The Aguero Sisters (25 page)

C
onstancia drives
to the airport in her pink Cadillac convertible with the top down. It's a record day of heat in Miami, with next to no wind and the threat of rain sufficient to keep the humidity intolerable. More and more, Constancia is averse to artificial changes in temperature. In fact, she's convinced that air-conditioning is weakening the muscles of her diaphragm, keeping her perpetually short of breath.

At the airport, buildings and buses waver in the hammering light. Constancia parks the car near a construction site. The gravel beneath her high-heeled shoes sounds like a monstrous chomping, like her own bones giving way to some invisible jaw. She ties the sash of her old-fashioned hat tight under her chin and tentatively, like a tender-footed child on a shaly beach, picks her way to the arrivals gate.

It's freezing inside the airport. Constancia blows into her cupped hands to see if her breath is visible, then briskly
rubs her palms together. She checks her watch. Isabel's plane is due in from Hawaii at two o'clock. She goes to a nearby phone and calls the factory manager. There's a critical shipment of spearmint due this afternoon. “Pressure the suppliers!” Constancia insists. “Make sure it gets here today, or that batch of Rodillas de Cuba will go to ruin!”

Constancia hangs up the phone and wonders suddenly how close she and her daughter ever were. Those chilly winter mornings in bed when they read storybooks together. Those slow hours pretending to cook alphabet soup in the tub. Did it all count? Or did they merely love each other?

Summer lightning crackles outside, causing a minor panic in the airport. Isabel's plane is a half hour late. The first passengers stream out of the gate, wearing straw hats and wilted leis. When you give birth, Constancia thinks, you cede your place to another. You say, in effect, when I'm gone, you will live, you will remember. But what is it exactly they're supposed to remember?

Isabel is nearly nine months pregnant. When Constancia was nine months pregnant, she ripped up all the photographs she had of her ex-husband, Gonzalo. Then she went to the seashore and fed the thousand pieces to the tides. Summer ducks stormed over, anticipating food. Constancia liked to imagine bits of Gonzalo's face ground down in the ducks' gizzards, upsetting their centers of gravity. She envisioned these ducks flying far off their courses, missing entire continents, every celestial clue.

Her daughter emerges from the gate, a glory of swollen flesh. She is wearing the largest pair of overalls Constancia has ever seen. Isabel is blotchy pink and luminous, like those portraits of saints in the midst of heavenly visions. She might divine water, abruptly erupt with poppies, harvest fat stars from the sky.

“Hi, Mom.” Isabel hands Constancia a mesh bag with heavy, irregular shapes wrapped in Honolulu newspapers—the last pieces of pottery she worked on before she found out she was pregnant. Her daughter didn't make ordinary teapots or mugs she could give away at Christmas. She's never made a vase. Isabel has always been drawn to more free-form work, odd shards of clay and other materials combined to suggest something recycled, something tampered with or incomplete.

Constancia takes the mesh bag. She saw her daughter working once. Isabel glazed a chunk of clay, then fired it in a red-hot kiln until the color took hold. Later, she removed it with barbecue tongs and nestled it in a garbage can with dried eucalyptus leaves. When the leaves caught fire, she banged on the lid and waited. What comes out, Isabel said, is as much inspiration as destiny.

“You look good, Mom.” Isabel carefully inspects Constancia. “Like some earlier version of yourself.”

Constancia supports her daughter as she walks. Isabel's ankles and feet are inflated beyond recognition, shod in oversized hippie sandals. She manages only a slow slide-shuffle through the airport corridors. Constancia flags down a roving motorized cart for the disabled and bundles her daughter on board. Isabel has brought no luggage except for the few pieces of pottery in the mesh bag.

“No clothing?” Constancia asks, incredulous.

“Nope.”

“No deodorant? No baby blankets?”

“Nope, nope. I sold everything.”

Constancia looks hard at her daughter, at the quiet defiance she knows so well. She's convinced that by two years old, children have expressed all they will ever feel for the rest of their lives.

Constancia tells Isabel to wait on the curb while she brings the pink Cadillac around. The heat is stifling, made worse by the car exhaust. Constancia notices that her hands are moist and shaking. Is it possible she's going to be a grandmother?

As she pulls up in front of Isabel, the sight of her hugely pregnant daughter moves her. How does anyone recover from such an ordeal? Constancia helps Isabel into the car, pulls a pink chiffon scarf from the glove compartment to keep her daughter's unruly hair in place.

“Not exactly my style, but thanks.”

“Don't worry,
mi cielo
. I have a new product—Cabello de Cuba Plus—that will tame your hair, turn it to silk!”

Isabel flinches forward. The baby kicks her hard, then twice more. Constancia wants to stop traffic, put her ear against her daughter's stomach, feel the tiny, wayward foot. Isabel says she took natural childbirth classes. Her instructor explained that having a baby was like pushing out a large grapefruit.

“
¿Una toronja?
” After all these years, Constancia is still astounded at the understatement of certain Americans.

Why doesn't anyone talk about the pain? The ruthless red pressure wrapped tight to your center? What is this conspiracy of stoicism women have about childbirth? Why doesn't she tell Isabel right now that it's like forcing out the largest mammal on the planet? Why doesn't she tell her that you never, ever forget.

Constancia maneuvers the Cadillac onto the I-95. Reina has likened driving this car to driving a tank she once commandeered in a military exercise outside Cienfuegos. She likes to tinker with the Cadillac, fine-tune all its gizmos and gears. Recently, Reina took a job as a mechanic fixing antique cars. She's found a
novio
too, a wealthy American
who lives on a boat anchored off Key Biscayne. And this after she bedded half the yacht club, incited who knows how many divorces!

Ahead of Constancia, a brown sedan has its right blinker on. She knows that the driver, an elderly man in a starched guayabera, has no intention of changing lanes. It's one of the idiosyncrasies of driving in Miami. Cubans leave their blinkers on for hours, oblivious to the anxiety they create in their wake.

“Your aunt is at home, finishing up the baby's room,” Constancia says. “She wants to surprise you.” Reina is creating a mobile for the baby made from seaweed and a trio of Papi's stuffed bats. Constancia only hopes the thing doesn't scare her grandchild half to death.

Constancia visited her daughter in Hawaii last spring. She and her boyfriend lived in a cottage on the windward side of Oahu. The place was so small you couldn't spread your arms in the bedroom. There was a hot plate and a microwave but no stove, and a toilet that worked only infrequently. A redwood patio hung right over a marsh. Beyond it lay the constant blue of the Pacific.

Constancia doesn't ask Isabel about Austin or the Chinese-Filipina dancer. Behind her daughter's glowing health, Constancia can see the cold sliding ruin. Isabel's existence changed to mere scenery. Constancia remembers something her father said.
Every force moves toward death. Only constant violence maintains it
. Another one of his physics laws.

Near the tollbooth
for Key Biscayne, Isabel spots the display of a life-size shark advertising the Seaquarium.

“Let's go.”

“Now?” Constancia wants to accommodate her daughter,
but the aquarium? In her condition? To be logical, she thinks, is to be continually amazed.

“Why not?” Isabel cranes her neck to get a better look at the fake shark. “I've never been.”

“Whatever you say,
mi cielo
.”

Constancia drives across the Rickenbacker Causeway, past the narrow stretch of beach lined with coconut palms, past the enormous marine stadium where women in sequined bikinis frequently water-ski. She visited the Seaquarium once during Reina's second week in Miami. It was a nightmare. Her sister volunteered for every marine demonstration: cha-cha-chá-ing with seals, feeding sardines to the sea lions, playing basketball with a four-ton killer whale. Reina flirted shamelessly with the attendants (gangly men with snaggle teeth and sun-bleached hair) and their aquatic wards alike.

Isabel wants to see the manatees first, and so Constancia pushes her daughter to their tank in a rented wheelchair stenciled with dolphins. The air is thick with chlorine and seaweed and the droppings of a thousand tropical species.

“Do I look like her?” Isabel stares at the lumbering mother manatee as she sucks in a leaf of butter lettuce. Her calf swims close by with its slow paddle fins, rolls onto its back like a shapeless acrobat.

“Now that you mention it,
mi cielo
. But I think it's only temporary. Definitely
not
a family resemblance.”

Isabel laughs. Her voice scatters in the air like a spray of startled birds. Constancia likes pushing her daughter around in the dolphin wheelchair. It's as if Isabel were a baby again, compliant in her stroller. If only everything could remain this well defined.

In the outdoor turtle tank, a pair of loggerheads
are clumsily mating. The male is precariously balanced on the rear of the female's carapace. He tumbles back into the water but steadfastly tries to mount her again. Constancia respects his efforts but holds little hope for a new generation.

When she lived on her grandfather's ranch in Camagüey, Constancia frequently heard the great raw noise of animals in heat. In the spring, especially, when everything came to promiscuous life after the hibernating winter. Stallions and bulls, roosters and billy goats, birds of every size and hue. Trembling the nights and the white-hot days. Constancia was terrified that somehow she would be forced to surrender to a similar violence.

Sex was rampant in Cuba, and not only amongst the animals themselves. One day, Constancia saw one of her uncles (Ernesto, the second oldest) penetrate a little spotted mare from behind. He had to stand on a stump of a palm tree to do it, spit on his penis twice. Later, she saw many others from her hiding places in the restless shade of bushes. Her other uncles, farmhands,
guajiros
mostly, with horses and each other. Afterward, the mares would walk around snorting for an hour or more, with their tails slightly askew. She noticed nothing different about the men.

For a while, her grandfather used to ask Constancia to keep him company when he took his weekly bath in an outdoor tin tub. Constancia watched carefully from under the fig tree as Abuelo Ramón washed his penis, pulled the purplish foreskin back, meticulously rinsed it clean. Afterward, it hung there, withered and gleaming, like an unused limb. Abuelo would close his eyes then, tilt his head heavenward, breathing deeply, it seemed, of an old desire.

After heavy rainstorms, the ground around the tub would often be littered with figs.

• • •

In a few minutes
, it will be show time for Lolita, the Seaquarium's killer whale. Isabel wants to sit in the front of the amphitheater, even though signs everywhere warn of splashing. Constancia thinks how little her daughter's basic nature has changed despite her sorrow. Good-humored. Stubborn. No fear whatsoever of consequence.

Constancia pushes the wheelchair down a ramp to the front row and settles on a bench beside her daughter. Children run up and down the aisles, shrieking with anticipation.

“Have you considered other names besides Raku?” Constancia asks tentatively. She's not certain she can call her grandchild this, a sound like the mating call of some Amazonian bird.

Isabel shakes her head, eyes fixed forward for the first sign of the cetacean starlet. A moment later, like suspense incarnate, Lolita enters the underwater arena, circling, circling, maniacally circling, until with a leap unimaginable for a creature that size, she hurls herself into the air.

Splashing is not the word to describe Lolita's landing. Tidal wave, maybe. Tsunami. Not splashing. Isabel screams with hilarity and terror. That whale could have belly-flopped in their laps! Constancia sighs grimly. Her vintage linen suit is soaked with water and whale detritus. Meanwhile, Lolita is rewarded for her antic with a bucket of baby mackerel.

Constancia notices more water than necessary leaking from Isabel's wheelchair. At first, she thinks it's the whale water, but she finds it warm to the touch.

“Stand up,
mi hija
! I think your water broke!”

Isabel tries to push herself to standing, as more liquid pours down her legs. It
is
warm, and slightly sour from her daughter's womb. Constancia helps Isabel sit down again, presses her ear to her daughter's stomach. The crowd
roars, as another wave from the leaping Lolita drenches them both. Constancia is oblivious as she listens intently for a sign from her new grandchild.

When Raku is born
the following morning, he gives such a mewl of indignation that it breaks Constancia's heart. Her grandson, so tiny and wrinkled, with confused, swollen eyes. He latches onto Isabel's breast and sucks, quickly calming himself. Then he falls asleep against her, so fragile and sticky and impossibly flawless, it makes Constancia cry.

Reina visits in the afternoon, bringing a plastic shopping bag filled with odd gifts: a headdress of peacock feathers, an ancient chronometer that keeps perfect time, a bagful of lemons to squeeze into juice (“Helps avoid jaundice,” she says). For Raku, she brings a pint-sized “starter” hammer and a tiny gold-and-onyx bracelet.

“I got this in Cuba years ago,” Reina explains, fastening the bracelet on the sleeping Raku's wrist. “Payment for wiring up a black market satellite dish. The woman who gave it to me says it keeps away the evil eye. I always swore I'd give it to my first grandchild.”