The Aguero Sisters (28 page)

They barely spoke after the first acknowledgments, flourished wildly without language. Russ stoked their love-making with Greek figs and dates, teas sweetened with honey, assorted cream cakes. Their days were metered by shadows, by heat and its absence, the famine of smooth, burning candles. Reina yearned to hold the world inside her again, to have the sky empty all its gifts in her lap. What, then, was holding back her pleasure?

“Where's my toolbox?” she demanded on their third day together. She searched Russ's plush cabin for a clue. He opened wide the portholes, and the sea was visible all around. Anchored a few yards away, Heberto's motorboat rocked modestly in the breeze. Russ held her hands, twice as large as his, and stared at Reina for another hour. Reluctantly, he returned her toolbox, then took her to his restoration garage.

“I'll pay you whatever you want,” he said, and handed Reina an orange jumpsuit and a pair of workman's boots. “I need you close by.”

Reina is learning English. A slow English with the flavor of the Southwest. She isn't sure she likes the way English feels in her mouth, the press of her tongue against her palate, the lackluster
r
's. Russ is from Omaha—part Chippewa, part German, part French. He's writing a book in three parts, like himself. An autobiography that ends when
he is born. He reads sections of it aloud to Reina, but she admits she hardly understands a word.

Russ told her he left Nebraska in 1959, intending to join the rebels after reading an article that glamorized El Comandante in
Life
magazine. But he made it only as far as Fort Lauderdale. His fortune came quickly, in stocks and real estate and antique cars, and so he decided to stay.

Reina is learning Russ's American songs, outsized music from this endless land. Reina sings them as they speed through the intercoastal waterways, as she works on her vintage cars and eats her lover's barbecued steaks.

Reina dismantles the Thunderbird's carburetor and drops the parts in a bucket of her special solution. She wipes her hands on a rag, then pulls a pack of loose tobacco from her jumper pocket. Carefully, she presses together a cigarette, drags the smoke hard into her lungs. Reina didn't smoke much before. In Cuba, she enjoyed the occasional cigar with a tumbler of rum. The two go so well together, they're a kind of
congrí
, a red-beans-and-rice stew. For her, fixing cars and smoking have much the same dual appeal.

Reina wonders if her English will serve her better here than her quotidian Spanish. In Miami, the Cuban Spanish is so different, florid with self-pity and longing and obstinate revenge. Reina speaks another language entirely, an explosive lexicon of hardship and bitter jokes at the government's expense. And her sister sounds like the past. A flash-frozen language, replete with outmoded words and fifties expressions. For Constancia, time has stood linguistically still. It's a wonder people can speak to each other!

Constancia rarely mentions their mother, despite the
thousands of royal-blue bottles she processes daily, despite Mami's face firmly cemented over hers. For her sister, it's always Papi this and Papi that, as if their mother had never existed. Constancia and her fretwork amnesia. Constancia and her worn, jarring lies. Papá also had lied. He'd lied to Constancia, and then she guarded his lie, a hideous jewel, for forty years. So why should Reina believe anything her sister says now?

Until Mami died, Reina accepted what Papá said without question. Her memories are rich with his pronouncements, looming and fixed, like faces in musty oil paintings. Reina breathed in his words and they clung to her, became tissue and sinew, live buckling cells. Once, Papá pointed to a ridge of mountains edged with pines and empty sky. “Pity the poor souls condemned to interpretation rather than enjoyment,” he said, surveying the landscape as if he'd fashioned it himself. “Never trust anyone who cannot surrender himself to nature.”

Reina used to help her father feed birds on the balcony of their Havana apartment. In the cool release of evening, they scattered bread crumbs and seeds, the city's colonial architecture blooming at their feet. He entertained her with old wives' tales about what happened to birds in cold climates, theories about hibernation or supposed flights to the moon. No less a luminary than Aristotle, he told Reina, fancied that redstarts turned into robins to survive the cold and that swallows buried themselves in the mud.

All the while, Papá never held her or stroked her hair. She suspected he didn't love her.

One day, Reina asked Papá whether he was her real father. He was in his study, hermited behind a book. She touched his elbow and waited. Papá ignored her. Reina waited because it was important, because she wanted to know something for certain beyond the soothing circumference
of her mother's face. She waited all afternoon, until the faint arch of a new moon was visible through the window. Then she went to bed, emptied of all suspense.

Reina couldn't mourn her father's death. By the time he put the twelve-gauge shotgun to his heart, Reina was gangly with anguish from her mother's untimely death. She had spurted nearly a foot in two years. Reina remembers the cottony smell of Sundays, the stagnant contractions of weekly routines. She wishes her sister could have given her something vital then, something to ease her grief. But all that was essential collapsed between them in those years, collapsed but did not die.

It is ten o'clock
. Reina turns the dial from the frenetic weather report to the late-night edition of Constancia's favorite radio show,
La Hora de los Milagros
. Over recent weeks, Reina, too, has gotten hooked on the program. Although she doesn't consider herself conventionally religious, she's intrigued by mystical phenomena, by occurrences her sister attributes to one obscure saint or another. Reina reaches inside a paper sack for another apple and listens.

Tonight a carpenter from Elizabeth, New Jersey, calls in, claiming that Saint Joseph appeared to him while he was sanding a nightstand and gave him valuable woodworking tips. Another caller, a manicurist from Hackensack, complains that her husband, Lázarus Delgado, disappeared three days after their marriage in Saint Hilary's Church. Last night, she dreamed that he was eating a
carne asada
at the Versailles restaurant in Little Havana. The show's hostess, the flamboyant Aurora Galán, announces that dreams about
carne asada
can mean only one thing: that the caller should devote her life to God.

A news bulletin interrupts the show. It seems a third-rate invasion of Cuba is under way: a hundred or so exiles in
jungle gear are attacking Varadero Beach. Reina laughs at their preposterous effort. What could they possibly be thinking? That the Cuban people will welcome them with open arms? Roast suckling pigs in their honor? Start an impromptu carnival in the streets? No matter how dissatisfied her poor
compañeros
are in Cuba, these exiles are the last people on the planet they'd want taking over.

In recent years, small propeller planes buzzed over Havana like persistent insects, dropping leaflets urging a mass uprising. If these pilots were truly interested in building solidarity with their
hermanos
in Cuba (who, incidentally, were already gagging on propaganda), they would have dropped more useful items: sewing kits or instant soup, bars of soap, even decent novels, for that matter. The leaflets, Reina remembers, were barely suitable for toilet paper. They left tenacious exclamation points on her buttocks, which, despite vigorous scrubbing, took many days to fade.

It is nearly midnight
when Reina returns to Constancia's apartment on Key Biscayne. Her niece is awake, nursing her baby in the living room. Raku's mouth works rapidly, gorging on the lighter foremilk, then settles into a slower rhythm for the rest of his meal. The television is on, with no sound. Two fat men—one bald, the other sporting a squarish haircut—are poking each other in the eyes. Outside, the wind is blaring, rattling the balcony screens. The first drops of rain quickly turn into a downpour.

Reina settles opposite her niece and watches her nurse her son. In 1971, repairing electrical lines in Puerto Manatí, Reina spotted an odd configuration of cats in the bushes. Upon closer scrutiny, she saw a calico cat nursing a litter of kittens while it suckled its own mother's teats. Reina's throat, then as now, went completely dry.

When Reina gave birth to Dulcita, the nurses insisted
she didn't have enough breast milk. Reina checked herself out of the hospital and began nursing Dulcita round the clock. She loved the luxuriousness of her swollen breasts, the frank relief when Dulcita drained them of milk. Reina's body would go lax with the pleasure, her thoughts drifting back to those endless hours in her own mother's arms.

Over the years, Reina made a hobby of studying the nursing habits of mammals. Only the guinea pig, she learned, is sufficiently well developed at birth to survive without milk. At the other extreme is the pilot whale calf, which may suckle its mother for up to seventeen years. Opossum mothers, she was dismayed to discover, always have too few teats for their young, inciting a brutal fight for survival among her offspring.

A strange clay pendant hangs on a choker around Isabel's neck. She told Reina that the day she shut off her kiln, it produced for her this last token of exquisite red. Her niece said that she'd been trying to concoct this precise shade for many months. She explained how color was what she had the least control over in pottery, how the heat of the kiln, the humidity in the air, a minute or two more or less, can make all the difference in how a piece turns out.

Isabel said that during her last month in Hawaii, her studio began to have an air of neglect about it, of quasi-extinction. In a year, she predicted, liana vines would push their way through the cracks and crevices. In two years, birds would feather their nests on the tin roof, lay creamy, speckled eggs. Nothing would be left to announce that she'd once worked there, that what she'd done ever mattered.

Raku falls asleep at his mother's breast, still sucking sporadically. Gently, Isabel slips her little finger into the corner of his mouth to break the suction.

“
¿Puedo probar un poquito?
” Reina's voice is thick with longing.

Isabel doesn't seem surprised by the request. She motions for Reina to come closer.

Reina kneels and stares at the calm landscape of her niece's breasts. The nipples are large and dark brown. A few pale hairs sprout in their orbits like a faint halo. Isabel lifts a breast toward her aunt. Reina closes her eyes and breathes in the distant scent of her mother, closes her eyes and settles her lips on her past.

S
ilvestre Cruz
gives no forewarning of his arrival in Miami. He simply goes to La Guardia Airport and buys a ticket with some of the penitent cash his mother sent over the years. He packed nothing. Only a paperback in his pocket of Spanish Civil War poems.

Now he's taking the road back, to the palms and the heat and the father he avoided for so long.

Gonzalo Cruz is in the hospital. He has a degenerative liver ailment, his mother wrote, like what alcoholics get but not caused by alcohol. Silvestre has never met his father. Mamá protected him from Gonzalo. She said that he had no
interest in his only son. And it was true. Gonzalo had lived up to her words all these years.

At times, Silvestre feels an error breeding inside him, stamping every living cell, and he wonders whether he inherited this from his father. Not that it matters. According to his mother, Gonzalo is completely immune to guilt, claims zero remorse for abandoning their son. These traits seem oddly appealing to Silvestre, something he finally decided required his personal investigation.

On the morning flight to Miami, Silvestre asks himself a familiar question: What might have changed if he'd ever heard his father's voice? It was a pointless game. Silvestre knows, if he knows anything, that conjecture is less necessary than the everyday answers. After a certain point in life, nothing aimless and purely happy can happen again. Perhaps only death After all, the dead have many advantages over the living. Like being infinitely more revered.

The blast of tropical heat reminds Silvestre of his first winter in the orphanage in Colorado, reminds him because all he could think of in Denver—a city of treacherous ice and mountains and strange, anemic light—was heat. Heat and Cuba's fragrant seas. Perhaps that is why he willed the fever within him, willed the fever that revived everything that the Denver cold threatened to extinguish. Even today, Silvestre can recall the first spiking of his temperature, the glow of Cuba remembered shimmering off his skin.

While the fever had relieved the numbing chill, it also rendered him stone cold deaf. Consolation, he discovered, came with a price. Silvestre desperately attempted to conquer the damage, to discipline his other senses to make up for the unyielding silence. He strengthened his eyesight, his senses of smell and touch and taste, to fatiguing degrees.

It is not difficult to find his father. The Good Samaritan
Hospital. Where his sister's baby was born. Raku Silvestre Cruz. There's never a shortage of irony in Silvestre's life. It's something he's learned to rely upon.

Silvestre has driven only a few times in his life, but he rents a car anyway. Who would believe that a thirty-three-year-old man, deaf or not, can barely drive? Silvestre shows his driver's license to the clerk, a young Cuban with an alarmingly patriotic jacket and tie. Silvestre pays cash in advance, with more of his mother's guilt money. He doesn't plan on staying in Miami very long.

It takes him an hour of maneuvering until he feels confident enough to take the car out of the airport parking lot. For now, Silvestre decides to avoid the highways. He drives for several miles north on Le Jeune Road before realizing he must go in the opposite direction. The faded clapboard and cement houses of Hialeah are vaguely comforting to him. Here and there, he spots an outdoor shrine to La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre.