Mami didn’t look up. She blew on her rolling pin, tapped it on the counter, bent over her pastries to inspect the frills she’d drawn into their edges. Only I could see, over the top of my book, the tension on Tomás’s face. Mami didn’t look; Tomás placed his palms on the counter and leant far over into Mami’s way. He kissed her cheek, he swung, he waited for Mami to look. But when Mami turned to him, her gaze got lost somewhere on the way to meet his; her eyes were guilty somehow. She fed him some guava and told him, ‘It’s OK, London baby. You must trust yourself. Tomás is not your name; it’s just a tag we gave you until you find something you like.’
Late in the night Aya sits still, her head resting against Amy’s. She is knocked comatose by the twin thicknesses of Amy’s hair and honey.
Tayo has dragged out a drawer from his cupboard; he lays it carefully on the floor, he bids Aya look. His eyes are full, too full, brimming.
The drawer foams damp white; at first she thinks, snow?
No — row after immaculate row of drowned paper flowers. They pull at her heart, these flowers, they do not ask for light the way that real flowers do. She puts her hands out to make them well again, and as she touches them, one by one, they dry out and crackle under her fingers. Rice paper.
Aya asks, ‘They’re yours?’
He is vehement: ‘No.’
When Aya holds the flowers close to her face, she sees that each has a black word bled into it in spidery writing. On each flower, the same word.
‘Then I want them,’ she says.
He recoils. ‘They’re not meant for you.’
She asks who gave them to him, and he shakes his head.
‘A her?’ Aya asks.
‘Mm.’
‘And you parted?’
‘Not exactly. Kind of. Well, she doesn’t know.’
‘How can she not know that you’ve parted?’
He shrugs.
Aya hugs the flowers. She tries to hug all of them at once but her arms do not have enough space between them.
‘She knows,’ Aya says.
In her bedroom, in the morning, Amy says, ‘Yemaya, I have the trick of crossing heaviness with lightness. I could jump in the air right now and not come down. I wouldn’t go any higher, either. I’d just stay there. They’d ring bells and tell lies: a soul has gone to heaven. Yemaya Saramagua?’
When Amy leans over from her bed, there is no more early light; Amy’s face is desperate, her granite eyes disappearing under eddying water. She scratches at the bruises on her arms, trying to lift them away, bringing down blood instead. Aya tries to help her to lie down again, but Amy will not. ‘Amy, what is it? What is it?’ Aya asks her.
‘Ochun, Ochun. Please say it. Yemaya Saramagua, you must know my name,’ Amy weeps. She bites Aya to make her let go. Aya won’t let go. Finally Amy lays still and rattles out a breath that sounds like her last, sounds like her heart is broken.
‘I should never have left. Why doesn’t anybody know my name? Why doesn’t someone come for me?’
13 the hour of lead
I offer up Saturday night for a vigil. I flip through travel brochures. The purple UV lamps hurt my eyes. According to the brochures, Habana Vieja is old and beautiful and majestically crumbling, and Miramar has great beaches. Everything is very picturesquely blue and or a very surly brown, and set on a slant that sands down the sky’s edges. Cubans are, apparently, very friendly if they feel their gestures are reciprocated. Do I count, am I like that too? I thought everybody was like that.
I try to balance my saints’ medals on my forehead as if they are tokens that I can swap for something overhead, and I wait for Sunday morning Mass. I think, No, it is not true that Mami would try to inject me with visions. Not like that, not when I was so small. It is hard to know. I do know that Chabella loves me because she can look inside me against my will, and it seems people can only do that if they love you. But Chabella is from a different country to me; she is wound around and around with her Brigitte and my Bisabuela Carmen. I’ve had Mork and Mindy and The Cosby Show. I’ve had gaps between the things I see and the things I know, the dilemma of getting a comb through my hair on mornings when my personal hysteric makes my arms droop and refuse to work.
I stare at the Orishas from the distance Peckham affords me, but Chabella grew up in a small white house in Querejeta, just off a ring road, where trees are sparse and the traffic makes humidity fly in low circles. From her window she could see the Hotel Nacional waving its flag to welcome small crowds of hatted, suited, feathered, colourful Americans. From the first, she swears that all she ever wanted was to be gone from there.
There is one dog-eared photograph of Chabella at ten; we have never resembled each other physically, she and I. Light clusters in Chabella’s huge irises, and she is sitting on the marble steps inside her house, her posture perfect, her hands clasped, her hair combed up high and tied with a ribbon. She is smiling the way a china doll smiles, and to me that means she is not happy. China dolls, their cheeks flushed vicious, always look as if they have been threatened with dismemberment and posed, their limbs arranged. They would take life if they could. A few days after that picture was taken, Chabella tried to run away from home for the seventh time, and that day her father, Damason
(‘Your abuelo, God rest his soul,’ Chabella stares at me until I cross myself)
lost his patience with her and beat her. But escape wasn’t meant as a personal insult to Abuelo Damason.
Chabella was the youngest of his four children, and closer to her father than to Laline, her lawyer mother, who disappeared beneath portfolios and was preoccupied with women’s rights. Chabella and Abuelo Damason spent afternoons in his studio fascinated by feet, the whorls of taut skin. They stomped in vats of paint before dancing across vast sheets of expensive paper. He danced alone, then she danced alone, then they both danced together. They wanted to see whether the idea of dancing was contained in the feet, or, if not, what feet really meant. The tracks they made were linked, ungainly shapes, ridiculous, bright and strong, like the first images of their kind.
Abuelo Damason also had a lot of women back then. Sometimes Laline let her smooth veneer chip, and at night she would scream at Chabella’s father that he’d better stop making a fool of her with his girlfriends. They were ‘the kind of women who cluster around when a black Cuban becomes successful — all kinds,’ Mami said. Women who hated her, smiled at her, gave her sweets, and stole the hair from her combs so that they could have roots people work spells to make Chabella leave hold of her father’s heart. Chabella’s first real memory was of falling off the swing in the house’s back garden and cutting her knee, and then crying because her father wasn’t there. My pretty, light-skinned Tia Dayame, the next sister up from Mami, was combing her hair in front of the sitting-room mirror — when she saw the wound she simply shrugged and said, ‘Good.’
Maria, the family’s maid, cleaned Chabella’s knee with something special, and told her that she’d better be more careful. ‘If you leave your blood on the earth, it gets hungry for more,’ Maria told her, and then when six-year-old Chabella trembled, she reassured her by saying that there were at least three spiritual protectors observing her; one of them was an ancestor, another one was an Orisha. Maria told Mami that she was lucky. In those circumstances, it was true.
I grow so tired that my head droops and my mouth opens and I begin to think that I am my Chabella and that I am the woman who was singing the song that made the garden in Vedado so wild. St Bernadette and Jeanne d’Arc fall heavily into my lap and I try to make merciful Mary, the Mother of God, appear to me through the strength of my own heart.