She remembers something a santera told her nearly forty years ago, when she had decided to die: “Miss Celia, there’s a wet landscape in your palm.” And it was true. She had lived all these years by the sea until she knew its every definition of blue.
Celia turns toward the shore. The light is unbearably bright on the porch. The wicker swing hangs from two rusted chains. The stripes on the cushions have dulled to gray as if the color made no difference at all. It seems to Celia that another woman entirely sat for years on those weathered cushions, drawn by the pull of the tides. She remembers the painful transitions to spring, the sea grapes and the rains, her skin a cicatrix.
She and Jorge moved to their house in the spring of 1937. Her husband bought her an upright walnut piano and set it by an arched window with a view of the sea. He stocked it with her music workbooks and sheaves of invigorating Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, and a selection of Chopin. “Keep her away from Debussy,” she overheard the doctors warn him. They feared that the Frenchman’s restless style might compel her to rashness, but Celia hid her music to La Soirée dans Grenade and played it incessantly while Jorge traveled.
Celia hears the music now, pressing from beneath the waves. The water laps at her throat. She arches her spine until she floats on her back, straining to hear the notes of the Alhambra at midnight. She is waiting in a flowered shawl by the fountain for her lover, her Spanish lover, the lover before Jorge, and her hair is twisted with high combs. They retreat to the mossy riverbank and make love under the watchful poplars. The air is fragrant with jasmine and myrtle and citrus.
A cool wind stirs Celia from her dream. She stretches her legs but she cannot touch the sandy bottom. Her arms are heavy, sodden as porous wood after a storm. She has lost her shoes. A sudden wave engulfs her, and for a moment Celia is tempted to relax and drop. Instead, she swims clumsily, steadily toward shore, sunk low like an overladen boat. Celia concentrates on the palms tossing their headdresses in the sky. Their messages jump from tree to tree with stolen electricity. No one but me, she thinks, is guarding the coast tonight.
Celia peels Jorge’s letter from her housedress pocket and holds it in the air to dry. She walks back to the porch and waits for the fishermen, for daylight.
Felicia del Pino
Felicia del Pino, her head a spiky anarchy of miniature pink rollers, pounds the horn of her 1952 De Soto as she pulls up to the little house by the sea. It is 7:43 A.M. and she has made the seventeen-mile journey from Havana to Santa Teresa del Mar in thirty-four minutes. Felicia screams for her mother, throws herself onto the backseat and shoulders open the car’s only working door. Then she flies past the rows of gangly bird of paradise, past the pawpaw tree with ripening fruit, and loses a sandal taking the three front steps in an inelegant leap.
“I know already,” Celia says, rocking gently in her wicker swing on the porch. Felicia collapses on her mother’s lap, sending the swing lurching crazily, and wails to the heavens.
“He was here last night.” Celia grips the wicker armrests as if the entire swing would fly off of its own accord.
“Who?” Felicia demands.
“Your father, he came to say good-bye.”
Felicia abruptly stops her lament and stands up. Her pale yellow stretch shorts slide into the crease of her fleshy buttocks.
“You mean he was in the neighborhood and didn’t even stop by?” She is pacing now, pushing a fist into her palm.
“Felicia, it was not a social visit.”
“But he’s been in New York four years! The least he could have done was say good-bye to me and the children!”
“What did your sister say?” Celia asks, ignoring her daughter’s outburst.
“The nuns called her at the bakery this morning. They said Papi rose to heaven on tongues of fire. Lourdes was very upset. She’s convinced it’s a resurrection.”
Ivanito stretches his arms around his mother’s plump thighs. Felicia, her face softening, looks down at her son. “Your grandfather died today, Ivanito. I know you don’t remember him but he loved you very much.”
“What happened to Abuela?” Ivanito asks.
Felicia turns to her mother as if seeing her for the first time. Seaweed clings to her skull like a lethal plant. She is barefoot and her skin, encrusted with sand, is tinged a faint blue. Her legs are cold and hard as marble.
“I went for a swim,” Celia says irritably.
“With your clothes on?” Felicia tugs on her mother’s damp sleeve.
“Yes, Felicia, with my clothes on.” The edge in Celia’s voice would end any conversation save with her daughter. “Now, listen to me. I want you to send a telegram to your brother.”
Celia hasn’t spoken to her son since the Soviet tanks stormed Prague four years ago. She cried when she heard his voice and the sounds of the falling city behind him. What was he doing so far from the warm seas swimming with gentle manatees? Javier writes that he has a Czech wife now and a baby girl. Celia wonders how she will speak to this granddaughter, show her how to catch crickets and avoid the beak of the tortoise.
“What should I say?” Felicia asks her mother.
“Tell him his father died.”
* * *
Felicia climbs into the front seat of her car, crosses her arms over the steering wheel, and stares out the windshield. The heat rises from the green hood, reminding her of the ocean the day before it wiped the beach clean of homes, God’s bits of wood. It was 1944. Felicia was only six, her brother wasn’t even born yet, but she remembers that day with precision. The sea’s languid retreat into the horizon and the terrible silence of its absence. The way the she-crabs scurried after their young. The stranded dolphin towed out to sea by the Munoz brothers, and the majestic shells, thousands of them, with intricate mauve chambers, arranged on a cemetery of wet sand. Felicia set aside pails of them but selected only one, a mother-of-pearl shell, a baroque Spanish fan with which later to taunt her suitors.
Her mother hurriedly wrapped gold-rimmed goblets with newspaper and packed them into a scuffed leather suitcase, all the while listening to the warnings on the radio. “I told you not to bring shells into this house,” she reprimanded when Felicia held up her prize. “They bring bad luck.”
Felicia’s father was away on business in Oriente province when the tidal wave hit. He was always away on business. This time, he had promised to bring his wife a Jamaican maid from the east coast of the island so that she could spend her days resting on the porch, as the doctors ordered, and find solace in the patterns of the sea. Felicia’s father didn’t return with a maid but he brought back a signed baseball for her sister, Lourdes, that made her jump in place with excitement. Felicia didn’t recognize the name.
The sea took more than seventy wooden homes from their stretch of coast. The del Pinos’ house survived because it was sturdily built of brick and cement. When they returned, it was like an undersea cave, blanched by the ocean. Dried algae stuck to the walls and the sand formed a strange topography on the floors. Felicia laughed when she remembered how her mother had warned her not to bring shells home. After the tidal wave, the house was full of them.
“Girl, you’re going to fry in there!” Herminia Delgado raps on Felicia’s car window. She is carrying a basket with an unplucked chicken, four lemons, and a brittle garlic clove. “I’m making a fricassee later. Why don’t you come over? Or are you too busy with your naughty daydreams again?”