Dreaming in Cuban (24 page)
Authors: Cristina Garcia
April 11, 1956
Gustavo,
Spring again. What happened to us, Gustavo? We used to stay up whole nights, there was so much to learn about each other. Then the morning after I finally slept, I awoke with only your scent on my skin. When I opened the shutters of our room, I saw you rushing across the plaza. There was a crowd protesting I don’t know what, shaking placards in the air. I called out to you but you couldn’t hear me. That was the last I saw of you.
I’ve asked myself many times whether this was better than watching you grow old and indifferent beside me.
I remember when I applied for a job at El Encanto, the director wanted me to be a model, to walk up and down the aisles in gowns and hats draped with chiffon. The salesmen bought me perfume and invited me to lunch. But they couldn’t talk to me about why families of
guajiros
slept in the city’s parks under flashing Coca-Cola signs. Those men only murmured sweet nonsense to me, trying in vain to flatter me.
You were different,
mi amor
. You expected much more of me. That is why I loved you.
Yours as always,
Celia
September 11, 1956
Querido
Gustavo,
Lourdes will marry Rufino in three months. Jorge blames himself for traveling so much during her childhood. Felicia is sullen and envious and barely speaks to her sister. Even Javier is unsettled by all the emotion.
Two weeks ago, we had dinner with Rufino’s parents. Don Guillermo looked like an oafish policeman, right down to his elephantine ears and the brass buttons on his cuffs. He spoke the entire evening of the importance of maintaining good relations with the Americans and insisted that they are the key to our future. When I reminded him of the Platt Amendment, of the way the Americans have interfered in our affairs from the very beginning, he waved his fat, jeweled hand dismissively and turned to Jorge, continuing his pontifications.
Everyone knows that the Mafia runs Don Guillermo’s casinos and that he lunches with Batista on Thursdays at the Havana Yacht Club. People say that Batista had to pay a million dollars to become a member because his skin is not light enough. Don Guillermo fears the rebels, although he pretends not to. This gives me great pleasure.
His wife, Doña Zaida, is no better. During dinner, I heard cries as if there were a cat trapped above our heads. Later I learned that Zaida keeps her mother, La Muñeca, locked upstairs. Lourdes told me that La Muñeca is as Indian as they come, from Costa Rica. She refuses to wear shoes and used to carry her children and grandchildren in slings on her back. For this, Zaida keeps her mother a prisoner. How Rufino survived such horrid parents is a mystery to me.
Love,
Celia
October 11, 1956
Querido
Gustavo,
I awoke one night startled and aroused. I touched Jorge tenderly and he sat upright with fear. That’s how long it’s been between us. I told him I wanted to be with him again and he began to cry. I held him for a long time and then we made love slowly, with discovery. He told me that I’ve never been more beautiful, and I almost believed him.
Celia
November 11, 1956
Mi querido
Gustavo,
Zaida Puente changed all my plans for Lourdes’s wedding and arranged a spectacle instead at the Tropicana Club. She’s invited hundreds of society people whom she doesn’t even know, and insists that the food be French—pheasants and eels and God knows what else. Not a suckling pig in sight! Then she has the nerve to tell me that my plain taffeta dress is
unsuitable
for the Tropicana. That woman is a snake, an insufferable snake!
Love,
Celia
December 11, 1956
Gustavo,
The rebels attacked again, this time in Oriente. They’re hiding in the Sierra Maestra. People say the rebel leader sleeps in his uniform and olive cap, that his hair and beard are one, like a bear’s, and his eyes are just as fearless. The tension here is unbearable. Everyone wants Batista out.
Jorge is afraid that if the rebels win they’ll throw out the Americans and that he’ll lose his job before he can get his
pension. But I tell him that there’ll be
more
jobs for everyone when they throw that thief out of the palace.
Love,
Celia
P.S. The wedding was a circus, as I expected. The Tropicana was like a brothel, red lights everywhere, making me dizzy. The navy commander’s wife, unaccustomed to the rich foods and the imported champagne, vomited on the ballroom floor. And in the confusion, Silvio Arroyo Pedros, a retired Spanish matador (have you heard of him?), and a devotee of Havana’s most notorious fleshpots, broke his clavicle dancing with the widow Doña Victoria del Paso. They say that poor Doña Victoria dipped him too deeply in a moment of long-repressed passion. The ordeal lasted until morning when skinny women in sequined bodices served us scrambled eggs and bacon. Lourdes and Rufino appeared dazed but not unhappy. Zaida Puente, of course, had her picture in all the newspapers the next day, posing in her plum moiré gown like a would-be queen. She’ll be among the first to hang, no doubt.
June 11, 1958
Querido
Gustavo,
I took a walk on the beach late this afternoon. The moon appeared early, absorbing the lingering light. Each shell echoed a song my bones could hear. I have something to celebrate, Gustavo. I’m going to be a grandmother.
Tu
Celia
(1980)
Six Days in April
I
t is long past midnight. Celia searches the cardboard box containing the few articles Felicia left behind and finds her daughter’s black bathing suit. None of the foam or the underwire remains in the pointed brassière, and the seat is worn to near obscenity.
Celia remembers Felicia in another bathing suit, a tiny lemon-yellow one she wore the year the sea retreated beyond the horizon, the year the archaeology of the ocean floor revealed itself—catacombs of ancient coral, lunar rocks exposed to the sun. Felicia squatted, examining the shells as if they were unexpected gems, then rearranged them on the sand. Around her, neighbors scrambled with wooden buckets, looting the beach for stranded fish and crabs. The sun baked their footsteps hard as fossils. Then the tidal wave hit, wiping their traces from shore.
The day before the funeral, Celia had taken the morning bus from Santa Teresa del Mar to the house on Palmas Street. She no longer hitchhiked. She gathered up Felicia’s nightgown with the blue roses, Tía Alicia’s tarnished peacock brooch (which Celia
had given to Felicia for her fifteenth birthday), a stump of orange lipstick, two unraveling stretch shorts, and her daughter’s
santería
clothing.
Celia found unused ration cards permitting Felicia one and a half pounds of chicken per month, two ounces of coffee every fifteen days, two packs of cigarettes per week, and four meters of cloth per year. Her daughter had had little use for these provisions during the last months of her life.
Felicia had left a note with Herminia saying she wanted to be buried as a
santera
, and Celia could not refuse her daughter’s last request. In the mortuary, her friends from the
casa de santo
dressed Felicia in her initiation gown, her crown, and her necklaces. They arranged a pouch of seashells on her breast together with morsels of smoked fish and a few grains of corn. Into a large gourd they placed her cut hair and head dyes, okra, ashes, and wisps of dried corn silks. They covered the gourd with crossed cloths, then killed a black chicken and laid it over the offerings.
Later, they passed colorful handkerchiefs over Felicia’s body, all the while grieving in low voices to purify her corpse. By the time they finished, the terrible lumps on Felicia’s head had disappeared, and her skin was as smooth as the pink lining of a conch. Her eyes, too, had regained their original green.
After they removed the coffin to the street, the
santeros
broke a clay urn behind Felicia’s old De Soto, the funeral car, and sprinkled it with cold water to refresh her for the final journey. A block before the cemetery, the car broke down and Felicia’s coffin had to be carried the rest of the way by eight pallbearers in white.
At the entrance to the cemetery, a tall man stood in shreds and patches, his face slackly wrapped in scarves. He stood perfectly still and seemed to breathe through the dark open slit by his eyes, sucking sorrow from the air like venom.
*
Celia undresses noiselessly in the dark. She opens the closet door and studies her image in the speckled mirror. She feels a stain descend within her, like water through a plaster wall. It spreads, slow and sodden, loosening her teeth, weighing down her limbs, darkening the scar on her withered chest. Celia’s remaining breast droops by her elbow, the indifferent nipple facing downward. Her abdomen, though, is as unmarred as a childless woman’s. Between her legs, sparse hair clings to a swell of flesh.
She examines her hands next, bloated and twisted as driftwood, but she cannot reclaim them. Her legs, too, are unrecognizable—the enlarged knees, the calf muscles shorter and more angular than in her youth, her wounded feet. Her face, at least, is familiar. The faded mole by her lips holds the folds of thin flesh in place like a flat black button. And her drop pearl earrings still hang stiffly from her lobes.
Celia slips on Felicia’s sheer bathing suit. Outside, a crescent moon mocks her from its perch. She strides toward the water, and swims with brisk strokes far out to sea. The sky is dimmed of stars and Celia cannot identify their milky lights, their waning conclusions.
Pilar
My mother and I pass billboards advertising the revolution as if it were a new brand of cigarette. We drive by the Plaza de la Revolución, where, the taxi driver explains, El Líder holds his biggest rallies. He tells us that there’s more trouble for El Líder, that a busload of people seeking asylum crashed the gates of the Peruvian embassy early this morning. Mom hardly listens. She seems to be in her own world. The driver takes a detour along the Malecón, pointing out La Punta Fortress, and the Morro
Castle across the harbor. All Mom says is that the buildings in Havana are completely decayed, held up by elaborate configurations of wooden planks. What I notice most are the balconies.
The driver turns onto Palmas Street. The houses are painted a garish yellow. They’re chipped and flaking and look smeared with confetti. We stop in front of Tía Felicia’s house, the house in which Abuelo Jorge grew up. The windows are shuttered tight and the square of front yard is littered with broken pottery and soiled flags. My mother says there used to be sparrows in the tamarind tree, heavy once with fat clusters of pods.
Mom doesn’t bother to get out of the car or ask the neighbors what happened to her sister. She says she’s expected this since Abuelo Jorge spoke to her on the Brooklyn Bridge. As for me, I’m not sure what to expect, only that I’ll see Abuela Celia again, like I learned after my ninth herbal bath.
Since that day in Morningside Park, I can hear fragments of people’s thoughts, glimpse scraps of the future. It’s nothing I can control. The perceptions come without warnings or explanations, erratic as lightning.
“Take us to Santa Teresa del Mar,” Mom orders the driver. She closes her eyes. I think it’s less painful for her than looking out the window.
We take the coastal highway to my grandmother’s house. I look at the sea I once planned to cross by fishing boat. Trade winds roll the water in great masses. A hurricane is submerged. There are dolphins and parrotfish, hawksbill turtles and shovelnose sharks. There’s a shipwreck in the Gulf of Mexico filled with ingots and doubloons. Men in wet suits will find the galleon three years from now. They will celebrate with champagne and murder.
Four fresh bodies are floating in the Straits of Florida. It’s a family from Cárdenas. They stole a boat from a fisherman. It
collapsed in the current early this morning. A boatload of Haitians will leave Gonaïves next Thursday. They will carry the phone numbers of friends in Miami and the life savings of relatives. They will sail to the Tropic of Cancer and sink into the sea.
I’ve brought a sketchbook with me and a toolbox of brushes and paints, mostly watercolors. I wanted to bring my bass along but Mom said there’d be no room. She’s crammed every inch of our suitcases with cheap sneakers and tacky clothing from the Latino stores on Fourteenth Street. I want to do a few sketches of Abuela Celia, maybe even a formal portrait of her on her wicker swing. I think she’d like that.
Mom jumps from the taxi in her sling-back pumps and runs past the giant bird of paradise bushes, past the rotting pawpaw tree, and up the three front steps of Abuela Celia’s house. I follow her. The cement shows through the floor where the tiles are missing. It’s a patterned tile, with pastel buds and climbing vines. It hasn’t been mopped for months. A faded mantilla, soft as a moth, is draped over the sofa. There’s a chalk-white piano and a refrigerator, a bulk of rust, against the far wall.
My mother inspects the bedroom she used to share with Tía Felicia, vacant now except for a frilly party dress hanging in the closet. She crosses the hallway to Abuela’s room. A lace tablecloth is spread on the bed. A photograph of El Líder is on the night table. Mom turns from it in disgust.
I find Abuela sitting motionless on her wicker swing, wearing a worn bathing suit, her hair stuck haphazardly to her skull, her feet strangely lacerated. I kneel before her and press my cheek to hers, still salty from the sea. We hold each other close.
“Dios mío
, what happened to you?” Mom screams when she finds us. She scurries about preparing a hot bath with water boiled on the stove.
Abuela is missing a breast. There’s a scar like a purple zipper on her chest. Mom holds a finger to her lips and flashes me a look that warns, “Pretend not to notice.”
We wash Abuela’s hair and rinse it with conditioner, then we pat her dry with towels as if this could somehow heal her. Abuela says nothing. She submits to my mother like a solemn novitiate. Mom untangles Abuela’s hair with a wide-toothed comb. “You could have died of pneumonia!” she insists, and plugs in a Conair dryer that blows out the lights in the living room.
