|
|
Chapter One, page 11
Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19
next
would derail
my plans, thinking that my family was jeopardizing my opportunities
for advancement. My future, she told me, was in peril.
But I tell you what, she said. There just may be something we can do about
it.
Compañera Tania here has something for you.
Tania handed me a yellow envelope and asked me to take it home and make
sure that my parents answered each and all questions in the pages it contained
and to return it to her the next morning. I thanked her and the principal,
because
I felt that I had been given the responsibility to save my future. It was,
quite literally,
in my hands.
I went home thinking I would lock myself in the bathroom to read the papers
before handing them to my mother. But the moment my mother saw my face, she
asked me what had happened. I took the envelope from my book bag and handed
it to her, not telling her what the principal had said about my uncertain
future.
She glanced at the papers before laying them on the dining table; for once
her
face betrayed nothing. Accustomed to leaving important decisions to my father,
she said he would take a look at them when he came home from work, which
he
usually did after eight, exhausted from driving a delivery truck.
When he arrived that night, he, too, ignored the papers at first. I was aching
to read them but didn’t dare to touch them. I reminded my father to
answer all
the questions, just as the teacher had instructed. We’ll see, he said.
I went to bed but didn’t sleep. Because my sister and I shared the
couch in the
living room, I could see my father hunched over the papers by the light on
the
dining table. He stayed up half the night, sometimes reading, sometimes thinking,
holding his brow with the first three fingers of his left hand, as was his
custom
when events overwhelmed him. I peered at him from under the sheets,
pretending to sleep. Sometime before dawn he pushed the papers away and went
to bed.
In the morning he simply told me he couldn’t answer the questions,
and he
showed me why. The questionnaire asked every detail of our lives. Did we
have
relatives in the United States? What were their names and addresses? Did
we
communicate with them? How often? Did we go to church? Every week? Every
day? Did we know any counterrevolutionaries? Did we go to La Plaza to hear
Fidel
speak? Did we volunteer when the revolution needed us? One hundred and
