I am taken aback though I suppose there is no reason my grandmother shouldn’t know this. I am hit once again, like so many times on this trip, with truth that doesn’t square with my notions of Cuba or Cubans. There is an interest in rare collections! And why shouldn’t there be? I assumed such aesthetic pleasures would not interest Cubans, who surely have more concrete matters to attend to, more utilitarian purchases to pine for, even to notice a valuable antique relic tucked in a dust-engulfed bookshelf. It seems another naïve notion to me now. I feel like a clumsy tourist making sense of a world that feels my own emotionally but clearly is not.

“It is a special book. Something that had been in our family for ages. A gift from my great-grandmother. You know I hid it in the wall for years, that’s how special it is? And now he took it.”

More that I can’t make sense of. Maydelis said that my grandmother found it in the wall. She didn’t say my grandmother was the one who put it there in the first place. Was my grandmother wealthy once, and had she wanted to leave too? It doesn’t square with her politics. Nothing makes sense.

“Why would you assume he took it, Abuela?” I say, sliding the blunt knife away from me and placing the mamey on the table.

“Who else?” she says. “Yesterday I went to the bathroom and nobody watched him in the living room. That negro knows more than you’d think looking at him.”

Maydelis comes in with a plastic bag of bread my grandmother sent for from a neighbor who works at a bakery. She looks at both our faces and sets the bag down. Sweat has formed an outline of her spine through her tank top. She asks what’s going on and my grandmother repeats her accusation. Maydelis’s eyes shift to me and I look down at the fruit on the table. My heart races. I feel cold even as I sit in the unmoving hot air.

“I will report him,” my grandmother says. “I will report him to the Comité. I will report him to his workplace. I will even call the police.”

“Wait, wait,” Maydelis says. “Let me talk to him first.”

“Are you out of your mind?” My grandmother places a hand on the table to steady herself. She breathes hard.

“Sit,” I say, getting up and guiding my grandmother toward my chair. I still don’t dare look at Maydelis.

“I—think I can reason with him, Abuela. I won’t go alone,” Maydelis says. “Jeanette will go with me. Let us try that first at least.”

“You can’t trust people like that,” my grandmother says, placing a hand over the knife I have discarded. “If they don’t do it on the way in, they do it on the way out.”