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A Child's Glimpse of Cuba
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The Lightning
Alma Flor Ada

Mario, my father's younger brother, was a teacher in the Cuban countryside. To get to his school he needed to take the train and then ride for a few hours on horseback.

The school was a bohio, the typical country hut made of royal palm boards and thatched with royal palm leaves. The students sat on benches - three, four, or in the days when attendance was good, even five at a bench. But attendance was seldom good. Girls stayed home to help with their little brothers and sisters, to do the washing, to gather wood for the stove. And boys missed school because they had to help in the fields, planting, weeding, gathering. Mostly no one believed school would improve their lives and saw not much reason to go.

My uncle, himself, would cut class whenever possible. He came back to the city every Friday night, tired, exhausted and somewhat depressed. "What's the use?" he would say.

So many times on Monday morning he procrastinated and missed the train. An upset stomach, a small cold, were reasons enough not to travel. Many times he'd go on Tuesday and the week would only be four days long. Other times he'd come back Thursday night. "The attendance was poor this week," he'd say. "It always gets worse on Friday, so I just came home."

My father never criticized him. Because my grandfather died when my father was fifteen and my uncle only ten, my father had always looked after Mario. I think the memory of the pain of their loss, the unhappiness at having been sent to boarding school, the loneliness they had felt, made my father always compassionate of my uncle. Although Mario was now in his twenties, my father kept protecting him. My mother, on the other hand, kept reminding my uncle, "How are the kids ever going to believe in their education, when you don't? You could do so much for them..."

My uncle was a person of few words. He never entered an argument. He never tried to defend himself. He never told stories. As a matter of fact, he seldom spoke very much.

I could see my uncle's predicament. He stayed in the city to be able to come to our house. We were his only family and, I suspect, his only friends. It must have been hard to have my mother always reprimand him, but he just kept silent and kept on staying.

Then one Friday night he did not make his appearance at dinner. More surprisingly yet, he was not there Saturday night, nor Sunday. My mother asked my father, my father asked my grandfather, but no one knew where he was.

All during the week we didn't see him. Everyone speculated. There had been heavy rains, so maybe the rivers had overflowed and he had not been able to cross them. He had used this pretext many times to skip school. Maybe after all it had really happened.

The weekend arrived, but there was no news of my uncle. And, of course, there was no telephone or telegraph that would reach that remote school.

When my uncle returned, three weeks later, he looked like a different man. His usually pale skin was tanned, his carefully polished nails were broken and dirty. He was in need of a hair cut. But for the first time ever he looked strong and pleased.

He said nothing about his absence, so no one else mentioned it either, and we all sat down to lunch.

We had been enjoying the black beans and rice, the sweet fried plantains, when I noticed the mark on my uncle s wrist, a dark yellow band, where he normally wore his wrist watch.

"Uncle, what is that?" I could not help but ask.

"Oh, that...it s from the lightning."

There was a moment of silence. My mother set down the pitcher of coconut water even though her glass was still empty. My father put down his fork and knife. Even my little sister stopped eating.

"That first week I was gone," said my uncle, slowly, "there was a very major storm." And then he stopped.

"And..." my father prompted him. "What about the lightning?"

"The lightning was strong," my uncle continued. "It was difficult to teach with the noises of thunder. They seemed to be all over and around us..." He went silent again.

"Were many children present?" my mother asked. As if this were the cue he needed, my uncle continued.

"Yes, for once, they were all present. It was crowded and hot in that small room. And the children were all excited, as if charged with electricity. And then it happened..."

No one said a word. No one moved. We all stayed waiting for his next words.

"I didn t even hear the thunder when the thunderbolt hit the large mango tree next to the school. I simply passed out. The effects of thunderbolts are unpredictable. When I awoke, there was the most unbearable pain in my arm, my watch had melted right on my wrist. But I didn t focus on it. All the children were lying around on the floor. Every one of them..."

"Were they dead?" There was panic in my mother's voice.

"That s what I thought when I saw them. I thought they were all dead. Here they are all dead, I said to myself. And all just to hear a teacher that doesn t even believe in their education. But little by little, they began to stir, to wake up. No one was hurt. They were not even scared. But me..."

"So that's why you didn t come all this time," said my father, more to himself than to my uncle.

"I have been working on the school. I got a couple of fathers to help me enlarge it. And we are building some more benches. We also made a larger blackboard. It will take a while before everything is in place. I have spoken to one of the families to rent me a room so that I can stay over. I am turning over my own room next to the classroom, for an art workshop. There is so much to be done, I ll probably be coming back only once a month to get supplies."

My mother poured herself a large glass of coconut water. As she lifted it to her lips, it was hit by the rays of light coming in through the dining room window, and it looked as if she were making an offering.