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Sunday Journal: Stiletto heels can raise the sights

By Maggie Hall, Special to the Times
Published October 21, 2007

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I was a second-grader in stiletto heels. Not just any stiletto heels, but olive-green, suede-and-lizard-skin, pointed-toe stiletto heels.

I was never a beauty pageant contestant; my outfits were not crinolines or cowgirls. Usually I wore a handmade dress with what I pretended was a matching handbag on my arm.

The bag wasn't real, but the stilettos certainly were.

I spent my childhood in Havana during the 1960s, deep in the hunger of ration books and the paranoia of neighborhood surveillance of Fidel Castro's regime. Each block had a resident snitch whose days and nights consisted solely of monitoring what everyone was up to. If something or someone went in or out of your house, the block informant reported it to the government. The black-market Houdinis who traded food and clothing and spare parts to keep 1950s sedans running had to be very resourceful to escape their snooping.

A relative by marriage who specialized in food would visit us toting a large frame purse that always left our house empty. One time I witnessed a fish - head, body and large tail - materialize from her bag. When you grow up with black-market goods as part of your life, you don't ask how fish or stilettos end up in your house.

One day I came home from school, and there were two pairs of shoes fit for a diva in my aunts' bedroom. The diva had to be petite because the stilettos fit no one in the house - except me. I tried on the sapphire-blue pair and the olive-green pair and fell in love with both. They were more glamorous than anything my drab revolutionary childhood could have imagined: a rich suede trimmed with matching lizard skin on a heel that made me feel I was walking on a tightrope. It was love at first precarious step.

With those shoes I could now cope with the painful allergy tests I had to steel myself for every other day or the asthma attacks that my pediatrician couldn't control because he had nothing to prescribe.

Our lives were even grimmer than those of the other Cubans who managed to disguise their hate of the same government that Michael Moore says has great social services. My mother was an elementary school teacher and my father worked in pharmaceuticals until they asked for a visa to leave the country. Their jobs were taken away. Castro would starve us into seeing his point of view, which did not include political or economic freedom.

School consisted of drab lessons about the exploits of the Revolution and math problems about how many anti-Communists you could shoot. Even in second grade, I knew how to keep my opinions to myself. There were nights when lentil soup was all that my grandmother could cook for dinner and days when I waited for my mother to return home from the prison where she was visiting my uncle.

And, in the middle of it all, those glorious suede-and-lizard stilettos. I walked on the sunlit courtyard at my grandparents' house in them, pretending I wasn't a skinny, sickly second-grader living on someone else's ration allotments. I would walk with my elbow bent, imitating the ladies who visited our house carrying purses full of fish.

Then it all came to an end. The shoes found another black-market buyer, a dainty-footed client who wanted lizard-and-suede heels more than food. The shoes disappeared from my life. My mother explained how we couldn't keep them when they could be traded for a necessity. They were probably bartered for whatever we ate that evening. As unexpectedly as they came, the shoes left. In time, so did we.

I've been living in the United States for 40 years, and I have dozens of pairs of shoes in the closet. None of them have come close to my first pair of heels. Someday on eBay, a vintage seller is going to be offering suede-and-lizard, olive-green stilettos in my size, and I'm going to bid my house to buy them. And, this time, I'll get a real handbag to match, and it'll be big enough to carry fish.

Maggie Hall lives in Dunedin and still writes with a fountain pen.

[Last modified October 19, 2007, 17:32:05]