Mami, dearest

In my earliest memories from Cuba, my mother appears like something from a Bryce Echenique novel: enveloped in clouds of perfume and organza, sweeping up the stairs to kiss me before disappearing into the night on my father's arm. Until the next festive evening, when she would put in another cameo, and again, leave me questioning the point of the whole exercise. No words were ever exchanged,no affectionate delays tolerated. She was always in a hurry. But why? Don't worry, she'll be back tomorrow,offered my nanny Victoria, left to fill in as best as she could. Maybe my mother thought she was performing an important maternal duty;the cliche of upper crust kids being raised by servants happens to be true. Victoria, a modest spinster from a Cuban country town, was my real mother almost from my birth until I turned 15, when she died of cancer in Miami. In between, there were some rough times. When we moved to Florida, Victoria stayed behind in Cuba for a few years. My parents,my two brothers and I crammed into a tiny garage apartment in Coral Gables until my father got back on his feet.

My mother had to learn how to cook; clean and do laundry. She was already 40 and had a tough time adjusting to the lack of servants, the vanishing of an ecosystem that catered to her every whim. She reacted by lashing out at those around her; she turned into an emotional wreck--or was she always? Maybe. I really don't know, she'd always been a stranger. At age 11, for the first time ever, I made my mother's acquaintance with no cooks or nannies--or anybody else--to mediate. It was a rude awakening; gone was the seductive creature out of a Peruvian novelist's fantasies, replaced by someone given to temper tantrums and cruel remarks. My brothers and father practically stopped coming home. The boys moved out and dad spent much more time with a longtime mistress who was like a second wife and, I suspect, his refuge from the first one, his way of avoiding divorce. In reality, he was using her. Only now do I understand that this woman inadvertently saved us from a childhood of divorce-induced poverty, and I sincerely hope that stolen moments with a man she could never truly have were enough for her in the end. It's an old story in our culture. As Hispanic males, my father and brothers got away with doing whatever they wanted, but girls were kept on a much shorter leash, so I stayed home and became the sole recipient of mami's regular outbursts of rage, frustration and vitriol. She wasn't just ornery; I could have handled THAT, but it was much worse. My father stopped taking us on family nights at nice restaurants because she'd get drunk and cause scenes. On these occasions, she could not be controlled. No amount of discreet begging, pleading or reprimanding worked; she just became wilder, more violent, louder in her defiance. Whenever this turbulence turned on me,it had overtones of spite and jealousy too ugly to expand on here. Suffice it to say she viewed me as a competitor, not a daughter. She punished me physically until my late teens, she insulted me, she'd humiliate me by grounding me on the spot at the last minute, when my friends came to pick me up for an outing. I stopped having other kids over. Sometimes she gave me presents, but took them back if I didn't do her immediate bidding, so I learned not to accept gifts from my own mother--how fucked up is that? She ruined my early youth, I really had no life until I moved out at age 24. Back then, nice Cuban girls didn't leave home unless they were married, so I made a disastrous marriage with an unlikely groom, and 3 months later, I was divorced and living by myself. My father, alone with my mother for the first time in years, begged me to come back, to continue serving as a human lightning rod for him. I refused; she was no longer my problem and anyway, he had never intervened on my behalf whenever she abused me. He'd just step aside, probably relieved that for the moment, someone else was the target of her rage. Well, I was done with all that-- and surprised that only now did he realize what I'd been saving him from, albeit against my will. Five years after I moved out, he was dead of a heart attack. She didn't attend his funeral or his burial ceremony. I've always thought she helped kill him; I'd seen him clutch his chest after blowouts with her. Despite all this, I spent most of mom's life attempting to develop our relationship, only to get pushed away whenever I came close. I'd keep trying mostly because I'd always wanted a mother,but also because I realized that maternal estrangement equals social blasphemy. Officially, mothers represent everything good and noble, generous and loving, and if you have a horrid mother, you'd better keep it to yourself or risk being reviled by the world. Almost everyone I know would rather ignore that toxic mothers exist (though headlines trumpet the horrors of children abandoned, starved, abused, beaten, or dumped in trashcans at birth). But the "mami dearest" syndrome may even be a generational thing. Too many Cubans of my age and social class were raised by women trained to be decorative objects, women who had kids and then dropped them off with the help until Fidel Castro forced a change of plans. Of course,some ladies took better than others to their new, scaled-down lives in the USA. My aunts, for example, became terrific mothers. My mother became an alcoholic. I believe that alcohol doesn't defile character, it brings out its true nature. Yes, I should be more compassionate, but it's hard to feel compassion towards a tormentor. And yes, the 60's Cuban diaspora and its accompanying changes of status were traumatic for her and for many others, but people ADAPTED. Suffering makes some better;it made my mother worse. To my credit, it weighs upon my conscience that I've had such a hard time forgiving her, even though she's been gone for a long time now, and even though

I now partially understand what made her the person I had the misfortune to know.