CHAPTER 1

I’VE ALWAYS THOUGHT OF MEMORY as a distinct, individual thing. I’ve read with curiosity about the large parts of our brains where memory resides—how these areas remain vital, as animated at seventy-five as at twenty-five years old. Scientists say that when we think we’re losing our memory what’s actually happening is that we’ve blocked or severed connections.

But I don’t know. I’m not that old, just twenty-four, and I often wonder just how distinct my memories are. Sometimes I’m convinced they’re someone else’s recollections I’ve absorbed. I’m not talking about hooking into past lives, or other links established spiritually or psychically to other times. I’m not talking at all about suppressed memories. It’s just that sometimes other lives lived right alongside mine interrupt, barge in on my senses, and I no longer know if I really lived through an experience or just heard about it so many times, or so convincingly, that I believed it for myself—became the lens through which it was captured, retold and shaped.

Sometimes I’m as sure that I couldn’t have heard the stories about the memories anymore than lived through them—that both of the experiences are false for me—and yet the memory itself will be so fresh, so fantastic and detailed, that I’ll think maybe my family and I are just too close to each other. Sometimes I wonder if we’re not together too much, day in and day out, working and eating side by side, sleeping in the same rooms, fusing dreams. Sometimes I wonder if we know where we each end and the others begin.

Here’s what I mean. My family and I came from Cuba to the U.S. by boat when I was six years old, in 1978. These are the facts: It was a twenty-eight-foot boat; there were fourteen of us; the trip lasted two days; we were picked up by the Coast Guard just a few miles from Key West, around Cayo Sal, a deserted island that refugees often confuse for the southernmost tip of the U.S. but which really belongs to the Bahamas. I was seasick during most of the trip. My sister Nena, who’s three years older and very serious, spent the time with her arm around me, holding me as I leaned over the side of the boat, making sure I vomited into the sea and not onto her lap. My mother was frozen in prayer: head bent, fingers intertwined like wire mesh around my little brother, Pucho. My father, the genius behind the trip, wore loose, improbably white clothes, and stood at the prow of the boat. He would look through his binoculars at the darkened horizon, then turn around and whisper instructions to the two or three men in charge of paddling, or jacking up the motor, or slowing it down.

The whole time this was happening, I didn’t know what was going on. I was simply gathered up, like one more precious belonging, and packed into a stranger’s bloated car in the middle of the night, then taken down through black, rural roads with the car lights turned off. We huddled at the beach, listening to the fear in one another’s breathing, circles of women and children and small men waiting for the sound of the water to break ever so subtly—just a splash or two, an interruption of the otherwise hypnotic lapping—which signaled that our miserable little boat, its planks creaking against one another, had finally arrived to take us away.

So, if these are the facts, why do I remember so much more? Why do I remember foggy meetings around the kitchen table, cigars burning in the ashtrays, their tips glistening, while my father’s face appeared and disappeared behind the smoke? My mother tells me there were meetings just like those I remember, but that Nena, Pucho and I were in bed, protected by layers of mosquito nets, a radio on the night table tuned in to a station that broadcast West Indian music from Sint Maarten.

Why do I remember driving around senselessly, for days, in and out of the beaches outside La Habana (Guanabo, Cojímar, Mariel, even as far away as San Pedro), combing through tall grasses and dirt, as fascinated by the tiny, translucent frogs on the tree branches as by the malevolent shadows scurrying underneath? My father planned our escape this way, but I never went along on these excursions. So why is it I can see my father’s body, gleaming like larvae, vanishing into the water just off the shore? It’s a fact that he swam along the coast, checking the bottom for coral and traps, testing the milicianos, trying to see how far out he could go before they’d notice. It’s true that I’ve heard the stories, but I never went along, I never saw the motions, so how can I remember my father shaking the water off like a dog, the salt drying on his body, the hurried, nervous way he unearthed the street clothes he’d buried in newspapers in the sand?

If these aren’t my memories, then whose are they? Certainly not my father’s—he always casts himself as the stoic hero in his stories, unshakable and inscrutable. He would have said his body shone like a blade; he would have quoted compatriots and collaborators applauding his brilliance. If these were my father’s stories, they would be wholly congratulatory and totally void of meaningful detail.

My cousin Patricia says this is because his tales are almost always lies.

Some memories are precise. Ever since I can remember, I’ve always been surrounded by cousins. My mother says this isn’t exactly true, that we hardly ever saw our cousins in Cuba and that our cousins here are a different story. But Nena, Pucho and I have memories of seeing our cousins every day of our lives while we were growing up—not every single cousin, of course, but at least one, and often more. They were always at our house, eating, or we were at theirs, watching TV or using the phone.

In Cuba, when we had birthday parties, there were so many cousins to invite that hardly anybody outside the family came. When I look at those old black and white pictures my cousin Patricia brought back from Cuba, all the other relatives turn into one big genetic smear but I can identify my cousins at a glance. Most of these—Pedro Javier, Titi, Jorge and Eduardo (the twins), and Tomás Joaquín—are older and stayed on the island. But I know their faces, I know our family. What I mean is, we look exactly alike, with our sallow skin and large, liquid eyes. No matter the memories, we could never deny each other.

In the U.S., Nena, Pucho and I walked to class with our cousins Manolito, Caridad and, later, when she was old enough, Pauli. Patricia, who’s U.S. born and much older, gave us tips on how to survive. When American kids called us names or tried to hit us, we fought back or took refuge together. Sometimes we’d just huddle in the playground, listening to them screeching like birds at us.

Just like in Cuba, all the cousins in the U.S. have that unmistakable stamp of kinship. It’s all in the eyes—something tragic perhaps; I don’t really know how to describe it. Sometimes when I look at Caridad, or even Patricia, who’s so strong, their see-through eyes remind me of cats at night.

There are pictures of me in Cuba, right after I was born, being bounced in the air like a rag by my cousin Tomás Joaquín, a skinny blond boy with biceps and bulging calf muscles, even at ten. I don’t look scared, but faraway and serious. Tomás Joaquín is looking at me with eyes shiny and black. There is an abyss there, I think.

There are hazy color snapshots of me from when we first arrived in the U.S., a rubbery toddler in the arms of a sloe-eyed adolescent, all proud and beaming. That’s Caridad, and in the picture she’s holding me all wrong, but I’m happy. My pupils are so bright they look like peacock’s coal reflecting light.

The first boy my sister Nena kissed was my cousin Manolito. And the first girl I kissed was my cousin Pauli, not because we liked each other that way, but because we were curious and we could do that with each other.

That’s the thing about cousins—they’re part of the family and yet they’re not. They’re like faulty brothers and sisters—always present, always in on all the secrets, but not pure enough to bring in to the nucleus, the very heart of the matter. They’re electrons, just flitting about, connected only by the mystery of their orbit.

Then there’s the difference between blood cousins, like the ones in Cuba, and cousins in exile. We’re stuck with blood cousins. They’re there, recklessly swinging off the branches on the family tree whether we want them or not. They assume they can call on us, just because we crawled out of the same DNA pool, regardless of whether we’ve ever shared a word with them or not. They figure they can get us to send them food and medicine, to file their papers to get them out of Cuba, even to support them once they’re here. They assume we’ll tell them our most intimate thoughts, even if we’ve just met them, because they’re family, because they’re links in the chain of our history, even the history we don’t know.

Cousins in exile are different. They’re the cousins we never had, something far more vital than just substitutes for the ones left in Cuba. We know them because they’re the only other Cubans in our American neighborhood, or the only Cubans in our apartment building, or, sometimes, even if they’re not from the same town as our parents, maybe they’re from the same province. We just sort of stumble on these cousins, sorting out coincidences and fate. It doesn’t matter how it happens. By the end of the first or second visit, we’re related—we’re kissing hello and good-bye; before we know it, their parents are tío and tía and have the power to punish us if we misbehave.

I know a lot of people think cousins in exile are really random relationships, links forged out of loneliness and desperation. And that’s kind of true, I admit, but there’s more: We have an affinity, a way of speaking that’s neither Cuban nor American, neither genetic or processed. There’s a look, a wink, the way we touch each other. We communicate, I suspect, like deaf people—not so much compensating for the lost sense, but creating a new syntax from the pieces of our displaced lives.

There are times, I admit, when I can’t remember if I’m related to somebody by blood or exile. It’s not often, but it happens now and then. I’ll see an impossible resemblance, I’ll connect loose branches on the family tree. I’ll look into the face of someone who could have been, under different circumstances, a complete stranger, and I’ll see myself. These aren’t lies or inventions. How else could I explain my family? How else could I explain myself? I don’t long for a perfect memory. I don’t want to ensnare the universe; I already know that’s beyond the flawed connections of my small and curious brain.

What I want to know is what really happened.