by Unknown
Nearing turned to face him. “Well. Anything else, Detective?”
“Human sacrifice? Cannibalism? Any ideas? Any rumors that anybody’s into it around town?”
Nearing chewed his lip. “No, although it’s hard to rule anything out. As a professional anthropologist I can tell you that in our culture, those who want to eat human flesh generally keep fairly quiet about it.”
End of interview. Nearing got the usual “Call us if you hear anything” and Paz took his book and went out into the steaming bright afternoon. He sat in his car and ran the A/C and went over his notes. Africa again. Paz didn’t like the African angle at all or the magic crap. Or the Vierchau connection. He had the sense of someone playing with him, the business with his own looks, the perp seeming at least to be a ringer for Paz himself. And the incident with Tanzi, that voice, had shaken him more than he could admit, and so he filed it away with the other stuff he did not want to think about. Compartmentalization was Paz’s major mental strategy. He used it now. The weird stuff was not really weird but an artifact of ignorance. When they got the guy, it would turn out that … what? A gang. A cult. Like those wackos down in Matamoros, but more sophisticated. With chemicals, knockout drugs, hypnosis. Inside the paradigm; that was a good new word. Inside the paradigm, weird, but essentially familiar. And something else, he couldn’t quite …
Paz caught a flash of silver going by outside and looked up. The flash was the skin of a catering unit stuck on an old Ford pickup. It was lunchtime, and a good location, outside the hospital, for staff and visitors who might want a break from the cafeteria and were willing to brave both the heat of the day and the more subtle dangers of unsupervised food prep. Paz got out and bought a mango soda and a fruit pastry.
A memory tugged. The cab of his mother’s truck, him in the front seat strapped in, he must have been very young, because as soon as he was old enough to be in school, he had been behind the counter, serving out Cubano sandwiches and making change. His mother would pick him up right at the school, with the roachmobile. Memories of fighting about that, the shame of it. No, but that part was later, not what he was trying to pin down now. He was three or so, he was looking out the windshield and trying to grab the … leaning forward and reaching for … ? A Saint Christopher statue? That was it, a statue on the dash. The Virgin? No, it wasn’t white glow-in-the-dark plastic, it was brightly painted, larger than the commercial suction-cup icons; he could see it so clearly in his mind’s eye. It was painted, lifelike, and he had reached for it so hard that he had heaved himself over the restraint and fallen, knocking his head against the glove compartment knob. And his mother had heard his screams and come …
His mother hadn’t sold the truck until he was around eight. He had spent hours and hours in it, but he couldn’t recall seeing that statue again. The statue on the dash was a white plastic suction-cup Virgin, bland and of no interest. But he remembered a different statue.
It came to him then, the way that a forgotten word pops into the mind, with the same sense of inarguable assurance. A statue of a man in brown monk’s garb, tonsured, the face roughly painted with features, the skin pale chocolate, the mouth a drop of bright crimson, the base green and gold; from the hands clasped in prayer a wire depended, and on the wire, tiny glittering beads that trembled enticingly in the vibrations from the engine. It was a Santería figure, a santo, Orula, in fact, or Ifa, as he had recently learned to call him, the santo of prophecy. But that could not be. His mother despised all that.
Paz felt a coldness flow over the skin of his head, as when standing in the sun a cloud passes over. He looked up, but the sun was there directly overhead, unshielded, merciless.
SIXTEEN
The place is on Twenty-seventh just off the Trail, one of a line of low concrete-block stucco commercial structures selling goods to the Cubans who didn’t become millionaires in Miami. They sell furniture ( compre lo bueno y páguelo luegos), shoes ( descuentos especiales para mayoristas), sandwiches and Cuban coffee ( comidas criollas), fabrics ( grandes promociones, con los mas bajor precios) and pets. The sign that announces this last is hand-painted on a half sheet of exterior plywood, white on black. They are not running any specials in pets, but we go in anyway, early Friday evening after work, stepping carefully around the low concrete cone placed near the doorway. The place is stifling with the heavy ammoniac smell of chickens. Luz sneezes.
“It smells bad in here,” she remarks. “What are we buying here?”
What indeed? We are here because my transmission joint is up the street and I had spotted this place the last time I was by. There are dozens of them in the region we are now in, known to its inhabitants as Souwesera. They do not sell cute puppies or kitties or tropical fish, but only pigeons, chickens, and an occasional goat. All the animals are either pure white or dead black. The orishas are extremely particular about what they eat; they dislike complex color schemes.
I say to her, “I just have some business to do here. It won’t take long.”
“Who’s those?” Luz asks, pointing to the brightly painted plaster statues.
Three of them are lined up on the dusty shelf below the street window. In the center, the largest, nearly four feet tall, shows a dark woman of serene face, in a yellow dress, crowned with gold, holding a crowned child, and worshiped by three kneeling fishermen: Caridad del Cobré, the Virgin of Charity, patroness of Cuba. Flanking her on the left is another dark woman in a blue and white dress, standing on roiling waves, holding a fan shell. On the right is an old man, bearded, in rags, leaning on a crutch. I point to Caridad. “This is the Virgin Mary, and you know who this is?”
“Baby Jesus.”
“Right. This lady is Saint Regla. She watches out for people who go out on the ocean, and also for mommies.”
“Does she watch out for you?”
“I hope so.” I privately doubt that great Yemaya will watch over my fruitless womb. And I don’t go to sea anymore.
“And this is Saint Lazarus,” I say, “he helps you if you’re sick.”
“He looks sad.”
“Well, yes, there are so many sick people, aren’t there?”
Heavy steps, the chickens flutter noisily. A short, stocky woman comes in from the back of the shop. She is dressed in a yellow print cotton dress, her face is the color of an old saddle, and it has the gloss and the fine creases of worn leather, too. Her hair is dark and frizzy, and she could be any age from fifty to seventy-five. She is smoking a Virginia Slim, and looks at me and Luz with a blank look, out of deep-set eyes whose whites are pale yellow. In my clunky Spanish I say, “Seńora, please, I would like to arrange for an ebo .”
The woman’s eyes go narrow. She is still trying to put together the white-trash lady in the ugly brown dress and the pretty little black girl into some familiar social category. She asks, “You are omo-orisha ?”
She wants to know if I am a child of the spirits, a devotee of Santería. Something like that, I answer. She wants to know who my babalawo is. I tell her I haven’t got one, and she frowns. Makes sense. This is a neighborhood shop; 90 percent of her business must come from one or two local iles . She doesn’t much care for strangers wandering in and trying to order sacrifices. Why don’t they use their own PETS? She asks, “Who threw Ifa for you, then?” and I answer, “I threw Ifa by myself, for myself.”
A little gaping here, a show of missing teeth, of gold ones glimmering. Female babalawos are extremely rare, white female ones virtually unknown. I watch her trying to make up her mind. Suddenly she is nervous. She senses brujisma, I can tell. She says, “Wait, please,” and stumps back past the chickens and the goats. Luz is inspecting the place like the bold gringa kid she has miraculously become. I have to make a leaping stride to keep her from stepping on the concrete cone placed next to the doorway. It looks like a parking-lot button, and she likes to balance on parking-lot buttons in the Winn-Dixie lot. This is not a parking-lot button, however, but Eleggua-Eshu, guardian of portals, not to be trodden upo
n.
I turn around then, and of course, there is the small brown man dressed in white who was walking near the ER with Lou Nearing. I have Luz by the hand and the impulse to run is nearly overwhelming, but then I think, no. Ifa has set his hook in me, and is dragging me upward, to the true light or the ax, and clearly, this is a part of it.
The man is looking at me curiously, standing in the doorway to the back room. The old woman is behind him, in the shadows, peeking out from behind his shoulder. He is dressed in a white Cuban shirt and white trousers and he has a faded khaki baseball hat on his head. He steps forward and stands behind the dusty glass-topped counter of the shop, near the old iron far-from-digital cash register, as if he is about to take my order. He looks about fifty, a smooth, round pale brown face, no mustache, unlined, or nearly so. His eyes, shadowed by the bill of his cap, look enormous, like a lemur’s, all pupil.
In soft Spanish, he asks, “Can I help you in any way, seńora?”
I get my breathing under control. “I want to arrange ebó. Two black and two white pigeons, and thirty-two cowries.”
He says, “If you come to the ile, I would be happy to help you.”
“I can’t come to the ile .”
He shrugs. “Well, then I can’t help you.” Suddenly his face splits into a grin, showing swathes of pink gum and two golden teeth. In barely accented English, he adds, “It’s like the motor vehicle department. You have to be there. You can’t send anyone else.”
I feel myself smiling, too, remembering Uluné. He was always cracking up at little things. Delight seems to be a by-product of screwing around with the unseen world. Marcel, also. Unless you’re a witch.
I say, in English, now, with gratitude, because my Spanish is not quite up to this, “Then I guess I’ll have to buy the birds and do it myself.”
Shrug again. “You have to do it just right, or the orisha can’t eat. You really don’t want to offer the food and then snatch it away.”
“I understand that,” I say, “but I don’t think I should appear at an ile. “
“As you said. What was the verse Ifa gave you, if I may ask?”
Of course I have it now by heart, so I recite it for him.
He says, “I’m not familiar with that verse. Where did you learn it?”
“In Africa.”
“Africa. I’m envious. I always wanted to study with a Yoruba babalawo .”
Suddenly I realize what’s missing. This guy should stink of dulfana and he doesn’t. That peculiar vibration behind the sinuses, or whatever it is, isn’t there. This means that he’s either a fraud and doesn’t work any real magic at all, or he knows how to mask. It is unlikely that he’s a fraud, which means that he is a very serious player. Becoming invisible in the m’fa is hard enough; becoming invisible in the m’doli is apparently a lot harder. Uluné could do it, of course, or he would hardly have survived, but I did not expect to find the skill in Miami.
I say, “It wasn’t a Yoruba. I studied with the Olo.”
An inquiring look. Which is good. It would be bad if he knew about the Olo. What are you doing? screams the ogga in the control room. Why are you talking to this guy? Why aren’t you heading for Paducah, Moline, Provo? I ignore her; pulled by the hook, tied to the line. I explain, “The Olo claim they taught the Yoruba about the orishas long ago. In Ifé the Golden. They claim that the orishas were originally Olo, human people who became gods. They claim that in their ceremonies, the orishas come, but not mounted on people. They come themselves.”
“I see. Tell me, seńora, do you believe this?”
“I don’t know what I believe anymore. I’ve seen things in Africa that are very hard to explain except by believing this. Those wiser than I am might explain them in some other way.”
He nods, gently takes my hand. He says, “Seńora, you really should come to the ile. The way to escape this brujo is not by hiding or running anymore but by honoring the santos and obeying them. Then you will find your allies, and then you will find freedom and peace.”
A wave of stark terror. My ki is up in my throat. “You know about … um?” I croak out.
“Oh, yes. He is here and he is looking very hard for you. Who is he?”
“My husband. His name is DeWitt Moore.” I have not spoken my husband’s name in some years now, and have worked hard to keep it out of even my thoughts. And now there it is, vomited out into the dusty air of pets.
No recognition, although it is a reasonably famous name in some circles. The santero takes a receipt from a pad on the counter, scratches at it with a Bic, and hands it to me. Pedro Ortiz, it says, with an address nearby in Sowesera.
I put the slip of paper into my bag. Ortiz is beaming at Luz now. He reaches out over the counter and caresses her cheek. She doesn’t pull away as she does with most other people. Maybe I’ll trust this man. He likes children, and my husband did not. He thought the insects did a better job, locking their offspring up in cocoons until they were adults. Stupid, really, to trust, says the ogga, and serves up images of Hitler patting the cheeks of the boy soldiers, of Saddam and the little hostages before the Gulf War.
“You should come to the ile, ” Ortiz says. “We should discuss things. This is a bad thing that’s happening. Bad for you, bad for Santería.”
“How much do you know?”
“Very little, really. Rumors, feelings, a great disturbance in the currents of ashe, warnings from the orishas. Is it his child?”
“No.”
I converse with Ortiz, about Yoruba, about Africa, avoiding the details of my Olo vacation, making no commitments. I don’t tell him about the okunikua, so that there are still, to my knowledge, only two people in North America who know what it is. He suspects that I am holding something back, I see it swimming in his black eyes. These fixed on me, boring in, he says, “You know, the simple people think that we, I mean we santeros, have power over the santos, but we both know that isn’t true. We have learned to open ourselves, that’s all. The truth is, we are in their hands.” Here he clenches both of his hands into fists. “It’s frightening to be in the hands of the santos, isn’t it? We love to think we’re in control. But we do it because we know they love us and they know we love them. Even Shango, who’s so terrible when he comes. They are of God in the end, a path to God.”
I am nodding like one of those cheap dolls that people install over the backseats of their cars. I can’t stop myself. My face feels stiff. Do I have a phony smile on? He says, “But you know, there are other kinds of spirits in the orun besides orishas. The simple make the mistake of thinking that everything spiritual is good. But you know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”
“Ajogun,”I say.
His eyes close briefly and his lips move. “Yes, them. The orishas help the ashe flow and fill our hearts with peace. But the ajogun eat it. Greedy things, the ajogun. I hope you have never yourself …”
“No, never. But he has.”
“Of course. But he’s not just a brujo, is he?”
“No. I don’t know what he is. Something no one has seen in a long time, not even in Africa. I should go. I didn’t want to involve anyone in …”
He reaches out and gently grasps my hand. “We are people of the santos, so of course we are involved already. Listen to me, seńora. Pay attention to what the orisha says. That’s the only thing now. Pay attention! Come to the ile !”
But I can’t think of anything just now save escaping. It is hot and humid in pets and I can feel sweat trickling down my sides. It’s hard to breathe the thick ammoniac air. In a second I will be fainting, or falling at his feet crying, “Save me!”
Luz skips back and asks if she can have a baby chick. I am about to say no when the santero says a few words I don’t quite catch to the woman. She goes out and returns a minute or so later with a paper bag punched with holes and the top stapled shut. Luz and I peer into the holes. She is delighted.
A yellow bird.
Outside again, in the waning heat of the d
ay, the afternoon’s rainstorm turned back into humidity, Luz announces that she is hungry, and so we go next door to the Cuban coffee place for a couple of flat fruit pastries and a chocolate milk, and I have a café con leche. I am in a dilemma. I must make the sacrifice, I must find my allies, but in order to do that, it seems I will have to go to a Santería ritual, and if I do that, I will light up the m’doli like a fireball and he will know I am alive, for sure. Uluné could tell when someone he knew died, even if it was far away, and perhaps my husband has learned that trick too. Maybe all this running and hiding has been completely useless. Maybe he just hasn’t gotten around to me yet, and was waiting until chance brought him here to Miami. I sense large forces, thunderheads closing in, huge and hard like millstones. I will be ground to powder, unless Ifa is right, and I get the right allies. Magical allies, a concept unknown to mere objectivity. When you venture into the unseen world, the allies weave a circle of protection around you, a kind of sorcerous space shuttle. They don’t have to do anything, or even to know that they’re allies. This chicken probably doesn’t have the faintest idea that Ifa has picked her to guard my white ass. But you have to trust Ifa, and you have to pick them right. Not a trivial task.
“I’m going to call my chicken Peeper,” says Luz. “That’s her name.”
Some Proustian circuit closes in my head once again?the strong flavor of coffee, the heat, the peeping of the chick, a line from Ellison: “A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.” That’s from Invisible Man, and I reflect, not for the first time, that what I have been doing these last few years is a lot like what the anonymous protagonist of Ellison’s book did after his experiences on the front lines of our race wars.
In my mind, I’m in Chicago again, on the back veranda of Lou Nearing’s apartment, the top floor of a gigantic Victorian on the South Side, Fiftieth or Fifty-first, off Michigan, near the university. It was summer, hot in the afternoon, a white sky overhead, and I was looking down into the backyard, an overgrown tangle of ailanthus and honeysuckle and bindweed, with birds cheeping, and I was holding a drink, Kahlúa and cream on ice, which was my drink that summer. Lou always threw a big party on July Fourth, which was what this was. I was not, I recall, much of a party person myself at that time?this was a couple of years after my return from Siberia. I preferred to stand back and observe, sucking on drinks until oblivion approached and I could slip into an acceptably louche persona. Then I would go fairly wild, which is how I got together with Lou at another party, at which, if memory serves (and it does not), I removed my underpants during the dancing and threw them up upon a lighting fixture. He was taken in; he thought I was a fun person like him.