Dreaming in Cuban (21 page)

This is a constant struggle around my mother, who systematically rewrites history to suit her views of the world. This reshaping of events happens in a dozen ways every day, contesting reality. It’s not a matter of premeditated deception. Mom truly believes that her version of events is correct, down to details that I know, for a fact, are wrong. To this day, my mother insists that I ran away from her at the Miami airport after we first left Cuba. But it was
she
who turned and ran when she thought she heard my father’s voice. I wandered around lost until a pilot took me to his airline’s office and gave me a lollipop.

It’s not just our personal history that gets mangled. Mom filters other people’s lives through her distorting lens. Maybe it’s that wandering eye of hers. It makes her see only what she wants to see instead of what’s really there. Like Mr. Paresi, a pimpy Brooklyn lawyer who my mother claims is the number-one criminal defense attorney in New York, complete with an impressive roster of Mafia clients. And this because he comes to her shop every morning and buys two chocolate-frosted donuts for his breakfast.

Mom’s embellishments and half-truths usually equip her to tell a good story, though. And her English, her immigrant English, has a touch of otherness that makes it Unintentionally precise.
Maybe in the end the facts are not as important as the underlying truth she wants to convey. Telling her own truth is
the
truth to her, even if it’s at the expense of chipping away our past.

I suppose I’m guilty in my own way of a creative transformation or two. Like my painting of the Statue of Liberty that caused such a commotion at the Yankee Doodle Bakery. It’s funny but last year the Sex Pistols ended up doing the same thing with a photograph of Queen Elizabeth on the cover of their
God Save the Queen
single. They put a safety pin through the Queen’s nose and the entire country was up in arms. Anarchy in the U.K., I love it.

Mom is fomenting her own brand of anarchy closer to home. Her Yankee Doodle bakeries have become gathering places for these shady Cuban extremists who come all the way from New Jersey and the Bronx to talk their dinosaur politics and drink her killer espressos. Last month they started a cablegram campaign against El Líder. They set up a toll-free hot line so that Cuban exiles could call in and choose from three scathing messages to send directly to the National Palace, demanding El Líder’s resignation.

I heard one of my mother’s cohorts boasting how last year he’d called in a bomb threat to the Metropolitan Opera House, where Alicia Alonso, the prima ballerina of the National Ballet of Cuba and a supporter of El Líder, was scheduled to dance. “I delayed
Giselle
for seventy-five minutes!” he bragged. If I’d known about it then, I would have sicked the FBI on him.

Just last week, the lot of them were celebrating—with cigars and sparkling cider—the murder of a journalist in Miami who advocated reestablishing ties with Cuba. Those creeps passed around the Spanish newspaper and clapped each other on the back, as if they themselves had struck a big blow against the forces of evil. The front-page photograph showed the reporter’s
arm dangling from a poinciana tree on Key Biscayne after the bomb in his car had exploded.

I wonder how Mom could be Abuela Celia’s daughter. And what I’m doing as my mother’s daughter. Something got horribly scrambled along the way.

*  *  *

Outside, the afternoon light is a dark, moist violet. It’s a matrix light, a recombinant light that disintegrates hard lines and planes, rearranging objects to their essences. Usually I hate it when artists get too infatuated with light, but this is special. It’s the light I love to paint in.

Last semester when I was studying in Italy, I found the same light in Venice at carnival. It surrounded an impossibly tall person cloaked in black and wearing a white eyeless mask. The person dipped and circled like a bat in a square behind the Piazza San Marco. I was afraid to stay, but I was more afraid to go. Finally the light chased him down an alleyway and I was released from his spell.

The light was also in Palermo at dusk on Holy Thursday. Slaughtered lambs, skinned and transparent as baby flesh, hung evenly on rusted hooks. They were beautiful, and I longed to stretch out next to them and display myself in the light. When I returned to Florence, I began to model nude at my art school, something I’d vowed I’d never do. As I posed, I thought of the transparent lambs in the violet light.

Sometimes I ask myself if my adventures, such as they are, equal experience. I think of Flaubert, who spent most of his adult life in the same French village, or Emily Dickinson, whose poems echoed the cadence of the local church bells. I wonder if the farthest distance I have to travel isn’t inside my own head. But then I think of Gauguin or D. H. Lawrence or Ernest Hemingway,
who, incidentally, used to go fishing with my Abuelo Guillermo in Cuba, and I become convinced that you have to live in the world to say anything meaningful about it.

Everything up until this very minute, as I sit at my desk on the second floor of Barnard library, looking out over a rectangle of dead grass, and beyond that, to the cars racing down Broadway, feels like a preparation for something. For what, I don’t know. I’m still waiting for my life to begin.

My boyfriend, Rubén Florín, is Peruvian and his family, like mine, is divided over politics. His aunts and uncles, parents and grandparents align themselves against one another. Rubén moved to New York with his parents when he was two, like me. The difference is that at least he can go back to Lima anytime he wants. This makes me ache for the same possibility.

Rubén has a recurring dream of me. I’m in aqua robes threaded with gold, stepping through trapezoidal doors into the sun. Nothing happens to me, he says, but I look unhappy, very unhappy. “Keep sleeping,” I tell him, but his dream never goes any further.

I met Rubén my first day at Barnard. I’d transferred here after a semester of art school in Rhode Island and another semester in Florence. I couldn’t face going back to Providence after Italy, so I decided to give mainstream academia a try. Art school was getting to be a drag anyway, cutthroat and backbiting, with everyone seeking praise from the instructors. I didn’t want to end up being dependent on people I didn’t respect much, so here I am majoring in anthropology instead.

Rubén wants to join the Foreign Service after he graduates from Columbia and bounce around the Third World. I like being with him. We don’t show off like other couples on campus, always pawing at each other or exchanging hungry looks. We take our deep satisfactions for granted. I like it in the early evenings
best, when I’m just tired enough from the day to appreciate Rubén’s slow mouth and hands. We speak in Spanish when we make love. English seems an impossible language for intimacy.

Thinking about Rubén this way makes me pack my books, run a brush through my hair, and cross Broadway. It’s rush hour and people are pouring out of the 116th Street subway station as if it’s on fire. Someone’s playing a guitar on the steps of Low Library, a folk song, but nobody’s listening. People here react negatively to any overt displays of soulfulness. Besides, he could be a Moonie. There’re a lot of them on campus these days.

I want to surprise Rubén, get to his room before he returns from his late class, but instead I find him fucking the Dutch exchange student he introduced me to last week. She’s a pale, big-bosomed woman with enormous pink nipples. I keep staring at her nipples as Rubén talks. She doesn’t even pull the sheet over herself. I get the feeling she’s displaying herself, giving me a chance to size up the competition. She feels that certain of her charms. I don’t understand a word Rubén says. I must be standing there a long time because he runs out of things to say and the woman starts coughing delicately into her hand. Her breasts wobble as she coughs, like sunflowers in a breeze.

“Maybe you should leave,” Rubén tells me weakly in Spanish. And I do.

An hour later, I’m on my sixth cup of coffee at the Hungarian pastry shop on Amsterdam Avenue. I’m browsing through the
Village Voice
personals, the real kinky ones like: “Bisexual Amazon wanted for straight professional couple. Serious inquiries only.” Reading the ads is hardly getting my mind off what Rubén and that milkmaid were doing back at his room. I heard a psychologist on a radio talk show once describe the four stages of grief. I forget whether revenge is a stage or not. I’m probably out of sequence anyway.

A misplaced ad catches my attention. Under
WOMEN SEEKING WOMEN
, I see “Acoustic bass for sale. Student desperate for cash.
$300 obo. Mick. 674-9981.” I think about how my old boyfriend Max used to tell me I’d make a good bass player, and things start getting clearer. I call the number. It’s on Bleecker Street and I make it down there in a half hour flat.

A scrawny guy wearing a flannel shirt over his sweatpants counts my cash and pushes the bass at me. It’s a piece of furniture, a fucking
huge
piece of furniture. It’s like I’m buying my own heirloom. I struggle uptown with it in a kind of trance.

My whole body is aching by the time I get back to my room, but I don’t waste any time. I flip straight to the album I want—
The Velvet Underground & Nico
. I peel off Andy Warhol’s banana sticker and put on the good, thumping, straight-ahead rock and roll. The thick strings vibrate through my fingers, up my arms, down my chest. I don’t know what I’m doing but I start thumping that old spruce dresser of an instrument for all it’s worth, thumping and thumping, until I feel my life begin.

Herminia Delgado

(1980)

I
met Felicia on the beach when we were both six years old. She was filling a pail with cowries and bleeding tooth. Felicia used to collect seashells, then rearrange them on the beach before going home because her mother wouldn’t allow them in their house. Felicia designed great circles of overlapping shells on the sand, as if someone on the moon, or farther still, might read their significance. I told her that at my house we had many shells, that they told the future and were the special favorites of Yemayá, goddess of the seas. Felicia listened closely, then handed me her pail.

“Will you save me?” she asked me. Her eyes were wide and curious.

“Sure,” I answered. How could I realize then what my promise would entail?

Felicia’s parents were afraid of my father. He was a
babalawo
, a high priest of
santería
, and greeted the sun each morning with
outstretched arms. His godchildren came from many miles on his saint’s day, and brought him kola nuts and black hens.

The people in Santa Teresa del Mar told evil lies about my father. They said he used to rip the heads off goats with his teeth and fillet blue-eyed babies before dawn. I got into fights at school. The other children shunned me and called me
bruja
. They made fun of my hair, oiled and plaited in neat rows, and of my skin, black as my father’s. But Felicia defended me. I’ll always be grateful to her for that.

Felicia was forbidden to visit my house but she did anyway. Once she saw my father use the
obi
, the divining coconut, to answer the questions of a godchild who had come to consult him. I remember the pattern of rinds fell in
ellife
, two white sides and two brown, a definite yes. The godchild left very pleased, and Felicia’s fascination with coconuts began that day.

I never doubted Felicia’s love. Or her loyalty. When my oldest son died in Angola, Felicia didn’t leave my side for a month. She cooked me
carne asada
and read me the collected plays of Molière, which she borrowed from her mother. Felicia arranged for Joaquín’s remains to be brought home for a decent burial, and then she stayed with me until I could laugh again at silly things.

Felicia could be very stubborn, too, but she had a gift that offset her stubbornness, a gift I admired very much. I guess you could say she adapted to her grief with imagination. Felicia stayed on the fringe of life because it was free of everyday malice. It was more dignified there.

There is something else, something very important. Felicia is the only person I’ve known who didn’t see color. There are white people who know how to act politely to blacks, but deep down you know they’re uncomfortable. They’re worse, more dangerous than those who speak their minds, because they don’t know what they’re capable of.

For many years in Cuba, nobody spoke of the problem between
blacks and whites. It was considered too disagreeable to discuss. But my father spoke to me clearly so that I would understand what happened to his father and his uncles during the Little War of 1912, so that I would know how our men were hunted down day and night like animals, and finally hung by their genitals from the lampposts in Guáimaro. The war that killed my grandfather and great-uncles and thousands of other blacks is only a footnote in our history books. Why, then, should I trust anything I read? I trust only what I see, what I know with my heart, nothing more.

Things have gotten better under the revolution, that much I can say. In the old days, when voting time came, the politicians would tell us we were all the same, one happy family. Every day, though, it was another story. The whiter you were, the better off you were. Anybody could see that. There’s more respect these days. I’ve been at the battery factory almost twenty years now, since right after the revolution, and I supervise forty-two women. It’s not much, maybe, but it’s better than mopping floors or taking care of another woman’s children instead of my own.

One thing hasn’t changed: the men are still in charge. Fixing that is going to take a lot longer than twenty years.

But let me begin again. After all, this story is about Felicia, not me.

Felicia returned to our religion with great eagerness after her disappearance in 1978. She showed up at my house one day, slim and tanned, as if she’d just returned from a vacation at a fancy foreign spa. “Take me to La Madrina,” she told me, and I did. Then, during a holy trance, Felicia spoke of her days in a far-off town. She said she’d married a bearish man in an amusement park and that he’d planned to escape Cuba, to take a fishing boat north and go ice skating. I don’t know if this part is true, but Felicia said that she’d pushed this man, her third husband, from the top of a roller coaster and watched him die on a bed
of high-voltage wires. Felicia said his body turned to gray ash, and then the wind blew him north, just as he’d wished.