round-about way in which I’ve inserted five other stories before finally coming to the point, so that you think I’ve probably forgotten? That’s not my fault, either. I was born that way. It’s the way Cubans tell stories.
So I’m going to make an educated guess that my father’s story refers to an evening during his student days at the University of Havana, probably in 1949 or 1950. If my mother was with him at the movie that night, they would have needed chaperones, which may have been a married sibling and his or her spouse, or else it had to be a parent.
There was a full audience. It was probably an American movie, a Hollywood production, probably in English without subtitles. A baby began to cry during the showing of the movie. At first, there were only a few polite murmurs. If I am guessing right, and it was the '50s, many of the higher-class women were beginning to discover bottles and to set aside nursing, particularly when it came to taking babies out in public. But at that movie theater that night, the baby wouldn’t stop crying, and finally, one particular member of the audience stood up and shouted: ¡DALE LA TETA!
Do I need to translate that? Because, as you may have already gathered, the most Cuban of Cuban expressions are impossible to translate into conversational American English, and this is one of those: una teta = a tit. Dale comes from the verb dar = to give. ¡Dale la teta! means: Give him your tit!
Out on the street, the volume and the color content of the language only doubles; walking up and down Calle 23 past hordes of Cubans coming in and out of all the movie theaters, loudly commenting on this or that film or actor or director, while loudly commenting on everyone and everything they passed, or on what just happened…always knowing somehow that the way one relates the story is more important than what actually happened.
Walking down any street, anywhere in Cuba, as a single woman, is something. In Havana, it is something more than in Matanzas. There is a constant cacophony of sounds emanating from any man directed at any single woman or women. Sometimes, the sounds are intelligible words or phrases. The best one I’ve heard so far came from a man who looked to be in his 20s, from among a group of beautiful young adults, all gathered together as they do, in droves--I mean hundreds of them just "hanging out" along the gorgeous Avenida de los Presidentes as it nears Calle 23. This one guy spoke out loudly and clearly, addressing me as I passed by, saying something to the effect of: “Lady, you have nothing to be ashamed of, you are just as beautiful as any of these 15-year-olds!”
Indeed, the following night, there was romance in the air. But that is for another blog.
With love from Cuba,
Elisa
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