The Aguero Sisters (3 page)

The impact rattles Reina's spine, breaks her nose and both thumbs, and loosens a back molar. A tangle of her hair is pulled out by the roots.

Reina is pinioned forty feet high in the tree's uppermost branches. It is another kingdom entirely. Her pores absorb the green saturation of leaves, the merciful scent of the earth slowly ascending its limbs. Above her, the sky blossoms with gray velvet, with the fading light of long-departed stars. Suddenly, Reina wants her daughter to be with her, to share this air and the strange exhilaration of height. She would say: “Dulcita, all the gifts of the world are here.” But Reina
knows too well the uselessness of words, their power to divide and create loneliness.

Reina's body is sticky with blood and emulsions she does not recognize. Then nothing matters except an unexpected blindness, her heart's rhythm, and an exquisite sense of heat.

C
onstancia Agüero Cruz
straightens the rows of teal boxes at her cosmetics counter and checks her lipstick in the magnifying mirror. In five minutes, the doors of the Manhattan department store will open. It is the week before Christmas, and the crowds have thickened to unruly proportions. There is a sense of urgency with every purchase, an ever-elusive quest for holiday perfection.

Constancia is promoting a new artichoke extract that promises to eradicate even the finest lines around the eyes. Seconds after application, the gel hardens to a crystalline sheen that sets the skin for several hours. A dab of concealer and powder, and the need for surgery is temporarily camouflaged. Constancia's sales break all company records. But she is motivated not by commissions, only by the satisfaction of staving off women's little everyday deaths.

Constancia doesn't need to sell cosmetics. Her husband,
Heberto Cruz, owns a tobacco store on Sixth Avenue, where sheikhs and politicians shop. She helps him there on Saturdays, her day off, selling antique meerschaum pipes, custom blends of tobacco, porcelain cigarette holders, and the finest hand-rolled cigars in the world (there's a cache of illegal Cuban imports in the walk-in humidor). Sales double whenever Constancia is on duty, but her heart isn't in the transactions. She considers cigars to be merely agreeable distractions, not at all in the same category as a good night cream.

Within minutes, her cosmetics counter is lined with customers. Constancia works most efficiently alone, demonstrating her products with a quiet, authoritative air. No woman is immune to the subtle anxiety she creates with her sales pitches. In the first half hour alone, she makes twelve hundred dollars in sales.

Constancia considers her own image her most effective selling tool, and so she takes great pains with her appearance. She is fifty-one years old, but her skin is soft and white. Her dark hair is arranged in a French bun, and her nails are lacquered to match her carnelian lips. Constancia is partial to Adolfo suits, which set off her petite figure, and she completes every ensemble with a short strand of pearls. Her foreign accent and precise manner intimidate clients into buying whatever she suggests.

The morning passes quickly as Constancia rings up compacts and emollients, eyeliners, lip pencils, facial defoliants. Her division supervisor announced yesterday that Constancia had won a powder-pink Cadillac convertible, the fiscal-year award for the top salesperson in North America. Constancia wondered what she would do with such a fancy car in New York City. But Heberto suggested that the company ship it straight to Miami, where they plan to move after the holidays.

Constancia is uncertain whether she wants to leave New York, but Heberto is determined to retire. He is eleven years older than she and exhausted, he says, from standing on his feet all day inhaling other people's smoke. In September, Heberto bought a condominium on Key Biscayne, overlooking the ocean, not far from his widowed father's house. There is a pool and a sandy beach and the daily theater of sunsets, but Constancia is not persuaded by such attractions. She likes her work, fears all inactivity. When silence surrounds her, the temptation to remember is too great.

During her lunch break, Constancia steps out onto Third Avenue. The air rings with the competing voices of a dozen vendors selling pretzels, chestnuts, earmuffs, knockoff watches, and wooden carvings from Senegal. Around her, women march purposefully in sneakers and fur coats. The city's sidewalks are savage to high-heeled feet, but Constancia rejects the modern ethos of comfort before style. If she doesn't look good, it hurts her a lot more than a mere pair of heels. Her daughter, Isabel, doesn't understand this. She's a potter and lives barefoot and overalled in a rural part of Oahu.

At her favorite coffee shop, the waiter brings Constancia a dish of cottage cheese, puréed peaches, and a cup of chamomile tea. The meal settles her stomach after the morning tumult. She is careful to eat only soothing foods. Like her sister in Cuba, Constancia has a fragile digestive system. Neither of her children inherited this trait. Her daughter lives on hot-plate-warmed hash poured from cans, and her son, Silvestre, eats nothing but sausage heroes from an Italian take-out place in Morningside Heights.

Constancia tastes a forkful of her cottage cheese, shudders at the thought of all that indescribable meat. She opens the newspaper to the day's horoscope. Her birthday,
March 21, is on the cusp between Pisces and Aries, a volatile combination, and she often finds it difficult to interpret the dispatches from the stars. “Expect a serious loss. Cling to what you truly want and release all that is ephemeral. A financial coup may be yours if you play the part right.” Constancia is irritated by such equivocal advice. She prefers the more direct approach of the soothsayers back in Cuba.

At precisely three o'clock
, the Algerian diplomat appears at Constancia's counter. She declines his dinner invitation, as she has for the past two weeks, but he is not easily dissuaded. Although Constancia is intrigued by his gentility, by the irregular pattern of hair on his brow, she cannot envision herself out with another man. She hasn't bothered to tell her husband about the diplomat. Heberto is genetically incapable of jealousy. How else could he have married Constancia when she was still sick with love for his brother?

Constancia continues a brisk pace of sales throughout the afternoon. There is an interlude just before five o'clock when the number of male customers invariably increases. It is their time of day to buy perfume: to beg forgiveness, to surprise a lover, or to sweeten the end of an affair. Constancia can always tell whether hope or guilt is fueling a purchase. For men, it is always hope or guilt, never anything in between.

On her way home, the sky darkens to a bluish gray. The weatherman predicted snow, but no snow has fallen. Constancia wants the snow to come, to envelop the city in its mending white. Along the southern edge of Central Park, the trees grow heavy with obscurity, with the weight of impending night.

Heberto is closing shop when Constancia arrives to pick him up. He is flush with satisfaction. The finance
minister of Venezuela stopped in to buy ivory pipes for his mistress. Constancia examines the receipt her husband flourishes: $1,940. The minister paid for the pipes with two thousand-dollar bills and told Heberto to keep the change.

“Look how excited you are,
mi cielo
. Are you sure you Ye ready to retire?” Constancia asks, patting her husband's hand. She wonders what Heberto will do with himself in Florida. He has no hobbies or passions, only this steady mercantile drive.

Together they walk down Avenue of the Americas, against the tide of the crowds. They pass the skyscraper where Constancia's son works on the thirty-sixth floor. Silvestre clips newspapers for the library of a prestigious newsmagazine, sorting through sports and celebrity gossip, serial murders and monsoons. He says the fact that he's deaf makes his job easier, filters out distractions. His father, Gonzalo Cruz, is Heberto's brother. Constancia was married to him for exactly four months in 1956. Gonzalo lives in Miami now with his sixth wife, a Salvadoran teenager he met at a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Coconut Grove. This is another reason Constancia does not want to move to Florida.

Constancia is supposed to meet Silvestre at the Cloisters the first Sunday of every month, but her son hasn't shown up since August. Last time she saw him, he complained that she kissed him too hard on the mouth. Then he lifted his hand with a nervous flutter in a gesture that was pure Gonzalo. Silvestre looks so much like his father now that each time Constancia faces him in the medieval courtyard, it momentarily defeats her.

Still, she enjoys the view from the hill high above the Hudson River, the hodgepodge of European monasteries that make up the Cloisters' main structure. There are frescoes and tapestries and, in the formal gardens, dozens of
plants commonly found during the Middle Ages. Constancia frequently spots crows and jays in the foliage, occasionally a chipping sparrow trilling its long monotone.

She and her husband head west on Fifty-third Street until they reach their apartment building on the edge of the river, iridescent with ribbons of oil. Constancia has grown accustomed to the river's lethargy, to the pustular smokestacks on its far banks.

In Cuba, she'd worked near the water, as a receptionist for the Cruz family's shipping line. The foyer, decorated with an oversized compass and vintage nautical gear, overlooked Havana harbor and its comforting pattern of ships. Without checking her watch or consulting her calendar, Constancia could tell the time of day and the day of the month by the particulars of the flotilla outside.

She was still in the habit of walking home along the Malecón then, humming in time with the aimless waves on the other side. She and her father had walked this stretch so often in 1949, the year after her mother died, that Constancia knew the wall's indentations inch by inch. Her father rarely spoke during their walks, but something in the shiver of his stride made Constancia fear he would jump over the wall without saying good-bye.

There is leftover carne asada
for dinner, the remains of a pineapple crumb cake. Constancia serves Heberto in the kitchen, pours him a glass of milk. She cooks up a fresh batch of rice for herself and steams two zucchini until she can mash them to a pulp with her fork. Heberto studies pamphlets for a motorboat and fishing gear he plans to buy once they settle in Key Biscayne. This from a man, Constancia thinks, who doesn't even take his socks off at the beach. During their vacation in Rio de Janeiro, Heberto sat amidst
all the fleshly splendors of Ipanema reading the latest issue of
Cigar Connoisseur
.

Constancia turns on the radio to her favorite show,
La Hora de los Milagros
, and ponders the latest news: a rash of Virgin sightings in and around the tourist hotels of Cozumel; a Chilean pig rancher with unmistakable stigmata on his palms; a long-barren woman who finally conceived a boy at Lake George.

During the call-in portion of the program, a man from the Bronx reports in with another miracle. He says his son had a pet chicken named Wifredo that flew backward into a pot of boiling water to save the boy's life. “You see,” the man explained, “my son was dying of pneumonia, and Wifredo made the ultimate sacrifice in turning himself to soup. That broth is a miracle! We still have some in the freezer! Come and see for yourself!”

Heberto is impatient with Constancia's obsessions, characterizes the
milagros
as nothing more than freakish incidents grounded in perfectly logical explanations. He refutes statistics showing that New Jersey, hazily visible through their living room window, has the highest number of reported miracles of any state in the nation. That doesn't count Puerto Rico, of course, but Constancia knows it's just a territory.

Constancia dismisses her husband's skepticism. She knows in her heart that miracles arrive every day from the succulent edge of disaster, defying nature, impossible to resist. When Constancia was only five months old, her mother disappeared without a word and didn't return for two and a half years. Her father hired a nanny for Constancia, a mulatta from Regla, who carefully hid her disregard for science. Beatriz Ureña inducted little Constancia into the worthier mysteries of life.

• • •

After dinner
, Constancia retreats to her high-watt vanity mirror, sniffing the ruin that lies waiting for her there. She avoids most of the products she sells, devising instead her own youth-conserving therapies. She smooths warmed honey over her face and throat, letting it congeal for at least thirty minutes. Constancia read of its preservative powers in a book on ancient healings. Archaeologists discovered a jug of honey, still soft and sweet, in a prehistoric Turkish tomb. Primitive people also treated burns with honey to promote the growth of new skin.

Constancia rinses her face with mineral water and fresh pomegranate juice. She coats her skin with paraffin distilled from century-old redwoods, then smears the mixture on the soles of her feet before slipping on flannel booties. She saves the hand lotion for last: a special blend of vegetable shortening with a hint of oleander, which erases all traces of age.

The first time Constancia felt a rush of heat across her chest, she was trying on a black cashmere sweater in the dressing room at Saks. She thought she was having a heart attack, but then the heat swept up over her face and lingered there for several seconds. Her skin became damp and splotchy, rippled with chills. On an impulse, Constancia decided to steal the sweater.

After this, her periods came less frequently, until her flow diminished to just a few threads of blood. Her breasts ached every month like when she was twelve. She found herself elated one moment, despairing the next. It occurred to her that her parents had died long before they were old. How, then, could she possibly know how to grow old herself?

In Cuba, aging was not such a disgraceful affair. Most elderly women were venerated and sought after for counsel. They were surrounded by their families and often lived to
see their great-grandchildren grow up. The
abuelitas
were the eyes and ears of a clan, the peacemakers, the storytellers and historians. They held each young destiny in their hands. Although this was not true in her own family, where her mother and grandmothers died young, it didn't prevent Constancia from desiring a rich old age.