The waiting began in 1934, the spring before she married Jorge del Pino, when she was still Celia Almeida. She was selling American photographic equipment at El Encanto, Havana’s most prestigious department store, when Gustavo Sierra de Armas strode up to her display case and asked to see Kodak’s smallest camera. He was a married Spanish lawyer from Granada and said that he wanted to document the murders in Spain through a peephole in his overcoat. When the war came, no one could refute his evidence.
Gustavo returned to Celia’s counter again and again. He brought her butterfly jasmine, the symbol of patriotism and purity, and told her that Cuba, too, would one day be free of bloodsuckers. Gustavo sang to her beauty mark, the lunar by her mouth. He bought her drop pearl earrings.
Ese lunar que tienes, cielito lindo,
junto a la boca …
No se lo des a nadie, cielito lindo,
que a mí me toca.
When Gustavo left her to return to Spain, Celia was inconsolable. The spring rains made her edgy, the greenery hurt her eyes. She saw mourning doves peck at carrion on her doorstep and visited the botánicas for untried potions.
“I want a long, easy solace,” she told the gitanas.
She bought tiger root from Jamaica to scrape, a cluster of indigo, translucent crimson seeds, and lastly, a tiny burlap pouch of herbs. She boiled teas and honeycombs, steamed open her pores, adjusted the shutters, and drank.
Celia took to her bed by early summer and stayed there for the next eight months. That she was shrinking there was no doubt. Celia had been a tall woman, a head taller than most men, with a full bosom and slender, muscled legs. Soon she was a fragile pile of opaque bones, with yellowed nails and no monthly blood. Her great-aunt Alicia wrapped Celia’s thinning hair with colorful bandannas, making her appearance all the more startling.
The doctors could find nothing wrong with Celia. They examined her through monocles and magnifying glasses, with metal instruments that embossed her chest and forearms, thighs and forehead with a blue geometry. With pencil-thin flashlights they peered into her eyes, which hung like lanterns in her sleepless face. They prescribed vitamins and sugar pills and pills to make her sleep, but Celia diminished, ever more pallid, in her bed.
Neighbors suggested their own remedies: arnica compresses, packed mud from a holy well, ground elephant tusk from the Niger to mix in her daily broth. They dug up the front yard for buried maledictions but found nothing. The best cooks on Palmas Street offered Celia coconut custard, guayaba and cheese tortes, bread pudding, and pineapple cakes. Vilma Castillo lit a baked Alaska that set the kitchen aflame and required many buckets of water to extinguish. After the fire, few people came to visit Celia. “She is determined to die,” they concluded.
Desperate, her great-aunt called a santera from Regla, who draped Celia with beaded necklaces and tossed shells to divine the will of the gods.
“Miss Celia, I see a wet landscape in your palm,” the little santera said, then turned to Tía Alicia. “She will survive the hard flames.”
Celia wrote her first letter to Gustavo Sierra de Armas upon the insistence of Jorge del Pino, who came courting during her housebound exile. Jorge was fourteen years older than she and wore round steel glasses that shrank his blue eyes. Celia had known him since she was a child, when her mother had sent her from the countryside to live with her great-aunt in Havana.
“Write to that fool,” Jorge insisted. “If he doesn’t answer, you will marry me.”
November 11, 1934
Mi querido Gustavo,
A fish swims in my lung. Without you, what is there to celebrate?
I am yours always,
Celia
For twenty-five years, Celia wrote her Spanish lover a letter on the eleventh day of each month, then stored it in a satin-covered chest beneath her bed. Celia has removed her drop pearl earrings only nine times, to clean them. No one ever remembers her without them.
* * *
Celia’s twin granddaughters recount how on their camping trip they fed midget bananas to a speckled horse and examined horned earthworms peculiar to the island. Celia knows that Luz and Milagro are always alone with one another, speaking in symbols only they understand. Luz, older by twelve minutes, usually speaks for the two of them. The sisters are double stones of a single fruit, darker than their mother, with rounder features and their father’s inky eyes. They have identical birthmarks, diminutive caramel crescents over their left eyelids, and their braids hang in duplicate ropes down their backs.
The three of them hitch a ride to the house on Palmas Street. Their driver, a balding man with gently serrated teeth, shakes Celia’s hand with fingers the texture of cork. She correctly surmises that he is a plumber. Celia has prided herself on guessing occupations since her days at El Encanto, when she could precisely gauge how much a customer had to spend on a camera. Her biggest sales went to Americans from Pennsylvania. What did they take so many pictures of up there?
The driver turns left on Palmas Street with its matched rows of closely set two-story houses, all painted a flamboyant yellow. Last fall, the line at the hardware store snaked around the block for the surplus paint, left over from a hospital project on the other side of Havana. Felicia bought the maximum amount allowed, eight gallons, and spent two Sundays painting the house with borrowed brushes and ladders.
“After all,” she said, “you could die waiting for the right shade of blue.”
The air is damp from the afternoon rains. Celia gathers her granddaughters close. “Your grandfather died last week,” she tells them, then kisses each one on the cheek. She takes Luz and Milagro by the hand and walks up the front steps of the house on Palmas Street.
“My girls! My girls!” Felicia waves at them frantically from the second-story bedroom window, lost behind the tamarind tree heavy with sparrows and tawny pods. Her face is spotted and enlivened with heat. She is wearing her American-made flannel nightgown with the pale blue roses. It is buttoned to the top of her throat. “I made coconut ice cream!”
Store-bought ice cream is cheap, but for Felicia, making ice cream from scratch is part of the ritual that began after her husband left in 1966. Felicia’s delusions commence suddenly, frequently after heavy rains. She rarely deviates from her original pattern, her hymn of particulars.
Felicia coaxes her young son to join her. Celia and her granddaughters enter the house on Palmas Street, to find Ivanito, his dimpled hands clasped, singing the lyrics to a melodramatic love song.
Quieres regresar, pero es imposible
Ya mi corazón se encuentra rebelde
Vuélvete otra vez
Que no te amaré jamás
* * *
That night, Celia lies awake in the bare dining room of the yellow house on Palmas Street, the house that once belonged to her mother-in-law and where Felicia now lives. Sleep is an impossibility in this room, in this bed with memories that plague her for days. This house, Celia thinks, has brought only misfortune.
She remembers when she returned from her honeymoon in Soroa with a white orchid in her hair, one that Jorge had clipped from the terraced gardens high above the sulfur baths. Her mother-in-law, who had a fleshy-tipped nose and a pendulous, manly face, snatched the flower from Celia’s ear and crushed it in her hand.
“I will have no harlotry in my house,” Berta Arango del Pino snapped, staring hard at the darkened mole by Celia’s mouth.