• Home   • C.V.   • Teaching   • Images   • Writings  An Excerpt from the novel Cuban Quartermoon by Ann Putnam Download the entire excerpt in PDF format here.      It was just the two of us now, making our way through the late afternoon streets of Central Havana. Under this heavy, gauzy sky everything took on a bleached, dry feeling. It had the close, musty smell of unremembered rain. Some late afternoon high cloudiness had drifted in from the sea and tamped everything down into a sleepy, unguarded dream. I was glad we were going to the mountains tomorrow. I could hardly breathe.      "This is Santeria country. All santeria here,"Nancy said. "I know what you're thinking. Where's all the color? Even the sky. But just wait. In the tropics, things are always changing. Anyway, in Santeria country all the color is inside. You will not be disappointed in color."      She was watching the house numbers closely now. She said an address is hard to find here. She must find one doorway out of a hundred doorways. To me every street and cross street looked the same. If she disappeared I would be lost forever. There was nothing to mark my way-no curve of the Malecon, no scent of the sea or lighthouse where El Morro guards the harbor, no Paseo Prado and the bower of green, no Gran Teratro, no Ambos Mundos or Cathedral Square, nothing but this impenetrable heart of the city, block after despairing block.      There was no architectural extravagance here, not like Old Havana, where even the worst of the ruins held however precariously to a proud, Old World elegance. Here, the apartments jutted edge on edge into repeated rows of narrow doorways and dark, forbidding alley ways. And only now and then the surprise of coming suddenly to a doorway occupied by a shirtless old man with slow and watchful eyes sitting on the doorstep, elbows on his knees, or an old woman in a faded blue dress standing against the door jam, following us with her cautionary, narrowing gaze, a white bell of warning-don't go there! Download the entire excerpt in PDF format here.