Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

by Rafael Yglesias

  “Hey kid,” he said. “You sound like an American. Ever been there?”

  I explained the apparent contradiction of my name and my fluency in English.

  Her strategy worked. Tommy removed the hand he had put on her shoulder and asked me how I came to be in Spain. I answered briefly, said I was traveling with my father. I asked the Tennessee Williams heroine where Gabby was. She told me he’d gone to the kitchen.

  I was welcome in there and I excused myself, ignoring Tommy’s call for me to stay. I found Gabby being chewed out by one of the waiters. The harangue stopped at my appearance. The waiter asked if I needed anything.

  “I want a Coke,” I said and Gabby was released from the dressing down to attend to me.

  Gabby called the waiter a cunt under his breath as we walked out the back way to get a case of Coke. That was why he had gone into the kitchen in the first place, he said. Once outside, on the gravel of the service entrance to the kitchen, I told him my father had given me permission to fight the baby bulls.

  “Good,” he said. “We can go tomorrow. We have to leave early. Be ready by seven.”

  That was good news because Carmelita and Francisco never woke before nine.

  We returned to the bar. Gabby, the Tennessee Williams heroine, Tommy and I made a talkative foursome. Tommy seemed fascinated by us. He asked lots of questions and listened with enthusiasm to our life stories. He especially liked the fact that Gabby was going to teach me to be a bullfighter.

  When the light faded, I said I had to go upstairs for dinner. Tommy said, “Hey, you like comics?”

  Of course I did. I hadn’t been able to read any of my favorites for two months.

  “Come with me to my car for a second,” he said.

  “Another man’s going to leave me flat, darling,” our Tennessee Williams star said to Gabby.

  “I’ll be back, babe,” Tommy said. He lurched forward and caught her unprepared to dodge a loud wet smack on the lips.

  Only when, in the fading light, I was in the passenger seat of Tommy’s car, greedily holding the six brand-new comic books, did I feel odd about being with him. He put his hand on my neck and rubbed it. “You’re a good-looking kid,” he said. “How old are you?”

  I was alarmed. Only vaguely, of course, and I thought I was being silly and cowardly, but his manner was sufficiently worrisome for me to toss the comic books into his lap. “I have to go home.”

  Tommy shoved them back. “Hey, don’t be like that. I gave ’em to you. Take ’em. I got more in my apartment. You can come up tomorrow and take what you like.” He put a hand high up on my left thigh and squeezed. “After you fight the bulls.”

  I cursed myself for having told him about my plans with Gabby. If I insulted him, he might tell on me. “Okay …”

  “I’m in Three-A. Come tomorrow after lunch. Right?” He patted my thigh gently, interpolating each tap with quick strokes toward my groin.

  I opened the car door, carrying the comics in my free hand. “Okay.”

  “Good boy,” he slapped my behind as I got out. I raced into the building. I was overwhelmed with guilt by the time I reached the door. I was a fugitive again, a boy of secrets and rebellion. What should I do with the comic books? If I had to explain them to my father, then he might, in his infuriating gregarious way, befriend Tommy and learn about my plan. I put the comics under our doormat, intending to retrieve them after they fell asleep.

  Carmelita and Francisco were in a good mood. She seemed especially affectionate toward me, stroking my hair after she served me a bowl of soup. My father told me they had decided to leave Alicante at the end of the month rather than stay for four months as originally planned. We would go to Barcelona. A really cosmopolitan city, my father added enthusiastically. “You’re not making much use of the beach, anyway, right? And we can find you an American school in Barcelona.”

  “You said I didn’t have to go to school.”

  “There’ll be other American kids there. God knows what they’ll be like. They’ll be the children of corporate executives. But they’re kids, after all. You’ll like them and they’ll love you.” He said to Carmelita in Spanish, “Rafael is always the most popular kid in his class.”

  “No I’m not,” I said bitterly.

  “Yes you are.”

  “No I’m not!” Tears came with the anger.

  My father shouted, “Goddamnit!” He stood up, his soup spoon still in his hand. “I can’t say anything right!” He looked at the spoon as if it were the cause. He threw it at the sink. It clattered into the well and slid up, bouncing off the wall, and landed on the stove with a bang. “I can’t satisfy everybody!” He shouted at Carmelita in Spanish, “I told you!” And he walked out. In a moment we heard the front door slam.

  She hadn’t looked up from her bowl during the explosion. She calmly took anther sip. My tears and rage had scurried into a cubby in my soul and I doubt I could have found its opening with a team of searchers. What a bad boy I was! I counted my sins and my secrets and my bad feelings. No wonder I would no longer be my father’s only child—I didn’t deserve that honor.

  The dreadful silence that followed my father’s exit lasted too long. I wanted to fetch my father’s spoon from the stove, but I was scared to break the tableau. Finally, Carmelita looked up at me. Her round face seemed serene. She said softly, “You shouldn’t be rude to your father. Especially when he compliments you.”

  She was right, I believed, and yet I hated her for saying it. And, yes, I hated her for carrying the usurper in her belly. I didn’t deserve to be the only son, but if not for her, I would be anyway.

  While Carmelita washed the dishes, I reclaimed the comics from the doormat, went to my room, locked myself in, and started to read. I was halfway through my favorite, an X-Men Special Edition introducing a new character, when my door shook so hard the floor vibrated. My father’s voice boomed, “Rafael. Open this door.”

  I shoved the comics under my bed and hurried.

  Francisco was so friendly and charming in his manner that you could forget at times how big he was. He filled my doorway, all six foot three of him, trim, but still two hundred pounds, his smooth tanned skin not at that moment a pleasant contrast to his white teeth, but dark and menacing. His warm light brown eyes were cold with rage. He stared down at me and said nothing.

  I have tried to portray how scary he looked, yet I wasn’t intimidated. I was a foot shorter and a hundred pounds lighter, but in me there was a full-sized rage. “What do you want?” I asked rudely. “I’m busy.”

  He slapped me with his open palm. My head jerked to the side and snapped back to confront him. My legs trembled, my heart pounded, but my face seemed to have disconnected from those cowards, and remained still: eyes fixed on him, unflinching and tearless.

  “You disobeyed me,” he said.

  I said nothing.

  He flinched, rubbing his eyes with the hand he used to hit me. He uncovered to add, “Gabby told me what you’re planning. Do you know how humiliating it is to tell a stranger that your son is a liar?”

  “No,” I said.

  Francisco breathed in through his nose, snorting. His lips parted, showing teeth, and he raised his hand again.

  I turned aside as if already struck. I watched the threatening hand out of the corner of my eye. It stayed aloft for a moment and then dropped to my shoulder. He pushed me. Like a frustrated kid in the schoolyard, my father shoved me as if testing whether I was willing to fight him. I was staggered but didn’t fall. I certainly didn’t shove him back.

  “You’re riding for a fall, young man,” he said. His tone and manner were so unlike him that he seemed almost comical. He reached for the handle of my door. “You’re staying in this room until you’ve had a chance to think about what you’ve done.” He closed it halfway and added, “Think long and hard.” He slammed it shut.

  I pretended to be asleep when he looked in on me a few hours later. I read all the comics twice. I cried for a while, not
satisfyingly. Finally, after locking my door, I kicked off the sheets and allowed the ocean breeze to tickle my hairless penis as I pumped, remembering those dark embraces with my mother. This time, perhaps because of the fresh wafting air, perhaps because, although I was merely ten years old, puberty had finally begun, the familiar pleasant sensation was more intense, almost painful. I teased that new sensation, re-creating the motion that localized it and then something terrible and wonderful happened: a spasm from knees to my chest and with it, a single drop of almost totally clear liquid hit my belly. I was confused and scared until I recognized the famous seed I had read about in the book on sex my mother had given to me years ago when everything was normal and safe.

  So, I thought, trying to calm down from my initial horror: I am a man, after all.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Murder of the Self

  I WASN‘T RELEASED FROM MY ROOM UNTIL NOON. CARMELITA BROUGHT my breakfast in, but she called me out for lunch. My father was at the table. His smile, his animated eyebrows, his musical voice continued to be absent. He showed no teeth, his brows were a line and he spoke in the drone of a bureaucrat. It wasn’t really frightening; the imitation of sternness was just that—inauthentic and comic.

  “Rafe,” he said, “I have tried to understand why you would disobey a direct order from me. I can’t think of a single instance of your being deprived or forbidden anything you want. And the first time I say no, you disobey me. I’m afraid that’s exactly the problem—it was the first time I said no. You’re spoiled. You’re spoiled and you’re ungrateful. Do you have any conception of how many children would like to change places with you?” He let that hang for a moment and then, with atypical clumsiness, answered his own rhetorical question: “Millions. The answer is that millions of children would give their right arm to have your privileges.” (The truth of my father’s estimate seems to me a damning indictment of the condition of children. It burns in my consciousness, a constant nag. And it is still true, that for the Rafael’s of today, no matter how great their pain, in the eyes of the world it isn’t pain at all.)

  I believed at that moment, as a ten-year-old, two things: my father was right to be disappointed in me; and that if he knew my true self he would despise me. I had to find a place in this world, choose between my good father and my evil uncle. I chose my uncle because it seemed inevitable that only in his dark realm would I find admiration and love.

  I lied energetically to my father. I told him I knew I was bad and spoiled and that I was glad to be sent to school in Barcelona. Francisco was startled by the apparent totality of his victory. I understood I was confirming his belief that I needed discipline, but that didn’t matter since I was going to do everything in my power to escape my father, to be free of his impossible goodness. I would somehow get word to my uncle and thrive in the truer uncertainty of living as his ward.

  Chastened, I was permitted to go out. I bumped into Gabby as I lingered near the office eyeing the public phone, heart pounding, mind racing, trying to think how I could call Uncle. Gabby scolded me, gently, for having lied. “Your father is very angry,” he said. He saw that I was upset and added, “But hell get over it. Want a Coke?” he asked brightly.

  I declined. I had one avenue, perhaps, of escape. It wouldn’t be through good-hearted Gabby; he belonged to my father’s world. It was Tommy. He was a bad man, even if my suspicions were exaggerated. He drank too much, he admired a “foolish, decadent woman,” as my father once called the Tennessee Williams heroine, and he owned comic books—“worthless trash” in Francisco’s eyes. He wanted my company and that was wrong, no matter how far he intended to take it, and I could use that.

  I was terrified, of course. Don’t be fooled by the cold-blooded manipulativeness I had to affect to carry off my desperate act. All the fanciful ideas of neurotic, traumatized Rafe were an elaborate camouflage for the simple, although apparently paradoxical truth—I was fighting for survival. I climbed the stairs to be alone with a man I believed was a child molester so that he could help me become the ward of an evil man. In order to feel worthwhile, I had to live among people who were worse than me.

  Tommy wore a bathing suit and nothing else. He reeked of cologne.

  “Hey,” Tommy said, startled. “You alone?” he asked nervously, although the answer was obvious.

  He pulled me in roughly and shut the door fast. I saw all that pink flesh, soft belly overhanging the elastic band of his suit, droopy breasts, smelled his perfume and knew my suspicion was correct. He pushed me into his living room. The sun filled the room.

  “Look who showed up,” Tommy said to someone. I saw a figure in a chair, shadowed by the day’s brilliance behind him. He was skinny and dressed in a seersucker suit.

  I was convinced that Tommy had lured me here for this man. I was sure they would do something dirty to me and then kill me, perhaps because the killing was part of their pleasure.

  “What’s your name?” the thin man asked.

  I was ready to accept my fate. A slow death as the disappointing son seemed worse than this quick one.

  “Come on, kid. We know, anyway,” Tommy said. He put his thick hand on my neck and pushed me forward.

  The thin man stood up. “Well … ?”

  “I’m Rafael Neruda,” I said.

  “Do you know a Bernard Rabinowitz?” the thin man asked. His tone was as formal and dry as Perry Mason’s on TV.

  I didn’t answer at first, amazed that in this death there was resurrection.

  “He’s my uncle,” I said. “Is he here?”

  “He’s on his way. He wants to see you. Find out how you’re—”

  “Can I go home with him?” I interrupted.

  The thin man moved closer, appearing out of the sun as he blocked it. His nose was long and thin. He had pale blue eyes.

  “How the hell do you like that?” Tommy said and grunted.

  “You want to go back to the United States and live with your uncle?” Perry Mason asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t you want to live with your father?”

  “No.”

  “He mean to you, kid?” Tommy asked, massaging my neck.

  “I’ll ask the questions,” the thin man said sharply.

  “Okay, okay,” Tommy said and backed away from me.

  “My father is mean to me,” I said.

  The thin man turned his head to one side. He brought a long elegant hand to his ear and pulled on the lobe thoughtfully. “Call the Madrid office,” he said to Tommy. “Tell them to have Mr. Rabinowitz phone here as soon as he lands.”

  “Maybe we should take—” Tommy began.

  “Do it,” the thin man said in a soft voice but with such conviction it had the effect of a barked command. Tommy left the room.

  “How did your father get you out of the country?” he asked me.

  “We took a plane from New York.”

  “No, that isn’t what I meant.” He reached into his jacket pocket and produced one of those light green passports with the gold embossed letters and the terrible eagle. “Did he have one of these for you?”

  “Yes.”

  He was disappointed. “I see …”

  “But it was fake,” I pleaded. “A man brought it to him. It isn’t my picture inside.”

  The thin man smiled without showing teeth. “Whose picture is it?”

  “I don’t know. Some other boy’s.”

  The thin man put his passport away. Tommy entered and reported, “He’s coming though customs right now. He’ll call in a few minutes.”

  “There won’t be any difficulties,” the thin man said and he smiled again without showing a single tooth.

  Two months later, in the chambers of a judge on Long Island, I was seated across from a small man in his sixties who had a bad cold. Beside him sat a black woman typing on a stenographic machine. As the judge asked me each of his questions, he blew his nose, so that I had to wait before answering if I wanted him to hear me. I gave the
answers I was instructed to by my uncle’s lawyer. I said my father was a Communist employed by Fidel Castro. I said he had taken me out of the United States against my will using a fake passport. The judge showed me the fake passport and asked if that was it. I said yes. When asked, I said I wanted to live with my uncle and that I was frightened even to see my father, much less visit him. I had had to say the same things to a Spanish official in Madrid. Other than those two nauseating confrontations, my return as a ward of my uncle was undramatic. I never saw my father. Later, I learned he had been put under arrest until we were back in the States. That was a matter of several days. In exchange for not contesting Bernie’s custody, no charges in Spain or the United States were brought for his use of a fake passport.

  The events of my life were at last tranquil. I worked hard to please my uncle. I tried to become a winner at all things, from academics to athletics. My pursuit ran all day and night, from early practice for the basketball team to college-level courses for advanced students offered by a community college. I gathered As, chess tournament awards, swimming meet medals, praise from my teachers and offered the harvest to my beaming uncle with the innocent air of a maiden, revealing no personal motive for the bounty but to confirm the power of his fertile soil. By the time I was sixteen I had no conscious memory of the choice I had made in Spain. I believed simply that I had been raised by a madwoman and a Communist coward. I thought of myself—with the preposterous arrogance of the young—as a genius.

  Uncle casually referred to me as a genius, in the way someone might comment that a teenager was tall or could run fast. His son, meanwhile, defied all his values, disappearing into the burgeoning counterculture of the sixties, abandoning contact altogether after Bernie cut off his trust fund allowance. His daughter married a vice-president in Bernie’s company, moved to a grand house nearby and had three miscarriages. With each failure, her weight shrank and her drinking became more noticeable. Bernie spent little time with his wife—he had a mistress in the city I discovered later—and not much with me either except on the high holidays when he ignored his immediate family to talk to me about my future.