The Aguero Sisters (29 page)

His mother told Silvestre that La Virgen was his patron saint because his birthday coincides with her feast day. One year, she took him to the evening mass at Saint Patrick's Cathedral on September 8. Hundreds of people crowded the pews, mostly Cuban and Puerto Rican blacks and mulattos, wearing amber beads and waving yellow handkerchiefs and flags. The altars were laden with oranges and honey and elaborate fans.

Silvestre turns the car around on a side street, grazing a tin mailbox with his sideview mirror. Then he drives south, past acres of flatness and whitewashed filth, past sporadic solitary palms and the layered promises of Mediterranean roofs. The bay quivers in the distance, a soft blue-gray. A few drops of rain fall on the windshield, and Silvestre over-compensates with hazard lights and wipers on the fastest
possible setting. He fears the rain might distort some essential clue.

The hospital is a monstrosity, a nightmare of angles and haphazard wings. Silvestre abhors this proximity to death. In New York, it's become all too common, almost casual, a forced acquaintance. He's been celibate since the Christmas before last. It's much easier than living with the certainty of doom.

Gonzalo Cruz is on the eleventh floor, in the ward for the terminally ill. Silvestre's mother wrote that Gonzalo has occupied this bed longer than anyone in the hospital.
Your father is a river that refuses to dry
. Out of nowhere, a fat pigeon soars down the hallway, brushing Silvestre's cheek with a shiver of feathers. Two women give chase, but the bird disappears down a dumbwaiter chute. Silvestre is startled. He wonders whether the omen is good or bad. Neutrality, he can't afford.

His father is asleep, breathing hoarsely, his face cankered and closed. He looks deserted, a dusty, uninhabited town. There are machines in his room, multicolored wires, bottles with fluids suspended from circular racks. A fax machine whirs on the nightstand next to a stack of newspapers quietly fluttering disclosures.

Silvestre closes the door. He pulls down the sheet tucked under Gonzalo's armpits and stares at the bone heap of his father's body. The belly is hard and grotesquely swollen, the legs withered and rivered with veins. One leg is noticeably shorter than the other, the knee a welter of scars.

The hospital gown skims Gonzalo's spindly thighs. Silvestre raises the hem of his father's gown until everything is visible. So this is his origin, his inheritance. His first resurrection. These hairy orbs, so huge and sagging. This limp little snout, still pink as a boy's. So this, too, is his future.

Silvestre moves closer. His breath stirs the damp triangle of gray, bewildered hair. Gonzalo shifts in his sleep, releasing decay from every crevice. His hands move as if to protect his groin, but instead he absently strokes himself with stiff, intimate fingers.

A moment later, Gonzalo awakens. He looks up and stares straight into the face of his younger self, heedless and precipitate, looks up and stares straight into the face of his only son.

C
onstancia sits
in the waxy air of the church. The clicking of smoking, hand-swung censers quietly meters her grief. Men in berets and guerrilla attire line the pews, cellular phones hooked to their belts. Evidence of Gonzalo Cruz's excessive life is everywhere. Women of all sizes and shades, mostly his old lovers and previous wives, cry behind their veils of mourning black. Constancia scrutinizes his teary-eyed conquests, dozens of them, in various stages of disconsolation. One woman, a gruff, bottom-heavy redhead from the Florida Panhandle, wails hardest of all.

It is the ninth eulogy of Gonzalo's funeral mass. The speaker is a self-avowed man of action—an anti-Communist freedom fighter—a frail-looking
viejito
with disordered bones. As he tenderly remembers Gonzalo “El Gallo” Cruz (
He feared nothing … He made the best roast pork sandwiches at the
training camp
…), his sorrow rises above the assemblage, orbits and burns like an inconsolable planet.

Constancia is seated in a pew next to Gonzalo's second wife, Nena Prendes, an abdominous
dominicana
with a floor-length cloak of glossy crow feathers. Gonzalo's fourth wife, an exotic dancer from Venezuela named Vilma Alabarán, slips Constancia a business card advertising her new fortune-telling kiosk. Chachi Osorio, the teenager from El Salvador whom Gonzalo married last year, kneels in a back pew, wiping her eyes with paper napkins from the fast-food chicken place where she still works.

None of these women ever bore Gonzalo a child. Over the years, Constancia had heard the rumors. That his seed had turned acidic. That he burned his lovers' wombs, rendering them sterile. That after him, no woman could ever feel pleasure again. Somehow despite his reputation, women still flocked to Gonzalo, glorying in the lavishness of his transient attentions.

When Constancia heard that Gonzalo had died, she sent Silvestre a telegram:
Your father is dead. Come to Miami at once. It's finally safe to see him
. As usual, her son did not respond.

Constancia considers whether the reports about Gonzalo's demise might be true. The exile radio stations are broadcasting her ex-husband's death as the work of El Comandante's secret agents. It was no coincidence, Radio Así announced, that Gonzalo died the day after his long-planned invasion of Cuba was launched. It was sabotage, Radio Pa'llá concluded, an attempt to cut off the head of the hawk in flight. Just as in the Bay of Pigs, Gonzalo's soldiers were left orphans in the midst of attack.

The reports are conflicting, but this much Constancia knows to be true: that at Varadero Beach, forty-four men in guerrilla fatigues died storming the Hotel Bellamar. That two French-Canadian tourists and an Italian pop star who were trysting together in a cabana also got caught in the cross fire and killed. That seventeen other freedom fighters were captured by the Cuban militia with the help of the bartender—a former middleweight boxing champion named Enrique Capote—at the Siboney Lounge. That Heberto is among the twenty-nine missing, presumably hiding or dead.

Reina told Constancia that she was familiar with that stretch of Varadero Beach, that she'd threaded electricity there in the early years of the revolution, brought light to the new tourist hotels. The beaches were strewn with Russians then, she added, beefy sunburnt men with no aptitude for love.

Constancia had asked Reina to accompany her to Gonzalo's funeral, but her sister refused. She said she was restoring a '57 Bel Air convertible that she had to finish that day. “
Mira
, Constancia, if I had to stop and attend the funeral of every man I ever slept with, I'd never get anything done.” Constancia dropped her sister off at the restoration
garage where she works. Reina was wearing her uniform: a loose orange jumpsuit with a Model T embroidered on the back. Her hands, as always these days, were blackened with grease.

Constancia wants to shatter Reina's confidence, to tell her how their mother returned to Havana eight months pregnant, big with another man's child. How the apartment in Vedado became restless then, as if the world were licked senseless by a great wicked cow. Constancia wants to tell Reina that
she
was that unborn baby, that her surname should be not Agüero but God only knows what.

A fan of light
refracts through the stained-glass windows of the church, disrupting the settled shadows. How easy it is to forget the sun in here, to forget that the world isn't all refuge and trembling flame. How easily the body grows accustomed to darkness, how smoothly it ultimately adjusts. Constancia wonders whether Heberto might still be alive. If he were dead, wouldn't he have given her a sign? She finds it hard to believe that her husband would Simply go off and die.

If only Heberto could see their grandson, his small, perfect glory. If only he could watch the pink ferocity of Raku's mouth. If only Heberto could hold him, Constancia thinks, he'd know his immortality was intact.

Constancia worries about Isabel too. Her daughter is adrift in a dusk of days, worn out from the rapture of loss. Isabel smells damp and cloyingly sweet, like an armful of crumpled flowers, like Reina's fading roses. To keep up her milk supply, Isabel consumes gallons of pineapple juice every day. Constancia remembers how her own breasts went dry from the fright of crossing the Straits of Florida, how nothing eased her daughter's crying except sucking on grapefruit rinds.

Yesterday two letters arrived for Isabel. One was from Austin, postmarked Honolulu but with no return address. Inside was a money order for two hundred dollars and a request for a photograph of their son. Isabel tore up the check without a word. Her daughter's resoluteness frightens Constancia, reminds her of her own impractical stubbornness.
Por Dios
, what good has it done her all these years?

The other letter, postmarked Oaxaca and trimmed with colorful stamps, was from Silvestre. Constancia had been tempted to steam open the letter, but she decided, uncharacteristically, to refrain. What was her son doing in Mexico anyway? Why hadn't he even bothered to send her a postcard? Constancia suspected that another man was involved, some terrible ignominy of the flesh.

Constancia watched as Isabel read the letter, four onionskin pages scribbled with her half-brother's childish script. She asked Constancia for an ashtray and matches, brought the flame to a corner of the sheets, and stared at the extinguishing fringe. Then she settled down on the balcony to nurse Raku, to behold another ordinary day glide by.

The murmuring
in the church grows louder as the mourners at Gonzalo's funeral recite the Lord's Prayer. It is a steady, choral dissonance. Tío Dámaso used to tell Constancia that prayer is nothing more than another form of lust, a rumor in the flesh impossible to quench. She remembers a story he told her once, about how Pope Urban VIII ordered all the songbirds in the Vatican garden killed because they disturbed his concentration.

Constancia picks up a beat-up Bible from its rack on the back of a pew. Its marker ribbons are badly frayed, the corners worn aslant. She opens the book randomly for a message meant for her.

The procession past Gonzalo's corpse is slow and staggered with anguish. A squadron of furtive saints crowds the altarpiece. The organ music is more of a military march than a funereal hymn, but no one seems to notice. A rumbling begins near the front of the line, and Constancia soon observes why. It is starkly apparent that at the moment of his death, Gonzalo Cruz, out of great dread or desire—she supposes no one will ever know which—was fully roused for love.

Constancia stands for a moment before the body of her ex-husband. His cheeks are rouged to a false robustness. A stubble of gray hair covers his skull. Gonzalo gives off a diseased, alkaline scent, as if he'd been rescued from many leagues under the sea. In the crook of his arm is the hospital pillow the nurses found smashed against his face. Constancia considers this a macabre touch, but Gonzalo's compatriots insisted that the murder weapon be on display.

Constancia steadies herself against the coffin, leans over to better examine Gonzalo, when the world begins splintering, whirling out of place. She sags to the floor. Gonzalo's
ex-wives surround her, support her by the waist. They carry her outside in a cloud of competing perfumes to the tidal heat of the church's courtyard. One by one, they splash her with holy water they bring from the baptismal font.

“So you were his first,” Nena Prendes mumbles tenderly to Constancia amidst a fuss of crow feathers. “He told me he never forgot you.”

It is one-thirty in the afternoon. Constancia listens as the bell in the church tower inexplicably rings nine times, listens as it echoes incessantly against the leaden sky.

Several days later
, a stooped
guajiro
with a thick Camagüey accent appears at Constancia's door. His name is Evaristo Leal, and he claims to have worked on the Mestres' pig ranch before the revolution of 1933. Humbly formal, he presents Constancia with an envelope smudged with black ink. Inside is a letter from Tío Dámaso, written in 1984.

“On the day he died, your uncle sat up in bed and demanded something sweet to eat,” recounts Evaristo Leal, who'd spent four years caring for Dámaso. “I brought him my month's ration of sugar and watched him eat sixty-two
cucharadas'
worth. Then he gave me this letter to deliver to you personally. He told me he didn't trust anyone else.”

Evaristo Leal explained that he'd been planning to leave the country that same winter, but his departure papers were inexplicably delayed for six years.

Constancia wants to read her uncle's letter immediately, but too many images assault her at once: Tío Dámaso at the stove, stirring his plantain soup; galloping with her across fields of radiant grass; devouring guayaba paste beneath a ceiba tree (her diabetic uncle insisting all the while that his blood was safe under the sacred leaves); accompanying Constancia to her mother's funeral in 1948. Tío Dámaso lingered for hours after the ceremony, waiting for the evening
star. When it appeared, a violet circle amidst the darkening blue, he pointed it out to Constancia and told her,
Don't worry, lindita, I will always watch over you
.