Loving Che Read Online Free Page A

avenue that once burst with yellow flowers in March, they are really talking about a self they wish to have been. I am afraid, if I tell the story now after all these years of silence, that I will be confused for one of those dreaming tourists who point out only the graceful and vital, who are happy to deal with the surface of things.
    As a child, I had been one with weather. When we went down to the farm on the weekends, and the nights without moon were so black that you could scarcely make out your fingers in the dark, I used to lie awake, battered this way and that with the sound of the wind. If there was a storm coming, I could feel it miles away, smell it; and often I would wake the family, my parents and all the cousins, with my howling. This is when I began to wonder if perhaps the outer world was no more real than our imagination and all its thrashings but a mirror of our own thoughts. And I wonder now if our recorded history isn’t like this, if our idea of history isn’t another way of saying an idea of ourselves. First comes childhood, the innocence of times gone by, then the trauma of awakening to pleasure and pain, and then the expulsion, the revolution: all our private fears and desires cloaked in the great story of man. Behind us lies our beginning, ahead of us only oblivion. Because it is the old who look back, sometimes with fear and sometimes with joy. The young are all revolutionaries, struggling toward the future, convinced that just over the rim of sky—There; there!—lie the happiest times. But both the old and the young indulge in longing. And the older I get now, themore that longing for the past seems the only true course. Why idealize the future, where only death awaits? How much lovelier to think on the past when we were young and untested and our beginning lay behind us like a forgotten dream.
    When I was a girl, it seemed to me Havana was full of beautiful women. They had their dresses made in the shiny window shops, where the seamstresses wore white gloves so as to not soil the material from Europe. The salons were filled with women reinvesting in themselves—massaging thick cream into their heels, curling their hair to emphasize pretty slanted eyes, a plump cheek. Women ate their dreams and bloomed like orchids in the rain.
    My two sisters knew, too, how to rest their heads on their hands so the line of their long necks formed the symbol for longing. They had a way of moving their gold hair off their shoulders, slowly, as if in doing so, they had discovered a way to prolong the day. The men came to sing to them after dinner, when they sat on the porch to take the evening breeze, and their girl laughter took on the color of sunset.
    My own hair was thick and dark and I wore it short against my neck. In the evenings when the others sat on the porch, I climbed to the roof and watched the sun go down over the rooftops, letting my hair dry in the breeze, watching the horizon where the sky came every night to be swallowed by the ocean.
    I was smaller and darker than my sisters, with a boy’s skinny hips. The men did not sing songs to my window at night. In the afternoons, the suitors who came for my sisters forgot my name at the door. But I saw how the men leaned back from their wives at the little restaurant by the cathedral, the way their eyes darkened to match my own. A young girl and already knowing that silence held the heavier balance of truth.
    My mother let me roam the streets; she gave up on me long before I knew it. In the clear tropical mornings, before anyone was up, I left through the back door and went down the alleys of sleeping dogs. A different neighborhood. The rain and heat, the saltwater you could taste everywhere in Havana, got inside wood and metal. Cars rusted, foundations wasted. It took everything to keep the street-side faces of the house smooth and neat. Every year a new coat of paint, new curtains behind the windows, brass knockers taken down and