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My favorite, though, is one, I swear it, in North Carolina that says Cock—s, with an electric martini minus the olive.
No matter how hard I try, though, I keep seeing the bloated face of that aging beauty queen bouncing off the lights into my father’s outstretched hands. I guess my parents don’t see all that much of each other anymore except when Mom rings for Dad. He always looks real worried, too. Dad used to help Mom in the bakery but she lost patience with him. As handy as he is for some things, he couldn’t get the hang of the pastry business, at least not the way my mother runs it.
These days, Mom goes through her employees like those damn pecan sticky buns she eats. Nobody ever lasts more than a day or two. She hires the real down-and-outs, immigrants from Russia or Pakistan, people who don’t speak any English, figuring she can get them cheap. Then she screams at them half the day because they don’t understand what she’s saying. Mom thinks they’re all out to steal from her so she rifles through their coats and shopping bags when they’re working. Like what are they going to steal? A butter cookie? A French bread? She told me to check someone’s purse once and I said no fucking way. She believes she’s doing them a favor by giving them a job and breaking them in to American life. Hell, if she’s the welcome wagon, they’d better hitch a ride with someone else.
I remember when we first came to New York. We lived in a hotel in Manhattan for five months while my parents waited for the revolution to fail or for the Americans to intervene in Cuba. My mother used to take me for walks in Central Park. Once, an agent from the Art Linkletter show stopped us at the Children’s Zoo and asked my mother if I could be on the show. But I didn’t speak English yet so he passed.
Mom used to dress me in a little maroon woolen coat with a black velveteen collar and cuffs. The air was different from Cuba’s. It had a cold, smoked smell that chilled my lungs. The skies looked newly washed, streaked with light. And the trees were different, too. They looked on fire. I’d run through great heaps of leaves just to hear them rustle like the palm trees during hurricanes in Cuba. But then I’d feel sad looking up at the bare branches and thinking about Abuela Celia. I wonder how my life would have been if I’d stayed with her.
I saw my grandfather, Abuela Celia’s husband, when he came to New York to get treated for his stomach cancer. They took him off the plane in a wheelchair. Abuelo Jorge’s face was dry and brittle like old parchment. He slept in my bed, which my mother fixed up with a new nubby beige bedspread, and I slept on a cot next to him. Mom bought him a black-and-white television and Abuelo watched the fights and the Spanish novelas on Channel 47. No matter how much my mother bathed him, he always smelled of burnt eggs and oranges.
My grandfather was so weak that he’d usually fall asleep by eight o’clock. I’d take his teeth out for him and put them in a glass of water fizzing with denture tablets. He’d whistle softly through his gums all night. Sometimes he’d have nightmares and box the air with his fists. “Come here, you good-for-nothing Spaniard!” he’d shout. “Come and fight like a man!” But then he’d settle down, muttering a few curses.
When Mom first started taking him for cobalt treatments I imagined sharp blue beams aimed at his stomach. A strange color for healing, I thought. Nothing we eat is blue, not blue blue like my grandfather’s eyes, so why didn’t the doctors change the color of those damn beams to green? We eat green, it’s healthy. If only they had changed those lights to green, I thought, a nice jade green, he’d have gotten better.
My grandfather told me once that I reminded him of Abuela Celia. I took that as a compliment. He used to write her letters every day, when he still had the strength, long letters in an old-fashioned script with flourishes and curlicues. You wouldn’t expect him to have such fine handwriting. They were romantic letters, too. He read one out loud to me. He called Abuela Celia his “dove in the desert.” Now he can’t write to her much. And he’s too proud to ask any of us to do it for him. Abuela Celia writes back to him every once in a while, but her letters are full of facts, about this meeting or that, nothing more. They make my grandfather sad.
Minnie rides as far as Jacksonville. I’m curious so I look out the window to see who’s come to pick her up. But by the time the bus pulls away she’s still waiting.
The scenery gets so dull in Florida that I finally fall asleep. I remember one dream. It’s midnight and there are people around me praying on the beach. I’m wearing a white dress and turban and I can hear the ocean nearby, only I can’t see it. I’m sitting on a chair, a kind of throne, with antlers fastened to the back. The people lift me up high and walk with me in a slow procession toward the sea. They’re chanting in a language I don’t understand. I don’t feel scared, though. I can see the stars and the moon and the black sky revolving overhead. I can see my grandmother’s face.
The House on Palmas Street
The late-afternoon downpour sends the students’ mothers scurrying under the coral tree in the yard of the Nikolai Lenin Elementary School. A lizard vibrates in the crook of the tree’s thickest branch. Celia stands alone in the rain in her leather pumps and jade housedress waiting for her twin granddaughters to return from their camping trip to the Isle of Pines. It seems to her that she has spent her entire life waiting for others, for something or other to happen. Waiting for her lover to return from Spain. Waiting for the summer rains to end. Waiting for her husband to leave on his business trips so she could play Debussy on the piano.
The waiting began in 1934, the spring before she married Jorge del Pino, when she was still Celia Almeida. She was selling American photographic equipment at El Encanto, Havana’s most prestigious department store, when Gustavo Sierra de Armas strode up to her display case and asked to see Kodak’s smallest camera. He was a married Spanish lawyer from Granada and said that he wanted to document the murders in Spain through a peephole in his overcoat. When the war came, no one could refute his evidence.
Gustavo returned to Celia’s counter again and again. He brought her butterfly jasmine, the symbol of patriotism and purity, and told her that Cuba, too, would one day be free of bloodsuckers. Gustavo sang to her beauty mark, the lunar by her mouth. He bought her drop pearl earrings.
Ese lunar que tienes, cielito lindo,
junto a la boca …
No se lo des a nadie, cielito lindo,
que a mí me toca.
When Gustavo left her to return to Spain, Celia was inconsolable. The spring rains made her edgy, the greenery hurt her eyes. She saw mourning doves peck at carrion on her doorstep and visited the botánicas for untried potions.
“I want a long, easy solace,” she told the gitanas.
She bought tiger root from Jamaica to scrape, a cluster of indigo, translucent crimson seeds, and lastly, a tiny burlap pouch of herbs. She boiled teas and honeycombs, steamed open her pores, adjusted the shutters, and drank.
Celia took to her bed by early summer and stayed there for the next eight months. That she was shrinking there was no doubt. Celia had been a tall woman, a head taller than most men, with a full bosom and slender, muscled legs. Soon she was a fragile pile of opaque bones, with yellowed nails and no monthly blood. Her great-aunt Alicia wrapped Celia’s thinning hair with colorful bandannas, making her appearance all the more startling.
The doctors could find nothing wrong with Celia. They examined her through monocles and magnifying glasses, with metal instruments that embossed her chest and forearms, thighs and forehead with a blue geometry. With pencil-thin flashlights they peered into her eyes, which hung like lanterns in her sleepless face. They prescribed vitamins and sugar pills and pills to make her sleep, but Celia diminished, ever more pallid, in her bed.
Neighbors suggested their own remedies: arnica compresses, packed mud from a holy well, ground elephant tusk from the Niger to mix in her daily broth. They dug up the front yard for buried maledictions but found nothing. The best cooks on Palmas Street offered Celia coconut custard, guayaba a
nd cheese tortes, bread pudding, and pineapple cakes. Vilma Castillo lit a baked Alaska that set the kitchen aflame and required many buckets of water to extinguish. After the fire, few people came to visit Celia. “She is determined to die,” they concluded.
Desperate, her great-aunt called a santera from Regla, who draped Celia with beaded necklaces and tossed shells to divine the will of the gods.
“Miss Celia, I see a wet landscape in your palm,” the little santera said, then turned to Tía Alicia. “She will survive the hard flames.”
Celia wrote her first letter to Gustavo Sierra de Armas upon the insistence of Jorge del Pino, who came courting during her housebound exile. Jorge was fourteen years older than she and wore round steel glasses that shrank his blue eyes. Celia had known him since she was a child, when her mother had sent her from the countryside to live with her great-aunt in Havana.
“Write to that fool,” Jorge insisted. “If he doesn’t answer, you will marry me.”
November 11, 1934
Mi querido Gustavo,
A fish swims in my lung. Without you, what is there to celebrate?
I am yours always,
Celia
For twenty-five years, Celia wrote her Spanish lover a letter on the eleventh day of each month, then stored it in a satin-covered chest beneath her bed. Celia has removed her drop pearl earrings only nine times, to clean them. No one ever remembers her without them.
* * *
Celia’s twin granddaughters recount how on their camping trip they fed midget bananas to a speckled horse and examined horned earthworms peculiar to the island. Celia knows that Luz and Milagro are always alone with one another, speaking in symbols only they understand. Luz, older by twelve minutes, usually speaks for the two of them. The sisters are double stones of a single fruit, darker than their mother, with rounder features and their father’s inky eyes. They have identical birthmarks, diminutive caramel crescents over their left eyelids, and their braids hang in duplicate ropes down their backs.
The three of them hitch a ride to the house on Palmas Street. Their driver, a balding man with gently serrated teeth, shakes Celia’s hand with fingers the texture of cork. She correctly surmises that he is a plumber. Celia has prided herself on guessing occupations since her days at El Encanto, when she could precisely gauge how much a customer had to spend on a camera. Her biggest sales went to Americans from Pennsylvania. What did they take so many pictures of up there?
The driver turns left on Palmas Street with its matched rows of closely set two-story houses, all painted a flamboyant yellow. Last fall, the line at the hardware store snaked around the block for the surplus paint, left over from a hospital project on the other side of Havana. Felicia bought the maximum amount allowed, eight gallons, and spent two Sundays painting the house with borrowed brushes and ladders.
“After all,” she said, “you could die waiting for the right shade of blue.”
The air is damp from the afternoon rains. Celia gathers her granddaughters close. “Your grandfather died last week,” she tells them, then kisses each one on the cheek. She takes Luz and Milagro by the hand and walks up the front steps of the house on Palmas Street.
“My girls! My girls!” Felicia waves at them frantically from the second-story bedroom window, lost behind the tamarind tree heavy with sparrows and tawny pods. Her face is spotted and enlivened with heat. She is wearing her American-made flannel nightgown with the pale blue roses. It is buttoned to the top of her throat. “I made coconut ice cream!”
Store-bought ice cream is cheap, but for Felicia, making ice cream from scratch is part of the ritual that began after her husband left in 1966. Felicia’s delusions commence suddenly, frequently after heavy rains. She rarely deviates from her original pattern, her hymn of particulars.
Felicia coaxes her young son to join her. Celia and her granddaughters enter the house on Palmas Street, to find Ivanito, his dimpled hands clasped, singing the lyrics to a melodramatic love song.
Quieres regresar, pero es imposible
Ya mi corazón se encuentra rebelde
Vuélvete otra vez
Que no te amaré jamás
* * *
That night, Celia lies awake in the bare dining room of the yellow house on Palmas Street, the house that once belonged to her mother-in-law and where Felicia now lives. Sleep is an impossibility in this room, in this bed with memories that plague her for days. This house, Celia thinks, has brought only misfortune.
She remembers when she returned from her honeymoon in Soroa with a white orchid in her hair, one that Jorge had clipped from the terraced gardens high above the sulfur baths. Her mother-in-law, who had a fleshy-tipped nose and a pendulous, manly face, snatched the flower from Celia’s ear and crushed it in her hand.
“I will have no harlotry in my house,” Berta Arango del Pino snapped, staring hard at the darkened mole by Celia’s mouth.
Then she turned to her only son.
“I’ll fry you a red snapper, mi corazón, just the way you like it.”
Jorge’s business trips stretched unendurably. During the first months of their marriage, he called Celia every night, his gentle voice assuaging her. But soon his calls came less frequently, and his voice lost its comforting tone.
When he was home, they made love tensely and soundlessly while his mother slept. Their marriage bed was a narrow cot that was hidden in the dining-room closet during the day. Afterward, they would dress themselves in their nightclothes and fall asleep in each other’s arms. At dawn, Berta Arango del Pino would enter with a short knock, open the shutters, and announce breakfast.
Celia wanted to tell Jorge how his mother and his sister, Ofelia, scorned her, how they ate together in the evenings without inviting her. “Did you see the shirt she sewed for our Jorge today?” she heard Ofelia scoff. “She must think he’s growing a third arm.” They left her scraps to eat, worse than what they fed the dogs in the street.
One day, while the two of them went to buy embroidery threads, Celia decided to cook them a savory flank-steak stew. She set the dining-room table with the good linen and silverware, collected fruit from the tamarind tree, and squeezed and strained a pitcherful of juice. Hopeful and nervous, she waited for their return. Ofelia got to the kitchen first.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she said, opening and closing the lid of the pot like a cymbal.
Berta Arango del Pino followed on her thick-ankled legs. She took two dishrags and carried the pot impassively through the living room, down the front steps and across the yard, then poured the steaming casserole into the gutter.
Jorge’s mother and his sister played dominoes in the dining room until late, delaying Celia’s sleep, her only solace. Celia knew that Ofelia joined her mother at her dressing table, where they sat on their bony behinds and rubbed whitening cream into their dark, freckled faces. Berta Arango del Pino left the paste on overnight to remove any evidence of her mulatto blood. She had a taste for absinthe, too, and exuded a faint licorice smell. In the mornings, her cheeks and forehead burned from the bleach and the potent liqueur.
On Saturdays, she and Ofelia went to the beauty parlor and returned with identical helmets of girlish curls, which they protected fiercely with hairpins and kerchiefs. Ofelia still hoped for suitors although her mother had long since driven off the few men that dared come around, nervously clutching flowers or mints. She wore her decorous dresses to morning mass, and around her neck displayed the short single strand of pearls she had received on her fifteenth birthday.
Ofelia was afraid of the attention men once paid her but seemed more fearful now of her invisibility. In quiet moments she must have asked: Who am I whitening my skin for? Who notices the tortoiseshell combs in my hair? Would anyone care if the seams on my stockings were crooked? Or if I didn’t wear any at all?
*
Celia awoke one morning and knew she was pregnant. She felt as if she had swallowed a bell. The rigid edges of her wedding ring sliced into her tum
id finger. Days passed but her husband did not call. She took Ofelia aside and told her in confidence, but Ofelia absently touched her own milkless breasts and ran with the news to her mother.
“The indecency!” Berta Arango del Pino protested. “How many more mouths can my poor son feed?”
Ofelia took to appropriating Celia’s dresses and shoes. “You won’t be needing this anymore,” she said, clutching a cream linen suit, which hung better on the wire hanger than on her desiccated frame. “After the baby, none of this will fit you anyway.” She stole Celia’s leather pumps when her feet got too swollen to wear them and tore the backs open with her calcarated heels.
Celia wished for a boy, a son who could make his way in the world. If she had a son, she would leave Jorge and sail to Spain, to Granada. She would dance flamenco, her skirts whipping a thousand crimson lights. Her hands would be hummingbirds of hard black sounds, her feet supple against the floorboards of the night. She would drink whiskey with tourists, embroider histories flagrant with peril, stride through the darkness with nothing but a tambourine and too many carnations. One night, Gustavo Sierra de Armas would enter her club, walk onstage, and kiss her deeply to violent guitars.
If she had a girl, Celia decided, she would stay. She would not abandon a daughter to this life, but train her to read the columns of blood and numbers in men’s eyes, to understand the morphology of survival. Her daughter, too, would outlast the hard flames.
Jorge named their daughter Lourdes for the miracle-working shrine of France. In the final dialogue with her husband, before he took her to the asylum, Celia talked about how the baby had no shadow, how the earth in its hunger had consumed it. She held their child by one leg, handed her to Jorge, and said, “I will not remember her name.”
* * *
After her sleepless night in the house on Palmas Street, Celia wanders to the ceiba tree in the corner of the Plaza de las Armas. Fruit and coins are strewn by its trunk and the ground around the tree bulges with buried offerings. Celia knows that good charms and bad are hidden in the stirred earth near its sacred roots. Tía Alicia told her once that the ceiba is a saint, female and maternal. She asks the tree permission before crossing its shadow, then circles it three times and makes a wish for Felicia.
Dreaming in Cuban Page 4