The Aguero Sisters (26 page)

Isabel seems delighted with the gifts and gives her aunt a big hug. Constancia thinks the two of them look immense and flushed side by side, like hot giant rubies. She resists the urge to drag her sister from the room.

Constancia calls the factory from the hospital phone. For once, she's reassured. A cargo of head-to-toe products was successfully express-shipped to an American film star in Malibu.

Raku wakes up looking disoriented, as if everything had changed in his sleep. Isabel reaches for the baby and nestles him against her breast. “I can feel his little heart,” she says, her face softening.

The nurse sticks her head in, offering formula, and advises Isabel to get some rest. Reina dismisses the nurse with a wave of her hand.

“My mother nursed me until I was five,” she tells Isabel wistfully. “I wish she'd never stopped.”

“I'll take home some formula just in case Isabel changes her mind.” Constancia knows this sounds illogical and rivalrous but decides to hold her ground nonetheless.

“She won't change her mind,” Reina counters evenly.

That night
, Constancia stays with her daughter and grandson at the Good Samaritan Hospital. The maternity ward is only one floor down from the terminal cases, where Gonzalo continues to languish in festering splendor.

Constancia remembers her first days with her own son, the way his fists shook when he screamed, his pinched little mouth demanding milk. She didn't nurse him for long. She couldn't. Each time he suckled her breasts, Constancia felt a stirring between her legs. She tried to force her mind to neutral images, pigeons and peanut vendors, the calm of the ocean on a windless day, but it didn't help. The moment she felt the pleasure spread through her body, she pulled a startled Silvestre off her nipple and gave him cow's milk instead.

After her son moved out of the house, Constancia bumped into him all over New York: buying a pumpkin with a blind man on Columbus Avenue, roller-skating in the dead of winter with a thick-thighed
chinito
in Central Park. Silvestre seemed more annoyed than embarrassed on these occasions. When Constancia invited him and the Chinese man over for dinner, Silvestre gave her a look that said
Don't even bother
. In those days, he went by the name Jack. Jack Cross. Today Constancia left a message for him on his TTY
machine, announcing the birth of his nephew.
Isabel gave the baby your name, Raku Silvestre Cruz
.

It is long past midnight. Constancia kisses her sleeping daughter and grandson, then sneaks up the service stairwell to Gonzalo's room. He, too, is sleeping, his mouth lax and soundless, his chest quiet beneath the hospital sheet. Constancia approaches the bed. The fax machine on the night-stand begins grinding out a message that wakes him up.

“
Vente, mi vida
,” Gonzalo says in his dark river voice, reaching for Constancia's hips. He pulls her closer. His hands drift across her flesh like heat on snow.

“I'm a grandmother, Gonzalo,” Constancia whispers. For a moment, she is tempted to stand before him, part her legs slightly, welcome the moist fever of his tongue. Instead she twists away, worn out from resistance and erotic illusion. “
Soy una abuela
,” she repeats, her voice growing stronger.

Then she smooths her linen dress and coolly leaves the room.

Constancia returns
to the maternity ward and nestles into bed with Isabel and Raku. What is love if she can't feel it against her body? They lie together, mother and son and grandmother, as if tethered by invisible vines. Raku is asleep, wrapped in a flannel blanket so that his baby hands meet in prayer. A little Buddhist monk, waxy and lustrous as a sliver of moon.

If only Heberto were here, Constancia thinks, he wouldn't worry so much about another future. His vision would fill to the edges with their grandson's face.

After an hour of restlessness, Raku wakes up. His eyes dart back and forth in the unaccustomed light of darkness. Constancia sings to him softly and, in the singing, understands how completely the world is rigged with afflictions. On her grandson's heel is a red birthmark. It is the shape of
the gash on Isabel's left foot, where Constancia bit out an inch of flesh.

The axis suddenly shifts. Fierce and hissing, no longer buried, the knowledge comes to Constancia whole. She would kill to save him, kill to save them all.

THE ANDARAZ

B
lanca and I were married at City Hall the day after her graduation. It was only the two of us, the one-armed judge, and a listless witness from the state. Blanca wore a fitted carmine suit and a broad-brimmed hat with a spray of fresh violets. I found her ravishing
.

For our honeymoon, we traveled to the Isle of Pines, where I had seen the great leatherback so many years before. Blanca wanted to sit on the same beach and wait for the she-turtle, convinced that it would return. We lingered night after night under a waxing moon, but the leatherback never came
.

Those nights on the beach are still vivid to me, yet remote as a diorama. Our love was sheltered by the coconut palms, serenaded by the low whine of insects. How slight Blanca was, ribbed like an underfed cat, but soft too, in unexpected places. Her scent was sharp and green then, like budding leaves, inextricable from our passion. I would lie beside her and
whisper
: Estoy contento, querida.
And for a moment, time seemed to stop its audible march in our small paradise
.

The Isle of Pines is scrubby, about two thousand square miles in all, and has a single languid river, Las Casas, that cuts through the capital city of Nueva Gerona. During the day, Blanca loved to wade in the river and drink from it, of questionable purity even then. I sat under the shade trees on the river-bank and watched as the water echoed off her body, overcome by the wonder of my possession
.

One day, Blanca playfully coaxed me, fully dressed, into the river. When I was chest-high in the slow waters, she dove in beside me and tugged off my belt. Her boldness startled me, and I lost my footing. A force I could not fathom pulled me down and held me underwater. Just when I was certain I'd drown, I heard a child's voice imploring: Yield to the river! Yield to the river! Instead I broke free into the morning air
.

Blanca emerged from the water simultaneously, sleek as a river goddess. She kissed me with a hard ardor, continuing her caresses until I surrendered to a violent pleasure. I am the river, Blanca breathed in my ear. I am the river.… And around us, the waters murmured assent
.

That evening, Blanca showed me a wound on her left heel. She told me that something had bitten her while we were making love, a river rat or snake—she couldn't tell which from the size of the double puncture. Within hours, her foot swelled monstrously and the flesh around the wound turned yellow with suppurations. The doctor who came to examine her nervously advised an amputation
.

The swelling subsided by morning, but by then a fever had taken hold of her body. Blanca lapsed in and out of consciousness for nearly a week. I appealed for help from a medical colleague in Havana, Dr. Eduardo Iriarte, a specialist in tropical diseases, who took the ferry to Nueva Gerona to treat my wife. By the time he began his administrations—an arsenal of foul-smelling
medicines and saltwater baths—Blanca emerged from the worst of the crisis
.

We never learned what attacked Blanca in the river. The shape and depth of the wound were unlike anything I'd ever seen. I consulted countless reference books, queried experts on dangerous marine creatures. But nothing coincided with my wife's wound or subsequent symptoms
.

When we returned to Havana, Blanca and I moved into a furnished apartment I had rented from an astronomy professor who took off to fight in the Spanish Civil War. The place was filled with thick tomes about the origin of the universe and all manner of celestial phenomena. I remember reading one book on the asteroids that hover in space between Mars and Jupiter, another on the varied trajectories of comets. There were many history books too, including one recounting how the first crate of peaches arrived in Venice from the New World, electrifying the city's richest inhabitants
. Strip man of his curiosity,
Dr. Forrest used to say
, and you strip him of his appetite for life.

After our sojourn on the Isle of Pines, Blanca lost interest in carnal pleasures. She succumbed to my desire infrequently, and then only in fresh running water. This was a serious handicap in Havana, since its one river was terribly polluted and offered no privacy except in the wee hours of the morning. Perhaps I should have protested, stood firm against my wife's caprices, but at the time I would have indulged Blanca anything. It disturbs me now to think how passion ruled me like any ordinary man
.

Later that year, I received a research grant to do a comprehensive study of the
andaraz,
a large native rodent that inhabits the remotest forests of Oriente. Once abundant in Cuba, the creatures were becoming increasingly scarce. Moreover, they were difficult to find because they confined themselves to the tops of the highest and densest trees. An international commission
of wildlife conservation decided I should investigate its status
.

Blanca and I headed for the Sierra Maestra, to the town of Jiguaní, where we slept on vacant cots in the rural-guard barracks. My wife had not seen the rodent before, and so I brought along an illustration of it that I'd found in the
Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London.
The next morning, we set out on excellent horses furnished by the guard and rode far into the mountains to the village of Los Negros, which served as our base
.

Not surprisingly, it was Blanca who spotted the first
andaraz,
expertly bringing it down with a single shot from her custom-made rifle. Within a week, we'd collected enough of the creatures to make a series of skins, rough out several skeletons, and substantiate the precise point where its prehensile tail separates from its body
.

On the last evening of our expedition, resting in hammocks inside a coffee bean warehouse provided by our local host, Blanca complained of severe nausea. She rejected her early-morning steak and eggs, and said that the sight of her daily mango made her ill. The obvious did not occur to us. Not until we returned to Havana and consulted Dr. Iriarte again did we learn that she was pregnant
.

The day we returned from her medical examination, Blanca insisted that I pay her a salary. I had stopped remunerating her since our marriage because, frankly, I no longer saw the need. I admit I am not what one might call an emancipated man. Although it is true that my parents raised me with progressive ideas and Mamá taught music all her life, I had certain expectations for my wife. Not only did I refuse to pay Blanca; I prohibited her from seeking other employment
.

Blanca disregarded my edict outright. In spite of her pregnancy, or perhaps because of it, she applied to various scientific institutes in Havana under the name B. Mestre Sejourné. I was
prepared to disrupt her quest, but I found it unnecessary. No one would hire Blanca, even with her stellar qualifications. Each time she appeared for an interview, her stomach tightly bound to conceal her condition, the story was the same: If only you were a man
 … 
Our wives would not stand for it … Cuba, my dear, is not America
.

When I finally relented and agreed to resume her modest stipend, Blanca accused me of insincere motives. How could I deny it? Our research was receiving international attention, and I did not wish to impede the momentum of our efforts
.

Blanca began to speak of leaving for the United States, where professional women were treated marginally better than in Cuba. She developed a sudden interest in desert herpetology, wanted to visit the American Southwest, northern Mexico, the driest parts of Africa. Cuba, of course, has its savannas and plains but not the extreme dry conditions that warrant equally extreme modifications by desert fauna. I remember Blanca rhapsodizing about a certain horned lizard of Texas she'd read about, a prehistoric-looking creature that squirted blood from the corners of its eyes when alarmed
.

Despite these distractions, Blanca and I intensified our fieldwork in Cuba. Her condition hardly slowed her progress as she led the way across rugged terrain, on horseback and on foot, climbed mountains, waded hip-deep in streams, and ventured into underground caves thick with the stink of bat guano. As her pregnancy progressed, Blanca took more aggressive risks, as if she were denying the baby's increasingly evident existence. She seemed happy only on the road, sleeping under the stars, with the soothing obstinacy of a stream nearby
.

At our new apartment in Vedado, Blanca grew restless and cross, distressingly erratic. She slept fitfully, twisting the sheets around her swelling, disobedient body. She would wake up in the middle of the night, shivering with imagined fevers, and I would give her sponge baths to settle her nerves
.