“A MARVELOUS NOVEL AND THE DEBUT OF
A BRILLIANT STORYTELLER.”
Russell Banks
“A work that possesses both the intimacy of a Chekhov story and the hallucinatory magic of novel by Gabriel García Márquez. Though one is dazzled by the book’s small fireworks of imagery, though one stops to marvel at some of the fantastic events that bloom on its pages, the reader is never distracted from the gripping story of its extraordinary heroines and the passions that bind and separate them from one another and the country of their birth.… [Garcia] is blessed with a poet’s ear for language, a historian’s fascination with the past and a musician’s intuitive understanding of the ebb and flow of emotion.”
Michiko Kakutani
The New York Times
“Captures the pain, the distance, the frustrations and the dreams of family dramas with a vivid, poetic prose … A bittersweet novel that leaves a reader with a tender, but clinging sadness. And that sadness is made even stronger by the deadly uncertainties that Cuba continues to live through.”
Alan West
The Washington Post Book World
Chosen by Publishers Weekly
as One of the Best Books of the Year
“MAGICAL.”
Susan Miller
Newsweek
“A welcome addition to the growing literature of Latin American émigré experience [that] deftly bridges two divergent cultures … The book traces the fortunes, between 1972 and 1980, of a Cuban family divided by both geography and politics. The four central female characters comprise three generations of the colorful Del Pino family.… At its lyrical best, Garcia’s writing owes a debt to the magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende.… Cristina Garcia has something vital to say about the workings of family and government and art, and she says it in this novel with considerable authority and charm.”
Hilma Wolitzer
Chicago Tribune Book World
“Ambitious … Should delight readers who can dream of the Caribbean, those connected to the past who aren’t enchained by it, and those who remember or can imagine the generational stages of becoming ‘Americanized.’ ”
Morris Thompson
Detroit Free Press
“A vivid fresco of post revolutionary Cuba, as well as a valid assessment of the motives that led up to the Castro regime during the Batista years.”
Rosario Ferre
Boston Globe
“Original, humorous and a contribution to contemporary Cuban-American literature.”
Marjorie Agosin
The Christian Science Monitor
“A BRILLIANT BOOK …
that transcends and illuminates the familiar form of the immigrant family epic.… Leaping gracefully between a wide cast of narrators, past and present, the elegant and precise language of Dreaming in Cuban displays Garcia’s remarkable skill at portraying three strong heroines. Even more impressive is the author’s ability to tackle the historical theme of spiritual exile. By avoiding family melodrama, [Garcia] has elevated Dreaming in Cuban to masterpiece status.… With tremendous skill, passion and humor, Garcia just may have written the definitive story of Cuban exiles and some of those they left behind.”
Philip Herter
The Denver Post
“Exceptionally good … has a playful style and imagination that are engaging from the first.”
Gail Pool
Houston Post
“Embracing fantasy and reality with equal fervor, Garcia’s vivid, indelible characters offer an entirely new view of a particular Latin American sensibility.”
Publishers Weekly
“Garcia juggles opposing life forces like a skilled magician accustomed to tossing into the air fiery objects that would explode if they came into contact.… Garcia tells [this] story with an economy of words and a rich, tropical imagery, setting a brisk but comfortable pace. Highly recommended.”
Library Journal
ALSO BY CRISTINA GARCÍA
Monkey Hunting
The Agüero Sisters
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A One World Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 1992 by Cristina García
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by One World Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
One World is a registered trademark and the One World colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
William Peter Kosmas, Esq.: “Poemas de la Siguiriya,” “Gacela de la Huida,” and “La Casida de las Palomas Obscuras” by Federico García Lorca from Obras Completas (Aguillar, 1987 edition). Copyright © 1986 by Herederos de Federico García Lorca. All rights reserved. For information regarding rights and permissions for works by Federico García Lorca, please contact William Peter Kosmas, Esq., 25 Howitt Road, London NW3 4LT.
Pantheon Books: English translation of “Poemas de la Siguiriya” by Federico García Lorca from Federico García Lorca: A Life by Ian Gibson. Copyright © 1989 by Ian Gibson. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
Peer Music: Excerpt from “Corazon Rebelde” by Alberto Arredondo. Copyright © 1963 by Peer International Corporation. Copyright renewed. Excerpt from “Tratame Como Soy” by Pedro Brunet. Copyright © 1956 by Peer International Corporation. Copyright renewed. All rights reserved. International copyright secured.
www.oneworldbooks.net
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 92-90385
eISBN: 978-0-307-79800-8
v3.1
For my grandmother,
and for Scott
These casual exfoliations are
Of the tropic of resemblances …
—WALLACE STEVENS
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
ORDINARY SEDUCTIONS
Ocean Blue
Going South
The House on Palmas Street
Celia’s Letters: 1935–1940
A Grove of Lemons
The Fire Between Them
Celia’s Letters: 1942–1949
IMAGINING WINTER
The Meaning of Shells
Enough Attitude
Baskets of Water
Celia’s Letters: 1950–1955
A Matrix Light
God’s Will
Daughters of Changó
Celia’s Letters: 1956–1958
THE LANGUAGES LOST
Six Days in April
Celia’s Letter: 1959
About the Author
ORDINARY SEDUCTIONS
(1972)
Ocean Blue
Celia del Pino, equipped with binoculars and wearing her best housedress and drop pearl earrings, sits in her wicker swing guarding the north coast of Cuba. Square by square, she searches the night skies for adversaries then scrutinizes the ocean, which is roiling with nine straight days of unseasonable April rains. No sign of gusano traitors. Celia is honored. The neighborhood committee has voted her little brick-and-cement house by the sea as the primary lookout for Santa Teresa del Mar
. From her porch, Celia could spot another Bay of Pigs invasion before it happened. She would be feted at the palace, serenaded by a brass orchestra, seduced by El Líder himself on a red velvet divan.
Celia brings the binoculars to rest in her lap and rubs her eyes with stiffened fingers. Her wattled chin trembles. Her eyes smart from the sweetness of the gardenia tree and the salt of the sea. In an hour or two, the fishermen will return, nets empty. The yanquis, rumors go, have ringed the island with nuclear poison, hoping to starve the people and incite a counterrevolution. They will drop germ bombs to wither the sugarcane fields, blacken the rivers, blind horses and pigs. Celia studies the coconut palms lining the beach. Could they be blinking signals to an invisible enemy?
A radio announcer barks fresh conjectures about a possible attack and plays a special recorded message from El Líder: “Eleven years ago tonight, compañeros, you defended our country against American aggressors. Now each and every one of you must guard our future again. Without your support, compañeros, without your sacrifices, there can be no revolution.”
Celia reaches into her straw handbag for more red lipstick, then darkens the mole on her left cheek with a black eyebrow pencil. Her sticky graying hair is tied in a chignon at her neck. Celia played the piano once and still exercises her hands, unconsciously stretching them two notes beyond an octave. She wears leather pumps with her bright housedress.
Her grandson appears in the doorway, his pajama top twisted off his shoulders, his eyes vacant with sleep. Celia carries Ivanito past the sofa draped with a faded mantilla, past the water-bleached walnut piano, past the dining-room table pockmarked with ancient history. Only seven chairs remain of the set. Her husband smashed one on the back of Hugo Villaverde, their former son-in-law, and could not repair it for all the splinters. She nestles her grandson beneath a frayed blanket on her bed and kisses his eyes closed.
Celia returns to her post and adjusts the binoculars. The sides of her breasts ache under her arms. There are three fishing boats in the distance—the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María. She remembers the singsong way she used to recite their names. Celia moves the binoculars in an arc from left to right, the way she was trained, and then straight across the horizon.
At the far end of the sky, where daylight begins, a dense radiance like a shooting star breaks forth. It weakens as it advances, as its outline takes shape in the ether. Her husband emerges from the light and comes toward her, taller than the palms, walking on water in his white summer suit and Panama hat. He is in no hurry. Celia half expects him to pull pink tea roses from behind his back as he used to when he returned from his trips to distant provinces. Or to offer her a giant eggbeater wrapped in brown paper, she doesn’t know why. But he comes empty-handed.
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.
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