Dreaming in Cuban

by Cristina Garcia

  Lourdes closes her shop early and walks to the Sisters of Charity Hospital fourteen blocks away. Sister Federica escorts her down the dingy hallway. Lourdes lifts her dead father’s gnarled hands, his papery, spotted wrists. She notices the way his fingers are twisted above the first joints, stiffened haphazardly like branches. His stomach is shaved and tracked with stitches, and his skin is so transparent that even the most delicate veins are visible. The vast white bed obscures him.

  Her father had been a fastidious man, impeccable, close-shaven, with razor-sharp creases pressed into his trousers. He took pride in never walking barefoot, even in his own home, and shuffled around in highly polished leather slippers to protect himself from microbios. The very word lit a fire in his eyes. “They are the enemy!” he used to bellow. “Culprits of tropical squalor!”

  For her father, conquering the microbios required unflagging vigilance. It meant keeping the refrigerator so cold that Lourdes’s teeth ached from drinking Coca-Cola or biting into pieces of leftover pork. “Food spoils quickly in our climate!” he insisted, turning the dial to near freezing. It meant hearing his loud complaints about her mother’s culinary ambushes: chicken bloody at the bone, undercooked vegetables, unpeeled fruit served with room-temperature cream cheese.

  The way her father washed his manicured hands was a minor miracle in itself. To Lourdes, he looked solemn, like a doctor preparing for surgery. He taught her and Felicia and their younger brother, Javier, how to scrape under their nails with miniature scrubbers, how to let the hot water run over their hands for a slow, thirty-second count, how to dry between their fingers with towels boiled in bleach so the germs could not breed in the damp crevices.

  In the hospital, her father despaired at incompetences and breakdowns in procedures, at the rough, professional hands that prodded him. Once a nurse inserted a suppository to loosen his bowels and did not return, although he cramped his finger ringing the buzzer, until after he had soiled his pajamas. Lourdes knew then her father would die. She handed her remaining savings to the nuns and requested a private room with a television and the best nurse in the hospital.

  Her father’s last weeks were happy ones under the care of Sister Federica, whose devotion to a bewildering array of saints did not lessen her duty to cleanliness. Sister Federica doted on her father and gave him the smoothest shaves he’d ever had. Twice a day, she lathered his face with a stiff bristle brush and with a straight razor expertly scraped the dent in his chin and the narrow space between his nose and his upper lip. Then she snipped his unruly nostril hairs and dusted his neck with talcum. Lourdes knew that the little nun, with her puckish face and faint mustache, reminded her father of his barber in Havana, of the smell of his tonics and pomades, of the cracked red leather and steel levers of his enameled chairs.

  Her father died with a clean shave. That, at least, would have made him happy.

  When Pilar doesn’t return home by nine o’clock, Lourdes calls the police station and begins defrosting a two-and-a-half-pound stash of pecan sticky buns. At ten o’clock, she telephones the fire department and preheats the oven. By midnight, she’s alerted three hospitals and six radio stations and finished the last of the sticky buns.

  Rufino cannot comfort her. Her father is dead. Their daughter is missing. “And where were you this afternoon?” Lourdes suddenly shouts at her husband, but she doesn’t wait for an answer. Instead she tears through a shopping bag of photographs looking for a snapshot of her daughter, but all she finds is a wallet-sized school picture of Pilar in third grade. Pilar’s hair is straight and black and parted neatly on the side. She’s wearing a maroon plaid jumper, a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar and a matching snap-on tie. This girl looks nothing like her daughter.

  Lourdes can no longer envision Pilar, only floating parts of her. An amber eye, a delicate wrist with a silver-and-turquoise bracelet, eyebrows arched and thick as if inviting danger. Lourdes imagines these pieces, broken and bruised in unspeakable places, on piers and in alleyways, drifting down the river to the sea.

  She combs her daughter’s room for the Jimi Hendrix poster she made her take down and tacks it back on the wall. Then Lourdes scoops up an armful of Pilar’s grubby overalls and her paint-spattered flannel shirts and lies beneath them on her daughter’s bed. She inhales the turpentine, the smell of defiance that is Pilar.

  *

  Her daughter was born eleven days after El Líder rode in triumph to Havana. Pilar slipped out like a tadpole, dark, hairless, and eager for light.

  Lourdes had difficulty keeping nursemaids for Pilar. Few lasted more than a week or two. One girl left with a broken leg after slipping on a bar of soap Pilar dropped while the nanny was bathing her in the sink. Another woman, an elderly mulatta, claimed that her hair was falling out from the menacing stares the baby gave her. Lourdes fired her after she found Pilar in her bassinet smeared with chicken blood and covered with bay leaves.

  “The child is bewitched,” the frightened nanny explained. “I was trying to cleanse her spirit.”

  At dawn, Lourdes crosses the Brooklyn Bridge. The sun is low in the sky and she searches the silvery river for clues. A tugboat sounds mournfully, pulling its cargo of oil drums. The air smells of tar and clinging winter. Through the grid of steel cables, the skyscrapers divide into manageable fragments. To the north, more bridges are superimposed like a poker player’s cards. To the east lie the flatlands of Brooklyn and an expressway to Queens.

  Lourdes turns south. Everything, it seems, is going south. The smoke from the leaning chimneys in New Jersey. A reverse formation of sparrows. The pockmarked ships headed for Panama. The torpid river itself.

  Lourdes imagines her father, too, heading south, returning home to their beach, which is mined with sad memories. She tries to picture her first winter in Cuba. It was 1936 and her mother was in an asylum. Lourdes and her father traversed the island in his automobile, big and black as a Sunday-night church. From the car window, Lourdes saw the island’s wounded landscapes, its helices of palms. Fat men pressed their faces, snaked with purple veins, against her cheeks. They gave her cankered oranges, tasteless lollipops. Her mother’s doleful rhythm followed them everywhere.

  Pilar Puente

  I’m trying on French-style garters and push-up brassières in the dressing room of Abraham & Straus when I think I hear his voice. I stick my head out and see them. My father looks like a kid, laughing and animated and whispering in this woman’s ear. The woman is huge and blond and puffy like a 1950s beauty queen gone to seed. She has a cloud of bleached hair and high-muscled calves as if she’s been walking in those heels since birth. “Shit!” I think. “Shit! I can’t believe this!” I get dressed and follow them, hiding behind racks of hats and on-sale sweaters. At the candy counter, my father holds a toffee crunch above her flicking, disgusting tongue. She’s a head taller than he is so it’s not easy. It makes me sick to my stomach.

  They walk down Fulton Street arm in arm, pretending to window-shop. It’s just a run-down stretch of outdated stores with merchandise that’s been there since the Bay of Pigs. I guess my father figures that nobody he knows will see him in this neighborhood. The beauty queen leans into him outside a stereo place that’s blasting, incredibly, “Stop in the Name of Love.” I see that flycatcher tongue of hers go into his mouth. Then my father holds her waxy, bloated face in his hands, as if it were a small sun.

  That’s it. My mind’s made up. I’m going back to Cuba. I’m fed up with everything around here. I take all my money out of the bank, $120, money I earned slaving away at my mother’s bakery, and buy a one-way bus ticket to Miami. I figure if I can just get there, I’ll be able to make my way to Cuba, maybe rent a boat or get a fisherman to take me. I imagine Abuela Celia’s surprise as I sneak up behind her. She’ll be sitting in her wicker swing overlooking the sea and she’ll smell of salt and violet water. There’ll be gulls and crabs along the shore. She’ll stroke my cheek with her cool hands, sing quietly in my ear.

  I was o
nly two years old when I left Cuba but I remember everything that’s happened to me since I was a baby, even word-for-word conversations. I was sitting in my grandmother’s lap, playing with her drop pearl earrings, when my mother told her we were leaving the country. Abuela Celia called her a traitor to the revolution. Mom tried to pull me away but I clung to Abuela and screamed at the top of my lungs. My grandfather came running and said, “Celia, let the girl go. She belongs with Lourdes.” That was the last time I saw her.

  My mother says that Abuela Celia’s had plenty of chances to leave Cuba but that she’s stubborn and got her head turned around by El Líder. Mom says “Communist” the way some people says “cancer,” low and fierce. She reads the newspapers page by page for leftist conspiracies, jams her finger against imagined evidence and says, “See. What did I tell you?” Last year when El Líder jailed a famous Cuban poet, she sneered at “those leftist intellectual hypocrites” for trying to free him. “They created those prisons, so now they should rot in them!” she shouted, not making much sense at all. “They’re dangerous subversives, red to the bone!” Mom’s views are strictly black-and-white. It’s how she survives.

  My mother reads my diary, tracks it down under the mattress, or to the lining of my winter coat. She says it’s her responsibility to know my private thoughts, that I’ll understand when I have my own kids. That’s how she knows about me in the tub. I like to lie on my back and let the shower rain down on me full force. If I move my hips to just the right position, it feels great, like little explosions on a string. Now, whenever I’m in the bathroom, my mother knocks on the door like President Nixon’s here and needs to use the john. Meanwhile, I hear her jumping my father night after night until he begs her to leave him alone. You never would have guessed it by looking at her.

  When Mom first found out about me in the tub, she beat me in the face and pulled my hair out in big clumps. She called me a desgraciada and ground her knuckles into my temples. Then she forced me to work in her bakery every day after school for twenty-five cents an hour. She leaves me nasty notes on the kitchen table reminding me to show up, or else. She thinks working with her will teach me responsibility, clear my head of filthy thoughts. Like I’ll get pure pushing her donuts around. It’s not like it’s done wonders for her, either. She’s as fat as a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day float from all the pecan sticky buns she eats. I’m convinced they’re doing something to her brain.

  The bus ride down isn’t too bad. After New Jersey, it’s a straight shot down I-95. I’m sitting next to this skinny woman who got on in Richmond. Her name is Minnie French but she’s weirdly old-looking for a young person. Maybe it’s her name or the three shopping bags of food she’s got under her seat. Fried chicken, potato salad, ham sandwiches, chocolate cupcakes, even a jumbo can of peaches in heavy syrup. Minnie takes dainty bites of everything, chewing it fast like a squirrel. She offers me a chicken thigh but I’m not hungry. Minnie tells me she was born in Toledo, Ohio, the last of thirteen children, and that her mother died giving birth to her. The family split up and Minnie was raised by a grandmother who can quote the Bible chapter and verse and drives a beat-up Cadillac with a CB radio in it. Minnie says her grandma likes talking to other born-again motorists on her way to Chicago to visit relatives.

  I tell her how back in Cuba the nannies used to think I was possessed. They rubbed me with blood and leaves when my mother wasn’t looking and rattled beads over my forehead. They called me brujita, little witch. I stared at them, tried to make them go away. I remember thinking, Okay, I’ll start with their hair, make it fall out strand by strand. They always left wearing kerchiefs to cover their bald patches.

  I don’t really want to talk about my father but I end up telling Minnie how he used to take me horseback riding on our ranch, strapping me in his saddle with a leather seat belt he designed just for me. Dad’s family owned casinos in Cuba, and had one of the largest ranches on the island. There were beef cattle and dairy cows, horses, pigs, goats, and lambs. Dad fed them molasses to fatten them, and gave the chickens corn and sorghum until they laid vermilion eggs, rich with vitamins. He took me on an overnight inspection once. We camped out under a sapodilla tree and listened to the pygmy owls with their old women’s voices. My father knew I understood more than I could say. He told me stories about Cuba after Columbus came. He said that the Spaniards wiped out more Indians with smallpox than with muskets.

  “Why don’t we read about this in history books?” I ask Minnie. “It’s always one damn battle after another. We only know about Charlemagne and Napoléon because they fought their way into posterity.” Minnie just shakes her head and looks out the window. She’s starting to fall asleep. Her head is lolling about on her shoulders and her mouth is half open.

  If it were up to me, I’d record other things. Like the time there was a freak hailstorm in the Congo and the women took it as a sign that they should rule. Or the life stories of prostitutes in Bombay. Why don’t I know anything about them? Who chooses what we should know or what’s important? I know I have to decide these things for myself. Most of what I’ve learned that’s important I’ve learned on my own, or from my grandmother.

  Abuela Celia and I write to each other sometimes, but mostly I hear her speaking to me at night just before I fall asleep. She tells me stories about her life and what the sea was like that day. She seems to know everything that’s happened to me and tells me not to mind my mother too much. Abuela Celia says she wants to see me again. She tells me she loves me.

  My grandmother is the one who encouraged me to go to painting classes at Mitzi Kellner’s. She’s a lady down the block who used to hang out in Greenwich Village with the beatniks. Her house stinks of turpentine and urine from all her cats. She gave an art class Friday afternoons for the neighborhood kids. We started off doing blind contour drawings of our hands, then of lettuce leaves, gourds, anything wrinkly. Mitzi told us not to worry about copying objects exactly, that it was the strength of our lines that counted.

  My paintings have been getting more and more abstract lately, violent-looking with clotted swirls of red. Mom thinks they’re morbid. Last year, she refused to let me accept the scholarship I won to art school in Manhattan. She said that artists are a bad element, a profligate bunch who shoot heroin. “I won’t allow it, Rufino!” she cried with her usual drama. “She’ll have to kill me first!” Not that the thought hadn’t crossed my mind. But Dad, in his unobtrusive way, finally persuaded her to let me go.

  After I started art school last fall, Dad fixed up a studio for me in the back of the warehouse where we live. He bought the warehouse from the city for a hundred dollars when I was in third grade. It had lots of great junk in it until Mom made him move it out. There were a vintage subway turnstile and an antique telephone, the shell of a Bluebird radio, even the nose fin of a locomotive. Where my mother saw junk, Dad saw the clean lines of the machine age.

  Dad tells me the place was built in the 1920s as temporary housing for out-of-town public-school teachers. Then it was a dormitory for soldiers during World War II, and later the Transit Authority used it for storage.

  A cinder-block wall divides the warehouse in two. Mom wanted a real home up front, so Dad built a couple of bedrooms and a kitchen with a double sink. Mom bought love seats and lace doilies and hung up a tacky watercolor landscape she had brought with her from Cuba. She installed window boxes with geraniums.

  My father likes to sift through street castoffs and industrial junk heaps for treasures. Like a proud tomcat showing off the spoils of his hunt, he leaves what he finds for my mother in the kitchen. Mostly she doesn’t appreciate it. Dad likes raising things, too. It’s in his blood from his days on the farm. Last summer he left a lone bee in a jar on the kitchen counter for my mother.

  “What does this mean?” Mom asked suspiciously.

  “Apiculture, Lourdes. I’ve got a nest out back. We’re going to grow our own honey, maybe supply all of Brooklyn.”

  The bees lasted exactly one week
. Mom wrapped herself in beach towels and released them all one afternoon when Dad and I were at the movies. They stung her arms and face so badly she could hardly open her eyes. Now she never goes to the back of the warehouse, which is better for us.

  Dad has his workshop next to mine and tinkers with his projects there. His latest idea is a voice-command typewriter he says will do away with secretaries.

  To get hold of us, Mom rings a huge bell that Dad found in the abandoned shipyard next door. When she’s upset, she pulls on the damn thing like the hunchback of Notre Dame.

  Our house is on a cement plot near the East River. At night, especially in the summer when the sound carries, I hear the low whistles of the ships as they leave New York harbor. They travel south past the Wall Street skyscrapers, past Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, past Bayonne, New Jersey, and the Bay Ridge Channel and under the Verrazano Bridge. Then they make a left at Coney Island and head out to the Atlantic. When I hear those whistles, I want to go with them.

  When Minnie wakes up, she says she knows she shouldn’t be telling me this, that I’m too young to hear it, but I swear I’m thirteen and that seems to satisfy her. She’s seventeen and a half. Minnie says she’s going down to Florida to see a doctor her boyfriend knows and get herself an abortion. She doesn’t have any children and she doesn’t want any either, she tells me. Her voice is flat and even and I hold her hand until she falls asleep again.

  I think about how the New Guinea islanders didn’t connect sex with pregnancy. They believed that children float on logs in the heavens until the spirits of pregnant women claim them. I’m not too tired so I stay up reading the neon signs off the highway. The missing letters make for weird messages. There’s a Shell station missing the “S.”