Chapter Three
Eva
Havana
As the last students trickled from her classroom, Eva reached for her notebook.
Snippets of the girls’ conversations reached her ears—complaints about the number of pages Eva had assigned for reading, worry over the test that was coming at the end of the next week.
Threaded in between their academic concerns were plans for the weekend, a birthday party one of the girls was having that they were all looking forward to.
Her students’ lives were often far more exciting than hers, and she found herself taking inspiration in the joy with which they lived, their enthusiasm.
When one of them had her heart broken by some boy who surely wasn’t worth the trouble, Eva worried about her.
When another did well on a test, she cheered.
She spent so much of her life with them that after they inevitably moved on, she looked forward to the times when they would return to visit, to the letters they would write her.
She kept the correspondence in her dresser at home, tied together by a pale blue ribbon that had belonged to her mother.
Often her students inspired the characters in her writing, their final iterations so different from what had begun that she doubted even their own mothers would recognize them on the page.
Right now, though, her mind was elsewhere, on the final line for the third chapter of her novel. It had come to her while she was teaching.
Eva sat down at the wooden desk at the front of her classroom, her blue notebook freed from the cubbyhole where it rested while she taught.
She repeated the line in her mind lest she forget it. Words came to her at the strangest times, when she was bathing, teaching, shopping for groceries, on Sundays while she made a large pot of black beans for the week.
She lived her life in two worlds: she was Eva Fuentes—teacher of literature for fifteen female students—and she was the characters in her novels, slipping their personas on like a second skin.
They had endless conversations in her mind, as she conducted the triumphs and tragedies of their lives with a pen and paper.
Her characters were both family and friends, constant companions.
How do you get your ideas? her colleagues asked her, more than a little perplexed by how much of her time was spent dreaming about fictional characters and made-up stories.
She tried to explain that the ideas weren’t the problem.
They had always been there, ever since she was a little girl, like a melody playing in the background of her days.
At first, she hadn’t realized it was unusual, hadn’t understood that everyone didn’t walk around with these people they sculpted like lumps of clay in their mind, giving them full-fledged personalities and histories so that she knew exactly what they would say, understood their innermost thoughts better than her own.
They were real to her in a way that she couldn’t always adequately describe to others.
Perhaps because she put a part of herself in each of her characters—even the villains—and they became dear to her because often they contained the parts of herself that she didn’t share with others.
She gave her characters her secrets.
Eva scribbled the phrase onto the page, her brain working faster than her hand could.
Sometimes it was like this—a race to get the words out because they came with a fervor, ready to set the page on fire.
And other times, far too often, if Eva was being honest—it was a struggle, the battle between the pen and the blank page and the words that would not come.
But maybe that was what made her love writing the most—that for all the instances when it was difficult, when she was sure that she would never finish this infernal book, there were times when the magic would come, when the perfect words would meet the moment in her story.
“Still writing, I see?”
She jerked in surprise at the interruption, her pen skittering across the page mid-word.
Eva glanced up.
The school’s headmaster stood a few feet away from her desk, a smile on his face.
Mr. Garcia was generally well-liked among the students, equally so by the staff.
He was a fair headmaster, not an easy one, but the sort who pushed those around him to be the best versions of themselves.
She’d spent the first few months as a teacher convinced he didn’t like her, only to gradually realize that his respect took time to be earned, and once it was, he could prove himself to be a tireless advocate on that person’s behalf.
“May I?” he asked, his hand outstretched toward the notebook.
The nod was automatic, the product of over two decades of obeying her family, teachers, elders, over two decades of being obedient and helpful, the instinct to please, to acquiesce to avoid conflict, as second nature as drawing breath.
He picked up the notebook, and something lurched in the vicinity of her stomach, a protest resounding in her mind.
Eva lunged forward, her glasses slipping down her nose as her body listed.
Mr. Garcia’s eyes widened, and he dropped the notebook reflexively, no doubt more than a little surprised by the ferocity of her response.
Eva caught it as it dropped. Her fingers curled around the spine, relief churning through her veins.
Her cheeks burned with embarrassment.
“It’s not ready,” she blurted out as she met his gaze. “I haven’t—I haven’t shown it to anyone.”
He looked like he was trying not to laugh. “So you keep saying. When you didn’t object, I thought you might have finally finished it.”
“No—not yet. It isn’t. I keep—”
She didn’t know how to explain what it was like, how she would write ten pages on a Monday morning in the hour she had cobbled together to work before school began, and then by Wednesday, the pages she had written would end up in a ball in her trash can.
The trouble was that she knew there was a story inside her, knew there were words she wanted to say, words pushing inside her to get out, but when she tried putting them down on paper, it was like they slipped away from her, always outside of her grasp until she no longer recognized the story as the one that she had intended to tell.
And those were the good days. The days when the words flowed freely on the page, even if they weren’t the right words.
Other days, she woke at her writing time, and the blank page taunted her, the words dried up inside her.
It was a thoroughly maddening process, and sometimes she wondered why anyone would want to write a novel.
“I’m surprised,” Mr. Garcia replied. “With as much time as you spend on it, with as much effort as you’ve put into it, I’d think it would be ready for public consumption.”
He didn’t say it unkindly, and she couldn’t find it in herself to take offense. Her inability to finish the novel was becoming her greatest source of frustration.
“I’m not sure I’ll ever feel like it’s ready,” she admitted, giving voice to one of her greatest fears.
There was something so audacious about sharing her writing with others, as though she believed it was worth reading.
How would she ever know it was ready? How would she ever know it was good enough?
How would she ever know she was good enough?
“That’s likely a common fear with artists,” he replied.
“But I’ve seen how hard you’ve been working on your novel, the amount of time you’ve put into it.
I think that speaks a great deal to your determination to grow in your craft.
I’ve seen the kind of teacher you are, the kind of person you are.
I have the utmost faith that you will be good at anything you put your mind to. ”
She flushed. “Thank you.”
“Maybe a change of scenery, a new experience, an adventure if you will, could provide you with the inspiration to work on your novel. Not to mention some time to focus on it away from the classroom.”
An adventure sounded wonderful, but as improbable as Eva finally feeling as though her novel was done. The things she read about in the books she loved—ship passages, grand romances, and secrets and scandals—couldn’t have been further from her real life.
Eva wrote about things she had never experienced.
“I have an opportunity for you,” Mr. Garcia continued.
As soon as the word “opportunity” fell from his lips, she felt a spark of excitement, a shift in the schoolroom air. It was like a breeze had swept open the classroom door, a whisper of possibility calling to her.
Was there an available position at another school?
She’d spent her whole life in Havana, and the idea of seeing another part of the island—another city or the countryside, perhaps—filled her with hope.
She would miss her students, of course, but she had no family ties keeping her here with both her parents gone, and as much as she would miss the friends she had made, the truth was so many of them had moved on with their lives, marrying and having children, their priorities shifting as they took on new roles, new responsibilities, that she often sensed she had been left behind by others whose lives had passed her by.
“The American military governor Leonard Wood has proposed for us to send Cuban teachers to study in the United States. To Harvard. It was a plan initially conceived by our current superintendent of schools, Alexis Frye.”