Dreaming in Cuban (18 page)

Felicia first notices her second husband-to-be when he pedals
by her furiously on a clunky Russian bicycle, his hair vertical as a sail.

At the end of the alleyway, Ernesto Brito, nervously attempting a sharp right turn, clatters to the ground.

Felicia approaches the bleached, crumpled heap that will be her husband. He looks like a colorless worm, writhing on his stomach in a synthetic tan suit with precisely matching socks, his steel glasses smashed against the pavement. Felicia is smitten. She helps him up and, without a word, pats his hair until his face flushes the color of beets. She takes him by the hand and leads him to her 1952 De Soto parked a few yards away.

It is late afternoon. There is a jowly woman hanging her wash across the alley with a trolling motion of rope. A bowlegged farmer unloads a crate of country chickens for the butcher. Two young mechanics in loose jumpsuits smoke cigarettes with oil-creased hands. Felicia opens the rear door of her vintage American car and slides across the backseat, gently tugging Ernesto with her. The windows are rolled down and a fly circles and drones above them. She pulls him toward her and it begins to rain, a hard afternoon rain that is rare in winter.

Four days later, before Ernesto can move his belongings from his mother’s apartment to the house on Palmas Street, before Felicia’s mother, children, and best friend, Herminia, can object to the suddenness of her marriage to Ernesto, before Felicia can heed the directives of the
santero
, whose advice she has not entirely forgotten, before she and her husband can celebrate their union with a clamorous party, Ernesto dies tragically in a grease fire at a seaside hotel.

Ernesto, her gentle Ernesto, had been a restaurant inspector, renowned for his refusal to take bribes (neither money nor pork loins could tempt him) and for his scrupulous campaign against mice feces. At his sparsely attended funeral, Felicia howls like a
lonely she-wolf. “You killed him because he was honest!” she screams, tearing her hair. “He wouldn’t tolerate a single dropping!”

Felicia relived their brief time together. Ernesto’s pallid skin mottled with excitement, his tentative hands that quickly became assured under her encouragement, the way he laid his downy head between her breasts and slept contentedly, like a well-fed baby. Ernesto had been a virgin when Felicia coaxed him to the backseat of her car, and he displayed the profound gratitude of the unburdened. For three days they rocked in each other’s arms, voracious and inseparable, speaking few words, but knowing all they needed to know.

After Ernesto died, Felicia learned from his mother that they’d been born minutes apart, on the same day, of the same year.

Felicia writes a letter of protest to El Líder, demanding a full investigation into her husband’s death. When she doesn’t hear back from him, she becomes certain, with the surety of the white light illuminating her brain, that El Líder is to blame. Yes, he must have ordered her husband’s murder personally. Others, too, are involved. They watch her bleary-eyed from behind their square black glasses, signaling to each other with coughs and claps. It is making sense to her now. Of course, it is finally clear. That is why the light is so bright. They refract it through their glasses so she cannot see, so she cannot identify the guilty ones. All the while, they are spectators to her wretchedness.

Felicia knows that Graciela Moreira is one of their spies. That is why she returns to the beauty shop, time and time again, to have her ringlets seared. She, too, wears the glasses. She, too, loves the fire. Felicia will trap her into a confession. She waits until the moon is propitious, then calls Graciela on the telephone, inviting her to the beauty shop for a free permanent.

“It’s a special promotion, a new curling gel,” Felicia coaxes. “I want you to be my model.”

When Graciela appears an hour later, Felicia is prepared for
her. She mixes lye with her own menstrual blood into a caustic brown paste, then thickly coats Graciela’s head. Over it, she fastens a clear plastic bag with six evenly spaced hairpins, and waits. Felicia imagines the mixture melting through Graciela’s frail scalp, penetrating the roots and bones of her skull until it eats her vicious brain like acid. Graciela cries out and pulls on the cap, hardened now like a helmet, but Felicia clamps it in place with her fists.

“You lying bitch! You killed him, didn’t you?” Felicia shouts and knocks Graciela’s glasses from her face.

That is the last thing Felicia remembers for many months.

*  *  *

Felicia notices the outdated calendars first, each month taped neatly to the ceiling. She is lying on her back in a bed that’s not her own, in a room she doesn’t recognize.

In the center of the ceiling, affixed with yellowed tape, is January 1959, the first month of the revolution. The glossy pages of succeeding months blossom around it: landscapes of fluted mountains for 1964; a curious collection of Irish setters and pugs in 1969; twelve varieties of jasmine for each month of 1973. The pages rustle slightly in the breeze. Felicia raises her head from the pillow. Three swivel-neck fans scan her with air. The sun glares through the paper window shades. Suddenly, the room vibrates with a deafening rattle and the Dopplerized screeches of children. A jingling music starts up and the air around her surges with the ricocheting voices of vendors hawking toasted corn and toy rockets.

It’s as if Felicia’s senses were clicking on one by one. First sight, then sound, then sight again.

She flaps open a shade and blinks unbelievingly at the carnival below her. The whirl of colors is unbearable, a jagged, unsettling choreography. It is summer and hot and well past noon, that
much she can tell. A teenage boy in a baseball cap grins up at her nervously, and Felicia realizes she is standing naked in the window. She drops to her knees, wraps herself with a bed sheet, and lowers the shade.

A man’s work clothes, stiff with dirt, hang oddly ballooned in the closet. There are two sets of barbells, a burlap sack of sand, a jump rope with red wooden handles, and a pear-shaped leather punching bag nailed to the closet ceiling. In the corner, a neat stack of American magazines features page after page of luridly sculpted men in contorted poses. In one centerfold, someone named Jack La Lanne tows a rowboat with a rope held between his teeth. The words in the caption look insect bristly. Felicia cannot understand them.

There’s a straw shoulder bag on a hanger, and Felicia digs with her broken fingernails for clues. She finds eleven encrusted centavos, a rusted tube of orange lipstick, and, through a tear in the checkered lining, a soiled prayer card for La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre. Nothing to tell her who she is, or where she is from.

Felicia pulls on the navy trousers. They fit her snugly about the hips, although the hems come up to her shins. The shirt billows over her breasts. She tries on a pair of rubber flip-flops that are just the right size. Felicia decides to fry an egg on a hot plate in the kitchenette. She eats only the yolk, dabbing it with a piece of stale bread she finds in the cupboard. Then she peels a tangerine. There’s a gold band on her right ring finger. It’s familiar to her. The whole place, in fact, is familiar, but she can’t say how. She is not afraid, though. It’s as if her body had inhabited this space for a time and pronounced it safe for her mind.

Felicia opens the room’s only door and follows the hallway to a bathroom on the other end. She looks tanned and rested in the mirror, almost pretty. This reassures her. She combs her hair, spots a lone gray strand and plucks it with a flourish.

Outside, the air is thick and humid and crowded with noise.
Are people watching her? It’s hard for her to tell. She smooths her trousers with both hands and continues walking purposefully, to where she doesn’t know.

“Excuse me, please, but where are we?” she asks a pudgy girl.

“Cienfuegos, Señora.”

“And what day is it?”

“July 26, 1978,” she recites, as if Felicia were a teacher testing her history. “Is that your name?” she asks shyly, pointing to Felicia’s left shoulder, where “Otto” is stitched in plain lettering. But Felicia does not answer.

There are many men in navy work clothes like hers. They wave and blow mock kisses from their candy stands and ticket booths and from the bumper-car rink. They all know her name. Felicia smiles wanly, waving back. Toward the far end of the amusement park, the roller coaster hovers above the other less-rhythmic rides. Rattle, rattle, rattle, swoosh. Rattle, rattle, rattle, swoosh.

“Come here,
mi reina
, come here!” a broad-chested man calls to her from behind a toolshed. He has a squeaky, inefficient voice that swallows syllables whole.

Felicia moves toward him, toward his tidy, ursine face. An ellipse of curly black hair is visible between the upper buttons of his shirt.

“You couldn’t wait to come out, eh?” He laughs, patting her all over with hands solid and undefined as paws. His hair is frizzy, a woolly frame for his stubble-darkened cheeks. Felicia realizes with a start that he is carpeted with damp fur. She imagines him surviving freezing temperatures without so much as a sweater.

“I meant what I said last night,” he says, lowering his voice. “We’re going to Minnesota. It’s the coldest state in the U.S. We’ll open an ice-skating rink. I’ll sleep naked on the ice. My own ice!”

He pulls her so close she can feel his hot breath on her throat.

“I spoke with Fernando today and he said he could get us a
boat to share with another family Sunday after next. We’ll leave at night from the north coast. It’s only ninety miles to Key West. He says they treat Cubans like kings there.”

“Where are my clothes?” Felicia interrupts him sharply. She notices the stitching on his sweat-stained uniform, the gold band on his finger that matches hers.

“At the laundry,
mi reina
. Remember you asked me to take everything there? It’ll be ready this afternoon. Don’t worry, I’ll bring them back to you.”

During the following week, Felicia begins to assemble bits and pieces of her past. They stack up in her mind, soggily, arbitrarily, and she sorts through them like cherished belongings after a flood. She charts sequences and events with colored pencils, shuffling her diagrams until they start to make sense, a possible narrative. But the people remain faceless, nameless.

One evening right after dinner, as Otto is making love to her, her son’s face appears in a vision on the ceiling, superimposed on the most recent calendar month.

“When are you coming home, Mami? When are you coming home?” Ivanito begs her in a wavering voice.

Felicia remembers her son’s gangly body, his first stilted dancing steps, and begins to cry. Otto, mistaking his wife’s sobs for pleasure, pushes his muscled hips against hers and shudders with relief.

Later that night, after the amusement park closes, Felicia urges her husband toward the roller coaster.

Otto Cruz thinks his wife is crazy and beautiful and mysterious and he will do just about anything she asks. He can’t believe his luck in finding her. She was wandering by herself behind the spare-parts warehouse last winter. An angel. Heaven-sent. And he’d only gone to get replacement bolts for the Ferris wheel.

“I’m here,” she said simply. Then she shook her dark wavy
hair and began unbuttoning her blouse. Her breasts shone like moon-polished marble. Otto’s blood pumped so hard he thought he’d explode.

Otto knew he would never recover from his love for her and married Felicia the next morning. She stared at him innocently whenever he asked her where she came from, or where her family lived. “You’re my family now,” she’d say. “And I’ve come for you.”

Thinking about the night he met Felicia makes Otto hard again. He turns on the switch for the roller coaster and pushes the first car, painted with laughing clowns, along the well-worn grooves. The platform is high above the ground and the electric generator trills and crackles beneath the winding tracks.

The cars lurch forward and Otto jumps in next to his wife. Her skin is smooth and white against her hair. He slides his hands beneath her gauzy skirt and rubs her warm thighs. The car climbs higher and higher, groaning up the rickety wooden tracks. Otto stands, unzips his pants with a fumbling hand, and pushes himself toward Felicia’s lips, toward her miraculous tongue. The car stops for a split second at the peak of the first, the steepest crest. The sky is black, a cloudless blue-black. Below them, the roller coaster is a jumble of angles.

Felicia closes her eyes as the car begins to fall. When she opens them, her husband is gone.

(1978)

The day after Felicia burns Graciela Moreira’s scalp with lye, Celia’s son returns from Czechoslovakia. Javier arrives before dawn in an unraveling tweed suit, his face sunken to flat angles, and collapses on his mother’s back porch.

Celia falls on her son like a lover, kissing his face and his eyes and his broken-knuckled hands. His coarse graying hair is matted with salt air and there’s a lump the size of a baseball on the back of his neck. He cries deep soundless cries that make his thin body shiver like leaves in the wind. Celia half drags her son to her bed, the bed in which he was conceived, and for three days he sleeps wrapped in blankets and his father’s frayed pajamas. Celia pieces together his story from the torments he relives in delirium, between fevers and chills and a painful catarrh.

This is what Celia learns: that her son returned home from the university to find a note on the kitchen table, that the envelope was a buttery yellow and the handwriting tall, loopy, and confident, that his two pairs of trousers hung pressed with sharp creases in the closet, that his wife had made love to him the night before so he wouldn’t get suspicious, that she’d left him for the visiting mathematics professor from Minsk, that the professor was a spindly crane of a man with a shaved head and goatee who liked to impersonate Lenin, that Javier’s daughter, his beloved daughter, to whom Spanish was the language of lullabies, had left with her mother for good.

Celia ponders the lump on her son’s neck and the curious scar on his back, a pulpy line just below his left shoulder blade. She finds $1,040 worth of U.S. twenty-dollar bills divided evenly among Javier’s four pockets, and a receipt for nine cuff links.