El Vanta Koor -- The First Installment

1176 S.W. 20th Avenue: Vanta Court--"El Vanta Koor"--Now known as, "Shenandoah Square."

From Neighbors (Notes) - an ongoing series of vignettes I was working on in Washington, D.C., Sunday, November 7, 1999:

Miami – Vanta Court (Koor): Tata (son at Playa Hiron & in Vietnam); Leonor (very religious, surrounded by saints); Sarita (very pretty, two sons); Julia (sewed dresses for me; I used to fall asleep at her apt before the TV & had to be led back to my own bed like a somnambulist).

Another way of putting it:

TROOPING THE COLOUR

BY GEORGINA MARRERO

The changing of the guard (officially) occurred on Saturday the 27th. Jane was due to arrive later on that evening. Gabi had left early on Friday the 26th, after which Mami had proceeded to uneasily gasp her way through an entire day. Other than coughs, snores – and an occasional sneeze or two – she had lain in her hospital bed, silent, pliant: not her usual stubborn self – until that Friday. I had silently begged her, “Please, please hold on until Gabi leaves.” And she had.
Whatever I would have done without her (highly anecdotal) address book, I do not know. By the time I had left Hialeah Hospital late Friday, I knew I had to do something. She’s trying to pass over to the other side, but she’s fighting it, I told myself. She needs to have people around her with whom she’s comfortable. So I proceeded to call Elvirita, Juana, Gladys, and Leonor, her four friends whom I thought she’d like to feel around her.
Elvirita (and Marta) had helped me from the beginning, almost three weeks earlier, when I had frantically called her from D.C. after Mami had not answered the phone on the night of the 7th. She had put up with my mother’s majaderias for so long – she understood her so well. Of course, now she was scared, as Ana’s rapid decline was making her painfully aware of her own mortality.
Juana and her daughter, Sonia, had showed up, very early on. “La Cuquita,” they called me, when they saw me. They had last seen me – I think – thirty years ago. And yet, it was images of a life long ago that passed through our minds as we greeted each other with open arms. My fifth birthday party: Juana and Papi looking on as I shook hands with el mago. Juana in the background, keeping an eye on me as I stood, owlishly squinting at the sun, on the steps in front of our house in El Nuevo Vedado. More than a lifetime ago, and yet yesterday, at the same time.
Gladys (Mrs. Alexander) I had never met, and yet I felt I knew everything about her. She had been my mother’s proverbial right hand at South Florida State Hospital. Very formal with each other, they had been: “Dr. Marrero.” “Mrs. Alexander.” And yet, they trusted and respected each other tremendously. I believe they saw each other only once (or twice) after Mami retired in 1983, but they kept in regular touch. I instinctively knew my mother would want her by her side.
Since Julia had passed away, Leonor (and, to a lesser extent, Tata) had become my mother’s mainstay from our “Vanta Koor” days. Those early days in El Exilio, “before we had any money, when things were still simple,” remained – in my mother’s memory (and, also, in mine, now that I think of it) – our best years until the end of her life. If Julia had still been alive, it would have been she I would have called. But, probably, also Leonor. Leonor con sus santos. Of all of Anita’s friends, Leonor Diaz qualified as the most spiritual of the bunch.
By the time I arrived at the hospital on Saturday, everything was in place. I think Mami realized what I was about to do: she had calmed down, again. Elvirita and Marta came first, quickly followed by Sonia. Juana was in Cuba. Then Gladys and her daughter showed up. I had never met Mrs. Alexander in the flesh, but I was so glad she had come! Blind in one eye due to a detached retina, she has a sharp sense of humor. Her favorite anecdote about my mother never fails to amuse me: once, when a patient swallowed the sole of a tennis shoe, my mother crouched beside him, peered into his throat, and proclaimed, “What a strange appetite.” The staff did not stop laughing for an entire month, my mother’s favorite nurse wryly informed me.
The afternoon passed into evening. Pretty soon I would have to go to Main Street in Miami Lakes, where I had agreed to pick Jane up after she had arrived in town. Just as I was about to leave, Leonor and Cirilito entered the hospital room. The years truly melted away, then: Leonor, still with huge glasses, was now walking with a cane. Cirilito showed up with his second wife and their young son (he has a teenaged son with another woman). My childhood playmate, he had been: we had even played doctor, once. I reminded him of this. He blushed.
Leonor prayed at her old friend’s side. This is precisely what – and who – she needs to take her over, I told myself. I was experiencing so many emotions at one time. Perhaps it hadn’t been coincidental that the piece I had been working on, that last fully cogent morning in D.C., had been my collection of vignettes on “Neighbors,” in which I had prominently mentioned the “Vanta Koor” years.
Rushing to Main Street, I found Jane in the midst of the annual holiday crowd. Kind drill sergeant that she is, I found myself toeing the Weaver line in no time. She had arrived with my computer in tow. Messing around with such a contraption was probably about the last thing on my mind at the time, but she had insisted. There’s no arguing with a Leo.
We settled in for the night. She slept in my old room, as I had appropriated my father’s room since my divorce in 1991. Since my mother had arrived at Hialeah Hospital – on the hospice floor, where she had been transferred from Palmetto General about a week earlier – I had asked the staff to please wait until the following morning if she were to pass during the night. I knew she’d understand.
Sunday morning, the 28th, Jane insisted on taking “a brisk walk” and on locating the local Episcopalian Church. Feeling helpless at first – and increasingly restless – I nonetheless held myself in check when she returned around 1:30 p.m. After all, my friend was trying to help me. In the midst of my fog, I was, nonetheless, grateful.
We have to go to the hospital, I said. First, we had to eat, so we stopped at a McDonald’s. A Happy Meal later, we were once more on our way. We pulled into a parking spot at the hospital at about a quarter to three in the afternoon, and rushed to my mother’s room.
The door was closed. This was the first time this had occurred. Perhaps the other occupant in the room was being tended to? No, I knew what had happened. I pushed the door open. The kindly, highly spiritual Haitian nurse at my mother’s bedside tried to send me away. No, I said. I approached the bed.
“Your mother passed away quietly five minutes ago, as I was turning her,” she informed me. As it was 2:50 p.m, that meant that she had waited until I was on the grounds of the hospital. But not at her bedside. “You did it your way – after the fact,” I quietly informed my mommy. And then I began my first round of weeping.
Jane entertained herself outside as I spent as much time as I could with Mami that afternoon before the Caballero Woodlawn people came to pick her up to prepare her for the mini-velorio that I had requested… and the cremation that she had requested, via flyers I had found all over the living room of our Miami Lakes house when I had arrived on the 9th. That fairly recent Tuesday afternoon seemed – in retrospect – so very, very long ago.
As I cradled Ana Raab Marrero’s head in my arms, I could not help but notice that the head grows cold first. The rest of my mother’s body remained warm throughout most of the time I had with her. I stared at her body, so reminiscent of mine even now – of the body I’ll have in another forty years or so (if I’m still alive). I checked for the lack of breath streaming from the nostrils, for the constricted pupils: both markers of death. I felt very weird doing this, but a little book on what to expect had… well, led me to what to expect. I remembered how Dr. Ana R. Marrero had so clinically described Dr. Federico E. Marrero’s demise to one and all (mainly other doctors, to be sure). In my own way, I guess I had to keep up the tradition.
More than anything, this was my first death, up close. Ken and I had found Iskra’s lifeless body so many years ago in Hubbardsville, but that’s as close as I had gotten to the real thing. Now that I think of it: Princess Diana’s death helped prepare me for Mami’s. I was on the phone with her – between eleven-thirty p.m. and midnight – when CNN had announced that the Princess of Wales had died. She had gathered all my books on Diana together and had them waiting for me, in my room, for my next visit. I had gone to the British Embassy to sign the Condolence Book on that chilly, cloudless Friday before the funeral. A strange week, that one: that’s when I decided to send Lucretius to Errika in New York. Ana – and Horace – would now reign supreme, in my life, until their deaths, on November 28, 1999, and January 3, 2003, respectively.
I’m not one hundred percent sure, but I believe I perceived my grandfather’s presence in those first few minutes after I reached my mother’s bedside. “First and foremost, you are now Panni Raab, and Zoltan has come to take you away,” I (more or less) told myself. This was both the most selfish – and most selfless – moment of my entire life.
The following Thursday, I placed the Balinese crocodile wood happy/sad mask, which she loved so much, in her casket, along with a copy of “We Are The Punakawan,” which she also loved. She was cremated that Friday. On Monday, July 10, 2000, I scattered Mami’s ashes out on the Atlantic (thanks to Captain Tom Freedlich), along with twelve white roses. He tried to position his boat as close to the Amsterdam Palace as possible. Anita loved the Amsterdam Palace.
And she loved me.
Sunday, November 23, 2003
Slightly revised, April 11, 2004