The Aguero Sisters (24 page)

Around her, the borders of land are not at all enticing. It seems to Reina that everything comes to an end on land, rooted in accumulation. The sea is much more forgiving.
Reina works the little motorboat through the waves. It heaves and tugs with the determination of renewed youth. Last week, Reina painted the boat blood orange, like a first love, or an accident.

Her outings on the ocean help soothe her troubled feelings. It's a form of visual cruelty, Reina thinks, that Constancia looks so much like their mother. Looks like her but shares none of Mami's attributes. Reina keeps expecting to be comforted by Constancia's presence, yearns to submit to a forgotten solace. Instead she is repeatedly disillusioned, met with only a cool proficiency of sentiment.

The evening collects
the last of the sea's stray light. Reina turns off the motor and rocks in the violet haze of the bay. The city is in the distance, casual and glimmering. Civilization, she thinks, kills every original thirst.

It starts to rain, softly at first. Warm, interrupted rain that washes the long slopes of her body. Reina senses something loosening within her, becoming one with the water and the wind, with the delicate filaments of night. Papá insisted that Reina be weaned on her fifth birthday. If he hadn't done this, she muses, would she still be suckling at her mother's breast? Would she ever fall asleep with the assurance of that tranquillity again?

Reina is adrift in her mother's lost voice. She closes her eyes, and the light is aquatic beneath her eyelids. Everything loses its shape in this melody, lazily waves in faded suspension, in the spiraling disorder of total peace.

When she was a girl, Mami used to favor moonless nights like this. They used to go to the roof of their building, where she kept a cactus, a night-blooming cereus whose blossoms only rarely erupted. Last year, desperate with insomnia, Reina studied the night-blooming flora of numerous towns in Cuba. She liked the sausage trees best, because their hanging crimson flowers always fell to the ground by midnight.

Who will remember Mami in thirty years? Who will remember her father? Who, Reina wonders, will remember
her
? We hold only partial knowledge of each other, she thinks. We're lucky to get even a shred of the dark, exploding whole.

The wedge of light
strikes Reina's face. Outside it, all is black. Reina fell asleep in Heberto's motorboat and has been rocking in the sea for hours. There were trees in her dreams, forests of trees, twisted with branches sucking long and deeply from salt. Their language was harsh and clicking, improbably paused.

Reina's body is rigid with damp cold. She tries to spread her fingers, but her hands are curled tight into fists. There are others in the ocean, far away but distinct to her. She knows this. A Cuban woman her age, aflame in engine fuel. A teenager who surrendered his arm to a shark. Two
families from Camagüey are adrift in the sea after a storm overturned their rafts. They will die momentarily, wash ashore on Key West at dawn.

When the huge yacht sidles next to her boat, Reina does nothing. A voice calls to her from behind the foggy light. It is male and familiar, but she can't understand the words, rounded and slit with alarm.

“It's the goddess!” the voice shouts. It is the man with the portable computer from the canals of Key Biscayne. He throws her a horsehair blanket, which raises more bumps on her skin.

“
Sí, soy yo
,” Reina whispers, adjusting the blanket over her shoulders. She touches her throat. It is burning with thirst. “
Soy yo
.”

S
ometimes I think
I must be the wildest rumor going in Madrid. It's been months since I've seen that damn Bengt, and I still get phone calls from every Swedish pervert on vacation in Spain. You wouldn't believe what they want from me. In Cuba, sex was never so complicated.

Last week, La Señora intercepted one of my calls and got quite an earful. Some guy from Malmö into geese and Ping-Pong balls and God knows what else. I couldn't make it out for all her screaming. La Señora threw me out, with only a few
pesetas
in my pocket. What could I do? It was hard to say good-bye to little Mercedes, though. We'd gotten used to each other. She gave me kisses unannounced.

For several days, I hid out in a revival movie theater in the Salamanca district, which shows American films from the fifties. After the last show, I'd go to the women's rest room and unlatch the window so I could climb back in. I've
been living on stale popcorn and licorice and all the orange soda I can drink. It makes me jittery, like the time I tried cocaine with a deejay from Toronto at a back table of the Tropicana.

This morning, the theater manager found me asleep in a bathroom stall. I'd been snoring so loudly he thought there was a plumbing problem. I was having the strangest dream, too: I was back in Havana, walking along the Malecón, when out of nowhere, thousands of big, black-lipped dogs start jumping over the wall into the sea. The city was younger in my dream, crystalline, as if freshly washed by rain.

I have no home, no job, no friends or family here. Only a stubborn fear. I've been wondering lately whether fear is necessary for survival, whether it sharpens the senses during storms of uncertainty. Or is it, as I suspect, merely another variant of weakness? Back in Cuba, the certainty was dismal, but it was still a certainty. It was hard to fall between the cracks, to starve outright. I haven't decided yet where I'm the poorer.

Today I'm hanging out at the Archaeology Museum until siesta time. It's peaceful in here, and cool. Summer in Madrid is a nightmare, dusty and bone dry. There are a couple of jeweled crowns on display that belonged to Visigothic kings. It's scary how long the Spaniards have been brewing trouble for the rest of the world.

My mother told me once how the early explorers had come to Cuba with their pestilential pets and nearly killed off the island's native species. She said that her father, my Abuelo Ignacio, held King Ferdinand and Queen Isabela personally responsible for the decimation. My
great
-grandfather originally came from Galicia, from the mountains somewhere. My mother says that he was one of the greatest
lectores
in Pinar del Río, that he read the classics to the cigar
workers, organized unions, made a first-rate scallop pie. Why is it that everything interesting in my family happened long before I was born?

Sometimes I wish I could go back through all the blood and muscle to the origin. I read in the newspaper how scientists have traced genetic trails back millions of years to the first human beings in Africa. It makes me realize how we walk in their footsteps and everyone else's since. Thieves and czarinas, village chiefs and galley slaves, opera singers and oxcart drivers. Which one of my mother's philosophers said,
For I have been, ere now, a boy and a girl, a bush, a bird, a dumb fish in the sea?

There's a soreness at my center I can't rub away. It opens and withers like a night-blooming flower.
Carajo
, I'm starving. I haven't eaten since the night before last, when I polished off a half pound of Gummi Bears. There's a good Cuban restaurant on Avenida Infantas, filled with fat expatriates. I'm tempted to go there, but I know the smell of fried plantains might make me do something desperate.

It's a Thursday afternoon, and the restaurants are crowded. My sense of smell is heightened from hunger. I can tell what's cooking five blocks away. The aroma of breaded chicken floats down from a balcony fringed with soot. River crabs and stuffed green peppers decorate the plates at a fancy sidewalk café. If I begged, I could probably scrape enough money together for
churros
and a hot chocolate, but nobody is serving them this time of day.

I sneak into the subway and know immediately where I must go. My ex-husband, Abelardo, will be taking his lunch at that depressing cafeteria down the street. He'll stay the afternoon to play bridge with the albino waiter. Abelardo's sister does her marketing on Thursdays. It takes her forever, because she bargains like a fishwife for every onion and hunk of ham.

Their building is narrow and dank, acrid with the incense of age. A decaying elm stands guard at the entrance. Overhead, a flock of blackbirds dissolves into the sky. A rust-colored wind whirls down the street, rustling garbage and dead leaves. I wonder what I look like in my grimy nanny's uniform. What would I think if I saw me? If I bothered to see me at all?

The lock on the front door of Abelardo and his sister's apartment is easy to pick. My fingers are useful and intuitive, like my mother's. I'm grateful to her for them, and for one or two things besides. Like her sense of humor. And the fact that she preserved my grandfather's apartment in Havana, mildewy with books and hundreds of birds he himself had shot.

Mamá kept a picture of Abuelo Ignacio in the bottom drawer of his mahogany desk. The drawer of impossibilities, she used to call it. There was the beaded bracelet my father wore in the Sierra Maestra. A cream-colored brassiere Mamá claimed still held Abuela Blanca's scent.
What we pass on is often as much a burden as a gift
, my mother told me. I used to wonder how I'd be able to tell the difference, how I'd ever know what the hell might save me.

Every thing in Abelardo's apartment
is the same as I remember it. The filmy, yellowing curtains in the kitchen, the crusts of dry bread collecting in the majolica bowl. Abelardo's sister is a compulsive feeder of pigeons. She wouldn't share a cup of hot water with a neighbor, but she keeps the local pigeons plump. There are two tins of rancid custard in the refrigerator. A box of cheese crackers in the cupboard. Four linked
chorizos
and a braid of garlic draped on two crooked nails.

I eat the sausages without bothering to peel off the casings, open a jar of briny olives, gulp down what's left of a
strawberry yogurt drink. Then I break up the braid of garlic and stuff four of the bulbs into my apron. These will protect me, I think. They must. I steal a paring knife just to make certain, sharpen it on the edge of a rotting cutting board.

Their money is hidden in a plastic zippered case that's taped behind the armoire in my sister-in-law's bedroom. I found it there the first time too. They must have been certain I'd never return. Over a thousand
pesetas
in small bills. There's nothing else worth stealing, but I need a change of clothes. I dig out Abelardo's Sunday shirt, starched white and voluminous, and a pair of his leather suspenders. With his black ribbed socks rolled to my thighs, I look almost fashionable.

I search for somewhere to leave my mark. I want them to know, unmistakably, that I was here. But then suddenly it doesn't seem to matter. Instead I grab Abelardo's frayed airline cap and fix it on my head. I stuff a nylon satchel with my dirty clothes and immediately spring for the door.

On my way out, I glance at the cluttered table in the vestibule. There's an opened letter addressed to me. It's from my mother, postmarked Miami.
Mi queridísima hija
 …, it begins, and I feel something breaking inside me, something lost and irreparable. Now all I want is for night to come; I want to hide in its scent like an orphan in a palace garden. I tuck my mother's letter in the waistband of my underwear and search the streets for a safe place to read.

An onslaught of bells disturbs the late-afternoon peace. On top of a hill to the north, an ugly little church is to blame. I used to escape into the cathedral in Havana when the sun was too brutal or my boyfriends occasionally got violent. I grew up believing every permutation of evil had been cultivated by bishops and priests. Still, there's a veneer of civility to churches. Perhaps this is their greatest solace.

Inside, the stone walls are moldering, embedded with a ringing only I can hear. I dip my hands in the holy water and wash off my face and neck. It smells of chestnuts and dying violets. There's an ancient woman in the front pew, bent over in prayer. At the shrine to Saint Elizabeth, a grossly pregnant woman stands with a hand on her hip, as if ready to scold the heavens.

I take a seat in a worm-eaten pew. The wood is soft, and I scrape it with my fingernails, make a paste between my forefinger and thumb. Then I rub it on my thigh, on the purplish patch where the doctors stripped my skin to mend my mother's burns. Mamá's letter sticks to my palms as I read. She's in Miami with her sister, my Tía Constancia, and she's playing the lottery every week with auspicious numbers from my life. Mamá says I've always been a lucky child. I become impatient with her handwriting, impossibly round and leaning backward. What the hell could she know of my life?

There's more news. A yacht club on the bay run by Batista's right-hand man. Vintage cars she's begun fixing with the tools she smuggled out of Havana. A mature man, Mamá says, part Indian, part German, part French, who reveres every inch of her flesh. She's learning idiomatic English from him too, from the lyrics to his old American records.

My mother doesn't ask me about Abelardo, assumes my unhappiness. No worthwhile woman can stay married for long, she told me repeatedly when I was growing up. Well,
for once I think she was right. In the last few lines, Mamá begs me to come home. Home meaning where she is. She says that Miami's seas and skies are just like Cuba's, only fresher, bluer.
Everything here is so blue, Dulcita
, she writes. As if blue could take care of everything.