Mitchum, Mature, & Burton - My Parents' Movie Heroes in Havana, Cuba
My father grew up in the little town of San Pablo
where his mother worked as a teacher, and where
he met my mother, though he'd promised by then
to become somebody, that he'd return for to marry
her, which he did, and years later, as a beat policeman,
he'd stopped to light a cigarette on the wet streets,
read marquees of many movie theaters in Vedado
and other places in Old Havana, where, on many
a night, he'd gone in by himself to watch Night
of the Hunter, starring Robert Mitchum, his cleft
chin, and drowsy look, especially when he got angry,
and my father heard the women around him sigh
in the dark, and he thought on the night he watched
Cape Fear, that he'd work on that look, that glance.
And it only worked on my mother, he'd say years
later, though my mother also loved Mr. Mitchum,
but also Victor Mature in all those gladiator movies,
his curly hair and hard jaw - the jaw of a real man.
Though much later when they left Cuba for Spain,
and they didn't have much time to see movies,
they talked about the old black and whites, Sir Richard
Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Who's Afraid of Virginia
Woolf? My parents stopped watching films after we
came to Los Angeles, and on those days when he
brought home the newspaper, my father read the sad
news to my mother of all the great movie stars dead,
or dying, and they looked at each other and sighed,
understanding themselves how far they'd come, how
much their own lives had changed, how some names
linger in life or death, these beacons projected in dark,
like all these stars they've followed from there to here.
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- Second Aeon
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