Free The Aguero Sisters by Cristina Garcia Page B

that never wanes. How could she tell her that José Luís simply hadn’t wanted children, that it was nothing personal against Dulcita herself? Finally, Reina told her daughter that she was born of a grand passion, that at one time, nothing had mattered to Reina but her lover’s face.
    When he died, Reina knew somehow that José Luís had chosen it. Death, she is certain, begins from within. Itdoesn’t wait onstage like a retired general, eager for the podium, but overcomes a body cell by cell. For a few people, this happens long before the accidents and wrinkles, long before the conjugations of regret.
    Reina settles down
next to Pepín and closes her eyes. Voices gather in her head, scattering senseless codes. Since the burning atop the mahogany tree, voices come to Reina late at night, unfettered by logic, utterly imprecise.
The stars have died, murdered in their nests. Yours are the creased lies of solitude
, Oye, mi hijita,
patience condemns
. Sometimes, like tonight, they creak out a chorus or two of the national anthem:
    Al combate corred, bayameses

que la patria os contempla orgullosa
:
no temaís una muerta gloriosa
,
que morir por la patria es vivir
 …
    Sleepless and adrift in the dark, Reina circles and soars over the decades of her life, much like the bats and owls her father once so assiduously studied. She hisses and creaks and scolds herself for what she sees, for what she might have changed, for what she cannot. She avoids the image of her dead mother in the funeral home, which appears as something dangerous and blindingly hot far below, and averts her eyes as if from the direct rays of the sun. Is it for this that she’s remained so long conscious?
    When she opens her eyes, the voices and images recede. She is thirsty again. Reina drinks water straight from a Mexican pitcher Pepín brought back from a trip to Tampico, then sucks on the last lumps of ice. She paces the chilled marble floor in her bare feet. La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre has definitely failed her. The rooster flew off with some curse. Pepín insists that the powder he bought fromthat
bruja
, La Sequita, saved Reina’s life. Perhaps he is right, but for what?
    Reina reaches in the bottom drawer of her father’s desk and pulls out his passport, carefully stored in a wax-paper envelope. It was issued to him in 1948, the spring before her mother died. Reina examines the photograph, the flash-frozen expression. Papá was forty-three when the picture was taken, a sturdy man with brilliantined hair unfashionably parted in the center.
    A faint blue permit from the United States is stamped on the first page. Reina vaguely recalls a trip he and Mami were planning to the deserts of America. But she can’t recall why it was they never went. The succeeding pages of Papá’s passport are blank. It seems to Reina that this passport, filed away for years with her father’s other important documents, tells the truth of their lives as nothing else does.
    Reina wonders, too, whatever happened to the little bone her mother used to carry in a red flannel pouch at her waist. Mami would let her touch the bone sometimes, let her rub a finger against the mushroomy knot at one end. Reina never learned where the bone came from or why her mother kept it.
    In the closet, Reina unearths Papá’s twelve-gauge shotgun, in its velvet-lined case. She removes it from its cradle and holds it tight against her shoulder. Then she aims the gun at various targets in the room: the
periquito
her father had shot in a virgin forest near Guantánamo; the opaque globe of streetlight burning just outside her window; Pepín’s oblong face, heavy with sleep.
    There is a portrait of her mother on the desk. She is much younger than Reina is now, with round cheeks that end in a jutting little chin. Mami’s hair is loose and wavy and falls past her shoulders, past her smooth white throat. Itseems to Reina that