Exiled from Purgatory
The Cuban-born author gets himself into a bit of a hot tamale when he notoriously exclaims “If Cuba is hell, Miami is purgatory” and soon finds himself on the run again. The life an exile—whether by force or choice—is never completely easy and imagery poetically describes the fundamental problem:
“The exile is a person who, having lost a loved one, keeps searching for the face he loves in every new face and, forever deceiving himself, thinks he has found it. I thought I had found that face in New York, when I arrived here in 1980. The city took me into its fold. I felt as if I had arrived in a glorified Havana.”
Nightmare Fuel
Planning on a peaceful night’s sleep tonight? Well, cancel those plans, thanks to first example of imagery in the novel. The first paragraph of the opening page details the strange urge of the narrator as a toddler to eat dirt. By the middle of the second paragraph, the consequences of this urge are made unforgettably palpable as he recalls a bellyache sending him writhing in pain to the outhouse:
“The first thing that came out was a huge worm, a red creature with many legs like a centipede. It was jumping up and down in the pot, no doubt enraged at having been expelled from its home in such a violent way.”
Broom without a Witch
It is almost inevitable that any imagery involving a brook is going to be associated with witchery. But the author here upends convention in a most refreshingly sweet way, using the imagery of domesticity and the broom to create a poetic portrait of a touching if complicated mother/son relationship:
“She had a light way of sweeping, as if removing the dirt were not as important as moving the broom over the ground. Her way of sweeping was symbolic; so airy, so fragile, with a broom that swept nothing, it seemed an ancestral habit forced her to repeat the motion. Perhaps with that broom she tried to sweep away all the horrors, all the loneliness, all the misery that had accompanied her all her life, and me, her only son, now a homosexual in disgrace and persecuted as a writer.”
The Island
Most of the action takes place in Cuba and the topography of the narrator’s homeland is inextricably tied to his story, shaping his character and molding his destiny. Like on any island, regardless of the size, life revolves around beach, that barrier between the reality of the land and the siren song of possibilities expressed by what lies on the other side of the beach:
“The sea was then my most extraordinary source of pleasure and discovery; to see the raging waves in winter; to sit looking at the sea…particularly in Havana, where the sun falls into the sea like a giant balloon; everything seems to change at dusk, cast under a brief and mysterious spell. There is the smell of brine, of life, of the tropics. The waves, almost reaching my feet, ebbed and left a golden reflection on the sand.”
