The Aguero Sisters.
Hernandez, Ana Maria
Cristina Garcia's second novel opens in the mystical Zapata
Swamp on the southern coast of Cuba, a place long imbued with mystery
and magic in Cuban folklore and Afro-Cuban ritual. It is there that
Ignacio Aguero, a renowned naturalist, murders the mysterious Blanca,
his wife and research associate. Two years later, he commits suicide,
leaving no explanatory note. The novel thus becomes a whydunit, as in
the case of Garcia Marquez's Cronica de una muerte anunciada. The
reader approaches the story from multiple points of view, attempting to
elucidate the reasons for the murder/suicide and its effect on the
surviving Aguero daughters and their own progeny.
The novel is masterfully structured with a mosaic of narrations from
the Aguero sisters, their daughters Dulce and Isabel, Ignacio Aguero,
and a third-person narrator who localizes each sister alternately. The
diminutive Constancia, unwanted by her mother and virtually abandoned by
the latter after the birth of her half-sister Reina, relies on
appearance (she is a cosmetologist), social connections, and the
conventional trappings of success: a sizable income, a well-placed
condo, a boat, a (pink!) Cadillac. Reina, resembling her mother's
mulatto lover, basks in her mother's love and solicitous attention
(she is breastfed until she is five), and grows up self-assured,
androgynous, and libidinous - perhaps excessively so. The
forty-eight-year-old Reina's animal magnetism and endless conquests
seem a bit hyperbolic even by the standards of magic realism, to which
Garcia subscribes in a subdued manner. Constancia embodies the
traditional values of Cuban middle-class exiles, whereas Reina, a master
electrician by training and profession and a solid supporter of the
revolution until the job-related accident that results in her defection
to Miami, represents the blue-collar outlook of the supposedly classless
society in which she grew up and the survival skills of the last wave of
exiles.
Garcia meticulously researches every aspect of her novel - from
ornithology to cosmetology by way of electrical engineering and
antique-car repair - and conveys her findings with an admirable command
of language and a gift for metaphor. Her careful reconstructions of
habitats long destroyed and traditions long abandoned inspire Cubans to
remember and non-Cubans to discover; especially noteworthy is her
evocation of the lectores, cigar-factory employees whose function it was
to entertain cigarrollers with readings from the classics, hoping to
improve the quality of their product by improving the minds of its
makers. The descriptions of the Cuban landscape around the beginning of
this century provided by the naturalist Aguero are particularly lyrical
and almost mystical, even though we suspect that some of the species
described are figments of the author's imagination. At one point
she places a leatherback turtle - whose usual habitat excludes the
Caribbean - in the waters around the (former) Isle of Pines to the south
of Cuba. Aguero spots the gigantic turtle as she digs her nest on the
black volcanic sands of the isle and lay's her eggs at midnight. He
then watches in dread as predatory seagulls and stray dogs threaten the
nest: "What choice did I have? I sat on the leatherback's nest
all that day and all the next night, guarding her eggs from predators,
guarding the eggs for her." Immediately following an episode in
which Ignacio's first love goes sour after his beloved asks him to
exterminate a colony of bats that had infested her attic, the landscape
and its creatures become a metaphor for the subjectivity of the
character and an affirmation of the eternal laws of nature over the
vicissitudes of human life and love. Such juxtapositions abound
throughout the novel.
Satire is an important element in The Aguero Sisters - specifically
about the exile community in Miami, with the usual planned invasions of
Cuba and the sacralization of everything pre-Castro. Most amusing is the
mushrooming of Constancia's line of cosmetics, "Cuerpo de
Cuba," which caters to aging Cuban baby-boomers by offering a
special emollient for every sagging part of their anatomy ("Cuello
de Cuba," "Rodillas de Cuba," "Muslos de
Cuba"). This is a humorous, well-written, most enjoyable work from
the author of Dreaming in Cuban.
Ana Maria Hernandez LaGuardia Community College, CUNY
