Suddenly Lourdes’s wandering eye, like a wary spy, fixes on the quarters sliding across the counter to Maribel. It observes Maribel packing the two cinnamon crullers in a white paper bag, folding the top over neatly, and thanking the customer. It watches as she turns to the register and rings up fifty cents. Then, just as the eye is about to relax its scrutiny, it spots Maribel slipping the coins into her pocket.
Lourdes continues waiting on her customer, an elderly woman sizing up a mocha petit four. When she’s done, Lourdes strides to the register, pulls out nine singles and a roll of pennies for the afternoon’s work, and hands it to Maribel.
“Get out,” Lourdes says.
Maribel removes her apron, folds it into a compact square on the counter, and leaves without saying a word.
*
An hour later, Lourdes walks home from the bakery as if picking her way through a mine field. The Navarro woman has shattered Lourdes’s fragile peace of mind. Breezes from the sluggish river seem to inscribe her skin with metal tips. She crawls to an edge inside herself, longs to be insensate, a slab of brick. Lourdes thinks she detects the scent of her father’s cigar, but when she turns there’s only a businessman hailing a taxi, his hand waving a cigarette. Behind him, a linden tree drops a cluster of seeds.
When Lourdes was a child in Cuba, she used to wait anxiously for her father to return from his trips selling small fans and electric brooms in distant provinces. He would call her every evening from Camagüey or Sagua la Grande and she would cry, “When are you coming home, Papi? When are you coming home?” Lourdes would welcome her father in her party dress and search his suitcase for rag dolls and oranges.
On Sunday afternoons, after high mass, they went to baseball games and ate roasted peanuts from brown paper cones. The sun darkened Lourdes’s skin to the shade of the villagers on the bleachers, and the mix of her father’s cologne and the warm, acrid smells of the ballpark made her giddy. These are her happiest memories.
Years later, when her father was in New York, baseball became their obsession. During the Mets’ championship season, Lourdes and her father discussed each game like generals plotting a battle, assessing the merits of Tom Seaver, Ed Kranepool, and Jerry Koosman. They glued transistors to their ears all summer, even during Jorge del Pino’s brief hospital stays, and cheered when the Mets caught fire and the Cubs finally folded.
On October 16, 1969, Lourdes, her father, doctors, nurses, orderlies, patients, nuns, and a priest who arrived to administer last rites to a dying man crowded the television room of the Sisters of Charity Hospital for the fifth game of the World Series. When Cleon Jones camped under the final fly ball against the Orioles, all hell broke loose. Patients, bare-assed in their hospital gowns, streaked down the corridors chanting, “WE’RE NUMBER ONE!” Someone popped a bottle of champagne and tears streamed down the faces of the nuns, who’d prayed fervently for such a miracle.
At Shea Stadium, the crowd tore onto the field, ripping up home plate, pulling up fat clods of turf and raising them high over their heads. They set off orange flares and firecrackers and chalked the outfield fence with victory slogans. Across the river in Manhattan, on Wall Street and Park Avenue, Delancey Street and Broadway, people danced under showers of computer cards and ticker tape. Lourdes and her father laughed and embraced for a long, long time.
* * *
When she had first left Cuba, Lourdes hadn’t known how long they’d be away. She was to meet Rufino in Miami, where the rest of his family had fled. In her confusion, she packed riding crops and her wedding veil, a watercolor landscape, and a paper sack of birdseed.
Pilar ran away in the Miami airport, her crinoline dress swinging like a tiny bell through the crowd. Lourdes heard her daughter’s name announced over the loudspeaker. She couldn’t speak when she found Pilar, sitting on the lap of a pilot and licking a lime lollipop. She couldn’t find the words to thank the uniformed American who escorted them to their gate.
After several days, they left Miami in a secondhand Chevrolet. Lourdes couldn’t stand Rufino’s family, the endless brooding over their lost wealth, the competition for dishwasher jobs.
“I want to go where it’s cold,” Lourdes told her husband. They began to drive. “Colder,” she said as they passed the low salt marshes of Georgia, as if the word were a whip driving them north. “Colder,” she said through the withered fields of a Carolina winter. “Colder,” she said again in Washington, D.C., despite the cherry-blossom promises, despite the white stone monuments hoarding winter light. “This is cold enough,” she finally said when they reached New York.
Only two months earlier, Lourdes had been pregnant with her second child back in Cuba. She’d been galloping through a field of dry grasses when her horse reared suddenly, throwing her to the ground. The horse fled, leaving her alone. Lourdes felt a density between her breasts harden to a sharp, round pain. The blood bleached from her fingernails.
A large rodent appeared from behind an aroma tree and began nibbling the toes of her boots. Lourdes threw a rock at it, killing it instantly. She stumbled for nearly an hour until she reached their dairy farm. A worker lent her his horse and she rode at a breakneck pace back to the villa.
Two young soldiers were pointing their rifles at Rufino. His hands circled nervously in the air. She jumped from her horse and stood like a shield before her husband.
“Get the hell out of here!” she shouted with such ferocity that the soldiers lowered their guns and backed toward their Jeep.
Lourdes felt the clot dislodge and liquefy beneath her breasts, float through her belly, and slide down her thighs. There was a pool of dark blood at her feet.
Rufino was in Havana ordering a cow-milking machine when the soldiers returned. They handed Lourdes an official sheet of paper declaring the Puentes’ estate the property of the revolutionary government. She tore the deed in half and angrily dismissed the soldiers, but one of them grabbed her by the arm.
“You’re not going to start that again, are you, compañera?” the tall one said.
Lourdes heard the accent of Oriente province and turned to look at him. His hair, tamed with brilliantine, grew dense and low on his forehead.
“Get out of my house!” Lourdes yelled at the men, more fiercely than she had the week before.
But instead of leaving, the tall one increased the pressure on her arm just above the elbow.
Lourdes felt his calloused palm, the metal of his ring clapping her temple. She twisted free from his grip and charged him so abruptly that he fell back against the vestibule wall. Lourdes tried to run past him but the other soldier blocked her way. Her head reverberated with the clapping palm.
“So the woman of the house is a fighter?” the tall soldier taunted. He pressed his face close to Lourdes’s, pinning her arms behind her back.
Lourdes did not close her eyes but looked directly into his. They were unremarkable except for the whites, which were tinged with the filmy blue of the blind. His lips were too full for a man. As he tried to press them to Lourdes’s mouth she snapped her head back and spat in his face.
He smiled slowly and Lourdes saw a stained band along his front teeth, like the watermarks on a pier. His gums were a soft pink, delicate as the petals of a rose.
The other soldier held Lourdes down as his partner took a knife from his holster. Carefully, he sliced Lourdes’s riding pants off to her knees and tied them over her mouth. He cut through her blouse without dislodging a single button and slit her bra and panties in two. Then he placed the knife flat across her belly and raped her.
Lourdes could not see but she smelled vividly as if her senses had concentrated on this alone.
She smelled the soldier’s coarse soap, the salt of his perspiring back. She smelled his milky clots and the decay of his teeth and the citrus brilliantine in his hair, as if a grove of lemons lay hidden there. She smelled his face on his wedding day, his tears when his son drowned at the park. She smelled his rotting leg in Africa, where it would be blown
off his body on a moonless savanna night. She smelled him when he was old and unbathed and the flies blackened his eyes.
When he finished, the soldier lifted the knife and began to scratch at Lourdes’s belly with great concentration. A primeval scraping. Crimson hieroglyphics.
The pain brought a flood of color back to Lourdes’s eyes. She saw the blood seep from her skin like rainwater from a sodden earth.
Not until later, after the tall soldier had battered her with his rifle and left with his lumpy, quiet friend, after she had scoured her skin and hair with detergents meant for the walls and the tile floors, after stanching the blood with cotton and gauze and wiping the steam from the bathroom mirror, did Lourdes try to read what he had carved. But it was illegible.
* * *
Seven days after her father’s visitation, Lourdes looks out her bakery window. The twilight falls in broad violet sheets. In the corner store, the butcher closes out his register. Bare fluorescent tubes and a rack of ribs hang from the ceiling, obscuring his profile. The florist rattles shut his gate next door, securing it with a fist-sized lock. Across the street, the liquor store is open, a magnet to the wiry man in the sagging tan suit cajoling people for spare change.
Lourdes recognizes a passerby, a heavyset woman with a veiled pillbox hat who praised her Boston cream pies. She is dragging by the hand a little boy in short pants and knee socks. His feet barely touch the ground.
On her way home, Lourdes passes a row of Arab shops, recent additions to the neighborhood. Baskets of figs and pistachios and coarse yellow grains are displayed under their awnings. Lourdes buys a round box of sticky dates and considers the centuries of fratricide converging on this street corner in Brooklyn. She ponders the transmigrations from the southern latitudes, the millions moving north. What happens to their languages? The warm burial grounds they leave behind? What of their passions lying stiff and untranslated in their breasts?
Lourdes considers herself lucky. Immigration has redefined her, and she is grateful. Unlike her husband, she welcomes her adopted language, its possibilities for reinvention. Lourdes relishes winter most of all—the cold scraping sounds on sidewalks and windshields, the ritual of scarves and gloves, hats and zip-in coat linings. Its layers protect her. She wants no part of Cuba, no part of its wretched carnival floats creaking with lies, no part of Cuba at all, which Lourdes claims never possessed her.
Four blocks from her home, Lourdes smells her father’s cigar behind a catalpa tree.
“Mi hija, have you forgotten me?” Jorge del Pino chides gently.
Lourdes feels her legs as if from a distance. She pictures them slipping from their sockets and moving before her in a steady gait, still wearing their rubber-soled shoes, their white-ribbed stockings. Cautiously, she follows them.
“You didn’t expect to hear from me again?”
“I wasn’t even sure I heard you the first time,” Lourdes says tentatively.
“You thought you’d imagined it?”
“I thought I heard your voice because I wanted to, because I missed you. When I was little I used to think I heard you opening the front door late at night. I’d run out but you were never there.”
“I’m here now, Lourdes.”
There’s a ship leaving the harbor, its whistle resigned as an abbot in prayer, fracturing the dusk.
Lourdes recalls the plane ride to Miami last month to pick up Pilar. The airport was congested and they circled the city for nearly an hour before landing. Lourdes could smell the air before she breathed it, the air of her mother’s ocean nearby. She imagined herself alone and shriveled in her mother’s womb, envisioned the first days in her mother’s unyielding arms. Her mother’s fingers were stiff and splayed as spoons, her milk a tasteless gray. Her mother stared at her with eyes collapsed of expectation. If it’s true that babies learn love from their mothers’ voices, then this is what Lourdes heard: “I will not remember her name.”
“Papi, I don’t know what to do anymore.” Lourdes begins to cry. “No matter what I do, Pilar hates me.”
“Pilar doesn’t hate you, hija. She just hasn’t learned to love you yet.”
The Fire Between Them
Felicia del Pino doesn’t know what brings on her delusions. She knows only that suddenly she can hear things very vividly. The scratching of a beetle on the porch. The shifting of the floorboards in the night. She can hear everything in this world and others, every sneeze and creak and breath in the heavens or the harbor or the gardenia tree down the block. They call to her all at once, grasping here and there for parts of her, hatching blue flames in her brain. Only the Beny Moré records, played loud and warped as they are, lessen the din.
The colors, too, escape their objects. The red floats above the carnations on her windowsill. The blues rise from the chipped tiles in the kitchen. Even the greens, her favorite shades of greens, flee the trees and assault her with luminosity. Nothing is solid until she touches it. She blames the sun for this, for the false shadows it casts in her house, and she tightens the shutters against enemy rays. When she dares look outside, the people are paintings, outlined in black, their faces crushed and squarish. They threaten her with their white shining eyes. She hears them talking but cannot understand what they say. She never knows the time.
Felicia’s mind floods with thoughts, thoughts from the past, from the future, other people’s thoughts. Things come back as symbols, bits of conversation, a snatch of an old church hymn. Every idea seems to her connected to thousands of others by a tangle of pulsing nerves. She jumps from one to another like a nervous circus horse. It is worse when she closes her eyes.
Felicia remembers how when she was in grammar school the paraphernalia of faith had proved more intriguing than its overwrought lessons. After mass, long after the priest’s words stopped echoing against the cement walls, she remained in church, inspecting the pews for forgotten veils or rosary beads. She collected prayer cards and missals engraved with gold initials and filled glass jars with holy water, which she later used to baptize Ilda Limon’s chickens. Once she pried loose a crucifix with an ivory Jesus from a Station of the Cross and blessed her baby brother, Javier, with three mild raps to his forehead.
During high mass, her sister and father recited the Lord’s Prayer with loud precision and clung forever to the last syllables of the hymns.
“Alleluiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!” they sang, releasing the “a” only when those around them began to stare.
Felicia knew that her mother, who stayed at home reading her books and rocking on the porch swing, had an instinctive distrust of the ecclesiastical. She suspected her mother of being an atheist and only hoped she wouldn’t burn in hell for eternity as Lourdes and the nuns said.
Although Celia was not a believer, she was wary of powers she didn’t understand. She locked her children in the house on December 4, the feast day of Changó, god of fire and lightning, and warned them that they’d be kidnapped and sacrificed to the black people’s god if they wandered the streets alone. For good measure, she forbade Felicia to visit her best friend, Herminia, whose father everyone denounced as a witch doctor.
Lourdes took advantage of their confinement to tell Felicia how the shriveled tin peddler, who rattled by with his trolley at noon, abducted children to caves with flapping bats that nested in human hair. At night, he’d scoop out their eyes with a wooden spoon and drink their blood like milk. Lourdes insisted that the tin man had left the eyes of a dozen sacrificed children under Felicia’s bed as an omen. Felicia, her eyes closed tight, cautiously patted the floor until she touched the peeled grapes her sister had left for her there, and screamed to holy hell.
As the summer of coconuts wears on, Felicia hears Saint Sebastian speaking to her inside her head. She can’t stop his words, which come in rhymes sometimes or jumbled together like twisted yarn. He doesn’t let her think. He reminds her how much she used to love him, how much she has disappointed him over the years.
Felicia first became fascinated w
ith Saint Sebastian before her confirmation. She marveled over how he’d been shot through with arrows and left for dead, how he’d survived his murder only to be beaten to death by the Roman Emperor’s soldiers and buried in the catacombs. Sebastian’s double death appealed to Felicia. She studied his image, his hands tied above his head, his eyes rolled heavenward, arrows protruding from his chest and sides, and felt a great sympathy for him. But the nuns refused to let Felicia choose Sebastian as her confirmation name.
“Why don’t you pick Maria like your sister?” the nuns had suggested. Their faces were pink, puffy squares cut off at the brows, their pores enlarged from the pressure of their tightly bound habits. “That way Our Blessed Virgin Mother will always look after you.”
In the end, Felicia refused to be confirmed at all and Jorge del Pino blamed his daughter’s later troubles on that fact.
*
Felicia thinks of her father, of his death and resurrection, and finds it hard to concentrate. Judgment Day is at hand and she isn’t ready, not ready at all. So she plays the Beny Moré records over and over and teaches her son to dance, teaches him every dance there is to learn. He is only five years old but he can mambo and cha-cha, do the danzón and the guaracha with the facility of a gigolo. “Dance, Ivanito, dance!” Felicia shouts, exultant, laughing and applauding his silken moves. Everything makes sense when they dance. Felicia feels as though she were in love again, at the center of the universe, privy to its secrets and inner workings. She has no doubts.
But when the music stops, she sees her husband’s hands, big-knuckled with long, square-tipped fingers, inordinately large even for his frame. The nail of his right thumb is missing and the stump that remains is blanched and corrugated. He is long-boned and loose-jointed, over six feet, with the angular face of a cacique and a handsome nose somewhat swollen at the base.
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