The Aguero Sisters (18 page)

One night, during the carnival festivities, a band of costumed men broke into El Cid and smashed the cigar-rolling machines to unrecognizable hulks of metal. Later, explosives demolished the replacements from the United States. Papá, who had the soul of an anarchist but an accountant's practicality, had disapproved of his friends' plan. In the end, six of them went to jail
.

The tradition of the
lector
also had eroded. After my father resigned, no other reader proved as learned as he. No one, despite the enhancing advantages of a microphone, commanded the respect he'd once enjoyed. I was flattered to be offered the position myself, but I could not accept it. The world I'd known as a boy, Papá's world, no longer existed
.

Instead I took a job as a part-time hunting guide, to help my parents pay their medical bills. My clients were primarily North American tourists, indiscriminate and grossly under-skilled to a man. To me, shooting animals is neither recreation nor sport but a necessity subsumed to either hunger or higher scientific purpose. Today younger naturalists use cameras and recording devices that make collecting more humane. But in my day, such equipment as existed was much too unwieldy to take along on field trips. One simply had to kill a creature to fully understand it
.

Mamá implored me to return to Havana to finish my studies, but I refused to leave my father's side. Mercifully, Papá's degeneration was so gradual that we grew accustomed to it. His appetite diminished to nothing as he withered to eighty pounds. The cancer spread to his mouth and jaw until the bottom half of his face collapsed. He became disoriented and
spoke to me as if I were
his
father. When he reminisced, his bony fingers moved involuntarily, twitching with the memory of a hundred fine muscles. Papá spoke of the fiddles he'd helped his father carve on their kitchen table in the hills of Galicia, of the foul-smelling varnishes they'd distilled from the resins of trees. “It's the varnish, above all,” he insisted, “that ensures a violin's resonance and longevity
.”

Papá's final hour came unexpectedly. It was a late after-noon in September, and Mamá had just finished cooking a
caldo gallego,
my father's favorite soup. When she brought him the steaming bowl, Papá pushed himself onto his elbows, inhaled deeply of the aroma, and hummed the opening bars to the “Witches' Dance Variations.” My mother smiled sadly as she lifted the spoon to feed him. He grabbed it from her hand and began eating with unaccustomed gusto. Mamá and I looked at each other. Perhaps Papá's health would improve, after all
.

An instant later, my father threw the spoon to the floor and poured the remaining soup down the front of his dressing gown, his skin numb to its heat. His eyes and what remained of his mouth were open, but he could no longer see or speak. His face was a mask, stiffened with fear
.

I offered to run for the doctor, but Mamá took my hand and asked me to sit beside her on the bed
.

“
Go, if you must
, mi amor,”
she told Papá gently. “Your memory is safe with us
.”

Then she held his hands in hers as they quivered with the last of his life
.

No sooner had I finished my doctoral studies and begun lecturing in the biology department of the University of Havana than General Gerardo Machado ordered the college closed. The professors had protested vociferously that they could not teach with soldiers in the classrooms, and so that despot tried to do away with higher education altogether. It was 1931, a dreadful
year. Thousands of students were rounded up and many murdered in cold blood. One of my colleagues, the famous Bolivian zoologist José Garriga, was rumored to be a member of the secret terrorist group ABC. Early one morning, he was abducted from the university cafeteria and never heard from again
.

Many professors fled to New York or Miami or the Yucatan, waiting for the violence to end. Others remained in Havana and found menial jobs to stay alive or support their families. The chairman of the chemistry department became a short-order chef A physicist friend, Jorge de Lama, delivered ice for his uncle. Other colleagues worked as waiters, cane cutters, ranch hands, or shop clerks. I decided, once more, to return to Pinar del Río
.

During the course of my father's illness, Mamá's arthritis had bent her back and disfigured her graceful hands. She lived on Papá's pension, the few pesos I saved from my meager salary, and the generosity of our neighbor Graciela Montalvo, a retired dressmaker. I took to hunting for food in what remained of the forests around Pinar del Río, shooting
hutías
and pigeons for our dinner. I planted a garden and harvested garlic, onions, bell peppers, and tomatoes. Our orange tree, too, was prolific
. We
survived better than most
.

In those days, many people risked their lives to fight General Machado, a thug who financed his brutal regime with loans from American banks. His opponents organized rallies, planted bombs, sabotaged government buildings. I remember one local boy, Agapito Fernández, had his middle finger sliced off by the militia for refusing to divulge his union leader father's whereabouts. I heard these stories, and yet I found myself incapable of any useful action
.

I justified my stance then by convincing myself that politics was a sordid arena, separate from science. My mother did not share my views. When word spread of the massacre of students at El Principe prison, Mamá joined the protestors in the
main plaza of Pinar del Río. The following month, she marched to the police station to demand the release of Federico Zequeira, a former flute student falsely accused of treason. Later, Mamá wrote countless letters of complaint to U.S. Ambassador Harry Guggenheim and even to General Machado himself at the National Palace. It was a wonder she wasn't arrested
.

Since I found it impossible to earn a living, I decided to return to my research. My new project was unprecedented: the cataloguing of every one of Cuba's nearly extinct birds. It was indicative of both my grand ambition and my equally grand ignorance to have undertaken this project during a time of virtual civil war
.

Over the next eight months, with practically no funding except for what I could borrow, with an afflicted conscience, from my mother, I scoured the remotest corners of Cuba for
rarae aves.
I hitchhiked, jumped freight trains, cajoled
guajiros
into lending me their mules, slept in caves or beneath the canopies of immense ceiba trees. Cuba's landscape had changed so dramatically in only a decade that even the once populous birds that Dr. Forrest and I had collected were nowhere to be found, or found, at most, as singletons or in minuscule bands. There were no bird sanctuaries in Cuba, no sense that anything of value had been destroyed by the tractors and the plows
.

I recall vividly ten days I spent observing a band of glossy ibises in the Zapata Swamp—certainly the last band in Cuba, at most three or four hundred birds in all. The long-necked ibises flew in from the east in undulating lines and landed on the rippling marsh. Then they worked their way toward shore, hunting for insects and snails. When they were frightened, the birds took to the air en masse, wheeling about in a magnificent display
.

Mamá died of a heart attack while I was away in the Zapata. Señora Montalvo discovered her early one evening lying unkempt in her bed, the bed I was born in, the bed in
which, long before, Mamá had surrendered her placenta to the black owl of night. By the time I returned to Pinar del Río, my mother had been buried four days. She lay beside my father on a patch of windy hillock, strewn with the brilliant lavender blossoms of twin poinciana trees
.

I recalled then the story my mother revealed to me when I was nine years old. She said she hadn't wanted me to hear it from anyone else. Mamá told me that her father had banished her from the family when she was seventeen after a married man in Consolación del Norte had raped her. The culprit, the owner of a dry goods store, later became mayor of their town. That is how it was in those days
.

My mother, who refused to join the convent or surrender her child for adoption, fled across the Cordillera de los Organos and started her life anew in Pinar del Río. It seemed to her a full-fledged metropolis then, especially to one who had grown up in tiny Consolación del Norte. With money she borrowed from a sympathetic aunt (who nonetheless warned her never to return home), my mother bought a used flute and supported herself by giving music lessons to the children of wealthy merchants. Her daughter, Olivia, was born in 1890. Four years later, the little girl drowned when the Guamá River overflowed its banks
.

After Mamá died, I continued to live in my parents' home. Day and night I worked on my book, documenting the habits and habitats of ninety-six dwindling species, among them the Cuban paroquet, the wood ibis, the splendid camao
(Oreopeleia caniceps caniceps),
and Gundlach's hawk, one of the world's most seldom seen birds
.

Around my small oval of clarity and order, the house fell into disarray. I didn't clean it or make repairs, and if it hadn't been for the kindness of Señora Montalvo, I probably would have eaten little. I looked as thoroughly disheveled as my surroundings.
Occasionally, I left my study to walk in the woods, or to sell a piece of furniture to secure provisions. It took me many months to complete my book. By then, nothing remained in my parents' house except their hand-carved bed, Papá's philosophy texts, and a score of spiderwebs
.

The afternoon I reemerged into the world, I found all of Pinar del Río nailed shut. The market was deserted, the streets were empty of vendors, the bakers had let their ovens cool. Garbage was piled high everywhere. Somehow I found the hush and stench even more disconcerting than gunfire
.

Señora Montalvo told me that the chauffeurs of the Omnibus de la Habana had begun a general strike four days earlier. The streetcar motormen and taxi drivers had joined them. Then the stevedores, ferrymen, and longshoremen followed suit. She said that even the bellhops in the first-class hotels of Havana were going to work on roller skates. The island was at a complete standstill
.

The pressure on General Machado intensified, until he was forced to flee the country. Hundreds of people stormed the National Palace, carrying off potted palms and long-stemmed cannas from the private gardens. Others raided the General's food supplies, as much from vengeance as from hunger, and hauled off a squealing razorback hog, which they unceremoniously butchered in Zayas Park. Many more looted the homes of Machado's cronies, the
porristas,
burning their possessions in impromptu bonfires
.

The mood of revenge grew. Machado's henchmen were tracked down, beaten, and dismembered by mobs. Avengers found one notorious assassin, the man responsible for the massacre at El Principe prison, hiding under a kitchen sink disguised as an old crippled woman. They dragged his corpse, still wearing its black mantilla, through the jeering crowds of the capital. Many more days would pass before order was restored
.

I sold my parents' house and, with the profit, published
five hundred copies of my first book
, Cuba's Dying Birds.
It was a pleasure to finally hold the volume in my hands, to smell the fresh paper, touch the rough maroon binding. My name was on the spine, embossed in gold. It made all my work seem immediately less abstract
.

I sent my book abroad to the ornithologists I most admired. With all modesty, I must report it caused a stir in certain academic circles. Dr. Horatio Fowler III of Yale University wrote in
Ornithology Today
that he considered my book
“…  
one of the few instant classics of its time
.”

That fall, when the University of Havana reopened its doors, I was promptly appointed a full professor of general science and biology. It was 1933. And I was twenty-nine years old
.

A MATTER OF GIFTS
KEY BISCAYNE
JUNE
1991

R
eina unsnaps
the top of her bikini and lies by the pool with her back to the morning sun. It's been over a month since she arrived in Miami, and already she's grown accustomed to the uneasy indolence of exile life. The Cuba she knows is fading in the luxury of her sister's existence. Only a suitcase stuffed with her father's mementos—taxidermic bats and birds, a few books and clothes, the framed photograph of her mother—remains of that disquieting time before her departure.

It seems to Reina that she'd been on the verge of some certainty in Havana. Now she wonders whether all certainty will be kept from her, wonders, in fact, whether certainty isn't truly disaster in disguise.