By Jessica Snow Pisano
“Every day,” my Nana would say as she bounced me on her bony knees, her bracelets and bangles jingling, “my brothers and sisters and I would play at the beach, looking for pirate treasure.” Of all her stories, this was my favorite. I must have been young to fit on the lap of her tiny frame–maybe four. “One day, we found a cave, a slight opening into the ocean. We climbed inside, and what did we see? A pirate! A pirate named Tarará!”
I loved this story, but I always assumed it was something she’d concocted, something exciting to make my eyes light up, keep me quiet and out of mischief. I never thought to ask where the caves were, if they really existed. I never thought to ask about the name Tarará.
For my grandparents’ 40th wedding anniversary, my mother wanted to send them on a trip to Spain. For as long as I can remember, my grandmother has been obsessed with Spain and dreamed of visiting. When I was in middle school and high school, she and my Papa hosted Spanish exchange students, once teenage brothers from Madrid, once a girl my age from a small town in the Catalonia region. Spanish food, my Nana would say, is the best in all the world. Spanish men are the most beautiful in the world. Spanish writers and painters and sculptors and architects–the best. Her parents, she said, were born in Spain, moved to Cuba, and then to the United States. For her, Spain was the homeland she’d only seen in books, on TV, and in her imagination.
When my mom first brought up the idea of a trip, my grandparents were thrilled. Then, when she told my Nana she’d need her birth certificate to get a passport, her mood shifted. Her birth certificate, she said, was lost. No, she had no interest in getting another one. In fact, she didn’t want to go to Spain. Never really had. Nothing we said could change her mind. It was then that we started to wonder if my Nana had really been born in the United States.
“Were you born in Cuba, Mamá?” my mother would ask.
“No!” Nana would snap, “I was born in the United States, in California. Then, we moved back to Cuba for a short time. Later, we returned to the States for good. I was not born in Cuba!” She’d snort at the absurdity of the suggestion and then my mother and grandmother would fight, sometimes in English, often in Spanish.
“That’s ridiculous!” my mom would yell, “Why would you move here and then go back?”
“It was for my father’s work,” my Nana would say, “You don’t understand.” My mom accused her mother of lying, but still she refused to change her story. My grandmother has always been good at telling stories.
When I graduated with my masters’ degree, I asked my mom for old family photos. She made me an album with pictures of my grandparents, great-grandparents, great-aunts and uncles, cousins and friends. She added notes throughout in her perfect curling script. “This was your Nana’s father, your great-grandfather,” one reads, and explains that he worked as a translator for the Cuban government. It leaves out his cheating. The affair with one of their servants. His leaving his family for the other woman. These are stories my Nana would never tell. Mom pieced them together from talking with her abuela and tíaPaula over the years and from late-night phone conversations with cousins, trying, like my mom, to make sense of the jumbled fragments.
As an adult, I’ve tried to ask my Nana about Cuba. Most times, all I get is bitterness. “It was such a beautiful place,” she’d almost spit, “Beautiful streets and buildings. Beautiful women. But not now. Now it’s ugly. The people, the streets–all poor and ugly. The government, they don’t care about the people. I can see someone from another place, coming in, not caring. But not one of its own.” The rant that started in anger would soften into sadness, betraying a love greater than resentment.
In 2014, when Obama relaxed travel restrictions to Cuba–restrictions that Trump would later reverse–my husband bought me a travel guide and we considered a trip. Late one night, I sat at our dining table, sipping red wine and studying the maps in the guidebook. We’d start in Havana, but I had no idea where to go from there. I had no idea where in Cuba my grandmother had lived, where her family was from. As I traced the coastline with my finger, the island seemed to expand. I was looking for something, anything familiar. Perhaps she’d once said a word, a name, something I would remember as soon as I read it. Then, it appeared. Tarará. The name of the pirate from my Nana’s stories was a beach just east of Havana: Tarará. Had my Nana visited as a child? Did that mean they had lived near Havana or traveled there often? If her father worked for the government, that made sense.
A few months later, my youngest sister called to tell me she’d found the manifesto of a flight from Havana to New York dated 1946. The names of my Nana, her mother, and three of her brothers and sisters were included on the list of passengers. My Nana would have been 16 years old.
My great-grandmother, my Abuela, tiny and fierce, did this woman who prayed the rosary and walked to mass each day finally get fed up and leave a good-for-nothing husband behind in Cuba, stealing her youngest children away with her? Or did she leave because of a political shift? Was the family of a governmental official no longer safe? For what regime had my great-grandfather worked? Castro wouldn’t seize power for another thirteen years. Did he work for Batista? For Machado? Or had he slithered his way through these regimes and others, all the presidents and dictators who led Cuba during those tumultuous years? Was my Abuela simply tired of it all–the corruption, the violence, the lies, those of her husband and the men he worked for?
After trying for years, we finally convinced my grandparents, both ninety years old at the time, to move to Asheville to be closer to family. My grandmother had fallen in the kitchen. It took the last of my grandfather’s strength to help her up and get her into bed. For weeks after, his arms and legs were covered with bruises from her panicked, disoriented grip and gashes from her long, once perfectly manicured nails. He called my mother in tears that night and surrendered. My mom and stepdad moved them into an apartment on their property, a small farm where my grandparents could spend the rest of their days watching birds and racoons out their window, my stepdad’s horses grazing peacefully in the pasture.
It’s easier to visit now that they’re closer, harder to ignore their mental and physical decline. Not long after the move, my Nana fell again, this time ending up in the hospital, in surgery, in a nursing home for rehab. She’s back home now, in the little apartment with my grandfather, confined to a wheelchair and needing help with even the most basic tasks. My Papa walks slowly, with a cane, his legs swollen and sometimes weeping fluid. His mind, still sharp, is more and more confused, but my Nana is much farther gone.
“Alfred,” she reaches her frail hand out to her husband of more than seventy years, “are we sleeping here tonight?” My Papa shakes his head. In despair? Annoyance? Embarrassment?
“Yes, Vickie,” he sighs.
“Nana, you live here,” I remind her. “This is your apartment. Look at all your furniture, your pictures on the walls. We moved them in for you. Remember?”
“Ah,” she nods her head slowly, wanting to remember, to make sense of the world around her. “I just wished we lived closer. So we could see you more often.”
“Nana, I live just on the other side of town. I come to visit as much as I can.” And of course, I feel guilty, because “as much as I can” with two teenagers and a full-time job is not as often as I’d like.
So far, she has not forgotten me. But I know she only knows my husband and children because they walk in with me. She doesn’t remember their names. Maybe she doesn’t remember mine, but her eyes light up when I walk in. My mom says sometimes she mistakes her for her mother or her sister, both dead for years.
But while most days she can’t remember where I live or work or how old I am, her forgetting of the present seems to have opened a door to the past, to her earliest memories, ones she’s kept locked away for years. I wonder if she’s finally free from whatever forced them back into the farthest corners of her mind. So one day, I tried again: “Nana, will you tell me about Cuba?”
“You know,” she said, staring blankly out the kitchen window, “we never suffered. Not at all. My uncles were good. They made sure we didn’t suffer. They found us a house to live in and bought all the girls nice dresses. Their brother may have been a bum, but they wouldn’t let his family suffer.” She looked back at me, remembering I was there, and told me about walking along the Malecón in Havana, the ocean rushing up against the rocks.
My mom’s garage is still filled with boxes from my grandparents’ move. She goes through things little by little, sometimes because my Papa asks for something he’s remembered, sometimes just to clear space. A month or so ago, digging through a random box, she found–finally–her mother’s birth certificate. It confirms that my Nana, Victoria Morales, was born in 1930–in Ciego de Ávila, Cuba.
When my mother called to tell me, an image came to focus in my mind: a photo of my Nana as a young girl, maybe ten or twelve, sitting on a rocky coast. She had given it to me back when I was in college. Young and stupid, I lost the photo. But I remember it, looked for it so many times among the boxes and remnants of my own life, my own moves. Now I know where she stood in that picture–on a beach in Cuba, perhaps Tarará. I know why she defied regulations at the Crescent Beach condo where she and my Papa retired to plant hibiscus and bougainvillea and, when her mind started to go, plastic flowers in the sandy soil. Now her fantastic stories and her fierce secrecy make sense. Her adult life, a series of carefully constructed myths, each one building on the next to construct the perfect American woman, a front to hide the most dangerous truth: a scared immigrant girl.
Now, when I look back at the old photos from my mom, I see my Nana differently. When she sits, thin and made up, bleached-blonde Barbie doll next to her New Jersey Italian husband at a 1950s office party, I wonder if the look I’d imagined as affected boredom was really fear, lodged, perhaps, behind the discomfort of her cocktail dress and corset. When, in the 1980s, she holds the watering can over her beloved backyard plants, her hair swooped up into a low twist, I wonder if the glow in her eyes is wonder at the lush green blooming beneath her rather than the smug conceit of knowing she still looks good in her bathing suit and wrap-around skirt.
In some ways, after years of searching, my mother’s find was anticlimactic. We’d all suspected the truth. Perhaps it didn’t even matter. And yet it did. It does. As the distance she once held us at dissolves, the walls she constructed crumble, we finally get to know that young girl on the rocks, hurt by her father, waiting for her mother.
Last night we sat over dinner at my mom’s dining room table, my husband, mom, stepdad, Papa, and Nana. My Nana mumbles these days, thoughts escaping her lips unknown. Beautiful, terrible, innocent words and sounds.
“I love you,” she says to no one and everyone every few minutes.
“Mama,” she calls out, again and again, even though my Abuela passed away more than twenty years ago. I don’t remember her crying at the funeral. She learned young to keep strong and push through whatever life threw her way. Tonight, when I remind her gently about her mother’s passing, tears gather in her eyes.
“Really?” she asks, her eyes wide and her mouth open as the shock and sadness hit her anew.
I nod, wishing I’d never reminded her. “But she had a good long life.”
“No.” Suddenly, my Nana’s eyes are sharp again. “No, she had a hard life. Her husband left her. But,” she brightens, “she had a good family. Sisters, cousins. Nieces and nephews.”
“Where?” I ask, holding my breath.
“In Cuba,” she says, as though I’ve always known the truth. “In Ciego de Ávila.”
Jessica Snow Pisano is a Senior Lecturer at the University of North Carolina Asheville where she coordinates the First-Year Writing program and supervises teaching licensure students. She lives in Asheville with her husband, two children, and their dogs, cats, and backyard chickens.