Dreaming in Cuban (2 page)

He stops at the ocean’s edge, smiles almost shyly, as if he fears disturbing her, and stretches out a colossal hand. His blue eyes are like lasers in the night. The beams bounce off his fingernails, five hard blue shields. They scan the beach, illuminating shells and sleeping gulls, then focus on her. The porch turns blue, ultraviolet. Her hands, too, are blue. Celia squints through the light, which dulls her eyesight and blurs the palms on the shore.

Her husband moves his mouth carefully but she cannot read his immense lips. His jaw churns and swells with each word, faster, until Celia feels the warm breeze of his breath on her face. Then he disappears.

Celia runs to the beach in her good leather pumps. There is a trace of tobacco in the air. “Jorge, I couldn’t hear you. I couldn’t hear you.” She paces the shore, her arms crossed over her breasts. Her shoes leave delicate exclamation points in the wet sand.

Celia fingers the sheet of onion parchment in her pocket, reads the words again, one by one, like a blind woman. Jorge’s letter arrived that morning, as if his prescience extended even to the irregular postal service between the United States and Cuba. Celia is astonished by the words, by the disquieting ardor of her husband’s last letters. They seemed written by a younger, more
passionate Jorge, a man she never knew well. But his handwriting, an ornate script he learned in another century, revealed his decay. When he wrote this last missive, Jorge must have known he would die before she received it.

A long time ago, it seems to her, Jorge boarded the plane for New York, sick and shrunken in an ancient wheelchair. “Butchers and veterinarians!” he shouted as they pushed him up the plank. “That’s what Cuba is now!”
Her
Jorge did not resemble the huge, buoyant man on the ocean, the gentleman with silent words she could not understand.

Celia grieves for her husband, not for his death, not yet, but for his mixed-up allegiances.

For many years before the revolution, Jorge had traveled five weeks out of six, selling electric brooms and portable fans for an American firm. He’d wanted to be a model Cuban, to prove to his gringo boss that they were cut from the same cloth. Jorge wore his suit on the hottest days of the year, even in remote villages where the people thought he was crazy. He put on his boater with its wide black band before a mirror, to keep the angle shy of jaunty.

Celia cannot decide which is worse, separation or death. Separation is familiar, too familiar, but Celia is uncertain she can reconcile it with permanence. Who could have predicted her life? What unknown covenants led her ultimately to this beach and this hour and this solitude?

She considers the vagaries of sports, the happenstance of El Líder, a star pitcher in his youth, narrowly missing a baseball career in America. His wicked curveball attracted the major-league scouts, and the Washington Senators were interested in signing him but changed their minds. Frustrated, El Líder went home, rested his pitching arm, and started a revolution in the mountains.

Because of this, Celia thinks, her husband will be buried in
stiff, foreign earth. Because of this, their children and their grandchildren are nomads.

Pilar, her first grandchild, writes to her from Brooklyn in a Spanish that is no longer hers. She speaks the hard-edged lexicon of bygone tourists itchy to throw dice on green felt or asphalt. Pilar’s eyes, Celia fears, are no longer used to the compacted light of the tropics, where a morning hour can fill a month of days in the north, which receives only careless sheddings from the sun. She imagines her granddaughter pale, gliding through paleness, malnourished and cold without the food of scarlets and greens.

Celia knows that Pilar wears overalls like a farmhand and paints canvases with knots and whorls of red that resemble nothing at all. She knows that Pilar keeps a diary in the lining of her winter coat, hidden from her mother’s scouring eyes. In it, Pilar records everything. This pleases Celia. She closes her eyes and speaks to her granddaughter, imagines her words as slivers of light piercing the murky night.

The rain begins again, softly this time. The finned palms record each drop. Celia is ankle deep in the rising tide. The water is curiously warm, too warm for spring. She reaches down and removes her pumps, crimped and puckered now like her own skin, chalked and misshapen from the saltwater. She wades deeper into the ocean. It pulls on her housedress like weights on her hem. Her hands float on the surface of the sea, still clutching her shoes, as if they could lead her to a new place.

She remembers something a
santera
told her nearly forty years ago, when she had decided to die: “Miss Celia, there’s a wet landscape in your palm.” And it was true. She had lived all these years by the sea until she knew its every definition of blue.

Celia turns toward the shore. The light is unbearably bright
on the porch. The wicker swing hangs from two rusted chains. The stripes on the cushions have dulled to gray as if the color made no difference at all. It seems to Celia that another woman entirely sat for years on those weathered cushions, drawn by the pull of the tides. She remembers the painful transitions to spring, the sea grapes and the rains, her skin a cicatrix.

She and Jorge moved to their house in the spring of 1937. Her husband bought her an upright walnut piano and set it by an arched window with a view of the sea. He stocked it with her music workbooks and sheaves of invigorating Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, and a selection of Chopin. “Keep her away from Debussy,” she overheard the doctors warn him. They feared that the Frenchman’s restless style might compel her to rashness, but Celia hid her music to
La Soirée dans Grenade
and played it incessantly while Jorge traveled.

Celia hears the music now, pressing from beneath the waves. The water laps at her throat. She arches her spine until she floats on her back, straining to hear the notes of the Alhambra at midnight. She is waiting in a flowered shawl by the fountain for her lover, her Spanish lover, the lover before Jorge, and her hair is twisted with high combs. They retreat to the mossy riverbank and make love under the watchful poplars. The air is fragrant with jasmine and myrtle and citrus.

A cool wind stirs Celia from her dream. She stretches her legs but she cannot touch the sandy bottom. Her arms are heavy, sodden as porous wood after a storm. She has lost her shoes. A sudden wave engulfs her, and for a moment Celia is tempted to relax and drop. Instead, she swims clumsily, steadily toward shore, sunk low like an overladen boat. Celia concentrates on the palms tossing their headdresses in the sky. Their messages jump from tree to tree with stolen electricity. No one but me, she thinks, is guarding the coast tonight.

Celia peels Jorge’s letter from her housedress pocket and
holds it in the air to dry. She walks back to the porch and waits for the fishermen, for daylight.

Felicia del Pino

Felicia del Pino, her head a spiky anarchy of miniature pink rollers, pounds the horn of her 1952 De Soto as she pulls up to the little house by the sea. It is 7:43
A.M
. and she has made the seventeen-mile journey from Havana to Santa Teresa del Mar in thirty-four minutes. Felicia screams for her mother, throws herself onto the backseat and shoulders open the car’s only working door. Then she flies past the rows of gangly bird of paradise, past the pawpaw tree with ripening fruit, and loses a sandal taking the three front steps in an inelegant leap.

“I know already,” Celia says, rocking gently in her wicker swing on the porch. Felicia collapses on her mother’s lap, sending the swing lurching crazily, and wails to the heavens.

“He was here last night.” Celia grips the wicker armrests as if the entire swing would fly off of its own accord.

“Who?” Felicia demands.

“Your father, he came to say good-bye.”

Felicia abruptly stops her lament and stands up. Her pale yellow stretch shorts slide into the crease of her fleshy buttocks.

“You mean he was in the neighborhood and didn’t even stop by?” She is pacing now, pushing a fist into her palm.

“Felicia, it was not a social visit.”

“But he’s been in New York four years! The least he could have done was say good-bye to me and the children!”

“What did your sister say?” Celia asks, ignoring her daughter’s outburst.

“The nuns called her at the bakery this morning. They said
Papi rose to heaven on tongues of fire. Lourdes was very upset. She’s convinced it’s a resurrection.”

Ivanito stretches his arms around his mother’s plump thighs. Felicia, her face softening, looks down at her son. “Your grandfather died today, Ivanito. I know you don’t remember him but he loved you very much.”

“What happened to Abuela?” Ivanito asks.

Felicia turns to her mother as if seeing her for the first time. Seaweed clings to her skull like a lethal plant. She is barefoot and her skin, encrusted with sand, is tinged a faint blue. Her legs are cold and hard as marble.

“I went for a swim,” Celia says irritably.

“With your clothes on?” Felicia tugs on her mother’s damp sleeve.

“Yes, Felicia, with my clothes on.” The edge in Celia’s voice would end any conversation save with her daughter. “Now, listen to me. I want you to send a telegram to your brother.”

Celia hasn’t spoken to her son since the Soviet tanks stormed Prague four years ago. She cried when she heard his voice and the sounds of the falling city behind him. What was he doing so far from the warm seas swimming with gentle manatees? Javier writes that he has a Czech wife now and a baby girl. Celia wonders how she will speak to this granddaughter, show her how to catch crickets and avoid the beak of the tortoise.

“What should I say?” Felicia asks her mother.

“Tell him his father died.”

*  *  *

Felicia climbs into the front seat of her car, crosses her arms over the steering wheel, and stares out the windshield. The heat rises from the green hood, reminding her of the ocean the day before it wiped the beach clean of homes, God’s bits of wood. It was 1944. Felicia was only six, her brother wasn’t even born yet, but
she remembers that day with precision. The sea’s languid retreat into the horizon and the terrible silence of its absence. The way the she-crabs scurried after their young. The stranded dolphin towed out to sea by the Munoz brothers, and the majestic shells, thousands of them, with intricate mauve chambers, arranged on a cemetery of wet sand. Felicia set aside pails of them but selected only one, a mother-of-pearl shell, a baroque Spanish fan with which later to taunt her suitors.

Her mother hurriedly wrapped gold-rimmed goblets with newspaper and packed them into a scuffed leather suitcase, all the while listening to the warnings on the radio. “I told you not to bring shells into this house,” she reprimanded when Felicia held up her prize. “They bring bad luck.”

Felicia’s father was away on business in Oriente province when the tidal wave hit. He was always away on business. This time, he had promised to bring his wife a Jamaican maid from the east coast of the island so that she could spend her days resting on the porch, as the doctors ordered, and find solace in the patterns of the sea. Felicia’s father didn’t return with a maid but he brought back a signed baseball for her sister, Lourdes, that made her jump in place with excitement. Felicia didn’t recognize the name.

The sea took more than seventy wooden homes from their stretch of coast. The del Pinos’ house survived because it was sturdily built of brick and cement. When they returned, it was like an undersea cave, blanched by the ocean. Dried algae stuck to the walls and the sand formed a strange topography on the floors. Felicia laughed when she remembered how her mother had warned her not to bring shells home. After the tidal wave, the house was full of them.

“Girl, you’re going to fry in there!” Herminia Delgado raps on Felicia’s car window. She is carrying a basket with an unplucked chicken, four lemons, and a brittle garlic clove. “I’m making a
fricassee later. Why don’t you come over? Or are you too busy with your naughty daydreams again?”

Felicia, her face and forearms blotchy with heat, looks up at her best friend.

“My father died last night and I have to be at work in an hour. They’re going to transfer me back to the butcher’s if I’m late again. They’re looking for an excuse since I singed Graciela Moreira’s hair. They dumped her on me. Nobody likes to do her hair because it’s so fine it tears like toilet paper. I’ve told her a million times she shouldn’t get a permanent but does she listen?”

“Did Lourdes call?”

“The nuns told her it was like a Holy Ascension except Papi was dressed to go dancing. Then he shows up at my mother’s house and nearly scares her half to death. I think she dove in the ocean after him.”

Felicia turns away.

“He didn’t even say good-bye.” The last time Felicia saw her father, he had smashed a chair over her ex-husband Hugo’s back. “If you leave with that sonofabitch, don’t ever come back!” her father had shouted as they fled.

“Maybe his spirit is still floating free. You must make your peace with him before he’s gone for good. I’ll call La Madrina. We’ll have an emergency session tonight.”

“I don’t know, Herminia.” Felicia believes in the gods’ benevolent powers, she just can’t stand the blood.

“Listen, girl, there’s always new hope for the dead. You must cleanse your soul of this or it will trail you all your days. It may even harm your children. Just a small offering to Santa Bárbara,” Herminia coaxes. “Be there at ten and I’ll take care of the rest.”

“Well, okay. But please, tell her no goats this time.”

That night, Felicia guides her car along a rutted road in the countryside a few miles from Santa Teresa del Mar. Her headlights have not worked since 1967 but she shines an oversized flashlight
up the dirt pathway, startling two guinea hens and a dwarf monkey in a bamboo cage. The beam of light moves through the yard to the giant ceiba, thick as six lesser trees. Several identical red handkerchiefs are tied together around the trunk, midway up. The head of a freshly slaughtered rooster juts from one knot. Its beak hangs open, giving the bird a look of surprised indignation.