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Chapter 11: Monday Morning in Luyanó
- Rutgers University Press
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[ 112 ] 11 monday morning in luyanó Sara Elí Nassy and her daughter, Victoria Cohen Elí, were regulars at Shabbat services at the Centro Sefaradí and over the years I had often sat and talked to them at the lunch following services.These conversations always followed the same pattern: Sara would try to tell me about her life, while Victoria excitedly interrupted and tried to tell the story for her mother, who eventually would lose her patience and yell at Victoria to let her speak, which in turn would leave Victoria in a catatonic sorrow. I soon learned that it’s no secret in the Jewish community that Victoria is schizophrenic. And that Sara, the loving mother, had always valiantly stayed by her daughter’s side. Their relationship, from the start, struck me as tender in its intimacy and terrifying in its claustrophobia. I liked them both and had often wondered how they lived. I’d been promising for a long time to visit them at their home in Luyanó, a Havana neighborhood just beyond the old city. One Monday morning I decided I would pay them a visit. Sara and Victoria don’t have a phone, so I knew I was taking a chance by heading over unannounced, but I figured that on a Monday morning the two women would be home. Neighbors peer through half-shuttered windows and open doors as Humberto and I walk past. “Who are you looking for?” someone asks. And when I say “Sara and Victoria,” I’m told, “Go to the last door.” I knock softly. “Who is it?”The voice is Victoria’s. “Ruth.” I say. “From the Centro Sefaradí.” Victoria flings open the door and seeing us she becomes deliriously happy. Behar_3P-02.qxd:Behar design 7/30/07 2:20 PM Page 112 [ 113 ] Havana “Come in, come in,” she yells, for she is incapable of speaking without shouting . “We’re so grateful for your visit!” Then at the top of her lungs, “Mamá! Look who’s come to visit us!” Sara, a wisp of a woman at the age of ninety-two, floats in from the kitchen at the back of the house and greets us warmly. Behind her is Victoria’s older sister , Dora, who visits every day to help her mother and Victoria, though she herself suffers from severe depression. In lieu of a greeting, Dora looks despondently at us and says, “We don’t have water today. There’s a problem with the cistern. We won’t be able to offer you anything. We don’t have a single clean glass in this house.” Victoria immediately pipes in, “We’re always the last ones in the building to get water.That’s the way it is. Oh well, what are you going to do? But please, sit down!” We huddle in the front room, where one of the walls has burn marks from a Hanukkah menorah that caught fire a few years ago. I tell them I’d like to know about their lives. Sara begins to speak, but Victoria interrupts, “She recovered from cancer! My mother recovered from cancer! My mother is the best. She’s the greatest companion I could ever have!” “Now please let me speak,” Sara says to Victoria, who immediately quiets down. She turns to me and says, “I don’t have a lot to tell you. As a young woman I learned how to sew. I sewed for others and I embroidered. I can’t work anymore because my eyesight is gone. I only see a little from one eye. I married Abraham Cohen Behar who loved me. But he died young. I have two daughters and a granddaughter who has three children. I was a little girl when we came from Turkey. My mother said we were from Istanbul. We lived in Havana, then we went to Camagüey, but we didn’t like it there, so we came back to Havana. My husband died young. He was fifty years old when he died. He wasn’t religious. But I have faith in Judaism. On Yom Kippur we always light the candles and we fast for the entire twenty-four hours and every Saturday we go to the synagogue.” Victoria chimes in. “We go to the Centro Sefaradí every Saturday! They have a little bus that picks us up and brings us back. If it weren’t for that little bus, we couldn’t go.” Behar_3P-02.qxd:Behar design...