“Put on your prettiest smile, mi vida,” beautiful María told her daughter.

In fact, if anything, she couldn’t help but laugh, a half mad look in her eyes. For as they were making their way towards the exit doors, to the curbside where a Catholic Relief Services van waited to take them to a motel, little Teresita, hopping daintily along as if to a picnic, as graceful as María had been in the countryside, there trumpeted through the terminal a piece of Muzak which, to her bemusement, happened to be that song of love, as performed by the Lawrence Welk Orchestra. “Beautiful María of My Soul”-as if Nestor, watching her from afar, couldn’t help but say: “I’m still here, my love. Whether you want me or not, I’m still here.”

Chapter THIRTY-EIGHT

After nearly three decades in this country, María’s daughter, Dr. Teresa García, at thirty-two, had but the scantest memories of Cuba. She could remember something of the views from her mother’s terrace in Vedado, of looking up and seeing a sheer plate of endless blue, which was the sky, of looking down and seeing mists and the wakes of boats and ferries curling on the horizon, the crest of the city’s shoreline receding until it vanished into a plain of light, the roofs of countless buildings glowing in the sunsets like so many jewels. Of rain and mercurially changing, bottom-heavy clouds appearing suddenly. And always some business about the sweet bent-over viejita scrubbing the tile floors of their lobby, with its small, somewhat gaudy Rococo fountain (distinctly, a cherub riding a dolphin, water shooting docilely from its spout), that same nice old lady getting up whenever they came out of the elevator and, noisily complaining about her hips and knees (no doubt arthritic), handing Teresita a few hard candies, the most delicious things in the world, a daily ritual. Something too about waiting along the street for a bus, men tipping their hats or winking at her mother, and street vendors nearly demanding that they taste some fresh-scooped coconut or one of their ices dripping with fruit syrups, and marveling over her shiny black patent leather shoes and how those pavestones kept coming as they made their way under the arcades, and more friendly people popping out of the shadows-people she seemed to love now, simply because they were a part of that pleasant sunlit memory, even if she could not attach a single name to any of them.

Sometimes, however, Teresita would make a connection: a framed picture, cut from an old magazine, of El Caballero de París, a famous Havana street personality, a homeless man and itinerant who slept on park benches, and whom her mother had known, hung on their hallway wall, and just looking at it, the doctor would slip back through time and remember some goatish looking fellow bending forward, his bony hands covered with knobs, to pinch her cheeks and say (most kindly, because she wasn’t that way at all), “¡Qué preciosa, la niña!” Otherwise, a generic sort of cubano face, usually male-could be mulatto, could be negrito, could be one of those lighter-skinned gallegos-swirled about inside her head without any true definition. She had no memories of Ignacio, and if it weren’t for a few photographs that María had shown her, of the three of them out at a kiddies’ amusement park somewhere in Havana, Teresita wouldn’t have had the vaguest notion of what her papito looked like: of medium height, pock faced, heavy browed, not particularly handsome but manly looking, which was, in its way, attractive, that man’s genes were responsible for one of her least favorite pictures-of herself at about the age of three, no doubt taken in Havana, about six months before they’d left.

It was a black-and-white photograph beautiful María kept framed on a table in their living room, and misery passed over Teresa each time she sat down to watch TV with her mamá-whom she truly loved-because she couldn’t miss it. Until Teresita had turned ten, there had been a squatness to the shape of her skull, her liquid eyes were too set apart, her arched eyebrows so pronounced and close together that she seemed perpetually apprehensive about something. Even her hair, jet-black, seemed awfully thin, and while María had gone to the trouble of dolling her up in a lovely satin dress, with a crinoline underskirt, for that photograph, she had bunched Teresita’s hair into a central flourish, like a haystack, and tied it with a bow; and although she had meant well, Teresa resembled, to herself at any rate, one of those rubber shrunken heads or that of a smiling troll such as they sold at a carnival. Needless to say, María herself blamed Ignacio for these imperfections and took to regarding Teresita as she invariably would, with both affection and pity. When she said, “¿Sabes que eres muy linda, no?”-“You know that you’re lovely, don’t you?”-her mother’s eyes always conveyed something else, the unspoken “¡Qué feita!-How plain!”

Better to remember sweeter things: as when beautiful María had finally brought Teresa out to Pinar del Río, so that the guajiro community could see that she had come through with her own little child, and some farmer had taken her around the fields on a horse, her face smothered in its mane, this guajiro, with the bluest eyes and toothless gums, just smiling, smiling. Otherwise, what she could recall of that place came down to hens and roosters and pigs-a few goats as well-in the yards, hounds sniffing everywhere, bats flitting through the trees, butterflies the size of her mother’s sunhat; and in the forest she had seen the cascades that María always talked about in later years-a little piece of paradise and apparently a place of death, for her mother had told her the story, years later, of her namesake’s demise… There wasn’t much else to remember-how could she, when she was only three at the time? Nevertheless, Teresita would swear that she’d seen the mogotes, those limestone camel-mound hills, out in Viñales. “That’s possible,” her mother once told her. “Maybe we did go there.” And perhaps they had gone to the flooded subterranean caves nearby, exploring those caverns in a motorboat…or perhaps that was a dream, just like the idea of Cuba itself.

Nevertheless, in the middle of the day those thoughts comforted her: on the wall of her office in the oncology wing of the Miami Children’s Hospital, near Coral Gables, Teresita kept a professional photograph of Viñales valley, the greenness of the rolling countryside with its majestic royal palms going on forever, and, as well, a charming little painting of a burningly red flamboyán tree, shady and inviting, beside a rustic bohío (to which she sometimes wished she could retreat)-an item she’d bought at a street fair in South Beach. Raised by María, who rarely went to church in those days but who told her countless times, “Creo en Dios”-“I believe in God,” Teresita kept a small bronze crucifix, whose Jesus seemed particularly anguished, on the wall over her desk, just above a picture of María herself, at about the age of twenty, looking glamorous as hell, taken on the stage of some flashy Havana club. Her mother was so enticingly sexy, like a movie starlet, that every so often someone, a male nurse or social worker, peeking in, made a point of whistling and saying things like “¡Chévere!” or “That’s your mamá? Qué guapita!” Why Teresita kept it there even when she, not as elegant, long limbed, voluptuous, or pretty as María, suffered by the comparison, came down to a simple fact: as much as Teresa sometimes found it exasperating, her mother’s beauty had always been a source of pride, though she’d never tell María as much.

They were only keepsakes, but they cheered Teresa up on those mornings when she’d notice a nurse pulling taut the corners of a freshly dressed bed in the terminal ward, yet another of those poor children, none older than twelve, taken by leukemia or osteosarcoma or some other unstoppable disease in the middle of the night. That work was so heartbreaking that Teresita often thought about resigning her position, but each time she got into that frame of mind, it took only one look into the eyes of a stricken child, teary with longing for just a little affection and care, to change her mind. And while Teresita had helped cure many of them, it was the children who didn’t make it, Cubans and non-Cubans alike, from all over south Florida, sweet, uncomplaining, and trusting to the end, for whom she inevitably felt the most.