The Aguero Sisters Read Online Free PDF Page A

slowly rubbed her stomach, humming a Mozart sonata whose soothing effect on me she had previously noted. Instead the kicking intensified, followed by a series of rhythmic contractions. Mamá was all alone. She would miss the parade and the suckling pig and the ballroom lit with candelabras
.
    No sooner had she settled back on her matrimonial bed than Mamá spotted the shadow on the far wall. Straight ahead, standing guard between the open shutters of the bedroom window, was a siguapa stygian owl. My mother did not know its official name then, only that it was a bird of ill omen, earless and black and unmistakable. It was doubly bad luck to see one during the day, since they were known to fly about late at night, stealing people’s souls and striking them deaf
.
    Hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo, it called to her as she breathed a voluminous breath that caught her very center. She grabbed the etched glass lamp on the nightstand and threw it with all her might, but it fell short of the owl’s luminous eyes. Suddenly, the pain inside her spread upward and downward like two opposing tidal waves, and despite her fear or because of it, she delivered a nine-pound, four-ounce baby boy
.
    The owl remained still on its perch until the placenta spilled forth in a rush of blood. Then, with a dark flap of its wings, it swooped forward, plucked the sodden organ from the floor, and flew with it like a rumor out the window
.
    Later, my mother learned that the bird had flown low over the President’s parade with her placenta, scattering the crowd and raining birthing blood. Even President Palma, trembling with fear, crossed himself twice before jumping headlong into a flowering angel’s-trumpet bush, his crisp linen suit spattered with Mamá’s blood
.
    Word of the incident quickly spread throughout Cuba. Mamá told me that for once the priests’ and the
santeros’
interpretations were in accord: the island was headed for doom. Since then, the siguapa stygians are no longer so common in Cuba, killed over the years by superstitious country folk and the disappearance of the vast, unlit woods that once concealed them
.
    From the start, my mother blamed the siguapa stygian for my tin ear, although she was grateful it hadn’t flown off with my hearing altogether. Both my parents were accomplished musicians, and as a child I studied the piano, the violin, the flute, and the oboe, but I never coaxed more than rudimentary sounds from any of them. This was a heartbreak for my parents, who had hoped we might one day form a trio
.
    Pinar del Río was a steamy backwater in those days. Its cultural amenities included a theater with a red tile roof, where my mother and father and I attended an occasional concert, and a natural sciences museum—a dusty back room in a deteriorated municipal building—that had on exhibit a rare cork palm, a species indigenous to Cuba that can be traced back 250 million years
.
    The Sierra de los Organos loomed to the northwest, and though the mountains were far off, they managed to stamp the town with their somber mood. Tobacco fields stretched in every direction: on the vales, on the hillsides, on the mountaintops, and on the sheer sides of the
mogotes,
limestone bluffs that the workers ascended and descended by means of ropes. Although there were pineapple fields nearby and orange groves and acres of sugarcane, nothing competed with the supremacy of tobacco
.
    My father, as the
lector
of El Cid Cigar Manufacturers Company, was revered for his intellect and his splendid renditions of the works of Cervantes, Dickens, and Victor Hugo. For two hours every morning and then again after lunch, Papá read
aloud from an assortment of newspapers, novels, political treatises, and collections of poetry. While the workers occasionally voted on what they wanted my father to read, more often than not they left the choice to him, a testament to their utmost confidence in his taste. For twenty-one years