Dreaming in Cuban (5 page)

Our house is on a cement plot near the East River. At night, especially in the summer when the sound carries, I hear the low whistles of the ships as they leave New York harbor. They travel south past the Wall Street skyscrapers, past Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, past Bayonne, New Jersey, and the Bay Ridge
Channel and under the Verrazano Bridge. Then they make a left at Coney Island and head out to the Atlantic. When I hear those whistles, I want to go with them.

When Minnie wakes up, she says she knows she shouldn’t be telling me this, that I’m too young to hear it, but I swear I’m thirteen and that seems to satisfy her. She’s seventeen and a half. Minnie says she’s going down to Florida to see a doctor her boyfriend knows and get herself an abortion. She doesn’t have any children and she doesn’t want any either, she tells me. Her voice is flat and even and I hold her hand until she falls asleep again.

I think about how the New Guinea islanders didn’t connect sex with pregnancy. They believed that children float on logs in the heavens until the spirits of pregnant women claim them. I’m not too tired so I stay up reading the neon signs off the highway. The missing letters make for weird messages. There’s a Shell station missing the “S.”

My favorite, though, is one, I swear it, in North Carolina that says Cock—s, with an electric martini minus the olive.

No matter how hard I try, though, I keep seeing the bloated face of that aging beauty queen bouncing off the lights into my father’s outstretched hands. I guess my parents don’t see all that much of each other anymore except when Mom rings for Dad. He always looks real worried, too. Dad used to help Mom in the bakery but she lost patience with him. As handy as he is for some things, he couldn’t get the hang of the pastry business, at least not the way my mother runs it.

These days, Mom goes through her employees like those damn pecan sticky buns she eats. Nobody ever lasts more than a day or two. She hires the real down-and-outs, immigrants from Russia or Pakistan, people who don’t speak any English, figuring
she can get them cheap. Then she screams at them half the day because they don’t understand what she’s saying. Mom thinks they’re all out to steal from her so she rifles through their coats and shopping bags when they’re working. Like what are they going to steal? A butter cookie? A French bread? She told me to check someone’s purse once and I said no fucking way. She believes she’s doing them a favor by giving them a job and breaking them in to American life. Hell, if she’s the welcome wagon, they’d better hitch a ride with someone else.

I remember when we first came to New York. We lived in a hotel in Manhattan for five months while my parents waited for the revolution to fail or for the Americans to intervene in Cuba. My mother used to take me for walks in Central Park. Once, an agent from the Art Linkletter show stopped us at the Children’s Zoo and asked my mother if I could be on the show. But I didn’t speak English yet so he passed.

Mom used to dress me in a little maroon woolen coat with a black velveteen collar and cuffs. The air was different from Cuba’s. It had a cold, smoked smell that chilled my lungs. The skies looked newly washed, streaked with light. And the trees were different, too. They looked on fire. I’d run through great heaps of leaves just to hear them rustle like the palm trees during hurricanes in Cuba. But then I’d feel sad looking up at the bare branches and thinking about Abuela Celia. I wonder how my life would have been if I’d stayed with her.

I saw my grandfather, Abuela Celia’s husband, when he came to New York to get treated for his stomach cancer. They took him off the plane in a wheelchair. Abuelo Jorge’s face was dry and brittle like old parchment. He slept in my bed, which my mother fixed up with a new nubby beige bedspread, and I slept on a cot next to him. Mom bought him a black-and-white television and Abuelo watched the fights and the Spanish
novelas
on
Channel 47. No matter how much my mother bathed him, he always smelled of burnt eggs and oranges.

My grandfather was so weak that he’d usually fall asleep by eight o’clock. I’d take his teeth out for him and put them in a glass of water fizzing with denture tablets. He’d whistle softly through his gums all night. Sometimes he’d have nightmares and box the air with his fists. “Come here, you good-for-nothing Spaniard!” he’d shout. “Come and fight like a man!” But then he’d settle down, muttering a few curses.

When Mom first started taking him for cobalt treatments I imagined sharp blue beams aimed at his stomach. A strange color for healing, I thought. Nothing we eat is blue, not
blue
blue like my grandfather’s eyes, so why didn’t the doctors change the color of those damn beams to green? We eat green, it’s healthy. If only they had changed those lights to green, I thought, a nice jade green, he’d have gotten better.

My grandfather told me once that I reminded him of Abuela Celia. I took that as a compliment. He used to write her letters every day, when he still had the strength, long letters in an old-fashioned script with flourishes and curlicues. You wouldn’t expect him to have such fine handwriting. They were romantic letters, too. He read one out loud to me. He called Abuela Celia his “dove in the desert.” Now he can’t write to her much. And he’s too proud to ask any of us to do it for him. Abuela Celia writes back to him every once in a while, but her letters are full of facts, about this meeting or that, nothing more. They make my grandfather sad.

Minnie rides as far as Jacksonville. I’m curious so I look out the window to see who’s come to pick her up. But by the time the bus pulls away she’s still waiting.

The scenery gets so dull in Florida that I finally fall asleep. I remember one dream. It’s midnight and there are people around me praying on the beach. I’m wearing a white dress and turban
and I can hear the ocean nearby, only I can’t see it. I’m sitting on a chair, a kind of throne, with antlers fastened to the back. The people lift me up high and walk with me in a slow procession toward the sea. They’re chanting in a language I don’t understand. I don’t feel scared, though. I can see the stars and the moon and the black sky revolving overhead. I can see my grandmother’s face.

T
he late-afternoon downpour sends the students’ mothers scurrying under the coral tree in the yard of the Nikolai Lenin Elementary School. A lizard vibrates in the crook of the tree’s thickest branch. Celia stands alone in the rain in her leather pumps and jade housedress waiting for her twin granddaughters to return from their camping trip to the Isle of Pines. It seems to her that she has spent her entire life waiting for others, for something or other to happen. Waiting for her lover to return from Spain. Waiting for the summer rains to end. Waiting for her husband to leave on his business trips so she could play Debussy on the piano.

The waiting began in 1934, the spring before she married Jorge del Pino, when she was still Celia Almeida. She was selling American photographic equipment at El Encanto, Havana’s most prestigious department store, when Gustavo Sierra de Armas strode up to her display case and asked to see Kodak’s smallest camera. He was a married Spanish lawyer from Granada and said that he wanted to document the murders in Spain
through a peephole in his overcoat. When the war came, no one could refute his evidence.

Gustavo returned to Celia’s counter again and again. He brought her butterfly jasmine, the symbol of patriotism and purity, and told her that Cuba, too, would one day be free of bloodsuckers. Gustavo sang to her beauty mark, the
lunar
by her mouth. He bought her drop pearl earrings.

When Gustavo left her to return to Spain, Celia was inconsolable. The spring rains made her edgy, the greenery hurt her eyes. She saw mourning doves peck at carrion on her doorstep and visited the
botánicas
for untried potions.

“I want a long, easy solace,” she told the
gitanas
.

She bought tiger root from Jamaica to scrape, a cluster of indigo, translucent crimson seeds, and lastly, a tiny burlap pouch of herbs. She boiled teas and honeycombs, steamed open her pores, adjusted the shutters, and drank.

Celia took to her bed by early summer and stayed there for the next eight months. That she was shrinking there was no doubt. Celia had been a tall woman, a head taller than most men, with a full bosom and slender, muscled legs. Soon she was a fragile pile of opaque bones, with yellowed nails and no monthly blood. Her great-aunt Alicia wrapped Celia’s thinning hair with colorful bandannas, making her appearance all the more startling.

The doctors could find nothing wrong with Celia. They examined her through monocles and magnifying glasses, with metal instruments that embossed her chest and forearms, thighs and forehead with a blue geometry. With pencil-thin flashlights they peered into her eyes, which hung like lanterns in her sleepless face.
They prescribed vitamins and sugar pills and pills to make her sleep, but Celia diminished, ever more pallid, in her bed.

Neighbors suggested their own remedies: arnica compresses, packed mud from a holy well, ground elephant tusk from the Niger to mix in her daily broth. They dug up the front yard for buried maledictions but found nothing. The best cooks on Palmas Street offered Celia coconut custard,
guayaba
and cheese tortes, bread pudding, and pineapple cakes. Vilma Castillo lit a baked Alaska that set the kitchen aflame and required many buckets of water to extinguish. After the fire, few people came to visit Celia. “She is determined to die,” they concluded.

Desperate, her great-aunt called a
santera
from Regla, who draped Celia with beaded necklaces and tossed shells to divine the will of the gods.

“Miss Celia, I see a wet landscape in your palm,” the little
santera
said, then turned to Tía Alicia. “She will survive the hard flames.”

Celia wrote her first letter to Gustavo Sierra de Armas upon the insistence of Jorge del Pino, who came courting during her housebound exile. Jorge was fourteen years older than she and wore round steel glasses that shrank his blue eyes. Celia had known him since she was a child, when her mother had sent her from the countryside to live with her great-aunt in Havana.

“Write to that fool,” Jorge insisted. “If he doesn’t answer, you will marry me.”

For twenty-five years, Celia wrote her Spanish lover a letter on the eleventh day of each month, then stored it in a satin-covered chest beneath her bed. Celia has removed her drop pearl earrings only nine times, to clean them. No one ever remembers her without them.

*  *  *

Celia’s twin granddaughters recount how on their camping trip they fed midget bananas to a speckled horse and examined horned earthworms peculiar to the island. Celia knows that Luz and Milagro are always alone with one another, speaking in symbols only they understand. Luz, older by twelve minutes, usually speaks for the two of them. The sisters are double stones of a single fruit, darker than their mother, with rounder features and their father’s inky eyes. They have identical birthmarks, diminutive caramel crescents over their left eyelids, and their braids hang in duplicate ropes down their backs.

The three of them hitch a ride to the house on Palmas Street. Their driver, a balding man with gently serrated teeth, shakes Celia’s hand with fingers the texture of cork. She correctly surmises that he is a plumber. Celia has prided herself on guessing occupations since her days at El Encanto, when she could precisely gauge how much a customer had to spend on a camera. Her biggest sales went to Americans from Pennsylvania. What did they take so many pictures of up there?

The driver turns left on Palmas Street with its matched rows of closely set two-story houses, all painted a flamboyant yellow. Last fall, the line at the hardware store snaked around the block for the surplus paint, left over from a hospital project on the other side of Havana. Felicia bought the maximum amount allowed, eight gallons, and spent two Sundays painting the house with borrowed brushes and ladders.

“After all,” she said, “you could die waiting for the right shade of blue.”

The air is damp from the afternoon rains. Celia gathers her granddaughters close. “Your grandfather died last week,” she tells them, then kisses each one on the cheek. She takes Luz and Milagro by the hand and walks up the front steps of the house on Palmas Street.

“My girls! My girls!” Felicia waves at them frantically from the second-story bedroom window, lost behind the tamarind tree heavy with sparrows and tawny pods. Her face is spotted and enlivened with heat. She is wearing her American-made flannel nightgown with the pale blue roses. It is buttoned to the top of her throat. “I made coconut ice cream!”

Store-bought ice cream is cheap, but for Felicia, making ice cream from scratch is part of the ritual that began after her husband left in 1966. Felicia’s delusions commence suddenly, frequently after heavy rains. She rarely deviates from her original pattern, her hymn of particulars.

Felicia coaxes her young son to join her. Celia and her granddaughters enter the house on Palmas Street, to find Ivanito, his dimpled hands clasped, singing the lyrics to a melodramatic love song.

*  *  *

That night, Celia lies awake in the bare dining room of the yellow house on Palmas Street, the house that once belonged to her mother-in-law and where Felicia now lives. Sleep is an impossibility
in this room, in this bed with memories that plague her for days. This house, Celia thinks, has brought only misfortune.

She remembers when she returned from her honeymoon in Soroa with a white orchid in her hair, one that Jorge had clipped from the terraced gardens high above the sulfur baths. Her mother-in-law, who had a fleshy-tipped nose and a pendulous, manly face, snatched the flower from Celia’s ear and crushed it in her hand.