The Aguero Sisters (19 page)

At the Miami airport, Reina was stunned to see a vision of her mother rushing toward her at the gate. Constancia looks so much like Mami now, down to the minutest details,
that Reina couldn't help it—she studied her sister's face like a blind woman, tried to read with her hands the grace and terror that lay hidden there.

“What a strange way of being dead!” she finally exclaimed. It was her first direct utterance to Constancia in thirty years. Later, she stared at her sister for many more hours, considered her from every angle, until it made her frantic with grief.

Her first few nights in Miami, Reina slept in the same bed with Constancia, back to stomach, Reina on the outside protecting her slight, older sister, listening for messages from the dead. She and Constancia showered together, combed one another's hair, fed each other tidbits from their dinner plates. All the while, Reina kept watch over her sister's face as if it were a compelling tragedy.

Reina wonders whether Mami's face is only a superficial membrane, like her own patches of borrowed skin, or whether it penetrates further to the bone, to some basic molecular level. She can't help thinking how everything is fundamentally electric, how natural currents flow near the surface of the earth, telluric and magnetic, how she is pulled again and again into the charged fields of her sister's face.

If only Constancia would stop talking, stay mute sufficiently long enough for Mami to emerge. Reina finds intolerable the false expectations their mother's visage sets up. There is a part of Reina that wants to address Mami directly, to risk everything—even if it means eradicating her sister—in the hope of retrieving her past.

After their mother died, Papá sent Reina and Constancia to a boarding school in Trinidad. That first rainy winter, a forest of politeness took root between them, starching the air they shared. Each time Reina tried to talk about Mami, Constancia covered her ears and hummed the national anthem. Although they spent years together
at boarding school, by habit or cowardice—Reina isn't sure which—she and Constancia never discussed their mother again.

Reina dives into
the deep end of the condominium's pool with her eyes wide open. There's a dime and a gold hoop earring where the bottom slopes down. She plucks them from the concrete and leaves them on the rim of the pool. Then she swims with powerful strokes to the shallow end. One stroke, then two, and she's in the deep water. Two strokes more, and she's at the shallow end again.

This is a pool for pygmies, Reina thinks. Who else could be satisfied with these few drops of blue?

The sun is high in the sky. No interference from clouds. The ocean wrinkles with the slightest breeze. The city is in the distance, strangely flat and uninviting. Reina emerges from the water and shakes herself dry, a glorious titanic beast. Near her, sunglasses are lowered, shutters flung open. Her own pungent scent steams up from her mismatched skin.

At noon, Constancia calls down to Reina from the balcony, announcing lunch. It's delicious, as usual:
arroz con pollo
, fried plantains, a coconut flan for dessert, all served on fancy flowered plates.

“This is the century that Christianity has died out,” Constancia declares, picking the petit pois out of her rice. “The metaphysical is taking over. People believe in miracles now instead of God.”

Reina reaches over and mashes her sister's peas with a fork, sucks them off the tines. She looks up at the past trapped in Constancia's face and doesn't know what to say.

The phone rings incessantly during their meal. One call after another from Constancia's clients, impatient for orders of lotions and creams. Her sister is nearly finished retrofitting
a bowling ball factory into Cuerpo de Cuba's new manufacturing plant to meet the clamorous demand. Reina has volunteered to help Constancia with the remaining electrical work.

There's a stack of photographs on the kitchen table, taken before Constancia's affliction. Reina thumbs through the pictures, carefully examines them one by one. Her sister looks good, well groomed, younger than her fifty-two years, her body pliant and pampered, Reina notes, but lacking the tone of true succulence.

“Do you think this will pass?” Constancia is moody, restless. “I'm not extinct yet, am I?”

Reina isn't certain she can stay with her sister if Mami's face disappears, isn't certain she can stay if it remains. She takes her sister's hand and pats it. It's a child's hand, lineless and smooth. What could there possibly be here still tempting the dead?

“I wish you'd stop that!” Constancia hisses all of a sudden. “You've been doing it for days!”

Reina realizes with a start that she's been unconsciously whistling. She recognizes the melody, a traditional
changüi
from Oriente she once heard a
negrito
sing in Céspedes Park.
He nacido para ti, Nengón. Para ti, Nengón
. His singing had made Reina cry.

“I've been ingesting small amounts of sterling silver,” Constancia says, calmer now. She takes a denim pouch from her apron pocket, shows Reina the silver dust inside. “I heard on the radio that it soothes hallucinations.”

Reina reaches for an apple from a bowl on the kitchen table. She doesn't want to say that the entire world should be eating silver dust, then, because everyone is hallucinating.

“Someone told me this might be an equatorial disease. I must have caught it here in Miami. There are lots of people from South America.” Constancia pinches a bit of silver dust
and sprinkles it on the tip of her tongue. Then she washes it down with a glass of ice water. “What I want to know is where
my
face went. Where has it disappeared to?”

Reina remembers a stray snatch of a poem, she doesn't know from where, maybe something her father read to her once.
Life is in the mirror, and you are the original death
.

Of course, she doesn't tell Constancia this.

“
Ayúdame, por favor
.” Her sister decides to prepare a batch of Muslos de Cuba, her new thigh smoothener.

Reina isn't particularly interested—the smell and the steam give her a headache—but Constancia is so overwhelmed with work that Reina reluctantly agrees to help stir up a few gallons for a department store demonstration the next day.

“What are these for?” Reina asks, poking through a bowl of boiled avocado pits.

Constancia cracks the pits open with the blade of a knife and scrapes out the vegetal flesh. “Softens the subcutaneous cells of the thigh. Reduces the appearance of cellulite. Peel those peaches for me, will you?”

Reina leans over the tray of rotting fruit, waves away the cloud of feasting flies. She picks up a serrated knife and begins peeling. Reina is perplexed by the obsession women in Miami have for the insignificant details of their bodies, by their self-defeating crusades. She was appalled when Constancia took her to the Dade County shopping mall last Sunday. All those hipless, breastless mannequins, up to their scrawny necks in silk.

Don't women understand that their peculiarities are what endear them to men? Rarely do the most conventionally beautiful women have the greatest hold over their mates. Pepín, who adored Reina but remained an inveterate woman watcher over the years, admitted that he favored no particular
female features.
Cada mujer tiene algo
, he liked to say. Every woman has something. The best lovers, Reina knows from experience, approach women this way.

“You don't have to worry; you never had to,” Constancia sniffs. She opens a king-sized tub of cherry yogurt, ladles it into the steaming cauldron.

“But why should anybody?” Reina turns around, pulls up her terry-cloth cover-up to reveal her puckered thighs. “
Oye, chica
, since when did cellulite ever deter passion?”

Constancia grabs Reina's cutting board and scrapes the peach peels into the blender. It screeches like a malfunctioning drill. The skins turn brown and pulpy, altogether unappealing. Reina watches as her sister adds them to the bubbling emollient.

“I think every woman remains fixed at a certain age in her own mind.” Constancia lowers her voice to a conspiratorial degree. “A rare time when she saw herself in the mirror or through her lover's eyes and was pleased.”

Reina guesses this is her sister's best cosmetics-counter voice.

“Haven't you ever noticed how often women destroy pictures of themselves, Reina? That's because nothing conforms with our private image of ourselves. My products bring back that feeling. The beauty of scent and sensation, the mingling of memory and imagination.”

“Not me,
mi amor
. I live in the here and now.”

“Well, you're probably the only woman on earth who actually likes the way she looks!” Constancia snaps, stirring the thigh lotion with a steady rhythm of her wooden spoon. “Definitely bad for business!”

Reina retreats
to the guest room and changes into her work jumpsuit. She's putting up shelves and plywood hutches for their father's stuffed specimens. She retrieves a hammer
from her toolbox and secures another bracket against the wall. Her thumbs still feel a little sore from having been broken in the mahogany tree. Then she lines the shelves with arm lengths of aluminum foil she bought at the supermarket.

Reina is bewildered each time she goes shopping in Miami. The displays of products she'd forgotten or didn't even know existed. Red pepper spaghetti. Giant artichokes, looking vaguely medieval. Bread in countless textures and shapes. And anything, it seems, can be frozen or freeze-dried here. Instant, instant everything!

In the far corner of the room, on the topmost shelf, Reina displays the
periquito
Papi shot in a virgin forest near Guantánamo. Their father's spectacular
camao
, its mantle still an enviable blue, she places in a hutch by the window, next to an earless owl called a s
ijú
. Reina fondles the elfin owl, her favorite of their father's collection, recalls the faint traces of light it left in, a lace of leaves. She wonders if memory is little more than this: a series of erasures and perfected selections.

Over the dresser, where a decorative crucifix has been, Reina nails up the photograph of their mother that looks exactly like Constancia today. In fact, it's identical to the antiqued photograph her sister uses for the labels on her jars of lotions and creams. Mami is pale in the picture, so pale her complexion seems more conjecture than color. Reina remembers how the summer before she died, Mami's eyelashes whitened until her green eyes looked twice their normal size.

Reina works a neat row of nails in her mouth, then pounds them into the wall one by one. She adjusts another shelf against the wall. Working up a sweat, Reina strips down to her panties and an old-fashioned bra with conical cups. She's always wanted to work in the nude, considers clothing a nuisance at best. Nothing ever fits her quite right anyway, especially in this
nalgas
-denying country. Reina
knows she looks best without a stitch, even now with her patchwork skin.

It's nearly four o'clock
when Reina finishes with the guest room. She finds Constancia in the kitchen, dripping vanilla extract into the cooling thigh lotion. Reina urges her sister into taking Heberto's little motorboat out for a spin. “How hard can it be?” Reina asks. “No disrespect to your husband,
mi amor
, but how many astrophysicists do
you
know who go fishing on the planet?”

In Cuba, no one is allowed to go boating without a special permit, so Reina rarely got the opportunity to venture out on the open seas. Constancia is nervous because Heberto has been gone since March, on a covert mission against El Comandante. Reina suppresses her laughter. Nobody can bring that old
cabrón
down, much less mild-mannered Heberto Cruz. It amuses her to think that Constancia feels her husband has a fighting chance.

At the yacht club, Reina sets to repairing the rusting outboard motor before a crowd of hooting admirers. She buries her face in the motor, sharp-nosed pliers in hand, oblivious to the encircling commotion. Nobody has started the boat since Heberto's departure. Reina asks her sister for a spool of copper wire from her massive toolbox. She is always happiest with the toolbox at her side, even when she's making love. It increases her every pleasure.

Last month, she smuggled the toolbox out of Cuba by impressing the immigration officers at the airport with the name of a famous general she'd once seduced. Reina knows she could have bought a beach house in Manzanitas by selling her tools on the black market.
Coño
, it's impossible to get even a bandage in Cuba, forget a decent wrench. No way would she have left without her precious implements.

Constancia holds a stretch of wire for Reina to cut.
Reina patiently winds it through the motor, then pulls on the starter. The motor shivers and dies. She tightens two more bolts with her best adjustable wrench. Reina could be dropped anywhere with her tools, in a faraway galaxy with no water and a fraction of the earth's gravity, and somehow—she grins to think of this—she knows she would survive.

On the next try, the motor roars to life. Reina is pleased. Nothing, absolutely nothing, neither man nor machine, is immune to the resuscitative powers of her magic hands.

Constancia slips on her life jacket, but Reina doesn't bother to put one on. Instead she settles in the rear of Heberto's boat and motions for her sister to come on board. Then Reina steers her way out of the yacht club harbor as if she were bom for nothing else.

The air is much too weary for wind. It's the middle of the week, and only two other boats are on the bay, sailboats barely moving in the distance. Reina has been on a boat only twice in her life, but she likes the perspective it gives her, the ocean's open contempt for destinations. Why hadn't she ever realized before the futility of living on land?