The day she met him, he sat alone in the back booth of El Ternero Dorado restaurant staring at her. She approached him, nervously wiping the backs of her hands on her canvas apron.
“We have a sea bass special today,” she stammered. “Grilled, nice and fresh.”
“Have you eaten?” he asked, placing a heavy hand on her wrist. That was all it took.
Felicia removed her apron as if commanded by Saint Sebastian himself and followed Hugo Villaverde out the door.
Her future husband walked with a slow, loping gait like the giraffes Felicia had seen at the zoo, so much so that she half expected him to stretch out his neck and nibble at the laurel trees along the Paseo del Prado. She imagined his thick lips moving like warm, softened rubber.
Hugo bought Felicia a paper cone of fritters and a box of chocolates with a bright red bow. He spoke of his childhood in Hoiguín, where his father, a descendant of slaves, had worked in the nickel mines. Hugo joined the merchant marines at sixteen and on his first trip went to Dakar, where the markets were filled with monstrous fruits grown in soils of uncommon minerals.
“Not like these,” he said, indicating a fruit vendor’s display of withered melons.
Felicia told him how she’d left high school and answered an ad for international escorts in the newspaper. The office was located on the second floor of a building between a notary public and Dr. Zatarain’s venereal clinic. A prim woman with bobbed hair and a throaty French accent asked Felicia to remove her shoes and knee socks, then made a note in a calfskin ledger.
“If a girl does not take care of her feet, there is no point in going further,” Madame Thibaut said.
She asked Felicia to unbutton her blouse. Felicia’s nipples tightened as she did so. She knew her breasts were admired by the boys in Santa Teresa del Mar. Finally, Madame Thibaut insisted that Felicia remove her skirt and panties.
“Walk,” the Frenchwoman ordered.
Felicia felt her ample, dimpled behind quake seductively as she moved.
“Your buttocks are too large for Europe,” Madame Thibaut told her. “But for here they will do.”
Felicia had only one job for the Bon Temps International Escort Agency, with an obese, freckled rancher from Oklahoma, who wore mismatched snakeskin boots. For a small sum, Madame Thibaut loaned Felicia high heels and a silver-sequined gown sleek as a fish. Merle Grady took Felicia to a casino and rubbed her hips eagerly every time he won. He called her Lady Luck and blew gusts of whiskey breath into her ear. When she refused to return with him to his hotel room, Grady tore at her cleavage and demanded a refund. Felicia watched as the glittering scales of her rented dress clicked and scattered on the marble floor.
*
Felicia went with Hugo Villaverde to the Hotel Inglaterra, an ornate wedding cake of an edifice opposite the Parque Central. The inn’s reputation was eclipsed by more modern establishments with roulette wheels and long-legged dancing girls, but it continued to attract honeymooners from the provinces, who admired its worn charm and elaborate iron grillwork.
Hugo and Felicia stripped in their room, dissolving easily into one another, and made love against the whitewashed walls. Hugo bit Felicia’s breasts and left purplish bands of bruises on her upper thighs. He knelt before her in the tub and massaged black Spanish soap between her legs. He entered her repeatedly from behind.
Felicia learned what pleased him. She tied his arms above his head with their underclothing and slapped him sharply when he asked.
“You’re my bitch,” Hugo said, groaning.
In the morning he left, promising to return in the summer.
When they met again late in hurricane season, Felicia was seven months pregnant and working as a cashier in a butcher shop. She sat on a stool behind the counter ringing up newspaper-wrapped packets and rubbing her lower back. Her cheeks were threaded with a web of fine veins.
Bleeding carcasses hung on hooks the length of her arm. Chickens dangled in the window, bumping her shoulder. A hog’s head sat on the back shelf like a trophy. Felicia watched the thickset butchers cleave and carve the flesh like sculptors, could scarcely tell them apart, in fact, from the marbled slabs of beef at their elbows. Her customers, too, began to look like their purchases: Compañera Sordo with her bristly jowls and upturned nose, Compañero Llorente with his pink eyes and jerking chin.
“I’m red meat,” Felicia repeated to herself. She felt bloated, grotesque.
Hugo married Felicia at city hall the week of the Cuban missile crisis. Herminia brought a bottle of champagne from Spain but no one remembered to open it. Jorge del Pino refused to attend.
After the ceremony, Felicia and Hugo moved into the house on Palmas Street, which had been empty since Berta Arango del Pino’s only daughter, Ofelia, died of tuberculosis. Hugo settled into the sofa and stared straight ahead, saying nothing. Felicia finally approached him.
“If you want, I can tie you up the way you like,” she offered.
Hugo pressed his fist under Felicia’s chin until he choked off her breath, until she could see the walls of the living room behind her.
“If you come near me, I’ll kill you. Do you understand?”
Hugo slept on the sofa and left for sea the next day. His twin daughters were born without him on Christmas Eve.
* * *
Toward the end of the summer, Felicia’s condition worsens, as if a heavy curtain is drawn over her brain. Her own voice is mute to her, far away, and the chandelier wavers in the fetid air. She smokes stale cigarettes her husband left behind years ago, smokes them down to the butts until her son snatches them from her burning fingers. Ivanito’s lips are moving, Felicia can see that. She sees his teeth and his eyes, his cheeks and his jet-black hair swelling and shrinking like an accordion. What is he saying? Each word is a code she must decipher, a foreign language, a streak of gunshot. She cannot hear and see him simultaneously. She closes her eyes.
Felicia remembers the moment she decided to murder her husband. It was 1966, a hot August day, and she was pregnant with Ivanito. The nausea had persisted for weeks. Her sex, too, was infected with syphilis and the diseases Hugo brought back from Morocco and other women. That afternoon, as she was frying plantains in a heavy skillet, the nausea suddenly stopped.
It gave her a clarity she could not ignore.
Felicia dropped a rag into the skillet and watched it go limp with oil. She removed it with a pair of tongs and carried it dripping into the living room. The oil sizzled onto the floorboards.
She lit a match and approached her husband, asleep on the couch. His head was thrown back against a pillow, his mouth open, his throat exposed and still. She noticed that his lids barely covered his blank, rolled-up eyes.
Felicia carefully brought the blue flame to the tip of the rag. She smelled the quick sulfur and the plantains frying in the kitchen. She watched until the delicate flames consumed the rag, watched until the blaze was hot and floating in the air. Hugo awoke and saw his wife standing over him like a goddess with a fiery ball in her hand.
“You will never return here,” Felicia said and released the flames onto his face.
She laughs when she recalls her husband’s screams, the way he bolted out the door, his head a flaming torch. She plays this over and over in her mind, from one angle and then another, in bits and pieces like a torn photograph. The fire ate the flesh on Hugo’s face and hands, and the stench remained on Palmas Street for many months.
Felicia feels herself getting younger in her sleep, so young in fact that she fears she will die, be driven beyond the womb to oblivion. She grieves in her dreams for lost children, for the prostitutes in India, for the women raped in Havana last night. Their faces stare at her, plaintive, uncomplaining. What do they want with her? Felicia is afraid to sleep.
Her mother visits her with packets of food, greasy meats that slide on wax paper. She refuses to eat them, considers them poison. Her mother tries to talk to her, but Felicia hides in her bed. Her son will not leave her, that
much she knows. She opens her mouth but her thoughts erase themselves before she can speak. Something is wrong with her tongue. It forms broken trails of words, words sealed and resistant as stones. She summons one stone and clings to it, a drowning woman, then summons another and another until she cries, “Mami, I grieve in my dreams.”
Ivanito Villaverde
The day after his grandfather dies, Ivanito asks his mother if he can go to the Hungarian circus in Havana. He’s seen billboards with fire-eating clowns and a pretty woman in a feathered headdress. A boy told him there were albino elephants from Siam. But Ivanito never found out if it was true.
His mother’s days begin with the ritual of a Beny Moré song called “Rebel Heart.” The record is warped and scratched from the heat and so much playing, and the words bend as if they’re underwater. But Ivanito and his mother sing them that way after a while. Felicia has a strong, unbroken voice that begins deep inside her throat. She encourages Ivanito to sing with her and he does, at the top of his lungs. He knows the song by heart.
Ivanito watches his mother put on her flannel nightgown then wrap herself in a frayed Chinese tunic embroidered with chrysanthemums, a onetime gift from his father. His sisters still have the silk scarves Papá brought back from China. They keep them hidden in the back of their dresser drawer. Ivanito found a photograph of his father hidden in the same drawer. He is standing on the Paseo Prado with Havana harbor in the background. His beret is pushed low on his forehead, and his mouth is stretched wide, with big square teeth like a horse. Ivanito knows his father is a merchant marine and sails around the world. Luz and Milagro tell him that Papa still loves them, but Ivanito cannot be sure it is true.
His mother claims that he almost died because of Papa, from a venereal disease that infected him when he was born. In the hospital, she pinned a tiny onyx badge on his diaper to guard against the evil eye. She and her friend Herminia burned votive candles in the nursery until the doctor threatened to throw them both out of the hospital. He said they were killing the oxygen.
There’s a bin full of coconuts at the bodega. Felicia trades in her remaining food coupons for every last one, and the grocer throws in a chocolate bar for Ivanito. Then they go door to door, hunting for more coconuts. Ivanito follows his mother as she wanders farther and farther from Palmas Street in her tunic and scuffed pink slippers. Felicia’s hair springs from her head like electric wires, and she swings her arms in great arcs, as if her chaos had a rhythm.
They play a game with colors as they walk. “Let’s speak in green,” his mother says, and they talk about everything that makes them feel green. They do the same with blues and reds and yellows. Ivanito asks her, “If the grass were black, would the world be different?” But Felicia doesn’t answer.
His mother collects coconuts from strangers, promising haircuts and manicures in exchange. Others are not so kind. They shout insults at her from their windows and balconies, hiding behind the boughs of acacia trees.
“They’re afraid to call me a whore to my face,” his mother says disdainfully.
A gaunt mulatta tells Ivanito he smells of death. This scares him but his mother tells him not to worry, that the lady is probably crazy. On the way back, his bag rips and the coconuts scatter in the street like billiard balls. Cars brake and screech but his mother doesn’t notice the commotion. Instead, she scolds the coconuts one by one as if they were errant children.
At home, his mother removes her tunic and slippers. She takes a hammer and rusty chisel and shatters each coconut, scraping the blinding white, perfumed flesh from the shells. Ivanito helps her blend the coconut with egg yolks, vanilla, condensed milk, sugar, cornstarch, and salt, and holds the empty tin vegetable-oil containers while she fills them with the mixture. Together they arrange them in the freezer. With the leftover egg whites, she fashions star-shaped meringues, which she serves with the ice cream day after day, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. His mother believes the coconuts will purify them, that the sweet white milk will heal them.
Felicia’s spirits soar as the coconut ice cream diminishes. She makes pronouncements that Ivanito doesn’t understand, stays up all night hearing prophecies in her head, forgives her father and ex-husband long lists of past trespasses. She dances for days to her Beny Moré records, her hands in position for an impossibly lanky partner, to “Rebel Heart,” her slippers scraping the floor, to “Treat Me As I Am,” a buoyant guaracha,. There’s a Brazilian samba she stamps to in bare feet, waving her arms until she is flushed and exuberant with the rhythm of the drums. When she presses Ivanito to her chest, he can feel her heart jumping like it wants to come out of its cage.
When his sisters return from their camping trip, Ivanito can tell by their faces that something is wrong.
“We’ve seen Mamá this way before,” Milagro whispers.
“What way?” Ivanito asks, but she hushes him.
After Abuela Celia leaves, their mother rips the telephone from the wall and locks them all in the house. Ivanito continues to eat the ice cream his mother serves them but Luz and Milagro dump it in the sink. Undeterred, Felicia stubbornly refills their bowls.
The twins tell Ivanito stories of what happened before he was born. They say their father ran from the house with his head and hands on fire. That Mamá sat on the living-room floor laughing and banging on the walls with metal tongs. That the police came and took her away. That the kitchen curtains burned from the plantains she left frying on the stove.
That night Ivanito stands by his sisters’ bedroom window transfixed by the branches of the tamarind tree, so black against the sky. He repeats something he heard his mother say: “The moon glares with a vivid indifference.”
His sisters bristle. They tell him that he’ll end up crazy like Mamá, that he’s starting to show her symptoms. Luz says that families are essentially political and that he’ll have to choose sides.
Ivanito senses even then that something has come between them. He will never speak his sisters’ language, account for his movements like a cow with a dull bell. He is convinced, although he couldn’t say why, that they’re united against him, against his happiness with Mamá.
In his room, the wallpaper comes alive in the moonlight. Ivanito imagines the vines and tendrils, taut and violent as a killing rope, snaking along the floor to his bed, wrapping him in place, tighter and tighter, choking off his breath while his sisters sleep.
* * *
As the summer of coconuts wears on, Felicia’s obsessions grow like something botanical, dense and violent. She insists that the sun will damage her son’s lungs.
“We inhabit the eye of the swamp, Ivanito,” she warns, tightening the shutters against malevolent rays. “We are breathing the final village.”
Celia comes to their house with packets of food and encourages her grandson to eat, but Ivanito rarely touches the croquettes or the pork tamales she brings. He doesn’t want to betray his mother.
On the last day of August, his grandmother packs his clothes: his bathing trunks with the elastic band broken at the waist, his buckled sandals, the round straw hat he’s taken to wearing indoors. His mother promises that they’ll go to the beach tomorrow. Tomorrow, after they rest. But they don’t rest.
The minute Abuela Celia leaves, his mother becomes very animated. She mops and scours the kitchen floor until her hands are crinkly. She presses the bed sheets as if expecting a lover and sweeps the veranda clean of the summer’s dust. She throws open the shutters with finality.
Ivanito goes with her to the bodega. This time, they buy a whole chicken, two pounds of rice, onions, green peppers, and all the sweet plantains in the store. His mother cooks an arroz con polio and leaves the plantains warming in the oven for their dinner.
Down the street, a gardenia tree is lush with blossoms. Ivanito steadies the ladder as his mother clips an armful of flowers. He watches as she floats the white gardenias in her bath and rubs her thighs and breasts with walnut oil. She sets her hair and brushes it until the lust
er returns. Then she slips on a peach satin negligee, another token from his father, and examines her face in the dressing-table mirror. It’s the only mirror left in the house. The others were broken during her marriage.
“Mirrors are for misery, nothing more,” his mother says calmly. “They record decay.”
Ivanito notices the two deep creases that begin at her nostrils and end in hooks below her lips. If she doesn’t grin wide, the tooth she chipped on a rice stone is hardly noticeable. Lines crisscross at the corners of her eyes. They’re green, Ivanito thinks, like discovery.
He touches his mother’s arm. It’s soft and newborn pale after the summer retreat from the sun. Her hands, too, are soft. Ivanito watches as his mother powders her face like a geisha and rubs rouge high on her cheeks. She paints in arched eyebrows, then outlines her lips a bright orange. Ivanito thinks her face looks nailed on, like a mask on a wall.
After she finishes, his mother bathes him with the remaining gardenias. She combs his hair and kisses his eyes and forehead, the small of his back, and the tips of each finger. She shakes talcum powder on him until he looks like a pastry. This makes Ivanito afraid. Then she lays his clothes out on the bed. His short pants and jacket, his knee socks and his only pair of lace-up shoes. She dresses him carefully as if he might break, then holds him up before the mirror.
“Imagination, like memory, can transform lies to truths,” Felicia whispers in her son’s ear. Nobody else teaches him that.
Ivanito helps his mother set the table for two. They use his great-grandmother’s silverware, her lead-crystal goblets, and her china, with its pageantry of gold leaves. His mother lights the stub of a candle and places it in the chandelier that can accommodate twenty-three more. Ivanito counts the empty holders.
His mother serves him huge portions of chicken and rice, filling his plate twice. Ivanito eats three of the warm plantains in brown-sugar syrup and drinks mango juice chilled with ice. His mother speaks continuously. “You must imagine winter, Ivanito,” she tells him. “Winter and its white extinguishings.”
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