Dreaming in Cuban (7 page)
Authors: Cristina Garcia
When her granddaughters return, Celia presses her thumb against the rotting onions, indenting them. She picks the pebbles from the rice and rinses it in the sink. Tufts of feathers sprout from the chicken’s skull, and its feet secrete a sticky liquid. Celia sterilizes the bird over a flame and watches the puckered skin blacken and curl. She remembers her husband’s fastidiousness, his war against germs. How he drove her crazy with his complaints!
What was it he read to her once? About how, long ago, the New World was attached to Europe and Africa? Yes, and the continents pulled away slowly, painfully after millions of years. The Americas are still inching westward and will eventually collide with Japan. Celia wonders whether Cuba will be left behind, alone in the Caribbean sea with its faulted and folded mountains, its conquests, its memories.
She finishes chopping the onions and stirs them in a frying pan with a teaspoon of lard. They turn a golden yellow, translucent and sweet.
March 11, 1935
Mi querido
Gustavo,
In two weeks I will marry Jorge del Pino. He’s a good man and says he loves me. We walk along the beach and he shields me with a parasol. I’ve told him about you, about our meetings in the Hotel Inglaterra. He tells me to forget you.
I think of our afternoons in those measured shafts of light, that spent light, and I wish I could live underwater. Maybe then my skin would absorb the sea’s consoling silence. I’m a prisoner on this island, Gustavo, and I cannot sleep.
Yours forever,
Celia
April 11, 1935
Querido
Gustavo,
I’m writing to you from my honeymoon. We’re in Soroa. It hasn’t rained a single day since we’ve been here. Jorge makes loves to me as if he were afraid I might shatter. He kisses my eyes and ears, sealing them from you. He brushes
my forehead with moist petals to wipe away memory. His kindnesses make me cry.
I am still yours,
Celia
January n, 1936
Gustavo,
I am pregnant.
Celia
August 11, 1936
Querido
Gustavo,
A fat wax grows inside me. It’s looting my veins. I rock like a buoy in the harbor. There’s no relief from the heat. I rinse my dresses and put them on wet to cool off. I hope to die of pneumonia.
They poison my food and milk but still I swell. The baby lives on venom. Jorge has been away in Oriente for two months. He’s afraid to come home.
If it’s a boy, I’ll leave him. I’ll sail to Spain, to Granada, to your kiss, Gustavo.
I love you,
Celia
September 11, 1936
Gustavo,
The baby is porous. She has no shadow. The earth in its hunger has consumed it. She reads my thoughts, Gustavo. They are transparent.
December 11, 1936
G.,
J. has betrayed me. They’ve hung gold stars in the hallways. There’s a northern tree with metallic leaves that spin
in the sun. Malaria feeds the hungry clocks, the feverish hands spin and stop. They flay my skin and hang it to dry. I see it whipping on the line. The food is inedible. They digest their own faces here. How’s the weather there? Send me olives stuffed with anchovies. Thank you.
C.
January 11, 1937
Mi amor
,
The pills they watch me swallow make my thoughts stick like cotton. I lie to the doctors. I tell them my father raped me, that I eat rusted sunsets, scald children in my womb. They burn my skull with procedures. They tell me I’m improving.
Jorge visits me on Sundays. I tell him to line up the electric brooms and turn them all on at once. He doesn’t laugh. He sits with me on a wrought-iron bench. Nature is at right angles here. No bougainvillea. No heliconia. No flowering cactus burning myths in the desert. He holds my hands and speaks of Lourdes. Others surround us in the sun. Their words are muted as the winds they allow through the netting. It’s a sweet-scented rot.
I’ve made a friend here, Felicia Gutiérrez. She killed her husband. Doused him with gasoline. Lit a match. She is unrepentant. We’re planning to escape.
Tu
Celia
February 11, 1937
Querido
Gustavo,
They killed Felicia. She burned in her bed. They say it was a cigarette but none of the guards will admit to giving her one. Four men carried her ashes and bones. She trailed a white liquid that I could not read. The director wiped it up himself. No one else would.
I leave tomorrow. Jorge tells me we’ll live by the sea. I must pack. My clothes smell of mud.
Celia
November 11, 1938
Mi
Gustavo,
I’ve named my new baby Felicia. Jorge says I’m dooming her. She’s beautiful and fat with green eyes that fix on me disarmingly. I’ll be a good mother this time. Felicia loves the sea. Her skin is translucent, much like the fish that feed along the reefs. I read her poetry on the porch swing.
Lourdes is two and a half years old. She walks to the beach on her skinny brown legs. Strangers buy her ice cream and she tells them that I’m dead. Jorge calls her every night when he travels. “When are you coming home, Papi? When are you coming home?” she asks him. On the day he returns, even if he’s not expected until midnight, she wears her frilly party dress and waits for him by the front door.
Love,
Celia
February 11, 1939
Mi querido
Gustavo,
I get up while it’s still dark to see the fishermen push their boats into the sea. I think of everyone who might be awake with me—insomniacs, thieves, anarchists, women with children who drowned in their baths. They’re my companions. I watch the sun rise, burning its collection of memories, and I draw strength for another day. At dusk I grieve, thinking the earth is dying. I sleep a little.
Yours always,
Celia
July 11, 1940
Querido
Gustavo,
Last week, Jorge took us on a Sunday drive through Pinar del Rio province. The sight of mountains left me breathless. My vision is so accustomed to a shifting horizon, to the metamorphoses of ocean and clouds, that to see such a mass of rock, immovable against the sky, was astonishing. Nature had seemed more flexible. We drove past fields of sugarcane, rice, pineapples, and tobacco. Acres of coffee trees stretched in all directions.
We stopped in the capital for lunch. It reminds me of Havana when I was a girl. Hibiscus grew everywhere, as if painted by legions of artists. The pace was slow and there were rambling houses with columned verandas. I thought of Tía Alicia, her hair braided like mine with a blue ribbon, sitting at the piano playing Schumann’s
Kinderszenen
, her peacock brooch at her throat.
There were always children in the house who took lessons for a few months or a year or two, and shifted uneasily on the piano bench. They relaxed in her presence, brought her crayon drawings or flowers they had picked from their mothers’ gardens. Tía Alicia would take the canaries from their cage and let the children feed them seeds or grains of rice they’d saved from their lunch.
I remember Tía Alicia’s coconut cakes, the layers inflated with air. Her hands were always scented with the violet water she combed into my hair. She took me for long walks through the city’s parks and along its boulevards, revealing intriguing histories. She’s the most romantic person I’ve ever known.
Lourdes and Felicia were quiet most of the day, staring out the window. Felicia usually follows Lourdes around, imitating her sister until Lourdes gets exasperated. But today the two of them hardly said a word, I don’t know why.
Jorge coaxed me to try a
guayabita del pinar
, a local drink, and I surprised myself by finishing four. The girls shared a plate of pork chops.
Much love,
Celia
September 11, 1940
Querido
Gustavo,
I’m sorry I didn’t write to you last month but Jorge was in a terrible accident and I had to rush to Holguín with the girls. He crashed his car into a milk truck and broke both arms, his right leg, and four ribs. He was in the hospital for over a month and has splinters of glass in his spine that the doctors can’t remove. Jorge is home now and moves around on crutches but he won’t be able to go back to work for a while. Lourdes refuses to leave his side. I’ve set up a child’s cot for her next to his bed. Felicia cries and wants to play with them but they ignore her.
Jorge is a good man, Gustavo. It surprised me how my heart jumped when I heard he’d been hurt. I cried when I saw him bandaged in white, his arms taut in midair like a sea gull. His eyes apologized for having disturbed me. Can you imagine? I discovered I loved him at that moment. Not a passion like ours, Gustavo, but love just the same. I think he understands this and is at peace.
I’d forgotten the poverty of the countryside. From the trains, everything is visible: the bare feet, the crooked backs, the bad teeth. At one station there was a little girl, about six, who wore only a dirty rag that didn’t cover her private parts. She stretched out her hands as the passengers left the train, and in the bustle I saw a man stick his finger in her. I cried out and he hurried away. I called to
the girl and lowered our basket of food through the window. She ran off like a limping mongrel, dragging it beside her.
Yours,
Celia
Pilar Puente
I
t’s hot as hell when I finally get off that bus. The sun is burning my scalp, so I duck into a luncheonette. Everything looks antiquated, like the five-and-dime counters in New York. They’re the best places to get a BLT, so that’s what I order here, with an orange soda.
If I call my father’s parents, forget it. I’ll be on the next plane to New York. Abuela Zaida, my grandmother, would crow for days about how Mom can’t control me, how I’m running wild like the American kids with no respect for their elders. Those two hate each other from way back. Something happened between them before I was born.
There’s one cousin down here who’s not too bad. His nickname is Blanquito because he’s so white he has to wear a hat and T-shirt even when he’s swimming. I got to know him at Abuelo Guillermo’s eightieth birthday party two years ago in Miami. I figure if I can get hold of him, he’ll hide me for a day
or two, then take me to Key West, where I’ll get a boat to Cuba. Maybe he’ll even come with me.
It’s Saturday so I’ll have to go looking for him at home. The only problem is that the entire Puente tribe practically lives at his house. Blanquito’s parents have one of these ranch-style jobs in Coral Gables with a pool in the back. The rest of the family lives in apartments, so on weekends my uncles gather there to watch football and eat themselves sick.
I look up the number in the phone book. Blanquito’s mother answers so I hang up. I’d recognize her breathy voice anywhere. She’s always on the verge of collapsing from one imaginary illness or another. Last I heard, she thinks she has lumbago. That’s nothing compared to some of the other diseases she says she’s suffered from—tetanus, malaria, sprue, typhus. You name it, she’s had it. Her diseases are usually tropical and debilitating, but only occasionally deadly.
I stop in a church not far from their house. I swore I’d never set foot in anything remotely Catholic again but it feels good to get out of the sun. It’s dim and cool, and blue and red dots float in front of my eyes like after somebody snaps a flash picture. I remember how the nuns got upset when I called the Spanish inquisitors Nazis. My mother pleaded with the nuns to take me back. Catholics are always dying to forgive somebody, so if you say you’re sorry, you’re usually home free. But this time, they said, I’d gone too far.
Our neighborhood was mostly Jewish then and my mother was always saying, “They killed Christ! They pushed in the crown of thorns!” I felt sorry for the Jews getting thrown out of Egypt and having to drag themselves across the desert to find a home. Even though I’ve been living in Brooklyn all my life, it doesn’t feel like home to me. I’m not sure Cuba is, but I want to find out. If I could only see Abuela Celia again, I’d know where I belonged.
The last time I got kicked out of Martyrs and Saints, the school
nurse recommended a psychiatrist whose name was Dr. Vincent Price. “Tell me about your urge to mutilate the human form,” he asked me. He looked like the real Vincent Price, too, with the same widow’s peak and goatee. Mom must have told him about my paintings. But what could I say? That my mother is driving me crazy? That I miss my grandmother and wish I’d never left Cuba? That I want to be a famous artist someday? That a paintbrush is better than a gun so why doesn’t everybody just leave me alone? Painting is its own language, I wanted to tell him. Translations just confuse it, dilute it, like words going from Spanish to English. I envy my mother her Spanish curses sometimes. They make my English collapse in a heap.
Dr. Price told Mom that we should start some mother-and-daughter activities, that I was starved for a female primate, or something like that, so she enrolled us in a flamenco class in a studio over Carnegie Hall. Our teacher, Mercedes Garcia, was a bosomy woman with jackhammer feet who taught us how to drop our heels in time to her claps and castanets. Our first lesson was all stamping, first as a group then individually across the floor. What a thunder we made! Mercedes singled me out—“A proud chest, yes! See how she carries herself?
Perfecto! Así, así!”
Mom watched me closely. I could read in her face that we wouldn’t return.
The light refracts through the stained-glass windows into long fans of blue. Why do they always have to ruin places like this with religion? I think about the king-sized crucifix nailed to the front of my old principal’s desk. Christ’s wounds were painted in Day-Glo colors—the gash on his side where the nuns told us the last of his bodily fluids poured out; the beads of blood staining his forehead; the wounds where his hands and feet hung from spikes. The nuns knew from grief all right. I still remember how in third grade Sister Mary Joseph told Francine Zenowitz that her baby brother was going to limbo because her parents
didn’t baptize him before he died. Francine cried like a baby herself, with her face all screwed up. That day I stopped praying (before I stopped praying altogether) for the souls in purgatory and devoted all my Hail Marys to the kids in limbo, even though I knew it probably wouldn’t do them any good.
