Reina Agüero, cleaving to a telephone pole with thighs strengthened by many such climbs, is repairing a high-voltage cable outside El Cobre, a copper-mining town in eastern Cuba, when another storm blows in from the Cayman Trench. Lightning, intricate as a skeleton, shatters the afternoon hum of the Sierra Maestra, illuminating the pitted, open-cast mine in the distance. Reina Agüero wipes one hand, then another, on her regulation jumpsuit as she works her way down the splintered pole. Her tools clang reassuringly from her belt. In the evening, she will climb the coconut tree behind the government hotel and mingle its milk with a little rum. She hopes the concoction will finally permit her to sleep.

Reina Agüero's insomnia began last summer, on the thirty-seventh anniversary of El Comandante's attack on the Moncada Barracks. On the road, traveling for la revolución, it is especially difficult to rest. The beds are unpredictable, too soft or infested with fleas, and the days are lengthened by extra work. As a visiting master tradesman, Reina is expected not only to repair the balkiest electrical equipment in rural Cuba but also to conduct seminars for local electricians and suffer nightly ceremonies in her honor. Generally, she eats too much fresh pineapple at these events, upsetting her sensitive digestive system.

A cluster of electricians applauds as Reina descends the last few feet of the pole. The ground is saturated with weeks of unseasonable winter rains. Together she and the men slip and grapple their way down the hill toward town, a quarter of which is newly lit by her effort. Reina is drenched, and her jumpsuit clings to her still-curvaceous form. She is forty-eight years old, but her body appears many years younger. She ignores the men who linger behind her, mesmerized by the size and swing of her buttocks.

Reina is five feet eleven, a good four inches taller than most of the men with whom she works. Her mouth is large and flawless, with barely discernible corners. The most daring of her colleagues call her Compañera Amazona, a moniker she secretly relishes. Often, Reina selects the smallest, shyest electrician in a given town for her special favors, leaving him weak and inconsolable for months. After she departs, black owls are frequently sighted in the ceiba trees.

On the way back to her hotel, Reina stops in at the Basilica del Cobre. It is Gothic and gloomy and unwelcoming, like so many Catholic churches, but Reina has heard of the impressive curative powers of La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, the island's patron saint. Reina doubts that La Virgen, with all the tragic ailments laid at her feet, would bother about a little sleeplessness. But Reina is desperate. She's tried every soporific--herbal teas and sleeping pills, even sweet-potato plasters for her head--all to no avail.

Not even the usual rigorous lovemaking with Pepín Beltrán, her lover of twenty-four years, exhausts her sufficiently into slumber. Last week, during a dusk-to-midnight session, Pepín's face went slack as he dropped dead asleep beneath her pleasure. Afterward, she lay awake in the dark until she could perceive every crack and crevice in the ornate room. Years ago, it had been her father's study, one of eight chambers in their commodious old apartment in the Vedado section of Havana. After the revolution, the government rented out the remaining seven rooms to as many families.

Pepín blamed the anarchy of books in the study for Reina's insomnia. There are over three thousand volumes on the carved mahogany shelves, stacked on the marble floors, and on six lavishly decrepit armchairs. Many of the books were written by her father: A Naturalist's Guide to the Pearl of the Antilles, Reconsidering Bats, The Owls of Oriente, In Search of Erophylla Sezekorni, and his classic, Cuba: Flora and Fauna. A former china closet serves as a display case for his most cherished skins, rare birds and bats long extinct, specimens he himself stuffed with arsenical soap and that looked as fresh and alive as on the day he'd shot them.

Pepín begged Reina to clear these relics from their love nest. But Reina refused. Nothing had changed here since her father's death, forty years before.

Reina stands before La Virgen's shrine in the back of the basilica. Hundreds of candles burn to her in pleading and thanksgiving. Centuries of offerings are piled into wobbly, glittering towers: medallions and military badges from those who survived wars under her protection; crutches from devotees to whom she gave the strength to walk; ancient tiaras, chalices, Egyptian silks, and wedding rings donated by pilgrims and the miraculously healed. The brown-skinned Virgin presides over these offerings in a cream satin gown, a gold lamé cape, and her crown, poised and soothing as her Yoruban name: Oshœn.

"Bless me, Virgen, for I have sinned," says Reina, kneeling before the saint and awkwardly crossing herself. She barely recalls the prayers she learned as a child, the rituals of the Protestant boarding school she and her sister were sent to after their mother died. "Well, I haven't sinned exactly, but I can't sleep, and there must be a reason."

A medal from the Spanish-American War catches Reina's eye. A year after Cuba's independence, her grandfather had come to the island from the hills of Galicia. Reinaldo Agüero became a lector in the second-largest cigar factory in Pinar del R’o and was greatly admired for his erudition and his rich baritone. Reina's sister, Constancia, used to say proudly that this made them true criollos.

"I'm not very good at this, and you must have a lot on your mind, but I was hoping you could give me a direction of significance." Reina unsnaps a wrench from her tool belt and places it next to the medal from the Spanish-American War. "It's not much, I know. But maybe when you get a chance you could check in on me, okay?"

That night, Reina lies in bed and considers La Virgen's dark methods of grace. Reina is uncertain of her own beliefs. What she enjoys most is the freedom from a finality of vision, of a definitive version of life's meaning. If she could perceive nothing in its entirety, then why not celebrate what she could grasp with her own senses? Vive de la vida lo sublime. It had been her personal motto for as long as she could remember. After all, it seemed futile to chase what was forever elusive, when reality remained so largely unexplored.

Reina presses the musty hotel pillow over her nose and mouth and begins to count. One minute passes, then two. If she succeeds in rendering herself unconscious, Reina thinks, slumber might return. Six minutes pass, then seven. After eight minutes, Reina, fully conscious and supremely irritated with La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, removes the pillow from her face.

After her mother died, Reina's father also suffered from insomnia. But his was complete and incurable and drove him to suicide two years after his wife's death. At least, Reina thinks, most nights she manages to sleep an hour or two before dawn. Her body sighs with one long releasing breath, and that is the last thing she remembers before the faintest light awakens her, puzzled and refreshed.

Reina has thought often of her father's last night in his study, of his double-barreled twelve-gauge shotgun of Irish make, which is still in its velvet-lined case in the closet. His gun was ideal for pulling birds out of any but the highest trees. Although her father never considered himself a killer by nature, he'd been an excellent shot nonetheless, as effective on horseback as he was crouched low to the ground. Many of his specimens had found their way into the collections of the world's most prestigious museums.

The week after his death, a parcel arrived for Reina and her sister, Constancia, at their boarding school. In it was a selection of their father's lecture notes, rare stuffed bats and birds, and a dozen of his books, first editions, glossy with color plates. Constancia wanted nothing to do with any of them, but Reina carefully repacked the artifacts and slid them under her bed. Despite her suspicions, she couldn't bear to leave the work of Papá's lifetime for beetles and bookworms to devour. "The quest for truth," Ignacio Agüero had written his daughters, "is far more glorious than the quest for power." Their father had written this, and then he shot himself in the heart.

It is the fourth of December. Reina is up before dawn. In the countryside, people are already on the roads and the hillsides. This is a comfort to Reina, who hates to wake up feeling alone. As the first light filters and spreads through the darkness, colors seem to her less concentrated, as if sunlight, not its absence, diluted their strength.

During her long wakeful nights, Reina mentally inches her way from the periphery of her bed, reconstructing the world in concentric circles. Everything is at its most elemental in these circles, pure with the vital sheen of existence. Then a drift of memories overcomes her, reversing the progress of her life.

On the worst nights, Reina feels herself trapped as if on a magnetic plateau, with no fix on the blackness. She confuses the stuffed bats with the birds, and the books with the extinguished chandelier. She thinks often of her mother, hears her voice again, feels the warm press of her breast against her cheek. Reina was six years old when her mother died on the collecting expedition in the Zapata Swamp. How is it possible that she has existed without her all these years?

Reina has one more job in El Cobre before returning home to Havana for a two-week vacation. The incessant rains have flooded the copper mine. The electric water pump dragged to the site is almost prehistoric and has electrocuted two men since mid-November. Now not even the most skillful electricians will go near it.

The same group of men greets Reina in the hotel dining room, over a breakfast of rolls and fresh papaya with lime. Reina looked them over carefully the day before but deemed nobody worthy of her desire. They are all much too sure of their allure. This is a problem in Cuba. Even the most gnarled, toothless, scabrous, sclerotic, pigeon-toed, dyspeptic, pestilential men on the island believe themselves irresistible to women. Reina has often pondered this incongruity. Too much mother coddling is her theory. After the love and embraces of a Cuban mami, what man wouldn't think he is the center of the universe?

Electricians, in Reina's experience, are in a category apart. Adept with their hands and making sparks fly, they often look upon women as something of another electrical challenge. They are reliable but rarely inspired, which is partly why Reina enjoys reducing them to helplessness. Gratitude, she thinks, is a refreshing quality in a man. This is why Pepín Beltrán continues to be her ideal lover, despite the fact that he's married and wears orthopedic shoes. As an official in the Ministry of Agriculture, Pepín has nothing to do all day but rustle papers and daydream about her. By the time he arrives at her room every evening, with a packet of black market delicacies, he is nearly faint with anticipation. He follows Reina's body like music.

Reina admits to a certain vanity. She basks in the admiration she receives in her trade and in her bed, in the image of her image of herself. She is fond of saying she has few specialties but prides herself on doing them exceedingly well.

Nobody is allowed to carry Reina Agüero's toolbox. She insists upon this, forcibly when necessary. It weighs close to seventy pounds, but Reina carries it as if it contained no more than a pork sandwich and a carton of milk. Most days she makes do with her tool belt, but the pump at El Cobre's mine requires more electrical finesse. It is a forty-minute walk uphill in the rain.

Others from the town join the electricians on their trek to the mine. Word has spread of the lady electrician's ingenuity, and soon a colorful procession of El Cobre's truants and elaborately underemployed citizens follow Reina and her associates up the hill. Salvation or catastrophe, Reina notices, is always guaranteed to draw a crowd. The rain comes down harder. The citizens protect themselves with palm leaves and torn strips of cardboard and two black umbrellas marked propriedad del estado.

Topsoil slides down the hill in black rivulets. Snakes and mice and a profusion of underground creatures sweep past them as they climb. The trees are crowded with fretful birds, frogs, and lizards seeking refuge from the floods. One electrician, a flat-headed man named Agosto Piedra, steps knee-deep into a pocket of mud and unleashes a string of profanities so original it makes everyone laugh.

Reina is the first to reach the mouth of the copper mine. It is an amphitheater of decay. In the seventeenth century, slaves extracted enough ore from the mine to meet all of the country's artillery needs. A hundred years later, they turned on their masters with muskets and machetes and, eventually, through the intervention of the Bishop of Santiago and La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre herself, were declared free citizens.

It will take something of a divine intervention to get the thick, foul-smelling water out of the mine, Reina thinks. The pump, actually two pumps clumsily linked by a series of exposed wires, is sunk in a foot of mud. Reina motions for her attendant electricians to help her push the pump to drier land, but nobody moves a muscle. Instead they look back at her, alternately embarrassed and defiant. The machine has already claimed two lives. Revolutionary dedication goes only so far.

Reina puts down her toolbox. She circles the machine once, twice, three times, before deciding on an angle. The mud sucks at her knee-high regulation boots. She takes a deep breath, settles loosely on her haunches. Then, with the speed and strength of a wrestler, she forces the power of her entire body into her right shoulder. The machine moves two feet out of the mud. She repeats the maneuver, so focused she appears in a trance, then again and again until the whole contraption sits precariously on the lip of the mine. The crowd is silent. The rain continues to roar down. Overhead, an aura vulture wheels through the air.

What happens next occurs so fast that nobody present can describe the events accurately or in sequence. One moment, Reina is removing a side panel of the water pump with her battery-operated screwdriver, and the next, thousands of birds flee the trees at once, whirling madly in the rain. The ground begins to shudder and fissure. Reina jumps on the pump as it begins to careen downhill on a wave of mud belched forth from the mine. The pump crushes everything in its path, leaving a flattened double wake of dirt and brambles that stops short before a giant mahogany tree. Reina sees the tree coming and is almost relieved. It is a healing tree, she remembers, its bark used to treat rheumatism, tetanus, and pneumonia. Like the earth, it is violently trembling.

The impact rattles Reina's spine, breaks her nose and both thumbs, and loosens a back molar. A tangle of her hair is pulled out by the roots.

Reina is pinioned forty feet high in the tree's uppermost branches. It is another kingdom entirely. Her pores absorb the green saturation of leaves, the merciful scent of the earth slowly ascending its limbs. Above her, the sky blossoms with gray velvet, with the fading light of long-departed stars. Suddenly, Reina wants her daughter to be with her, to share this air and the strange exhilaration of height. She would say: "Dulcita, all the gifts of the world are here." But Reina knows too well the uselessness of words, their power to divide and create loneliness.

Reina's body is sticky with blood and emulsions she does not recognize. Then nothing matters except an unexpected blindness, her heart's rhythm, and an exquisite sense of heat.

Use of this excerpt from The Agüero Sisters by Cristina García may be made only for purposes of promoting the book, with no changes, editing or additions whatsoever, and must be accompanied by the following copyright notice: copyright ©1997 by Cristina García. All Rights Reserved.

 

Excerpted from The Agüero Sisters © Copyright 2009 by Christina García. Reprinted with permission by One World. All rights reserved.

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