Daysy’s fourteenth summer was long and strange, beginning on the day she discovered a bunch of bananas tied up by ribbons of every color, lying on the tiles of the front porch like a gift. She’d brought them into the house. Upon eyeing the bundle, Magda Elena screamed “Solavaya!” a word Daysy didn’t know, though it seemed the kind of thing one would say to cancel a spell. Disappearing in the kitchen for a moment, Magda Elena emerged with a broom held high over her head. Daysy flinched as her mother ran toward her with the broom, and she felt the stiff bristles come down hard on her arms, knocking the bananas out of her hands. Magda Elena used the broom to shoo the bananas out the door, down the driveway, and into the gutter, where they bobbed up and down in the murky water. Daysy held her breath as she watched the last of the bright ribbons soak up water and sink.
Later that afternoon, they found a dozen broken eggs smeared on the fender of Magda Elena’s car. She gave the eggs the same treatment as the bananas. Then Magda Elena burned the broom inside an aluminum garbage can. The broom crackled and sent up golden sparks as it burned. Every once in a while, a bit of burning straw caught flight just over the garbage can and hovered for a moment in the atmosphere. Then it would fall back down, sizzling into ash as it went. Daysy stood by her mother the whole time, repeating “solavaya” with her.
At dinner that night, Magda Elena said, “It’s revenge, of course. That María Luísa, la muy hija de puta. I accidentally got her fired yesterday.” She said it as matter-of-factly as if she’d been commenting on the summer heat, but Daysy noticed how her mother’s hands shook as she dipped a ladle into the beans.
According to Magda Elena, what happened was that she’d asked, at her sewing station, “Where in the hell is María Luísa?” when she ran out of pockets to sew onto pants. It was María Luísa’s job to pass them on to Magda Elena, and Magda Elena’s job to sew the pockets and get the rest of the piece off to the next worker, and so on. The foreman got up from his recliner in the corner, where he had been reading the paper and drinking his fourth cafecito of the day to search for the unfortunate María Luísa. He found her in the women’s bathroom, smoking a joint and eating a giant Cuban sandwich, and he fired her on the spot.
“That’ll do it,” Angel said.
“I don’t believe in Santería,” said Daysy.
Magda Elena coughed a little, turning her head to the side. Her hands had stopped shaking, though every so often, Daysy heard her mother saying “solavaya” underneath her breath. “Me either,” Magda Elena said once she’d sat down. “But I respect it.”
Two weeks after that incident, Abuelo started acting strangely, yelling, removing all of his clothes to work in the backyard, eating only guava paste at every meal. In time, the doctors diagnosed him with dementia, because they couldn’t say Alzheimer’s for sure until he was dead and a chunk of his brain was under their microscopes. Magda Elena blamed it on the curse brought on by the bananas and the eggs, and Daysy shuddered at how badly she had wanted those ribbons, ribbons she now dreamed about in strange patterns and permutations. She dreamt ribbons wrapped around her throat, ribbons leached of their colors, ribbons braided into her hair.
Abuelo’s deterioration happened with such rapidity it caught the family by surprise. Daysy had been the first to see him disrobing in the yard. She’d covered her eyes as fast as she could, but she’d seen a shadowy thing between his bare thighs anyway. She’d had a hard time looking her grandfather in the eye for a few days.
Some time after that, they’d lost power to the house, and a technician from Florida Power and Light had come by, clambering up the pole in the backyard, his tools clinking on his tool belt. With a yelp, the man slipped and dropped to the ground. Daysy watched him fall from her seat at the patio table where she’d been sketching. Later, she’d remember the slowness of his fall. It seemed to her a kind of dance, almost. She’d expected the thud, but the crack of bones surprised her. Electric lines dangled like jungle snakes after him, spitting light just out of reach of him on the grass. Daysy had gone screaming into the house, afraid to go near the moaning man. It was Abuelo who comforted him as they waited for the ambulance, helping the man with the broken leg sit up and lean against an old, gnarled lemon tree that Abuelo had grafted a naval orange limb onto.
Other strange occurrences followed. On the Fourth of July, Daysy had found three dead kittens in the metal shed in the backyard. Her grandfather had shut the door, which was always left open. He had been yelling all day about shadows that creep into dark places and play foul tricks on people. The door stayed closed for days, and when Daysy opened it, she found the three small bodies, curled together in a pile of sawdust. At first, she thought they were sleeping in the stifling heat. The shed was like an oven in the summer. She lifted one and found that it did not drape over her hands in that way of kittens, but rather, was a hard thing, the skin and fur no longer pliable, but stuck to the bones and matted. Daysy shivered so hard her teeth rattled. She dropped the kitten, and the dull sound it made when it hit the ground reminded her of the man falling off the electric pole. She thought of Abuelo, too, getting sicker and stranger by the day, and Daysy imagined that all of these terrible things were connected in some way, perhaps, to the curse of the bananas and eggs. Daysy cried over the dead kittens for a long while. A lanky, full-grown cat stalked the doorway to the shed. It meowed at Daysy, but the sound was deep, like a growl, and Daysy guessed this was the grieving mother. The cat locked eyes with Daysy for a moment, then crouched low, its ears flattened on its skull. Leaping at Daysy clumsily, the cat struck a shelf and knocked down some PVC pipes Abuelo had put there. The plastic tubes tumbled onto the kittens and rolled off them. Stepping out into the sunlight, Daysy made room for the cat, which sniffed the bodies for a long time, passing her tongue over their heads. Later, Abuelo would dig a grave by the fence for the kittens, humming a slow tune as he turned over the earth.
Abuelo was always singing, or drumming his fingers against whatever hard surface he had at hand. His rhythms were the soundtrack of Daysy’s life. Long ago, her grandfather had been the set director at the Teátro Tacón in Havana, Cuba. Though his hands were calloused from sanding and lifting, his voice raspy from the years of swallowed sawdust, Abuelo could sing along with the operas. He enjoyed wispy kisses from the prima ballerinas backstage every night. Or so Daysy imagined. The stories he told of those times were long and colorful, and were the only clearly defined images left to him, it seemed. He told Daysy how he taught himself to play the flute, how from behind the curtains, he watched over the heads of the actors onstage to observe the orchestra below, miming their movements. If only he hadn’t been so dark skinned, his hair coiled so tightly against his head, he might have had one of the seats in the pit, playing his flute for the best productions on the island. He named his son Angel after the cherubs encased in the theater’s tapestry and arranged it so that his son might marry his girlfriend, Magda Elena, on the theater’s grand marble staircase. Abuelo still remembered the theater, could describe it in such glorious detail that each shining brass tack of each red velvet seat was accounted for in his head.
Out of all the stories Magda Elena told, Daysy’s favorite had to do with her grandfather and his gift for music. As the story went, Magda Elena was not yet married, and she’d gathered enough courage to visit Angel’s house on her own. Gregorio had opened the door and sung “¿Quien es ella?” operatically. Magda Elena smiled, wondered if she was being courted by a man with madness in his gene pool, and allowed herself to be led in by Gregorio. He’d sat her down then and sung a few more bars from the Spanish opera, Laura y Don Gonzalo. Sometimes, when she told the story, Abuelo would make his flute appear, as if by magic Daysy sometimes thought, and play a tune as Magda Elena spoke.
He’d smuggled the flute out of Cuba when he left in 1983. Those leaving the island for good were stripped of all belongings. The guard at the airport had pulled the flute out of Abuelo’s pocket and attempted to throw it onto a large pile of confiscated photo albums behind him, when Abuelo took hold of the guard’s wrist with one hand, seized the flute, and shoved the head joint underneath the guard’s chin, as if the flute were a knife. “My wife is dead and I’ve got nothing to lose but this flute,” he had said,