Jubana! by Gigi Anders Page B

the stain / Of tears, the aftermark / Of almost too much love / The sweet of bitter bark / And burning clove.”
    Oh, if only I could live on air, like a leaf…
    There were bright spots. There was a trip to the National Zoo on a wonderfully moody autumn day, my favorite time of year: Mami’s deep gray cropped angora sweater (worn with a sleek pair of black ski-type slacks, black leather gloves, black ballet flats, diamond stud earrings, and a silver charm bracelet) matched the color of the sky. Her hair and painted lips were remarkably red. Papi bought me a paper bag of unshelled peanuts, much to Mami’s gastronomic dismay, and we ate some and fed the rest to the elephants, whose skin matched Mami’s sweater and the Washington, D.C., sky. We took pictures. Mami looked like a model.
    Another time Mami rented a stroller and rolled me through the ample, quiet corridors of the National Gallery of Art. It was cool and dim, and Mami showed me the paintings she favored; most were of ballerinas. “Míra,” she told me. Look. There was Auguste Renoir’s Dancer and Edgar Degas’s beautiful ballerinas. I loved to see those graceful figures, especially from the back, where green, yellow, blue, or pink satin sashes were tied in bows around the waists of their white tutus. We passed some Monet landscapes. Mami liked them, too. Her tastes, such as they were, were definitely eclectic. At the gift shop, she bought two small Monet prints and a Degas called Dance Class. Mami had the three framed and hung the Monets in the bathroom and the Degas in her bedroom. She said that one reminded her of her ballet school in Havana.
    More than a decade later, when I was in college in Paris studying literature, poetry, and art history, I saw similar paintings at the Louvre. The Degas dancers resonated more than even Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, probably because M.L. is encased in a bulletproof box and is always surrounded by hundreds of tourist gawkers. At five-two, I could barely get a glimpse of anything but her mysterious, long, eyebrow-less almond eyes. Besides, Degas’s ballerinas had always been Mami’s picks; how could anything else dare to compete?
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    Even when life was no longer about fighting off the threat of starvation or eviction, my parents usually left me to my own devices. Maybe I’d gotten too good at playing the independent, happy-go-lucky, assimilated child. Maybe my interests (books, magazines) and strengths (writing) were too isolating and foreign to them. Maybe I was just really good at entertaining myself. Maybe the ’rents, as I refer to them with my friends, didn’t get me because I was so different from them. Maybe my presence made them miss Cecilia and Cuba too much. Maybe I had the wrong anatomy. Maybe Papi only had enough tunnel vision energy to love one girl. Maybe Mami was competing with me and would never let me win.At any rate, I thought I could overcome and rise above any and all of those possibilities, and outwardly mask my blue inner feelings, by embracing the Gypsy attitude: “Let me entertain you, let me make you smile, let me do a few tricks, some old and then some new tricks, I’m very versatile.”
    In Mami’s office I found a yellow legal pad and government-issue pens. Since I could never go to cahm, where they have cool crafts like papier-mâché, I settled for sketching flowers resembling the ones I used to pick for Mami in El Jardín Botánico and El Parque Central. Living where we did in D.C., there wasn’t much nature. Behind our crummy apartment building, though, there was a shallow running creek. My Tía Elisa, Tío Julio’s wife, used to take me back there to wade when she and Tío Julio came to visit us from Miami. Tía Elisa was a Big Mama who loved to eat EVERYTHING, and I could easily coax her into taking me to the Safeway supermarket where she’d buy me all the exotic delicacies that Mami wouldn’t: