Poetry and Tragedy

My father wooed my mother in the summer of 1959, a few months after what the communists call El triunfo de la revolución (The Triumph of the Revolution). They were married within half a year. Thereafter, everything about their life together was tinged with the politics of the times.

“My Mother’s Trousseau” alludes to a genteel period when women prepared for marriage by acquiring items of clothing, accessories, and linen—the trousseau—to be transported to their husbands’ homes as outward symbols of their change in status. (Men had no such need, as their life was seen as one long continuum, their value not determined by marriage and children in the same way.)

My mother thought she would always follow the old traditions. My father had to ask her widowed mother for her hand, and that’s all he got until they wed (hence the short courtship). He visited her house and maybe walked her to the park, a chaperone always within view. He bought her a ring, and he gave her money for a new wardrobe. She went to Havana to buy it, and there she realized that nothing would be normal again.

The French merchant ship, La Coubre, was bombed in the Bay of Havana on March 4th, 1960 while trying to unload 76 tons of grenades and munitions. She told me her story many times, how the shoes skipped in their display cases as glass scattered everywhere. Then, when she took the first bus back to her town of Alacranes, she witnessed a gruesome scene: arms and legs falling onto the highway from the truck that was hauling away the human casualties.  

Mami was married two weeks later at home by a justice of the peace. She would have preferred a Catholic wedding, but churches were also targets of terrorism, and she took no more chances. My father had a plot of land he had bought to build her a house, but there was a shortage of cement after the revolution, and eventually the property was confiscated by the communist government anyway. After the wedding, Mami went to live with my father’s family in the city of Matanzas. At first, this included only his parents and two single brothers. But within three years, the brothers also married, and all three brought babies into the house. To make matters worse, no one could find alternative housing without the government’s blessing. And none of the brothers would swear fealty to Fidel.

My father eventually brought my mother and me to the United States. Again, his brothers followed suit. Here, Mami tried to continue the traditions of a country that no longer existed. She guarded me jealously, even when I became a latchkey kid while she and Papi worked. On weekends, I went nowhere without my family, especially nowhere that boys could be. I would be available for courting after my quinceañera, and then the boy would have to ask for my hand, establish visitation days and hours, and see me at home under the watchful eye of my parents.

None of these courting traditions held once I came of age. It was a different world. Even Cuba had its sexual revolution not long after the other one. There was no reference point anymore, no patria to return to. The ominous beginning of her marriage—that disruption of her trousseau trip—marked the end of an era. She was always a little lost after that.