The Opposite House

2 mama proserpine and her aspects

In the Cuba house, before before, Aya and her Mama loved so fiercely. For noonday naps they lay entangled in the centre of the bed, fingers tearing tracks in each other’s hair. When awake, Aya followed where her Mama went, shoes clacking on bamboo tiles. Perched on an outcrop of their greeny-gold garden, Aya and her Mama were so close together that they heard the water slewing down the rocks with the same ear. And Aya’s Mama warned: Beware Proserpine, since she is the murder that walked from my heart.

Before Aya was born, Proserpine came and caught Aya’s Mama unawares. Proserpine came when Aya’s Mama was still carrying baby Aya in her stomach, ripe, ripe, and feeling it. Every step Mama took she felt in her stomach, through Aya. Steps became sharp teeth — they bit. They tried to pull baby and mother asunder. Temper was the only way to be higher. One day, because she had raised her voice against him

(with Mama’s full voice comes fear, oh, fear to split you open and make you pour out good gold like yolk)

Papa caused Mama to fall to the ground. Mama fell hard and, as Papa had wanted, as he had needed, she fell quiet. She lay. She lay under minutes like fingers, and after a handful Aya did not move in her mother’s stomach.

The stillness brought the thought: I’ve lost this baby.

Then transparency.

Mama became as a season is; she felt weather in her, she felt empty heat. Slowly she came to understand that she wasn’t alone, that she had some secret help inside her. They got up, Aya’s Mama and her help, and they took a bone-handled cutlass, and they went to the next room to kill Aya’s Papa.

When they came, Aya’s Papa saw two women and one face — the face was small and faraway, and it looked on him with laughter.

Aya’s Papa said, ‘Who is that? Who’s there?’

Mama and her helper didn’t answer — they cut Mama’s fingertip to make sure the knife was sharp enough. The blood rushed well, and quickly. They accused him. They said to him, ‘You’ve made her lose her son.’

Aya’s Papa said, ‘Not a son, daughter. And you haven’t lost her, you couldn’t have.’

But still these two accused him and turned their tiny eyes on him as if his death was already a lens that they looked through.

‘Who is that? What’s there?’ Papa called. ‘Name it — name her.’

Mama said later, It was too much temptation for my help; he was giving her a chance to be. So she broke away from me to name herself — Proserpine — and a name was all he needed to take her from me.

Like every girl, I only need to look up and a little to the right of me to see the hysteria that belongs to me, the one that hangs on a hook like an empty jacket and flutters with disappointment that I cannot wear her all the time. I call her my hysteric, and this personal hysteric of mine is designer made (though I’m not sure who made her), flattering and comfortable, attractive even, if you’re around people who like that sort of thing. She is not anyone, my hysteric; she is blank, electricity dancing around a filament, singing to kill. It’s not that there are two Majas; there is only one, but she can disappear into her own tension and may one day never come back.

My second ever boyfriend was five years older than me, frizzy, blond-haired and rugby-player-built, a postgraduate student when I was a first-year undergraduate. He seemed to prefer my personal hysteric to me. He told me over and over that I was beautiful, sweet, so clever.

In his mouth, on his tongue, those words were not safe.

And he said these terrible things earnestly enough to make me sit on my hands when I was across from him at dinner. In his mouth, on his tongue, those words cast a spell which conjured me into the things he kept insisting I was.

Luke was always pleading with me to calm down before I even realised that I was unsettled. I stopped daring to raise my voice at him, or smile too much, even. Luke made bedtime drinks for me, mugs brimful with creamy white, warm Kahlua and milk. When I sipped them sleepily from the enfoldment of his arms, I became convinced that I was ill, and that it was terminal. There was no other reason for such care, for the way he laid hands on me so lightly that it seemed I was already disappearing. One night, drunk, drunk, drunk, I dropped my empty shot glass and a full one for Luke, sat down beside the pieces and arranged them in my skin, twisting clear flowers planted to grow from my soles, my arms. It hurt. But wearing my hysteric, it became a matter of art and pain and so on. It was extreme, it was because of tension. Luke took me to Accident and Emergency and spoke to me richly, quietly, held me for as long as he could while I cried and put my sight away from my torn skin.

We went to a girls’ school, Amy Eleni and I. We know about subtle, slow murder, the way that glances and silences and unnecessarily kind words can have a girl running into traffic trying to get hit so that she doesn’t have to turn up the next day. When Amy Eleni arrived at the hospital she was in no mood for pleasantries. She took Luke aside and told him to ‘Fuck right off. Immediately.’

Luke became typical; he called her a man-hating dyke, and she made some movement towards him, some movement that scared him. It was as if she was going to pincer his testicles and he thought she’d do it, so he shrank. When she told me about it her voice rose and fell, bitter and sad. Amy Eleni told me gossip about Luke as I waited to be allowed to go home. One girl had said to her, ‘Luke only goes out with nutters. But he’s never been out with a black girl before, so she must be extra psychotic.’

My hysteric smells foreign, like perfumed sand, but maybe that’s how she’s supposed to smell. She is not part of me, but part of my store. In times of need she converts into my emergency image of Chabella, a poorly done portrait that I can show people when I need to ask, ‘Have you seen this woman?’

I have no natural sensitivity; I am forced to it.

For a boyfriend from the Ivory Coast, handsome and strong like a mined mineral, I cut off all my hair. Because he said he preferred me like that, all long neck, bare ears and hopeful eyes. I hated my hair like that, hated it almost too much to live. When I wasn’t with him I spent a lot of time crying. Chabella, who sometimes is my mind outside of me, said, musingly, ‘You look like a boy with that haircut. Your nose. . it takes over the middle of your face when there’s no hair to look at. It’s strange, because in actuality your nose isn’t that big.’

Amy Eleni only said, ‘It’ll grow. Your hair always grows really fast.’

But I had to keep cutting away new growth with scissors. When he broke up with me, he said he was unhappy that I didn’t seem to love my hair in its natural state. I asked him, Is its natural state short? He just said he had to go. I ran a bath; the hysteric came and I was persuaded to try and drown myself. But Amy Eleni phoned and I realised I wanted to answer the phone just a little bit more than I wanted to die.

Amy Eleni gets it. When I first tried to describe the hysteric to her, she snorted and said, ‘You can’t speak for all of us. My personal hysteric walks three paces behind me at all times, and when it’s all a bit much, I kind of hang back and she kind of hurries forward, and she jumps on my back and takes me down. Then she stands up in my place.’

I said I didn’t like that idea. I said it sounded like a denial of responsibility, a denial that Amy Eleni was underneath her hysteric.

‘I am underneath her,’ Amy Eleni said. ‘She has her fucking stilettos digging into my spine.’

When Amy Eleni isn’t doing well her thoughts ignore her and come out exactly the way they want to. One summer her mother went to Cyprus without her. Even though Amy Eleni wanted to go, so much. But Despina was punishing her because of a bad school report. We were in her bedroom at her parents’ house, and she was sitting on the broad window ledge with her curls squashed against the glass, her hands clawing the window as if she was trying to hold her house upright. She said insistently, through gritted teeth, ‘Do you aid me with my pulse which is gone away.’ She said it a few times before I heard the words. I can’t remember her expression; instead I think of redness. But if she had punched the window she would only have hurt herself.

When we were fourteen Amy Eleni decided that she and I should be friends. Before that, she wouldn’t talk to anyone she didn’t want to talk to. She was a bit dangerous. She ate lunch by herself — as if lunchtime for the packed-lunch students wasn’t all about setting up a circle of chairs in the school hall for your group, as if lunchtime wasn’t all about showing that you had a group. She placed her chair near the centre of the hall so that she faced outwards, looking toward the door, and she sat cross-legged on it, eating interesting-looking food that didn’t match her precise, English features; flat pita sandwiches filled with grilled chicken, cold stuffed vine leaves, squares of honeyed pastry, pomegranates. She ate daintily and with a calm that said she couldn’t be bothered with the likes of us.

At lunchtime I always struggled with Chabella’s sandwiches. Like all her food, Mami’s sandwiches are works of slow-cooked love. They’re ostentatious and difficult to eat in public — by the time you curl your fingers around one and take a bite, the marinated pork or chicken has already spilled out from atop the onion- and tomato-stuffed cocoon of wheat-rich bread, and a shower of sandwich and salsa sauce spatters your hands and your lap. You can’t even lick your fingers as you would leaning on the table at home because you feel guilty, you feel embarrassed, you feel mad to have brought in such a luxury bed of a sandwich when everyone else is making do with the equivalent of string hammocks.

Amy Eleni was probably equal to the challenge of a Chabella sandwich — I had never seen her blush. She made no attempt to customise her uniform; she just let it hang off her in limp monochrome. Her hair was longer, then. She let it all curl into a big, burnt-yellow shock, thick enough for me to pile up on her head later in a crown of Senegalese twists. But at that time everyone, including me, ignored her insistence on being addressed at all times as ‘Amy Eleni’. We just kept calling her ‘Amy’, which sometimes forced her to shout ‘Die before your parents do!’ and slap her rump in the direction of the person who was disregarding her wishes. The rumours about her were numerous, but the predominant one was that Amy had three boyfriends and was having sex with all of them on a timetabled basis.

One day Amy Eleni, her most devastating smile in place, beckoned me away from the centre of my lunch circle, where I had been sitting with one foot up on the edge of another girl’s chair laboriously washing pink varnish over her fingernails. I went over to Amy Eleni with the nail varnish still in my hand, and she took it from me and screwed the lid back on. The first thing she told me, with breathtaking serenity, was that we should be best friends because we were both pretty, and pretty girls always found it difficult to make real girlfriends who wouldn’t turn Judas on them. The second thing she told me was that I absolutely had to call her Amy Eleni; Eleni was her middle name but she took her Cypriot heritage seriously and found it hard enough to keep up when she looked like a common-or-garden variety English kid and had a surname like Lang. Then she mentioned that at her Holy Communion she had spat out the Host into her hand because she didn’t believe in all that Jesus crap, and that the following Saturday she had snuck back into the church while the priest was taking confession and had tried to make the figurine of the baby Jesus beat upon a drum to prove his reality. She’d then broken the figurine because it hadn’t. I stared at her and smiled, timid, aghast. She burst out laughing. She named a book and said I really needed to read it.

Our favourite film is Vertigo. Amy Eleni and I must watch it seventeen or eighteen times a year, and with each viewing our raptness grows looser and looser; we don’t need the visuals any more — one or the other of us can go into the kitchen halfway through and call out the dialogue while making up two cups of Horlicks. From the minute you see empty, beautiful, blonde Madeleine Elster, you know she is doomed because she exists in a way that Scottie, the male lead, just doesn’t. You know that Madeleine is in big trouble because she’s a vast wound in a landscape where wounds aren’t allowed to stay open — people have to shut up and heal up. She’s in trouble because the film works to a plan that makes trauma speak itself out, speak itself to excess until it dies; this film at the peak of its slyness, when people sweat and lick their lips excessively and pound their chests and grab their hair and twist their heads from side to side, performing this unspeakable torment.

When things are serious and either Amy Eleni or I need to beat our personal hysteric, the informal code is to seize your head and twist coils of your hair around your fingers and groan, ‘I’m not mad! I’m not mad! I don’t want to die!’ And if you have a friend who knows, then the friend grabs her head too and replies, ‘There’s someone inside of me, and she says I must die!’ That way it is stupid, and funny, and serious.

Our hysteric is the revelation that we refuse to be consoled for all this noise, for all this noise, for the attacks on our softnesses, the loss of sensitivity to my scalp with every batch of box-braids. Sometimes we cannot see or hear or breathe because of our fright that this is all our bodies will know. We’re scared by the happy, hollow discipline that lines our brains and stomachs if we manage to stop after one biscuit. We need some kind of answer. We need to know what that biscuit-tin discipline is, where it comes from. We need to know whether it’s a sign that our bones are turning against the rest of us, whether anyone will help us if our bones win out, or whether the people that should help us will say ‘You look wonderful!’ instead.

Why can’t we kill this panic, or do the other thing and make it mute?

My heart bounces on the end of a string whenever I hear the names of Chabella’s Orishas. Those gods who trip us up, then haul us up, then string us up, who understand that it hurts, but also understand that it needs to. They’re deadly friends from stories, their names braided into explanations for the heavy nights edged with uncertain light like dull pearls, the nights when Chabella would wake me up at hourly intervals, pleading with me to sip a little, just a little, of one herbal tincture or another. Nights when I protested with all my soul to be allowed to sleep instead. That is how the Orishas are real to me: Olorun, the father god, greatest of gods, god without a face; Ochun the beautiful, fertile dancer; wise man Orumbila; Yemaya of the ocean; fiery Chango; wily Echun-Elegua; reaper Iku; Ogun, the man of iron.

They make Papi impatient. ‘Those are Yoruba gods,’ he tells Mami. ‘And you are not Yoruba. You are a black Cuban. There is a difference. For an intelligent person, you really surprise me. To us, these gods are historical artefacts.’

Papi rubs his head bemusedly with both hands and tries not to laugh during the midnight Masses and Easter vigils Mami drags us to. He’s not entirely in the wrong; it’s easy to laugh at Mass in a Catholic Church where everyone is so straight-faced and ceremonious, even if they’re just shaking a stick or something. Once when Mami, overcome with tears as a sung Gloria confirmed that Christ has risen, whispered to Papi did he feel something, he squeezed her hand with both of his. He muttered to me, instead of to her, ‘I’m seventy-four, yes, but I’m still lucid.’

Papi’s irritation must begin as soon as he steps inside the house. Where there would usually be a lump of shaped brass, Mami and Papi’s coat stand has a host grinning from its top — a concrete skull, eye sockets filled with dull shells. The shells are eyes for Elegua to look through — Echun-Elegua, the trickster god, who protects us from the works of other, inferior tricksters. He hides behind the door of his ramshackle, crazy-beamed house, watching the people who hurry up and down his crossroads like so many dusty-backed beetles. Some people are speeding past so quickly, so intent on their maps, that they don’t even notice Elegua’s house rocking nonchalantly on the heels of its stilt-feet like Baba Yaga’s hut getting ready to run.

Mami says of Elegua, ‘If you know anything about him, you fear his kindness.’

When Chabella first became a Santero, Elegua chose her for his own — unusual that he should have chosen a woman. But then perhaps my mother’s family is favoured. My great-grandmother, Bisabuela Carmen, was a female babalawo, a Santeria priest.

My middle name is Carmen.

I like to sleep with the washed-out, monochrome, passport-sized photo of Bisabuela Carmen under my pillow — the only other copy of it is slotted into Chabella’s altar. In the pictures, Bisabuela Carmen’s skin doubles in on itself in a river of wrinkles; her mouth and nose are washed away. Her gaze is bright, tough; she looks as if she doesn’t care and not caring is a statement — really, I don’t care!

Abuela Laline told Mami that once, when a child had been struck dead by lightning, Carmen called up the personification of lightning, Iya, for a fight — but Iya wouldn’t come. Chango came, amused, to see what the fuss was about, and so Carmen wrestled Chango, the storm god at the bottom of St Barbara’s stare. When Chabella says that Chango ‘came’, she means that at a Santeria Mass Chango stepped down from heaven. He slid into the space left between song and drumbeat, he pierced veils of spiced smoke, and he possessed the body of a burly, full-grown man. Then he seized my Bisabuela Carmen by the neck. Carmen must have been terrified but, as Mami says, ‘anyhow she tried’. She lost, of course she lost.

Chango broke both of Carmen’s arms and a leg, sparing her her life because she surprised him — her boldness surpassed humanity. But Chango was wary ever afterwards of Carmen’s sharp nails and deep bite. Mami’s apataki tales aren’t only about the gods; they flow and cover her family too, her memories place a mantle around Bisabuela Carmen, whose namesake I am.

Carmen was born in Camaguey six years before slavery was officially abolished in Cuba. My Bisabuela lived her last years in her other son-in-law’s house because she could not sleep under the same roof as my grandfather, Abuelo Damason the Unbeliever. Abuela Laline was unhappy; Consuelo was only her half-sister but seemed always to have been the smiled-upon one — Carmen had forgotten to halve her love. Also, Bisabuela Carmen predicted lunacy for my Abuelo Damason. Abuela Laline hissed, ‘How could you wish lunacy on the father of my children, Mami?’

Carmen replied, ‘I don’t wish it. But if you forget your ancestors you forget yourself. Isn’t that what it is to run mad, to forget yourself?’

Laline reported Carmen’s words back to Mami decades later, in tones of triumph, because Abuelo Damason had remained lucid and sardonic about everything going on around him right up until the day his heart muscle wound tight and flung him into the next life with the force of its uncoiling. But at the time of her prediction, my Bisabuela Carmen was adamant in her decision to live with Consuelo. Bisabuela Carmen ignored Consuelo’s children, Chabella’s boy cousins. She insisted on having Chabella by her on weekends. At mealtimes, Chabella brought food to Bisabuela Carmen’s room, knelt by the old woman’s rocking chair and handfed her. Carmen’s teeth were worn stumps. She sucked at her teeth and she looked out of the window and she said, ‘Jesus bless you,’ between mouthfuls of mashed cassava and ajiaco.

Carmen smelt of sour wine. Chabella took an interest in her abuela because her abuela called her ‘Carmen, too’. Nobody in that house dared to contradict the old woman and remind her of her granddaughter’s real name. Carmen told Chabella stories about the Orishas as if she were telling about a place that she had just left and was impatient to get back to — without breaking the flow of her words she shook and rocked in her chair, she rose and lifted her voice, and clapped her hands.

On Carmen’s mantelpiece, amongst her tall candles, was a statuette of a black Madonna. One afternoon, in the middle of her tale-telling, Carmen lifted her head and stared at the statuette. She strode across the dim room with her African print gown beating the air around her like wings, and she took the black Madonna in her hand and crushed its head against the wall. Dust fell out, and then a white flower. It was not a flower that Chabella could name. Chabella touched the flower and fresh dew rolled off the fringed petals, petals closed like a mouth around a spiky green stamen. There was blood on some of the petals, but it was not the Madonna’s blood, it was Carmen’s — she’d cut her finger on a piece of the porcelain.

Carmen got to know that Chabella couldn’t eat pork chops because she was troubled by the problem of the bone beneath the meat. Carmen took a pork chop and tore the meat off the bone and divided it with her teeth. Chabella watched her abuela struggle with the meat against the suction of her gums and she understood that this was love. Bisabuela Carmen spat the brown mess into Chabella’s bowl and panted, ‘There, no bones. Don’t be afraid of it any more.’

Chabella discovered that meat eaten from the bone was not so bad after all.

Bisabuela Carmen put cracked lips to Chabella’s ear and said, ‘Carmen, we are one. Carmen, you are born again, but you are born without your tongue. Find it. Be who you were before before.’

Mami’s Elegua collar came to her long before she became a Santero or understood what Santeria was. It came to her from Bisabuela Carmen’s hand. In Chabella’s first moment of ownership, the collar was of such weight that when she looked down at the double cup she’d made of her hands, the collar was in the centre of it and her fingertips were filled with the blood that had drained away from her palms.

Chabella wanted to know if this collar was the tongue that Carmen had said was missing from her.

Yes, no, perhaps, Bisabuela Carmen said.

Chabella was twelve when Carmen died. Carmen did not warn Chabella of her intentions, but one morning she made a hand gesture of submission, lowering her palms with a resigned flick, turned over onto her stomach in bed

(for that was how she liked to sleep)

and let her breath leave her.

Because she is venerated and loved to distraction, because Chabella will not let her fade, my Bisabuela is a friend who is locked inside her own face.

The cold has driven Mami back into the house; she is perched woodenly on the arm of a sitting-room chair. From the next room Papi wonders aloud why some women need to act like madwomen and give old men trouble. Mami is directly beneath the benign gaze of Elegua’s double, the paint-swaddled Holy Child of Atocha. Tomás and I call him The Holy Kid. He is happy today. Before him, on a small mahogany wall-bracket, is a shallow dish full of pallid aguardiente, Elegua’s favourite alcoholic offering.

When Mami sees me, she scrambles up from her seat. I pick up her overnight bag — its canvas corners are collapsing; the last time she used it, Tomás was being born. Tomás, the most fastened fifteen-year-old I have ever known, is probably lying on his bed right now, plugged into his Walkman; Fela Kuti’s hoarse euphony, or NWA.

Before we can leave, Papi carefully emerges from the kitchen (hobbling is beneath him, but he is unable to disguise his arthritis) his close-cut grey hair gleaming in the light that ricochets from his glasses. He says, ‘Maja, help me talk to this woman. You’d better help me talk to her. She tried to poison me. .’

Mami puts her hand in mine and tugs me away.

‘I will come back when you have fixed my altar,’ Chabella tells Papi, coldly. ‘And when you’ve put it back where it was.’

Papi groans, ‘Isabella.’ Nobody calls my Mami that except in desperation.

Once Mami and I are safely outside she says, ‘Look at you in those jeans!’ and taps my thigh with forced gaiety. ‘Just look at you. They fit too close, they’ll do some kind of damage. M’hija, you will not be able to have children if you’re not careful.’

Aaron sleeps amongst toppled blankets on the sitting-room floor. Mami and I tiptoe past him. I make her a late dinner and pretend not to hear her tutting loudly over the mess in the kitchen. Chabella eats enormous amounts of food with consummate delicacy; she gives the impression of eating sparely and denying herself, lining shredded pieces of fried plantain around the edge of her bowl of stew, mashing fufu into the stew with her spoon. But she eats it all, slowly and in small mouthfuls. With her other hand, she serenely marks A-level German coursework. Fifty-two, still dewy-skinned, with a serious, slow-burning bonfire stare and a head of coal-black hair, Chabella looks better and stronger than she ever did in her thirties and forties. I sit opposite her, chin in hand, watching her, smiling stupidly because she is so beautiful.

‘Listen to this,’ she says, pausing and looking at me. ‘This boy is absurd. His mother is wasting money paying me to help him pass. He will never pass; his head is a coconut. Here I see that he has sat down and thought to himself “I need to write another paragraph, but I am too stupid to use any more German.” So what does he do? He writes an entire paragraph in English and puts die, der and das where he feels it is appropriate. Sonntag abend, bin ich ins Kino gegangen, and then he puts a dash — not even a connective sentence — and a list of films: Austin Powers, Das Fifth Element, Face/Off, Der Full Monty —’

‘When are you going to make up with Papi?’ I ask.

Mami says, ‘When he puts my altar back.’

Her face is drawn.

‘Chabella,’ I say.

‘I can stand anything but that. There is so much of me that hasn’t survived with all this moving around. Paris. And Hamburg —’

I put a hand to Chabella’s cheek, and she puts her hand over mine.

‘Do you wish you’d stayed there? You can speak the language. .’

‘No, of course not. Germans are racist.’

I laugh. ‘All of them?’

She doesn’t smile. ‘All of them,’ she says, firmly. ‘Every single one.’

‘What about Brigitte?’ I ask.

Mami says, ‘Brigitte doesn’t count as German. Brigitte was trying to get away.’

I ask her why Papi moved her altar, and she raises her hands defensively, as if I’m going to hit her.

‘I asked my babalawo for something for your father’s pain — you know it kills him to walk around with his ankles like wood, but he will never say anything. I knew that he’d refuse the remedy because it’s herbal and because it’s “religious”, and he wanted me to make him coffee, so —’

‘Mami!. .’

‘Maja, I know. I know! And then I think I put in too much, because he vomited. My God, yes, he vomited, violently, so violently, and kept on stopping and starting like that for something like half an hour; I was praying. I thought maybe he’d vomit out the arthritis or something, either that or die. But then he stopped and he was fine. But straightaway he was shouting at me, calling me stupid woman, what had I done, because he said he knew I had done something, and he was saying all kinds of things to me — “You think you’re powerful,” he said, and then he said that I think I am a witch —’

‘Chabella, it’s OK, I know. It’s Papi. You know he’ll calm down.’

She knows.

‘But when will I calm down?’ Chabella asks. She flounces into mine and Aaron’s bedroom and slams the door. Beneath his covers in the sitting room, Aaron convulses at the sound and asks ‘Whaaaa?’ then subsides.

I tidy up Mami’s papers and wait.

I do not wait long. Dressed in her pyjamas now, Chabella opens the door a little way and murmurs, ‘Sing for me please?’

I start to hum, and to speak tunefully to myself, the way I do when I’m climbing into song. I am nervous because it’s been a few days and the most terrifying thing for someone whose vocal cords are strung for both song and speech would be to reach into the dark between one and the other for melody and find nothing. I find it.

It’s the five-year-old Maja that brings jazz into me, blocking my chest so that I have to sing it out. I turn my Cuba over in my mind: a myriad of saltwater noons whirring around the inside of Vedado; a drinking glass stained camel-colour. I remember paper plates fuzzed with fruit-cake crumbs, livid seizures of multicoloured ribbon and being swung, squealing and dizzy, from arm to arm along a line of much older boys at someone’s quinceanera. I struggled away when people cried on me as we were leaving from Jose Marti.

At the height of the Cuban summer, the heat came down from the sky differently from anywhere else I’ve been, came down with a passion for me, for every pore of my uncovered skin. I carefully extract my only complete memory that is longer than my life somehow

(God gave a loaf to every bird

But just a crumb to me

I dare not eat it — though I starve. .)

I remember a tiny, veiled woman appeared beneath the palm trees at the bottom of the garden of a house in Vedado. Our going-away party. It was full moon, white paper moon; the glass lanterns on the tables cast shadowed orange crescents onto the grass. I peered out from beneath the high table, an earthy hinterland where I and another girl with a soft, ruddy face were sitting and eating papaya in the centre of a polished starfish of adult feet. There was a stir as someone else noticed that woman at the end of the garden, the woman who was not one of us. People began asking who she was. And then she began to sing to us out of the falling night. We couldn’t understand her words — she mixed Spanish with another language that no one there knew — but the first notes felled me the way lightning brings down trees without explanation or permission.

The girl who was under the table with me began to suffer a fit — her eyes whirled blind, she slurped and dribbled and winced as she bit her tongue over and over. One of her hands drummed at the side of her head as if trying desperately to dislodge something. I noticed her only distantly. To avoid her slapping me by accident, I moved away, closer to the warm grass outside and the song. I didn’t think to tell anyone about the other girl’s fit. It was only when the woman had finished singing and slipped away under cover of the grown-ups’ applause that the girl’s mother discovered her under the table and carried her away.

My Cuba is a hut with a tabletop for a roof, wall-less and unmoored by strange music and feet and fruit juice. So of course my singing is nothing like Billie’s speech from amidst the pieces of her heart, and it doesn’t imitate Ella’s pure tone; my noise doesn’t sound anywhere near as good as they do because I am not really singing. No one knows that but me. Peace. When I rework my Cuba I allow myself to notice that, just to the right of me, Papi’s tuxedoed knees are shaking. I understand what I didn’t understand then, that he didn’t see a path beyond leaving forever, that the country had been ripped up from under him and handed to an ‘everyone’ far above. And that it was scary; scary to freefall the way that he knew he was about to, with all chains cut, no land behind him and no solid ground before him.

‘Mami, I was thinking of becoming a postulant, you know,’ I say, after a silence. But I say it in a joking way, as if Chabella is supposed to laugh. She does.

‘Well, if Aaron isn’t making you happy, there are other men, you know. . you don’t have to become a nun. . anyway, what’s wrong with Aaron?’

She yawns, and goes to bed.

If I’d begun in the right way I might have been able to tell her why I ran away to St Catherine’s. But I think about the two tiny, jewel-eyed girls who used to walk with me in my sleep, and I feel nauseated. It’s like telling Mami about my son will bring bad luck. If I say anything it’ll bring back the potions and the night vigils.

Miss Lassiter’s telephone is ringing — she has it on a loud setting so that it soaks through the separating floors like a tremulous wave.