Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina Garcia

Author:Cristina Garcia [Garcia, Cristina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-79800-8
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

Enough Attitude

(1975)

Lourdes Puente is walking her beat. It’s a five-block square of Brooklyn with brownstones and linden trees, considered safe as neighborhoods go on this side of Atlantic Avenue. Lourdes is an auxiliary policewoman, the first in her precinct. She scored one hundred on her written test by answering “c” to the multiple-choice questions she wasn’t sure of or didn’t understand. Captain Cacciola congratulated her personally. He wanted to make sure she was tough enough on crime. Lourdes said she believed drug dealers should die in the electric chair. This pleased the captain, and she was sent on patrol Tuesday and Thursday nights between seven and ten.

Lourdes enjoys patrolling the streets in her thick-soled black shoes. These shoes, it seems to her, are a kind of equalizer. She can run in them if she has to, jump curbs, traverse the buckled, faulted sidewalks of Brooklyn without twisting an ankle. These shoes are power. If women wore shoes like these, she thinks, they wouldn’t worry so much about more abstract equalities. They would join the army reserve or the auxiliary police like her, and protect what was theirs. In Cuba nobody was prepared for the Communists and look what happened. Now her mother guards their beach with binoculars and a pistol against Yankees. If only Lourdes had had a gun when she needed it.

It’s Thursday, just after nine. There’s a full moon out. It hangs fat and waxy in the sky, creased with shadows.

“Every loony in New York comes out of the woodwork on nights like this,” the regular beat cop had warned her.

But so far everything’s been quiet. It’s too cold for loiterers. Lourdes suddenly remembers how her daughter had ridiculed Armstrong’s first words on the moon. “He had months to think up something and that’s all he could say?” Pilar was only ten years old and already mocking everything. Lourdes slapped her for being disrespectful, but it made no difference to her daughter. Pilar was immune to threats. She placed no value on normal things so it was impossible to punish her. Even now, Pilar is not afraid of pain or of losing anything. It’s this indifference that is most maddening.

The last of the Jews have moved out of the neighborhood. Only the Kellners are left. The others are on Long Island or in Westchester or Florida, depending on their ages and their bank accounts. Pilar thinks Lourdes is bigoted, but what does her daughter know of life? Equality is just another one of her abstractions. “I don’t make up the statistics,” she tells Pilar. “I don’t color the faces down at the precinct.” Black faces, Puerto Rican faces. Once in a while a stray Irish or Italian face looking scared. Lourdes prefers to confront reality—the brownstones converted to tenements in a matter of months, the garbage in the streets, the jaundice-eyed men staring vacantly from the stoops. Even Pilar couldn’t denounce her for being a hypocrite.

Lourdes feels the solid ground beneath her solid black shoes as she walks. She breathes in the wintry air, which stings her lungs.

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