Read Online The Aguero Sisters by Cristina Garcia - Free Book Online

widow spat at him on the Paseo del Prado. Her husband had been killed in the Spanish-American War, and she could not stand to hear Papá’s Castilian accent
.
    The desk clerk at my father’s
pensión
recommended that he become a
lector
on account of his grandiloquent voice. A week later, Papá got a job in a cigar factory in the Vuelta Abajo region of Pinar del Río. His first day on the platform, perspiring with nervousness and encircled by cigar smoke and the scrutinous eyes of a hundred workers, he began to read
:
    â€œ
In a village of La Mancha the name of which I have no desire to recall, there lived not so long ago one of those gentlemen who always have a lance in the rack, an ancient buckler, a skinny nag, and a greyhound for the chase
 …”
    As a boy, I often wondered how Papá had endured those first months away from home, surrounded by strangers, a refined misfit among coarser men, a man whose first purchase in Cuba, after much sacrifice and diligent saving, was a gramophone and a thick record of the “Witches’ Dance Variations” by Paganini
.
    In time, my father met Soledad Varela, a local flutist, ten years his senior. It was a Sunday afternoon, and they were attending a concert by a chamber music quartet from Havana. In fact, they were the only ones in the audience. Mamá sat in her wide-brimmed straw hat. Papá smoothed a Panama in his lap. She liked the way his mouth moved, his unseemly mustache. He liked the way she held her silence, unafraid, weighing her words like silver on her tongue
.
    It turned out they had much to say to one another, about the muddy-sounding flute and the violin tuned half a note too high. They continued their conversation after the concert, beginning a three-day courtship that ended in Pinar del Río’s town hall. Mamá was thirty-one years old and by then had refused proposals of marriage from suitors women half her age would have coveted. But in Reinaldo Agüero of Galicia, a newcomer not long off the boat, she had found her destiny
.
    From my parents’ first meeting, my future was born and the very moment I am living was predetermined. From my parents’ first meeting, two more people walk the earth in search of solace, two more people with Papá’s first loneliness echoing in their breasts
.
    â€¢ • •
    Music is my earliest memory, earlier than sight or smell or touch, earlier than consciousness itself. My parents spent most evenings playing duets, for which they were technically, if not temperamentally, suited. Papá worshiped the magnificent “Carnaval de Venice,” while Mamá preferred the stateliness of Beethoven’s adagios or the more restrained brilliance of Tchaikovsky’s “Danse Russe.” I remember how the mood of our house was colored by the music in it, as if the notes themselves could brush the air with paint
.
    Although I was not musical in any conventional sense, I could, at an early age, accurately imitate the calls of every bird in the woods around Pinar del Río. Our neighbor, Secundino Robreño, used to coax me into the forest to help him secure doves for his poultry cart. I warbled with such proficiency that within moments, dozens of birds dropped from the trees to welcome his shotgun. Secundino rewarded me with sticky candies from his pockets, usually less than fresh, or a handful of spent bullets
.
    During one of our expeditions, I discovered the nest of a tree duck in a hollow stump north of town. Inside were four eggs and, fortunately, no mother
yaguasa
in sight. Secundino offered me twenty cents apiece for the eggs, a fantastic sum at the time, but I refused him and decided to raise the fledglings myself. I gathered the eggs carefully, placing one in each trouser pocket and holding the other two in my cupped hands. On the way home, balancing on the balls of my feet, I whistled the
yaguasa’s
one-note song to soothe the unborn chicks
.
    In those