Another passage from House without Doors, a fictionalized memoir, (published so far only in Hebrew translation), told in the voice of the 12-year old Mira:
The grove of karawara spañó trees on the side of Didachi's house is like a dense forest. High on a branch of a tree we have tied one end of a rope leaving the other dangling down. We stand on the yellow wall near the wayaká tree, holding tightly to the loose end of the rope and jump off, flying through the air, like Tarzan on the lianas in the jungle.
I love to play Tarzan. But since most of the time I am the only girl among Dito's friends, I always have to be Jane. It does not matter that I am the oldest and the most agile of them all, that I can run the fastest and jump the farthest and that I can climb the highest on the rain pipe that comes down from Didachi's roof. There is no way they will ever let me be Tarzan. At the most I can be Cheeta, the monkey.
The karawara spañó trees are hard to climb because their bark is rough and they do not have any low branches to grab onto. But we have learned to use the rope to help us go up one of the trees, where we built a tree house. The grownups were quite scared at first, but as they watched us going up the trees they slowly began to realize that we are very good acrobats. They are amazed and perhaps even thrilled that we can climb so well.
No one ever says I should not climb trees because I am a girl. How could they, when my own mother had been quite a tomboy herself when she was young and growing up in the countryside of Cuba, although I am sure Mamita did not like that very much. Mamita is a very proper lady.
Yaya, who was my mother’s nanny and still lives with my grandparents, tells me all about my mother's adventures in Cuba. She says my mother rode horses and even drove a cart that was pulled by a billy-goat. Once the goat ran so fast that my mother lost control and the cart turned over and threw her into a ditch. Her arm was so badly broken that she had to have several operations until it was finally well again. An enormous scar, like a centipede crawling up her arm, is still there to remind us of her daredevil days.
Yes, it is all right to be one of the boys when we play in the yard, but when I am away from our house, especially at birthday parties, I have to behave like a proper little girl. I envy the boys. They do not have to wear neat clothes and smile and be told how pretty they are. At costume parties they can be cowboys and Indians, while I have to be a sweet little Red Ridinghood, clutching a basket of flowers for her sick grandmother who lives on the other side of the deep, dark woods.
The boys are allowed to run around and climb trees and get their clothes dirty, it does not really matter. They are excused because boys are like that. That is their Nature. They just cannot sit still, they are wild and do naughty things. Sometimes they get punished but there always seems to be a twinkle in the eyes of the grownups whenever they speak of the naughty pranks of the boys, as if, somehow, they are secretly proud of them