Back to Wando Passo

by David Payne

  Her laugh is sharp. “You are right! You are so right! Spending the night—our wedding night—in another woman’s bed does not give the appearance that you are fighting for your wife!”

  “I didn’t spend it there by choice.”

  “I see,” she says. “Her charms, then, her Cuban charms, are simply such that you were helpless to resist….”

  “I am bewitched.”

  Addie’s eyes widen. She starts to laugh again. Her mouth actually falls open to emit the laugh, but something in Harlan’s sobriety stops her. He isn’t sweating now, isn’t making the large, emphatic gestures of the hands. Some new self-possession has stolen over him. Is it his father’s death? Whether that or something else, his hazy ginger eyes, for once, are clear. His expression is that of a man in contemplation of a peril, not panicked before it, but serious, alert. A thought flies through Addie’s mind—the clearing in the woods and what she saw inside the hollow of the tree…The small, clawed feet of fear skitter up her spine like mice. Yet she can’t take his assertion without contest.

  “You are bewitched,” she repeats with scorn.

  “You smile, madam. But it’s no laughing matter, I assure you. Will you hear me?”

  Addie won’t give him the satisfaction of an answer. Her heart is set against him now. Yet what choice does she have except to listen, and Harlan reads her face and sees she has no choice.

  “For you to grasp this matter…I must take you back,” he says, lighting his cigar, “…to the beginning. I ask you to remember, Addie, that my memory of Clarisse, my sole childhood memory, is of a swaddled bundle in Paloma’s arms, a voice that, at the quinta, sometimes woke me in the night. I was six the day we sailed for Charleston. Father and Paloma were both there. The bundle wasn’t. There was no more crying in the night. I didn’t see Clarisse again till I was thirty-three.

  “She was raised at La Mella, in Villa-Urrutia’s household. I’ve told you this before, but what is crucial for you to understand is that Paloma was pregnant when Father won her, but the child, by law and right, belonged to Wenceslao. The Count, as you may readily imagine, wasn’t pleased to lose his slave and favorite mistress and was certainly in no mood, no mood at all, to toss Clarisse, as further lagniappe, into Father’s pile. So Paloma came with Father, but Clarisse, when she was born, went back to Wenceslao, and the old Count found her charming, by reports. She is beautiful, I think you can agree….”

  “Yes,” says Addie, clipped.

  “And charming, when she has a mind. And the Conde, you see, was old, Addie. His other children were all grown. So she became his pet. He raised her as his own, sent her to the Franciscans in Guanabacoa, spoiled her, allowed her to dress like a marquise, and at his death, he set her free and left her little but her wardrobe and her jewels. I knew nothing of this situation, Addie. The day I sailed for Cuba to apprentice, on the very wharf, Father took me aside and pressed an envelope into my hand. In it were a name and an address, a sum of cash. He told me the story in no greater detail than I’m telling you right now. A good deal less, in fact. He asked me to seek her out, to settle the sum upon her, to help her if I could. Understand, Addie, at that point in time, eight years ago, Clarisse was no more than a name to me, the Negro daughter of my father’s Negro concubine.

  “But Cuba is different, Addie, as I said before. I began to feel the change some miles in the offing, while still at sea. The warm south wind off the island brought a smell of spice, of poinciana. I felt a kind of spell steal over me. At the docks, my first moment there, I was almost run down by a quitrín. The Negro coachman, the calesero, in his top hat and silver spurs, made some rude call in Spanish and raised his whip to frighten me. Me, a white man. Through the window, Addie, as the carriage clattered past, I saw a dark-faced woman, a mulatto or quadroon. She was wearing silks and jewels, sitting regally on the upholstered bench. She gazed at me with cutting eyes, as though I deserved to be run down for having the temerity to interrupt her progress. In Charleston, she and her coachman would have been taken out and whipped. There, it was a wholly unremarkable event for them to treat a white man as an object of contempt. I did not know where I was. I felt my moorings slip.

  “I wrote Clarisse and asked to meet. She suggested the opera. She said I’d know her by the flower in her hair, so there I was, Addie, in the street before Tacón’s at eight o’clock at night. The volantes rolled up as before, filled with elegant, well-dressed men and women. There was hardly a face without some shade of brown, whether of Spain or Africa—how was one to know? No one seemed to care but me. And the girls…There were scores of them, perhaps some hundreds, all dressed in the identical style, in white dresses, with lace mantillas on their shoulders, and each and every one of them, Addie, without exception, wore a flower in her hair. Madam, I was in a swivet! I turned this way and that. I was perspiring. Not to put too fine a point on it, I was sweating like a hog! Women picked up their skirts and hurried past, casting poisoned looks at me. Officers seemed prepared to draw their swords and run the madman through! And then I saw her, Addie…. No, no, at first I didn’t know it was Clarisse. You saw her—would you guess she had a drop of Negro blood? She was standing in the shadow of a pier, by torchlight, laughing, Addie, this beautiful, elegant young woman dressed in evening dress, laughing at my frantic exercise. I went up to her, and I was fuming. Do you understand? I meant to give it to her straight, no water and no ice! Yet she couldn’t stop. She tried to stop. She’d hold her breath for ten or fifteen seconds, but then she’d look at me and that would set her off again. And I don’t know what it was, Addie, even now, I truly don’t, but after two or three such volleys, I started laughing, too. We stood there shaking, literally shaking in the street before Tacón’s, as the glittering crowd flowed past, giving us wide berth. We were racked with laughter for five minutes, five minutes and a half, before we introduced ourselves or spoke a single word. And what am I to tell you—I’d never had such an encounter with a woman in my life, nor have I since. And when we finally recovered and began to speak, it was not in the diffident and tentative way of new acquaintances; it was as though we’d known each other all our lives. I spoke to her about my mother, Addie, whom I never speak about….”

  “Certainly not to me…”

  “No, Addie, you’re right, not to you or anyone, and hardly to myself. Yet, with Clarisse, in the first quarter of an hour, I told the story of her illness and death. I felt some permission, and as I spoke, her eyes brimmed with tears. I saw she understood what that had been to me, a boy of five. We were still there in the gallery, walking up and down, at intermission, and when the final curtain fell. It was as if no time had passed at all. It seemed innocent, Addie. I didn’t call it love. It was weeks before I called it that. I only knew a sense of buoyancy had stolen over me. It was as if, finally, I’d discovered what living was, and I was grateful and didn’t ask its name….”

  “And can you possibly imagine I wish to hear this?” she asks him wretchedly. “Is it your intention to torture me?”

  “No, my dear. No, Addie, not at all.” He sits beside her on the bed and tries to take her hands, but she refuses. “My sole intention is to make you understand what happened, how it’s led to the predicament we’re in. May I go on?”

  “Yes, yes,” she says. “Yes, if I must hear it, and I suppose I must.”

  There is tenderness in his expression now, tenderness, compassion, and regret. “You see, Addie, when I look into your eyes,” he says, “I see suspicion and distaste. I see a person I don’t like or want to be, yet fear I am, have always feared I was. I’ve helped to put that image there, I know. But, in Clarisse’s eyes, I saw someone strong and capable, someone generous and full of life, who made her laugh. With her, I saw a person I’ve never been but always wanted to believe I might become. Perhaps you’ve never had such feelings, Addie. If you have, I don’t deceive myself they were for me.”

  This is the help you’re to receive…. The voice she heard with Jarry on the horse ride through the
swamp comes back, and now the nerve is struck. And so, as Harlan speaks, she listens with a double mind.

  “It was the most shattering thing that’s ever happened in my life,” he continues. “And this went on. Day by day, it grew. And there came a point when it appeared to me that there was no way back. I decided to forgo my inheritance and stay with her in Cuba, and I was happy in the contemplation of that life. I asked Clarisse to be my wife. It never dawned on me that she might hesitate, and yet she did. She said, ‘I love you, Harlan, but there are things I haven’t shared with you, important things, things I’ve been afraid to say. I see that you must know them now.’

  “‘Tell me, then,’ I said. ‘For God’s sake, tell me now.’

  “But she shook her head and put her finger to my lips. She whispered, ‘Shhh. There are some things you can speak, and others you can only show.’

  “That weekend, we traveled to Matanzas, out to the plantation. Her half brother had inherited La Mella and ran it as an absentee, so there was no one in the house but us. To be clear, Addie, we’d been chaste until that time, and this was by Clarisse’s choice, not mine. That night we slept in separate rooms in separate wings. On Sunday morning, the sound of drumming awakened me a little past first light. Shortly after, Clarisse knocked on my door. Understand, Addie, in all the time I’d known her, she’d dressed the way she had that first night at Tacón’s, like an unmarried Cuban girl of good descent. That morning she was someone else. She had a printed headscarf on, a red and green one of the sort they call vayajá, hoop earrings and a full skirt with petticoats. There were collares, strings of beads, around her neck and bangles on her arms. Her feet were bare.

  “She led me down into the barracoon. I was the sole white person there, and the scene is one I can hardly describe to you. Addie, it was like the end of days. There were people moiling in the streets, dancing, selling jerked beef and plantains, playing games, all to the rhythm of those drums. Right out in the open, as women and children jeered and hooted, men put their cocks—forgive me—grown men put their cocks into great clay jugs to see if they could reach a layer of ash in the bottom and leave a mark. People stared and made way as we passed. I thought it was because of my white face, but then I noticed how they averted their eyes from her, as though Clarisse were some sort of royalty.

  “Deeper and deeper we went, till we arrived at a small house, better than the other houses. The door was studded with cut nails and rivets in the Spanish fashion, and a design had been drawn on it in pembe, chalk, what they call a firma, a hieroglyph—I didn’t know that then. We passed through into the courtyard where the drummers were, three of them, playing on the caja, the mula, and the small one with the high tone, which is called cachimbo. The dancing was almost at a frenzy. Women with their arms akimbo made thrusting motions with their hips, advancing in a line, while others spread their arms like wings and banked and wheeled like flying birds. Clarisse introduced me to her godparents, Demetrio and Esperanza, two old Congos dressed in white. When Demetrio raised his hand, the drumming stopped.

  “‘Padrino, Madrina…,’ Clarisse said in the silence, ‘Godfather, Godmother, this is Harlan, who has asked me to become his wife. I come to seek your blessing and the blessing of this munanso on our marriage.’

  “Demetrio lit a cigar from the candela at his feet and, without warning, puffed the smoke directly in my face. I flinched, Addie, and several people laughed, but it was kindly laughter. I did not feel ridiculed. And then I heard a bleat and turned to see a young man leading a goat onto the patio. Demetrio unsheathed a knife and dripped the wax from a black candle in lines along the blade, each side. People began to wash the goat’s feet and its mouth, and Demetrio chanted, ‘Kiao lumbo! Kiao lumbo!’ And then he pressed the goat’s head to my genitals, to Clarisse’s breasts, and began to speak in a loud, demanding voice, Spanish mixed with words I didn’t know, ‘We are here today to ask the blessing of this rama, both the living and the dead, upon this marriage. And we invoke the nkisi, and above all, Zarabanda, by the power of these firmas, that our sister, Clarisse, may be blessed in her union with this man.’

  “And then, Addie, he showed the knife to the goat, which was pulling and shitting, rolling its eyes as if it knew, and he said, ‘Buen meme, y a lesa kwame,’ ‘Good goat, you will go into a sleep.’ He sang this and then whispered something in its ears and nose, and it grew calm, Addie. It grew tame. It was the strangest thing. And then the crowd drew back, and I saw, for the first time, in the center of the patio, what the dancers had obscured, a pot, a black iron pot.”

  Now the small hairs stand on Addie’s back.

  “In it were the limbs of trees, many different kinds, and the horns of animals, deer, a ram; there was a machete, there were bones. Animal bones, some of them, but not all. In the center was a human skull.”

  The clearing in the woods, the fallen tree, and what she saw inside…All this returns to Addie as he speaks, and she feels chilled, though these are not the sorts of chills that come from cold. And it’s curious, isn’t it, how swiftly she—who’s often smiled at “Negro superstition,” at the ax head under the mattress to cure the rheumatism, at fence-grass tea and the hurried shoving of the poker in the fire when the hoot owl cries outdoors; Addie, who all her life has encouraged her aunt’s servants’ reason, their belief in Christ—how swiftly magic, presented in this light, reenters her life as a real possibility and wipes away the mistress’s smile of condescending knowledge, leaving, in its stead, the sober stare of a small girl contemplating a dark wood at dusk.

  “Demetrio presented the knife to this pot, Addie,” he goes on, “with the deference of a vassal to his lord, as though it, too, were sentient, or as though some sentient thing resided there, and the people began to sing,

  “‘Ahora sí menga va corre, como corre,

  Ahora sí menga va corre, sí seño,

  Ahora sí menga va corre!’

  “I understood the Spanish, Addie, all but that one word, ‘menga,’ which is from an older tongue, but when Demetrio plunged the knife in the goat’s throat, I understood. The word was blood, sacrificial blood, and they were singing, ‘Now the blood will flow, surely it will flow, surely now the blood will flow.’ Demetrio collected it, as it spurted, hot, into a plate of salt and poured it on the skull, which they called ‘kiyumba.’ He was singing, ‘Fogoro yarifo, menga corre menga sangra sala lai la lai la,’ and he cut the goat’s head off with a sawing, slicing motion. Terrible, terrible. He placed it in the pot, atop the skull, and the drums exploded, Addie, all around, people chanted, prayed, and wailed, it was a Babel pierced with shrieks and moans of ecstasy. They threw themselves into the dance, they whirled and lost themselves, and after some time, one woman screamed and fell. People caught her arms. They supported her as her limbs jerked and quivered. Then she grew still. The tension left her face. She looked, briefly, like someone who was drunk, so drunk she couldn’t keep her eyelids open. Only a thin white sliver remained visible, and a rim of iris like a sun, a black sun creeping up over a hill. But there was something else there, too, Addie, not drunkenness, some awareness, still and old and deeply self-possessed. And then she stood and opened her eyes, and I was terrified for the first time. Because I saw her fall, Addie. I saw her close her eyes. When she opened them again, she was someone else. Her eyes were like eternity, two black lakes of thunder in which I saw the lightning flash. I’m forty-five years old, I’ve looked into my share of faces, but I’ve never seen a human being look like that. And when she began to speak, it was in a different voice, a man’s, commanding, deep. She picked people from the crowd and upbraided them. She told one man to give up alcohol for forty days, another to stop eating shrimp.

  “Then suddenly she turned to me and something happened. My head began to swim. I felt light-headed, ill, and then my body caught on fire. I looked into her pupils, and there were what looked like sparks or fireflies swarming there, constellations of swirling stars, and they flew close, and I realized they were spirits, Addie,
angels, ghosts, I did not know what they were, but I wasn’t frightened anymore. They were clothed in radiant white, clapping their hands and singing. I realized they were welcoming me. And I looked down and saw the courtyard where the dancers were, I saw Demetrio and Esperanza. I saw Clarisse kneeling beside a writhing body. Mine. I was lying on the stones. I’d left my body, Addie. It had fallen down, and I had left it, and these radiant presences, these beings of light, I wanted to go to them, to stay. I didn’t see my mother, but I knew she would be there, and these others, they would show the way. And I knew, too, that I would have to die to go. I knew that I was dying even then. I don’t know how I knew, Addie, many things were clear to me, and I will tell you, I was not afraid of dying, no, I wanted to, death seemed no more than opening a door and walking into the next room. And like that”—he snaps his fingers now—“they scattered. I fell to earth.

  “I came to on the riverbank. The drumming went on, but it was in the distance now. I was naked to the waist. I was wet. Clarisse was washing me with something, some liquid—there was rum in it, and spice, albahaca…what is it called? Basil, basil, yes, of course, and pepper—the same thing they used to wash the goat. It’s called chamba, and it is to them like chrism is to us. She was weeping. I took her hand and asked her what was wrong. She told me the nkisi, the spirit that had mounted the woman and then passed into me, had said, through my own lips, that we could never marry, must not, that to be together would be a pollution. I was stunned. I asked her why. She shook her head. ‘The spirits don’t always give us reasons.’ ‘And you accept it?’ I asked. ‘You accept the end of everything we’ve felt and been to each other, just like that?’ She took my hands in hers. ‘Harlan,’ she said, ‘this is my faith. This house, this rama, is my house. It is my church. Demetrio and Esperanza are its priests. They are my mother and father. I’ve taken vows to them and to the nfumbi, the muertos of this line. To break them would invite their wrath.’ I couldn’t understand, Addie, I was hurt and reeling. I said, ‘The dead? What have they to do with us, the living? I’ve given up the life I would have had for you. What we feel, I’ve never felt before. Have you? Look me in the face and tell me it is not the same for you. Look me in the face and tell me you accept that it is wrong to love like this.’ But she couldn’t, Addie. She could not. Clarisse just looked at me with those dark eyes, and said, ‘Do you have any notion what you’re asking me to do? Do you have any notion of the price it would require not just of me, but of you?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t, none at all, I only know, whatever it may be, I’m prepared to pay.’ She gazed at me for a long time, Addie, and then she said, ‘Pues, que así sea’—‘So be it’—and she stood up and took my hand and led me into the grass beneath the willow trees.” He pauses now. His gaze trains over her left shoulder.