The Aguero Sisters (13 page)

Constancia resists the deafening white, but then, as if
by a divine capsizing, she surrenders to its peculiar peace. There's a secret art to the senses, she decides; nothing is directly perceived. She understands then that time arcs differently for those intimate with blood.

It is six in the morning. Constancia awakes from her dream and goes to the bathroom. She switches on her vanity mirror, finds her face in disarray, moving all at once like a primitive creature. Her neck and temples itch furiously, erupting with bumps each time she attempts to scratch.

Constancia takes a deep breath, sprays herself with a plant mister of salt water she keeps nearby for extra hydration. Then she checks the mirror again. Her face has settled down, but it appears different to her, younger, as if it truly had been rearranged in the night. She rubs her eyes, pinches her cheeks. Her eyes seem rounder, a more deliberate green. Then it hits her with the force of a slap. This is her mother's face.

Constancia turns off the lights and nervously climbs back into bed. She senses a sudden coldness at her center, as if she were freezing from the inside out. Her blood is congealing, her nerves are a fine net of ice. For a moment, Constancia fears she may no longer exist. “A! E! I! O! U!” she shouts, as loud as she can. If she can still recite her vowels, Constancia reasons, she couldn't possibly be dead.

Since Heberto left last month on his clandestine mission, Constancia hasn't been herself. She's lost without his sturdy presence, volatile though he was in the last weeks before his departure. If only her husband were here to reassure her, tell her she looked as lovely as ever. Then Constancia would reward him, slip her hands down the front of his pants, breathe warmly in his ear:
You are a traveling jewel merchant in Cienfuegos. I am a rich, lonely housewife with an unfaithful husband. Sell me a ruby ring
, mi cielo. Lately,
her fantasies have been getting more and more outlandish. Casts of thousands. Exotic locales. Raw close-ups of flagrant masculinity.

Constancia gets out of bed and changes into her swim-suit. A walk on the beach will help, she thinks, clear her head of delirium. Perhaps she has too much time on her hands. Perhaps she should call and apply for that Avon job, after all. As she passes her reflection in the hallway mirror, she barely stifles a scream. Her mother's face hovers in the glass, appearing as frightened as Constancia herself.

She hurries to the closet and pulls out a stack of bed-sheets, then drapes every mirror in the house with expanses of pastel linens. Still, it's impossible to avoid her reflection entirely, the reluctant dialogue with light on every surface in the house.

Outside, the sun feels like a hunter aimed at her skin. Constancia strolls along the beach, moving her head carefully, as if in a levitated present, willing herself not to touch her cheeks. She wonders if her mother's face could have built up incrementally overnight, layer by cumulative layer, like limestone or unbridled coral.

Above her, the seagulls appear strangely magnified, streaking the sky with their arrogance. Constancia's condominium building, circular and nineteen stories high, is set back on the sand. Incongruent details loom up from it in sharp focus, as if linked by a commonality not yet apparent to her. On the roof, an American flag flutters from its sleek pole.

Constancia greets a passing neighbor, but he doesn't seem to recognize her. Her voice is off—higher, girlish, with a queer, feathery lilt. Every breath feels as though it's forcing itself through a lump in her chest.

The sea shimmers an aquarium blue. Constancia knows that Miami is replete with marine biologists and other so-called
ocean experts. She recalls that showy Frenchman on television with his cameras and oxygen tanks, his melodrama business of underwater science. But like her father, Constancia is wary of the sea. Papi joked once that they shared an irrational fear of devolution, that somehow in the ocean they might return to an earlier life form, lobsters, perhaps, or irritable squids.

The night her father died, Constancia stopped dreaming altogether. Not until she was pregnant with Isabel many years later did Constancia begin to dream again. Her first dream was simple to interpret: a barren landscape, mud dried to cracks, the persistent drone of midday. A slender shoot appeared, tenderly green, and then another and another, until the earth was ablaze with the density of life.

She wonders now why her first pregnancy didn't disrupt her dreamlessness. All the while she carried Silvestre in her womb, Constancia felt him as a nerve inside her. She'd had to fight an impulse toward edges, tried in vain to steady her erratic heart. It didn't help that her son grew up to look exactly like Gonzalo. By the time he was twelve, Constancia found herself spying on Silvestre in the shower, lifting the blanket on his naked, sleeping body, running a finger along his quiet hipbone.

Constancia's love for her daughter was entirely different, an easy, radiant devotion. Her balancing necessity.

Back home
, Constancia digs in her rattan armoire for Heberto's Instamatic camera and takes thirty-one photographs of herself. Then she sends the undeveloped film to her daughter in Hawaii. Constancia can always count on Isabel to tell her the truth. Her daughter has no sense of the usual proprieties, is invulnerable to ordinary temptation. Constancia could no sooner get her to wear lipstick than she could build a hydrogen bomb. Each time she attempts to persuade Isabel
to do or say or wear something at odds with her nature, the reply is unfailingly negative.

Constancia checks her horoscope in the newspaper. As usual, it gives her no clues. “Everything lives at night in secret doubt. Something tells you that to die is to wake up.” Constancia considers the Miami
Bugle's
astrologer unusually poetic but not the least bit illuminating. She decides to dress in her navy-blue Adolfo suit, accenting it with a checkered silk scarf and a choker of pearls. The outfit reassures her, makes her feel substantial, armed for the worst. It is difficult to indulge self-doubt looking this good.

Constancia drives to the yacht club in her pink Cadillac convertible, the top down, the radio bursting with a raucous merengue. She swivels slightly to the beat, knees together, in her bucket seat. The guard waves her in to the parking lot, and she is somewhat heartened. If she looked like a total stranger, he certainly wouldn't have let her pass.

In the clubhouse dining room, there's a
palomilla
steak special for lunch. Constancia orders this with French fries and the house salad, blue cheese dressing on the side. Perhaps her diet is interfering with her perceptions. All the Cuban food she's been ingesting lately, so heavy on the grease and meat. That must be it. Her fat intake has dramatically increased. She calls over the waiter and promptly cancels her steak.

There's one other diner besides her, devouring a key lime pie. It is her husband's favorite dessert. Constancia silently promises a battery of saints that she'll bake a pie for Heberto every day of his life if they return him to her in one piece. Now whom should she petition, Constancia wonders, to get rid of her mother's face?

Constancia picks at her salad, allocates a drop of dressing for each leaf of romaine. At eleven-thirty, the regular clique of Cuban ladies comes in for their heavily sugared
espressos. Constancia waves to them, but she receives only chilly smiles in return.

“
¿No me reconocen?
” Constancia asks, walking over to their table, desperate for acknowledgment.

But the five ladies simply stare at her, blank with surprise.

Constancia rushes out the door and starts up her car. There is nowhere for her to drive, but she wants to drive anyway, far from the ocean and its grammar of ruin. She longs for a small body of water, self-contained, secure.

She remembers a trip she and Papi took to the caves outside Matanzas early in 1948. Armed with torches and fishing nets, Constancia trailed her father deep into an underground cavern until they came upon a pool of water so still it appeared frozen. Carefully, Papi cracked through a surface coat of lime to discover crystalline waters where thousands of pale fish swam, looking, Constancia thought, as if they'd devoured stars.

“They're blind,” Papi said. In fact, the fish were so sensitive to the slightest movement or sound that it took nearly three hours to secure a dozen specimens.

Outside the cave, another surprise awaited them: a group of rural guards had surrounded the entrance. Their leader, a thickset sergeant missing a thumb, demanded an explanation. Word had spread quickly of their trek to the caves. There could be only one reason, the locals decided, and they wanted part of the treasure. Only after Papi produced his sodden identification papers and held up the booty of fish did the sergeant, with a profound sigh of disgust, agree to let them go.

It begins to rain
as Constancia drives toward the mainland, but she doesn't put up the top. Instead she pulls a map of Miami from the glove compartment and searches for the
tiniest lake she can find. There's one in Hialeah, right off northwest Sixty-second Street. The roads begin to swell with the downpour. Constancia gets soaking wet, but she continues to drive anyway. The roar of the rain is a kind of silence, she thinks, a dark, temporary precinct. To the north, the horizon looks as if it's below the level of the sea.

Constancia turns left on Dr. Martin Luther King Boulevard and passes a bright-yellow house. She impulsively stops. She knocks on the door, drips a puddle of water where she stands. No one answers, so she enters the house, and waits. Inside, everything is yellow; floors, walls, ceiling, all yellow. There's a yellow cotton sofa and five yellow-painted chairs. By the window, a lone sunflower grows in a yellow ceramic pot. Above her, a ceiling fan hesitantly stirs the air.

A plump man, no taller than five feet, appears in the hallway, dressed in white, a prim white cap on his skull. His name is Oscar Piñango.

“How does my face look?” Constancia demands, as if he could tell her everything.

“I can see destruction is dear to you.”

“Is it that obvious?”

“All afflictions are obvious.”

Constancia follows Piñango down the bare hallway, trailing rainwater, to a room entirely devoted to La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre. There's an electric fountain in the center, lit by amber spotlights, and, on the altar, a white sheet cake with a crenulated yellow border. Pumpkins of all sizes are draped in beads and arranged at the goddess's feet. The santero calls La Virgen by her African name, Oshún.

In Cuba, Constancia had heard of Oshún, of the goddess's fondness for rivers and gold and honey. She unclasps the pearls from around her neck and offers the necklace to the santero. Piñango motions for her to place it with Oshún's
other propitiations, between the
ochinchín
—the shrimp-and-watercress omelet—and a six-pack of orange soda. Then Constancia kneels before the altar, giddy with the mingled scents of urgent devotion.

“It will please her,” Piñango says, unsmiling. His round bulk shivers as he beckons Constancia toward a straw mat. He lights a good-quality
claro
, oddly feminine between his stout fingers, and puffs on it five times. He sucks in his lips until they disappear entirely, then offers the lit cigar to Oshún for extra
ashé
in reading the shells.

“You carry your enemies here,” he tells Constancia, tapping his upper chest. “You have power but no strength. You are tired from too much useless vigilance.”

The santero dips his middle finger in a bowl of water and sprinkles the floor to refresh the divining shells. His voice deepens as he prays in Yoruban, first to Oshún, then to the other
orishas
, until they are properly honored one by one. Then he gathers the cowries and touches Constancia's blessing points so that the gods may perceive her burdens.

“The shells never lie. Through their mouths the
orishas
disclose their purpose.”

Piñango gently shakes the cowries before throwing them on the mat. The pattern falls in
ofún
, where the curse was born. This is the principal ruling. Then he throws the shells twice more. The message doesn't waver:
oddi
, where the grave was first dug, where the grave was first dug.

The room grows warmer. Constancia removes her checkered silk scarf. It's damp and it reeks of salt. The santero continues to pray. Her luck is not good, he says. There must be a
lariache
, a solution, a circumvention, perhaps, but none is forthcoming. Black smoke from Oshún's cigar ripples through the room. The odor is brackish, rotting, nothing at all like tobacco. Constancia finds it difficult to breathe.

Suddenly, the cigar catches fire, fueling the air with its hot fossil stench. Constancia is held still by the sight of the flames, by the spike of pain in her throat. Piñango shakes a maraca, beseeching Oshún, until the air slowly clears and a fine yellow ash coats every surface in the room.

THE NATURE OF PARASITES