Dreaming in Cuban (11 page)

His mother collects coconuts from strangers, promising haircuts and manicures in exchange. Others are not so kind. They shout insults at her from their windows and balconies, hiding behind the boughs of acacia trees.

“They’re afraid to call me a whore to my face,” his mother says disdainfully.

A gaunt mulatta tells Ivanito he smells of death. This scares him but his mother tells him not to worry, that the lady is probably
crazy. On the way back, his bag rips and the coconuts scatter in the street like billiard balls. Cars brake and screech but his mother doesn’t notice the commotion. Instead, she scolds the coconuts one by one as if they were errant children.

At home, his mother removes her tunic and slippers. She takes a hammer and rusty chisel and shatters each coconut, scraping the blinding white, perfumed flesh from the shells. Ivanito helps her blend the coconut with egg yolks, vanilla, condensed milk, sugar, cornstarch, and salt, and holds the empty tin vegetable-oil containers while she fills them with the mixture. Together they arrange them in the freezer. With the leftover egg whites, she fashions star-shaped meringues, which she serves with the ice cream day after day, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. His mother believes the coconuts will purify them, that the sweet white milk will heal them.

Felicia’s spirits soar as the coconut ice cream diminishes. She makes pronouncements that Ivanito doesn’t understand, stays up all night hearing prophecies in her head, forgives her father and ex-husband long lists of past trespasses. She dances for days to her Beny Moré records, her hands in position for an impossibly lanky partner, to “Rebel Heart,” her slippers scraping the floor, to “Treat Me As I Am,” a buoyant
guaracha
,. There’s a Brazilian samba she stamps to in bare feet, waving her arms until she is flushed and exuberant with the rhythm of the drums. When she presses Ivanito to her chest, he can feel her heart jumping like it wants to come out of its cage.

When his sisters return from their camping trip, Ivanito can tell by their faces that something is wrong.

“We’ve seen Mamá this way before,” Milagro whispers.

“What way?” Ivanito asks, but she hushes him.

After Abuela Celia leaves, their mother rips the telephone from the wall and locks them all in the house. Ivanito continues
to eat the ice cream his mother serves them but Luz and Milagro dump it in the sink. Undeterred, Felicia stubbornly refills their bowls.

The twins tell Ivanito stories of what happened before he was born. They say their father ran from the house with his head and hands on fire. That Mamá sat on the living-room floor laughing and banging on the walls with metal tongs. That the police came and took her away. That the kitchen curtains burned from the plantains she left frying on the stove.

That night Ivanito stands by his sisters’ bedroom window transfixed by the branches of the tamarind tree, so black against the sky. He repeats something he heard his mother say: “The moon glares with a vivid indifference.”

His sisters bristle. They tell him that he’ll end up crazy like Mamá, that he’s starting to show her symptoms. Luz says that families are essentially political and that he’ll have to choose sides.

Ivanito senses even then that something has come between them. He will never speak his sisters’ language, account for his movements like a cow with a dull bell. He is convinced, although he couldn’t say why, that they’re united against him, against his happiness with Mamá.

In his room, the wallpaper comes alive in the moonlight. Ivanito imagines the vines and tendrils, taut and violent as a killing rope, snaking along the floor to his bed, wrapping him in place, tighter and tighter, choking off his breath while his sisters sleep.

*  *  *

As the summer of coconuts wears on, Felicia’s obsessions grow like something botanical, dense and violent. She insists that the sun will damage her son’s lungs.

“We inhabit the eye of the swamp, Ivanito,” she warns, tightening
the shutters against malevolent rays. “We are breathing the final village.”

Celia comes to their house with packets of food and encourages her grandson to eat, but Ivanito rarely touches the croquettes or the pork tamales she brings. He doesn’t want to betray his mother.

On the last day of August, his grandmother packs his clothes: his bathing trunks with the elastic band broken at the waist, his buckled sandals, the round straw hat he’s taken to wearing indoors. His mother promises that they’ll go to the beach tomorrow. Tomorrow, after they rest. But they don’t rest.

The minute Abuela Celia leaves, his mother becomes very animated. She mops and scours the kitchen floor until her hands are crinkly. She presses the bed sheets as if expecting a lover and sweeps the veranda clean of the summer’s dust. She throws open the shutters with finality.

Ivanito goes with her to the bodega. This time, they buy a whole chicken, two pounds of rice, onions, green peppers, and all the sweet plantains in the store. His mother cooks an
arroz con polio
and leaves the plantains warming in the oven for their dinner.

Down the street, a gardenia tree is lush with blossoms. Ivanito steadies the ladder as his mother clips an armful of flowers. He watches as she floats the white gardenias in her bath and rubs her thighs and breasts with walnut oil. She sets her hair and brushes it until the luster returns. Then she slips on a peach satin negligee, another token from his father, and examines her face in the dressing-table mirror. It’s the only mirror left in the house. The others were broken during her marriage.

“Mirrors are for misery, nothing more,” his mother says calmly. “They record decay.”

Ivanito notices the two deep creases that begin at her nostrils and end in hooks below her lips. If she doesn’t grin wide, the
tooth she chipped on a rice stone is hardly noticeable. Lines crisscross at the corners of her eyes. They’re green, Ivanito thinks, like discovery.

He touches his mother’s arm. It’s soft and newborn pale after the summer retreat from the sun. Her hands, too, are soft. Ivanito watches as his mother powders her face like a geisha and rubs rouge high on her cheeks. She paints in arched eyebrows, then outlines her lips a bright orange. Ivanito thinks her face looks nailed on, like a mask on a wall.

After she finishes, his mother bathes him with the remaining gardenias. She combs his hair and kisses his eyes and forehead, the small of his back, and the tips of each finger. She shakes talcum powder on him until he looks like a pastry. This makes Ivanito afraid. Then she lays his clothes out on the bed. His short pants and jacket, his knee socks and his only pair of lace-up shoes. She dresses him carefully as if he might break, then holds him up before the mirror.

“Imagination, like memory, can transform lies to truths,” Felicia whispers in her son’s ear. Nobody else teaches him that.

Ivanito helps his mother set the table for two. They use his great-grandmother’s silverware, her lead-crystal goblets, and her china, with its pageantry of gold leaves. His mother lights the stub of a candle and places it in the chandelier that can accommodate twenty-three more. Ivanito counts the empty holders.

His mother serves him huge portions of chicken and rice, filling his plate twice. Ivanito eats three of the warm plantains in brown-sugar syrup and drinks mango juice chilled with ice. His mother speaks continuously. “You must imagine winter, Ivanito,” she tells him. “Winter and its white extinguishings.”

Ivanito tries to imagine winter. He’s heard of snow and thinks of lacy ice falling from the sky. He covers everything and everyone he knows with this ice. Ice on the house on Palmas Street,
ice on the tamarind tree, ice coating the ships on the dock and the sparrows in midflight. Ice on the roads and the fields, and the beach where his grandmother lives. Ice collapsing her wicker swing, his sisters at her feet. His father would float in a sea of white ice, his grandfather atop the white palms.

His mother crushes pink tablets on the last of their ice cream. Hard, bittersweet shards.

“This will give us strength, Ivanito.”

Felicia carries her son upstairs and gently places him on the fresh sheets. She adjusts the shutters, lies down next to him, and fans her satin gown over them both.

“Close your eyes,
mi hijo
. Be very still.”

Then she crosses her hands over her breasts and they sleep.

Celia del Pino

More and more, Celia thinks, Ivanito looks like his father. He is tall for his age, with large, premature teeth, and arms that hang too long at his sides. He is only five years old but there is something already adolescent about him. Celia fears how this resemblance is affecting Felicia. What can be going through her head in that shuttered house, dancing in the dark with her only son?

The last time Celia saw Hugo Villaverde, Felicia was pregnant with Ivanito. Hugo’s hair was combed back in neat furrows and he wore a pressed
guayabera
open at the neck. Celia tried to dissuade them from entering her house. Jorge had threatened to kill his son-in-law if he dared show his face in Santa Teresa del Mar. But Celia could see that Hugo was in a mood to test his limits. He pushed his way past her, took a bottle of orange soda from the rusted refrigerator, sat with one hand flat against the dining-room table, and waited.

Jorge emerged from the bedroom in his slippers and undershirt. He had been napping but no trace of sleep lingered in his face. The heat of his breath clouded his round glasses. Without a word, he lifted a dining-room chair and swung it in a wide arc against the back of his son-in-law. The fragments exploded across the room as if a gigantic tree had been sloppily felled. Hugo stood up slowly, turned to Jorge, and grinned with his big horse teeth. Then he punched him full in the face. Jorge slid to the ground, his face lacquered with blood.

“If you leave with that sonofabitch, don’t ever come back!” Jorge shouted at Felicia, his mouth pinched white with rage. But Felicia followed Hugo out the door. Celia wiped the blood from Jorge’s despondent blue eyes with a wet cloth.

By the end of the summer, Felicia is dancing infrequently and her pronouncements are few. Sometimes nothing will rouse her from her bed, from a somnolence that coats the very air she breathes. Celia washes her daughter’s hair and tries to remove the grimy flowered nightgown, which Felicia insists protects her from the sun. Then she bathes Ivanito and dries his hair, knowing that she’ll find him unwashed and uncombed again.

Celia frequently stops by the ceiba tree in the Plaza de las Armas on her way home from Palmas Street. She places an orange and a few coins by its trunk, and says a short prayer for her daughter. Now and then she runs into Herminia Delgado carrying baskets filled with crusty roots and ratoons and fresh, healing spices for Felicia. Aniseed for hysteria. Sarsaparilla for the nerves and any remaining traces of syphilis. River fern and
espartillo
to ward off further evil. Herminia never mentions the ceiba tree, but Celia recognizes the distinct cluster of its leaves among her many herbs.

Celia is uneasy about all these potions and spells. Herminia is the daughter of a
santería
priest, and Celia fears that both good and evil may be borne in the same seed. Although Celia dabbles
in
santería’
s harmless superstitions, she cannot bring herself to trust the clandestine rites of the African magic.

*  *  *

The day Felicia tries to kill herself is like many others that summer. At two o’clock, Celia walks from her little brick-and-cement house to the highway and hitches a ride to Havana. She carries, as usual, packets of warm, salted food for her grandson, a nail file, and a new bar of soap. A bearded textile worker in a tumbledown Dodge leaves her at Felicia’s door.

Celia tells Felicia that her job is still waiting for her at the beauty shop, but that she’ll have to start from the bottom again, sweeping hair clippings and doing shampoos. Then she packs her grandson’s clothing and threatens to take him to Santa Teresa del Mar. Felicia remains quiet. She has no energy left for defiance.

Celia strokes her daughter’s hair, murmuring a worn lullaby, a poem she set to music once. Felicia remembers the tune, mouths the words as she cries. Then she promises to go to the beach the following day with Ivanito. Celia leaves, confident that the intolerable season is over.

Outside the sun is too bright. Sounds Celia cannot distinguish blare thickly in the air. Faces and buildings seem enlarged, exposing their scars.

Celia passes by a theater in Old Havana and recognizes two of her half brothers standing by the entrance. She identifies them by their high cheekbones and their small, even teeth. The afternoon sun sharpens their profiles, her father’s profile. She stares at them, twin ghosts, and nervously pats her throat. A fluttering like a steady motor whirs in her breast.

The taller one wears trousers patched with careless stitches. He pushes up his hat and offers his brother a wheel of pineapple
to eat. Celia notices their ungainly hands,
campesino
hands, stained with tobacco. She decides not to speak to them.

Celia takes the bus home, so she can think. All summer, it seems to her, since she returned from the sugarcane fields, she has lived in her memories. Sometimes she’ll glimpse the hour on a dusty Canada Dry clock, or look at the sun low in the sky, and realize she cannot account for her time. Where do the hours go? Her past, she fears, is eclipsing her present.

Her half brothers remind Celia of when she was a baby, and a confusion of brothers and sisters surrounded her. She barely recalls their faces, only the fringe of their dense hair leaning into her carton crib. Most days, Celia lay under a fan palm beside the
bohío
, its thatched roof steaming after the morning rains. She remembers this infant landscape, the waving haze of fronds through the torn netting that someone fastened to her face to keep out the flies.

Celia’s father had maintained two families, each with nine children. His second family lived less than a mile away but they might as well have been across the world. They never acknowledged one another, not even in the village church, with its six splintering pews.