“Tell me you love me,” Leni whispered to me one morning during her recovery as I helped her from the bed to the bathroom. She was back at her own place by then. Her arms sort of flopped around my neck. “Tell me you still love me, at least a little.” I kissed her cheek and hauled her up on her feet. “I love you,” I said. Her girlfriend was gone, every bit of her obliterated from Leni’s apartment. It was like the Russians in Cuba, erased without a trace. “Okay,” she said as we shuffled together down the hall to the bathroom, “now tell me in Spanish, for old times’ sake.” “Te quiero,” I said, smiling, because it was true still. Leni pulled away. “That’s not how you used to say it,” she said, not with her usual sarcasm, but with her voice hushed and small, sore like her wounds. “Sure I did,” I said, plopping her down on the toilet. Her left leg jutted out, unable to bend, the pins a gift from Dr. Frankenstein. “No, I remember: te amo,” she said, her balance uneasy. I immediately wondered if she might be abusing any one of her many medications. “It’s te quiero now.” “What? Your Spanish Language Royal Dickhead Academy eliminated te amo?” This is the beauty of Leni: At any given time, she retains just enough detail about what’s important to make you feel like she’s really listening. “No, no, but you and I . . . you know, we’re just te quiero, it was always te quiero underneath, that’s why it works, that’s why I’m here,” I said. Leni guffawed. “Oh please,” she said. “You’re here ’cause, let’s face it, there’s some sick kick in seeing me not so cute anymore. I bet you think if this had happened earlier, there wouldn’t have been so many others, so much damage to us.” She took a breath. “Aw, hell, you’re all fucked up, you don’t know what you want. . . .” She didn’t just mean me, but us—Latinos, probably cubanos in particular. It’s not just a prejudice on her part, although I wouldn’t be surprised if Leni’s bitterness had turned that way without her realizing it. What she meant was that we have a twisted way of expressing love: Te quiero, from the verb querer, doesn’t mean love at all, but desire. Querer is to want, to yearn for. But here’s the madness: Querer is quotidian, what you say to parents and friends, cousins and children. Querer is love designed strictly for living things. You can’t querer a movie the way you can love a film in English, you can’t querer arroz con pollo or a bicycle or a particular and comfortable old pair of shoes (although, just to be confusing, you can querer arroz con pollo in the sense that you can have a taste for it and want some). Querer always implies an imperfect and human bond. Combine querer with any number of other words and its latent urgency shines through: como quiera, anyhow; cuando quiera, anytime; donde quiera, anywhere. Amar is so much more precise: love, romantic love. It’s the stuff of both the most lyrical poetry and the tackiest soap opera, making it virtually impossible—especially among Cubans, I think—to say with a straight face. Te amo practically requires that you recite a quick verse by Federico García Lorca and cut your veins. I said it to Leni in moments of complete adoration but more likely because there were no knowledgeable witnesses, no one to make me follow through on its real and complete usage. “Te amo is so cold, don’t you think?” my father once asked when we were discussing this very subject. “Cold?” I was stunned. This was, I’d always thought, the most wildly intense and amorous thing you could say to a lover. How could that be cold? “Well, it’s so formal, so sharp, “ he said, embarrassed. “It’s nothing you could say tosomeone with whom you’re ticklish or playful . . . I mean . . .” “Don’t you say it to Mami?” “Oh my god no,” he said, chortling. “She’d never take me seriously again!” Like querer, you can’t really amar a thing either; it’s generally reserved for person-to-person application. In fact, you really can’t love inanimate objects in Spanish; it’s an emotion for warm bodies, sentient beings. A cat maybe, a parrot, perhaps a car if it’s been anthropomorphed enough. In Spanish, if you like something very, very much, if you love it the way you might love books or flowers in English, you are then enchanted by them (me encantan) or you like them (me gustan) and you use tone and context to convey your deep, deep affection that’s awfully close to but never quite love. But gustar is tricky, too. It’s versatile, good for both people and things. But while you can gustar trains and postage stamps and music by Arsenio Rodríguez, you have to be careful when it applies to individuals. That’s because gustar, like querer, is chock-full of lust. In other words, while you can gustar your lifeless leather jacket and no one will necessarily think you kinky, the minute that you gustar your mother-in-law, as opposed to just liking her, you have crossed all lines of propriety. The safest thing to do in Spanish, it turns out, is to always be encantada—enchanted—perpetually caught in some kind of spell or trance, this way your actions are not necessarily entirely your own. When I return to Cuba in 1997, Moisés and Orlando pick me up at the airport, which is as airless and hot as ever, except now it is full of happy Canadian and Spanish businessmen (no women) chattering on their cell phones. Although Havana has been rocked by a series of bombings—as many as ten explosions and at least one dead Italian tourist—there’s a party atmosphere the whole way through customs, with the soldiers from the Ministry of the Interior now playing second fiddle to the young, blue-blazered hosts from Havanatur and the other agencies that facilitate the bureaucracy for foreigners. New TV monitors on the walls loop scenes from Cuban variety shows featuring salsa bands that play to American tastes. - from Days of Awe, by Achy Obejas
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