Love and Ghost Letters, page 3
But Josefina found well-bred men hateful. They’d visit her dressed in wool suits (wool suits in Cuba!) and speak with booming voices, addressing most of their talk to the sergeant and not to Josefina. Then they’d want to steal kisses when the sergeant excused himself to go spend ten long minutes in the bathroom. No, Josefina much preferred Lorenzo’s way. Lorenzo, whom she called Renzo. Renzo, who climbed up the wooden lattice that led to her bedroom at night, who buried himself under her bedclothes and whispered bawdy poems he had learned. Renzo, whose thin body emanated a heat so intense that Josefina’s blood seethed and was soon settled by his embrace.
* * *
The wedding was held one morning in a cathedral near the sergeant’s Vedado home. Stained glass decorated every archway. Female saints lined the left side of the church, and the male saints marked the right like marble bridesmaids and groomsmen. The church was quite empty, because the sergeant did not want anyone present, an act which angered many of his colleagues in the police department and many of the society mothers from the dances. As Josefina walked down the aisle with her father, the sound of her heels echoed through the church where no solid bodies soaked up the sound. It even traveled into the cloisters, where solitary nuns turned their heads and wondered at the odd, echoed tapping. Regla alone sat in one of the pews, clutching her left hand, which she had burned with an iron the night before while steaming Josefina’s veil.
Once at the altar, the sergeant pulled a sheet of paper from his coat pocket and said to Lorenzo, “Sign this.”
“What is it?” Lorenzo asked, his mouth forming an impertinent pout.
“A contract,” the sergeant said.
Lorenzo took the paper, headed Contrato de Matrimonio, 1934, and read it aloud. His tone mocking, he looked every so often at the priest who gave him a knowing smile, so accustomed was the priest to the intrusiveness of fathers. “Numero uno,” Lorenzo read, “Lorenzo Concepción will promise to maintain a sizable house for Josefina Navarro in the best area of El Cotorro.”
The sergeant bristled in his military jacket as Lorenzo read. Droplets of sweat hung from either side of his mustache.
“Numero dos,” he continued, “the aforesaid gentleman will work consistently and during reasonable hours and will keep the seventh day holy for God and his family.” He paused, turning on his heels to face the sergeant, then finished reading: “Y numero tres, the gentleman will take the aforesaid lady out dancing every other weekend as was her habit when in the custody of her father.”
The sergeant already had one hand on his daughter’s neck, sure that Lorenzo would tear the contract in two and run from the altar. But it was Josefina who took the letter and folded it. Her eyes were moist and red-rimmed as she pushed the paper into her father’s coat pocket. The sergeant looked at her with eyes that burned like a kiln, as if to cook away the emotion he found in her face. She, too, knew that Lorenzo would not sign the contract.
“Papá, por favor, no. No, por Dios.” She said this quietly, through the airy tulle of her veil.
The priest, already amused at the severity of the sergeant’s face and too drunk from the brandy that had accompanied his lunch to notice the violence that poured and ebbed from the bodies before him, laughed and said, “God’s blessing is enough of a contract.” Lorenzo grasped Josefina’s arm, pulling her away from her father’s firm clamp at her nape and turned to look at the priest. The sergeant felt dizzy. The balls of his feet slid around inside his shoes, and he felt as if he would fall forward into the priest’s stomach or backward to the freshly polished aisle. He sat at a pew instead, several feet from where Regla knelt crying and closed his eyes to feel the spin of the earth.
After the wedding, Lorenzo and Josefina went to the house in Vedado, with its cool porches garnished with roses and paper lanterns, its old Spanish paintings, and stone tiles. Lorenzo came into Josefina’s room and opened her closet where he drew his arms wide and grabbed all her clothes at once, taking them downstairs and letting the delicate cloth drag on the floor. The sergeant yelled at his daughter from the doorway, and Josefina cupped her hands over her ears. She followed Lorenzo out the door, leaving the fresh, open house that the sergeant kept and stepped out into the dusty cobbled streets of the city, her satin slippers tearing with each stumble.
4
The train ride to El Cotorro was quiet. Every so often, Lorenzo would hum a couple of bars from an old ballad, but the sound seemed out of place, and it made the few people in the car shift in their seats with discomfort. Before they had left, Regla had taken the contract the sergeant had written, and she had placed it in Josefina’s purse. Josefina now waited until Lorenzo was asleep before she read the contract again.
As she read, Josefina could feel the heat swelling in her throat and into her cheeks. She imagined the sergeant hunched over his desk writing out the arrangement in his careful, pampered cursive. Josefina’s fingers curled around the edges of the paper as she remembered the fiasco at the church and how much she had wished, at the moment that her father swooned at the foot of the altar and fell into the pew, that his diseased old heart would have stopped for good.
The truth of that desire, of the horrible wish that her father was dead, washed over her. She crumpled the paper up into a tight ball and threw it under her seat, to be found, unraveled, and chuckled over later the next day, by a group of young men on the way to the university. She tucked her head down onto Lorenzo’s lap and closed her eyes. Lorenzo rested his hand on her head as he slept, and she soon developed a headache from the pressure of his palm on her skull.
They arrived in El Cotorro by dawn, and Josefina got her first glimpse of the town. The houses were dipped in pale pinks and blues. Each home had a tiny front patio, and on each patio were pots of different shapes filled with small palms and tall papayas that swayed, top-heavy, in the breeze. Schoolchildren scurried to class in dingy white uniforms. A flock of girls came by with no shoes on their feet, an image that contrasted with the huge, extravagant bows that sat atop their heads, in the fashion of the day, like monstrous butterfly wings ready to carry the wearer into the mountains. They walked through the streets in silence; the same stifling quiet from the train seemed to follow them like a fog. Skinny, battered dogs sniffed their ankles as they walked, then turned on their bony haunches up the street.
At one intersection, Josefina and Lorenzo were taken aback by a crowd that surged around a baker’s cart that had overturned. Long, soft bread rolled off the cart and onto the ground as old grandmothers and children pushed each other to get at them. Guava sweets were scooped up into sticky arms, stuffed down housedresses and into purses. Cheese rolls, ham croquettes, and even a large birthday cake with thick pink merengue were harvested from the wreck. All the while, the baker stood atop his crushed cart and shouted obscenities at the crowd. Tears of anger fell onto his cheeks as he took to throwing hard, stale muffins at the crowd to fend them off. Josefina watched, her large eyes still and watery.
Lorenzo released Josefina’s hand and ran into the throng. After a few minutes he emerged with an armful of meat pastries. His skin glistened with sugar and syrup, and here and there, small merengue puffs stuck to his shirt. He stuffed one of the meat pastries into his mouth before offering another to Josefina.
“Here,” he said, and aimed the thing at her lips.
“How can you eat that?” Josefina asked and pointed at the baker who was now sitting on one of the spindly wheels and weeping.
“Don’t be so stupid, Josefina,” Lorenzo said, and filled his mouth with another pastry. Josefina wished that the sergeant would suddenly appear and arrest them all. But earlier, she remembered, I had wished him dead. And with that remembrance and with a resoluteness to equal her father’s, she plucked a merengue from Lorenzo’s shirt. She ate it, though the sugar burned her throat.
“There you go, mi amor,” Lorenzo said. “You’ll have to be tough to live in a place like this.”
Josefina had never seen a place so heartbreaking. The sun that warmed the cold tiles of her father’s house was, here, an oven that threatened to mar her complexion. On the street people shouted obscenities at one another and sat on porches playing cards. Flowers were housed in big coffee cans, not terracotta pots. Dust rose from the ground like a cloud. She had read about villages like this in newspapers now and then and had scowled when her French teacher preached about obnoxious privilege in his students. I’d be happy to share what I have, Josefina always thought and had said so often to her admiring peers. And when she saw Lorenzo that day, his face dirtied, his clothes torn, she had thought he was the most romantic figure she had ever known. She had imagined herself scouring his clothes with her own hands, of dreamy cottages with cracked plaster that they could call home and where they could live honest lives. That vision had not been accompanied by scores of children coughing in loud, thunderous roars, by dirt paths and shattered glass, by thievery or hunger.
Lorenzo ate his fill as they walked up and down streets lined with tiny cement blockhouses. A FOR RENT sign, written on a white sheet with shoe polish, fluttered on a line in front of one small house. Lorenzo and Josefina entered through a dark parlor then passed through a small kitchen before they found the owner of the house. She was an old woman who sat placidly on her couch, eating bean soup.
“You want to live here?” she asked, without looking up.
“Sí,” said Lorenzo.
“Bien,” the woman replied through a bean-filled mouth, and she began to show them around. Josefina’s nose crinkled as she examined her new home. It smelled like rotting food, and as the old woman opened up the cabinets to show off all of the space in the kitchen, Josefina saw where the stench was coming from. In one of the cabinets the woman had set up an orisha, a stone representing a Santería god. It had cowrie shells for eyes and a mouth, and around its base were offerings of stiff steak and eggs, moldy bread, and new packages of chewing gum. Tiny cockroaches walked across the god’s face, and the old lady shooed them away with a wave of her crooked fingers.
Josefina had seen these orishas before, tucked away in the closet of Regla’s bedroom. Except Regla kept her god well fed and she never let any of the food rot or begin to smell. Indeed, she often set mousetraps outside the closet door, to stop any furry intruders from eating her offerings.
“Lorenzo, let’s go,” Josefina said, “I don’t like this place.” Lorenzo ignored her and followed the woman into one of the two small bedrooms.
“Señora,” he said, “how much?” The woman whispered the sum and kept her eye on Josefina. Lorenzo accepted the offer with a pat on the woman’s shoulder and dropped his bag onto the floor.
“But Renzo…” Josefina said quietly.
“Enough!” Lorenzo shot back, apologized to their new landlady, and headed out the door to the train depot, to collect the rest of their belongings.
The old woman moved out in two days. She had very little to take with her, since she was going to live with her daughter-in-law and her son. All of the furniture she left behind, which Lorenzo delighted in. She also left behind the orisha that Josefina would not go near. The organic little god stayed in Josefina’s mind at all times. It haunted her days, seemed to call to her from inside the kitchen cabinets, begging for a morsel. Josefina wrote to Regla about it, and the old woman advised that she keep up the ritual, just in case. So Josefina drew up her courage, cleaned out the god’s cabinet so that it no longer stank of rotted food, and left a glass of coconut water for it every morning, making sure to drain the glass and wash it at night. Still, the little god stayed in her thoughts, and Josefina could only banish it from her mind at night, when she and Lorenzo made love so loudly that the neighborhood children threw pebbles at their windows.
* * *
As the weeks progressed in El Cotorro, Lorenzo found it hard to work, and he left at least once a month to find employment in neighboring towns. Josefina wrote to Regla every day and received letters just as often, but only from the nursemaid. Her father had said his last to her on the wedding day. She missed Regla as much as any daughter would long for her mother. Regla had known what to do about the abandoned god in her cupboard. She would know, too, what to say when Lorenzo’s eyes wandered and he stared too long at the pretty, dark girls on the street. Lorenzo found her crying on the bed one day, her head buried into the pillow, the room hot and dark.
“We’ll install a telephone as soon as we can,” he said, knowing that she cried for Regla, and Josefina quieted, turned her head, and smiled at her husband. She loved him entirely. As he dried her face with the corner of the bedsheet, Josefina closed her eyes and imagined hearing her nursemaid’s voice again, and her father’s, too.
It was a week after she had begun dabbing holy water on her pulse points like perfume according to Regla’s instructions that Josefina found work in the market. An elderly merchant named Rosa Arias hired her to watch over her shop in the marketplace, selling pet birds—young green parrots that flew freely all over the island. She bred them in her house and hand-fed them scrambled eggs until they sprouted feathers. On those hot, summer market days, Josefina wore an apron and sleeveless dress and sat on a wooden crate. Rosa set the shop up in the mornings and returned in the evenings to collect her birds and her money. Some mornings she would hand Josefina a bird wrapped in a hand towel to break it of its biting habit. At first the young bird would bite and hiss at people. Josefina would swaddle the bird in the towel with only its little round head peeking out until it was moist and exhausted from the effort of trying to reach around the cloth to her skin to nip her. After a few mornings of this mummy treatment, the bird would be broken, like a horse is broken in the country, and would eat out of Josefina’s mouth and tickle her ear with its beak.
Rosa had a daughter, a college student named Yesenia, home for vacation, who wore her long hair in braids and read long novels in the shade of a palm while Josefina worked. A college education was a rare thing in the country, and the people regarded Yesenia as one does a politician or someone with an infirm mind. Josefina enjoyed her quiet company and liked to imagine that she had had the chance to go to the university though her father would never have allowed it. In truth, Josefina liked the idea of a place filled with young, brilliant people, but not the books and essays and professors that went with it. The girl read with a pen in her mouth, then scribbled furiously at intervals, muttering, “Hmmph,” every so often. Her brown eyes glimmered hopefully whenever Josefina spoke to her. Josefina still possessed that charm she had as a child in Vedado; the charm that had made friends, boys and girls alike, fall in love with her. When Josefina asked Yesenia why she didn’t study in the comfort of her home, Yesenia had said she wanted to “be with real people” and then had hugged Josefina to her bewilderment and cooed at one of the parrots.
The young woman, close to Josefina in age, was defiant and confident and brought Josefina novels and poems to read. Josefina thanked her but never read any of them. She had only read one novel in her life, a book with a romantic plot in which the Italian lovers were killed by a jealous husband. Josefina had cried all night after she finished it, cried until Regla made her a special tea and then forbade her to read about sadness anymore. From the deep dent between Yesenia’s eyes and the tightness around her lips, Josefina could tell that all the reading caused grief in some way. Josefina felt she was already grieving enough. Eventually, the fall semester began and Yesenia stopped bringing books, stopped coming to read by the shade of the tree, returning again in a few months time, her hair wilder, her ideas more forceful, her novels thicker.
At the market, the parrots squawked all day. Since their wings were clipped, they didn’t fly away. They’d hobble about in their little parrot way around Josefina’s ankles, inside her pockets. She fed them parsley snippets and bits of banana. Still, the cheerful notes of the parrots were not enough of a distraction for Josefina. She watched the children who didn’t go to school and had no place to play but in the muddy puddles of the market. They would steal fruit and even whole fish from stands. Josefina let them pet the birds when Rosa was not around, so they did not bother her or dare take one of the parrots. Most did not wear shoes, and the calluses on their feet and infections in their toenails made Josefina wince. They sucked on sugarcane all day, because it was cheap and the men who made guarapo drinks out of the stalks let them have the discards. So their teeth were brown like coffee grinds and rotted. The teeth moldered away as they played and fell out of their mouths, as if the children were old men and women. Josefina watched them and cried all day for the baby she was carrying by then, hoping and praying aloud to the green birds that her child would never be alone and hungry like that.
About this time, too, Josefina started receiving letters from her father. They came in thin monogrammed envelopes. Inside, the stationery was monogrammed, too. She would tell Lorenzo that she threw the letters away. It made him smile and kiss her hard. “I knew you’d come to see we don’t need him in our lives.” But at night, Josefina would hide the letters inside her shirt, and read them in the bathroom, over and over again. She imagined her father’s soft voice telling her all about the new officers at the station, about Regla’s sprained wrist. She smelled the paper for traces of his cologne. The tone of the letters was detached, though, as if he were writing to an old Spanish friend, or distant cousin. The only trace of emotion came at the end of each letter when he asked that she write back, and that she leave her husband.
Josefina never wrote to the sergeant. Whenever she tried, the letter would sound too formal, and she didn’t know the words to write that would explain to him that she loved Lorenzo, even if he was careless sometimes. When Lorenzo looked at her and smiled, she felt she would do anything for him. Once, in trying to compose a fresh letter to her father, Josefina wrote one line: Papá—te extraño. I miss you. But then she remembered the sergeant’s final shouts at her as she and Lorenzo left Vedado. He had stood in the doorway of the elegant house and had yelled so that the entire neighborhood might hear. “You took my Ana away from me when you were born! Now you leave like this. ¡Odiosa!”—Hateful girl!—“Don’t you dare come back!”
