by Ana Simo
Since her reappearance, she had eaten twice as much without gaining an ounce. Heaping plates of steamed potatoes and pig knuckles, tureens of tripe and oxtail soups, goat stews, mounds of fat sausages of all colors and origins—among which I could identify only the boudin blanc from having seen its picture in a magazine (not being a sausage lover myself)—scrambled eggs with calf brains, and a variety of stewed animal entrails all began appearing on the dinner table from the first day McCabe returned, as if Petrona again had received instructions behind my back. There were now two distinct dinners served: mine, faithful to the master menu of the month I had given Petrona; and McCabe’s, increasingly visceral and gargantuan. Only good wines were served now—the ones I kept under lock and key—different ones every day, cannily chosen. Every day, I checked my key and the wine cellar lock, still spying on Petrona, hoping to catch her stealing my wine or ordering the meats that McCabe now ate, which were delivered daily and in vast quantities.
Petrona was her usual hieratic self. She was the only one in the household who had not changed: surrounded by unexplained phenomena, I acquired for a while a nervous twitch on the left corner of my mouth that made me look as if I were smiling even when distressed. On arrival, Petrona always greeted me with a Buenos días, señora in her obsequious pre-Columbian lilt, quickly glancing at the tip of my nose, never my eyes, and then lowering her eyes back to half-mast, which is where she kept them when she was around me (in her own home I was sure that she was a straight-gazed, unblinking John P. Wayne). Her departure was identical, gesture for gesture, the only difference being a subtly textured Buenas noches, señora, evoking each night a different shade of contempt. In between, on the rare occasions on which I spoke to her, she stuck to her meretricious script with Noh-theatre discipline. Petrona behaved as if she were immortal, connected every minute to all the Petronas that had existed before her and would exist ever after. I felt vertigo one day looking at Petrona’s impassible face, which suddenly became the face of millions. Was that what Mrs. Wilkerson felt when she looked at my mother’s own guarded face? Spying on Petrona yielded only one curious fact: she liked to eat sugar cubes. I never found out how any of the household’s new food and wine transactions were accomplished, and I dared not ask. After all, everything in this house—the food, the wine, even Petrona—belonged to McCabe. I was a guest.
I removed McCabe’s boots and socks so I could examine her feet. She stirred but did not wake up. Her feet, which had seemed elongated, were in fact still beefy and pink, and covered with freckles. So were her hands. They were the only parts of her body that had not changed, as far as I could tell (I had never seen McCabe naked or even at the beach). Hands and feet now looked incongruous, a graft performed by a surgeon devoid of aesthetic sense. She opened her eyes just as I finished putting back on her socks and boots. That night I replayed this scene in my room. Hadn’t she opened her eyes just a beat before I had withdrawn my hands from her left foot, like an actor stepping on another actor’s cue, a microscopic step that neither the audience nor the other actor can see, but both can sense, or at least suspect?
11
October
Killing a pig is easy. Pigs are like fat babies. Hot-blooded, squirmy, squealing, sly, and utterly useless unless you like their meat. Feeding them both to sharks, as the sublime Montevidean advised two centuries ago, would have raised humanity a tiny bit closer to the angels. It’s physically harder to kill a pig or a gargantuan baby than to twist the neck of a goose, but it’s morally easier. Cuteness will not stop you if, like me, you do not confuse sentimentality with morality. You will put on your butcher’s apron and get to work.
McCabe used to be an easy kill. Not anymore. She was now closer to a bird than a mammal, except for her wolf-like appetite. She was still gaunt despite the prodigious amounts of meat she ate, but a thin, steely layer of muscle and tendons now covered her bones. You wouldn’t notice it unless you touched her, as I had while she slept under the willow tree. It was now mid-October. The cool air had chased away the gnats and the mosquitoes. Dust had vanished from the streets of Elmira, resplendent in the lingering Indian summer. The townspeople had begun wearing bright red jackets and hats, so that hunters would not mistake them for deer.
After her passionate account of the migrating birds, McCabe had become silent and elusive again. Not unfriendly, though. She smiled at me the few times we crossed paths in the garden, a tentative, embarrassed little smile. She seemed to spend her days pacing the property line, deliberately, like a prospector counting her footsteps, with her eyes always fixed on the ground. I did not have an uninterrupted view of her journey, even with the Judge’s binoculars. McCabe would disappear behind a copse and reappear an hour or two later half a mile to the left. She could have gone to town and back. Yet I was sure that she hadn’t. It was a deduction grounded on an objective fact. I observed that every day McCabe would begin her walk at one cardinal point and that every two hours on the dot she would appear at the next. The entry point and the walk itself would proceed clockwise for four days, and counterclockwise for another four. Someone sneaking to town wouldn’t trap herself in such ironclad routine.
The re-education and killing scenarios I had imagined for her predecessor did not quite fit this peculiar automaton either physically, logistically, or, worst of all, morally. Justification and execution procedure alike had to be retooled. I resented the bony creature for making me redo my homework, and tried to whip up resentment into murderous motivation, but that was too ridiculous, even for me. I began to take long baths before going to bed, seeking illumination in the water. Watching the hypnotic filling of the tub, I wondered if it would be painless to take sleeping pills and drown.
In that state of mind, I stood one day at dusk on the edge of the Judge’s property, overlooking the river one hundred feet below. I stood there every day to watch the sun set beyond Shangri-La. I do not care for sunsets, but I liked staring at Shangri-La, which at that hour looked like a bunch of tea leaves at the bottom of a dirty teacup. I had a feeling someone was watching me. When I turned around, McCabe was there. I had not heard her approach, even though the ground was already thick with crunchy red and yellow leaves.
“They tried to kill him,” she said, flatly. “Who?” I said, turning back toward the river and Shangri-La to hide my face from her. She did not immediately answer, but I already knew. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed her lips moving in silence, as if trying to find the right words. “The National Security Advisor,” she finally said, one slow word at a time. My mouth dried out. I could not speak. “A car bomb. Crossing the Bosphorus,” she said; and then, mistaking my horror at her intrusion for concern: “But he’s unharmed.” We were now facing each other. I had trouble breathing. My knees gave out. On the ground, I covered up by pretending to examine a weed. How had she found out that I knew him? Was she spying on me? At least she had used his official title, instead of his more intimate name. I had nothing to do with Rafael Cohen. Since I left Elmira, thirty years ago, aboard the last refugee bus to make it out of the starving heartland, I had hardly thought about him. I was already erasing Elmira as the bus took off, and I waved back to my parents, grandmother, and godparents Genoveva and Ezequiel Cohen, all of whom preferred starvation at home to begging in the city. Rafael always sent me Christmas cards, but we had met again only twice, at my parents’ funerals. The last time I had seen him was seven years ago, at my mother’s wake, right before he published the essay that would propel him from academia to the West Wing. He did not seem to resent that I did not reciprocate with his burials: when his mother and then his father had died I just sent Hallmark condolences. Still, Rafael Cohen belonged to me, to my most secret memories, not to McCabe.
“I heard it on the radio,” McCabe said, as if reading my mind. It was as simple as that. No spying, no mental eavesdropping, no conspiracy: just a regurgitation of the radio news. Like old McCabe used to do. How she would have riffed on this one, from appetizer through dessert. I suddenly mi
ssed old McCabe, missed her bombastic speeches, her heft, her booming voice, her unshakeable certainty that she was always right, and so rich she could always get her way. My eyes moistened, I had lost my good, old McCabe, my pal in reverse, the one who had been with me all these years, the one that I personally had to kill. Someone else had beaten me to it. I suddenly hated the new McCabe I had in front of me, shifting instantly from neutral to two-hundred and fifty miles per hour of murderous hatred. The McCabe before my eyes, the gaunt impostor, the body snatcher, the miserable mutant, must have noticed, because she said, “I’m sorry if I upset you. It’s a slaughterhouse out there,” and she gestured vaguely toward the flaming horizon. I stood up, wanting to hit her. She looked at me with curiosity. My white-knuckled fists seemed to hold a particular fascination for her. She knew, and she was going to let me do it. I had what I wanted, the Nuremberg trial, from beginning to end, in just one second, not through any elaborate plan on my part, but nonetheless happening right here, and now. I could push her off the edge. I should have. For what old McCabe and Elmira had done to me. And for something that now seemed even more monstrous, for what she had done to old McCabe. We were frozen for a few seconds, silent-movie style: me with my fist raised, and her looking at me sweetly, like the girl in Broken Blossoms gazes at the Chinaman who has just saved her. Then I turned and ran away.
12
Father and Sons
When Pedro Andújar and Jacinto Benavides left the Buena Esperanza, each with a gold onza sewn inside the seam of a shoe, they decided to part ways. It was easier, they reasoned, for one marrano to pass unnoticed in the chaotic port, than for two. Jacinto Benavides went off into the free Negro quarter to find a woman and drink himself to death. He had time for the first, but not for the second. A month later, he was knifed by his woman’s common-law husband who, in jail for murdering another Negro, was let out unexpectedly because the Spanish alguacil needed room to accommodate some tobacco smugglers who tried to skimp on their bribes. The murderer and the woman—in reality, a fifteen-year-old mulatto girl who, unbeknownst to her, was carrying Jacinto Benavides’ daughter—dumped his body in the bay after removing all his clothes. They knew that Jacinto Benavides had been circumcised and might be a marrano. This, they felt, was none of their business, since it was a squabble among Spaniards, a marrano being just another kind, adept at some witchcraft that worked only in Spain, and not the island. Just in case, they cleansed the mulatto girl’s hut, where the murder had taken place, using herbs and chants that she had learned from her African mother. The clothes and shoes were sold to a street peddler, who may or may not have found the gold onza inside the shoe. Someone at some point must have, because poor people never threw away shoes or clothes, but used them until they disintegrated upon their bodies, at which point the gold onza must have fallen on the ground and made someone very rich and very happy.
Pedro Andújar walked away from the port as soon as he found a quieter street. In San Cristóbal de La Habana, on the first days of the year 1625, a quieter street was one where the sweaty, screaming mass of soldiers, pigs, prostitutes, beggars, half-naked urchins, criminals, dogs, and street vendors with their greasy, smoky braziers frying pork, plantains, and cassava began to thin out, replaced by the tiny shacks of the mulatto cobblers, leather workers, cabinet makers, tailors, mercers. A hurricane had struck two months earlier, opening gaps in the fortified wall built to protect the city against flooding and attacks by the English, French, and Dutch. Most of the artisans’ shacks were now missing something, but their owners continued to work inside them as if the roof, or door, or walls were still there, like the actors in Fuenteovejuna, sitting inside their painted cardboard shops pretending they were real. Pedro had seen the play performed by an itinerant troupe in Cádiz, right before he first sailed for the New World. He had been in San Cristóbal de La Habana three times before, the last time two years earlier, but he had never been separated from Jacinto Benavides, and had never left the port area, where Jacinto said a man could find all he needed to recover from the brutal months at sea: drink, food, and women, in order of importance. On his earlier visits, he had been a glutton for all of these, particularly nísperos and mulatto women, both of which were abundant here and became one in his mind. He had never seen either before. He drank to please Jacinto, who loved drink more than anything else in the world, even if it made him cry and speak in broken Ladino, which could have gotten them both burnt at the stake. Pedro and Jacinto had been inseparable for ten years, from the Canary Islands, where they had both enlisted in the Buena Esperanza at the age of fifteen, to Cádiz; from there to Veracruz; and then back a year later by way of San Cristóbal de La Habana. They were inseparable, but only on land, when no one was watching them. On board the Buena Esperanza, each pretended the other did not exist. If forced to speak to each other in public on the boat, they would do so with distant courtesy. Neither wanted to be a marrano for the rest of his life.
Pedro had never uttered that word, marrano. Growing up in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, he was terrified that if he did, the word would stick to him forever, give him bad luck, make him grow a curly tail and stiff hairs that would stick out of his nose. He no longer checked the base of his spine every morning when he woke up, as he had done ever since a playmate had called him marrano. That was the first time he had heard it. However, he was now doubly repulsed by the word, because he had become thoroughly Christian in culture, while still deeply Hebrew in temperament, neither of which he knew yet, and pigs are loathsome to both from different angles. Jacinto, though, had no allegiance to anything outside his physical appetites, or so he claimed, though Pedro remembered Jacinto’s drunken tears and pseudo-Ladino babble, his ostentatious way of stuffing himself with pork at every opportunity. Jacinto laughed at the word marrano and, when they were alone, to see Pedro squirm, he liked to sing softly in his ear an obscene ditty he had composed, rhyming marrano with ano (anus), and ojo del amo (eye of the master) with ojo del ano (asshole). Sometimes Jacinto would just mouth his rhyme at Pedro, snorting and wiggling his nose like a pig, shaking his big frame and the curly blond locks that San Cristóbal de La Habana’s mulatto girls fought with each other to touch, so that Jacinto never paid for sex.
Perhaps because they were so different, while being alike from birth, the happiest time on board for Pedro was the one night a month that he and Jacinto stood guard together. They were alone for eight hours and could talk without witnesses. Unlike on land, Jacinto was always sober here. Captain de Horta, so lenient in other ways, ruthlessly punished any sailor who got drunk while on night watch: the first time, fifty lashes and ten days in the brig with only stale bread and water. If repeated, the man was left at the first port without a penny, and with a bad word whispered in the ear of the local alguacil, which in their case would be, or include, the troublesome marrano.
On their last watch together, the night before they reached the Biloxi Marsh, which the Spaniards called “Marasmo,” Pedro had gone over the story of how he and Jacinto would jump ship in Veracruz, their last stop. They would bribe a public scrivener to get themselves new Christian identities and blend into the population. Pedro had been planning every detail for over a year, forcing Jacinto to save, so he, too, would have a gold onza when the time came. It gave Pedro great pleasure to tell Jacinto the story of their future together while they stood on lookout at night, half-whispering so he wouldn’t be heard by anyone else (Pedro had noticed, watching Fuenteovejuna on that makeshift stage ten years earlier, that the line prompter hiding under a cardboard half shell did not whisper as much as he half-whispered, so that only whoever was sitting on the first row might catch a word or two. The one time the prompter was forced to whisper a line again because the actor had not heard it the first time, his whisper carried all the way to the back of the courtyard theater and the audience jeered and threw chicken bones. Pedro never whispered after that.)
In Pedro’s story, after getting their new names, he and Jacinto would buy a mule and two horses, a
nd make their way to the northern reaches of the New Spain, where one could get land for free. “You’re standing all crooked,” Jacinto said, when Pedro had them already in their haciendas, married to two Indian princesses in whose father’s land Eldorado was located (at Jacinto’s insistence, this had been added to the story a few months earlier). “You still look crooked to me.” Pedro straightened himself again. “You look like an old man,” Jacinto said, with unexpected bitterness, which he then tried to hide by grunting softly and wiggling his nose, pig-like. Pedro did not say anything else the rest of that night. He was startled by Jacinto’s sourness. He did not understand it then, and he did not understand it forty-seven years later when, on his deathbed, he asked Jacinto, who had died long ago, “But what about Tenerife?” No one around him knew who Jacinto was, and what had happened in Tenerife, or even what or where Tenerife was. It is doubtful that Jacinto himself, had he been sitting next to the seventy-two-year-old Pedro, would have known specifically what it was about Tenerife that Pedro had in mind, although Jacinto, who had an excellent memory, would have remembered all about it, or at least those parts that were important to him, and either way would have been satisfactory for him and the dying man.
On his deathbed, what Pedro remembered was the day Jacinto had revealed to him the word marrano. They were eight-year-olds, battling with tree-branch swords in front of their parents’ shacks, on the dirt road that led to the better parts of Tenerife. Jacinto, golden locks flowing, was as usual Tirant lo Blanc, and Pedro, the Sultan Mehmet. “Portez comme un joug le Croissant!” cried the fearsome Sultan. “Groin de cochon! Nourri d’immondice et de fange. Nous n’irons pas à tes sabbats, you filthy marrano,” cried back Tirant, cutting off the Sultan’s head and saving Constantinople. On his deathbed Pedro was asking Jacinto how he could have abandoned him, when the two should have been bound together forever, after Jacinto taught him that terrible word on a dusty Tenerife afternoon. The old man had forgotten by then that it had been he who had decided on that last night at the crow’s nest to leave Jacinto. Unless he now meant not leaving in a physical sense, but abandoning love, which is what he thought Jacinto had done that night when he said to him, “You look like an old man.” Those were the last words spoken that night. After that, they were both distracted until dawn by the smells of the approaching Biloxi Marsh.