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MY SISTER LOLA will tell you she’s important because of this or she’s important because of that. Sure, she has the café, but whom did she marry? What is the Santos name in this city? That José is a loyal soldier but he has no imagination. He conducts life by the book, even when everyone knows that the people who write the rules are the last ones to follow them. Not so long ago, his family lived in the fields and no one bothered to learn their last name. Lola saw something in him, though, and convinced Papi that they should wed. I’ve said more than once that José should’ve taken the Montero name. Instead, Lola took the Santos name. Thanks be to God that she had enough sense to train her children to always use Montero Santos and never let anyone shorten it to the nondescript surname of their bland father.
Of course I was much more sensible than headstrong Lola. I married a La Luz. And our oldest, romantic Rosita, well, her husband was completely useless. Ramón was one of those anemic boys who finished school in the States and returned with nothing more than bad habits. The only way he managed the tannery was through the ready fists of that drunkard brother of his. Theirs was another last name not worth remembering.
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The La Luz dynasty ruled an important aspect of life: mechanics. Their name was synonymous with the best of the sugar mill shops, and my Diego’s grandfather worked on the first cars to land here. He was among the first to cross the island by auto when the trip involved hacking out a path across the mountains. Diego was known for his expertise with any type of engine, but particularly with those in luxury American cars. The Revolution curtailed the imports from the North, but it never diminished the Cuban appetite for magnificent wheels. Diego continued to be in demand. He put in long hours but always came home with hands clean enough for a judge, as he would say. He even cleaned around his fingernails, unlike the men who worked for him.
If Lola hadn’t married a Santos, everything would be different now. He was the one that brought the Russians into our lives. The day that Lola came to tell me about her enlistment to cook for them, she stayed until the evening birds chattered and squawked. Then she took her officious air away from the Montero House.
Yes, I, Chita Montero de La Luz, the middle sister, lived in the family home. It had a grand inner court and large guest house; it also was a mishmash of styles that an early sea merchant originally from New England had acquired a taste for on his travels around the world. He had copied the wrap-around front porch and the widow’s walk on the roof of a whaling captain’s house he visited on the island of Nantucket in his native Massachusetts. However, instead of using the North’s wood clapboarding and shale shingles, he covered the house with island stucco and the humps of red Spanish roof tiles.
Wings flew off behind the staid front of our house and formed the Mediterranean-style courtyard. A windowless wall of the guest house enclosed its fourth side. A fountain in the shape of a lion’s head hung in the center of the wall and was smothered by the grape vines growing along the wall. Legend had it that the original owner kept his mistress in the guest house, which was why its back faced the main house with no access to the courtyard. Family lore claimed that the merchant’s wife, ensconced in what was one of the finest houses in Versalles, didn’t bother to be jealous of anyone she couldn’t see.
The house had been in our family for years, and we Sisters Montero and Tomasito enjoyed busy, gay childhoods in it. After we started families of our own, our parents moved into a smaller but still stylish home and gave the main house to Diego and me. Before the Revolution, the wags at the tobacco shops debated whether Tomasito deserved the house more than I did since he was the only male heir, or whether perhaps Rosita did as the oldest of the Montero offspring. Papi hadn’t given her husband the tannery, just the job of running it. Was a job as a factory manager for that useless Ramón the equal of a fancy house near the river?
I heard that Rosita laughed when confronted with such impudence. Despite myself, I admired her reported aplomb in sidestepping the intrusive curiosity. Even though the busybodies reported she implied she could’ve had the house if she wanted it, I wouldn’t give those meddling gossips the satisfaction of a public feud. Then, post-Revolution, with Ramón’s appointment as a deputy in the local CDR, no one broached the subject, even in jest, for fear that their own house deeds would be scrutinized.
The La Luz name was well respected, but everyone, even Diego and me, continued to refer to our home as the Montero House. It perched on a slight rise in the middle of the block, guarded by a black, scrolled, wrought-ironed fence with a wooden gate guarding the end of the driveway and giving privacy to the side yard. The house stood out as a popular neighborhood landmark—east or west of the Montero House, one would say. No one in the family thought anything of speaking in such a manner. “Seven blocks west of our house,” Lola said when pinpointing the location of her precious café. She never meant the house that peasant of a husband bought for her.
I sat alone in the courtyard until Diego arrived home with his immaculate hands.
“Where are my boys?” he asked, standing in the doorway. I sat at the wrought-iron table drinking a papaya milkshake. The light shade of early evening had already overtaken the yard.
“In their room.”
I could barely see Diego through the striving branches of the mamey sapote. It had become uncivilized and needed pruning. I often dreamed of this tree laden with fruit, which he and I had planted together when the house had become ours to run. That was before the furrow between his eyes had become permanent.
He slipped past the tree and came to me for a kiss. After taking a sip of my drink, he leaned toward the kitchen window. “Lupe,” he called.
Our maid appeared in the window, her dark face blank above the yellow blossoms in the window box. “Please,” Diego said, raising my glass. He put it down in front of me and Lupe disappeared.
“But their set’s out here,” he said. He moved the box filled with chessmen from a seat and sat down.
Miguelito and Beto had three chess sets, one carved in ivory, but the blocky wooden warriors in this box were their favorites. Miguelito, at twelve years, reigned as the best junior at the Matanzas Chess Club. His brother, although two years younger and more easily distracted by baseball and girls, ranked close behind at the fourth spot. If they maintained their standings, they would be part of the Club’s junior team to compete in the national tournament at the Capablanca Club in Havana in late October. Diego, a junior champion himself in his day, gave instruction to the boys and harangued them to practice for two hours each day before dinner. At that moment, they should have been hunched over the set that Diego had just put aside.
“They left such a stew of books and dirty clothes and stale food in their room,” I said. “They’re old enough to know better.” Lupe had been grumbling about the duty of the domestic worker to resist the slothfulness of the upper classes. We were not of the top class, but we could afford her, so her resistance was well-placed, I guess. I shifted in my seat and brushed a foot across Diego’s. “So they’re cleaning up their own mess.”
He pulled his foot out of my reach and raised a hand to smooth back his thinning hair. He needed a haircut. “Chita, the tourney is only a month away.” Plenty of time for them to finish tidying up, I thought, but I said nothing.
Lupe sauntered into the courtyard, pushed aside the tree branches, and banged Diego’s glass on the table. Dealing with her had been such an ordeal since the start of the Revolution, but by that fall, she had gotten openly hostile, even to my husband.
“Many thanks,” Diego said with his best smile. He wasn’t a classically handsome man, but women found his confident ways attractive. When he raised an eyebrow, he charmed the proletarian righteousness out of our maid. She nodded once and returned to the doorway.
“Señora Peña,” Diego said. Lupe stopped and stood taller in her small frame. She loved the formal address. “Tell the boys to come out here, please. And to bring the board.” He flipped his hand toward the chess set.
“But they’re not finished with their room yet,” I said.
Diego turned his back on Lupe, as if she were already gone. “Señora Peña can finish for them.”
Lupe hissed something and slammed the screen shut behind her. I’d told Diego about Lupe’s knowledge of Santeria, and how I’d seen her pocket clumps of his hair from the tub drain, but he remained unconcerned. I can’t believe the bad luck that visited our family was Lupe’s doing. She wouldn’t have wanted to put the children in danger, but then, you never know. In any case, misfortune first splattered Lola and soon drenched the rest of us.
