My mother was afraid it might be our last chance to visit her family in Cuba. The revolution was almost two years old, and already there was talk of an impending crisis.
At the airport in Miami she gave us three instructions.
“Never tell anyone you are tomboys.”
“Why?”
“They wouldn’t understand. Also, don’t tell the other children about your allowance. You have more money in the bank than their fathers make in a year.”
“So?”
“So, they would feel bad.”
“Oh.”
“And most important, don’t bring animals into your grandmother’s house.”
“But Mom...”
“No animals. They don’t like having animals in the house. Do you understand?”
At the airport in Havana we released the caterpillars we had hidden in our luggage.
“Just in case there are no butterflies here,” my sister and I reassured each other.
We had no idea what to expect, but the island did not disappoint us. Abuelita’s house was on the outer fringe of Havana, and there were animals everywhere. We put lizards in beds, and tarantulas and scorpions in the living room. The fisherman who lived across the street gave us a ripe swordfish snout to play with. When it really started to stink, my mother threw it on the roof, where it rotted quickly in the sun.
The fisherman’s daughter asked me if I had money for ice cream. “Yes,” I said with pride, “I have eighty dollars in the bank, which I saved all by myself.”
“Dollars? Really?” I could see she didn’t believe a word of it. I squirmed inside, remembering my mother’s admonition.
“Well, I have something better,” the girl offered. “Crabs. When my father gets home, you can have one to cook for your dinner.”
She was right, of course. The crabs were better than my money. Her father came home with a truckload of them, bright orange crabs as big as cats. We put ours on a leash and led it up and down the street until it died.
My sister liked dogs better than crabs. She begged my mother for a can of dog food for my great-grandmother’s mangy hound. We had to go all the way downtown, to Woolworth’s, just to find dog food in cans. It cost more than a month’s supply of real food, corn meal, black beans and rice.
Just to make sure there were no sins left uncommitted, I went across the street and told the fisherman’s daughter I was a tomboy.
“Oh no,” she said, horrified. “You’re not a tomboy, don’t worry. You will be fine.” She fluffed her petticoats and curled a lock of hair with her fingers.
My collection of revolutionary bullets was growing. They were everywhere—in Abuelita’s front yard and in the weeds where we searched for tarantulas, which we caught with wads of gum attached to strings. There were bullets in the open fields beyond the city, and in the passion vines which clung to the walls of houses.
On one of my solitary expeditions I wandered far beyond those walls, beyond the open fields, and into a mud-floored hut with a thatched roof and many inhabitants. The family greeted me as if I had some right to invade their home. The children came outside to introduce me to their mule, their chickens and the sensitive Mimosa plant which closed its leaves at the touch of a child’s fingers.
One of the children was called Niña, meaning “girl.” I assumed her parents had simply run out of names by the time they got around to her. In Niña’s case, her name was no more unusual than her appearance. She was hardly there, just bones and eyes, and a few pale whisps of hair bleached by malnutrition.
“Doesn’t she get enough to eat?” I asked my mother when I reached home.
“They say she has a hole in her stomach.”
One day I was standing in the sun of the front porch, watching a black storm cloud sweep across the sky, bringing toward me its thunder and lightning, which fell only in one small corner of the sky. A motionless circle of vultures hung from the cloud, listless, with black wings barely trembling in the wind.
“Come in,” my mother warned. “Don’t forget your uncle who was killed by lightning, right in his own kitchen.”
I ignored her. If it could happen in the kitchen, then why bother to go inside? I was just as safe outside.
Niña crept up to the porch, smiling her death’s head smile, like the skull and crossbones on a bottle of medicine.
“Here,” she said, offering me half of the anon fruit she was eating. I took it. Together we ate and stared and smiled at each other, not knowing what to say. We both knew my half of the seedy, juicy fruit was going into my body, making flesh and fat, while hers was going right out the gaping invisible hole in her stomach.
Something like a shiver passed through my shoulders.
“Someone stepped on your grave,” Niña giggled.
“What do you mean?”
“They say when you shiver like that it’s because someone stepped on the spot where your grave will be.”
I stared at Niña’s huge eyes, wondering who could have been cruel enough to inform her that she would ever have a grave.
When we trooped down the street to the bingo games at my great-grandmother’s house, Niña tagged along. An endless array of uncles and cousins filed in and out, a few boasting revolutionary beards and uniforms, but most outfitted in their farmers’ Sunday best, their hands brown and calloused.
Niña was quiet. She poured burnt-milk candy through the hole in her stomach, and watched. The size of her eyes made her watching feel like staring, but no one seemed to notice. Children like Niña surprised no one.
On the anniversary of the revolution, the streets filled with truckloads of bearded men on their way to the mountains to celebrate. A man with a loudspeaker walked along our street announcing the treachery of the Yanquis. I was listening inside my grandmother’s house. Suddenly his voice changed.
“Let me clarify,” he was saying, “that it is not the common people of the United States who we oppose, but the government which has ... “I stopped listening. Niña was at the open door, smiling her bony smile.
“I told him,” she said very quietly, “that you are from Estados Unidos. I didn’t want him to hurt your feelings.”
At the beach, my sister and I went swimming inside shark fences. We imagined the gliding fins beyond the fence. Afterwards, our mother extracted the spines of bristly sea urchins from the soles of our feet.
We visited huge caverns gleaming with stalactites. How wonderfully the Cuban Indians must have lived, I thought, with no home but a cave, nothing to eat but fruit and shellfish, nothing to do but swim and sing. “We were born a thousand years too late,” I told my sister.
With a square old-fashioned camera, I took pictures of pigs, dogs, turkeys, horses and mules. Not once did it occur to me to put a friend or relative into one of my photos. I was from Los Angeles. There were more than enough people in my world, and far too few creatures. When my uncle cut sugarcane, it was the stiff, sweet cane itself which caught my eye, and the gnats clinging to his eyes. His strong arms and wizened face were just part of the landscape. When my cousins picked mamonsillo fruit, it was the tree I looked at, and not the boys showing off by climbing it. I thrived on the wet smell of green land after a rain, and the treasures I found crawling in red mud or dangling from the leaves of weeds and vines. I trapped lizards, netted butterflies, and once, with the help of my sister, I snared a vulture with an elaborate hand-rigged snare. Our relatives were horrified. What could one do with a vulture? It was just the way I felt about everything which mattered to them. If the goal of the revolution was to uproot happy people from their thatched havens, and deposit them in concrete high-rise apartment buildings, who needed it? Thatched huts, after all, were natural, wild, primitive. They were as good as camping. When my mother explained that the people living in the bohíos were tired of it, I grew sulky. Only an adult would be foolish enough to believe that any normal human being could prefer comfort to wildness, roses to weeds, radios to the chants of night-singing frogs.
I knew the hole in Niña’s stomach was growing. She was disappearing, vanishing before my eyes. Her parents seemed resigned to her departure. People spoke of her as if she had never really been there. Niña was not solid. She didn’t really exist.
On the day of her death, it occurred to me to ask my mother, “Why didn’t they just take her to a doctor?”
“They had no money.”
I went out to the front porch, abandoning the tarantula I had been about to feed. As I gazed across the open fields toward Niña’s bohío, the reality of her death permeated the humid summer air. In my mind, I sifted through a stack of foals and ducks, caterpillars and vultures. Somewhere in that stack, I realized, there should have been an image of Niña.