Dreaming in Cuban

by Cristina Garcia

  At the next table, a group of sunburnt French Canadians were enjoying baked lobsters and getting drunk on Cuba libres. Lourdes overheard one woman remarking on a Cuban boy who had flirted with her on the beach. So these were El Líder’s supporters overseas? Odious armchair socialists! They didn’t need coupons to eat! They didn’t have to wait three hours for a pitiful can of crabmeat! It had taken all of Lourdes’s resolve to remain calmly in her seat.

  Celia picked at her food, not saying much. She ordered two dishes of coconut ice cream and ate them slowly with a soup spoon.

  Was it true, Lourdes wonders, that the older you get the less you can savor and that sweetness is the last taste left on the tongue? Had her mother really aged so much? Could so much time have passed?

  She is a complete stranger to me, Lourdes thinks. Papi was wrong. Some things can never change.

  Her nieces look nothing like Felicia or the pictures Lourdes has seen of their father. Luz and Milagro are plain and squat, with wide noses, and appear to be a mixture of black and Indian. Could Felicia have slept with someone besides Hugo? It wouldn’t have surprised Lourdes. Nothing Felicia ever did surprised her. Since they were children, her sister would do anything to be the center of attention, even take off her blouse in front of the neighborhood boys and charge them a nickel apiece to touch her breasts. Felicia used to burst in on conversations between Lourdes and her father, whining and stamping her feet until they included her. Of course they never spoke of anything important while she was present.

  Pilar looked so clumsy last night dancing with Ivanito. The band was playing a cha-cha-cha, and Pilar moved jerkily, off the beat, sloppy and distracted. She dances like an American. Ivanito, though, is a wonderful dancer. His hips shift evenly, and his feet keep precise time to the music. He glides through his turns as if he were ice-skating.

  When Lourdes finally danced with her nephew, she felt beholden to the congas, to a powerful longing to dance. Her body remembered what her mind had forgotten. Suddenly, she wanted to show her daughter the artistry of true dancing. Lourdes exaggerated her steps, flawless and lilting, teasing the rhythm seductively. She held the notes in her hips and her thighs, in the graceful arch of her back. Ivanito intuited her movements, dipping her with such reluctant fluidity that the music ached and blossomed around them. The crowd gradually pulled back to watch their unlikely elegance. Then someone clapped, and in an instant the room rumbled with applause as Lourdes spun and spun and spun across the polished dance floor.

  This morning, Ivanito told Lourdes that dancing with her had reminded him of his mother. He’d meant it as a compliment, but his words ruined the spell of the dance for her, ruined its very memory. But Lourdes said nothing. Yesterday was Ivanito’s birthday. He is thirteen years old. What, Lourdes asks herself, does the boy have to look forward to in this country?

  Lourdes is driving along the north highway to Varadero in the black Oldsmobile she rented from a neighbor. She admires the sea, a calm, brilliant turquoise to her left, and the familiar pattern of royal palms dotting the landscape. She remembers the summer vacation she spent crisscrossing the island with her father, stopping in the plazas and main streets of every town and village from here to Guantánamo. He used to straighten his tie and adjust the angle of his hat in the rearview mirror before pulling his sample fans and electric brooms from the trunk. Lourdes waited patiently for him in the front seat, and each time he returned with an order she’d throw her arms around him and kiss him on the cheek. Her father would blush with pleasure.

  Lourdes drives through the city of Matanzas along its famous bay. It was her favorite stopover that summer because of the Bellamar caves nearby. It seemed the coolest, most magical place on the island. Her wandering eye would transform the stalagmites and stalactites into sculptures of hanging alligators, witches’ claws, or the face of her hated history teacher.

  As she reaches the narrow Hicacos peninsula, Lourdes searches for the outline of the Hotel Internacional at the far end of Varadero Beach. She and her husband had spent their honeymoon at the hotel. She remembers the men in white tuxedos, the women encased in their strapless gowns, rubies fastened to their ears. There were no views of the moon or the peninsula of powdery sand from the gambling rooms, only the lights of the chandeliers enticing them to stay. One night, Lourdes won six hundred dollars at the roulette table.

  Today, the town is fallen to pieces. Only the du Pont mansion has been somewhat maintained. Lourdes wishes Ivanito were with her so she could point out the opulence—the nine-hole golf course, the landing dock for the seaplane, the Carrara marble floors. It’s impossible, Lourdes thinks, for failure to argue with success.

  She climbs to the top-floor ballroom, with its panoramic view of the bay. The shadowed waters conceal a coral reef offshore. Lourdes remembers paddling gently over the reefs with Rufino the day after their wedding night. Once the first pain subsided, it was as if a rainstorm were falling between her legs, flooding her entire body. She would have willingly drowned.

  It’s an hour south to the Puente finca. The red clay earth reminds Lourdes of Rufino’s mud-caked overalls. He used to arrive late to their accounting class with singular excuses—a cow’s lack of appetite, the difficult birth of two foals. Their teacher, a delicate Jesuit with forgiving eyes, would simply point him to a seat in the back row.

  Lourdes learned to appreciate Rufino’s humble ways. He was the opposite of his flashy brothers, who drove Cadillac convertibles and fraternized with the shapely waitresses and cigarette girls employed at their father’s casinos. Rufino’s mother, Doña Zaida, encouraged her sons’ philandering. As long as her sons didn’t get too serious about any one girl, they belonged to her.

  When Doña Zaida realized she couldn’t dissuade Rufino from marrying Lourdes, she took control of the wedding instead. Lourdes remembers the day Doña Zaida appeared at the little brick-and-cement house in her chauffeured limousine.

  “My dear Celia, I cannot have my son getting married at a picnic on the beach,” Doña Zaida patiently explained, as if Lourdes’s mother were an imbecile. “After all, we have a reputation to uphold in the capital.”

  After Lourdes and Rufino got married, his brothers followed in quick succession, marrying pretty, dull-eyed girls from families approved by Doña Zaida herself. Doña Zaida had decided she couldn’t risk another Lourdes in the family.

  Lourdes turns up the main driveway of the old ranch. She recognizes the poinciana at the gate. In two months, it will be ablaze with purplish pink blossoms. She walks behind the villa to the patio. The pool is filled with concrete, the fountain is dry. A redheaded woman pushes another in a wheelchair. Both wear nylon robes. They execute a precise rectangle then switch places and repeat the maneuver.

  A blind man sits alone on the rim of the fountain. His bleeding fingers pick absently at the tiles. His blank eyes appear fixed on the women and their unerring choreography.

  Lourdes’s thoughts come sniffing like underfed dogs. She remembers the night the lightning hit the royal palm, how the birds circled in confusion before scattering north.

  She lost her second child in this place. A baby boy. A boy she would have named Jorge, after her father. A boy, Lourdes recalls, a boy in a soft clot of blood at her feet.

  She remembers a story she read once about Guam, about how brown snakes were introduced by Americans. The snakes strangled the native birds one by one. They ate the eggs from the nests until the jungle had no voice.

  What she fears most is this: that her rape, her baby’s death were absorbed quietly by the earth, that they are ultimately no more meaningful than falling leaves on an autumn day. She hungers for a violence of nature, terrible and permanent, to record the evil. Nothing less would satisfy her.

  Lourdes circles back to the front of the villa on unsteady legs. The sculpted mahogany doors have been replaced by unvarnished plywood. She follows a nurse across the portal into the bare foyer. Lourdes studies the checkered linoleum, longs to dig for her bones like a dog, cl
aim them from the black-hooded earth, the scraping blade.

  A petite nurse stands before Lourdes, tilting her head like a parakeet. There’s a minute scar on her cheek.

  “May I help you?” she asks, startled by Lourdes’s drifting eye.

  But Lourdes cannot answer.

  Ivanito

  Everything is mixed up, as if parts of me are turning in different directions at once. I wake up exhausted, not knowing why, as though I’m working hard in my sleep, moving my thoughts like so many stones in the dark.

  Last night I dreamt I visited my sisters at their boarding school and they took me horseback riding in the woods. It had just rained and the horses gleamed in the wet air. I rode with one hand on the pommel and the other goading my horse with a switch. We came upon a clearing where other horses were grazing. I galloped hard, inciting a stampede. I galloped like a thunderstorm across the field and disappeared into the woods on the other side. I didn’t know where I was going, only that I must not stop.

  I talk and talk to my cousin Pilar late at night on the beach. I tell her about Mom’s devotions, about the summer of coconuts and how we’d spoken in green. I tell her about my Russian teacher, Mr. Mikoyan, and what the boys at school said, and about the time I saw my father with the black-masked whore, his sex hard with purple veins. I tell her about Mom’s funeral, and how the colors all melted together like on summer days, and the radio on Abuela’s doorstep addressed to me. I tell her about the Wolfman. I didn’t know I had so much to say.

  Pilar has this book, a Chinese oracle, that predicts the future. Today, she gathers everyone in the living room and encourages each of us to ask it a question. Luz and Milagro exchange a glance that says, “Oh no, not another loca in the family!” and refuse to ask anything. They’ve been oddly subdued around Tía Lourdes and Pilar, and barely speak to them, or to me. I’m glad they’re going back to boarding school tomorrow. I don’t like the way they follow me with their eyes, indicting me, as if being close to Pilar or Tía will somehow contaminate me.

  Pilar has tried to talk to the twins, but they answer her in monosyllables. Their world is a tight sealed box. Luz and Milagro are afraid of letting anyone inside. They’re afraid of Pilar’s curiosity as if it were a stick of dynamite that could blow apart their lives. I know as long as they have each other they’ll survive. But what about me?

  I think about a suitable question for the I Ching, but I’m too afraid to ask what I really want to know. Tía Lourdes doesn’t want to ask anything at first, calling it “Chinese mumbo-jumbo,” but she finally gives in.

  “Will I see justice done?” Tía demands angrily, as if the oracle will betray her. But then she looks at me kindly, slaps the three coins back and forth between her hands like a piece of dough, and throws them on the table.

  Tía Lourdes has taken a special liking to me since we danced that first night at the hotel. She watches me when she thinks I’m not looking and hugs me tightly for no reason. Tía seems concerned that I spend so much time with Pilar, and finds excuses to pull me away. “Show me the new dances, Ivanito!” she coaxes. Or “Come here, Ivanito, I have a surprise for you!” She buys me treats at the tourist shop—chocolate bars with hazelnuts, German swimming trunks, and more underwear than I could possibly use. I tell her it’s too much, that she shouldn’t spend her money this way, but she insists, pressing the gifts into my arms. “You’re my sweet boy, Ivanito. You deserve this,” she says and kisses me again and again.

  Tía tells me stories about America, things she thinks I’d like to hear. Like the farm boy who grew up to be a billionaire or the paperboy who now has a dozen satellites in space. “Anything is possible if you work hard enough, mi hijito.” Tía says she plans to open hundreds of bakeries from coast to coast. She wants to be rich, like her idol du Pont, but she needs help. I tell her I want to be a translator for world leaders, that I speak good Russian, but I don’t think she hears me. Instead, Tía looks right through me and describes a Christmas show at Rockefeller Center with an indoor parade of camels. I don’t want to hurt her feelings so I say nothing more.

  Pilar runs her finger up and down the Chinese chart, interpreting the symbols, then she shakes her head warily and begins to read. She tells Tía Lourdes that “the times demand an alignment with the flow of the cosmos,” and that adjustments have to be made before any further action can be taken. “Examine your motives,” Pilar reads from her book, translating into Spanish as she goes along. “They will be the cause of your problems.”

  Tía Lourdes gets upset and says it’s like a horoscope, that it means nothing unless you want it to, that it’s a complete waste of time. “It’s like the newspapers here in Cuba! Not even good for toilet paper!”

  “What about you, Abuela?” Pilar says, ignoring her mother. “You can ask it whatever you want. You can ask about your future.”

  Abuela Celia considers this for a moment, then looks up, smiling. I haven’t seen her so happy since before Mom died. She and Pilar sit for hours on the wicker swing, passing the afternoons. Pilar is painting our grandmother’s portrait. She says she’s used up most of her blue already, and has to mix in other colors to make it last. I’m worried about what will happen after she leaves. Abuela keeps saying, “Everything will be better now that Pilar is here,” even though she knows Pilar and Tía will be in Cuba only a week. Before my cousin arrived, I thought my grandmother would die soon. But Pilar has brought her back to life.

  “Should I give myself to passion?” Abuela asks, surprising everyone.

  But the message is uncertain. Pilar says the pattern of coins reveals something called “Ta Kuo,” critical mass. She says it’s like having a piece of wood suspended between two chairs, but piled in the middle with too many heavy objects. The pressure will eventually break it. “You may have to act alone and firmly during the onslaught of these weighted times,” Pilar reads hesitantly.

  Abuela doesn’t seem to mind, though, and goes off to take a nap.

  Afterward, Pilar pulls me aside and asks me to take her to Herminia Delgado’s house. She says she wants to learn the truth about my mother, to learn the truth about herself.

  “I need to know more than you can tell me, Ivanito,” she explains.

  I’ve never actually been to Herminia’s house, but everyone in town knows where she lives. It’s a white house with red shutters, and has a giant acacia in the front yard. Herminia welcomes Pilar and me as if she’s been expecting us, and serves us guayaba juice in tall glasses. It’s peaceful inside. There are velvet pillows with tassels on the sofa and a ceiling fan that cools us.

  Herminia settles down next to us and holds Pilar’s hands in hers. She’s wearing a turban layered high on her head, and she sits very straight. A bunch of red and white beaded necklaces click together in her lap as she speaks.

  We listen to stories about my mother as a child, about her marriages to my father and to other men, about the secret ceremonies of her religion and, because Pilar insists on every detail, about my mother’s final rite, and her last months on Palmas Street.

  When she finishes, Herminia closes her eyes for a moment, then guides Pilar to a back room lit with candles. There’s an ebony statue of a female saint in the corner, and a tureen on an altar crowded with apples and bananas and dishes of offerings I can’t identify.

  “Bienvenida, hija,” Herminia says and embraces Pilar. Then she draws me to them, and I breathe in the sweet, weary fragrance of my mother.

  Pilar

  “So tell me how you want to be remembered,” I tease Abuela Celia. It’s very early in the morning and the light is a transparent blue. “I can paint you any way you like.”

  “You don’t have to do that, hija. I just want to sit here with you.” She settles into her wicker swing and pats the cushion by her thigh. Abuela is wearing her faded jade housedress and a brand-new pair of sneakers with thick cotton socks. Suddenly she leans toward me. “Did you say any way I like?”

  “Sí, Abuela. You name it.”

 
; “Even younger? Much younger?”

  “Or older, if you prefer.” I laugh. She laughs, too, and her drop pearl earrings dance from her lobes.

  “Well, I’ve always envisioned myself in a flared red skirt like the flamenco dancers wear. Maybe with a few carnations.”

  “Red ones?”

  “Yes, red ones. Many red ones.”

  “Anything else?” I joke around, feigning a flamenco. But Abuela doesn’t laugh. There’s a sadness in her expression tempered by hope.

  “Are you going to stay with me, Pilar? Are you going to stay with me this time?”

  *

  I paint a series of watercolor sketches of my grandmother. I’m out of practice, though. Abstract painting is more up my alley. I feel more comfortable with it, more directly connected to my emotions. In a few of the sketches, I paint Abuela Celia just the way she wants—dancing flamenco with whirling red skirts and castanets and a tight satin bodice. Abuela likes these paintings best, and even ventures a few suggestions. “Can’t you make my hair a little darker, Pilar? My waist a little more slender? Por Dios, I look like an old woman!”

  Mostly, though, I paint her in blue. Until I returned to Cuba, I never realized how many blues exist. The aquamarines near the shoreline, the azures of deeper waters, the eggshell blues beneath by grandmother’s eyes, the fragile indigos tracking her hands. There’s a blue, too, in the curves of the palms, and the edges of the words we speak, a blue tinge to the sand and the seashells and the plump gulls on the beach. The mole by Abuela’s mouth is also blue, a vanishing blue.