Love,
Celia
P.S. The wedding was a circus, as I expected. The Tropicana was like a brothel, red lights everywhere, making me dizzy. The navy commander’s wife, unaccustomed to the rich foods and the imported champagne, vomited on the ballroom floor. And in the confusion, Silvio Arroyo Pedros, a retired Spanish matador (have you heard of him?), and a devotee of Havana’s most notorious fleshpots, broke his clavicle dancing with the widow Doña Victoria del Paso. They say that poor Doña Victoria dipped him too deeply in a moment of long-repressed passion. The ordeal lasted until morning when skinny women in sequined bodices served us scrambled eggs and bacon. Lourdes and Rufino appeared dazed but not unhappy. Zaida Puente, of course, had her picture in all the newspapers the next day, posing in her plum moiré gown like a would-be queen. She’ll be among the first to hang, no doubt.
June 11, 1958
Querido Gustavo,
I took a walk on the beach late this afternoon. The moon appeared early, absorbing the lingering light. Each shell echoed a song my bones could hear. I have something to celebrate, Gustavo. I’m going to be a grandmother.
Tu Celia
THE LANGUAGES LOST
(1980)
Six Days in April
It is long past midnight. Celia searches the cardboard box containing the few articles Felicia left behind and finds her daughter’s black bathing suit. None of the foam or the underwire remains in the pointed brassière, and the seat is worn to near obscenity.
Celia remembers Felicia in another bathing suit, a tiny lemon-yellow one she wore the year the sea retreated beyond the horizon, the year the archaeology of the ocean floor revealed itself—catacombs of ancient coral, lunar rocks exposed to the sun. Felicia squatted, examining the shells as if they were unexpected gems, then rearranged them on the sand. Around her, neighbors scrambled with wooden buckets, looting the beach for stranded fish and crabs. The sun baked their footsteps hard as fossils. Then the tidal wave hit, wiping their traces from shore.
The day before the funeral, Celia had taken the morning bus from Santa Teresa del Mar to the house on Palmas Street. She no longer hitchhiked. She gathered up Felicia’s nightgown with the blue roses, Tía Alicia’s tarnished peacock brooch (which Celia had given to Felicia for her fifteenth birthday), a stump of orange lipstick, two unraveling stretch shorts, and her daughter’s santería clothing.
Celia found unused ration cards permitting Felicia one and a half pounds of chicken per month, two ounces of coffee every fifteen days, two packs of cigarettes per week, and four meters of cloth per year. Her daughter had had little use for these provisions during the last months of her life.
Felicia had left a note with Herminia saying she wanted to be buried as a santera, and Celia could not refuse her daughter’s last request. In the mortuary, her friends from the casa de santo dressed Felicia in her initiation gown, her crown, and her necklaces. They arranged a pouch of seashells on her breast together with morsels of smoked fish and a few grains of corn. Into a large gourd they placed her cut hair and head dyes, okra, ashes, and wisps of dried corn silks. They covered the gourd with crossed cloths, then killed a black chicken and laid it over the offerings.
Later, they passed colorful handkerchiefs over Felicia’s body, all the while grieving in low voices to purify her corpse. By the time they finished, the terrible lumps on Felicia’s head had disappeared, and her skin was as smooth as the pink lining of a conch. Her eyes, too, had regained their original green.
After they removed the coffin to the street, the santeros broke a clay urn behind Felicia’s old De Soto, the funeral car, and sprinkled it with cold water to refresh her for the final journey. A block before the cemetery, the car broke down and Felicia’s coffin had to be carried the rest of the way by eight pallbearers in white.
At the entrance to the cemetery, a tall man stood in shreds and patches, his face slackly wrapped in scarves. He stood perfectly still and seemed to breathe through the dark open slit by his eyes, sucking sorrow from the air like venom.
*
Celia undresses noiselessly in the dark. She opens the closet door and studies her image in the speckled mirror. She feels a stain descend within her, like water through a plaster wall. It spreads, slow and sodden, loosening her teeth, weighing down her limbs, darkening the scar on her withered chest. Celia’s remaining breast droops by her elbow, the indifferent nipple facing downward. Her abdomen, though, is as unmarred as a childless woman’s. Between her legs, sparse hair clings to a swell of flesh.
She examines her hands next, bloated and twisted as driftwood, but she cannot reclaim them. Her legs, too, are unrecognizable—the enlarged knees, the calf muscles shorter and more angular than in her youth, her wounded feet. Her face, at least, is familiar. The faded mole by her lips holds the folds of thin flesh in place like a flat black button. And her drop pearl earrings still hang stiffly from her lobes.
Celia slips on Felicia’s sheer bathing suit. Outside, a crescent moon mocks her from its perch. She strides toward the water, and swims with brisk strokes far out to sea. The sky is dimmed of stars and Celia cannot identify their milky lights, their waning conclusions.
Pilar
My mother and I pass billboards advertising the revolution as if it were a new brand of cigarette. We drive by the Plaza de la Revolución, where, the taxi driver explains, El Líder holds his biggest rallies. He tells us that there’s more trouble for El Líder, that a busload of people seeking asylum crashed the gates of the Peruvian embassy early this morning. Mom hardly listens. She seems to be in her own world. The driver takes a detour along the Malecón, pointing out La Punta Fortress, and the Morro Castle across the harbor. All Mom says is that the buildings in Havana are completely decayed, held up by elaborate configurations of wooden planks. What I notice most are the balconies.
The driver turns onto Palmas Street. The houses are painted a garish yellow. They’re chipped and flaking and look smeared with confetti. We stop in front of Tía Felicia’s house, the house in which Abuelo Jorge grew up. The windows are shuttered tight and the square of front yard is littered with broken pottery and soiled flags. My mother says there used to be sparrows in the tamarind tree, heavy once with fat clusters of pods.
Mom doesn’t bother to get out of the car or ask the neighbors what happened to her sister. She says she’s expected this since Abuelo Jorge spoke to her on the Brooklyn Bridge. As for me, I’m not sure what to expect, only that I’ll see Abuela Celia again, like I learned after my ninth herbal bath.
Since that day in Morningside Park, I can hear fragments of people’s thoughts, glimpse scraps of the future. It’s nothing I can control. The perceptions come without warnings or explanations, erratic as lightning.
“Take us to Santa Teresa del Mar,” Mom orders the driver. She closes her eyes. I think it’s less painful for her than looking out the window.
We take the coastal highway to my grandmother’s house. I look at the sea I once planned to cross by fishing boat. Trade winds roll the water in great masses. A hurricane is submerged. There are dolphins and parrotfish, hawksbill turtles and shovelnose sharks. There’s a shipwreck in the Gulf of Mexico filled with ingots and doubloons. Men in wet suits will find the galleon three years from now. They will celebrate with champagne and murder.
Four fresh bodies are floating in the Straits of Florida. It’s a family from Cárdenas. They stole a boat from a fisherman. It collapsed in the current early this morning. A boatload of Haitians will leave Gonaïves next Thursday. They will carry the phone numbers of friends in Miami and the life savings of relatives. They will sail to the Tropic of Cancer and sink into the sea.
I’ve brought a sketchbook with me and a toolbox of brushes and paints, mostly watercolors. I wanted to bring my bass along but Mom said there’d be no room. She’s crammed every inch of our suitcases with cheap sneakers and tacky clothing from the Latino stores on Fourteenth Street. I want to do a few sketches of Abuela Celia, maybe even a formal portrait of h
er on her wicker swing. I think she’d like that.
Mom jumps from the taxi in her sling-back pumps and runs past the giant bird of paradise bushes, past the rotting pawpaw tree, and up the three front steps of Abuela Celia’s house. I follow her. The cement shows through the floor where the tiles are missing. It’s a patterned tile, with pastel buds and climbing vines. It hasn’t been mopped for months. A faded mantilla, soft as a moth, is draped over the sofa. There’s a chalk-white piano and a refrigerator, a bulk of rust, against the far wall.
My mother inspects the bedroom she used to share with Tía Felicia, vacant now except for a frilly party dress hanging in the closet. She crosses the hallway to Abuela’s room. A lace tablecloth is spread on the bed. A photograph of El Líder is on the night table. Mom turns from it in disgust.
I find Abuela sitting motionless on her wicker swing, wearing a worn bathing suit, her hair stuck haphazardly to her skull, her feet strangely lacerated. I kneel before her and press my cheek to hers, still salty from the sea. We hold each other close.
“Dios mío, what happened to you?” Mom screams when she finds us. She scurries about preparing a hot bath with water boiled on the stove.
Abuela is missing a breast. There’s a scar like a purple zipper on her chest. Mom holds a finger to her lips and flashes me a look that warns, “Pretend not to notice.”
We wash Abuela’s hair and rinse it with conditioner, then we pat her dry with towels as if this could somehow heal her. Abuela says nothing. She submits to my mother like a solemn novitiate. Mom untangles Abuela’s hair with a wide-toothed comb. “You could have died of pneumonia!” she insists, and plugs in a Conair dryer that blows out the lights in the living room.
I notice Abuela Celia’s drop pearl earrings, the intricate settings, the fine gold strands looping through her lobes. There’s a cache of blue shadows in the pearls, a coolness in the smooth surfaces. When I was a baby, I bounced those pearls with my fingertips and heard the rhythm of my grandmother’s thoughts.
“I went for a swim last night,” Abuela Celia whispers to me alone. She looks through the arched window above the piano as if searching the waves to find the precise spot. Then she squeezes my hand. “I’m glad you remember, Pilar. I always knew you would.”
Mom replaces Abuela’s bedding with fresh sheets and a lamb’s wool blanket we brought from home. I help Abuela into a new flannel nightgown while Mom prepares bouillon and instant tapioca pudding. Abuela Celia tastes a spoonful of each, swallows a vitamin C tablet, and-falls into a deep sleep.
I pull the covers over Abuela’s shoulders, searching her face for a hint of my own. Her hair turned gray since I last saw her. Her black mole has faded. Her hands are stamped with faint liver spots.
I know what my grandmother dreams. Of massacres in distant countries, pregnant women dismembered in the squares. Abuela Celia walks among them mute and invisible. The thatched roofs steam in the morning air.
“Can you believe this mierda?” My mother snatches the picture of El Líder off Abuela’s night table. It’s framed in antique silver, wedged over the face of Abuelo Jorge, whose blue eye peers out from behind El Líder’s army cap. Mom walks to the edge of the ocean in her silk dress and stockings, her pleated skirt ballooning like a spinnaker, and flings the picture into the sea. Two sea gulls dive for it but surface with empty beaks. The horizon shifts like a bright line of buoys.
I wonder about the voyages to old colonies. Ocean liners gliding toward Africa and India. The women on board wore black elbow-length gloves. They drank from porcelain teacups, longed for moist earth to eat. They lingered with their impulses against the railings.
Perhaps my mother should have approached Havana by sea. Boarded a ship in Shanghai and crossed the Pacific wave by wave. Rounded Cape Horn, the coast of Brazil, stopped for carnival in Port-of-Spain.
Cuba is a peculiar exile, I think, an island-colony. We can reach it by a thirty-minute charter flight from Miami, yet never reach it all.
* * *
Later, while Abuela still sleeps, my mother and I walk to the corner of Calle Madrid. Mom stops a guajiro selling a few stalks of sugarcane. She chooses one and he removes the woody husk for her with a machete. Mom chews the cane until she tastes the guarapo, the sticky syrup inside.
“Try some, Pilar, but it’s not as sweet as I remember.”
Mom tells me how she used to stand on this corner and tell tourists that her mother was dead. They felt sorry for her and bought her ice cream. They patted her head. I try to picture my mother as a dark skinny girl, but all I can envision is a miniature version of her today, an obese woman in a beige dress with matching pumps, and a look fearsome enough to stop the Lexington Avenue express in its tracks.
Suddenly, I want to know how I’ll die. I think I’d prefer self-immolation, on a stage perhaps, with all my paintings. I’d definitely want to go before I got too old, before anyone would have to wipe my ass or push me around in a wheelchair. I don’t want my granddaughter to have to take out my teeth and put them in a glass of water fizzing with tablets like I did with Abuelo Jorge.
My mother keeps talking but I’m only half listening. I have this image of Abuela Celia underwater, standing on a reef with tiny chrome fish darting by her face like flashes of light. Her hair is waving in the tide and her eyes are wide open. She calls to me but I can’t hear her. Is she talking to me from her dreams?
“You’d think they could make a few decent solid colors in this place,” my mother complains loudly so everyone can hear.
I look around me. The women on Calle Madrid are bare-armed in tight, sleeveless blouses. They wear stretch pants and pañuelos, match polka dots with stripes, plaids with flower prints. There’s a man in goggles pumping his sharpening wheel, a dull ax shrieking against its surface. A pair of frayed trousers stick out from beneath a ’55 Plymouth. Magnificent finned automobiles cruise grandly down the street like parade floats. I feel like we’re back in time, in a kind of Cuban version of an earlier America.
I think about the Granma, the American yacht El Líder took from Mexico to Cuba in 1956 on his second attempt to topple Batista. Some boat owner in Florida misspells “Grandma” and look what happens: a myth is born, a province is renamed, a Communist party newspaper is launched. What if the boat had been called Barbara Ann or Sweetie Pie or Daisy? Would history be different? We’re all tied to the past by flukes. Look at me, I got my name from Hemingway’s fishing boat.
Mom is talking louder and louder. My mouth goes dry, like the times I’ve gone with her to department stores with merchandise to return. Four or five people gather at a safe distance. It’s all the audience she needs.
“Look at those old American cars. They’re held together with rubber bands and paper clips and still work better than the new Russian ones. Oye!” she calls out to the bystanders. “You could have Cadillacs with leather interiors! Air conditioning! Automatic windows! You wouldn’t have to move your arms in the heat!” Then she turns to me, her face indignant. “Look how they laugh, Pilar! Like idiots! They can’t understand a word I’m saying! Their heads are filled with too much compañero this and compañera that! They’re brainwashed, that’s what they are!”
I pull my mother from the growing crowd. The language she speaks is lost to them. It’s another idiom entirely.
* * *
I’m lying on Tía Felicia’s childhood bed. My breathing falls in time with my mother’s, with the tempo of the waves outside. When I was a kid, Mom slept in air thin and nervous as a magnetic field, attracting small disturbances. She tossed and turned all night, as if she were wrestling ghosts in her dreams. Sometimes she’d wake up crying, clutching her stomach and moaning from deep inside a place I couldn’t understand. Dad would stroke her forehead until she fell asleep again.
My mother told me once that I slept just like her sister, with my mouth open wide enough to catch flies. I think Mom envied me my rest. But tonight it’s different. I’m the one who can’t sleep.
Abuela Celia is
in her wicker swing looking out to sea. I settle in beside her. There’s a comforting wilderness to Abuela’s hands, to the odd-shaped calluses, the split skin on her thumb.
“When I was a girl, I used to dry tobacco leaves one at a time,” she begins in a quiet voice. “They stained my hands, my face, the rags on my body. One day, my mother bathed me in a tin tub behind our house and rubbed me with straw until my skin bled. I put on the ruffled dress she had made, a hat with ribbons, and patent-leather shoes, the first I ever wore. My feet felt precious, tied up like shiny parcels. Then she left me on a train and walked away.”
As I listen, I feel my grandmother’s life passing to me through her hands. It’s a steady electricity, humming and true.
“There was a man before your grandfather. A man I loved very much. But I made a promise to myself before your mother was born not to abandon her to this life, to train her as if for war. Your grandfather took me to an asylum after your mother was born. I told him all about you. He said it was impossible for me to remember the future. I grieved when your mother took you away. I begged her to let you stay.”
There’s a wrinkled hand in the window next door. The curtain drops, the shadow recedes. The gardenia tree fills the night with its scent. Women who outlive their daughters are orphans, Abuela tells me. Only their granddaughters can save them, guard their knowledge like the first fire.
Lourdes
Every way Lourdes turns there is more destruction, more decay. Socialismo o muerte. The words pain her as if they were knitted into her skin with thick needles and yarn. She wants to change the “o” to “e” ’s on every billboard with a bucket of red paint. Socialismo es muerte, she’d write over and over again until the people believed it, until they rose up and reclaimed their country from that tyrant.
Last night, she was shocked to see how her nephew devoured his food at the tourist hotel in Boca Ciega. Ivanito refilled his plate six times with palomilla steak, grilled shrimp, yuca in garlic sauce, and hearts of palm salad. Ivanito told her that they didn’t get such good food at his boarding school, that it’s always chicken with rice or potatoes. They don’t do much to disguise it. Lourdes knows that Cuba saves its prime food for tourists or for export to Russia. Degradation, she thinks, goes hand in hand with the certainty of deprivation.
Dreaming in Cuban Page 19