POP MUSIC : The Last Hurdle : Gloria Estefan says returning to the concert stage will allow her to put last year’s wrenching accident behind her

Gloria Estefan has the kind of figure that makes even the most impervious women covetous--shapely, athletic and impossibly small-waisted.

Last spring, though, she had a different shape altogether.

“I had no curve here,” she says, pointing to her upper hip, which has obviously since rebounded. “It was like a big wall. My butt went to visit my ankles, because all these muscles were cut. For a long time I didn’t want to look at my body. I could see some of the hardware in my back and the scar was really bad.

“It was strange. I’ve always been very much in tune with my body, and I had worked to get it to a point where I was probably in the best physical condition that I’d ever been in my life. Having this happen felt like hopping into an alien body.”

The day that temporarily altered Estefan’s personal topography: a highway accident last March in which she was thrown from her bunk on a tour bus and broke her back.

Potentially debilitating as it was, the injury didn’t sideline Estefan for long. A new album is due in stores this week under her own internationally famous name--the name Miami Sound Machine has finally been retired, though many of the band members have stayed with her.

Completing the comeback blitz, a full-scale concert tour is imminent, following Estefan’s first post-accident live performance Monday night on the American Music Awards telecast.

Touring, she says, is “one more thing I have to do to be able to get it behind me. I’ve already put it more behind me than most of the people that still haven’t seen me come back and are still curious about it. But I know that by the second or third song, it’ll be more behind everyone.”

Wearing black tights and an equally snug turquoise shirt, with a red cast to her dark ringlets, Estefan, 33, looked more like a fit, carefree teen-ager during a recent stay at a West Hollywood hotel than a fairly recent victim of bloated paralysis--or a mother to a 10-year-old, for that matter. And she was able to joke freely about “the dreaded day.” But there was a soft-spokenness to her mostly serious manner that suggested she had spent at least as much time in introspection this past year as in physical therapy.

An operation inserting metal braces to stabilize two broken vertebrae was followed by months of difficult workouts, mandating the Cuban-born singer’s first extended break from recording and touring since the Miami Sound Machine had its first big American hit with the strongly salsa-flavored “Conga” six years ago.

A single from the new album, “Coming Out of the Dark,” inspired by her recovery, is already on the charts. (See review, Page 67.) Estefan even closes the album with a Spanish-language reprise of the title track. “It’s one song I really wanted to reach both my audiences with,” she says, “because they were all very supportive for me after the accident.”

(Don’t expect too spicy of a Latin flavor on the rest of the album, though: Having released a Spanish-language Miami Sound Machine greatest-hits album last fall, says Estefan, “We had done something for my Spanish audience specifically, so I didn’t feel the need to have to put a lot of Spanish on this particular album.”)

The single may be a gentle ballad, but don’t expect a frail or physically timid Estefan upon her return.

“I wouldn’t want to get back on that stage and be less than I was,” she asserts. “I’m trying to even go beyond what I did before, because I had very high energy on stage, but it was unfocused. I had always wanted to dance, but I knew it took a lot of time (to learn)--which I didn’t have because I used to go straight from the recording studio to touring. But now I’ve had time to work on a little bit of choreography and do things in a more organized fashion. I’m going to surprise the audience; I’ll be moving around quite a bit.”

Estefan’s tour bus was behind a stopped truck on a wintry rural Pennsylvania highway when it was struck from behind, sending bodies hurtling. Her 10-year-old son, Nayib, suffered a broken collarbone. No one initially realized that his mother’s injury was far worse until Estefan insisted she couldn’t move her legs. Not until after surgery much later that day were doctors able to tell her she probably wouldn’t be permanently paralyzed.

Though the accident was traumatic, Estefan never blocked it out.

“I remember ,” she emphasizes. “I wish I could forget sometimes. I had a lot of nightmares at the beginning, but that’s over now. I was asleep and had just opened my eyes when everything exploded. How I got the actual injury no one remembers, but I do relive the point of impact a lot. We think I was thrown against a table, because everything was pushed into the spine.”

Estefan lay in agonizing pain for more than an hour, waiting for a helicopter to reach the remote highway after her husband, the band’s leader Emilio, called for help on the bus phone. To make it through the painful wait--which she describes as several times worse than childbirth--she made use of Lamaze training, focusing in on a spot on the bus ceiling during breathing exercises.

One other factor kept her from panicking through the wait--a sense of parental responsibility for Nayib, who held his mother’s hand during the wait despite his own injury.

“I was forced to really keep a lot of control, because I didn’t want him freaking out. There was chaos on that bus. And I still remember as a child that if you were to see your parents lose control in any situation, it would be really a very traumatic thing, because you always think of adults having a grip on everything. And I didn’t want him to feel that we had lost that grip for him, so that helped me hang on.”

Her son inspired the new album’s “Nayib’s Song,” in which Estefan sings of a mother’s hope that she can bring her son up in such a way that he might in turn care for her in her elderly years. The song was actually begun before the accident, based in part in Estefan’s own experience looking after a paraplegic father in her youth, and given even more weight and finished after the possibility of Estefan’s herself becoming physically dependent had momentarily loomed large.

“Seeing the news about what was going on in the world was very depressing at the time I started writing the song. It’s difficult sometimes to think this is the future that you’re handing over to your kids. But after the accident, I felt it doesn’t matter what happens in the world, because that’s always gonna continue and progress very slowly. The bottom line is that we’re here for each other, and if all else fails, then I’ll be there for him and then eventually someday he’ll be there to take care of me.

“I see it as such a continuous circle. In this country, it’s difficult, because when you reach old age sometimes it’s like you’re obsolete. The one thing I wanted to instill in my son is that we are responsible for each other. There has to be that responsibility. I pray that someday it will turn around, and if I am in that position--which I almost was already--that he would care for me in that way.”

There’s a melancholy cast to another song on the new album, “Remember Me With Love,” in which the singer, though apparently thankful for true love, assures her mate that if fate should ever dictate a breakup, she hopes he’ll remember their union with affection, not bitterness. It’s an odd, speculative sentiment for one so apparently content, almost sounding like a self-fulfilling prophesy, but not at all uncommon for someone debilitated in a serious accident, who may entertain the prospect of having to go it alone.

“The thing I hate the most is to see a relationship fall apart for whatever reason and then have such extreme love turn into such extreme hate, which to me is just a spectrum of an emotion,” Estefan explains.

“It’s just a thought that I had. Songwriters say to me, ‘You have such a happy life, how come you write all these (sad) songs?’ But all it is really is an emotional photograph. The difference between me and somebody else is, I get a fleeting thought sometimes that’ll turn into a song, and then it’s etched in stone forever.”

But in real life, she says, the calamity “drew us together. Emilio didn’t even leave the house for the first three months. We were fortunate that we were well off, that I didn’t have to worry about money or the concerns that other people that have to make a living day in and day out do.

“I know the facts of being paraplegic, because my father was, and I knew how difficult it was on the family. So I couldn’t really go through all the stages of denial. I couldn’t do anything on my own. They would have to sit me somewhere and then 20 minutes later they would have to come and help me move. I couldn’t dress, I couldn’t bathe.

“Emilio knows how private I am, so he didn’t want to leave me for a second, because I couldn’t even go to the bathroom alone. I would not have wanted to trade places with him. I think he had the more difficult of the two situations to be in.”

Now considering herself “pretty much completely recovered”--though certain activities, like skiing, are still out--Estefan is determined that her upcoming concert appearances be “a celebration.”

“I speak of being reborn in many ways,” she said. “I always was a very thankful person, because I did go through some difficult things, but you tend to forget and get caught up in day-to-day worries and petty stuff that becomes so huge and important in our lives. Practically losing your life really gives you a fresh start. But I’m sure,” she says, laughing, “there’s gonna be a lot more (stuff’s) gonna happen. Just being alive every day is something new.”