Failed Secrets

There is no one to whom I can tell this story, Mami. It’s sealed tight, cauterized with thick keloid skin, smooth and impenetrable. So, I tell it, filling in all the blanks, going back to the brief, blessed time when love, trust and safety is the kind embrace of a doting father. But he dies when you are seven, your padre, your saint. And she—beautiful, distracted, who enjoys the company of men more than motherhood—offers no comfort. She remarries quickly.

The potent male likes you, little stick-skinny girl with expressive eyes and vulnerable lips. Was it one of her lovers or a stepfather who violated your core, shattering your belief in love? Did she accuse you of baiting him?

You get skinnier and there’s a campaign initiated to fatten you up; a different type of bean every day, meat run through the grinder, thinner than the air surrounding you. At one point, you are forced to drink fresh calf’s blood to fortify your own, your deep-socketed eyes and jutting cheekbones incriminates them. Then your baby sister’s born colicky, just in time. You can go off to school, and mother doesn’t care that your socks are falling around your ankles and your shoes aren’t brightly polished. She’s just glad you are out of the house so she can put that child down and sleep (you carry the baby every chance you get, soothing her with old songs you remember from Papi; it doesn’t help though it calms you).

You excel in school, higher scores every year; you even win a prize for recitation of a patriot’s nationalist lyric. Some popular girls adopt you, their skinny but almost pretty friend. Many of them plan purposeful lives, university studies. It’s 1943; in Cuba women now can be professionals. You dream of being a doctor; it makes sense. Your grandfather studied medicine (until he was disowned by his family for slumming with la puta negra—dark hussy); your father tried to become a pharmacist. You decide to ask for your patrimony; Grandfather left money, properties.

It goes something like this. One day after school, you approach your mother, who is sitting on the wide front porch in the afternoon breeze.

I want to have my share. I want to go to university, to study medicine.

Did she laugh? Did she pause before she crushed your dream to bits under her stacked heel? Did she turn to her lover and comment on the wastefulness of educating girls?

Was this betrayal worse than the first?

You decide to get away; it takes some doing—girls don’t leave the house unless they’re married. But by then another baby sister and your oldest sister’s children crowd the house. Nineteen, unmarried, you go to live with the eccentric maiden aunt. After all, everyone expects you to follow suit. You work in your father’s family’s pharmacy, mixing tonics, giving injections. You are in heaven all day, until evening when you return to a bare room, bed bug-ridden mattress, peephole reopened every night by the neighbor pervert. In a nightmare, you see yourself tubercular, like your aunt coughing in the next room, living in squalor even while there is means to avoid it, you almost understand the pride and think you can learn to embrace it but in the morning you awake to blood-covered sheets and oozing scabs all over.

You decide to get away again, this time to leave completely. The first leaving was easy, just across the city and without scandal. This time you take a plane to live with a school chum who’s gone to el norte. She lives in a boarding house run by a Spanish matron who has seven sons who need wives, willing to marry them off to Cuban sluts since they are neither handsome nor skilled. You are 22, undereducated but not ignorant, single, speak no English, and have never been anywhere outside of Havana but your passport is a door you intend to step through. The plane lands in Miami; you board a bus to New Jersey and hope Elsa will be there when you arrive. She is and you are finally safe in this new life.

This fight might be difficult at times, your tongue thickens at every attempt in the new brutish language, but it is easier than being back on the island. You get by by taking shitty jobs in factories surrounded by unintelligible Polish and Italian ladies sewing dainties for years, but every night you can go to the movies and listen over and over to the dialogue, deciphering the romance of America. And every night you can go to your own apartment, not a home but your own room, sleep in a clean bed with clean sheets. No peeping toms and no immediate danger.

You order your own life without regard to what others think—those others are left far behind, across the ocean. No one sees what you do or don’t do. If you take English classes at night, go to church everyday, no one will ridicule you. You are expert at economizing, save all your pennies but things are difficult in Cuba and you start to send money, generously acknowledged by your sisters. You feel guilty, not knowing exactly why, but you learn to accept your independence. You learn to be proud of your strength built on such a scrawny frame that shakes sometimes, knocking your no-longer skinny knees together.

You didn’t have to tell me your secrets, you see. They betrayed themselves over the years anyway. But tell me, Mami, what did I miss?

-Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés was born in New Jersey to Cuban parents, and educated in Miami and in New York. These facts contribute in large part to the themes she treats as well as the language she uses. She enjoys writing fiction, creative non-fiction and poetry. Marielitos, Balseros and Other Exiles, a collection of short stories, will be published by Ig Publishers in May 2009.