The Aguero Sisters (5 page)

Against all medical precedents, experimental skin grafts from loved ones miraculously took. Pepín Beltrán donated a patch of his backside, Dulcita a long stretch of thigh. Other people, dead and alive, gave Reina their skin, unblistered, unsinged. On bad days, she wishes they hadn't tried.

No one will bring Reina a mirror. There's a lump of
gauze where her nose is healing, a dull pulsing where her molar remains loose. Her thumbs have lost all sensation. They say her face survived best of all, but Reina is not permitted to see it. Each time she asks, the nurses refuse her, then release a familiar tug of drugs in her veins. Reina decides she can stand anything but lies.

Nothing is allowed to touch her. The slightest breeze refines her pain. And so she is motionless all day, remembering the moment before the heat. The mass shifting of leaves, the branches violet with light, offering her to the sky. She understood then the private language of nature, the patience and debts it defines. She lost two weeks of her life to this knowledge.

When Reina awoke again, she believed the world had converted to fire. Hadn't anyone noticed but her? Everything simmered with heat. Fevers rippled like snakes through her room, rattling their tails of sparks. Her skin gave off a sweetish smoke. Electricity had replaced her voice.

Reina understands that lightning has its work to do. It's an atmospheric discharge, urgent between clouds or between clouds and the ground below. Many thousands of bolts strike the earth daily, searing their fatal messages. Yet Reina cannot accept a rational explanation. What she knows is this: that she was singled out to die but, instead, has survived.

In Cuba, Reina has heard it whispered, Changó owns the lightning, uses it to display his displeasure, his brazen force. Oyá, his first and favorite wife, also owns the fire. She stole it from Changó once when he went off to battle. Reina asks a nurse to tie two ribbons for these fractious lovers—one red, one maroon—to the foot of her bed, just in case.

It is winter
. Pepín Beltrán comes from Havana for the weekend with a suitcase of her father's books and the ancient binoculars Reina requested. To the west, a Batista hawk
glides high on invisible drafts. Reina lifts the binoculars, her arm muscles aching with effort, and watches the hawk circle just below the clouds, imagines its musical three-call note. An hour later, as if summoned by the mountains for tasks unknown, the hawk drifts out of sight.

“I'm thirsty,” she says, still searching for the hawk, her binoculars unsteady. Her throat is parched, beyond slaking, like the thirst she endured nursing Dulcita for eighteen months.

“You must accept this as a condition of survival,” Pepín says. He offers Reina a local drink made with pepper leaves, vanilla, pine needles, soapberries, and Indian root. She's surprised by its sweet smoothness, drinks it down with a long swallow. But her thirst immediately returns.

Her daughter arrives while Pepín is there. Dulce is thirty-two years old, but she wears a miniskirt and white go-go boots to show off her missing strip of thigh. Her daughter's scar reminds Reina of the purplish burns on her own mother's forearms. Blanca Mestre Agüero had started out as a chemist and bore the telltale signs of her profession's serious demands. But to Reina, her mother's scars had seemed more decorative then disfiguring, like exotic tattoos.

“Read to me,” Reina pleads. She rarely asks this of her daughter. Dulcita deliberately ruins the melody of a sentence, skips words she doesn't understand. But her voice is high and girlish and reminds Reina of a happier time. Reina's father had made a habit of reading to her from a tender age:
The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
, classics of zoogeography, nineteenth-century French and Russian literature, histories of the Greeks, the Romans, and the Mongol invaders. He allowed no naps or intermissions.

Dulcita reluctantly accepts a brown leather book from her mother, already opened to a favorite passage. Dulcita's thumb darkens the corner of the page with perspiration,
picks up tiny flecks of gilt from the edge. Reina mouths the words as her daughter reads:

Abruptly, Dulcita stops reading. She has an announcement to make. She is leaving the country with a sixty-four-year-old airline reservations clerk from Spain. Reina doesn't have the strength to say what is necessary, to point out that Dulcita's actions are no more than restlessness in disguise. Her daughter has boyfriends from Sweden and France, from Brazil, Canada, Pakistan. They send her letters and trinkets and family pictures. Then send her nothing at all. Dulcita doesn't want children. Not with the Spaniard, not with anyone.

“At least he isn't married,” Dulcita sneers, staring at her mother's lover.

“Do you love him?” Reina asks.

“Of course not.”

“What will you do in Madrid?”

“Take up boxing.” Dulcita rolls her eyes.

“
Bueno, mi amor
, you are long past the age of illusions.”

Pepín Beltrán reaches for a vial of silvery powder hidden in a slit in the mattress. He taps the vial gently, sprinkles the talcum-fine powder onto Reina's tongue. He procured it from La Sequita, a famous herbalist in Guanabo, who said that by the time Reina finished it, she would be either completely healed or dead.

“It's worst after midnight,” Reina tells him after Dulcita leaves. Her daughter's sharp saffron scent permeates the room.

“It always is,
querida
.”

Pepín stays with Reina as the dusk extinguishes the clouds one by one, then on through the endless continent of the night. Reina stares out the window for hours, trying to make sense of the density of stars.

At dawn
, Pepín carries in a tattered shopping bag he'd saved from El Encanto, a department store in the capital that had burned to the ground years ago. He reaches inside and pulls out a stark white rooster. Its pink eyes widen in the sudden light, but it does not otherwise stir.

“See how gentle he is, Reina? How perfect?” Pepín holds the rooster upside down by its legs and begins circling the room. He climbs onto a chair, then balances on the windowsill, waving the bird toward the far corners of the ceiling. The rooster remains perfectly still.

Reina follows the slick red flesh of its comb. She has heard that in Moscow they eat cocks' combs in cream sauce when there are shortages of meat.

“
Así, así
,” Pepín croons under his breath. He holds the rooster over Reina's midriff and begins a prayer she cannot understand.

Pepín insists that a persistent evil is interfering with La Sequita's cure. The rooster, he says, will trace it, absorb it, fling it back to its dank origin.

Reina is drawn by the semblance of order to Pepín's universe, to the unifying principles he calls gods. Like him, she believes that the world functions through a myriad of vital linkages, animate and inanimate, infinite and infinitesimal, a grand interdependency that survives in order to perpetuate growth and change and decay. Nothing, Reina knows, can ever be dismissed.

She studies the luster of the bird's cape, the arch of its sickle feathers. The spurs are particularly pronounced, the
claws and beak strong. It could have been a fighter, a champion. Reina disapproves of cockfighting, but she cannot help admiring the rooster's attributes all the same.

“Where did you find him?” she asks, as a mysterious rushing storms her veins.

“
Concéntrate
, Reina. Close your eyes.”

A moment later, it's over. The rooster squawks as it flies out the window, blazing newly black against the wild, colluding sky.

C
onstancia Agüero Cruz
considers the illumined corpse of her father-in-law at the foot of the altar rail. Arturo Cruz's face is overly rouged, and his hands, enlaced with a worn wooden rosary, appear stiff and squared-tipped as piano keys. His family and friends, spent by the upheaval of his death, are gathered in the front pews. Constancia adjusts her veiled hat, smooths the sash of her black chiffon dress. Against the back wall of the chancel, a dominion of faded saints hovers with long-forgotten ecstasies.

Dusk erupts through the stained-glass windows of the church. The candles gutter as if disturbed by a draft. Constancia is startled. In the tropics, twilight is such a swift affair, one flamboyant cloak exchanged for another, with a flare and a whirl. In New York City, she recalls wistfully, the days receded gradually, sulking for hours.

“It is a season of ruin, a season of salvation.” Constancia
ignores the pouchy-eyed priest, the irksome hymns prescribed for grief. Her father-in-law died from a surge of blood that flooded his brain during a game of dominoes at Gerardo's
carnicería
. Constancia doesn't question his passing. There are, she knows, reasons good enough for everything that happens.

Maldición, maldición, maldición
. Constancia imagines the words colliding along the stone floor, rattling the coffin and the narcissistic saints. She reaches for her husband's hand. It is cold and fleshy. Heberto has been irascible for weeks, is worse now that his father is dead. The family was close back in Cuba, before debt and exile drove them apart. Now Constancia fears that Heberto, too, will choose to die, like the aborigines who paint their faces and disappear into the forest when their time comes.

From a nearby pew, her first husband, Gonzalo Cruz, scrapes his way to his father's coffin on his flame-tree cane. Constancia hasn't seen him in thirty-three years. It is difficult for her to reconcile the sight of this man with the memory of him, with the despair that corrupted her for any other love.

Gonzalo's left leg is shorter than his right, a souvenir of the Bay of Pigs. When Constancia knew him, there was no limp. His legs were his best feature then, muscular and smooth as a boy's. Still, something of his old rapacity lurks in his wilted bearing, in his fading marauder's face. Constancia wonders, shrewdly assessing her ex-husband, if this is what their son will look like at sixty.

Relatives have informed her that Gonzalo Cruz is slowly dying. His malady yellows his skin to a delicate tarnish, as if privileged by the sun, and he exudes a potent, beckoning odor. From his eleventh-floor suite at the Good Samaritan Hospital, Gonzalo holds court like a deposed dictator,
with every manner of refugee and sycophant. He is pleased when he is caught, as happens frequently, in flagrante delicto.

Constancia considers what her daughter told her over the phone last week. That doctors today know what will kill you by the time you are thirty-five. There are magnetic resonance imaging machines, Isabel said, that spit out cross-sections of the human torso, pinpointing the petrified specks that ultimately signal death. “We are
all
,” she stressed, “radiant with disease.”

Isabel is two months pregnant. She's been living on Oahu for the past year with her painter boyfriend, Austin Feck. She makes oddly shaped objects from clay, fires them in the Japanese manner. Girl or boy, married or not, Isabel and her boyfriend plan to name their baby Raku. Constancia isn't ready to be a grandmother yet, but she plots, during the countless minute deliberations of her day, how she can wrest this child, her first grandchild, from its undeserved fate.

Recently, Constancia received a catalogue of Austin's latest exhibit,
Images of Isabel
. Her daughter's face, her naked body, whole or in select close-ups, floating in a strange, distorting light. Constancia blanched to look at them, the glossy, vulnerable pinks of Isabel's private parts. Her daughter says she plans to continue modeling for Austin throughout her pregnancy, all the more now since she's stopped throwing clay. She fears that the lead in her glazes might harm their unborn child.

It's dark by the time they reach the cemetery. Constancia has never heard of a nighttime burial, but her father-in-law left a will with specific instructions. Everyone lights white tapers from a tiki torch, then slowly circles the funeral tent. Two clarinetists in black tie play a tune Constancia doesn't recognize. Arturo. Cruz's longtime mistress, Jacinta
Fuentes, all ruddy bulk, with pearls the size of tamarinds, tries to leap into her lover's grave but is restrained by a circle of friends.

The following evening
, Constancia's husband announces he's going fishing in Biscayne Bay. Constancia knows that Heberto will return at dawn without a single fish. One night, he'll pledge to bring home a catch of red snapper; the next, a dozen sea bass for a bouillabaisse. Heberto keeps up with the fishing reports: this school of marlin moving offshore in unfathomable numbers; a swordfish the size of a man recently caught in the Gulf Stream. Constancia imagines her husband upright in his little motorboat, addressing the sky in his earnest, formal manner. She's convinced that he doesn't even bother to drop his line.

How different Heberto is from his younger brother. The two of them lie continually, congenitally, but Heberto's lies are more innocent, a quiet, wistful habit. Gonzalo's lies were blatant and unapologetic, inaccurate as language itself. In fact, Constancia could accuse Gonzalo of only two straightforward acts during their marriage: impregnating her, then leaving her when he found out. In all these years, he has never set eyes on their son, Silvestre, deaf from the time he was four. Another casualty of that
dichosa
revolution.

It is the last day of January. Constancia folds a sheet of stationery in half and slips in a pair of hundred-dollar bills for her son. Silvestre used to reproach her for sending him cash, but he no longer acknowledges the monthly supplement. Constancia doesn't know whether he saves it or spends it or throws it away. It doesn't matter anyway. The money, she realized a long time ago, is more for her than for him.