Free The German Girl by Armando Lucas Correa Page B

Manhattan, a proper island, one step away from dry land.
    Dad’s family arrived in Cuba on a ship, and that was where they stayed. But he grew up and left, like almost all those born in Cuba. “You have to leave islands,” he would always tell Mom. “That’s what you think when the endless sea is your only frontier.”
    Dad was shy. He didn’t know how to dance, he didn’t drink, he never smoked. Mom used to joke that the only thing Cuban about him was an old passport. And the Spanish language. He spoke it without any harshness, pronouncing the s ’s and without swallowing the consonants. English was his second language, which he spoke fluently without an accent, thanks to the aunt who brought him up after his parents’ death. He obtained American citizenship because of his father, who had been born in New York. That was all the information Mom had been able to gather during the few years they were married; she verified it with the great-aunt in a phone call that was constantly cut off.
    Occasionally a film reminded her of the man with whom she had decided to have a family that he never knew. It was thanks to him that Mom had discovered postwar Italian cinema. Dad was fascinated by Visconti, Antonioni, De Sica. But he also enjoyed Madonna. Those were his contradictions. When they started going out together, one of their first dates was at the Film Forum in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, to see the original version of De Sica’s Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini , one of his favorite films. Dad always left the cinema in a state.
    “I saw his eyes brimming, and he said I looked like the heroine in the movie,” recalls Mom. “It was such a romantic thing from someonewho said so little that I thought, I can live with this man . Your father never showed his emotions, but at the movies, he was always weeping.”
    Dad found refuge in his work, his books, and the dark theaters where stories were told through moving images. He didn’t have friends. I used to imagine him as a superhero who came to rescue the oppressed and those who had nothing. Mom would laugh at my wild fantasies. But she never criticized them because she knew that, to me, he was still alive.
    Mom is all alone. She was an only child, and her parents died, one after the other, when she was about to finish college. Then Dad appeared. They met at a concert of baroque music at Columbia University, where she taught classes in Latin American literature.
    The day she announced she was getting married, none of her friends asked if Dad was Hispanic, Jewish, or a foreigner just passing through. His origin wasn’t important: he spoke good English, and that was enough. He had a job in a center for nuclear studies, as well as a nice apartment he had inherited from his family.
    Dad worked outside the city but had an office downtown where he went every Tuesday. Those were the only days he arrived home later, but she never questioned him about it. My father wasn’t someone you could question, or even feel jealous about. Not because he wasn’t handsome, but because he didn’t like complications or anything that would disturb his space, which was already well-defined.
    She never introduced him to her faculty friends, and so had no need to explain. All she knew about Dad was that his parents had died in an airplane crash when he was a young boy and that he had been brought up by an aunt. That was enough. He never spoke about his past.
    “It’s best to forget,” he would tell her.
    I go into Mom’s room. She is kneeling in front of the dresser, rummaging through papers and books. She pulls out an old shoe box. I can see a pair of cuff links, a pair of men’s sunglasses, several envelopes.
    When Mom hears me at the door, she turns around and offers me her best smile.
    “Some of your father’s things,” she says, closing the box and handing it to me.
    I run back to my island with my new treasure, and shut myself in to examine it.
    “ Look how many treasures I have.