The Aguero Sisters (15 page)

H
eberto Cruz
is unaccustomed to the crushing sun, to the drip and suck of the swamp, to the stinging heat behind his bloodshot eyes. Clots of incessant mosquitoes, whining, tormenting, settle and resettle on his blood-lit face. Heberto trudges on in his water-cracked boots, the submachine gun slung diagonally from hip to shoulder blade, a pink fungus blooming on his thumb. Heberto trudges on, taken with a sense of his own new significance.

Constancia, he knows, is skeptical of his mission. Of course, she would be. She hid his razor, shrank his underwear, embroidered epithets on his socks. Glorious vainglorious—what does it matter what his wife thinks? He is here now, isn't he? Here with men of action, helmets afire. Here with hundreds of militant,
ordained
men. The stench for miles a privilege of endurance. He is here, no? Not any previous elsewhere. Not rocking in his boat, pathetic and
pleading with the moon. Not constrained behind his counter, dispensing expensive cigars. Not surrendering himself to the erratic republic of Constancia's bed.

After all, Heberto thinks sourly, what has safety brought him but more fruitless safety?

It's late afternoon. Clouds rush in from the south, booming with thunder. In a moment, all is water and refraction, every variation of vertical. Lightning steals down from the sky in brilliant filigrees. The men shout instructions, hold fast to cypress trees. Heberto stays put. He knows that the only protection from the storm is time. Except for this clandestine mission, it makes no sense to be in the swamp this time of year, when only a few misguided tourists from Europe visit. But this heat, this training, is meant to toughen him, to prepare him for the invasion ahead.

Invasion. The word makes Heberto hard as a young man. He can feel it. The tight ridge of expectation in his groin. His contracting
cojones
, the same ones his father accused him of not having. Heberto puts his hand over his heart and imagines it roaring with life. Tireless. Inexhaustible. Vibrant with a fugitive rhythm.

For him, there'll be no more waiting on the sidelines in this shabby empire of exile. Soon he'll confront himself in the ultimate exaltation—focused, vehement, without memory. Nothing less will satisfy him.

Years ago
, Heberto had wanted to join his father and exiled brothers in the Bay of Pigs invasion, longed to commandeer one of the Cruzes' secretly donated ships. But Constancia threatened to leave him and move to Spain. “I won't sacrifice myself for your
politica dichosa
!” she screamed, packing her hard-shell suitcase. And so Heberto stayed home.

Heberto's older brother died a hero in the Bay of Pigs. Leopoldo Cruz drowned in the stampede toward shore,
while the skies remained empty of American planes. At the last minute, President Kennedy lost his nerve and pulled the promised air support. Gonzalo, the youngest, was shot in the leg. His knee was so badly mangled that he still walks with a pronounced limp. Gonzalo could have fixed his leg years ago, but he prefers it damaged, the pretext it gives him to boast of his valor. Their father, Arturo, who watched the invasion through binoculars on the deck of his cargo ship, left Cuba good only for dominoes and a dulling nostalgia.

For years afterward, Heberto's father treated him coolly. Heberto's shame came bullying during idle hours, and so he kept busy until his every minute was accounted for, until there was nothing of any importance left to do. The winters in New York City helped, the ice and blindness one long third of the year. With each passing season, Constancia, like any woman with her own money, grew more confident at his side, and Heberto was besieged by all that had escaped his life.

At one time, Heberto had loved Constancia, desired her with a ferocity that frightened him to near passivity. Above all, he wanted to protect her. She'd been Gonzalo's first wife, and she had suffered with his brother. Heberto didn't want to make Constancia suffer anymore. But over the years, as his passion waned and his wife bloomed with self-assurance, Heberto couldn't shake off the disconcerting feeling that somehow he'd inherited his brother's spoils. Heberto had even raised Silvestre, Gonzalo and Constancia's son, put him through that expensive deaf college in Washington, D.C.

For once in his life, Heberto wanted something that was entirely his own. Was this so much to ask?

When he first moved to Miami, Heberto had avoided Gonzalo, the putrid skin of his brother's final illness. But their father's death brought them together again. The night
of the funeral, Heberto drove Gonzalo back to the hospital. His brother invited him up to the terminal ward for a drink and, with a snap of his fingers, had an orderly bring them two bottles of seven-year-old Cuban rum. They drank slowly, deliberately, emptying the night, smoking
coronas
(Montecristo No. 3's) and reminiscing until dawn.

They remembered their mother, María Josefa Escoto de Cruz, so brittle and decorous and constantly weeping.
Una neurasténica
, such women were called in her day. María Josefa died in her sleep the same day her trim, coiffed hair turned all white (this was no biological impetuosity, a neighbor said; María Josefa had been planning it for weeks). Her three sons were still in their teens. Heberto and Gonzalo reluctantly agreed, drinking and smoking and nearly weeping themselves, that their mother had loved only their older brother, Leopoldo.

They recalled, too, the night their father took them to a whorehouse near La Chorrera in Havana. Heberto and Gonzalo were only eleven and nine, but Papá made them watch him fuck an opulent mulatta with Oriental eyes, made them watch as his prodigious
cojones
bounced against her immense, quaking, plum-colored ass. The heat that rose from their coupling nearly stifled the boys' breath. Finally, Papá ordered the woman to suck his
pinga
for what seemed an eternity, until he groaned and slumped forward like a lanced bull.
Así jode un hombre
, Papá said with satisfaction, and taunted his sons to follow suit. When they backed away, terrified by the whore's acres of naked flesh, Papá laughed at them and called them
maricones
.

On the way home, Papá told them that any woman who sucked their
pingas
was a whore, that they should remember this and not be made fools of.

For years afterward, this image of his father haunted Heberto, disturbed him on the rare mornings when he could
remember his dreams. On his wedding night, in a baroque room lit with leaning tapers, Constancia tenderly bent over his loins. Heberto brutally pushed her away. “Don't ever do that again!” he demanded, then turned his back on her. He suspected his brother of corrupting Constancia, of humiliating her the same way their father had the slant-eyed whore.

The nights in the swamp
are worse than the days. Heberto sleeps fitfully or not at all as the lanterns burn, glaucous with insect repellent. The other men dream angrily from the mouths of their tents. Every night, Heberto secretly lights a Cuban cigar, a
panatela
, away from the encampment. When it comes to cigars, at least, Heberto sets politics aside.

He was glad to know that Gonzalo, who considered himself an unerring exile leader (he's known as El Gallo for his success with the ladies and his willingness to take on any foe), also succumbed to the transcendent pleasures of a hand-rolled Cuban cigar. That night in the hospital, they'd shared their country's finest rum and
coronas
, and their lives began to intertwine once more.

Who can defend Cuba today? Its daily, ordinary evils?
Gonzalo had asked Heberto this behind a cloud of fragrant smoke.
Nobody
, Heberto answered, growing more and more despondent as he inventoried his own inaction over the years.
The revolution is an accident of history, entirely reversible
, Gonzalo continued with an eloquence that astonished Heberto.
Everyone on the island wants a fresh start, a radical change of destiny, a pair of brand-name blue jeans. Anything less is insupportable
.

By morning, Heberto wanted desperately to fight alongside his brother, to break free from his leashed life. He was tired of everything. Of the part in his hair, combed just so. Of his useless, uncallused hands. Heberto wanted a role
in Cuba's salvaging. He'd blow up bridges, if he had to, swallow the necessary bricks. For him, there'd be no hesitating, no more anxiously looking back.

Beneath him, the river of grass does its continental slide. The rhythms of the dark seem all wrong to Heberto, clashing and without syncopation. Back in his tent, each of his legs twitches to a separate tempo inside his nylon sleeping bag. He hears the cries of the spectral birds, the alligators' ungainly slinking into mud. And though panthers are exceedingly rare here, Heberto imagines again and again their soft, circular padding around his tent.

Nobody is too holy to die, Heberto tells himself. Perhaps a distinguished death might redeem the stolidity by which he's lived. To live with death, he believes—to live with it like a hot breath on the back of your neck—is to truly live. No matter; this time he would be deliberate. Yes, for once, Heberto Cruz would be deliberate, and he would be saved.

A
vat of Constancia's
new face emollient simmers on the kitchen stove. She adds a cup of ground papaya stones, folds in the petals of a dozen yellow roses. Seventy-two royal-blue bottles crowd her Formica counters. Each is affixed with a label featuring a cameo of her mother's face (now her own) beneath the ornate logo
Cuerpo de Cuba
. Constancia inserts rosewood stoppers in the bottles and winds them with silk cords and tassels to give them the appearance of heirlooms.

It is seven in the morning. Constancia turns up the radio, half hoping to hear news of her husband. Heberto left nearly two months ago, and she still hasn't heard a word. A moment later, she switches to the early edition of
La Hora de los Milagros
. Constancia learns that in Xcalacdzonot, a village not far from the ruins of Chichén Itzá, a brindle cow named Chuchi has begun reciting the Lord's Prayer during its morning milking. At first, the miracle was dismissed because
Benito Zúñiga, the cow's owner, is known in those parts as an incorrigible prankster. But the village priest, a man indisposed toward excessive religiosity, confirms that the otherwise ordinary Chuchi is indeed reciting the Our Father, if somewhat indistinctly.

Constancia rubs a bit of the hot emollient on the slant of her cheeks and considers the case of the praying cow. She traces a faint line across her forehead, on the hint of a crease between her eyebrows. Last month, she awoke and discovered that her mother's face had replaced her own. Since then Constancia has slept only four hours a night, and her energy has increased to an exhilarating degree. She finds the soft stretch of Mamá's flesh over hers oddly sustaining, as if she were buoyed by a warm tidal power.

Still, Constancia's moods pendulate unpredictably, from this sense of contentment to an uncontrollable desire to scratch off her face. She wonders how long she must carry her mother's visage, shoulder the burden of Mamá's youth in full bloom (she was thirty-four when she died in the Zapata Swamp) alongside her own midlife perspective. What penance this is: to wear Mamá's mouth, her eyes, like a spiteful inheritance, to suffer the countenance that scorned her, that banished her to a lonely childhood of uncles and horses.

And the question persists: Where has her own face fled?
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction
. Her father taught her this, an immutable law of physics. If it's true that nothing is lost in the greater balance sheet of energy, then her face must be somewhere—slipped through some cosmic sluice, tucked deep into a cold black hole, urged away by unknown codes of affinity. Perhaps, Constancia hopes, it's only a rare menopausal side effect.

Constancia waits an hour
for the emollient to cool before pouring it through minute funnels into her royal-blue bottles.
The cream is sharply fragrant, like a season distilled. Constancia sweats in the heat and daze of its strange amplifications, in the long-ago summers in Cuba it conjures up. She remembers her Tío Dámaso standing before the wood-fire stove at the ranch, stirring his famous plantain soup. Although her grandfather and uncles raised horses and cattle, they were practically vegetarians. And there was an unspoken rule that pork would not be tolerated in their home. Not even
chicharrones
, the crispy pork cracklings that Constancia loved.

At times, when she recalls those isolated years on the ranch, Constancia senses the room, the air, indeed everything around her, rotating slowly, imperceptibly, as if she were a small white sun, the cynosure of a modest new galaxy.

Fortunately, it hasn't taken Constancia long to interest Miami's department stores and specialty shops in her homemade lotions and creams. Her initial strategy has been simple: to keep quantities of the products strictly limited in order to stimulate demand. Her first success, an eye repair cream called Ojos de Cuba, sold out in forty-two minutes at the Bal Harbour shopping mall. And her foot bath, Pies de Cuba, received a two-column rave in the beauty section of the Miami
Bugle's
Sunday magazine.

Constancia intends to launch a full complement of face and body products for every glorious inch of Cuban womanhood: Cuello de Cuba, Senos de Cuba, Codos de Cuba, Muslos de Cuba, and so on. Each item in her Cuerpo de Cuba line will embody the exalted image Cuban women have of themselves: as passionate, self-sacrificing, and deserving of every luxury. Last week, she found a defunct bowling ball factory she plans to convert into a cosmetics plant with money from her account at the Nicaraguan bank.

Constancia credits the emergence of her mother's face
over hers with her business acumen. Her ads (glossy, soft-focus affairs with antique mirrors and tropical foliage) appeal to her clients' memories, to the remembered splendors of their Cuban youth. Her motto—
Time may be indifferent but you needn't be
—appeals to their anxious vanity. Hardly a subtle approach, she admits, but highly effective.