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little sticker with such clarity of detail while the faces of so many I had loved have smudged and faded as if memory had worn them from the handling. I wondered about this aloud once to my mother. I told her I had hoped life would unfold like a book where each detail built on the one before it, all of it racing to a satisfying conclusion. But life is not a tidy narrative, she had said, pulling her hair back into a smooth bun. We learn this late. These scraps of memory that become untethered from the rest, flapping disconsolately in the wind, these memories are the most important of all. Memories like these remind us that life is also loose ends, small events that have no bearing on the story we come to write of ourselves.
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    Forgive me, my daughter. I have labored to construct a good history for you, to put down the details of your life smoothly; to connect events one to another. But my first efforts seemed false. And I am left with only these small shards of remembrances written on banners of wind.
    After the triumph …
    I don’t know if I can describe to you the feeling of that time—it was the strange and dreadful excitement of a world turning, of everything staid and ordinary being swept away. The future rode a chariot and the people pressed together to watch it pass. We were all so happy then.
    And those palms, eternal witness to the blowing winds. Oh Cuba my beautiful land!

    How quiet was that first of January. An eerie quiet as if everyone were waiting to see what had really happened, no one quite ready to celebrate in case the dictator’s abrupt departure had been a trick. But by the next day the crowds came spilling into the streets, as if a great convulsion had emptied every house in Havana. Men and women lined up past El Cotorro to the palace and out toward Columbia. Up and down our block, people hung the red and black July 26 flags. I didn’t join any of the demonstrations. I have had since I was very young a terrible fear of crowds. But for days, from my little studio, I could hear the roar of the people, like a monster come out of the sea. Shouts, gunfire, glass breaking. There was hardly a block, it seemed, that didn’t have at least one store that had been destroyed. Someone who wasn’t there to see it, as I was, might say all that glass was broken out of bitterness or revenge or greed or even envy. All those explanations fail. Cataclysmic events, whatever their outcome, are as rare and transporting as a great love. Bombings, revolutions, earthquakes, hurricanes—anyone who has passed through one and lived, if they are honest, will tell you that even in the depths of their fear there was an exhilaration such as had been missing fromtheir lives until then. In those first days of January, the air was clear, the nights were cool. It was like being young and knowing the joy of it as well as if one were old.
    I remember passing a jewelry store on San Rafael in the early days of January. Every window had been broken. And yet all those jewels remained in their cases. I stood for a long time in front of the shattered glass, staring at a necklace adorned with a row of red rubies, like little drops of blood.
    Toward the end of the month of January, my husband and I threw our party for the revolution. I thought at the time that the revolution didn’t know what it wanted to be yet, but it was we who didn’t know what we wanted to be.
    Our house was made for parties. Even during the summer months you could put a small band out in the courtyard and the music would carry up to the top floors and at night the sound seemed to come from above and the stars seemed little points of light from the uppermost balconies.
    I wore a dress of blue satin. I had spent the afternoon at the beauty shop, where the girls had gathered my long hair into a swirl at the nape of my neck and shaved the stray hairs and powdered me with lavender and rubbed my shoulders with rose oil. I had descended the