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The Island Within
- University of Pittsburgh Press
- Chapter
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16 The Island Within for Ruth Behar I’m still thinking about your porch light like a full moon casting a foggy halo in the frigid air last night, the bare oaks branching into the sky like nerve endings inches away from the frozen stars, the pink gables of your Victorian home protesting yet another winter for you captive in Ann Arbor as you practice mambo by the fireplace. I’m following your red-velvet shoes to conga beats and bongo taps taking your body, but not your life, from the snow mantling your windows outside, 1,600 miles away from Cuba. I’m tasting the cafecito you made, the slice of homemade flan floating in burnt sugar like the stories you told me you can’t finish writing, no matter how many times you travel through time back to Havana to steal every memory ever stolen from you. You’re a thief anyone would forgive, wanting only to imagine faces for names chiseled on the graves of your family at Guanabacoa, walk on Calle Aguacate and pretend to meet the grandfather you never met at his lace shop for lunch, or pray the Kaddish like your mother at the synagogue in El Vedado, stand 17 on the steps there like you once did in a photo you can’t remember taking. I confess I pitied you, still trying to reach that unreachable island within the island you still call home. I thought I was done with Cuba, tired of filling in the blanks, but now I’m not sure. Maybe if I return just once more, walk the sugarcane fields my father once cut, drive down the road where my mother once peddled guavas to pay for textbooks, sit on the porch of my grandmother’s house, imagine her still in the kitchen making arroz-con-leche— maybe then I’ll have an answer for you last night when you asked me: Would you move to Cuba? Would you die there? ...