VANISHING MAPS, by Cristina García
A halo representing a mother’s ghost appears in Cristina García’s “Vanishing Maps” as the Berlin drag queen La Ivanita — given name Ivanito Villaverde — prepares to perform Olga Guillot’s 1950s bolero “Miénteme,” in which the singer begs her paramour to lie to her, to keep the illusion of his love alive. Meanwhile, in Cuba, Ivanito’s nonagenarian grandmother Celia is surprised to discover even her doctor has left the country amid economic hardship on the island; as her granddaughter (and Ivanito’s cousin) Irina, living in Russia, romanticizes the time her parents met in Prague in 1968: “Hopes had been impossibly high then — for democracy, for freedom, even for love.” So opens this follow-up to García’s 1992 debut, “Dreaming in Cuban,” which traced the generational ruptures within one diasporic family from the 1930s to the 1980s.
“Vanishing Maps” is set at the turn of the 21st century, and though a lot has changed for the del Pino family — whose four living generations are now scattered around the world — Celia has maintained loyalty to the unnamed Cuban leader for 40 years, for unlike Gustavo, a Spanish tourist with whom she spent “four rapturous nights” in 1934, “El Líder … had never abandoned her.” After 66 years of one-sided correspondence, she meets Gustavo in Spain for a reunion that is unsurprisingly dotted with low-grade disappointment, with the unsparing wash of time. Still, like the lover in “Miénteme,” Celia croons to Gustavo, “I’ll believe everything you tell me, true or not.” By the end of the novel, she’s considering, for the first time in her life, not going back to Cuba and staying in Spain.
The passage of time is also evident in García’s prose itself. Three decades after publishing “Dreaming in Cuban,” García has done away with italicizing Spanish words, and with contextualizing them for an Anglophone audience. Aside from snippets of expository text that situate “Vanishing Maps” as a stand-alone novel, the book is not invested in explaining the Cuban diaspora to the unfamiliar. In one parodic reprieve, García includes a transcript from a hard-line radio show in Miami, in which the host interviews Celia’s daughter Lourdes, “a fast-rising political star” who’s running for mayor — challenging the Democrat Alex Panetela (his last name a joke for García’s Spanish-speaking readers, he is a stand-in for Alex Penelas, Miami’s actual mayor from 1996 to 2004). Lourdes takes a reactionary position in “the tragic case of Eliseo González,” a loosely fictionalized counterpart to Elián, the child at the center of a custodial and political battle between Cuba and the United States in 1999-2000.
García seems less interested in the land mine of historical accuracy than in the emotional registers of its fractured interpretations. Describing the breakup of her punk band, Lourdes’s daughter Pilar could be speaking about any political or familial denouement: “Nothing left but a black hole stuffed with … ideologues, codifications, mainstreaming, commercialism, confusion and sorrow.” For Lourdes, proving her Cubanidad in Miami requires a tired political performance. For Ivanito, who also works as a translator at a bank, texts prove easier to decipher than his ghost-mother’s desires. In a moment of painful irony, Irina dreams of opening a queer club in Moscow and wonders whether “their new president, Vladimir Putin, could put things right.”
Like a ghost, art too resists containment; and “Vanishing Maps” is a true aesthete’s novel, evoking names from Guillot and Federico García Lorca to Bach and Debussy. Song lyrics, photos and visual descriptions are included throughout the narrative as Pilar, a punk musician turned sculptor, engages directly in artistic experimentation. Alongside her own stylistic experimentation, García allows for a slipperiness between what is real and what can only be explained in the untranslatable languages of specters and Santería. By the time we meet Irina’s long-lost twin, Tereza, in a chance encounter that strains the limits of plausibility, we’ve been trained to accept that anyone may or may not be a figment of the imagination, possibly even a shadow of lives that could have been.
“How many borders had fallen in her lifetime?” Irina thinks. “The Berlin Wall, the far-flung boundaries of the U.S.S.R., the shifting puzzle of the former Soviet bloc.” Over the course of the novel, we see the corrosion of familial borders, too; as Ivanito reminds his cousins with a phrase now commonly used, “the political and the personal are inseparable.” As the youngest generation prepares to reunite in Berlin, the underlying question remains: When a map vanishes, what is left in its wake? Or, more important, was there ever a map to begin with?
Gabriela Garcia is the author of the novel “Of Women and Salt.”
VANISHING MAPS | By Cristina García | 254 pp. | Alfred A. Knopf | $28