Cuban Memory of and in the Moments

Sarah Johnson

Dr. Hickman

Engl 358R

3 April 2008

Cuban Memory of and in the Moments

Hortencia, a Cuban-born American, angrily snaps at her husband Felipe: “why did you chase the parrot away” (95)? Her friend Matilde asks herself: what will I do with “pounds and pounds of bananas” (59)? And Matilde’s son, Anselmo, can’t ignore tennis (158). But what do these random subjects have in common? For Cuban-American authors, like Ana Menéndez, it all comes back to Cuba. Another Cuban-born author and editor, Cristina García, compiled a book of some Cuban Literature called ¡Cubanísimo! In it, she compares Cuban music to the literature. She notes that the clave (key) to Cuban music is a simple 1-2-3, 1-2 cadence. Likewise, in Cuban literature, she argues there is a key to understanding Cuban authors as well. And simple as it sounds, like with Menéndez, that key is Cuba. Whether Cuba represents the Revolution or nostalgia in Miami, both Cuban and Cuban-American authors have a shared rhythm (García xiii). Their literary constructs suggest an underlying tone of nostalgia, played out by focused subjects like the bananas, a parrot, and tennis in Menéndez’s short stories. In the same tradition, Virgil Suárez’s 90 Miles has a chapter titled “the Republic of Longing,” which has a poem that focuses on frogs. These frogs “embrace the fact that they are there, like the past” (Lines 27-8); they are eidetic images that trigger Suárez’s memories of his “childhood not lived” (21). But on a smaller scale, Menéndez’s claves in In Cuba, I Was a German Shepard, voice the emotional chasm between Cuba and the United States by zeroing in on singular subjects that articulate the living memory in the Cuban American existence.

In “the Story of a Parrot,” Menéndez’s character Hortencia is an older, “beautiful woman who, like many women of her generation and temperament blame[s] her unlucky circumstances on her husband” (89). Though it’s possible that Menéndez is critiquing gender stereotypes, it’s more important that Hortencia looks to some outward source to make sense of her “fragmented life” (REF). That life had “evaporated along with the rest of [her] world […] which every day remind[s] Hortencia of the crooked turns her life had taken” (90). But then, whoosh!—“A bird flew into a door [that] Hortencia left open” and into her home—her current world (Menéndez 90). In Hortencia’s life, the door left open can represent her unsettled mind, as she tries to live in a state radically different from her desires—Cuba in the idealized form. The parrot is the clave to this story, a singular subject that sounds the underlying dominance of memory in Hortencia’s life because of the emotions and memories it stirs. It carries many meanings and Hortencia seems to attach many feelings to the exotic bird.

In one sense, the parrot represents a Cuban exile, whether first generation or second. Hortencia says that “Miami had lately been overrun by wild parrots, descendants of freed pets” (Menéndez 90). In Miami, there is a large concentration of Cuban exiles from the various waves of migration (Grenier 23), and some could be the wild parrots, while others the freed pets. These pets could be many of the aristocratic immigrants in the early wave from 1959-1962, trying to escape communism. They were the “displaced and alienated elite […who] found themselves on the losing side of Cuba’s …class conflict” (23). And though not all Cuban immigrants fit this mold, the elitist exiles probably could at least understand the general stereotype of aristocratic peoples being high maintenance—the upkeep of pets. A nice comparison is the Disney movie the Aristocats, which depicts wealthy pets’ standards and how hard the transition from one lifestyle to another is tricky, as the cats removed from their mansions, must survive in the streets. As a freed pet, life is challenging since survival of the fittest is the game, but the players are accustomed to always having the upper hand. In a way, Hortencia laments her former life because she imagines herself as wealthy, whereas here in exile, she listens to the plunks of her husband’s typewriter rather than the clink of his change (REF). She seems to believe she is worthy of being a maintained pet, but because she is freed from communism in exile from her former supposed glory, she is actually enslaved by that freedom.

Hortencia probably dislikes seeing “wild parrots” in Miami because they are misplaced, a notion akin to many exiles. The parrot, a singular symbol reminds her of this displacement. In The Legacy of Exile: Cubans in the United States, Grenier says that Miami is a “community obsessed with Cuba, but more importantly for [him], a community that [senses it is] not supposed to be there” (10). These early exiles are the “faithful keepers of the exile legacy” (23); their attitudes precede and influence the rest of the Cuban immigrants who would come. This is like Hortencia’s attitude in the story. Hortencia does not want the parrot in her home because she immediately thinks of it carrying diseases, just as some view exile status, dangerous and infectious (90). But later, it elicits nostalgia within her.

Voicing the emotion within, Hortencia says that she feels as though “she’s been through a nightmare so terrible that memory…has rejected it” (94-95). And in waking up, this parrot reminds her that “she is in the middle of her life, in the middle of Miami, and halfway through a story,” her story (95). With the eidetic influence of the bird, she realizes through its exoticism that she has been accepting her life and forgetting what could have been. Borrowing Suárez’s words from “Frogs,” she begins to imagine her other life—the one she did not live or remember (Line 21). Ana Menéndez understands this emotion within her character because she is the daughter of exiled parents like Hortencia and Felipe. She says that as American-born children, second generation exiles “grew up being aware that [their] parents lost a lot” (Puckett 2). But that sense of loss, dubbed “unresolved mourning,” can be “passed on from generation to generation” (Yanez 2). In other words, the wild parrots adopt the parent’s loss, showing how early exile attitudes set the tone for the exiles who would follow (Grenier 23). García says among Cuban exiles and authors, there a longing for a “common identity” (xiii). Just as with music, “children clap out dance rhythms before they can walk,” they are shaped by their parents’ connection with Cuba (xiii). Seeing this wild parrot almost slaps Hortencia out of her emotional hibernation, “beckoning for [her] mind to leap” (29). And leap it does.

Somehow, Hortencia forgets that she had begged Felipe to get rid of the parrot. She misremembers and says to him in a silent, resentful whisper: “you chased away that beautiful parrot” (95), i.e., he chased away Cuba—her other life. This time, the parrot seems to simply embody Cuba to her. Describing the scene, Menéndez says that there stood “man, woman, [and] bird: a modern allegory in feather and flesh” that represents the exiles, both men and women with Cuba (94). Menéndez explicitly states that this scenario is an allegory of “feather” and “flesh;” or in other words an allegory of memory (the feathers) and reality (the flesh) tied into Hortencia’s faulty idealism and biting realism.

But memory, especially to characters like Hortencia, is a questionable source. The real bird is “magnificently’ green and yellow with a shiny beak (90). Later though, when Hortencia is nagging Felipe, she recalls or actually thinks she recalls the parrot’s blue feathers (99). She also “remembers” the beautiful song it sang, when in reality, the parrot was silent and merely staring at her until the moment it flew out of their lives (99). That is when it CAWKED loudly, hardly a lovely tune (94). In short, she forgets reality and invents a new picture of what the bird looked like, its song or lack there of, and how it left her home. It is fascinating that it is not only the parrot itself that stirs her memories, but also its absence. Because of this absence, Hortencia, a piece of fiction herself, begins to fictionalize her own life. In an interview, Menéndez explains that for people in general “memory is the first fiction,” (Morrison 1). Clearly Hortencia is a prime example of this human tendency as she confuses the parrot and then invents a past for herself that did not exist.

As mentioned, this misplaced memory is not unique to Hortencia alone, but Menéndez definitely critiques it. In Cuban Writers Off the Island, Pamela Smorkaloff quotes Edward Said of New York University who says that young Cuban writers often bring to the literary cannon a collective “forgetting” and “alternate memory” (64). In fact, according to Said, “if knowledge of the past is silenced” or silent to begin with like the parrot is, then “understanding the present is blocked” like Hortencia who conveniently forgets the reality of the bird and her life (64). She imagines it singing and being a beautiful experience that Felipe robbed her of by chasing the bird away, overlooking that it was she who asked him to clear it out. In this case, Hortencia who is a first generation immigrant cannot see her alternate memory, but a younger distanced writer like Menéndez has a wider vision because she brings to the shared history a distance (64) from it that allows her to disavow emotional interplay in the situation and memory.

Hortencia, in trying to reconcile her past, re-invents what she wishes it had been, which makes her a questionable storyteller, as she seems unable to accept truth in any situation. The parrot is a simple figurehead that represents her Cuba, her former life, and herself. Therefore, she sees in it everything “crooked” in her life (90). She can’t confront the actual past or present. Smorkaloff also borrows Paule Marshall’s words, the words of a Barbadian-American novelist. She explains that it is important to “confront the past, both in personal and historical terms” in order to “reverse the present order” (64). The present order for Hortencia is her invented history. And by making it seem outlandish, Menéndez reverses it, as she juxtapositions Hortencia’s imaginings with the parrot experience to slap Hortencia out of her hibernation. Menéndez, with a “knowing edge,” notes how clinging to nostalgia is a coping method, but she also admits that exiles like her own grandmother “spend their whole lives waiting…and put their lives on hold” like Hortencia has done (Morison 1). By showing how Hortencia hasn’t confronted the past, Menéndez gives the consequences of dying at age 42 like her grandmother who like Hortencia dreamed of an inexistent past that supposedly shapes her unhappy present. It is amazing that a simple parrot, a single symbol evokes all of these conflicting emotions in Hortencia, showing readers her unbalance and the need for reconciliation with reality.

Midway through the story, Cuba, as the parrot used to be, melds into Hortencia herself or at least her alternate memory of it. She says that its absence like Cuba’s “sounds like music in the dark” (Menéndez 96), which leads her to fill the empty space, trying to bridge the gap between her present and her past. She suddenly starts singing around the house. Really it is “a song she had not heard in many years” that takes her back to her imagined glory (96). In fact, the opening words to the song are “mueren y a las ilusiones del ayer” (the illusions of yesterday are dead), which is interesting because she sings about dead illusions, yet allows the illusion of a parrot’s memory to unleash her resentments and dead dreams (96). In a way, “she unfixes the action [of singing] from time, taking her readers in and out of the past, into and out of her own dreams” (Cowert 93). The first paragraph in the story tells how Hortencia’s parents pulled her from an audition line, forever blighting her career and causing her mundane, underprivileged life (89). As she sings in her imagined “pink tulle” I muse about her influence in her life, how she affected where she is now.

Hortencia actaully sings a fatal note for her so called stardom, when she says that she wonders who “put this memory here for her to pluck” (96). Basically, even in her musings and daydreaming, she acknowledges that her memory is unreal and not her own. But! She doesn’t bring herself back to reality; she continues to add to her imaginings. She pictures young men fawning after her and being “embraced by the stars” as she is the star dazzling her audience (96). Though this appears insane to an outside audience, Hortencia’s mental response to her situation is not all that irregular. In Immigrant Writing in Contemporary America, David Cowert critiques the editor of ¡Cubanísimo! , Cristina García’s work, Dreaming in Cuban, the piece he chose to represent Cuban-American literature in his collection. The character Pilar says of Cuba that “[she doesn’t] know if that’s home, but [she wants] to find out” (98). And after she actually visits Cuba, she says that though it is not home, it’s more home than New York, where she belongs (99). This is the mental battle that Hortencia faces. Though she knows that her “memory” isn’t home or real for her, it is more real than her present boredom. Like fictional Pilar, Menéndez even experienced this emotion. She said that “growing up, [she felt she] had lost Cuba. And when [she] went to Cuba [she] felt, this is what I lost” (Takahama 2).

So I must ask, why Hortencia chooses to keep her fictional memory alive? And how can a parrot pull all of this out of Hortencia? In A Culture of its own, author Mark Falcoff says that because in Miami, the climate is just enough similar that the original Cuban exiles were able to create their own “Little Havana;” therefore, they didn’t have to abandon their other culture, which would seem good. But the result has been that the exiles are unable to “put old ghosts to rest,” especially as new refugeses “sharpen the sense of loss and keeps the wound from healing” (212). In a way, this is the bittersweet situation Hortencia faces. In a later story called “The Party,” a Ernesto, a fellow Cuban exile, describes Hortencia’s stance as “an echo of someone she might have been” (Menéndez 186). This party was at Hortencia’s community’s restuarante cubano, which in Menéndez’s fiction shows how perpetuating these ghosts or echoes as Ernesto calls Hortencia haunt the characters daily lives. The Florida professor, Rothe says that “for those older exiles, Cuba is like a dead person who somehow remains half-alive, like a zombie, because [the exiles] have never completed their mourning process of disconnecting and forming new bonds” (Yanez 1). They instead remain in “emotional limbo,” which explains why Hortencia’s emotions consume her mind.

As Hortencia is the parrot, one can see how her sanity teeters on the edge of grief, yet when her husband Felipe asks her what she had sung the night before, she responds, “an old song (Menéndez 97). She doesn’t even remember its name, which goes to show “how small the world is in the eyes of memory” a stolen phrase in Barnett’s Rachel’s Song (Smorkalof 28). Hortencia says that it just came to her, like the parrot she had not planned on. Thirteen pages of a short story, all comes from the symbol of the parrot. The winged animal flings Hortencia into the trap of idealizing reality. But, as her memory of the past competes with Felipe’s when their memories come together, she comes back to the present (8). She tells him that he “is writing in the wrong age” (Menéndez 97). Now aware of reality because the parrot forced her to face it, she says that Felipe is a romantic who writes “stuff that has gone out of style” (97). After saying this to him, she sings the old song again, but this time, in touch with reality. The words this time are “Y muere también con sus promesas crueles / La inspiraciόn que un día le brinde” (and the inspiration that one day I offered him / also dies with his cruel promises) (97). And sadly, “between the verses she could hear the click-clack of Felipe’s typewriter” (97), showing he still hasn’t accepted reality either, though less eccentric than Hortencia.

Hortencia is like the parrot to Felipe as well. In fact, “on the tattered canvas of the past he still carries, he paints a bird with great wings moving to embrace him. He hear the beating of blue feathers in his chest and turns from the window and the moon shadow that is already gliding away from him” (102). Even Felipe, who originally corrects Hortencia that the bird was green, now remembers it as blue. The parrot not only gives him Cuba, but forces him to take flight and embrace a new life. But he is sad to do it.

Like García’s 1-2-3,1-2 cadence, the parrot is Hortencia’s and Felipe’s clave to unlock their present lives. For Felipe, “the typewriter is music. [And] his long fingers find the keys like a lover in the dark” (102). He and Hortencia found the key to their lives through the parrot. David Cowert, the expert in Immigrant fiction says that every distinctive culture has a system of symbolic representation (92). For Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban, that symbol is a dream. For Menéndez’s “Story of a Parrot” it is the parrot. In the Hartfort Courant newspaper, Menéndez says that [she] thinks art “works for [her] when it’s a specific situation with a universal point that can be extrapolated” (Nunez 3). This is a common theme for Cuban-American literature. When Menéndez work at the Miami Herald, she heard stories of immigrant lives, whose themes of longing and loss, seem to be the universal point for immigrants and especially Cuban exiles (McMahon 1). And in all the stories in In Cuba, I Was a German Sheperd, Menéndez is an expert at symbolizing the whole with a single punch—a literary clave to match her Cuban-American beats.