Cuba Diaries by Isadora Tattlin

containers, and mint will be
resuelto
ed at the last minute, but the pig remains up in the air.
    I tell Manuel that I would like to find some other way to get enough flour and sugar, and others have whispered to me that they would be able to
resolver
flour and sugar, but so far Lorena has been the only one who has been able to successfully
resolver
these two items.
    â€œI’VE GOT A NICE PIG ,” the plumber who is Miguel’s friend says, lying under the sink with a wrench in his hand.
    Miguel is nearby, nodding. “It’s true,” he says. “He has a very nice pig, large, good for the party.”
    We arrange to buy the pig for three hundred dollars, which I gather is one dollar a pound. The plumber will kill it, scald it (which, I learn, is what you have to do to get the bristles off), and bring it to the house with the head and feet removed on a day when the children are in school.
    SACKS OF FLOUR AND of sugar are dragged in through the door by Lorena, who is whispering, eyes opened wide and the whites of her eyes showing all the way around her pupils.
    CONCHA APPROACHES ME while I am having lunch. “I have a good boy who can help for the party.”
    â€œGood.” I have asked the help to find extra waiters, people they know, for the party.
    â€œHe knows how to serve. He has a white shirt . . .”
    â€œFine.”
    â€œDo you mind if he’s black?”
    â€œWhat?” I say, thinking that it’s just my Spanish, but Concha touches two fingers to her forearm.
    â€œ
Negro. El es Negro. Le da fastidio?
”
    I give a slight jerk. She
is
asking me if it bothers me that he is black.
    â€œBlack, white, yellow, green, it doesn’t matter to me.”
    â€œSorry to ask you,
señora
, but some ladies, they
do
mind.”
    THE PIG ARRIVES AND is laid out on the table on the veranda in back of the kitchen, where the help usually eat lunch, two legs of the table on the slightly raised cement floor of the veranda, two legs on the grass, so that the blood drains off into a basin Manuel has placed in the grass at the lower end. I walk back and forth in front of the door leading to the veranda, half watching, half not wanting to watch, as Manuel, wearing an old
guayabera
and wielding a large knife, skins the pig, then cuts the fat off. He cuts the fat into large cubes, which are rendered into
chicharrones
, or cracklings, by Lorena and put into tubs of lard in the
despensa
, like goose livers in France. The legs are cut off, wrapped, and put in the freezer, then the rest of the meat is cut up into pieces of three to four kilos each, wrapped, and put in the freezer.
    I am—
afraid
, I guess, is the word—to ask whether the three hundred dollars includes the head and feet of the pig or not. I have not
seen
the head, but there is a mysterious black plastic bag on the kitchen floor. I don’t want them to know that I didn’t know, when I paid the plumber, if I was paying for the head and feet or not. I did ask the plumber to cut the head and feet off before the pig came to the house, but I didn’t tell him to
keep
them. I don’t want the help to know that I didn’t know exactly what I was paying for. I think the plumber did say something to me about head and feet and price, but I don’t want him or the help to know how little in control I am.
    I am also afraid to find out (if the head
is
around), what it is they
do
with the head. I’m sure they do something with it: Cuba is a do-something-with pigs’-heads type of place.
I. 39
    Nick and I go with our Elegguá to the opening of a group show in the gallery-cum
-paladar
of Arquitecto Vasquez.
    Once again, people in natural-fiber clothes, and on the wall, a picture of a bearded centaur (his face is covered, but you can see pieces of beard protruding), his body pierced by arrows decorated with the flags of former Communist countries. A cherub seated on the centaur’s back holds the cloth