The Aguero Sisters (4 page)

Constancia lowers her bedroom blinds. Northern winds rattle the windowpanes, stir the garbage in the streets. Green stars skim the sky, shedding their forgotten light. Constancia settles under her quilt with the cross-stitch design and assesses her progression toward death. Death troubles her deeply, but not nearly as much as the prospect of an untimely transition. If only she could choose the hour and manner of her passing, plan for it properly with the caterers, she could avoid any unseemly panic. She is the first to admit she has a low threshold for disorder.

The smoke of Heberto's cigar filters into the bedroom like the thinnest of voices. It is the last thing Constancia registers before falling asleep.

A SIGUAPA STYGIAN

M
y name is Ignacio Agüero, and I was born in the late afternoon of October 4, 1904, the same day, my mother informed me later, that the first President of the Republic, Estrada Palma, arrived in Pinar del Río for a parade and a banquet and a long night of speeches at the governor's mansion. Cuba had gained its independence two years before, and despite the Platt Amendment, which permitted the Americans to interfere in our country from the day it was born, the citizens of Pinar del Río poured into the streets to welcome the President
.

A brass band played on a wooden platform decorated with ribbons and carnations, and children scampered about in their Sunday finery, clutching pinwheels and balloons. Angry cigar workers pressed through the crowd, shaking placards protesting the high foreign tariffs levied on tobacco. My father, Reinaldo Agüero, a
lector
who read to the cigar workers in their factory, marched among them
.

Back at our whitewashed cement house, which was shaded by the crown of a graceful frangipani, my mother was readying herself for the festivities when she felt the first of my violent kicks deep inside her. She sat down at the edge of the bed and slowly rubbed her stomach, humming a Mozart sonata whose soothing effect on me she had previously noted. Instead the kicking intensified, followed by a series of rhythmic contractions. Mamá was all alone. She would miss the parade and the suckling pig and the ballroom lit with candelabras
.

No sooner had she settled back on her matrimonial bed than Mamá spotted the shadow on the far wall. Straight ahead, standing guard between the open shutters of the bedroom window, was a siguapa stygian owl. My mother did not know its official name then, only that it was a bird of ill omen, earless and black and unmistakable. It was doubly bad luck to see one during the day, since they were known to fly about late at night, stealing people's souls and striking them deaf
.

Hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo, it called to her as she breathed a voluminous breath that caught her very center. She grabbed the etched glass lamp on the nightstand and threw it with all her might, but it fell short of the owl's luminous eyes. Suddenly, the pain inside her spread upward and downward like two opposing tidal waves, and despite her fear or because of it, she delivered a nine-pound, four-ounce baby boy
.

The owl remained still on its perch until the placenta spilled forth in a rush of blood. Then, with a dark flap of its wings, it swooped forward, plucked the sodden organ from the floor, and flew with it like a rumor out the window
.

Later, my mother learned that the bird had flown low over the President's parade with her placenta, scattering the crowd and raining birthing blood. Even President Palma, trembling with fear, crossed himself twice before jumping headlong into a flowering angel's-trumpet bush, his crisp linen suit spattered with Mamá's blood
.

Word of the incident quickly spread throughout Cuba. Mamá told me that for once the priests' and the
santeros'
interpretations were in accord: the island was headed for doom. Since then, the siguapa stygians are no longer so common in Cuba, killed over the years by superstitious country folk and the disappearance of the vast, unlit woods that once concealed them
.

From the start, my mother blamed the siguapa stygian for my tin ear, although she was grateful it hadn't flown off with my hearing altogether. Both my parents were accomplished musicians, and as a child I studied the piano, the violin, the flute, and the oboe, but I never coaxed more than rudimentary sounds from any of them. This was a heartbreak for my parents, who had hoped we might one day form a trio
.

Pinar del Río was a steamy backwater in those days. Its cultural amenities included a theater with a red tile roof, where my mother and father and I attended an occasional concert, and a natural sciences museum—a dusty back room in a deteriorated municipal building—that had on exhibit a rare cork palm, a species indigenous to Cuba that can be traced back 250 million years
.

The Sierra de los Organos loomed to the northwest, and though the mountains were far off, they managed to stamp the town with their somber mood. Tobacco fields stretched in every direction: on the vales, on the hillsides, on the mountaintops, and on the sheer sides of the
mogotes,
limestone bluffs that the workers ascended and descended by means of ropes. Although there were pineapple fields nearby and orange groves and acres of sugarcane, nothing competed with the supremacy of tobacco
.

My father, as the
lector
of El Cid Cigar Manufacturers Company, was revered for his intellect and his splendid renditions of the works of Cervantes, Dickens, and Victor Hugo. For two hours every morning and then again after lunch, Papá read
aloud from an assortment of newspapers, novels, political treatises, and collections of poetry. While the workers occasionally voted on what they wanted my father to read, more often than not they left the choice to him, a testament to their utmost confidence in his taste. For twenty-one years (not counting strikes, holidays, and illnesses), Papá stood at his lectern and read to the hundred or so workers seated below him. Most of them smoked continuously as they listened to him, stripping and sorting and rolling the finest tobacco in the world
.

Papá had a deep, sonorous voice, cured to huskiness over the years by the sheer volume of smoke he inhaled. Although he nursed his throat regularly with honey and lemon, he refused to yield to the temptations of the microphone, which, he was convinced, distorted the robust timbre of his voice. In the afternoons, when he customarily read from novels, townspeople gathered outside the factory with their rocking chairs and embroidery to listen to the intriguing tales that drifted through the open windows
.

My father was particularly proud of the literary name that was imprinted on the factory's cedar boxes and its gilded cigar rings. Once a year, an occasion for which he would dress up in a jacket and waistcoat and his patent-leather spats, my father read in its entirety
El Cid,
that great medieval epic poem, moving even the stolid factory director to tears
.

What most people did not know was that my father was also a superb violinist. Many who heard his serenades from the street or in the nearby square assumed that the music came from my father's phonograph, prized by the town as evidence of their collective sophistication. Papá did not discourage this assumption. The violin was a link to his past, to his own father, who had lived like a pauper in the hills of Galicia, carving fine, sturdy fiddles that nobody bought. My father's father had grown demented in his last years, convinced that he was descended from the great violin makers of Cremona, which had
bestowed upon the world the successive geniuses of Nicolò Amati and Antonio Stradivari
.

I have often wondered why someone of Papá's talent never sought to make a larger impression on the world, why he had so whittled down his dreams, for dreams he must have had to abandon Spain. It seems to me now that Papá had exhausted his lifetime's supply of adventure on his one voyage across the Atlantic. The hardships of that trip must have sated him, cured him completely of any further scheming. By the time he'd arrived in Cuba, my father wanted nothing more than to reclaim the stability he'd so recklessly left behind
.

During brief nostalgic lapses, Papá re-created his favorite dishes from Spain. He made his own sausages, complaining that the local
chorizos
slept on his palate, and he taught himself to bake perfect
empanadas,
plump with spiced ground beef. When he cooked codfish and white-bean stew, his eyes watered in happy relief. One winter, he planted a dwarf olive tree in our backyard, but despite his painstaking care, the sapling never bore fruit. My mother, seeing how homesick Papá was for the verdant hills of Galicia, often encouraged him to return for a visit. But Papá shook his head and said, “My fate was decided a long time ago
.”

That is not to say that my father was a melancholy man; not at all. Most days he awoke with a heightened sense of purpose. His readings engrossed him enormously, and as he strode to work, his throat rumbled with anticipation over what the morning newspapers might bring
.

It was my mother who was the moodier of the two. Her name was Soledad, and she knew better than anyone the meaning of solitude: that the beginning already implies the end, and that at the end we understand only the vague dimensions of our ignorance. As you get older, you question the utility of your life
.

Years later, I learned that Mamá had had a child out of wedlock long before I was born, a little girl named Olivia, who'd drowned when the Guamá River overflowed one rainy September. I remember my mother was always saddest in September, and to this day it seems to me the bleakest of months
.

CONDITIONS OF SURVIVAL
SANTIAGO DE CUBA
JANUARY
1991

T
he talk at Céspedes Hospital
is of blindness. Thousands of Cubans are losing their sight in Santiago de Cuba. There is speculation that a
yanqui
virus or infected fish is to blame, though this last theory is quickly dismissed because fish is impossible to obtain. The blindness, they say, begins with a pain like a bad mosquito bite in the eye.

Reina Agüero watches as the blind patients stumble down the corridors, their arms waving like frontal antennae, cursing the revolution and El Comandante himself. Ten years ago, Reina wouldn't have put up with their blaspheming. Now she doesn't even flinch.

Others still talk of the earthquake that shook the province in December. Eleven people died from the mud slides and fires and the collapse of El Cobre's mine. The weather since has been unpredictable, freezing one day, summer hot the next. People blame the Fosa de Batle, seven
thousand meters deep in the Windward Passage. Santiago de Cuba faces it head-on. When too many drowned men stir in the ocean trench, misfortune is certain to spread.

As a child, Reina learned about the island's geological tensions from her father, about the ancient foundations of rocks carved by erosion into arid plains. She learned that Cuba, in all probability, was connected to Haiti and the Yucatán long ago. That the depth of its limestone sustains an unheard-of variety of mollusks. That its system of subterranean drainage prevents lakes and ponds from forming. Rivers, yes. Lakes and ponds, no. Except in the great Zapata Swamp, Cuba's waters are never still.

The Tana, the Najasa, the Jatibonico del Sur, the Toa, the Damují, the Saramaguacá. Dozens of sleepy rivers, with their whimsical names, crisscross the island. Reina wants to float in these rivers, quench the incessant burning. Instead she lies suspended in a hospital bed. Around her, machines blink with cool assurance, red lights and green, a parade of bulging blue waves. A grimy window overlooks Santiago Bay. Thorn and scrub savanna trim the coastline for miles in both directions.

The doctors tell her that she is lucky to have survived a direct hit of lightning in that mahogany tree. Already they've scraped acres of cinereous flesh from her back, charred a foreign gray. The tools on her belt branded their silhouettes on her hips. Her hoop earrings burned holes in her neck. For weeks, her pores oozed water and blood, until Reina thought it might be better to die.