Dreaming in Cuban (24 page)

I
t is long past midnight. Celia searches the cardboard box containing the few articles Felicia left behind and finds her daughter’s black bathing suit. None of the foam or the underwire remains in the pointed brassière, and the seat is worn to near obscenity.

Celia remembers Felicia in another bathing suit, a tiny lemon-yellow one she wore the year the sea retreated beyond the horizon, the year the archaeology of the ocean floor revealed itself—catacombs of ancient coral, lunar rocks exposed to the sun. Felicia squatted, examining the shells as if they were unexpected gems, then rearranged them on the sand. Around her, neighbors scrambled with wooden buckets, looting the beach for stranded fish and crabs. The sun baked their footsteps hard as fossils. Then the tidal wave hit, wiping their traces from shore.

The day before the funeral, Celia had taken the morning bus from Santa Teresa del Mar to the house on Palmas Street. She no longer hitchhiked. She gathered up Felicia’s nightgown with the blue roses, Tía Alicia’s tarnished peacock brooch (which Celia
had given to Felicia for her fifteenth birthday), a stump of orange lipstick, two unraveling stretch shorts, and her daughter’s
santería
clothing.

Celia found unused ration cards permitting Felicia one and a half pounds of chicken per month, two ounces of coffee every fifteen days, two packs of cigarettes per week, and four meters of cloth per year. Her daughter had had little use for these provisions during the last months of her life.

Felicia had left a note with Herminia saying she wanted to be buried as a
santera
, and Celia could not refuse her daughter’s last request. In the mortuary, her friends from the
casa de santo
dressed Felicia in her initiation gown, her crown, and her necklaces. They arranged a pouch of seashells on her breast together with morsels of smoked fish and a few grains of corn. Into a large gourd they placed her cut hair and head dyes, okra, ashes, and wisps of dried corn silks. They covered the gourd with crossed cloths, then killed a black chicken and laid it over the offerings.

Later, they passed colorful handkerchiefs over Felicia’s body, all the while grieving in low voices to purify her corpse. By the time they finished, the terrible lumps on Felicia’s head had disappeared, and her skin was as smooth as the pink lining of a conch. Her eyes, too, had regained their original green.

After they removed the coffin to the street, the
santeros
broke a clay urn behind Felicia’s old De Soto, the funeral car, and sprinkled it with cold water to refresh her for the final journey. A block before the cemetery, the car broke down and Felicia’s coffin had to be carried the rest of the way by eight pallbearers in white.

At the entrance to the cemetery, a tall man stood in shreds and patches, his face slackly wrapped in scarves. He stood perfectly still and seemed to breathe through the dark open slit by his eyes, sucking sorrow from the air like venom.

*

Celia undresses noiselessly in the dark. She opens the closet door and studies her image in the speckled mirror. She feels a stain descend within her, like water through a plaster wall. It spreads, slow and sodden, loosening her teeth, weighing down her limbs, darkening the scar on her withered chest. Celia’s remaining breast droops by her elbow, the indifferent nipple facing downward. Her abdomen, though, is as unmarred as a childless woman’s. Between her legs, sparse hair clings to a swell of flesh.

She examines her hands next, bloated and twisted as driftwood, but she cannot reclaim them. Her legs, too, are unrecognizable—the enlarged knees, the calf muscles shorter and more angular than in her youth, her wounded feet. Her face, at least, is familiar. The faded mole by her lips holds the folds of thin flesh in place like a flat black button. And her drop pearl earrings still hang stiffly from her lobes.

Celia slips on Felicia’s sheer bathing suit. Outside, a crescent moon mocks her from its perch. She strides toward the water, and swims with brisk strokes far out to sea. The sky is dimmed of stars and Celia cannot identify their milky lights, their waning conclusions.

Pilar

My mother and I pass billboards advertising the revolution as if it were a new brand of cigarette. We drive by the Plaza de la Revolución, where, the taxi driver explains, El Líder holds his biggest rallies. He tells us that there’s more trouble for El Líder, that a busload of people seeking asylum crashed the gates of the Peruvian embassy early this morning. Mom hardly listens. She seems to be in her own world. The driver takes a detour along the Malecón, pointing out La Punta Fortress, and the Morro
Castle across the harbor. All Mom says is that the buildings in Havana are completely decayed, held up by elaborate configurations of wooden planks. What I notice most are the balconies.

The driver turns onto Palmas Street. The houses are painted a garish yellow. They’re chipped and flaking and look smeared with confetti. We stop in front of Tía Felicia’s house, the house in which Abuelo Jorge grew up. The windows are shuttered tight and the square of front yard is littered with broken pottery and soiled flags. My mother says there used to be sparrows in the tamarind tree, heavy once with fat clusters of pods.

Mom doesn’t bother to get out of the car or ask the neighbors what happened to her sister. She says she’s expected this since Abuelo Jorge spoke to her on the Brooklyn Bridge. As for me, I’m not sure what to expect, only that I’ll see Abuela Celia again, like I learned after my ninth herbal bath.

Since that day in Morningside Park, I can hear fragments of people’s thoughts, glimpse scraps of the future. It’s nothing I can control. The perceptions come without warnings or explanations, erratic as lightning.

“Take us to Santa Teresa del Mar,” Mom orders the driver. She closes her eyes. I think it’s less painful for her than looking out the window.

We take the coastal highway to my grandmother’s house. I look at the sea I once planned to cross by fishing boat. Trade winds roll the water in great masses. A hurricane is submerged. There are dolphins and parrotfish, hawksbill turtles and shovelnose sharks. There’s a shipwreck in the Gulf of Mexico filled with ingots and doubloons. Men in wet suits will find the galleon three years from now. They will celebrate with champagne and murder.

Four fresh bodies are floating in the Straits of Florida. It’s a family from Cárdenas. They stole a boat from a fisherman. It
collapsed in the current early this morning. A boatload of Haitians will leave Gonaïves next Thursday. They will carry the phone numbers of friends in Miami and the life savings of relatives. They will sail to the Tropic of Cancer and sink into the sea.

I’ve brought a sketchbook with me and a toolbox of brushes and paints, mostly watercolors. I wanted to bring my bass along but Mom said there’d be no room. She’s crammed every inch of our suitcases with cheap sneakers and tacky clothing from the Latino stores on Fourteenth Street. I want to do a few sketches of Abuela Celia, maybe even a formal portrait of her on her wicker swing. I think she’d like that.

Mom jumps from the taxi in her sling-back pumps and runs past the giant bird of paradise bushes, past the rotting pawpaw tree, and up the three front steps of Abuela Celia’s house. I follow her. The cement shows through the floor where the tiles are missing. It’s a patterned tile, with pastel buds and climbing vines. It hasn’t been mopped for months. A faded mantilla, soft as a moth, is draped over the sofa. There’s a chalk-white piano and a refrigerator, a bulk of rust, against the far wall.

My mother inspects the bedroom she used to share with Tía Felicia, vacant now except for a frilly party dress hanging in the closet. She crosses the hallway to Abuela’s room. A lace tablecloth is spread on the bed. A photograph of El Líder is on the night table. Mom turns from it in disgust.

I find Abuela sitting motionless on her wicker swing, wearing a worn bathing suit, her hair stuck haphazardly to her skull, her feet strangely lacerated. I kneel before her and press my cheek to hers, still salty from the sea. We hold each other close.

“Dios mío
, what happened to you?” Mom screams when she finds us. She scurries about preparing a hot bath with water boiled on the stove.

Abuela is missing a breast. There’s a scar like a purple zipper on her chest. Mom holds a finger to her lips and flashes me a look that warns, “Pretend not to notice.”

We wash Abuela’s hair and rinse it with conditioner, then we pat her dry with towels as if this could somehow heal her. Abuela says nothing. She submits to my mother like a solemn novitiate. Mom untangles Abuela’s hair with a wide-toothed comb. “You could have died of pneumonia!” she insists, and plugs in a Conair dryer that blows out the lights in the living room.