The Aguero Sisters (21 page)

“I didn't say ‘forget.' I said ‘romanticize'!” Constancia snaps back.

If only she
could
forget. But certain memories are fixed inside her, like facts many centuries old. No amount of reconsideration can change them. Like the day her mother smeared a sticky blue paste on her mouth, which made her hallucinate for hours. Constancia complained bitterly to her father, but he was helpless before Mamá. In retaliation, Constancia tried to hurt Reinita—plugged her rosebud mouth with mud, dropped spiders in her crib. When Mamá found out, she ordered that Constancia be sent away.

Reina hisses for the waitress. “Do me a favor,
mimi
, and
bring me a
cafesito
and a
pudín de pan
. You want anything else, Constancia?”

Constancia looks down at her plate. She hasn't touched her sandwich. The plantains are cold and greasy-looking, scorched on one side. “
No, nada más
.”

Reina stares at her, as if trying to see through the intoxication of their mother's face. “Sometimes we become what we try to forget most.”

“What are you telling me?” Constancia's mouth tightens. “That I
am
Mamá?”

“No,
mi amor
, you're just worn out by mirrors.”

That night
, Constancia wakes up after only a few hours' sleep and pads over to the kitchen in her lambskin slippers. She sets out her cut-crystal goblets, her silverware and serving spoons, her china with the lily-of-the-valley pattern. She uses her good china for every meal, predawn breakfasts included. Not that her sister notices or takes care. So far, Reina has chipped two dessert plates, cracked an oval serving platter, ruined a silver fork prying English muffins from the toaster.

There have been other mishaps. A favorite silk blouse streaked with dishwashing liquid, her sofa stained pink with dime-store nail polish. Not to mention the countless electrical irregularities: clocks moving backward or stopping altogether, lights dimming for no discernible reason, the refrigerator coughing like a four-pack-a-day smoker.

Constancia sits at the kitchen table with her
café con leche
and a dish of whole-wheat toast. She drops three sugar cubes into the steaming mug. Constancia prefers cubes to loose sugar, the ceremony of the little tongs. Reina isn't home. This is no surprise. She must have slipped off for another post-midnight tryst with one of her paramours.

After breakfast, Constancia picks up a mister and
sprays her sister's roses until they look newly picked.
The flower indicates the crime
, her father used to tell her. After Mamá died, Papi wore violets in his lapel, violets with velvety dark centers. For years, every time Constancia did something wrong, she'd search for the nearest flower. Stealing was white carnations. Lilies were blasphemy. And sex meant
ave del paraíso
orchids—yellows, crimsons, the deepest blue-blacks—six hundred four orchids in all, for each time she and Gonzalo made love.

Constancia fills numerous bowls with apples, red as rampant lust, and places them strategically around the apartment. Oscar Piñango told her that apples absorb evil and all ill intentions, that Constancia should display dozens of them in her home each week. The apples should not be eaten, the santero advised, but Reina disregards his edict. She munches at least nine or ten a day—seeds, core, and all. The gods, she says, will forgive her this one transgression. In Cuba, there'd been no apples since the early days of the revolution, so Reina feels justified in devouring at least thirty years' worth in as many days.

On an impulse, Constancia plucks an apple from the bowl in the living room and lifts it to her mouth. A music starts up in her brain, a September music, somber and dark. Constancia drops the apple, dusts off a thick black record, José Ardévol's Symphony in F-sharp, and settles on the sofa to listen. These are the ruins she dreamed of when young, after Papi shot himself, after his ashes were strewn in the Zapata Swamp.

She reaches up to touch her face. When will her mother slip through? A word, a gesture, intact from the past? And what of her own oblivion? The memory of her previous self fluttering like a small satin flag?

Constancia looks around her apartment. It's decorated in every shade of white. White is all colors, she remembers
her daughter telling her, black its total absence. Only the apples and Reina's red humming roses mar the perfection.

Isabel calls
just as the sun begins to rise. Last week, she called at the same hour, informed Constancia that she was using photographs of Constancia's face in a collage she was fashioning with found bits of bird bone from the Paiko Lagoon. Then Isabel confessed that her boyfriend had disappeared every night for a month, that he avoided her swelling body, disproportionate with new life.

“
Cuéntame todo
.” Constancia knows her daughter wouldn't telephone again at this hour without a good reason.

“Austin's left me, Mom. He's moved in with a Chinese-Filipina dancer from the Don Ho show. She wears flesh-toned Lycra when she wears anything at all. Her family's been here since the reign of Queen Liliuokalani.”

“Who?” Constancia prides herself on her knowledge of international royalty, but this queen she's never heard of.

“She's modeling for him. She's nineteen years old. She has tiny breasts.” Her daughter's voice diminishes until it is barely audible.

“Get on a plane,
mi hija. Aquí te espero
.”

On Isabel's tenth birthday, Constancia took her to the American Museum of Natural History. Her daughter hadn't wanted an ordinary party. They visited the World of Birds first. Constancia pointed out three specimens her father had shot and shipped to the museum from Cuba years before: a haughty-looking bird with fuchsia plumage; another with stalk legs and a sprocketed bill; the last one so tiny Isabel had to squint to see it—a bee hummingbird with an iridescent throat.

Now poor Isabel is suffering the way Cpnstancia once suffered. Those endless pregnant days weaving Silvestre in her womb. Gonzalo's absence banging inside her like a
cheap tambourine. Nothing before or after him but a faint memory of what her body used to love. After Silvestre was born, Constancia watched the weather for hours, the tail end of day seeping into night. She had no energy for anything else. She heard a woman on the radio read a poem that spoke to her misery:
Love is a matter of gifts thrown in the fire, for nothing
.

Gonzalo returned to visit her when their son was eight months old. Constancia opened the cutlery drawer, aimed a carving knife at his heart. Gonzalo didn't wait to see where it would land. All the while, Silvestre slept soundly in his crib. It was the last day of May. Constancia longed for a change of seasons, a brief snowstorm, a swirl of dying leaves. Anything to mark this moment from the last.

Constancia wonders what Gonzalo would think of their son today. How long it would take for them to get to know each other. A month? Six months? Another thirty-three years? There's no substitute for the quiet culture of a life together, the endless days commemorating nothing, amassing history bit by bit. Only a few events irrevocably divide the past from the future. Like the time Constancia returned home and found Silvestre in the den, with a stranger's penis in his mouth. That same night, Silvestre moved out, explaining nothing. He was twenty-four years old.

Constancia hasn't returned to the Good Samaritan Hospital. Gonzalo calls her frequently, leaves
boleros
on her answering machine. His voice is like dark running water. Her hand still burns where she touched him.

It's dark in the guest room
, funereal-looking with Papi's gloomy taxidermy. Reina's bed is unmade, as usual, her pillows and pastel sheets strewn with the black curly hair she indiscriminately sheds. Constancia has noticed that the hair on her
sister's head and pubis is identical, thick and springy and intimate.

Constancia picks up the female
camao
, strums its gull-gray crown with her thumb. When her father shot it, the bird was practically extinct. Papi used to point out dozens of rare species to her on their collecting expeditions, told her tales about the fallen ones, the hunted ones, their every manner of demise. How the planters of Ciego de Avila used to feast on the tender flesh of the quail dove. How the Cuban macaws disappeared from Pinar del Río after the great hurricane of 1844.

Long ago, Constancia liked to imagine that she was the last dodo on earth, because her father loved nothing more than imperiled birds. Constancia pictured herself living in a silver cage in his study, subsisting on insects and rotten fruit. Her father would coddle her, stroke the feathers on her aching breast. What was it he said once?
Only lost causes merit any effort
.

Now Constancia feels extinct, like the many lost birds her father had lamented over the years, the birds that Cuba could no longer sustain, the birds they'd vainly searched for in the remotest corners of their sacrificed island.
Things cannot be murdered twice
, Papi liked to say. But Constancia isn't sure this is true.

She recalls one Sunday several months after her father died. The air was thin and dry in her dormitory room. The bells in the boarding school chapel rang for her presence, colliding with the distant ringing from Trinidad's oldest church, Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria de la Popa. Instead of rising with the other girls and dressing for morning mass, Constancia nestled deeper into her bunk and pulled the covers over her head.

Her bed was a small cemetery then, congested with
death. Her body felt heavy, her heart sank in its own sluggish blood. Her jaws were so weak she could barely open her mouth, much less eat the fish croquettes the boarding school cook personally delivered to her room in a futile attempt to cheer her up.

There is a muffled
scratching at the front door. The hallway lights begin nervously flickering. Constancia slips on her robe and finds her sister trying to break into the apartment with a crowbar from her trusty toolbox.

“
Gracias, mi amor
.” Reina's hair is wild, every strand standing on end; her patchwork skin is flushed. “I forgot my keys.”

Constancia follows her sister back to the guest room, watches as Reina tears off her clothes and flops into bed. Papá's dead birds stare from the shelves with their empty agate eyes.

Reina yawns and pulls the top sheet to her chin. “You know, it took me years to realize that not everyone would want dead animals displayed in their home.”

Constancia remembers how proud her father was of his prize specimens, how he fussed over them, cleaned them periodically with a glandular oil found only in certain cetaceans, how he protected the skins from insects by scrupulously wrapping them in chinaberry leaves.

Suddenly, Constancia decides that she, too, must attend to Papá's lost birds. She grabs a washcloth from the hall closet and moistens it under the bathroom faucet. The sun climbs in the sky, spilling a river of light into the guest room. Reina is already asleep in the twin bed by the window. Her body rises and falls with a low, rhythmic scraping.

Constancia begins wiping every faded wing and feather, methodically, as her father would have done, polishes
each beak and hinge and claw. But no matter how much she dusts, the birds still look dead.

Only her mother looks alive in the guest room, in the photograph that Reina hung over the dresser. There's an invitation in Mamá's eyes, in the poised set of her mouth, as if she knew someone would ask her a crucial question long after she'd died.

THE WORLD'S SMALLEST FROG

T
he first time Blanca Mestre walked into my biology class at the University of Havana, she sent a shiver through the room. There was something about her presence—quiet, luminescent, distracted—that stirred people, although it did not induce them to get close to her
.

Her gifts had nothing to do with intelligence, which she displayed in impressive abundance, but were born of qualities much less tangible. Instinct. Intuition. An uncanny sense for the aberrational. Blanca had no patience for hypotheses or dry pontifications. For her, an unsolved mystery was sufficient enough invitation to science
.

Blanca was most inclined toward chemistry then. The subject came naturally to her, and she seemed to have an odd, mimetic gift for inanimate substances. When she worked with sulfur, for example, her normally green eyes took on a yellowish tinge. If an experiment called for phosphorus, she vibrated with
its unearthly glow. And ordinary lead made her appear heavy and malleable and gray. It was as if matter spoke to Blanca directly, revealed to her its secrets
.

As a practical man, a man of science, I could not make sense of any of this. Yet how could I be logical when the very sight of this woman uprooted my heart?

Blanca was slight, as delicately boned as certain birds, and she had a cascade of blue-black hair that fell past her shoulders. Small purple burns marred her forearms, vestiges of chemistry experiments gone awry. She spoke little, as if unwilling to surrender to the unreliable realm of words. When Blanca was lost in thought, she often drew a finger across her throat
.