Lucky

I thought it would just be a little white lie, forgotten by the next morning.  But then Sadys went off and recounted the story four times before the night was over and I was smack in the lime light I was trying to avoid.

The problem is Sadys is generous.  Too generous.  There I was, sleeping in her house, eating her food, going out with her friends, and she wouldn’t let me pay for anything.  She’s a flautist with a combined weekly salary from her four jobs barely totaling $30 and she was paying for our taxis, ice cream, concert tickets, everything.  So when she went out to smoke a cigarette at the restaurant where we were drinking mojitos, I called over the waitress to pay the tab in advance, order two more, and instructed her to act as if the couple from the other table had paid for them so that Sadys wouldn’t put up a fight.

But apparently anonymous invitations aren’t common practice in Havana.  Sadys was so amazed that perfect strangers would buy us drinks (and the night before, some British guys had treated us to beers at the hotel where Sadys works), she broke the story to Regla, Yadira, Francie, and her mom as if it were headline news.  And that's when they all decided that I must be some sort of magical good luck charm.  

And, I suppose, to some extent they’re right.   I might not be the good luck charm, but I definitely have had an unfair share of good karma in my life.  I have no other explanation to offer them when they peruse the photos of my camera--Bogota, Santa Marta, Bucaramanga, Rinon del Mar, Cartagena, beaches, waterfalls, parties...  They smile half-heartedly, their eyes stretching out to the tiny screen as if the power of their stare might transform the images into a portal, a magic miror, to transport them somewhere far away.  When I say that I’m not sure where I’m going next when I fly back to Colombia, they nod silently and politely in a way that says, “Must be nice.”  

Luck is the allusive red balloon that floated to my doorstep and lifted me up and away to smell lovely roses and drink lovely wine.  Its shiny roundness forever looming above me--to the resentful envy of those who stand in its shadow. 

I don’t like to flaunt it, but sometimes I am careless.  At Sadys apartment I said something about not having checked my email in several weeks and Sadys said, “Oh, and that’s a long time for you isn’t it?”  Then I remembered how she told me that she once waited four hours for a webpage to open.  Later, I mentioned something about sleeping in airport gates.  Her blank nod reminded me that she has never been in an airport gate. 

As I look out the window of the plane flying over the Caribbean, the worlds is a firey sapphire marble--the horizonless sunset above the clouds that I have seen so many times I almost forget to be breath-taken by its ethereal beauty. 

I think back to the night Sadys and I went to see the sunset from the top floor of the tallest building in Havana, 32 stories up.  Sadys wrote a poem on a napkin about the tranquility of being above all the chaos and gasoline fumes of the streets below.  Thirty-two stories might be as close as she ever gets to the clouds.

She told me that she’s heard of some flautists getting sponsored and chaperoned by the government to travel to Quito for international Cuban musical festivals.  I excitedly told her she should go for it and started asking more questions about when and how and for how long...
Her answers were short and unsure.  Her eyes grew distant and drifted upward above my head, fixated on the invisible red balloon.