YAYA
A photograph, by my grandfather Benjamin Gomes Casseres, of Yaya Leonor reading a story from her Papiamentu newspaper to my cousin Ronnie. When my grandparents moved to Cuba and my mother was born in 1913, they sent for Yaya to come and care for their new baby as her nanny, her yaya. Yaya remained with my grandparents all those years (she lived till the age of 101), and we, their grandchildren, who came to visit them often, loved her dearly.
Here is another passage from my book House without Doors, that was published (so far) only in Hebrew translation as בית ללא דלתות - it is a fictionalized memoir, told in the voice of a twelve year old called Mira:
(...)
In the early afternoons, when the sun is still hot, and we have to be quiet to let Mamita rest, we often sit in the shade of the tall barba di yonkuman that stands on the eastern side of the house, the side where the trade winds blow. There it is always cool, even on the hottest days. The barba di yonkuman sways in the wind and we can hear the seeds inside the long dry pods up in the tree shaking and keeping the rhythm.
Under the great barba di yonkuman, sitting on its roots that rise up above the ground, crawling around the heavy trunk of the tree like twisted wooden animals, Yaya often takes us with her to Cuba, to Mami’s childhood.
She tells us how Mami had to have donkey’s milk when she was a baby, for she would get very sick from cow’s milk. A man would come by with his donkey every morning, to milk it right at their doorstep. And Yaya tells us how she had to be on guard when walking through the park with the baby carriage, for in Cuba there were many children’s thieves who would be eying her to grab the carriage, the minute she did not pay attention.
Sometimes Yaya tells us stories she reads to us from the Papiamentu newspaper that she receives every week. When we first started going to school and learned to read in Dutch, we were amazed how she could make sense of those jumbled letters that looked like a foreign language to us.
Even today, I still find it hard to read and write in Papiamentu. It is really more a spoken language and the spelling is always different, depending on the mood of the person who is writing it. But Yaya had learned to read in the School of the Nuns, where girls from poor families were taught to read only in Papiamentu. For some strange reason, they were not taught Dutch - even though the Nuns themselves came from Holland and spoke Papiamentu with a funny accent.
In the backyard of the house in Skarlo, just after one of the gates, is an open space with a tall shady tree. Here Mamita's laundrywoman does the wash in big tubs full of soapy water. Behind her looms the tall cistern, bulging under the pressure of the water that is held inside. The walls of that old cistern are eaten by saltpeter so that (...) you can see the deep cracks between the coral-stones.
That cracked cistern always makes me think of the story of Kompa Nanzi, the clever spider and Cha Tiguer, and so when we are sitting under the shady tree, near the cistern, I beg Yaya to tell that tale. It goes like this:
One day, Nanzi, the little spider, saw Cha Tiguer, the mighty tiger, coming towards him. Cha Tiguer was watering at the mouth, a sign that he was very, very hungry, and would certainly devour the little Nanzi if he was only given the chance. So Nanzi quickly thought of a ruse: he went to stand with his back to an old rain cistern, pressing against its cracked wall with the full weight of his little body.
The clever Nanzi, who knew how the Cha Tiguer, like all members of the cat family, hated getting wet more than anything in the world, told the hungry tiger that if he did not help hold unto its walls, the cistern would burst and they would both drown in the flood.
Cha Tiguer immediately joined the little Nanzi, who said he would run quickly and get a mason to fix the old cistern, leaving the mighty tiger behind, desperately pushing against the cracked cistern, to make sure it would not burst.
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