The Aguero Sisters (22 page)

Other men shared my infatuation with Blanca Mestre, succumbed to the peculiar vertigos she inspired. Amado Saavedra, a law student from a wealthy banking family in Ciego de Avila, suffered over Blanca's indifference toward him and eventually hanged himself from a manchineel tree after swallowing its deadly sap. That same autumn, Professor Isidoro de Grijalve, a renowned entomologist, became so obsessed with Blanca that he abandoned his wife and five daughters to dedicate himself full-time to her pursuit. His quest proved futile, and his illustrious career went to ruin
.

There were others. A visiting Belgian herpetologist fell madly in love with Blanca and hired her as his assistant over other, more qualified candidates. The Belgian, who sported a mustache of caterpillaran proportions, did not manage to win her love on the many field trips he planned for them. But she proved a worthy apprentice of herpetology, nonetheless. Blanca was entranced by the distinctive camouflages of her subjects, by their versatile physiognomies, by their flagrant melding of the biological with the chemical
.

On Fridays, when Blanca visited the central market in Havana, I used to follow her at a distance, stopping at the same stalls she frequented. I touched the same tangerines and soursops
,
basked in the pockets of warmth she left in her wake. It was the only way I dared come as close as I dreamed
.

There was another question I hoped my occasional spying might answer. What
, por Dios,
did the poor girl eat? Neither I nor anybody else at the university had ever seen Blanca ingest anything but milk, quarts and quarts of it, with thick hats of cream
.

It turned out that Blanca ate only one meal a day, at four in the morning, the hour in which she'd been accustomed to breakfasting on her father's ranch. The menu did not vary: skirt steak, two fried eggs over rice, and a ripe mango in season. Between this and her vast quantities of milk, she seemed to require no other nourishment
.

When at last I invited Blanca to become my research assistant, my colleagues were suspicious at best. Although I was immensely attracted to Blanca, I never would have hired her if she hadn't already proved to be a talented collector. She forged into caverns and woods without a backward glance, and her hands were especially fine, quick and useful. She could pack mud on insect bites, heal cuts and bruises with trim squares of moss, concoct elixirs for any ailment
.

One evening, Blanca prepared for me a potion of five-pointed leaves that she boiled for an hour with a peculiar blue stone. Remarkably, my symptoms—acute abdominal pain and a spiking fever—disappeared almost instantly. That night, I dreamed vividly in black and white, instead of my usual color, and woke up temporarily forgetting my name
.

Blanca and I traveled a great deal through Cuba our first winter together, initially by train but more often on horseback. It was 1936, and much had changed since I'd traversed the country with Dr. Forrest. I know it is unfashionable to admit this, especially in these days of fervent nationalism, but I
missed the old British-owned railways. Certainly the uniformed waiters and afternoon teas could not have been more out of tune with local customs, but they were no less quaint for the incongruity. After General Machado took power, the country's train service severely declined and, sadly, never recovered. But even today, trains are still preferable to traveling by automobile. Cuba's roads, now as then, remain deplorable
.

Our mission that winter was to document and collect sixteen targeted reptiles on the island before their native habitats were destroyed by new farmlands. Cuba supports more than seventy species of reptiles—fifty-two particular to the island, greater than any other in the Antilles—and nearly a third were already in danger of extinction. Blanca's and my findings were published jointly in a paper entitled “The Lost Reptiles of Cuba.” I daresay it secured our reputations in international herpetological circles
.

Blanca was especially partial to the world's tiniest frog, a lovely creature native only to Cuba, mauve with a yellow streak running the quarter inch from its nose to the insertion of its hind limbs. One day, near Hanabanilla, a pair of elderly
campesinas
came upon us capturing the minuscule frogs in the woods
. “¡Extraño ver personas tan grandes cazando animalitos tan chiquitos!”
one woman sniffed to the other before walking on. Strange indeed it must have seemed to them to spy two grown people hunting such tiny game
.

Blanca did not touch the doves or hutías I shot to roast over our evening campfires. While I ate with the exaggerated hunger spurred by the outdoors, Blanca was content to drink fresh milk from her canteen. Occasionally, I succeeded in coaxing her to eat a bowl of beans or a baked yam to keep me company. But the food I cooked did not sit well with her. As always, she brought her own provisions for her predawn repasts
.

Our constant proximity enabled me to note a streak of morbidity in Blanca. “Billions of insects die every second,” she might say quietly as we prepared our campsite. Or, surveying a vast fertile valley in Oriente: “Everywhere, this reckless procession toward death!
”

On the road, Blanca kept a fragment of bone in a worn flannel pouch on her belt. It was a human scaphoid, evident from the prominent tuberosity on one end. At times, Blanca seemed to consult the little wristbone, ask it for guidance. She would not tell me where she got it or what it was for
.

I remember an expedition we took to a cave ten miles inland from Cienfuegos Bay. Blanca was squatting on her heels, the flannel pouch dangling from her waist, when she caught a blind lizard that neither of us had seen before. Less than an inch long and translucent as coconut milk, the creature had an archaic aspect and the probing habits of an earthworm. It turned out that the lizard was utterly unique. To my knowledge, no other specimen has ever been found. Blanca was pleased, but she did not seem the least bit surprised by this remarkable discovery
.

Despite our many hours together, I gleaned only a few details about Blanca's past. She rarely spoke of her family, and then told only curious, tattered stories that hardly amounted to a history. She said she grew up on a pig ranch in Camagüey, that she was the youngest of seven children, and the only girl, and that she'd kept a series of pet crows. They were her favorite birds, she said, because they mate for life, look after their fledglings longer than other birds, and come to the aid of their wounded. Like me, she read Latin fluently and rode a horse expertly
.

Later, I learned from Dámaso Mestre, the youngest of her brothers, that their mother was a mulatta descended, in part
,
from French colonists who'd fled Haiti after the slave revolt of 1791. They settled in Santiago de Cuba with twenty-seven thousand other displaced French planters, imprinting the city with their culture, customs, and surnames. Her mother, whose maiden name was Sejourné, had been fond of French aphorisms
. Au pays des aveugles, les borgnes sont rois.
In the country of the blind, the one-eyed men are kings. It was a saying Blanca repeated often
.

According to Dámaso, their mother died in a freak accident on the ranch when Blanca was five years old. Eugenia Mestre's pistol went off in its holster, injuring the horse beneath her and inciting a stampede of pigs that trampled her to death. The ranch hands brought back her remains, soft broken remnants wrapped in a saddle blanket, and laid them on the veranda, where Blanca was playing. Only her mother's hands—brown, thick-nailed, and strong as a man's—were intact
.

Their father, overcome with anger and sorrow, single-handedly slit the throats of the six hundred nine pigs that had taken part in the stampede. All the workers and villagers who ate the slaughtered pork vomited savagely for three days and nights. Several people died, including a twelve-year-old boy with a withered arm, but the others woke on the fourth morning cured of all minor maladies
.

There were those who claimed that Eugenia Mestre had died a martyr or a witch, and for years, on the anniversary of her death, a memorial mass and countless cruder ceremonies were offered in her name. No one knows who painted the mural on the back of the town hall, but not even Críspulo Navarrete, the fearless chief of police, dared whitewash it. The painting featured Doña Eugenia, regal in flowing golden robes, stepping on the head of an agonized sow
.

Ramón Mestre built an old-fashioned sarcophagus for his
wife, carving the stone himself and sealing it tight against worms. Blanca grew up in the shadow of her mother's coffin, which was erected outside her bedroom window. Her father began raising cattle and horses instead of pigs, but for years afterward, everyone continued to refer to his place as the pig ranch
.

In Blanca's only photograph of her mother, Eugenia Mestre wears tan riding pants and polished boots to her thighs. She is a tall woman, narrow-hipped, with a large, high bosom. In the picture, her expression is mock fierce, as if she might crack a whip on your back, but her eyes betray the humorous pretense
.

Blanca said she did not have a picture of her father, that she would sooner forget his sorry, dissolute face
.

Late one night, while Blanca was setting water to boil for her rice, I crawled out of my tent to watch her fix her daily meal. There was no moon and only a scattering of faint stars, but this did not hinder Blanca
's
movements. She seasoned my charred skillet with a few drops of olive oil before frying her steak and eggs. Then she pulled off the skin of a mango as if she were merely slipping off its cape
.

When the rice was done, Blanca piled her plate high with food and settled down by a pair of flat rocks. She spread a napkin on her lap and ate daintily with a knife and fork, her canteen of milk at her side. The night was unnaturally silent. The dying fire patterned shadows on her face
.

I am not certain why it was this of all nights I chose to make clear my intentions. Perhaps the obscuring sky and Blanca's fine manners gave me courage. I smoothed my hair as best I could and, like a holy-day penitent, lurched over to her on my knees. Her hands were soaked with blood. A queer apparition. I realize now I should have taken a closer look, that she had spelled out her grief for me to see
.

But then without preambles or guitar serenades, without bouquets of roses or confessions of love, without, in fact, any of the nonsensical accoutrements of courtship, I asked Blanca Mestre to marry me. And to my complete astonishment, she handed me her bloody knife and said “Yes
.”

POLISHING BONES
MIAMI
JULY
1991

I
t is Friday
, the best day for dispelling negative influences. Reina and Constancia follow Oscar Piñango around the Cuerpo de Cuba factory as he recites an oration to La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre. He sprinkles a pungent elixir on the vats of emollient, on the bottling machine and industrial trolleys, even on the Agüero sisters themselves. Reina thinks she smells several of the same ingredients her longtime lover, Pepín, used to disperse throughout her father's apartment in Vedado—
paraíso, tártago
, and his favorite curse buster,
rompezaragüey
.

In the middle of the cement floor, the santero begins kindling a fire with leftover lignum vitae from the bowling ball factory. It's a dense wood, smoky and hard to burn.

“Open that door,” Oscar Piñango instructs, pointing to Constancia's mezzanine office, “and all the closets and storage areas. Quickly.”

The sisters dash around and do as they're told. There have been too many mishaps lately to take any chances: a family of dead bats found in a tub of elbow abradant; ointments and creams inexplicably curdling overnight. And during the first employee meeting, bloody chicken feathers floated down from the ceiling, prompting half the staff to quit on the spot. Only by increasing his salary prodigiously did Constancia convince her new manager, a young Wharton graduate named Félix Borrega, to stay.

Reina has noticed that Constancia, who rarely even breaks a nail, is becoming prone to minor accidents as well. Knives slip in her hands. Bottles shatter on the factory floor. Why, just this morning her sister got a burn the size of a sand dollar where she leaned too long on an electric vat. Today Constancia sent her employees home at noon (with full pay!), so that the santero could execute his purifications in peace.

Oscar Piñango chants in monotone as he mixes a
sahumerio
to smoke out the evil. Incense, storax, mastic, garlic skins, brown sugar, all scorched in a censer over the wood fire. The smell stings Reina's nostrils, makes her lungs ache. The smoke clings to her hair. She wonders if her skin will absorb this stink the way it did the burning at El Cobre, whether it will replace that old distracting stench.