CONTENTS
Epigraph
LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT
Four Years Before I Existed
MAGICAL TRAVELS
Flight
Voice
More Love at First Sight
Learning Many Meanings
No Place on the Map
The Dancing Plants of Cuba
More and More Meanings
First Flames
Learning to Listen
Dangerous Air
After the Flames
More and More Homes
My American Dad
Turtle Came to See Me
When I Was a Wild Horse
Mi Mami Cubana
Damaged Air
Kinship
The Geography of Libraries
Other Journeys
Different
Horse Crazy
Earthbound
Mysteries
Runaway Horses
Homecoming
News
What Am I?
More and More Secrets
Spies
Investigated
After the FBI
My Own Questions
Hidden
Refuge
The Visitor
No Wings
Realidad/Reality
WINGED SUMMER
Evening News
The Last-Chance Train
Flowing
Midair
Fluttering
Revolutionary
Wonderstruck
Feeling Almost at Home
Los Barbudos/The Bearded Ones
Tarantulas and Scorpions
Secrets
Two Minds
My Great-Grandmother’s Garden
My Great-Grandmother’s Hair
Storytellers
More and More Stories
El BohÍo/The Hut
Wings
Singers and Dancers
Fiestas/Parties
Doubts
La Guagua/The Bus
Exploration
Traveling to My Mother’s Hometown
Quiet Times
Tropical Windows
La Siesta/The Nap
Lost in Translation
Escape
Guajiros/Farmers
Separation
El Rodeo/The Roundup
Waiting My Turn
The Milking Hour
Ritmo/Rhythm
Never Ending
My Grandmother’s Mare
Breath
Hasta Pronto/Until Soon
STRANGE SKY
The Faraway Gift
Until Next Summer
Out of Reach
Some Things Should Never Change
Why Do We Have to Move?
Strays
My Library Life
April 1961
Junior High
Learning
Learning the Hard Way
Solitude
October 1962
Solitary
More Dangerous Air
Waiting to Die
Waiting to Understand
Waiting to Be Rescued
Wondering
Imagining
Survival
Three Sides to Every Story
Life Goes On
First
Last
Rebellion
Invisible
Small Journeys
Close to Home
Ghostly
Communication
Wilderness
TWO WINGS
A Swirl of Changes
Travel Plans
Reality
My Own View of History
Soaring
Nomadic
Cave Paintings
Imaginary Horses
Secret Languages
Village Life
Unanswerable Questions
Final Flames
My Second Wing
Hope
Cold War Time Line
Author’s Note
About Margarita Engle
For my parents, who took me traveling, and my sister, who shared the adventures, and for the estimated ten million people who are currently stateless as the result of conflicts all over the world
¡Qué fácil es volar, qué fácil es!
Todo consiste en no dejar que el suelo
se acerque a nuestros pies.
Valiente hazaña, ¡el vuelo!, ¡el vuelo!, ¡el vuelo!
How easy it is to fly, how easy!
It’s all done by never allowing the ground
to come close to our feet.
Brave deed, flight, flight, flight!
—Antonio Machado, Poema 53
Love at First Sight
VALENTINE’S DAY, 1947
FOUR YEARS BEFORE I EXISTED
When my parents met, it was love at first sight. They were standing on the terrace of an art school in an elegant palace now known as the Museo Romántico, the Romantic Museum. They were breathing the enchanted air of Trinidad de Cuba, my mother’s hometown. My American father was a visiting artist who had traveled to Trinidad after seeing National Geographic magazine photographs of the colonial plaza, where horsemen still galloped along cobblestone streets, beneath soaring church bell towers, against a backdrop of wild green mountains. My mother was a local art student, ready to fall in love.
Since they could not speak the same language, my parents communicated by passing drawings back and forth, like children in the back of a classroom. Their meetings were chaperoned, their conversations mimed—sketches, signs, and gestures had to substitute for words.
He asked her to marry him. Her hands said no. He asked again. Her eyes refused. He packed his suitcase. She rushed to explain, using fingers and facial expressions, that in her old-fashioned town, the rules of romance had been established centuries earlier, at a time when brides were not supposed to seem eager. A marriage proposal must be repeated three times. Saying yes after only two repetitions was my mother’s first act of courage.
Magical Travels
1951–1959
FLIGHT
The first time my parents
take me soaring through magical sky
to meet my mother’s family in Cuba,
I am so little that I can hardly speak
to my island relatives—
my abuelita, my old grandma,
who still loves to dance,
and her ancient mamá, my great-grandma,
who still loves to garden, working
just as hard as any strong
young man.
Already, this island is beginning to seem
like a fairy-tale kingdom,
where ordinary people
do impossible
things.
VOICE
Everywhere we go in Cuba,
I hear caged songbirds
and wild parrots.
Somehow, the feathery voices
help me make my decision to sing
instead of speak, and even though
I sing in a voice more froglike
than winged,
I do dare to sing,
and that is what matters
on this island
of bravely dancing,
hardworking
old folks.
MORE LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT
I fall in love with the farm
where my abuelita
and her ancient mother
were born.
My dazzled eyes absorb
the lush beauty of a land so wild
and green that the rippling river
on my great-uncle’s farm
shimmers like a hummingbird,
all the
dangerous crocodiles
and gentle manatees
deeply hidden beneath
quiet waters.
Surely there must be mermaids here,
and talking animals,
the pale, humpbacked Zebu cows
and graceful horses
that roam
peaceful hillsides,
moving as mysteriously
as floating clouds
in the stormy
tropical sky.
LEARNING MANY MEANINGS
The memories that I carry away
from those first visits to the island
are restful.
Cool ceramic floor tiles on a hot day,
and an open-air kitchen with roll-up walls
that are only needed during hurricanes—
when the weather is fine, moths and birds
fly in and out of the house, drifting freely
toward fruit trees in the patio, passing
the old women in rocking chairs,
who fan their faces, welcoming
the sea breeze.
Old women love fresh air, but they are also
afraid of aires, a word that can be a whoosh
of refreshing sky-breath, or it can mean
dangerous
spirits.
NO PLACE ON THE MAP
After those first soaring summers,
each time we fly back to our everyday
lives in California, one of my two selves
is left behind: the girl I would be
instead of Dad’s continent.
On maps, Cuba is crocodile-shaped,
but when I look at a flat paper outline,
I cannot see the beautiful farm
on that crocodile’s belly.
I can’t find the palm trees,
or bright coral beaches
where flying fish leap,
gleaming
like rainbows.
Sometimes, I feel
like a rolling wave of the sea,
a wave that can only belong
in between
the two solid shores.
Sometimes, I feel
like a bridge,
or a storm.
THE DANCING PLANTS OF CUBA
In California, all the trees and shrubs
stand still, but on the island, coconut palms
and angel’s trumpet flowers
love to move around,
dancing.
Fronds and petals wave
in wild wind.
Climbing orchids dangle
from high branches.
The delicate leaflets
of sensitive mimosa plants
coil and curl, folding up
like the pages
of a wizard’s book,
each time I touch
their rooted magic.
Maybe I will be a scientist someday,
studying the dancing plants of Cuba.
MORE AND MORE MEANINGS
In one country, I hear the sweet words
of another.
Dulce de leche means sweet of milk.
Guarapo is sugarcane juice.
At home in California, when I speak
boastful English, I can say that I fly,
but when I make the same claim in Spanish,
I have to say: voy por avión.
I go by airplane.
Two countries.
Two families.
Two sets of words.
Am I free to need both,
or will I always have to choose
only one way
of thinking?
FIRST FLAMES
At home in Los Angeles, when my big sister
is struck by polio, I am not yet old enough
to understand ominous words like iron lung,
quarantine, or eternal light—the candle
our abuelita back in Cuba
promises to ignite
in honor of La Virgen
de la Caridad del Cobre
on one condition:
that the Virgin of the Charity of Copper
will agree to spare the life
of Magdalena
Madalyn
Mad.
When Mad survives—and does not even
need a wheelchair—the joyous news travels
by telephone, all the way to the island,
where a grateful flame
begins to glow
forever.
LEARNING TO LISTEN
Dad finds a job teaching art at a college
near the Oregon border, where we will live
in a storybook house, surrounded by
a giant forest.
Mami tells me and Mad
that our new home will be
paradise, but Dad says we’ll miss
his parents—my other grandma
and my grandpa, the ones who live
in Los Angeles, and don’t speak any
Spanish at all, just English and Russian
and Yiddish, because they were born
in the Ukraine, a place they fled long ago,
to escape violence.
It’s true that we miss them
in the northern forest, where the air
turns out to be far too cold for Mami’s
tropical mind.
She dreads the fog,
hates the gloom, and fears the gray,
missing blue.
I love blue sky too, but I also love
these enormous redwood trees,
and the crashing ocean waves
on a cold rocky coast.
I love seeing green moss,
orange butterflies, blue dragonflies.
I love nature.
I also love listening
when my mother reads stories.
Her reading voice glows
with hot Cuban sun, even when
the book is in English, a language
with such strange spelling
that for her, certain sounds will always
be mysterious.
When Mami reads out loud,
all I crave is one more page,
and then another,
and the next . . .
but I’m even more fascinated
when Mami recites poetry out loud
from memory—like the one by José Martí
about growing la rosa blanca—the white rose—
as a gift for enemies
as well as friends.
I don’t know what it means,
so Mami explains
that it’s a simple verse about
forgiveness.
DANGEROUS AIR
One night,
our storybook house
in the towering forest
suddenly bursts
into flames.
Dad’s paintings crumble to ash.
Mami’s photos of her family in Cuba
rise into the cold sky,
stray
wisps
of
dark
smoke
blending
into gray fog.
Later, we learn that the cause of the fire
was wiring, so perfectly hidden
inside visible walls.
AFTER THE FLAMES
We move south again,
to a cabin in the foothills
of the mountains near Los Angeles,
where a sycamore tree pierces
the cabin’s roof, and wild deer
behave like tame pets, sipping
from a leaky faucet.
Each night, Mami rises—silently,
secretly—to switch off all
the electricity,
so that fire
can never
find us
again.
Fear has suddenly entered our lives,
left behind by airy wisps of smoke
from those scorched
storybook walls.
MORE AND MORE HOMES
Sometimes on the weekends,
we drive to Mexico, where Dad
paints bullfights, while I stay
with a woman who has a goat
that carries me on its horns.
Later, we move to a corner
of northeast Los Angeles
known as Skunk Hollow,
because the rugged streets
are not yet paved,
so that small wild animals
roam dusty backyards.
Dad teaches art, and paints.
Mami plants flowers,
sews dresses, and listens
to old Cuban love songs,
while Mad and I roam outdoors,
searching for adventure.
MY AMERICAN DAD
Dad paints a knight on a white horse,
galloping toward a windmill.
Don Quixote, he explains—
not a real knight, just a man who dreams
of battling imaginary giants
like the windmill, with its spinning arms
and towering height.
When Dad gives me my own art supplies,
I clip a big sheet of paper onto a board,
and drape a smock over my clothes,
to keep all the colors of the world
from ruining the dress Mami made.
What should I draw, with my new
rainbow of crayons?
Dad paints my beautiful mother,
and he paints my pretty sister.
Both of them have big, dark eyes,
so why are mine blue-green-gray,
like ocean waves
in changeable
weather?
When Dad paints my portrait,
my eyes look like Don Quixote’s,
neither happy nor completely sad,
just daydreamy,
and wistful.
TURTLE CAME TO SEE ME
The first story I ever write
is a bright crayon picture
of a dancing tree, the branches
tossed by island wind.
I draw myself standing beside the tree,
with a colorful parrot soaring above me,
and a magical turtle clasped in my hand,
and two yellow wings fluttering
on the proud shoulders of my ruffled
Cuban rumba dancer’s
fancy dress.
In my California kindergarten class,
the teacher scolds me: REAL TREES
DON’T LOOK LIKE THAT.
It’s the moment
when I first
begin to learn
that teachers
can be wrong.