The Aguero Sisters (12 page)

Papá, no doubt, would have been surprised at her devotion, surprised that it was she and not Constancia who had taken care of his treasures all these years. Her father used to speak of Constancia as perfection in absentia, intrepid and talented, although Papá never explained why she couldn't return home. With Reina, he always maintained a more formal demeanor. He read to her frequently and worked to sharpen her reasoning abilities. What he could not do was deter Reina from loving him.

Reina puts on
her work jumpsuit, consoling even without the customary weight of her tool belt. She laces her rubber-soled boots, then slips on her official government windbreaker, which she hasn't worn since the burning at El Cobre. Reina hops in place, first on one foot, then on the other, enjoying the exorbitant lightness at her hips. Then she unhooks the metal ring of keys from a nail on the door and eases herself into the night.

Bus after bus goes by as Reina strolls east on La Rampa. During the day, she frequently waits two hours for a ride and still can't elbow her way on, for all the people. Who can explain such planning? Empty benches line the Avenida
de los Presidentes. A woman of indeterminable age rattles toward her, pushing a wooden cart piled high with rancid bundles. She is dressed in tattered layers of many colors. Reina thinks the woman might have looked festive from afar, like an apparition from medieval times, but up close there is no mistaking her misery. Around the corner, a slick black Plymouth slides by, inflating the air with the faint notes of a
danzón
.

At La Rampa and L Street, Reina heads south toward the University of Havana. She remembers one Saturday she accompanied her father to his office while Mami was away visiting friends. Reina played for hours with Papá's stuffed birds and bats, careful not to disturb him. She conducted unlikely marriages among the furred and feathered creatures, threw a treetop party, mourned the
cordoníz
at its, imaginary funeral.

That afternoon, Papá turned to her, his eyes a complicated gray like the winter sky outside. Reina remembers the height and curve of his forehead, the twist of his polka-dotted bow tie. She had a little earless owl in one hand and, in the other, a bat so tiny it looked like a butterfly.

“Please be so kind as to tell me,” Papá began, as if solemnly addressing a graduate student, “what makes us different from those creatures you hold in your hands?”

Reina was thoroughly puzzled. Her father had often held long discourses on the nature of instinct and intelligence, but she was much too young to follow his arguments. She merely picked up a word or a phrase here and there. Normally, he did not ask her questions, much less expect a response. Reina wondered if Constancia would have known what to say.

Papá's breathing came in steady, labored puffs. His breath filled the room, dictated its warmth and moisture, its chemical composition. Then suddenly he dropped his gaze
and looked out the window, which neatly framed a leaning royal palm.

“Receptacles,” he whispered, as if remembering something from long ago. “Thousands of receptacles.” His voice rose, impossibly slowed. His back was still turned. “We … are … not … bees.”

Then he returned to his work with a renewed ardor, leaving his senseless words to dance in Reina's head.

Reina makes her way
to the biology building, in the middle of campus. Posters with revolutionary slogans wash over the walls like a static sea. The main entrance and the side doors are locked. Reina rolls her pants to her knees and, fueled by the aberrant strength of her insomnia, hoists herself up the side of the building. She begins to climb, wedging her feet between the immense limestone panels, scaling ledge after ledge until she reaches an open window near the top.

It takes her a moment, but Reina finds a light switch and flips it on. She is disoriented. There's no office or classroom here, just a crude exhibit of invertebrates against the far wall—sponges, polyps, flatworms, rotifers. In one corner, in an encrusted glass case, a Gila monster and a giant salamander stand face-to-face; in another, a large family of pin-pricked coral shrimp is on display.

Reina remembers a story her mother told her once, about how the nebulous lights Christopher Columbus saw from the poop deck of the
Santa María
were probably Bermuda fireworms. “Twice a year the fireworms mate,” Mami explained, “and turn miles of the Caribbean a phosphorescent green.” Then she held Reina's face in her hands and spoke to her sharply: “You don't know how much of what you see,
mi hija
, you never see at all.”

Her mother used to tell her many stories like this, but from her head, not mostly read from books, like Papá.

From the time Reina was an infant, her mother took her all over Havana. She used to carry Reina in a sling as they wandered along the Río Almendares, which meanders to the sea between Vedado and Miramar, then on to the Bosque de la Habana, with its lush subtropical trees and chalk-white cliffs. Her mother would point out the lizards and snakes hiding in the logs and piles of leaves, turn over stones to examine every manner of insect.

As Reina grew older, she and her mother would visit Chinatown on the weekends, especially the Teatro Gran China, in the heart of the red-light district. They would sit through the histrionic plays, not understanding a word but drawn to the extravagant tragedies and the wonderful, dissonant music.

When Dulcita was a few days old, Reina fashioned a sling from two hospital pillowcases and carried her daughter along the same path she and her mother used to take by the Río Almendares. But the river was filthy, shimmering with mosquitoes and algae, the trail clotted with garbage and rotting fruit. This was not what Reina had remembered.

Reina moves down
the hallway, desperately flicking on lights everywhere. If only she could brighten the place fast enough, she might get a glimpse of her mother bent over a specimen or quietly writing at a desk. In the buzz of unexpected illumination, the burden of the biology building trumpets itself: a sink full of petri dishes, velvety with mold; the mildewing skins of dozens of discolored birds; a haphazard skeleton missing key bones.

The glare of lights only increases Reina's confusion. Nothing is familiar to her, nothing seems in its rightful place. She races from room to room like a howl in the night, desperately searching for her father's office. Would her mother be there, stuffed and inert like everything Papá killed? Her
throat patched over with grafts of skin? Her riding boots shined to catch light? Would the greens of the world lie dead in her eyes? And around her slender neck, a hand-printed sign reveal her species, the date and place of her capture, her normal habitat?

By the time Reina reaches the ground floor and pushes open the enormous bronze doors of the entrance, she is shaky and feverish. The science building is ablaze in a thunderous light. Reina feels as though she, too, were lit from within, burning with a forged history. She waits to see whatever her disturbance will bring. But nothing happens, nothing at all.

At precisely five-thirteen
in the morning, Reina approaches the grandfather clock in Papá's study. With a flourish, she removes the black cape with which she'd draped it earlier that night, as if it were a voluble parrot. Then she records the hour in a small spiral notebook. Her mission is clear, although her motives are still ambiguous. Reina knows only one thing for certain: she can no longer stay in Cuba. She trusts that the rest of what she must learn will announce itself in time. She envies her daughter's clarity in leaving the country, her willingness to go to any lengths to get what she thinks she wants.

Reina gathers her soap, her toothbrush, Papá's ancient gold razor, and steps down the hallway to the bathroom. Reina prides herself on completing her day's grooming in just under five minutes. The key, she's discovered, is to accomplish a multitude of bothersome tasks—brushing her teeth, blowing her nose, wiping clean her ears, and urinating—all while in the shower. Despite the disruption of months in the hospital, Reina maintains her exacting schedule.

Today she dresses in her soft flannel skirt, a short-sleeved white blouse, and a silk vest with bone buttons borrowed from Papá's wardrobe. She fastens on the hoop earrings that somehow survived the lightning. Her black patent shoes, which she wears only on special occasions, are thick-heeled, with oversized buckles, a coachman's footgear from another era.

Outside, it begins to rain hard, linear and relentless, like self-important men. Reina reaches for her father's ancient umbrella. The visa and emigration office won't open until eight o'clock, but Reina is prepared to wait. She marches down the dormant streets, twirling Papá's umbrella with a surety of purpose. The rain subdues the stink of her skin to a bearable mixture of vinegar and suede, and this pleases her.

Soon Reina takes her place among the dissenters at the visa headquarters on Avenida Bélgica. Her passport picture, taken six years earlier for her trip to Venezuela, no longer resembles her. She wants to clarify this discrepancy, explain the condition of her malodorous skin, but no one bothers to ask for an explanation.

Why do you wish to leave Cuba?
It occurs to Reina that this question, third down on the emigration application form, requires from her an answer lengthier than the inch of blank space provided. Her father used to say that bureaucracies preferred the tyranny of clear-cut solutions, of irrefutable knowledge, a defined time and place. “True questions,” Papá told her repeatedly, “always insist on better questions.”

“Come back in three months, and we'll inform you of the status of your application,” the clerk says automatically when Reina hands her the application form.

“But you haven't even looked at my papers.”

“I don't make the decisions. I only accept the petitions.”
The young woman's hair is arranged in an old-fashioned bun, but her uniform, revolutionary crisp, is all modern angles.

“Then I'll just stay here until I get word.”

“
Compañera
, I told you to come back in three months. We won't have anything for you before then.”

“I'll wait over there,” Reina indicates the plank bench in the foyer.

Reina is uncharacteristically polite
during the four days and nights she camps out in the visa and emigration office, refrains from raising her voice or resorting to threats. She simply states, as one official after another pleads with her to be reasonable, that she will not quit the premises without first receiving permission to leave the country.

The secretary of the interior initially vetoes her trip on the grounds that Reina's record is badly marred by her daughter's defection to Spain and that her own skills as an electrician are still considered essential for the revolution. But Reina remains intractable.

During the day, she passes the time playing cards with the dissenters, sharing their coffee and cold
yuca
fritters. At night, Reina rests on the same plank bench, her thoughts whirling above her like a lumbering galaxy through space. She thinks about Dulcita, the loneliness that must descend upon her every evening in Madrid. Reina received a postcard from her daughter a week ago. Dulcita wrote that she'd seen a billboard on the Calle de Alcalá that said,
Jesus rents grace
.

On the fifth morning of Reina's vigil, word comes down from El Comandante himself: “Let the old mare go to America if it pleases her. What use is she to us now?” And with that unimpeachable directive, Reina is finally given her departure papers.

• • •

In all the years
they've known one another, Reina has never set foot in Pepín's house. The night before she leaves Cuba, she appears on her lover's doorstep in her wrinkled flannel skirt. His wife answers the bell. Gloria Beltrán stares up at Reina. She needs no introduction. After nearly a quarter century, she knows who it is. Even before her husband's indifference, even before their children left home for places they'd shown her on maps, cold places in Eastern Europe or Russia or places hotter than Cuba in summer, she had imagined this woman's face.

“He's in the bedroom,” Gloria says stoically. She's a psychologist at the 26th of July Elementary School and accustomed to speaking in comforting tones. She leads Reina to her husband.

The room is neat, rectangular, the paint a faded pink. A chandelier hangs askew over a sagging double bed. Beyond the shut window, a trellis of bougainvillea can be seen dominating the courtyard below. Reina thinks of something Pepín told her years ago, that there's an unlicensed spot in the brain that if manipulated just right could keep a person happy for decades.

She closes the door, waits until she can hear Gloria's footsteps retreating down the hallway. Then she reaches with both hands and guides Pepín's mouth toward hers.

Their lips are dry, hot, flammable. The air in the room is close, suffused with a stale, floral, female scent, as if roses had withered on the dresser or under the bed where they lie. Then Reina and Pepín make love for the last time, tenderly as only old lovers can, briefly sheltered from the long and rumoring night.

T
here is a faint whirring
that Constancia cannot identify in the slow, surrounding white. It sounds just below the surface, enameled, perhaps, and slightly metallic. Her eyes are closed, but she can hear the surgeon's breathing, muffled and near. His crimson scissors sing neatly through her skin. He pulls and relayers the delicate flaps, so flimsily rooted, dips and loops his special dissolving thread, a bloody pointillist.

Constancia listens to the pressure of the surgeon's supporting fingers. They creak and groan like miniature glaciers, alive against her face. Constancia is inside the whirring now, immediate as fury. The surgeon severs roots and useless nerves, reinvents the architecture of her face. Oh, the noise the tight crown makes, newly slotted to her skull! It drowns all entering sounds.