Word: seat
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...drop Jorge at the beach at Santa Maria del Mar and get back to moving down the coast. Minutes later we pull over for two girls, each carrying a cake, each about 20, giggling to themselves in the back seat. Sisters? No, just friends. They're on their way home, to the next town, Guanabo. We pass a photo shoot, by the water: a skeletal blond woman, a photographer, a band of Cuban men, grinning in matching shirts, all standing in front of a mid-'50s Chevy, powder blue. We all wonder who the model is. Anyone we know...
Then he was in the car. It happened before we knew it had happened. He just opened the door, and then suddenly he was giving us directions from within the car. The smallish back seat was empty, then full, full with this large man, his knees cramped up near his chin. He was so nonchalant, and had not uttered any commands or taken out a gun or any of the other ostensible signs of carjacking, and so it dawned on us that this was what happened in Rome. In Cuba, that is. Here hitchhiking is custom. Hitchhiking is essential. Hitchhiking...
...name is Juan Carlos. And while he speaks a little English, thankfully in the passenger seat is a translator/navigator (T/N), and she duly interprets...
...just a little ways out of town. Ten minutes later--ĦAqui, Aqui!--she gets out. She smiles thank-you, and we smile goodbye--and again we're empty. We don't like to be empty. Through the Cuban countryside we feel ashamed to have the back seat unpeopled--all this room we have, all this fuel. It's getting dark, and as the roads go black, what was a steady supply of hitchhikers, punctuating the roads like mile markers, quickly disappears. Where they go is unclear. What happens when night comes but a ride hasn...
...want that woman sitting in the seat next to you to quit trying to read over your shoulder. I'm just trying to help...