The Aguero Sisters (31 page)

On May 10, 1942, in the midst of a terrible thunderstorm, Blanca returned to our apartment in Vedado, nearly eight months pregnant (just as the santera had prophesied). One eye was bruised shut, and her clothes were torn and dirty, missing buttons. She wore a single high-heeled shoe and a strand of onyx beads that fell past her massive stomach
.

I carried Blanquita, sneezing and shivering and soaked
to the bone, into the bathroom. Carefully, I washed her in a tub of warm water, perfumed every lovely swell of her body, the puzzling scar on her heel from our honeymoon. I slipped one of my dressing gowns over her head, then put her to bed in my room
.

Blanca stayed there for the next month, eating red grapes and cashews and knitting a blanket with a pattern of mallards. In June, she gave birth to another man's baby, twelve pounds strong, nutmeg brown, with huge hands, and eyes that devoured the world
.

Although Blanca's black spells ceased, she never again became my wife. This was difficult for me, because everything about Blanca continued to mesmerize me: The disturbing slide of her bare legs. The wealth of her loose black hair. The way her skin hoarded the morning light. And her voice. Blanca's voice left me hungry for more than I could articulate
.

It is my conviction that to our dying breath we have a will, diminished though our range of possibilities may be. Even a man condemned to death can shout one last obscenity. This is our grandeur, what separates us from the lesser creatures of the planet. What, then, could be more wretched than its voluntary surrender?

I admit there were many forsaken nights when I wondered why I'd spent my heart on Blanca, why I'd let her pillage it like a common corsair. Then I simply stopped questioning. Even now, two years after her death, I love Blanca. A rich, blind, orphaned love
.

After the baby was born, Blanca installed herself in the guest room again and redecorated it to suit her taste. She had the walls painted a thick flaxen yellow and draped a changing array of textured fabrics over her nineteen mongrel chairs. Then she set up a parrot named Pío on a trestle and ordered Constancia and her nanny from the house
.

Beatriz Ureña left the next day, but I insisted that Constancia remain. Blanca was not pleased. She barely acknowledged our daughter, refused to address her directly. Constancia threw tantrums, tore the fabric on her mother's chairs, called her names she'd learned from the departed nanny. One day, Blanca found Constancia trying to force-feed the baby mud from a tin cup. She'd dropped spiders in the crib too, venomous ones that stung Reinita's face
.

The following Saturday, my daughter and I boarded a train for Camagüey. I tried to console Constancia about spending the summer at her grandfather's ranch, but she did not care to listen. She said nothing during the trip, and in the rhythm of her silence I understood the harm I was inflicting on her
.

Constancia kept to herself on the ranch, hiding in the tangled bushes to look at the storybooks I gave her. That first summer stretched into fall, then to winter and to the spring after that. I argued frequently with Blanca, but she refused to accept our daughter back. I asked Dámaso, my wife's favorite brother, to look after Constancia. And I believe, over the years, they grew close. When I visited her (always unbeknownst to Blanca), Constancia begged me to take her home. She promised to behave herself, to not hurt Reinita anymore. Soon, I would tell her. Soon. But soon did not come
.

As she grew older, I began enlisting Constancia on my field trips. She proved to be an exceptional companion, watchful and adept, as her mother used to be, at catching anything with her hands
.

In Havana, Blanca devoted herself to Reina's care, nursing the girl until she was ready for school. I heard the neighbors' whispering, noticed their eyes on her nutmeg skin. Reina used to climb the tulip tree in our backyard to escape their surveillance
,
happy amidst the shimmer of leaves and the boisterous songbirds. I cared for the girl in my way, but I never considered her mine
.

One summer, when Blanca was vacationing with her daughter at a rented beach house in Guanabo, a giant mulatto, tall as a lamppost and with incalculable heft, loitered at the end of our street. He had a broad, smooth face and eyes that suggested a touch of Oriental blood. He was impeccably dressed, every inch tailored, and he wore a Panama hat with a broad red band. His resemblance to Reina was unmistakable
.

Day after day the goliath waited, unhurried, as if time held no consequence for him. It was a blistering day in August when I finally approached him. The street wavered in the heat. I offered him an envelope stuffed with the last of my savings, nearly eight hundred dollars. He reached for the money, carefully counted it, handed it back tome. It was then I noticed the beaded bracelet on his wrist, the unmistakable red-and-white pattern
. Por favor, no vuelvas más,
I beseeched him. Don't ever come back. I desperately wanted to believe that he would heed my request
.

Somehow I managed to work productively during those lonely, straitened years. I published numerous books. One, on the mating habits of tropical bats, is considered the definitive study on these most maligned of beasts. Another, entitled
Owls of Oriente,
analyzes the diminishing habitats of native owls in our easternmost province. To my surprise, the latter became something of an academic best-seller. It was translated into English, German, and French, and acclaimed by prominent ornithologists in Cuba and overseas
.

Despite the Second World War and the privations, both material and moral, it imposed on our island, I received a great number of visitors in Havana, naturalists from Europe and
the United States who came to investigate Cuba's unique zoogeography. Several herpetologists claimed that their research had been influenced by the seminal studies Blanca and I had done on our island's rare lizards and snakes. But my wife dismissed her earlier work as if it had been no more than the silly enthusiasms of an adolescent girl
.

By then, Blanca exhibited only a vestigial interest in the natural world. At dusk, she and Reina might climb a nearby belfry to watch the city's bats take flight, or stroll along the river to count centipedes. I encouraged my wife to join me on my collecting trips, but she always demurred. How I longed to offer myself to her: Take my brain, my steady hands. See with my eyes the pattern of your life. But I knew I was only being presumptuous, a self-righteous man who'd done nothing but fuss with the captivating insentience of nature when, near me, Blanquita was dying like the rarest of birds
.

Occasionally, my wife consented to an excursion in our 1934 Packard, an automobile so temperamental that I decided, eventually, to trade it in for a pair of reliable horses. One Sunday, we visited the sponge markets of Batabanó, where long ago I'd taken the steamer to the Isle of Pines and where, years later, Blanquita and I had set sail for our ill-fated honeymoon. My wife bought armloads of sponges on the wharf, then suspended them with wire (“sponge clouds,” she called them) from the ceiling of our living room, adding to the incomprehensible decor of our home
.

Often, I drove to Pinar del Río alone. The landscape of my childhood never failed to move me: The blue rock mountains clinging with mist. The fertile earth dark with vegetation. The cheesecloth tents sheltering my father's beloved tobacco. I toured Papá's old cigar factory, but the place had lost its luster. The deafening blare of the radio and the clamorous cigar machines had replaced the rapt, papery hush of a hundred cigar rollers listening to my father as he read them a poem
.

• • •

In 1948, Blanca decided unexpectedly to throw a carnival party. She invited our neighbors for blocks around. My wife, who rarely cooked, made enough
arroz con mariscos
to regale a hundred guests. She decorated our apartment in festive anarchy: with jasmine garlands, Japanese cranes, and intricate ornaments she fashioned herself from colored paper and foil
.

On the night of the party, Blanca transformed herself into a dazzling bird. She wore a filmy pink bodice, a long swirling skirt, and a diadem of artificial jewels. Reinita was outfitted in a dragonfly costume that Blanca had sewn together from crepe de chine scarves. And I, rather too sensibly, dressed up as if for one of my cave expeditions, complete with rubber boots, a flashlight, and my fine-mesh net
.

The evening got off to a riotous start as the bartender, whom Blanca hired from an establishment called Happy Pete's, served his drinks—presidentes, daiquiris, Cuba libres, and the deadly Sazarac cocktails—at thrice their usual strength. I dusted off our prehistoric turntable and played my modest collection of big-band music and Cuban dance songs from an earlier era. But the potent libations scrambled everyone's rhythms. Rumbas and
guarachas
were danced to Tommy Dorsey's “Boogie-Woogie,” improbable jitterbugs to the most romantic
danzón.

Blanca disappeared from our apartment about eleven o'clock, but returned at midnight with a crowd of gaudy revelers from the street. The party stopped, and the newcomers were assessed with suspicion. They were from Regla, perhaps, judging by the darkness of their skin
.

Blanca coaxed a huge, near-naked man onto the dance floor. He was dressed in a sequined loincloth, a red velvet cape, and a towering headdress with a red stone fastened to the crown. He and Blanquita danced close, not an inch of space
between them, so close they seemed an erosion, and before the song ended he pulled Blanca down the hallway without a word
.

Later that night, after the last guests had trickled away, I forced open Blanca
's
bedroom door. The shutters in her room were flung open. Her parrot was gone from its perch. Blanca sat alone on the window ledge, as if in private discourse with the moon. She was wrapped in nothing but an unraveling mantilla
.

I closed the door behind me, disentangled myself from my clothes. Then I led her to the bed. Blanca did not resist. I felt my desire striking like a slowly tolling bell
. “Au pays des aveugles, les borgnes sont rois,”
Blanca whispered. Then she merely received me, forlorn in her dimming flesh, concealed by a thousand invisible veils
.

Our last months together were relatively peaceful. It was as if my dreadful assertion the night of the masquerade ball had altered Blanca's view of me. My wife addressed me kindly again, questioned me about my work, reassessed me, it seemed, with her stark green eyes. We spoke of touring America's deserts, of searching for the blood-spurting toad. We went so far as to obtain passports, secured our visas for the United States
.

Late that summer, when I told Blanca about my commission to hunt ruddy ducks for the natural history museum in Boston, she surprised me by wanting to come along
.

FLOWERS OF EXILE
MIAMI
SEPTEMBER
1991

T
he river is hardly
a river at all, so still and black, its banks mostly concrete. But there's a sacred spot in its southernmost bend, a conjunction of trees, one ceiba and one palm, whose leaves and roots and surrounding ground are replete with prophecies. Reina follows Constancia, walking along the river. They're both dressed in white to deflect interferences. Reina is carrying a wooden bucket for her sister, who is balancing a platter of broken coconut on her arm. A white paste, stiff and vaguely sweet, coats Constancia's hair. She wears a knotted cloth over it for extra protection.

There are weeds in their path and half-starved bushes, foul with absorptions. Factories grind the night downriver, marking time. The air around them is slow and solid, thickening all motion. Insects Reina cannot identify hover near her face, colossal with blood. The river itself has no margins or tides, no submarine life. All fishermen extinct.

The sisters stop before the sacred zone of trees. Constancia kneels on the ground next to Reina, strokes the fallen fronds and the five-pointed leaves. There are warm spots and cold, others too hot to touch, unnecessary blanched stones. Maybe the ground is the true river, Constancia thinks, alive, pulsing with currents and destinations. She longs to scratch the dirt with her fingertips, harvest one distinct thing.

“Let's go by the river, Reina.” Constancia appears taller under the moon, an elongated priestess. Her face, her mother's face, is a balcony flooded with light. Constancia begins reciting the prayers she learned at their boarding school, recites every set note of their intonations until she is crowded with grief.

Reina hated those prayers, the canticles they were forced to sing at Sunday mass. She senses an electricity swilling within her, giving off random sparks. A stench like something freshly singed emanates from her skin. Reina wonders why she agreed to help Constancia, why she isn't at home with her boyfriend instead. She's grown accustomed to Russ's hands, to the steaks he barbecues for her, bleeding rare. Better yet, she should be with her niece and great-nephew, skimming the bay in Heberto's motorboat.