Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

by Rafael Yglesias

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “Shh,” my father said and clumsily pulled both me and Pablo away from the package counter. From the moment Pablo joined us, we had the clerks full attention. He leaned forward to get a look at the object that so interested us; he could easily see it was a passport.

  I thought my father was inept at how he reacted to the clerk’s scrutiny. He backed us out of the anteroom and onto the airport road. We left without watching where we were going. A taxi honked at us. We had to scurry away as it passed, missing us by inches. I looked down at my feet to make sure they weren’t squashed. During my nap, the sunny winter day had become a raw, foggy night. A heavy mist oozed moisture, a fine drizzle. We were quickly covered by a sheen of water. We hustled under a covered sidewalk leading to the terminal. I looked back. The clerk stared after us, not amused at our comic departure.

  “That was dumb,” I said to my father. “Now he’s watching us. You should have acted like it wasn’t anything special.”

  Pablo laughed. He had a row of tiny bottom teeth; two were black. “Sam Spade,” he said and rumpled my hair. His fingers smelled of tobacco.

  “Nevertheless, Rafael is right.” My father straightened and appeared loftily unconcerned. “Let’s walk casually into the terminal.”

  There were molded plastic seats in the Trans World Airlines terminal. I had never seen that kind before and I was amused that their slippery surface caused me to slide right off. I had to make an effort not to fall to the floor.

  Pablo took out a Daily News. He spread it open in front of him, the passport concealed inside, so that to an observer he and my father appeared to be studying a news item together. I couldn’t see that well from my angle, but I could tell they were looking at a small black and white photograph stapled inside the passport. It was of a boy, a boy who had dark hair like mine and a nose like mine and high cheekbones with deep-set wide-apart eyes that also resembled the general look of my face. But my prospective doppelgänger had spread his mouth into a smile for the photographer, a broad goofy smile that revealed a missing front tooth. A tooth that I certainly still had in my head. “Coño,” my father said as he looked at me and then returned to the photograph.

  “Let me see,” I said, trying to climb onto my father. I was too big for his lap. I leaned across his body and rustled the Daily News. “Is that supposed to be me?” I asked, I guess too loudly, because Francisco shushed me and Pablo groaned.

  “Now you are not careful,” he said.

  “Well, I have all my teeth,” I whispered with so much intensity that my father shushed me again. “And he has too much hair.”

  “Your hair could have been …” Pablo used the fingers of his right hand to imitate a scissor cutting. Half the Daily News began to unfurl and he grabbed for it.

  “Oh, right,” I said. And then I cried out with inspiration: “And I’ll keep my mouth closed!”

  They shushed me. My father seemed quite angry this time. “How many times do I have to tell you? Don’t shout.”

  “Sorry.” I slunk back onto my seat. “But he doesn’t look like me,” I said, having had a closer inspection. The resemblance was superficial. His face was narrower than mine, his eyes were almost in shadow they were so far back, and his nose was fatter, more squashed.

  “Listen.” My father took hold of my bicep. His fingers were long and strong; they seemed to wrap around my skinny arm twice over. “This is very important. We had to use another boy to get the passport. I didn’t have time to get you to take the picture. There’s nothing seriously wrong about what we’re doing, but you can’t talk about it. They won’t look at it carefully. Just keep your mouth closed so they can’t see your teeth. Okay?”

  “Okay. I said that first.” I pulled my arm free. It felt numb.

  “And don’t talk about it to anyone. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I was miserable. My legs ached, my eyes burned. Was I sick? There was an uncomfortable heat snaking throughout my body and pulsing in my head.

  We approached the ticket counter. My father held out the passports, ready to hand them over to the clerk.

  You’re with Daddy, I said in my head, and you’re happy.

  Francisco gave the ticket agent my passport. He opened it.

  You’re with Daddy, I repeated in my head. And you’re happy, I insisted, more intensely to myself, the prayer reverberating in my aching skull. I hoped this would not only get us past the ticket agent but also cure my illness.

  To my horror, the agent didn’t merely glance at my passport. He kept it open and started writing something on my ticket. Later I discovered he was copying my passport number onto the stub.

  But I panicked while the copying went on. You’re with Daddy and you’re happy, I screamed to my throbbing temples. We got through without incident and started the long walk to the gate. You’re with Daddy and you’re happy, I said, softer to my hurting head.

  “They’ll look at it again there,” Pablo said. “Just a glance before you go in.”

  “It’s okay,” Francisco said to me. “They didn’t notice. Like I told you.”

  Our successful fraud didn’t relieve my symptoms. Instead, nausea accumulated with the other pains. You’re with Daddy, I whispered to myself, and you’re safe.

  Francisco’s anxieties seemed to have abated. As we walked, he talked eagerly of seeing Spain again, of the poets and actors and radicals he was going to look up, of the hellos and love he would carry to them on behalf of Pablo. Pablo interrupted to call my father’s attention to my condition. We had reached the waiting area at the gate; it was already crowded with fellow passengers and their well-wishers.

  “What’s wrong?” Francisco put a hand on my forehead. “Are you sick?”

  “I feel crummy,” I said.

  “You don’t have a fever,” he commented. “You’re probably hungry and tired.”

  “I don’t wanna eat,” I said. I had a horror of vomiting. I associated it with the day of my mother’s funeral when I stayed home, throwing up almost continuously for hours.

  “You can rest on the plane.” He swung my hand up and down. My arm wobbled as if it were boneless. “Be cheerful. Even if it kills you. That’s the only lesson about life I can teach you: life is too sad not to laugh at it.” He turned to Pablo and half-mockingly, half-seriously began to sing: “Adios, muchacho! Compañero de mi vida!” He let go of my exhausted hand and embraced Pablo. This was still the early sixties in America: two men embracing earned us many stares. I was embarrassed by the looks from our fellow passengers. My father seemed to think we were safe. But Uncle was still out there, convinced I wanted him to rescue me, sure that I didn’t want to be with my own father. I had told him so, hadn’t I?

  I was going to be sick. I couldn’t bear the sensation of food rising. I sunk to my knees, put my hands on the cold floor and squeezed my body tight, flexing every muscle to keep the airport doughnut and the school lunch of macaroni and cheese and my breakfast of Cheerios down, safe within me, because I couldn’t let it out, couldn’t let them see the gunk inside.

  “Rafael!” my father said, horrified. He pulled me up effortlessly. “What’s the matter with you!” There was more annoyance than concern in his voice.

  “Pobrecito,” Pablo said.

  “You need to sleep,” my father said, softer now. He hugged me tight; tight enough that I didn’t have to make any effort to stand on my own. I breathed the slightly stale odor of his Old Spice cologne, combined with a fresher whiff of his real smell. Oddly, it cured me of my queasiness. I breathed in his heat and his animal nerves. He was a big, hot strong man. Of course he could prevent Bernie from taking me. I was safe, after all.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Sibling Rivalry

  CARMELITA WAS WAITING FOR US AS WE EMERGED FROM THE ANXIETY OF clearing customs in Madrid. This time, when my phony passport was presented to the Spanish official, I was too scared to pray in my head for happiness. But the official’s comparison of
the photograph against me was perfunctory. He chatted with my father about why we were in España: were we looking up relatives? In this confrontation my father seemed brilliant to me. He relaxed on his heels, smiled, and told the story of my grandfather’s emigration from Galicia to Tampa; he even began to recount the quaint anecdote of how Pepín romanced Jacinta by making up for her slow rolling of the cigars with his own superhuman speed. The customs man was charmed, but a supervisor (I think; or perhaps a stern colleague) looked cross and that spurred the agent to interrupt Francisco, stamp my passport without a glance and use a nub of white chalk to check off each of our bags, although there had been no investigation of their contents.

  I was surprised by the lax security of this running dog of fascism. On the tedious flight Francisco had told me his version of the Spanish Civil War. It amazed me that we—and especially that I, a half-Jewish boy—were en route to a nation ruled by a man whose staunchest and most crucial ally had been Hitler.

  “Did they exterminate Jews?” I asked.

  He laughed. “Why am I laughing?” he caught himself. “There was the Spanish Inquisition, after all.” And he explained about Spain’s peculiar Jewish history, of the almost total annihilation of the literate, prosperous, and talented Spanish Jews, accomplished for the most part by murder and exile but also by massive conversion, the hiding of thousands behind new names and the adoption of Catholicism. My father told me—accurately, by the way—of the Spanish families who, to this day, turn their paintings of the saints to the wall at sundown on Fridays and then light candles, but don’t know why. “You don’t have to worry about anti-Semitism today,” he concluded as we began our airplane meal.

  But with his coffee and my scoop of ice cream, he changed his mind. “Maybe, just to be careful, you shouldn’t mention to anyone that you’re half-Jewish.”

  After that talk I had expected more vigilance from the guardians of the fascist Spain than we experienced at customs.

  So had my father, evidently. “We made it,” he whispered with a smirk of triumph as we walked, officially sanctioned, under a sign that welcomed us to Madrid in Spanish, English and German. I thought—we’re safe, it’s over, everything’s okay—while barely noticing that there was a young Negro woman, tall and thin, except for large breasts and a pronounced potbelly, clapping and calling to us. Carmelita had broad lips painted vermilion and huge brown eyes whose whites brimmed with happiness at the sight of my father. She stopped her applause, came toward Francisco with measured speed and single-minded purpose, her skinny arms casting for him, gathering him with the blind confident greed of an octopus; a beautiful, exotic and apparently harmless octopus, but nevertheless a creature whose reach seemed boundless and whose grip looked unbreakable.

  All eyes were on them. As I was to discover shortly, any black-skinned woman, much less one as exquisite as Carmelita, would have attracted stares in Spain during the sixties. I had a specifically American racist response to her: as a right-thinking red-diaper baby I saw her as Negro, noble and oppressed, and therefore probably a cleaning woman or a singer, since those were the only activities permitted by American culture and economics. I was amazed, therefore, when Carmelita spoke. She had a rich voice, deep and amused, which certainly would have made for a good chanteuse, but what stunned me was that she talked in Spanish, in the cackling, speedy Cuban of my Tampa relatives.

  “Y tú eres Rafael?” she yammered at me with a broad smile of brilliant teeth. She had a remarkable mouth, huge and almost always parted, flashing her pink tongue and cheerful smile. Not liking her was impossible. “Es muy guapo, verdad?” she said to Francisco and then commented to me, “Como tu padre.” These compliments on my looks—any likening of my appearance to my father’s had to be praise—increased my confusion. Why wasn’t she speaking in English, in the sassy trill of my former classmates from P.S. 173, or the slow Southern drawl of the Great Neck serving women? Obviously she had learned Spanish from my father, but why was she using it on me?

  “I don’t speak Spanish,” I said.

  “But you understand a lot,” my father said. “And you’re at the perfect age to learn. At this age your brain is like a sponge. In two weeks you’ll be talking like a Castilian.”

  “No lo hablas?” Carmelita stroked my face lovingly. “Qué lindo,” she said, another compliment that I took as a way of praising Francisco. Not that I minded. I liked her a lot. Of course I was an easy mark: she was a woman and a woman’s presence reassured me. A loving glance, a kind word, and any woman owned my soul.

  My father, who had still made no reference to my mother or her death, didn’t explain Carmelita either except to say, “Carmelita is Cuban. She knows some English, but refuses to speak it.” The language of the enemy, I assumed, and felt ashamed that it was all I spoke. So there were Negro Cubans. [In case my ignorance surprises readers who may assume that my Tampa relatives were of mixed race and had dark complexions, I should explain that although a branch of my family is of mixed race, the relatives I had met—and whom I mistakenly thought of as wholly representative of the Cuban population—were of Mediterranean origin. One particular branch, the Pardos, are especially fair, with red hair and freckled skin. Of course to a true believer in Aryanism my white skin wouldn’t truly distinguish me or my people from an African-American. Years ago, at the suggestion of my training analyst, I did as complete a trace as I could of both lines of my ancestors—Latin and Jewish—and discovered relatives of all races within four generations. I have an African great-great-uncle and a great-great-grandmother who was Chinese. Nevertheless, to my white-skinned American eyes Carmelita was distinctly a Negro, just as to my own eyes I was distinctly a Jewish-Spanish boy. I should also point out, although it is a tiresome cliché no one believes in anymore, that ultimately we all have the same parents. Race is one of the mind’s most convincing and deadly illusions. As Freud might have written: racism is frequently the excuse for our savage behavior, but rarely its cause.]

  We took a cab through the surprisingly New York-like Madrid streets. My father chattered to Carmelita in Spanish, telling the story—I could gather from the occasional word I understood—of our surreptitious departure from the United States. I watched my new world out the cab’s window. The gray modern buildings whose coldness disgusted my father (“fascist architecture,” he called it) reassured me. However, the sight of one of the Guardia Civil patrolmen was unsettling. I interrupted my father’s account to Carmelita to ask about him, expecting to be told he was an elite soldier, a unique man, perhaps an executioner. Before he answered, my father pointedly glanced at the cabbie to remind me of his presence. The driver did seem interested in us, for obvious reasons—not only the racial mixture but now the mixture of tongues. Francisco explained with studied indifference, “He’s one of the Guardia Civil. They’re a kind of police. In fact, they are the police.”

  That fearsome man was merely a policeman! I suppressed my amazement, and my fear, because of the driver. I wanted to suggest we leave this country immediately. I would have much preferred to be in Cuba, fearing the arrival of hostile forces, than to scurry between the legs of the Guardia Civil. And my father, as I observed while we were driven to the hotel, was apparently right. The Guardia Civil were not only the regular cops, they were plentiful. I saw more than twenty on our drive. We’d have to be constantly on the alert. And they were scary, the scariest sight on the streets, in fact the only scary sight on those peaceful Madrid streets. Their tailored uniforms and patent leather boots were set off by a dramatic cape and a strange three-cornered hat: a combination of streamlined Nazi terror and the romance of medieval chivalry.

  Carmelita had rented two rooms in a modest pension. She left us to get some food. We took the tiny, manually operated lift to the third floor. Francisco let me hold the lever with him; I was thrilled that we stopped the car almost flush with the landing on our first try. My father led the way to a single room with a washbasin and no toilet. It was charming but had the narrowness of a closet, hard
ly relieved by its one window. Next door was a room only a bit larger, sufficient to squeeze in a double bed. He said that was for him and Carmelita. “You get your very own room. You can pretend you’re a grown-up, staying on your own in Madrid, Spain’s capital, one of the world’s great capitals. Of course I’m right on the other side of that wall, but you can pretend that tomorrow morning you’ll get up, buy a ticket to the bullfights—”

  “Can we go to a bullfight?” I asked.

  “Well, it’s winter. They don’t fight in Madrid in the winter.”

  “Oh shit.”

  “Rafael!” Francisco scolded my language, but with a tolerant smile. “We’ll have to go south to Cádiz to see a bullfight. You really want to see a bullfight?”

  “Yes!” I insisted, more with annoyance than enthusiasm.

  “Aren’t you scared of—?”

  “No! When can we go to Cá—” I hesitated.

  “Cádiz. If you want to sound like a true madrileño, say it like this—KA-DEE-T.” He pronounced it with the aristocratic Castilian lisp.

  “KA-DEE-TH,” I said, so well that my father applauded. “When can we go there? Is it warm there?” It was cold in Madrid, a much bitterer cold than New York’s.

  “I don’t know. I have no idea where we will go tomorrow. First I have to have dinner tonight with my Spanish publisher. I should say, the man who I hope will be my Spanish publisher.”

  “Tonight?” It was past eight in the evening. Carmelita had gone to buy sandwiches. I assumed they were for all of us and we would then go to bed.

  “Oh, Spaniards think eating dinner at ten o’clock is early. In fact, we’re not supposed to meet until eleven. You’ll be asleep—”

  “I’m not tired!” I probably shrieked this. Certainly my father reacted as if I were in the grip of a panic. He hugged me, awkwardly pushing my head into his chest and thumping me on the back. That made a hollow sound. No surprise there—I felt as if there was nothing inside me. Being in a foreign country with Carmelita and a father I had known only as a mythic figure for over a year, seemed to have taken the me out of me. Everything flowed out. I couldn’t properly process the new sights. I stared at the bed, the sink, the window—banal and familiar objects—as if in this setting, with these people, they were fundamentally altered. Everything was strange, including me.