The Aguero Sisters

ALSO BY CRISTINA GARCÍA

Dreaming in Cuban
Monkey Hunting

PROLOGUE
ZAPATA SWAMP
SEPTEMBER 8, 1948

I
gnacio and Blanca Agüero
took the long route to the Zapata, Swamp, horseback riding in silence along the Río Hanábana through the familiar wide-open countryside of palm trees and hardwood hammocks. It was their first collecting trip together in nine years. They had visited the swamp many times before, but never in weather so oppressive. Now they were back, hunting ruddy ducks for a new museum collection in Boston.

The ducks were notoriously difficult shots and required immortal patience. They hardly flew, preferring instead to swim submerged to the tips of their beaks, which slyly peeked from the water. When the ruddies rested on the swamp's fragile skin, it was always amidst the shelter of the
malanguetas
, the great upstanding cow-lily leaves. Only the locals had any skill in shooting the ducks. Stealthily, the
guajiros
propelled their pirogues with bamboo poles and surprised the birds in their hiding places. By aiming just
ahead of where the ruddies dove for cover, they always got their prey.

Years earlier, before Blanca fell ill, the Agüeros had gathered many fine specimens in the Zapata Swamp. Crab hawks, spotted rails, purple gallinules, even a peculiar local crocodile, unknown anywhere else in the world. There, too, they once spotted—but failed to catch—the
Capromys nana
, a homely rodent descended from an ancient order of mammal.

As naturalists, Ignacio and Blanca Agüero had traversed Cuba with a breadth and depth few others achieved over considerably smaller territories. They knew intimately every cleft of the island's limestone mountains, every swell of its plains and pine forests, every twist of its rivers and underground caves. Together they had spent years cataloguing the splendor of Cuba's flora and fauna, and had decried with each passing season the decline and extinction of once populous species.

The Agüeros often imagined what Cuba must have been like before the arrival of the Spaniards, whose dogs, cats, and rats multiplied prodigiously and ultimately wreaked havoc with the island's indigenous creatures. Long ago, Cuba had been a naturalist's dream. Why, then, had so much been sacrificed to successive waves of settlers and the spreading monotony of sugarcane fields?

On cloudless days like this
, the light in the Zapata was so fierce that even the most experienced travelers were deceived, made to consider all manner of ruinous delusions. The swamp was known to exert a hypnotic effect on ambition, that all-welcoming peril. But the stagnant waters of the Zapata rationed its secrets sparingly. Ignacio Agüero lovingly studied his wife and understood that satisfaction came not in the pursuit of modest discoveries but in the bald act of approaching the very essence of things.
Science is primarily a
yardstick waving in the dark of the unknown, approximating what it has yet to learn from what it has partly exposed
.

It was noon, and the sun was unsparing. The saw grass and bulrushes quivered in the morass. All morning, Blanca Agüero had followed her husband reluctantly, trailing the wily ruddy ducks without success. The heat weighted her lungs like mercury, slipped beneath her netted helmet, inside her hip-high boots. Damp wisps of hair clung to her forehead and cheeks. How long had it been since she'd endured such physical discomfort? Blanca Agüero restlessly stroked her shotgun, decoratively inlaid with mother-of-pearl. She hadn't used it since dawn. She set the gun against a clump of hyacinths and wiped her face with a pocket handkerchief.

Behind her, a sudden whirring arose, a soft breath at the nape of her neck. Blanca Agüero turned and spotted a brilliant apparition, vibrating inches from her helmet. A bee hummingbird with a metallic pink gorget and strange markings on its wings. A gorgeous specimen, no bigger than a wasp. An adult in full plumage, exceedingly rare. It would no doubt cause a mild sensation in certain scientific circles. She turned to alert her husband and found him staring at her, fixed as a muscle behind his double-barreled gun.

At the sound of the shot, their two horses, ordinarily even-tempered and accustomed to gunfire, snapped their restraints and bolted into the
tembladera
, sinking without a trace. Blanca Agüero collapsed with an unexpected violence, half sliding into the rippling marsh.

Ignacio Agüero waited until nightfall, watched and waited until a lone red-tailed hawk soared above them in the sky. Then he carried his wife seventeen miles to the nearest village and began to tell his lies.

ACTS OF GOD
EL COBRE
DECEMBER 1990

R
eina Agüero
, cleaving to a telephone pole with thighs strengthened by many such climbs, is repairing a high-voltage cable outside El Cobre, a copper-mining town in eastern Cuba, when another storm blows in from the Cayman Trench. Lightning, intricate as a skeleton, shatters the afternoon hum of the Sierra Maestra, illuminating the pitted, open-cast mine in the distance. Reina Agüero wipes one hand, then another, on her regulation jumpsuit as she works her way down the splintered pole. Her tools clang reassuringly from her belt. In the evening, she will climb the coconut tree behind the government hotel and mingle its milk with a little rum. She hopes the concoction will finally permit her to sleep.