“She looks like an Auntie,” I say.
“Doesn’t she?”
He stares at the doll with a bemused half smile. I sit down beside him so my back is against the dead tree trunk and my sleeve brushes against his.
“Just once, Mamãe told me she buried this here. I think she thought I was too young to remember.”
“What is it?”
When he looks at me now I’m struck by how gentle he seems, how restful, even at peace. I have never seen Enki so relaxed.
“Oh, bem-querer,” he says, whispering for no reason I can tell. “Sometimes you don’t know me at all, sometimes you read me so clearly.”
“Which is it today, Enki?”
He hands me the doll. “You should take this.”
The once-white cloth of her dress stains my hands with red soil. She smells a bit like the catinga and suddenly, I’m so homesick I could throw up.
“But it’s your mamãe’s,” I say. A little girl named Sintia had loved this. A young woman named Sintia, pregnant with the future summer king, had buried this in her garden. But why?
“Do you remember what I told you about her? About how she convinced the Aunties to let her into the city?”
“The library?” I say, and then I remember: She made two copies of the classified information before the university had been bombed to rubble. One, she brought with her to Palmares Três. The other …
I look down at the doll.
“Oh,” I say, and remember Zanita.
She’s studiously ignoring us, leaning against the crumbling wall and whittling a fallen branch with a penknife. I mostly trust her, but if I’m really holding the one remaining copy of Salvador’s university library, it seems prudent to keep that to myself.
“Hey,” I say. She looks up.
“You guys done? Mind if we wait a bit? This wood is really good to work with.”
I lean over so I can get a better view. She’s working on the tail of what looks like some four-legged animal — a cow, maybe, or a horse. She’s taking her time with it, putting in detail that I can’t help but admire.
“That’s pretty good,” I say.
She shrugs. “Just something I tinker with. Tomas says it’s a waste of time.”
“Art is never a waste of time.”
Zanita flashes me the first genuine smile I’ve seen from her all day, but it’s soon drowned by something else. I shift uncomfortably, remembering Tomas’s shallow breathing in the second-floor bed, the hushed whispers as his family discussed their options.
Her cousin might die today, but Zanita is sitting here with us. People handle grief differently. I ought to know that.
Enki stands, breaks a wrist-thick branch from the dead tree and ambles over to her.
“Can you show me how?” he asks with surprising diffidence.
Zanita stares at him blankly for a moment, then shrugs and tosses the half-finished figurine to the grass. “Sure, why not?” she says. “We still have time.”
I haven’t done much sculpture before, let alone wood carving (it’s a crime to cut trees in Palmares Três). I can no more resist a new kind of art than Enki can. I hover nearby, riveted when she hefts her small knife and demonstrates how to strip the bark.
“Always remember to go with the natural grain of the wood. Work with it, not against it, eh?”
Enki holds the knife with a sure, steady grip, as if he’s been using one all his life. But then, growing up in the verde, maybe he did. His cuts are crude and unsteady at first, but he doesn’t seem to notice. Zanita gives him tips, occasionally demonstrating with her own figurine. Enki watches with eyes that could swallow her, and then he tries again.
She touches his hand and then flinches away. “Are you … do you feel okay?”
Enki looks at me. Well, should we tell her? his eyes seem to say.
Saliva pools in my mouth; I have to remember to swallow. “The heat’s just a thing the Aunties did,” I say, though that’s such a twisting of the truth it’s almost a lie.
Zanita scowls. “Yeah, well, maybe that’s the price for living in paradise.”
Paradise? I love my city, but I would never call it that. Zanita looks angry and closed off. Enki shuts his eyes and rolls onto his back. The sunlight hits his face through the dead branches of the tree so that he hardly looks human. His breathing has turned shallow and irregular, but he’s done that enough lately that I don’t think much of it. Everything will be better when we get to Lisbon or Paris or wherever.
But for now, I find myself pulling out the two knives from my pack and unfolding them.
“I have an idea,” I say.
“What, Princess?” Her voice holds more bitterness than her expression. I know she partly blames us for what happened to Tomas, and maybe she isn’t wrong.
Enki opens his eyes. His pupils are dilated near-black; his mouth moves almost imperceptibly. Whoever he’s listening to, it isn’t me.
“Why don’t we carve the tree? We can each take a third.”
“That’s … strange,” Zanita says.
“It’s art,” I say.
She picks up her knife and flips it in the air. “You’re kind of hung up on that, aren’t you?”
I laugh. “My name is June,” I say.
“And she’s the best artist in Palmares Três.”
I didn’t think he could hear us; I didn’t know he remembered that. He levers himself into a sitting position. Zanita shakes her head as though she can’t believe she’s listening to us, but she follows me when I walk over to the tree.
“What should I make?” she asks.
“Anything you like.”
She frowns, but it’s more from concentration than disapproval. A moment later, she starts in on the wood. Enki works on my other side. I take my knife. The trunk is firm but not too dense — perfect for carving, just as Zanita said. I’m not sure what to make, and I have no skill at this anyway, but that familiar stillness, that intense and sharp focus bears upon me like a tide. It’s been so long since I’ve been able to simply create, to feel the joy of art in the absence of its politics or its consequences.
The afternoon sun sinks, warm on my back. In the street, kids shriek and scuffle. I imagine a game of football, like what Gil and I used to do on boring summer evenings before everything changed. I kick off my shoes and dig my toes into the sun-warmed dirt. I breathe earthworms and rust and fresh-cut wood. I don’t look at Enki but I can feel him carving his mother’s tree, as clearly as if he were an extension of myself. The dark of the backs of his hands, the light of his palms, the almost religious fervor with which he cuts, they are mine because they are his.
I think, You are my heart, and I know he hears because his hand reaches for mine. For once, I am sure inside Enki’s love. The mods don’t matter anymore. He can love the world, and I won’t begrudge it.
I lose track of time. I didn’t really know what I would carve until I started, but now I focus on it with all my intensity and limited skill. Maybe an hour passes — at least, the sun has burned down to an ember and I find myself squinting to see the detail in my work.
There’s a noise in the street outside. More kids playing ball, I think, and keep carving. Zanita steps away from the tree.
“I had to,” she says.
I ignore her. Just a few more minutes, and I should be finished. It’s been so long and I don’t know when I’ll have another chance once Enki and I continue our journey.
Powerful lights illuminate the house, glancing off the tree enough to help me work. I don’t bother to turn around; I’ve spent all my life in a city of lights, after all.
But this is Salvador, and its militias and gangs have never gone in for much illumination.
Enki puts his hands around my waist, rests his head in the hollow of my neck.
“June,” he says. “Bem-querer.”
“June Costa.” I’d recognize Auntie Maria’s voice anywhere. “Put down your weapon and step away from the king.”
“Toma
s will die otherwise,” Zanita says, and I want to tell her to shut up and crawl back through the house with her million reals and save Tomas’s life because she’s just ruined mine.
But we have so little time, too little to waste on something as useless as anger.
“Run,” I say, leaning into him, letting his body fill all the space between us. He smells like wood, like grass, like his mamãe’s doll forgotten on the rubble. Like the earth, burning.
“I’m going to die anyway,” he says. His tongue flecks my ear. I shudder. “It’s the mods. From the very first one they gave me, in the ceremony after I won. No matter what, June, they always make sure we’ll die in a year.”
My mind feels clear as a pond. I understand him perfectly. “So why come here?”
“For this. For you.”
He lifts my chin and I’m forced to see. Our tree has turned into something too beautiful to mark something so ugly. Zanita has made a carnival, a Death Head’s skeleton jumbled with feathers and fire. It’s the battle that nearly killed Tomas, death and life dancing in the ruins of a city. And Enki? He’s made an altar, the kind in the main city shrine. A crude, rough-hewn figure lies beneath a blade.
“You knew they were coming?”
“I heard her. The city. She helps pilot their aircraft.”
“We could have gotten away.”
“I’m still dying.”
“But why should they have you!”
My voice is loud and broken. Auntie Maria asks again for me to step aside and Enki doesn’t move.
“It’s time to go home, June,” he says. “We need to go home.”
For some reason, I look back up at the tree. The middle carving is cruder than the other two. I’m not any good, after all. But it’s my papai who looks at me from the dead tree. My dead papai who smiles and plays music and lives.
He lost the music, and maybe that’s why he could never find my art. I’ve had to find it for myself.
“Summer King,” says Auntie Maria, “we should leave now.”
Enki kisses my ear. He turns my head until I taste just the corner of his mouth. I am crystal clear, I am a pond, I am a light.
I am nothing at all.
He lets me go. “There’s a song,” he says. He takes a step back.
“There’s always a song,” I say.
Auntie Maria hovers right behind him. Two security officers take my arms, but they don’t move.
“Forgive me if I dare to confess,” he sings, badly. “I will always love you.”
“Are you sure that’s right?” I say, though of course it is.
He smiles. “Oh, my God, how sad, the uncertainty of love.”
“We’re leaving, Enki,” Auntie Maria says. Enki doesn’t seem to hear her.
“Wait for me,” he says. “I’ll be dead, but wait for me.”
He turns. He walks away. Unthinking, I call out. I try to follow him and the security guards pull me back. One of them lifts my sleeve, the other pricks my arm.
Enki walks away with an Auntie who will kill him in two weeks.
His dreadlocks in the light from their cruisers. The shoes he hates walking through the ruins of his mamãe’s house. The clothes that are dirty from the garden. The hands that just touched my own.
Does he look back? I sink to the ground. My head lolls against my shoulder.
Does he look back?
I burn where he last touched me.
I stare at the space where he has been until everything fades.
My papai died in July, which I think he meant as a kindness.
He was unfailingly kind in those last months, which always made it worse. Mother and I tried to reason with him at first. We sent him to priests and mães de santo and doctors. We tried to be understanding, but in the end, the only thing we needed to understand was that he was done with life.
“I’ve lost the music,” he said, and so I tried to sing it for him. But we both knew I had never understood music the way he did, and he would merely smile and turn away. He gave away his collection to one of his colleagues at the university. I bought more and tried to play it for him. He gave away his clothes and his books. He registered with medical services to donate his useful parts before cremation. He attended the required therapy sessions, wrote the required explanations, waited out the required holding period. And throughout it all, he never wavered, never once seemed to question his decision.
The kiri board approved his request. Mother had ten days to register a formal family protest — it would have given us a reprieve of another six months in which to reason with Papai before the kiri board could review his case again.
She refused. “João wants to do this. I just have to respect his decision. I can’t drag him through another six months.”
But I knew what she meant: She couldn’t bear another six months of watching her husband of forty years patiently, gently, kindly longing to die.
“You’re killing him!” I remember screaming. I think I yelled worse. That’s when it started, of course. Not after, when she introduced me to Auntie Yaha, or at their wedding. Of course not. I stopped loving my mamãe when she decided to let my papai go.
I didn’t understand much about letting go, back then. I suppose I didn’t know very much about love.
I tried to file the protest myself. The registrar handed me a tissue and waited for me to stop sobbing before she explained that you had to turn thirty before you could petition to delay the kiri of a relative. I said that he was my father. She said that it was a shame, but you just couldn’t trust wakas to know when it was a grande’s time to go.
Gil never said much back then, but he would listen. In a world of grandes who talked, his silence kept me sane. Gil has always been great at understanding. And not just me — my mamãe and my papai too. He understood the whole sorry mess and could see no better way out of it than the rest of us.
Papai’s request passed the formal review process. He scheduled a date: July 3, because at least then I wouldn’t always associate my papai’s death with my name.
I didn’t want to associate my papai’s death with anything, I said, but Mamãe just stroked my hair and told me to be strong.
He gave me his copies of The Zahir and True Palmarina, two paper books that he brought with him during his long merchant ship journey around the world. I’d loved to touch them when I was little but I hadn’t thought of them for years.
I refused to take them. When he insisted, I tossed them into the bay.
I cried more that day than a week later, when he actually died. He seemed so blank, so sad and uncomprehending. And now, with over three years of his absence behind me, I could punch that girl I was; I would kill her if I could. What right did she have to do that? To squander the last moments with her father? To destroy the piece of himself that he had meant to leave behind?
Papai wore a white shift and no shoes. In the vestibule, he seemed distracted, but happier than I had seen him in months.
He kissed mamãe and whispered something in her ear. She nodded and her eyes stayed dry.
To me, he offered an embrace. I refused him.
“I hope you have a happy life, June,” he said. “I believe you’ll be great.”
That was the last time we saw him alive. They delivered the urn a few hours later.
“He passed peacefully,” the intake nurse told us.
We scattered his ashes in the bay, into a frigid wind on a boat where we could watch the sun set behind the city.
Neither of us cried.
They’ve removed my tree. I laugh when I first realize it, staring at my naked body in the single half mirror. They did a good job, at least. The faint pale marks where the lights used to glow will fade eventually. Then I’ll look just like everyone else again. My laughter hurts.
It seems petty — as though they imagine that by removing my signature body art, they could remove the spirit of transformation that has gripped this city.
I don’t remember much of how I got here. Just
snatches from a long overland trip in a cruiser: a rotting ship, just off a sandbar. A pile of wood, bleached like whalebones. Rivulets of brackish water cutting channels to the ocean.
I try to remember the ocean, because I don’t know if I will ever see it again.
I don’t know if I will ever see anything but this small room. It’s much like the congenial prison where they kept Lucia: bare floors, a single hard bed, a desk without even the most basic fono array, and a bathroom. Unlike Lucia, I don’t merit a window. They have given me nothing to write with, nothing to draw with, nothing to communicate with. If not for the meals periodically deposited by security bots, I’d have no sense of the passage of time. A few of my own clothes are in the closet, so at least Mamãe must know what has happened. I wonder if they will let me speak with her. I ask the bots questions when they enter: What day is it? What time is it? Where is Enki? Where is Gil? Where’s my mamãe? The bots say nothing, but I know they record my questions. Maybe if I beg enough the Aunties will relent, but it seems a frail hope.
Of all my questions, the first is the most important: What day is it? I remember learning that carnival used to be in February, at the end of summer — winter in the northern hemisphere. We kept it that way down here in the south for centuries, but the first Palmarinas decided to change it. I suppose if you’re sacrificing a king to the gods in a rite of spring, it doesn’t make any sense to do it at the end of summer.
They caught us at the start of September. Two weeks away from the sacrifice and affirmation of the Queen’s position. Two weeks away from his death. Enki would ask why it matters, but I can’t bear the thought that he might die without my even knowing.
That he might already be dead.
A week or so in sedation, making that steady, painfully slow land journey back to the city. I wonder if Auntie Maria herself planned that particularly cruel bit of torture. And then? Two days in solitude here, praying to any orixás that will listen to spare Enki’s life, or at least let me see him one last time.
That leaves two or three days until the ceremony. He’d be in seclusion by now, preparing himself for that final communion, for his most sacred duty. He wanted this. I never understood before, but I do now. Enki might not respect the Aunties, but for some reason he wants to play their game to the end. Our detour to Salvador was just his final chance to say good-bye to his mamãe.
The Summer Prince Page 27