Dreaming in Cuban

by Cristina Garcia

  “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.

  Herminia motions to her from a side door of the run-down house. She is wearing a cream-yellow blouse with a collar the luster of the absent moon. Her plump black arms stir the darkness. “Hurry up! La Madrina is ready!”

  Felicia slides to the backseat of her car and opens the door with a scrape. Ferns and chicken feathers graze her ankles as she tiptoes in backless sandals toward her friend.

  “Por Dios, we’ve been waiting for you for over an hour! What took you so long?” Herminia grabs Felicia’s arm and pulls her to the door. “Let’s go in before you make the gods angry.”

  She steers Felicia down an airless passageway lit on one side with red votive candles set on wooden tables coated with hardened wax. At the end of the corridor, long strands of shells hang in an arched doorway, the mollusks separated by odd-shaped bits of polished onyx.

  “Bienvenida, hija,” La Madrina beckons in a voice hoarse with a vocation to the unfortunate. “We have been expecting you.”

  She gestures with upturned palms in an arc around her. Her face is an almond sheen of sweat under her white cotton turban, and her lace blouson, settled off her shoulders, reveals duplicate moles, big and black as beetles, at the base of her throat. Layers of gauze skirts
, delicate as membranes, brush her feet, which are bare on the cold cement floor. The low-ceilinged sea-green room wavers with the flames and incense of a hundred candles.

  Against the back wall, an ebony statue of Santa Bárbara, the Black Queen, presides. Apples and bananas sit in offering at her feet. Fragrant oblations crowd the shrines of the other saints and gods: toasted corn, pennies, and an aromatic cigar for Saint Lazarus, protector of paralytics; coconut and bitter kola for Obatalá, King of the White Cloth; roasted yams, palm wine, and a small sack of salt for Oggún, patron of metals.

  In the front of the room, Elleguá, god of the crossroads, inhabits the clay eggs in nine rustic bowls of varying sizes. The eggs have cowrie-shell eyes and mouths, and soak in an elixir of herbs and holy water. Four mulattas, wearing gingham skirts and aprons, kneel before the shrines, praying. One man, a pure blue-black Yoruban, stands mute in the center of the room, a starched cotton fez on his head.

  “Herminia has told us of your dystopia.” La Madrina is fond of melodious words, although she doesn’t always know what they mean. She places a hand heavily ringed with ivory and bezoar stones on Felicia’s shoulder and motions toward the santero. “He has traveled many hours from the south, from the mangroves, to be with us, to cleanse you of your infelicities. He will bring you and your father peace, a peace you never knew while he lived on this earth.”

  “Elleguá wants a goat,” the santero says, his lips barely moving.

  “Oh no, not another goat!” Felicia cries and turns to her friend accusingly. “You promised!”

  “You have no choice,” Herminia implores. “You can’t dictate to the gods, Felicia. Elleguá needs fresh blood to do the job right.”

  “We will open the future to you, hija, you will see,” La Madrina assures her. “We have a friendly contact with the complicated surfaces of the globe.”

  La Madrina gathers the believers around Felicia. They wrap her in garlands of beads and stroke her face and eyelids with branches of rosemary. The santero returns with the goat, its mouth and ears tied with string. Felicia takes a mouthful of shredded coconut and spits it on the goat’s face, kissing its ears as it whines quietly. She rubs her breasts against its muzzle. “Kosí ikú, kosí arun, kosí araye,” the women sing.

  The santero leads the goat over the offerings and quickly pierces its neck with a butcher knife, directing the stream of blood onto the clay eggs. The goat quivers, then is still. The santero shakes a box of salt on its head, then pours honey over the offering.

  Felicia, reeling from the sweet scent of the blood and the candles and the women, faints on La Madrina’s saint-room floor, which is still warm with sacrifice.

  Going South

  The continents strain to unloose themselves, to drift reckless and heavy in the seas. Explosions tear and scar the land, spitting out black oaks and coal mines, street lamps and scorpions. Men lose the power of speech. The clocks stop. Lourdes Puente awakens.

  It is 4:00 A.M. She turns to her husband sleeping beside her. His reddish hair is flecked with gray and his nearsighted eyes disappear under weary, fleshy lids. She has exhausted poor Rufino again.

  Lourdes puts on a size 26 white uniform with wide hip pockets and flat, rubber-soled shoes. She has six identical outfits in the closet, and two more pair of shoes. Lourdes is pleased with her uniform’s implicit authority, with the severity of her unadorned face and blunt, round nose. The muscles in her right eye have been weak since she was a child, and every so often the eye drifts to one side, giving her a vaguely cyclopean air. It doesn’t diminish her 20/20 vision, only skews it a bit. Lourdes is convinced it enables her to see things that others don’t.

  Lourdes pins a short braid against her head, twists on a hairnet, and leaves a note for her daughter on the kitchen table. She wants Pilar at the bakery after school. Lourdes fired the Pakistani yesterday and she’ll be alone behind the counter today if she doesn’t get help. “No excuses this time!!” she scrawls in her sharply slanted script.

  The street lamps shed their distorted lights. It is not yet daybreak, and ordinary noises do not startle Lourdes. A squirrel scratching up in an oak tree. A car engine stalling down the block. Between the brownstones and warehouses, the East River is visible, slow and metallic as the sky.

  Lourdes enjoys walking in the dark unseen. She imagines her footprints sinking invisibly through the streets and the sidewalks, below the condensed archaeology of the city to underground plains of rich alluvial clay. She suspects the earth sheds its skin in layers, squandered of green.

  The early-morning refuge of the bakery delights Lourdes. She is comforted by the order of the round loaves, the texture of grain and powdered sugar, the sustaining aromas of vanilla and almond. Lourdes bought the bakery five years ago from a French-Austrian Jew who had migrated to Brooklyn after the war. Before that, she’d been working as a file clerk at a nearby hospital, classifying the records of patients who had died. Now she wanted to work with bread. What sorrow could there be in that?

  The refrigerated cakes come in flimsy cardboard boxes steaming with dry ice. There are Grand Marnier cakes and napoleons with striped icing and chantilly cream. Lourdes unpacks three Sacher tortes and a Saint Honoré studded with profiteroles, Linzer bars with raspberry jam, éclairs, and marzipan cookies in neon pink. In the summer, there’ll be fresh peach strudel and blueberry tarts. In the fall, pumpkin pies and frosted cupcakes with toothpick turkeys.

  Lourdes lines the display cases with paper doilies and organizes the croissants and coffee rings. She places the day-old pastries in the back of the rows, the easier to reach them. She scrapes the trays of raisins and honey and pops the sugary morsels into her mouth.

  Lourdes saves the pecan sticky buns for last. She unloads a tray of them from the delivery cart, reserving two to eat later. As she sets the first pot of coffee to brew, Sister Federica of the Sisters of Charity Hospital calls.

  “Your father is a saint,” she whispers fiercely. The elfin nun from Santo Domingo is crazy about saints, often identifying the holy ones long before the Vatican even contemplates their canonization. “The mother superior would never believe me. It’s a nest of lapsed bats here. But I wanted you to know the truth.”

  “What happened?” Lourdes asks, stripping the sticky buns of pecans and nervously chewing them one by one.

  “I saw it with my own eyes, may his soul find sanctuary.”

  “My God!” Lourdes crosses herself rapidly.

  “I was making my early rounds when I saw a blue light coming from your father’s room. I thought he might have left the television on.” Sister Federica pauses for a long moment, then resumes with an air more befitting a divine vision. “When I went in, he was fully dressed, standing there erect and healthy, except that his head and hands glowed as if lit from within. It was a nimbus of holiness, I am certain. You know I am an expert in matters of religious enigmas.”

  “And then?”

  “He said, ‘Sister Federica, I wish to thank you for your many kindnesses during these last days. But now another interval awaits me.’ Just like that. Well, I fell to my knees and began a rosary to La Inmaculada. My hands are still trembling. He put on his hat, passed through the window, and headed south, leaving a trail of phosphorus along the East River.”

  “Did he say where he was going?”

  “No.”

  “God bless you, Sister. I’ll light you a candle.”

  Lourdes tries for nearly an hour to telephone her mother in Santa Teresa del Mar, but the operator tells her that the rains have knocked out the phone lines on the northwest coast of Cuba. Outside, customers tap on the glass door with keys and coins. She finally dials her sister Felicia’s number in Havana.

  The rest of the morning, Lourdes tends hurriedly to her customers, mixing up orders and giving the wrong change. Her worst mistake is decorating a christening cake in bold red script with the words “In sympathy.” Lourdes telephones her husband at noon but nobody is home. The customers keep coming. Where is Pilar? Lou
rdes vows to punish her daughter. No painting for a month. That will teach her, she thinks. Then Lourdes calls Rufino again. Still no answer.

  The flow of customers slows in the afternoon, and for the first time since Sister Federica called, Lourdes sits down with a watery cup of coffee and her sticky buns to figure things out. She remembers how after her father arrived in New York her appetite for sex and baked goods increased dramatically. The more she took her father to the hospital for cobalt treatments, the more she reached for the pecan sticky buns, and for Rufino.

  The flesh amassed rapidly on her hips and buttocks, muting the angles of her bones. It collected on her thighs, fusing them above the knees. It hung from her arms like hammocks. She dreamt continually of bread, of grainy ryes and pumpernickels, whole wheat and challah in woven straw baskets. They multiplied prodigiously, hung abundantly from the trees, crowded the skies until they were redolent of yeast.

  Lourdes had gained 118 pounds.

  When she was a skinny child, strangers bought Lourdes treats on the beach or on the main street of town, believing she was malnourished and motherless. As a teenager, Lourdes would drink three or four milk shakes with dinner. Even on the day before her wedding, the seamstresses took in her bodice, begging her to eat and fill out her gown.

  Now the extra weight did not alter her rhythmical gait, but men’s eyes no longer pursued her curves. It was not a question of control. Lourdes did not battle her cravings; rather, she submitted to them like a somnambulist to a dream. She summoned her husband from his workshop by pulling vigorously on a ship’s bell he had rigged up for this purpose, unpinned her hair, and led him by the wrist to their bedroom.

  Lourdes’s agility astounded Rufino. The heavier she got, the more supple her body became. Her legs looped and rotated like an acrobat’s, her neck swiveled with extra ball bearings. And her mouth. Lourdes’s mouth and tongue were like the mouths and tongues of a dozen experienced women.

  Rufino’s body ached from the exertions. His joints swelled like an arthritic’s. He begged his wife for a few nights’ peace but Lourdes’s peals only became more urgent, her glossy black eyes more importunate. Lourdes was reaching through Rufino for something he could not give her, she wasn’t sure what.