The Aguero Sisters (7 page)

These days, I find myself wondering not what my father would think of me but what he would think of his revolution and his former heroes.

People know my father was José Luís Fuerte, and so it makes it difficult sometimes. They expect more from me. I used to be friends with Che Guevara's son in high school. We used to joke about our respective revolutionary burdens. Last I heard, he was a heavy-metal musician, pierced everywhere and trying to leave the country.

I thought of leaving too. At night on an inner tube with other
balseros
from the beach at Jaimanitas or Santa Fé. A friend of mine from junior high, Lupita Núñez, tried it in 1989, but she got picked up by the Cuban coast guard and sentenced to three years in jail. Others get eaten by sharks or go insane from the thirst. The people who make it to Miami become the real heroes of the revolution. My friends and I listen to the shortwave or spend hours trying to tune in to Radio Martí to get the news. Or if we're really lucky, a TV report from south Florida.

Leaving. Leaving and dollars. That's all anybody ever talks about anymore.
¡Basta ya!

Sometimes, late at night, I wonder how my life would've been different if Mamá had left for the United States with her sister. Tía Constancia lives in New York and has two grown children. I like to imagine how cold it gets there. I'd like to wrap myself in fur and skate endlessly on frozen lakes. Round and round I'd go, my breath a trace of vapor behind me. In Cuba, there aren't any lakes. And only the future is frozen.

When I'm not out here on the Malecón, I ride my bicycle to pass the time. Not by choice, believe me. The damn island ran out of gas, and then the government started importing these bulky black bikes from China and tried to convince everyone that it was good for their health. Well, for once they were right. People started losing weight and having more energy for sex—not that there's ever a shortage of
that
here. Now something like a million bicycles clog Havana, and total chaos reigns in the streets. It's as if cars never existed.

I like to take my bike out of the city and ride for hours in the countryside. On weekends I've gone clear across to the Viñales Valley in Pinar del Río province. There are fields of tobacco everywhere you look. Mamá tells me her father's family came from there, that they were refined people who recited poetry and played music every night. She still has the handmade violin my great-grandfather Reinaldo brought with him from Spain in 1903. Every now and then, Mamá takes the violin out of its little coffin and rubs the horsehair bow with a speck of rosin. I often think of my great-grandfather as I ride, suspended low over the earth, skimming along just fast enough to notice anything important.

My boyfriends come from everywhere. But the Canadian tourists are the easiest tricks, because they want to believe everything you tell them. Like that guy over there. Look how he can't keep his eyes off that trashy number in the hot pants.
¡Que nalgotas!
Something happens to their brains when they hit Cuba. My theory is that it's the ratio of sunlight to oxygen to ocean here. Ninety percent of their cells are dormant until they arrive and see a good-looking
habanera
. Then all hell breaks loose. Unfortunately, they're so sexually deprived, they make you work harder than anyone else on the planet.

From what I can tell, the only people making a decent living here are the
babalawos
. There's one around the corner from my building who's redone his entire house with money from
santería
initiations. Only a couple of years ago, everyone knew where to find Lisardo Cuenca if he was needed, but it was all very hushed. His house looked like any other on the street, peeling with old paint. The occasional bleating of an illegal goat or the appearance of a horde of paralytics on his doorstep was the only clue to the secret power inside.

Now you should see the place. A thirty-foot statue of San Lázaro stands on his minuscule lawn, and his house is painted white with bright-blue stripes. Seventeen matching flags surround it, and people come from all over, openly carrying pigeons, sacks of beans, and toasted corn. Cuenca's best clients are referred to him by the government: foreigners who want an authentic initiation. Cuenca charges them a fortune, too. Four thousand dollars in cash is what I've heard. The government, of course, gets its cut. Anything in the name of foreign exchange.

You know things have gotten desperate when the Party needs to buy off the
babalawos
. I don't care if a white dove came to rest on El Comandante's shoulder during his inauguration speech, or that he was clearly the gods' chosen one. I don't think anybody, god or mortal, could have imagined how bad things would get here, to what depths people would stoop for a pork leg or a rusty saw. You always hear how the revolution divided families left and right. But what's going on now is worse than anything that preceded it. I heard of one family committing their grandmother to an asylum to get her apartment in Old Havana, of a brother killing his twin over a used battery for his Chevrolet.

• • •

The Malecón's
been getting rough lately with lowlifes and black marketeers. The hustlers carry knives now, work the strip in pairs. You have to be careful. They don't appreciate girls like me, who come out only occasionally and give them competition. See this scar on my stomach? Some bitch came after me with a metal nail file when her French boyfriend dared look me over. That's when I decided to try my luck at the Habana Libre Hotel. No Cuban woman worth her salt would wear the ugly sandals and calf-length skirts I see on the tourists, so that's what I put on to pass for an
extranjera
. My English is pretty convincing too, for about ninety seconds, just enough to get me a seat at the rooftop bar. That's where I met Abelardo.

At first, I thought he might be an undercover cop, on account of his exaggerated Castilian accent (one of their stupider tricks). But he started off by telling me how he lives with his widowed sister in a tiny high-rise apartment in Madrid. His left hand is partially withered, and he held it up in what little intermittent light reflected off the revolving mirrored ball, as if to say,
Are you sure you still want to talk to me?
He seemed surprised when I did.

Then he told me he had a tumor the size of a plum on his balls, but the doctors assured him it was benign. I almost lost my nerve right then, but he took my hand and told me, sincerely, I thought, that I was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen, and the kindest, and would I give him the pleasure and honor of becoming his wife.

The old man scared the hell out of me, and it must have shown, because he pulled back, apologized profusely, and—
¡Coño! ¡Cojones! ¡Hijo de la gran puta que es tu madre!
—he began to cry. Not a little disappointed snuffling but loud, heartrending sobs. Everyone turned to stare at me. The room became utterly still. Out. Out. Get out of there. But I
was glued to my seat like an idiot while Abelardo wailed on. Hotel security arrived three abreast and arrested me.
I
was arrested at the bar of a Cuban hotel because I couldn't produce a foreign passport.

The rest is too tedious to tell in detail, but here's the bottom line: I got booked for prostitution, lost my job coaching volleyball, worked two hours in a cement plant with no cement before walking out, and decided to marry Abelardo.

TREE DUCKS

M
y father liked to boast that he'd arrived in Cuba with ten pesos in one pocket, a volume of verse by the great Romantic poets in another, and his handmade violin. For one month he played his caprices and sonatinas, collecting coins on the streets of Havana, interspersing his selections with the more mundane requests of passersby. One day, a young widow spat at him on the Paseo del Prado. Her husband had been killed in the Spanish-American War, and she could not stand to hear Papá's Castilian accent
.

The desk clerk at my father's
pensión
recommended that he become a
lector
on account of his grandiloquent voice. A week later, Papá got a job in a cigar factory in the Vuelta Abajo region of Pinar del Río. His first day on the platform, perspiring with nervousness and encircled by cigar smoke and the scrutinous eyes of a hundred workers, he began to read
:

As a boy, I often wondered how Papá had endured those first months away from home, surrounded by strangers, a refined misfit among coarser men, a man whose first purchase in Cuba, after much sacrifice and diligent saving, was a gramophone and a thick record of the “Witches' Dance Variations” by Paganini
.

In time, my father met Soledad Varela, a local flutist, ten years his senior. It was a Sunday afternoon, and they were attending a concert by a chamber music quartet from Havana. In fact, they were the only ones in the audience. Mamá sat in her wide-brimmed straw hat. Papá smoothed a Panama in his lap. She liked the way his mouth moved, his unseemly mustache. He liked the way she held her silence, unafraid, weighing her words like silver on her tongue
.

It turned out they had much to say to one another, about the muddy-sounding flute and the violin tuned half a note too high. They continued their conversation after the concert, beginning a three-day courtship that ended in Pinar del Río's town hall. Mamá was thirty-one years old and by then had refused proposals of marriage from suitors women half her age would have coveted. But in Reinaldo Agüero of Galicia, a newcomer not long off the boat, she had found her destiny
.

From my parents' first meeting, my future was born and the very moment I am living was predetermined. From my parents' first meeting, two more people walk the earth in search of solace, two more people with Papá's first loneliness echoing in their breasts
.

• • •

Music is my earliest memory, earlier than sight or smell or touch, earlier than consciousness itself. My parents spent most evenings playing duets, for which they were technically, if not temperamentally, suited. Papá worshiped the magnificent “Carnaval de Venice,” while Mamá preferred the stateliness of Beethoven's adagios or the more restrained brilliance of Tchaikovsky's “Danse Russe.” I remember how the mood of our house was colored by the music in it, as if the notes themselves could brush the air with paint
.

Although I was not musical in any conventional sense, I could, at an early age, accurately imitate the calls of every bird in the woods around Pinar del Río. Our neighbor, Secundino Robreño, used to coax me into the forest to help him secure doves for his poultry cart. I warbled with such proficiency that within moments, dozens of birds dropped from the trees to welcome his shotgun. Secundino rewarded me with sticky candies from his pockets, usually less than fresh, or a handful of spent bullets
.

During one of our expeditions, I discovered the nest of a tree duck in a hollow stump north of town. Inside were four eggs and, fortunately, no mother
yaguasa
in sight. Secundino offered me twenty cents apiece for the eggs, a fantastic sum at the time, but I refused him and decided to raise the fledglings myself. I gathered the eggs carefully, placing one in each trouser pocket and holding the other two in my cupped hands. On the way home, balancing on the balls of my feet, I whistled the
yaguasa's
one-note song to soothe the unborn chicks
.

In those days, people used to gather tree-duck eggs for profit. The nests could be found in clumps of regal bromelias or in the crooks of trees cushioned with thick Spanish moss. Common folk and breeders alike used to raise the
yaguasas
among their own domestic poultry, because they broke up barnyard quarrels and whistled at the approach of strangers.
Tree ducks, I daresay, were an avian blend of bouncer and rural guard
.

My
yaguasas
grew to be quite elegant, with lovely long necks and the hauteur of fine geese. Of course, they were excellent watch ducks too. In fact, my mother credited them with saving my father's life during a particularly fractious strike at the cigar factory
.

Early one morning, two men I did not recognize knocked on our front door. The taller one carried a tree limb studded with nails. The shorter one, unshaven, had pineapple fists. It was apparent they had come to teach my father a lesson for his leading role in the strike
.

No sooner did Papá come to the door than my ducks raced from the backyard, whistling and squawking and scattering feathers. They attacked the men with the resolve of old hens, viciously pecking and scratching them until the thugs stumbled away in a daze. No one ever came to disturb our peace again
.