The Affliction
Page 16
As Javier Castillo walked back up the drive and approached the Great House, he called out to his driver to fetch the car and be ready to take Teresita into town. As Javier neared the steps to the House, the front door opened and Teresita bowed her head while asking him when he would like to have his lunch. Javier Castillo asked about Leenck and then told Teresita to go into town and bring her brother back to the House. Teresita did not look at Javier Castillo. She did not question. She had never questioned Javier Castillo or his mother in the years she worked at the Great House. She merely nodded. Javier Castillo told her the driver was waiting for her at the car and would drive her into town to get her brother. He then stepped inside, crossed the living room to the back hallway, and made his way down to the small bedroom that had once been a servant’s room many years ago before his mother had inherited the House, back when she was younger and had declared no servants were to live inside the House. Leenck had been staying there as he had become too weak to climb the long staircase to one of the bedrooms on the upper floor. When Javier told the story, he was always very careful to state that when he entered the room he noted the stillness of it. There was a quiet in the room, everything motionless and calm. Within seconds, he realized Leenck was not just lying there asleep but dead. I am fairly sure that when he first told me this he did so purely to gauge my response.
First his mother, then his aunt, and then his father, the Archbishop. But then, there, lying in front of him, another person dead. Javier Castillo knew it then without a doubt that he was studying death, that he was somehow being made to study death after the rapid succession of events over the prior six months. As he stood there, he noticed what his father had noticed, what I have noticed, that Leenck looked a great deal like him, that many of his features were the same ones he had seen in the mirror. And Javier was disturbed by this resemblance. When he first recounted this to me, this is the part that bothered him the most. He wondered if his mind were playing tricks on him, if this were not, in fact, a message from the other world. But it wasn’t a message from the afterlife. Leenck did look a lot like Javier. I noticed this the minute I met Javier. The plain truth of it was that Leenck and Javier were cousins; their fathers, brothers. The Archbishop was none other than the youngest brother of Leenck’s father, the brother who had gone missing in the Dark Forest as a small child.
Javier Castillo left the room and went to sit in his sunroom. He drank coffee and, for the first time in weeks, smoked a cigarette. He sat silently and read the newspaper, trying as best as he could to emulate a typical late morning in his life living at the Great House. Maybe a half hour later, he heard the gravel beneath the tires crunching and crackling as the car came up the drive. A few minutes passed before Teresita motioned me into the sunroom. Javier Castillo gestured to us with his right hand.
“Señor,” I said, “my sister said you requested me, but I don’t...”
“Your friend Leenck is dead.”
“He is dead?”
“Yes, Señor Flores, dead.”
The directness with which Javier Castillo announced this surprised me. It likely made him, for the first time in his adult life, realize he was much more like his father, the Archbishop, than he had ever wanted to admit. As Javier looked up, he could see the tears uncontrollably running down my face. Javier Castillo did not expect this and, without thinking, rose from his chair and offered me his handkerchief. As he did so, I began to openly sob. I cannot remember a time in my life before where I felt so completely betrayed by my own body.
“I wanted him to come see Cassie,” I said. “I wanted him to be okay.” The words came out garbled and strange as the sobs stuttered my voice and breath.
“Unfortunately, my mother was already dead when he arrived here.”
“If he had only listened. I tried to ... If he ...”
“She was already dead the morning that you arrived on the island. She was dead by the time your boat docked.”
Teresita brought a cool wet towel to me to wipe my face. She looked confused but also concerned for her only brother. Javier Castillo stood there watching the two of us. It is difficult for me to remember exactly what happened at this point, but I believe I asked Teresita to let me sit somewhere for a minute, and she took me to one of the sitting rooms off the main entry. But Javier Castillo followed and sat in an armchair across from me.
“I wish I had known you were on the island. I would have sent for you earlier.”
“So, you’re a Diaz. You are Cassie’s son?” I needed to change the subject, needed to pull myself together.
“I am Cassie’s son, but I am a Castillo, not a Diaz. I’m sorry I haven’t introduced myself. I’m Javier Castillo.”
“Diego Flores, though I guess you already know that.”
I couldn’t help staring at Javier Castillo. I couldn’t help but remember how years before, while traveling for work, I had picked up a grifter outside Los Angeles, a man who stayed with me for almost three months and then disappeared. That man spoke often of a Javier Castillo, a man who could vanish into thin air. And I knew then, as certainly as I know anything, that right then and there as I stared openly at Javier Castillo, he was this very man. The Javier Castillo in front of me with this common name had to be, nonetheless, the very same man, the same man I worried would appear in a chair in my bedroom those many years before. Of course you know he was the same man. Why else would I be telling you any of this? Of course we all know that this was the very same Javier Castillo. Another coincidence? Of course not. I wanted to laugh then, but the grief of Leenck’s death confused me, confused almost every emotion I had within me.
“I wanted to head back to the U.S. I wanted to leave him here, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t get myself...”
“Was he your lover?” Javier Castillo asked me, again with the directness of the Archbishop.
“No! He was a friend, a good friend. Nothing more. We had been neighbors in Santa Monica.”
“I am sorry. I wasn’t thinking. I just...”
“We were just friends. Nothing more, man. He was just a close friend.”
“Well, I am sorry about his passing.”
“I just didn’t expect it to happen like this. You know it is going to happen, but you don’t ever really expect it, or know exactly when it will happen.”
“Well, there is no one way, my friend.” As the words left his mouth, I wondered why Javier Castillo had called me, a man he didn’t even know, his friend. This was followed by the even more surprising: “Please stay the afternoon.”
Javier Castillo telephoned Father Juan Marquez at the Archbishop’s Mansion, and the priest assured him he would take care of everything. Men came within the hour and removed Leenck’s body. The funeral took place three days later. It was a small gathering with Father Juan Marquez saying the mass. For reasons none of us completely understood, Father Juan Marquez said the mass in Spanish. He must have recalled Leenck had been born in Spain, not far from his former boss. Or maybe he did it for Javier or for me. I am not sure. Neither of us would have cared if he had done the mass in English. He could have said the mass in Latin and none of us would have cared. Teresita insisted he said the mass in Spanish out of respect, a claim I can neither confirm nor deny. My sister and I were there at Santa Maria Estrella del Mar for the mass and the entire service, but I shed no tears that hot afternoon. When we all returned to the Great House, Teresita asked to go home to check on our father. Javier Castillo told her she could just return the following day as he didn’t need her and knew our Father was old and unwell. As she left the house, Javier went to the bar in the library, took a bottle of rum from one of the cabinets and came to join me on the back terrace, a space he apparently almost never visited, preferring instead to sit in the sunroom looking out at the gardens. From the terrace, the insistent sounds of the sea crashing against the cliff side well below the house could be heard and little else.
“Whispers. You hear that? The ocean sounds like whispers.” I said.
I wasn’t listening very closely to Javier Castillo. I wish I had been. I have replayed that moment in my head many times looking for clues but have found none, not a single one. I know he said more, something about the whispers, but I assumed then that whatever he said was somehow to poke fun at the flowery language I had just used about the ocean whispering.
“You can stay here, Diego. You don’t have to stay with your father.”
“I don’t know what to say to that. I’m not sure what the hell I’m going to do.”
“No, seriously, you can stay here. I know from talking to Teresita that you and your father don’t speak much.”
“This is true. We haven’t been on good terms for a very long time.” In that moment, I felt so incredibly tired. This was my life? This was in no way the life I had imagined even a year before. I was back where I had started, back on that godforsaken island that people foolishly fought over centuries ago with the belief there was gold and wealth here. But honestly, this was not remotely where I believed I would be. And who on earth would fight over this rock sitting in a blue-green sea now?
“Better then to stay here. It isn’t like there isn’t enough space, right?” Javier poured two glasses of rum, filled them almost to their tops, so much so that as he brought them over rum spilled over the sides of each of them.
“I want to go back to Santa Monica, but I just don’t belong there. As silly as it sounds, I don’t know where I belong.”
“Men like us don’t really belong anywhere.”
I did not question Javier’s statement then or the way he emphasized the word “belong” as he said what he said. I sat and sipped the rum. We both sipped rum until we were laughing and telling dirty jokes about the people in the town. Within an hour, the bottle of rum was empty, and the two of us were friends in a way only grief and alcohol can cement.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come looking for you sooner. I regret that now. I am pretty sure Leenck wanted to make amends with you.”
“Well, things happen . ..” As I said this, we both began to laugh, the rum now settling in to our systems.
“Yes, you are right. Things happen.”
“Man, why is it so goddamned hot here?”
“Well it is summer!” The two of us laughed some more and I opened my shirt, my skin shining with perspiration.
“Oh, what the hell.” As Javier Castillo said this, he took off his shirt altogether, his brown skin, like mine, damp with sweat.
Laughing, I removed my shirt as well. “This is like strip poker without cards,” I said. But I went a step further and took off my pants, the two of us laughing the entire time.
“Without cards!” Javier stood and took off his pants as well, the two of us now standing there in our underwear.
The two of us stood on the terrace drinking rum and laughing. The Great House was empty except for the two of us and our intermittent laughter: more jokes, more discussion of growing up in that place and the fact neither of us knew the other until then. It is funny how clearly one can remember moments like this. As we continued joking and laughing, Javier Castillo took off his boxer shorts and stood facing the sea off to the side of the house, the sunlight flush against him.
“You said men like us don’t belong anywhere. What kind of man do you think I am?” As I said this to him, I, too, removed my underwear. I laughed and stumbled as I was removing my left leg from the briefs. I barely caught myself on the edge of one of the tables before falling. And slowly, very slowly, I realized that Javier Castillo had helped to catch me and was holding my arm. “You are a man like me.” As Javier Castillo said this, he bent and kissed my forearm while fixing his eyes on me to register my response. “Just like me,” he repeated with exactly equal emphasis on each of the three words.
Months after Leenck’s funeral and that drunken afternoon, I hitched my horse at the edge of the yard. I had ridden out to the edge of the property beyond the hill and surveyed the eastern orchards. The property was larger than I had guessed as a child staring up at the Great House from the harbor. As I walked toward the Great House, I could see that Señora Grise was waiting for me on the back terrace.
“Señor Flores, Señor Castillo asked that when you came back from your ride that you review some papers he left on his desk for you in his study.”
“Thank you, Señora Grise. I’ll take a look at them after lunch. I’m starving.”
“Teresita has your lunch already prepared for you, Señor.”
As I ate my lunch that afternoon, I looked out at the gardens and beyond them to the cane fields and orchards that could be seen from this side of the hill. I couldn’t believe it, couldn’t help but wonder how any of this had happened. I was the land agent of the Estate, the Reynolds Estate, the very one I had looked up at from the town my entire childhood. Javier Castillo had not only asked me to live there at the Great House but had turned over the entire operation of the Estate to me. Part of me would never get used to that. Part of me would always be that poor boy who lived in a two-room house with his parents and sister. As I stared out the window, I caught my reflection in the glass. My eyes were a deeper shade of brown than I had remembered, dark and deep. The image of myself, poor as it was in the window, startled me.
Memories, like ghosts, were indeed everywhere on that land. And the cats, the ones everyone in the town used to eye with suspicion, the ones that had belonged to Javier’s mother, now feral, were rarely sighted on the land anymore. They had long since stopped trying to re-enter the House. I felt I had everything, which should have been a warning right then and there. I felt I had everything, even a man who gave himself over to me completely. As I sat there eating lunch and thinking about all of this, I remembered the papers Señora Grise had mentioned, and I got up quickly and went to Javier’s study to review them.
The papers on the desk, lying in a neat stack, were legal documents. As I reviewed them, I realized it was Javier’s will. As I read and read, it became clear that Javier Castillo had designated the house, the land, the rum distillery, all of it to me should he die. There were so many pages of the document I couldn’t read it carefully. I scanned through them, enough to register the request that ten percent of the estate’s earnings should go to James Reynolds, the Governor General, or his heirs, in perpetuity. I leafed through the stack of papers and then returned them to the neatly set way I found them. I wanted them, for some reason, to be as if I had never touched them. When I returned to the sunroom, I found Javier Castillo sitting there, reading the newspaper.
“Javi, I didn’t hear you come in.”
“Have you reviewed the papers?”
“I have, but...”
“I wanted you to know about them in case when I am gone there is any trouble with the Governor General.”
“But why now, Javi?”
“I need to be prepared, papi. That’s all. The lawyers filed the papers this morning.”
Practicing for death. I had heard these words and variations of them from Javier Castillo many times over the months I had lived at the Great House with him. With each strange story he told me, there was the sense he was practicing. I didn’t understand it then. In many ways, I don’t understand it now. And through the entire time I had been living there, the long-gone grifter would time and time again surface in my head. Ricardo Blanco. That was the man’s name, the one who talked and talked about a man named Javier Castillo, a man who could disappear before one’s very eyes. But in Javier’s tales, the last name Blanco was never used. There was Ricardo and Rosa, their sons Pedro and Carlos, a host of other characters. And despite many opportunities to watch Javier Castillo, not once in those months had I seen him disappear. For a brief time then, I even began to wonder if he were in fact the same Javier Castillo I had heard about almost daily in those months I had been with the grifter.
One eve
ning, maybe a week after the will had been signed, Javier Castillo requested a special dinner, French cuisine, something he almost never did. Señora Grise and Teresita were sent into town to request the chef at the lone four-star hotel come to the house to cook this meal, and he came without hesitation. Javier Castillo was in essence a Reynolds. He may not have been English, did not have the Reynoldses’ build, but he was, to the people of the island, a Reynolds now. No one, except for me and Teresita, spoke to him in Spanish.
After the elaborate dinner that evening, after the after-dinner brandy, after the surprising announcement that he would take some rum on the back terrace with me, after the said rum was consumed, Javier Castillo retired to his room. He was tired, immensely tired. Once he had taken off his clothes and gotten into bed, once I heard the click of the light switch as he turned off the lights, I opened the door that connected my room to his and entered quietly. Without a word between us, I got into bed next to Javier Castillo as I had done night after night since I began living there.
“I am surprised you asked Marcel to come cook tonight.”
“Why, papi? He is a good chef.”
“Just surprised me, that’s all.”
“Well, good! I am glad I can still surprise someone.”
“Did you ever know a man named Blanco?” The question slipped from my mouth and into the air of the room.