Dreaming in Cuban (3 page)

Herminia motions to her from a side door of the run-down house. She is wearing a cream-yellow blouse with a collar the luster of the absent moon. Her plump black arms stir the darkness. “Hurry up! La Madrina is ready!”

Felicia slides to the backseat of her car and opens the door with a scrape. Ferns and chicken feathers graze her ankles as she tiptoes in backless sandals toward her friend.

“Por Dios
, we’ve been waiting for you for over an hour! What took you so long?” Herminia grabs Felicia’s arm and pulls her to the door. “Let’s go in before you make the gods angry.”

She steers Felicia down an airless passageway lit on one side with red votive candles set on wooden tables coated with hardened wax. At the end of the corridor, long strands of shells hang in an arched doorway, the mollusks separated by odd-shaped bits of polished onyx.

“Bienvenida, hija
,” La Madrina beckons in a voice hoarse with a vocation to the unfortunate. “We have been expecting you.”

She gestures with upturned palms in an arc around her. Her face is an almond sheen of sweat under her white cotton turban, and her lace blouson, settled off her shoulders, reveals duplicate moles, big and black as beetles, at the base of her throat. Layers of gauze skirts, delicate as membranes, brush her feet, which are bare on the cold cement floor. The low-ceilinged sea-green room wavers with the flames and incense of a hundred candles.

Against the back wall, an ebony statue of Santa Bárbara, the Black Queen, presides. Apples and bananas sit in offering at her feet. Fragrant oblations crowd the shrines of the other saints and
gods: toasted corn, pennies, and an aromatic cigar for Saint Lazarus, protector of paralytics; coconut and bitter kola for Obatalá, King of the White Cloth; roasted yams, palm wine, and a small sack of salt for Oggún, patron of metals.

In the front of the room, Elleguá, god of the crossroads, inhabits the clay eggs in nine rustic bowls of varying sizes. The eggs have cowrie-shell eyes and mouths, and soak in an elixir of herbs and holy water. Four mulattas, wearing gingham skirts and aprons, kneel before the shrines, praying. One man, a pure blue-black Yoruban, stands mute in the center of the room, a starched cotton fez on his head.

“Herminia has told us of your dystopia.” La Madrina is fond of melodious words, although she doesn’t always know what they mean. She places a hand heavily ringed with ivory and bezoar stones on Felicia’s shoulder and motions toward the
santero
. “He has traveled many hours from the south, from the mangroves, to be with us, to cleanse you of your infelicities. He will bring you and your father peace, a peace you never knew while he lived on this earth.”

“Elleguá wants a goat,” the
santero
says, his lips barely moving.

“Oh no, not another goat!” Felicia cries and turns to her friend accusingly. “You promised!”

“You have no choice,” Herminia implores. “You can’t dictate to the gods, Felicia. Elleguá needs fresh blood to do the job right.”

“We will open the future to you,
hija
, you will see,” La Madrina assures her. “We have a friendly contact with the complicated surfaces of the globe.”

La Madrina gathers the believers around Felicia. They wrap her in garlands of beads and stroke her face and eyelids with branches of rosemary. The
santero
returns with the goat, its mouth and ears tied with string. Felicia takes a mouthful of shredded coconut and spits it on the goat’s face, kissing its ears
as it whines quietly. She rubs her breasts against its muzzle.
“Kosí ikú, kosí arun, kosí araye
,” the women sing.

The
santero
leads the goat over the offerings and quickly pierces its neck with a butcher knife, directing the stream of blood onto the clay eggs. The goat quivers, then is still. The
santero
shakes a box of salt on its head, then pours honey over the offering.

Felicia, reeling from the sweet scent of the blood and the candles and the women, faints on La Madrina’s saint-room floor, which is still warm with sacrifice.

T
he continents strain to unloose themselves, to drift reckless and heavy in the seas. Explosions tear and scar the land, spitting out black oaks and coal mines, street lamps and scorpions. Men lose the power of speech. The clocks stop. Lourdes Puente awakens.

It is 4:00
A.M
. She turns to her husband sleeping beside her. His reddish hair is flecked with gray and his nearsighted eyes disappear under weary, fleshy lids. She has exhausted poor Rufino again.

Lourdes puts on a size 26 white uniform with wide hip pockets and flat, rubber-soled shoes. She has six identical outfits in the closet, and two more pair of shoes. Lourdes is pleased with her uniform’s implicit authority, with the severity of her unadorned face and blunt, round nose. The muscles in her right eye have been weak since she was a child, and every so often the eye drifts to one side, giving her a vaguely cyclopean air. It doesn’t diminish her 20/20 vision, only skews it a bit. Lourdes is convinced it enables her to see things that others don’t.

Lourdes pins a short braid against her head, twists on a hairnet,
and leaves a note for her daughter on the kitchen table. She wants Pilar at the bakery after school. Lourdes fired the Pakistani yesterday and she’ll be alone behind the counter today if she doesn’t get help. “No excuses this time!!” she scrawls in her sharply slanted script.

The street lamps shed their distorted lights. It is not yet daybreak, and ordinary noises do not startle Lourdes. A squirrel scratching up in an oak tree. A car engine stalling down the block. Between the brownstones and warehouses, the East River is visible, slow and metallic as the sky.

Lourdes enjoys walking in the dark unseen. She imagines her footprints sinking invisibly through the streets and the sidewalks, below the condensed archaeology of the city to underground plains of rich alluvial clay. She suspects the earth sheds its skin in layers, squandered of green.

The early-morning refuge of the bakery delights Lourdes. She is comforted by the order of the round loaves, the texture of grain and powdered sugar, the sustaining aromas of vanilla and almond. Lourdes bought the bakery five years ago from a French-Austrian Jew who had migrated to Brooklyn after the war. Before that, she’d been working as a file clerk at a nearby hospital, classifying the records of patients who had died. Now she wanted to work with bread. What sorrow could there be in that?

The refrigerated cakes come in flimsy cardboard boxes steaming with dry ice. There are Grand Marnier cakes and napoleons with striped icing and chantilly cream. Lourdes unpacks three Sacher tortes and a Saint Honoré studded with profiteroles, Linzer bars with raspberry jam, éclairs, and marzipan cookies in neon pink. In the summer, there’ll be fresh peach strudel and blueberry tarts. In the fall, pumpkin pies and frosted cupcakes with toothpick turkeys.

Lourdes lines the display cases with paper doilies and organizes
the croissants and coffee rings. She places the day-old pastries in the back of the rows, the easier to reach them. She scrapes the trays of raisins and honey and pops the sugary morsels into her mouth.

Lourdes saves the pecan sticky buns for last. She unloads a tray of them from the delivery cart, reserving two to eat later. As she sets the first pot of coffee to brew, Sister Federica of the Sisters of Charity Hospital calls.

“Your father is a saint,” she whispers fiercely. The elfin nun from Santo Domingo is crazy about saints, often identifying the holy ones long before the Vatican even contemplates their canonization. “The mother superior would never believe me. It’s a nest of lapsed bats here. But I wanted you to know the truth.”

“What happened?” Lourdes asks, stripping the sticky buns of pecans and nervously chewing them one by one.

“I saw it with my own eyes, may his soul find sanctuary.”

“My God!” Lourdes crosses herself rapidly.

“I was making my early rounds when I saw a blue light coming from your father’s room. I thought he might have left the television on.” Sister Federica pauses for a long moment, then resumes with an air more befitting a divine vision. “When I went in, he was fully dressed, standing there erect and healthy, except that his head and hands glowed as if lit from within. It was a nimbus of holiness, I am certain. You know I am an expert in matters of religious enigmas.”

“And then?”

“He said, ‘Sister Federica, I wish to thank you for your many kindnesses during these last days. But now another interval awaits me.’ Just like that. Well, I fell to my knees and began a rosary to La Inmaculada. My hands are still trembling. He put on his hat, passed through the window, and headed south, leaving a trail of phosphorus along the East River.”

“Did he say where he was going?”

“No.”

“God bless you, Sister. I’ll light you a candle.”

Lourdes tries for nearly an hour to telephone her mother in Santa Teresa del Mar, but the operator tells her that the rains have knocked out the phone lines on the northwest coast of Cuba. Outside, customers tap on the glass door with keys and coins. She finally dials her sister Felicia’s number in Havana.

The rest of the morning, Lourdes tends hurriedly to her customers, mixing up orders and giving the wrong change. Her worst mistake is decorating a christening cake in bold red script with the words “In sympathy.” Lourdes telephones her husband at noon but nobody is home. The customers keep coming. Where is Pilar? Lourdes vows to punish her daughter. No painting for a month. That will teach her, she thinks. Then Lourdes calls Rufino again. Still no answer.

The flow of customers slows in the afternoon, and for the first time since Sister Federica called, Lourdes sits down with a watery cup of coffee and her sticky buns to figure things out. She remembers how after her father arrived in New York her appetite for sex and baked goods increased dramatically. The more she took her father to the hospital for cobalt treatments, the more she reached for the pecan sticky buns, and for Rufino.

The flesh amassed rapidly on her hips and buttocks, muting the angles of her bones. It collected on her thighs, fusing them above the knees. It hung from her arms like hammocks. She dreamt continually of bread, of grainy ryes and pumpernickels, whole wheat and challah in woven straw baskets. They multiplied prodigiously, hung abundantly from the trees, crowded the skies until they were redolent of yeast.

Lourdes had gained 118 pounds.

When she was a skinny child, strangers bought Lourdes treats on the beach or on the main street of town, believing she was malnourished and motherless. As a teenager, Lourdes would
drink three or four milk shakes with dinner. Even on the day before her wedding, the seamstresses took in her bodice, begging her to eat and fill out her gown.

Now the extra weight did not alter her rhythmical gait, but men’s eyes no longer pursued her curves. It was not a question of control. Lourdes did not battle her cravings; rather, she submitted to them like a somnambulist to a dream. She summoned her husband from his workshop by pulling vigorously on a ship’s bell he had rigged up for this purpose, unpinned her hair, and led him by the wrist to their bedroom.

Lourdes’s agility astounded Rufino. The heavier she got, the more supple her body became. Her legs looped and rotated like an acrobat’s, her neck swiveled with extra ball bearings. And her mouth. Lourdes’s mouth and tongue were like the mouths and tongues of a dozen experienced women.

Rufino’s body ached from the exertions. His joints swelled like an arthritic’s. He begged his wife for a few nights’ peace but Lourdes’s peals only became more urgent, her glossy black eyes more importunate. Lourdes was reaching through Rufino for something he could not give her, she wasn’t sure what.

Lourdes closes her shop early and walks to the Sisters of Charity Hospital fourteen blocks away. Sister Federica escorts her down the dingy hallway. Lourdes lifts her dead father’s gnarled hands, his papery, spotted wrists. She notices the way his fingers are twisted above the first joints, stiffened haphazardly like branches. His stomach is shaved and tracked with stitches, and his skin is so transparent that even the most delicate veins are visible. The vast white bed obscures him.

Her father had been a fastidious man, impeccable, close-shaven, with razor-sharp creases pressed into his trousers. He took pride in never walking barefoot, even in his own home, and shuffled around in highly polished leather slippers to protect himself from
microbios
. The very word lit a fire in his eyes. “They
are the enemy!” he used to bellow. “Culprits of tropical squalor!”

For her father, conquering the
microbios
required unflagging vigilance. It meant keeping the refrigerator so cold that Lourdes’s teeth ached from drinking Coca-Cola or biting into pieces of leftover pork. “Food spoils quickly in our climate!” he insisted, turning the dial to near freezing. It meant hearing his loud complaints about her mother’s culinary ambushes: chicken bloody at the bone, undercooked vegetables, unpeeled fruit served with room-temperature cream cheese.

The way her father washed his manicured hands was a minor miracle in itself. To Lourdes, he looked solemn, like a doctor preparing for surgery. He taught her and Felicia and their younger brother, Javier, how to scrape under their nails with miniature scrubbers, how to let the hot water run over their hands for a slow, thirty-second count, how to dry between their fingers with towels boiled in bleach so the germs could not breed in the damp crevices.

In the hospital, her father despaired at incompetences and breakdowns in procedures, at the rough, professional hands that prodded him. Once a nurse inserted a suppository to loosen his bowels and did not return, although he cramped his finger ringing the buzzer, until after he had soiled his pajamas. Lourdes knew then her father would die. She handed her remaining savings to the nuns and requested a private room with a television and the best nurse in the hospital.

Her father’s last weeks were happy ones under the care of Sister Federica, whose devotion to a bewildering array of saints did not lessen her duty to cleanliness. Sister Federica doted on her father and gave him the smoothest shaves he’d ever had. Twice a day, she lathered his face with a stiff bristle brush and with a straight razor expertly scraped the dent in his chin and the narrow space between his nose and his upper lip. Then she snipped his unruly nostril hairs and dusted his neck with talcum.
Lourdes knew that the little nun, with her puckish face and faint mustache, reminded her father of his barber in Havana, of the smell of his tonics and pomades, of the cracked red leather and steel levers of his enameled chairs.