The Aguero Sisters (16 page)

Already, Constancia has received dozens of letters from women who confess that they feel more
cubana
after using her products, that they recall long-forgotten details of their childhoods in Sagua la Grande, Remedios, Media Luna, or Santa Cruz del Sur. Perhaps it is Mamá's questioning eyes that spur these reminiscences, or the sight of her long, unguarded throat. Politics may have betrayed Constancia's customers, geography overlooked them, but Cuerpo de Cuba products still manage to touch the pink roots of their sadness.

Constancia is not immune from these sudden reveries herself. The last time she applied her eye cream, she vividly recalled her mother's funeral, the electric-blue dove that hovered over the burial pit, helplessly thrashing the air, her sister's unrelenting grief. Papi held a clod of wet dirt to throw into the grave, but aimed it at the dove instead. The bird drifted interminably until it came to rest on Mamá's coffin. “It's still moving!” Reina shouted, but Papi paid no attention. He grabbed a shovel from a cemetery attendant and quickly filled in the grave.

Constancia rearranges the condiments in her refrigerator to make room for the fresh batch of emollient. She uses no preservatives, so it's essential that she keep the cream cool, especially in this weather, which spoils everything so quickly. As she lines the shelves with her royal-blue bottles, Mamá's face stares back at her in dizzying miniature. Constancia considers how far she's traveled away from her
mother, only to find that she is waiting for her in each new place.

Lately, Constancia has begun wearing vintage clothing. Fitted suits from the forties, strapless summer dresses that flare out at the hips. She buys old brooches and drop pearl earrings, crocodile pumps made in Havana years ago. She doesn't remember her mother dressing like this, doesn't remember much of Mamá at all, except for the day she returned home, eight months pregnant and bruised. Constancia likes to imagine herself as her mother might have been, on Papi's arm, attending a scientific conference in the capital. The hall would rumor with her presence, unsettling Papi's colleagues with her disturbing beauty.

It is afternoon
by the time Constancia loads up her Cadillac for her first delivery of the day. She thinks of Heberto as she fills the backseat with three Styrofoam chests, vaporous with dry ice. What would she ask him if she were allowed only one question?

Today she'll deliver Cara de Cuba to accounts in Kendall, Coconut Grove, and South Beach. Her other clients must wait several more days for a shipment. Constancia knows that people will endure almost anything for a product they consider precious or rare. Whenever she pulls up to a shop in her pink Cadillac convertible, steps out in her forties dress and open-toed pumps, all traffic instantly stops.

The sun weaves the air with thick, unbearable light. Constancia drives her convertible with the top up and the air-conditioning on full blast to protect her fragile cargo. How different this is from her childhood traveling days, when she and her father braved every inconvenience Cuba could offer—torrential rains, black clouds of mosquitoes, dirt roads or none at all, and the beastliest heat in
the Western Hemisphere—in pursuit of their endangered creatures.

On one trip through Pinar del Río province, she and her father came upon an upland pasture pockmarked with hundreds of singular-looking burrows. Some of them were rough and unfinished, while others had a smooth, patted appearance. The rough ones, Constancia quickly discovered, were filled with tarantulas, quite common in Cuba. But the smooth ones, about eight inches deep, each contained the rare toad they were seeking:
Bufo empusus
. The toads, which looked much larger than their burrows, used the tops of their heads to seal off their homes, like precise lids.

That night, as they camped out under a sky collapsing with stars, her father expounded on the relative merits of the Greek philosophers. Abruptly, though, he changed the subject.
Analyzing people is infinitely more taxing than distinguishing among even the subtlest variations of subspecies
. It was true that with a quick glance, Papi could identify a creature's essential habits—its food preferences and mating rituals, its nurturant or aberrant behavior.
Human beings are distressingly unpredictable. They have a natural propensity for chaos. It is part of their biology, like a capacity for despair or profound joy
. Her father paused, looked up at the quickening wounds of a million stars.
There is a comfort
, mi hija,
in knowing what to expect
.

Constancia was perplexed. Her father's pronouncements were usually circumscribed—to the present, to natural history, or to abstract philosophies. Papi never alluded to her mother or her half-sister in Havana, not even in passing. Constancia struggled with the burden of this emptiness, of sharing no past but the land's and no future but the creatures soon to be in her and Papi's possession. But the pleasure of her father's presence, his reassuring voice, frequently overrode her discontent.

• • •

Constancia takes
U.S. 1 south toward Kendall. Her client's boutique is situated across the street from a serpentarium. Constancia is tempted to visit it—some of her most enjoyable memories are of catching snakes with her father—but she fears her emollient won't withstand even a moment's exposure in this heat. A banner outside the store announces the day's arrival of Cara de Cuba. A long line of elegantly dressed women are waiting to buy her product. Constancia pulls up in her pink Cadillac and removes a Styrofoam chest from the backseat. The women burst into applause. A scuffle breaks out at the front of the line, and a security guard rushes in to break up the fight. The owner tells Constancia that the first clients started lining up at dawn and are feeling somewhat testy.

At the Coconut Grove store an hour later, customers learn that only two dozen bottles of Cara de Cuba will be available for sale, and another fracas ensues. One woman tears through the back window of Constancia's convertible and grabs the last chest of lotion, meant for the South Beach shop.

On an impulse
, Constancia drives to the Good Samaritan Hospital in Coral Gables. Her ex-husband, Gonzalo, is still dying on the eleventh floor. She tells herself she'll insist on learning Heberto's whereabouts, that she won't leave until she knows when he's coming home. She blames Gonzalo for Heberto's departure, for inciting her husband to become a bold, impassioned man.

Constancia is reluctant to visit Gonzalo. In fact, she hasn't seen him since his father's funeral, in January. He looked quite feeble then, but his presence stirred her nonetheless. Secretly, Constancia feared he might reignite a passion inside her, impossible to quench. Gonzalo may have left her long ago, may have lied to her so consistently it, was a
kind of truth, but Constancia never forgot him. Never forgot him or forgave him.

Over the years, their son yoked Constancia to Gonzalo as if to a living steer. She suspects that her decision to send Silvestre to an orphanage in America was more for her benefit than for his. By then, she was resigned to her marriage with Heberto—so predictable, kind, and quietly efficient in bed (he was sanitary too, unfailingly rinsing and powdering his penis after every coupling). Yet each time she and Heberto made love, Silvestre knocked on their bedroom door, wanting something. The sight of her son, his eyes the same capricious brown as Gonzalo's, continually revived Constancia's despair. Not until Silvestre was in Colorado, deaf and nearly dead of a fever, was she able to get pregnant again.

At the hospital, Constancia is surprised to see how robust Gonzalo looks for a terminal patient, although the nurse tells her it's mostly water-swelling. His head seems large and hard to balance, his fingers monstrously tumid. Worst of all are his eyes, dim and sticky with mucus.

Gonzalo doesn't recognize Constancia at first. But as soon as she speaks, he opens his arms in welcome. “
Ah, mi golondrina!
” he coos, using his old pet name for her. Gonzalo always maintained that he could remember a lover best by her voice.

Years ago, Reina confided that she'd slept with Gonzalo once, after he'd divorced Constancia. His penis was so small, her sister complained, a mere boy's, that she could hardly feel him inside her. Constancia was astonished. She'd always considered Gonzalo's penis impressive, certainly more so than Heberto's. But she'd had only two lovers all her life. How could she imagine what Reina's other conquests had accustomed her to?

“Are you aware of the deadly attraction certain infective
agents have for the liver?” Gonzalo asks, staring intently at Constancia.

“Where's Heberto?” she demands, trying to quell the anger in her voice. “He left with your pirates in March, and I still haven't heard a word!”

“The trees are disappearing,” Gonzalo whispers, turning toward the window. The clouds are pink and fleshy in the sky. Constancia follows his wandering gaze and notices a patch of cabbage palms in the hospital gardens, two jacarandas, a single bottlebrush tree.

Gonzalo picks up the telephone as if prompted by an invisible signal and calls a fellow patient down the hall, a mystic named María del Carmen, who, despite a pneumectomy, continues to smoke through a hole in her throat.

María del Carmen shuffles in on paper slippers. Her head is shorn, her nails are geometrically lacquered in gold. She insists that the Holy Ghost oversees the body's purification systems and tells Gonzalo that he, too, must shave his head so that the Spirit can descend upon him with a minimum of friction.

“So you think I should cut this off?” Gonzalo flirts with Constancia, flicking the ends of his scraggly hair. There's a drop of spittle on his chin. “Do you think it would make a difference?”

Constancia says nothing. She tries to reconcile the sight of Gonzalo with the slim brown body that once defeated hers, that left her prepared for more than she would ever receive again. She studies his fever charts, the registry of his manifold disease. It occurs to her that in all these years and through six disastrous marriages, Gonzalo has sought no solace but adventure. Her own life, in contrast, has been a pursuit for ever more exalted security. Which appetite, she wonders sadly, is the more meaningless?

María del Carmen pulls a razor and shaving cream
from a fold of her hospital gown and gets to work on Gonzalo. She begins with his widow's peak, methodically shears him from the hairline back.

Gonzalo is in a sentimental mood. He recalls the first time he saw Constancia, sitting at her receptionist's desk against the picture window of Havana harbor. It was 1956. She wore low-heeled sandals, and her tiny feet were visible beneath her desk.

“I looked at those China-girl feet and knew right then I would marry her,” he says to no one in particular.

No sooner does María del Carmen exit, her razor held high in triumph, than Gonzalo begins rubbing himself freely, prompting his little sex to swell beneath his hospital gown.

“This summer, your husband will be a hero,” Gonzalo says in his most seductive voice. He looks down at his inconsiderable bulge, then stares at Constancia expectantly, as if offering her an unparalleled opportunity for patriotic duty. “Really,
mi vida
, you should be thanking me.”

Constancia takes a step toward Gonzalo, absorbs a wave of his humid decay, of the scent of mint shaving cream still damp on his skull. She wants to reprimand him, demand Heberto's return, but something makes her stop.

She bends over him, slips her right hand beneath his hospital gown, grips the solid familiar warmth. Constancia stares into her ex-husband's face, dissolving now with pleasure, then quickly pulls her hand away. She covers her nose and mouth with it, inhaling deeply, and hurriedly leaves the room.

Constancia guides
her battered Cadillac back toward Key Biscayne. From the interstate, she spots the riotous blur of a poinciana in bloom. Most of Miami's poincianas are still dormant, heavy with dark seed pods. In another month, the city will be ablaze with their brilliant displays. Constancia
prefers the deep scarlet of the royal poincianas best. Papi showed her once how each one of its red flowers has a token white petal, which unfolds when its pollen is ripe. The white petal serves as a nectar guide for bees and birds and other pollinators.

Constancia crosses the Rickenbacker Causeway in her pink convertible. The top is down, and her hair whips loosely in the wind. What a relief it is to escape the oppression of possibility in Gonzalo's hospital room.

Around her, the bay slackly merges with dusk. The tide is low, and an army of iridescent crabs scrambles along the shore. Shirtless men in cut-off shorts gather the crabs in tin buckets as spirals of smoke rise up from barbecues on the beach. The fading light lingers on the water before dying altogether. The hour spreads quickly, emptily, in all directions at once. As the heat of the day grows quiet, the darkness absorbs the horizon and all other illusions.

Constancia counts the traveler's palms along Crandon Boulevard. She wants to stop and tug at the base of each leaf stem, tap the quart of water trapped inside. She and her father drank frequently from the trees during their travels, quenching their thirst, refilling their empty canteens. They ate their seed pods, nutty and slightly bitter, often sheltered themselves with their enormous, wind-torn leaves. Papi told Constancia that
guajiros
thought that in the wild, the palms were a natural compass, always aligning themselves in an east-west direction. Later, Constancia was disappointed to learn that this was not actually true.

She signals left, heads toward her condominium on the beach. The guard waves her in, and she parks in her usual spot. Heberto's plain Chevrolet sits idly in its space. There's nothing of interest in the mailbox. No postcard from her husband. No letter from her daughter or from her son in New York. Only coupons from the pizza place down the
block. Slowly, Constancia climbs the nine flights of stairs to her apartment. She does this once a day to keep her legs in shape.