The Aguero Sisters (34 page)

Around them, the night vibrates its tropical din. The moon is high, just shy of full, coaxing the ocean in its monotony dance. A soft wind stirs the pines, carries the passions of insects on its back. Reina sees a three-legged raccoon peering down at her from a tree. Its paws daintily clean its spectator face. Behind it, the stars are distant pinpoints, a
useless map of light. The city seems farther still, crouched low against the horizon.

Hip-to-hip against Russ's hold, Reina sears his skin electric. She is fastened to this immediate love, but her malaise persists. Reina closes her eyes and loses herself in a reverie. She is naked and willful and four times her normal size. She's gorging on fruit—massive pineapples and mangoes, breadfruit, star apples, and soursops—trapped and glistening on raw platters of light. One by one, Reina tears off their monstrous rinds, swallows each whole as a century. Russ is motionless beneath her, his head dropped back from the heat and release.

Reina opens the back door of the car and walks toward the ocean. The moon is a shadow on her spine, unloosed from its slot in the sky. As she wades waist-deep into the sea, it slides across her naked shoulders, down her slow brown throat. She is a river of sinew and muscle now, forcing the moon toward her will. Finally, Reina senses the moon sinking within her, lowering itself in her womb. She arches her back, and a tiny clot quickens in the storm of moist lightning, quickens until the first fragile tendril takes root. It shatters the dense heavens within, brings Reina a wave of contracting, immaculate pleasure.

She lifts her eyes and finds the moon fully restored in the sky. It is midnight. The tent of stars, unmoved, stares on. Tonight, Reina knows, she will sleep deeply, a complete, satisfied sleep. In another month, the bit of flesh at her center will grow to a delicate skeleton, to the size of a hummingbird. Already, Reina feels it fluttering in its net of blood, fluttering its steady work toward eternity.

T
wenty-nine vintage automobiles
are double- and triple-parked before the Gran Hotel at dawn. Word has spread of the crazy exile lady's request. All the men shout to Constancia at once, praising their outmoded cars. She is furious at the clerk's indiscretion, but she must seize this chance nonetheless. Constancia only hopes the local police don't get wind of her presence. Rapidly, Constancia surveys the Chevys and Plymouths, the Fords and the Oldsmobiles. Then she spots the black Packard from the thirties, like the one her father used to drive, and decides at once to rent it.

The old Mestre ranch is fifteen miles outside Camagüey. Constancia lurches along a dusty road, upsetting chickens and meandering goats. Above her, the sky is rubbed a preternatural blue, so blue it seems impossible that clouds exist. Children scamper in the dirt, whistling for a ride as she passes. Cattle snort in the fields.
Guajiros
in
pointed straw hats amble along on mules. This is a world preserved, Constancia thinks, a landscape where every origin shows. For the first time in her life, she's grateful it's a part of her past.

Tío Dámaso wrote to her that the Mestre farmhouse is easy to miss these days. It's a broken sketch of a place. No porch or roof to speak of, weather-beaten and worm-eaten, with shutters hanging loose. The best way to find it, her uncle advised, was to search for the cloud of bees that always hovers over the place. Long ago, he said, Eugenia Mestre's sarcophagus was taken apart by pilgrims and miracle seekers. A piece here, a piece there, until nothing was left of her tomb. He couldn't stop the thefts. Worst of all, no one knows what became of his mother's remains.

Constancia slows through a village of thatch-roofed homes. A procession is under way. All the girls wear yellow dresses, have flowers braided through their hair. The boys, also in yellow, carry a statue of their beloved patron saint. Others offer pumpkins and strands of amber beads to La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre. Constancia is surprised by the celebration. She didn't know public displays of devotion were still permitted in Cuba. She waits quietly as the feast day parade winds its way down the road. Suddenly, she remembers that it's her son's thirty-fourth birthday.

Although it's only early morning, the heat is a steady pressure against her skin. Constancia idles in her Packard along a stretch of deserted dirt road. She keeps imagining she sees her uncle's mirage of whirling bees, but each time she stops, the vision mysteriously disappears. Constancia rolls down her window and decides to listen for the bees without any visual distractions. The road is straight and empty ahead, and so she creeps along with her eyes shut tight.

At first, Constancia hears nothing, only her temples pulsing with blood. It is soothing to rest her eyes in their
sockets, to dismiss all this blinding light. Then a droning filters toward her from the south. The Packard strays off the road and hits a stone fence, crumpling its front fender.

Constancia is startled by the sudden curtain of light. She shields her eyes and spots what looks like a heap of bleached bones in the distance. The past is a wilderness, she thinks, as she approaches the abandoned farmhouse. High above it, a wreath of bees furiously rotates. Faster and faster the bees spin, until they're no more than a wheel of dark yellow. Then, as abruptly as they appeared, the bees reel out of sight.

Inside the farmhouse, the wood gives way under Constancia's feet. The floor is so weak, in fact, she fears she'll be absorbed in its rotting undertow. Constancia dislodges the crumbling floorboards with her sturdy farmer's spade, methodically at first, then wildly as her impatience grows. The heat strangles from all sides, until Constancia is salt damp and exhausted with purpose.

She stops for a moment and leans on her shovel. Scraps of colored satin flutter in through the window, sustained by an imperceptible breeze. Then, like a sinuous rumor, she senses where she must search. Constancia digs outside in the dictated spot, tunnels a wound in the earth until she hits the copper box.

Her uncle left it unlocked for her. Inside, nestled in felt, is a paring knife, a box of matches, a faded flannel pouch containing a worn bit of bone, and the stack of her father's last papers. Constancia slips the little bone from its pouch, fingers its knotted end as she begins to read. Papi's writing is neat, legible, crisply formal—intended, it seems, for no one in particular.

Constancia reads Papi's words carefully, reads and reads them again, until only the stars are left to clarify the sky. The little bone, she decides, she will take home to her sister.

THE HUMMINGBIRD

I
did not plan what happened in the Zapata Swamp. You must understand this. One moment, my wife was standing at the edge of the morass, wiping a wisp of hair from her cheek. The next, a most extraordinary bird hovered into view. It trembled in the air above Blanca's helmet, between the limbs of a hammock tree. A glittering jewel, no bigger than the tip of my thumb
.

I do not recall taking aim, only the fierce recklessness of my desire, the press of the twelve-gauge shotgun against my shoulder, the invitation from the bird itself I moved my sight from the hummingbird to Blanca, as if pulled by a necessity of nature
.

It was noon, and the sun was unsparing. The air shuddered with the sound of my shot. Our horses, tethered to a tangle of mangroves, snapped their restraints and sank into the swamp without a trace. In an instant, the future spread before me, a thin permanent season
.

The day stole past in an hour. Clouds scrolled by, dragging their shadows across the watery land. I heard Blanca's voice in the stirring of grasses and reeds, in the crisscrossing cranes overhead, in the swaying clumps of cow-lily leaves. All afternoon the Zapata clicked and rustled, clicked and rustled its fatal chorus, until a lone red-tailed hawk soared above us
.

I held my Blanquita. I held her. A mournful, bitter pleasure. Then, in the broken violet light of dusk, I carried her seventeen miles to the nearest village and reluctantly began to tell my lies
.

My profound thanks to Richard Gilbert and Ana Sanchez-Granados for their kind and unwavering sustenance. To my friends Wendy Calloway, Mona Simpson, Mary Morris, Eric Wilson, and Bob Antoni for their generous insights and enthusiasm. And to Laura García, Norma Quintana, and especially to José Garriga for all the precious rest.

Special thanks, too, to Ellen Levine, Sonny Mehta, Jenny Minton, and Louise Quayle for their exquisite and myriad attentions. And, finally, to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, the Council of Humanities at Princeton University, and the Cintas Foundation for invaluable support.

C
RISTINA
G
ARCÍA

A Reader's Guide

Q: What served as the inspiration for this story?

Q: How would you describe the themes in your latest novel?

Q: You were born in Havana but moved with your family to New York when you were two. Do you have any memories that survive from those early years in Cuba?

Q: You first began traveling to Cuba when you were in your mid-twenties. How did that change you?

Q: The theme of mystical religion—in this case santería—plays a large part in this novel. Has it played a large part in your own life as well?