Why did Pilar always have to go too far? Lourdes is convinced it is something pathological, something her daughter inherited from her Abuela Celia.
* * *
It is Thanksgiving Day. Lourdes has lost 118 pounds. Her metamorphosis is complete. She will eat today for the first time in months. The aroma of food is appealing again, but Lourdes is afraid of its temptations, of straying too far from the blue liquid, from the pitchers of cleansing ice water. There is a purity within her, a careful enzymatic balance she does not wish to disturb.
The day before yesterday, Lourdes bought a red-and-black size-six Chanel suit with gold coin buttons. “You’re so lucky you can wear anything!” the salesgirl at Lord & Taylor’s had complimented her as she swiveled this way and that before the dressing-room mirror. Lourdes spent a week’s profits on the suit. It was worth it, though, to see Pilar’s astonishment at her weight loss.
“My God!” Pilar exclaims as she walks through the front door of the warehouse and stares at the fraction of her mother before her. “How did you do it?”
Lourdes beams.
“She starved herself,” Rufino interjects irritably. He’s wearing a toque like a fat white carnation on his head. Lourdes hushes him with a wave of her newly slender hand.
“I just made up my mind to do it. Willpower. Willpower goes a long way toward getting what you want, Pilar.”
Her daughter’s face registers suspicion, as if Lourdes is going to launch into a lecture. But Lourdes has nothing of the sort in mind. She ushers her daughter to the table, which is set with hand-painted china and an autumn-leaves centerpiece.
“Your father has been learning to cook since I stopped eating,” Lourdes says. “He’s been in the kitchen since Sunday, preparing everything.”
“Are you going to eat today, Mom?”
“Just a few bites. The doctor says I have to start weaning myself back on food. But if it were up to me, I’d never eat again. I feel pure, absolutely clean. And I have more energy than ever before.”
Lourdes begins reminiscing about the instant foods she made when she first came to New York. The mashed potatoes she whipped up from water and ashen powder, the chicken legs she shook in bags of spicy bread crumbs then baked at 350 degrees, the frozen carrots she boiled and served with imitation butter. But soon the potatoes and the chicken and the carrots had all tasted the same to her, blanched and waxen and gray.
“I think migration scrambles the appetite,” Pilar says, helping herself to a candied yam. “I may move back to Cuba someday and decide to eat nothing but codfish and chocolate.”
Lourdes stares hard at her daughter. She wants to say that nobody but a degenerate would want to move back to that island-prison. But she doesn’t. It’s a holiday and everyone is supposed to be happy. Instead, Lourdes turns her attention to a sliver of turkey on her plate. She tastes a small chunk. It’s juicy and salty and goes straight to her veins. She decides to have another piece.
In a moment her mouth is moving feverishly, like a terrible furnace. She stokes it with more hunks of turkey and whole candied yams. Lourdes helps herself to a mound of creamed spinach, dabbing it with a quickly diminishing loaf of sourdough. The leek-and-mustard pie, with its hint of chives, is next.
“Mi cielo, you really outdid yourself!” Lourdes praises her husband between mouthfuls.
For dessert, there’s a rhubarb-apple betty topped with cinnamon crème anglaise. Lourdes devours every last morsel.
*
The next morning, Lourdes scours the newspapers for calamities as she dunks sticky buns into her café con leche. A twin-engine plane crashed in the umber folds of the Adirondacks. An earthquake in rural China buried thousands in their homes. In the Bronx, a fire consumed a straight-A student and her baby brother, asleep in his crib. There’s a photograph of their mother on the front page, ravaged by loss. She’d only gone to the corner store for a pack of cigarettes.
Lourdes grieves for these victims as if they were beloved relatives. Each calamity makes Lourdes feel her own sorrow, keeps her own pain fresh.
Pilar suggests they go to an exhibit at the Frick Museum, so Lourdes wriggles into her Chanel suit, the gold-coin buttons already straining across her middle, and they take the subway to Manhattan. On Fifth Avenue, Lourdes stops to buy hot dogs (with mustard, relish, sauerkraut, fried onions, and ketchup), two chocolate cream sodas, a potato knish, lamb shish kebabs with more onions, a soft pretzel, and a cup of San Marino cherry ice. Lourdes eats, eats, eats, like a Hindu goddess with eight arms, eats, eats, eats, as if famine were imminent.
Inside the museum, the paintings all look alike to Lourdes, smeared and dull. Her daughter guides her to an indoor courtyard, suffused with winter light. They settle on a concrete bench by the reflecting pool. Lourdes is mesmerized by the greenish water, by the sad, sputtering fountain, and a wound inside her reopens. She remembers what the doctors in Cuba had told her. That the baby inside her had died. That they’d have to inject her with a saline solution to expel her baby’s remains. That she would have no more children.
Lourdes sees the face of her unborn child, pale and blank as an egg, buoyed by the fountain waters. Her child calls to her, waves a bare little branch in greeting. Lourdes fills her heart to bursting with the sight of him. She reaches out and calls his name, but he disappears before she can rescue him.
Pilar
(1978)
My mother told me that Abuela Celia was an atheist before I even understood what the word meant. I liked the sound of it, the derision with which my mother pronounced it, and knew immediately it was what I wanted to become. I don’t know exactly when I stopped believing in God. It wasn’t as deliberate as deciding, at age six, to become an atheist, but more like an imperceptible sloughing of layers. One day I noticed there was no more skin to absently peel, just air where there’d been artifice.
A few weeks ago, I found photographs of Abuela Celia in my mother’s hosiery drawer. There was a picture of Abuela in 1931, standing under a tree in her T-strap shoes and wearing a flouncy dress with a polka-dotted bow and puffed sleeves. Abuela Celia’s fingers were tapered and delicate and rested on her hips. Her hair was parted on the right and came down to her shoulders, accentuating the mole by her lips. There was a tension at the corners of her mouth that could have veered toward sadness or joy. Her eyes told of experience she did not yet possess.
There were other photographs. Abuela Celia in Soroa with an orchid in her hair. In a cream linen suit descending from a train. At the beach with my mother and my aunt. Tía Felicia is in Abuela’s arms, a plump, pink-lozenge baby. My mother, unsmiling, skinny and dark from the sun, stands a distance away.
I have a trick to tell someone’s public face from their private one. If the person is left-handed, like Abuela Celia, the right side of her face betrays her true feelings. I placed a finger over the left side of my grandmother’s face, and in photograph after photograph I saw the truth.
I feel much more connected to Abuela Celia than to Mom, even though I haven’t seen my grandmother in seventeen years. We don’t speak at night anymore, but she’s left me her legacy nonetheless—a love for the sea and the smoothness of pearls, an appreciation of music and words, sympathy for the underdog, and a disregard for boundaries. Even in silence, she gives me the confidence to do what I believe is right, to trust my own perceptions.
This is a constant struggle around my mother, who systematically rewrites history to suit her views of the world. This reshaping of events happens in a dozen ways every day, contesting reality. It’s not a matter of premeditated deception. Mom truly believes that her version of events is correct, down to details that I know, for a fact, are wrong. To this day, my mother insists that I ran away from her at the Miami airport after we first left Cuba. But it was she who turned and ran when she thought she heard my father’s voice. I wandered around lost until a pilot took me to his airline’s office and gave me a lollipop.
It’s not just our personal history that gets mangled. Mom
filters other people’s lives through her distorting lens. Maybe it’s that wandering eye of hers. It makes her see only what she wants to see instead of what’s really there. Like Mr. Paresi, a pimpy Brooklyn lawyer who my mother claims is the number-one criminal defense attorney in New York, complete with an impressive roster of Mafia clients. And this because he comes to her shop every morning and buys two chocolate-frosted donuts for his breakfast.
Mom’s embellishments and half-truths usually equip her to tell a good story, though. And her English, her immigrant English, has a touch of otherness that makes it Unintentionally precise. Maybe in the end the facts are not as important as the underlying truth she wants to convey. Telling her own truth is the truth to her, even if it’s at the expense of chipping away our past.
I suppose I’m guilty in my own way of a creative transformation or two. Like my painting of the Statue of Liberty that caused such a commotion at the Yankee Doodle Bakery. It’s funny but last year the Sex Pistols ended up doing the same thing with a photograph of Queen Elizabeth on the cover of their God Save the Queen single. They put a safety pin through the Queen’s nose and the entire country was up in arms. Anarchy in the U.K., I love it.
Mom is fomenting her own brand of anarchy closer to home. Her Yankee Doodle bakeries have become gathering places for these shady Cuban extremists who come all the way from New Jersey and the Bronx to talk their dinosaur politics and drink her killer espressos. Last month they started a cablegram campaign against El Líder. They set up a toll-free hot line so that Cuban exiles could call in and choose from three scathing messages to send directly to the National Palace, demanding El Líder’s resignation.
I heard one of my mother’s cohorts boasting how last year he’d called in a bomb threat to the Metropolitan Opera House, where Alicia Alonso, the prima ballerina of the National Ballet of Cuba and a supporter of El Líder, was scheduled to dance. “I delayed Giselle for seventy-five minutes!” he bragged. If I’d known about it then, I would have sicked the FBI on him.
Just last week, the lot of them were celebrating—with cigars and sparkling cider—the murder of a journalist in Miami who advocated reestablishing ties with Cuba. Those creeps passed around the Spanish newspaper and clapped each other on the back, as if they themselves had struck a big blow against the forces of evil. The front-page photograph showed the reporter’s arm dangling from a poinciana tree on Key Biscayne after the bomb in his car had exploded.
I wonder how Mom could be Abuela Celia’s daughter. And what I’m doing as my mother’s daughter. Something got horribly scrambled along the way.
* * *
Outside, the afternoon light is a dark, moist violet. It’s a matrix light, a recombinant light that disintegrates hard lines and planes, rearranging objects to their essences. Usually I hate it when artists get too infatuated with light, but this is special. It’s the light I love to paint in.
Last semester when I was studying in Italy, I found the same light in Venice at carnival. It surrounded an impossibly tall person cloaked in black and wearing a white eyeless mask. The person dipped and circled like a bat in a square behind the Piazza San Marco. I was afraid to stay, but I was more afraid to go. Finally the light chased him down an alleyway and I was released from his spell.
The light was also in Palermo at dusk on Holy Thursday. Slaughtered lambs, skinned and transparent as baby flesh, hung evenly on rusted hooks. They were beautiful, and I longed to stretch out next to them and display myself in the light. When I returned to Florence, I began to model nude at my art school, something I’d vowed I’d never do. As I posed, I thought of the transparent lambs in the violet light.
Sometimes I ask myself if my adventures, such as they are, equal experience. I think of Flaubert, who spent most of his adult life in the same French village, or Emily Dickinson, whose poems echoed the cadence of the local church bells. I wonder if the farthest distance I have to travel isn’t inside my own head. But then I think of Gauguin or D. H. Lawrence or Ernest Hemingway, who, incidentally, used to go fishing with my Abuelo Guillermo in Cuba, and I become convinced that you have to live in the world to say anything meaningful about it.
Everything up until this very minute, as I sit at my desk on the second floor of Barnard library, looking out over a rectangle of dead grass, and beyond that, to the cars racing down Broadway, feels like a preparation for something. For what, I don’t know. I’m still waiting for my life to begin.
My boyfriend, Rubén Florín, is Peruvian and his family, like mine, is divided over politics. His aunts and uncles, parents and grandparents align themselves against one another. Rubén moved to New York with his parents when he was two, like me. The difference is that at least he can go back to Lima anytime he wants. This makes me ache for the same possibility.
Rubén has a recurring dream of me. I’m in aqua robes threaded with gold, stepping through trapezoidal doors into the sun. Nothing happens to me, he says, but I look unhappy, very unhappy. “Keep sleeping,” I tell him, but his dream never goes any further.
I met Rubén my first day at Barnard. I’d transferred here after a semester of art school in Rhode Island and another semester in Florence. I couldn’t face going back to Providence after Italy, so I decided to give mainstream academia a try. Art school was getting to be a drag anyway, cutthroat and backbiting, with everyone seeking praise from the instructors. I didn’t want to end up being dependent on people I didn’t respect much, so here I am majoring in anthropology instead.
Rubén wants to join the Foreign Service after he graduates from Columbia and bounce around the Third World. I like being with him. We don’t show off like other couples on campus, always pawing at each other or exchanging hungry looks. We take our deep satisfactions for granted. I like it in the early evenings best, when I’m just tired enough from the day to appreciate Rubén’s slow mouth and hands. We speak in Spanish when we make love. English seems an impossible language for intimacy.
Thinking about Rubén this way makes me pack my books, run a brush through my hair, and cross Broadway. It’s rush hour and people are pouring out of the 116th Street subway station as if it’s on fire. Someone’s playing a guitar on the steps of Low Library, a folk song, but nobody’s listening. People here react negatively to any overt displays of soulfulness. Besides, he could be a Moonie. There’re a lot of them on campus these days.
I want to surprise Rubén, get to his room before he returns from his late class, but instead I find him fucking the Dutch exchange student he introduced me to last week. She’s a pale, big-bosomed woman with enormous pink nipples. I keep staring at her nipples as Rubén talks. She doesn’t even pull the sheet over herself. I get the feeling she’s displaying herself, giving me a chance to size up the competition. She feels that certain of her charms. I don’t understand a word Rubén says. I must be standing there a long time because he runs out of things to say and the woman starts coughing delicately into her hand. Her breasts wobble as she coughs, like sunflowers in a breeze.
“Maybe you should leave,” Rubén tells me weakly in Spanish. And I do.
An hour later, I’m on my sixth cup of coffee at the Hungarian pastry shop on Amsterdam Avenue. I’m browsing through the Village Voice personals, the real kinky ones like: “Bisexual Amazon wanted for straight professional couple. Serious inquiries only.” Reading the ads is hardly getting my mind off what Rubén and that milkmaid were doing back at his room. I heard a psychologist on a radio talk show once describe the four stages of grief. I forget whether revenge is a stage or not. I’m probably out of sequence anyway.
A misplaced ad catches my attention. Under WOMEN SEEKING WOMEN, I see “Acoustic bass for sale. Student desperate for cash. $300 obo. Mick. 674-9981.” I think about how my old boyfriend Max used to tell me I’d make a good bass player, and things start getting clearer. I call the number. It’s on Bleecker Street and I make it down there in a half hour flat.
A scrawny guy wearing a flannel shirt over his sweatpants counts my cash and pushes th
e bass at me. It’s a piece of furniture, a fucking huge piece of furniture. It’s like I’m buying my own heirloom. I struggle uptown with it in a kind of trance.
My whole body is aching by the time I get back to my room, but I don’t waste any time. I flip straight to the album I want—The Velvet Underground & Nico. I peel off Andy Warhol’s banana sticker and put on the good, thumping, straight-ahead rock and roll. The thick strings vibrate through my fingers, up my arms, down my chest. I don’t know what I’m doing but I start thumping that old spruce dresser of an instrument for all it’s worth, thumping and thumping, until I feel my life begin.
God’s Will
Herminia Delgado
(1980)
I met Felicia on the beach when we were both six years old. She was filling a pail with cowries and bleeding tooth. Felicia used to collect seashells, then rearrange them on the beach before going home because her mother wouldn’t allow them in their house. Felicia designed great circles of overlapping shells on the sand, as if someone on the moon, or farther still, might read their significance. I told her that at my house we had many shells, that they told the future and were the special favorites of Yemayá, goddess of the seas. Felicia listened closely, then handed me her pail.
“Will you save me?” she asked me. Her eyes were wide and curious.
“Sure,” I answered. How could I realize then what my promise would entail?
Felicia’s parents were afraid of my father. He was a babalawo, a high priest of santería, and greeted the sun each morning with outstretched arms. His godchildren came from many miles on his saint’s day, and brought him kola nuts and black hens.
The people in Santa Teresa del Mar told evil lies about my father. They said he used to rip the heads off goats with his teeth and fillet blue-eyed babies before dawn. I got into fights at school. The other children shunned me and called me bruja. They made fun of my hair, oiled and plaited in neat rows, and of my skin, black as my father’s. But Felicia defended me. I’ll always be grateful to her for that.
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