20

by John Edgar Wideman

  It was a farewell worthy of Olivia's talents. Their subsequent correspondence had been affectionate. Olivia's apartment in Israel would become Señora Perera's final home; she'd fly straight to Tel Aviv from Miami. The diamonds would support a few years of simple living. But for a little while longer she wanted to remain amid the odors, the rap blaring from pickup trucks, the dance halls, the pink evangelical churches, the blue school uniforms, the highway's dust, the river's tarnish. To remain in this wayward place that was everything a barn was not.

  ————

  Luis was waiting for her at dawn, standing beside the limousine. He wore a mottled jumpsuit.

  “Much trouble last night?” she asked, peering in vain into his sunglasses while trying to avoid his corrupt breath.

  “No,” he belched, omitting her title, omitting even the honorific. This disrespect allowed her to get into the front of the car like a pal.

  At the airport they climbed the steps of a tipsy little plane. Luis stashed his Uzi in the rear next to the medical supplies. He took the copilot's seat. Señora Perera and the nurse—a Dutch volunteer with passable Spanish—settled themselves on the other two buckets. Señora Perera hoped to watch the land fall away, but from behind the pilot's shoulder she could see only sky, clouds, one reeling glimpse of highway, and then the mountainside. So she reconstructed the city from memory: its mosaic of dwellings enclosed in a ring of hills, its few tall structures rising in the center like an abscess. The river, the silly Parisian bridge. The plaza. People were gathering there now, she guessed, to hear today's orations.

  The Dutch nurse was huge, a goddess. She had to hunch her shoulders and let her big hands dangle between her thighs. Some downy thatch sprouted on her jaw; what a person to spend eternity with if this light craft should go down, though there was no reason you should be stuck forever with the dullard you happened to die with. Señora Perera planned to loll on celestial pillows next to Olivia. Federico might join them every millennium or so, good old beast, and Gidalya, too, prince of rabbis released from his avian corpus, his squawks finally making sense…She offered her traveling flask to the nurse. “Dutch courage?” she said in English. The girl smiled without comprehension, but she did take a swig.

  In less than an hour they had flown around the mountain and were landing on a cracked tar field. A helicopter stood waiting. Señora Perera and the nurse used the latrine. A roll of toilet paper hung on a nail, for their sakes.

  And now they were rising in the chopper. They swung across the hide of the jungle. She looked down on trees flaming with orange flowers and trees foaming with mauve ones. A sudden clearing was immediately swallowed up again by squat, broad-leafed trees. Lime green parrots rose up together—Gidalya's rich cousins.

  They landed in the middle of the town square beside a chewed bandstand. A muscular functionary shook their hands. This was Señor Rey, she recalled from Lina's instructions. Memory remained her friend; she could still recite the names of the cranial nerves. Decades ago, night after night, she had whispered them to the cow. She had explained the structures of various molecules. Ma Petite Vache…. She had taught the cow the Four Questions.

  Señor Rey led them toward a barracks mounted on a slab of cement: the infirmary she had come to inspect. The staff—a nurse-director and two assistants—stood stiffly outside as if awaiting arrest. It was probable that no member of any government had ever before visited—always excepting smugglers.

  The director, rouged like a temptress, took them around the scrubbed infirmary, talking nonstop. She knew every detail of every case history; she could relate every failure from undermedication, from wrong medication, from absence of medication. The Dutch girl seemed to understand the rapid-fire Spanish.

  Surgical gloves, recently washed, were drying on a line. The storeroom shelves held bottles of injectable Ampicillin and jars of Valium—folk remedies now. A few people lay in the rehydration room. In a corner of the dispensary a dying old man curled upon himself. Behind a screen Señora Perera found a listless child with swollen glands and pale nail beds. She examined him. A year ago she would have asked the parents' permission to send him to a hospital in the city for tests and treatment if necessary. Now the hospital in the city was dealing with wounds and emergencies, not diseases. The parents would have refused anyway. What was a cancer unit for but to disappear people? She stood for a moment with her head bowed, her thumb on the child's groin. Then she told him to dress himself.

  As she came out from behind the screen she could see the two nurses through a window. They were walking toward the community kitchen to inspect the miracle of soya cakes. Luis lounged just outside the window.

  She leaned over the sill and addressed his waxy ear. “Escort those two, why don't you? I want to see Señor Rey's house alone.”

  Luis moved sullenly off. Señor Rey led her toward his dwelling in resentful silence. Did he think she really cared whether his cache was guns or cocaine? All she wanted was to ditch Luis for a while. But she would have to subject this village thug to a mild interrogation just to get an hour's freedom.

  And then she saw a better ruse. She saw a motorbike, half concealed in Señor Rey's shed.

  She had flown behind Federico on just such a bike, one summer by the sea. She remembered his thick torso within the circle of her arms. The next summer she had driven the thing herself, Olivia clasping her waist.

  “May I try that?”

  Señor Rey helplessly nodded. She handed him her kitbag. She hiked up her skirt and straddled the bike. The low heels of her shoes hooked over the footpieces.

  But this was not flying. The machine strained uphill, held by one of the two ruts they called a road. On the hump between the ruts grass grew and even flowers—little red ones. She picked up speed slightly and left the village behind. She passed poor farms and thick growths of vegetation. The road rose and fell. From a rise she got a glimpse of a brown lake. Her buttocks smarted.

  When she stopped at last and got off the bike, her skirt ripped with a snort. She leaned the disappointing machine against a scrub pine and she walked into the woods, headed toward the lake. Mist encircled some trees. Thick roots snagged her shoes. But ahead was a clearing, just past tendrils hanging from branches. A good place for a smoke. She parted the vines and entered, and saw a woman.

  A girl, really. She was eighteen at most. She was sitting on a carpet of needles and leaning against a harsh tree. But her lowered face was as untroubled as if she had been resting on a silken pouf. The nursing infant was wrapped in coarse, striped cloth. Its little hand rested against her brown breast. Mother and child were outwardly motionless, yet Señora Perera felt a steady pulsing beneath her soles, as if the earth itself were a giant teat.

  Señora Perera did not make much of a sound, only her old woman's wheeze. But the girl looked up as if in answer, presenting a bony, pockmarked face. If the blood of the conquistadors had run in her ancestors' veins, it had by now been conquered; she was utterly Indian. Her flat brown eyes were fearless.

  “Don't get up, don't trouble yourself…” But the girl bent her right leg and raised herself to a standing position without disturbing the child.

  She walked forward. When she was a few feet away from Señora Perera, her glance caught the diamonds. She looked at them with mild interest and returned her gaze to the stranger.

  They faced each other across a low dry bush. With a clinician's calm Señora Perera saw herself through the Indian girl's eyes. Not a grandmother, for grandmothers did not have red hair. Not a soldier, for soldiers did not wear skirts. Not a smuggler, for smugglers had ingratiating manners. Not a priest, for priests wore combat fatigues and gave out cigarettes; and not a journalist, for journalists piously nodded. She could not be a deity; deities radiated light. She must then be a witch.

  Witches have authority. “Good that you nurse the child,” said Señora Perera.

  “Yes. Until his teeth come.”

  “After his teeth come, chica. He can learn not to bite.” S
he opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue and placed her forefinger on its tip. “See? Teach him to cover his teeth with his tongue.”

  The girl slowly nodded. Señora Perera mirrored her nod. Jew and Indian: Queen Isabella's favorite victims. Four centuries later, Jews were a great nation, getting richer. Indians were multiplying, getting poorer. It would be a moment's work to unfasten the pin and pass it across the bush. But how would the girl fence the diamonds? Señor Rey would insist on the lion's share; and what would a peasant do with money anyway—move to the raddled capital? Señora Perera extended an empty hand toward the infant and caressed its oblivious head. The mother revealed a white smile.

  “He will be a great man,” promised the Señora.

  The girl's sparse lashes lifted. Witch had become prophetess. The incident needed only a bit of holy nonsense for prophetess to become lady. “He will be a great man,” Señora Perera repeated, in Polish, stalling for time. And then, in Spanish again, with the hoarseness that inevitably accompanied her quotable pronouncements, “Suckle!” she commanded. She unhooked the pin. With a flourishing gesture right out of one of Olivia's operettas, conveying tenderness and impetuousness and authority too, she pressed the diamonds into the girl's free hand. “Keep them until he's grown,” she hissed, and she turned on her heel and strode along the path, hoping to disappear abruptly into the floating mist as if she had been assumed. Penniless exile crawls into Tel Aviv, she thought, furious with herself.

  When she reached the motorbike, she lit the postponed cigarette and grew calm again. After all, she could always give Spanish lessons.

  ————

  Señor Rey was waiting in front of his shed. He clucked at her ripped skirt. And Luis was waiting near the helicopter, talking to the pilot. The Dutch nurse would stay until next Saturday, when the mail Jeep would arrive. So it was just the three of them, Luis said with emphasis, giving the unadorned lapel a hard stare. She wondered if he would arrest her in the chopper, or upon their arrival at the airstrip, or in the little plane, or when they landed at the capital, or not until they got to her apartment. It didn't matter; her busybody's career had been honorably completed with the imperative uttered in the clearing. Suckle. Let that word get around—it would sour all the milk in the country, every damned little jar of it.

  And now—deportation? Call it retirement. She wondered if the goons had in mind some nastier punishment. That didn't matter, either; she'd been living on God's time since the cow.?

  1997

  FADO

  Katherine Vaz

  One morning I could not find Lúcia, my stuffed toy pig. I ran crying next door to Dona Xica Adelinha Costa. Xica buried her Saint Anthony and told him he would stay there until he helped us. Then she kissed me and sent me home. That night I saw Lúcia's cloven hoof jabbing out of my bed, and with a shriek I clutched her in a dance. Xica left Saint Anthony in his grave another day to teach him to be faster in finding what was lost.

  When the Californian valley heat pressed down on us, Xica would lift my hair, so electric it leapt to greet her approaching palm, and she would blow on the back of my neck. Summers the fuchsia hung swollen like ripe fruit—the dancing-girls' skirts mauve, cherry, scarlet—and Xica taught me how to grasp the long stamen running up into the core and with a single sure yank pull it out with the drop of watery honey still glistening at its tip. My parents urged me to spend time with Dona Xica. We were lucky to be neighbors. I had never known my real grandmothers, and Xica would never have a real grandchild because a car wreck had made her married son an idiot.

  ————

  Bicho vai,

  Bicho vem,

  Come o pai,

  Come a mãe,

  E come a menina tambêm!

  The worm-monster goes,

  The worm-monster comes,

  It eats the father,

  It eats the mother,

  And it eats the baby too!

  Mamãe walked her fingers up my leg singing this rhyme, and on the final line she attacked my stomach until I squealed with laughter. I would beg her to do it over and over. O bicho never got to my throat. I kept him down where it tickled.

  I met worse night-things as I grew up. If I stared too long at those red and white pinpricks in my dark room, they rolled into constellations that burst alive, into pirates and dogs speaking guttural English. When they came for me I would sign crosses in an invisible picket fence around my bed. The beasts roared, but none of them could get me.

  One night I finally kicked my sheets over the cross-fence and thought: Climb in with me. Xica is not afraid of you and neither am I. I am more afraid of being alone.

  ————

  The old stories said that our Azorean homeland was Atlantis, rising broken from the sea. We all have marks and patches surfacing on our skin. I have a fierce dark animal erupting from my side.

  Xica had a wine-colored star in the cove at the base of her throat. When she drowsed in the sleeping net that swung between two trees dividing our yards, I liked to touch the star and the bones of her face. She had a long nose ridge, arcing like a dolphin's spine from between her eyes. Inside her hands and chest more bones floated, like those soft needles that poke unmoored in fish's meat.

  My fingers could never drink up the rheum that always trickled from beneath her closed eyes. We are so sad, so chemically sad, that it leaks from us. The fados wailing from our record players remind us that without love we will die, that the oceans are salty because the Portuguese have shed so many tears on their beaches for those they will never hold again.

  ————

  Xica Adelinha Costa could faint at will. She would quicken her breath toward that giddy unlatching when the spirit shoots from the body. Then all is cold and black, with a prickle of nausea. One day when I was thirteen I fell with her at the Lodi post office. We were in line to pickup the ribbon do Nosso Senhor do Bonfim sent from her cousin in Brazil, and suddenly Xica could not wait anymore. She shook so much I shook too, and then she collapsed into my arms and drove us both to the floor.

  Most townspeople already knew that when Xica could not be without something another moment she hurled herself into the dark. Postmaster Riley did not rush over, but he tossed me Xica's package. I unwrapped the thin blue ribbon do Nosso Senhor and tied it around her wrist. She woke up because now she could make her pact with God. Xica whispered this prayer:

  O Nosso Senhor: Heal my child. He has not spoken a single word since his accident.

  O Nosso Senhor: You threw my husband off that whaling boat and did not return him when I was young and pretty in Angra—lift the fog from my son.

  O Nosso Senhor: Make his wife love him again.

  When the knot broke on its own, those wishes would come true. “Rosa,” she said, “I can almost hear my boy saying my name.” She smiled at the man offering her water and kissed the wrist tie that marked her as a woman of divine desires.

  For sprawling in public with charms, my parents made me recite all the rosary Mysteries—the Joyful, the Sorrowful, and the Glorious—to scrub out my soul.

  ————

  My father's lavender soap always drew me from sleep. The male-flowering scent came for me before dawn, as he padded around the house until his veins breathed open. He insisted I do his morning exercises with him. Out with the violet bristles protruding from the artichokes, there in the dark-claret light.

  “Inhale with me, Rosa,” said Papai.

  In—let it fill you—out.

  Sister Angela, my eighth-grade teacher, explained the heart:

  Old tired blood of night and sleep starts out purple.

  It goes through the heart to wash itself red.

  The morning sky is red and purple to remind us that we walk in the air of burst hearts.

  I would sit on the porch awhile holding my father's hand. It was the first time I already missed someone I still had, and my first lesson that true joy creates not memory but physical particles. My Lodi mornings hid embers in me that will
float upward when I die, to burrow in someone else, because they have nothing to do with dust.

  Mamãe would bring out mayonnaise-and-tomato sandwiches. We ate together before my father left for his milk route, and then she and I would go back to bed. Sometimes it is beyond endurance, the separateness of all our lives.

  ————

  Manuel was soft and red-streaked as crabmeat now instead of big-framed and handsome. Xica led him by the hand and said aloud what everything was. He never spoke, but she refused to give up. When her ribbon broke she wanted him to awake with the world already learned. She told him about things that could be held:

  Brier roses: Same genus as the strawberry. But you would never guess they were one family. Perfumed, pink. Careful how you touch it, love. Not a few big thorns but a hundred little stabs.

  Cat: Venha cá, gatinha, gatinha! Here kitty kitty. It brushed your legs and then disappeared, Manuel. Até breve, gatinha. Don't cry, Manny.

  Rocks: They stay in one place even if you turn away. Let me brush your fingers against them for you.

  Brick: Watch me scrape my frayed ribbon against it to hurry your cure.

  ————

  Before school I took Manuel's other hand. His wife Marina sat watching. An earthworm sometimes stitched its way around her bare toes in the mud, but she did not move. She liked belly crawlers: A recurring tapeworm let her stay thin and eat madly. We all ate pork—vinho d'alhos, torrêsmos—laden with invisible cooked trichinae, but only Marina would not flinch at finding alive in the ground what also churned dead in our stomachs.

  In terrible heat she poured honey water or lemonade on herself, whatever was near in the pitcher, and her skin glistened with sugar. Marina was twenty-three, four years younger than Manuel, the most beautiful animal I will ever cross.

  Because Manuel said nothing, Xica's morning lessons often veered off into history stories:

  Lace: This at my throat, from my sister Teca. She lost her husband off the same boat that killed your father. She went blind hooking lace webs the old way, with an open safety pin. Flowers and faces white and matterless as the drone after the hive sucks him dry. The drone is left jelly. The drone is soft quiver.