Authors: Cristina Garcia
Dreaming in Cuban (12 page)
When Celia’s parents divorced, they dispersed their children among relatives throughout the island. Celia’s destination was Havana, with her Great-Aunt Alicia, known for her cooking and her iconoclasm. Celia was alone only this once: when she was four, and her mother put her on the daybreak train bound for the capital.
Solitude, Celia realizes now, exists for us not to remember but to forget.
On the long train ride from the countryside, Celia lost her mother’s face, the lies that had complicated her mouth. The life Celia was leaving seemed no longer significant. For hours she watched the rapid sequence of textures that flapped like streamers outside her window: vast
latifundios
, provinces of royal
palms, black mountains encircled with clouds. Each station along the way rippled with activity, with curiosities. How could she have slept?
Then the bells rang at noon to welcome her, singing from all corners of the city. Tía Alicia appeared in a petticoated dress, carrying a parasol against the mild winter sun. Celia noticed the tiny ivory buttons down her aunt’s spine, marveled at their use-lessness. She and her aunt picked their way across the cobblestones, avoiding the horses with their brisk clippity clops and the boxy black cars with chauffeurs in patent-brimmed caps. Celia walked uncertainly, twisting her ankles on the hard, uneven surfaces, and for a brief moment she itched to go barefoot, to feel the padding of fresh earth beneath her feet.
But Celia soon grew to love Havana, its crooked streets and the balconies like elegant chariots in the air. Oh, and the noise! So much delightful noise! The horse-drawn milk carts at dawn. The broom vendor with his mops and dusters and stiff bristle brushes. The newspaper boys with the latest edition of
El Mundo
or
Diario de la Marina
. Tía Alicia took her to museums and the symphony and the ancient ceiba tree. Celia ran around it three times for every wish, until the tree repeated itself like a flashing deck of cards.
Her aunt did not attend church and derided those who did. Once she took Celia to the foot of the hill crowned with the Church of Saint Lazarus. A procession of suppliants climbed the knoll on bare, bloodied knees to show their devotion or purge their grief or beg forgiveness in the slow tearing of flesh and bone. They wrung rosaries and veils between their fingers, clutched their chests, ripped their hair. Their prayers rose from the pavement like the din of insects on summer evenings.
On Saturdays Celia and her aunt would go to the picture show. The organ player, a plump man who scrambled to keep up with the action on-screen, appeared relieved when the love scenes came. He’d play a minor chord or two with his left hand
and, with a flourish of his right, wipe his perspiring face with an enormous white handkerchief. Tía Alicia considered the American films naive and overly optimistic but too much fun to resist. She named her two canaries Clara and Lillian after Clara Bow and Lillian Gish. When Clara laid eggs, however, Tía Alicia changed Lillian’s name to Douglas, after Douglas Fairbanks. Their babies were Charlie, Mary, and Gloria.
There is an electric power outage in Santa Teresa del Mar. Celia walks along the peaceful, darkened streets and smells the frying meat from open windows, observes the candle flames blinking shadows on the kitchen walls. She would have preferred to live by candlelight, she suddenly decides.
The twins surprise her with an omelet-and-rice dinner. They kiss her with dry lips, slip off her pumps, and boil pots of water for her bath. They do not ask about their mother or brother.
Celia settles in her wicker swing to watch the ocean, jumping with silver light. Is it flying fish or dolphins or some undiscovered pulse? The sky is alive with lightning, feeding on the earth’s heat. How many seasons has she searched its horizon for signs? Many more seasons than she has lived, it seems to her, many more.
El campo
de olivos
se abre y se cierra
como un abanico.
Sobre el olivar
hay un cielo hundido
y una lluvia oscura
de luceros fríos
.
Celia is partial to the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca. She heard him give a reading more than forty years ago at the Principal
de la Comedia Theater. It was the last of his five lectures in Havana and Celia listened, entranced, to his sonorous voice as he played the sad songs of the gypsies. Lorca explained that the
cante jondo
was a primitive flamenco from his native Andalusia, a region enriched by Moorish invaders, and that the songs had inspired his own gypsy ballad poems.
During his presentation, a torrential rainstorm fell and the black sounds of the
duende
shivered in the air with mystery and anguish and death. Death was alluring, seductive, and Celia longed to die in the thrill of it over and over again.
That night Celia sleeps restlessly. Voices call to her in ragged words stitched together from many languages, like dissonant scraps of quilt. The syllables float overhead, drifting into an icy blur of white. Celia awakes to an ominous pattern of moonlight on her sheets. She shouts for her granddaughters.
“Run to Herminia’s house! Tell her she must drive us to Havana right away!”
Celia’s hands flutter like disoriented birds. They cannot settle to button her jade housedress. She runs on stiff legs past the sofa draped with the faded mantilla, past the water-bleached walnut piano, past the dining-room set missing a chair, and waits in front of the house.
“Mi hija, mi hija, mi hija
,” she repeats as if her words alone could save Felicia.
The night is stenciled with stars but Celia does not notice. In a corner of the sky, a desolate quarter moon hangs. Celia smells the ocean from the highway, smells it all the way to Havana.
December 11, 1942
Querido
Gustavo,
The Civil War came and went and now there are dictatorships in both our countries. Half the world is at war, worse than it’s ever been before. Death alone is reliable.
I still love you, Gustavo, but it’s a habitual love, a wound in the knee that predicts rain. Memory is a skilled seducer. I write to you because I must. I don’t even know if you’re alive and whom you love now.
I asked myself once, “What is the nature of obsession?” But I no longer question it. I accept it the way I accept my husband and my daughters and my life on the wicker swing, my life of ordinary seductions. I’ve begun teaching myself French.
Tu
Celia
November 11, 1944
Mi amor
,
Have you read about the tidal wave that hit Cuba? Hundreds of people lost their homes, everything they owned.
A widower in our village, Nestor Prendes, drowned because he refused to leave his house. He said he wanted to join his wife, that it was his right to die. Nestor fought his children off with a cane when they tried to lift him from his chair, and he cried with such a pitiful hoarseness that they finally left him in peace.
Our house is still drying out after being underwater for so long. The only thing I’m really worried about is the piano. Jorge bought it for me when we first moved here. The rich walnut is now a chalky white. I press the keys but there’s only the sound of wet felt. When we fix the piano, I know what I’ll play first. Debussy, of course.
Love,
Celia
April 11, 1945
Querido
Gustavo,
The days rain tyranny. I survey my interior as a general does a map, dispassionately, calculating the odds. I remember our spring walks through Havana. The destitute were everywhere, spread out on the benches in the Parque Central, asleep on yesterday’s newspapers. Remember the young woman with the dangling wooden leg and the single oxford? The beggar families from the countryside looking for work in the iron-fenced mansions of Vedado? The smart couples in their convertible roadsters driving by without a second glance? I remember how all the men wore boaters in those days. Even the poorest of the poor had them—soiled, ripped, brimless, covering their faces as they slept in the park, but boaters just the same.
Why is it that most people aspire to little more than comfort?
Celia
May 11, 1945
Gustavo,
The familiar is insistent and deadly. I study the waves and keep time on my wicker swing. If I was born to live on an island, then I’m grateful for one thing: that the tides rearrange the borders. At least I have the illusion of change, of possibility. To be locked within boundaries plotted by priests and politicians would be the only thing more intolerable.
Don’t you see how they’re carving up the world, Gustavo? How they’re stealing our geography? Our fates? The arbitrary is no longer in our hands. To survive is an act of hope.
Celia
July 11, 1946
Querido
Gustavo,
My son was born with a caul. Jorge tells me there’s been only one boy born to each generation of del Pinos and each had a caul. He tells me it’s a sign of good luck, that the del Pino men have never died by drowning. I’ve called him Javier, after my father. He’ll look like him, too, I can see that already. Papá had a broad face and cheekbones you could rest coins on. His lips were plush cushions and his teeth were like a woman’s, small and even. He was a tall man, muscular, with hands that hung like hams at his sides. Those hands knew intimately every woman in our village.
I saw his face in my Tía Alicia’s. That’s why I remember him so clearly. She told me he was killed when I was thirteen, by cuckolds with machetes in a grove of banana trees. I didn’t mourn for him until Tía Alicia died, just before I married, and she left me her treasured peacock brooch.
Of my mother I remember next to nothing, only hard eyes that seemed to float like relics in her forehead, and her voice, so queer and feathery. When she put me on the daybreak train to Havana, I called to her from the window but she didn’t turn around. I watched her back in a striped blue dress round a corner. The train was delayed a quarter of an hour. On the way to Havana, I forgot her. Only the birth of my son makes me remember.
Love,
Celia
October 11, 1946
Gustavo,
Jorge says my smile frightens him, so I look in the mirror and try on old smiles. My girlfriends and I used to paint our mouths like American starlets, ruby red and heart-shaped. We bobbed our hair and wore cloche hats at coquettish angles and tried to sound like Gloria Swanson.
We used to go to Cinelandia every Friday after work. I remember seeing
Mujeres de Fuego
with Bette Davis, Ann Dvorak, and Joan Blondell. There were three of them—just like there were three of us—and one of them had to die. We used to joke about which one of us would go first. Then I’d look at the women in the food lines across the street, thin women with shawls too warm for the weather, and be ashamed of my thoughts.
After you left me I took to my bed, Gustavo. I stayed there for months playing back every minute of our time together, watching it like I watched the movies, trying to make sense of the days we buried squandering love. Jorge saved me, but for what I don’t know.
Tu
Celia
February 11, 1949
Mi querido
Gustavo,
I’ve been reading the plays of Molière and wondering what separates suffering from imagination. Do you know?
My love,
Celia
The Meaning of Shells
(1974)
F
elicia del Pino cannot remember why she is marching in the Sierra Maestra this hot October afternoon. The camouflage helmet feels like a metal ring around her head, and the rifle, slung over her left shoulder, keeps bumping up against it, making the space behind her eyes reverberate with pain. The cheap Russian boots pinch her feet as she trudges, the last of a single file of would-be guerrillas, up the intolerably fragrant mountainside. “Let’s talk in green,” her son would have told her, trying to distract her from her misery.
“Vámonos, vámonos
!” a petite mulatta roars ten yards ahead of Felicia. Lieutenant Xiomara Rojas has an undershot jaw, and her jumble of yellowish teeth is visible when she shouts. “El Líder never slowed down in these mountains! For him it was a matter of life and death, not a Sunday outing! Keep moving!”
Felicia looks down at the trail of moist trampled grasses. Her face is flushed and sweaty, and she can’t tell whether the salt in her eyes is from perspiration or involuntary tears. Lieutenant
Rojas is from these parts, Felicia thinks, that’s why she doesn’t sweat. Nobody from Santiago de Cuba ever sweated. It’s a known fact.
“Compañera del Pino, you must keep up the rear! It’s the most vulnerable position after the leader!” Lieutenant Rojas bellows, not unkindly.
Felicia’s calves feel like baseballs below her knees. The earth, muddy and pliable, sucks at her feet. Every tendon is straining, stretched taut like the muscles of cows at the butcher shop that had died in fear. Their meat was never as tender as the flesh of the animals that hadn’t anticipated death. Felicia fumbles for her canteen. She twists off the cap, attached by a chain to its neck. Her hands are a stranger’s, swollen and coarse, her fingernails dirty.
“Fatherland or death!” Lieutenant Rojas shouts, as Felicia tips the water toward her mouth.
“Fatherland or death!” the guerrillas echo, all except Felicia, who wonders whether all this shouting wouldn’t alert the enemy in a real war.
At the makeshift camp, the guerrillas set up their tents and open cans of pinto beans and pressed meat the color of dung. It’s their fifth day of this food and it’s given some of the soldiers diarrhea, others constipation, and all of them gas. Only Lieutenant Rojas seems unaffected and eats with enthusiasm. Felicia looks around at the others in her mostly middle-aged brigade. Everyone is there for the same reason, whether they admit it or not. They are a unit of malcontents, a troop of social misfits. It is Lieutenant Rojas’s mission to reshape them into revolutionaries.
Felicia is there because she nearly killed herself and her son. She doesn’t remember this but everyone has told her it is so. “Why did you do it?” her mother asked her sadly, stretching her hands on the starched white bed. “Why did you do it?” the psychiatrist with the severe pageboy questioned her, as if Felicia
were a willful child. “Why, Felicia?” her best friend, Herminia, beseeched her, all the while rubbing Felicia’s forehead with herbs behind the nurse’s back.
