To the Child in the Blurry Photograph
It was a blue-sky day in Cuba. I was four, maybe five, spending the day at our grandmother’s house. It was on a hill, with a wide front porch and windows opened to breezes that carried the scent of the nearby sea. The pebbly lane that curled up the hill was lined with long-needle pines whose branches swayed like dancers in the sea breeze.
Our grandmother prayed often: prayers whispered below her breath as she cooked, prayers that kept cadence with the back-and-forth pedaling of her sewing machine, prayers loudly recited when thunderstorms struck, prayers while she lit candles for her loved ones, both the living and dead. In her prayers, she often spoke to you as if you’d never left at all. You, her angel in heaven. Ay, mi ángel, mi niña, may you be resting without pain. Maybe it was her idea that I go outside and play that day. Maybe I heard her speak as if she were interacting with you, and thought I could, too. I remember standing in the lane, tossing a ball over and over up into the sky, asking a child I only knew from whispered prayers and tender reminiscences to catch it and throw it back. Only the wind rustling through the pines answered.
Like throwing the ball up to you, the memories I have of you aren’t truly memories of a real you at all. The constant one is a photograph. Slightly larger than wallet size. Black and white and blurry. In it, you are not yet two and I am not yet three. I’m sitting on the floor, legs bent backwards at the knees like a frog. A small blanket tied at my throat as if it were a princess cape. A fluffy stuffed toy rests limply in my hands. You? You’re standing sideways to the camera. Head full of brown curls. Fat toddler tummy. Your profile non-descript in the shadows of the picture. Your hands touch the top of my head as if it were a coronation.
You. My cousin, Marilys. At the time, the only other child in our extended family. The one who would not celebrate a third birthday.
Neuroblastoma is a pediatric cancer that develops in the nervous system. Immature nerve tissue grows out of control: dividing, forming tumors, causing pain. Even with present day treatments, survival is tenuous. In late 1950s Cuba, there was no hope of survival at all. In some cases, the disease is present in utero. I wonder if that was the case with you. Were you born dying? I suppose we’re all born dying.
I was a lone child, but not a lonely child. Your parents—your father my father’s brother, your mother my mother’s childhood friend—and our grandparents, aunts, and uncles all tended their grief. They funneled their love, attention, and tenderness into me, the living child. Your mother, your excruciatingly young mother, in those early months after your death would often take me to her home for the day. Once, years later, I asked her if during any of those days—when she rocked three-year-old me to sleep for an afternoon nap or watched a school-age me leave the house, hair pinned back with plastic barrettes—whether she was ever angry or jealous thinking the wrong child had died. When she said no with eyes that held nothing but truth, I didn’t have the courage to share my truth: that I’d sometimes wondered if the wrong child had lived. I was the bony child with fly-away straight hair and a fastidious appetite, not the plump cherub from the photograph. How can an imperfect regular girl ever be as worthy as an angel?
Almost fifteen years passed after the day I tossed you that ball when I created another memory of you. Years during which momentous events took place.
“Plus, the word I’d heard in hushed tones at home, and been instructed not to say aloud outside of it: freedom.”
Your father escaped Castro’s Cuba in a small boat in the dead of night. Months later, after the required paperwork for him to claim her, your mother boarded her first plane to join him in the United States. We were both gifted with siblings. Years after that, in 1965, your father risked his life a second time in the Florida Straits returning to Cuba aboard a shrimp boat to pick up our extended family—seventeen of us—as part of the Camarioca Boatlift. I was days short of my eighth birthday when we, too, left in the dead of night. By a heartless decision of Fidel’s regime, our departure took place during an emerging tropical storm. Permission to depart was denied for the sixteen sunny days during which we waited at port to join your father aboard the shrimper. I don’t remember being afraid during those days; I was excited. I had everyone together: my grandparents and parents, my brother, aunts, uncles, and cousins. My clan engulfed me in love, and the magical North I’d always heard about awaited. Stores filled with food. Shiny patent leather shoes. Bubble gum. Color television. Plus, the word I’d heard in hushed tones at home, and been instructed not to say aloud outside of it: freedom.
I wasn’t afraid until the boat was too full and the waves were too high. The skies were filled with rain, and the adults who’d always protected me were filled with fear. Our grandmother prayed loudly during that storm, too. This time for our safety. A U.S. Coast Guard cutter rescued us, saving us from drowning in an overcrowded boat taking on water in a stormy sea. Later, our small, thin grandmother, who had the whitest hair and the kindest eyes, would say the most precious thing she left behind wasn’t her country or her home, but your tomb.
Our family struggled to build new lives in a new land. In a small town on the southwest coast of Florida, where the number of Cuban families was easy to count, the men went to work immediately, and the women, out of necessity, followed. I became fluent in a second language and forgot how to dream in my first one. Would it have been easier navigating American customs with you a mere school year behind me? Would homework assignments, science projects, after-school activities, sleep-overs, and high school credits been easier to manage? When grandparents needed a translator at medical appointments, or newly arrived relatives needed help at the DMV, would you have been sent with me, or perhaps sometimes, instead of me?
When I created the next memory of you, I was a young woman of eighteen living away from home at a state university, a privilege I’d earned by fighting against our traditional and cultural expectations of the times. I, like our mothers, was supposed to date with a chaperone, marry, live within minutes from family, and have babies. Perhaps leaving would have been easier if you had been my companion. But conversely, if you had not been a voracious reader like me or possessed my curiosity and desire to experience the world beyond our small town and large family, would it have been harder for me to leave?
You were an angel in heaven, but I had to try to be an angel on Earth. Only a girl who never stepped out of line even in any of the normal growing-up ways, a girl who never gave her family any reasons for reprimand or concern, could be trusted and permitted to be the first one to leave home alone. Though rebellious enough to want to forge my own future, I was sufficiently wise to know that my passport was to be studious, level-headed, and trustworthy. I slowly and persistently convinced them to permit and support my departure.
I loved college, even though it was yet another culture I had to learn, explain, and define for our family. It was everything I imagined it would be: dorm life with roommates, long study sessions with friends and cheap coffee, parties with bad beer, a world of knowledge and heady discussions.
I was happy and triumphant—until I wasn’t.
“I did not get cancer, drown in open water, or grow up under an authoritarian regime. I could study, read, write, and speak freely.”
It was my second semester and for the first time, I was on the verge of failing classes I found too difficult. Words were easy for me; the required math and sciences were not. I was also nursing a wounded heart—another first. And then, there was God. Or more accurately, the fact that for me, there was no God—certainly not the one to which our grandmother diligently prayed. The questions and doubts I’d churned for years had solidified. But I still searched for answers. I knew what I rejected, but I didn’t know what, if anything, was left for me to embrace and accept.
It was a dark night then, too. Not stormy, but foggy. Everything felt small: my cramped dorm room, my skin—the interior me chafing against exterior me—my brain with the myriad of thoughts it held, and my soul for everything it felt and questioned. I felt weary and unmoored. I got in my car and drove.
Thick fog like clouds of wet smoke hovered over the Florida landscape, weaving through the slash pine woods near the university. I was floating in a personal darkness as disorienting as the eerie landscape through which I was driving. I couldn’t see me any more than I could see past the fog. I drove far from the university grounds; so far that I wasn’t sure where I was. I’d driven long and aimlessly on a country road through undeveloped Florida flatland. No one around for miles. As I took one particular turn, I considered for an instant letting go of everything—the wheel, the car, the road.
Then, there you were.
One of us conjured your presence into the car. You didn’t speak our first language or my second one. I felt you as a whisper, but your message was clear. Not this road. I had a choice of roads, both physical and metaphorical. You’d had neither.
I did not get cancer, drown in open water, or grow up under an authoritarian regime. I could study, read, write, and speak freely. I could feel the sun on my face, taste the sweetness of a ripe mango, and hear the music of birds singing from trees. I ached because I’d loved. I questioned because I could think. I had been granted a life denied to you. What I did with it was my choice.
The French have a term: l’appel du vide. The call of the void. The phenomenon where, for an instant, one considers stepping off a cliff, a precipice, hurling oneself into the void. Or in my case, giving up control of a fast car on a curving turn in the dead of night. Some researchers don’t consider l’appel du vide as a moment of self-destruction. On the contrary, they consider it the brain reaffirming one’s will to live. And I had to live—fully, productively, and passionately—because I was living for me and for you. I owed you that, your presence in my dark car demanded.
You’ve never come to me again. Now, decades later, I keep our blurry picture framed in my home. I light candles to you, honoring you and our grandmother’s tradition. Our elders are leaving us. Our grandparents are gone, and our parents, aunts, and uncles are dwindling in number. Our siblings and cousins never sat on the floor of a living room with you sharing playtime. You are a part of me; a part of me that I lost, but still a part of me. I’ve carried you always, from one country across an angry sea to another, and through the years, in times of extreme joy, profound sorrow, and all the in-between quotidian moments of living. And as long as you’re a part of me, which will be as long as I breathe, you exist.
About the Author
Aracelis González Asendorf was born in Cuba. Her work has appeared in TriQuarterly, Brevity Magazine, Kweli Journal, Aster(ix) Journal, The Adirondack Review, Puerto del Sol, The South Atlantic Review, and elsewhere. Her stories have been anthologized in 100% Pure Florida Fiction (University of Florida Press, 2000), All About Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), and Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness (University of Florida Press, 2021). She is the recipient of the 2016 South Atlantic Modern Language Association Graduate Creative Writing Award for Prose, and a 2019 Sterling Watson Fellow. Her short story collection Dressing the Saints is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2024.
Read Aracelis’ “Behind the Essay” interview in our newsletter.
Header photo by Jura.
Edited by Aube Rey Lescure.
