"Dreaming in Cuban," Vocabulary from Book 2: Imagining Winter

After all, as her mother points out, the only thing Felicia ever did for the revolution was pull a few dandelions during the weed- eradication campaign in 1962, and then only reluctantly.

Her lack of commitment is a source of great rancor between them.

Even the lowly weed pullers had boasted a belligerent name: The Mechanized Offensive Brigade.

El Li'der, it seems, saves his most ardent passions for the revolution.

Reform, not punishment, is her modus operandi, and Celia has succeeded in converting many young delinquents into productive revolutionaries.

By the time Celia restores a tenuous calm, she has come to a decision.

It’s as if Rogelio’s response has justified every polemic.

The lines in his face look as if each one were put there by a distinct calamity rather than a slow accumulation of sorrow.

We’re a double helix, tight and impervious.

He is her gullible rag doll.

Lourdes prefers to confront reality—the brownstones converted to tenements in a matter of months, the garbage in the streets, the jaundice-eyed men staring vacantly from the stoops.

Dona Zaida, once a formidable matriarch who ruled her eight sons by a resolute jealousy, spent long afternoons watching novelas on television and perfuming her thickening wrists.

Out went the ornate bric-a-brac, the austere furniture carved with the family crest.

Lourdes refilled the mosaic-lined fountain with sweet water and built an aviary in the garden, stocking it with toucans and cockatoos, parrots, a macaw, and canaries that sang in high octaves.

A voice is talking to her now, calm and officious.

They believed that hedonism was the only way to get rid of their sins.

Later, Dad looked up the Manichaeans in the encyclopedia and discovered that, contrary to what Max claimed, the Manichaeans believed that the world and all matter were created by nefarious forces, and that the only way to battle them was through asceticism and a pure life.

Later, Dad looked up the Manichaeans in the encyclopedia and discovered that, contrary to what Max claimed, the Manichaeans believed that the world and all matter were created by nefarious forces, and that the only way to battle them was through asceticism and a pure life.

Even supposedly knowledgeable and sensitive people react to good art by a woman as if it were an anomaly, a product of a freak nature or a direct result of her association with a male painter or mentor.

She stands there, immobile, clutching the sheet against her silk blouse, when someone yells in raucous Brooklynese, “Gaaahbage!

“Too much heat addles the brain.”

In Cuba, everything seemed temporal, distorted by the sun.

Through the mouths of the cowries the gods speak to him in clear, unambiguous voices.

He combs his flaxen strands meticulously from the lower left side of his head to his right temple, then swirls them round and round on his bald crown, securing them with a greasy pomade.

Ernesto, her gentle Ernesto, had been a restaurant inspector, renowned for his refusal to take bribes (neither money nor pork loins could tempt him) and for his scrupulous campaign against mice feces.

For three days they rocked in each other’s arms, voracious and inseparable, speaking few words, but knowing all they needed to know.

She waits until the moon is propitious, then calls Graciela on the telephone, inviting her to the beauty shop for a free permanent.

She mixes lye with her own menstrual blood into a caustic brown paste, then thickly coats Graciela’s head.

Felicia moves toward him, toward his tidy, ursine face.

The thought of her daughter in bed with these men drives Lourdes to despair, to utter repugnance.

The hip-splitting pain, the blood on the conjugal bed were proof of her virtue.

She can’t even look at it without her mouth filling with the acrid saliva that precedes vomiting.

Every day they grow more convinced that the dearth of bad news about Cuba is a conspiracy by the leftist media to keep international support for El Lider strong.

Why can’t the Americans see the Communists in their own backyards, in their universities, bending the malleable minds of the young?

Lourdes taunted the journalists who questioned her last year about the opening-day fracas at the second Yankee Doodle Bakery.

I liked the sound of it, the derision with which my mother pronounced it, and knew immediately it was what I wanted to become.

I heard one of my mother’s cohorts boasting how last year he’d called in a bomb threat to the Metropolitan Opera House, where Alicia Alonso, the prima ballerina of the National Ballet of Cuba and a supporter of El Lider, was scheduled to dance.

I think of Flaubert, who spent most of his adult life in the same French village, or Emily Dickinson, whose poems echoed the cadence of the local church bells.

The santeras had made eight cuts on her tongue with a razor blade so that the god could speak, but Felicia could not divulge his words.

But when Felicia returned to Palmas Street with her sacred stones and her tureen, her seashells and the implements of her saint, neither her mother nor her children were there to greet her.

Franco and I commiserate about how St. Mark’s Place is a zoo these days with the bridge-and-tunnel crowd wearing fuchsia mohawks and safety pins through their cheeks.

Iridescent oils are displayed with amulets, talismans, incense.

Apothecary jars labeled in childish block letters are filled with pungent spices.

When Chango found out, he tracked down his inept accomplice to the foot of a palm tree.

I’m walking naked as a beam of light along brick paths and squares of grass, phosphorescent and clean.