Dreaming in Cuban

by Cristina Garcia

  Celia suggests to the boy that he put down his pen for six months and work as an apprentice with the Escambray Theater, which educates peasants in the countryside. “I don’t want to discourage your creativity, Simón,” Celia tells the boy gently. “I just want to reorient it toward the revolution.” After all, she thinks, artists have a vital role to play, no? Perhaps later, when the system has matured, more liberal policies may be permitted.

  Celia’s life resumes a stale, familiar air. She no longer volunteers for the microbrigades, and only guards her stretch of shore one night per month. The rest of the time, she tends to Javier’s needs. She hadn’t expected her son’s illness to take this turn, and she feels helpless and angry, like the times Jorge had bullied Javier as a child. In fact, Javier is a small boy again. Celia helps dress him and combs his hair, reminds him to brush his teeth, and ties his shoelaces. She tucks him into her bed at night, absently stroking his brow. But when she holds her son’s face in her hands, Celia sees only an opaque resentment. Is it his, she wonders, or her own?

  Despite her care, Javier’s skin turns sallow and thins until it looks as if she could strip it away in papery sheets. His knuckles heal poorly and he is clumsy with everything but his tumbler of rum. Since Javier returned home, Celia has hardly thought of Felicia, who has been missing since winter, or of the twins or of Ivanito, away at boarding school, or of the faraway Pilar. Something tells Celia that if she can’t save her son she won’t be able to save herself, or Felicia, or anyone she loves.

  With the help of some microbrigade friends in the capital, Celia tracks down the santera from east Havana who had diagnosed her in 1934, when she was dying of love for the Spaniard.

  “I knew it was you,” the santera says, clapping her hands with brittle twig fingers when she finds Celia on her doorstep. Her face is black and puckered and oily now and seems to breathe all at once like an undersea creature. But when she smiles, her skin pulls back like a curtain, stretching her features until they are as lineless as a young woman’s.

  She places her speckled hands over Celia’s heart, and nods solemnly as if to say, “I am here, hija. Speak to me.” She listens closely to Celia, and they decide to travel together to Santa Teresa del Mar.

  The santera looks up at the brick-and-cement house, bleached by the sun and the ocean air, and positions herself under the pawpaw tree in the front yard. She prays every Catholic prayer she knows in quick, calm succession. Hail Marys, Our Fathers, the Apostles’ Creed. Her body starts to sway, and her clasped hands rock beneath her chin until it seems she is all loose, swinging angles. And then, as Celia watches, the little santera’s moist eyes roll back in her dwarfish head until the whites gleam from two pinpricks, and she trembles once, twice, and slides against Celia in a heap on the sidewalk, smoking like a wet fire, sweet and musky, until nothing is left of her but her fringed cotton shawl.

  Celia, not knowing what else to do, folds the santera’s shawl into her handbag, and enters her home.

  She knows by the stillness of the house that Javier is already gone. He’d talked of going to the mountains, of planting coffee on the forested slopes. He said he’d descend to Santiago for carnival and dance to the fifes and the melé, to the snare and the batá drums, that he’d die (in sequins and feathers) at the head of a conga line in Céspedes Park.

  Celia reaches up and feels a lump in her chest, compact as a walnut. A week later, the doctors remove her left breast. In its place they leave a pink, pulpy scar like the one she’d discovered on her son’s back.

  Celia’s Letters: 1950–1955

  February 11, 1950

  Querido Gustavo,

  Even on her deathbed, Berta Arango del Pino cursed me. Last month she got a chest cold that turned into a pneumonia, and before you know it she was dead. Jorge asked me to go with him to Palmas Street because his mother swore she wanted to make her peace with me. But when I arrived, she threw a decanter that shattered at my feet and stained my hem green with absinthe.

  “You stole my husband!” she screamed at me, then she reached for Jorge, stretching her arms pathetically, her fingers moving like worms. “Come here, my lover. Come to my bed.” Ofelia’s mouth dropped wide as a shovel and then her mother turned to her and shrieked, “Whore! What are you looking at?” And with those words Dona Berta fell back on her pillows, her mouth twisted, her eyes bulging like a hanged man’s, and died. Poor Jorge has been terribly shaken by all this.

  Celia

  April 11, 1951

  Querido Gustavo,

  Are you a good father? I ask you this because of Jorge. There is something harsh, something unyielding about him when it comes to our son. Javier never runs to greet his father like his sisters do because he knows the lessons, the admonishments will begin the minute his father sees him. If you can believe this, Jorge has been forcing our son to study accounting. “For the love of God!” I say. “He’s only five years old!”

  Even Felicia sticks up for her brother, but Jorge ignores us. He is plagued by dreams of that milk-truck accident years ago and fears we’ll be left destitute unless Javier learns to manage the family’s money. The splinters of glass embedded in Jorge’s spine still cause him great discomfort, but this does not excuse his unreasonableness. I try to make it up to the boy after Jorge leaves, baking natilla, his favorite dessert, but Javier senses my weakness and is growing cold toward me, too.

  Kiss your sons if you have them, Gustavo. Kiss them goodnight.

  Yours,

  Celia

  March 11, 1952

  Mi Gustavo,

  That bastard Batista stole the country from us just when it seemed things could finally change. The U.S. wants him in the palace. How else could he have pulled this off? I fear for my son, learning to be a man from such men. You’d be proud of me, mi amor. Last month I campaigned for the Orthodox Party. Felicia helped me paste up fliers in the plaza, but people shouted at us and tore the papers in our faces.

  Afterward, Felicia took me to her best friend Herminia’s house. Her father, Salvador, is a santería priest, an unassuming, soft-spoken man, black as the blackest Africans. He surprised me by serving us tea and homemade cookies. I’m not sure what I expected, I’d heard so many frightful stories about him. When I spoke about fighting Batista, he said it was useless, that the scoundrel is under the protection of Changó, god of fire and lightning. Batista’s destiny, Salvador told me, is set. He will escape Cuba with a fortune in his suitcase, and die of natural causes.

  If what he says is true, there will be no justice for Batista. But for the rest of us, Gustavo, for the rest of us, there may be hope.

  Love,

  Celia

  August 11, 1953

  Querido Gustavo,

  Yesterday, I took the bus to Havana to join the protesters in front of the palace. We marched for the release of the rebels who survived the attack on Moneada. Their leader is a young lawyer, like you were once, Gustavo, idealistic and self-assured. Jorge called last night from Baracoa, and when Lourdes told him where I’d gone, he became very upset. That girl is a stranger to me. When I approach her, she turns numb, as if she wanted to be dead in my presence. I see how different Lourdes is with her father, so alive and gay, and it hurts me, but I don’t know what to do. She still punishes me for the early years.

  My love,

  Celia

  May 11, 1954

  Gustavo,

  I’m very worried about Felicia. She’s left high school and says she wants to work. She takes the bus to Havana every afternoon and doesn’t come back until late at night. She tells me she’s looking for a job. But there’s only one job in the city for fifteen-year-old girls like her.

  Felicia is spirited and unpredictable, and this frightens me. I’ve heard too many stories of young girls destroyed by what passes as tourism in this country. Cuba has become the joke of the Caribbean, a place where everything and everyone is for sale. How did we allow this to happen?

  Tu Celia

  October 11, 1954 />
  Querido Gustavo,

  Javier won the children’s national science prize for a genetics experiment. His teachers tell me he’s a genius. I’m very proud of him, but I’m not exactly sure for what. Lourdes takes out scientific texts for him from the college library and he locks himself in his room to read for days at a time. Lourdes takes out books for me, too. I’m reading Madame Bovary in French now, grievously, very grievously.

  Yours always,

  Celia

  P.S. Felicia got a job selling stationery at El Encanto, where I used to work. All the society girls come and order their wedding invitations there. I don’t know how long she’ll last, though. Felicia has no patience for such frivolous girls.

  April 11, 1955

  Mi querido Gustavo,

  There was a three-person band in the Parque Central today that played their ballads with such heart that many people lingered to hear them. The singer’s voice sounded just like Beny Moré’s in his finest years. One song made me cry, and I saw others crying, too, as they tossed their coins in the musicians’ hat.

  Mírame, miénteme, pégame, mátame si quieres

  Pero no me dejes. No, no me dejes, nunca jamás …

  And this in the park across from the Hotel Inglaterra! Forgive me, Gustavo. It is April, and I am melancholy, and twenty-one years have passed.

  Yours always,

  Celia

  June 11, 1955

  Gustavo,

  The rebels have been released! Now the revolution is close enough to smell. We’ll get rid of Batista the way we did that tyrant Machado. But this time, mi amor, we’ll make it stick like rice to a pot!

  Love,

  Celia

  A Matrix Light

  (1977)

  Lourdes Puente welcomes the purity, the hollowness of her stomach. It’s been a month since she stopped eating, and already she’s lost thirty-four pounds. She envisions the muscled walls of her stomach shrinking, contracting, slickly clean from the absence of food and the gallons of springwater she drinks. She feels transparent, as if the hard lines of her hulking form were disintegrating.

  It is dawn, an autumn dawn, and Lourdes is walking. She is walking mile after mile, pumping her arms furiously, her eyes fixed determinedly before her. She is walking down Fulton Street in her mauve velour jogging suit, past the shabby May’s department store with mannequins from another era, past shuttered shops and bus-stop benches draped with sleeping bums. Lourdes turns and strides past Brooklyn’s sooty town hall, past the state supreme court, where the Son of Sam trial will take place. Lourdes can’t understand what happened with Son of Sam, only that he exists and that he had a dog that commanded him to kill. His victims were girls with dark flowing hair, young girls like Pilar. But, no matter what Lourdes said, Pilar refused to pin up her hair or hide it under a knitted cap as other girls did. No, Pilar let her hair swing long and loose, courting danger.

  Pilar is away at art school in Rhode Island. She won scholarships to Vassar and Barnard, but instead she chose a school of hippies with no future, delicate men with women’s lips and a dissembling in their eyes. The thought of her daughter in bed with these men drives Lourdes to despair, to utter repugnance.

  Lourdes was a virgin when she married, and very proud of it. The hip-splitting pain, the blood on the conjugal bed were proof of her virtue. She would gladly have hung out her sheets for everyone to see.

  Pilar is like her grandmother, disdainful of rules, of religion, of everything meaningful. Neither of them shows respect for anyone, least of all themselves. Pilar is irresponsible, self-centered, a bad seed. How could this have happened?

  Lourdes marches down Montague Street, her elbows jutting behind her like pistons. The Greek diner is open and there’s a stoop-shouldered man in the back booth eyeing his bacon and eggs. The yolks are too orange, Lourdes thinks. She imagines their sticky thickness coating the old man’s throat. It sickens her.

  “One coffee, black,” she tells the uniformed waiter, then heads for the public telephone. Lourdes dials her daughter’s number in Rhode Island. The phone rings four, five, six times before Pilar answers sleepily.

  “I know someone is there with you,” Lourdes rasps. “Don’t lie to me.”

  “Mom, not again. Please.”

  “Tell me his name!” Lourdes squeezes the words out between her teeth. “Whore! Tell me his name!”

  “What are you talking about? Mom, it’s five in the morning. Just leave me alone, okay?”

  “I called you last night and you weren’t in.”

  “I was out.”

  “Out where? To your lover’s bed?”

  “Out for a pastrami sandwich.”

  “Liar! You never eat pastrami!”

  “I’m hanging up now, Mom. Nice talking to you, too.”

  Lourdes slaps two quarters on the counter and leaves the coffee steaming in its thick white mug. She hasn’t had relations with Rufino since her father died. It’s as if another woman had possessed her in those days, a whore, a life-craving whore who fed on her husband’s nauseating clots of yellowish milk.

  Lourdes lifts one arm, then the other to her face, sniffing them suspiciously for the scent of grease and toast.

  The smell of food repels her. She can’t even look at it without her mouth filling with the acrid saliva that precedes vomiting. These days, it’s nearly impossible to endure even her own bakeries—the wormy curves of the buttery croissants, the gluey honey buns with fat pecans trapped like roaches in the cinnamon crevices.

  Lourdes did not plan to stop eating. It just happened, like the time she gained 118 pounds in the days her father was dying. This time, though, Lourdes longs for a profound emptiness, to be clean and hollow as a flute.

  She advances toward the Brooklyn Promenade. The abandoned shipyards display their corrugated roofs like infected scars. The East River, meeting the Hudson near its mouth, is quiet and motionless as the mist. On the other side of the river, the towers of Wall Street reach arrogantly toward the sky. Lourdes paces the quarter-mile-long esplanade eight times. A jogger runs by with a tawny Great Dane at his side. Cars hum on the highway below her, headed for Queens.

  There is a moment of each dawn that appears disguised as dusk, Lourdes decides, and for that brief moment the day neither begins nor ends.

  * * *

  Lourdes has lost eighty-two pounds. She is drinking liquid protein now, a bluish fluid that comes in tubes like astronaut food. It tastes of chemicals. Lourdes rides her new Sears exercise bicycle until sparks fly from the wheels. She tacks up a full-color road map of the United States in her bedroom and charts her mileage daily with a green felt marker. Her goal is to ride to San Francisco by Thanksgiving, when her daughter will return home from school. Lourdes pedals and sweats, pedals and sweats until she pictures rivulets of fat, like the yellow liquid that pours from roasting chickens and turkeys, oozing from her pores as she rides through Nebraska.

  Jorge del Pino is concerned about his daughter, but Lourdes insists that nothing is wrong. Her father visits her regularly at twilight, on her evening walks home from the bakery, and whispers to her through the oak and maple trees. His words flutter at her neck like a baby’s lacy breath.

  They discuss many topics: the worsening crime on New York City’s streets; the demise of the Mets since their glory seasons in ’69 and ’73; day-to-day matters of the bakery. It was her father who had advised Lourdes to open a second pastry shop.

  “Put your name on the sign, too, hija, so they know what we Cubans are up to, that we’re not all Puerto Ricans,” Jorge del Pino had insisted.

  Lourdes ordered custom-made signs for her bakeries in red, white, and blue with her name printed at the bottom right-hand corner: LOURDES PUENTE, PROPRIETOR. She particularly liked the sound of the last word, the way the “r” ’s rolled in her mouth, the explosion of “p” ’s. Lourdes felt a spiritual link to American moguls, to the immortality of men like Irénée du Pont, whose Varadero Beach mansion on the north coast of Cuba she ha
d once visited. She envisioned a chain of Yankee Doodle bakeries stretching across America to St. Louis, Dallas, Los Angeles, her apple pies and cupcakes on main streets and in suburban shopping malls everywhere.

  Each store would bear her name, her legacy: LOURDES PUENTE, PROPRIETOR.

  Above all, Lourdes and her father continue to denounce the Communist threat to America. Every day they grow more convinced that the dearth of bad news about Cuba is a conspiracy by the leftist media to keep international support for El Líder strong. Why can’t the Americans see the Communists in their own backyards, in their universities, bending the malleable minds of the young? The Democrats are to blame, the Democrats and those lying, two-timing Kennedys. What America needs, Lourdes and her father agree, is another Joe McCarthy to set things right again. He would never have abandoned them at the Bay of Pigs.

  “Why don’t you go down and report on Cuba’s prisons?” Lourdes taunted the journalists who questioned her last year about the opening-day fracas at the second Yankee Doodle Bakery. “Why are you wasting your time with me?”

  Lourdes hadn’t approved of Pilar’s painting, not at all, but she wouldn’t tolerate people telling her what to do on her own property.

  “That’s how it began in Cuba,” Lourdes’s father whispered hoarsely through the trees, counseling her. “You must stop the cancer at your front door.”

  After Pilar left for college, Lourdes stared at her daughter’s painting every night before she walked home. If Pilar hadn’t put in the safety pin and the bugs in the air, the painting would be almost pretty. Those bugs ruined the background. Without the bugs, the background was a nice blue, a respectable shimmering blue.