by Ana Simo
19
Burnt Feet
The house was silent the next afternoon when I woke up. There was no lunch basket by my door; no one came when I rang my hospital bell or yelled. And the phone by my bed was dead. Outside a storm was raging, a typical Elmiran Thanksgiving storm—a North Atlantic gale with its black skies, brutal galley winds, and forty-foot waves, which central casting had successfully adapted to the heartland.
“A Thanksgiving message from El Jefe,” Ezequiel Cohen bellowed every year in Spanish, pointing upward with his drippy, buttery corn on the cob, and waiting the required three beats before the punch line: “You’re all in the same boat!” Then, a theatrical aside in broken English: “’Cept dat soma yous travel firs class!” Everyone, even Genoveva who never laughed at her husband’s jokes, would crack when Ezequiel said “yous” in what he called his Little Sambo accent. Our Negro neighbors down the road couldn’t get enough of it. Ezequiel was asked to do the Sambo in their front yard at least once a week.
In my first year and only year in college I found out that all this was wrong. I lectured my parents, both of whom agreed it was awful while shuffling their feet and avoiding my gaze. I slammed the kitchen door on their Stepin Fetchit noses. When I tried to force my mother to talk to Ezequiel, she stared at me as if I were a slimy, green creature from outer space, the first such stare in a line of thousands that would stretch onward for the next two decades, until she died, well before her time. I considered approaching Rafael. He must have heard an even harsher judgment at his college about his father’s hobby. After all, he was not going to backward Elmira County Community College like I was, but to—gasp!—Harvard. On a full scholarship, complemented by assorted little grants which he kicked back to his endemically hand-to-mouth parents.
I did not envy Rafael, then or now. He was a genius. He would have been Mozart if he had been born with musical genes. More importantly: he was a good son, and remained so to the end. That was his biggest accomplishment. He made us proud. His triumphs were ours. He deserved the very best in life. That was the prevailing wisdom in both our families, to which I subscribe to this day. I never spoke to Rafael about his father’s Little Sambo deviationism, afraid to upset the delicate mechanism of genius and ruin our only future claim to fame. There was nothing delicate about squat, dark, meaty, wide-chested Rafael, who never missed a class, or a chance to stuff himself. His body was just the physical envelope. His mind, able to grasp advanced math while mine could not even understand a simple equation, seemed like the mechanism of Monsieur de la Trouille’s automaton, frail under the weight of complexity.
The last time I saw Rafael’s father alive, he was about to perform Little Sambo for three Negro generations in their front yard. The grandmothers and mothers sitting in their rocking chairs, the men leaning against the porch pillars in small knots, elegant and sullen, the children perching on the steps, all wearing their Sunday best, including shiny new shoes, because they had just returned from church. Ezequiel opened his mouth. The men doubled up with laughter. The women held their shaking bellies or clutched their hearts, fanning themselves faster and whispering in each other’s ears, each whisper triggering a fresh wave of laughter across the porch. The children shrieked, clapped, and pointed at Ezequiel in his frayed, but immaculately clean and starched school janitor’s uniform, which he always wore in civilian life. Ezequiel, whose only intelligible words in English were Little Sambo’s. Puppet or puppeteer? He sure made them laugh.
Lightning struck so close that a monstrous boom shook the Judge’s house and the sky lit almost simultaneously. The lights blinked. The boom echoed for several more seconds with the power and malice of an earthquake aftershock. I wheeled myself away from the window. I had once seen a windowpane shatter in our house during a storm like this. In the intense light, I saw McCabe’s leased Land Rover, our only vehicle, parked on the driveway.
The Judge’s studio, which I occupied, was slightly elevated above the rest of the ground floor. To reach the living room, the kitchen, the staircase leading to McCabe’s rooms, and the front and back doors, I had to go down three wide steps. I’d never make it in the wheelchair. I would have to walk. I considered keeping the bandages to cushion my feet. The image of bloody pulp oozing from inside them made me change my mind. I peeled them off slowly, afraid of what I would find. I had not yet seen my frostbitten feet. When McCabe or the doctor tinkered with them I always looked away. My feet were whiter than the rest of my body, an unnatural white with a pinkish hue like white baby buttocks in a diaper ad. They also seemed smaller, though my toes were still painfully swollen. I would have to walk on the balls of my feet, lifting each up and down, clubfoot-style, careful not to roll them forward. I grabbed the Judge’s letter opener, the only weapon in the room, and wheeled myself to the edge of the first step. McCabe could be unconscious, or dead, from natural or unnatural causes. Petrona could have been caught in the storm and forced to go back home. Or a burglar could have killed them both. I did not want to believe McCabe could have left. Wasn’t the Land Rover still in the driveway?
I pushed myself up on the wheelchair armrests, set the balls of my feet down, and then released my arms. The pain was blinding. When I came to, I was at the bottom of the steps. I must have collapsed and rolled down. My arms were bruised, but my nose was intact. Another blow to it and I would be exhibited as a descendant of the australopithecine. When I recovered, I fell on my knees, not to thank God, but to crawl on them. Luckily, crawling comes naturally to spics. Didn’t it win José Ferrer an Oscar last century? I wished I had had his Lautrec kneepads. I left bloody strips of knee skin on the floor. I think of José Lautrec now, but that day my model was not him, but Saint Lazarus and the thousands who walked on their knees to the old leprosy colony at El Rincón, in my parent’s native island, where he has a sanctuary. My grandmother was a dyed-in-the-wool, absolutist Deist. She hated priests, nuns, pastors, santeros, and all other intermediaries as fervently as she believed that there was Something Big Up There. I don’t believe in miracles, she said, and most of those saints and miracles we hear about are frauds. However, God is great and he does sometimes grant especially good people the power to work miracles, not thousands or hundreds of miracles, but one here or there. Saint Lazarus was one of these. But not all cures attributed to him are true. Ten percent, maybe—the other “cured” are lying or under the power of suggestion. People like to fool themselves. That is why the power of suggestion is so dangerous, she warned me.
My pilgrimage on my knees around the Judge’s house did not end in a miracle. I found no dead or unconscious bodies. The kitchen was as clean as an operating room, with no traces of the cooking of the day before, not even a faint smell. The garbage cans must have been washed and disinfected before new bags were put in. The refrigerator, gleaming and freshly defrosted, contained a modest amount of new, strategically chosen staples (eggs, milk, butter, my tofu, hot dogs, tomatoes, lettuce). No cooked food. The freezer was packed with the meats McCabe consumed. Judging from the even layer of frost on the top, it had not been disturbed recently. Whatever McCabe, Petrona, and Mrs. Crandall had cooked the day before (and I was sure it was not last night’s Rabelaisian dinner, which bore Petrona’s lone imprint) had disappeared, and no forensic analysis could reconstruct it. They had literally erased their fingerprints from every surface. The bulky shape wrapped in Mrs. Crandall’s blanket could have been a very large turkey, or a small pig, although the latter was doubtful even as speculation, given that Mrs. Crandall was not, even remotely, a spic. The living room was equally spotless.
At the end of the pilgrimage, after walking two, ten, twenty miles on their knees, the devotees of Saint Lazarus must climb the steep staircase leading to his shrine, still on their knees. It is only if and when they reach it that supplicants may beg the saint for a miracle. The gray stone steps have turned pink and shiny from the blood of a hundred thousand ulcerated knees. I went up the twenty-seven steps to McCabe’s room, one knee first, then the other,
fifty-four times in total, unable to decide what miracle I would ask for: McCabe ill or sleeping, dead or unconscious, or in perfect and oblivious health, counting her money, signing her sale contracts, looking at the package of Joseph Beuys slides that her German agent had sent her on Monday, which she was carrying when she brought my breakfast, not knowing that I can read upside down at lightning speed. Anything, anything, anything but gone. Arriving at the landing before her door, I paused like all supplicants must when they reach the top, and their mouths are level with the rotting feet of the saint, being licked by his mangy dog. You lick the saint’s feet then, careful not to touch the dog, until he gives you what you want, or before the next sad biped piece of meat in line behind you elbows you away. McCabe’s door was locked. I looked through the generous keyhole, an 1820 Cutler Brothers model installed when the house was built, the Judge told me. There was no one inside the bedroom, or in the bathroom, or the closet, whose doors had been helpfully left open. There was nothing on any surface, anywhere: no FedEx packages, books, magazines, candy wrappers, no signs of human occupation. That did not mean the massive oak armoire was empty, or the chest of drawers, two night tables, bureau, medicine cabinet. I had never seen this, or any other McCabe habitat before, so I could not tell if this was the way this room normally looked, or if it had been especially cleansed like the rest of the house, as if State Security was expected any moment. The room exuded a jasmine fragrance. I stuck my nose to the keyhole and inhaled. My stomach rumbled at the memory of last night’s delicate rice. I descended the stairs on my ass. The house was empty. McCabe had flown the coop.
20
A Daughter
When Serafina was twelve, her mother, who had lost half of her nose and one ear to syphilis and was waiting to die, told her that her real father was not the man who had been killed in a knife fight when she was seven, nor any of the men who had been in and out of their shack ever since, but the most beautiful man that human eyes had ever seen—white, young, golden-haired, tall, strong, sweet, smart, generous, rich, well-spoken. Jacinto Benavides, the love of her life. She had reached that conclusion after repeatedly reliving their drunken, fornicating week together, which the man that she now thought of as the Beast had put an end to. She told Serafina how Jacinto was killed and dumped in the bay, but not by whom, and how his body had been found a week later by a fisherman, intact, as if he were just sleeping. Jacinto Benavides was then burned and his ashes strewn in the sea, as was done with men like him. Serafina asked what kind of men, but her mother could only tell her that it had to do with some quarrel among Spaniards. “What was this quarrel about?” Serafina asked, with a premature tinge of the sarcasm that would later serve her well. She had been raised in the certainty that Spaniards were quarrelsome, greedy, and stupid. “It was about their dicks,” her mother said, in a spasm of laughter so violent and prolonged that she almost died then, and not the next morning. When she recovered, she explained that some Spaniards like Jacinto Benavides cut the skin off the tips of their dicks. Most don’t, maybe because they are afraid of pain. They must be jealous of the brave ones, because they have gotten the King of Spain to forbid any dick trimming, and to punish those like Jacinto Benavides who dare to do it. Her mother advised Serafina to keep this information to herself. The less anyone knows about you, the safer you are, as her own mother had told her after revealing why she had been freed. Both of these things were family secrets. Serafina was now their keeper. Her mother made her swear on the Blessed Virgin, and on the holy wounds of Saint Glykeria, Martyr that she would pass on those secrets to one of her children, the smartest one. “Unless you only have one child, like me, in which case you better pray you’re as lucky as I’ve been.” This was the first and only time her mother praised Serafina out loud, although she did so to herself every day. She was afraid Serafina would become too vain for her own good. “Children talk too much. Only one of them should know. Don’t tell them all, and don’t tell too soon,” she added, before a gale of coughing carried her away. Serafina went to bed that night with a picture of her father in her mind. He looked just like her, fully grown and in men’s clothing. It was not too far off the mark. Serafina was the spitting image of Jacinto Benavides.
Serafina buried her mother near the back wall of the cemetery in the narrow, humid strip reserved for free blacks and mulattoes. Syphilis kills slowly, and her mother was hardworking and thrifty. She finished paying for her burial plot two years before taking up residence there. “I have room for two more,” she told Serafina. “Just don’t put them on top of me. I want to smell the grass.” The burial was swift. The mule-wagon man and his son slid the featherweight coffin into the hole. The gravedigger, who was three times as old as most of those he buried, mumbled a prayer as he began shoveling dirt into the hole. When he finished packing it with the back of his shovel, he looked at Serafina expectantly. So did the other two. She had no intention of giving them a tip after they had extorted from her an exorbitant fee in advance, knowing that she had no brother or husband to fight for her. She dismissed them, politely but firmly. They did not move at first. The old man clutched his shovel until his black knuckles became gray. The mule-wagon man spat and glanced at his son, who always knew what to do in cases like this. The son was distracted by the question of Serafina’s age. He could always tell by the shape of the breasts, but the coarse vest that covered Serafina’s upset his calculation. She was lucky to be wearing that vest, to be as tall as him, and a head above the two other men, and to look older and stronger than her age. Burying free blacks and mulattoes was unprofitable. You scraped a living only by periodically ransacking a shack while the relatives moaned at the cemetery, or snatching the rare gold chain or ring from the few corpses stupid enough to wear them. The most profitable side-business, however, was snatching the widow, if she was still young, along with the youngest orphans, and selling them to the illegal slave traders, mostly Dutch or French, who were always loitering in the twisted port streets. The mule-wagon man looked at Serafina’s long blond curls and light honey skin and knew he could never sell her as a slave. She was worth a great deal, but only to herself, if she was smart enough.
Serafina watched them leave until they were a blur in the distance. She allowed herself, only this once, to spit on the ground with contempt. The mule was the only one of the four departing beasts she could not imagine killing. The other three she stabbed, quartered, and disemboweled with her knife, throwing their livers to the feral pigs that roamed the cemetery at night, and burning the rest until only the teeth and bones remained. Those she left on the ground as a warning to anyone else who dared defy her. With these pleasant images of butchery still lingering in her mind, Jacinto’s daughter walked back home.
She kept her mother’s washing and ironing clients, but dismissed the men who came late at night. They had deserted her mother when she was unable to hide her disease any longer, but the scent of young flesh brought them back. One refused to go, knocking her against the iron bed railing and trying to mount her. She stabbed him in the left hand in panic, and was surprised at how quickly he let her go and threw himself on the floor, writhing and screaming in pain. Her imaginary bloodletting had been always soundless and in slow motion. She hit him in the mouth and on the head with her laundry paddle while he was helpless on the floor. When he passed out, she dragged him all the way to the sewage ditch, one hundred meters away, dumping him on the edge, so he would not drown. She wanted him alive so he would warn others not to come to her shack. He did this better than she imagined. To save face, he spread the word that she was sick like her mother.
Without the men’s money, Serafina could not pay Don Manuel for his lessons. Her mother had taken her to Don Manuel a year earlier, insisting that he teach her reading, writing, and arithmetic. Don Manuel disliked children, girls in particular, and especially pretty mulatto girls like this one, all of them born whores who knew instinctively how to wrap wealthy white men around their little fingers. No need to teach them letters and n
umbers. Besides, even rich white girls on the island were mostly illiterate. He relented only after Serafina’s mother threatened to tell the authorities that he was a sodomite. She had no proof, and no clear notion of what the word meant (it could not be the common buggering all men engaged in, but something else, particularly wicked, that she could not fathom), but knew it was a deadly accusation. Don Manuel did know what the word meant. He also knew the Tribunal of the Inquisition relished accusations without proof, which allowed them to torture you until you provided it yourself. The stench of the seventeen sodomite sailors recently burnt at the stake was still in the air in San Cristóbal de La Habana. It was Serafina’s turn now to be difficult. She refused to sit across from the little brown gnarled man with the sour-smelling jacket. She gave in after her mother, physically choking with rage, whacked her hard on the buttocks with the laundry paddle. Serafina was already a foot taller than her mother, who had started small and had shrunk considerably with her illness. She could have easily taken the paddle away from her. She did not, afraid that her mother would die more quickly if she shattered the illusion that she was the stronger of the two.
Don Manuel was about to tell Serafina that he could not continue to teach her for free, when much to his own surprise, he heard himself say the opposite. He did not like Serafina any better now that she had learned in one year what had taken him, the smartest person he knew, at least ten. However, he was bored writing love letters and petitions to the authorities for his illiterate neighbors. Although he didn’t realize it yet, he had nearly resigned himself to never seeing his talent and knowledge (one year of law school in Salamanca, Spain!) recognized on this barbaric little island. How far would he be able to stretch the brain of this female mammal that now sat before him, her incongruous yellow locks framing a face that would be handsome if only she were a boy and bathed more often? (Don Manuel, in spite of his musty frock, had a sensitive nose, and Serafina, to keep predator males away, did not wash much.)