Dreaming in Cuban (6 page)

“I will have no harlotry in my house,” Berta Arango del Pino snapped, staring hard at the darkened mole by Celia’s mouth.

Then she turned to her only son.

“I’ll fry you a red snapper,
mi corazón
, just the way you like it.”

Jorge’s business trips stretched unendurably. During the first months of their marriage, he called Celia every night, his gentle voice assuaging her. But soon his calls came less frequently, and his voice lost its comforting tone.

When he was home, they made love tensely and soundlessly while his mother slept. Their marriage bed was a narrow cot that was hidden in the dining-room closet during the day. Afterward, they would dress themselves in their nightclothes and fall asleep in each other’s arms. At dawn, Berta Arango del Pino would enter with a short knock, open the shutters, and announce breakfast.

Celia wanted to tell Jorge how his mother and his sister, Ofelia, scorned her, how they ate together in the evenings without inviting her. “Did you see the shirt she sewed for our Jorge today?” she heard Ofelia scoff. “She must think he’s growing a third arm.” They left her scraps to eat, worse than what they fed the dogs in the street.

One day, while the two of them went to buy embroidery threads, Celia decided to cook them a savory flank-steak stew.
She set the dining-room table with the good linen and silverware, collected fruit from the tamarind tree, and squeezed and strained a pitcherful of juice. Hopeful and nervous, she waited for their return. Ofelia got to the kitchen first.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she said, opening and closing the lid of the pot like a cymbal.

Berta Arango del Pino followed on her thick-ankled legs. She took two dishrags and carried the pot impassively through the living room, down the front steps and across the yard, then poured the steaming casserole into the gutter.

Jorge’s mother and his sister played dominoes in the dining room until late, delaying Celia’s sleep, her only solace. Celia knew that Ofelia joined her mother at her dressing table, where they sat on their bony behinds and rubbed whitening cream into their dark, freckled faces. Berta Arango del Pino left the paste on overnight to remove any evidence of her mulatto blood. She had a taste for absinthe, too, and exuded a faint licorice smell. In the mornings, her cheeks and forehead burned from the bleach and the potent liqueur.

On Saturdays, she and Ofelia went to the beauty parlor and returned with identical helmets of girlish curls, which they protected fiercely with hairpins and kerchiefs. Ofelia still hoped for suitors although her mother had long since driven off the few men that dared come around, nervously clutching flowers or mints. She wore her decorous dresses to morning mass, and around her neck displayed the short single strand of pearls she had received on her fifteenth birthday.

Ofelia was afraid of the attention men once paid her but seemed more fearful now of her invisibility. In quiet moments she must have asked: Who am I whitening my skin for? Who notices the tortoiseshell combs in my hair? Would anyone care if the seams on my stockings were crooked? Or if I didn’t wear any at all?

*

Celia awoke one morning and knew she was pregnant. She felt as if she had swallowed a bell. The rigid edges of her wedding ring sliced into her tumid finger. Days passed but her husband did not call. She took Ofelia aside and told her in confidence, but Ofelia absently touched her own milkless breasts and ran with the news to her mother.

“The indecency!” Berta Arango del Pino protested. “How many more mouths can my poor son feed?”

Ofelia took to appropriating Celia’s dresses and shoes. “You won’t be needing this anymore,” she said, clutching a cream linen suit, which hung better on the wire hanger than on her desiccated frame. “After the baby, none of this will fit you anyway.” She stole Celia’s leather pumps when her feet got too swollen to wear them and tore the backs open with her calcarated heels.

Celia wished for a boy, a son who could make his way in the world. If she had a son, she would leave Jorge and sail to Spain, to Granada. She would dance flamenco, her skirts whipping a thousand crimson lights. Her hands would be hummingbirds of hard black sounds, her feet supple against the floorboards of the night. She would drink whiskey with tourists, embroider histories flagrant with peril, stride through the darkness with nothing but a tambourine and too many carnations. One night, Gustavo Sierra de Armas would enter her club, walk onstage, and kiss her deeply to violent guitars.

If she had a girl, Celia decided, she would stay. She would not abandon a daughter to this life, but train her to read the columns of blood and numbers in men’s eyes, to understand the morphology of survival. Her daughter, too, would outlast the hard flames.

Jorge named their daughter Lourdes for the miracle-working shrine of France. In the final dialogue with her husband, before he took her to the asylum, Celia talked about how the baby had
no shadow, how the earth in its hunger had consumed it. She held their child by one leg, handed her to Jorge, and said, “I will not remember her name.”

*  *  *

After her sleepless night in the house on Palmas Street, Celia wanders to the ceiba tree in the corner of the Plaza de las Armas. Fruit and coins are strewn by its trunk and the ground around the tree bulges with buried offerings. Celia knows that good charms and bad are hidden in the stirred earth near its sacred roots. Tía Alicia told her once that the ceiba is a saint, female and maternal. She asks the tree permission before crossing its shadow, then circles it three times and makes a wish for Felicia.

Celia rests in the interior patio of the plaza, where royal palms dwarf a marble statue of Christopher Columbus. Inside the museum there’s a bronze weathervane of Doña Inés de Bobadilla, Cuba’s first woman governor, holding the Cross of Calatrava. She became governor of the island after her husband, Hernando de Soto, left to conquer Florida. Doña Inés, it is said, was frequently seen staring out to sea, searching the horizon for her husband. But de Soto died on the banks of the Mississippi River without ever seeing his wife again.

Celia passes by the Hotel Inglaterra, drab and peeling from neglect. Celia imagines her dead husband staring up at the shuttered windows, carrying a late-model electric broom. He studies the ornate balconies like a burglar, gazes through the blue panes of stained glass until he spots her with the Spaniard, naked and sharing a cigarette. She imagines him swinging the broom round and round in a quickening circle, scattering pigeons and beggars, swinging so hard that the air breaks in a low whistle, swinging and swinging, then releasing the broom until it flies high above him, crashing through the window and shattering her past.

*

Celia hitchhikes to the Plaza de la Revolución, where El Líder, wearing his customary fatigues, is making a speech. Workers pack the square, cheering his words that echo and collide in midair. Celia makes a decision. Ten years or twenty, whatever she has left, she will devote to El Líder, give herself to his revolution. Now that Jorge is dead, she will volunteer for every project—vaccination campaigns, tutoring, the microbrigades.

In the back of the plaza, flatbed trucks are accepting volunteers for the fields. “There is no need to worry,” El Líder assures them. “Work for the revolution today and tomorrow will take care of itself.” Celia pulls on a hand stretched before her, its nails blunt and hard as hooves. A bottle of rum passes from mouth to mouth. Celia smooths her housedress then lifts the bottle. The liquor burns in her chest like a hot cloud.

For the next two weeks, Celia consigns her body to the sugarcane. From the trucks, the acres of cane are green and inviting. But deep in the fields the brownish stalks rise from the earth to more than twice her height, occluding her vision. There are rats everywhere, hollowing the sweetest stalks, and insects too numerous to swat. Celia learns to cut the cane straight across at the base, strip its leaves with her machete, then chop it in even pieces for the gatherers. Despite her age or because of it, Celia advances steadily through the fields, hardening her muscles with every step, every swing. She rips her hands on the tough, woody stalks. The sun browns her skin. Around her, the sugarcane hums.

One day, a worker slashes a volunteer with a machete. Celia stares as the blood mingles with the sweat of his victim’s chest. “Amateurs!” the
machetero
shouts so everyone can hear. “Sunday peasants! Go to hell, all of you!” Several men grab the worker from behind and take him from the fields. Oblivious of the tumult, a Creole woman spits out a curse. Celia does not know to whom.

Celia imagines the cane she cuts being ground in the
centrales,
and its thick sap collected in vats. The furnaces will transform it to moist, amber crystals. She pictures three-hundred-pound sacks of refined white sugar deep in the hulls of ships. People in Mexico and Russia and Poland will spoon out her sugar for coffee, or to bake in their birthday cakes. And Cuba will grow prosperous. Not the false prosperity of previous years, but a prosperity that those with her on these hot, still mornings can share. Next season the cane will regenerate, a vegetal mystery, and she will return to cut it again. In another seven years, the fields will be burned and replanted.

In the evenings, the stink of sugarcane coats Celia’s nostrils and throat, sweetening her meat and rice and the cigarettes she smokes. She soaks her feet in balms of herb water, plays cards past midnight, eats oranges under a full moon. She examines her hands daily with pride.

One dream recurs. A young girl in her Sunday dress and patent shoes selects shells along the shore, filling her limitless pockets. The sea retreats to the horizon, underlining the sky in a dark band of blue. Voices call out to the girl but she does not listen. Then the seas rush over her and she floats underwater with wide-open eyes. The ocean is clear as noon in winter. Bee hummingbirds swim alongside pheasants and cows. A mango sapling grows at her side. The fruits swell and burst crimson and the tree shrivels and dies.

When Celia returns from the fields, she finds her daughter’s condition has declined. Felicia’s skin appears enameled in pinks like the wallpaper of Old Havana inns. The blue roses of her flannel nightgown adhere to her damp filth. Celia washes her daughter’s hair over the kitchen sink then untangles it with a broken comb. She cannot persuade Felicia to take off her nightgown, to allow light in the tenebrous house.

“They stole my hair and sold it to the gypsies,” Felicia complains. “The sun burns our imperfections.”

“What are you talking about?” Celia asks impatiently.

“Light infiltrates. It’s never safe.”

“Please,
hija
, give me your gown to wash.”

Felicia runs upstairs to her bed and lies with her hands tightly clasped under her breasts.

The twins complain that they’ve had nothing but ice cream to eat for days, that their mother dances with Ivanito and warns them of the dangers of daylight. Luz accuses Ivanito of repeating their mother’s pretentious phrases, of saying things like “The moon glares with a vivid indifference.”

“Come here,
chiquitico
,” Celia coaxes, lifting her grandson to her lap. “I’m sorry I left you. I thought your mother would get better in a day or two.”

Milagro touches a blister on her grandmother’s palm. Celia displays her hands, marred by cuts and callouses. Her granddaughters explore the scarred terrain.

“Pack your bathing suits; we’re going to Santa Teresa del Mar.”

“I won’t go!” Ivanito cries, and runs to bury himself in his mother’s bed.

“Just for a few days. Your mother must rest,” Celia calls after him. Suddenly she remembers her great-aunt’s hands floating on a white surf of keys, overlapping like gulls in the air. Celia used to play duets with her Tía Alicia, side by side on the piano bench. Neighbors would stop and listen to the music, and occasionally invite themselves in for a cup of tea.

“You can’t steal him,” Felicia warns her mother, rocking Ivanito beneath the sheets.

Celia leads the twins away from the house on Palmas Street. The girls do not speak but their thoughts tumble together like gems in the polishing, reaching their hard conclusions. Celia fears their recollections—the smashed chairs that left splinters
in their feet, the obscenities that hung like electric insects in the air.

Their father, Hugo Villaverde, had returned on several occasions. Once, to bring silk scarves and apologies from China. Another time, to blind Felicia for a week with a blow to her eyes. Yet another, to sire Ivanito and leave his syphilis behind.

Despite this, Luz and Milagro insisted on keeping their father’s name. Even after he left for good. Even after Felicia reverted to using her maiden name. The girls, Celia realized, would never be del Pinos.

Celia sits in the front seat of the bus with her granddaughters. As they leave Havana, a brisk rain falls, rattling the tin bus. Celia cannot mourn for her husband, she doesn’t know why. She loved him, that she learned once, but the grief still won’t come. What separates her from sorrow, she wonders. Felicia’s delusions? The fortnight in the sugarcane fields? The swelter of the afternoon rains? Had she simply grown too accustomed to Jorge’s absence?

Already it seems a long time since her husband walked on water in his white summer suit and Panama hat. Much longer still since he’d boarded the plane for New York.

The rain stops as abruptly as it began. By the time Celia and the twins arrive in Santa Teresa del Mar, the sun is as certain as if the day had just begun.

Celia examines the withered contents of her refrigerator: three carrots, half a green pepper, a handful of spongy potatoes. She sends the twins to the bodega with an empty can and the last of her monthly coupons. She wants the fattest chicken they can find, a sack of rice, two onions, six brown eggs, and a refill of lard.

Memory cannot be confined, Celia realizes, looking out the kitchen window to the sea. It’s slate gray, the color of undeveloped
film. Capturing images suddenly seems to her an act of cruelty. It was an atrocity to sell cameras at El Encanto department store, to imprison emotions on squares of glossy paper.