Veronica had made rice and beans for us. Even though she had my ration card as well as the family’s, I always tried to eat sparingly of food we had not grown ourselves — like that rice that nearly cost Luis his life. But I didn’t have to hold back that day. I had no appetite.
“Don’t peck at your food like a chicken,” Veronica said. “You need to eat more. You are working hard.”
“See?” Rafael said. “I’m not eating like a chicken. I’m eating like Gordo.” Gordo was the fattest of the four pigs.
His mother laughed. “You’re always eating like Gordo.”
Veronica and I carefully propped Luis up to a sitting position so he could eat his food. My whole body flinched watching the pain in his face, but he emptied his plate, gave a crooked smile, and slid back to the mattress. “Like a baby,” he said. “So helpless.”
Is it too hard? Yes, I thought, but it’s not the work. It is too hard to see this suffering and know I had a part in it. But I can’t run from it. I am needed now for more than teaching the ABCs.
When it was time for lessons that night, Luis asked Rafael to fetch his pencil and workbook. “At least I can study while I’m lying here useless,” he said to me.
“Not useless,” I said, suddenly realizing that with concentrated work, he could finish the primer quickly. “And as soon as you have written your letter to Fidel,” I said, “you can help me by teaching the others.”
“Me? A teacher?”
“Oh, yes, Luis. You will be a fine teacher.”
When the following week Esteban came, escorting the doctor, I was able to give him Luis’s final exam, including his letter to Fidel Castro. The signature, Luis Santana, was large and bold.
The doctor said Luis’s back was badly bruised but not fractured. He put a proper cast on Luis’s leg and provided him with crutches so he could hobble around a bit, though he warned Luis against trying to walk any distance, and working in the fields was forbidden.
Esteban echoed the doctor’s instructions. “I know that will be hard for you, Luis,” he said. “You have worked hard all your life.”
“Oh,” said Luis. “I haven’t stopped working.”
“But . . .” both Esteban and the doctor began to sputter in protest.
“Yes,” said Luis. “I’m working hard. I have a new job. I have become a teacher. It keeps me very busy.”
It was still the rainy season, with showers every day, but we did not stop work or lessons because of rain. In Havana, we might have stayed indoors until the shower passed. In the mountains we just kept on working, rain or shine. Of course we tried to bring the laundry in so it wouldn’t get soaked again, but with all that was going on, we didn’t always succeed.
In the country, no one worries about the rainy season. But hurricanes are another matter. And it turned out that 1961 was a bumper year for hurricanes. They began in July and didn’t end until November. Every time we got word that Hurricane Anna or Betsy or Carla or one of their sisters was on the way, I began to be anxious — not only for what a storm like that would do to the crops but also for what would happen to the house itself. Tropical hurricanes had blown away stronger houses th
an ours. Luckily, even though several hurricanes hit Cuba on the west or the east, causing flooding and death, we in the central mountains were largely undamaged by the rains and winds. Our threats did not come from nature.
We had never given up being careful — Luis wouldn’t let us — but when weeks had gone by without a hint of trouble, I decided that I should certainly now be able to go to the river for water or washing. After all, just the day before, Maria and I had gone to our Sunday meeting. We were all back to wearing our uniforms. Our singing and dancing was joyful. No one had to pull me to my feet to join in. What’s more, Esteban had praised Luis’s final exam and read aloud his letter to Castro before the whole squad. My friends all clapped, and someone shouted, “Hooray, Lora!” I tried not to blush. It was Luis’s triumph, not mine.
On the way home, I was feeling particularly happy. When we got to Maria’s house, she asked me to wait. She wanted to show me her poem.
I was so eager to get home that I didn’t even dismount. She ran into the house and came back with a page obviously torn from her diary. “Here,” she said. “Poetry has not healed me, but then,” she sighed, “nothing will. But anyhow . . .” She handed the paper up to me.
“I’ll read it on the way home,” I said. I didn’t want to have to read it with her standing right there waiting for me to comment on it. And it was a good thing I decided to wait. Well, let me just say that Maria was a much better literacy teacher than a poet. I could hardly keep from laughing out loud as I bounced along on Bonita’s back — the lines of verse just about as bumpy as the ride.
I could see the pain in his dark eyes.
He sighed and I knew the meaning:
“My heart is broken into a million tiny pieces,”
And the grief in my eyes replied,
“Yes, yes, my heart, too, is broken,
Broken into a million tiny pieces.”
On and on it went. I didn’t count, but there must have been at least fifty lines echoing this beginning. I mean, just how many times in one poem can you say “My heart is broken into a million tiny pieces”?