Hola! I don’t usually post short stories here, but today I feel like sharing the English translation of “El día que volvía a ayer” (The Day I Returned to Yesterday) because of its connection to The Novel Detective. Just like the novel, the plot takes place in the Manzana de Gómez building and, at least the first part, during the time I was a student there, from 1977 to 1980.

Ever since those days, I wanted to write about La Manzana. This short story was my first attempt. Maybe that’s why it’s still very close to my heart… It has been published in Spanish in several places online and is part of the collection En la Feria del Libro de Miami y otros viajes astrales, reviewed here by Professor Marisela Fleites-Lear.

I hope you enjoy my little story… And who knows, maybe one of my readers has also traveled back in time!

The Day I Returned to Yesterday

 Most of my middle school classmates fell platonically in love with movie stars, athletes and famous singers. In Cuba, we used to say we were metidos with them, (metido meaning literally inserted or stuck in) though, at least in theory, nothing material was inserted anywhere.

 Among the stars from across the Atlantic, Alain Delon shone the brightest—it was the late seventies. Luisita Fraga had plastered a huge poster of the French actor on her bedroom wall and lit a candle for him every day, as if he were a deceased relative.

 “Estúpida, you’re going to burn the house down with this nonsense,” her grandmother grumbled, but stubborn Luisita never wavered in her daily devotions.

 My next-door neighbor Isela, was obsessed with The Beatles. Since she couldn’t pick just one to love, she would fall in love with a different one each month. Other crushes had local celebrities as their distant objects of desire. A vocalist called Alfredito Rodríguez, who appeared on tv in suit and tie and sang romantic ballads that bordered on rebellious (in an era that celebrated sweaty singers and a native rhythm called Mozambique), had girls swooning as well.

 After a screening of the venerable Hollywood comedy Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, produced in 1948 and re-released in Havana theaters in ’79, there was a sudden vampire craze, much like what Twilight would later unleash on the world, but scaled to our island. Girls began sighing over the pale masculinity of Count Dracula, and even The Wolf Man, as played by Lon Chaney, managed to gather a few fans. Another friend, Yarmila, idolized Béla Lugosi, probably without knowing he had died back in ‘56, ten years before his Cuban fan was even born.

 Yarmila was the first in our group to “develop” (another euphemism from the time) and considered appropriate to show all her friends her sanitary pad dyed with a reddish, pungent-smelling liquid.

  As for me, the oddball, well, I wasn’t interested in unreachable stars. My crushes, no less platonic than those of my friends, were on ordinary, flesh-and-blood guys. One of my earliest meteduras was into the dialectical abyss of a ninth-grade Marxism teacher nicknamed Quique. Despite the mind-numbing boredom of the subject he taught—or maybe because of it—I spent the class periods daydreaming, imagining myself (a taller, more confident version of me, wearing a white dress like Claudia Cardinale’s in The Leopard) returning to middle school many years later to share a sweeping, happy-ending kiss with Quique. So obsessed was I that one day, while staring into the empty hallway as the teacher droned on, I thought I saw myself (my adult self) standing outside the classroom door, waiting for him . . .

            This upgraded Teresita wore some fabulous sunglasses perched stylishly on her head.
The real Teresita, however, was afflicted with a vicious case of nearsightedness and forced to wear eyeglasses with thick plastic frames, earning me the lovely nicknames Little Owl and Four-Eyes. To top it off, the eyeglasses didn’t even help me see clearly. Due to the poor quality of the lenses or a bad diopter measurement, I blundered through life half-blind.

 Climbing the marble staircase to the classroom was an ordeal: on good days, it meant a slip; on bad days, it meant falling flat on my butt and sliding down to the next landing. Luckily, I befriended Lázaro, the kind elevator operator, who took pity on me and spared me the agony of battling the stairs, though students were forbidden from using the creaking Otis that had been in the building since the ‘50s, or earlier.

            Our school occupied the fourth floor of a battered old building: La Manzana de Gómez, located right across from Central Park. On the ground floor, there were clothing stores, a shoe shop, and La Central, the pharmacy where my mother worked. She would go upstairs during break time to bring me a sandwich, which triggered endless teasing from my classmates. (Between the hideous glasses and my mother’s helicopter visits, I spent my teenage years with a soundtrack of snickers.) But who cared? The snack was essential. I was scrawny and needed to “develop.”

        Quique wasn’t exactly a male model either. He was short, skinny, and verging on ugly, a gawky guy with military-short hair that was already thinning. When I secretly confessed my crush to Luisita, she burst out laughing and said:
  “Girl, that prof is uglier than a wood sandal. And look at his head—he’s going to be balder than a baby’s bottom in a few years!”

           To complete the picture, Quique wore blue plaid shirts that were the epitome of cheísmo—Cuban slang for the ultimate in bad taste.      Of all the ninth-grade girls, I was probably the only one who found him sexy, or even desirable. But love is blind, or at least as nearsighted as I was.
            While Quique lectured about the correspondence between the productive forces and the relations of production, I imagined the two of us strolling arm in arm down the school’s long hallways, always heavy with the smell of urine wafting from the bathrooms, whose doors had been chewed up by years and humidity.

 I never managed to make my daydreams come true.
    Maybe Quique considered me his best student (I tried hard to get the highest grades on the exams so he’d notice me), but I’m sure he never realized that I secretly adored him with the same passion Luisita felt for Delon and Yarmila for Lugosi.
    And if he did notice, it didn’t matter to him one bit.

            I don’t blame him, really: besides being shy, bony and four-eyed, I was also woefully lacking in the backside department. This absence of one of the great hallmarks of the Cuban woman’s charm put me at a serious disadvantage when it came to attracting male attention. I never even had a boyfriend, never had a boy with whom to snuck off for kisses in the stairwell landings known as the tunnels of love.

            And so my ninth-grade year at José Antonio Echeverría Middle School drifted by: hopelessly crushing on Quique and longing for some distant, blurry tomorrow when I would no longer be skinny and shy, when I would return, dressed in white and without glasses, to seek out my old teacher, frozen in time, still giving his Marxism lectures . . .  waiting for me.

            This all took place at the beginning of 1980.

 Fifteen years later, in 1995, Havana was struggling through the Special Period, a surreal time when buses turned into eighteen-wheel trucks called “camels” and sanitary pads became scraps of cloth. Beef had mutated into a concoction known as goose paste, though it contained no goose, or any other poultry meat. The lack of vitamins turned us paler than Lugosi’s Dracula, and the movie theaters went dark; there was no electricity for Abbott, Costello, Delon, or anybody else. Yarmila, who had become a nurse, treated too many neuropathy cases at the Hermanos Ameijeiras Hospital.

 We talked a lot about “solving problems” back then. Among the problems to solve were breakfast, lunch and dinner. It was hard to find soap, chicken, a pair of shoes, or a bottle of cooking oil. To buy them, we needed dollars because the Cuban peso had lost what Quique would have called its exchange value, and foreign currency (illegal though it was used by many) began to determine the correspondence between the productive forces and the relations of production.

 I had solved my own Special Period problem in a very pragmatic way, by marrying an American. A plane ticket to San Diego in my pocket, my stay in the island came to a close. It was late December, and unusually cold. By then I had shed the thick-framed glasses, swapping them for contact lenses, and now looked out at the world through a pair of flirty purple Persol sunglasses.

 I was less shy than in my teenage days, though still short, skinny, and, let’s be honest, not yet particularly blessed in the backside department. (Upon arriving in the United States, I would learn that big butts didn’t drive American men crazy, a fact I happily documented in my story The Astral Portrait.) But back in Cuba, my lack of assets left me at a disadvantage, and the fact that I had married a foreigner made both my friends and enemies turn green with envy.

  As Luisita, who had graduated with a BA in French, put it, “God gives a beard to those who have no chin.” Yarmila was even more graphic: she swapped beard for husband and chin for butt.

  The José Antonio Echeverría Middle School was long gone. On the ground floor of La Manzana de Gómez there were now only two stores open and a small café that was always empty because hot dogs and sandwiches had to be paid for in dollars. It catered mostly to foreigners, the few tourists who, like my husband, wanted to take a last look at Cuba before “it changed for good.” The upper floors of the building remained unused.

            I hadn’t set foot in La Manzana in years. But when Isela asked me to accompany her to buy a flashlight—a necessity during the frequent blackouts—at one of the surviving La Manzana stores, I said yes without thinking twice. I’m not sure why I did. I’ve never been sentimental, and my memories of middle school weren’t particularly sweet. Maybe it was the chill of that winter afternoon, maybe boredom, maybe the sense that I would soon be leaving Havana behind, and who knew for how long.

            As we walked away from the building where we both lived, she asked me, all of a sudden, “Would you rather live in tomorrow or yesterday?”

            At that point, our tomorrows were looking rather bleak. People remembered fondly the years when they could buy a meringue cake without the ration card, or eat a grilled snapper at El Emperador paying with pesos, both things impossible in the ‘90s. (In the rough years of the ‘90s, all yesterdays seemed better.) But no one knew what the future might bring. It could be worse.

 “Tomorrow,” I said without hesitation. After all, my tomorrows were no longer in Havana, but in that distant California city with a very Spanish name: San Diego.

            After waiting in vain for a bus that never came, we set off on foot. From where we lived, next to the Emergency Hospital, all the way to Old Havana, it was a marathon of a walk. We arrived at La Manzana sweaty and out of breath.

            Isela took the last place in a line that snaked like a giant serpent around La Manzana’s porticoed first floor. Dozens of people leaned against the arcade columns, waiting for their turn. I figured she wouldn’t get in the store for at least an hour, and it occurred to me to go upstairs and snoop around. Even today, I can’t explain why I had the sudden urge to see, maybe for the last time, the classrooms and hallways where I had spent three years of my youth.

       I pushed my sunglasses up onto my head like a headband, which made me look quite chic, instead of stashing them in my bag, where nobody could admire them. I climbed the stairs, for the first time, without fear of tripping now. Lázaro was gone; the elevators had been shut down for lack of spare parts. A security guard was sitting on a landing, filing her nails, too busy to notice me.

      I wandered slowly through the fourth floor, silent and deserted. Not even the bathrooms smelled anymore; they were all sealed off. A film of dead insects carpeted the steps that led to the tunnels of love. Though it was just past noon, everything was cloaked in gloom. A dusty haze floated in the stale air.

      It was the perfect set for a Lugosi movie.

 Then I heard voices. Surprised, I turned a corner and found myself in front of a classroom packed with students in uniform. In the front row sat a teen girl wearing thick-framed glasses, gnawing on a stubby pencil. Her eyes were fixed on the teacher—a gawky guy with military-short hair, already thinning. There was something about him (and about the girl) that struck me with a disturbing familiarity.

            But those people couldn’t be who I thought they were. First, because the school no longer existed. Second, because after fifteen years, my former teacher had surely changed, or at least updated his wardrobe. Yet there he was, wearing one of those blue plaid shirts that had disappeared with the arrival of the Special Period.
            No, that man couldn’t be Quique. That teenage girl with the thick glasses couldn’t be me.

            But it was. I stumbled back, leaned against the wall and rubbed my eyes, nearly dislodging my left contact lens. I was shaking all over under my white dress, which, I realized, even looked a little like Claudia Cardinale’s dress in The Leopard.

            But then I thought—why not seize the moment? This was magic in the time of hunger, my chance to fulfill an old, cherished dream. I took a step toward the classroom, then stopped halfway and took a better look at the object of my teenage obsession.
            Oh, but he was so scrawny and ugly and pitifully sad! Almost without thinking, I slid my Person glasses over my eyes. Yet the dark lenses didn’t do Quique any favors. They only made him seem thinner and more pathetic.
            The spell of that old love shattered between two sentences about the productive forces and the relations of production. I turned and bolted toward the stairs.
            As I ran, hallways began to fill up. In one of the tunnels of love, I caught sight of Luisita hugging Alain Delon, who looked exactly like the poster she had once taped to her bedroom wall. Farther down, next to the door of the sealed-off bathroom, Dracula was biting Yarmila’s neck. Yarmila, eyes closed, sighed in blissful surrender.

            I saw Isela kissing each of The Beatles in turn, starting with John Lennon and ending with Ringo Starr. I saw girls hanging on Alfredito Rodríguez’s arm, and farther down, others kissing identical versions of the crooner. A whole parade of long-haired Alfreditos had sprung up out of nowhere, crowding the corridors that had been empty a minute earlier.

            I let out a scream and shoved and kicked my way through that tropical nightmare of ghosts, and shot past the security guard, who this time barked,
            “Hey, comrade, where do you think you’re going?”
            But I kept running until I reached the ground floor, gasping and wild-haired.

            After catching my breath, I walked slowly through the darkened arcades, my blood pounding like a Mozambique drumbeat against my temples. The shops were shuttered, the line had disappeared, and Isela was nowhere to be found.

 The streetlamps were already glowing in Central Park. It was seven o’clock. By my own reckoning, I hadn’t spent more than fifteen minutes upstairs, but according to the clocks of the world, more than five hours had passed. When I called Isela from a public phone, she was worried sick and furious. Not without reason, though. She had gone home after waiting for me three hours.

      “The flashlights were sold out ten minutes after we arrived. But what the hell happened to you? Where were you?”

       I don’t remember what excuse I made, or if I said anything at all. I do remember hanging up the phone, walking back to Central Park, and sinking onto a bench. Eventually, a camel lurched up, huffing and belching smoke from its exhaust. With transportation thusly “solved,” I closed my eyes behind my Persol sunglasses, melted into the sweaty, compact mass around me and didn’t look out the windows again until I felt we had reached the Emergency Hospital stop. (I had taken the trip so many times, I could tell by instinct.)

 I climbed silently up the stairs to my apartment and closed the door on yesterday.