***
In her bedroom later that night, among the dolls and books of her youth, Luis and Margarita pressed their aging bodies together, kissing very quietly, touching and trying not to sigh too loud, as they were aware, like anxious teenagers, that her mother’s bedroom was three doors away, the house otherwise so quiet that all they could hear besides their own hushed breathing and moans was the tick-tock of a pendulum clock in the parlor, the chirping of cicadas in the fields, the occasional slapping shut of a barn door in the wind, and the skitter of mice in the ceiling boards. And while Luis tried to be as quiet as possible, when he entered Margarita, in the slow and dense immersion of his still lively sex inside her he had moaned and told her, “Oh, Margarita, you feel as moist and delicious as the first time we ever went to bed.” And Luis, who found in the act of love a release from his worldly troubles, turned and twisted around inside her, shaking the bed and making the floors creak. Even though they shared a hundred and thirty-nine years of life between them, they were soon caught up in the revelries of mutual pleasure and affection, and their age seemed pointless. They were as frolicsome as young newlyweds, each trembling, each perspiring and loving the taste of the other’s sweat and tongue and all the bodily caresses that filled the room at a certain moment with the muffled cries of love.
That night, Mariela was vaguely aware that some amorous mischief was taking place down the hall. She had been reading some of her writing when at one in the morning she heard a cry of pleasure. Of course she knew what they were doing in Margarita’s bedroom, and that was fine—what did she care? There was something about Luis’s suffering that reminded her of the sufferings of her own father, and perhaps because of that, she found herself blessing their union, for in her ripe age, and despite the crucifix she always wore around her neck, she had no objections to those simple moments of earthly happiness that were a salve to the pains and troubles of this world.
***
Eighty-seven years old and delighted, Mariela Montez spent a morning dressing in a white gown, too large now for her withered body. She was to pose in the downstairs parlor of her house in Cobbleton for her photographer son, who had come in from California, tanned and fit and happy—there were rumors that he was again in love—and although she noticed that he now walked with a slight limp, he was ever attentive and courteous.
Margarita threw a party for her mother. The Chanteuses arrived in Cobbleton with Gloria; then came Irene, Patricia, and their families; Sarah from Philadelphia with her husband; Violeta and her saintly spouse and their children; Veronica alone; Marta and Carmen and their husbands. They all converged on the house to wish their mother another happy birthday.
Only Helen and her husband—off on a tour of the South of France—and Isabel, still in Cuba, were unable to attend.
Much activity around her—peals of laughter—and the old woman, who’d let her hair go white, sitting down among them.
She only spoke in Spanish now—her faculty for the English language having slipped away from her. That was unfortunate. At times she could barely discern what Irene was saying when she’d call out to her grandchildren, “Now be still. Your great-grandmother doesn’t have all the time in the world to wait for you to get settled.” And Mariela would say in response, “Soon I’ll have all the time there is!”—few understanding her.
She would tickle the little ones’ chins, saying, “Now comport yourself with respect for your elders,” but in Spanish, and the children would look at her and smile, not knowing what she’d said. Sometimes just the activity, their scampering, their blowing of bubbles, would make her laugh, and getting up, she’d chase after them. She was so busy trying to catch the tots as they’d run by that she did not hear her son, Emilio, poised behind a large portrait camera, directing everyone to hold still. He had been saying, “Please, everyone, together please, and, Mama, please sit down.”
And then he surprised her by calling out in a deep voice, “Mama, siéntese!” And, as if hearing a command from her father or from her husband, Mariela settled in a chair whose arms were as knobbed and grainy as her own.
***
She’d lived to see the splendid August landing of the American astronauts on the moon some few years before. The event, which found her sitting before the television with a thick-beaded rosary in her hand, had left her transfixed. The cratered surface of the moon, with its bleak valleys and pointy mountains, the nearly somnambulist movement of the astronauts, the camera following them, had led her to believe that around the next corner they would soon come across some splendid city. Waiting for that moment, she kept the television, with its live broadcasts from the moon, on every night, and she was disappointed when no great discovery of civilizations was made. Finally, past midnight and feeling drowsy, she would turn the set off and, with the help of Margarita, go up the stairs to her room.
She imagined, on one of those nights, that a splendid crystal vehicle had drifted down like a soap bubble, nearly weightless, in the yard and that from this glowing craft emerged ethereal creatures. In her dream the men resembled the movie actor Rudolph Valentino, each dressed in a flowing, nearly transparent Roman-style gown, and the ladies of this species, in their similar garb, resembled Rita Hayworth. Floating through the walls like ghosts, they occupied Mariela’s room. They seemed so real that her heart’s beat became erratic and she thought she would have a heart attack. But one of these gentle and benevolent beings, a man gallant in the Old World sense, bowed before Mariela, making a request: “Queen Isabela of our planet, Mars, wishes the pleasure of your company.”
And because Mariela had nothing better to do, she accompanied these beings into their craft; that is, she blinked and found herself looking out the window at countless stars. When she saw the planet Saturn she swore that she could reach out and chip off a piece of its porcelain rim. Then someone said to her, “We know you’re very old, but that doesn’t matter to us. We bless you with all the love of the Lord.” And after coming down through an atmosphere of sunlight, brilliant clouds, and a horizon of palaces about which floated winged beings like butterflies, Mariela Montez found herself being led to the surface of the red planet.
Soon she was dressed in a silvery robe and escorted into the company of Isabela, the queen of that planet. Beautiful and regal, a diamond-and-sapphire crown on her head, her hands covered with rings, she wore a long, flowing gown. Isabela said to her, “Welcome to the planet of happiness.”
There was a grand-feast going on—banquet tables covered with food and a savory aroma in the air, with attendants carrying great flasks of wine, and so much confusion, with so many of these ethereal citizens blowing kisses and cheering her as she walked along the great hall that it suddenly dawned on Mariela that the banquet was in her honor.
Mariela asked a courtier, “Do I curtsy before Her Majesty?” and the courtier had whispered, “Yes.”
So Mariela curtsied, and the great Queen said, “I’ve brought you here to confer on you a medal of honor.”
“Your Highness,” she asked, “why is this honor being granted?”
The Queen laughed. “Because of all the life you have brought into the world.” And after consulting with one of her magistrates, she added, “Because of your beautiful, beautiful poetry. Would you honor Our Presence with a recitation?”
“Oh, yes, with much pleasure.”
And searching through the pocket of her nightgown, into which, hours before, she slipped a verse she had written in the kitchen, she began to read a poem called “Mariposita,” or “Butterfly,” which fell delightfully on the ears of her listeners.
The Queen said, “Well done,” and then taking a scepter, she laid it on the old woman’s shoulder.
“And I say to thee, ye who believe in me, one day you will be in Paradise.”
But Christ had once said that, and His words on the Queen’s lips startled Mariela.
She awakened, thinking such a dream the intrusion of fantasy into the last days of an elderly woman’s life.
>
— Her Final Days, 1972 —
Of all her daughters, it was Margarita who most closely observed her mother in the pasture of old age, where she reigned over a meadow of memory, scattering emotions before her. In those last months, she’d reminded her children that she’d spent a third of her life bringing them into the world, that she was the mother of their sleep, their tears, their doubts. If Margarita and Gloria once boarded a jet to Rome, if they had toured the Roman Forum, dined in the trattorias of the old Jewish quarter, if they kissed the hand of the Pope, it was because she had given them life. If Maria, Olga, and Jacqueline concertized in Monte Carlo, or entertained at a private party aboard a luxury liner for the Count of Avignon, or dined on some Parisian terrace, or had croissants and Swiss marmalades for breakfast, it was owed to her. It was their mother who had given them the planets, the sun, the star-hazed night; it was she who made Halley’s comet appear in 1910, who had given them the opportunity to weep with sadness over the death of Rudolph Valentino in 1926, she who presented them with the glory of a meadow on a lovely spring day. They owed her their very lives, the Cuban woman whom they sometimes tolerated, and loved very much until the end.
When she lapsed into her final days (in 1972) with a cancer, Margarita arranged for all her daughters and her son to come to visit her. (Even Isabel made the journey from Cuba, remaining in Cobbleton for a month, sitting each and every day at her mother’s bedside, but in the end heading reluctantly back to Cuba and her husband.)
All her children came to pay their respects and she opened her eyes to see them. Just lifting her hand to touch the cheek of her son, Emilio, made her wonder why, with so much love in her life, she would now lose it forever. And though she had made her confession and received the sacrament of extreme unction, she opened her eyes one evening and, focusing them on the crucifix on the wall in front of her, saw it turning into the devil, and just then she was stricken with a loss of faith. She became impossible, swearing that the sisters had put her away in a home, fanning away bad spirits, and crying out with terror as she made acquaintance with death.
“Nothing, nothing will come of this,” she repeated so often that even Margarita, thrusting herself on her mother, whispered, “It’s not like that, Mama”—her mother, turning her head one way and the other, saying, “It is so!”
But after three days of torment, the devil, who had put such doubts in her heart, was chased from her bedroom by an angel with a flaming sword, and the light of heaven returned to her life.
In those last moments, she was surrounded by her children, and though she was a little delirious, saying, “I can see Jesus and your father and my mother and father and my sisters waiting for me at the gates of heaven,” she was grateful for their presence.
Emilio, her only son, kissed her and held her hands, for she cried, “Oh, hold me,” and then in a moment Mariela Montez, experiencing some of the same sensations that had come over her while giving birth, felt the soul slipping out of her body into another world.
— A New Life —
With her mother gone, Margarita took it upon herself to put the house in Cobbleton up for sale and spent her days going through its rooms, making decisions as to how she would distribute certain keepsakes, which clothes were to be thrown away and which were to be packed and given to charity, which chairs and tables and cabinets were to be turned over to an antiques dealer and which they, the family, would keep for themselves. Helen wanted one of the cabinets that stood in their mother and father’s bedroom, which resembled a high German altar, with spirals and knobs. The other sisters would choose smaller, less cumbersome items, like old tin boxes, painted jars, framed photographs, mirrors, and crucifixes, but Margarita chose for herself the porch rocking chair that her mother sat on for those many years and the mirror that hung in her bedroom.
Emilio, of course, would get his father’s old camera, the one with which he had traveled to Cuba around the turn of the century. He would put it in his studio window in Los Angeles and later bring it to New York.
Margarita felt odd, cleaning out her mother’s and father’s closets, which over the years had taken on the aromatic scent of firewood, camphor, and perfume, for each piece of her parents’ clothing was redolent of their spirit. And although she packed most of these items into boxes for charity, she could not help setting aside some thing that she would forever identify with them: her father’s derby, one of her mother’s ribbon-brimmed hats; her father’s watch with its cameo of Kate O’Brien, which she had not remembered for years; his pipe; his photography manual, which she would send to Emilio; and that other book which always made her laugh, A Gentleman’s Guide to Love. Then her mother’s hand mirror and her books (En la ciudad de Dios, La vida en el planeta marte, and her Spanish Bible). What surprised her was the amount of memorabilia kept in a black trunk—envelopes marked with her sisters’ names that held first teeth and locks of hair, as well as old rosaries, prayer and communion cards, hair ribbons, school report cards, newspaper clippings from the Cobbleton Chronicle (among them, birth announcements, obituaries—one dating back to 1897 for Katherine O’Brien, another for her father—and wedding announcements from here and there, among them her own to Lester Thompson in 1925). And there were parcels of letters, mainly from Cuba. And in their father’s shed there were boxes of photographs, many of which seemed to her to have some historical value, as they went back to his days in the Spanish-American War, and his photographs of the family over the years, which she would distribute equally among them all.
Her greatest discovery—in a hatbox in the closet—were her mother’s notebooks. She laughed when she found the note her mother had left, in the minuscule and unsteady handwriting of her last days:
My dearest Margarita, I know that you will one day find these little verses and writings of mine and they are yours to keep. When you read them, remember that your mother never had much schooling, but that she always tried very hard. Don’t be harsh with them—for they were good company to me during my life, and as you read them, remember, God willing, that I will be watching you from Paradise.
Love, Mama
Carrying them down into the parlor, she opened a bottle of wine and poured herself a glass, and then sat by the very window, brilliant with light, where her mother would often compose her verses, and she began to read.
Page after page was filled with pleasant musings and poems, many about an imagined afterlife:
I want to be transported to a place where I will hear the hymn of sleeping birds, where streams flow with musical waters, and where I will find majestic trees in whose boughs I will hide my soul.
And sometimes sad, unfinished pieces:
I am surrounded by life and yet feel alone, with open hands begging…
On some pages there were simple observations that harkened back to the days when the house was filled with children:
Margarita spends too much time in front of the mirror, but then, at her age, so did I.
Today Maria started to cry because she wanted an expensive dress from town and Poppy would not buy it for her.
Irene is too fat, but food makes her happy as a mouse.
Poor Gloria, the other day she found a dying bird in the snow and tried to warm the creature by the fireplace, and when the poor shivering thing died in her hands, she cried and put it in a tin box and buried it in the field.
I am worried because Violeta has too much of an eye for men—but I am praying to God that she will preserve her virginity for marriage.
My husband was drunk today, but I said nothing to him, the man works so hard…
Then this, among many others, in an old ledger-style book, dating back to 1902–3:
I don’t know very much about my husband’s life with his poor sister, Caterina. But in a dream I believe I saw her. She was standing in the hall outside our bedroom, a beautiful woman with long, curly red hair, but with much sadness in her eyes, for she had left this world and knew it. She was wearing a white dress that fell to the floo
r, with frilled butterfly sleeves… How lovely she seemed and yet so sad. I knew that she meant me no harm, that she was just lonely. And because I was not afraid, I moved toward her, and she said to me, smiling, “I am happy that my brother has found so good a woman,” and that was all. And then she passed back into the shadows. I thanked her the next day by walking to the cemetery, where I placed some flowers on her grave, the poor woman.
Reading late into the night, she found narratives, among them one that filled nearly half a notebook, called “The Birth of My Daughter Margarita at Sea,” dating back to 1902, and this, written sometime during the past several years, which she had titled “Our Love,” a brief passage that she had tried to cross out but that was still legible:
My dear husband: Although you are not here, I woke this morning remembering the day, so long ago, that we set out on our honeymoon. My papa and mama and the others had seen us off as we made our way east to that little house by the sea. Do you renumber how the world looked that day, my love? In the fields everywhere were wildflowers and we were so happy that we would stop the carriage, picking so many that they were heavy and sweet-scented in my arms—but I held them close to my breast because they were the blossoms of our love; and I remembered that they were our companions on that day when we finally entered the house by the sea and that we were both so nervous that you closed the shutters because the sun was too bright, and perhaps out of humility and respect for me, because even though we had kissed the night before, in my moodiness I had not allowed you to go any further. And yet thinking about your sadness that night I remembered how you slept in your evening clothes, and how you had pressed against me, sighing, and how the touch of your body against mine left sweat between my virgins thighs. But that next day I was as prepared and ready as a young bride could be, and in the half light of the room, we both began to undress and for the first time we touched each other with our nakedness. Do you remember, my husband, how I passed my hand from your lips and down to your chest and below, feeling much surprise, for I had never touched a man before? I remember closing my eyes and taking a deep breath because your flesh was long and hot—and do you remember then that I did not care if we could see each other and I opened the shutters and the room filled with light and the flowers burned with color? Then we fell on the bed kissing and my breasts began to swell from your kisses, and because you were so shy and respectful of me, I began to play a game, examining your masculinity like a doctor—until you could not control yourself and you opened me up with a thrust that left a flower of my blood on the sheet, and while at first I cried in your arms, when you pulled away from me I wanted you back inside me, and to show you I touched myself there and rolled my fingers around my femininity until I was very wide and then you came back into me, and instead of crying I felt as happy as a young bride could feel. I was thinking about that this morning, my love; and so I send you these thoughts—the thoughts of una viejita who spends her days thinking about you and awaiting our reunion in Paradise.
The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien Page 46