all are equal.
PALOMA
Together
Daniel and I visit
a Quaker meeting
to see if it’s true
that Protestants
really are exotic.
We join a circle of people
sitting quietly, praying.
Sometimes they sing
without the music
of an organ
or even a piano
or guitar.
The human voice
sounds so wistful
all by itself.
After the quiet,
eerie service,
we run down to the beach
where the music of waves
sounds so joyful
and wild.
DAVID
When the young people ask me
to tell the tale of my youth,
I try to describe Russia
with her vast forests and wheat fields.
I speak of frozen lakes, ice skates,
long winters, and wars.
Soldiers galloped into my village
with torches, setting fire to the houses,
killing the women, and capturing
the boys, forcing us to kill others,
so I ran away to the seashore,
where I found an old ship
splintered and creaking.
When I asked the captain
if he was sailing to America,
he said yes, and it was true—
here I am, decades later.
I did not arrive in New York
as I had expected
but in this other part
of las Américas.
All of that was long ago,
and the past is the past.
I must think of the future—
next month, Cuba will celebrate
the summer carnival,
a delightful madness
of dancing and music.
JULY 1939
PALOMA
I gather feathers and beads
for decorating masks, capes,
wings, and horns. . . .
I show Daniel how to dance
on stilts.
Together, we craft
crowns, robes, turbans,
and cardboard horses
for make-believe knights.
We practice spinning long poles
topped with lanterns—
our towering castles of candles,
our explosions of light.
Daniel helps me invent
musical instruments,
using things that wash up
on the beach—
cowbells, conch shells,
brake drums, railroad spikes. . . .
We remind ourselves
how to be happy
at least for a few hot
midsummer days.
DAVID
Dancing on stilts has always been
my favorite delight of carnival season.
I feel like I am sitting on God’s shoulders,
looking down at a beautiful world.
Two years ago, carnival was cancelled
when a Cuban official decided
the dances were too African,
too tribal . . .
but outlawing dance in Cuba
is like trying to hide the sun
with one finger.
Joy and truth both have a way
of peeking through any dark curtain.
PALOMA
The names of the carnival teams
are Pretty Bird, Hawk, Toad,
Scorpion, and Serpent.
My father used to dress up
as the heroic magician
who kills scorpions and snakes.
Now, he won’t even watch
the dancing
or listen to music
of any sort.
The part of his soul
that loved melodies and rhythms
vanished when Mamá
danced away.
DANIEL
I never stop dreaming
of my parents.
I see my grandfather
on the Night of Crystal
while I fasten pieces
of a broken mirror
of silky blue cloth,
creating a sky
filled with stars.
I hear my father’s voice
over the clang of farm tools
used by Cubans
for making music—
shovels, hoes, and rakes
accompanied by drums
and dreams. . . .
My grandfather
would have been horrified.
He loved the soft music
of flutes and violins.
DANIEL
I think of my family
so often
that my grandfather seems
to be alive
and my parents’ voices
sound real,
as if shadows
and memories
could play
their own
sad music.
DANIEL
Paloma and I have decided
to sell flowers and fruit from her garden
to raise money for new refugees
who arrive every day.
Each time a ship lands,
many people need food, clothing,
and a place to sleep.
Knowing that our labor has a purpose,
it is almost easy for me to smile
while I work
decorating a fruit cart
with cheerful green palm fronds
and startling red tassels
to ward off the evil eye,
even though I don’t believe
in superstitions.
Sometimes I’m not sure
if I can ever believe again
in all the miracles
from my grandfather’s
stories about angels
and rescues.
DANIEL
Music helps me forget
my loneliness.
Melodies feel like paths
I can follow
to find my way past
all the terror.
I learn how to play
a big conga drum
and a set of two small
bongo drums
and the square rumba drums
made from codfish boxes—
hollow drums played
by the dockworkers
who unload cargo
from the ships
while they sing.
DANIEL
When I realize that Summer Carnival
is a religious festival,
I almost change my mind
about dancing.
My parents would not approve
of celebrating a Catholic saint’s birthday,
but David explains that Carnival
also marks the end of a year’s
long, exhausting sugar harvest,
and seasons, he assures me,
are a miracle even city people
can understand
all over the world.
DANIEL
Once I decide to dance,
I put my heart into the movements
and the sounds. . . .
I study the rhythms
of polished sticks called claves
and rattles of all sorts
and the güiro,
a gourd carved with grooves
that are scraped
with a stiff wire,
and I study la quijada,
the sun-bleached jawbone
of a long-dead mule
with loose teeth that chatter
each time I shake
the musical skull.
I feel like a troubled ghost
from one of my grandfather’s
funny stories.
PALOMA
The rumba
is a wild dance,
the conga
is a festive dance,
and the son
has a more wistful style
the sort of music I think of
as a danceable sorrow.
DANIEL
Today, all the singing vendors
seem to be saying,
“Hurry! hurry! Taste this moment
before the sunlight
slips away.”
“Hurry! hurry! Taste these wonders
before I go on my way,
far away.”
So I taste the sweetness of a guava
that smells like a forest,
and a coconut
with its scent of beach
and the sugarcane juice
called guarapo, a syrup pressed
from towering green shoots
deeply rooted
in muddy
red soil.
DANIEL
Acrobats leap
twirling long machetes.
I think of my mother
chopping onions.
Men dance in capes,
pretending to fight cardboard bulls.
I remember my father
dressed up for his job as a pianist.
Women dance with lanterns
balanced on their heads.
I see our flickering fireplace
on a shivery winter night.
Paloma dances on her stilts.
I think of Black Forest trees
swayed by wind.
Each time I picture my parents
dancing a waltz, or my grandfather
hopping, clowning around,
I feel like two people—
the young man who makes music
out of odds and ends
of wood and bone
and this other person,
the boy lost somewhere
between the torment of memory
and a few fragile shards
of hope.
PALOMA
The streets are decorated
with strands of colored paper
cut into the shapes
of lightbulbs and flags.
I dance on stilts,
smiling down at my feet
far below—
like Alicita in Wonderland
when she was tall.
I feel like many people—
the little girl who had a mother
and the one who hides with doves
and the one who obeys her father
and this once-a-year
young woman
who knows how to dance
in midair.
PALOMA
Carnival only lasts
for a few days and nights,
and then I will need
to dream up new ways
to make money for helping
the sad people
who still come
on more and more ships,
even though that one ship
was sent away
by my father,
El Gordo, “the Fat Man.”
Papá is actually not fat at all.
He is a tall, lean man
who keeps dreaming up ways
to make his fat wallet
even fatter.
PALOMA
Lottery vendors sing about tickets,
so I buy them, based on my dreams—
a Cuban custom.
If I’ve dreamed about tigers,
I buy number fourteen.
Horse dreams are one,
and death is either eight,
if the person who died in the dream
is a commoner,
or sixty-four,
if the dead man in the dream
is a king.
Dreams of a woman
who is kind and gentle
are number twelve,
so I buy a few of those tickets
even though I have not seen Mamá
in my dreams
for a long time,
and now, when I do see her,
we usually meet
in a nightmare.
DANIEL
Today, Paloma and I
traded secrets.
She told me she longs
to be a dancer like her mother.
I admitted that I find it hard to believe
I will ever have the chance
to grow old, playing the piano
like my father.
His life as a musician
made him happy.
I always imagined that I
would be happy too,
but now, each night
I dream that German soldiers find me.
I hear the crash of windows falling
and people screaming
and the boots, so many pounding,
drumming boots. . . .
In the morning, I have to struggle
to convince myself that the Nazis
are not here.
Will I ever feel
truly safe?
DANIEL
I sit on the beach.
I play drums
for the sea.
Waves are my audience.
The shorebirds do not listen.
They are too busy
making a music
all their own,
a dance of wings
and stiltlike legs,
each feather
an instrument played
by wind.
DANIEL
Islands belong to the sea,
not the earth.
All around me
the world is blue.
Above, more blue,
like a hot, melting star.
Music is the only part
of Cuba’s heated air
that feels like something
I can breathe.
DANIEL
I feel like a King Midas of living things
instead of gold.
Everything I touch
turns into something that grows.
This morning, I heard
a trapped insect chirping
inside the wood of a table—
it must have hatched after
the tree was chopped down.
Last night, I tried to read Spanish stories
in a book marked by worm-eaten pages
and parallel grooves left by rats’ teeth.
In the tropics
everything is eaten
by something else.
Trees lift the sidewalk,
vines swallow buildings,
and fence posts sprout leaves,
turning themselves into hedges.
Like King Midas, I am left with nothing
but this unreasonable hope
that, somehow, my strange life
and my lost family
will return
to normal.
DANIEL
Cubans eat pigs and shellfish.
Paloma buys crab fritters
and fried pork rinds
from vendors who sing
about the beauty
of beaches and farms.
She might as well offer me
spiders and mice.
She does not understand
our customs.
She expects us to dance
on the Sabbath,
on Friday night
and all day Saturday.
She keeps teaching me Spanish,
but what use do I have
for this island’s singsong language?
I should be learning English.
Even if my parents
are no longer alive,
I must plan on somehow
reaching New York
in honor
of their memory,
their dream.
DAVID
I was taught that there are four
&n
bsp; kinds of people in the world—
wise, wicked, simple,
and those who do not yet know
how to ask questions.
I was taught that questions
are just as important as answers.
I was a child when I learned these things.
Now I am old, but I still know
that life’s questions
outnumber life’s answers.
Carnival joy is one of my questions—
where does it come from,
this season of musical contentment,
even though I have lived so long
and lost so much?
DECEMBER 1941
DAVID
Perhaps I have taught
the art of wondering