Part of the picture I got was that, in Jekyll-Hyde fashion, he turned out to be one of those abusive men who believed that once he had married a woman and taken her virginity, she belonged to him — to beat as he pleased, as he might a horse he owned at the ranch, the way he mistreated servants. On a whim.

But there was something else, some weirdness in the bedroom that led to the violence when it erupted the first time. Later Mami said she thought it was jealousy underneath the rage that caused him to beat her senseless as he called her a whore and used a pair of scissors to ruin each of the lovely dresses that had been made or bought for her honeymoon, by slashing them and then cutting them up into hundreds of little pieces. Instead of being proud of her good looks, he was jealous of them, if that was possible, enraged by her beauty and by the way others found her attractive.

My mother locked herself in a hotel room, packed the remains of her clothing into her suitcase, and made the decision to leave the next morning and return to her parents. When morning came, she hesitated, remembering the sacred vows she had taken, feeling ashamed for not listening to her father, and not wanting to bring further shame to her family. But all her inner voices were telling her — leave, leave, leave!

My father showed up before she left, crying morosely and wringing his tear-streaked white handkerchief in his hands, begging for forgiveness. He assured her that an outburst like that would never happen again. He promised to replace the dresses. For the next few days he was his charming, considerate self, but when he brought the new dresses to her — several of them — she was mortified to discover that they were long and unflattering, severe, meant for older, matronly women.

Mami's gift of sight returned to her then. She prayed to her saints for protection and guidance to help her awful choice of a husband to improve, but she remained wary. For the time being Papi did improve. He tried to control his temper for the most part, at moments showing her warmth, affection, and even the fun, seductive side of El Ciclón. Unfortunately, this was a side of himself that he liked to show to others too. After Mami became pregnant, some three months following their marriage, she was informed, somehow, that the housemaid who had been working for her and Papi had paid a startling visit to Las Minas.

The maid asked to speak with my grandparents, whereupon she disclosed that she had been having an affair with their son Antonio and was pregnant with his child. Apparently the young woman had already learned that her employer had no money to give her, so she was appealing to his parents for financial support.

Victoriano — who may have dealt with similar appeals in the past — did not question whether she was telling the truth or not. But he did remind the unwed mother that she was of legal age and therefore the baby was her responsibility. He sent her away empty-handed.

Mami later heard that the maid gave birth to a girl, though the paternity was never verified. If Papi was the father, somewhere in the world there would be a half sister to my siblings and me, born roughly in July of 1954, around the same date that my mother went into labor with her baby and was rushed to La Clínica de Los Angeles.

During the excruciating hours that followed, Dr. Orizando eventually came to the conclusion that if he was able to save the baby, the mother, given her weakened state, would probably not survive the birth. The problem, so Mami explained, was that Antonio Arturo Rivas Jr., weighing over ten pounds, was obviously quite content to stay in her safe, warm, aquatic womb, and simply refused to come out. If it is true that prenatal babies can hear and sense the world that's waiting for them, that would make sense in my family's case.

When Tony was finally born, on July 9, Mami's vital signs were fading and she began to hemorrhage. She lost so much blood that Dr. Orizando was now certain that giving life to my brother was going to take hers. Pero con el ayudo de Dios...she survived. I later wondered if in that tunnel through which we are said to pass after death — the dark gauntlet with the glorious light at its end where Mami's saints would have been waiting to guide her to heaven — she didn't turn back and decide to return for her new infant and the other children to be born to her. She may have known how much we would need her.

My father undoubtedly was overjoyed to have a First Son, his namesake, almost as if Tony Jr.'s goodness and brilliance would redeem Papi's shortcomings. There was never a question in my young mind about his proud, loving feelings for my brother. In my role as Second Son I was cast in the position of always having to try harder to prove my worth, and I didn't always recognize the toll that Papi's expectations for perfection took on Tony, starting at an early age, in addition to the stigma he bore for being the baby Mami had almost died for when bringing him into the world.

My birth, fifteen months later, on October 1, 1955, at La Clínica de Los Angeles in the town and province of Sancti Spíritus (amid angels and holy spirits), was much less auspicious, except for the accidental fall Mami took on the last day of her ninth month when, during a visit from my Abuela Maria and Abuelo Chucho (our nickname for Victoriano), she tripped and landed awkwardly on the edge of a drawer with her huge belly. Maybe it was an omen that I was destined to withstand major physical onslaughts later on, accidental and otherwise.

When she was pregnant, Papi's violence tended to be restrained, so in a way she was fortunate to be as fertile as she was — although, considering the size of her babies, this was a mixed blessing. Thankfully my delivery was not the gargantuan struggle Tony's had been, but I was even bigger, weighing in at a hefty ten and a half pounds. "A beautiful baby!" Mami liked to say whenever remembering — except, well, there was one thing. The fingers. I had been born with six fingers on each hand, an ominous sign the meaning of which was never explained to me. The doctor snipped them off and preserved them in a jar for Mami, who kept them under lock and key, another family secret.

In honor of both my grandfathers, my parents named me Victor Manuel Remigio Rivas Garcia-Rubio Lopez. While Tony had my mother's darker coloring and features, from Papi's side I was fair skinned, with light eyes.

Back at home, Mami had two babies to nurse, one for each breast. At church and other community or family gatherings, we presented a handsome picture of a happy, loving, upper-class Cuban family. My father was a magician at striking the pose of normalcy. My mother's open smile became forced. She learned to keep more secrets.

Papi's roaming continued. Shortly after my birth, during a dash to and from Havana, he broke his leg in a motorcycle accident. While he was in a cast, he volunteered to sleep on the living room sofa — so as not to disturb Mami's sleep and to avoid any accidental kicks from her.

She didn't object but was highly concerned at one point when she woke in the middle of the night to hear my father moaning and gasping, seemingly in a bout of horrendous pain. Mami hurried to the living room to help. The bedding on the sofa was in disarray and he wasn't there, as if he had tumbled out and dragged himself to the bathroom. With the volume of his moans escalating, she ran to the bathroom, imagining that he had slipped on the tile. He wasn't there either. Following the reverberation of what was starting to sound more like pleasure than agony, she made her way to the live-in housemaid's bedroom. After a moment's hesitation, she opened the door. There he was, leg cast and all, on top of the young woman, humping away. Mami closed the door, swallowed whatever outrage ought to have been hers into a silent, cold shield that was forming around her heart, and returned to her bedroom.

Manolo had been right. Antonio Rivas was a mama's boy: he saw what he liked and he took it, with a sense of entitlement that had nothing to do with how he was raised. But on a more encouraging note, Papi seemed to take seriously his role as a provider. When he and Mami were married, his father had gotten him a post with the Justice Department — the first job he had ever held — and though that hadn't lasted long, he struck on a better idea, announcing to Mami late in 1956 that he had decided he wanted to move to the United States. His days at the Georgia military school had left him with fond memories of the good life in America, and he assured her there would be plenty of professional opportunities there for which he was well suited.

Just three years later, the first great wave of Cuban exiles would begin migration to American shores, fleeing Castro's communist regime and all that it entailed. But our departure had nothing to do with the revolution, even though its roots were taking hold out in the provinces, partly in reaction to the growing decadence and corruption that flourished in Havana. Oblivious to the political winds that were blowing, my father, then as later, simply wanted to move somewhere else, somewhere better (perhaps away from the scrutiny or judgment of his parents and siblings), and made arrangements to do so as quickly as possible.

Because it would be easier to obtain the necessary paperwork in the capital, the four of us moved to Havana to stay with Mami's parents. Soon after that, Papi was granted his visa and went on ahead of us to search for work and housing. For almost a year, my mother waited for him to send for us. In the interim, she rarely heard from him and he never sent her any money, so both sets of grandparents supported us. Finally, not long after my second birthday, Papi called to say he was ready for us to join him.

On October 26, 1957, Mami, my brother, Tony, and I flew to the United States, leaving our tropical homeland officially for good. Only one submerged memory of my earliest childhood in Sancti Spíritus came with me. Other memories of Cuba were acquired a year and a half later, thankfully, when Abuelo Chucho and Abuela Maria sent for my brother and me in the summer of 1959 to come for a two-month visit.

Some of the grainier images stayed preserved, very generally, from what was my then almost four-year-old awareness, like bright, wide swipes of color — in multiple shades of green everywhere, in tropical, jungle shapes, in snaking narrow roads through expansive fields bursting with crops of different kinds, swatches of grazing land with contented livestock dining away, and air so thick with humidity it refracted all those colors like a prism. Other recollections were more vivid and specific, like the day that my grandparents took us to the famed beaches of Varadero, where the sand was so white and squeaky underneath my feet that it felt as if I were walking on talcum powder.

Our stay in Sancti Spíritus at Las Minas also left strong impressions: the long, unpaved driveway lined by towering palms that led to the opulent two-story main house, with gardeners, ranch hands, chauffeurs, cooks, valets, housekeepers, and other servants (apparently more populous than the number of actual residents), all of whom seemed to welcome our presence and cater to our wants. Most memorable was Moya, the head cochero — driver — who worked on the ranch with his wife.

Moya was one of the most striking men I had ever seen, with ebony black skin so dark he was almost blue in tone, and a royal demeanor that, in my perception, put him in my wealthy grandfather's league of importance. When he wasn't chauffeuring family members in a luxury car, Moya drove an old topless army jeep around the ranch, running errands, on which Tony and I volunteered to join him as often as he would have us.

That is, until the day we went out with him and he had to stop back at the ranch to get something. Moya turned off the motor, took his keys, and bounded into the house. Tony — who had just turned five — slid over to the driver's seat, placed his hands on the steering wheel, and pretended that he was driving.

Entertained, I laughed and said, "Let me try!"

Tony ignored me and instead studied the mechanics of the stick shift, jerking it hard enough to force it out of gear and into neutral. We could feel the jeep begin to roll slowly backward down the slight incline of the driveway as we exchanged big smiles. Magic!

Tony held the steering wheel straight as we began to pick up speed, at exactly the same moment we looked back to see Moya emerge from the house. Racing toward us, he waved both of his hands at us, screaming, "Coño! Que estan haciendo?" Our laughter turned to frightened hysteria as it became clear that the faster Moya ran after us, the farther away from him we were. Picking up speed, somehow the jeep — which fortunately did not have power steering — maintained a fairly straight reverse course. We flew backward down the entire length of the driveway and across the paved main road, careening into shrubbery so dense that it behaved like a latter-day air bag, cushioning our crash.

Moya's immediate concern was for our well-being, not the blame he was going to shoulder for our mishap. Seeing that we were uninjured, though traumatized, he told us we were extremely lucky that there had been no traffic on the main road and that we hadn't crashed or tipped over into a roadside canal. Moya's message had another implication for me, which was that a protective adult would do anything in his power to make sure children in his care were not hurt. My father's messages from this era told me something else.

When we visited my mother's parents in Havana, they too made us feel safe and loved unconditionally. Even though I have only a dim recollection of their home and lifestyle from this visit, I later wondered if the feeling of safety that I associated with Abuelo Manolo and Abuela Muñeca (she was affectionately nicknamed "Doll") had come from our earlier, yearlong stay with them when Papi had already left for the United States.

When Tony and I left Cuba at the end of the summer of 1959, we said good-bye to my mother's parents not knowing that we would never see them again.

Only three months after we left, Fidel Castro's New Year's Eve coup toppled Batista's regime in Havana and flooded the country with fatigue-wearing revolutionaries. There was no mention in our household of why it was happening, what it meant, or how this might impact us or our relatives. Certainly, the prospect that we would never see our homeland again was not suggested.

As other events and challenges occupied my attention, the soil from which I first grew became more and more distant in my sensibilities, and my early years all but faded from conscious memory. Many years later, I had a strange dream in which I was a toddler, maybe a little over one year old, that I eventually recounted for Mami, as usual when she was busy in the kitchen, this time while doing dishes.

In the dream, I told her, I was wearing a diaper and had the terrifying, helpless sensation of falling backward, as though in slow motion, attached somehow to a high chair.

With her back to me as I described the odd emotion of shame that accompanied my fall in the dream, I saw her suddenly freeze. Her shoulders hunched over the sink and began to shake involuntarily. She was crying.

Without turning around, Mami said, "Ay, hijo, como tu te puedes acorda te ese momento? Tu tenias meno de dos anos." How can you remember that moment? You were less than two years old.

What I hadn't recovered in my dream was that just before the fall I took in the high chair that day in Sancti Spíritus, she had, innocently enough, told Papi that she had found me in my high chair with my hands down the front of my diaper — obviously having discovered my penis and the primal pleasure that came from touching it — and she hadn't known what to do to discourage such behavior.

For Mami, there was a lesson to emerge from this episode, making it the first and the last time that she asked El Caballero to resolve a situation involving her children that she could handle on her own. For me, the lesson filtered into later years, bringing with it the idea that whatever punishment I received, I deserved.

The moment Papi heard what his fifteen-month-old Second Son had been doing, he walked over and gazed down at me, and then, without a second thought, gave me a stinging backhand slap. The force of the blow not only sent the high chair and me toppling over backward, but threw me out of my chair so that I hit the back of my head on the coffee table.

All that came to me in the dream at a later age, however, was the sensation of free-falling backward, my first memory in life, one of my few memories of Sancti Spíritus.

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Copyright © 2005 Atria Books

Tags: Abuse and Violence

About the Author

Victor Rivas Rivers, a veteran actor who has starred in more than two dozen films (including The Mask of Zorro, The Distinguished Gentleman, and Blood In, Blood Out), is the spokesperson for the National Network to End Domestic Violence. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and son. More