Sandra M. Castillo

at Las Villas, a small Carol City bar with a makeshift stage, where he spends too much time drinking, pretending he can learn to play the guitar at forty-five, become a singer, a musician, who writes about "Que Difícil Es...." to live in Spanish in Miami, a city yet to be translated, in a restaurant where he has taken us for Cuban food, where I sit, frozen, unable to make a sound, where Mother smiles, all her teeth exposed, squeezes my hand, where Mae and Mitzy hide under the table shielding them from shame with a blood-red tablecloth, leaving my mother and me, pale-faced, trapped by the spotlight shining in our eyes, making it difficult for us to pretend we do not know the man in the white suit pointing to us.

I see you, not as you stand before me, so full of language threatening to spill from you, a silver-blue luminous substance the page of cups might carry in love, in a gold chalice, but as a child I might have seen, held, had I been an adult on that island where we might have become anyone other than ourselves. You are a sound you say your father carries, a beat in the heart of an African drum that seduced him with the thunder of Changó the red of blood and earth, a flesh-pink guava growing inside you, its seeds on the tips of your fingers like islands, like memories becoming leaves, their veined undersides becoming maps, palmlines, bridges where the sound of water collects childhood in a blue bucket of memory, where my Tío Machuco stands with childhood sandwiches I ate sitting on the cold terraza, leaning against the Southwest red of that couch Tía Hilda discarded like a useless memory when we were no longer voices in open rooms with connecting doors, when we were words, onion-skinned paper as transparent as re-written history or exile.

“All accounts of the past are made up of possibilities.” —Dionisio Martinez for Larry Villanueva i. For years, you were a story of ancestors, pre-revolutionary Cuba: Barrios, Donate, Gallata, Villanueva, family names strung and pearled in the Caribbean by blood and memory, nostalgia and calamity en Artemisa, a small town in my mother’s childhood, a woman in December of 1967, your Tía Marta, a hospital room en la Covadonga, rows and rows of children, my sisters, unexpectedly two, your cousins, whose clothes Mae and Mitzy wore into history and exile. En el exilo, La Cuba del Norte, ten years after the summer of El Mariel, you were my map of Cuba, un espejo, un reflejo, a tisa-blue knot of possibility. Mi esquina Habanera, a street en la arquitectura del pasado, a superficial distance in the patina of memory, a me I had never really known, a language I had learned not to think in. Later, you were a face on T.V. en Guadalupe, María Elena, my mother’s telenovelas en el canal 23, an actor, a director, a sculptor, abstract angst with a face history and coincidence had given me. ii. So when you become fingerprints and words, a noun, a verb, a snapshot in motion, I am no longer alone with my ghosts, las sombras de el pasado, inventing truth, reclaiming language, my old self. I am me, unadorned by speech, English or translation; I am an I, simple, exposed, this afternoon in our lives, a conversation about the circle of coincidence and persuasion, a photograph of an idea we once were, and you are familiar, somehow. iii. Constantly returning, we breathe in Spanish, move through blank spaces like incantations, waiting for words to fill a moment (often ninety miles long) with etymology, jargon, ghostwords, shadows and nostalgia, and become Harina de Castilla, Larry, re-shaped, translated, improvised, sculpted and redefined.

We assemble the silver tree, our translated lives, its luminous branches, numbered to fit into its body. place its metallic roots to decorate our first Christmas. Mother finds herself opening, closing the Red Cross box she will carry into 1976 like an unwanted door prize, a timepiece, a stubborn fact, an emblem of exile measuring our days, marked by the moment of our departure, our lives no longer arranged. Somewhere, there is a photograph, a Polaroid Mother cannot remember was ever taken: I am sitting under Tia Tere’s Christmas tree, her first apartment in this, our new world: my sisters by my side, I wear a white dress, black boots, an eight-year-old’s resignation; Mae and Mitzy, age four, wear red and white snowflake sweaters and identical smiles, on this, our first Christmas, away from ourselves. The future unreal, unmade, Mother will cry into the new year with Lidia and Emerito, our elderly downstairs neighbors, who realize what we are too young to understand: Even a map cannot show you the way back to a place that no longer exists.

“History always dresses us for the wrong occasions.” —Ricardo Pau-Llosa Camera Obscura The afternoon lightening his shadow, Fidel descends from the mountains, the clean-shaven lawyer turned guerilla, his eyes focused on infinity, El Jefe Máximo con sus Barbudos, rebels with rosary beads on their 600-mile procession across the island with campesinos on horseback, flatbed trucks, tanks, a new year’s journey down the oldest roads towards betrayal. Ambient light. Available light Light inside of them, nameless isleños line El Malecón to touch Fidel, already defining himself in black and white. The dramatic sky moving in for the close-up that will frame his all-night oratory, he turns to the crowd, variations on an enigma, waving from his pulpit with rehearsed eloquence, a dove on his shoulder. This is a photograph. This is not a sign. Flash-on camera. Celebrity portraits. 1.     Fidel on a balcony across the street from Grand Central Station, an American flag above his head, New York, 1959. 2.     Fidel made small by the Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C., 1959. 3.     Fidel learning to ski, a minor black ball against a white landscape, Russia, 1962. 4.     Fidel and shotgun, hunting with Nikita, Russia, 1962. Circles of Confusion Beyond photographs, Havana is looted and burned. Women weep at out wailing wall, El Paredón, where traitors are taken, and television cameras shoot the executions, this blood soup, the paradoxes of our lives, three years before I am born. Photoflood But it is late afternoon, and a shower of confetti and serpentine falls from every floor of the Havana Hilton, where history is a giant piñata, where at midnight, Fidel will be photographed eating a ham sandwich.