Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

by Rafael Yglesias

  He laughed at that, squeezed my head hard once again and let go. The embrace of his arm made me deaf and dumb for a second and its release just as abruptly restored the bright world. It is no fanciful metaphor for me to say that my father could make the earth appear and disappear at will. “You’re a Gallego all right,” my father said, referring to the province of Galicia where Grandpa Pepín had been born. “You’ve got the hard-headed common sense of your peasant ancestors.” We had reached the counter. Behind it was another Southern woman who beamed at his approach. My father referred to the white Southerners in private as “crackers,” an insult, like so many ethnic slurs, that seemed utterly meaningless to me when I looked at its target, but he smiled back at the waitress with welcome. “We’re here to spoil our appetites for dinner,” my father announced.

  “Well, darling,” the Dairy Queen waitress answered, “that’s what we’re here for. To spoil you men silly.” She might call him a spic or a wetback or God knows what in private and Dad would say she was a redneck or a cracker in Grandma’s spotless kitchen, but face-to-face they seemed to see other possibilities in each other. Dad chatted with her a bit before giving our orders. He told her he was going to be on radio that evening and she promised to listen. Eventually he ordered us both chocolate dips and watched her retreat to the stainless steel soft-ice-cream machines with careful interest. Then he returned the full glare of his attention to me. “What was I saying? Oh yes, you’re the first Neruda to break a bone in thirty years. You know why?” He didn’t bother to pause for my reply. (Sometimes I catch myself responding today to questions my father asked long ago without waiting for my answer.) “Because you’re the first Neruda to do anything physical in thirty years. We’ve turned into decadent intellectuals.” He grabbed my head and repeated the blackout of light and sound. He let go and continued, “I broke my leg sliding into home when I was twelve playing with the cigar-makers. I used to love playing ball in West Tampa on Sundays. You know there are a couple of Tampa boys in the major leagues. In fact, Al Lopez—he managed the Cleveland Indians to a World Series—was responsible for breaking my leg …” I knew. I had heard this story several times. My father was a natural celebrity. He had the knack of making conversation with strangers that suggests intimacy and yet didn’t truly expose him. He had a colorful fan of anecdotes that were amusing, credible and subtly self-aggrandizing. He spread it gracefully and with apparent spontaneity: like a peacock’s feathers, they were impressive and they distracted from the frail body at the center of all that brilliance. Unfortunately for members of his family, Francisco sometimes forgot that we weren’t strangers; we had already been seduced by his plumage; we didn’t need to be dazzled anymore.

  When the Dairy Queen woman returned with our towering cones—she seemed to have given us twice the usual portion—Francisco was almost done with his Al Lopez-broken leg anecdote. She showed interest in it and he repeated the story for her. I bit off the tip of hardened chocolate syrup at the top, sucking up the interior cream. There was throbbing inside my hard cast. I wanted to touch my arm where it hurt. The pain was deep inside my forearm, unsoothable, an awkward ache that couldn’t be eased by any position I assumed. And it seemed to be getting worse. I sucked up more of the ice cream, determined to enjoy myself, to follow my father’s lead.

  This was my favorite ice cream cone. But having it while I hurt was worse than not having it at all. I had the pleasure in my grasp but I tasted only discomfort. The soft ice cream leaked out of its chocolate cast and down the edges of the cone, streaking my hand.

  “Eat up,” my father said as he finished the broken leg story. The cone fell. I hadn’t let it go, but I hadn’t held on either. I watched its graceful somersault and crushing splatter onto the concrete with morbid fascination. I was glad to see it destroyed.

  My father and the waitress exclaimed with dismay. I looked up at Grandpa’s car and saw my mother staring at me. Grandma Jacinta was talking to her, again with an unusual animation and uncertainty. My mother’s curly flop of black hair, parted on one side and covering half of her brow, was still while she listened. That too was unusual. She always seemed to be in motion, especially her hair; it would tremble from her nervous energy. Her green eyes were wide as she stared at me. But she wasn’t seeing me. She didn’t react to the ice cream cone’s death.

  I sagged. I didn’t keel over. I slumped against my father. I felt weak and exhausted. There was commotion. My mother came out of the car. Grandma called my name in a faraway panicked tone: “Rafa! Rafa!” The waitress said she’d get me water. Francisco picked me up.

  “Ugh,” he groaned at my weight. “What a big boy you’ve become.”

  “What’s wrong!” my mother said in an angry shout.

  “He’s tired,” my father insisted. “You can lie down in the back, Rafael. We’ll go home and you’ll take a nap.”

  I was horizontal in my father’s arms as he carried me to Grandpa’s car. The low Tampa buildings bounced. A blue car with a white hat bobbed up and down. It was across the avenue, stopped at a gas station, but not at a pump. I didn’t notice the occupants before my father turned away from them to angle me at the Plymouth. I wondered if the man with the baseball cap and aviator glasses was inside that blue and white car. I thought about mentioning the men and the car to my parents. Ruth had lectured me around Christmastime about strangers watching us. She told me to let her know if I saw men hanging around outside our apartment building. I asked why they would. She didn’t really answer. She said that some men had been questioning our neighbors about us. When I pressed for a fuller explanation, she was vague. (I had no idea that for a decade my parents had been subject on and off to harassment—some might prefer to call it surveillance—by the FBI. They had been members of the Communist Party until 1950 and then there was my father’s friendliness to Fidel’s Cuba.) She made me promise I would report any men lurking about. I wondered if these men in the blue and white car qualified.

  I didn’t get a chance to bring it up. When Francisco maneuvered me to the rear door, a disagreement started between Ruth and Grandma about who was going to sit in the back with me. At first, they expressed their desires passively.

  “Jacinta, you sit up front,” my mother said. “You’ll be more comfortable.”

  “No,” Grandma said, “there’s not enough room for you in the back.”

  “There’s plenty of room.”

  “No, I’ll be fine. I’ll put Rafa’s head on my lap,” Grandma insisted.

  “I can put his head on my lap,” Ruth said.

  “It’ll wrinkle your dress,” Grandma objected.

  “For God’s sake,” my father said. “Somebody open the door!” He was still holding me. It was hot. He shifted me in his arms, weary from the weight.

  Jacinta opened the rear door and slid to the far seat. “No!” my mother protested. Francisco put me in and Grandma eased my head onto her lap.

  “I want to sit with him,” my mother insisted to Grandma. The sharp tone she used on Jacinta was rare—in fact, unique. She was always solicitous of Grandma. “Why aren’t you paying any attention to what I say? I’m his mother. I want to sit with him.”

  “Take it easy,” my father mumbled.

  “You take it easy,” my mother said loudly. She was angry, but she wasn’t hysterical. She had confidence. “It took over two hours to get Rafe treated. He hasn’t had anything to eat since breakfast and he threw that up. I think he’s dehydrated and your great solution is to give him ice cream and pinch him and shove him around like he’s some chum in a bar—”

  And then something extraordinary happened. So extraordinary that I completely forgot about my pain. My grandmother began to cry. She talked through the tears, saying in English to my mother, “It’s my fault. I know that. You blame me. I know I was stupid. I got so nervous. I know I ought to take him to the hospital right away.” Big tears rolled down the old woman’s face. One splashed on the bridge of my nose and rolled into my left eye. It stung a little.
To see my dignified and reserved Grandma cry was amazing. Also her tone of voice was amazing. She sounded like a little girl pleading to be forgiven; oddly, she spoke with much less of an accent than she usually did. If I were to shut my eyes I couldn’t have recognized that voice as hers. “I’m an old fool. I know. But he was not hurt by my stupidity. He’s okay.” Grandma looked down and stroked my face. More tears fell on me. She wiped them off with her fingertips. “I would never hurt my only grandson.”

  “Oh Jesus,” my mother moaned. It was her turn to cry. She put her hands to her temples, rubbed them and then covered her eyes, pushing the tears back. “I give up.” She opened the front door and got in. “I’m never right about anything!” she shouted at the windshield.

  I fell asleep. I wakened somewhat as my father carried me to the guest bedroom. I heard voices greet Francisco with enthusiasm and quickly modulate to whispered concern about me. I kept my eyes shut.

  The air in the room was still and hot. Ruth and Jacinta each brought in a fan. They argued over which one was more effective. They didn’t convince each other. After an ominous silence, my mother said they should keep both fans going. Ruth took off my sneakers and Jacinta lifted my head to slip a pillow underneath. I pretended to be asleep. In fact, with the heavy cast lying across my chest, I wondered if I could ever sleep again.

  The guest bedroom was right off the living room and had a window looking onto the porch. Wide horizontal Venetian blinds covered the screen, but the window was up and I could hear my father hold court out there. Judging from the chorus of exclamations, questions and laughter that punctuated his storytelling, a crowd as large as what one would expect in the evening had already gathered, although it was still midafternoon. Twice my grandmother complained to the group that Francisco needed to rest from his flight, especially because he was due to be on the Tampa radio show at eight o’clock. My mother joined with Jacinta on this issue and said to my father that he had to stop talking by five so that he could get himself ready and eat some dinner.

  “Let Frankie finish about the shoes!” a cousin complained. “Then we’ll go home and warm up the radios so we can listen to him tell those anti-Communists what true socialism is all about.”

  My father told them that for decades Cuban children had been undernourished because they suffered from tapeworms. It was the primary cause of Cuba’s high rate of childhood mortality. Many died from opportunistic diseases made possible by the wasting effect of the worms. My father described how the worms grow in the stomach. (He told these stories in English, repeating key information in Spanish, evidently because he feared a particular relative wouldn’t understand.) He said the worms wound themselves around and around in the intestines and got to be as long as six feet, sometimes twice as long as the child is tall. Under Batista’s rule medical treatment was never free, even if the illness were life-threatening. Drugs existed that would kill the worms in a matter of weeks. American children could get a prescription from their pediatrician and have it filled for a moderate cost or for free through various agencies or clinics, but the price of the medicine was ten times higher in Cuba thanks to Batista’s profiteering. Anyway, even at the lower American cost, the pills would be more than a Cuban peasant could afford.

  Since the revolution, my father asserted, not only were the affected children receiving medicine at no charge, but the spread of the parasites had been stopped. How? Simply by handing out free shoes to each and every Cuban child. Evidently the worms entered through cuts on their feet. “You know how we’ve all seen pictures of happy children in tropical countries, running barefoot?” my father said. “It isn’t because they’re so carefree. It’s because their parents have no money to give them shoes.”

  That wasn’t his last anecdote, despite the promise to my mother. But I didn’t hear the next one. I dozed off, thinking of those insidious worms, picturing them crawling into my feet. I didn’t know they got in as microscopic eggs; I imagined fully developed creatures puncturing my skin. I saw them slither up into my stomach, winding around and around, ropes of quivering slimy robbers, eating me alive.

  There was one sitting on my chest as I slept, crawling toward my face.

  I woke up screaming.

  Once my mother calmed me, I was hungry. My arm didn’t hurt at all. Grandma cooked biftec palomillo and plátanos for my father and me. We ate dinner side by side at the yellow kitchen Formica table. Grandma, Grandpa and Mom watched us. Grandpa was full from snacking on the Cuban sandwiches he had bought coming back from the airport; Grandma ate at the counter while cooking; and my mother refused any food. She touched her flat stomach and insisted she had gained too much weight.

  “You’re very beautiful,” Grandma answered. “But you’re too skinny,” she added in a friendly tone.

  “I love you Mama,” my mother said to her. They hugged at Grandma’s post by the stove with as much feeling as if they were saying goodbye for a long time. “I need to have you with me all the time,” Ruth said as they let go of each other.

  The fried bananas were sweet and, thanks to my Grandmas technique, weren’t greasy. I ate as many as my father did. He was silent. His eyes were alive with internal conversation and speeches. I understood that he was rehearsing for the radio program. I could see his lips occasionally part and seem to whisper something. When his mother touched the back of his head lovingly he didn’t react. After he finished his dinner and was waiting for his espresso, my mother reached over and took his hand. He squeezed it but still looked through and beyond her.

  Outside, the sky—blue all day—was now being churned by black clouds. I saw lightning flash, cutting across one of the dark masses in the sky. Huge drops of rain followed. They splattered noisily against the windows. Thunder cracked above us. The noise was clear and terrible: as if God had broken the sky across His knee.

  I wanted to run and hide in the bedroom. I was too embarrassed for that. But I did slide off my chair and hide under the table.

  The grown-ups laughed good-naturedly. The room had darkened so much from the black rain clouds that Pepín turned on the kitchen light. I stayed under the table. I took hold of my cast with my free hand; for the first time I was glad to feel my new armor.

  “No Pepito,” Grandma protested about the light. She believed it was dangerous to use electricity while there was a lightning storm.

  There was a clap right above us, ear-splitting and awful. All the lights went out. My mother shrieked in surprise. I must have screamed. The next thing I knew my father was beside me. He had folded up his tall body and crawled under the table. He winked at me. I was so scared by the thunder that at first I didn’t get his joke of a performance of boyish fear. I thought he was as scared as me.

  “Mira, Francisco!” my grandmother said, chuckling.

  Again the sky split open. This time Grandma exclaimed at the boom.

  “I’m getting under there with you,” my mother said. She kicked off her high-heeled shoes (she was dressed up for the radio show) and scrambled next to my father and me. She gathered me in her arms and snuggled Francisco. I smelled his aftershave and her perfume. The rain came hard and fast and straight; peering up at the window, it was as thick as a curtain. I could no longer see the palm leaves of the backyard tree. Literally we huddled as a family, sheltered from the storm. I was eight. That was the last time my mother, my father and I embraced.

  Overheated afternoon Florida storms rarely last for more than thirty minutes. It’s as if the weather were a toddler, exhausted and frustrated by the long hot day, letting loose a tantrum of rage and tears that is gone as suddenly as it begins. An hour later there was no sign of the cooling rain, except that the suffocating humidity had been slightly ventilated. By then it was time to go. I asked my father to take me with him to the radio show. Ruth, Jacinta, and Pepín all said no.

  Francisco overruled them. He put his arm around me and said, “I have to take Rafe with me. He proves to those Yanquis I’m no crazy radical. How could I be? Look at him!” He ho
oked me with his arm and squeezed my head. “He’s a real American boy. That radio host will take one look at Rafael and he’ll believe everything I say.”

  He insisted Grandpa stay home to keep Grandma company. “I’ll be my own chauffeur,” he said. I sat in the back seat of the Plymouth; my mother rode in the front with Francisco. I can’t recall (and there have been many concentrated attempts at recovering all the details of that day) what stopped me from remembering the blue car with the white hat and mentioning it to my parents. I can summon a vivid memory of pressing my face against the rear window to see if there were any cars behind us. Why did I do that, if not to search for the blue and white car? Maybe I was uninformative because I didn’t have a chance to look very long. Francisco, tense while he searched for the radio station’s building, snapped, “Sit down, Rafe! I can’t see out the rearview mirror!”

  The radio station was in a beige four-story building beside a highway overpass. The street consisted of office buildings and had a spooky deserted look, although it was early evening. We parked across from the entrance.

  The host signed my cast. So did his producer, a young woman. They were friendly. The producer gave me a Coke and brought my parents coffee. The host was especially cheerful and welcoming. Until airtime.

  “Aren’t you a Communist sympathizer, Mr. Neruda? I’ve read your article in the New York Times.” He said New York as though it were contemptible. “You make every possible excuse for Fidel Castro’s crimes of robbery and murder. It doesn’t matter that he has destroyed countless family businesses, grabbing the money they worked hard for, supposedly to spend on the peasants. My bet is it’s all going into a Swiss bank account. But you and the New York Times tell us it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that Castro has firing squads working round the clock killing people whose only crime was that they were soldiers following orders. You call these understandable excesses. Some excesses. I wonder how you would feel if some foreign reporter called it an understandable excess when the Communists take all your money and shoot you in cold blood.”