The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien Page 14

  Back then, she never wrote anything down, but had the distracted presence of a woman in the process of remembrance: she tended, in these continual and spontaneous but unrecorded compositions, to think in terms of flowery and avian images, as in: The saddest hummingbird laughs dancing upon a blossom, light as the air, but carrying the world in its heart, and so many others, so many that she confused them with the ordinary thoughts of life.

  In those days, she could not walk unescorted from her house, so, during a trip perhaps with her maid Florida to the market, she would sidetrack the poor woman, leading her along the most circuitous routes around the city. From time to time in the marketplace she would purchase some magazines from the United States, coming away with copies of The Saturday Evening Post and Colliers Weekly, old, outdated issues which she could not read but much enjoyed examining. And she went to church on Sundays with her father and mother, who, as she yawned, kneeling on the stone floors, were always quick to remind her that religious devotion was in her blood. (After all, she was said to resemble her maternal great-aunt Benedicta, a saintly woman whose good deeds and exemplary life in Spain in the first part of the nineteenth century were of such merit that she had been elevated by the Pope into the hagiographic enclave in 1870, that aunt coming from a family line whose sons and daughters had often sacrificed themselves to holy vocations. She slept on planks, survived on roots and brook water, and traveled through the arid provinces of Spain preaching that faith in God was a question not of proof but of personal discipline. Miracles were attributed to her, and she’d also experienced, during a time of great good acts, a visitation by the Holy Mother, who’d advised her as to the day and hour of her death, when she would join the Lord in heaven. When that day arrived, Benedicta, suffering much, was relieved of worldly pain and lifted up to Paradise. “You have much to look forward to,” her mother, María, would tell Mariela.)

  Sometimes the family would take long strolls, sit in the plaza listening to political speeches, or simply to hear music or watch passersby. She had never been allowed to speak to young men, though for a time she was party to something of an arranged betrothal to a young man who was later killed during the war.

  There were the occasional trips out to the farms—one managed by her brother Pablo, the other by her sister Teresa and her husband (her other sister, Vivian, living with them)—where she would spend part of her days, so happy to be away. But those trips were infrequent, her father, Don Emilio, not trusting the peace of the times.

  She was forced to accept the serene monotony of those days, beside her mother and in the company of the maid. Her father was not much for speaking to her, except to give her orders, exerting his manly control. He was a good man, but a little apprehensive about life. The flight into the mountains in 1897, when fires were burning everywhere and guns sounded in the fields, had left him unnerved. They had lived in crude conditions, in one large room in a mountainside house: there was no privacy and sanitary needs were met in the brush, water fetched from a stream. She had enjoyed the rigors, and the beauty of nature at night, but her father, concerned about his properties, dreaded losing everything; he did lose his livestock and horses and had the gloom of a man who’d watched from afar his life’s work turn to air. He had “retired,” turning over the rebuilding of the farms to his daughter and son but, since the days of their return to the city, had suffered in spirit. Instead of managing the farms and his workers, he managed his wife and daughter Mariela, the house his kingdom. He would watch her anytime she was in a room, his eyes following her as if exerting control over her. If she moved from the parlor into the tiled hallway that led to the patio, he would never fail to ask, “Where are you going, my daughter?”

  As a result, she was famous in the household for refusing to answer her father, and sometimes went for days without saying so much as a word to anyone. He regarded her as obedient but “contrary.”

  Still, he adored her, and being a proud father and a little sentimental, he noticed that she had matured into a young beauty, and one day, as she was sitting on the patio, he called out to her, saying, “Mariela, I want to have a photograph made of you.”

  So she accompanied her father to the Irishman’s photography shop on Bolívar Street.

  That afternoon, Don Emilio, with his wheezy anatomy, entered the Irish photographer’s shop, his daughter behind him, just some few streets down the hill from Victoriana de Avila. When they entered the studio, the Irishman had just finished drinking a cup of coffee and the room itself, that long, front parlor with its mirrored wall, carried the cheery fragrance of pipe tobacco and of potassium and silver nitrate. Nelson O’Brien, in his affable way, welcomed his new subject and her father. Mariela had come in, moody and indifferent, and, barely willing to lift up her head, was averting her eyes. Nelson, coming close, appraised her. As he did so, a queasiness began to come over him, as he had caught a glimpse of her clever eyes, and he had the sensation, far more momentous than anything he had felt during his four years in Cuba, of falling through the air.

  For the sake of relaxing his “subject,” he tried to amuse her, launching, in his unsteady Spanish, into an explanation of the photographic process.

  Light, he told her, had a physical property which allowed it to infiltrate certain chemical surfaces. He said that light to a silver-nitrate plate was what the perfume of a flower was to the nose, that she, in that very moment, was giving off her own kind of light (really, in those moments, she was giving off molecules of her own stubborn feminine allure, and these molecules were floating through the Irish photographer’s studio, slipping up his nose, drifting into his eyes, seeping into his skin).

  He mentioned many great photographers of the past—Daguerre, Hauron Du Cros, Ives—and hoped, as he moved close to her, that she would give some appreciative notice of his presence.

  He had thought to himself, This is a woman who never smiles, and found himself intrigued.

  Perhaps he had not been able to communicate his explanation in Spanish well, for after a time Mariela looked up and asked, “What are you talking about?”

  Perhaps it was her indifferent beauty that moved him, but he found himself feeling a little drunk, as if he had run into Harrington again on one of his swings through Santiago and they sat in a waterfront café drinking aguardiente until the moon hummed in their ears and every passing woman seemed queenly and breathtakingly beautiful. He felt a pang of passionate interest in Mariela—his face turned red and the palms of his hands sweated.

  Leading her out to the sunny courtyard where he would pose his subjects, he ordered his assistant to position a mirror to reflect light on her face. She sat on a stool, her body bent forward, her face remote and so uncooperative that after a few minutes her father, Don Emilio, losing patience, said to her, “Mariela, please sit up.”

  She remained in that posture for a long time and then suddenly raised her head, as if awakening from a dream-ridden sleep, and then Nelson saw a tear roll out of her eye. She was in pain, and the sight of it nearly unraveled his businesslike demeanor. From his vest pocket, he pulled a clean handkerchief and wiped her cheek. Then he offered her and her father a glass of brandy. Having sipped delicately from the glass, she seemed in better spirits and settled into a pose, smiling and appreciative of the Irishman’s concern. He disappeared under his black cloth but had to collect himself before proceeding to take the picture.

  That night, thinking about her, he found himself unable to sleep. It was not so much the way she looked—many beautiful young Cuban women would come to the studio with their intendeds to pose—but she seemed to possess some inward quality, compassion perhaps, and a certain demureness that much appealed to him.

  ***

  After dallying before the mirror, brushing his hair and parting it in the middle, clipping his whiskers and cleaning his teeth with dental powder, he had wandered about his parlor, trying on different waistcoats, and looping and relooping the Mississippi-gambler bow tie that he wore around his shirt collar, and
slapping some sweet-smelling cologne on his face.

  Making his way up the cobblestone streets, he was whistling in imitation of the birds, when he heard the church bells of San Lázaro ringing loud. Its doors were open and, from within, a choir was singing “Ave Maria,” and when he peered inside he saw row after row of the pious, many of them war widows, kneeling, rosaries and prayer books in hand. He moved on uphill toward Victoriana de Avila Street, where he was to deliver some photographic plates that he had taken of the young Montez woman a few days before.

  At around 11:30 on that Sunday morning in 1900, Nelson pulled the cord of the house bell posted by the curlicue gate of the entrance of Avila number 17. As he stood waiting under an orange tree, its fruit long ago picked off by passersby, his palms were sweaty and his stomach in knots. He rang again and a voice called out and at the entrance appeared the maid, Florida, who led him down a tiled hallway to their parlor with its high, glassless windows facing the street—a bodega across the way, and a shoe repair shop. Señor Montez had been napping in a room at the far end of the house and grunted when Florida awakened him. Shortly, eyes still blearied with sleep, he shuffled in slippers and a long robe into the parlor, where they sat.

  As Montez examined the photographs, Nelson noticed beyond the parlor and dining room a set of double French doors that opened to a patio and garden. There Montez’s daughter was sitting by a table sewing. Nelson stared at her, hoping to attract her attention.

  “Now, thank you very much, Mr. O’Brien,” Montez said just then.

  “I would like to know, sir,” Nelson said to Montez, “your daughter’s opinion of them.”

  Shortly, the two men stepped out into the light of the patio and Mariela examined the prints. She saw herself as perhaps she had always wished she could be, a startlingly beautiful young woman, surrounded by an aureole of light, the surface of the photograph dappled with what she imagined were flushes of affection and pain. And as she held the print, lacquered and mounted on a board (and destined to sit one day in a frame on a dresser in a faraway place), she felt honored somehow. But, although she wanted to smile, she set the print aside, did not look up at Nelson, and resumed darning her father’s shirts.

  ***

  From that day on, Nelson O’Brien returned often to that house. At first, he would arrive on the pretense of taking another photograph, free of charge, of Mariela on their back patio. Then he would turn up to play checkers with her father. Finally, on a rainy Sunday afternoon, he confessed to Don Emilio that he wanted permission to see his daughter, and her father, liking the Irishman, allowed him to do so.

  It was an entirely different thing for him to win her over. Because his Spanish was far from perfect, he was often tongue-tied and awkward. His hands would shake, his teeth sometimes chattered as he spoke to her, but he always comported himself with respect and courtesy—and he was ever attentive: if she walked across the patio to pet her dog, he seemed genuinely pleased; if she picked a gnat or a flower petal out of the tresses of her hair, he’d smile. If she walked into the parlor, ignoring everything around her, his eyes followed her—such good and clear and earnest eyes—the “eyes of a saint,” her mother would say.

  Slowly, Mariela had come to look forward to the young Irishman’s visits, and she took his presence as a blessing, even when she knew that in time she might find a more handsome Cuban man, less rigid in his demeanor. He came to visit her for twenty-seven Sundays in a row, and in that time she began to discern the weight of tragedy on his heart, and slowly, though she was aloof and a bit arrogant in her own way, came to feel compassion and the beginnings of love for him.

  ***

  In September of 1901, Nelson O’Brien asked Señor Montez for formal permission to marry Mariela. That had been on a Wednesday afternoon, when he encountered the man making his way along the market arcades. The following Sunday, when Nelson came to visit the family, the couple were left alone on the patio. There Nelson knelt on the tile floor to propose. She lowered her head, closed her eyes, nodded her consent.

  By then, she had gotten used to his angular Celtic face, his good and honest though confused nature. His sincerity and inner pain had touched her. She thought, in those moments, that they would one day have a household in which they could raise children of intelligence. There would be books, and music; there would be an atmosphere in which children could be helped to take their proper place in the world.

  She watched his face, befuddled by a momentary wave of thought.

  He told her about his house in a distant place called Pennsylvania, deep in the heart of America, where people could do as they pleased and there was no war. She thought that they, as people of class, could travel and live a good life.

  She told him, “Yes.”

  For his part, he was a happy man. In dreams such as one might have dreamed in a mist-ridden meadow in Ireland, he saw them in Cobbleton, restoring felicity to that house. A recent note from a banker in Cobbleton who’d hired someone to look after O’Brien’s property mentioned that a storm had damaged the roof. In his happiness, this did not bother him.

  They were wed in the Church of San Lázaro, the bridegroom elegant and queasy during the ceremony. Among the well-wishers was his friend Harrington, who’d stopped by on his travels, and, winking, presented Nelson with a bawdy volume of forbidden lore, A Gentleman’s Guide to Love. They received other gifts, and that afternoon the bride and groom repaired to a hall to attend the festivities. Afterward the Irishman, ever polite, was perplexed as to how he would undertake the seduction of his wife.

  Retiring with much apprehension and gaiety to a bedroom in her parents’ house, they undertook the new ritual of being man and wife. She had worn a complicated white dress with flowery embroidered sleeves that her mother had made for her and she had shocked Nelson during the first moments, when they were sitting in prolonged silence on opposite sides of the canopied bed, by asking him to undo the cross-hatched laces down her back. Then she had disappeared into an adjoining room, where she took an infinite amount of time removing the dress. She was humming a melody, something like what a young girl taking a stroll with a paramour in the spring might hum, the melody of a young girl taking a walk in a field and defining, through the mellifluousness of her voice, her sovereignty. An indecipherable but distinctly female, Spanish, Arab-tinged melody. That first night together, they did not talk about the wedding, but she had called him “my husband” and did not turn her head away when, for the first time, he began to kiss her on the mouth and chin and behind her ears. She did not turn away when he timidly advanced his hands over the upper portions of her nightgown, finding (for it must have been so with a woman who would bear so many children) the firm breasts and taut nipples. She allowed his hands to roam and he touched her skin, smooth and warm as if it had been covered in heated oil, and then he attempted to lift up the hem of her gown, but she turned away, and when he tried again to lift the gown and move his hand toward the angelic heart below her navel, she abruptly turned on her side and said, “Let us wait until tomorrow.”

  During their honeymoon—their luna de miel—spent in a simple house by the sea, they made love thirty-two times in one week. The days were beautiful and grand, eternal in memory. By day they would go bathing, he in a striped outfit that reached to his knees, romping about in the surf like a nineteenth-century muscleman; she with a parasol, examining the marine fossils, in a bathing dress that hung down to her ankles, the uplifted hem of her skirt splashed and damp from the water. Ever timid, he would come in from the porch and find her naked body serrated by the shuttered sunlight. He would rest his body against hers and mumble, and she would float and shake and her womb would become packed with damp blossoms. Pressed against her, he would daydream that he was with an angel from heaven with soft and florid wings. She would twist and churn as if trying to squeeze out a ball of sugar and honey. She would think about his Celtic skin, fair and defined by many bones, pressing against hers, and that his sperm smelled of grain and the meadows o
f Ireland. (In his cries during orgasm, “Oh my,” the bleating of sheep, the murmur of bulls, the howl of wolves. Wind through the treetops, a man’s breathlessness at the end of a fierce fight or a long run.)

  She’d talk and talk. “People always say that we must do things in a certain way,” she’d tell him in Spanish. “But we can do whatever we like, isn’t that so?”

  It did not matter; they were both surprised by their intimacy.

  — Over the Ocean, the Stars at Night —

  And on one of those nights Nelson handed her a wedding gift, which he had ordered from the States. It was a Newton telescope from Holland, its tube lacquered black like a Chinese trunk and covered with bronze spirals, inlaid with mother-of-pearl stars and quarter-moons. It had arrived in a slender pine case with three latches and a soft felt lining that was a pleasure, like many things of this world, to touch. It also came with a celestial map, good for the latitudes of Cuba. When Mariela unwrapped this present, her eyes grew dreamy and she stood on the porch—perhaps thinking about La vida en el planeta marte—trying to understand its operation. Pointing it upward, she found the stars difficult to locate, but over the following nights, she eventually glimpsed, in that age before electricity overpowered the sky, the fabled planet Saturn. Excited, she called her new husband from the house and he came out, drowsy-eyed. In her young hand, the long tube of science was revealing the singular magnificence of the planet.

  “Please look,” she had said to him and he had yawned, and focusing his eyes, he saw through the eyepiece Saturn, bone-white and tilted on its side. It had a polished rim that resembled an easily chipped porcelain ring that floated in the darkness, its surface reflecting the starlight.

  It hung there with the weight of a cow.