The Aguero Sisters (8 page)

Sadly, the once abundant
yaguasas
have disappeared along with the island's lowland forests. With luck, one might still spot a few in the remotest regions of the Zapata swamp. At night, they fly out to visit the palm groves of cultivated plantations and eat the
palmiches,
the clustered fruit of the royal palms
.

Neither of my parents had any inclination toward ornithology, so it was all the more remarkable that they encouraged in me a preoccupation so far removed from their own interests. They indulged me with frequent trips into the countryside for my field observations. On one trip near Bailén, I spotted a pair of sandhill cranes, already quite rare when I was a boy. They were digging in the scorched earth of what was probably their former breeding grounds, digging with their bills for roots or beetle larvae in land that had been cleared to plant more sugarcane
.

On another trip, to the Lomas de los Acostas, I caught my
first sight of a red-tailed hawk. It was known locally as the
gavilán del monte
by the peasants who lived in the huts high on the open savanna hills
. “¡Gavilanes del monte! ¡Gavilanes del monte!”
the women cried from ridge to ridge when they spotted the hawks. Then they turned to warn their own chickens, which scurried, terrified, into their coops
.

Every spring and fall, I searched the trees for the many migrants that lingered in Cuba en route to and from South America. I collected hundreds of birds over the years, shooting them with my sling and a few well-chosen stones. Mamá complained that our house flew with feathers, but how else could I study my beloved birds? I watched their migrations and imagined flying in their immense flocks, darkening the unreachable parts of the sky. Often, they traveled at night, billions of them, at altitudes too high to be easily observed, taking their cues from the sun and the stars, wind directions, and the magnetic fields of the earth. That, I decided, was how I'd fancy traveling
.

During the winter of 1914, a record number of American redstarts and black-throated blue warblers sojourned in Cuba. The trees around our house positively shook with their commotion, disturbing my father, who had fallen ill with yellow fever. His temperature soared, he vomited continually and could barely lift his head from the pillow. After several days, jaundice set in. Still the birds continued to bicker and sing
.

My mother and I took turns reading aloud
The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius,
to which Papá had frequently turned when troubled: “Think of the universal substance, of which thou hast a very small portion; and of universal time, of which a short and indivisible interval has been assigned to thee; and of that which is fixed by destiny, and how small a part of it thou art
.”

Mamá soothed Papá's fever with cold cloths and held his hands for hours, as if trying to transmit through her fingertips her own vitality. She made Papá
caldo gallego
and gave him
black Spanish olives to suck. Slowly, his health improved, although he was never the same again
.

On his first day back to the cigar factory, Papá's step was plodding and faltering, and I was certain he could not walk the entire mile to the outskirts of town. I accompanied him, bracing his elbow. Friends greeted him along the way, ignoring the sweat that rolled from beneath his hat, and this seemed to encourage him
.

When at last we arrived at the factory and Papá, with great difficulty, climbed the three steps to his platform, the room erupted with hoarse cheers. “¡A-güe-ro! ¡A-güe-ro!” the workers chanted, clapping and stamping their feet to the rhythm of our name
.

“
Please
, hijo.”
My father finally turned to me, his voice barely audible. He raised his palm to the crowd, and the room became silent, suffused with smoke and the sweet smell of cedar. “Read for me today
.”

He handed me a heavy book, its red leather faded, its spine broken from so many readings, and I took his place at the lectern. I turned to the first page. The smoky air made my eyes water. Words scattered before me like a frightened school of fish
.

The workers strained toward me. My voice was small, hesitant. Down below, a paper fan fluttered. I reached the second paragraph and stopped
.

“
Go on, Ignacio,” my father whispered
.

SPRING MIGRATION
HAVANA
MARCH 1991

I
t is the time
of the spring migration. Reina Agüero opens the French doors of her father's study and steps onto the small square of balcony three stories above the pavement. She searches the sky for the slightest hint of morning but finds none. The moon is still firmly in charge. At this hour, the trade winds clear the air of the day's rude accretions, and it is good to breathe.

Reina cranes her neck to the left, toward the dark moving silhouettes of treetops sheltering the dead in Colón Cemetery, toward the ancient poinciana guarding her mother's grave. Then she looks to the right, past the floating procession of wrought-iron balconies, past the slow-changing colors of traffic lights directing the rhythm of cars on the Paseo Aranguren. If she listens closely, Reina can hear a car sputtering down the Avenida de los Presidentes. Isn't someone, she thinks, always trying to escape?

The street is deserted except for a light in the old mansion on the corner. It is a building of associations now, for poets and painters, sculptors and ceramists. Its walls are optimistically lacquered with murals. Is it forgetfulness or necessity, Reina speculates, that keeps the light burning?

Pepín Beltrán is asleep on her bed, snoring loudly as he always does after they make love. Although he insists that he is aroused as ever by the discordant new landscape of her skin, Reina has noticed that Pepín lingers longest by his own dermal donation, stitched in the glossy hollow of her back. Most of Reina's nutmeg color is gone, replaced by a confusion of shades and textures. A few patches of her skin are so pink and elastic, so perfectly hairless, they look like a newborn pig's.

At the hospital in Santiago de Cuba, doctors from around the country came to admire her exceptional recovery, the thickly puckered rind of her behind. But after a while, their prurience disgusted Reina, and she barred them all from her room.

Reina doesn't particularly mind her skin, mismatched and itchy as it is, but she cannot tolerate its stench. No one else seems to notice, but to her it reeks of dry blood and sour milk. She recalls hearing of animals in the wild spurning their own kind when touched by an unknown odor. Now Reina understands why.

She tries to mask the odor by rinsing smoked grapefruit through her hair. But the relief is only temporary. The stink ruins all her familiar pleasures. Gone is her rapture. Gone her hot, black scent. When Reina makes love, nothing, not even Pepín, whose hands erase all borders, whose mouth clashes against hers in love, can make the bliss return. Perhaps it was her own scent, Reina thinks, that had stirred her all along.

It is the first day of her period. Reina is proud that
despite her age and incongruous skin, her monthly blood, at least, is still intact.

Remnants of a bird's nest
dangle from the chandelier in her father's study. Reina remembers how Papá used to leave the French doors to his room wide open so that families of birds could flit back and forth with their twigs and bits of thread or twine. They fed on the crumbs of his sandwiches and the mashed-potato croquettes he messily ate at his desk.

“Tell me what you want, and I will tell you who you are.” Her father had read those words to her once from a book in his lap. She was too young to understand the question, but she remembered it nonetheless. Well, what is it she wants now? Reina wonders whether it's nostalgia to yearn for her mother, nostalgia to gather her shadows all these years. Why else would she choose to live like this, amidst the debris of her childhood and Papá's dead specimens? What truths can they possibly reveal to her after so long? Can they tell her why her mother died, why her sister was sent away?

Reina remembers how, after her mother's death, everyone's vision splintered. There was a bird that hovered over Mami's burial plot at the Colón Cemetery. Her father pronounced it a common crow. Constancia, fresh from the farm in Camagüey, insisted it was electric blue. Reina wanted to believe her sister, but
she
saw a bird on fire, tiny and bathed in a violent light. It broke the air around them, invited an early dusk. Reina recalls how the emptiness seemed to surround them then, a sad bewilderment that has never lifted.

The day before, Reina had accompanied her father to the Flores y Jorganes Funeral Home on Obispo Street. She carried a prized snakeskin in a little felt sack to place in her mother's coffin. But Papá wouldn't let her anywhere near Mami.

The odor inside the funeral home made Reina catch her breath. In one room, she saw a man with a preposterous mustache, naked and covered with leaves. In another, a plump woman with no fingertips, resting on a sea of satin. Next to her, a pale sliver of a girl lay in a frosted-pink coffin. It was early morning, but Reina remembers thinking she could already hear the moon, its long, threading wail of solitude.

Quietly, Reina slipped away from her father while he was talking to the funeral director. In the last embalming chamber, her mother lay on a rusting pedestal, her throat an estuary of color and disorder, as if a bloody war had taken place beneath her chin. Reina stared at her mother, forced herself to see her whole again, to breathe the lost incense of autumn in her hair.

There were footsteps in the hallway. Reina quickly kissed her mother's cheek, then snuck out to the patio, into shrill daylight, and released the papery fragments of her dried snakeskin to the wind.

When Reina returned
from the hospital in Santiago de Cuba, the local Committee for the Defense of the Revolution insisted she volunteer for night duty since she was awake anyway, but Reina refused. Like her cursing, blinded, half-mad
compañeros
at Céspedes Hospital, Reina decided to do nothing more for the revolution.

Reina cannot say when her discontent took root. Pepín, for one, blames El Comandante. After all, it was he who invited the trouble by allowing the exiles to return to Cuba for visits. What those
gusanos
brought in their crammed suitcases—photographs of ranch homes and Cadillacs, leather shoes in every color, watches that told the time in China, even extra-strength aspirin—began rapidly to unravel the revolution. In no time at all, good citizens started skipping the May Day rallies, refused to cut their quota of sugarcane.

Over the years, Reina had hoped her sister would return to Cuba, but Constancia always found an excuse not to come. Instead she sent packages every Christmas, with instant vanilla pudding, cubes of beef bouillon, and the strawberry sourballs she knew Reina loved. Constancia referred to her husband and her children only in passing, updating what Reina hadn't known to begin with. Heberto finally passed his kidney stone; Isabel had dyed her hair indigo, like Indonesian cloth; Silvestre had changed his name to Jack. Curious details.

Reina realized then that she understood as little of her sister's life in America as she had in Cuba. When they were children, Reina had wondered why Constancia had been sent to live so far away. But her mother told her only that she and her sister were meant to live apart.

Six years ago, Reina had a chance to leave the country. She was on a trip to Venezuela with a Cuban delegation of master electricians, to install generators along the Orinoco River, where the mosquitoes feasted on every inch of exposed flesh. By the end of the second week, all her colleagues had defected, and Reina returned to Cuba alone.

Now it's nearly impossible to leave the island without the express permission of El Comandante himself. Escapes have become more daring, the repudiations more scorchingly severe. Last year, Osoris de León, a former lover of Reina's from Tunas de Zaza, a decorated hero from the war in Somalia, fled the island in a stolen government helicopter and landed on the roof of the Miami airport's Holiday Inn. A group of backslapping exiles were waiting for him, and soon Osoris was giving interviews deploring the revolution on Radio Martí. Now Reina's daughter, too, has left Cuba. Her Dulcita, a desperate
jinetera cualquiera
.

Reina wonders what José Luís would think of his revolution now, of Dulcita's defection on the arm of a detestable
tourist. José Luís had been one of El Comandante's most trusted aides, his link to sympathetic youth throughout the country. He was only fourteen when he left high school to join the rebels in the Sierra Maestra. Reina discovered José Luís several years later, gaunt and foul-mouthed, subsisting on oranges from her boarding school's grove. She hid him in a local dovecote, far from Batista's men, and later in her bed. When Reina found out she was pregnant, she begged him to marry her.