The First Woman
She was my Sunday school teacher
when I was just seven and eight.
He was the newly hired pastor,
an albino, alarming sight
with his transparent eyelashes
and mouse-pink skin that looked like it
might hurt whenever she caressed
his arm. Since Eva was her name,
to my child’s mind it made great sense
that she should fall in love with him.
He was Adán. Before the Fall
and afterward, her invert twin.
And she, Eva, was blonde as well,
though more robust, like Liv Ullmann.
I loved her honey hair, her full
lips; her green eyes a nameless sin.
(Not that I worried all that much—
the church was Presbyterian.)
In Sunday school, her way to teach
us kids to pray was to comment
on all the beauty we could touch
or see in our environment.
My hand was always in the air
to volunteer my sentiment.
Since other kids considered prayer
a chore, the floor was usually mine.
My list of joys left out her hair
but blessed the red hibiscus seen
through the windows while others bowed
their heads. Her heart I schemed to win
with purple prose on meringue clouds.
—For who was Adán, anyway,
I thought, but nada spelled backward?
While hers, reversed, called out, Ave!
Ave! The lyric of a bird
born and airborne on the same day.
But it was night when I saw her
outside the church for the last time:
yellow light, mosquitoes, summer.
I shaped a barking dog, a fine
but disembodied pair of wings
with my hands. She spoke in hushed tones
to my parents. The next day I would find
myself up north, in a strange house,
without my tongue and almost blind,
there was so much to see. This caused
Cuba, my past, to be eclipsed
in time, but Eva stayed, a loss.
Ave, I learned, meant also this:
Farewell! I haven’t seen her since.
Aleida Rodríguez, "The First Woman" from Garden of Exile. Copyright © 1999 by Aleida Rodríguez. Reprinted by permission of Sarabande Books, Inc.
