Drowning Che
The distance which separates Lourdes and her mother is one which stretches much farther than the geography between Cuba and NYC. It is also an ideological distance, though one suspects that Lourdes anti-communist sentiments have more to do with biology than politics. Nevertheless, the imagery which most powerfully situates the divide is the Lourdes melodramatic overreaction to book of pro-communist essays featuring a portrait of Che Guevara on the cover:
“Lourdes snatched the volume from under the Christmas tree, took it to the bathroom, filled the tub with scalding water, and dropped it in. Che Guevara's face blanched and swelled like the dead girl Lourdes had seen wash up once on the beach at Santa Teresa del Mar with a note pinned to her breast…Lourdes fished Pilar's book out of the tub with barbecue tongs and placed it on the porcelain platter she reserved for her roasted pork legs. Then she fastened a note to the cover with a safety pin. `Why don't you move to Russia if you think it's so great!’ And she signed her name in full.”
Dreaming Spanish
What is the difference between dreaming in Cuban and dreaming in Spanish? It is not clear, but at least the effect of dreaming in Spanish situated concisely. One need not read the whole book to discover its meaning, but one well-fashioned bit of imagery:
“I’ve started dreaming in Spanish, which has never happened before. I wake up feeling different, like something inside me is changing, something chemical and irreversible. There’s a magic here working its way through my veins. There’s something about the vegetation, too, that I respond to instinctively - the stunning bougainvillea, the flamboyants and jacarandas, the orchids growing from the trunks of the mysterious ceiba trees. And I love Havana, its noise and decay and painted ladyness.”
The Smell of Rape
A more compelling reason for Lourdes’ hatred of communism—and by extension her mother—is that shew as raped by revolutionary soldiers working for the cause of Fidel Castro. And so communism is inextricably tied to that memory. And that memory is inextricably linked to the sensory imagery associated with smell. Interestingly, however, the smells are not all literally connected to the assault:
“Lourdes could not see but she smelled vividly as if her senses had concentrated on this alone. She smelled the soldier's coarse soap, the salt of his perspiring back. She smelled his milky clots and the decay of his teeth and the citrus brilliantine in his hair, as if a grove of lemons lay hidden there. She smelled his face on his wedding day, his tears when his son drowned at the park. She smelled his rotting leg in Africa, where it would be blown off his body on a moonless savanna night. She smelled him when he was old and unbathed and the flies blackened his eyes.”
The Man, the Myth, the Baseball
Celia, the protagonist who is fervently committed to Castro and the communist cause, is portrayed as perhaps a bit overzealous in her acceptance of the myths of El Lider as she is the man. One of the most persistent myths in America—and one can only imagine it is even more ingrained in Cuba—is that the world came within a fastball or two of history changing forever as a result of Castro becoming a major league pitcher rather than the leader of a revolution. The myth has been thoroughly debunked in in America: Castro simply wasn’t talented enough to have ever been seriously scouted. But in Cuba, who knows?
“She considers the vagaries of sports, the happenstance of El Lider, a star pitcher in his youth, narrowly missing a baseball career in America. His wicked curveball attracted the major-league scouts, and the Washington Senators were interested in signing him but changed their minds. Frustrated, El Lider went home, rested his pitching arm, and started a revolution in the mountains.”
