Dreaming in Cuban (20 page)

Pilar is away at art school in Rhode Island. She won scholarships to Vassar and Barnard, but instead she chose a school of hippies with no future, delicate men with women’s lips and a dissembling in their eyes. The thought of her daughter in bed with these men drives Lourdes to despair, to utter repugnance.

Lourdes was a virgin when she married, and very proud of it. The hip-splitting pain, the blood on the conjugal bed were proof of her virtue. She would gladly have hung out her sheets for everyone to see.

Pilar is like her grandmother, disdainful of rules, of religion, of everything meaningful. Neither of them shows respect for anyone, least of all themselves. Pilar is irresponsible, self-centered, a bad seed. How could this have happened?

Lourdes marches down Montague Street, her elbows jutting behind her like pistons. The Greek diner is open and there’s a stoop-shouldered man in the back booth eyeing his bacon and eggs. The yolks are too orange, Lourdes thinks. She imagines their sticky thickness coating the old man’s throat. It sickens her.

“One coffee, black,” she tells the uniformed waiter, then heads for the public telephone. Lourdes dials her daughter’s number in Rhode Island. The phone rings four, five, six times before Pilar answers sleepily.

“I know someone is there with you,” Lourdes rasps. “Don’t lie to me.”

“Mom, not again. Please.”

“Tell me his name!” Lourdes squeezes the words out between her teeth. “Whore! Tell me his name!”

“What are you talking about? Mom, it’s five in the morning. Just leave me alone, okay?”

“I called you last night and you weren’t in.”

“I was out.”

“Out where? To your lover’s bed?”

“Out for a pastrami sandwich.”

“Liar! You never eat pastrami!”

“I’m hanging up now, Mom. Nice talking to you, too.”

Lourdes slaps two quarters on the counter and leaves the coffee steaming in its thick white mug. She hasn’t had relations with Rufino since her father died. It’s as if another woman had possessed her in those days, a whore, a life-craving whore who fed on her husband’s nauseating clots of yellowish milk.

Lourdes lifts one arm, then the other to her face, sniffing them suspiciously for the scent of grease and toast.

The smell of food repels her. She can’t even look at it without her mouth filling with the acrid saliva that precedes vomiting. These days, it’s nearly impossible to endure even her own bakeries—the wormy curves of the buttery croissants, the gluey honey buns with fat pecans trapped like roaches in the cinnamon crevices.

Lourdes did not plan to stop eating. It just happened, like the time she gained 118 pounds in the days her father was dying. This time, though, Lourdes longs for a profound emptiness, to be clean and hollow as a flute.

She advances toward the Brooklyn Promenade. The abandoned shipyards display their corrugated roofs like infected scars. The East River, meeting the Hudson near its mouth, is quiet and motionless as the mist. On the other side of the river, the towers of Wall Street reach arrogantly toward the sky. Lourdes paces the quarter-mile-long esplanade eight times. A jogger runs by with a tawny Great Dane at his side. Cars hum on the highway below her, headed for Queens.

There is a moment of each dawn that appears disguised as dusk, Lourdes decides, and for that brief moment the day neither begins nor ends.

*  *  *

Lourdes has lost eighty-two pounds. She is drinking liquid protein now, a bluish fluid that comes in tubes like astronaut food. It tastes of chemicals. Lourdes rides her new Sears exercise bicycle until sparks fly from the wheels. She tacks up a full-color road map of the United States in her bedroom and charts her mileage daily with a green felt marker. Her goal is to ride to San Francisco by Thanksgiving, when her daughter will return home from school. Lourdes pedals and sweats, pedals and sweats until she pictures rivulets of fat, like the yellow liquid that pours from roasting chickens and turkeys, oozing from her pores as she rides through Nebraska.

Jorge del Pino is concerned about his daughter, but Lourdes insists that nothing is wrong. Her father visits her regularly at twilight, on her evening walks home from the bakery, and whispers to her through the oak and maple trees. His words flutter at her neck like a baby’s lacy breath.

They discuss many topics: the worsening crime on New York City’s streets; the demise of the Mets since their glory seasons in ’69 and ’73; day-to-day matters of the bakery. It was her father who had advised Lourdes to open a second pastry shop.

“Put your name on the sign, too,
hija
, so they know what we Cubans are up to, that we’re not all Puerto Ricans,” Jorge del Pino had insisted.

Lourdes ordered custom-made signs for her bakeries in red, white, and blue with her name printed at the bottom right-hand corner:
LOURDES PUENTE, PROPRIETOR
. She particularly liked the sound of the last word, the way the “r” ’s rolled in her mouth, the explosion of “p” ’s. Lourdes felt a spiritual link to American moguls, to the immortality of men like Irénée du Pont, whose Varadero Beach mansion on the north coast of Cuba she had
once visited. She envisioned a chain of Yankee Doodle bakeries stretching across America to St. Louis, Dallas, Los Angeles, her apple pies and cupcakes on main streets and in suburban shopping malls everywhere.

Each store would bear her name, her legacy:
LOURDES PUENTE
,
PROPRIETOR.

Above all, Lourdes and her father continue to denounce the Communist threat to America. Every day they grow more convinced that the dearth of bad news about Cuba is a conspiracy by the leftist media to keep international support for El Líder strong. Why can’t the Americans see the Communists in their own backyards, in their universities, bending the malleable minds of the young? The Democrats are to blame, the Democrats and those lying, two-timing Kennedys. What America needs, Lourdes and her father agree, is another Joe McCarthy to set things right again.
He
would never have abandoned them at the Bay of Pigs.

“Why don’t you go down and report on Cuba’s prisons?” Lourdes taunted the journalists who questioned her last year about the opening-day fracas at the second Yankee Doodle Bakery. “Why are you wasting your time with me?”

Lourdes hadn’t approved of Pilar’s painting, not at all, but she wouldn’t tolerate people telling her what to do on her own property.

“That’s how it began in Cuba,” Lourdes’s father whispered hoarsely through the trees, counseling her. “You must stop the cancer at your front door.”

After Pilar left for college, Lourdes stared at her daughter’s painting every night before she walked home. If Pilar hadn’t put in the safety pin and the bugs in the air, the painting would be almost pretty. Those bugs ruined the background. Without the bugs, the background was a nice blue, a respectable shimmering blue.

Why did Pilar always have to go too far? Lourdes is convinced it is something pathological, something her daughter inherited from her Abuela Celia.

*  *  *

It is Thanksgiving Day. Lourdes has lost 118 pounds. Her metamorphosis is complete. She will eat today for the first time in months. The aroma of food is appealing again, but Lourdes is afraid of its temptations, of straying too far from the blue liquid, from the pitchers of cleansing ice water. There is a purity within her, a careful enzymatic balance she does not wish to disturb.

The day before yesterday, Lourdes bought a red-and-black size-six Chanel suit with gold coin buttons. “You’re so lucky you can wear anything!” the salesgirl at Lord & Taylor’s had complimented her as she swiveled this way and that before the dressing-room mirror. Lourdes spent a week’s profits on the suit. It was worth it, though, to see Pilar’s astonishment at her weight loss.

“My God!” Pilar exclaims as she walks through the front door of the warehouse and stares at the fraction of her mother before her. “How did you do it?”

Lourdes beams.

“She starved herself,” Rufino interjects irritably. He’s wearing a toque like a fat white carnation on his head. Lourdes hushes him with a wave of her newly slender hand.

“I just made up my mind to do it. Willpower. Willpower goes a long way toward getting what you want, Pilar.”

Her daughter’s face registers suspicion, as if Lourdes is going to launch into a lecture. But Lourdes has nothing of the sort in mind. She ushers her daughter to the table, which is set with hand-painted china and an autumn-leaves centerpiece.

“Your father has been learning to cook since I stopped eating,”
Lourdes says. “He’s been in the kitchen since Sunday, preparing everything.”

“Are you going to eat today, Mom?”

“Just a few bites. The doctor says I have to start weaning myself back on food. But if it were up to me, I’d never eat again. I feel pure, absolutely clean. And I have more energy than ever before.”

Lourdes begins reminiscing about the instant foods she made when she first came to New York. The mashed potatoes she whipped up from water and ashen powder, the chicken legs she shook in bags of spicy bread crumbs then baked at 350 degrees, the frozen carrots she boiled and served with imitation butter. But soon the potatoes and the chicken and the carrots had all tasted the same to her, blanched and waxen and gray.

“I think migration scrambles the appetite,” Pilar says, helping herself to a candied yam. “I may move back to Cuba someday and decide to eat nothing but codfish and chocolate.”

Lourdes stares hard at her daughter. She wants to say that nobody but a degenerate would want to move back to that island-prison. But she doesn’t. It’s a holiday and everyone is supposed to be happy. Instead, Lourdes turns her attention to a sliver of turkey on her plate. She tastes a small chunk. It’s juicy and salty and goes straight to her veins. She decides to have another piece.

In a moment her mouth is moving feverishly, like a terrible furnace. She stokes it with more hunks of turkey and whole candied yams. Lourdes helps herself to a mound of creamed spinach, dabbing it with a quickly diminishing loaf of sourdough. The leek-and-mustard pie, with its hint of chives, is next.

“Mi cielo
, you really outdid yourself!” Lourdes praises her husband between mouthfuls.

For dessert, there’s a rhubarb-apple betty topped with cinnamon crème anglaise. Lourdes devours every last morsel.

*

The next morning, Lourdes scours the newspapers for calamities as she dunks sticky buns into her
café con leche
. A twin-engine plane crashed in the umber folds of the Adirondacks. An earthquake in rural China buried thousands in their homes. In the Bronx, a fire consumed a straight-A student and her baby brother, asleep in his crib. There’s a photograph of their mother on the front page, ravaged by loss. She’d only gone to the corner store for a pack of cigarettes.

Lourdes grieves for these victims as if they were beloved relatives. Each calamity makes Lourdes feel her own sorrow, keeps her own pain fresh.

Pilar suggests they go to an exhibit at the Frick Museum, so Lourdes wriggles into her Chanel suit, the gold-coin buttons already straining across her middle, and they take the subway to Manhattan. On Fifth Avenue, Lourdes stops to buy hot dogs (with mustard, relish, sauerkraut, fried onions, and ketchup), two chocolate cream sodas, a potato knish, lamb shish kebabs with more onions, a soft pretzel, and a cup of San Marino cherry ice. Lourdes eats, eats, eats, like a Hindu goddess with eight arms, eats, eats, eats, as if famine were imminent.

Inside the museum, the paintings all look alike to Lourdes, smeared and dull. Her daughter guides her to an indoor courtyard, suffused with winter light. They settle on a concrete bench by the reflecting pool. Lourdes is mesmerized by the greenish water, by the sad, sputtering fountain, and a wound inside her reopens. She remembers what the doctors in Cuba had told her. That the baby inside her had died. That they’d have to inject her with a saline solution to expel her baby’s remains. That she would have no more children.

Lourdes sees the face of her unborn child, pale and blank as an egg, buoyed by the fountain waters. Her child calls to her, waves a bare little branch in greeting. Lourdes fills her heart to
bursting with the sight of him. She reaches out and calls his name, but he disappears before she can rescue him.

Pilar

(1978)

My mother told me that Abuela Celia was an atheist before I even understood what the word meant. I liked the sound of it, the derision with which my mother pronounced it, and knew immediately it was what I wanted to become. I don’t know exactly when I stopped believing in God. It wasn’t as deliberate as deciding, at age six, to become an atheist, but more like an imperceptible sloughing of layers. One day I noticed there was no more skin to absently peel, just air where there’d been artifice.

A few weeks ago, I found photographs of Abuela Celia in my mother’s hosiery drawer. There was a picture of Abuela in 1931, standing under a tree in her T-strap shoes and wearing a flouncy dress with a polka-dotted bow and puffed sleeves. Abuela Celia’s fingers were tapered and delicate and rested on her hips. Her hair was parted on the right and came down to her shoulders, accentuating the mole by her lips. There was a tension at the corners of her mouth that could have veered toward sadness or joy. Her eyes told of experience she did not yet possess.

There were other photographs. Abuela Celia in Soroa with an orchid in her hair. In a cream linen suit descending from a train. At the beach with my mother and my aunt. Tía Felicia is in Abuela’s arms, a plump, pink-lozenge baby. My mother, unsmiling, skinny and dark from the sun, stands a distance away.

I have a trick to tell someone’s public face from their private one. If the person is left-handed, like Abuela Celia, the right side
of her face betrays her true feelings. I placed a finger over the left side of my grandmother’s face, and in photograph after photograph I saw the truth.

I feel much more connected to Abuela Celia than to Mom, even though I haven’t seen my grandmother in seventeen years. We don’t speak at night anymore, but she’s left me her legacy nonetheless—a love for the sea and the smoothness of pearls, an appreciation of music and words, sympathy for the underdog, and a disregard for boundaries. Even in silence, she gives me the confidence to do what I believe is right, to trust my own perceptions.