Dreaming in Cuban

by Cristina Garcia

  Ivanito tries to imagine winter. He’s heard of snow and thinks of lacy ice falling from the sky. He covers everything and everyone he knows with this ice. Ice on the house on Palmas Street, ice on the tamarind tree, ice coating the ships on the dock and the sparrows in midflight. Ice on the roads and the fields, and the beach where his grandmother lives. Ice collapsing her wicker swing, his sisters at her feet. His father would float in a sea of white ice, his grandfather atop the white palms.

  His mother crushes pink tablets on the last of their ice cream. Hard, bittersweet shards.

  “This will give us strength, Ivanito.”

  Felicia carries her son upstairs and gently places him on the fresh sheets. She adjusts the shutters, lies down next to him, and fans her satin gown over them both.

  “Close your eyes, mi hijo. Be very still.”

  Then she crosses her hands over her breasts and they sleep.

  Celia del Pino

  More and more, Celia thinks, Ivanito looks like his father. He is tall for his age, with large, premature teeth, and arms that hang too long at his sides. He is only five years old but there is something already adolescent about him. Celia fears how this resemblance is affecting Felicia. What can be going through her head in that shuttered house, dancing in the dark with her only son?

  The last time Celia saw Hugo Villaverde, Felicia was pregnant with Ivanito. Hugo’s hair was combed back in neat furrows and he wore a pressed guayabera open at the neck. Celia tried to dissuade them from entering her house. Jorge had threatened to kill his son-in-law if he dared show his face in Santa Teresa del Mar. But Celia could see that Hugo was in a mood to test his limits. He pushed his way past her, took a bottle of orange soda from the rusted refrigerator, sat with one hand flat against the dining-room table, and waited.

  Jorge emerged from the bedroom in his slippers and undershirt. He had been napping but no trace of sleep lingered in his face. The heat of his breath clouded his round glasses. Without a word, he lifted a dining-room chair and swung it in a wide arc against the back of his son-in-law. The fragments exploded across the room as if a gigantic tree had been sloppily felled. Hugo stood up slowly, turned to Jorge, and grinned with his big horse teeth. Then he punched him full in the face. Jorge slid to the ground, his face lacquered with blood.

  “If you leave with that sonofabitch, don’t ever come back!” Jorge shouted at Felicia, his mouth pinched white with rage. But Felicia followed Hugo out the door. Celia wiped the blood from Jorge’s despondent blue eyes with a wet cloth.

  By the end of the summer, Felicia is dancing infrequently and her pronouncements are few. Sometimes nothing will rouse her from her bed, from a somnolence that coats the very air she breathes. Celia washes her daughter’s hair and tries to remove the grimy flowered nightgown, which Felicia insists protects her from the sun. Then she bathes Ivanito and dries his hair, knowing that she’ll find him unwashed and uncombed again.

  Celia frequently stops by the ceiba tree in the Plaza de las Armas on her way home from Palmas Street. She places an orange and a few coins by its trunk, and says a short prayer for her daughter. Now and then she runs into Herminia Delgado carrying baskets filled with crusty roots and ratoons and fresh, healing spices for Felicia. Aniseed for hysteria. Sarsaparilla for the nerves and any remaining traces of syphilis. River fern and espartillo to ward off further evil. Herminia never mentions the ceiba tree, but Celia recognizes the distinct cluster of its leaves among her many herbs.

  Celia is uneasy about all these potions and spells. Herminia is the daughter of a santería priest, and Celia fears that both good and evil may be borne in the same seed. Although Celia dabbles in santería’s harmless superstitions, she cannot bring herself to trust the clandestine rites of the African magic.

  * * *

  The day Felicia tries to kill herself is like many others that summer. At two o’clock, Celia walks from her little brick-and-cement house to the highway and hitches a ride to Havana. She carries, as usual, packets of warm, salted food for her grandson, a nail file, and a new bar of soap. A bearded textile worker in a tumbledown Dodge leaves her at Felicia’s door.

  Celia tells Felicia that her job is still waiting for her at the beauty shop, but that she’ll have to start from the bottom again, sweeping hair clippings and doing shampoos. Then she packs her grandson’s clothing and threatens to take him to Santa Teresa del Mar. Felicia remains quiet. She has no energy left for defiance.

  Celia strokes her daughter’s hair, murmuring a worn lullaby, a poem she set to music once. Felicia remembers the tune, mouths the words as she cries. Then she promises to go to the beach the following day with Ivanito. Celia leaves, confident that the intolerable season is over.

  Outside the sun is too bright. Sounds Celia cannot distinguish blare thickly in the air. Faces and buildings seem enlarged, exposing their scars.

  Celia passes by a theater in Old Havana and recognizes two of her half brothers standing by the entrance. She identifies them by their high cheekbones and their small, even teeth. The afternoon sun sharpens their profiles, her father’s profile. She stares at them, twin ghosts, and nervously pats her throat. A fluttering like a steady motor whirs in her breast.

  The taller one wears trousers patched with careless stitches. He pushes up his hat and offers his brother a wheel of pineapple to eat. Celia notices their ungainly hands, campesino hands, stained with tobacco. She decides not to speak to them.

  Celia takes the bus home, so she can think. All summer, it seems to her, since she returned from the sugarcane fields, she has lived in her memories. Sometimes she’ll glimpse the hour on a dusty Canada Dry clock, or look at the sun low in the sky, and realize she cannot account for her time. Where do the hours go? Her past, she fears, is eclipsing her present.

  Her half brothers remind Celia of when she was a baby, and a confusion of brothers and sisters surrounded her. She barely recalls their faces, only the fringe of their dense hair leaning into her carton crib. Most days, Celia lay under a fan palm beside the bohío, its thatched roof steaming after the morning rains. She remembers this infant landscape, the waving haze of fronds through the torn netting that someone fastened to her face to keep out the flies.

  Celia’s father had maintained two families, each with nine children. His second family lived less than a mile away but they might as well have been across the world. They never acknowledged one another, not even in the village church, with its six splintering pews.

  When Celia’s parents divorced, they dispersed their children among relatives throughout the island. Celia’s destination was Havana, with her Great-Aunt Alicia, known for her cooking and her iconoclasm. Celia was alone only this once: when she was four, and her mother put her on the daybreak train bound for the capital.

  Solitude, Celia realizes now, exists for us not to remember but to forget.

  On the long train ride from the countryside, Celia lost her mother’s face, the lies that had complicated her mouth. The life Celia was leaving seemed no longer significant. For hours she watched the rapid sequence of textures that flapped like streamers outside her window: vast latifundios, provinces of royal palms, black mountains encircled with clouds. Each station along the way rippled with activity, with curiosities. How could she have slept?

  Then the bells rang at noon to welcome her, singing from all corners of the city. Tía Alicia appeared in a petticoated dress, carrying a parasol against the mild winter sun. Celia noticed the tiny ivory buttons down her aunt’s spine, marveled at their use-lessness. She and her aunt picked their way across the cobblestones, avoiding the horses with their brisk clippity clops and the boxy black cars with chauffeurs in patent-brimmed caps. Celia walked uncertainly, twisting her ankles on the hard, uneven surfaces, and for a brief moment she itched to go barefoot, to feel the padding of fresh earth beneath her feet.

  But Celia soon grew to love Havana, its crooked streets and the balconies like elegant chariots in the air. Oh, and the noise! So much delightful noise! The horse-d
rawn milk carts at dawn. The broom vendor with his mops and dusters and stiff bristle brushes. The newspaper boys with the latest edition of El Mundo or Diario de la Marina. Tía Alicia took her to museums and the symphony and the ancient ceiba tree. Celia ran around it three times for every wish, until the tree repeated itself like a flashing deck of cards.

  Her aunt did not attend church and derided those who did. Once she took Celia to the foot of the hill crowned with the Church of Saint Lazarus. A procession of suppliants climbed the knoll on bare, bloodied knees to show their devotion or purge their grief or beg forgiveness in the slow tearing of flesh and bone. They wrung rosaries and veils between their fingers, clutched their chests, ripped their hair. Their prayers rose from the pavement like the din of insects on summer evenings.

  On Saturdays Celia and her aunt would go to the picture show. The organ player, a plump man who scrambled to keep up with the action on-screen, appeared relieved when the love scenes came. He’d play a minor chord or two with his left hand and, with a flourish of his right, wipe his perspiring face with an enormous white handkerchief. Tía Alicia considered the American films naive and overly optimistic but too much fun to resist. She named her two canaries Clara and Lillian after Clara Bow and Lillian Gish. When Clara laid eggs, however, Tía Alicia changed Lillian’s name to Douglas, after Douglas Fairbanks. Their babies were Charlie, Mary, and Gloria.

  There is an electric power outage in Santa Teresa del Mar. Celia walks along the peaceful, darkened streets and smells the frying meat from open windows, observes the candle flames blinking shadows on the kitchen walls. She would have preferred to live by candlelight, she suddenly decides.

  The twins surprise her with an omelet-and-rice dinner. They kiss her with dry lips, slip off her pumps, and boil pots of water for her bath. They do not ask about their mother or brother.

  Celia settles in her wicker swing to watch the ocean, jumping with silver light. Is it flying fish or dolphins or some undiscovered pulse? The sky is alive with lightning, feeding on the earth’s heat. How many seasons has she searched its horizon for signs? Many more seasons than she has lived, it seems to her, many more.

  El campo

  de olivos

  se abre y se cierra

  como un abanico.

  Sobre el olivar

  hay un cielo hundido

  y una lluvia oscura

  de luceros fríos.

  Celia is partial to the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca. She heard him give a reading more than forty years ago at the Principal de la Comedia Theater. It was the last of his five lectures in Havana and Celia listened, entranced, to his sonorous voice as he played the sad songs of the gypsies. Lorca explained that the cante jondo was a primitive flamenco from his native Andalusia, a region enriched by Moorish invaders, and that the songs had inspired his own gypsy ballad poems.

  During his presentation, a torrential rainstorm fell and the black sounds of the duende shivered in the air with mystery and anguish and death. Death was alluring, seductive, and Celia longed to die in the thrill of it over and over again.

  That night Celia sleeps restlessly. Voices call to her in ragged words stitched together from many languages, like dissonant scraps of quilt. The syllables float overhead, drifting into an icy blur of white. Celia awakes to an ominous pattern of moonlight on her sheets. She shouts for her granddaughters.

  “Run to Herminia’s house! Tell her she must drive us to Havana right away!”

  Celia’s hands flutter like disoriented birds. They cannot settle to button her jade housedress. She runs on stiff legs past the sofa draped with the faded mantilla, past the water-bleached walnut piano, past the dining-room set missing a chair, and waits in front of the house.

  “Mi hija, mi hija, mi hija,” she repeats as if her words alone could save Felicia.

  The night is stenciled with stars but Celia does not notice. In a corner of the sky, a desolate quarter moon hangs. Celia smells the ocean from the highway, smells it all the way to Havana.

  Celia’s Letters: 1942–1949

  December 11, 1942

  Querido Gustavo,

  The Civil War came and went and now there are dictatorships in both our countries. Half the world is at war, worse than it’s ever been before. Death alone is reliable.

  I still love you, Gustavo, but it’s a habitual love, a wound in the knee that predicts rain. Memory is a skilled seducer. I write to you because I must. I don’t even know if you’re alive and whom you love now.

  I asked myself once, “What is the nature of obsession?” But I no longer question it. I accept it the way I accept my husband and my daughters and my life on the wicker swing, my life of ordinary seductions. I’ve begun teaching myself French.

  Tu Celia

  November 11, 1944

  Mi amor,

  Have you read about the tidal wave that hit Cuba? Hundreds of people lost their homes, everything they owned. A widower in our village, Nestor Prendes, drowned because he refused to leave his house. He said he wanted to join his wife, that it was his right to die. Nestor fought his children off with a cane when they tried to lift him from his chair, and he cried with such a pitiful hoarseness that they finally left him in peace.

  Our house is still drying out after being underwater for so long. The only thing I’m really worried about is the piano. Jorge bought it for me when we first moved here. The rich walnut is now a chalky white. I press the keys but there’s only the sound of wet felt. When we fix the piano, I know what I’ll play first. Debussy, of course.

  Love,

  Celia

  April 11, 1945

  Querido Gustavo,

  The days rain tyranny. I survey my interior as a general does a map, dispassionately, calculating the odds. I remember our spring walks through Havana. The destitute were everywhere, spread out on the benches in the Parque Central, asleep on yesterday’s newspapers. Remember the young woman with the dangling wooden leg and the single oxford? The beggar families from the countryside looking for work in the iron-fenced mansions of Vedado? The smart couples in their convertible roadsters driving by without a second glance? I remember how all the men wore boaters in those days. Even the poorest of the poor had them—soiled, ripped, brimless, covering their faces as they slept in the park, but boaters just the same.

  Why is it that most people aspire to little more than comfort?

  Celia

  May 11, 1945

  Gustavo,

  The familiar is insistent and deadly. I study the waves and keep time on my wicker swing. If I was born to live on an island, then I’m grateful for one thing: that the tides rearrange the borders. At least I have the illusion of change, of possibility. To be locked within boundaries plotted by priests and politicians would be the only thing more intolerable.

  Don’t you see how they’re carving up the world, Gustavo? How they’re stealing our geography? Our fates? The arbitrary is no longer in our hands. To survive is an act of hope.

  Celia

  July 11, 1946

  Querido Gustavo,

  My son was born with a caul. Jorge tells me there’s been only one boy born to each generation of del Pinos and each had a caul. He tells me it’s a sign of good luck, that the del Pino men have never died by drowning. I’ve called him Javier, after my father. He’ll look like him, too, I can see that already. Papá had a broad face and cheekbones you could rest coins on. His lips were plush cushions and his teeth were like a woman’s, small and even. He was a tall man, muscular, with hands that hung like hams at his sides. Those hands knew intimately every woman in our village.

  I saw his face in my Tía Alicia’s. That’s why I remember him so clearly. She told me he was killed when I was thirteen, by cuckolds with machetes in a grove of banana trees. I didn’t mourn for him until Tía Alicia died, just before I married, and she left me her treasured peacock brooch.

  Of my mother I remember next to nothing, only hard eyes that seemed to float like relics in her forehead, and her voice, so que
er and feathery. When she put me on the daybreak train to Havana, I called to her from the window but she didn’t turn around. I watched her back in a striped blue dress round a corner. The train was delayed a quarter of an hour. On the way to Havana, I forgot her. Only the birth of my son makes me remember.

  Love,

  Celia

  October 11, 1946

  Gustavo,

  Jorge says my smile frightens him, so I look in the mirror and try on old smiles. My girlfriends and I used to paint our mouths like American starlets, ruby red and heart-shaped. We bobbed our hair and wore cloche hats at coquettish angles and tried to sound like Gloria Swanson.

  We used to go to Cinelandia every Friday after work. I remember seeing Mujeres de Fuego with Bette Davis, Ann Dvorak, and Joan Blondell. There were three of them—just like there were three of us—and one of them had to die. We used to joke about which one of us would go first. Then I’d look at the women in the food lines across the street, thin women with shawls too warm for the weather, and be ashamed of my thoughts.

  After you left me I took to my bed, Gustavo. I stayed there for months playing back every minute of our time together, watching it like I watched the movies, trying to make sense of the days we buried squandering love. Jorge saved me, but for what I don’t know.

  Tu Celia

  February 11, 1949

  Mi querido Gustavo,

  I’ve been reading the plays of Molière and wondering what separates suffering from imagination. Do you know?

  My love,

  Celia

  IMAGINING WINTER

  The Meaning of Shells

  (1974)

  Felicia del Pino cannot remember why she is marching in the Sierra Maestra this hot October afternoon. The camouflage helmet feels like a metal ring around her head, and the rifle, slung over her left shoulder, keeps bumping up against it, making the space behind her eyes reverberate with pain. The cheap Russian boots pinch her feet as she trudges, the last of a single file of would-be guerrillas, up the intolerably fragrant mountainside. “Let’s talk in green,” her son would have told her, trying to distract her from her misery.