The Aguero Sisters (23 page)

The santero lights fifteen yellow votive candles, all encased in glass. He places one at the factory entrance, two at either end of the assembly line, three by the vat of underarm exfoliant, and five on the shelves where the royal-blue bottles labeled with Blanca Agüero's face are arranged.

“These must burn for nine days straight.” Piñango's
face glitters in the light, silvery and squamous as a river trout. “Do not move them, touch them, or blow them out—or the spell will be broken.”

Then he takes the last two flickering candles upstairs to Constancia's office and announces that the
limpieza
, the cleansing, is complete.

Reina bends over to thank the rotund santero, and he kisses her on the forehead. She thinks that Piñango, too, smells smoked, like a fish cured overly long.

“Return to me before Oshún's feast day,” he implores the sisters as they escort him to his canary-yellow Buick. “Do not miss the instant of recognition, I warn you. Or you will suffer, together and separately, each according to her affliction.”

The fire continues to smolder on the factory floor. Constancia wants to pour water over it, but Reina dissuades her. “Give it an hour. It will extinguish itself.”

“All I need now is for the place to burn down!” Constancia is still shaky from the recent string of crises. The timing couldn't be worse. Her first out-of-state shipment is due in two days.

Reina walks over to the shelves of empty royal-blue bottles. Their mother's face is tremulous in the candlelight. For many years, Reina couldn't bring herself to visit Mami's grave, although she imagined it time and again: the scallop of chiseled black marble, the plot swollen with rain. Every day that passed, Reina felt her mother die again.

“Did you ever go the cemetery?” Reina asks, still staring at the repeating pale faces.

“Not since the funeral, you know that.” Constancia is agitated, already defensive. “Papi used to go frequently, though. He told me so.”

Reina walks to the foot of the mezzanine stairs. She
flips open the metal clasps of her toolbox and removes her favorite pliers. Then she searches for a carton of Cuello de Cuba, Constancia's neck-mending potion (Reina imagines short-throated, reptilian-skinned women as its primary beneficiaries). She pulls out a jar, twists off the top, and begins coating her pliers with the mint-green cream. It's an excellent lubricant, Reina's discovered, much better than ordinary grease.

“I've asked you not to do that!” Constancia loses her temper. “People might get the wrong idea!”

“
Cálmate, mi amor
. There's nobody here but us.” Reina knows how much it irritates her sister, but she continues to rub the luscious unguent into the hinge. “Did Mami ever show you her bone?”

“What bone?” Constancia asks tersely. She wants to grab the jar of cream from her sister, throw her pliers out the factory window.

“The one she kept in a pouch. A little bone, all yellowed, with a bump on one end. Like a root.” Reina wipes a hand on her pants. “You never saw it?”

“No, I did not,” Constancia sniffs, refilling the carton of neck cream and taping it shut.

“Mami said she'd give it to me when I grew up. I looked for the bone after she died, but it had disappeared. Maybe it was buried with her.”

Reina first visited her mother's grave in 1962, fourteen years after her death. The headstone was perfectly clean, and at its base, a round earthenware pot smoked with fresh herbs. The burial ground was clipped and cleaned of weeds. Not a leaf anywhere stirred.

The next day, Reina returned with a bunch of violets and a Christmas picture of her daughter in a velveteen dress. Reina placed the photograph facedown on the grave.
This is
Dulcita, Mami Tu. primera nieta. She's almost four years old
. Then Reina knelt down and did something she'd never attempted before. She prayed.

“I saw a man at the grave.” Reina faces Constancia, uneasily tests her pliers.

She recounts how tall and corpulent the stranger was, his skin a flawless evening black. His pants, made of fine linen, were sharply creased, and his tie was divided down the middle by a thin pink line. He wore an old-fashioned boater on his head and a silver watch on an endless chain, which he took out to confirm the time.

“He crouched next to me and looked at Dulcita's picture. ‘She is very beautiful. And very wild. Like you,
mi hija.'
Then he stood up, pulled a handkerchief from his vest pocket, and began to polish Mami's headstone.”

Reina recalls her mother's epitaph, the smoothness of the grooves beneath her fingertips.

Each time she returned to the grave, Reina looked for the elegant man. But she never saw him again. She brought other photographs of Dulcita, planted a bird-of-paradise bush for her mother in the shade. The cemetery attendant could tell Reina little, only that long ago the same man used to visit Mami's grave every day.

Constancia picks up a broom, begins sweeping the cinders on the factory floor. They stir with a last flash of heat before dying altogether. As she sweeps, Constancia's head jerks back and forth inexplicably, like an energetic pigeon's.

“Papá looked too good after Mami died,” Reina accuses her sister.

Constancia stops sweeping. She looks away, tries hard not to swallow.

“Excuse me, Constancia, but grief usually makes people look like hell!”

Reina remembers how their father's appearance conspicuously improved after Mami died, as if he'd stolen something of her life to replenish his own. His thinning hair grew back lush and black, as if someone were seeding his scalp in the night. The curve of his back slowly straightened, until he recouped every last inch of his six-foot height. As he strode along the great boulevards and cobblestoned side streets of Havana, women of all ages eyed him with more than casual curiosity. Even Margarita Vidal, the petite spinster next door, baked him vitalizing sweets, insisting it was her six-layer guayaba tortes that were restoring his vigor.

More royal-blue bottles are lined against the south wall of the factory, thousands of them, like a flock of migratory birds at a watering hole.

“Today's my last day here,” Reina says. Her eyes smart in the still-smoky air. “I'm sorry,
mi amor
. But I can't help you anymore.”

Constancia pretends to ignore her. “I heard on the radio this morning that all the chandeliers in a remote mountain village in Peru are hovering six feet off the ground.”

Reina can't imagine how many chandeliers there could be in such a cluster of mud huts. One, maybe two at most, and then only if there's a church nearby. No, it doesn't make any sense. Nothing does.

Reina strides
the two miles from her sister's condominium to the yacht club by the bay. It takes her less than half an hour. It's already dusk, and the worst of the heat is over. A hint of a breeze refreshes her pace. Men in cars honk their horns and stop on the road to offer her rides. Reina isn't wearing
anything special, just white shorts and a tank top, but she might as well be walking naked down the road. Every inch of her body, Pepín used to tell her, is an open invitation to pleasure.

When she was a girl, Reina used to wonder where she'd gotten her dark good looks. Her mother was petite and transparently pale, her face a midsummer moon. Her father was big, like Reina, but plated with womanly flesh. Reina's hands were enormous at birth, the size of a five-year-old child's. Slowly, she grew into them, but after her mother died, Reina's hands spread and thickened again to luxurious disproportion.

What is bred in the bone has a mission all its own
. One of her father's colleagues, Professor Arturo Romney, used to repeat this rhyme to Reina when he bounced her on his knee. She was three, four, five years old when he did this, harder each time, until he bruised her bottom. After her parents died, Professor Romney wanted to adopt Reina. He showed up at her boarding school with a shopping bag of tiny plaid skirts. When she saw him, Reina said nothing, only spat on his black lace-up boots.

Reina carries a portable radio hooked to the elastic waistband of her shorts. She'd seen tourists with these miniature radios in Cuba, swaying to rhythms hidden inside their headphones. But Reina never dreamed she'd own one herself. The sound of a mambo in high gear puts an extra swing in her gait. Reina likes to listen to the reactionary exile stations in Miami best. They play the best music and the most outrageous lies on the air. She's amused by their parading nationalism, like a bunch of roosters on the make. Who was it that said patriotism is the least discerning of passions?

The minute anyone learns that Reina recently arrived from Cuba, they expect her to roundly denounce the revolution.
It isn't enough for her simply to be in Miami, or even to remain silent. These pride-engorged
cubanos
want her to crucify El Comandante, repudiate even the good things he's done for the country. What's the use of learning to read, they say, if all you get is that
comemierda
propaganda? Of course you get free health care! How else can you afford even a measly cotton swab on your salaries
de porquería
? The other day, Reina's vernacular slipped, and she called the Winn-Dixie cashier
compañera
by mistake. Well, all hell broke loose on the checkout line, and a dozen people nearly came to blows!

El exilio
, Reina is convinced, is the virulent flip side of Communist intolerance.

By now, Reina is a familiar figure at her sister's yacht club by the bay. She's seduced a number of its more inspirited members, other women's men, but Reina doesn't dwell on unpleasant particulars. It's a well-known fact that ninety-seven percent of mammals are polygamous. Birds are another story, with their near-universal monogamy. But human beings are mammalian through and through. Why fight against nature?

Every day, bouquets of red roses arrive for her at Constancia's apartment. Reina is immune to the folly of her lovers' gestures, disdains the lack of imagination that sublime lust engenders. Why not cacti or carnivorous plants? That would be more to her liking. The married men are the worst, demanding all manner of commitment while remaining ringed through the nose. One
pobre infeliz
, Walfredo Ferrín, even offered her a new BMW to sleep with him again.

More distressing yet, every one of her conquests in Miami spells badly. Reina knows it's petty and prejudicial, but she can't tolerate a single consonant out of place. Now the men leave saccharine messages for her on Constancia's
answering machine (like well-trained dogs, after the beep), something no self-respecting
cubano
would do back home even if they
had
the damn machines. All these factors, combined with a general conservatism among the men, make them suitable for a night or two's dalliance at best.

The most gifted of her recent lovers, Ñico Goizueta, a painter she met while he was whitewashing the clubhouse, loved her like a beast. He fought for her surrender, intimately feasting on her flesh until she was in a daze of sensation. Passion, he told her, is a frail interlude between the prosperities of loss. Still, Reina's pleasure didn't come. Afterward, Ñico sent her a dozen watercolors of their night together, paintings so gorgeously erotic that Reina felt on the verge of her past rapture. But her body continued to betray her.

Her sister seems discomfited by all the attention men shower on Reina. Constancia digs out the love notes Reina throws in the garbage, clips the stems of her roses, mists them regularly to prolong their life. When Reina announced that she'd won seventy-five dollars playing the lottery, it annoyed her sister no end. “You've never had to fight for anything!” Constancia lashed out. “You don't even know what it is to have to ask!”

The only time Constancia seemed in the least bit agreeable toward her lately was when Reina told her that she'd had a small part of her cervix removed. The doctors in Cuba said she may have a predisposition for cervical cancer, most likely caused by a sexually transmitted disease. Constancia seemed strangely pleased, as if Reina had gotten her due.

Whenever Reina stops by
the yacht club, workmen and waiters line up on the dock to watch her. One wiry busboy, besotted with love for her, usually tosses her a complimentary can of beer. Boats stop in mid-throttle, women in mid-sentence.
Reina waves briefly to the onlookers, but today she's in no mood to banter. She removes the canvas cover from Heberto's boat and starts up the motor, which she's repaired and rebuilt to whirring perfection.

The headwaiter points to the black horizon, to the intervals of sheet lightning illuminating the sky, but he knows better than to try to dissuade Reina from leaving. Already, she's skittering out of the harbor, stitching a path on the gray, choppy water. Reina enjoys the feel of the ocean's mindless engine beneath the boat's hull. She follows the slick backs of dolphins mounting the waves, the mannered drifting of pelicans.

Reina wishes her daughter could be with her, could breathe every ounce of this invigorating blue. She touches her right forearm, where Dulcita's flat strip of thigh is patched in from elbow to wrist. It seems to pulse in the early-evening light. Reina is curious about how her daughter is faring in Madrid, if she's worn out yet from her compromising. For a moment, Reina is stricken with fear, but then she senses that Dulcita is alive, unhappy but alive. Tonight she will write to her daughter, invite her to come and swim in this healing blue.

In Cuba, the ocean is off-limits to all but government-approved fishing and tourist boats. People can swim near the shore if they want, but anything farther is strictly forbidden. It is essential, El Comandante has said many times, for one and all to stay close to land in case of a
yanqui
invasion. Now that she's in America, Reina can see how ludicrous the idea of an invasion had been. It's the last thing on anyone's mind here. People are too busy making money, too busy sorting through the hysteria of what to purchase next.