Felicia was forbidden to visit my house but she did anyway. Once she saw my father use the obi, the divining coconut, to answer the questions of a godchild who had come to consult him. I remember the pattern of rinds fell in ellife, two white sides and two brown, a definite yes. The godchild left very pleased, and Felicia’s fascination with coconuts began that day.
I never doubted Felicia’s love. Or her loyalty. When my oldest son died in Angola, Felicia didn’t leave my side for a month. She cooked me carne asada and read me the collected plays of Molière, which she borrowed from her mother. Felicia arranged for Joaquín’s remains to be brought home for a decent burial, and then she stayed with me until I could laugh again at silly things.
Felicia could be very stubborn, too, but she had a gift that offset her stubbornness, a gift I admired very much. I guess you could say she adapted to her grief with imagination. Felicia stayed on the fringe of life because it was free of everyday malice. It was more dignified there.
There is something else, something very important. Felicia is the only person I’ve known who didn’t see color. There are white people who know how to act politely to blacks, but deep down you know they’re uncomfortable. They’re worse, more dangerous than those who speak their minds, because they don’t know what they’re capable of.
For many years in Cuba, nobody spoke of the problem between blacks and whites. It was considered too disagreeable to discuss. But my father spoke to me clearly so that I would understand what happened to his father and his uncles during the Little War of 1912, so that I would know how our men were hunted down day and night like animals, and finally hung by their genitals from the lampposts in Guáimaro. The war that killed my grandfather and great-uncles and thousands of other blacks is only a footnote in our history books. Why, then, should I trust anything I read? I trust only what I see, what I know with my heart, nothing more.
Things have gotten better under the revolution, that much I can say. In the old days, when voting time came, the politicians would tell us we were all the same, one happy family. Every day, though, it was another story. The whiter you were, the better off you were. Anybody could see that. There’s more respect these days. I’ve been at the battery factory almost twenty years now, since right after the revolution, and I supervise forty-two women. It’s not much, maybe, but it’s better than mopping floors or taking care of another woman’s children instead of my own.
One thing hasn’t changed: the men are still in charge. Fixing that is going to take a lot longer than twenty years.
But let me begin again. After all, this story is about Felicia, not me.
Felicia returned to our religion with great eagerness after her disappearance in 1978. She showed up at my house one day, slim and tanned, as if she’d just returned from a vacation at a fancy foreign spa. “Take me to La Madrina,” she told me, and I did. Then, during a holy trance, Felicia spoke of her days in a far-off town. She said she’d married a bearish man in an amusement park and that he’d planned to escape Cuba, to take a fishing boat north and go ice skating. I don’t know if this part is true, but Felicia said that she’d pushed this man, her third husband, from the top of a roller coaster and watched him die on a bed of high-voltage wires. Felicia said his body turned to gray ash, and then the wind blew him north, just as he’d wished.
She never spoke of this again.
Within a week, Felicia had her old job back at the beauty shop. She worked hard to regain the confidence of her former customers, except, of course, for Graciela Moreira, who’d taken to wearing synthetic wigs imported from Hungary. I sent Felicia a few customers myself from the factory. Those girls needed manicures after assembling batteries all day long.
At night, Felicia attended our ceremonies. She didn’t miss a single one. For her, they were a kind of poetry that connected her to larger worlds, worlds alive and infinite. Our rituals healed her, made her believe again. My father used to say that there are forces in the universe that can transform our lives if only we’d surrender ourselves. Felicia surrendered, and found her fulfillment.
Felicia’s mother discouraged her devotion to the gods. Celia had only vague notions about spiritual possession and animal sacrifice, and suspected that our rites had caused her daughter’s mysterious disappearance. Celia revered El Líder and wanted Felicia to give herself entirely to the revolution, believing that this alone would save her daughter. But Felicia would not be dissuaded from the orishas. She had a true vocation to the supernatural.
Before long, La Madrina initiated Felicia into the elekes and gave her the necklaces of the saints that would protect her from evil. They weren’t easy to make. Since the revolution, it’s been difficult to obtain the right beads. La Madrina told me she had to fashion Felicia’s necklaces from the beaded curtains of a restaurant in Old Havana.
Many initiations followed, but I was not allowed to Felicia’s last one, her asiento. This ritual has been done in secret since the first slaves worked the sugarcane fields on this island. But Felicia told me what she could.
Sixteen days before the asiento, Felicia went to live with La Madrina, who had procured seven white dresses for her, seven sets of underwear and nightclothes, seven sets of bedding, seven towels, large and small, and other special items, all white.
Felicia changed every day to stay pure.
On the morning of her initiation, sixteen santeras tore Felicia’s clothes to shreds until she stood naked, then they bathed her in river water, rubbing her with soap wrapped in vegetable fibers until her skin glowed. The women dressed Felicia in a fresh white gown and combed and braided her hair, treating her like a newborn child.
That night, after a purifying coconut shampoo, Felicia was guided to a windowless room, where she sat for many hours, alone on a stool. La Madrina slipped the sacred necklace of Obatalá around Felicia’s neck. Felicia told me she grew sleepy, and felt as though she were drifting through the heavens, that she was a planet looking at herself from one of her moons.
After many more rituals and a final bath in the omiero, the santeras led Felicia to Obatalá’s throne. The diviner of shells shaved her head as everyone chanted in the language of the Yoruba. They painted circles and dots on her head and cheeks—white for Obatalá, reds and yellows and blues for the other gods—and crowned her with the sacred stones. It was then Felicia lost consciousness, falling into an emptiness without history or future.
She learned later that she’d walked purposefully around the room, possessed by Obatalá. The santeras had made eight cuts on her tongue with a razor blade so that the god could speak, but Felicia could not divulge his words. When Obatalá finally left her body, she opened her eyes and emerged from the void.
Once more Felicia was led to the throne. The goats to be sacrificed were marched in one by one, arrayed in silks and gold braids. Felicia smeared their eyes, ears, and foreheads with the coconut and pepper she chewed before the babalawo slit their throats. She tasted the goats’ blood and spit it toward the ceiling, then she sampled the blood of many more creatures.
Four hours later, the babalawo, drenched in sweat and countless immolations, lowered his head near hers.
“Eroko ashé,” he whispered. It is done, with the blessings of the gods.
When I visited Felicia the following day, she was dressed in her coronation gown, her crown, and all her necklaces. She sat on a throne surrounded by gardenias, her face serene as a goddess’s. I believe to this day she’d finally found her peace.
But when Felicia returned to Palmas Street with her sacred stones and her tureen, her seashells and the implements of her saint, neither her mother nor her children were there to greet her. Felicia was crestfallen, but she was certain that the gods were testing her. She wanted to prove to the orishas that she was a true believer, serious and worthy of serving them, so she continued her rituals.
Felicia did everything she was supposed to as a novice Santera. She dressed only in white, and didn’t wear makeup or cut her hair. She never touched th
e forbidden foods—coconuts, corn, or anything red—and covered the one mirror in her house with a sheet, as she was prohibited from seeing her own image.
When I came to visit her, we settled on the warping floorboards, where Felicia ate her meals with a serving spoon. As she spoke, Felicia rolled the spoon between her palms and watched its clumsy, twirling shadow on the wall.
“Have you spoken with them?” she asked me, referring to her mother, her daughters, her son.
“Your mother says they’re frightened, like the summer of coconuts.”
“But this is completely different. I have a clarity now. You can see the sun enters here.” Felicia indicated the dusty shafts of light. “Did you tell her that even El Líder is initiated? That he’s the son of Elleguá?”
I shook my head, saying nothing. Felicia covered her face with her hands. A rash erupted on her neck and cheeks. I noticed the imprint her fingers made on her forehead, the delicate chain of bloodless flesh.
Then Felicia spoke of our faith, of her final healing, and held my hands in hers.
“You’ve been more than a sister to me, Herminia. You saved me, like you promised on the beach.”
That night, I dreamt of Felicia in her bathing suit with her pail of cowries and bleeding tooth.
“Will you save me?” she asked me.
“Sure,” I answered, again and again.
I’ve seen other santeras during their first year. They are radiant. Their eyes are moist and clear, their skin is smoothed of wrinkles, and their nails grow strong. When you make a saint, the saint takes good care of you. But Felicia showed none of these blessings. Her eyes dried out like an old woman’s and her fingers curled like claws until she could hardly pick up her spoon. Even her hair, which had been as black as a crow’s, grew colorless in scruffy patches on her skull. Whenever she spoke, her lips blurred to a dull line in her face.
Over the next weeks, all of us from the casa de santo took turns visiting Felicia. We wrapped her wrists with beaded bracelets, gave her castor-oil enemas, packed hot cactus compresses on her brow. We boiled yerba buena teas and left yams and swatches of cotton on Obatala’s altar. But nothing seemed to help. Felicia’s eyesight dimmed until she could perceive only shadows, and the right side of her head swelled with mushroomy lumps.
La Madrina was beside herself with worry. She performed sacrifices every day in Felicia’s behalf. Some of us traveled with our offerings to the mountains, where Obatalá is said to live, and placed white flags around the house on Palmas Street to attract peace.
But each time La Madrina threw the shells, the omen was the same. Ikú. Death.
A group of babalawos tried a panaldo, an exorcism, and thought they had trapped an evil spirit in the rooster they buried in a knotted cloth. But Felicia continued to grow worse. The babalawos consulted the oracles with all their powers of divination. The opelé. The table of Ifá. Even the ikin, the sacred palm nuts. Still, the omen did not change.
“It is the will of the gods,” they concluded. “It will be resolved by the spirits of the dead.”
Just as the babalawos were about to leave, Felicia’s mother entered the house on Palmas Street. She was wild-eyed, like a woman who gives birth to an unwanted child.
“Witch doctors! Murderers! Get out, all of you!” she cried, and swept the image of Obatala off its altar.
We pulled back, afraid of the god’s response.
Celia overturned the tureen with the sacred stones and crushed Felicia’s seashells under the heels of her leather pumps. Suddenly, she removed her shoes and began stamping on the shells in her bare feet, slowly at first, then faster and faster in a mad flamenco, her arms thrown up in the air.
Then just as suddenly she stopped. She made no sound as she wept, as she bent to kiss Felicia’s eyes, her forehead, her swollen, hairless skull. Celia lay with her torn, bleeding feet beside her daughter and held her, rocking and rocking her in the blue gypsy dusk until she died.
Ivanito
The night is pitch-black. I aim my radio at the farthest point in the sky and click it on. It pops and sputters like my mother’s old car. I turn and turn the dial, half expecting to hear Mom singing in her deep-throated way, singing the sad words of her Beny Moré song.
After my mother’s funeral, I found a package addressed to me on the front steps of Abuela Celia’s house. Inside I found this radio wrapped in shredded newspapers. I think my father may have sent it to me, I don’t know why. Maybe he understood how alone I felt. People who knew him say I look like him, skinny and gangly, all arms and legs. I’ve grown six inches since last summer. My clothes don’t fit me anymore, so at school they gave me the uniform of a senior who’d hanged himself from a tree the year before.
I return to the beach whenever I can. My mother never speaks to me, but sometimes I sidestep along the beach until I pick up radio stations in Key West. I’m learning more English this way but it’s a lot different from Abuelo Jorge’s grammar books. If I’m lucky, I can tune in the Wolfman Jack show on Sunday nights. Sometimes I want to be like the Wolfman and talk to a million people at once.
Daughters of Changó
(1979)
By the fall of 1979, Jorge del Pino speaks less and less with his daughter on her evening walks home from the bakeries. He complains of an energy waning within him, and is convinced that the time he’s stolen between death and oblivion is coming to an end. His voice crackles softly, like the peeling of an eggshell, and Lourdes has to stand perfectly still to hear his words. Trees and buildings interfere with her reception, so Lourdes seeks quiet, open places to speak with her father—the limestone plazas of a younger Brooklyn, the expanse of lawn in front of the post office, the path by the river where the Navarro boy jumped to his death.
“My knowledge is no greater dead than alive,” Jorge del Pino tells his daughter. It is the first day of November, nearly dusk, and he is speaking in morbid riddles again.
“What are you saying?” Lourdes asks.
“That we can see and understand everything just as well alive as dead, only when we’re alive we don’t have the time, or the peace of mind, or the inclination to see and understand what we could. We’re too busy rushing to our graves.”
“How many days do we have left, Papi?”
“I couldn’t say precisely.”
“A year? A month?”
“Not that long.”
Lourdes sits on a bench overlooking the river. It is a dull moving metal, incapable of reflection. Only on a night with an exceptional moon can the river rightfully claim its light or any other subtlety. Now it offers Lourdes a bitterness she can taste. Her father is dying all over again, and her grief is worse than the first time.
“Ask me, hija. I am here.”
“Why did you leave Cuba, Papi?”
“Because I was sick. You know that.”
“Yes, but why?”
“Those doctors were butchers, poorly trained.”
Lourdes waits.
“And your mother. I couldn’t bear to watch her. She had fallen in love again. She thought only of the revolution. There was nothing I could do but eat my own sour guts.”
“Did you love her? Did you love Mama?” Lourdes asks tentatively. The remnants of the day’s light tangle in the sky. Lourdes studies the colors wrestling to unravel, flaring like certain male species of birds. She thinks of how singular yet familiar they are.
“Yes, mi hija, I loved her.”
“And did she love you?”
“I believe she did, in her way.”
* * *
“I thought you had left me for good,” Lourdes tells her father as she walks on the wooden-planked tier of the Brooklyn Bridge. It is a Sunday afternoon in winter, so clear it appears hard glazed. Lourdes has not heard from her father in over a month.
She watches as two gulls circle a pier, rotating a wheel of air. They stir the near-absent blue.
“I can’t return anymore,” her father answers ruefully.
Lourdes looks
up through the steel lattice of the bridge coated black with exhaust. Through one elongated triangle she sees a clean patch of cloud. The black outlines it, defines it.
“I’ve come to tell you a few last things. About myself. About your mother. So you’ll understand.”
“I know too much already.”
“You haven’t even begun to understand, Lourdes.”
Jorge del Pino is silent for a long time.
“Your mother loved you,” he says finally.
The bridge’s planks reverberate with the cars passing below. Down the river, a train crosses another bridge with the sound of a dragging chain. Lourdes wants to slow it down, to examine the faces in the streaming windows before they disappear into the tunnel on the other side.
“After we were married, I left her with my mother and my sister. I knew what it would do to her. A part of me wanted to punish her. For the Spaniard. I tried to kill her, Lourdes. I wanted to kill her. I left on a long trip after you were born. I wanted to break her, may God forgive me. When I returned, it was done. She held you out to me by one leg and told me she would not remember your name.”
Lourdes follows a tugboat moving toward the sea. It seems to pull the city behind it. She finds it difficult to breathe.
“I left her in an asylum. I told the doctors to make her forget. They used electricity. They fed her pills. I used to visit her every Sunday. She told me to turn on my electric brooms and then laughed in my face. She told me that geometry would strangle nature. She made a friend there who had murdered her husband, and I became afraid. Her hands were always so still.”
Jorge del Pino stops; his voice softens.
“The doctors told me that her health was delicate, that she must live by the sea to complete her forgetting. I bought her a piano like her aunt’s. I wanted to see her hands move. I was afraid they’d lie still in her lap, threatening me. I kept traveling, Lourdes. I couldn’t bear her gentleness, her kind indifference. I took you from her while you were still a part of her. I wanted to own you for myself. And you’ve always been mine, hija.”
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