Dreaming in Cuban

by Cristina Garcia

  “Yes.”

  “Yes what?”

  “I did try to seduce her.”

  The audience cheers, each person for his or her own reasons. It’s as if Rogelio’s response has justified every polemic.

  “Liar!” Ester screams, flushed and trembling. Then in a spectacular leap that no one thought her capable of, Ester knocks her husband to the ground, pulls at his hair, and bites his cheek. By the time her friends pry her away, Ester is crying uncontrollably.

  Celia steps onto her metal folding chair and stands over the crowd until no sound can be heard except the steady wheezing of Ester’s sobs.

  “I have come to a decision,” Celia says deliberately. “Rogelio Ugarte, I sentence you to one year of volunteer work at the state nursery in Santa Teresa del Mar.”

  “What?” Rogelio looks up from the floor, still dazed from his wife’s attack.

  “The nursery is short-staffed, and our compañeras need help changing diapers, warming milk, washing linen, and organizing the children’s playtime. You will be the first man to ever work there, compañero, and I will be checking up to see that your behavior is one of a model Socialist man in all respects. This case is adjourned.”

  Celia’s decision wins her both bravos and more full-throated squabbling.

  “Why don’t you send him to Africa?” Nélida Grau shouts, one hand on her hip, the other indicating the direction.

  Loli Regalado, while pleased with her exoneration, complains that putting Rogelio with the compañeras at the state nursery is akin to dropping the fox off at the henhouse with a knife and fork.

  Celia watches, dispirited, as her neighbors file out of the auditorium, already merrily expectant for next month’s “love motel” case. In January, Hilario and Vivian Ortega, who live down the street from Celia, will defend themselves against charges that they have been illegally renting by the hour two rooms of their beachfront home. Celia fears that the citizens of Santa Teresa del Mar once again will consider the court as hardly more than occasion for a live soap opera.

  Outside the theater, the peanut vendor continues to work the crowd. He offers Celia a packet, and she accepts it without reproaching him. Then she walks unhurriedly back to her brick-and-cement house by the sea, chewing the peanuts one by one.

  * * *

  Later that night, Celia rocks in her wicker swing and considers the star-inscribed sky, as if its haphazard arrangements might reveal something to her. But tonight it is as formal and unilluminating as a tiara.

  Celia enters her kitchen and warms a little milk on the stove, then sweetens it with a few lumps of sugar. How is it possible that she can help her neighbors and be of no use at all to her children? Lourdes and Felicia and Javier are middle-aged now and desolate, deaf and blind to the world, to each other, to her. There is no solace among them, only a past infected with disillusion.

  Her daughters cannot understand her commitment to El Líder. Lourdes sends her snapshots of pastries from her bakery in Brooklyn. Each glistening éclair is a grenade aimed at Celia’s political beliefs, each strawberry shortcake proof—in butter, cream, and eggs—of Lourdes’s success in America, and a reminder of the ongoing shortages in Cuba.

  Felicia is no less exasperating. “We’re dying of security!” she moans when Celia tries to point out the revolution’s merits. No one is starving or denied medical care, no one sleeps in the streets, everyone works who wants to work. But her daughter prefers the luxury of uncertainty, of time unplanned, of waste.

  If only Felicia could take an interest in the revolution, Celia believes, it would give her a higher purpose, a chance to participate in something larger than herself. After all, aren’t they part of the greatest social experiment in modern history? But her daughter can only wallow in her own discomforts.

  Nothing shakes Felicia’s settled indifference. Not the two weeks she spent guerrilla training in the mountains. Not the day and a half she lasted cutting sugarcane. Felicia returned from the fields complaining of her wrenched back, her shredded hands, of the clumps of dust she’d swallowed. After that, she vowed to drink her coffee bitter. No more sugar.

  Felicia’s doctors recommended that she join a theater group, saying that many malcontents had finally made their peace with the revolution through acting. But Felicia showed no aptitude for the stage. Her daughter’s talents, Celia realized ruefully, lay in her unsurpassed drama for the everyday. In the post office, in the plaza, or in the beauty shop where she worked, Felicia could have earned standing ovations and showers of red carnations.

  Celia rummages through her nightstand drawer for her favorite photograph of her son. He is tall and pale as she is, with a mole on his left cheek identical to hers. Javier is wearing his Pioneers uniform, bright and new as the revolution, as his optimistic face. She cannot imagine him any older than he is in this picture.

  Her son was almost thirteen when the revolution triumphed. Those first years were difficult, not because of the hardships or the rationing that Celia knew were necessary to redistribute the country’s wealth, but because Celia and Javier had to mute their enthusiasm for El Líder. Her husband would not tolerate praise of the revolution in his home.

  Javier never fought his father openly. His war was one of silent defiance, and he left for Czechoslovakia secretly in 1966, without saying good-bye to anyone.

  Javier wrote her a long letter after his father died three years ago, and said he’d finally become a professor of biochemistry at the University of Prague, lecturing in Russian, German, and Czech. He didn’t mention his wife, not even in passing, but he wrote that he spoke Spanish to his little girl so she’d be able to talk with her grandmother someday. This touched Celia, and she wrote a special note to Irinita encouraging her to keep up her Spanish and promising to teach her how to swim.

  Over the years, her son had written her only sporadically, quick notes jotted down, it seemed to Celia, between his lectures. Rarely did he write anything of substance, as if only the most superficial news was suitable for her. What she learned most about Javier came from the family picture her daughter-in-law, Irina, dutifully sent every Christmas. Celia saw her son age in these photographs, watched his mouth acquire his father’s obstinate expression. And yet there was something vulnerable in his eyes that heartened Celia, that reminded her of her little boy.

  In bed, Celia adjusts her breasts so she can sleep comfortably on her stomach. Every morning she wakes up on her back, her arms and legs spread, the cover sheet on the floor. She cannot account for her inquietude. Her dreams seem to her mere sparks of color and electricity, cut off from the current of her life.

  Celia closes her eyes. She doesn’t like to admit to herself that, despite all her activities, she sometimes feels lonely. Not the loneliness of previous years, of a reluctant life by the sea, but a loneliness borne of the inability to share her joy. Celia remembers the afternoons on the porch when her infant granddaughter seemed to understand her very thoughts. For many years, Celia spoke to Pilar during the darkest part of the night, but then their connection suddenly died. Celia understands now that a cycle between them had ended, and a new one had not yet begun.

  Luz Villaverde

  (1976)

  For a man with such large hands, my father fidgeted with delicate things—a loose thread on his jacket, a twirling match, the tiniest clasps. He had the touch of a young girl’s nimble fingers. I watched him sew a minuscule button on my dress once and, later, unfasten a prostitute’s black mask.

  My father had been a handsome man. I have the picture to prove it. It was Mamá who destroyed him.

  Now his nails are embedded with grime and his face and neck are the texture of cured hides. He owns one shirt, polka-dotted, which he wears rolled up to his elbows, and a greasy pair of trousers too long in the seat. The lines in his face look as if each one were put there by a distinct calamity rather than a slow accumulation of sorrow. His teeth are blackened and ground down with worry, and he eats only mashed foods like a baby. He keeps his weddi
ng ring in a blue velvet box with tight springs. I remember how he used to slip the ring on and off his finger easily as if it were greased, and the things he did when it was off didn’t count. My father was a man who could not turn down an adventure.

  After Mamá set him on fire, we knew Papi wouldn’t return. In fact, we didn’t see him again for nine years. But I fantasized about how he’d come back to take Milagro and me away from Mamá and her coconuts. We kept the scarves he’d brought us back from China when we were two years old, silks with a graceful pattern of cranes. It didn’t matter that we were too young to wear them, only that he thought we could. I imagined riding on the backs of those cranes, flying to wherever he was.

  Milagro and I lied to our friends about him. “He’s coming back for us,” we’d say. “He’s been delayed in Australia.” But after a while we stopped. What was the use? By then everyone else’s parents were divorced, too, so it didn’t seem to matter as much.

  Luckily, Milagro and I have each other. We’re a double helix, tight and impervious. That’s why Mamá can’t penetrate us.

  “Do you know the meaning of shells?” she asked Milagro once, all honey-voiced. “They’re the jewels of the goddess of the sea. They bring good luck not bad, like everyone says. You’re my little jewel, Milagro.”

  And then Mamá turned to me and said, “You, Luz, you’re the light in the night that guides our dreams. You guard what’s most precious.”

  This was just like her. Pretty words. Meaningless words that didn’t nourish us, that didn’t comfort us, that kept us prisoners in her alphabet world.

  My sister and I call our mother “not-Mamá.” As in not-Mamá charred the chicken and is cursing in the kitchen. Not-Mamá is playing that record again, dancing by herself in the dark. Watch out, not-Mamá is feeling sorry for herself. She wants us to tell her we love her. When we don’t, she looks right past us as if she could see another pair of girls just behind us, girls who will tell her what she wants to hear.

  Ivanito thinks we’re cruel to Mamá but he never saw what we saw, he never heard what we heard. We try to protect him but he doesn’t want to be protected. He is her gullible rag doll.

  Since the summer of coconuts, Milagro and I have had a pact to ignore Mamá, to stay as far away from her as possible. We’re studying hard so when we grow up we can get good jobs and go wherever we please. Abuela Celia tells us that before the revolution smart girls like us usually didn’t go to college. They got married and had children while they were still children themselves. I’m glad we don’t have to worry about that. I’m going to be a veterinarian and operate on the biggest animals on the planet—elephants, rhinoceroses, giraffes, hippopotamuses. I’ll probably have to go to Africa for that, but Milagro says she’ll come with me. She wants to be a mycologist specializing in tropical fungi. She keeps fuzzy specimens in an aquarium at school. I tell her as long as it stays out of our room it’s okay with me.

  My sister is more sentimental than I am, so sometimes when she starts feeling sorry for Mamá I remind her of our ninth birthday party, when the entire fourth-grade class came to our house on Palmas Street. There were a frosted cake and homemade cone hats, and Mamá wore a satiny cape and sparkles on her face and did magic tricks. She pulled rings from behind our ears and rubber spiders from a bowl floating with gardenias. A donkey piñata with button eyes hung from the ceiling.

  Mamá blindfolded me and handed me a broom. At first I swung wildly, battering Manolo Colón, the smart, shy boy who liked me. He almost ran home, but Mamá wiped his face with a damp rag and gave him a piece from the best part of the cake. Then she blindfolded me again and I whipped the air with the broomstick until the piñata burst open, releasing long, gooey tentacles of raw egg.

  Eggs. Mamá had filled the piñata with eggs.

  Everyone laughed and screamed and began smearing each other with yolk, chasing each other up and down the house, rocking its frame with their stamping feet.

  “Come back soon!” Mamá yelled after them as they ran toward their parents, who were too stunned at the egg in their children’s hair and clothes to notice my mother shaking with laughter.

  Milagro and I went to our room without saying anything to Ivanito or Mamá. We picked bits of shell from our hair, looked at each other, and cried.

  We got our first postcard from Papi last summer. Later, we learned that he had sent us others but that Mamá burned them the way she’d burned his face. It was a sunny day and the postman made a second trip to our house to deliver the postcard he’d forgotten. Mamá was not at home.

  The postcard was of a tobacco factory, row after row of women bunching bronze leaves into cigars. The caption on the back said “Cuba … alegre como su sol.” Papi wrote that he’d returned from his travels and was settled in a hotel on the wharf. He said he very much wanted to see us and called us his “two precious beans.” He said he had never forgotten us.

  Milagro and I took out our crane scarves and flew around our room, watching the birds flutter in the air behind us. We folded and refolded our clothes and waited for escape.

  A few days later, Mamá was leaving for one of her overnight voodoo meetings. Milagro and I persuaded her to let us stay by ourselves in Havana instead of going to Abuela Celia’s house. After she left, Milagro and I packed our clothes in a duffel bag and looped the crane scarves around our necks. We waited for a taxi by the plaza, and didn’t look back.

  The moon was already high in the sky, impatient for night to fall. It seemed to draw light from the waning sun. We drove up one alley and then another, bouncing on the cobblestones and the taxi’s creaking springs. The waiting seemed longer than all the waiting before it. Would we be able to escape?

  When we stopped, I looked up at the decayed hotel, I looked up at our future.

  Milagro seemed to know where to go so I followed her through the wrought-iron archway and up the steep, curved stairs reeking with filth. The banister wobbled in place as we climbed one flight, then another.

  “He’s in there.” Milagro pointed to a wooden door with no number. She strode up to it as if she were coming to collect the rent and knocked hard, twice.

  Our father’s face was hung with slack ugly folds that dragged down his eyes until the rims showed red, that dragged down the stump of his nose and his misshapen ears, dragged them down until his skull was taut and bare. And before we could scream or run away, Papi stretched out his arms, his once-beautiful hands, and called our names.

  Milagro and I continued to see our father in secret whenever we could. If Mamá had found out, who knows what she would have done. Our father’s room, formerly a servant’s, had a single window that looked out over an alley where mongrels fought. At night, Papi said, he could hear the moans of the ships leaving Havana. It made him feel alone.

  After Mamá burned him, Papi said a captain in the merchant marines took pity on him and doctored his papers so they’d say he was injured during an explosion on board. Papi’s disability pension was meager so I don’t know how he afforded the gifts he gave us—huge dolls with creamy skin and velvety bows, plastic purses with cartoons on them, colorful barrettes for our hair, which we hid from our mother. It’s as if now that we’d grown, Papi wanted to turn back the clock. He wanted us smaller, younger, pocket-size. I think he may have bought the gifts long ago but wanted desperately for us still to like them, still to like him.

  After a while, it wasn’t difficult for us to look at our father’s face. In his sagging eyes we found the language we’d been searching for, a language more eloquent than the cheap bead necklaces of words my mother offered.

  We brought Papi mashed-up food and wiped clean the folds of his scarred flesh. I worked extra time in my school’s lemon groves and earned coupons for a cassette radio. Milagro bought him an Irakere jazz tape that he played over and over again. He didn’t say what he did when we weren’t there, but I suspect he never left his room.

  “I was the fastest runner in high school,” he told us once. The past was as vivid
to him as if he could live it over at will. He was his parents’ only son, born years after they’d stopped praying for a baby, and he was pampered and fussed over like a first grandchild. “I won the hundred-yard dash even though I was much heavier than the other boys. I made it to the finish in thirteen seconds.”

  He told us, too, how he’d lasted only one morning in the nickel mines before joining the merchant marines. But when he returned from his first voyage to Africa, his parents had died.

  One day, Papi asked to see Ivanito, I don’t know why. Milagro and I warned him that Ivanito probably wouldn’t come, that all he’d heard were lies and more lies about him. Maybe we were jealous. We wanted to keep Papi for ourselves.

  But then we changed our minds. We wanted Ivanito to see what Mamá had done to our father, what she’d done to us.

  There was a hurricane warning that day. The wind whipped up the garbage in the streets and the air was so wet that the buildings gleamed through it. Down by the harbor, the ocean was rough and high on the piers. No watermarks showed. The three of us ran with linked arms, clutching our jackets, and felt the first drops of rain as we reached Papi’s hotel.

  “I don’t think he’s home.” Milagro looked at me strangely but neither of us knew why. Ivanito began jumping nervously in place, jumping brisk little jumps like he was trying to stay warm.

  If it hadn’t been for the rain that fell hard and sudden, we wouldn’t have gone up those stairs. If we hadn’t been afraid of the dogs fighting in the alley, we might have taken Ivanito away. If we hadn’t seen the ships, big ones with curled Russian lettering, moored to the docks like Gullivers, we might have come back another day. But we didn’t.

  My father’s door was slightly open and we heard a low grunting, like newborn pigs suckling their mother’s teats. Ivanito pushed open the door and we saw my father, his face terrible and swollen and purple as his sex, open his mouth wide and shudder as his milk sputtered on the breasts of the masked naked woman below him.