The Aguero Sisters by Cristina Garcia

Author:Cristina Garcia [Garcia, Cristina]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780307803429
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-07-26T14:00:00+00:00

A MATTER OF GIFTS

KEY BISCAYNE

JUNE 1991

Reina unsnaps the top of her bikini and lies by the pool with her back to the morning sun. It’s been over a month since she arrived in Miami, and already she’s grown accustomed to the uneasy indolence of exile life. The Cuba she knows is fading in the luxury of her sister’s existence. Only a suitcase stuffed with her father’s mementos—taxidermic bats and birds, a few books and clothes, the framed photograph of her mother—remains of that disquieting time before her departure.

It seems to Reina that she’d been on the verge of some certainty in Havana. Now she wonders whether all certainty will be kept from her, wonders, in fact, whether certainty isn’t truly disaster in disguise.

At the Miami airport, Reina was stunned to see a vision of her mother rushing toward her at the gate. Constancia looks so much like Mami now, down to the minutest details, that Reina couldn’t help it—she studied her sister’s face like a blind woman, tried to read with her hands the grace and terror that lay hidden there.

“What a strange way of being dead!” she finally exclaimed. It was her first direct utterance to Constancia in thirty years. Later, she stared at her sister for many more hours, considered her from every angle, until it made her frantic with grief.

Her first few nights in Miami, Reina slept in the same bed with Constancia, back to stomach, Reina on the outside protecting her slight, older sister, listening for messages from the dead. She and Constancia showered together, combed one another’s hair, fed each other tidbits from their dinner plates. All the while, Reina kept watch over her sister’s face as if it were a compelling tragedy.

Reina wonders whether Mami’s face is only a superficial membrane, like her own patches of borrowed skin, or whether it penetrates further to the bone, to some basic molecular level. She can’t help thinking how everything is fundamentally electric, how natural currents flow near the surface of the earth, telluric and magnetic, how she is pulled again and again into the charged fields of her sister’s face.

If only Constancia would stop talking, stay mute sufficiently long enough for Mami to emerge. Reina finds intolerable the false expectations their mother’s visage sets up. There is a part of Reina that wants to address Mami directly, to risk everything—even if it means eradicating her sister—in the hope of retrieving her past.

After their mother died, Papá sent Reina and Constancia to a boarding school in Trinidad. That first rainy winter, a forest of politeness took root between them, starching the air they shared. Each time Reina tried to talk about Mami, Constancia covered her ears and hummed the national anthem. Although they spent years together at boarding school, by habit or cowardice—Reina isn’t sure which—she and Constancia never discussed their mother again.

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