The Aguero Sisters (20 page)

At Constancia's insistence, Reina veers left and putters through the canals of Key Biscayne.

“What would you do with this much money?” Constancia shouts over the whining motor, as if trying to impress Reina with the possibility.

Reina shrugs. She's indifferent to the mansions and yachts crowded together on the waterways. To have money and share this swamp with mosquitoes and water rats?
Por favor
. If she wins the lottery—and she's been playing religiously since she arrived in Florida—Reina would spend the rest of her life floating around the world, ravishing her choice of men. Certainly she wouldn't choose to live like this, cheek by jowl with the pathological rich.

Of course, if she won the jackpot, she'd split the money with Dulcita, coax her away from that Spanish buzzard in Madrid. Perhaps, Reina muses hopefully, she might become a grandmother. No, Dulcita is much too sensible for that. When she was fourteen and pregnant, Dulcita never said a word about it. But Reina could tell. Her daughter slept for hours in the afternoon, kept a box of stale crackers by her bed. Reina hoped that Dulcita, by some miracle, would decide to keep the baby. But she aborted it that autumn, like something fragile and seasonal.

“I want to be a grandmother,” Reina announces as she speeds around a curve. “I want to be a grandmother and mambo all night!”

Constancia turns to look at her, bemused. Reina is disconcerted by her face, by their mother's resurrected expression.

Anchored off a stub of jetty, on the deck of a yacht, a bare-chested man in madras pants types away at a portable computer. He looks up and blows a kiss at Reina.

“You're a goddess!” he shouts in badly accented Spanish, removing his baseball cap. There's a shock of gray hair on his head.

“
Caballero
, tell me something I don't know!” Reina shouts back, laughing.

The man tosses his cap in the air.

Suddenly, Reina longs for deeper waters to explore, and so she navigates her way out of the maze of canals and around the eastern tip of the island.

“Don't go too far, Reina! It's not safe!” Constancia protests. “Heberto never took the boat out of the bay!”

But Reina merely looks past her sister to the bristling blue concourse, to the broken arch of seagulls in the sky. She's impatient with Constancia's fear of adventure. Even at boarding school, her sister always asked permission for
everything—to leave the breakfast table or cross the dirt road to wander through the orange grove. Then she married that boor Gonzalo, who cured her forever of any recklessness. Reina remembers how Constancia wore the loss of him like a spectacle, a holy medallion for everyone to see. But for Reina, the loss of her first lover, José Luís Fuerte, only whetted her appetite for more passion, like the ocean before them with its hunger for vulnerable men.

A concord of clouds solemnly assembles on the horizon. The sun recedes, and an unexpected wind raises tufts of monotonous waves. The little motorboat climbs and drops as the rain begins. Then nothing is visible but this realm of blue water and light.

“Turn around, Reina.
Tengo miedo
.” Constancia is shivering on her vinyl banquette, her hands raw from gripping the side of the boat.

The boat pitches in the deepening waves, spraying them with water. Reina's blouse is saturated, her sister's hair mats to her skull. The boat dips again. Another fierce spray drenches them both.

What was it Constancia told her at the boarding school?
Mercy, Reina, is more important than knowledge. Coño
, who had taught her sister that? Worse still, how could she have believed it? Their teachers had told them to pray for their mother's soul, to ask God for forgiveness. But Reina couldn't understand what their mother had ever done wrong.

She wants to tell Constancia again what she saw at the funeral home. Describe the colors of Mami's devastated throat. Force her to listen. Shout it loud in her sister's face. Mami couldn't have drowned, like their father said. No, she couldn't have drowned, which means their father must have lied. And if Papá lied, what the hell was the truth?

The bow of the boat tips steeply into a wave. Ocean pours in astern, up to Reina's shins. She's surprised at its
beckoning warmth. She tries to imagine her mother, breathing her last breath of swamp.

Another wave slams against the side of the little boat. The motor floods and stops. Reina throws her sister a child's plastic bucket. “Start bailing!” she shouts. Constancia moves stiffly, her shoulders tight and square. The boat rocks hard in the waves. Reina inspects the outboard, unsnaps its casing. When there's only an inch of water left at their feet, Reina blows hard on the engine, emptying her lungs. She pulls the starter, and the motor turns over without a stutter.

Reina maneuvers the boat until they're heading southwest, toward the spangle of palms on her sister's tiny island, toward the dying twilight already fraught with stars.

C
onstancia stands outside
her new Cuerpo de Cuba factory in South Miami, gazing up at the sky. Everything is heavy around her, as still as the thickening clouds. An occasional, scattered wind scratches the leaves in the palms. Only the birds move. Constancia follows their trajectories, pretends the birds are trailing colors until the sky fills with the bright lines of their unintended grace.

In the distance, a storm disrupts the sky, skittish with lightning and the low roll of thunder. Constancia wonders if it's raining where Heberto is, what he's using for shelter, whether he's had to buy more underwear. The tides, Constancia heard on the radio, are at record highs. The viscous air is scented with death. Since her sister arrived from Havana, it's rained in Miami nearly every day.

Reina is napping in the factory office. She's been up since dawn, doing the last of the electrical rewiring. It was
no easy job converting this bowling ball factory into Cuerpo de Cuba's first manufacturing plant. Constancia is astonished at her sister's competence, her yeomanly concentration, the respect she commands from the awed construction workers. Balanced on ladders, twisting wires into place, Reina gleams with the quiet power of a perfect equation.

Yet there is something about her sister that Constancia mistrusts. To her way of thinking, anyone who can say “Wealth is ultimately futile” cannot be depended upon. After all, what can you possibly understand about people until you know what tempts them?

Her sister seems alarmingly content with the forty-dollar allowance Constancia has been giving her each week: for her lottery tickets (Reina plays with devout enthusiasm, tries endless combinations of numbers from her daughter's life), her chocolate bars (jumbo-sized Baby Ruths), and her diesel fuel (for her twilight rides on Heberto's motorboat).

Constancia wants to hire Reina as her factory floor supervisor, but her sister won't even consider it. Not even at six hundred dollars a week to start. She wouldn't take a cent, either, for all her work getting the factory ready.

“It's not the money, Constancia. I just can't see working with Mami's face like this. Her image parading past me every day, as if she were no longer mine.”

“And my face?” Constancia felt a shiver pass between them.

“You can't help that.”

“So you think I'm exploiting Mamá?” Constancia tried to decipher her sister's expression. Indulgent and sad, devoted, desirous. It irritated her to no end. “This is strictly business, Reina!”

“That's just what I mean.”

• • •

Constancia climbs
the short flight of stairs to her office. Reina has stripped off her clothing and is sleeping naked on the secondhand recliner. Constancia notices the echoes of burns on her sister's hips, her painfully cracked fingertips. Reina's skin looks fluorescent, on fire, like those films of the volatile surface of the sun. But then Constancia blinks, and her sister is only plainly radiant again, with her curious patch-quilt skin.

Last winter, Reina was struck by lightning in a giant mahogany tree on the outskirts of El Cobre. The electricity, her sister swears, still courses through her veins. In Cuba, Reina claims, she suffered from a tenacious insomnia, but here in Miami she has no trouble sleeping at all, particularly just before a downpour.

Constancia remembers how her Tío Dámaso once got hit by lightning as he was galloping through a field of dry grasses. The bolt struck a royal palm first, discharging a circular wave of electricity that traveled up through his horse, into his body, and out the top of his head in a fiery ball. Her uncle claimed he got smarter after the hit, that he developed an uncanny, if useless, ability to read everything backward.

Despite her skin, Reina has changed little in thirty years. Constancia is impressed by her sister's strength and stature, by her mesmerizing slabs of soft, beveled flesh. Reina occupies space with the confidence of tall men, issues an instant challenge to women. Her voice is deep, as it's always been, the sound of a sensuous cello. Constancia doesn't know why she ever felt guilty about not protecting her younger sister, why she didn't allow Reina to protect her instead.

Everywhere Reina goes, people watch her, whisper, point behind her back. Each time she sets foot in the yacht club, pandemonium breaks out. Constancia's female acquaintances
have pleaded with her to keep Reina under lock and key.
We have enough trouble keeping our husbands in Line without your sister coming around like temptation incarnate
.

Estela Ferrín, one of the regulars at the yacht club, even threatened to call immigration and have Reina deported. She suspects that her husband, Walfredo, an importer of German cars, has already strayed with the shapely electrician from Havana. In the past two weeks, he's lost nineteen pounds, dyed his hair a shoe-polish black, and calls out Reina's name in his sleep every night. According to his disgruntled partners, Walfredo Ferrín hasn't bothered to close a single deal on a luxury sedan in days.

Meanwhile, roses arrive for Reina by the dozens, red and humming, as if invisible microphones were recording their decay. Constancia's apartment is dense with the scent of a hundred dying blossoms. Her sister seems indifferent to the daily onslaught of flowers, to the magnitude of her attraction. Reina wants to open the windows to release the aroma, afflictive to her as weddings, but Constancia refuses to let in the fresh air. Instead she floats about late at night in a state of vague feverishness.

Reina's daughter, Dulce, is supposed to be just as stunning. When Constancia left Cuba, her niece was still little. She remembers Dulce as a sullen child, with a cleft in her chin and a fondness for pickled corn. Now Reina tells her that Dulcita is living in Spain, married to a senescent airline clerk she picked up at the Habana Libre Hotel.

“
Levántate
.” Constancia leans in toward her sister. “It's nearly six o'clock.”

Reina sputters awake. “I was dreaming I was a turnip, a famous one, a regent of Sweden.” She laughs and kisses Constancia on the cheek. “Life was pretty quiet.”

Constancia watches as Reina gets dressed, the ease with which she moves her body, the concert of muscles like something
well reasoned. Reina's breasts are beautiful too, soft and generous. Today she doesn't wear a bra.

“The air-conditioning isn't working yet.”

“Don't worry, Constancia. Ill have it fixed for you by Monday.” Reina swings her toolbox in a gesture of certain triumph.

Constancia follows Reina across the factory floor, past huge electric vats (“vice cookers,” Reina calls them) and a shiny conveyor belt, past row after row of industrial shelving, past boxes of royal-blue bottles pasted with their mother's pale face.

“Maybe you should create a perfume with my profile,” Reina jokes, showing off her comely right side. “You could make it from coconuts and honeybees and the sweat of Brazilian monkeys. You know what they used to call me in Cuba?”

“I'm afraid to ask.”

“Amazona.” Reina flexes a biceps, feigns an aggressive stance. “
Créelo, mi amor
. It would be a big seller.”

Outside
, the sky ruptures with rain. Reina grabs Constancia's hand and drags her to the safety of the pink Cadillac. Reina settles in behind the wheel. Constancia always lets her sister drive. Somehow it seems inappropriate not to, an affront to her competence, despite the fact that Reina doesn't have her Florida license yet.

Her sister cruises north on U.S. 1. She convinces Constancia that they should stop for a bite to eat at the Americas Cafeteria on Coral Way. Constancia isn't very hungry, but she orders a
medianoche
anyway, with a banana milk shake and sweet plantains on the side. Reina orders the day's special, fried liver with onions, black beans and rice, an avocado salad.

The horseshoe counter makes everyone visible to
everyone else. Constancia studies the other diners in the glare of Formica, slurping and masticating and licking their fingers, and it occurs to her that eating should be strictly a private affair.

“You know what I miss most about Cuba?” Reina asks in a voice loud enough to make Constancia uncomfortable. “The little plazas in every town. In Miami, there are no places to congregate.”

Constancia spears a fried plantain and puts it on her sister's plate. “I don't like to romanticize the past.”

“You don't remember the plazas?”

“I think we remember a lot of things differently.”

During their first days together in Miami, Reina asked Constancia to grant her small intimacies. Intimacies that Reina and their mother had shared. But soon Constancia found this too upsetting to sustain. Her memories of Mamá are altogether different from her sister's, hardly benign.

Reina eats the remainder of her liver and onions, washes it down with a bottle of dark lager. She leans back against her chrome-and-leatherette swivel seat. “I guess it's less painful to forget than to remember,” Reina says quietly.