The Aguero Sisters (17 page)

A telegram is taped to her front door. It seems to bleed into the blond wood around it. The message is from her sister, Reina, in Havana. It says that she will be arriving in Miami via the Bahamas the following night.

H
ere in Madrid
, the sky is a constant placid blue. No violence to match my own. It hasn't been pretty, this rush of purpose deflated. To leave Cuba I had to burn everything I know. Memory, I'm convinced, is the worst of traitors.

Two weeks with Abelardo, that sickening ridge of spine and tailbone, and I left him for good. A wilderness of patience, and then I left him for good. Sometimes I wonder what I've gained besides this new bargain with solitude.

I stole everything I could from Abelardo's widowed sister, pocketed her greasy cash, pawned the jewelry. This was after our fistfight. She pulled my hair, called me a Communist whore. I knocked her down a flight of stairs. She survived by landing on an elderly neighbor just back from retrieving her mail. Abelardo had nothing worth stealing.

It didn't take me long to find a job. I'm the woman hired to clean the mansion and love the lonely two-year-old girl.
My uniform is a disaster: baby pink with a scalloped apron and white, spongy-soled shoes. Let's just say my presence is a tolerated intrusion.

The weather inside the house is restless. It's obvious there's a divorce in the making. I prefer it when the Señor and Señora leave me alone with the girl. Her name is Mercedes, and she is spindly and inscrutable for being so tiny. She barely speaks, so I tell her what I read in the newspapers. How the polar ice caps are melting and the half-degree rise in the temperature of the earth's surface is killing off countless forms of life.

We go for walks in the afternoon. Mercedes always stops in front of the cutlery store and stares at the gleaming display. Little cleaver, I joke, you'll grow up and kill your parents. I think of how all evil begins with the first absence.

Nobody knows where I am
. It's as if night has descended on me with a velvet anonymity. Of course I don't use my real name. Not that I think Abelardo and his Franco-worshiping sister are looking for me. Not that I think anyone is looking for me. But more to try on a fresh identity, plant a tentative new root. Sometimes I wish everything I wanted could be arranged this easily.

There are no paintings or books on the walls of the house where I work. Only mirrors, dozens and dozens of them ricocheting with light. I've reached the point where I can finally ignore my reflection, even when cleaning a mirror head-on. Believe me, it's a relief to be this invisible.

The Señora preens in her mirrors every evening, adjusting her sparse blond bob. Mercedes sits beside her, pulling her own baby, batlike ears.

Somehow this is more than I intended, and less. I'm on another clock, suspended in time, expecting privileges I thought automatically came with risk. But it's a place with
rules I don't understand. I look for clues in the shredded bullfight posters, in the separatist graffiti, in the conversation I overhear in the meat department of El Corte Ingles. Each word is a map I track toward the same blank wall, thickly covered with moss.

Sunday is my day off, and I go to El Retiro and walk around the man-made lake. Every ripple from a diving swan sparks little internal ceremonies of doubt. There's a Gypsy woman on the promenade, whom I usually sit with for an hour or more. She's young, no older than I am, with coarse skin and two-different-color eyes. I smoke cigarettes and listen to her garbled Spanish, watch her nimble leather fingers snap my future into place.

“You are thin, but there is too much fat in your blood,” she begins each session, her gray and brown eyes serious.

“Tell me something new,” I asked her the last time.

“I look in your heart and read only questions.” She stopped shuffling her cards and pointed to a knave with a red collar of bells. “Who is this man still whispering in your ear?”

“Che Guevara.” I laughed. Then I lost patience. “Look, how should I know? You're the Gypsy!” I was down to my last cigarette. I needed something to eat. I thought of how antibiotics were losing their effectiveness against disease.

The Gypsy slid her cards together in a haphazard pile. “No charge for you today,” she said, and sullenly turned away.

Last week
, I took Mercedes to El Prado. Except for the archives in Santiago de Cuba, where my father's picture hangs with other artifacts from the revolution, I'd never been to a real museum before. I've never even been to a church. Who the hell can keep up with all those martyrs and saints? In Cuba, we were taught that religion is a refuge for the
weak and the ignorant. But then I saw Raphael's
Cardinal
, and I knew that wasn't right at all.

“Look at that man's face, Mercedes.”

“Man,” she repeated in a loud voice.

“Everything you need to know about ambition is right between his eyes.”

I come from a long line of atheists. My mother puts her faith in electricity and sex. And my father's anticlerical slogan for the revolution—“Make them grow palm nuts!”—is still exhorted in Cuba today. My maternal grandparents were scientists and dismissed organized religion out of hand. “Religion is a form of willing delusion,” Mamá used to say, quoting her father. Both her parents died within two years of each other back in the 1940s, but Mamá could never tell me why.

Sometimes I wish I could've known my grandparents. My mother makes them sound larger than life, like those billboards of Che intoning that we do more for the revolution. They traveled all over Cuba, studying birds and bats and other animals. Mamá says her parents were famous in their field, that scientists from all over the world came to visit them in Havana. I wonder if anyone still remembers them.

Some days I feel the hot mist of the past on my back, all the generations preceding me, whispering
this way and this way and not that
. There should be rituals like in primitive societies, where the elders confer their knowledge on their descendants bit by bit. Then we could dismiss all the false histories pressed upon us, accumulate our true history like a river in rainy season.

My mother has passed along only fragments of her family's past, a few quotes from ancient philosophers, a questioning nature that, more often than not, has gotten me into trouble. Of my father's family I know nothing. (His parents were “laborers,” the revolutionary books say. Like who
the hell isn't?) Mamá didn't have much time to fill in the gaps. She was always working, illuminating the remoter parts of the island. She has an unusual gift for light. As for me, I spent practically my whole childhood in boarding schools, wearing navy-blue uniforms, picking lettuce or lemons or yams and reciting useless facts.

Everything at the museum cafeteria
is so expensive that I buy only a bowl of gazpacho to share with Mercedes, and all the saltines I can stuff into my pockets.

“Hot!” she shouts, meaning spicy, so I pour a little water into the soup to dilute the taste. This suits Mercedes just fine. I've been teaching her how to eat with a spoon, and she slurps the gazpacho with relish.

I notice a man watching us, but then he gets up to leave and I think nothing more of him until he slides into our booth with two trays of steaks and stewed vegetables and portions of wobbly flan. He is exceedingly tall. Even sitting down, he is taller than most people. A planetary height. His features are so bland I can't get a fix on him. It's like staring at a peeled potato.

“I'm here in Madrid for two days only,” he says finally. I place his accent as Swedish or Norwegian, and in fact he's from a suburb of Stockholm.

Nothing is free, I think, but I'm so hungry I cut off a piece of steak. Mercedes grabs the flan nearest to her and squeezes it in her fists.

“She's not my daughter,” I announce, and then wonder why I feel the need to explain. “I just take care of her.”

The man says nothing but continues to stare at me. A blood blister sprouts on one thumb.

“What's your business?” I ask in English, and it puts him immediately at ease.

“Pharmaceuticals.” He straightens up and looks ready
to sell me something. “We have antidotes for many diseases. Baldness. Lung infections. Moroccan skin fungus.”

“I'm glad to say I won't be needing any of your products,” I say, back to Spanish. Mercedes starts laughing, squawking like a little parrot, as if she understood my joke. Her face and smock are smeared with flan.

“You have beautiful hair,” the man sputters, as if seized by a sudden revelation, then he looks down at his immense hands.

His eyes are a delicate pink. Like a rabbit's, I think. Or a secret sorrow.

Mercedes and I accompany Bengt to a bullfight that afternoon. His company gives him tickets for entertaining clients, and so we have excellent seats. The matadors' costumes shimmer in the sun like grandiose insects. Four bulls are lanced with minimal fanfare, unleashing a torrent of hoots, cheers, and seat cushions. It's hopeless to read what pleases the crowd. Only disgust is unmistakable.

The fifth bull is small, overheated, glossy with anger. Again and again, it charges the young matador. He loses his footing, and the crowd jeers. The second time he slips, the matador is furious. He holds his sword high in the air, poised to kill, but the bull knocks him down and smashes his leg with its hooves. The matador slashes back frantically, severing the bull's ear and gouging out an eye.

For a moment, the bull stops, stunned. Then it charges wildly around the ring as blood pours from its skull. The fans go crazy, cursing the matador and every one of his ancestors. It takes a dozen men to finally kill the beast. When the ambulance pulls into the stadium to pick up the wounded matador, the crowd hurls rocks and bottles, and the medics barely escape with their lives.

• • •

It's nearly midnight
when I sneak out of the mirrored house to meet Bengt at his hotel. He orders room service, then spends an hour watching me eat. Roast duck in olive oil, sweetbreads with pepper sauce, a half loaf of bread spread with pounded salt cod.

“May I feed you dessert?” Bengt asks shyly. There are a dozen
yemas
arranged like ovaries on a silver tray. He takes my hand and leads me to the king-sized bed in the other room.

The night is sold, I think, and begin to undo my clothes. He stops me.

“Please lie down,” he whispers.

I notice the dark expanse of his tongue, thick and swollen and overrunning his mouth. He gives off a sharp, trespassing smell. It makes me afraid.

Bengt removes my shoes but nothing else. For a moment, he fingers the scar on my thigh, where I donated skin to heal Mamá's burnt flesh. Then he sits on a chair beside me with the tray of sugared egg yolks and a silver serving spoon. Bengt cradles the back of my head in his hand, gently, as if I were sick and needing assistance. With the other, he spoons the first
yema
into my mouth. It dissolves on my tongue with a moist, precise sweetness. Then he spoons another, and another after that.

Tranquillity is nothing less than the good ordering of the mind
. I repeat this twice to calm myself down. I think of my mother reading her philosophers aloud, her face lax with nostalgia as if she herself had lived in ancient Greece or Rome. What was the last thing she told me before I left Cuba? Suddenly, it seems crucial to remember.

Seven
yemas
, eight. The egg yolks swell inside me like fat, sticky suns. Like the time I was fourteen and expecting a baby. Nine, ten, eleven
yemas. All things are changing; and thou
thyself art in continuous mutation and in a manner in continuous destruction, and the whole universe too
.

Twelve
yemas
. Twelve. Bengt lets the spoon drop. He loosens his tie and covers his face with his hands. They seem radiant, trembling and sunken in light. Then he climbs into bed beside me and falls deeply asleep.

RARAE AVES

D
uring my last year at the University of Havana, my father was diagnosed with throat cancer. The doctors said he would live only a few months, but his will defied the prognosis. He survived nearly three years more. I decided to return to Pinar del Río to read to him. This was a luxury for Papá, who had spent so many years dutifully reading to others. Day after day, tome by tome, I read his entire library back to him
.

My father, as always, took greatest comfort in the Greek and Roman philosophers—Plato and Epictetus—and, above all, in Marcus Aurelius. He delighted, too, in the poetry of Miguel de Unamuno and Rubén Darío, especially the poems in
Cantos de Vida y Esperanza.
Papá was not a religious man, but I suspect he discovered in those poems a path to a private solace
.

Papá received countless visitors during his illness. His friends ignored his deteriorating health and shared with him news and gossip from the cigar factory. The talk of the day was
of the vile cigar-rolling machines, those clanking monstrosities from America that were ruining the cigar workers' way of life. No amount of marching or rioting would rid the factories of them. It appeared that the jobs that had been lost would stay forever lost
.