Dreaming in Cuban (25 page)

I notice Abuela Celia’s drop pearl earrings, the intricate settings, the fine gold strands looping through her lobes. There’s a cache of blue shadows in the pearls, a coolness in the smooth surfaces. When I was a baby, I bounced those pearls with my fingertips and heard the rhythm of my grandmother’s thoughts.

“I went for a swim last night,” Abuela Celia whispers to me alone. She looks through the arched window above the piano as if searching the waves to find the precise spot. Then she squeezes my hand. “I’m glad you remember, Pilar. I always knew you would.”

Mom replaces Abuela’s bedding with fresh sheets and a lamb’s wool blanket we brought from home. I help Abuela into a new flannel nightgown while Mom prepares bouillon and instant tapioca pudding. Abuela Celia tastes a spoonful of each, swallows a vitamin C tablet, and-falls into a deep sleep.

I pull the covers over Abuela’s shoulders, searching her face for a hint of my own. Her hair turned gray since I last saw her. Her black mole has faded. Her hands are stamped with faint liver spots.

I know what my grandmother dreams. Of massacres in distant countries, pregnant women dismembered in the squares. Abuela Celia walks among them mute and invisible. The thatched roofs steam in the morning air.

“Can you believe this
mierda?”
My mother snatches the picture of El Líder off Abuela’s night table. It’s framed in antique silver, wedged over the face of Abuelo Jorge, whose blue eye peers out from behind El Líder’s army cap. Mom walks to the edge of the ocean in her silk dress and stockings, her pleated skirt ballooning like a spinnaker, and flings the picture into the sea. Two sea gulls dive for it but surface with empty beaks. The horizon shifts like a bright line of buoys.

I wonder about the voyages to old colonies. Ocean liners gliding toward Africa and India. The women on board wore black elbow-length gloves. They drank from porcelain teacups, longed for moist earth to eat. They lingered with their impulses against the railings.

Perhaps my mother should have approached Havana by sea. Boarded a ship in Shanghai and crossed the Pacific wave by wave. Rounded Cape Horn, the coast of Brazil, stopped for carnival in Port-of-Spain.

Cuba is a peculiar exile, I think, an island-colony. We can reach it by a thirty-minute charter flight from Miami, yet never reach it all.

*  *  *

Later, while Abuela still sleeps, my mother and I walk to the corner of Calle Madrid. Mom stops a
guajiro
selling a few stalks of sugarcane. She chooses one and he removes the woody husk for her with a machete. Mom chews the cane until she tastes the
guarapo
, the sticky syrup inside.

“Try some, Pilar, but it’s not as sweet as I remember.”

Mom tells me how she used to stand on this corner and tell tourists that her mother was dead. They felt sorry for her and bought her ice cream. They patted her head. I try to picture my mother as a dark skinny girl, but all I can envision is a miniature
version of her today, an obese woman in a beige dress with matching pumps, and a look fearsome enough to stop the Lexington Avenue express in its tracks.

Suddenly, I want to know how I’ll die. I think I’d prefer self-immolation, on a stage perhaps, with all my paintings. I’d definitely want to go before I got too old, before anyone would have to wipe my ass or push me around in a wheelchair. I don’t want
my
granddaughter to have to take out my teeth and put them in a glass of water fizzing with tablets like I did with Abuelo Jorge.

My mother keeps talking but I’m only half listening. I have this image of Abuela Celia underwater, standing on a reef with tiny chrome fish darting by her face like flashes of light. Her hair is waving in the tide and her eyes are wide open. She calls to me but I can’t hear her. Is she talking to me from her dreams?

“You’d think they could make a few decent solid colors in this place,” my mother complains loudly so everyone can hear.

I look around me. The women on Calle Madrid are bare-armed in tight, sleeveless blouses. They wear stretch pants and
pañuelos
, match polka dots with stripes, plaids with flower prints. There’s a man in goggles pumping his sharpening wheel, a dull ax shrieking against its surface. A pair of frayed trousers stick out from beneath a ’55 Plymouth. Magnificent finned automobiles cruise grandly down the street like parade floats. I feel like we’re back in time, in a kind of Cuban version of an earlier America.

I think about the
Granma
, the American yacht El Líder took from Mexico to Cuba in 1956 on his second attempt to topple Batista. Some boat owner in Florida misspells “Grandma” and look what happens: a myth is born, a province is renamed, a Communist party newspaper is launched. What if the boat had been called
Barbara Ann
or
Sweetie Pie
or
Daisy
? Would history be different? We’re all tied to the past by flukes. Look at me, I got my name from Hemingway’s fishing boat.

Mom is talking louder and louder. My mouth goes dry, like the times I’ve gone with her to department stores with merchandise to return. Four or five people gather at a safe distance. It’s all the audience she needs.

“Look at those old American cars. They’re held together with rubber bands and paper clips and
still
work better than the new Russian ones.
Oye!”
she calls out to the bystanders. “You could have Cadillacs with leather interiors! Air conditioning! Automatic windows! You wouldn’t have to move your arms in the heat!” Then she turns to me, her face indignant. “Look how they laugh, Pilar! Like idiots! They can’t understand a word I’m saying! Their heads are filled with too much
compañero
this and
compañera
that! They’re brainwashed, that’s what they are!”

I pull my mother from the growing crowd. The language she speaks is lost to them. It’s another idiom entirely.

*  *  *

I’m lying on Tía Felicia’s childhood bed. My breathing falls in time with my mother’s, with the tempo of the waves outside. When I was a kid, Mom slept in air thin and nervous as a magnetic field, attracting small disturbances. She tossed and turned all night, as if she were wrestling ghosts in her dreams. Sometimes she’d wake up crying, clutching her stomach and moaning from deep inside a place I couldn’t understand. Dad would stroke her forehead until she fell asleep again.

My mother told me once that I slept just like her sister, with my mouth open wide enough to catch flies. I think Mom envied me my rest. But tonight it’s different. I’m the one who can’t sleep.

Abuela Celia is in her wicker swing looking out to sea. I settle in beside her. There’s a comforting wilderness to Abuela’s hands, to the odd-shaped calluses, the split skin on her thumb.

“When I was a girl, I used to dry tobacco leaves one at a time,” she begins in a quiet voice. “They stained my hands, my face, the rags on my body. One day, my mother bathed me in a tin tub behind our house and rubbed me with straw until my skin bled. I put on the ruffled dress she had made, a hat with ribbons, and patent-leather shoes, the first I ever wore. My feet felt precious, tied up like shiny parcels. Then she left me on a train and walked away.”

As I listen, I feel my grandmother’s life passing to me through her hands. It’s a steady electricity, humming and true.

“There was a man before your grandfather. A man I loved very much. But I made a promise to myself before your mother was born not to abandon her to this life, to train her as if for war. Your grandfather took me to an asylum after your mother was born. I told him all about you. He said it was impossible for me to remember the future. I grieved when your mother took you away. I begged her to let you stay.”

There’s a wrinkled hand in the window next door. The curtain drops, the shadow recedes. The gardenia tree fills the night with its scent. Women who outlive their daughters are orphans, Abuela tells me. Only their granddaughters can save them, guard their knowledge like the first fire.

Lourdes

Every way Lourdes turns there is more destruction, more decay.
Socialismo o muerte
. The words pain her as if they were knitted into her skin with thick needles and yarn. She wants to change the “o” to “e” ’s on every billboard with a bucket of red paint.
Socialismo es muerte
, she’d write over and over again until the
people believed it, until they rose up and reclaimed their country from that tyrant.

Last night, she was shocked to see how her nephew devoured his food at the tourist hotel in Boca Ciega. Ivanito refilled his plate six times with
palomilla
steak, grilled shrimp,
yuca
in garlic sauce, and hearts of palm salad. Ivanito told her that they didn’t get such good food at his boarding school, that it’s always chicken with rice or potatoes. They don’t do much to disguise it. Lourdes knows that Cuba saves its prime food for tourists or for export to Russia. Degradation, she thinks, goes hand in hand with the certainty of deprivation.

At the next table, a group of sunburnt French Canadians were enjoying baked lobsters and getting drunk on Cuba libres. Lourdes overheard one woman remarking on a Cuban boy who had flirted with her on the beach. So these were El Líder’s supporters overseas? Odious armchair socialists!
They
didn’t need coupons to eat!
They
didn’t have to wait three hours for a pitiful can of crabmeat! It had taken all of Lourdes’s resolve to remain calmly in her seat.

Celia picked at her food, not saying much. She ordered two dishes of coconut ice cream and ate them slowly with a soup spoon.

Was it true, Lourdes wonders, that the older you get the less you can savor and that sweetness is the last taste left on the tongue? Had her mother really aged so much? Could so much time have passed?

She is a complete stranger to me, Lourdes thinks. Papi was wrong. Some things can never change.

Her nieces look nothing like Felicia or the pictures Lourdes has seen of their father. Luz and Milagro are plain and squat, with wide noses, and appear to be a mixture of black and Indian. Could Felicia have slept with someone besides Hugo? It wouldn’t have surprised Lourdes. Nothing Felicia ever did surprised
her. Since they were children, her sister would do anything to be the center of attention, even take off her blouse in front of the neighborhood boys and charge them a nickel apiece to touch her breasts. Felicia used to burst in on conversations between Lourdes and her father, whining and stamping her feet until they included her. Of course they never spoke of anything important while she was present.

Pilar looked so clumsy last night dancing with Ivanito. The band was playing a cha-cha-cha, and Pilar moved jerkily, off the beat, sloppy and distracted. She dances like an American. Ivanito, though, is a wonderful dancer. His hips shift evenly, and his feet keep precise time to the music. He glides through his turns as if he were ice-skating.

When Lourdes finally danced with her nephew, she felt beholden to the congas, to a powerful longing to dance. Her body remembered what her mind had forgotten. Suddenly, she wanted to show her daughter the artistry of
true
dancing. Lourdes exaggerated her steps, flawless and lilting, teasing the rhythm seductively. She held the notes in her hips and her thighs, in the graceful arch of her back. Ivanito intuited her movements, dipping her with such reluctant fluidity that the music ached and blossomed around them. The crowd gradually pulled back to watch their unlikely elegance. Then someone clapped, and in an instant the room rumbled with applause as Lourdes spun and spun and spun across the polished dance floor.

This morning, Ivanito told Lourdes that dancing with her had reminded him of his mother. He’d meant it as a compliment, but his words ruined the spell of the dance for her, ruined its very memory. But Lourdes said nothing. Yesterday was Ivanito’s birthday. He is thirteen years old. What, Lourdes asks herself, does the boy have to look forward to in this country?

Lourdes is driving along the north highway to Varadero in the black Oldsmobile she rented from a neighbor. She admires
the sea, a calm, brilliant turquoise to her left, and the familiar pattern of royal palms dotting the landscape. She remembers the summer vacation she spent crisscrossing the island with her father, stopping in the plazas and main streets of every town and village from here to Guantánamo. He used to straighten his tie and adjust the angle of his hat in the rearview mirror before pulling his sample fans and electric brooms from the trunk. Lourdes waited patiently for him in the front seat, and each time he returned with an order she’d throw her arms around him and kiss him on the cheek. Her father would blush with pleasure.

Lourdes drives through the city of Matanzas along its famous bay. It was her favorite stopover that summer because of the Bellamar caves nearby. It seemed the coolest, most magical place on the island. Her wandering eye would transform the stalagmites and stalactites into sculptures of hanging alligators, witches’ claws, or the face of her hated history teacher.

As she reaches the narrow Hicacos peninsula, Lourdes searches for the outline of the Hotel Internacional at the far end of Varadero Beach. She and her husband had spent their honeymoon at the hotel. She remembers the men in white tuxedos, the women encased in their strapless gowns, rubies fastened to their ears. There were no views of the moon or the peninsula of powdery sand from the gambling rooms, only the lights of the chandeliers enticing them to stay. One night, Lourdes won six hundred dollars at the roulette table.

Today, the town is fallen to pieces. Only the du Pont mansion has been somewhat maintained. Lourdes wishes Ivanito were with her so she could point out the opulence—the nine-hole golf course, the landing dock for the seaplane, the Carrara marble floors. It’s impossible, Lourdes thinks, for failure to argue with success.

She climbs to the top-floor ballroom, with its panoramic view of the bay. The shadowed waters conceal a coral reef offshore. Lourdes remembers paddling gently over the reefs with Rufino
the day after their wedding night. Once the first pain subsided, it was as if a rainstorm were falling between her legs, flooding her entire body. She would have willingly drowned.