The Aguero Sisters Read Online Free PDF Page B

1991
    T
he talk at Céspedes Hospital
is of blindness. Thousands of Cubans are losing their sight in Santiago de Cuba. There is speculation that a
yanqui
virus or infected fish is to blame, though this last theory is quickly dismissed because fish is impossible to obtain. The blindness, they say, begins with a pain like a bad mosquito bite in the eye.
    Reina Agüero watches as the blind patients stumble down the corridors, their arms waving like frontal antennae, cursing the revolution and El Comandante himself. Ten years ago, Reina wouldn’t have put up with their blaspheming. Now she doesn’t even flinch.
    Others still talk of the earthquake that shook the province in December. Eleven people died from the mud slides and fires and the collapse of El Cobre’s mine. The weather since has been unpredictable, freezing one day, summer hot the next. People blame the Fosa de Batle, seventhousand meters deep in the Windward Passage. Santiago de Cuba faces it head-on. When too many drowned men stir in the ocean trench, misfortune is certain to spread.
    As a child, Reina learned about the island’s geological tensions from her father, about the ancient foundations of rocks carved by erosion into arid plains. She learned that Cuba, in all probability, was connected to Haiti and the Yucatán long ago. That the depth of its limestone sustains an unheard-of variety of mollusks. That its system of subterranean drainage prevents lakes and ponds from forming. Rivers, yes. Lakes and ponds, no. Except in the great Zapata Swamp, Cuba’s waters are never still.
    The Tana, the Najasa, the Jatibonico del Sur, the Toa, the Damují, the Saramaguacá. Dozens of sleepy rivers, with their whimsical names, crisscross the island. Reina wants to float in these rivers, quench the incessant burning. Instead she lies suspended in a hospital bed. Around her, machines blink with cool assurance, red lights and green, a parade of bulging blue waves. A grimy window overlooks Santiago Bay. Thorn and scrub savanna trim the coastline for miles in both directions.
    The doctors tell her that she is lucky to have survived a direct hit of lightning in that mahogany tree. Already they’ve scraped acres of cinereous flesh from her back, charred a foreign gray. The tools on her belt branded their silhouettes on her hips. Her hoop earrings burned holes in her neck. For weeks, her pores oozed water and blood, until Reina thought it might be better to die.
    Against all medical precedents, experimental skin grafts from loved ones miraculously took. Pepín Beltrán donated a patch of his backside, Dulcita a long stretch of thigh. Other people, dead and alive, gave Reina their skin, unblistered, unsinged. On bad days, she wishes they hadn’t tried.
    No one will bring Reina a mirror. There’s a lump ofgauze where her nose is healing, a dull pulsing where her molar remains loose. Her thumbs have lost all sensation. They say her face survived best of all, but Reina is not permitted to see it. Each time she asks, the nurses refuse her, then release a familiar tug of drugs in her veins. Reina decides she can stand anything but lies.
    Nothing is allowed to touch her. The slightest breeze refines her pain. And so she is motionless all day, remembering the moment before the heat. The mass shifting of leaves, the branches violet with light, offering her to the sky. She understood then the private language of nature, the patience and debts it defines. She lost two weeks of her life to this knowledge.
    When Reina awoke again, she believed the world had converted to fire. Hadn’t anyone noticed but her? Everything simmered with heat. Fevers rippled like snakes through her room, rattling their tails of sparks. Her skin gave off a sweetish smoke. Electricity had replaced her voice.
    Reina understands that lightning has its work to do. It’s an atmospheric discharge, urgent between clouds or between clouds and the ground below. Many