The Aguero Sisters (11 page)

“De acuerdo,”
he said. “But in case your mother asks you, tell her we've spoken
.”

Since his bout with yellow fever, Papá often asked me to substitute for him at the cigar factory. I was no longer so nervous before a crowd, and the cigar workers complimented me on my voice—not nearly as sonorous as my father's, they said, but high and distinct as chimes. It was not what I wanted to hear, but I accepted their praise just the same
.

On one such day, I organized the morning's reading: two local newspapers, a movie magazine, the latest newsletter from the International Cigar Workers Union, and Papá's favorite recipe for Galician-style scallop pie, which called for a special type of scallion grown only in Spain. My father had taken to sharing his culinary expertise with the cigar rollers, who greatly appreciated his cooking tips. Once, when Papá had tried to demonstrate how to prepare the perfect
torta a la española
on a portable burner, the director stopped him mid-lesson for creating a fire hazard. A banner reading
NO COOKING ON THE PREMISES
still hung, frayed and yellowed with smoke, in the back of the hall. In the afternoon, I would continue with the
Spanish translation of
La Bête Humaine,
which Papá had begun the week before
.

After lunch, a new employee walked through the factory doors. She was the very image of a voluptuous carnival reveler I'd once admired in a nineteenth-century engraving. The young woman, who wore a gingham dress and a starched white kerchief, took a seat in the front row and removed a circular blade from her purse. The foreman brought her a large pile of tobacco leaves. She was a
despalilladora,
whose specialty it was to strip the stems from the leaves
.

Up on the platform, all my old nervousness returned. I felt as if the
despalilladora
alone sat below me, judging me with her lustrous eyes. I cleared my throat and began to read
:

I felt exceedingly hot, stifled, but there was no window I could open, no place I could turn for air. I noticed that the
despalilladora
did not smoke cigars but that she inhaled the smoke deeply, with satisfaction, as if the wisps encircling her were fresh breezes from the sea
.

A distressing prickliness spread through my body, starting in my chest, where my heart knocked loudly, then to all
my extremities at once. In an instant, my skin was coated with sweat and every vein in my body jumped with blood. Down below, the
despalilladora
stared at me, her eyebrows raised in concern, her circular blade poised in midair
.

I awoke flat on my back in the offices of El Cid's general manager. My mother stood above me, passing a hand over my forehead. It smelled good, of vanilla, of the creamy soaps she used. She helped me sit up, straightened my collar and tie, then looked me full in the face
.

“
You're in love, Ignacito,” Mamá whispered so no one else could hear, and held me tight against her
.

Nothing came of my obsession, which lasted the better part of a year, except that I missed many days of school, spying on Teresita Castillo. My sentiments, opulent with insecurities, bred in me humorlessness so severe as to border on pathos. How could I laugh when I feared more than anything being laughed at myself?

I learned that Teresita had recently married and moved to Pinar del Río from another part of the Viñales Valley. Her husband, Rodolfo, a slight man with an unexpected, sinewy strength, drove a truck for a box factory and was gone for days at a time on cross-country deliveries. I imagined saving Teresita from this unworthy mite, offering her a life by my side, but I had just then started high school
.

Each time Teresita and I met—never by chance, since I knew her schedule down to the minute and occasioned to see her several times daily—she asked about my health, as if I were somehow sickly or prone to fainting spells. This ate at me more viciously than any acid, which, in my despair, I thought of swallowing. If I could not win Teresita's love, I would settle for her pity. Pity, I'd learned from reading so many of Papá's novels, often proved a fertile, if shallow, soil for romance
.

Such foolish thoughts, such a foolish heart! It would be
almost comical if, looking back, I did not feel a twinge of the anguish I once felt
.

My mother was kindest to me during this time, which is to say she left me alone, asked me no questions, and made certain I ate despite my distraction. Papá was less comforting. He lost patience when I pestered him for details about my beloved. I wanted to hear only superlatives about Teresita Castillo. That she was the best
despalilladora
in the factory, the quickest and most efficient with her knife. That she was the kindest of all the cigar workers, the most generous of heart. But my father would not condescend to tell me what I wished to hear
.

During the time I was in love with Teresita, Papá did not ask me to read for him at the factory. My mother must have ensured this with gently pointed threats
.

Shortly before Easter, Teresita confided to me that she had an infestation of bats in her roof. What marvelous luck! Of course, I knew all about her bats from my constant spying, but I did not let on. Most Cubans in those days were quite tolerant of bats—a simple fact of life, after all. This was unlike the attitude prevalent among Americans and even a few Europeans, who erroneously credited bats with all manner of antisocial behavior. Still, the number of bats in Teresita's house had grown immoderate and the stench too pronounced to ignore
.

I arrived at Teresita's house just before nightfall, dressed in my father's borrowed waistcoat and jacket, looking more appropriate for a state dinner than a mass extermination. She invited me in, kindly ignoring my appearance, and offered me something to drink
.

“
A whiskey, if you have it. Or a cognac
. Por favor.”
I immediately regretted this
.

“
Would a little rum do?” she asked me, straight-faced. I wanted to kiss her in gratitude
.

“
Yes, yes. Thank you
.”

I took small, burning gulps of the liquor
.

“
This is about the time they begin stirring,” Teresita said. I stared at her, uncomprehending, my face and chest on fire. “The bats,” she emphasized. “Can't you hear them?
”

In fact, the bats were squeaking and scuttling above us with a rapidly intensifying clamor. A moment later, the sounds melded into what sounded like the buzz of a gigantic beehive
.

“
There they go!” Teresita announced above the din
. “¡Mira!”

Outside the window, a stream of bats poured into the air, forming a huge gray-black whirlpool. Around and around they went, as hundreds more took flight, circling at high speeds before flying off in every direction
.

“Tedarida murina,”
I said. “They're the best fliers on the island.” I wanted to tell Teresita that the bats were the second most plentiful in Cuba after
Molossus tropidorhynchus,
that they occupy much the same position among their kind as swifts do among birds, that their long, narrow wings row through the air so rapidly that the bats oscillate from side to side, that their habitat extends to Jamaica, Santo Domingo, and Puerto Rico
.

Reluctantly, I told her how to plug the roost openings with straw and cement, where to place the rat poison for maximum fatalities, what to do about the persistent stink. It made me sad to tell her all this. On my way home an hour later, still slightly drunk from the rum, my love for Teresita Castillo began to fade
.

That summer, partly to console me for love's failure, my parents took me to the south coast of Cuba for my first solitary expedition. From there, I connected with a steamer that ferried me across the Batabanó Gulf to Nueva Gerona, the capital of the Isle of Pines. Before I boarded the ship, Papá handed me a
wicker hamper laden with foods he'd prepared himself: shrimp tartlets, fresh bread with anchovy paste, lamb sausages, and a still-warm seafood stew. It occupied twice the space of the satchel I carried for my entire trip
.

As I crossed the turquoise waters of the gulf, past archipelagos of tiny islands with fanciful names, I thought of what the first explorers must have felt at the sight of a new horizon, at the roar of possibilities in their heads. How they imagined the vast riches that awaited them, all there for the taking with a musket and a strong pair of hands
.

On the steamer, an American woman with two young children befriended me. She'd been living on the Isle of Pines since 1913, when her husband had bought a grapefruit plantation. On warm summer nights, she sighed, the aroma of citrus coated every particle of air. Señora Crane recommended that I visit the Punta del Este caves. They had recently been discovered by survivors of a shipwreck, she explained, and contained paintings from pre-Columbian times. In the biggest cave, pictographs of red and black concentric circles were connected by arrows pointing east
.

In my exalted state and the Isle of Pines' unforgiving heat, I found it impossible to sleep. I calmed myself with nightly swims along the northern beaches, brilliant with black sands. It was on my fifth night, as I floated lazily in the ocean, that something mammoth swam by me, grazing my leg. I panicked, quickly calculating the odds of a shark coming so close to shore. That afternoon, I had cut my foot on a shard of marble at Bibijagua Beach, and the wound was still raw
.

Cautiously, I paddled my way toward shore, keeping my injured foot above the water as best I could. I reached the beach, breathing so hard I thought my lungs would collapse
.

It was then I saw her. Her ridged back and the enormity of her flippers made identification easy, especially in the moonlight.
She was over eight feet long, a half ton of slow magnificence. The leatherback turned her wrinkled, spotted neck and gazed at me, as if gauging my trustworthiness. I could see her eyes clearly, the inverse widow's peak of her beak. She proceeded up the beach, dragging herself with her front flippers, stopping every few feet to rest. In her wake, she left a long, wide ridge of sand
.

It was exceptionally rare to see a great leatherback on our shores. The turtles breed primarily off the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa and lay their eggs in the shallow waters around Ceylon. Even then I knew that a leatherback turned up in Cuba no more than once every several years, and almost never to spawn
.

When the leatherback found a nesting site, she sank herself deep into the sand, rotating several times until she had shaped her hollow. Again she faced me, as if warning me to come no closer. Then she continued to dig her egg pit, using one flipper and then the other, curling the edges inward to force up more sand
.

After what seemed interminable digging, the giantess brought her hind flippers together, craned her neck forward, and began to sway slightly to a private rhythm, finally laying her eggs in the sand. When she was done, the exhausted mother filled in her pit. She patted the sand until she erased all traces of her nest, then wearily made her way back to the sea
.

All night I searched the waves for a sign of her, but only the steady surf answered my scrutiny
.

At dawn, a fat scavenging gull dropped onto the leatherback's buried nest. I cursed the bird and threw a fistful of sand at it. A moment later, more gulls appeared, suspended in formation overhead, and a stray dog nosed its way down the beach
.

What choice did I have? I sat on the leatherback
's
nest all
that day and all the next night, guarding the eggs from predators, guarding the eggs for her. I imagined her babies racing for the surf later that summer, and I still wonder sometimes how many of that hatch survived. Perhaps only one or two. Those turtles would be fully grown by now, parents themselves, idly traversing the seven seas
.

R
eina works through
the warm April night, rummaging among her father's books, papers, and animal skins. The French doors to the study are wide open. It seems to her that tonight this room is an intimate part of the city, not sealed off by plaster and stone but one of its small vital organs, an essential cavity. For once, Reina is glad of her insomnia, of the gentle solace of the dark. The past she combs through is long dead, sloughed off from Papá's life like the desiccated skin of a snake.

Still, dozens of his specimens are left to inspect, all creatures native to Cuba. Most of these Reina will donate to the Natural History Museum of Gíbara. The best-preserved of the lot she will bequeath to the Carlos de la Torre Collection in Holguín. Her father had been friends with de la Torre, the greatest Cuban naturalist of all, an expert in mollusks who once gave a remarkable demonstration at the University of
Havana. Blindfolded and with astounding alacrity, de la Torre distinguished ninety-two shells with only his fingertips. And he was old, too, nearly blind enough not to need the blindfold.

Reina wonders who would remember de la Torre today. All of her father's friends are dead, their bones long enrolled in the earth's myriad cycles. Dr. Sergio Manubens y Quintana. Dr. Mario Sánchez Roig. Dr. Victor Rodríguez y Fuente. Dr. Eliseo Pérez Tovar. Dr. Isidoro Castellanos Solís. All superb scientists in their day, now an anonymous bit of fish muscle here, a breath in the lung of a migrant bird there. To be forgotten, Reina decides, is the final death.