Havana Lunar Read Free Page B

Mamá hug me like you would entreat a sick person to eat: “Un abrazo, señora, por favor …”
    After school I had gone straight up to Aurora’s attic to play with dominoes until that twilight hour when the peanut vendor breezed by. As soon as we heard the call come up from Calle 23—“Cacerita no te acuestes a dormir …” and by cacerita I knew he meant Aurorita; she was his little housekeep—Aurora scooped me up, shifted me to her hip, threw open the French doors, and lowered the line with a peso in the basket. She reeled the basket back in and Machado, my pet dog, stood on his hind legs. Aurora swatted him. “¡Mendigo!” She stuffed the hot nuts in the front pocket of my overalls.
    â€œAurita,” I said, “what’s the man singing about that’s so hot and tasty?”
    â€œAlgo que tu tienes en los pantolones.”
    â€œÂ¿Y qué es eso?”
    Yanking the paper cone from my pocket, Aurora cried, “¡Maní!”
    Aurora unraveled the cone and poured me two handfuls. It was hot. It was good. I knew what the man meant. You really didn’t want to go to bed without a little something hot in your belly. That afternoon Mamá seemed to be feeling okay, so Aurora took the evening off. Mamá baked us a cake and we had the world all to ourselves.
    After Mamá died, I developed a small hemorrhage beneath my right eye. Many photos and X-rays were taken. Dermatologists and neurosurgeons first diagnosed that, if the hematoma were to burst, I could suffer a massive and likely lethal stroke. I carried a time bomb in my head. Should they schedule surgery? Would it do any good, or would it just trigger the detonator? Although I was allowed to leave the hospital in a few days, I had to return daily for medical observation. After two months the doctors decided that the thrombus was benign. Although the only thing the lab-coats did was figure out to leave me alone, my case was considered a milestone for Socialist medicine, a great prognostic step. The chief pediatrician was flown to Gdansk and Stockholm and Mexico City for conference presentations, complete with slide projections. An intern pointed out that the macula was shaped a little like Havana on the map. The custodians of Communist health care came up with a term for my infarctus incubatus , indexed in medical textbooks throughout Cuba, China, East Germany, Russia, and Angola: Havana Lunar .
    My grandmother Mamamá moved into the house, but she grieved so deeply for Mamá that I was left in Aurora’s care. In this way things were not much different from before. I did not play with other children. I would look in the mirror, wondering why the mark shows up on one side of my nose in photos, the other in the glass. I worried that I didn’t really know which side to hide from strangers. What most disturbed me about someone seeing it for the first time was not the steady stare, the curled lip, or the involuntary “¡Qué raro!” or “¡Qué asco!” It was the follow-up among those brazen enough to ask aloud: “How did you get that?”
    Aurora would take me to Cemeterio Colón, the necropolis, to visit Mamá. We passed the monument to the firemen, dozens of them who perished in a great conflagration at the turn of the century. On each corner of the tomb, a stone mourner bowed her head. I tried to peer up under the shrouds at their eyes, but these statues were never given sight. We passed the tomb of La Milagrosa, and Aurora told me the story of this famous resident of the necropolis. The woman died delivering a stillborn child. They were buried together, the child’s corpse laid to rest between the mother’s legs as was the custom in the early part of the century. Years later, when the widower requested that his late wife be moved, the remains were exhumed and they found the infant skeleton cradled in the mother’s arms. Pilgrims visit her