The Woman She Was

by Rosa Jordan

  Celia spotted them immediately. Even in Cuba, where mixed-race couples were commonplace, they stood out. Philip, close to two metres tall, cut a striking figure in the dark blue uniform. Franci was not much taller than Celia, but she had a style—high heels and a towering Afro hairdo—that gave her the appearance of being as tall as her husband.

  Hugs and kisses exchanged, Celia was soon tucked into the back seat of their Fiat. As Philip manoeuvred smoothly through Santiago’s chaotic traffic of cars, trucks, buses, bicycles, pedicabs, pedestrians, and horse-drawn carriages, Franci turned half-around to talk to Celia. “Good the train was on time. That gives you plenty of time for breakfast and a shower before heading over to the campus. How’s Liliana?”

  “Healthy as can be, making good grades, lots of friends. I could not ask for more,” Celia told her proudly.

  “And Luis?” Philip asked.

  “Pretty high at the moment. Geology reports from the offshore area near Santa Cruz del Norte definitely show petroleum deposits.”

  “Wouldn’t that just make Cuba’s future!” Philip exulted.

  “How are Las Madres?” Celia asked.

  Franci and Philip looked at each other, rolled their eyes, and laughed. Las Madres was a term they had adopted when they decided to invite their widowed mothers to live with them. The original idea was that the mothers would share a suite above the garage, but that proved unworkable from the start. The move had to be delayed until they could construct a tiny, one-room cottage in the backyard. Franci’s mother had opted for the cottage, leaving Philip’s to rule the roost above the garage.

  Observing her friends from the back seat, Celia felt a twinge of envy for Philip and Franci’s intimate laughter. Did the humour derive from their closeness, or were they close because they had the capacity to turn often-stressful situations into private jokes?

  Franci laid her arm across the seat, fingertips touching and caressing Philip’s shoulder, and said, “You go first.”

  “My mother,” Philip began, “has been reincarnated as a French-Cuban version of Scarlett O’Hara.” He and Franci chuckled in unison.

  “How is that?” Celia had read Gone with the Wind ; in fact, she and Franci read it together in their teens. She could not picture Philip’s wizened mother with her overpowdered face and pixie cap of dyed red hair in any way resembling its heroine.

  “She is given to recalling the ‘gracious days’ when our family owned a coffee plantation in Guantánamo Province.”

  “Wasn’t that a while ago?” Celia asked. “Like, uh—”

  “Two hundred years ago,” Philip cut in. “But the way she talks, one would think she grew up in a plantation culture instead of a Guantánamo barrio. You know, I studied French in college but we never spoke a word of it at home. Now she affects a French accent, and if you let her, she’ll bore you out of your gourd talking about la culture française.”

  “And servants,” Franci added. “She keeps reminding me that they had more than two hundred slaves.”

  “No!” Celia gasped. “Surely she realizes—”

  “That my ancestors were slaves? Apparently not.” Again Franci and Philip reached out to each other with sympathetic laughter.

  “Then there is my mother.” Franci turned to look at Celia. “She has become a serious, and I might add much respected, Espiritista.”

  “Santería?” Celia surmised.

  “Naturally. And since she weighs nearly one hundred and forty kilos, you can imagine what a figure she cuts in one of those long white priestess dresses.”

  Bemused, Celia said, “And you were hoping they would become friends.”

  “Oh, they have,” Philip assured her. “They do have separate social lives, and in their own circles they run each other down unmercifully. But they spend hours of every day together and form a united front—against us.”

  “It’s the baby thing.” Franci sighed and Celia saw that she found this less amusing. “It’s so bad I’ve told them that if they keep bringing it up, Philip and I will move out.”

  “They do know . . . ?” Celia delicately left the sentence dangling.

  Philip finished it for her. “That we can’t have kids? Listen, those two know only what they want to know. They’ve been given the same medical information we have. We even had Franci’s gynecologist explain it to them. You think it did any good? My mother implies that it’s because I’m not the macho my father and grandfathers were—overlooking the fact that I myself am an only child. Franci’s mother thinks it’s all a matter of praying to the right fertility goddess—or possibly our conversion to Santería.”

  They pulled into the driveway. As if materializing for a Santería ceremony, Franci’s massive mother sailed toward them in a billowing white lace dress. A blue turban, wrapped African-style, added almost a foot to her height. The whole effect might have been awe-inspiring were it not for the comic touch of a live chicken tucked under one arm.

  “Would I be right to surmise that that chicken is not long for this world?” Celia murmured.

  “Good guess,” Franci replied and called, “Hola, Mamá. Look who’s here.”

  Philip opened the back door for Celia and took her bag. “It’s been an ongoing battle to keep her from filling the backyard with chickens,” he muttered. “So she buys them live, one at a time, and sneaks it into the cottage until it’s needed for ceremonial purposes. We are not supposed to know, of course.”

  Laughing, Celia called out, “Buenos días, Tía Yolanda.” She approached Franci’s mother on the opposite side from the clucking chicken and stood on tiptoe to brush a kiss across her espresso-coloured cheek. Normally the old lady was garrulous, but apparently she had more serious matters to attend to this morning, or possibly some trepidation at having been caught with a contraband chicken. She murmured a welcome to Celia and moved majestically down the sidewalk toward the bus stop.

  Franci paused under a vine-covered portico from which dangled lavender blossoms. One flower lay decoratively atop her frothy hair. Although the Afro style had gone out of fashion decades ago, Franci’s poise was such that on her it looked as avant-garde as tomorrow. She motioned Celia into the house. “Come.”

  Celia followed her into a living room ringed with family photographs. Several were from their wedding. One showed Franci’s beautiful black hair brushing Philip’s blond crew-cut as they bent to cut the wedding cake. Another caught them as they descended the church steps. One of Franci’s smooth dark arms was linked through the white sleeve of his dress uniform, the other lifted to fling her bouquet to her bridesmaids. What the picture did not show, but Celia remembered vividly, was how deliberately Franci had aimed it toward her, and how, with equal determination, she had refused to reach for it, still being too raw from José’s abandonment to participate in the fantasy of someday finding her own perfect mate.

  “You know where your room is,” Franci called over her shoulder as she headed for the kitchen. Celia did, but tossed bag and briefcase onto the sofa and followed them into the kitchen. Franci put on the coffee. When Philip went to take eggs from the refrigerator, Franci leaned past him for the milk, rubbing one well-endowed breast provocatively against his arm.

  “Phe-leep! Franc-ee!” The high-pitched decibels of Renée Morceau rippled through the open kitchen window like an opera singer’s aria. “Is the café ready?”

  Celia looked in the direction of the voice in time to see Philip’s mother retreat back into her apartment over the garage. Surprised that she had not come down to join them, Celia asked, “Is your mother ill?”

  “No,” Philip sighed. “It’s her latest manifestation of the Scarlett O’Hara syndrome. She wants morning coffee served in bed.”

  Franci hacked off a piece of bread and placed it, along with a dish of guayaba marmalade, on a tray. She added the requested coffee and a large bowl of sugar.

  “It’s not that I mind taking it up to her,” she said in a tone that suggested that she did. “It’s the way she always says, ‘Franc
i, ma chérie! I didn’t expect you to bring it up.’ As if I might have sent one of our non-existent servants!”

  Philip reached for the tray. “I’ll take it.”

  “No, you go ahead with the omelettes.”

  “Let me.” Celia lifted the tray with a firmness that caused both to relinquish their hold on it. “I want to say hello anyway.”

  “Good idea,” Philip said. “But tell her you can’t stay; breakfast will be waiting.”

  “Shall I call her tía like always?” Celia asked. “Or should it be madame?”

  “Oh, these days it’s definitely madame,” Franci clarified. “But still tía for my mother. That will make them both feel superior.”

  Celia climbed the steps to the apartment over the garage. The old lady, hearing her pause outside the door, called, “Entrez.”

  Celia stepped into the room and saw Philip’s mother propped against the headboard of a large bed, her bottle-bright hair vivid as a child’s orange crayon against a pillowcase printed with pink rosebuds. “Bonjour, Madame.”

  “Celia, ma chérie! Tu parles la langue de mon père!” Renée Morceau responded in such an atrocious accent that Celia almost laughed aloud.

  “A few words,” Celia acknowledged, placing the tray before her. She brushed the woman’s cheek with her own, noticing, as she did so, that only one side of the wrinkled face had received the dubious benefits of heavy-handed powdering. “I am sorry I can’t stay, but breakfast is ready downstairs.”

  “Go, go.” Renée Morceau already had knife in hand and was attacking the bread and jam. “We shall chat later, n’est-ce pas?”

  Celia slid into her chair at the kitchen table. Philip eased a perfect fresh-herb omelette onto her plate. “Um!” Celia murmured appreciatively. “You can deny your French heritage all you want, Philip, but you did not get your flair for elegant cuisine from the Cubans.”

  “Didn’t I tell you that’s why I married him?” Franci poured coffee all around. “As soon as I found out he liked to cook but didn’t know how to make rice and beans.” Again the shared laughter at what had to be an old joke between them.

  Philip divided the second omelette and slid one half onto each of his and Franci’s plates with a practised air that suggested this was their breakfast routine. Philip ate quickly, saying apologetically, “Sorry, but duty calls.”

  Guilty for her dawdling, Celia pushed another bite of omelette into her mouth and washed it down with a swallow of orange juice.

  “Take your time,” Franci admonished. “Philip is in a hurry, not us. When you’re finished you can take a shower and I’ll drive you to the campus.”

  “It’s so close,” Celia protested. “I can walk there easier than Philip can walk to work.”

  “I don’t walk!” Philip crossed the living room to where a shiny Flying Pigeon bicycle was parked. Striking a pose beside it, he told Celia, “I fly.”

  When he had gone out, Celia and Franci relaxed over a second cup of coffee. “Does he always bike to work?” Celia asked.

  “Except when it rains,” Franci said proudly. “And what it’s done for his body! Maybe you noticed? He’s got the buns of a twenty-year-old.”

  “And if I had noticed, would I tell you?” Celia teased. “You think I have forgotten the time you threatened to run one of my A-cup bras up the flag pole if I kept flirting with some creep you had a crush on?”

  Laughter filled the kitchen like sunshine as they reached across the table and clasped hands, needing that physical contact to reflect an emotional closeness that had survived loves serious and false, found and lost. For a few minutes it seemed like old times, their discussing the physical attributes of whatever boy or man had turned up their hormonal thermostats. In the old days such an opening would have been followed by interminable analyses of attendant emotional issues. But Franci and Philip did not appear to have any issues, and Celia was reluctant to mention her noticeably long engagement to Luis. Celia could tell that Franci expected it, but when nothing was forthcoming, she tactfully changed the subject.

  “What is your presentation on this time?”

  “The damaging effects of second-hand smoke on the respiratory system of small children, infants in particular. And government avoidance of the issue.”

  “Madre de Dios! Are you looking for sainthood as a martyr, or what?”

  “I doubt it will come to that,” Celia protested with an uneasy smile. “We have plenty of data. Somebody has to go public with it.”

  “If you say so.” Franci rose and began clearing the table. “Go take your shower. I can already smell you, and the pressure you’ll be under in that lecture hall will have you sweating like a horse. No, leave the dishes; I’ll have them done by the time you’re dressed. I hope you brought something cool?”

  “A summer dress my mother would have approved of,” Celia said primly, heading for the bathroom.

  “It’s going to be a scorcher,” Franci yelled through the bathroom door. “Forget the stockings. In fact, forget your underwear too.”

  “Neither of our mothers would approve of that,” Celia called back. “And mine I hope will be watching. Guardian angel with a flaming sword, waiting to strike down anybody who gives me a hard time.”

  • • •

  Once on the medical school campus they went their separate ways, Franci to her office, Celia to the auditorium where the conference was being held. She slid into the front-row seat reserved for speakers just as the first one was adjusting his microphone.

  Celia listened attentively to statistics that confirmed that broken bones and serious head injuries were becoming increasingly frequent as more bicycles competed with more cars. The only fault she found with the doctor’s approach to his subject was that he neglected to note that the prevention of such injuries was more a matter of public policy than medicine: helmets, safety classes, more bike lanes, and hard dividers on existing bike lanes. They all cost money, of course. But surely the cost of prevention compared to the cost of treating such injuries was worth mentioning?

  Next was a presentation by a doctor whom Celia knew slightly. It was on the subject of non-drug alternatives that could be substituted for drugs not easy to obtain because of the embargo. The results of a study that showed that hyperactivity could often be brought under control by a combination of physical exercise and massage therapy gave Celia a ripple of satisfaction. For the past five years she had been prescribing just that for children suffering from any disorder that she suspected might result from or be exacerbated by tension.

  The next presenter, as if fearing that too much focus on children’s health problems might lead to negative publicity, rehashed studies showing Cuba’s children to be among the healthiest on earth. The statistics were well known and had repeatedly been verified by the World Health Organization. Celia allowed her mind to drift. Or rather, it drifted of its own accord, to a plan she had begun to formulate on the train ride. Her attention snapped back when her name was called.

  She moved to the podium and presented the results of her own study on what she believed to be the most prevalent health issue presently facing Cuban children: asthma. The assembled pediatricians listened politely. Given the number of asthmatic children they were treating, they hardly needed her review of the statistics to tell them how serious a problem it was. “Asthma and most other respiratory ailments in children are aggravated by, if not precipitated by, smoking parents,” she summarized.

  When Celia could see that they were in comfortable agreement, heads nodding, she dropped her bombshell: “Government policies exacerbate the problem.”

  There was a rustle of unease as she went on to make points no one could deny. Cuba was a smoking culture. Tobacco was a major generator of foreign exchange and something for which Cuba was famous. But which was more important—healthy sales or healthy children? When she completed her presentation of the data, Celia concluded, “I agree with our colleague, Dr. Caicedo. Without an adequate supply of drugs to alleviate the symptoms of c
ertain illnesses, we must place heavier emphasis on prevention. The government has demonstrated its concern by raising taxes on cigarettes, causing many Cubans to cut back on smoking. But is it not the government’s responsibility, and ours, to educate parents on the harmful effects of second-hand smoke, particularly as it relates to their children’s respiratory problems?”

  Letting the question hang in the air, Celia picked up her notes to indicate the conclusion of her presentation. The discomfort of the audience was palpable. All of the previous speakers had been peppered with questions, but for Celia, there were none. She waited a long minute, then said, “Gracias para su atención” and left the stage.

  The schedule indicated a lunch break so Celia did not return to her seat but followed the audience out of the auditorium. Doors to the dining hall were not yet open, but coffee urns had been set up in the lobby. Perhaps, she thought, it was too personal an issue. Smokers, who included at least half of the doctors present, were embarrassed to speak up and non-smokers were reluctant to pose questions for fear of offending their smoking colleagues. Perhaps they would find it easier to discuss the issue in private.

  Celia took a cup of coffee and moved to a quiet corner. No one approached her. By the time she had finished the coffee, the lobby was blue with cigarette smoke.

  Impatience welled up in her. She wanted to shout, Shame on you for resting on the laurels of what our health system has accomplished and flaunting statistics to prove that our children are the world’s healthiest! Children are not statistics and some of ours are not healthy! Why are we not discussing what we can do for them?

  Celia did not shout, of course. She remained silent, and alone, in her semi-quiet corner. But she knew what she was going to do. She just had not known until this moment that she definitely was going to do it. She flung her paper cup into a trash container and headed across the medical school campus to Franci’s office.

  The door, bronze-plated to identify it as the office of Dr. Franchesca Cumba, head of the school’s psychiatric department, stood ajar. Celia paused, again undecided. If she was going to seek professional help, who better than Franci? But Franci would only tell her what she already knew: that the hallucinations were being generated by her own subconscious and she needed to pay attention to what they were trying to tell her.