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Chapter One, page 9
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the word “all,” stretching
the vowel to make it match the sweeping arch of her
arms over the entire class of thirty. Why is she so individualistic, so bourgeois?
And why does she insist in calling me señorita?
To be polite was to be bourgeois, a sin in Castro’s Cuba.My teacher
wanted to
be called compañera. She wanted my mother to become a “combatant
mother,” a
much-politicized version of the hard-driving PTA mother. I had begged my
mother to join the mothers’ group and to start using the words that
the government
had popularized. But she eschewed any kind of organized effort, and her
thin lips seemed to be built for softer words, like “Miss” and “please” and “kindly.”
“
Comrade” was harsh .“Combatant” was a military word.
Oxen have partners, my mother used to tell me. We are people. I don’t
have a
compañera, and I don’t wage war.
The weeks of school went by. My mother never knew that la señorita
Tania— so young and innocent-looking—was mocking her in front
of the class. I dared
not tell her, for I feared her reaction. If she talked to the teacher, I
was certain, the
mockery would never end.
One Saturday, as my parents were dressing for their weekly outing to the
movies, my mother asked me why I hadn’t yet selected my clothes for
church.
Every Saturday my parents walked my sister and me to our weekly catechism
class, and then they would quickly leave for the movies. By the time the
movie
ended, my sister and I were taking communion. My parents waited for us in
the
back pews, hoping no one noticed they had missed mass. Neither one of them
had
been brought up in a particularly religious home. Yet they insisted that
my sister
and I go to church because, they said, nothing bad could ever happen to us
there.
But I wasn’t so sure anymore that church was good for me, and I told
my
mother just that as she was slipping on her black high-heeled sandals. She
got up
from the bed, looked me in the eye, and asked why.
I just don’t like it, I said. It’s boring, and I have to confess,
and I don’t have any
sins, so I make them up, and I’m tired of that. My eyes welled with
tears.
My parents were stunned at my words.
