Jabas
When your father still had the dog he inherited from your brother and sister who left for big universities in big cities with real night life, you saved all your plastic bags for him. From under the sink, you would give him big bags stuffed full of bags and he would grin like a kid at Christmas and say, “Thanks! Thanks so much!” Your mother would scold him and say, “Harvey, they are just plastic bags.”
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Living back in Canada after living years in Cuba, you would divide your extra plastic bags. Three portions: one for the back of the vehicle presumably to bring into the store to save buying more. This portion you always left in the car. Another portion to hand to your happy father for his walks with the dog: morning, afternoon and evening. The third portion you would carefully fold for your husband to pack in his suitcase to bring to Cuba for your former neighbours — the plastic was stronger than theirs.
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There is a joke that Cubans evolved with a fifth appendage. “There’s the arms,” they say, “there’s the legs, and then there’s … the jaba!”
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Cuban Spanish evolved its own strange vocabulary, words that sound like the balling up of a bag in your fist. But like the fifth appendage, when you get used to speaking them, they are hard habit to break.
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Jaba: pronounced haba, a plastic bag. Elsewhere known as bolsa.
Jabas can be bought from the man in the shade leaning his back against the rough trunk of the sprawling tree close to the corner store or the puestecita of fruits and vegetables. They can be bought from the woman with the navy apron in the dim concrete hallway of the Mercado, produce lower level, bread upper level. You must use clean bags for bread. If the seller isn’t there, you juggle long crusty baguettes back to the car; if you are on your bicycle, you go without.
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The bags are as thin as onion skins, a peso a piece, sometimes three. Sometimes three jabas for five pesos. The seller peels them off the pile and tears them free like sheets from a pad of paper.
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If you were really Cuban, you would have learned sooner to carry plastic bags, tucked in your purse, in pockets, down the front of your shirt. “I don’t have enough cleavage to hide this,” you complain to your ample-busted friends, “besides, it is hot and uncomfortable in my shirt.” “You don’t have to hide it,” your friends reply, “It is your third boob.” They reach down their shirts and pull out bags and phones like it was Mary Poppin’s purse in there. They pull out laughter.
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You are at a restaurant with a group of women who are learning English. You are leading them through a counseling course as English practice, because their limping stories demand being heard in any language. As usual, the serving of rice at the restaurant is enough for a whole family, the chicken pounded thin. You ask the waitress for a take-out container. She looks at you sideways, “We have no containers.”
“Oh, okay,” you reply and nonchalantly pull a clean bag out of your purse.
When she is out of ear shot, the table erupts with laughter. “Look at you, Yuma!” broad-shouldered Anya says, using the slang term for foreigner, “pulling out your jaba for your leftovers like you were just one of us from the barrio!”
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You buy new bags when you need them. Most carefully wash the bags so as not to tear them, wash them as they slowly redden with the stains of soil, hang them off their balconies to bleach in the sun. You wash your imported Ziplock bags until they spring leaks from at least three places.
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Most stores do not have plastic bags. They place your groceries in your hands or on a wobbly square of cardboard, stuffed into the thick, ripped plastic packaging a product came in.
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No matter that you shove it in a closet with other balled up things, Cuba clings to you like a fifth appendage, like some strange growth on your chest, somewhere between your throat and heart. You still slip and use Cuban words sometimes, instead of English or Spanish, and it sounds like plastic choking you, like afternoon and evening walks, like something thin enough to hold anything at all that may or may not break.