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Dreaming in Cuban by Garcia Cristina (z-lib.org).epub

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Dreaming in Cuban by Garcia Cristina (z-lib.org).epub "A MARVELOUS NOVEL AND THE DEBUT OF A BRILLIANT STORYTELLER." Russell Banks "A work that possesses both the intimacy of a Chekhov story and the hallucinatory magic of novel by Gabriel García Márquez. Though one is dazzled by the book's small reworks of imagery, though one stops to marvel at some of the fantastic events that bloom on its pages, the reader is never distracted from the gripping story of its extraordinary heroines and the passions that bind and separate them from one another and the country of their birth.… [Garcia] is blessed with a poet's ear for language, a historian's fascination with the past and a musician's intuitive understanding of the ebb and ow of emotion." Michiko Kakutani The New York Times "Captures the pain, the distance, the frustrations and the dreams of family dramas with a vivid, poetic prose … A bittersweet novel that leaves a reader with a tender, but clinging sadness. And that sadness is made even stronger by the deadly uncertainties that Cuba continues to live through." Alan West The Washington Post Book World Chosen by Publishers Weekly as One of the Best Books of the Year "MAGICAL." Susan Miller Newsweek "A welcome addition to the growing literature of Latin American émigré experience [that] deftly bridges two divergent cultures … The book traces the fortunes, between 1972 and 1980, of a Cuban family divided by both geography and politics. The four central female characters comprise three generations of the colorful Del Pino family.… At its lyrical best, Garcia's writing owes a debt to the magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende.… Cristina Garcia has something vital to say about the workings of family and government and art, and she says it in this novel with considerable authority and charm." Hilma Wolitzer Chicago Tribune Book World "Ambitious … Should delight readers who can dream of the Caribbean, those connected to the past who aren't enchained by it, and those who remember or can imagine the generational stages of becoming 'Americanized.' " Morris Thompson Detroit Free Press "A vivid fresco of post revolutionary Cuba, as well as a valid assessment of the motives that led up to the Castro regime during the Batista years." Rosario Ferre Boston Globe "Original, humorous and a contribution to contemporary Cuban- American literature." Marjorie Agosin The Christian Science Monitor "A BRILLIANT BOOK … that transcends and illuminates the familiar form of the immigrant family epic.… Leaping gracefully between a wide cast of narrators, past and present, the elegant and precise language of Dreaming in Cuban displays Garcia's remarkable skill at portraying three strong heroines. Even more impressive is the author's ability to tackle the historical theme of spiritual exile. By avoiding family melodrama, [Garcia] has elevated Dreaming in Cuban to masterpiece status.… With tremendous skill, passion and humor, Garcia just may have written the de nitive story of Cuban exiles and some of those they left behind." Philip Herter The Denver Post "Exceptionally good … has a playful style and imagination that are engaging from the rst." Gail Pool Houston Post "Embracing fantasy and reality with equal fervor, Garcia's vivid, indelible characters o er an entirely new view of a particular Latin American sensibility." Publishers Weekly "Garcia juggles opposing life forces like a skilled magician accustomed to tossing into the air ery objects that would explode if they came into contact.… Garcia tells [this] story with an economy of words and a rich, tropical imagery, setting a brisk but comfortable pace. Highly recommended." Library Journal ALSO BY CRISTINA GARCÍA Monkey Hunting The Agüero Sisters This is a work of ction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used ctitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. A One World Book Published by The Random House Publishing Group Copyright © 1992 by Cristina García All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by One World Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. One World is a registered trademark and the One World colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: William Peter Kosmas, Esq.: "Poemas de la Siguiriya," "Gacela de la Huida," and "La Casida de las Palomas Obscuras" by Federico García Lorca from Obras Completas (Aguillar, 1987 edition). Copyright © 1986 by Herederos de Federico García Lorca. All rights reserved. For information regarding rights and permissions for works by Federico García Lorca, please contact William Peter Kosmas, Esq., 25 Howitt Road, London NW3 4LT. Pantheon Books: English translation of "Poemas de la Siguiriya" by Federico García Lorca from Federico García Lorca: A Life by Ian Gibson. Copyright © 1989 by Ian Gibson. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Peer Music: Excerpt from "Corazon Rebelde" by Alberto Arredondo. Copyright © 1963 by Peer International Corporation. Copyright renewed. Excerpt from "Tratame Como Soy" by Pedro Brunet. Copyright © 1956 by Peer International Corporation. Copyright renewed. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. www.oneworldbooks.net Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 92-90385 eISBN: 978-0-307-79800-8 v3.1 For my grandmother, and for Scott These casual exfoliations are Of the tropic of resemblances … —WALLACE STEVENS Contents Cover Other Books by This Author Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph ORDINARY SEDUCTIONS Ocean Blue Going South The House on Palmas Street Celia's Letters: 1935–1940 A Grove of Lemons The Fire Between Them Celia's Letters: 1942–1949 IMAGINING WINTER The Meaning of Shells Enough Attitude Baskets of Water Celia's Letters: 1950–1955 A Matrix Light God's Will Daughters of Changó Celia's Letters: 1956–1958 THE LANGUAGES LOST Six Days in April Celia's Letter: 1959 About the Author ORDINARY SEDUCTIONS (1972) C Ocean Blue elia del Pino, equipped with binoculars and wearing her best housedress and drop pearl earrings, sits in her wicker swing guarding the north coast of Cuba. Square by square, she searches the night skies for adversaries then scrutinizes the ocean, which is roiling with nine straight days of unseasonable April rains. No sign of gusano traitors. Celia is honored. The neighborhood committee has voted her little brick-and-cement house by the sea as the primary lookout for Santa Teresa del Mar. From her porch, Celia could spot another Bay of Pigs invasion before it happened. She would be feted at the palace, serenaded by a brass orchestra, seduced by El Líder himself on a red velvet divan. Celia brings the binoculars to rest in her lap and rubs her eyes with sti ened ngers. Her wattled chin trembles. Her eyes smart from the sweetness of the gardenia tree and the salt of the sea. In an hour or two, the shermen will return, nets empty. The yanquis, rumors go, have ringed the island with nuclear poison, hoping to starve the people and incite a counterrevolution. They will drop germ bombs to wither the sugarcane elds, blacken the rivers, blind horses and pigs. Celia studies the coconut palms lining the beach. Could they be blinking signals to an invisible enemy? A radio announcer barks fresh conjectures about a possible attack and plays a special recorded message from El Líder: "Eleven years ago tonight, compañeros, you defended our country against American aggressors. Now each and every one of you must guard our future again. Without your support, compañeros, without your sacri ces, there can be no revolution." Celia reaches into her straw handbag for more red lipstick, then darkens the mole on her left cheek with a black eyebrow pencil. Her sticky graying hair is tied in a chignon at her neck. Celia played the piano once and still exercises her hands, unconsciously stretching them two notes beyond an octave. She wears leather pumps with her bright housedress. Her grandson appears in the doorway, his pajama top twisted o his shoulders, his eyes vacant with sleep. Celia carries Ivanito past the sofa draped with a faded mantilla, past the water-bleached walnut piano, past the dining-room table pockmarked with ancient history. Only seven chairs remain of the set. Her husband smashed one on the back of Hugo Villaverde, their former son-in-law, and could not repair it for all the splinters. She nestles her grandson beneath a frayed blanket on her bed and kisses his eyes closed. Celia returns to her post and adjusts the binoculars. The sides of her breasts ache under her arms. There are three shing boats in the distance—the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María. She remembers the singsong way she used to recite their names. Celia moves the binoculars in an arc from left to right, the way she was trained, and then straight across the horizon. At the far end of the sky, where daylight begins, a dense radiance like a shooting star breaks forth. It weakens as it advances, as its outline takes shape in the ether. Her husband emerges from the light and comes toward her, taller than the palms, walking on water in his white summer suit and Panama hat. He is in no hurry. Celia half expects him to pull pink tea roses from behind his back as he used to when he returned from his trips to distant provinces. Or to o er her a giant eggbeater wrapped in brown paper, she doesn't know why. But he comes empty-handed. He stops at the ocean's edge, smiles almost shyly, as if he fears disturbing her, and stretches out a colossal hand. His blue eyes are like lasers in the night. The beams bounce o his ngernails, ve hard blue shields. They scan the beach, illuminating shells and sleeping gulls, then focus on her. The porch turns blue, ultraviolet. Her hands, too, are blue. Celia squints through the light, which dulls her eyesight and blurs the palms on the shore. Her husband moves his mouth carefully but she cannot read his immense lips. His jaw churns and swells with each word, faster, until Celia feels the warm breeze of his breath on her face. Then he disappears. Celia runs to the beach in her good leather pumps. There is a trace of tobacco in the air. "Jorge, I couldn't hear you. I couldn't hear you." She paces the shore, her arms crossed over her breasts. Her shoes leave delicate exclamation points in the wet sand. Celia ngers the sheet of onion parchment in her pocket, reads the words again, one by one, like a blind woman. Jorge's letter arrived that morning, as if his prescience extended even to the irregular postal service between the United States and Cuba. Celia is astonished by the words, by the disquieting ardor of her husband's last letters. They seemed written by a younger, more passionate Jorge, a man she never knew well. But his handwriting, an ornate script he learned in another century, revealed his decay. When he wrote this last missive, Jorge must have known he would die before she received it. A long time ago, it seems to her, Jorge boarded the plane for New York, sick and shrunken in an ancient wheelchair. "Butchers and veterinarians!" he shouted as they pushed him up the plank. "That's what Cuba is now!" Her Jorge did not resemble the huge, buoyant man on the ocean, the gentleman with silent words she could not understand. Celia grieves for her husband, not for his death, not yet, but for his mixed-up allegiances. For many years before the revolution, Jorge had traveled ve weeks out of six, selling electric brooms and portable fans for an American rm. He'd wanted to be a model Cuban, to prove to his gringo boss that they were cut from the same cloth. Jorge wore his suit on the hottest days of the year, even in remote villages where the people thought he was crazy. He put on his boater with its wide black band before a mirror, to keep the angle shy of jaunty. Celia cannot decide which is worse, separation or death. Separation is familiar, too familiar, but Celia is uncertain she can reconcile it with permanence. Who could have predicted her life? What unknown covenants led her ultimately to this beach and this hour and this solitude? She considers the vagaries of sports, the happenstance of El Líder, a star pitcher in his youth, narrowly missing a baseball career in America. His wicked curveball attracted the major-league scouts, and the Washington Senators were interested in signing him but changed their minds. Frustrated, El Líder went home, rested his pitching arm, and started a revolution in the mountains. Because of this, Celia thinks, her husband will be buried in sti , foreign earth. Because of this, their children and their grandchildren are nomads. Pilar, her rst grandchild, writes to her from Brooklyn in a Spanish that is no longer hers. She speaks the hard-edged lexicon of bygone tourists itchy to throw dice on green felt or asphalt. Pilar's eyes, Celia fears, are no longer used to the compacted light of the tropics, where a morning hour can ll a month of days in the north, which receives only careless sheddings from the sun. She imagines her granddaughter pale, gliding through paleness, malnourished and cold without the food of scarlets and greens. Celia knows that Pilar wears overalls like a farmhand and paints canvases with knots and whorls of red that resemble nothing at all. She knows that Pilar keeps a diary in the lining of her winter coat, hidden from her mother's scouring eyes. In it, Pilar records everything. This pleases Celia. She closes her eyes and speaks to her granddaughter, imagines her words as slivers of light piercing the murky night. The rain begins again, softly this time. The nned palms record each drop. Celia is ankle deep in the rising tide. The water is curiously warm, too warm for spring. She reaches down and removes her pumps, crimped and puckered now like her own skin, chalked and misshapen from the saltwater. She wades deeper into the ocean. It pulls on her housedress like weights on her hem. Her hands oat on the surface of the sea, still clutching her shoes, as if they could lead her to a new place. She remembers something a santera told her nearly forty years ago, when she had decided to die: "Miss Celia, there's a wet landscape in your palm." And it was true. She had lived all these years by the sea until she knew its every de nition of blue. Celia turns toward the shore. The light is unbearably bright on the porch. The wicker swing hangs from two rusted chains. The stripes on the cushions have dulled to gray as if the color made no di erence at all. It seems to Celia that another woman entirely sat for years on those weathered cushions, drawn by the pull of the tides. She remembers the painful transitions to spring, the sea grapes and the rains, her skin a cicatrix. She and Jorge moved to their house in the spring of 1937. Her husband bought her an upright walnut piano and set it by an arched window with a view of the sea. He stocked it with her music workbooks and sheaves of invigorating Rachmanino , Tchaikovsky, and a selection of Chopin. "Keep her away from Debussy," she overheard the doctors warn him. They feared that the Frenchman's restless style might compel her to rashness, but Celia hid her music to La Soirée dans Grenade and played it incessantly while Jorge traveled. Celia hears the music now, pressing from beneath the waves. The water laps at her throat. She arches her spine until she oats on her back, straining to hear the notes of the Alhambra at midnight. She is waiting in a owered shawl by the fountain for her lover, her Spanish lover, the lover before Jorge, and her hair is twisted with high combs. They retreat to the mossy riverbank and make love under the watchful poplars. The air is fragrant with jasmine and myrtle and citrus. A cool wind stirs Celia from her dream. She stretches her legs but she cannot touch the sandy bottom. Her arms are heavy, sodden as porous wood after a storm. She has lost her shoes. A sudden wave engulfs her, and for a moment Celia is tempted to relax and drop. Instead, she swims clumsily, steadily toward shore, sunk low like an overladen boat. Celia concentrates on the palms tossing their headdresses in the sky. Their messages jump from tree to tree with stolen electricity. No one but me, she thinks, is guarding the coast tonight. Celia peels Jorge's letter from her housedress pocket and holds it in the air to dry. She walks back to the porch and waits for the shermen, for daylight. Felicia del Pino Felicia del Pino, her head a spiky anarchy of miniature pink rollers, pounds the horn of her 1952 De Soto as she pulls up to the little house by the sea. It is 7:43 A.M. and she has made the seventeen-mile journey from Havana to Santa Teresa del Mar in thirty-four minutes. Felicia screams for her mother, throws herself onto the backseat and shoulders open the car's only working door. Then she ies past the rows of gangly bird of paradise, past the pawpaw tree with ripening fruit, and loses a sandal taking the three front steps in an inelegant leap. "I know already," Celia says, rocking gently in her wicker swing on the porch. Felicia collapses on her mother's lap, sending the swing lurching crazily, and wails to the heavens. "He was here last night." Celia grips the wicker armrests as if the entire swing would y o of its own accord. "Who?" Felicia demands. "Your father, he came to say good-bye." Felicia abruptly stops her lament and stands up. Her pale yellow stretch shorts slide into the crease of her eshy buttocks. "You mean he was in the neighborhood and didn't even stop by?" She is pacing now, pushing a st into her palm. "Felicia, it was not a social visit." "But he's been in New York four years! The least he could have done was say good-bye to me and the children!" "What did your sister say?" Celia asks, ignoring her daughter's outburst. "The nuns called her at the bakery this morning. They said Papi rose to heaven on tongues of re. Lourdes was very upset. She's convinced it's a resurrection." Ivanito stretches his arms around his mother's plump thighs. Felicia, her face softening, looks down at her son. "Your grandfather died today, Ivanito. I know you don't remember him but he loved you very much." "What happened to Abuela?" Ivanito asks. Felicia turns to her mother as if seeing her for the rst time. Seaweed clings to her skull like a lethal plant. She is barefoot and her skin, encrusted with sand, is tinged a faint blue. Her legs are cold and hard as marble. "I went for a swim," Celia says irritably. "With your clothes on?" Felicia tugs on her mother's damp sleeve. "Yes, Felicia, with my clothes on." The edge in Celia's voice would end any conversation save with her daughter. "Now, listen to me. I want you to send a telegram to your brother." Celia hasn't spoken to her son since the Soviet tanks stormed Prague four years ago. She cried when she heard his voice and the sounds of the falling city behind him. What was he doing so far from the warm seas swimming with gentle manatees? Javier writes that he has a Czech wife now and a baby girl. Celia wonders how she will speak to this granddaughter, show her how to catch crickets and avoid the beak of the tortoise. "What should I say?" Felicia asks her mother. "Tell him his father died." * * * Felicia climbs into the front seat of her car, crosses her arms over the steering wheel, and stares out the windshield. The heat rises from the green hood, reminding her of the ocean the day before it wiped the beach clean of homes, God's bits of wood. It was 1944. Felicia was only six, her brother wasn't even born yet, but she remembers that day with precision. The sea's languid retreat into the horizon and the terrible silence of its absence. The way the she- crabs scurried after their young. The stranded dolphin towed out to sea by the Munoz brothers, and the majestic shells, thousands of them, with intricate mauve chambers, arranged on a cemetery of wet sand. Felicia set aside pails of them but selected only one, a mother-of-pearl shell, a baroque Spanish fan with which later to taunt her suitors. Her mother hurriedly wrapped gold-rimmed goblets with newspaper and packed them into a scu ed leather suitcase, all the while listening to the warnings on the radio. "I told you not to bring shells into this house," she reprimanded when Felicia held up her prize. "They bring bad luck." Felicia's father was away on business in Oriente province when the tidal wave hit. He was always away on business. This time, he had promised to bring his wife a Jamaican maid from the east coast of the island so that she could spend her days resting on the porch, as the doctors ordered, and nd solace in the patterns of the sea. Felicia's father didn't return with a maid but he brought back a signed baseball for her sister, Lourdes, that made her jump in place with excitement. Felicia didn't recognize the name. The sea took more than seventy wooden homes from their stretch of coast. The del Pinos' house survived because it was sturdily built of brick and cement. When they returned, it was like an undersea cave, blanched by the ocean. Dried algae stuck to the walls and the sand formed a strange topography on the oors. Felicia laughed when she remembered how her mother had warned her not to bring shells home. After the tidal wave, the house was full of them. "Girl, you're going to fry in there!" Herminia Delgado raps on Felicia's car window. She is carrying a basket with an unplucked chicken, four lemons, and a brittle garlic clove. "I'm making a fricassee later. Why don't you come over? Or are you too busy with your naughty daydreams again?" Felicia, her face and forearms blotchy with heat, looks up at her best friend. "My father died last night and I have to be at work in an hour. They're going to transfer me back to the butcher's if I'm late again. They're looking for an excuse since I singed Graciela Moreira's hair. They dumped her on me. Nobody likes to do her hair because it's so ne it tears like toilet paper. I've told her a million times she shouldn't get a permanent but does she listen?" "Did Lourdes call?" "The nuns told her it was like a Holy Ascension except Papi was dressed to go dancing. Then he shows up at my mother's house and nearly scares her half to death. I think she dove in the ocean after him." Felicia turns away. "He didn't even say good-bye." The last time Felicia saw her father, he had smashed a chair over her ex-husband Hugo's back. "If you leave with that sonofabitch, don't ever come back!" her father had shouted as they ed. "Maybe his spirit is still oating free. You must make your peace with him before he's gone for good. I'll call La Madrina. We'll have an emergency session tonight." "I don't know, Herminia." Felicia believes in the gods' benevolent powers, she just can't stand the blood. "Listen, girl, there's always new hope for the dead. You must cleanse your soul of this or it will trail you all your days. It may even harm your children. Just a small o ering to Santa Bárbara," Herminia coaxes. "Be there at ten and I'll take care of the rest." "Well, okay. But please, tell her no goats this time." That night, Felicia guides her car along a rutted road in the countryside a few miles from Santa Teresa del Mar. Her headlights have not worked since 1967 but she shines an oversized ashlight up the dirt pathway, startling two guinea hens and a dwarf monkey in a bamboo cage. The beam of light moves through the yard to the giant ceiba, thick as six lesser trees. Several identical red handkerchiefs are tied together around the trunk, midway up. The head of a freshly slaughtered rooster juts from one knot. Its beak hangs open, giving the bird a look of surprised indignation. Herminia motions to her from a side door of the run-down house. She is wearing a cream-yellow blouse with a collar the luster of the absent moon. Her plump black arms stir the darkness. "Hurry up! La Madrina is ready!" Felicia slides to the backseat of her car and opens the door with a scrape. Ferns and chicken feathers graze her ankles as she tiptoes in backless sandals toward her friend. "Por Dios, we've been waiting for you for over an hour! What took you so long?" Herminia grabs Felicia's arm and pulls her to the door. "Let's go in before you make the gods angry." She steers Felicia down an airless passageway lit on one side with red votive candles set on wooden tables coated with hardened wax. At the end of the corridor, long strands of shells hang in an arched doorway, the mollusks separated by odd-shaped bits of polished onyx. "Bienvenida, hija," La Madrina beckons in a voice hoarse with a vocation to the unfortunate. "We have been expecting you." She gestures with upturned palms in an arc around her. Her face is an almond sheen of sweat under her white cotton turban, and her lace blouson, settled o her shoulders, reveals duplicate moles, big and black as beetles, at the base of her throat. Layers of gauze skirts, delicate as membranes, brush her feet, which are bare on the cold cement oor. The low-ceilinged sea-green room wavers with the ames and incense of a hundred candles. Against the back wall, an ebony statue of Santa Bárbara, the Black Queen, presides. Apples and bananas sit in o ering at her feet. Fragrant oblations crowd the shrines of the other saints and gods: toasted corn, pennies, and an aromatic cigar for Saint Lazarus, protector of paralytics; coconut and bitter kola for Obatalá, King of the White Cloth; roasted yams, palm wine, and a small sack of salt for Oggún, patron of metals. In the front of the room, Elleguá, god of the crossroads, inhabits the clay eggs in nine rustic bowls of varying sizes. The eggs have cowrie-shell eyes and mouths, and soak in an elixir of herbs and holy water. Four mulattas, wearing gingham skirts and aprons, kneel before the shrines, praying. One man, a pure blue-black Yoruban, stands mute in the center of the room, a starched cotton fez on his head. "Herminia has told us of your dystopia." La Madrina is fond of melodious words, although she doesn't always know what they mean. She places a hand heavily ringed with ivory and bezoar stones on Felicia's shoulder and motions toward the santero. "He has traveled many hours from the south, from the mangroves, to be with us, to cleanse you of your infelicities. He will bring you and your father peace, a peace you never knew while he lived on this earth." "Elleguá wants a goat," the santero says, his lips barely moving. "Oh no, not another goat!" Felicia cries and turns to her friend accusingly. "You promised!" "You have no choice," Herminia implores. "You can't dictate to the gods, Felicia. Elleguá needs fresh blood to do the job right." "We will open the future to you, hija, you will see," La Madrina assures her. "We have a friendly contact with the complicated surfaces of the globe." La Madrina gathers the believers around Felicia. They wrap her in garlands of beads and stroke her face and eyelids with branches of rosemary. The santero returns with the goat, its mouth and ears tied with string. Felicia takes a mouthful of shredded coconut and spits it on the goat's face, kissing its ears as it whines quietly. She rubs her breasts against its muzzle. "Kosí ikú, kosí arun, kosí araye," the women sing. The santero leads the goat over the o erings and quickly pierces its neck with a butcher knife, directing the stream of blood onto the clay eggs. The goat quivers, then is still. The santero shakes a box of salt on its head, then pours honey over the o ering. Felicia, reeling from the sweet scent of the blood and the candles and the women, faints on La Madrina's saint-room oor, which is still warm with sacri ce. T Going South he continents strain to unloose themselves, to drift reckless and heavy in the seas. Explosions tear and scar the land, spitting out black oaks and coal mines, street lamps and scorpions. Men lose the power of speech. The clocks stop. Lourdes Puente awakens. It is 4:00 A.M. She turns to her husband sleeping beside her. His reddish hair is ecked with gray and his nearsighted eyes disappear under weary, eshy lids. She has exhausted poor Ru no again. Lourdes puts on a size 26 white uniform with wide hip pockets and at, rubber-soled shoes. She has six identical out ts in the closet, and two more pair of shoes. Lourdes is pleased with her uniform's implicit authority, with the severity of her unadorned face and blunt, round nose. The muscles in her right eye have been weak since she was a child, and every so often the eye drifts to one side, giving her a vaguely cyclopean air. It doesn't diminish her 20/20 vision, only skews it a bit. Lourdes is convinced it enables her to see things that others don't. Lourdes pins a short braid against her head, twists on a hairnet, and leaves a note for her daughter on the kitchen table. She wants Pilar at the bakery after school. Lourdes red the Pakistani yesterday and she'll be alone behind the counter today if she doesn't get help. "No excuses this time!!" she scrawls in her sharply slanted script. The street lamps shed their distorted lights. It is not yet daybreak, and ordinary noises do not startle Lourdes. A squirrel scratching up in an oak tree. A car engine stalling down the block. Between the brownstones and warehouses, the East River is visible, slow and metallic as the sky. Lourdes enjoys walking in the dark unseen. She imagines her footprints sinking invisibly through the streets and the sidewalks, below the condensed archaeology of the city to underground plains of rich alluvial clay. She suspects the earth sheds its skin in layers, squandered of green. The early-morning refuge...