BPR 50 | 2023
Growing up in Miami any tropical fruit I ate
could only be a bad copy of the Real Fruit of Cuba.
Exile meant having to consume false food,
and knowing it in advance. With joy
my parents and grandmother would encounter
Florida-grown mameyes and caimitos at the market.
At home they would take them out of the American bag
and describe the taste that I and my older sister
would, in a few seconds, be privileged to experience
for the first time. We all sat around the table
to welcome into our lives this football-shaped,
brown fruit with the salmon-colored flesh
encircling an ebony seed. “Mamey,”
my grandmother would say with a confirming nod,
as if repatriating a lost and ruined name.
Then she bent over the plate,
slipped a large slice of mamey into her mouth,
then straightened in her chair and, eyes shut,
lost herself in comparison and memory.
I waited for her face to return with a judgement.
“No, not even the shadow of the ones back home.”
She kept eating, more calmly,
and I began tasting the sweet and creamy pulp,
trying to raise the volume of its flavor
so that it might become a Cuban mamey. “The good
Cuban mameyes didn’t have primaveras,” she said
after the second large gulp, knocking her spoon
against a lump in the fruit and winking.
So at once I erased the lumps in my mental mamey.
I asked her how the word for “spring”
came to signify “lump” in a mamey. She shrugged.
“Next you’ll want to know how we lost a country.”
from Cuba (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1993)
first appeared in Kenyon Review
All of Ricardo Pau-Llosa's works featured in Issue 50 can be read/downloaded in PDF format