The Aguero Sisters (10 page)

Constancia is driving seventy miles per hour behind her husband. She knows he won't see her. Heberto goes too fast, never checks his rearview mirror, carelessly changes lanes.
Besides, Constancia is in disguise, much too garish to be recognized. Her hair is swept up inside a flowered turban, her sunglasses are oversized. She wears fuchsia lipstick well past her mouth's outline.

Her husband continues north, past signs for the airport, past exits Constancia might have guessed he would take. Then, to her surprise, Heberto heads west toward Bird Jungle. Constancia visited it one afternoon when Heberto went fishing. She found a
guajiro
there who told her everything he knew: that the bones of the loons are most like those of the first birds who flew; that on the Chincha Islands of Peru, five million cormorants roost; that of all the birds in Cuba, the quail dove wore the most riveting blue.

Heberto continues past Bird Jungle, past Le Jeune Road, to the entrance of Hialeah Park. Although the racetrack is closed for off-season, men with hoes and mowers meticulously work the grounds. The gatekeeper waves Heberto in as if he were a regular customer. Constancia stops a half mile behind. Moments later, she follows her husband inside.

Constancia wanders through the deserted clubhouse, brackish with last season's smells, and raps on each betting window. She inspects the men's rooms, the ribbed cage of the grandstand. Everything is empty of Heberto.

Outside, in a garden of bromeliads, a spotted iguana suns itself on a rock. Constancia remembers the black iguana she saw once, hung to dry from a
yagruma
tree in Pinar del Río. Her father explained that the black iguanas were nearly extinct because the
campesinos
killed them to ward off bad luck.

The paddocks are green with tending and recent rains. A duet of frogs sits in a puddle, courting or complaining, she isn't sure which. Flamingos are everywhere, awkwardly
preening. Constancia suddenly longs for a horse to brush. For years, her father used the same two mares on their collecting expeditions. Gordita was plump and parti-colored and fond of peeled grapes. Epictetus was the color of chestnuts and loved a good chase. Both horses died on the same day in the Zapata Swamp, driven mad, her father said, by relentless mosquitoes.

Her mother died with the horses that day. Her father said that Mamá had drowned after they'd separated to better catch the evasive ruddy ducks. He said Mamá slipped and hit her temple on a log, that she breathed in the swamp water, unconscious, until she died. Constancia remembers watching Papi's face as he told her this, his flat, decided eyes. She remembers thinking that Mamá may have died, but she'd be impossible to bury, that she'd remain in their lives forever, sulfurous as her absence.

When Reina insisted that she'd seen Mamá in the funeral home with a shattered throat, Papi denied this was possible. Reina screamed like an animal blinded and tore all the blossoms from her favorite tulip tree. Then she went from house to house, pulling up the neighbors' gardens, scattering petals and bees.

When their father sent them to the boarding school in Trinidad, her sister took to sitting in the rain, numb as a wildflower, sucking on fallen leaves. Constancia wanted nothing to do with Reina, rebuffed her overtures, refused to hear another word about Mamá. Constancia felt jealous of her sister's grief, for she felt nothing at all.

A year later, Papi finally confided to Constancia that what Reina had seen was no lie. Their mother had shot herself in the Zapata-Swamp, he said, aimed the gun at her own throat. He made Constancia promise never to tell Reina, that the secret would only reopen wounds. This frightened Constancia
more than his original version, because now she knew she couldn't rescue Papi, knew for certain that he would die next.

Constancia crosses the Hialeah racetrack in the noon heat. High above her, in the announcer's box, she spots a waving pair of spangled high-heeled shoes. She is uneasy with the implications. This is one discovery about her husband she refuses to suffer. Constancia rests by the edge of the pond inside the track's ring. Then she tears a frond from a stubby palm and carefully wipes the lipstick from her mouth.

It is late afternoon
. Heberto has not yet returned home. Constancia climbs a stepladder and, corner by corner, removes the Cuban flag her husband tacked up on their bedroom wall. She shakes it out until it billows like a freshly laundered sheet. Then she folds it into a diminishing square against her chest. Constancia mistrusts flags, understands all too well their steadfast passion for the dead.

Constancia goes to the living room and selects a record from her collection of twentieth-century Cuban symphonies. The music peels back raw regions of misery, wires lesions from nerve to nerve. When she listens to the rumbling drums, her every season is disturbed.

Her son was seven years old when Constancia gave him a set of bongos to play. Silvestre banged them and banged them until he could feel the beat. Then he claimed he could still hear things.

“Like what?” Constancia asked him.

Silvestre imitated the roar of the ocean, called out like the vendors plying fruit near the Malecón:
¡Mangos preciosos, mangos deliciosos!
Constancia realized then he was just remembering the sounds, the way amputees still felt their
missing arms and legs. Finally, Silvestre imitated Constancia's voice, loud and in Spanish:
Be a little man and don't cry, Silvestre. This is much better than becoming a Communist
.

In 1961, it was rumored in Cuba that children would be rounded up and shipped to boarding schools in the Ukraine. Panicked, parents sent their sons and daughters to orphanages in America, where they hoped to retrieve them after the crisis passed. Constancia sent Silvestre to Colorado. That winter, it was so cold in Denver that her son wore layer upon layer of the clothes Constancia had packed for him. A few other children spoke Spanish. They were at the Catholic orphanage for the same reason as Silvestre: so the Russians wouldn't get them.

In less than a week, Silvestre was in the hospital with a 107-degree temperature and a bad swelling up and down the right side of his body. By the time his fever subsided, he was irreversibly deaf.

A year later, Constancia left Cuba and went with Heberto and baby Isabel to pick up her son. They found Silvestre sequestered in the orphanage infirmary. Constancia refused to believe that Silvestre could no longer hear anything. She clapped her hands behind his back, expecting him to jump. When he didn't, Constancia tore up the room, guilty and grief-stricken, and ended up temporarily hospitalized herself.

There's a picture of Silvestre on the coffee table, framed in polished silver. He is sixteen and dressed in a light-blue tuxedo and an extravagantly ruffled shirt for his junior prom. Constancia remembers dropping him off a block from his high school, then sneaking into the gymnasium later to watch him dance. All the students at his school were deaf, but they rocked to the blasting music anyway, responding to the vibrations from the waxed wooden floor. Constancia spotted Silvestre slow dancing with a tall, buxom girl in a
floor-length dress.
She looks nothing like me, nothing at all
, Constancia thought. He nuzzled the girl's neck, and they soon began kissing, Silvestre straining slightly to reach her lips.

The spectacle revived Constancia's sorrow, stunned her with the fidelity of certain unshakable pain.

Constancia turns off
the stereo and twists the dial from the twenty-four-hour tides report to
La Hora de los Milagros'
nightly update. There is a follow-up on the Virgin sightings in Cozumel, which local boosters are comparing to the miracles at Lourdes and Guadelupe.

The Virgin, apparently, is still partial to the laundry room at El Presidente Hotel, where she's appeared nine times to the laundress Bernarda Estrada, cloistered now with the Sisters of Mercy. The Virgin also manifested herself twice to kitchen assistant Consuelo Barragán, each time as she was peeling potatoes for the hotel's acclaimed lobster stew. And on the south tennis courts of the Hotel El Cozumeleño, groundskeeper Gustavo Rubio has sworn on the grave of his mother that he saw the Virgin hover six feet above the net, swinging her right arm as if in a powerful serve.

Constancia remembers her own religious devotion, encouraged at first by her nanny, Beatriz Ureña, and then by her ragtag assortment of uncles in Camagüey. There were rituals on
the finca
, men dressed in white, chanting, always chanting late into the night. When Constancia was eight, she jumped from a municipal trolley to show her Tío Dámaso that Jesus would make her fly. Instead Constancia landed on a mango vendor's cart, smashing his careful display. For weeks, she attracted stray cats with her sweet, fleshy scent.

Another time, Constancia carved her thighs with her grandfather's pocket knife, engraving shallow crosses that
healed into tiny crucifix scars. But nobody, not even the suggestible nuns at the Santa Ana Convent, would believe they were stigmata.

After her father killed himself, Constancia stopped praying altogether. She knew then that with luck, she might control only the minute precisions of her life. Everything else would be out of reach.

There is a pound of ground beef in the freezer. Constancia defrosts it in the microwave and heats a swirl of olive oil in her largest skillet. She sets a pot of water to boil for the rice. The garlic is dry, but she minces it anyway, chops an onion, the remains of a glossy green pepper, sautes it all in the pan. She browns the meat next, adds a can of tomato sauce, pimientos, stuffed olives, a half box of raisins.

As the
picadillo
simmers, Constancia returns to the balcony with a paring knife to watch the approaching storm. The heat presses against her face like a warm hand. She thinks of something Isabel told her a week ago (where does her daughter learn these odd facts?): that if every person on earth wanted to take a vacation in the galaxy, there'd be thirty solar systems to choose from apiece. Constancia repeated this statistic to Heberto, but he didn't seem the least bit impressed.

Last month, Isabel sent them a gift for their thirty-second anniversary: a collection of dead wrens in jars of formaldehyde, dressed in woolen booties and shawls. Her daughter knitted the pastel outfits herself. Isabel said that since she'd stopped her pottery, she's been experimenting with more conceptual pieces, involving traditional handicrafts.
Anniversary Birds
, she said, was evidence of her new artistic direction.

Constancia cuts through the balcony screen in five places. The metallic gashes curl inward like injured leaves. Constancia wonders whether she could ever kill herself. She
would do it differently from her parents, choose a high open place, a suitable cliff, a sunny stretch of Mediterranean coast. Certainly no place where they could find her broken body for her husband and her children to lament.

Constancia takes a step forward and flattens both hands against the torn screen. Heberto is leaving the day after tomorrow. It's against nature to choose death, yet the alternative, this slow lifetime of dying, hardly seems dignified at times. Her limbs feel heavy with blood. Constancia tries to recall her dreams of last night, but she can't remember a single one, remembers only the weight and disturbance of having dreamed them.

The sun's absence spreads down the beach, then approaches itself wave by wave. It is a colossal disregard, indifference afire. It leaves behind a landscape no ordinary darkness can hide.

THE LEATHER BACK

M
y parents celebrated my thirteenth birthday the way they did every important event in our lives, with ceremony and fanfare. Papá baked me an almond torte with marzipan parrots he'd ordered from a sweet shop in Havana, then the two of them serenaded me for an hour like a pair of mariachis. Mamá sang in her squeaky, scratchy way, so unlike her mellifluous speaking voice, and Papá slowly forced out his baritone until “Happy Birthday to You” sounded more like a speech than a song
.

I'd expected a gift, but none so spectacular as the full-color, single-volume British encyclopedia
Birds of the World.
One thousand forty-three pages in all. Years later, this exquisite volume was stolen from my office at the University of Havana. The illustrations turned up in the markets throughout Cuba, framed in cheap wood and sold for pennies to
guajiros
as
decorations for their homes. I know this because I bought several of the illustrations myself in Guardalavaca and Morón
.

After dinner, my father and I walked through the balmy streets of Pinar del Río, stopping here and there to greet a friend or admire the latest binoculars in the window of the camera shop. This aimless strolling went on for an hour or more, unusual for my purposeful father. It seemed that Mamá had instructed Papá to discuss with me the ways of nature—me, a keen observer of the animal kingdom since I could walk! Papá coughed and strained uncomfortably with his words until I found myself waving my hands the way he did when he was impatient or anxious
.