Everyone loaded their own plates from the spread on the kitchen table. There was saffron rice, black beans, yucca cooked with garlic, and wonderful fiery, transparent sauce, and a powdered combination of banana and pappers to sprinke over it all. I settled on a couch in a sort of parlor near the front door, the only area with at least a couple of free seats. It was a darkly-painted little room with a beautiful sofa in purple crushed velvet, tucked into one of the window alcoves. A huge surfboard leaned against the wall in one corner. At one point, I got up and located my purse. I feared it blending so completely in with the brown walls and drk wooden furniture that I’d have a hard time finding it when we were ready to leave. It was night now, and in the window nearby I could see only a large bush, covered with white bell-like flowers, rocking gently in the wind.
Tag: Bernal heights
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One of the guests talked about the visit she paid to the Soviet Union in the 1970s. It had not been connected to any work. She’d just thought it would be a fascinating place to visit. However, the fact that she worked in the American media had made her instantly suspect, and she’d encountered a good bit of questioning from the Soviets while she tried to arrange the trip. On her flight into the country, she’d spoken with an Englishman who told her about the “Bird Market,” an open-air market in the Russian countryside. She decided she had to see it. Her Soviet guides objected, either for political reasons or because they didn’t like the idea of a single woman who spoke barely any Russian wandering so far afield, but she had decided to go to the Bird Market, so she did. She told us about the Russian women wrapped up in their babushkas, the men in their hats and hip boots, the maggots sold as bird food, which came rolled up in newspaper cones. Since she spoke no Russian and nobody spoke any English, she’d communicated with them and they with her by drawing pictures.
In Leningrad, she’d gone to the opera, which got out so late there were no taxis in sight. Her attempts to find out about buses went nowhere because nobody could understand what she was saying. It was dark, and it was late, and it was a long way to her hotel. Suddenly, two young men, neither of them much older than thirty, appeared and answered in the affirmative when she asked if they spoke English. They were intrigued once they knew she was an American. First, they wanted to know if she could change rubles for dollars. Then they wanted to know if she had any blue jeans. Then they asked her if she had any paperback books. She said, well, yes, she had one at the hotel, but she doubted if it was by anyone they’d ever heard of. It was an American author named Kurt Vonnegut.
Kurt Vonnegut! They were enraptured. It turned out that the only way they were exposed to American literature in their schools was through paragraph-long synopses of American novels, and it happened that Kurt Vonnegut was one of the authors they’d encountered this way. An agreement was reached. They would give her a ride to her hotel, dropping her off two blocks away, since Russians were not allowed near hotels used by foreigners. The following day, they would leave their car parked at a certain place and time with a window rolled partly down. She would walk past an slide the Vonnegut book through the window for them.
She did it, but she was genuinely afraid, she told me. Any Russians who saw her might suspect her of concealing microfilm or something in the book.
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Jean said Cuba was terribly, horribly poor, largely because of the American blockade. There were no antibiotics to be had, almost no drugs, and no medical instruments. Physicians boil hypodermics to reuse them, and there is a terrible sort of triage in place where AIDS victims are refused AZT on the grounds that they have brought the illness upon themselves. Criticizing Fidel can get you sent to prison. “I thought if I had to look at one more picture of Che, I was going to puke.”
But she was impressed with how kind the people were, and how their lives in Cuba, and the kind of society it is, fostered a sense of teamwork, of responsibility for each other.
At one point in her visit, she wanted to film what is known as “The Ice Cream Park,” the brainchild of a revolutionary who apparently considered access to ice-cream an inalienable right of the people. Getting into the ice-cream park required patience. There were long lines of people waiting for a chance to enter, and Cuban guards would only wave in a few once other guests left. When her turn came, a young guard, about eighteen, questioned her sharply about her video camera and told her she could not take it in. The other, older guards, scolded him. “Leave her alone. Can’t you see she’s just a tourist?” He backed off, genuinely abashed and she went in feeling a little ashamed, because the young soldier had been correct — she was no mere tourist, but a filmmaker.
In the park at one point, a fellow approached her as she spoke to an ice-cream vendor and pointed out that the camera she was carrying was the kind of thing used by professionals. Jean rolled her eyes in imitation of a girl delighted with the attention. “I said, ‘Gol, guys! I really got a bargain didn’t I? Really? It’s what filmmakers use? Kewel!‘”
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In the kitchen I had a long, interesting conversation with Jean, one of Michael’s co-workers. She’s a jolly woman in her thirties, with shoulder-length dark hair, no makeup. She’d just gotten back from a trip to Cuba, and talked about a documentary she’d considered doing on a relative who was “not a red-diaper, but a crimson-diaper baby.”
The relative’s parents had not been actual party members, but only because her father was the bureau chief at Tass in the American city where they lived, and needed to maintain at least the appearance of objectivity. The parents, Jean said, combined their Communist views with an especiallky virulent form of New England puritainism, and as a result her relative had a constrained, paranoid, and isolated childhood. Her memories of the Red Scare were especially terrible, of government agents following her and her parents, of tapped phones and other forms of harassment. By the time she was twenty, she found herself virtually unemployable in the U.S., so she’d gone to Czechslovakia to live, then ended up in Cuba, where she remains. Now an older woman she is, Jean said, like most American expatriates in Cuba — intense, neurotic, and dogmatic.
Her life was tragic in ways Jean said she’d rather not discuss, and Jean decided not to do the documentary. It might have upset her relative and the story might distract viewers from what Jean wanted the documentary to be about — life in Cuba. Her relative, she said, seems to be one of those people who lives someplace, not because she loves the culture or langauge (her Spanish is still terrible) but because it appeals to her politically. Jean mentioned another interesting ex-patriate, an ex-CIA agent who had a crisis of conscience and defected. He’s now a travel agent in Havana.
At that time, it was still illegal for Americans to visit Cuba.
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Monday night we went to a party in Bernal Heights. A friend drove us, parking the car on a sloped little street near a seedy grocery store. The hill we were on offered a panoramic view of a tangle of highways and roads about as pleasant to survey as basement pipework.
Bernal Heights retains the appearance of being low rent, but I suspect proeprty values there are just as outrageous as anywhere else in San Francisco. The house we were visiting was one of those hillside places that seems almost built into the surrounding slopes and foliage. Just walking up the steps to the door, I saw a beautiful mossy brick path leading into a shady green garden.
The house itself was the kind of place I dreamed about having when I was a teenager. Cozy, dark, idosyncratic, with roughly-hewn walls and beams, exotic carvings and dcecorations, and worn looking furniture. The hostess was slender, blonde, very serious, the host a squarjawed, dark man with a ponytail. He was overseing the cooking in the kitchen space, which had jars adn jars of wonderful looking spices. She saw to the guests in a vaguely, anxious, uncheerful manner that left me feeling as though I’d been briefly examined and found wanting. There were already about nine people there, most of them about a decade younger than me and almost all with the enviable ease and charm of people who are doing exactly what they want with their lives. Michael and I each picked up a glass of red wine and walked out onto the narrow, planklike back porch. It was high up, but offered little view other than trees and rooftops, so we went back in.
Pam Troy 