Dreaming in Cuban

by Cristina Garcia

  Yours,

  Celia

  A Grove of Lemons

  Pilar Puente

  It’s hot as hell when I finally get off that bus. The sun is burning my scalp, so I duck into a luncheonette. Everything looks antiquated, like the five-and-dime counters in New York. They’re the best places to get a BLT, so that’s what I order here, with an orange soda.

  If I call my father’s parents, forget it. I’ll be on the next plane to New York. Abuela Zaida, my grandmother, would crow for days about how Mom can’t control me, how I’m running wild like the American kids with no respect for their elders. Those two hate each other from way back. Something happened between them before I was born.

  There’s one cousin down here who’s not too bad. His nickname is Blanquito because he’s so white he has to wear a hat and T-shirt even when he’s swimming. I got to know him at Abuelo Guillermo’s eightieth birthday party two years ago in Miami. I figure if I can get hold of him, he’ll hide me for a day or two, then take me to Key West, where I’ll get a boat to Cuba. Maybe he’ll even come with me.

  It’s Saturday so I’ll have to go looking for him at home. The only problem is that the entire Puente tribe practically lives at his house. Blanquito’s parents have one of these ranch-style jobs in Coral Gables with a pool in the back. The rest of the family lives in apartments, so on weekends my uncles gather there to watch football and eat themselves sick.

  I look up the number in the phone book. Blanquito’s mother answers so I hang up. I’d recognize her breathy voice anywhere. She’s always on the verge of collapsing from one imaginary illness or another. Last I heard, she thinks she has lumbago. That’s nothing compared to some of the other diseases she says she’s suffered from—tetanus, malaria, sprue, typhus. You name it, she’s had it. Her diseases are usually tropical and debilitating, but only occasionally deadly.

  I stop in a church not far from their house. I swore I’d never set foot in anything remotely Catholic again but it feels good to get out of the sun. It’s dim and cool, and blue and red dots float in front of my eyes like after somebody snaps a flash picture. I remember how the nuns got upset when I called the Spanish inquisitors Nazis. My mother pleaded with the nuns to take me back. Catholics are always dying to forgive somebody, so if you say you’re sorry, you’re usually home free. But this time, they said, I’d gone too far.

  Our neighborhood was mostly Jewish then and my mother was always saying, “They killed Christ! They pushed in the crown of thorns!” I felt sorry for the Jews getting thrown out of Egypt and having to drag themselves across the desert to find a home. Even though I’ve been living in Brooklyn all my life, it doesn’t feel like home to me. I’m not sure Cuba is, but I want to find out. If I could only see Abuela Celia again, I’d know where I belonged.

  The last time I got kicked out of Martyrs and Saints, the school nurse recommended a psychiatrist whose name was Dr. Vincent Price. “Tell me about your urge to mutilate the human form,” he asked me. He looked like the real Vincent Price, too, with the same widow’s peak and goatee. Mom must have told him about my paintings. But what could I say? That my mother is driving me crazy? That I miss my grandmother and wish I’d never left Cuba? That I want to be a famous artist someday? That a paintbrush is better than a gun so why doesn’t everybody just leave me alone? Painting is its own language, I wanted to tell him. Translations just confuse it, dilute it, like words going from Spanish to English. I envy my mother her Spanish curses sometimes. They make my English collapse in a heap.

  Dr. Price told Mom that we should start some mother-and-daughter activities, that I was starved for a female primate, or something like that, so she enrolled us in a flamenco class in a studio over Carnegie Hall. Our teacher, Mercedes Garcia, was a bosomy woman with jackhammer feet who taught us how to drop our heels in time to her claps and castanets. Our first lesson was all stamping, first as a group then individually across the floor. What a thunder we made! Mercedes singled me out—“A proud chest, yes! See how she carries herself? Perfecto! Así, así!” Mom watched me closely. I could read in her face that we wouldn’t return.

  The light refracts through the stained-glass windows into long fans of blue. Why do they always have to ruin places like this with religion? I think about the king-sized crucifix nailed to the front of my old principal’s desk. Christ’s wounds were painted in Day-Glo colors—the gash on his side where the nuns told us the last of his bodily fluids poured out; the beads of blood staining his forehead; the wounds where his hands and feet hung from spikes. The nuns knew from grief all right. I still remember how in third grade Sister Mary Joseph told Francine Zenowitz that her baby brother was going to limbo because her parents didn’t baptize him before he died. Francine cried like a baby herself, with her face all screwed up. That day I stopped praying (before I stopped praying altogether) for the souls in purgatory and devoted all my Hail Marys to the kids in limbo, even though I knew it probably wouldn’t do them any good.

  I still don’t know what I’m supposed to do next. All I could think of the whole way down to Florida was getting here. Now that I’m here, and sitting in a church of all places, I haven’t got a clue. My mind whirs this way and that, weighing the alternatives, then grinds to a halt under the strain.

  The shops along the Miracle Mile look incredibly old-fashioned. It’s like all the mannequins have been modeled after astronauts’ wives. Who could ever have thought a beehive was attractive? I imagine these men sitting in fashion control centers around the world thinking of new ways to torture women, new ways to make them wince twenty years from now when they look at old photographs of themselves. I had a friend in grammar school whose mother wore hot pants and white vinyl go-go boots just like Nancy Sinatra. I mean, who was she trying to impress?

  It’s getting late. The sky looks like a big bruise of purples and oranges. It’s funny how when the land is so flat, and the buildings so low, the sky seems to take over everything, announcing itself in a way you can’t ignore. In New York, the sky gets too much competition.

  All the streets in Coral Gables have Spanish names—Segovia, Ponce de Leon, Alhambra—as if they’d been expecting all the Cubans who would eventually live here. I read somewhere that the area started off as just another Florida land scheme. Now it’s one of the ritzy neighborhoods of Miami, with huge Spanish colonial houses and avenues of shade trees. I suppose if enough people believe in the hype, anything is possible.

  There are lights on in every room of my cousin’s house, and several of my uncles’ junky cars are in the driveway. I make my way along the south wall of the house, past a clump of banana trees, still green with miniature fruit. I hear voices coming from the kitchen. It’s Abuela Zaida and Blanquito’s mother, Rosario. Abuela is complaining that there was too much salt in the ropa vieja, that high blood pressure runs in the family, and that Rosario should be careful not to aggravate their condition. Abuela Zaida always speaks in the collective “we,” meaning her and her husband and her eight sons. All the daughters-in-law are never “we” but “you.”

  I look over the edge of the windowsill. Abuela Zaida is wearing her hair in lacquered coils, like huge schnecken over each ear. She grows her nails so long that she scratches you even while she strokes your face and says nice things. Mom tells me that Abuela Zaida had all her sons out of wedlock in Costa Rica then convinced my grandfather he should marry her and move to Cuba. Now she’s the most fakely pious person I know. She calls any woman who even wears lipstick a whore.

  Through the living-room curtains, I see five of my uncles lined up on two sofas and a La-Z-Boy, grumbling over the news. They’re arguing over whether Angela Davis, who’s on trial in California for murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy, is one of El Líder’s agents or a direct emissary from Moscow.

  “She’ll never be acquitted,” Tío Arturo says in Spanish. “Mark my words.”

  “Forget it, hombre, they’ve bought that jury lock, stock, and barrel,” Tío Osvaldo shoots back.

  No sign
of Blanquito. I go around by the pool, which is drained and covered with plastic sheeting. There’s a half-inflated rubber alligator reclining on a lounge chair looking like it could use a drink. I check out the small window on the other side of the pool. My grandfather is asleep on his back, his enormous stomach piled two feet in the air. For someone who’s always coughing and spitting and clearing his throat, Abuelo Guillermo sleeps soundly, with smooth, even breaths.

  When he’s conscious, my grandfather is a blustery caballero who insists that even his wife call him “Don Guillermo.” He’s from Cádiz and stowed away to the Caribbean when he was twelve, then made it big in the casino business after World War I. My parents lived in his country villa when I was born. On the weekends, they gave big parties for their college friends. Everyone danced under Chinese lanterns and went for late-night dips in the oval swimming pool.

  I remember one day, when I was about a year and a half, I escaped from my carriage through the broken drop latch and tumbled past the front lawn toward a dirt tractor road. I plopped myself down in my polka-dotted sunsuit and picked off the fattest ants to eat. César, a Doberman pinscher guard dog that had a soft spot for me, started barking and tugging at my diapers, trying to drag me off the road. Everyone ran from the house, thinking the dog was attacking me, and my goddamn grandfather took out his pistol and killed poor César with a shot between his eyes.

  The air is suddenly very still, and a moment later the rain roars down. I press my back against the side of the house, trying to protect myself under the eaves but it’s no use. The ground turns to mud and my sneakers are soaked in no time. There’s a jacaranda tree in full bloom and its flowers come loose in waves of lavender. The rain eases up but it’s a full fifteen minutes before it stops completely. My watch quits at exactly 7:17 and 42 seconds. I’m staring at it when it stops.

  I get discouraged. I look in through the rest of the windows without even trying to hide. Two of my aunts are conferring in the bathroom but I can’t hear what they’re saying. Still no Blanquito. I’m tired and feel faintly ridiculous. Like what am I? A fugitive from my mother’s bakery? I go back around to the pool. The plastic covering is concave with the weight of the rain, and the alligator has slumped to the ground. I take its place on the lounge chair and adjust the metal bracing until I’m lying flat on my back. The clouds speed through the darkening skies, probably headed for Cuba. It’ll rain there, too, in another hour or so.

  For a minute I can’t remember where I am. All I see is my mother’s face when she finds out I’ve run away. She can look like the dogs guarding hell, except she sounds more like a terrier or a Chihuahua. “You can’t compare yourself to me!” she yaps no matter what I complain about. “I work fourteen hours a day so you can be educated!” So who’s comparing?

  I might be afraid of her if it weren’t for those talks I have with Abuela Celia late at night. She tells me that my mother is sad inside and that her anger is more frustration at what she can’t change. I guess I’m one of those things she can’t change. Still, Mom can get pretty violent. In her hands, bedroom slippers are lethal weapons.

  Back in Cuba, everybody used to treat Mom with respect. Their backs would straighten and they’d put on attentive faces like their lives depended on the bolt of fabric she chose. These days, all the neighborhood merchants hate her. “Where are the knobs, kid?” they ask me when her volume goes up. I don’t think Mom’s ever bought something and not returned it. Somebody somewhere must be keeping track of this. One day, she’ll walk into a department store and there’ll be camera lights and a big brass band and Bob Barker will announce, “Congratulations, Mrs. Puente! This marks the thousandth time you’ve come in here to complain!”

  I wake up feeling the wet bands of the lounge chair against my cheek. My head seems insulated with felt, like a soundproof room. Everything is muted, far away.

  “Come in, mi cielo, you’ll die of pneumonia!” It’s Tía Rosario. She reaches down and tries to lift me, but she’s too weak. Her shoulders feel like chicken bones stitched together. I’m afraid they’ll snap in two.

  The morning is bleaching the edges of the sky. Shit. It’s back to Brooklyn for me. Back to the bakery. Back to my fucking crazy mother.

  “What time is it?” I ask Tía feebly.

  “Three minutes after six,” she answers without looking at her watch, as if she tallied each second in her head.

  Three minutes after six and counting, I think.

  Lourdes Puente

  “Lourdes, I’m back,” Jorge del Pino greets his daughter forty days after she buried him with his Panama hat, his cigars, and a bouquet of violets in a cemetery on the border of Brooklyn and Queens.

  His words are warm and close as a breath. Lourdes turns, expecting to find her father at her shoulder but she sees only the dusk settling on the tops of the oak trees, the pink tinge of sliding darkness.

  “Don’t be afraid, mi hija. Just keep walking and I’ll explain,” Jorge del Pino tells his daughter.

  The sunset flares behind a row of brownstones, linking them as if by a flaming ribbon. Lourdes massages her eyes and begins walking with legs that feel held by splints.

  “I’m glad to see you, Lourdes. Thank you for everything, hija, the hat, the cigars. You buried me like an Egyptian king, with all my valuables!” Jorge del Pino laughs.

  Lourdes perceives the faint scent of her father’s cigar. She has taken to smoking the same brand herself late at night when she totals the day’s receipts at the kitchen table.

  “Where are you, Papi?”

  The street is vacant, as if a force has absorbed all living things. Even the trees seem more shadow than substance.

  “Nearby,” her father says, serious now.

  “Can you return?”

  “From time to time.”

  “How will I know?”

  “Listen for me at twilight.”

  Lourdes arrives home with a presentiment of disaster. Is her mind betraying her, cultivating delusion like a hothouse orchid? Lourdes opens the refrigerator, finds nothing to her liking. Everything tastes the same to her these days.

  Outside, the spring rains resume ill-temperedly. The drops enter through the kitchen window at impossible angles. A church bell rings, shaking down the leaves of the maple tree. What if she has exhausted reality? Lourdes abhors ambiguity.

  She pulls on the shipyard bell that rings in Rufino’s workshop. Her husband will assure her, Lourdes thinks. He operates on a material plane. His projects conduct electricity, engage motion with toothed wheels, react in concert with universal laws of physics.

  Rufino appears, dusted with blue chalk. His fingernails, too, are blue, an indigo blue.

  “He’s back,” Lourdes whispers hoarsely, peering under the love seats. “He spoke to me tonight when I was walking home from the bakery. I heard Papi’s voice. I smelled his cigar. The street was empty, I swear it.” Lourdes stops. Her chest rises and falls with every breath. Then she leans toward her husband, narrowing her eyes. “Things are wrong, Rufino, very wrong.”

  Her husband stares back at her, blinking rapidly as if he’d just awakened. “You’re tired, mi cielo,” Rufino says evenly, coaxing Lourdes to the sofa. He rubs her insteps with a cool lotion called Pretty Feet. She feels the rolling pressure of his thumbs against her arches, the soothing grip of his hands on her swollen ankles.

  *

  The next day, Lourdes works extraconscientiously, determined to prove to herself that her business acumen, at least, is intact. She sails back and forth behind the bakery counter, explaining the ingredients in her cakes and pies to her clients. “We use only real butter,” she says in her accented English. “Not margarine, like the place down the block.”

  After her customers make their selections, Lourdes leans toward them. “Any special occasions coming up?” she whispers, as if she were selling hot watches from a raincoat. If they answer yes—and it’s always a musical yes to Lourdes’s ears—she launches into her advance-order sales pitch.

/>   By two o’clock, when the trainee reports for work, Lourdes has cash deposits on seven birthday cakes (including one peanut-butter-and-banana-flavored layer cake topped with a marzipan Elvis); a sixty-serving sheet cake for the closing recital of the Bishop Lowney High School marching band; a two-tiered fiftieth-anniversary cake “For Tillie and Ira, Two Golden Oldies”; and a double-chocolate butter cream decorated with a wide high heel for the retirement of Frankie Zaccaglini of Frankie’s EEE Shoe Company.

  Lourdes’s self-confidence is restored.

  “See this,” she announces to her new employee, Maribel Navarro, riffling her orders like a blackjack dealer. “This is what I want from you.” Then she hands Maribel a bottle of Windex and a roll of paper towels and orders her to clean every last inch of the counter.

  Lourdes spends the afternoon training Maribel, a pretty Puerto Rican woman in her late twenties with a pixie cut and stylishly long nails. “You’re going to have to trim those if you want to work here,” Lourdes snaps. “Unsanitary. The health department will give us a citation.”

  Maribel is pleasant with the customers and gives the correct change, but she doesn’t show much initiative.

  “Don’t let them get away so easily,” Lourdes coaches her. “You can always sell them something else. Some dinner rolls, a coffee ring for tomorrow’s breakfast.”

  Nobody works like an owner, Lourdes thinks, as she places fresh doilies under the chiffon pies. She pulls out a tray of Florentine cookies and shows Maribel how to arrange them on overlapping strips of wax paper so they look more appealing.

  “The Florentines are seven ninety-five a pound, two dollars more than the other cookies, so weigh them separately.” Lourdes pulls a sheet of tissue paper from a metal dispenser and places it on the scale with a cookie. “See. This Florentine alone weighs forty-three cents. I can’t afford to throw that kind of money away.”

  Business picks up after five o’clock with the after-work crowd stopping by for desserts. Maribel works efficiently, tying the boxes of pastries firmly with string just as she was taught. This pleases Lourdes. By now, she has almost dispelled the effect of her father’s visitation yesterday. Could she have imagined the entire incident?