The street lamps shed their distorted lights. It is not yet daybreak, and ordinary noises do not startle Lourdes. A squirrel scratching up in an oak tree. A car engine stalling down the block. Between the brownstones and warehouses, the East River is visible, slow and metallic as the sky.
Lourdes enjoys walking in the dark unseen. She imagines her footprints sinking invisibly through the streets and the sidewalks, below the condensed archaeology of the city to underground plains of rich alluvial clay. She suspects the earth sheds its skin in layers, squandered of green.
The early-morning refuge of the bakery delights Lourdes. She is comforted by the order of the round loaves, the texture of grain and powdered sugar, the sustaining aromas of vanilla and almond. Lourdes bought the bakery five years ago from a French-Austrian Jew who had migrated to Brooklyn after the war. Before that, she’d been working as a file clerk at a nearby hospital, classifying the records of patients who had died. Now she wanted to work with bread. What sorrow could there be in that?
The refrigerated cakes come in flimsy cardboard boxes steaming with dry ice. There are Grand Marnier cakes and napoleons with striped icing and chantilly cream. Lourdes unpacks three Sacher tortes and a Saint Honoré studded with profiteroles, Linzer bars with raspberry jam, éclairs, and marzipan cookies in neon pink. In the summer, there’ll be fresh peach strudel and blueberry tarts. In the fall, pumpkin pies and frosted cupcakes with toothpick turkeys.
Lourdes lines the display cases with paper doilies and organizes the croissants and coffee rings. She places the day-old pastries in the back of the rows, the easier to reach them. She scrapes the trays of raisins and honey and pops the sugary morsels into her mouth.
Lourdes saves the pecan sticky buns for last. She unloads a tray of them from the delivery cart, reserving two to eat later. As she sets the first pot of coffee to brew, Sister Federica of the Sisters of Charity Hospital calls.
“Your father is a saint,” she whispers fiercely. The elfin nun from Santo Domingo is crazy about saints, often identifying the holy ones long before the Vatican even contemplates their canonization. “The mother superior would never believe me. It’s a nest of lapsed bats here. But I wanted you to know the truth.”
“What happened?” Lourdes asks, stripping the sticky buns of pecans and nervously chewing them one by one.
“I saw it with my own eyes, may his soul find sanctuary.”
“My God!” Lourdes crosses herself rapidly.
“I was making my early rounds when I saw a blue light coming from your father’s room. I thought he might have left the television on.” Sister Federica pauses for a long moment, then resumes with an air more befitting a divine vision. “When I went in, he was fully dressed, standing there erect and healthy, except that his head and hands glowed as if lit from within. It was a nimbus of holiness, I am certain. You know I am an expert in matters of religious enigmas.”
“And then?”
“He said, ‘Sister Federica, I wish to thank you for your many kindnesses during these last days. But now another interval awaits me.’ Just like that. Well, I fell to my knees and began a rosary to La Inmaculada. My hands are still trembling. He put on his hat, passed through the window, and headed south, leaving a trail of phosphorus along the East River.”
“Did he say where he was going?”
“No.”
“God bless you, Sister. I’ll light you a candle.”
Lourdes tries for nearly an hour to telephone her mother in Santa Teresa del Mar, but the operator tells her that the rains have knocked out the phone lines on the northwest coast of Cuba. Outside, customers tap on the glass door with keys and coins. She finally dials her sister Felicia’s number in Havana.
The rest of the morning, Lourdes tends hurriedly to her customers, mixing up orders and giving the wrong change. Her worst mistake is decorating a christening cake in bold red script with the words “In sympathy.” Lourdes telephones her husband at noon but nobody is home. The customers keep coming. Where is Pilar? Lourdes vows to punish her daughter. No painting for a month. That will teach her, she thinks. Then Lourdes calls Rufino again. Still no answer.
The flow of customers slows in the afternoon, and for the first time since Sister Federica called, Lourdes sits down with a watery cup of coffee and her sticky buns to figure things out. She remembers how after her father arrived in New York her appetite for sex and baked goods increased dramatically. The more she took her father to the hospital for cobalt treatments, the more she reached for the pecan sticky buns, and for Rufino.
The flesh amassed rapidly on her hips and buttocks, muting the angles of her bones. It collected on her thighs, fusing them above the knees. It hung from her arms like hammocks. She dreamt continually of bread, of grainy ryes and pumpernickels, whole wheat and challah in woven straw baskets. They multiplied prodigiously, hung abundantly from the trees, crowded the skies until they were redolent of yeast.
Lourdes had gained 118 pounds.
When she was a skinny child, strangers bought Lourdes treats on the beach or on the main street of town, believing she was malnourished and motherless. As a teenager, Lourdes would drink three or four milk shakes with dinner. Even on the day before her wedding, the seamstresses took in her bodice, begging her to eat and fill out her gown.
Now the extra weight did not alter her rhythmical gait, but men’s eyes no longer pursued her curves. It was not a question of control. Lourdes did not battle her cravings; rather, she submitted to them like a somnambulist to a dream. She summoned her husband from his workshop by pulling vigorously on a ship’s bell he had rigged up for this purpose, unpinned her hair, and led him by the wrist to their bedroom.
Lourdes’s agility astounded Rufino. The heavier she got, the more supple her body became. Her legs looped and rotated like an acrobat’s, her neck swiveled with extra ball bearings. And her mouth. Lourdes’s mouth and tongue were like the mouths and tongues of a dozen experienced women.
Rufino’s body ached from the exertions. His joints swelled like an arthritic’s. He begged his wife for a few nights’ peace but Lourdes’s peals only became more urgent, her glossy black eyes more importunate. Lourdes was reaching through Rufino for something he could not give her, she wasn’t sure what.
Lourdes closes her shop early and walks to the Sisters of Charity Hospital fourteen blocks away. Sister Federica escorts her down the dingy hallway. Lourdes lifts her dead father’s gnarled hands, his papery, spotted wrists. She notices the way his fingers are twisted above the first joints, stiffened haphazardly like branches. His stomach is shaved and tracked with stitches, and his skin is so transparent that even the most delicate veins are visible. The vast white bed obscures him.
Her father had been a fastidious man, impeccable, close-shaven, with razor-sharp creases pressed into his trousers. He took pride in never walking barefoot, even in his own home, and shuffled around in highly polished leather slippers to protect himself from microbios. The very word lit a fire in his eyes. “They are the enemy!” he used to bellow. “Culprits of tropical squalor!”
For her father, conquering the microbios required unflagging vigilance. It meant keeping the refrigerator so cold that Lourdes’s teeth ached from drinking Coca-Cola or biting into pieces of leftover pork. “Food spoils quickly in our climate!” he insisted, turning the dial to near freezing. It meant hearing his loud complaints about her mother’s culinary ambushes: chicken bloody at the bone, undercooked vegetables, unpeeled fruit served with room-temperature cream cheese.