The Best American Travel Writing 2014

  Sandra was imminently due. Her pink-and-gray-striped T-shirt snuck up her belly, which protruded nearly a foot from her slight frame, to reveal thick purplish marks.

  We snaked through the area. “Baby’s still cooking, china?” whistled the man who leaned against the counter of the near-bare corner bodega, where rations were dispensed. Sandra rolled her slightly slanty eyes.

  “Child’s coming out walking if she stays in much longer,” muttered one woman as she sauntered by.

  “When are you due?” asked a girl as she pressed Lilliputian hands against Sandra’s swollen belly. “Today? Tomorrow?”

  “If it were up to me,” she said, “I’d go straight to the hospital right now and get this baby the hell out of me.” The temperature stretched toward around a hundred degrees of mostly humidity.

  When we reached the main avenue, Yessica and I stayed on the sidewalk with the stroller as Sandra advertised in shops—laundromat, cafeteria, Banco Nacional de Cuba. At the bank, the girls stopped to rest in the air-conditioned ATM cabin and sort out who wanted what inside. They ferried upwards of 40 cups of pineapple and strawberry while I stayed with the stroller. If a policeman came, Yessica said sternly, I was to invent an excuse or pretend not to speak Spanish and run. Sandra giggled: “The yuma comes to Cuba to sell yogurt. That’s how bad the economy up north is.” When one yogurt spilled open and the bitter smell of synthetic strawberry began to stink, Sandra whisked a towel embroidered with a yellow duckie out of her purse, which had at one point been my purse, a black faux-patent tote I’d given her on the last day of my last trip—she’d noted at our Habana Vieja pizza dinner what a good diaper bag it would make and I’d left it with her. She wiped up the yogurt and stuffed the damp towel in an interior zip compartment.

  Once the stroller was empty, Yessica pointed it toward home and Sandra walked me toward the bus stop. The amber afternoon was dusty. As we paused at a corner to let a truck turn, she pivoted toward me. “I’d like to ask you something,” she said. “Will you be the baby’s godmother?”

  I felt her at my side, gauging my response as she studied the ends of her long, layered hair for split ends. The truck passed, and we crossed the street. I needed to redraw the lines between us, I knew then, and if that meant she’d toss me aside, foreign and writer and all, I’d do it anyway. I wished that there was a part of me that wanted to say yes, or believe she’d asked me out of genuine sentiment, but there wasn’t.

  “The problem,” I explained, “is that I’m still hoping to write something about you someday.” If I was the godmother of her child, I could be seen as being too involved, I said, and my “bosses,” hazy as they were, would find even our formal interviews suspect.

  She nodded. We were on the main street among sweaty men in dago Ts, old ladies with shopping bags, and girls with hair in netted ballerina buns. We passed under shaded colonnades that had been painted, vandalized, and repainted darker shades, a mottled patchwork of scratched-out signatures, expletives encased in bubbles, and declarations of love, PR+SN and Yoser y Lulu.

  Sandra shook her head and pursed her lips. “No,” she said. She laughed and, after a beat, nodded. “Of course I’d rather maybe be famous. You just keep doing your job. Yessica wanted to be godmother anyway.”

  The day after Mia Jaqueline was born, yogurts were still stacked three-deep in Sandra’s tepid freezer. All nonessential furniture had moved outside to the shared patio. A crib had been assembled in the windowless bedroom, and the two twin mattresses on which Aboo, Gallego, and Sandra slept were piled one atop another. Fourteen plastic bottles on which Winnie-the-Pooh licked honey from a jar sat atop the old washing machine that was the kitchen counter between cleaning days. Sandra’s father had sent her a suitcase of baby goods from Florida, and she would sell the overstock.

  I sat in a rocking chair next to Sandra. The baby squirmed on her knees. She had stuffed her bra full of tissue paper and stowed a lighter between her swollen breasts, and she waved to gesture that I should light a cigarette for her. I grabbed the packet off the table, lit the cigarette, and handed it over; she kept one hand on the baby’s belly.

  The Cuban government almost never granted exit papers for children. The consequences of this fact hadn’t seemed real, I supposed, until Sandra had held Mia. This would be her life, she spat—these two rooms, these neighbors, motherhood. My presence in her home felt suddenly cruel. I sipped my coffee, nodded, and slipped away after 15 minutes or so.

  It was a few weeks before I went to San Miguel again. There always seemed to be a reason to postpone: I was interviewing other people; dealing with the logistics of settling into living in Cuba; she had run out of phone minutes and didn’t call me back when I left messages at her aunt’s. The afternoon I returned, uninvited but assuming she’d be home around two or three, tiny white baby linens hung thick as curtains on the patio’s laundry lines, one after the other. Aboo waved me inside, cheerfully brushing off my offers to help her hang the white gauze squares. She was nearly done anyway. Sandra was out, the baby was asleep in her crib, and I sat to wait. An army of ants carried thumbnail-size bread crumbs up the lavender wall. The room smelled tangy. When Sandra arrived a half-hour later, she bustled into the apartment with a “Hooooooolia!” She pulled open her black patent purse and asked if I wanted to buy air fresheners. I laughed.

  “So that’s what you’re doing for money now,” I said.

  She shook her head and busied herself making coffee. “Nah, not for long. An amigo comes out this weekend from Spain—he’s Cuban but he lives in Spain—and I ran into his daughter around here last week. ‘China, he’s crazy to see you,’ she says, and I tell her that I’ve just given birth, so she comes to see the baby. Of course she said Mia was beautiful. Anyway, ‘You call me as soon as the cuarentena is done,’ the girl says. ‘You can see my dad as soon as you’re ready.’ See, he knows no one can do the things I can do.” So, she continued, she was cutting short the 40 days of staying sexually chaste. He wasn’t technically a new partner.

  Mia woke with a yowl, and Sandra asked me to grab her while she prepared a bottle of formula. She was trying to stop breastfeeding so she wouldn’t sag too much, she said. The silence that followed was swollen and barbed. I commented on how much Mia had grown. She had huge, chubby cheeks, and milky-blue, barely slanted eyes, like Sandra’s, but shhh, she said—it was what made her look like Bong.

  “Any news from Bong?” I asked.

  “Well, he called the other day,” she said, “first time I’d spoken to him since I told him I was having his baby, months ago, that time when the call dropped. ‘Sandra,’ he says, ‘how’s the baby?’ Identical to you, I say. She’s your carbon copy. ‘Really,’ he says. ‘I can’t wait to meet her.’ Then the call went dead. He said he was coming next month, though.”

  State salons aren’t the only ones allowed in Cuba anymore. Among the 178 nonprofessional jobs that Raúl Castro signed into legality last year is haircutting. Sandra could open a small business if she wanted. She wouldn’t, though, because a neighbor with a quicker reaction time already had a monopoly on her block. We sat on the malecón again, in nearly the exact spot of our first meeting, a year and some after I’d moved away from Cuba in 2010.

  Sandra dabbed her forehead with an orange washcloth so she looked dewy but never damp and introduced me to her new Cuban boyfriend. It had been tough to find clients lately, she said, and he nodded as she spoke. “I’ve been here last night, the night before, all last weekend, and nothing,” she said. Sandra gestured toward the Riviera and the Meliá Cohiba on the opposite corner: “See how few lights are on?” She was brusque and stiff, as if her insides had puddled down and a shell kept her upright. “Not even worth paying to get in.”

  Gallego was in jail, seven years on charges Sandra wouldn’t detail. Mia was two and back home with Aboo, same as always, doing fine. I could come over tomorrow. She’d call when she woke up. “That’d be great,” I said. Before I left, she asked me for money. Just $5 or maybe $10 or
whatever, just so she could get a cab home.

  The second time I’d ever met Sandra, she’d asked to borrow 10 kilos, 10 cents, to buy cigarettes. I, misunderstanding her, had rustled through my pockets for bills. “Ay, no,” she’d laughed, pushing at my forearm and holding out an incomplete palm full of coins. She wanted to buy a pack of cigarettes.

  I understood slang now, sure, but also how Havana forced an acknowledgment of the shades that existed between people. Jinetera or amiga, self-sufficient or dependent, realistic or delusional. There were armies of young people around Havana whose private dramas unfolded in isolation in the vast stretch between the Castro estates in Siboney and San Miguel del Padrón, who were something like Sandra. Idlers, academics, Santería initiates, and punk rockers harbored poorly constructed skyscraper fantasies about the lives they’d lead beyond their island home. Some of them actually wound up elsewhere, whether with the help of an amigo or on their own, turning those dreamscapes into realities. The one binary that Havana tried to enforce was Cubano and turista. I would always be some unnamed in-between, neither Cubano nor turista, journalist nor friend. I would always be coming from somewhere else, always leaving, always able to leave.

  I didn’t have much cash on me but I handed Sandra a $5 bill and walked away, feeling like there was a fire at my back and I was gliding toward the air that fed it. I never heard from her again.

  JANINE DI GIOVANNI

  Life During Wartime

  FROM Harper’s Magazine

  THERE WAS SPRING RAIN and pale fog in Sarajevo as my plane approached the city last April, veering over the green foothills of Mount Igman. Through the frosted window I could see the outline of the road we used to call Snipers’ Alley, above which Serbian sharpshooters would perch and fire at anyone below. Twenty years had passed since I’d arrived in Sarajevo as a war reporter.

  During the siege of the city, most foreign journalists had lived in the Holiday Inn, and it was in that grotty hotel that the man who was to become my husband and the father of my child professed undying love. I met some of my best friends in Sarajevo and lost several others—to alcoholism, drugs, insanity, and suicide. My own sense of compassion and integrity, I think, was shaped during those years.

  Since then I had come back many times to report on Bosnia, on the genocide there, and to try to find people who had gone missing during the war. Now I was returning for a peculiar sort of reunion that would bring together reporters, photographers, and aid workers who, for one reason or another, had never forgotten the brutal and protracted siege, which lasted nearly four years. By the end of the war, in 1995, a city once renowned for its multiculturalism and industrial vigor had been reduced to medieval squalor.

  Why was it that Sarajevo, and not Rwanda or Congo or Sierra Leone or Chechnya—wars that all of us went on to report—captured us the way this war did? One of us, I think it was Christiane Amanpour, called it “our generation’s Vietnam.” We were often accused of falling in love with Sarajevo because it was a European conflict—a war whose victims looked like us, who sat in cafés and loved Philip Roth and Susan Sontag. As reporters, we lived among the people of Sarajevo. We saw the West turn its back and felt helpless.

  I had begun my career in journalism covering the First Intifada in the late 1980s. I came to Sarajevo because I wanted to experience firsthand the effect war had on civilians. My father had taught me to stick up for underdogs, to be on the right side of history. But I had no idea what it would feel like to stare into the open eyes of the recently dead; how to count bodies daily in a morgue; how to talk to a woman whose children had just been killed by shrapnel while they were building a snowman.

  During my first ride into the city from the airport—past a blasted wall on which the words Welcome to Hell had been graffitied—it was clear that my wish to see war up close would be granted. I had gotten a lift from a photographer named Jon Jones, and as we careened down Snipers’ Alley toward the city, he told me how many reporters had already been killed, how close the snipers were and how easily they could see us, and about the hundreds of mortar shells that fell on Sarajevo each day. He recounted in detail how a CNN camerawoman had been shot in the jaw, and told me that a bullet could rip through the metal of a car as easily as a needle pierces a piece of cloth.

  “Think of being in a doll’s house,” he said, edging up to a hundred miles per hour on the straightaways. “We’re the tiny dolls.”

  He dropped me off at the Holiday Inn, the only “functioning” hotel in the city, leaving me to lug inside my flak jacket, battery-operated Tandy computer, sleeping bag, and a duffel bag filled with protein bars, antibiotics, a flashlight, batteries, candles, waterproof matches, pens and notebooks, and a pair of silk long johns (which I never took off that entire first winter of the war). I had with me just a single book: a copy of The Face of War, by Martha Gellhorn, a journalist who had covered the Spanish Civil War, the Allies’ invasion of Normandy, Vietnam, the Six-Day War, and almost every other major conflict of the 20th century. She settled in Paris in 1930, married a Frenchman, and began to write for Collier’s, the Saturday Evening Post, and other publications. In 1936, in a bar in Key West (the Frenchman was long gone), she met Ernest Hemingway, whom she married, and later moved with him to Spain. She was blond and beautiful and, above all, brave. She was also, as I would later find out, very ill-tempered and often not a “woman’s woman.”

  I had gone to meet Gellhorn in Wales on a hot summer day in 1991, having been sent to interview her about a collection of her novels that was just being published. History had forgotten her to some extent, but she had a loyal cadre, mostly men, who adored her. She drank and smoked, but she had a rare femininity.

  That day, I took a train, a bus, then finally hiked over hot fields to reach Catscradle, her remote cottage. I was keenly aware of my youth and inexperience, and felt embarrassed for all that I had not yet witnessed. She answered the door in tailored slacks with a long cigarette in her hand. She was in her 80s by then and still extremely good-looking. She invited me inside and together we watched the invasion of Slovenia on television while she made astute comments about the coming destruction of Yugoslavia. I listened intently, but, as she made clear, she had no interest in taking on a protégé.

  “I hope you’re not expecting lunch,” she said rather sharply. She did bring me a glass of ice water, and had laid out a guest towel in her upstairs bathroom for me to use. But that was the limit of her hospitality and, by implication, her professional encouragement.

  A few weeks later, I got a letter from her scolding me for having made mistakes in my article. I had reported that the light in the room was strong, when in fact it had been rather weak. What infuriated her most was that I had mentioned she had once been Hemingway’s wife. You violated the rule of journalism, she wrote. You lied.

  Some years later, shortly before she died (her close friends believed it was suicide), we served together on a panel about war reporting for Freedom House, and she called me “dear girl,” and embraced me affectionately. By then, I had reported on many sieges and many wars. Someone took a photograph of us together, both speaking animatedly, our faces captured in heated emotion.

  In the lobby of the Holiday Inn, I looked around and tried to be brave. To my surprise, there was an ordinary, if dark, reception area with cubbyholes for passports presided over by a rather elegant bespectacled man who took my documents, registered them, and handed me the keys to a room on the fourth floor.

  “There’s no elevator,” he said matter-of-factly, “since there’s no electricity. Take the stairs there.” He gestured toward a cavernous hallway and told me the hours of the communal meals, which were served in a makeshift dining room lit by candles.

  “And please, madame, don’t walk on this side of the building.” He pointed to a wall, through which you could see the sky and buildings outside, that looked as though a truck had run into it. “And don’t go up on the seventh floor,” he added cryptically. The seventh floor, I soon learned, was w
here the Bosnian snipers defending the city were positioned. And the forbidden side of the building faced the Serbian snipers and mortar emplacements. If you emerged from the hotel on that side and a sniper had you in his range, you got shot.

  Walking into the dining room that first night, I felt I had made a terrible mistake. I knew no one in Sarajevo, it was a few weeks before Christmas, and it was bitterly cold. I had not seen the photographer since he’d dumped me at the hotel (declaring, in passing, that he hated all writers). Perhaps, I thought, staring at the blown-out windows and mortar-cracked walls, I should stay a few days and go home.

  Around me, I heard many languages: Dutch, Flemish, French, German, Japanese, Spanish, as well as Serbo-Croatian (which is now often referred to as three separate but nearly identical tongues: Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian). The huge room was full of grizzled reporters, everyone looking slightly dazed—a combination of exhaustion, hangover, and shock. In the distance I heard machine-gun fire and a mortar shell dropping somewhere in the city. No one paid attention to the noise, or to a newcomer like me.

  But I soon encountered warmth and even fierce camaraderie. Over dinner—a plate of rice and canned meat from a humanitarian-aid box—an American cameraman of Armenian descent named Yervant Der Parthogh told me about the toilets. “Find an empty room and follow your nose,” he said, passing me a bottle of Tabasco sauce, standard issue in war zones, where the bland diet of rice cried out for a little seasoning. (ABC, the BBC, and other TV-news organizations bought the condiment in bulk, and it was often shared.)