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grave every day, requesting her intercession in all kinds of family matters.
    At the corner of H y 8 was Mamá. Going to the grave was therapeutic for me. It was a place to be left alone not only by the doctors but by all the strangers around the neighborhood or at school who had heard of my tragedy. Just by stepping into Cemeterio Colón I was inoculated against anyone coming up to me and saying I’m sorry. I closed my eyes and tried to picture Mamá’s face. She wasn’t so different in death from the months leading up to it, losing a fight with cancer and very depressed. Now that she was out of her suffering, I loved her more than ever. There were days, sometimes many in succession, when I wished she had taken me with her.
    At school I was given the nickname “La Mancha.” I developed a crush on a girl in my class but was too young to know what to do about it. She sat directly to my left, and I stole glances all day long. Her light blue eyes: such a beautiful rarity on this island. The girl’s eyes were windows onto another place, somewhere remote from Cuba, somewhere altogether different from this world. During reading time I lifted my book to shield my face and gaze sideways at those arctic eyes while the teacher, an embittered Catholic widower, graded papers with Last Judgment gusto. I taught myself how to speed-read through Edad de Oro . If I scanned the basic gist of the issue in four or five minutes, I was ready to deflect the oral comprehension questions, and then I could spend a good quarter-hour getting lost in the girl’s icy countries. That’s the cold North where my father is, I told myself. I knew winters in Miami weren’t icy, but there was a supermarket with a big machine that made a mountain of snow in the parking lot to entertain the children last Christmas, which is what the gusanos celebrate two weeks before Reyes Magos. Perhaps if I touched the girl’s hand and looked into those eyes, I could travel there to the cold North.
    â€œÂ¡Manolo! ¿Qué te pasa con el cuello?” The teacher came right down our row and loomed over me like a malicious gargoyle. Suddenly subjected to my classmates’ scrutiny, I didn’t even have the presence to turn away. My fellow students, happy to be distracted from their tasks, began to chatter, and the girl turned to face me. She was annoyed, anxious to get back to her book. She was looking at me for the first time, and there was nothing special registering for her. It was utter indifference I was looking back at. The teacher pinched my cranium and rotated my flushed face toward the book. “Qué bonitos ojos tienes ¿no?” the teacher blurted. The entire class erupted in laughter, except for the girl with blue eyes. As punishment, the teacher made me switch desks with the boy seated in front of the blue-eyed girl. No longer was I just “La Mancha.” Now I was also called “El Enamorado,” and my beloved became “Ojitos Lindos.”
    Near the end of the school year I set myself the task of observing a ghost. When Aurora was asleep one night, I left the house for the place they lived: the necropolis. I boosted myself over the wall and snuck past the gargantuan arch, wherein the groundskeeper lay sleeping. The moon, at its brightest, burned my cheeks while I penetrated deep into the heart of the cemetery to the corner of H y 8. I sat cross-legged against the tomb of Mamá’s neighbor, cracked where tree roots had pushed through, and waited for a ghost to show. The sharp spines of obelisks glowed against the night sky, and my accelerated heart rate made it impossible for me to sleep. Finally, toward morning, I lay on my side to rest.
    I opened my eyes onto a deep blue dawn. A narrow column of light emerged from the earth. My body rigid with sleep paralysis, I couldn’t move to make sense of the apparition. I stared at it for an un-measurable moment and felt no fear or