The Aguero Sisters (6 page)

Constancia keeps a large store of high-denomination bills hidden in the false bottom of her traveling vanity case
and in a secret account at a local Nicaraguan bank. She siphoned the money from the tobacco store in the last months before it was sold. She thought it prudent to hoard the stash for unexpected plans. Surprisingly, Heberto didn't miss the cash.

The lights parade in the sliding glass doors of her balcony, aimed at the sea. The sky is muddy with low-hanging clouds. Constancia imagines the tops of the palm trees piercing the soft masses, drinking in the purity above. Tonight she is grateful for the moon's absence. Without a moon and with the sea nearby, she can lose herself in the night's imprecisions.

In the pool below, a wrinkled woman swims with a snorkel mask and fins. What could she be searching for at this hour in the concrete blue?

Constancia goes to the kitchen and heats a plate of rice, cooks a yam to bulging in the microwave. Her slacks are getting a little snug, her espadrilles too. She's gained three and a half pounds since she arrived in Florida. Her acquaintances at the yacht club tell her the extra weight becomes her. But Constancia doesn't believe these women. She knows she isn't one of them, that her life outside Miami will always mark her as a foreigner.

The problem, Constancia decided, is that the
cubanas
here can't make comfortable assumptions about her. One of them, a socialite named Rosalina Bellaire de Lavigna, asked her where she'd had her face “done.” Rosalina was skeptical when Constancia vowed she hadn't undergone surgery. Another time, Constancia mentioned she'd voted Democratic (just once, for Jimmy Carter), and the room fell starkly silent. How could she possibly define herself by such unambiguous terms?

Constancia doesn't consider herself an exile in the same way as many of the Cubans here. In fact, she shuns their
habit of fierce nostalgia, their trafficking in the past like exaggerating peddlers.
Her
father was a scientist, concerned with the biological exigencies of origin and barter. Evolution, Papi told her again and again, is more precise than history. Who, then, could pretend to the answers?

Of course, she wouldn't dare say this aloud in Miami and expect to survive.

Constancia moved to Key Biscayne just before the new year. She decorated her apartment all in white from a close-out furniture sale at Burdine's. She's thought of getting a job in sales—Avon has an opening for a district manager—but Heberto has persuaded her to wait until they're more settled. Constancia misses her work, but there is something more. Miami is disconcerting to her, an inescapable culture shock, the air thickly charged with expiring dreams.

The light is blinding too, a sentence to the past, to her life in Cuba. Everywhere, there is a mass of disquieting details. The deep-fried croquettes for sale on the corner. The accent of the valet who parks her car. Her seamstress's old-fashioned stitching. And the songs, slow as regret, on the afternoon radio.

At the best
bodega
in Little Havana, two dozen varieties of bananas are sold. There are pyramids of juicy mangoes, soursops, custard apples, and papayas. In a flash, they'll make her a milk shake that tastes of her past. Every Friday, Constancia loads up her pink Cadillac convertible with fresh fruit to purée and cries all the way home.

Constancia remembers the time she accompanied her father to the central market in Havana. Mamá was already dead by then. She and Papi wandered around for hours, surrendering themselves to a thousand aromas. Her father loved the poultry stalls best, squawking with barnyard fowl and the more delicate clamor of pheasants, partridges, and
quail. She preferred the fish vendors' displays—giant Morro crabs, toothy parrot fish, oysters, eels, and always a few good-sized sharks—perhaps because when she was a child in Camagüey, the ocean had seemed so far away.

When Constancia was five months old
, her mother abandoned their house. Then shortly after Constancia's third birthday, Mamá returned, eight months pregnant and bruised. There were terrible welts on her body, and one eye was swollen shut, but Mamá did not cry or complain. Constancia remembers wishing her mother would leave and never come back.

Constancia found a pearly black powder in her nanny's drawer. She'd seen Beatriz Ureña use it on a photograph of her last boyfriend. “
¡Fuera, diablo!
” she shouted, before setting the picture aflame. Constancia took the same powder and sprinkled it on her mother's windowsill so that it would look like soot. But despite Constancia's primitive invocations, Mamá stayed, and her half-sister, Reina, was born that June.

The baby was dark-skinned and fat and impossibly placid, with hands larger than Constancia's own. It was a formidable task to make her cry, although Constancia frequently tried. She dropped spiders in her sister's crib, forced clumps of mud in her tiny mouth. If her mother hadn't found out, Constancia wonders how long Reina might have survived.

After Mamá threatened to leave again, Papi took Constancia to stay on Abuelo Ramón's ranch in Camagüey. It was supposed to last only the summer. It endured for the next six years. Constancia remembers the still, buzzing heat of her grandfather's ranch. The monotony of expectation. The solace of sudden thunderstorms. Although Papi visited frequently and, as she got older, began taking Constancia on
his collecting expeditions, she never shared a home with her parents again.

Constancia lived with Abuelo Ramón and his six unmarried sons until just before Mamá's funeral in 1948. It was then she saw her half-sister again.

Reina still lives in Havana, in the old family apartment in Vedado, the apartment from which Constancia was expelled as a child. Reina's continuance there irks Constancia. Why did her sister inherit their past—Papi's stuffed birds and bats, his books, the family's photographs—while Constancia managed to receive nothing at all?

Her sister writes to her now and then, with news of successive deprivations. Reina says it's sad to see the near-empty baskets and shelves of the markets in Cuba, the withered vegetables, the chickens too scraggly even for soup. People trade anything they can, home-roasted coffee or their ration of cigarettes for a used brassiere or a gallon of gas. She's heard of brain surgeons baking birthday cakes on weekends to earn extra cash.

No, Constancia thinks, she could not have been happy in Cuba after 1959.

Nearly thirty years ago, Constancia escaped the island on one of the Cruzes' cargo ships. By then, she had married Heberto, the proprietor's middle son, who had resolutely pursued her after her divorce from Gonzalo. She yielded to Heberto, not with passion, but with a deep sense of relief. Constancia gave birth to their daughter, Isabel, the same day the government expropriated her father-in-law's shipping company.

She and the baby were crossing the Straits of Florida when officers from the revolution came aboard to search for defectors. For an hour, Constancia hid with Isabel in a two-ton container of grapefruit, with barely enough air. Isabel
grew limp with the heat and the asphyxiating citrus. Constancia tried everything to revive her; slapped her daughter hard, held her upside down like the obstetrician did when Isabel was born and short of breath, even tore open her blouse and offered her a breast suddenly dried out from fear. But Isabel didn't stir. Finally, Constancia bit her daughter so hard on the heel, she ripped out an inch of flesh.

At four in the morning
, Constancia wakes up in distress. She slips on her slacks and a silk blouse and goes straight to the condominium's garage. Her pink Cadillac convertible is not in its usual parking space. Constancia checks the upper level, but her car is nowhere in sight. She borrows a bicycle from the night watchman and rides a mile to the yacht club where Heberto keeps his motorboat.

Nobody else is on the road. The muscles of her legs flex and lock, moving her forward with unaccustomed speed. Everything appears the same veiled color: the bottle palms and the blacktop road, the mini-malls with their lusterless promises, a flock of plastic flamingos in a man-made lagoon. No one stops her at the solitary guardhouse.

Heberto's little boat is rocking in its moorings, but there is no sign at all of her husband. The door to the clubhouse is locked. The children's pool is drained, its paint an unnatural blue. In the harbor, a manatee surfaces in search of fresh water.

Constancia follows a low droning sound to the storage warehouse. Her pink Cadillac convertible, its motor running, is wedged inside among anchors and ropes. The air is thick with a killing exhaust. Heberto lies naked on the backseat, unconscious, his arms tied behind his back, a dirty crew sock stuffed in his mouth. There is a bucket of orange roughy rotting in the driver's seat.

For a moment, Constancia hesitates, struck by the strange peacefulness of her husband's expression. She climbs onto Heberto, slips, climbs again, then starts pounding his chest until she resuscitates him, pounds him and pounds him until his eyelids flutter.

S
ex is the only thing
they can't ration in Havana. It's the next-best currency after dollars, and much more democratic, if you ask me. The biggest problem is competition. Then policemen. Almost everyone I know my age, male or female, turns a trick once in a while. It's the easiest thing in the world, and most of the time you can convince yourself it's just a date that went a little too far. The foreigners like us because there isn't supposed to be any AIDS in Cuba. That's probably El Comandante's most successful propaganda campaign yet. But it's just that. Propaganda.

Take a stroll with me down the Malecón, and you'll see what I'm talking about. It's a fucking safari. And anybody with a pair of brand-name sneakers or sunglasses is the big game. See those
jineteros
over there? I know them. Very ambitious. They make a living from the hustling. With their dollars and closets of tourist-shop gifts, they're the perfect
go-betweens for ordinary Cuban citizens. Don't be so shocked. What the hell else are people supposed to do? Do you really think a family of five can live on one scrawny chicken a month?
¡Por favor!

Despite what my mother suspects, I'm not a professional. I only buy what I need. I only buy what I
need
. Right now, I'm out here earning pocket money until my visa comes through for Spain.

Like I said, it takes an occasional
novio
to get by. Mamá doesn't understand this. She's immune from the day-to-day hassles because she's had that bureaucrat lackey lover of hers since the dawning of
la revolutión
. Every night, Pepín brings her a feast from God knows where. Fresh steamed lobsters. Steaks thick as my thumb. Mangoes so perfectly ripe and sweet—not the stringy stuff you get with coupons—they're a kind of ecstasy. He also brings her shampoo that doesn't glue your hair together like the local brand, when you can find it. Let's just say the woman hasn't had to wait in a line since the Year of Ten Million, when the whole country went crazy cutting sugarcane.

Mamá isn't the most fervent revolutionary on the island, but she's basically tolerant of the system. She and Pepín say that young people today are spoiled and don't appreciate all we have, that we should've seen how things were before the revolution to understand deprivation. Everybody I know is sick of these arguments, sick of picking potatoes and building dormitories, only to find no meaningful work in the careers we trained for. Sick of not washing our hands after we shit because there isn't any soap. Sick of the blackouts and dry faucets. Sick of having nothing to do, period. At minimum, it can make a person permanently irritable.

You can never work hard enough here, either. Cuba is like an evil stepmother, abusive and unrewarding of effort.
More, more, and more for more nothing. Until last month, when they fired me for fraternizing with a foreigner, I was the volleyball coach at José Martí High School (we came in sixth last year at the national championships), and I earned one hundred eighteen pesos a month.
Créeme
, it's not easy staying in shape on sugar-and-lard sandwiches. At least this way, I make a few dollars. That's how it breaks down here—those with dollars and those without. Dollars mean privileges. A roll of toilet paper. A bottle of rum. Pesos mean
te jodes
. You're fucked. It's that simple.

Come here. Look at this view, this harbor, this gorgeous curve of coast. Men from all over the world tell me that Havana is the most beautiful city they've ever seen. So when will we get it back? When will it be truly ours again?
Coño
, El Caballo has four broken legs, and no one has the courage to put him out of his misery.

My father, José Luís Fuerte, was one of the original revolutionaries. He was at Moncada and in the Sierra Maestra side by side with you-know-who. Part of a museum display in Santiago de Cuba is devoted to his exploits. Mamá took me there when I was a kid. There was a blown-up photograph of him with a rifle across his back. He's smoking a too-big cigar and has a beaded bracelet on his wrist. The odd thing was that he seemed very familiar to me, even though I'd never seen him before. Then I realized it was because I'd inherited his face.

All the while I was growing up and misbehaving, Mamá used to say: What would your father think if he were still alive? It used to shame me for the moment. I have a tattoo on my shoulder, three twisting vines intertwined with the name of my first boyfriend, coincidentally also named José Luís. When I was fourteen and got pregnant by him, my father was the first person I thought of. Mamá never found out, or she would've insisted I have the kid. She was sixteen when I
was born and says she couldn't have imagined her life otherwise. Mamá's been after me to have a child. And for what? So she can coo over the kid before shipping him off to some boarding school in
el campo
like she did with me? Forget about it.