I will not write here about why we left. I said in the preface that this is not that kind of book, and I meant it. It is enough to say that by the spring of 1962 my wife and I had decided that our children should grow up somewhere else, that it took many months and a great many papers, and that when the day was finally given to us, it was Thursday, the thirteenth of September.

We lived then in the Víbora, a neighborhood on the south side of Havana, in a small house with a porch and a mango tree that we had bought in 1953, the year before our son was born. My wife, Dolores, had grown up three streets away. I had come to Havana from Cienfuegos for the university in 1943 and had stayed, first as a student, then as a teacher of mathematics in a secondary school not far from our house, where I had taught for thirteen years. Our son Julio was eight that September. Our daughter Carmen was six.

In August I went to Cienfuegos alone, on the train, to see my mother. My father had died four years before, at his desk, of his heart, with his pen in his hand. I was grateful that September, God forgive me, that he did not have to watch me go. My mother would not come with us. She was sixty-one. She said that she had been born in Cienfuegos and would die in Cienfuegos and that in between she did not intend to learn English. We sat in the front room with her sewing machine between us, and she gave me a list of things I must not forget to do for the children, and I wrote them all down so that she could see me do it. When I left, she stood in the doorway and did not wave, because she said waving was for people who would see each other next week.

I did not see her again. She died in 1970. I have made my peace with that, as much as a person can.

We were allowed one suitcase each. There were rules about what could be taken and what could not, and we followed the rules, and I will not list them here. What I want to write about is the choosing.

Dolores packed her suitcase four times. Each night that last week, she would fill it and close it, and then in the morning I would find it open again on the bed and half of it in different piles. She was trying to fit a whole house into a space the size of a bread box, and of course it would not go, and every time she took something out she had to decide again to lose it. In the end she took clothes for herself and for the children for the cool months, which she had been told were real in Miami, a few photographs, her mother's rosary, and the recipe book that her grandmother had begun in 1911, in which three generations of women had written in three different inks. That book is in my granddaughter's kitchen today. It has new recipes in it in a fourth ink, and some of them are in English.

Julio wanted to take his baseball glove. It was too big for his suitcase with anything else in it, so he wore it, on the plane, the whole way, and would not take it off. Carmen took a cloth doll that her grandmother had made from the scraps of one of my mother's dresses, and was otherwise unconcerned. Six is a good age for traveling. You believe what your parents tell you.

My suitcase was the simplest and the hardest. I had, at that time, four hundred and twelve books. I know the number because I counted them, on the last night, after the children were asleep, because I did not know what else to do with my hands. I could take perhaps six. I took my father's gift, La isla misteriosa. I took a book of Spanish poetry Dolores had given me when we were engaged. I took the cigar box of problem cards from my fifth-grade teacher in Cienfuegos. I took my diplomas, rolled in a cardboard tube, and my slide rule in its leather case, which I could not imagine being without. The rest of the space was shirts.

The other four hundred and six books stayed on the shelves. I took one last look at them by the light of the lamp, the way you look at a room full of people you are not going to see again, and then I turned the lamp off.

We got up at half past four. There was no reason to get up so early, but none of us had slept. Dolores made coffee in the old aluminum pot, the cafetera, as she had every morning of our marriage, and we drank it standing in the kitchen, because the chairs suddenly seemed to belong to someone else. Then she washed the pot and the four little cups and dried them and put them back on the shelf, exactly where they went. I did not ask her why. I understood.

We dressed the children in their best clothes, and then in their second-best clothes on top of their best clothes, because what you wore did not count against the suitcase. Carmen looked like a small round bell. She thought it was very funny. Julio put on his glove.

Dolores's mother came at five, walking the three streets in the dark. She was not leaving. She had a sister who was ill and would not go without her, and she had told us, firmly, that she would come later, when things were settled. She did come, eventually, but not for seven years. That morning she kissed the children over and over, and she held Dolores for a long time in the kitchen, and she said nothing to me at all except "Cuídalas," take care of them, meaning her daughter and her granddaughter. Julio, in his glove, was apparently able to take care of himself.

Our neighbor across the street, a kind man who drove a delivery truck, had offered to take us to the airport. At six he was outside with the engine running. The whole street was awake. People stood in their doorways in the gray light, in their housecoats and undershirts, and some of them came across to embrace Dolores, and some only raised a hand. A woman I barely knew pressed a small bag of galleticas, little crackers, into Carmen's hand for the trip.

I locked the front door. I knew by then that the house would no longer be ours, that someone would come with a list and the house would belong to the list. I locked it anyway, out of a lifetime of habit. Then I stood on the porch with the key in my hand and did not know what to do with it. A key to a house that is not yours is a strange object. In the end I put it in my pocket. I have it still. It is in the cigar box with the problem cards.

The mango tree had fruit on it that year. I remember thinking someone else would eat them, and hoping they would be ripe.

The airport was at Rancho Boyeros, south of the city. I will say only a little about the waiting. The people leaving were kept in a waiting room with walls of glass, which everyone called la pecera, the fishbowl, because that is what we were. On the other side of the glass, the families who had come to see us off stood and watched. We could see them and they could see us, and we could not hear each other or touch. For hours. Dolores's mother had come in the truck with us, and she stood on the other side of the glass the whole time, with her hand flat against it, and Dolores stood on our side with her hand against the same place.

Carmen breathed on the glass and drew a heart in it with her finger for her grandmother. Then she drew a cat. Then she ate the galleticas. Julio sat on his suitcase and punched his glove.

Our suitcases were opened and gone through. I do not hold that against the man who did it. He was doing his job, and he was not unkind about it, and he folded my shirts better than I had.

When our flight was called, we walked out across the hot tarmac to the airplane. I had told myself I would not look back. I looked back. I could not see anyone through the glass with the sun on it. I have decided since that this was a mercy.

The flight to Miami takes less than one hour. I know this because I timed it with my watch, and because I calculated it on the way, which I did to keep from thinking. The distance is about two hundred and thirty miles. If the airplane cruises at such and such a speed, allowing so many minutes for climbing and descending, then. I filled the margin of a newspaper with figures. Dolores held my left hand so hard I could not have written with it if I had wanted to. Carmen fell asleep against her mother almost immediately. Julio sat by the window with his glove pressed against it, watching the sea.

And then, under the wing, there was land, very flat and very green, with water shining in pieces all through it, and as we came lower I saw that the roads were laid out in straight lines, every street meeting every other at a right angle, the blocks as square as a chessboard.

I laughed out loud, there in my seat. Dolores asked me what on earth was funny. I could not explain it then. I am explaining it now.

When the door of the airplane opened, the air that came in was hot and wet and smelled of the sea, the same as the air we had left an hour before. It was the same sea. I had to remind myself of that many times in the years that followed. It was the same sea, only seen from the other shore.