Of course, she was my mother, I knew that—she kept telling me so—“Soy tu mamá!” But she also seemed a stranger, and all the more so whenever she started to speak Spanish, a language which, as time went by, sounded both familiar and oddly strange to me. I surely understood what she was saying (I always would); her words seemed to have something to do with our apartment on West 118^th Street, con tu papá y tu hermano, and, yes, Cuba, that beautiful wonderland, so far away, of love and magic, which I had visited not so long before.