Dreaming in Cuban (16 page)

These days, Lourdes recognizes her husband’s face, his thinning reddish hair, and the crepey pouches under his eyes, but he is a stranger to her. She looks at him the way she might look at a photograph of her hands, unfamiliar upon close inspection.

Lourdes is herself only with her father. Even after his death, they understand each other perfectly, as they always have. Jorge del Pino doesn’t accompany Lourdes on her beat because he doesn’t want to interfere with her work. He is proud of his daughter, of
her tough stance on law and order, identical to his own. It was he who encouraged Lourdes to join the auxiliary police so she’d be ready to fight the Communists when the time came. “Look how El Líder mobilizes the people to protect his causes,” Jorge del Pino told his daughter. “He uses the techniques of the Fascists. Everyone is armed and ready for combat at a moment’s notice. How will we ever win Cuba back if we ourselves are not prepared to fight?”

Pilar makes fun of Lourdes in her uniform, of the way she slaps the nightstick in her palm. “Who do you think you are, Kojak?” she says, laughing, and hands her mother a lollipop. This is just like her daughter, scornful and impudent. “I’m doing this to show you something, to teach you a lesson!” Lourdes screams, but Pilar ignores her.

Last Christmas, Pilar gave her a book of essays on Cuba called
A Revolutionary Society
. The cover showed cheerful, clean-cut children gathered in front of a portrait of Che Guevara. Lourdes was incensed.

“Will you read it?” Pilar asked her.

“I don’t have to read it to know what’s in it! Lies, poisonous Communist lies!” Che Guevara’s face had set a violence quivering within her like a loose wire.

“Suit yourself,” Pilar shot back.

Lourdes snatched the volume from under the Christmas tree, took it to the bathroom, filled the tub with scalding water, and dropped it in. Che Guevara’s face blanched and swelled like the dead girl Lourdes had seen wash up once on the beach at Santa Teresa del Mar with a note pinned to her breast. Nobody ever came to claim her. Lourdes fished Pilar’s book out of the tub with barbecue tongs and placed it on the porcelain platter she reserved for her roasted pork legs. Then she fastened a note to the cover with a safety pin. “Why don’t you move to Russia if you think it’s so great!” And she signed her name in full.

All this she left on Pilar’s bed. But it did not provoke her
daughter. The next day, the platter was back in the cupboard and
A Revolutionary Society
was drying on the clothesline.

Lourdes’s walkie-talkie crackles as she works her way along the length of river that forms the western boundary of her territory. The night is so clear that the water reflects every stray angle of light. Without the disruptions of ships and noise, the river is a mirror. It reminds Lourdes of a photograph she saw once of the famous Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles with its endless ricocheting light.

At the edge of her vision, the darkness shifts. Her spine stiffens and her heart is audible deep inside her ears. She turns and squints but she cannot make out the figure, crouched and still, by the river. Lourdes grips her nightstick with one hand and pulls on her flashlight with the other. When she looks up again, the figure springs across the low fence and jumps into the river, shattering the light.

“Stop!” she shouts, running toward the spot as if chasing a part of herself. Lourdes turns her flashlight on the river, penetrating its rippled surface, then hoists herself over the fence. “Stop!” she shouts again at nothing at all. Lourdes pulls her walkie-talkie from its holster and screams too close to the speaker. She cannot remember what to say, the codes she had carefully memorized. A voice is talking to her now, calm and officious. “Tell us your location,” it says, “… your location.” But Lourdes jumps into the river instead. She hears the sirens wailing as the cold envelops her, numbing her face and her hands, her feet in their thick-soled shoes. The river smells of death.

Only one more fact is important. Lourdes lived and the Navarro boy died.

Pilar

(1976)

The family is hostile to the individual. This is what I’m thinking as Lou Reed says he has enough attitude to kill every person in New Jersey. I’m at a club in the Village with my boyfriend, Max. I figure I have enough attitude to kill a few people myself, only it never works on the right ones.

“I’m from Brooklyn, man!” Lou shouts and the crowd goes wild. I don’t cheer, though. I wouldn’t cheer either if Lou said, “Let’s hear it for Cuba.” Cuba. Planet Cuba. Where the hell is that?

Max’s real name is Octavio Schneider. He sings and plays bass and harmonica for the Manichaean Blues Band, a group he started back in San Antonio, where he’s from. They do Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters and lots of their own songs, mostly hard rock. Sometimes they do back-up for this crazy bluesman, the Reverend Billy Hines, who keeps his eyes shut when he sings. Max says that the reverend was a storefront preacher who played the Panhandle years ago and is attempting a comeback. Max himself had a modest hit in Texas with “Moonlight on Emma,” a song about an ex-girlfriend who dumped him and moved to Hollywood.

I met Max at a downtown basement club a few months ago. He came over and started speaking to me in Spanish (his mother is Mexican) as if he’d known me for years. I liked him right away. When I brought him around to meet my parents, Mom took one look at his beaded headband and the braid down his back and said,
“Sácalo de aquí
.” When I told her that Max spoke Spanish, she simply repeated what she said in English: “Take him away.”

Dad was cool, though. “What does your band’s name mean?” he asked Max.

“The Manichaeans, see, were followers of this Persian guy who lived in the third century. They believed that hedonism was the only way to get rid of their sins.”

“Hedonism?”

“Yeah, the Manichaeans liked to party. They had orgies and drank a lot. They got wiped out by other Christians, though.”

“Too bad,” my father said sympathetically.

Later, Dad looked up the Manichaeans in the encyclopedia and discovered that, contrary to what Max claimed, the Manichaeans believed that the world and all matter were created by nefarious forces, and that the only way to battle them was through asceticism and a pure life. When I told Max about this, he just shrugged and said, “Well, I guess that’s okay, too.” Max is a tolerant kind of guy.

I just love the way Lou Reed’s concerts feel—expectant, uncertain. You never know what he’s going to do next. Lou has about twenty-five personalities. I like him because he sings about people no one else sings about—drug addicts, transvestites, the down-and-out. Lou jokes about his alter egos discussing problems at night. I feel like a new me sprouts and dies every day.

I play Lou and Iggy Pop and this new band the Ramones whenever I paint. I love their energy, their violence, their incredible grinding guitars. It’s like an artistic form of assault. I try to translate what I hear into colors and volumes and lines that confront people, that say, “Hey, we’re here too and what we think matters!” or more often just “Fuck you!” Max is not as crazy about the Ramones as I am. I think he’s more of a traditionalist. He has a tough time being rude, even to people who deserve it. Not me. If I don’t like someone, I show it. It’s the one thing I have in common with my mother.

*

Neither of my parents is very musical. Their entire record collection consists of
Perry Como’s Greatest Hits
, two Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass albums, and
Alvin and the Chipmunks Sing Their Favorite Christmas Carols
, which they bought for me when I was a kid. Recently, Mom picked up a Jim Nabors album of patriotic songs in honor of the bicentennial. I mean, after Vietnam and Watergate, who the hell wants to hear “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”?

I used to like the Fourth of July okay because of the fireworks. I’d go down by the East River and watch them flare up from the tugboats. The girandoles looked like fiery lace in the sky. But this bicentennial crap is making me crazy. Mom has talked about nothing else for months. She bought a second bakery and plans to sell tricolor cupcakes and Uncle Sam marzipan. Apple pies, too. She’s convinced she can fight Communism from behind her bakery counter.

Last year she joined the local auxiliary police out of some misplaced sense of civic duty. My mother—all four feet eleven and a half inches and 217 pounds of her—patrols the streets of Brooklyn at night in a skintight uniform, clanging with enough antiriot gear to quash another Attica. She practices twirling her nightstick in front of the mirror, then smacks it against her palm, steadily, menacingly, like she’s seen cops do on television. Mom’s upset because the police department won’t issue her a gun. Right. She gets a gun and I move out of state fast.

There’s other stuff happening with her. For starters, she’s been talking with Abuelo Jorge since he died. He gives her business advice and tells her who’s stealing from her at the bakery. Mom says that Abuelo spies on me and reports back to her. Like what is this? The ghost patrol? Mom is afraid that I’m having sex with Max (which I’m not) and this is her way of trying to keep me in line.

Max likes Mom, though. He says she suffers from an “imperious disposition.”

“You mean she’s a frustrated tyrant?” I ask him.

“More like a bitch goddess,” he explains.

Max’s parents split up before he was born and his mother cleans motel rooms for minimum wage. I guess Mom must seem exotic by comparison.

But she’s really not. Mom makes food only people in Ohio eat, like Jell-O molds with miniature marshmallows or recipes she clips from
Family Circle
. And she barbecues anything she can get her hands on. Then we sit around behind the warehouse and stare at each other with nothing to say. Like this is it? We’re living the American dream?

The worst is the parades. Mom gets up early and drags us out on Thanksgiving Day loaded with plastic foam coolers, like we’re going to starve right there on Fifth Avenue. On New Year’s Day, she sits in front of the television and comments on every single float in the Rose Parade. I think she dreams of sponsoring one herself someday. Like maybe a huge burning effigy of El Líder.

Max flatters me but not in a sleazy way. He says he loves my height (I’m five feet eight inches) and my hair (black, down to my waist) and the whiteness of my skin. His mouth is a little sauna, hot and wet. When we slow-dance, he presses himself against me and I feel his hardness against my thighs. He says I would make a good bass player.

Max knows about Abuela Celia in Cuba, about how she used to talk to me late at night and how we’ve lost touch over the years. Max wants to go to Cuba and track her down, but I tell him what happened four years ago, when I ran away to Florida and my plans to see my grandmother collapsed. I wonder what Abuela Celia is doing right this minute.

Most days Cuba is kind of dead to me. But every once in a
while a wave of longing will hit me and it’s all I can do not to hijack a plane to Havana or something. I resent the hell out of the politicians and the generals who force events on us that structure our lives, that dictate the memories we’ll have when we’re old. Every day Cuba fades a little more inside me, my grandmother fades a little more inside me. And there’s only my imagination where our history should be.

It doesn’t help that Mom refuses to talk about Abuela Celia. She gets annoyed every time I ask her and she shuts me up quickly, like I’m prying into top secret information. Dad is more open, but he can’t tell me what I really want to know, like why Mom hardly speaks to Abuela or why she still keeps her riding crops from Cuba. Most of the time, he’s too busy refereeing the fights between us, or else he’s just in his own orbit.

Dad feels kind of lost here in Brooklyn. I think he stays in his workshop most of the day because he’d get too depressed or crazy otherwise. Sometimes I think we should have moved to a ranch in Wyoming or Montana. He would have been happy there with his horses and his cows, his land, and a big empty sky overhead. Dad only looks alive when he talks about the past, about Cuba. But we don’t discuss that much either lately. Things haven’t been the same since I saw him with that blond bombshell. I never said anything to him, but it’s like a cut on my tongue that never healed.

*  *  *

Mom has decided she wants me to paint a mural for her second Yankee Doodle Bakery.

“I want a big painting like the Mexicans do, but pro-American,” she specifies.

“You want to commission
me
to paint something for
you?”

“Si
, Pilar. You’re a painter, no? So paint!”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Painting is painting, no?”

“Look, Mom, I don’t think you understand. I don’t
do
bakeries.”

“You’re embarrassed? My bakery is not good enough for you?”

“It’s not that.”

“This bakery paid for your painting classes.”

“It has nothing to do with that, either.”

“If Michelangelo were alive today, he wouldn’t be so proud.”

“Mom, believe me, Michelangelo would definitely
not
be painting bakeries.”

“Don’t be so sure. Most artists are starving. They don’t have all the advantages like you. They take heroin to forget.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“This could be a good opportunity for you, Pilar. A lot of important people come to my shop. Judges and lawyers from the courts, executives from Brooklyn Union Gas. Maybe they’ll see your painting. You could become famous.”

My mother talks and talks, but I block out her words. For some reason I think about Jacoba Van Heemskerck, a Dutch expressionist painter I’ve become interested in lately. Her paintings feel organic to me, like breathing abstractions of color. She refused to title her paintings (much less do patriotic murals for her mother’s bakery) and numbered her works instead. I mean, who needs words when colors and lines conjure up their own language? That’s what I want to do with my paintings, find a unique language, obliterate the clichés.

I think about all the women artists throughout history who managed to paint despite the odds against them. People still ask where all the important women painters are instead of looking at what they did paint and trying to understand their circumstances. Even supposedly knowledgeable and sensitive people react to good art by a woman as if it were an anomaly, a product of a freak nature or a direct result of her association with a male
painter or mentor. Nobody’s even heard of feminism in art school. The male teachers and students still call the shots and get the serious attention and the fellowships that further their careers. As for the women, we’re supposed to make extra money modeling nude. What kind of bullshit revolution is that?