49 pages • 1 hour read
Ana MenéndezIn Cuba I Was a German Shepherd
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaThe Perfect Fruit” and “Why We Left”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story Summary: “The Perfect Fruit”
A third-person narrator follows middle-aged Matilde. The story alternates between her reflections on her marriage to Raúl and motherhood, and her attempts to prepare dinner for her son Anselmo and his American girlfriend Meegan.Anselmo was born two months premature in Cuba, when Matilde was 21 and waiting for her visa to join Raúl in Miami. When Anselmo was one, he and Matilda finally made it out. Raúl glanced at the baby then patted Matilde on the back. In Havana, she had read poetry to him; in Miami, they were rarely intimate. He was gone 14 hours a day.
Late one night, the phone rang; when Matilde answered, the caller hung up. Matilde believed she needed to “make Raúl’s secrets her own” (46). She awoke the next morning with a desire to cook and began experimenting. As Anselmo grew, Matilde gradually began to forget. She felt overwhelming love for Anselmo but suspected that her happiness with him was “like a gauze that wrapped around her heart to keep it from spilling out” (44).
During a recent visit with Anselmo, Matilde complained that he had lost 15 pounds since moving in with “that woman” (39). Privately, she finds Meegan pathetic for thinking that she knows Anselmo when she just walked “into the middle of his life” (39).
Meanwhile, Matilde notices that the banana trees Raúl planted without her consent have begun to grow fruit. She worries that they will rot on the trees and spoil her yard ahead of the dinner. She complains to Raúl that he “ruined my beautiful green yard” (44). She notices how he has aged, and it gives her “a sudden and unexpected thrill” (44).
The out-of-control bananas fill her with “the old panic of not understanding” (46). She stays up all night and the following day cooking banana-based desserts. Raúl returns home to banana pies, cobblers, flans, cookies, muffins, tarts, and cakes. He asks Matilde why. She shrugs, saying that she has heard bananas are “the perfect fruit” (49) because they grow anywhere. Anselmo and Meegan will be there any minute, but Matilde and Raúl have nothing to feed them except dessert.
Matilde tells Raúl that in one of their wedding photos another woman is kissing him on the cheek. He looks happier in that moment that Matilde has ever seen him. He asks why any of that matters now. Matilde replies, “Everything was going away from me again” (51). They hear Anselmo’s car in the driveway. Matilde sets a pie in front of Raúl, telling him she “made it just for you” (51).
Story Summary: “Why We Left”
“Why We Left” contains allegorical and magical realist elements. In it, a first-person female narrator talks to her lover about losing their baby boy and leaving Miami for an unnamed western city that neither of them likes because of the cold.
She recalls how her lover quoted the poet William Butler Yeats the first time they met. She unplugged her phone and spent the entire night and following day reading Yeats. When she plugged her phone back in a week later, the first call she received was from her lover. She quoted Yeats to him, saying that “the center cannot hold” (52), and he proposed. She describes her dark hair and skin being replaced by red hair and freckles.
She recalls “looking for sorrows” (52) when she was young, inventing past girlfriends of whom she could be jealous. Now, she makes lists to combat her lover’s increasing lack of communication. She recalls their romantic early love, noting they now wrap themselves in separate blankets. For a while, he stops eating and spends all his time counting coins, which he then abruptly stops.
One December night, she returns home and tells her lover that she has discovered “a forest where hibiscus bloom from the slender limbs of birches” (53). Her husband puts a dime in his pocket and holds the woman close. She asks if he remembers why they left Miami and describes the night she told him that she lost their baby. She blamed him for “working all the time” (54). When he walked out of the house, head hanging, she felt ashamed.
With her fingernails blue from cold, she explains how she stood in her forest and spoke with an ancient palm tree. Her lover grabs her hands and shakes her, telling her that is not possible. She asks why they left and begs him to come to her forest with her. He tells her that it does not exist and that they left Miami because they “lost a baby” (56). She says that he believes “leaving is a form of reverence” and that his memories “could make of the past something sacred” (56).
On winter’s last night, the woman stays out all night under her ancient palm tree. The woman hears her memories and wants to follow her son’s voice “to where he lies” (57). Instead she hears her lover’s voice, first soft then insistent. He picks her up in his arms. She asks him to lie in the forest with her. She feels his hot breath in her lungs. He begs her to wake up; she tells him not to cry.
Story Analysis: “The Perfect Fruit” and “Why We Left”
Matilde and the narrator of “Why We Left” illustrate diverging responses to loss and pain, a persistent feature of both personal relationships and the Cuban immigrant experience. In Matilde’s case, her loss is the way leaving Cuba alters her relationship with Raúl. Meanwhile, “Why We Left” bears no explicit connection to the Cuban experience besides the fact that the couple originally lived in Miami. Nevertheless, it is implied that the narrator is, if not a Cuban immigrant herself, the child of immigrants—her hair changing color could represent acculturating to American life. In the collection, the story functions to demonstrate the universality of loss. While the Cubans’ losses are unique to their circumstances, everyone who has experienced loss has a link to others who have also been through it.
When she first arrives in the US, Matilde feels defeated and can barely muster the energy to care for her baby, Anselmo. She has lost everything that is familiar to her, including her relationship with Raúl. She struggles to adjust to the drastic change—in Cuba they read poetry together, while in the US he is gone 14 hours a day. Though it is never explicitly stated, she recognizes that he likely has had and continues to have affairs, but she does not confront him. The late-night phone call prompts Matilde to seek control where she knows she can find it: through food. Feeding her son and seeing him grow as a result provides her with a sense of agency, though a part of her understands that she is sublimating her now unrequited love for her husband.
When her adult son begins pulling away because moving in with Meegan has shifted his priorities, Matilde panics. Anselmo no longer finds comfort in Matilde’s food, and her feelings about Meegan create a barrier between them. Compounding this anxiety is the explosion of bananas in her yard. Raúl planted the trees without her knowledge or consent, and now their sudden growth threatens her yard’s order and serenity. Her repeated response is to control a chaotic situation not of her making through cooking. She cuts every banana down and spends all day and night baking them into desserts until not a single banana remains.
Raúl fears Matilde has lost her mind, but she is actually seeking to regain control over elements that overwhelm her. Preparing and serving food provides tangible evidence of what she longs for in her life: progress and change. Focusing on the bananas takes her mind off Anselmo and Meegan. Planning dinner for them takes a backseat to resolving the banana problem. During this time, she is also pleased to notice that Raúl has begun to show his age, perhaps because it will make him less attractive to other women. This either indicates that she continues to love her husband and sees a possibility for regaining their former closeness, or that she is glad his vanity is being punished. When she places the pie in front of him in the story’s final scene, she now transfers her love for her son back to her husband.
The story’s turn-return movement contrasts with the more overtly bleak outlook of the relationship in “Why We Left.” Where Matilde strives to regain control, the narrator of “Why We Left” retreats from her pain and loss.
The first-person narration places readers inside the mind of a woman who becomes increasingly disconnected from reality. She describes her husband sorting change on the floor, an image which echoes her accusation that because he worked too much and left her lonely, she lost their baby. Representative of Menéndez’s enigmatic narrative style, the story never clarifies whether the narrator had a miscarriage or whether the baby died sometime after birth.
Whatever its cause, the baby’s death compelled the couple to leave Miami. The husband wanted to move as a tribute, to “make of the past something sacred” (56). By leaving, their memory of Miami remains bound up with the baby they lost. If they had instead stayed in the city, their experiences would pile layers over their loss, and the city would no longer be “sacred” (56) as the baby’s resting place.
Midway through the story, the narrator begins retreating outdoors, claiming that she has found a magical forest in which hyacinths bloom on birch trees and an ancient palm tree communicates with her. In the western city where they live, it is actually winter and dangerously cold. The final scene suggests that the woman has lain outside in the cold, hallucinating and freezing almost to death. Her lover finds her, perhaps performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation—“I feel your breath, hot and wet in my lungs” (57). He wills her to wake up, but she tells him not to cry, suggesting she has given up and does not want to return to him, or life.
