Cristina Garcia. The Aguero Sisters
By Ana Maria Hernandez

Cristina Garcia's second novel opens in the mystical Zapata Swamp on the Southern coast of Cuba, a place long imbued with mystery and magic in Cuban folklore and Afro-Cuban ritual. It is there that Ignacio Aguero, a renowned naturalist, murders the mysterious Blanca, his wife and research associate. Two years later, he commits suicide, leaving no explanatory note. The novel thus becomes a why unit, as in the case of Garcia Marquez's Cronica de una muerte anunciada. The reader approaches the story from multiple points of view, attempting to elucidate the reasons for the murder/suicide and its effect on the surviving Aguero daughters and their own progeny.

The novel is masterfully structured with a mosaic of narrations from the Aguero sisters, their daughters Dulce and Isabel, Ignacio Aguero, and a third-person narrator who focalizes each sister alternately. The diminutive Constancia, unwanted by her mother and virtually abandoned by the latter after the birth of her half-sister Reina, relies on appearance (she is a cosmetologist), social connections, and the conventional trappings of success: a sizable income, a well-placed condo, a boat, a (pink!) Cadillac. Reina, resembling her mother's mulato lover, basks in her mother's love and solicitous attention (she is breast-fed until she is five), and grows up self-assured, androgynous, and libidinous--perhaps excessively so. The forty-eight-year-old Reina's animal magnetism and endless conquests seem a bit hyperbolic even by the standards of magic realism, to which Garcia subscribes in a subdued manner. Constancia embodies the traditional values of Cuban middle-class exiles, whereas Reina, a master electrician by training and profession and a solid supporter of the revolution until the job-related accident that results in her defection to Miami, represents the blue-collar outlook of the supposedly classless society in which she grew up and the survival skills of the last wave of exiles.

Garcia meticulously researches every aspect of her novel--from ornithology to cosmetology by way of electrical engineering and antique-car repair--and conveys her findings with an admirable command of language and a gift for metaphor. Her careful reconstruction of habitats long destroyed and traditions long abandoned inspire Cubans to remember and non-Cubans to discover; especially noteworthy is her evocation of the lectores, cigar-factory employees whose function it was to entertain cigar-rollers with readings from the classics, hoping to improve the quality of their product by improving the minds of its makers. The descriptions of the Cuban landscape around the beginning of this century provided by the naturalist Aguero are particularly lyrical and almost mystical, even though we suspect that some of the species described are figments of the author's imagination. At one point she places a leatherback turtle--whose usual habitat excludes the Caribbean--in the waters around the (former) Isle of Pines to the south of Cuba.

Aguero spots the gigantic turtle as she digs her nest on the black volcanic sands of the isle and lays her eggs at midnight. He then watches in dread as predatory seagulls and stray dogs threaten the nest: "What choice did I have? I sat on the leatherback's nest all that day and all the next night, guarding her eggs from predators, guarding the eggs for her." Immediately following an episode in which Ignacio's first love goes sour after his beloved asks him to exterminate a colony of bats that had infested her attic, the landscape and its creatures become a metaphor for the subjectivity of the character and an affirmation of the eternal laws of nature over the vicissitudes of human life and love. Such juxtapositions abound throughout the novel. Satire is an important element in The Aguero Sisters--specifically about the exile community in Miami, with the usual planned invasions of Cuba and the sacralization of everything pre-Castro. Most amusing is the mushrooming of Constancia's line of cosmetics, "Cuerpo de Cuba," which caters to aging Cuban baby-boomers by offering a special emollient for every sagging part of their anatomy ("Cuello de Cuba," "Rodillas de Cuba, " "Muslos de Cuba"). This is a humorous, well-written, most enjoyable work from the author of Dreaming in Cuban.

World Literature Today.Ana Maria Hernandez