An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba

Chapter 30: Villa Elisa

30 villa elisa Sancti Spíritus is all flatland, or so it seems to me when I arrive there at the crack of dawn on a bus from Santiago de Cuba. José Isidoro Barlía Loyarte, a math teacher who acts as the president of the Jewish community of Sancti Spíritus, had given me his address on the phone. I hadn’t bothered to ask for directions because I’d become spoiled enough to think we’d be able to take a taxi to his home. But outside the bus station there is only one means of transportation and it’s a horse cart. Not that I have anything against horse carts. I don’t mind riding on them at all, but I have a rolling suitcase and two heavy shoulder bags filled with notebooks, a laptop, and toiletries . I hesitate to try climbing onto the cart with all those things. Not knowing what else to do, I go back inside to the bus station, look for a public phone, and call up José. “Hello, José, we’re here. But we can’t find a taxi to get to your house.” “Do you like to walk?” José asks. I say yes, but mention that I have a suitcase and some bags to carry. “It’s six blocks to my house,” he replies. “I’ll come pick you up, but I don’t have a car, so it will take me a few minutes.” A half hour later, José arrives with his bicycle, walking slowly alongside it rather than riding it, as if he had all the time in the world. He straps my two shoulder bags to the bicycle and we proceed to walk down a long street that seems to stretch endlessly before us. I pull my rolling bag along, the wheels clacking in the still air of the morning. [ 204 ] Behar_3P-03.qxd:Behar design 7/30/07 2:27 PM Page 204 We make a left turn and then a quick right. When we come within view of his house I am in awe. Never have I seen a house like this. Not in Cuba, not anywhere. It is a pink stone house flanked on all sides by grillwork formed into Stars of David. There is a Star of David over the front window, the front door, the side gate. The front gate is inscribed with the words Villa Elisa. It is Jewish rococo in the tropics, the handiwork of a dreamer or a madman. With so many Jewish stars, the building should be a synagogue, but it’s not. This is the house Salomón Barlía built in 1946 and which his son inherited and left untouched. I am so completely fascinated by the house that I ask José to tell me its story before we’ve even crossed the threshold. “So you want to know about the house?” he says, looking at me with weary eyes. “Let me put away the bicycle and we’ll sit down and relax and then I’ll tell you the story.” He leads us inside and we pass a Star of David hovering above the living room. We take seats in the patio at the rear of the house, where another Star of David adorns a staircase leading to the roof. One by one, the members of José’s family emerge from the different rooms of the starry house: his wife, Daisy Bernal Mayea, a pharmacist, their daughters Anna Esther, Anni Frid, and Ivonne, their son José, and their granddaughter Claudia. Rambunctious five-year-old Claudia is thrilled to have company and begs Daisy to give her the photo album so she can show it to me. No one can say a word until I have looked at all the pictures of her dressed up as Queen Esther at the last Purim party held in Sancti Spíritus. “Very pretty!” I say, and Claudia beams. “And this one is pretty too!” she says, by now so comfortable with me that she’s sitting on my lap. “Now Claudia, please let your grandfather talk,” Daisy says, gently pulling away the photo album. An envelope filled with negatives falls to the floor and I rush to pick it up and hand it to Daisy. But she hands the envelope back to me. “Keep them,” she [ 205 ] In the Provinces Behar_3P-03.qxd:Behar design 7/30/07 2:27 PM Page 205 [18.117.81.240] Project MUSE (2024...