Dreaming in Cuban (10 page)

Although Celia was not a believer, she was wary of powers she didn’t understand. She locked her children in the house on December 4, the feast day of Changó, god of fire and lightning, and warned them that they’d be kidnapped and sacrificed to the black people’s god if they wandered the streets alone. For good
measure, she forbade Felicia to visit her best friend, Herminia, whose father everyone denounced as a witch doctor.

Lourdes took advantage of their confinement to tell Felicia how the shriveled tin peddler, who rattled by with his trolley at noon, abducted children to caves with flapping bats that nested in human hair. At night, he’d scoop out their eyes with a wooden spoon and drink their blood like milk. Lourdes insisted that the tin man had left the eyes of a dozen sacrificed children under Felicia’s bed as an omen. Felicia, her eyes closed tight, cautiously patted the floor until she touched the peeled grapes her sister had left for her there, and screamed to holy hell.

As the summer of coconuts wears on, Felicia hears Saint Sebastian speaking to her inside her head. She can’t stop his words, which come in rhymes sometimes or jumbled together like twisted yarn. He doesn’t let her think. He reminds her how much she used to love him, how much she has disappointed him over the years.

Felicia first became fascinated with Saint Sebastian before her confirmation. She marveled over how he’d been shot through with arrows and left for dead, how he’d survived his murder only to be beaten to death by the Roman Emperor’s soldiers and buried in the catacombs. Sebastian’s double death appealed to Felicia. She studied his image, his hands tied above his head, his eyes rolled heavenward, arrows protruding from his chest and sides, and felt a great sympathy for him. But the nuns refused to let Felicia choose Sebastian as her confirmation name.

“Why don’t you pick Maria like your sister?” the nuns had suggested. Their faces were pink, puffy squares cut off at the brows, their pores enlarged from the pressure of their tightly bound habits. “That way Our Blessed Virgin Mother will always look after you.”

In the end, Felicia refused to be confirmed at all and Jorge del Pino blamed his daughter’s later troubles on that fact.

*

Felicia thinks of her father, of his death and resurrection, and finds it hard to concentrate. Judgment Day is at hand and she isn’t ready, not ready at all. So she plays the Beny Moré records over and over and teaches her son to dance, teaches him every dance there is to learn. He is only five years old but he can mambo and cha-cha, do the
danzón
and the
guaracha
with the facility of a gigolo. “Dance, Ivanito, dance!” Felicia shouts, exultant, laughing and applauding his silken moves. Everything makes sense when they dance. Felicia feels as though she were in love again, at the center of the universe, privy to its secrets and inner workings. She has no doubts.

But when the music stops, she sees her husband’s hands, big-knuckled with long, square-tipped fingers, inordinately large even for his frame. The nail of his right thumb is missing and the stump that remains is blanched and corrugated. He is long-boned and loose-jointed, over six feet, with the angular face of a cacique and a handsome nose somewhat swollen at the base.

The day she met him, he sat alone in the back booth of El Ternero Dorado restaurant staring at her. She approached him, nervously wiping the backs of her hands on her canvas apron.

“We have a sea bass special today,” she stammered. “Grilled, nice and fresh.”

“Have you eaten?” he asked, placing a heavy hand on her wrist. That was all it took.

Felicia removed her apron as if commanded by Saint Sebastian himself and followed Hugo Villaverde out the door.

Her future husband walked with a slow, loping gait like the giraffes Felicia had seen at the zoo, so much so that she half expected him to stretch out his neck and nibble at the laurel trees along the Paseo del Prado. She imagined his thick lips moving like warm, softened rubber.

Hugo bought Felicia a paper cone of fritters and a box of chocolates with a bright red bow. He spoke of his childhood in Hoiguín,
where his father, a descendant of slaves, had worked in the nickel mines. Hugo joined the merchant marines at sixteen and on his first trip went to Dakar, where the markets were filled with monstrous fruits grown in soils of uncommon minerals.

“Not like these,” he said, indicating a fruit vendor’s display of withered melons.

Felicia told him how she’d left high school and answered an ad for international escorts in the newspaper. The office was located on the second floor of a building between a notary public and Dr. Zatarain’s venereal clinic. A prim woman with bobbed hair and a throaty French accent asked Felicia to remove her shoes and knee socks, then made a note in a calfskin ledger.

“If a girl does not take care of her feet, there is no point in going further,” Madame Thibaut said.

She asked Felicia to unbutton her blouse. Felicia’s nipples tightened as she did so. She knew her breasts were admired by the boys in Santa Teresa del Mar. Finally, Madame Thibaut insisted that Felicia remove her skirt and panties.

“Walk,” the Frenchwoman ordered.

Felicia felt her ample, dimpled behind quake seductively as she moved.

“Your buttocks are too large for Europe,” Madame Thibaut told her. “But for here they will do.”

Felicia had only one job for the Bon Temps International Escort Agency, with an obese, freckled rancher from Oklahoma, who wore mismatched snakeskin boots. For a small sum, Madame Thibaut loaned Felicia high heels and a silver-sequined gown sleek as a fish. Merle Grady took Felicia to a casino and rubbed her hips eagerly every time he won. He called her Lady Luck and blew gusts of whiskey breath into her ear. When she refused to return with him to his hotel room, Grady tore at her cleavage and demanded a refund. Felicia watched as the glittering scales of her rented dress clicked and scattered on the marble floor.

*

Felicia went with Hugo Villaverde to the Hotel Inglaterra, an ornate wedding cake of an edifice opposite the Parque Central. The inn’s reputation was eclipsed by more modern establishments with roulette wheels and long-legged dancing girls, but it continued to attract honeymooners from the provinces, who admired its worn charm and elaborate iron grillwork.

Hugo and Felicia stripped in their room, dissolving easily into one another, and made love against the whitewashed walls. Hugo bit Felicia’s breasts and left purplish bands of bruises on her upper thighs. He knelt before her in the tub and massaged black Spanish soap between her legs. He entered her repeatedly from behind.

Felicia learned what pleased him. She tied his arms above his head with their underclothing and slapped him sharply when he asked.

“You’re my bitch,” Hugo said, groaning.

In the morning he left, promising to return in the summer.

When they met again late in hurricane season, Felicia was seven months pregnant and working as a cashier in a butcher shop. She sat on a stool behind the counter ringing up newspaper-wrapped packets and rubbing her lower back. Her cheeks were threaded with a web of fine veins.

Bleeding carcasses hung on hooks the length of her arm. Chickens dangled in the window, bumping her shoulder. A hog’s head sat on the back shelf like a trophy. Felicia watched the thickset butchers cleave and carve the flesh like sculptors, could scarcely tell them apart, in fact, from the marbled slabs of beef at their elbows. Her customers, too, began to look like their purchases: Compañera Sordo with her bristly jowls and upturned nose, Compañero Llorente with his pink eyes and jerking chin.

“I’m red meat,” Felicia repeated to herself. She felt bloated, grotesque.

Hugo married Felicia at city hall the week of the Cuban missile crisis. Herminia brought a bottle of champagne from Spain but no one remembered to open it. Jorge del Pino refused to attend.

After the ceremony, Felicia and Hugo moved into the house on Palmas Street, which had been empty since Berta Arango del Pino’s only daughter, Ofelia, died of tuberculosis. Hugo settled into the sofa and stared straight ahead, saying nothing. Felicia finally approached him.

“If you want, I can tie you up the way you like,” she offered.

Hugo pressed his fist under Felicia’s chin until he choked off her breath, until she could see the walls of the living room behind her.

“If you come near me, I’ll kill you. Do you understand?”

Hugo slept on the sofa and left for sea the next day. His twin daughters were born without him on Christmas Eve.

*  *  *

Toward the end of the summer, Felicia’s condition worsens, as if a heavy curtain is drawn over her brain. Her own voice is mute to her, far away, and the chandelier wavers in the fetid air. She smokes stale cigarettes her husband left behind years ago, smokes them down to the butts until her son snatches them from her burning fingers. Ivanito’s lips are moving, Felicia can see that. She sees his teeth and his eyes, his cheeks and his jet-black hair swelling and shrinking like an accordion. What is he saying? Each word is a code she must decipher, a foreign language, a streak of gunshot. She cannot hear and see him simultaneously. She closes her eyes.

Felicia remembers the moment she decided to murder her
husband. It was 1966, a hot August day, and she was pregnant with Ivanito. The nausea had persisted for weeks. Her sex, too, was infected with syphilis and the diseases Hugo brought back from Morocco and other women. That afternoon, as she was frying plantains in a heavy skillet, the nausea suddenly stopped.

It gave her a clarity she could not ignore.

Felicia dropped a rag into the skillet and watched it go limp with oil. She removed it with a pair of tongs and carried it dripping into the living room. The oil sizzled onto the floorboards.

She lit a match and approached her husband, asleep on the couch. His head was thrown back against a pillow, his mouth open, his throat exposed and still. She noticed that his lids barely covered his blank, rolled-up eyes.

Felicia carefully brought the blue flame to the tip of the rag. She smelled the quick sulfur and the plantains frying in the kitchen. She watched until the delicate flames consumed the rag, watched until the blaze was hot and floating in the air. Hugo awoke and saw his wife standing over him like a goddess with a fiery ball in her hand.

“You will never return here,” Felicia said and released the flames onto his face.

She laughs when she recalls her husband’s screams, the way he bolted out the door, his head a flaming torch. She plays this over and over in her mind, from one angle and then another, in bits and pieces like a torn photograph. The fire ate the flesh on Hugo’s face and hands, and the stench remained on Palmas Street for many months.

Felicia feels herself getting younger in her sleep, so young in fact that she fears she will die, be driven beyond the womb to oblivion. She grieves in her dreams for lost children, for the prostitutes in India, for the women raped in Havana last night. Their faces stare at her, plaintive, uncomplaining. What do they want with her? Felicia is afraid to sleep.

Her mother visits her with packets of food, greasy meats that slide on wax paper. She refuses to eat them, considers them poison. Her mother tries to talk to her, but Felicia hides in her bed. Her son will not leave her, that much she knows. She opens her mouth but her thoughts erase themselves before she can speak. Something is wrong with her tongue. It forms broken trails of words, words sealed and resistant as stones. She summons one stone and clings to it, a drowning woman, then summons another and another until she cries, “Mami, I grieve in my dreams.”

Ivanito Villaverde

The day after his grandfather dies, Ivanito asks his mother if he can go to the Hungarian circus in Havana. He’s seen billboards with fire-eating clowns and a pretty woman in a feathered headdress. A boy told him there were albino elephants from Siam. But Ivanito never found out if it was true.

His mother’s days begin with the ritual of a Beny Moré song called “Rebel Heart.” The record is warped and scratched from the heat and so much playing, and the words bend as if they’re underwater. But Ivanito and his mother sing them that way after a while. Felicia has a strong, unbroken voice that begins deep inside her throat. She encourages Ivanito to sing with her and he does, at the top of his lungs. He knows the song by heart.

Ivanito watches his mother put on her flannel nightgown then wrap herself in a frayed Chinese tunic embroidered with chrysanthemums, a onetime gift from his father. His sisters still have the silk scarves Papá brought back from China. They keep them hidden in the back of their dresser drawer. Ivanito found a photograph of his father hidden in the same drawer. He is standing on the Paseo Prado with Havana harbor in the background. His
beret is pushed low on his forehead, and his mouth is stretched wide, with big square teeth like a horse. Ivanito knows his father is a merchant marine and sails around the world. Luz and Milagro tell him that Papa still loves them, but Ivanito cannot be sure it is true.

His mother claims that he almost died because of Papa, from a venereal disease that infected him when he was born. In the hospital, she pinned a tiny onyx badge on his diaper to guard against the evil eye. She and her friend Herminia burned votive candles in the nursery until the doctor threatened to throw them both out of the hospital. He said they were killing the oxygen.

There’s a bin full of coconuts at the bodega. Felicia trades in her remaining food coupons for every last one, and the grocer throws in a chocolate bar for Ivanito. Then they go door to door, hunting for more coconuts. Ivanito follows his mother as she wanders farther and farther from Palmas Street in her tunic and scuffed pink slippers. Felicia’s hair springs from her head like electric wires, and she swings her arms in great arcs, as if her chaos had a rhythm.

They play a game with colors as they walk. “Let’s speak in green,” his mother says, and they talk about everything that makes them feel green. They do the same with blues and reds and yellows. Ivanito asks her, “If the grass were black, would the world be different?” But Felicia doesn’t answer.