Margarita, blushing, cried out: “Mama!”
— Her Own New Life —
Some months later, when much had been cleared away, a young newlywed couple, out to start their lives together, met with Margarita a second time and decided to buy the house for some twenty thousand dollars. A few other prospective buyers, whom Margarita did not particularly like, also came by, and for a time Irene and her husband considered moving in, but in the end they decided to remain in their happy home. So, seventy years old and retired from high school, Margarita passed one sad afternoon moving through the rooms of that house, remembering the happy past she and the family shared there. Her own new life was to begin now. Luis, her Cuban love, had driven down with a U-haul to bring Margarita and her possessions to his rented house in the town of New Elm, Connecticut.
These were days of new love for the oldest of the sisters. In Margarita, Luis would always find refuge from the troubles of his life and he treated her with the purest affection. Over the years he’d managed to bring some members of his family out of Cuba—a younger brother and his wife and children, now settled in Miami—and while they were working and would be able to help bring other relations to the States, Luis, ever concerned and a little bitter, kept toiling all the more toward that end. Retired from General Motors, he’d gotten himself a part-time job at one of the local garages, its owner a Cuban who had come to the States in the 1950s. Luis would show up at the garage five days a week, and on the weekends, instead of relaxing, he’d moonlight as a mechanic at the local Greyhound depot. He was rarely at home except in the evenings and was often so exhausted that, after eating his dinner, he would sit in front of the television watching old Hollywood movies until he began to fall asleep and then Margarita would help him off with his clothes and into bed, where suddenly, after an hour or so, despite his exhaustion, his eyes would pop open, his head filled with worries for his family and with the strangeness of his new life, which he never really liked.
He would open Margarita’s gown, smothering her with his body. He was still virile enough that these sessions of love would last for a long time, and after they’d both been satisfied, he would feel his tiredness again and drift off, sleeping for another twenty minutes before his eyes would pop open again and he would plant more kisses on her body. Then he usually remained awake, staring at the ceiling light and sighing.
As he got up for work, putting on his blue service-station coveralls, Margarita would prepare a breakfast of eggs, bacon and sausage, and fried potatoes, and while watching him eat, she would speak cheerfully about the prospects for their future. Now that they were finally together, in their waning years, it was time for them to enjoy life. “Luis, my love, why don’t we go back to Spain for a little vacation?”
“Yes, yes, but what will I do for money? It doesn’t come out of the air.”
“I have money, Luis. Poppy left us all with money” (each of his children, after Mariela’s death, received seventeen thousand dollars). “And I’ve got my Social Security and the pension from the high school, and I can always go back to work.”
“Margarita, you’re not a young girl anymore.”
“No? When I’m with you, I feel very young.”
“That’s not how the world works, my love.”
“But I would pay for you—please let’s do something—we have to do something before you get too pent up with your worries.”
“We’ll see, my darling.”
And wearily, after breakfast, he’d kiss her on the forehead and make his way out of the house, a lunch box tucked under his arm.
***
Though the political situation in Cuba had taken over more and more of his life, to Margarita the fate of the island seemed most distant. But for Luis it always loomed as a most pressing issue. Watching the evening news reports that sometimes spoke admiringly of the “socialist experiment” to the south, he would brood about how Castro had taken in the “Eastern Establishment liberals.” He was unable to understand why the American soldiers stationed in Guantánamo, a base the Americans procured from Cuba in the first days of the Cuban republic—so that the Americans could intercede in Cuban affairs if necessary, as per the Platt Amendment—did not simply spill over into the surrounding country, retaking Cuba for the principles of freedom. That’s why he cursed the Vietnam War, even though the Americans were fighting against the Communists—why, if they had only put half their efforts into Cuba, he and Margarita would be sitting on the terrace of his house in La Regla, sipping daiquiris, he’d say.
His Cuban friends and their wives were much the same way, coming to the house on Sundays, when he took the afternoon off, for a joyous meal, which, however, too often for Margarita’s taste, turned into a series of heated arguments about “what can be done,” voices raised in the kitchen, and by the evening’s end, poor Luis tied up in knots. And it surprised her, for the suave, kindly, and genteel man she first met in Spain in her younger days had changed.
She felt a great sympathy for him. She loved him, but heaven help her if, for example, she happened to mention her sister Isabel’s calmness about the situation. Isabel remained in the house in Santiago, living humbly but comfortably enough with her husband, and while she harbored no great love for the new Cuba, her daily life, spent mainly in her house, by her husband’s side, looking after the man—with his arteries layered with fat—had never really changed. And while in letters Isabel lamented the long separation from her wonderful family in America, and sometimes alluded to the discomforts of rationing and the intrusiveness of her neighbors—she and her husband always believed that everyone was being watched—she never talked about leaving, as long as her husband was alive. She did, however, miss her children. Her daughter had long ago married and moved to Havana, and from there, after the revolution, to San Juan, Puerto Rico, where her husband worked for a bank. One son, an engineer, went to work in Chile, and the second boy, a lawyer, was now living with his own family in Ft. Lauderdale. (On her way back to Cuba after their mother’s funeral, Isabel stopped off to visit him and to see her grandchildren, and she was quite pleased with his affluence and with the serenity and love of his family, a life she saw as happy.)
It did not help that Luis, who’d once lorded over several hundred workers, spent hours alongside a fellow he did not like, whom he referred to as “un negro americano.” The dispatcher at the Greyhound depot was an elderly, good-natured black man with whom he got along well enough, but one of the other mechanics, a fellow named Calvin, seemed too free-spirited for Luis’s taste. He’d turn up at work with a conk hairdo, loved to tune in the blues station on the radio, and seemed quite happy-go-lucky, a posture that struck Luis as indolent. (And on their occasional trips to visit with the sisters in New York, mainly during holidays, he was always astounded by what he perceived as the arrogance of New York blacks, who, in his eyes, were well off and did not know what suffering was really like.) A single moment of disrespect—Calvin always made him angry by calling him Ace—“My name is Mr. Vasquez!”—would set him off, and he would come home and complain for hours about the humiliation of his days.
So many things made him angry that Margarita would take him aside and say, “Luis, why are you always working yourself into such a state? It’s not worth it. People are the way they are, and there is really nothing we can do about it. If you don’t like that job, then leave it. I’ll take care of us. Otherwise, you’ll end up having a heart attack, and I don’t want that for you, my love.”
In his absence she kept busy. She read, and passed hours with a Spanish-language dictionary, translating the poems from her mother’s notebooks, which she read a half dozen times, and made copies in English for the sisters who never learned her mother’s language, so they would know a little more about their mother’s heart. And after a time she went to the local high school and, speaking of her experience as a Spanish teacher in Cobbleton, got herself a few hours of work tutoring kids at the school, and spent her Saturdays conducting a special class in Eng
lish for children who were the sons and daughters of recent Spanish-speaking immigrants from all over: Cubans, Mexicans, Colombians, Dominicans—work, she’d recall, that filled her heart with special sweetness and pride. In Cobbleton, most of her students had been the sons and daughters of American farmers and factory and railroad workers, but these kids, fresh from their respective countries, not only invoked her own mother’s experience but reminded her of her own childhood, when the music of her mother’s language was lost in the daily buzz of English. For several years, that had made her feel a certain confusion, for there were few others like herself then. And there they would sit, attentive and respectful—a new bloom of a generation that she took much pleasure in helping. (And because so many of them were poor, she turned the end of these classes into something of a weekly party, so they would have something to look forward to besides their studies, Miss Montez, as she called herself, bringing in sandwiches and soda and cookies, and, in the season of Christmas, presents—board games and books and, for the poorest of the poor, a new sweater or scarf to protect them from the wintry cold.)
In the evenings, while waiting for Luis, she would sometimes read their simply written compositions about their countries, all so beautiful, even Cuba, in the memory of children. But what was Cuba, she would ask of herself, but a conduit to some pleasant memories, a language, for she was an American. She’d imagine what Cuba must have meant to the others in her family. For Isabel, of course, it was her first true love, and for Maria, Olga, and Jacqueline, it was one of their sources, these women having spent more time in places like London and Paris than in Cuba. For Helen, it was as far away as China, for, apart from a visit in the fifties to a special meeting of advertisers at the Havana Yacht Club, it had existed mainly as a sum of phrases uttered by her mother—a crocodile-shaped land on the map, sometimes alluded to, because of the revolution, in newspapers and on television. What could Cuba mean to her other sisters? For Irene, she thought it definitely boiled down to the delicious cuisine, for she loved fried plátanos and could make a good roast pork. To Sarah and her husband, Rafael, in Philadelphia, who’d raised their daughters to be good citizens, or to Patricia, with her folksy husband out in Pennsylvania, or to Veronica in Illinois—her accent in English having gotten twangy over the years—what could it have been but a detail from their parents’ lives? And what of the others? To Marta and Carmen in Anaheim; Violeta, reverent in Baltimore; and Gloria, with her Macy’s job in New York? A source of pride, distant and far removed, perhaps—that was all.
But then she thought of her former movie-actor brother, Emilio, out in Los Angeles. What was it that he, then forty-seven years old, told her in the days after their mother died?
“I’ll learn some of that Spanish, one way or the other.”
Walking a line that placed the emotional above the political, Margarita supported Luis, for all his troubles. Still, the sweet idyll of their lives together seemed to have passed. Reluctantly, she began to regard him with caution and distance; it was hard to be around him when he was poisoning himself with bitterness. One evening, she suggested that they drive over to Hartford, where there was a Cuban psychiatrist, from whom he might seek counsel. But that only made him angrier.
“You think I’m crazy, don’t you? But you don’t know what I’m feeling, like I have nothing? You’re Cuban, but only half Cuban by blood, and even though that’s better than not being Cuban at all, you don’t know what it’s like for me. So I would thank you to leave me alone with my thoughts, because right now they are keeping this crazy bird alive.”
During the winters of their years together, they liked to go to the movies and then drive over to Hartford to a restaurant run by Cubans, where they would have a great feast, gorging themselves and drinking wine and laughing with the owners, who were a sturdy and cheerful lot. But with time he simply preferred to stay home, fed up with the snow and the life of that New England town, the only events of interest to him being boxing matches and phone calls to family and friends in Florida, the sameness of the Cuban situation making him more tense with each passing day. She would caress him and say, “My sweet darling, if I could change everything for you, I would.” And that would mean something to him, because for a moment he would seem calmer, and they would retire like young lovers to bed.
She devised other strategies. One day, while driving to town to buy groceries, she noticed a new shop next to the drugstore, the Peace and Love Herbal Emporium, whose owners were hippies. She went in, finding them most amusing and gentle, and she liked the sweet incense that filled their shop and the harmonious Nepalese chimes that tinkled musically whenever the door opened. In their eyes, it seemed to her, was an impassioned serenity, as if they were perpetually looking up into the sky on a beautiful spring day. Examining their shelves filled with bins of organic grains, cereals, and nuts, she turned to a rack of books on Yogic treatment and spiritual healing, and peered at the labels of apothecary jars filled with herbs and roots, which the gentle owner said were good for a soothing, soul-cleansing bath.
And so Margarita bought some tea and a pound of an herb mixture that seemed to consist of flower buds, seedlings, and butterfly wings.
That night, when Luis came home from work, she set about to calm him. She made him a cup of orange-flavored tea with a teaspoon of honey and three ounces of rum, and she drew him a hot bath into which she poured the herbal concoction. Skeptical but amused, Luis lowered himself into the tub and found that the waters indeed seemed soothing, He liked the scent of the herbs. “Reminds me of the market in Havana,” he said. Dressed in a robe, she knelt on a cushion before the tub and with a sea sponge began to wipe his body; after a while, he leaned back and closed his eyes, his tension leaving him. And mischievous still, she began to caress him until his penis, engorged and livid, rose up out of the water, and in a moment he was out of the tub, dripping water, a portion of his aged, still virile anatomy bobbing in the air.
In the bedroom of that house, they made love for the first time in months, and in the peacefulness of their embrace, they laughed and recounted memories of passion in Spain, in Miami, in Cobbleton. Snow was falling, and it seemed that his physical release calmed him. He told her that night, “Maybe I have gotten too worked up about things, but today was a good day for me, I was able to send some money to my brother in Miami. But perhaps what we should do now, my love, is look again to the future, maybe go to Spain for a little vacation in the spring. You know, Andalusia is the most beautiful in May.”
“You want to?”
“Yes.”
When he fell asleep, she rested her head against the fleecy white hair of his chest, listening to his heartbeat. Now and then she caressed him, and then sleep came to her, too. But when she awakened in the middle of the night, she again laid her head on his chest, and instead of that loud heartbeat, there was the odd silence of a body in complete and, perhaps, eternal repose.
— In Her Regal Old Age, 1987 —
In the years before she entered her regal old age, Margarita Montez O’Brien liked so much to work with the children of the town that, after Luis’s death, she rented another house and remained in New Elm, Connecticut. For twelve years she worked as a Spanish tutor and a teacher of English, until the school board decided that Margarita, well into her eighties, was too old to continue. Then, in 1987, she found a new profession, spending her days in the public-minded and solitary work of a senior-citizen librarian. Her hair had turned white, but she dyed it black. Her breasts seemed pouty with stretch marks, and one day she noticed for the first time in her life, while standing naked before her bedroom mirror, the faint tremor of her breathing diaphragm, so thin was the surface of her translucent skin.
But sometimes she liked to think that she was quite young still—a delusion, she would later tell herself over a glass of wine or while having the dreams of the very old. She’d sit before a vanity that dated back to her marriage, stroking with a cherry-wood, black-bristled brush the hair which fell down past her shoulde
rs, and with her head held at a certain angle, skin stretched tight, the lines of facial antiquity lifted, she resembled for a moment the Margarita of her youth.
During her visit to Cuba in 1932, her grandmother Doña Maria had seemed to her, a young woman, as old as the moon itself—and yet at that time her grandmother couldn’t have been more than seventy-five. And here was Margarita, past eighty, in spritely good health, though her hands sometimes shook. Her alertness would startle her when the sight of a sparrow alighting on a fence or a beautiful piece of music, say Bach or Mozart, or something upbeat from the easy-listening station on the radio still seemed so new. In fact, each of her days was spent navigating through her feelings of permanence in this world, as she had lived so long that it seemed as if the threads of life would hold forever. Her doctor, to whom she made twice-yearly visits, would examine her and declare, “You have the health of a much younger woman,” and she, having what she considered the powdery recesses of her interior, would usually blush. She could not imagine taking leave of the world, though she knew it was inevitable; but when she considered this, she found it impossible to think the outcome dark, her childhood dreams of angelic flight striking her as a very great possibility.
The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien Page 47