Lourdes stands and circles the desolate bridge tower. She thinks of how the most accidental gestures can lead to precise conclusions.
“Your mother loved you,” Jorge del Pino repeats urgently.
“She loved me,” Lourdes echoes.
The colors drain from the sky until the air seems more sand than light. Lourdes feels its texture on her fingertips. Everything, it seems, has slowed to its constituent elements.
“There is something else I must tell you,” Jorge del Pino says. “Your sister has died. She was sad when she died. She spoke your name and mine.”
“Felicia? How?”
“You must go to them.”
“I can’t go back. It’s impossible.”
“There are things you must do, things you will only know when you get there.”
“You don’t understand,” Lourdes cries and searches the breeze above her. She smells the brilliantined hair, feels the scraping blade, the web of scars it left on her stomach.
“I know about the soldier, Lourdes. I’ve known all these years,” her father says evenly. “But your mother never knew, I swear it.”
“And you? Who told you?” Lourdes collapses on the walkway, her lungs swelling with air.
“Nobody. I just knew.”
Lourdes rests on the wooden planks. She breathes deeply, until the air courses through her chest without effort. She looks up and sees faint lights in the sky—the sun, the moon, the other planets. Perhaps they are farther than anyone thinks.
“Please return and tell your mother everything, tell her I’m sorry. I love you, mi hija.”
Lourdes imagines white azaleas and an altar set for high mass on an April Sunday. She sings in a high, pure voice, carefully pronouncing each word. She remembers she likes April. It is her favorite month.
Pilar
(1980)
I’m browsing in the remainders bins outside a record shop on Amsterdam Avenue when two men call to me halfheartedly from across the street, more out of habit than desire. I sift through old 78 polkas with beribboned women smiling at me from the album covers. There’s something grotesque about their grins, fixed for thirty years. Maybe I’d do them a favor by buying their records and breaking them in two. Maybe it’d release them from some terrible Romanian spell.
I find a Herb Alpert record, the one with the woman in whipped cream on the cover. It looks so tame to me now. I read somewhere that the woman who posed for it was three months pregnant at the time and that it was shaving cream, not whipped cream, she was suggestively dipping into her mouth.
In the last bin, I find an old Beny Moré album. Two of the cuts are scratched but I buy it anyway for fifty cents. The cashier’s features are compressed beneath a bulbous forehead. When I thank him in Spanish, he’s surprised and wants to chat. We talk about Celia Cruz and how she hasn’t changed a hair or a vocal note in forty years. She’s been fiftyish, it seems, since the Spanish-American War.
Then we get to talking about Lou Reed. It’s funny how his fans can sniff each other out. We agree that his sexually ambiguous days—when he wore white face and black nail polish—were his best. It’s hard to believe that Lou came out of a suburban home on Long Island and went to college in upstate New York. He should have been a lawyer or an accountant or somebody’s father by now. I wonder if his mother thinks he’s dangerous.
The cashier, Franco, puts on the Take No Prisoners album. I was at the Bottom Line the night they recorded it. How many lifetimes ago was that? I think about all that great early punk and the raucous paintings I used to do.
Shit, I’m only twenty-one years old. How can I be nostalgic for my youth?
Midterms are in a week and I can’t seem to concentrate on anything. The only thing that helps is my bass. I’ve taught myself to play the thing these last two years and I’m not half bad. There’s a group at Columbia that meets Sunday afternoons to jam on this punky fake jazz everyone’s into. When things are cooking, me and my bass just move the whole damn floor.
Still, I feel something’s dried up inside me, something a strong wind could blow out of me for good. That scares me. I guess I’m not so sure what I should be fighting for anymore. Without confines, I’m damn near reasonable. That’s something I never wanted to become.
Franco and I commiserate about how St. Mark’s Place is a zoo these days with the bridge-and-tunnel crowd wearing fuchsia mohawks and safety pins through their cheeks. Everybody wants to be part of the freak show for a day. Anything halfway interesting gets co-opted, mainstreamed. We’ll all be doing car commercials soon.
It used to be you could see the Ramones in the East Village for five bucks. Nowadays you have to pay $12.50 to see them with five thousand bellowing skinheads who don’t even let you hear the music. Count me out.
I enter a botánica on upper Park Avenue. I’ve passed the place before but I’ve never gone inside. Today, it seems, there’s nowhere else for me to go. Dried snakeskins and ouanga bags hang from the walls. Painted wooden saints with severe mouths stand alongside plastic plug-in Virgins with sixty-watt bulbs. Iridescent oils are displayed with amulets, talismans, incense. There are sweet-smelling soaps and bottled bathwater, love perfumes and potions promising money and luck. Apothecary jars labeled in childish block letters are filled with pungent spices.
I’m not religious but I get the feeling that it’s the simplest rituals, the ones that are integrated with the earth and its seasons, that are the most profound. It makes more sense to me than the more abstract forms of worship.
The owner of the shop is an elderly man who wears a white tunic and cotton fez. For a young woman with cropped hair, he prescribes a statuette of La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, a yellow candle, and five special oils: amor (love), sígueme (follow me), yo puedo y tú no (I can and you can’t), ven conmigo (come with me), and dominante (dominant).
“Carve his name on the candle five times and anoint it with these oils,” he instructs. “Do you have a picture of your intended?”
The woman nods.
“Bueno, put it on a dessert plate and coat it with honey. Then arrange five fishhooks on the picture and light the candle. Rest assured, he will be yours in two Sundays.”
I envy this woman’s passion, her determination to get what she knows is hers. I felt that way once, when I ran away to Miami. But I never made it to Cuba to see Abuela Celia. After that, I felt like my destiny was not my own, that men who had nothing to do with me had the power to rupture my dreams, to separate me from my grandmother.
I examine the beaded necklaces near the register. Most have five strands and come in two colors. I select a red-and-white one and place it over my head. I lift an ebony staff carved with the head of a woman balancing a double-edged ax.
“Ah, a daughter of Changó,” the elderly man says and places a hand on my shoulder.
I say nothing but I notice that his eyes are the same almond color as his skin, that they’re centuries older than his face.
“You must finish what you began,” he says.
I rub the beads in my left hand and feel a warm current drifting up my arm, across my shoulders, down between my breasts.
“When?” I ask him.
“The moon after next.”
I watch as he moves through the store. His back is long and straight, as if his ancestors were royal palms. He gathers herbs from various jars, then reaches for a white votive candle and a bottle of holy water.
“Begin with a bitter bath,” he says, lining up the ingredients on the counter. “Bathe with these herbs for nine consecutive nights. Add the holy water and a drop of ammonia, then light the candle. On the last day, you will know what to do.”
I reach in my jeans to pay him but he holds up his palm.
“This is a gift from our father Changó.”
I can’t wait to get back to my room and fill up the bathtub so I take a shortcut through Morningside Park. I feel shielded by the herbs, by the man with the straight spine and starched cotton fez. An elm tree seems to
shade the world with its aerial roots. It begins to rain and I pick up my pace. The herbs shift rhythmically in my sack like the seeds of a maraca.
I remember the nannies in Cuba with their leaves and rattling beads. They prayed over me, sprinkled cinnamon in my bath, massaged my stomach with olive oil. They covered me with squares of flannel in the dead heat of summer.
The nannies told my mother that I stole their shadows, that I made their hair fall out and drove their husbands to other women. But my mother didn’t believe them. She fired the nannies without an extra day’s pay.
One night there was a furious thunderstorm. Lightning hit the royal palm outside my window. From my crib, I heard it snap and fall. The fronds whined in the wind. The aviary shattered. The toucans and cockatoos circled in confusion before flying north.
My new nanny wasn’t afraid. She told me that it was only the temperamental Changó, god of fire and lightning. Changó, she said, once asked a young lizard to take a gift to the lover of a rival god. The lizard put the present in its mouth and scurried to the lady’s house but it tripped and fell, swallowing the precious trinket.
When Changó found out, he tracked down his inept accomplice to the foot of a palm tree. The terrified reptile, unable to speak, ran up the tree and hid among the fronds, the gift still lodged in its throat. Changó, who believed the lizard was mocking him, aimed a lightning bolt at the tree, intending to scorch the sorry creature dead.
Since then, Lucila explained, Changó often takes out his rage on innocent palm trees, and to this day the lizard’s throat is swollen and mute with the god’s gift.
Three boys surround me suddenly in the park, locking me between their bodies. Their eyes are like fireflies, hot and erased of memory. The rain beads in their hair. They can’t be more than eleven years old.
The tallest one presses a blade to my throat. Its edge is a scar, another border to cross.
A boy with a high, square forehead grabs the sack with the dried herbs and throws my Beny Moré album like a Frisbee against the elm. It doesn’t break and I’m reassured. I imagine picking up the record, feeling each groove with my fingertips.
The boys push me under the elm, where it’s somehow still dry. They pull off my sweater and carefully unbutton my blouse. With the knife still at my throat, they take turns suckling my breasts. They’re children, I tell myself, trying to contain my fear. Incredibly, I hear the five-note pounding of Lou Reed’s “Street Hassle,” that crazy cello with its low, dying voice.
I watch as the last boy pinches some of the herb and arranges it on a rectangle of paper in his palm. He shapes it into a narrow cylinder then rolls the paper, licking the edge with the delicacy of a preening cat.
“Who’s got a match?” he demands and the boy with the square forehead offers him a flame from a red plastic lighter. The boy takes a deep breath and holds it in his lungs. Then he passes it to the others.
I press my back against the base of the elm and close my eyes. I can feel the pulsing of its great taproot, the howling cello in its trunk. I know the sun sears its branches to hot wires. I don’t know how long I sit against the elm, but when I open my eyes, the boys are gone. I button my blouse, gather up my herbs and my album, and run back to the university.
In the library, nothing makes sense. The fluorescent lights transmit conversations from passing cars on Broadway. Someone’s ordering a bucket of chicken wings on 103rd Street. The chairman of the linguistics department is fucking a graduate student named Betsy. Gandhi was a carnivore. He came of age in Samoa. He traversed a subcontinent in blue suede shoes. Maybe this is the truth.
I buy apples and bananas in the cafeteria and eat them furtively in my room. I’d prefer a cave, a desert, a more complete solitude.
I light my candle. The bath turns a clear green from the herbs. It has the sharp scent of an open field in spring. When I pour it on my hair, I feel a sticky cold like dry ice, then a soporific heat. I’m walking naked as a beam of light along brick paths and squares of grass, phosphorescent and clean.
At midnight, I awake and paint a large canvas ignited with reds and whites, each color betraying the other. I do this for eight more nights.
On the ninth day of my baths, I call my mother and tell her we’re going to Cuba.
Celia’s Letters: 1956–1958
February 11, 1956
Mi querido Gustavo,
Lourdes is seeing a young man I like very much. His name is Rufino Puente, and despite the fact that he comes from one of the wealthiest families in Havana, he’s a modest young man. Lourdes says he shows up to classes in overalls and reeks of manure from his father’s ranch. I’m pleased that he’s not afraid to work, to get his hands dirty, unlike so many men from his circle. In the evenings, Rufino comes to court Lourdes, impeccably dressed, and brings us juicy steaks to grill. He’s a funny-looking boy, too, with wavy reddish hair.
Jorge is so jealous that he acts like a stubborn child. He refuses to shake Rufino’s hand and then he locks himself in our bedroom, sulking until Rufino leaves. Jorge complains incessantly about him, finding faults where there are none. This is the first time I’ve ever seen Lourdes cross with her father.
Last Saturday, I chaperoned a dance at the university and Rufino spent the entire evening talking with me. Lourdes is quite a dancer but Rufino’s feet are put on backward. He can barely make it through the simplest merengue without bruising the dancers around him. His awkwardness makes him very endearing, although it’s clear my daughter prefers more refined dancers. Lourdes was wearing an organdy dress that cinched her waist. I was astonished to see how popular she is, how much of a woman she’s become.
Celia
April 11, 1956
Gustavo,
Spring again. What happened to us, Gustavo? We used to stay up whole nights, there was so much to learn about each other. Then the morning after I finally slept, I awoke with only your scent on my skin. When I opened the shutters of our room, I saw you rushing across the plaza. There was a crowd protesting I don’t know what, shaking placards in the air. I called out to you but you couldn’t hear me. That was the last I saw of you.
I’ve asked myself many times whether this was better than watching you grow old and indifferent beside me.
I remember when I applied for a job at El Encanto, the director wanted me to be a model, to walk up and down the aisles in gowns and hats draped with chiffon. The salesmen bought me perfume and invited me to lunch. But they couldn’t talk to me about why families of guajiros slept in the city’s parks under flashing Coca-Cola signs. Those men only murmured sweet nonsense to me, trying in vain to flatter me.
You were different, mi amor. You expected much more of me. That is why I loved you.
Yours as always,
Celia
September 11, 1956
Querido Gustavo,
Lourdes will marry Rufino in three months. Jorge blames himself for traveling so much during her childhood. Felicia is sullen and envious and barely speaks to her sister. Even Javier is unsettled by all the emotion.
Two weeks ago, we had dinner with Rufino’s parents. Don Guillermo looked like an oafish policeman, right down to his elephantine ears and the brass buttons on his cuffs. He spoke the entire evening of the importance of maintaining good relations with the Americans and insisted that they are the key to our future. When I reminded him of the Platt Amendment, of the way the Americans have interfered in our affairs from the very beginning, he waved his fat, jeweled hand dismissively and turned to Jorge, continuing his pontifications.
Everyone knows that the Mafia runs Don Guillermo’s casinos and that he lunches with Batista on Thursdays at the Havana Yacht Club. People say that Batista had to pay a million dollars to become a member because his skin is not light enough. Don Guillermo fears the rebels, although he pretends not to. This gives me great pleasure.
His wife, Doña Zaida, is no better. During dinner, I heard cries as if there were a cat trapped above our heads. Later I learned that Zaida keeps
her mother, La Muñeca, locked upstairs. Lourdes told me that La Muñeca is as Indian as they come, from Costa Rica. She refuses to wear shoes and used to carry her children and grandchildren in slings on her back. For this, Zaida keeps her mother a prisoner. How Rufino survived such horrid parents is a mystery to me.
Love,
Celia
October 11, 1956
Querido Gustavo,
I awoke one night startled and aroused. I touched Jorge tenderly and he sat upright with fear. That’s how long it’s been between us. I told him I wanted to be with him again and he began to cry. I held him for a long time and then we made love slowly, with discovery. He told me that I’ve never been more beautiful, and I almost believed him.
Celia
November 11, 1956
Mi querido Gustavo,
Zaida Puente changed all my plans for Lourdes’s wedding and arranged a spectacle instead at the Tropicana Club. She’s invited hundreds of society people whom she doesn’t even know, and insists that the food be French—pheasants and eels and God knows what else. Not a suckling pig in sight! Then she has the nerve to tell me that my plain taffeta dress is unsuitable for the Tropicana. That woman is a snake, an insufferable snake!
Love,
Celia
December 11, 1956
Gustavo,
The rebels attacked again, this time in Oriente. They’re hiding in the Sierra Maestra. People say the rebel leader sleeps in his uniform and olive cap, that his hair and beard are one, like a bear’s, and his eyes are just as fearless. The tension here is unbearable. Everyone wants Batista out.
Jorge is afraid that if the rebels win they’ll throw out the Americans and that he’ll lose his job before he can get his pension. But I tell him that there’ll be more jobs for everyone when they throw that thief out of the palace.
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