The Aguero Sisters (27 page)

It was clear that she resented the unborn life inside her, resented what she considered the misery accumulating at her center. “If only I were oviparous,” she repeated again and again. Blanca said she would infinitely prefer to lay eggs like her beloved lizards and snakes and be done with the entire maternal ordeal. Not even her little wristbone, which continued to dangle in its pouch from her belt, seemed to be of much help
.

In her sixth month, Blanca decided to move all her belongings into the empty guest room. I tried to dissuade her, but she ignored my wishes. She furnished the room with discarded chairs she salvaged from garbage heaps, nineteen in all. A musty feather mattress on the floor completed the decor. There were days Blanca did not leave the room at all, sitting in one chair and then another, fretfully consulting her watch for a precise number of minutes only she could gauge
.

“
It's raining in my room,” she stated calmly each time I knocked on the door. Then she would ask me to bring her another umbrella. She complained that the dozens of umbrellas already at her disposal did not shield her from the rain
.

Toward the end of her pregnancy, I encouraged Blanca to visit her family in Camagüey. I had never met her father and brothers and was not even certain they knew of my existence. Each time I suggested she introduce me to them, Blanca clicked her tongue and looked away. This time, however, the prospect of returning to the ranch seemed to cheer her
.

It was December, and it rained the entire journey. Her injured leg swelled with the humidity, and she insisted her teeth were receding to the back of her throat. I read to her from the newspapers, filled her in on the war in Spain. But nothing I said or did seemed to distract her
.

No sooner did we arrive at the Mestre ranch than Blanca wanted to leave. She gave no explanation, nor did she seem angry, just emphatically matter-of-fact. Her family, brusque in
the manner of parrots, took her decision in stride. One by one, her brothers—Arístides, Ernesto, Virgílio, Fausto, Cirilio, and Dámaso—embraced her, nodded to each other in unspoken agreement
.

Blanca barely took notice of them except for Dámaso, with whom she whispered a few words. Her father, Ramón, kept an unnatural distance from Blanca, as if he feared receiving an electric shock. Not one of them mentioned her condition. I understood that something had transpired among them, but I could not fathom what
.

I did not see the Mestre men again until three and a half years later, when I delivered Constancia, our firstborn, to them in Camagüey. I remember Ramón Mestre and his sons waiting for us at the train station. They'd arrived in their tumbledown truck and were uncomfortably dressed in new suits from another era. It occurred to me then that they'd most likely worn those suits only once before—for Eugenia Mestre's funeral in 1919
.

Our daughter, Constancia, looked preternaturally old from her first breath. During labor, which lasted the better part of two days, Blanca would ask, her inflection rising: Will someone please tell me …? Will someone please tell me …? But she never completed her question. When I looked into my wife's eyes, I saw a woman who had drowned a thousand years before
.

After the baby was born, Blanca rocked Constancia for hours in the nursery, a deceptively cheerful room with a border of leaping frogs. Round the clock, Blanca rocked, unaware of the hour, the day, of my physical presence
.

In the mornings, the sun hit her face directly, but she did not seem to notice. Except for the baby, everything around her was dead, a sad contagion. Periodically, she loosened her nightgown to let Constancia nurse. Blanca made no other movement, no other sound. Her mouth was a pale, immovable gash
.

Dr. Eduardo Iriarte said he alone could not save Blanca, and so he enlisted the help of physicians I did not fully trust. They prescribed vitamin shots for my wife, metallic medicines to stir her blood. One psychiatrist, freshly trained abroad, fastened electrodes to Blanca's temples and gave her intermittent shocks. But nothing broke the terrible spell. After the last doctor left, hopelessly shrugging his shoulders, there was no one I could confide in, no one I could turn to for help
.

Five months after Constancia was born, Blanca disappeared. She left no note, no clue to where she would go, only our daughter shrieking blue in her crib
.

A NATURAL HISTORY
KEY BISCAYNE
AUGUST
1991

T
he doors of the restoration garage
are open to the night, a balmy mingling of eucalyptus and acacia and warm axle grease. There's a trace of ocean in the wind, a hint of a coming squall. Reina wonders if the pull of death isn't stronger at night, when life is so much less distracting.

Lightning strikes a nearby cluster of palms. The tallest tree flares up in a plume of smoke. A black gash divides it in two. Then a slow blaze begins in the canopy of leaves. Birds flutter and screech, stirring the soot like pollen. Reina decides that this isn't an accident but an act of translation. Only she doesn't yet know the language.

Reina rolls under a 1959 Cadillac, an apple affixed to her mouth. The sweet juice seeps onto her tongue. The car is a big-finned baby with a white exterior and cherry-red seats. The owners told Reina that for years the automobile was
sheltered in a Tampa garage by an agoraphobic Armenian who didn't drive.

This Cadillac could make someone rich back in Cuba, Reina thinks, finishing her twelfth apple of the day. Weddings, tourist rentals,
quinceañeros
, cameo appearances in foreign films. Reina knows an electrician in Havana, modestly talented at best, who built a house on the beach at Santa Teresa del Mar with money he earned chauffeuring his dead father's Chevrolet.

Reina makes a final adjustment to the carburetor. They're usually the weakest link in these antique cars. Reina likes to take the carburetors apart and soak the pieces overnight in a solution of her own devising. Then she leaves it all to ferment outside under fleecy evening skies. In the morning, she wipes each piece clean with her chamois rags and rebuilds the carburetors from scratch. She hasn't had one dissatisfied customer yet.

After quitting her sister's factory, Reina hadn't intended to find a job right away. But in fact, it's done her some good. Unlike her work as an electrician, fixing vintage cars is comfortingly predictable. There's no chance of electrocution or breaking her neck falling off the curve of a fantastic fin. And thankfully, no chance of attracting stray lightning. Reina keeps the hours she wants, no pressure whatsoever. Considering all her other adaptations lately, this new job suits her just fine.

Reina would much rather tinker with these aging cars than work at the Cuerpo de Cuba factory any day. Constancia's cosmetics business is expanding so rapidly (in her second month of operation, she's quadrupled output and secured fifty-four accounts nationwide) that she barely has a spare moment to herself, much less for poor Isabel and Raku. If
her
daughter were visiting with a newborn grandchild,
Reina certainly wouldn't be wasting her time fussing with useless lotions and creams.

Her sister is launching yet another product—Décolletage de Cuba—which has her moodier than ever. Last week, Constancia was on a Miami cable TV show called
Mi Fortuna
, about Latino success stories like hers. She shared the stage with Fredi Torriente Díaz, a manufacturer of do-it-yourself liposuction kits, and Rosita Luz Roja, a perky peroxide blonde whose dating service, for the previously incarcerated (Rosita herself has served time for extortion and credit card fraud), is the most popular in Dade County.

Constancia's face recently appeared on the cover of a Florida financial magazine too. Inside, there were photographs of her sister in action: checking the temperature on a too-hot vat of Pies de Cuba; breaking up a fight between the ever-feuding Odio cousins on the factory floor; testing the freshness of bushels of lavender, daffodils, and peppermint. All the while, Constancia's signature royal-blue bottles (as always, pasted with Mami's face) continue to clink and rattle down the assembly line.

Reina skimmed through the article, picking out the English words she understood. As far as she could tell, there was no information whatsoever on sales figures or plans for international expansion, not a single conventional indicator of success. Constancia, it seemed, only wanted to talk about why customers loved her products. So much gibberish about nostalgia and femininity that it made Reina sick.

At least with a car, Reina thinks, you can fix it, paint it, or improve its performance.
Por favor
, mere creams and lotions won't make a woman desirable. The confidence in her walk is what gives birth to lust. A sense of humor. A look in the eye that says
Acércate, Papi
, come a little closer. Reina doesn't wear deodorant and never shaves her underarms. And she still feels disoriented without her pre-lightning
scent. Why would any woman want to deliberately disguise her natural odor? Why would any woman want to smell of anything but herself?

At breakfast this morning, Constancia reprimanded Reina for the number of men she'd already “processed” at the yacht club.

“ ‘Processed'? Is that what you call it, Constancia?” Reina laughed so hard she succeeded in further infuriating her sister.

Isabel was sitting between them, eating a bowl of granola and nursing Raku. “Tía's right, Mom. At least you could call it ‘fucking.' ” It was the first thing Isabel had said to anyone in days.

“What kind of language is that for a new mother,
mi cielo
?” Constancia asked, her voice low and measured.

Then she faced Reina.

“And you! You have a rep-u-ta-tion already!” Constancia emphasized the syllables as if they were four separate words, whether out of outrage or lack of imagination, Reina didn't know.

Finally, Constancia wheeled around on her forties crocodile heels and stormed off to work.

Coño
, Reina thought, her sister has slept with the same man for thirty years. What could she possibly still know of desire? And why are married women so stingy about other people's sex lives anyway?

“I don't think I'd want anyone making love to me right now,” Isabel said, looking down at her month-old son.

Reina regarded her niece affectionately across the kitchen table. “Don't worry,
mi amor
, you're not supposed to. Now's the time most men rediscover they're polygamous.”

Reina had heard the whole story about Austin and that hula dancer. The only thing that surprised her was that anyone should be shocked. Women expected too much from
men, too little for themselves. Sexual fidelity—what an absurd concept! This younger generation was, if anything, more intransigent on the subject than her own.

Later that morning, Reina took her niece and great-nephew for another ride in Heberto's motorboat. They skimmed through the bay as they often do before noon. Isabel put the baby in a sling facing forward so he could get a full view. They glided around for an hour or two, past mangrove islands and the glistening waterfront of the city.

Sometimes Isabel steered the boat and Reina got a chance to hold Raku. A humming filled her then, enduring and pure. Reina dangled seaweed before Raku's eyes, dripped water on his wrists, rubbed sand between her fingers and let him take a whiff. He seemed to know her already, watched her expressions closely. When his face was opposite hers, Reina felt the warmth of his milky breath like a bit of lace at her lips.

Reina puts the final touches on the white Cadillac, then sets to work restoring a 1955 Thunderbird. For thirty-five years, the client said, he'd kept this sky-blue beauty in a climate-controlled garage as a tribute to his lost first love. But now his love is a widow in Pensacola and eagerly awaiting his return.

On the radio, there are reports of an impending hurricane gathering strength off the Bahamas. An evacuation of Key Biscayne may be necessary. Reina has been through so many hurricanes in Cuba, they no longer frighten her. The real danger, she knows, is not from the floods or the screaming winds but from the damn flying fruit—mangoes or plantains turned to deadly weapons at ninety miles per hour. A dear lover of hers from Santa Cruz del Sur, Hermán Duyós, was killed in 1986 by a high-velocity avocado to the back of his head. Poor Hermán. Reina cannot think of a more undignified way to die.

Somehow she can't imagine her current lover being killed by an avocado or some lesser vegetable. Russ Hicks is the closest thing she knows to a hero, a concept Reina resists in principle. The night he rescued her on Heberto's boat, Russ took her straight to his cabin (he didn't have to ask). His body was surprisingly light and silvered with hair. It was the first day of Reina's period, but Russ didn't mind. He covered her body again and again, then held her in place with his tongue until he found her true center.