The Aguero Sisters (33 page)

The boat is aimed at Varadero Beach. Constancia is convinced, and the captain agrees, that the Cuban militia won't expect invaders twice in the same place. Yet another one of Reina's lovers, a politically savvy buildings inspector named Calixto Peón, has agreed to be Constancia's guide in Cuba for a day or two. She wants to claim Heberto's body first, have his bones burnt to a portable ash. How can anyone refuse her that?

Constancia considers what rites she needs to perform with her husband's remains, what prayers to offer to Oshún. But no ordinary dispersal seems right. Perhaps she'll simply carry Heberto from town to town until she reaches Camagüey.

Papi's papers are buried there, under the Mestre farmhouse. The house in which her mother was born, the house
of the grandmother who'd been pig-trampled to death. Tío Dámaso wrote that he'd concealed Papi's memoirs in a copper chest lined with yellow felt. Every few years, he would dig up the chest and read them again. Her uncle claimed he didn't know why Constancia's father had sent him this last testament.

Constancia balances on the deck of the rolling boat. She tries to stand without support, but she's thrown face forward when a wave slams aft. It would be so easy to offer herself to this wind, to become one with the ocean, surrender herself to each harsh element. No mission but existence and cycle. Laws greater than any one sad thing.

Constancia checks the boat's location on the captain's nautical map. They could veer sharply left and miss Cuba altogether. Past the Santaren Channel and the Great Bahama Bank, through the Mayaguana Passage to the wide open ocean. But the earth, she thinks, is too small to contain the escape she wants to make.

The captain announces that they're near the Tropic of Cancer, that there's often good bonefishing here. Constancia wants to ride the imaginary tropic around the planet, compulsive as a satellite, ride it and ride it until there's no longer any reason to stop.

The Sabana Archipelago is visible in the distance, guarding the hazy lights of Cárdenas Bay. The captain confirms her pickup for exactly one week from today. She can't risk being away from the factory any more than that. If she doesn't show up, for whatever reason, Constancia insists, he must return every Sunday until she reappears.

Constancia prepares herself, squeezes into her slick black diving suit. In a waterproof satchel, she's packed Reina's old Cuban jumpsuit, retailored to fit her, a pair of rubber-soled boots, two thousand dollars in cash, her
makeup kit, a cellular phone, and a canteen of fresh pomegranate juice. The captain assists her with her flippers, then holds the ladder steady as she descends into the sea. Constancia is exactly three miles from the Cuban coast. Three miles from all the answers she desires most.

I
t was hell to get here
. I needed seven hundred dollars for the flight, and so for three endless days, I resorted to my old Havana tricks. I try to tell myself it doesn't matter, that it's always a means, not an end. But when the hell will I ever stop needing the means?

I never worked so hard for so little. I tried to think of each bed as a desk, a place of calculation, each body as a collection of unrelated parts. Here a hideous metatarsal, there a trapezius rippling with knots. Anything to provide the necessary distance. Again and again, I soldered myself into those deadening men, approximating lust.

One
madrileño
, with a sword tattooed on his chest, insisted I impersonate saints. He told me that I was the spitting image of Saint Elmo, patron saint of sailors. Hardly a compliment, I thought. In stormy weather, Saint Elmo's fire can sometimes be seen from airplanes and ships. It's a
flaming phenomenon, he explained, resembling a brush discharge of electricity. Strangely enough, my next two clients complained that I gave them electric shocks. Each time they touched me, I sparked.

It's chaotic in Miami, and that's saying a lot after what I've been through. My Tía Constancia took off for Cuba last week, so I haven't met her yet. Meanwhile, Mamá is threatening to paint my aunt's apartment black. Everything black but the wide ocean view. She wants to paint Abuelo Ignacio's dead birds too. All she says by way of explanation is that the time for mourning is long overdue.

I tell Mamá I'm tired of doing the contrary, the everyday outlawed things. In the end, I say, it's the worst kind of predictability. But I don't think she understands. Lately, all she wants to do is comb my hair, two tight braids down my back, like when I was a kid. Mamá winds flowers through my hair, violets she snips on the sly from clay pots at the supermarket. And she sings American songs nonstop. I don't understand the words, but her voice sounds off to me, like the discontented peacocks I saw once at the Barcelona zoo.

“I want you to have a baby,” she announces at breakfast. Mamá fries three eggs for me, heats up a slab of honeyed ham. She claims she's trying to build up my energy for the pregnancy ahead.

“
Por favor
,” I sneer, “I'd rather be struck by lightning.”

Mamá gives me a wounded look. I know I'm being insensitive, but if I don't exaggerate, she never gets the point. Fuck it, I don't want my body permanently entangled with another's. I don't tell her, either, that I've been bleeding in between periods for months. Enough blood to fill a small sink.

I dip a piece of ham into the egg yolk. It's delicious.
After my starving in Spain, everything here tastes so good. I've gained six pounds this week alone. I have to lie flat on my back to zip up my jeans.

“I'd take care of your baby,
mi amor
” Mamá stops, fixes her eyes on mine. “I'd pamper him to death.”

Yesterday Mamá bought me leather cowboy boots at a place called Parrot Jungle, where the birds walk tightropes and eat seeds from your hand. My boots, tooled with canaries at the ankles, are a size larger than the ones Mamá bought for herself. She's convinced that if we sleep every night in our identical boots, we'll finally know what to do. I tell Mamá, as nicely as I can, to stop wasting her dreams on me.

My cousin
Isabel is here with her baby, Raku. They float through the rooms together like a pair of anemic ghosts. The little boy bleats as if he were part goat. Isabel hardly speaks. She drinks pineapple juice all day from a plastic cup with a built-in spiral straw. Mamá tells me that my cousin is heartbroken, her anguish only barely interruptible, that it kicked in after the baby was born. There's something incurable in Isabel's eyes. I wonder sometimes, looking at her, which might be worse: to know her misery, or to never know it at all.

Last week, I checked out Tía Constancia's factory to see if I could work there, do something legitimate for a change. My aunt makes weird lotions for cellulite and sagging everything. The air was so dense with perfume that it gave me an instant headache. The manager, a Cuban guy with a Beny Moré-style mustache, seriously looked me over, then invited me out for lunch. For about a day, I harbored plans of taking over the factory, of making a million dollars in no time flat. I'd buy one of those oceanfront fortresses,
build a tennis court and a helipad, have a foot massage every night. What is it about this city that fosters such empty delusions?

Then Mamá suggested that I help her rebuild carburetors at her restoration garage. She says that my hands are talented, underutilized (if she only knew). But working with her is the last thing I'd want to do.

Today I found a job at a sandwich shop. It's on Crandon Boulevard, a few blocks from Tía Constancia's condominium on the beach. I think it'll be okay for now. The owner, Nestor Vallín, was a famous Cuban volleyball player in the fifties. When I recognized him, he hired me on the spot. “The Cubans own everything in Miami,” he told me proudly, working the silver meat slicer. Nestor is teaching me how to make a
medianoche
—the precise proportion of pork to ham to cheese, quick smears of mayo and mustard, three slivers of sour pickle, all grilled to melting perfection on a hunk of crusty bread.

I ate a sandwich like that once in Cuba, years ago, before the hard times hit. It made me realize how close we are to forgetting everything, how close we are to not existing at all.

C
onstancia hitched a ride
on the back of a military truck just outside Sancti-Spíritus. The transportation was arranged for her by Reina's old flame Calixto Peón. The truck is empty except for a metal cabinet secured with a rusting lock. There could be anything inside, rifles or auto parts or butchered hens on their way to the black market. Four days in Cuba, and nothing surprises Constancia anymore. Four days in Cuba, and, thanks to the burly Calixto's assistance, half her mission is done.

The central highway cuts through an arid plain dotted with royal palms. Constancia searches the skies and the trees for the rare birds she remembers, but she spots only vultures and doves, a family of finches in a lone coral tree. The truck jumps violently with every bump and pothole. Constancia squats in place to cushion the jolts.

Soon they cross two rivers toward vast fields of sugarcane.
The soldiers stop for a
guarapo
by the roadside, and Constancia treats them all to the treacly cane juice. Everywhere she looks, the green stalks sway, crowned with ripening flowers. Here and there, a clump of shacks breaks the waving monotony. In a month, when the harvest begins, the fields and sugar mills will exhale a sweet black smoke.

It's late afternoon by the time the soldiers drop Constancia off in Camagüey, in front of the colonial cathedral near Agramonte Park. She's glad to stretch the journey from her legs. Enormous
tinajones
filled with rainwater occupy several street corners. Constancia buys a warm soda from a roving vendor and hunts for the hotel Calixto recommended.

Her supply of dollars is getting dangerously low. Constancia has spent nearly all her money to get her this far. From the moment she emerged shivering from the sea at Varadero Beach, it seems there's been nothing but bartering and bribes.

Mostly, she's let Calixto do the talking. She feared that her accent, her obsolete language, would betray them both. What she didn't realize was that her appearance would give her away time and again. Her skin is too smooth by local standards, too protected from the sun. Her makeup is flawless, her nails manicured. When El Comandante kicks the bucket, Constancia speculates, just imagine all the lotions and creams she could sell!

It's a mark of the island's privation, she thinks, that not a single person has turned her down. Even Constancia's most outlandish requests have been met, like exchanging her wet suit and flippers for her husband's rigid corpse. The coroner told her that Heberto arrived at the morgue dead but not wounded. Most likely, he'd died of a hemorrhage or heart attack. She thanked the coroner, then paid him six hundred dollars to cremate her husband clandestinely.

The only thing Constancia hasn't managed to do is get
through to home. Her cellular phone doesn't work from Cuba. And there isn't a fax machine for miles. Even the ordinary telephone lines are either busy or irreparably dead. She hopes Isabel and Raku are holding up, with Reina in charge. That the factory doesn't fall apart, with her gone.

Constancia pats her waterproof satchel to make certain Heberto is still inside. His remains, a half pound of irregular gravel, are stored in her emptied cold cream jar. Constancia is disconcerted by Heberto's final condition. She'd expected him to look softer, pinker, like a high-grade face powder. Not this handful of gritty shards, this irreducible bone.

Constancia wanders down Maceo Street and checks into the Gran Hotel. The clerk tells her that the pipes are broken, so there won't be any water tonight. And his phone, unsurprisingly, hasn't worked for weeks. But the dining room is open, he says, with a tremor of Saint Vitus' dance, and for a change, there is plenty of
malanga
and pork chops to eat.

“Calixto sent me,” Constancia says quietly. She pays the clerk ten dollars for his torn map of the province and makes of him an instant friend. “I need a reliable car and a workman's shovel at dawn,” she continues. “A hundred dollars for the day.
Sin preguntas y sin compañía
.” Then she climbs the stairs to her room.

The sun is just setting, and Constancia pulls a chair to the window to watch. The colors disrupt the sky like something merciless spilled. It occurs to her that night and day are nothing more than a pair of alternating thieves. It's impossible for her to recall her life before this trip. It all seems a perishing dream. Is she really a grandmother now? Is her son lost in Mexico? How did she spend her evenings? What did she used to eat?

Constancia loosens her clothing and settles into the flat-mattressed bed. She wants to be rational, map out the
morning's plan. But the closer she gets to her strange inheritance, the more it feels unreal. It's as if every moment in Cuba is absorbing many times its weight.

She opens her cold cream jar and shakes Heberto loose on the sheets. She takes an opaque shard and holds it up to the light. Then she places the piece on the tip of her tongue and slips it in her mouth. Constancia wishes it would dissolve completely, reveal to her something significant. But stubbornly, just like when he was alive, Heberto remains maddeningly inert.

T
here is a lazy curve
of Key Biscayne saturated with pines and papaya trees. The fruit is in season, fat and lush, garlanded with open-mouthed flowers. Reina plucks several papayas from a female tree and splits the skins with her teeth. She offers the meat to her lover, Russ, and licks the juice from his unshaven chin. Then she pulls on the swinging stalks of a nearby male tree. Its fruit is small and contains no seeds but tastes just as intensely sweet. Reina settles into the back of Russ's '56 Nash, the one with the fold-down seat.