Introduction

Maria Sirena tells stories. She does it for money—she was a favorite in the cigar factory where she worked as a lettora—and for love, spinning gossamer tales out of her own past for the benefit of friends, neighbors, and family. But now, like a modern-day Scheherazade, she will be asked to tell one last story so that eight women can keep both hope and themselves alive.
 
Cuba, 1963. Hurricane Flora, one of the deadliest hurricanes in recorded history, is bearing down on the island. Seven women have been forcibly evacuated from their homes and herded into the former governor’s mansion, where they are watched over by another woman, a young soldier of Castro’s new Cuba named Ofelia. Outside the storm is raging and the floodwaters are rising. In a single room on the top floor of the governor’s mansion, Maria Sirena begins to tell the incredible story of her childhood during Cuba’s Third War of Independence; of her father Augustin, a ferocious rebel; of her mother, Lulu, an astonishing woman who fought, loved, dreamed, and suffered as fiercely as her husband. Stories, however, have a way of taking on a life of their own, and transported by her story’s momentum, Maria Sirena will reveal more about herself than she or anyone ever expected.
 
Chantel Acevedo’s The Distant Marvels is an epic adventure tale, a family saga, a love story, a stunning historical account of armed struggle against oppressors, and a long tender plea for forgiveness. It is, finally, a life-affirming novel about the kind of love that lasts a lifetime and the very art of storytelling itself.

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Excerpt

Prologue

An unexpected envelope was delivered to me two months ago, on the first day of June. The outer package displayed the address of the University of Havana, Department of History in blue ink and a symmetrical print. My name was written in a different hand, and my address seemed to belong to yet another, as if the package had passed from person to person, each contributing some element to its outward appearance. Unnerved by all of those invisible hands, I left the package alone. But I could feel its presence, like fingers reaching into my purse, or trying to lift my skirt slowly. Accustomed to being alone, the package began to feel like an intrusion, and I could no longer stand it.

So, I opened it. Inside there was a pair of letters. The first, new and crisp, the blue ink rubbing off on my fingers, explained the second, which was old and crumbling. María Sirena, it began, casually, impertinently, as if I were an old friend, we believe this letter belongs to you. It has been housed in our archives, unopened, for many decades. The letter, it was explained, was waylaid somehow at the turn of the century, had turned up in a collection of war-era correspondences sold at auction, and acquired by an alumnus of the university. An ingenious student, they wrote, had tracked me down as part of his thesis. And on it went, describing the historical effort to preserve what was most important, and find homes for the insignificant.

With one glance at the faded postal stamps, my heart began to pound.

I worked the brittle flap open, chips of paper falling like confetti. I pulled out an article from an American newspaper, so fragile that tiny parts of the paper crumbled to dust, etching out words and individual letters, as if the thing were censoring itself before my eyes. Another page, this one made of onion-skin, upon which a Spanish translation of the article had been written in delicate, old-fashioned penmanship, held my attention for a moment until a small square of stiff paper fluttered to the floor from within the envelope.

I did not have to bend down to see what it was. A picture of my little boy faced me. My hands, holding the envelope and pages, curled into question marks, and then all of the contents of the package, those unwanted, insignificant things to the historians at the university, slipped to the floor.

That day, I sat on the floor and read the article again and again. It was the final proof of my shame, my fault made plain for others to read in boxy type on yellow newsprint. I kept the picture in my bra, close to my skin, until a corner of it bent, then, I wept for that small damage. I could not undo the crease, but I found a frame for the picture, one deep enough to house the article and translation with it. I whispered the diminutive of his name, the only name I ever spoke to him, “Mayito,” and wondered at the way the envelope had found its way to Maisí, and my little cottage by the sea.

These days, I think of my first-born relentlessly, reduced to this still image, his eyes looking slightly to the side, as if someone had called his name. The delivery of the package has flipped switches in my head, triggering sights and sounds I had forgotten. Old images come into focus again, like viewing them through the wooden stereoscope I once fiddled with as a young woman—here is a vision of Mayito’s first long drink of air, his wet, blinking eyes, his tiny tongue probing his lips…

After so much time, life’s hard revisions still surprise me.

1

Waiting for the Sea to Come

My next-door neighbor, Ada, treads through the sand wearing plastic sandals that flap against her hard heels. I hear her before I see her. She’s come to my back porch that faces the sea to warn me of a storm in the Atlantic. It does not matter to Ada that I can see for myself the ferocious churn of the sky, like a black mouth opening and closing, and the white, teeth-like caps of the waves. She has a television, and has become the ears of the neighborhood, watching reporters all day, then, broadcasting the news from house to house. She says the storm began off the coast of Africa, that they named it Huracán Flora, and that already, in Haiti, the sea itself had been wrenched away, revealing a sunken ship for a moment before the water came crashing back down. How interesting! she cries. I, for one, have had enough of ships, sunken or otherwise, in my life. The storm is said to be bigger than all of Cuba, and Ada says I should be worried.

“You needn’t have come,” I tell her, and point at the sky. “I don’t need a television to tell me anything. Cobbled sky,” I say, but don’t finish the old adage, the one that says cielo pedrado, piso mojado. Cobbled sky, wet ground.

The pregnant clouds race one another in the sky. In the sand, blue crabs scuttle towards rocks, forcing themselves into nooks and crannies. Ada and I watch them for a moment from my back porch. The movement in the sky and on the ground is disorienting, and I feel a touch of vertigo.

“Fidel is opening the old governor’s mansion in Santiago to those of us on the coast. For safety’s sake,” Ada says, reaching out her hand to me as if I would take it, come out of my chair, and abandon my house to the winds.

“Me quedo aquí,” I tell her, and face the sea again.

“What would Beatríz think?” she asks me, her mouth pursed.

My eyes prickle, and I blink them hard. “I haven’t heard from my daughter in weeks. She’s an Habanera now, didn’t you know?” A small crab makes its way towards my foot, as if it wants to get into the house. It opens a tiny, cobalt claw at me. First Ada’s outstretched hand, then the crab’s claw. I am besieged.

“Déjame,” I say quietly. In truth, the roiling surf is calming. I feel right by the sea. “And besides,” I say then, completing my thoughts aloud. “I won’t step foot in that mansion.”

Ada groans and sits beside me. The wicker couch creaks and the wind whips her skirt about. She is seventy-three, ten years younger than I. But ten years seem to be just enough to make a difference. Ada’s ankles have not yet begun to swell just from sitting. She has not yet discovered the disquieting tendency to fall over for no good reason, as if the earth has tilted suddenly, playing a child’s practical joke on her.

“Beatríz will come for you,” Ada insists.

“That is an old dream, Adita,” I say, and lay my hand over hers. My daughter is a woman of the city now, or so she says. She has become the kind of person who sets foot in a house and immediately begins to criticize it. “That old rug has holes in it, Mami,” or “Why don’t you dye your hair?” Once, I asked if she was ashamed of me, and she waved her hands in the air as if performing a magic trick, and said nothing. Even so, I love her. Thoughts of Beatríz always lead to thoughts of Mayito, and my throat tightens, my stomach plummets. Oh, my children, the only beings who have heard the beating of my heart from within. I wish that Ada would leave so that I might sleep the bad feeling away.

“It’s coming here, to Maisí,” Ada says, meaning the storm. “We must go.” She grips my hand hard, stands, and tugs, trying to lift me.

“Déjame,” I say again, more forcefully this time.

“You want to die here? You want the sea to swallow you?” Ada yells. The crabs still at the sound for a moment, then resume their crawl across the beach.

Once more, I say, “Déjame,” and this time, Ada leaves without a sound, though I can tell, by the way her arms are moving, that she is wiping her eyes.

Ada will be back, I know. She will take the time to pack up her cottage. Her daughter-in-law, Panchita, will come over with her grandsons, strapping boys with piercing blue eyes. Ada, who never brags about her great-grandchildren, knowing that it would hurt me, will shuffle behind the boys, touching them on the shoulders to get their attention, her eyes swallowing them up. They will load her valuable things into their car (for Ada’s son, Miguel, owns a bright blue 57 Ford Fairlane that roars up and down the street, startling me each time), and drive west, keeping inland, getting as far as Matanzas, maybe. I will watch all of this from right here, this seat.

Even when the waves come, I plan on not moving at all.

2

The Mermaid’s Daughter

Of course, I have to leave my seat by the sea sometime. I feel hungry, and fire up the stove. I chop up a ripe plátano and fry it in oil. There is day old rice on the counter, which smells fishy, the way rice does after a few hours, but it is good to eat. I throw the rest of it out onto the beach, and the crabs, which are still mid-exodus, stop over the grains before trotting on. I can hear them under the house, scratching, digging, burrowing. I lay awake in bed listening to them.

I do not sleep that night, though it feels as if I’m dreaming. In truth, I’m merely remembering, and what I remember is a story my mother told me long ago about another storm.

Her name was Iluminada Alonso. Her friends in Santiago de Cuba called her, lovingly, Lulu. Lulu’s water broke the morning of my birth, on a July day in 1881, on a ship named Thalia that had left Boston Harbor two days earlier, bound for Cuba. The dribble of her fluids mingled with the seawater that had splashed on deck. She had not told anyone about her pains all night, thinking that if only she ignored them, they might go away. After all, Lulu did not want to give birth on a boat, so many miles from Cuba.

But there came a moment when my mother could no longer pretend.

At dawn, Lulu had climbed above deck, gasping for air. She’d gripped the handrail, felt the water between her legs, and cried out. The crew, unaccustomed to women onboard their vessel, shouted among themselves, calling to my father, Agustín Alonso, who emerged from below deck with shaving cream still on his face.

Lulu said that three marvelous things happened at my birth. “Those distant marvels,” she called them, and looked out beyond my face, as if she were seeing them again, and as if she knew that the days when wondrous things happened without explanation belonged only in the past. The first marvel was a storm that came that morning, suddenly, and with few clouds feeding it. A mass of darkness, from which lightning flashed, and rain poured down, hung above the ship. But around the edges of that murky mass was the blue sky of summer, so the sun shone even as it rained, and the water glistened as it came down. People still say that when it rains and the sun is shining, the devil’s daughter is giving birth. They believed it then, too, and this gave the sailors pause, so they dropped anchor and scurried below deck. Lulu said that her pains came and went with the lightning, as if the heavens were delivering something, as well.

She remembered Agustín arguing with the captain, a Spaniard, who raised the Spanish flag each morning on his ship. Agustín had run to his trunk, dug out a crinkled flag, and thrust it in the face of the captain. “My child is Cuban, not Spanish,” he’d said, meaning that the captain should raise the flag my father was holding instead. In those days, children born at sea were registered under the flag flying from the ship’s mast on the day of their birth.

But Cuba did not have an official flag of her own then.

Lulu and Agustín had been in Boston that summer, meeting with what remained of the patriots from the first war for independence. They were a defeated lot. Their leader, General Antonio Macéo, the one everyone called the Bronze Titan for the color of his skin and the strength of his character, had been exiled from the island after the revolution was squashed. Spain had effectively shut down the patriotic voices, so the Cubans gathered in Boston to talk strategy. Lulu said it was an apt city for such talk, that the blood of revolutionaries was in the very mortar of the buildings. My father was among them, twenty or so men interested in reviving the bid for independence in Cuba. Two wars of independence had already been fought, the Cuban patriots crushed by Spanish forces both times. In Florida, the poet José Martí was raising funds, mainly tapping the patriotic Cuban cigar company owners in Tampa. That money was coming north, where my father and the others met in secret, deciding how best to use it. One of these men, another Cuban poet, named Miguel Tolón had designed a simple flag—three blue stripes for Cuba’s three provinces, and a single star in a field of red. Later, Lulu would tell me that Cuba’s independence was fed on poetry, and I would nod as if I understood, because pleasing Lulu made me happy. Miguel’s wife, Emilia, had done the sewing and embroidery on ten of these new flags, and one was in my father’s possession at my birth.

This was the very flag he held in a fist, shoving it into the captain’s hands. The captain refused and so, Agustín had no choice but to thrust his pistol under the captain’s jaw. Lulu remembered the sight of a skinny cabin boy climbing the mast without ropes, taking down the Spanish flag, and attaching Cuba’s new colors above the sails.

“Put it down in the ship’s log,” Agustín had demanded, “that my child was born free.”

This story may or may not be true. My mother was dying in a field hospital when she told it, while I, rosy-cheeked and healthy, sat beside her, clutching her bony hands and watching her rib cage rise and fall with each jagged breath. Agustín had been killed earlier that same year, but already had taken on the gloss of heroism in her mind. Perhaps she’d forgotten his cruelties. At that moment, at her death, Lulu remembered Agustín as her savior.

There were no women onboard the Thalia, and so Agustín delivered me himself, on a straw mattress brought above deck because Lulu could not bear to go into the dark belly of the ship.

“¡Luz!,” she’d yelled. “I need light!”

She’d kicked at Agustín, and scratched his face when he tried to drag her downstairs. He gave in at last, and it was he who peered between my mother’s legs and yanked me out. He used the short knife he kept tucked in his waistband to cut the cord. That same knife had gutted a Spaniard during the first war, my father told me often, his eyes twinkling. The three of us cried out together into the thick, stormy air. Then, it was silent. The rain stopped. Later, the bloody mattress was thrown overboard, and Lulu says she watched it floating, following the ship for a while as if it were being towed.

Then the second strange, marvelous thing occurred: three gulls lighted on the mattress, picking at the afterbirth that clung to the fabric, clucking at each other as if in conversation about something important, then diving into the water. Only then, Lulu says, did the mattress sink. As for the gulls, Lulu watched and watched the sea, scanning a swath of water the length of the ship, but she never saw them emerge.

Lulu died believing that our blood and that of the three gulls mingled with the sea, becoming an offering that led to the third and strangest marvel.

My father had wanted to name me Inconsolada after his mother, who had died long ago. Lulu, having borne a long ‘I’ name all her life, chafed at the idea. In addition, her mother-in-law had been a heartless woman. The name itself meant “inconsolable,” and it seemed like a curse.

“Give me a few days,” Lulu had said, as the Thalia sailed steadily alongside the eastern coast of the United States. Agustín did not press the matter. The captain had threatened to have him arrested once we returned to Cuba, and so Agustín was busy bribing and flattering the captain, getting the man drunk on rum during his breaks, in the hopes that the man would not remember whether Agustín had actually pulled a gun on him that frightening morning, or if he’d just imagined it.

Finally, one afternoon, the ship rounded the tip of Florida, and within a few hours, was in sight of Cuba. The island appeared like a low cloud on the horizon. Inspired, Lulu carried me unsteadily towards the ship’s bow, to glimpse our homeland. The sea was calm and crystal clear. Dolphins played a few feet away, their polished backs breaking the surface again and again, like extraordinary fruit bobbing in the water. Lulu says that the dolphins dove deeply suddenly, and in their foamy wake, a ghostly white hand emerged, then another, then, finally, the dark, wet head of a lady rose from the water.

The lady spoke, “I claim her as mine.” Lulu said that the Cuban flag snapped off the mast with a loud pop, and it fluttered onto the deck. When Lulu looked again, the lady was gone.

My mother had studied to be a teacher in Havana. She could read and write better than most, and knew well the temptations of nymphs, and the dark dangers of sirens. And yet, those Greek and Roman stories meant nothing to her. Instead, thinking of la Virgen, who appeared to black slaves at sea near el Cobre, home to Cuba’s nickel mines, and of the mermaids she remembered from the storybooks of her childhood, Lulu named me María Sirena. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

María Sirena’s mother Lulu had the spirit of a true revolutionary, but as a woman, lacked the social position to fight for the cause. What does The Distant Marvels suggest about the place of women in history?

Why is Agustín so determined to keep Lulu and María Sirena in his life when he expresses so little affection for them?

As the storm approaches and the pain in her side flares, María Sirena sends up a prayer that someone will remember her after she’s gone. Why do you think she desires this? Do you ever think about your own life in those terms?

After living the strangely sheltered life of a child prisoner, at the age of fourteen María Sirena is thrown into a world of conflict. Is there a singular moment in the story when she becomes an adult, or is it a gradual transformation?

How has motherhood shaped María Sirena, softened or hardened her remembrances, changed her perspective on herself as a younger woman?

Does María Sirena ever get the “cosmic justice” that Dulce claims the world lacks? What would that justice be?

Do you think it was reasonable for Mireya to blame María Sirena for her son’s death?

What is the relationship between María Sirena’s ailing physical body and her vision of herself as a young woman? What does The Distant Marvels suggest about the relationship of the physical body to the life of the mind and the spirit?

How does the Casa Velazquez serve as a metaphor for the dramatic changes taking place across Cuba?

What aspects of The Distant Marvels recall the form of a fairytale or an epic?

What relevance does storytelling have in contemporary life? Is it a way to preserve valuable history, or a way of obscuring the cold facts of history?

Is it possible to look objectively at one’s own history? How objective or subjective is María Sirena’s tale?

What does The Distant Marvels suggest about the relationship between the individual and history? How much of an individual’s life is shaped by the history that precedes them, and how much power does an individual have to shape their future?

At the end of The Distant Marvels, do you think that María Sirena has forgiven herself for what happened to her mother, Mario, and Mayito? Did she ever deserve blame for their fate, and if so, does she deserve forgiveness?

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