The place is shabby, and even though I have never been there it belongs to me, too. We accept the pictures gratefully because there is nothing else we have from that life. My mother and aunt cry in rare harmony. I don't know if I've made a mistake by showing them the pictures. Cuban-Jewish memory can induce bouts of ecstasy and hysteria.
Memory is sweeter.
I've turned both my mother and my aunt into Lot's wife, tempting them to look back at a decrepit Cuba, turning them into pillars of salt. To look back, I tell you, is to look into the eye of power, to feel the salt burn. Maybe some of us don't have to learn that lesson. I, a child of exile, will someday make that return trip to Havana as a maiden voyage, proving that the Exodus can be a roundtrip. St Martins Press.