The Best American Travel Writing 2013 by Elizabeth Gilbert Read Free Book Online Page A

go back.”
    Her husband and son were gone, her grandson gone to Miami. Her other grandson, Erik, half brother of the boy who left, was still around. In fact, he was thriving. He had started a little furniture business. He was living in the house with his wife and daughter, and all had been going well. But just months before, they lost a son, an infant, to a respiratory disease. So within a short span of years, he lost his father, grandfather, and his brother (to emigration), and now his son. He was the only male in the house.
    Erik’s daughter, a young girl with glasses and reddish-brown hair, was as shy as her grandmother. She stayed on the edges of whatever room we were in. My daughter was at my feet, peeking through my legs at her. I could feel their intense awareness of each other, but neither would approach.
    After lunch, while Erik was explaining different aspects of the furniture operation to me, my six-year-old came up and started tugging on my shirt. She was mouthing something at me. I kept saying, “Please don’t interrupt, sweetheart.” She said, “Give me your phone!” I excused myself from Erik for a second to give her a little lecture. I knew she was bored, I said, but this was an important day, and she needed to use her manners, not play with the phone. “Give me the phone!” she said, and ran off in a huff when I refused.
    Barely 20 minutes later we went back upstairs and passed by the little girl’s room. She and the six-year-old were sitting on the bed, playing on a phone. It was my wife’s. The six-year-old had taught her cousin to play Angry Birds. They were smiling and leaning on each other. For the next two days they were completely inseparable and wanted to sleep in the same room. They communicated through my wife when they really needed to work something out. They will probably know each other for the rest of their lives now, because of that game.
     
    We went out walking the streets, making the rounds to see other family members—to the old church, with its brightly painted statue of Saint Julian, where Wei-Wei was married and where they remembered her,
“la maestra,”
past the school where she taught and the corner store her father owned, where first she and then her children, my mother-in-law and her brother, grew up playing, before it was taken away—and as we strolled, I had a diminished, doubtless much-flawed version of the old woman’s cake-box map in my head. I was hearing her voice-over, all the stories she told me over almost 20 years now, some of them repetitive, but with details emerging and receding.
    Her memories of the revolution begin with the shortwave radio, kept in the backroom by her husband. Wei-Wei and her husband would gather with friends to listen to the transmissions that the Castro brothers and Che and Camilo Cienfuegos (the best loved of the young
comandantes
, at least by my wife’s family, worshiped as a pop star by my mother-in-law, then 11) were broadcasting from the mountains, giving assurance that they were about to ride down and liberate the island. For years I assumed that the family had been listening to these speeches in fear—as a couple, they were about as solidly middle-class as could be, a teacher and a tobacco salesman, and their later experience of the revolution involved only pain and regret—but the
abuelita
surprised me one night, at the table, by saying that, on the contrary, they heard those speeches with great excitement. No one liked Batista, no one who wasn’t directly benefiting from his thuggery and favoritism. The powerful charisma of the freedom fighters had percolated down into even quiet, apolitical homes.
    There was a night back home, after a long meal, when for the first time after knowing her for so long, I got a bit pushy with her—asked her follow-up questions instead of just mm-hmming—and she gave me a description of what it had actually been like to watch this optimism turn to fear, and something worse, what that had