The way her father washed his manicured hands was a minor miracle in itself. To Lourdes, he looked solemn, like a doctor preparing for surgery. He taught her and Felicia and their younger brother, Javier, how to scrape under their nails with miniature scrubbers, how to let the hot water run over their hands for a slow, thirty-second count, how to dry between their fingers with towels boiled in bleach so the germs could not breed in the damp crevices.
In the hospital, her father despaired at incompetences and breakdowns in procedures, at the rough, professional hands that prodded him. Once a nurse inserted a suppository to loosen his bowels and did not return, although he cramped his finger ringing the buzzer, until after he had soiled his pajamas. Lourdes knew then her father would die. She handed her remaining savings to the nuns and requested a private room with a television and the best nurse in the hospital.
Her father’s last weeks were happy ones under the care of Sister Federica, whose devotion to a bewildering array of saints did not lessen her duty to cleanliness. Sister Federica doted on her father and gave him the smoothest shaves he’d ever had. Twice a day, she lathered his face with a stiff bristle brush and with a straight razor expertly scraped the dent in his chin and the narrow space between his nose and his upper lip. Then she snipped his unruly nostril hairs and dusted his neck with talcum. Lourdes knew that the little nun, with her puckish face and faint mustache, reminded her father of his barber in Havana, of the smell of his tonics and pomades, of the cracked red leather and steel levers of his enameled chairs.
Her father died with a clean shave. That, at least, would have made him happy.
When Pilar doesn’t return home by nine o’clock, Lourdes calls the police station and begins defrosting a two-and-a-half-pound stash of pecan sticky buns. At ten o’clock, she telephones the fire department and preheats the oven. By midnight, she’s alerted three hospitals and six radio stations and finished the last of the sticky buns.
Rufino cannot comfort her. Her father is dead. Their daughter is missing. “And where were you this afternoon?” Lourdes suddenly shouts at her husband, but she doesn’t wait for an answer. Instead she tears through a shopping bag of photographs looking for a snapshot of her daughter, but all she finds is a wallet-sized school picture of Pilar in third grade. Pilar’s hair is straight and black and parted neatly on the side. She’s wearing a maroon plaid jumper, a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar and a matching snap-on tie. This girl looks nothing like her daughter.
Lourdes can no longer envision Pilar, only floating parts of her. An amber eye, a delicate wrist with a silver-and-turquoise bracelet, eyebrows arched and thick as if inviting danger. Lourdes imagines these pieces, broken and bruised in unspeakable places, on piers and in alleyways, drifting down the river to the sea.
She combs her daughter’s room for the Jimi Hendrix poster she made her take down and tacks it back on the wall. Then Lourdes scoops up an armful of Pilar’s grubby overalls and her paint-spattered flannel shirts and lies beneath them on her daughter’s bed. She inhales the turpentine, the smell of defiance that is Pilar.
*
Her daughter was born eleven days after El Líder rode in triumph to Havana. Pilar slipped out like a tadpole, dark, hairless, and eager for light.
Lourdes had difficulty keeping nursemaids for Pilar. Few lasted more than a week or two. One girl left with a broken leg after slipping on a bar of soap Pilar dropped while the nanny was bathing her in the sink. Another woman, an elderly mulatta, claimed that her hair was falling out from the menacing stares the baby gave her. Lourdes fired her after she found Pilar in her bassinet smeared with chicken blood and covered with bay leaves.
“The child is bewitched,” the frightened nanny explained. “I was trying to cleanse her spirit.”
At dawn, Lourdes crosses the Brooklyn Bridge. The sun is low in the sky and she searches the silvery river for clues. A tugboat sounds mournfully, pulling its cargo of oil drums. The air smells of tar and clinging winter. Through the grid of steel cables, the skyscrapers divide into manageable fragments. To the north, more bridges are superimposed like a poker player’s cards. To the east lie the flatlands of Brooklyn and an expressway to Queens.
Lourdes turns south. Everything, it seems, is going south. The smoke from the leaning chimneys in New Jersey. A reverse formation of sparrows. The pockmarked ships headed for Panama. The torpid river itself.
Lourdes imagines her father, too, heading south, returning home to their beach, which is mined with sad memories. She tries to picture her first winter in Cuba. It was 1936 and her mother was in an asylum. Lourdes and her father traversed the island in his automobile, big and black as a Sunday-night church. From the car window, Lourdes saw the island’s wounded landscapes, its helices of palms. Fat men pressed their faces, snaked with purple veins, against her cheeks. They gave her cankered oranges, tasteless lollipops. Her mother’s doleful rhythm followed them everywhere.
Pilar Puente
I’m trying on French-style garters and push-up brassières in the dressing room of Abraham & Straus when I think I hear his voice. I stick my head out and see them. My father looks like a kid, laughing and animated and whispering in this woman’s ear. The woman is huge and blond and puffy like a 1950s beauty queen gone to seed. She has a cloud of bleached hair and high-muscled calves as if she’s been walking in those heels since birth. “Shit!” I think. “Shit! I can’t believe this!” I get dressed and follow them, hiding behind racks of hats and on-sale sweaters. At the candy counter, my father holds a toffee crunch above her flicking, disgusting tongue. She’s a head taller than he is so it’s not easy. It makes me sick to my stomach.
They walk down Fulton Street arm in arm, pretending to window-shop. It’s just a run-down stretch of outdated stores with merchandise that’s been there since the Bay of Pigs. I guess my father figures that nobody he knows will see him in this neighborhood. The beauty queen leans into him outside a stereo place that’s blasting, incredibly, “Stop in the Name of Love.” I see that flycatcher tongue of hers go into his mouth. Then my father holds her waxy, bloated face in his hands, as if it were a small sun.
That’s it. My mind’s made up. I’m going back to Cuba. I’m fed up with everything around here. I take all my money out of the bank, $120, money I earned slaving away at my mother’s bakery, and buy a one-way bus ticket to Miami. I figure if I can just get there, I’ll be able to make my way to Cuba, maybe rent a boat or get a fisherman to take me. I imagine Abuela Celia’s surprise as I sneak up behind her. She’ll be sitting in her wicker swing overlooking the sea and she’ll smell of salt and violet water. There’ll be gulls and crabs along the shore. She’ll stroke my cheek with her cool hands, sing quietly in my ear.
I was only two years old when I left Cuba but I remember everything that’s happened to me since I was a baby, even word-for-word conversations. I was sitting in my grandmother’s lap, playing with her drop pearl earrings, when my mother told her we were leaving the country. Abuela Celia called her a traitor to the revolution. Mom tried to pull me away but I clung to Abuela and screamed at the top of my lungs. My grandfather came running and said, “Celia, let the girl go. She belongs with Lourdes.” That was the last time I saw her.