Domingo, 26 de septiembre de 1999

The hospice people came Friday for the bed. The Florida room is just a room again, with four little dents in the carpet where the wheels were. Susan vacuumed around them. Neither of us has said anything about it.

Miguel drove back to Orlando this morning. Cristina stays until Tuesday. Last night she asked if she could borrow the shoeboxes, the letters, and read them herself with a dictionary, slowly. She says she is signing up for Spanish next semester, a real class, "not kitchen." I said yes before she finished asking.

I went to eight o'clock Mass alone and then, because I did not want to go home yet, to the domino park. It was early. Only Armando was there, setting up. He did not say one word about my mother. He pushed half the tiles across the table to me, and we played two-handed until the others came.

Many of you have written this week. A woman in New Jersey who came on a Pedro Pan flight in 1962 and was sent to Colorado. A man in Ohio who lost his mother in the spring. A lady in Texas who is praying a rosary for Caridad. Gracias. I read every one. I will answer when I can.

I don't know yet what this page is for, now. I will probably keep writing anyway.

Jueves, 23 de septiembre de 1999

The velorio was Tuesday night at the funeral home on Calle Ocho. In Cuba a velorio went all night, and in Miami the old people still try. There was coffee in the back room from six o'clock on. The ladies from her parish said the rosary at eight, and again at ten, in case anyone missed it the first time. Armando came in his jacket and tie. Chucho cried more than I did.

Around eleven Cristina whispered, "Dad, I don't know half these people." I told her, neither do I, but they all knew her, and that is how it works. You come to the velorio. You bring your stories. You drink the coffee.

The funeral Mass was Wednesday morning. Cristina did the second reading in Spanish. Susan says she practiced it forty times in the guest room. She mispronounced one word and not one person in that church cared. Miguel was a pallbearer with Pepe's grandsons. We buried Mami beside Papi, under the same stone, which has had her name and her birth year on it, waiting, since 1993.

Afterward somebody's aunt brought two trays of pastelitos de guayaba, and there were so many people in the kitchen that I went out and stood in the yard under the mango tree for a while, where it was quiet.

Lunes, 20 de septiembre de 1999

Se nos fue. She left us.

My mother died yesterday morning, Sunday, a little after seven, at home in the Florida room, with the window open. Susan had one hand and I had the other. Cristina was asleep in the armchair with her shoes still on. It was very quiet. Her breathing slowed over about an hour, and then it was finished, the way someone sets down a cup.

All my life I thought that when this came I would say something. I didn't say anything. I held on.

Gladys came and did what they do, gently, and made the calls. Pepe and his wife were at the door before noon. I don't know how he heard so fast. The Cuban telegraph.

This morning I got up at six and made the cafecito the way she taught me, the first drops beaten with the sugar into espumita, and I had poured out two cups before I noticed what I had done. I drank them both.

Que en paz descanse, Mami.

Viernes, 17 de septiembre de 1999

Gladys says it is days now, not weeks. Father Tomás came from the parish this afternoon and gave Mami the anointing. She held my hand through all of it, and at the end she said "Amén" louder than the priest. The kids are driving down tomorrow.

No more words tonight.

Sábado, 11 de septiembre de 1999

Mami asked tonight about the Schroeders. Mrs. Schroeder sent a card when she heard, all the way from Iowa, with a Bible verse and a pressed maple leaf inside. She is eighty-five.

I lived with them on their dairy farm outside Dubuque from the fall of 1961 to the summer of 1966. I had never seen snow. I had never seen a cow up close, or a boy with red hair, and in that house there were four of them. They taught me English, mostly the wrong words first. Mrs. Schroeder made pot roast every Sunday, and every Sunday after dinner I sat at her kitchen table and wrote to my mother.

Mami wrote back every week, when the mail allowed it. I kept all of her letters, two shoeboxes, on onionskin paper so thin you can read them from the back. Tonight I read some of them to her. She laughed at herself. So many instructions! Wear your undershirt. Say your prayers. Obey la señora Schroeder. Do not forget your Spanish.

That last one is in almost every letter. No te olvides del español. I didn't, Mami. I only forgot to give it away.

Sábado, 4 de septiembre de 1999

Susan made me go out. "Two hours," she said. "Go sit with men who are older than you."

So I went to the domino park on Calle Ocho, where my father played almost every afternoon for twenty years. Three of his old friends are still there: Pepe, Chucho, and Armando, who is ninety and still wears a tie. They have called me "el muchacho" since I was seventeen. I am fifty. I will be el muchacho until the last of them is gone.

They asked about Caridad and I told them. Armando said nothing for a while. Then he shuffled the tiles, the double-nine set with the white gone yellow, his big hands flat on the table the way Papi used to do it. That clattering is the sound of every Saturday of my life after 1966.

Pepe and I were partners. We lost badly. Armando took the last hand with a capicú, a tile that plays on either end, and slapped it down so hard the tourists with the cameras jumped. Then he looked at me and said, "Tu padre jugaba mejor." Your father played better.

He did. I came home and told Mami that Armando still wears a tie, and she said, "Of course he does. He's from Matanzas."

Domingo, 29 de agosto de 1999

The kids came down this weekend, Miguel from Orlando and Cristina home from college on the Greyhound, which she says was "an experience." They are good kids. Their Spanish is what we call español de cocina, kitchen Spanish. They can ask for more rice and they know when they are being scolded, and that is about all. That is my fault. When they were small I was so busy being American for them that I forgot to be Cuban for them too. Susan tried harder than I did, and Susan is from Ohio.

Cristina told me she practiced in the car the whole way down. She went in and took her abuela's hand and said, very carefully, "Abuela, te quiero mucho. Perdóname por mi español." Grandmother, I love you very much; forgive my Spanish. My mother cried, then corrected her pronunciation, then cried again.

Later, with the house asleep, Mami told me about la pecera, the fishbowl. That was the glass room at the airport in Havana where the ones leaving had to wait. The families stood on the other side of the glass. "Yo te veía por el cristal," she said. I could see you through the glass. You didn't turn around. I know you were being brave. I wanted you to turn around.

I don't remember the glass. I remember my new shoes, which were too tight, and that I did not want to cry in front of the other boys.

Jueves, 19 de agosto de 1999

She talks more at night. The medicine makes her soft around the edges, and the stories come out of her like water from a tap that was stuck for years.

Tonight it was El Encanto, the department store on Galiano, where her sister Nena worked the glove counter. You did not go to El Encanto in house slippers, mi'jo. You went in a hat and gloves, and you bought one thing and looked at a hundred. Then she said, "Se quemó," it burned, in the same flat voice she uses to say my father is dead. El Encanto burned in April of 1961, a few weeks after I left. I had forgotten that. She had not.

Then the Malecón on Sunday evenings, when she and Papi were courting, with Tía Nena walking three steps behind as chaperone and eating peanuts out of a paper cone, a cucurucho de maní. Papi bought the peanuts to keep her busy. "Your father was a very practical man," Mami said, and laughed until she had to stop and rest.

I write it all on a legal pad by the bed. Tonight I realized I have never known Tía Nena's real name. Nena is only what you call a girl. I will ask tomorrow.

Domingo, 8 de agosto de 1999

My mother came home from the hospital on Friday. Saturday a hospice nurse named Gladys came to the house, a woman from Hialeah with a gold cross and a big canvas bag, and sat at our kitchen table and explained, very kindly, that nobody was going to poke at my mother anymore. No more tests. From now on the goal is comfort.

Mami listened to all of it in English, which she understands perfectly and pretends not to. When Gladys left she said to me in Spanish, "So they sent me home to die. Good. The food in that place was a crime."

She is eighty-two. Her heart is worn out, and the doctors say there is nothing left to try that would not be worse than the thing it fixed. Susan and I put the hospital bed in the Florida room, where she can see the mango tree, and Susan hung the old picture of la Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre on the wall above her. My mother is named for her. It seemed right.

My daughter talked me into this free home page last Christmas so I could put up "tax tips." I never wrote one tax tip. I have kept other people's books for twenty-six years. Tonight I find I need somewhere to keep my own.