The Aguero Sisters (30 page)

For the next two years, Tío Dámaso wrote to Constancia every week at her boarding school. He sent her wild-flowers to press into collections and bags of freshly baked meringues. Constancia enjoyed receiving his packages, the solace of his stale scent imprinted on all his gifts. But after her father shot himself, her uncle's letters abruptly stopped. She wrote to him another year more, then concluded bleakly that he, too, must be dead.

Constancia invites Evaristo Leal in for a
cafesito
, but he declines, bowing more deeply than necessary. It is nearly ten o'clock. His daughter is waiting for him in a car down the street.

“Did you know my grandmother?” Constancia asks hurriedly.

“Doña Eugenia was a fine woman.”

“Is it true how they say she died?”

“I was only a boy then.” Evaristo Leal looks up at the ceiling, as if in celestial consultation. Then he tilts his head methodically from side to side. “Forgive me, señora, but my father liked to say that the Jews were right about one thing. Pigs bring bad luck.”

Then he bows again and bids Constancia a good night.

Constancia carries
her uncle's letter to the guest room and sits opposite the photograph of her mother. Tío Dámaso used to tell Constancia that she reminded him of his sister, Blanca. Constancia didn't want to hurt Tío Dámaso's feelings, and so she never told him how much she hated Mamá.

Her uncle wrote that he continued to live on the ranch after 1950, when his normally docile horse threw him against a baobab tree and left him paralyzed below the waist. After his father and brothers died, he donated the family property to the revolution, with the agreement that he'd always have a place to stay.

Tío Dámaso buried Papi's last papers there, near the site of the sarcophagus where Eugenia Mestre's remains were laid to rest. “
I could not trust myself to stay silent, as your father asked, and so I no longer wrote to you … Perdóname, Constancita
 …” Her uncle spent his remaining years at the decaying ranch house, studying Latin until he could puzzle out Pliny's
Historia Naturalis
, which Ignacio Agüero had bequeathed to him with his penultimate missive.

Her father, Constancia remembers, used to expound on the incredible feats of memory Pliny recorded. How Cyrus, king of the Persians, knew the name of every one of his thousands of soldiers. Or how Mithridates Eupator ruled his kingdom in the twenty-two languages of his subjects.
Ut nihil non lisdem verbis redderetur auditum
.

Constancia turns on every light in her apartment and waits for her sister to return home. The floor lamps in the living room make huge shadow crosses on the walls. Constancia senses something arching inside her, like the time she was pregnant with Silvestre. But she took four-hour naps then, slept through the night, a baby herself. Now Constancia isn't tired in the least.

At precisely 4:22 a.m., the lights flare brightly, before blinking off. The refrigerator moans from the kitchen, starts another round of coughing. The front locks tick with keys. Reina is finally home.

“What are you doing here, sitting in the dark?” Reina sets her toolbox down in the foyer.

“I was waiting to tell you something.” Constancia
studies her sister, the triangular flush of red skin strangely glowing at her throat.

“What's up?” Reina comes closer, curious.

“He wasn't your father.”

“Who?”

“Papi. Papi wasn't.” Constancia moves her gaze up from Reina's throat. Her sister's eyes are gentle and sad. It is not what she expected.

“You didn't think I knew?” Reina looks at Constancia a long time. Then she shakes her head and slowly walks off to bed.

The next day
, Constancia, dressed in a brocaded yellow suit, meets Oscar Piñango for lunch in South Beach. He's been wanting to try out the food at La Conga's, a trendy restaurant bankrolled by a Cuban pop singer.

“The beans are too watery,” he pronounces as he spoons them over his rice. “And the portions are small, ridiculous. American portions!”

Constancia orders the vegetarian plate:
yuca
in garlic sauce, sweet plantains, and the requisite black beans and rice. Everything is lukewarm, as if the management didn't want to delay table turnover by serving the food steaming hot.

“I feel envy ruling here,” Oscar Piñango continues, between mouthfuls of fried pork. “Envy and greed.” He lowers his sunglasses as a bevy of high school girls in neon miniskirts saunters by.

Constancia stares past the parade of tourists and cruising convertibles to the glinting expanse of sand. A brisk wind rattles the fronds of the palm trees, lifts modest curls of waves. Constancia pulls her uncle's letter from her purse and slides it across the glass tabletop.

The santero exchanges his sunglasses for a pair of bifocals
he extracts from a fold of his guayabera. He reads the letter straight through, twice.

“How much time do you have?”

“Not much,” Constancia says. “I'm launching Caderas de Cuba tomorrow at the Coconut Promenade. I've got two thousand bottles, but I don't think it'll be nearly enough. You know how much women hate their hips.”

“Give me an hour,” Oscar Piñango insists. “Follow me home. Do you think we can get a rice pudding to go?”

Constancia trails
the santero's yellow Buick across the MacArthur Causeway, past the port of Miami, and onto the highway toward Hialeah. She calls the factory from her new cellular phone, checks in with her manager, Félix Borrega, on the day's progress of Caderas. “Double the output!” she shouts over the roar of traffic. “Pay overtime if you have to! I have a good feeling about this one!”

It's the last day of August, a week before the Catholic feast day of La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, twelve days before Oshún's Yoruban celebration. Already, Oscar Piñango has collected hundreds of pumpkins, sweet-scented candles, and a vat of orange blossom honey for his beloved saint. In a few days, his godchildren will bring him so many gifts that the room will be every inch a shrine for Oshún.

“I think I ate too fast,” the santero says, after a series of resonant belches.

He accepts Constancia's impromptu offerings—her braided gold bracelet and a sampling of Cuerpo de Cuba creams she happened to have in her trunk. He smears a bit of honey on Constancia's lips and ears, on her nostrils and eyelids, the better to receive the
orisha's
intentions.

“Time to get serious now,” Oscar Piñango says as he disappears into another room. He returns with a pitcher of fresh water and a plump guinea hen. He rinses its beak and
feet, then passes the bird over Constancia as she slowly turns in place.

“
Ñaquiña, ñaquiña loro
,” he chants, plucking the guinea hen's feathers. He instructs Constancia to tug the bird's throat in respect for its life sacrifice.

Constancia feels the hen's pulse against her thumb, its last quivering violence before Oscar Piñango tears off its head. He directs the blood in widening circles over the
orisha
's sacred stones. Then he traces the pattern of blood with a thin stream of honey and sprays it all with a mouthful of rum. After the final candles are lit, he stuffs the guinea hen's carcass to bulging with candies, coconut, and toasted corn, fashioning a small nest of death.

“You will return home, disguised as night.” Oscar Piñango wraps the dead hen in brown paper and lays it at Constancia's feet. “As the river flows to the sea, so does Oshún flow to her sister, Yemayá.”

Then he rubs Constancia's temples with river fern and whispers a story of the gods:

Oscar Piñango gathers his cowrie shells for the final part of the ritual. Constancia notices how the veins in his forefingers are straight and slightly raised, like perfectly sewn seams. Her father's fingers had been like that. Why hadn't she realized this before?

“How strong are the dead?” Constancia is appalled by the tenacity the deceased have for the living, by their ferocious tribal need for reunions.

“Dead is not death. It's merely a transition. Nobody is ever truly dead.”

Oscar Piñango blesses the sixteen cowries, then shakes them in his cupped hands before throwing them on the mat. The shells seem to stop in midair before falling facedown. “
Se me fué el caracol de la mano
.” A bad omen.

Constancia is uneasy with the implications. Oscar Piñango brings his hands together, doubles over to pray. Constancia tries to breathe with him, to find comfort in the forced rhythm of his back. She touches Tío Dámaso's letter in her jacket pocket, stares at the top of the santero's starched cap. Its whiteness seems to leak into the air like a poison.

A breeze flutters through the low-ceilinged room. The forest of candle flames stutters. Constancia stands up and begins circling in place. The breeze turns to a strong wind, dry and funneling and scented with death. It thrusts open Constancia's mouth, scorches every passageway, blasts her dry lungs hot. Her tongue shrivels in place, unhooks from her life like a dead desert lizard. Her ears roar with a harsh internal storm.

Constancia falls to the floor and grabs a nearby pumpkin, smashes it at the santero's feet. Then she aims another at the ill-omened shells, yet another at the fetish of dead guinea hen. Pulp and seeds splatter across the room, stain the hem of Oshún's gold lamé gown. Oscar Piñango is motionless. He watches as Constancia lifts a hunk of pumpkin and smears it against her face. When she tries to do the unthinkable—eat a piece of Oshún's sacred gourd—he wrestles her to the ground and ties her up with a length of electrical cord.

Quickly, he throws the cowries again to determine what to do. The pattern falls in
ofún
, where the curse was first born. He throws the shells twice more to refine the message. It doesn't waver:
oddi
, where the grave was first dug, where the grave was first dug.

The santero tells Constancia that she must go with her sister to the sacred trees by the river before returning to Cuba. That in Cuba, the secrets will lie buried in their original grave. That long ago, a streak of fire, supple as evil, had altered their lives. Then he gives her precise instructions that she must not change. “We die many times,” he reminds her, “but never forever.”

And when he is satisfied that Constancia is listening and adequately subdued, Oscar Piñango finally unties her and orders her from the room.

OWLS OF ORIENTE

D
uring the two and a half years that Blanca disappeared, I tried everything possible to find her. I pasted her picture in town squares, enlisted the help of the rural police, persuaded every newspaper from Havana to Guantánamo to run her photograph. In my grief, I also hired an American detective, a Mr. Frederick Noose from Tallahassee, Florida, who specialized in retrieving fugitive spouses
.

After all my efforts failed, I consulted a famous santera in East Havana, a thin, mulish woman with a mild case of scrofula. Her name was Estér Salvet Llagunto, and her blue-black skin hung in folds from her skeletal frame. The santera told me that there was nothing I could do to bring my wife back, that Blanca would ultimately return of her own accord, bearing a child for the god Changó
.

For a man of science, I became shamelessly superstitious. I lit candles according to Estér's instructions, brought her young
hens and a gelded goat to behead. Estér gave me a beaded necklace to wear surreptitiously beneath my starched shirts. How can I explain my weakness? When logic fails, when reason betrays, there is only the tenuous solace of magic, of ritual and lamentation
.

I taught my university classes as usual, frequented the requisite departmental meetings, gave lectures at conferences that were well attended largely on account of my presence. But I was not myself. Blanca continued to live inside me like a restless river. I would have gladly chosen blindness over this sorrow
.

After Blanca left, I doted on our baby, spent hours gazing at her as she slept. I hired a nanny, Beatriz Ureña, a cousin of Estér's, to take charge of my daughter's daily needs. Over time, it seemed to me that Constancia grew healthy and reasonably happy, although she was somewhat slow to speak. My daughter was skinny, with abundant black hair like her mother's. Her voice had a tinge of wistfulness to it, as if she were always wanting something
.

In the second year of Blanca
's
absence, a marine biologist from California came to teach in our department. Her name was Leticia Greene, and she spoke Spanish with a Mexican inflection. I yielded to this
gringa
with the short, flaming hair. Guiltily. Insatiably. With an acute sense of treason. I cannot say I loved Leticia, but I am grateful to her. I believe she saved my life, saved it longer, perhaps, than was necessary
.