Recently, I walked into a local Barnes & Noble. I was keen on finding a book for my daughters. One special book, the experience of which would carry them into adulthood. I wandered through the stacks, hoping to find what I was looking for, but it was nowhere to be found. Could I have missed it? Could I have missed all of them? I rushed to the customer service island and whispered something to the spectacled redhead behind the counter.
“Never heard of it,” she said.
“Could you try looking it up?” I asked.
She tapped her keyboard with languid fingers. “Out of print. Not available in the States.”
“Really? Could you try again?” I insisted.
“Wait,” she said, unfolding her shoulders enough to feign interest. “There’s one. Would you like to place an order?”
“Could I please see the screen?” I asked.
With only the tip of an index finger, she turned the screen my way. I looked at the title for a couple of seconds. “No, thank you,” I finally said.
Back home, I went straight to a bookcase. I had five books, all tightly wedged against each other. In one instance, the spine cover had been ripped off; in another, corner dents and the passing of time were discreet, but indelible marks. In any case, I had five. I pulled one out, Segundo año en Torres de Malory [Second Year in Malory Towers]. I opened it to approximately a third of the story. The cotton binding stitching—exposed like an exoskeleton—signaled an irreversible order. I smelled the yellowed pages—musty wood chips, with a hint of grass and vanilla. On the top right-hand corner of the inside cover, a paper stamp: LA UNIVERSAL.
If you grew up in Cuba during the 1970s, you probably have a small space in your heart (and perhaps even a bookcase) reserved for Enid Blyton.
A British children’s book author, Blyton (1897-1968) was voted in 2008 the UK’s best-loved writer, ahead of J. K. Rowling, Jane Austen and even the Bard himself. While publishing houses in Spain such as Editorial Molino and Editorial Juventud translated Blyton’s books into Spanish and distributed them to bookstores and public libraries in Latin America, in Cuba the books were only found—if one was lucky—in the far-end nooks of our small town libraries and local bookstores. At the time, I imagined myself alone in an island, with books written just for me; but to read Blyton in Cuba in the late 70s was to belong to a community of young readers who skipped meals and read past bedtime, in order to avoid postponing the answer to What happens next?
Sadly, although characters like George (short for Georgina) and a series such as the Famous Five still have devoted fans, Blyton’s books in the last decades have been accompanied by disapproval; and Blyton herself has been dogged by accusations of sexism and racism. Beyond what could be said about the accuracy of such positions, with respect to Blyton’s books, for me, her series (The Towers of Malory, The Secret Four, The Famous Five, The Seven, The Twins of Santa Clara, among others) allowed for a way out of the economic, social, political, and familial tensions that marked my life in 1970s Bauta.
A nearly rural town in the outskirts of Havana, Bauta’s many charms included a lagoon teeming with moss and frogs, a park, and a church with a bell tower. Our greatest claims to fame are a painting (of unknown whereabouts) by René Portocarrero and Father Gaztelu’s dinner parties, which included some of the most prominent members of the Cuban Avant guard in the 1930s and 40s. Not too shabby for a provincial appendage to our city’s capital.
Summers in Bauta were divided into outdoor and indoor activities. Following the traditional (patriarchal) division of space, the boys played on the street and the girls looked on from the door, anticipating a future of housedresses, talcum powder, and hair rollers. I, in turn, had the local library. In spite of our many limitations, my mother—lo and behold!—was one of the librarians. At the far end of the entrance, near the floor, a shelf with Blyton’s books waited for me. The stories were filled with caves, passwords, secret tunnels and, most importantly, unsupervised girls who went away on holidays, ate staggering amounts of ginger sandwiches, and lived in boarding schools. I read in our back patio, on a makeshift hammock my father built me—turning page after page, eating buttered crackers, and drinking lemonade. Or on blanket, when the hammock finally collapsed; but always near the lagoon and a banana tree that, in the midst of my dreaming, seemed to wish for nothing more than for us to have bananas as a side dish to everything—a sort of informal tribute to Josephine Baker, I imagine. Surely, I read through family arguments, the flooding of the lagoon, and the chaos of the Mariel boatlift. I must have read—or should have—through the many repudiation rallies we were gifted weeks before we boarded a plane for Central America, in the winter of 1981.
My first book in Costa Rica was Heidi. I also had corn flakes for the first time, Jell-O, a hair dryer, my first doughnut, and color TV (at somebody else’s house). It was the 80s and my parents sunk into a blue corduroy couch to watch Delia Fiallo’s Topacio and Raúl Velasco, in Siempre en Domingo. One day, we took a bus to the capital city, San José. An all-glass, two-story high McDonald’s was our first stop. Then, to the nearby POPS. As if ice cream were not good enough on its own, these fine folk took it upon themselves to offer various dipping options: first chocolate, then coconut, then crushed peanuts, then whatever your heart desired. Across the street, and possibly lit by celestial rays, stood the biggest toy store I had ever set eyes on, LA UNIVERSAL. Barbies of every profession, from an aerobics instructor, to a rock star, to an astronaut—with none of the wires and mold spots we’d grown accustomed to—and all beyond our economic reach. “Do you think they have books?” I asked my mother, lowering my voice into a whisper. “Upstairs,” someone said. My heart pounded as we rode the escalator. The library in Bauta could have fit five times into what suddenly became for us a maze of book shelves. My dad looked under B: Ba, Be, Bl, Blyton! There were endless stacks of Enid Blyton books, but my eyes perched on one, Second Form at Malory Towers. “Have you read those before?” my mother asked. “No,” I said. The hard, shiny cover felt cool and smooth on my fingers. I opened it. Tried to breath in the moist banana breeze of summer afternoons in Bauta (or something like that), but the book was new—and a new kind of enchantment came over me. For the next three and a half years, on the morning of January 6th (Three Kings’ Day), the generous Melchor, Gaspar, and Baltazar left me three or four books behind. I gulped them all in one sitting.
When we finally arrived in Los Angeles, California, it was 1984 and I was twelve and a half years old. When I needed her the most, Blyton had stopped writing for me. But the fiery, short-haired George—hands in pockets, whistling her way through anything—accompanied me to my first ESL class, my eighth grade graduation, and my awkward teens. My mom is no longer a librarian and the library in Bauta may or may not exist. I no longer dream of ginger sandwiches. But books have a way of becoming us and I, well, I have a thing for old books—and I still love to read. As for my daughters, I can only wish them long summer days with a favorite book.
— Susannah Rodriguez Drissi
Susannah Rodriguez Drissi is Cuba Counterpoints’ Review and Contributing Editor.