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Overview
When Rebecca, a well-to-do Cuban-American woman, decides that she’d like to revive the old Cuban tradition of the tertulia, or women’s get-together, her best friend dashes her hopes, explaining that in today’s career-driven world even her friends require a compelling reason to come from all over Miami to casually meet and chat. At last, the ingenious Becky hits upon the idea of a reading group, and the book selected is a historical novel about nineteenth-century Cuba: the saga of an aristocratic dress-manufacturing clan, the Santa Cruz family. The novel is called . . . Playing with Light.
Oddly, as they get ever deeper into the story of the Santa Cruzes—especially Tico and Lolo—strange things begin to happen to the reading group. Everyone seems to be . . . sucked in . . . and affected (not necessarily pleasantly) by the saga. (“What’s for dinner, Mommy?” “Get a slice of salami out of the refrigerator, dear. Can’t you see I’m reading?”) As two worlds, from two different centuries, begin to intertwine in odd ways, and her friends begin to . . . well, to disappear, actually . . . Rebecca can’t help but wonder what she’s gotten herself into.
Beatriz Rivera has written an entrancing and wonderfully ambitious novel that places her in the first rank of writers of her generation.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781518503009 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Arte Publico Press |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Beatriz Rivera cleverly conveys the experience of the Latina woman attempting to reconcile her heritage and her existence within the greater construct of the American society in her short stories and novels. Rivera’s characters draw from their distinctive backgrounds to forge a bi-cultural image of themselves and their communities.
Cuban-born Beatriz Rivera grew up in Miami. She finished high school in Switzerland and then went on to study Philosophy in Paris where she received a Master’s degree. Her intention then was to remain in Europe and never to return to the U.S. She began writing her first novel in Paris, while teaching English and Spanish in area schools. Rivera spent ten years in Paris until one day she realized that, as a writer, she didn’t have much of an identity. If she wasn’t Parisian, and wasn’t an American in Paris, what was she?
After returning to the U.S., two of her short stories appeared in journals: the first, entitled “Paloma,” appeared in The Americas Review, and the other, “Life Insurance,” in Chiricu, Bloomington, Indiana. Three years later, her short story collection, African Passions and Other Stories (Arte Público Press, 1995), was published. Other short stories and poems appeared in reviews such as The Afro-Hispanic Review, and in anthologies such as Little Havana Blues (Arte Público Press, 1996) and Floricanto, Si! (Penguin Books, 1998).
Rivera’s three works eloquently demonstrate Rivera’s humor and spirit. Rivera followed her collection of short stories, African Passions, with her novel Midnight Sandwiches at the Mariposa Express (Arte Público Press, 1997). In 2000, Arte Público Press released her third work, a novel entitled Playing with Light. In all three books, Rivera creates a funny yet realistic portrait of the Cuban American female struggling to find her place in the American Dream. Her latest novel, Do Not Pass Go (Arte Público Press, 2006), is about an unlikely love affair between a former child prodigy and a newspaper reporter.
In 2002, Rivera completed her Ph.D. in Spanish Literature on Challenging the Canon: A History of Latina Literature Anthologies, 1980-2000 at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. She is an Assistant Professor at Penn State University and lives in Northeastern Pennsylvania with her husband and two children.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
"I didn't know then that the art of reading out loud had a long and itinerant history, and that over a century ago, in Spanish Cuba, it had established itself as an institution within the earthbound strictures of the Cuban economy."
Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading
The sun, coming through the rosewood louvers, cast distorted geometric patterns of light and dark over the roundness of her thigh. Dust motes drifted, suspended in the rays of midmorning light. Rebecca in the rocking chair, her hand in the sun, her knee in the shade, the book on her lap between the broken lines, and her bare foot moving from the shade to the light and back to the dark. She rocked gently, all the motion coming from her right foot, on the cool floor, up and down went her heel; the other foot was on her knee, she was moving her lips, she was thinking in bits and pieces, voices, letters, while she made circles with the foot that was on her knee.
Rebecca didn't go bicycling on the causeway this morning, over by the Seaquarium. She's even questioning the benefits of daily exercise these days. After she dropped Nell off at school she just kept on going instead of making that turn, and drove straight to her parents'.
As she pulled into the cracked and grassy driveway she immediately caught sight of her father, sitting out on the porch, on his wheelchair, reading The Miami Herald to the cat.
Rebecca still feels this trickle of cold in her stomach each time she sees him. She keeps remindingherself that it has only been six months. Six months is nothing. Eventually she'll get used to this new situation, to her father in a wheelchair, incapable of doing anything for himself. What's more, people recover from strokes, don't they?
His body is a wiry, lightweight, lopsided cage, and his eyes make her think of two little finches inside it. He can talk, and he has limited use of his hands, so he is not in a bell jar, he can reach out through those thin, rusty bars, but never again can he come out, it seems like his life sentence.
He is happy though, he boasts that it has taken him eighty years of being a bad man—and a nasty stroke—to make him discover what he loves the most, reading out loud. Not only that but he is looking forward to doing it for the rest of his life.
"It's okay, Becky," he says all the time.
As to the stray black cat in the shrubs, he is a gift from God, he is the audience.
A loving and enthusiastic, "Becky!" was Papi's greeting.
Right away the cat leaped up and disappeared into the croton shrubbery nearby. Papi didn't even notice. He simply reminded Becky that she hadn't come to visit for two days. Where had she been? "You keep on abandoning me with your mother," he whispered and pointed to the screen door, made a gesture with his tangled hand, shaking it at the wrist, up and down, twice each time, fast.
It meant trouble. Trouble as usual. Each morning Mami blamed the world for last night's dishes. Why her? And didn't she deserve better? Her days are downward spirals, and as the day progresses, so do the illogical premises, the paranoid conclusions, it's everyone's fault, she's a victim, they want her to suffer, it's a conspiracy. That's why she often says that she feels alive when she's angry.
"Your mother's a good woman though," Papi said. "Don't ever forget it."
"How could I forget?"
"How's Nell?" Papi asked.
"She's still scared of getting shampoo in her ears and going deaf."
"And your husband?"
"Tommy's working all the time. I never get to see him," Rebecca said, then pointed to the door and added, "I'd better go in before she thinks we're gossiping about her. We'll talk later."
Rebecca braced herself, as she opened the screen door, walked into the house and let the door slam, she rehearsed. A cheery greeting, pay no attention to the bitter mood, pretend you don't notice, ask Mami how she is, then quickly change the subject and ask her where they are, the old Academy of the Assumption yearbooks.
But Rebecca couldn't find the Spanish word for yearbook, so after having walked around the broken glass and spilled milk of her mom's demons, she had to explain it awkwardly, the books with the pictures of all her classmates at The Academy of the Assumption, grade by grade, year after year, from second grade until 1973, the year she graduated. Come to think of it, she didn't want all of them, just the last one.
"Who are you looking for?" Mami's question sounded like a mouthful of thorns.
She is a furious little woman in her early sixties with puffy eyes and skin that can't absorb any more tears. She reigns like Bloody Mary over this crumbling mansion and her fifteen-year-old Cadillac (with only forty thousand miles).
The truth is that both Rebecca's parents jettisoned their lives many years ago with their nightly, messy, quarrels, so they have to pay the price for squandering, in installments that strangely resemble a buzzing myriad of minimum payments to chrome green, silver, and gold Visas and Mastercards.
Often Mami complains because el jardinero wants to charge her too much to mow the lawn. "Who does he think I am? Does he think I'm rich like the Jewish people?" is her cry of lament.
They have had this conversation over and over again.
"He thinks you're just another rich Miami Beach Jewish woman," is Rebecca's reply.
"Do you really think so?" she asks, and on those occasions she sounds flattered. She never did want to be who she was.
But they were rare, those times when her mom was pleased or flattered. Rebecca couldn't visualize her smiling, much less laughing. If everyone has a superlative, an "-est" that's all theirs. Rebecca's mother was probably the unhappiest. Or was it the angriest?
Today it is slowly approaching as bad as it gets. Rebecca knows this particular mood of her mother's well.
"Could it be that you're looking for yourself in those yearbooks?" Mami then asked, dying to be galvanizing.
"Maybe," said Rebecca in her slippery, way. "Me before Tommy lost his business and Papi had his stroke. Before I had to get my priorities straight." She glanced at her mother's nails. "I like that red," she said
Mami, who was drying her hands with a piece of paper towel, stopped to inspect the flattered red on her nails. "Brr, my hands have gotten so old and ugly and if I had known that this was my lot in life I would have gladly killed myself."
"So do you have any idea where the yearbooks are?"
"Remember how nice your hair was?" was Mami's reply. "I just remembered because you mentioned the yearbooks."
"Huh?" was Rebecca's reaction while she ran two fingers through her hair, just to make sure it was still there. If she had to name that red, the red of her mom's nail polish, what would she say? And what about her jet-black hair dye? What name would she give it if she were finally angry? Never mind the hair dye, what about the red on her lips? Mami always put on lipstick, even to do the dishes, and she always managed to get some of that blood red on her teeth.
"It was before that man you married taught you to disdain and mistreat your own mother ..." Mami momentarily stopped to think, and sighed. "When I think of all the sacrifices I made to send you to that school ... so that you could mingle with the best people in Miami ... and go to the best university ... have a career ..."
Before she finished saying all that Rebecca was already upstairs.
* * *
The yearbooks sat in a bookshelf, at the end of a dusty corridor, upstairs, in a part of the house her parents didn't use any more. They'd moved downstairs for good when Rebecca left, twenty years ago. So the slats of the jalousie windows refused to close, the rain came in, the heat came in, the sun came in, faded all the colors, warped the wood paneling, finished turning everything into junk. A pair of canvas Keds with holes at the big toes, a torn bathing cap with frills, a pile of old LPs, a bikini bottom with no elastic, plasticized wooden plaques congratulating her dad for having sold millions of dollars worth of insurance policies, a tainted trophy, and a faded family photograph under an oxidized can of roach poison only added to the mustiness.
Too much light up there, and no curtains, Rebecca squinted. She sat down on the red tile floor. It was grainy and dusty. There was one of Mami's brittle yellow and hardly used "Aprenda Inglés/Learn English" or-your-money-back-fifteen-minute-a-day-miracle-language-learning-method, the ninety-minute cassette, the workbook; all reminiscent of those mornings when her mom would wake up and say, "That's it! I'm going to learn English." There was a yoga book, there was a Nancy Drew Mystery, the A-B volume of the encyclopedia, a heavy one, Second Year Latin, The World's Most Beautiful Poems, and there were novels from the time when all Rebecca ever did was "read, and never listen."
When she took out the 1973 yearbook several empty roach eggs fell to the red tile floor near her toes. She could hear her parents quarreling downstairs, and her mother shouting, "I'm tired of life! I want to die! Your daughter treats me like dirt! She's an ungrateful shit! My biggest failure!"
Sooty dust had accumulated on the top edge of the yearbook. The corners had been chewed by rodents. The cover looked as if it had been drenched by several Miami rainstorms and then left out in the sun to bake.
She coughed, stood up, shook the dust off the back of her thighs and her shorts. "Whatever happened?" she wondered. What happened to the girlfriends she threw out with the old address books?
Well, she still has her girlfriend Conchita, who lives near here in North Bay Road and whom she sees just about every day. They take turns picking their daughters up at school. Conchita's picture is in here.
And Helen and Daisy, her two sisters-in-law, are also in the yearbook.
Those three are in Rebecca's life for good, or so it seems.
Sometimes she even wishes she could lose Daisy. But that's when she's being chummy with Helen.
On the other hand when's she's being chummy with Daisy she finds Helen too obnoxious and opinionated.
And there are times when Daisy and Helen are being chummy with each other. That's when Rebecca gossips the most with Conchita.
But those are the moody musical chairs of the present. Never mind the present. This yearbook here is ancient history, and the question is, Quick! right now, what's the first thing that comes to mind? What can she remember about those times, so far away now? Those sad times that seem so appealing now. Because it's time to set those priorities straight now ...
Selene Machado always drew a happy face in the "o" of Machado.
Rebecca didn't admit it to herself right away. She tried to come up with something better.
Something better ...
So was that it? Did it all come down to that? Ten or twelve years of her life that can be resumed with a happy face in the "o" of Machado. In peacock-blue ink.
Can't be. There has to be more, Rebecca was thinking as she pulled out of her parents' driveway onto the charming coconut-tree-lined Flamingo Drive.
Umbertico Barrios stopped reading momentarily and took the glass of ice water to his lips. María Fernanda looked at him and stuck her tongue out. He noticed. He always did. And her scorn embarrassed him.
This is how María Fernanda spent her childhood. In the dress factory, on the floor, playing with the light, listening to the lector, the Reader. Who are those people? she wondered. And does that book talk to me? The Reader is supposed to make it talk. Fine. With the books of the past it just takes a little philology, or so it seems. That's what the Reader said last week. He's always saying things like that because words are his life. But these women are one hundred years from now. Why this contrast? Do they talk to me? Or do they simply remind me of my aunt and of my mother?
In the morning there were perfect diamond shapes of on the worn terra cotta floor. It had something to do with the way the light came in, the divided light. At one given moment the shapes were perfect. Then each hot long hour that passed pulled and pulled on the shapes, until they couldn't take it, turned into lines and seeped into the cracks. Those were María Fernanda's toys. The most permanent and fleeting toys there ever were.
The Reader cleared his throat. The factory workers stopped murmuring and started cutting. They wondered, Will they name the next gown after one of these women? Rebecca, Daisy, Helen, Conchita, The Mad Mother. After all, cigars had been named after Romeo and Juliet and the Count of Monte Cristo. Couldn't they do the same thing? Hush! Umbertico Barrios has sipped enough ice water. He is ready to resume his reading.
The minute she got home Rebecca put on the Balinese music, then dragged one of the wicker-bottom rocking chairs out to the back terrace and sat down. She was dying to open the book on her lap, but at the same time she enjoyed extending the thought of it, the pleasure. Gently she rocked, her distorted shadow jumping from wall to wall. One minute it was in the bookshelf, then it was hanging on to a painting, then it was in the wineglasses, then back to where it began. "Who are you looking for? Yourself?" her mother asked.
"That's right, myself," Rebecca whispered. Before Papi had his stroke. Before Tommy lost his business and his freedom and left her all alone here all day, with no purpose, just a bunch of old raggedy ridiculous priorities. Take Nell to school, go for a bicycle ride ... Looking for herself, along with everybody else. "Whatever happened to your hair? The sacrifices I made to send you to that school. Your father drank all the money he made ... It was before that man you married ... When all you did was read. I have nothing to live for, I want to die." Oh! Oh no! Don't bring me down! "Becky, is your hair falling out? And who are you looking for in there? Yourself?" Before ... When ... "When you had such nice hair."
Rebecca suddenly remembered that while searching through her father's things after he had his stroke—trying to determine what bills to pay (keeping in mind that he said, "Never mind Visa and MasterCard, just pay the Platinum AmEx")—she found an old black-and-white photograph of an interior in Havana.
Immediately she was taken by the photograph. The light was shining in through curly iron bars, into a room, creating odd shapes on the floor. The pattern was broken by the empty wicker rocking chairs that had been placed in a circle.
That afternoon at the hospital Rebecca showed the photo to her father and asked him about it. He glanced at it and smiled. "I never knew those people," he said before closing his eyes.
He still had that smile.
He was in intensive care, and after her father fell asleep Rebecca looked around.
The room had a wall of windows that gave out to the water, the causeway, the Miami skyline. Actually it got so bright at times that the shutters had to be pulled down. She pulled them up now that it was sunset, but then she realized what she was doing and pulled one shutter down halfway, just so the room wouldn't look like everyone else's and she wouldn't have any trouble recognizing it once she was downstairs, in the parking lot. She could then look up and know which room it was. She wanted to do that.
"There aren't any people in the picture," she said, believing he was sound asleep.
"Yes there are. They're in the shadows."
Usually there are more chairs, so that the guests can converse, drink ice water, eat finger sandwiches made with soft bread.
His speech was slurred.
The next day Rebecca returned to the hospital and asked him about the photograph again. He seemed more alert.
"Tertulias they're called," he replied.
Not a dance, not at all. You sit, you talk, you rock. That light? Where did that Cuban light go? Is it gone? Should we blame Fidel?
Maybe, because one of these days they're going to have to tear all those old houses down, and without architecture, is there light?
"That's what Cuba is about, light and ... sugar ... azúcar," he said. "Sugar. La niña linda de Cuba. Cuba's pretty little girl."
"I still don't see any people in the photograph."
When she got home from the hospital Rebecca immediately dialed her sister-in-law's number at work.
"Listen to this, Daisy," she said.
Rebecca and Daisy talked so often that they always skipped polite beginnings such as "Hello, how are you?"
"I'm going to try to contact as many girlfriends as possible and invite them to a weekly Friday afternoon tertulia. Not only that but I'm even going to buy a white wicker rocking chair with a pretty cushion for each guest. Isn't that a great idea?"
Rebecca was leaning against the kitchen counter scratching her ankle with her toes.
"Don't do it without me," Daisy said.
"Of course you're invited!"
Rebecca was all excited, she glanced at the old black-and-white photograph that she still had in her hand.
"No, I mean don't go buying those rocking chairs without me. Those wicker ones you have are too short in the front and if you rock too hard you can fall flat on your face. I know a place in Hialeah where you can get wonderful wicker ones ..."
"But what do you think about the tertulia?" Rebecca interrupted.
Now that she was through scratching herself with that free foot, she kept on slipping it in and out of the wrong shoe.
"Oh, it won't work," Daisy replied matter-of-factly. "Nobody in their right mind is going to drive to Miami Beach every Friday afternoon without a reason. Are you kidding? With the traffic on I-95 these days? I swear, it's never been this bad. Just the other day it took me ..."
"Daisy! I'm being serious."
Rebecca had walked out of the kitchen and was already in the Florida room inspecting one of her wicker rocking chairs to see if Daisy was right.
"I know you're being serious, corazón," said Daisy, "and it's my mission to keep you from becoming too serious. You know how you tend to get too excited about things and then you feel let down. By the way how's your dad?"
Rebecca was rocking slowly.
"Now he's down to a hundred and five pounds. First Tommy loses his business, then this happens to my dad."
With the tip of her index finger she counted each one of the chairs on the photograph.
"Things will never be the same again," she said finally.
She wants to be Alice, and step right into that photograph.
They don't know about the future. María Fernanda chuckled and stuck her tongue out at the Reader. It made him clear his throat. Read on! she shouted. My family pays you, carajo! If you stop reading I'll have you fired! You'll starve! You'll eat tasajo for the rest of your life! Read on! That's all you're good for! ¡No sirves para más nada! You don't have a future! Idiot!
Poor Umbertico didn't even bother to take a sip of ice water and just kept on reading. He hated tasajo! And he was waiting for the future to become wonderful and bright. Why was she saying things like that?
You could also hear those scissors going at full speed. María Fernanda scared everyone in the factory. They were convinced she was bad to the bone. So they were cutting cutting cutting and hoping the little girl wouldn't take notice of them.
While they were cutting the fabric you could see all that lint suspended in the light. They were working with Jamaican cotton, so they had to work fast. There was an embargo, and Jamaican cotton was strictly forbidden on the island.
All María Fernanda wanted was to hear more. She had no idea she frightened all these people so much. And she always felt bad after she said bad words, but she couldn't help it. Truly, this little girl never meant half the nasty things that came out of her filthy mouth and she would have been surprised and perhaps even hurt to hear that no one even suspected that she was a highly sensitive person who suffered intensely. She would have sworn that her rawness was obvious, she even thought she smelled of raw burnt flesh. Didn't they know anything about her?
What it all came down to was that she didn't want the Reader to stop. It always broke her heart. Sometimes the pain was so bad that she'd roll on the floor and holler and curse the Reader for stopping. "I'm going to turn you into a finch !" she yelled. "And put you in a wiry, rusty, banged-up cage for the rest of your life! That'll teach you to stop reading, old man !" The factory workers thought that she was simply having another one of her tantrums.
Every evening Umbertico Barrios stopped reading at six. This was Hell for María Fernanda. At six the Reader's voice stopped, the final little cough, and he stepped down from the podium, and the diamond shapes were pulled into nothingness, swallowed by the floor, the light flew away, the colors cracked and fell off, catapulting you into the black-and-white page of existence, the interruption, all happiness and interest oozed into the cracks, there was this sucking sound and it was all over.
Continues...