Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the memoir Under the Royal Palms: A Childhood in Cuba by Alma Flor Ada (@1998 by Alma Flor Ada).

Daily life in La Quinta Simoni started very early in the morning. The placid night fragrances of jasmine and gardenias, which entered my bedroom from the garden, were quickly overtaken by the acrid but friendly smell of coffee brewing.

Before I was fully awake, my grandmother would often scoop me in her arms to take me to where they were milking the cows she still kept.

When we returned to the house, everyone would be bustling about, getting ready to leave—my father to teach at the high school, my uncle Manolo to the radio station, my uncle Medardo to his office, my aunt Lolita to her classes, and my grandmother to the school she ran.

Before long the big house was all my mother’s and mine. While she worked on her bookkeeping ledgers, I would spend hours playing outside, under the trees, just by myself.

Every afternoon, around four o'clock, I had to take a bath and get dressed “for the evening.” I would set aside the boots I hated, with their hard insoles to support my flat feet, and put on my white shoes with a little strap on top and a buckle on the side. As my mother tied the bow at the back of my dress, I felt like a butterfly, daily forced to return to her chrysalis, and daily freed again.

The next thing to be done each afternoon was to gather maravillas. These simple wild flowers—red, orange, white, purple, or spotted—opened late in the day. It was as if, like me, they led two lives; one curled up and wrinkled in the heat of the day, one open and splendid in the late afternoon as the sun began to go down. They grew plentifully on an empty lot about half a block from the old Quinta Simoni. I would walk proudly down the sidewalk, glancing at my shoes, ready to gather as many flowers as I could.

On my return, my grandmother would be waiting for me on the front porch, sitting in a rocking chair, ready to praise the beauty of my simple offering. Then, we would both go on tip-toes, as if approaching an altar, to place the flowers on top of the piano, a ritual that pleased us both.

Once the ritual was finished, we would walk hand in hand out to the large front porch with its high masonry arches. She would sit in the rocking chair. I would sit on the steps a few feet away, listening to her sing verses set to music she herself had composed.

And the night would fall around us, almost without notice, as it does in the tropics. Then the first of the bats would appear. They lived above the porch, between the ceiling and the roof. We never saw or heard them during the day. But at nightfall their squeaks began, like an orchestra tuning its instruments before a concert, and it was as if the ceiling came alive.

Occasionally, a little one would fall to the floor through a crack in the ceiling either pushed by a thoughtless adult or as a result of its own carelessness. Even though it was not ready to fly yet, by instinct the little bat would open its membranous wings, glide clown, and land alive, although perhaps somewhat stunned. Sometimes an adult bat would come immediately to the rescue. Then the little one would cling to the adult’s chest and enjoy a safe return home. But on occasions when no adult came, we had to decide whether to fetch the tall ladder and try to place the baby back in the nest, or keep it in a shoe box and feed it with my doll’s bottle. Fortunately, this only happened once in a while.

Most nights, my grandmother and I would pretend to count the bats as they left their nest to feed on the fruit from our backyard: sweet mangoes, guavas, soft and delicious nísperos. We knew already that it was impossible to keep a true tally, because in a few minutes their number would increase from a handful circling over our heads to several dozens, coming and going, so that we were unable to tell which were the ones just leaving the nest. Counting them over and over again, we would finally give up and burst out laughing, at the bats, at ourselves, at our game, and at the delightful warmth of the night, fragrant with the aroma of jasmine and gardenias. My aunts and my mother would smile, and shake their heads: “There go those two, counting bats again ... “

The quiet serenity of those evenings and the tender love my grandmother and I shared has nourished me often throughout my life. On the many occasions when I have later felt that I am once more trying to count bats, engaged in an impossible task, I have allowed myself to laugh, happy to remember that some of the best things in life are like counting bats: It was never the final count that mattered, but rather the joy of seeing them fly.