Tania gets bubbly, a big broad smile, Coti pecks at her chest, distracted. We do a warrior pose, a makeshift downward dog, a standing forward bend, legs straight, chest working toward the legs. I stand tall in mountain pose - tadasana – my three new students before me. “Eduardo,” she says, Eduardo joga.” She once knew him, we learn, years ago when she still left her room. Elsa suddenly appears, walking, her scant nightgown covered in a curious apron like a tropical bathrobe. Joga, she says, the Spanish “y” sounding like a “j.” “Joga” I repeat, and her hips do a Latin wiggle as her hands join in prayer. My body is tight from walking the dusty streets of La Habana Vieja, from scammers selling fake cigars in Central Havana, from falling prey to scalped ballet tickets at the Gran Teatro, from trying salsa steps, from staying out late because in Havana I forget to sleep. I wonder what to offer, not speaking the language. Twenty-five people will squeeze into a small pastel room with wide-open doors and windows. I’m preparing a yoga class I will soon teach with Cuba’s so-called “father of yoga,” Eduardo Pimentel. A deck as good as you get, with space for me to stretch as the sun rises above the water. There’s a leafy palm up on the roof too and green lacy plants, one sprouting from a converted toilet and comfy wicker chairs. Palm trees stand tall, graceful and elegant no matter what may be crumbling around them. We kiss and hug some more.Īround Tania’s deck is the low, colorful city, grand and luxurious in the heat yet faded and crying for repair. She likes me, says sweet things, I can tell, without words. Me gusta! Me gusta! She talks in a long stream of Spanish. She knits me an ivory shawl I wear to the Casa de la Musica, a hot salsa club in town. She has a Buddhist guru, rare in Cuba, a chubby bushy-haired man seen in many fuzzy pictures.Įlsa’s eyes are often closed but her eyeballs are cast upward, speaking to her God. Sometimes we turn to el perro, Tania’s 16-year-old sweet and deaf dog who barely walks or Tania’s mother, Elsa, who doesn’t seem to walk either but soon will surprise us all. Every day we signal and laugh and kiss and hug and point and posture as we try to rise above hola and adios. We all welcome the game I speak no Spanish, Tania speaks no English. It’s from 1959, when Cuba, from America’s point of view, went frozen in time.Ĭoti sits on Tania’s flowered sundress like a decorative pin and pecks at my finger with his white beak. From Tania’s small 3-bedroom flat, “Theme from a Summer Place” floats in. A red 1950s DeSoto – I think my Dad had one – screeches to a halt, seeking a fare. Salt water sprays over the Malecon, Havana’s seaside avenue where people huddle in romantic bunches at night. Two drawers in Tania’s refrigerator are toppling with eggs, dozens of eggs, apparently because in Cuba, when you find huevos, you buy them. Every breakfast in her Havana “casa particular” is the same. I’ll forget most everything else I learn in Spanish, but that mistake I won’t make twice.įruta bomba! Me gusta! I exclaim as Tania and her pet parrot Coti follow with crusty chunks of white bread and eggs topped with strips of cheese like a row of bookmarks. Papaya means something else it’s a slang word for a woman’s private parts. In Cuba, the word for papaya is fruta bomba and it arrives in neat orange squares on Tania’s rooftop deck overlooking the Caribbean.
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