Dolores's cousin met us at the airport. She had come over in 1960 with her husband, and they rented two rooms at the back of a wooden house off Southwest Eighth Street, which the Cubans were already beginning to call la Calle Ocho. They gave us one of the two rooms. There were six of us and two beds and one bathroom shared with the landlady, a widow from Ohio who kept parakeets and was more patient with us than we had any right to expect. The children slept crosswise on one bed, like sardines, and thought it was a party.

On the second morning, the cousin's husband took me downtown on the bus to El Refugio.

Today everyone calls it the Freedom Tower. It is a tall cream-colored building on Biscayne Boulevard with a tower on top copied from the Giralda, the great bell tower of the cathedral in Seville. It was built for a newspaper, and it was finished in 1925, the year I was born, which I took that morning as a good sign, because a man in my situation takes his good signs where he finds them. In 1962 the government had made it the center for Cuban refugees, and we called it simply El Refugio. The line went out the door and down the block. Men in suits stood in it, and women in their good dresses with their hair done, because we had all been raised to dress properly for an office, and we stood there in the Miami sun in our best clothes, sweating through them.

I will say plainly that I do not know what we would have done without that place. They took our names and our histories and helped us with the papers, which were endless. They gave us, once a month, surplus food: powdered milk, canned meat, a large block of yellow cheese, flour and such things. Some people were ashamed to carry those boxes home on the bus. I was, a little, the first time. Then I watched my children eat, and I was not ashamed anymore.

There was also an office that helped people find work. The young woman at the desk, an American with a careful schoolroom Spanish, read my card, which said Profesor de matemáticas, and explained with great sympathy that I could not teach in Florida without a Florida certificate, and that for the certificate I would need English, and courses, and time. In the meantime, she said, a hotel on Miami Beach needed a dishwasher. She said it very gently, as if she expected me to be insulted.

I was not insulted. I was relieved. I asked her what time I should be there.

The hotel was a large one on Collins Avenue. I will not give its name. It has changed owners three times since, and the people I knew there are gone. I took the bus across the causeway at half past five every morning with a paper bag that held two sandwiches Dolores had made, one for breakfast and one for lunch, and I came back across the causeway at four, smelling of soap and grease, and fell asleep on the bus every afternoon with my head against the window.

A hotel kitchen at breakfast is a kind of war. The waiters come through the swinging doors with trays stacked high, and they shout, and the cooks shout, and the dishwashing machine roars and steams like a locomotive, and you stand at the end of it in a rubber apron and try to keep up. You do not keep up. You only fall behind more slowly. By nine o'clock my hands were red to the wrist, and by the end of the first week the skin of my fingertips had gone soft and wrinkled, like a grandmother's, and stayed that way for a year.

The kitchen manager was a big quiet man from Georgia named William Norcross, who had cooked in the Navy during the war and ran his kitchen the same way. For the first month we communicated by pointing. One afternoon I was waiting to punch my card, and he was at his desk adding the order for the next week, pounds of butter and cases of eggs, on an adding machine that kept jamming. He was cursing the machine. I looked over his shoulder, and I could not help myself. I read down the column and told him the total, in Spanish numbers, and then, slowly, in English numbers. He checked it on the machine when it finally worked. Then he checked it again. Then he looked at me for a long time and said, "What did you do back home?"

I understood that much. I said, "Professor. Mathematics."

After that he called me Professor. Everyone in the kitchen did. And on Thursday afternoons, for the rest of my time there, I stayed fifteen minutes after my shift and added the order for him, and he paid me for an extra half hour, which was dishonest of him, and I was grateful.

The man at the pot sink beside mine was named Antonio Carrillo. He was fifty-three and had been a lawyer in Havana for twenty-five years, with an office on Obispo Street and a brass plate on the door. Now he scrubbed the great pots that the soup and the oatmeal were made in. He did it with total seriousness. He told me once that a man's dignity is not in his work but in how he does it, and I believe he was the best scrubber of pots on Collins Avenue. While we worked, to keep his mind sharp, he recited articles of the Civil Code to me, in order, from memory. In exchange I explained to him the proofs of geometry. He said that law and mathematics were cousins, because both were attempts to make the world obey rules it had never agreed to. I have thought about that remark for thirty-seven years.

I learned English that year from the Miami Herald, read every night with a dictionary, from the radio, and from the hotel menus, which lay around the kitchen. I learned "au gratin" and "hollandaise" well before I could ask for directions, and for some time I had the vocabulary of a headwaiter and the grammar of a child.

In October came the days when the whole world held its breath. Everyone who lived through them remembers, and I have nothing to add. We sat by the radio in our one room, with our families on the other side of the water, and Dolores said the rosary. After that month the flights stopped. That is all I will say.

The children, meanwhile, did what children do, which is to say they surpassed us. In the public school a few blocks away, where the teachers spoke no Spanish, Carmen cried every afternoon for the first weeks, and Julio said nothing at all, which was worse. By Christmas they were chattering in English on the way home and stopping when they reached the door, out of courtesy to their parents. By spring Carmen was correcting my pronunciation. She still does. And in March, Julio joined a baseball team at the park, and wore the glove he had worn on the airplane, and played second base, and was not very good, and was the happiest boy in Florida.

In January, at Mass, the priest of our parish made an announcement. He was an American, Father Walter Selzer, a thin man with big ears who had learned his Spanish in the Dominican Republic and spoke it with an accent that made the old ladies smile. He said that the Cuban children in the parish school and in the public schools were falling behind in arithmetic, not because they were slow but because they could not understand the teacher. He asked whether there were any teachers in the congregation who would give a few hours on Saturday mornings in the parish hall.

Dolores pinched my arm so hard that I had a mark there for a week.

So it was that on Saturday, the second of February, 1963, at nine o'clock in the morning, I stood in front of a classroom again. It was not much of a classroom. It was a parish hall with a linoleum floor and folding chairs and a blackboard on an easel borrowed from the parish school, with a box of chalk that Father Selzer had bought with his own money. There were twenty-three children, from nine years old to fourteen, in their Saturday clothes, and some of their mothers sitting along the back wall, watching me with the same expression the woman at El Refugio had worn.

I had been planning the lesson for two weeks. I had it written out on cards, like the cards of my old teacher in Cienfuegos. And when I picked up the chalk, my hand shook so much that I could not write.

I put the chalk down and took a breath. Then I picked it up again and drew a long line on the blackboard and divided it into four equal parts, and I asked, in Spanish, what one of the parts was called. A small girl in the front row said "un cuarto." I said, good, and now in English? And a boy at the back, a tall boy who had not wanted to be there, said "one fourth," and then, with great scorn for the adults of the world, "a quarter, like the money." And everybody laughed, including me, and the chalk stopped shaking.

We did fractions for two hours. They taught me "numerator," which I knew, and "denominator," which I could not pronounce to their satisfaction. I taught them how to find a common denominator, which none of them could do at nine o'clock and all of them could do by eleven. When it was over, a mother at the back came up and shook my hand without saying anything, the way my father had at the railroad station.

Then I took the bus across the causeway to the hotel, because Saturday was a working day, and put on my rubber apron, and washed the dishes from the lunch. Antonio Carrillo looked over from the pot sink and asked me how it had gone.

I found that I could not answer him. I only nodded. He nodded back, and went on scrubbing, and after a while he began reciting the Civil Code again, more quietly than usual, which I understood to be a kindness.

I taught on those Saturday mornings for six years, until I had my certificate and a classroom of my own. Of those first twenty-three children I know what became of eleven. Among them are two engineers, a pharmacist, an accountant, a nurse, and a teacher of mathematics, who wrote me last year to say that she has her students find a common denominator by drawing a long line on the board and dividing it into four.

The next chapter is about the taxi. It is less dignified, but there are more jokes in it.