I spin around to see the beauty that is Doña Garcià standing in the doorway with the moonlight spotlighting her like a Broadway actress I had seen once on the television. She shuts the door and comes to me, shouting and crying. What have you done, she asks me. Who are you and what am I doing here? I won’t deny my little boy’s disappointment to hear that she didn’t even know that I existed, that she doesn’t even know my name. She grabs me by the wrist and tears me away from the body of her son. I try to explain to her that I am an admirer, I live here with Father and have loved her for quite some time. I came because he refuses to let me have my future read and that is all that I want.
“Your future read?” she scolds. “You come here to have your future read?” She drags me toward the door, threatening my shoulder out of its socket, but stops when we pass the small card table. She throws down my arm and I fall to the floor in tears. She goes to the table and leans over it. I am terrified of what she is going to do to me, petrified of what Father will do when he discovers that I sneaked out to come here. At the same time, I can’t help but notice that she is not wearing underpants beneath the shortness of her skirt and a quick flutter of heartbeat excites me. Then she turns back to me with horror on her face. “Did you touch my cards?” she asks. She whispers those words, the words that will haunt me for years to follow, worse than the disappearance of Father from our hut nearly a dozen years later, as though there is someone listening she does not want to hear them.
“Yes, Ma’am. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
Then, she laughs, so hard that she has to curve her body back to let it out smoothly. It only horrifies me more. “You want your future read, boy? Come here!” I stand up and go to the table. “Do you know what these are?” she points at the cards and I shake my head. “These cards were not to have been read, you stupid little bitch. They’ve gone sour.” And then she tells me my future. I dream this scene every time I sleep and, every time, I wake before she tells me what is to come to me. Only, in my dreams, Doña Garcià is not the beautiful young woman I am in love with as a boy, she is a haggard old bony thing with skin hanging off her body like drapes, with ugly bristles of hair atop her head crawling with red-eyed insects. Her apartment is a cave dripping with stale water and squirming with nubile cockroaches and spiders the size of my head. The old bed is an altar on which her son is crawling with those same hungry insects. The card table, though, the card table is always unchanged from what it was. I wake fortunate enough not to hear her damning words, a prediction too miserable for me to relive night after night. But it is, after all, why I’ve come back here. To keep it from coming true.
* * *
When I wake I notice that the sun is already going down. My back aches but I feel refreshed, widely awoken before my eyes even open. I let the dream fade and then I sit up. I think the words, I’m coming for you. And then I see that there is a woman sitting at the foot of my bed with her back to me. At first I think it must be Elizabeth Hesse, but the frame is all wrong. The hair is all wrong. And then she turns. It is the woman I met on the train last night, the one who got drunk on tarot sours. She doesn’t realize yet that I’m awake. I can’t imagine how she could have found me, but I have a few guesses as to why she’s come here. Most of them are simply the manifestations of the fantasies I’d derived watching her move on the train. She’s a beautiful woman, but as she turns to look at me I see that she still wears that beauty like a woman who either doesn’t know she has it or thinks she doesn’t deserve to know it.
“Good morning,” she says as she stands up from the bed.
“Can you hand me my pants?” I ask. “Or would it be more efficient if I just kept them off?” I sit up and scoot back to lean against the headboard. I check to make sure the bedroom door is closed. She smiles shyly and leans over, picks up my jeans and tosses them at me. I slide out of the covers and pull them on without standing. “How did you find me?” I ask her.
“The hotel was full. I described you to the woman behind the desk. She remembered you. Mrs. Hesse let me in, I told her I’m a coworker.”
“Mm. And what are you doing here? I think I remember you saying that you’re married.”
“I am. Though I never said happily. But that’s really got nothing to do with why I’m here.”
“So why?”
“I want to hear more about what you’re doing here. You said you were looking for someone. Someone who wanted to kill the General. You said something about Asam Cifezzo.”
I tell her all there is to tell. That Father raised me preaching about the teachings and tenets of the thirteenth century Italian philosopher, Asam Cifezzo. That he was—obsessed was the wrong word so I choose preoccupied—preoccupied with the belief that the world is slowly ending. That it is an animal caught in its own death throes and acting irrationally, and we all have only two choices, to help it die or to help keep it alive. Years ago I was separated from Father when, for some reason unknown to me, he left in the middle of the night without a word. It is Father I am seeking, and I am seeking him for two reasons. First, that in the years between then and now, the years after he had left me, I spent my life researching Cifezzo and had discovered something that I absolutely needed to discuss with him.
“What was it?”
“What was what?” I ask her.
“What you learned about Cifezzo? Your father abandons you twenty years ago and it takes something about an eight hundred year old philosopher to send you looking for him?”
I think about telling her what I discovered. The truth was that it took me nearly all of this twenty-year interim just to discover what it is about Cifezzo that I had been seeking. And it is only after finally finding it that I am able to begin searching for Father. Instead I tell her, “The second reason I am trying to find him now is because I’ve come to believe that he was right about the world coming to an end, and that he was also right about the fact that General Anselmo is trying to hasten it along.” The woman gives a funny little smirk and looks down at the floor. “His aim all those years ago was to hunt down the General and kill him. He obviously never achieved it. I don’t know what happened to him, but I want to help him. And—I miss him.”
She thinks for a long moment. I stand up and I go to where she’s standing. I can smell her, she smells like sweat and sex. I lean down and pick up my shirt, pull it on over my head, then pick up my socks and sit on the edge of the bed to put them on. Finally she says, “I found Asam Cifezzo.”
I laugh. “What do you mean, you found him?”
“Last night, after the train broke down, I got off and I walked here, through the woods. There was a cabin, out about an hour north of here. Obviously, he can’t be the real Cifezzo. But, if he goes by the name, he probably knows something about the man.”
“You found Asam Cifezzo,” I repeat.
“I can take you there now,” she offers. She goes to the window. I notice a small flap of black cloth sticking out of her back pocket.
“I can’t now. There’s something I need to do before I leave. When I get back—”
“No, I’m leaving on the next train. I don’t even really have time to take you to the cabin but I will. If I have to sit around and wait to go… There’s no way I could explain my lateness to my boss.”
“And who’s your boss whose work is so important that you can’t be a day late?”
I stand up after slipping on my shoes and I start loading my pockets back up with everything I’d emptied out onto the bed table. “General Anselmo,” she tells me.
I pause for an instant, though I’m sure it’s long enough of a jerk for her to have seen it, then I continue placing my change, my wallet, in my pocket, start wrapping the band of my watch to my wrist.
“You work for the General.”
“The General’s my father.”
I take in a deep breath and consider my options only to realize I have none. Had I told her that I was here to kill him? Did I explicitly use the wor
d ‘kill’? I am pretty certain that I did. “An hour north, you said? I should be able to find it myself. Annie, you said, right? Thank you.”
I walk past her and out into the hall. She calls after me as I begin stepping down the stairs, “I won’t say anything. I’ll be there when you come. I’ll be waiting.”
* * *
The town has always been a peaceful thing at twilight. An animal curling into its own tail to find a few hours of serenity before the heat and dryness of the day send it wandering again. I think of what Annie the General’s daughter told me, that she had found Asam Cifezzo here in the woods. I have to laugh at the simplicity with which she has done something that I have spent twenty years trying to do. After reading Father’s farewell letter, I sit on our bed and cry for hours until the sheet of parchment is nothing but a pool of fibers and pulp at my feet. When I am able to compose myself I return to the elder and ask him if he knows where Father might have gone. He of course says that he has no idea, and I have no reason not to believe him. I inform him as respectfully as I can that I will be leaving the village and thank him for all of his service and help over the past dozen years. Later that afternoon, I pack what little I have back at my hut and begin hiking through the jungle toward the closest major city. From there I take a flight to Buenos Aires where I board a flight that takes me to Italy.
It is there that I spend half a dozen years hunting down the most well respected professors and scholars of Italian history, philosophy, and metaphysics in search of any insight there might be into the teachings of Asam Cifezzo. It is only toward the second half of the sixth year that a professor from the University of Turin, a man whom I had seen many times over the years for advice, translation, or simply a morsel of wisdom on where to search next, calls me and says that he has recently caught wind of a small, private symposium that was held earlier that year in Hamburg. I thank him profusely and take the first train there, though the professor hadn’t been able to give me a more precise location, nor the name of the host of the symposium or any other information other than that he believed he had heard that one had been held.
It takes me three more years to track down the secretary of the man who held the symposium, a gorgeous Swede (the secretary, not the man who held the symposium) who sleeps with me rather eagerly after informing me that her boss, who had passed away just weeks before I find his office, had held the symposium with an open invitation to any other interested academics on the topic of solar flares and the physical and metaphysical effect the sun and moon have on the earth and its inhabitants. The name Asam Cifezzo, she believes, had been mentioned by her boss over the phone once in her presence. Only one man had attended the symposium, an American scholar who lives in New York. She has his information on file and she gives it to me while she strips herself of her lederhosen and tosses them across her desk. I continue seeing the Swedish girl while trying to get in touch with the American, and so in the meantime I am able to ask for her boss’s phone records that, as with everything else, she gives to me eagerly. Later, when I am able to get through to the man in New York, he tells me that yes, while he did attend the symposium, the name Asam Cifezzo had never come up, and he had, in fact, never heard the name before.
I spend another year going through the Swede’s employer’s phone records in what seems from the beginning like a futile attempt at finding whomever he had spoken to about Cifezzo, while sleeping with her whenever my mind or body sent word to the other that it needed a distraction. Though neither of us believes I will ever find the man and that I will spend the rest of my life in Hamburg sleeping with the Swedish secretary, the fates smile and after a year I find him. He is living here in Germany, a professor at a nearby university, a scientist who specializes in solar flares but who’d had prior obligations the week of the symposium and could not attend. He tells me that no, he knows nothing about Asam Cifezzo, but his friend, the Swedish girl’s boss, did mention the name on several occasions. All he can tell me is that his friend had frequently expressed an interest in the philosophy of this man Cifezzo, and that he had spent the last three years of his life trying to track down a man in the Dominican Republic who was said to be the one and only expert on him. I thank him, and then I kiss my Swede goodbye.
After another two years of searching the Caribbean islands for some news of this expert, I manage to set up a meeting with a man named Gustav, who is living in a cloistered villa estate on the outskirts of a dusty farming village on the island of San Marco di Paolo. He is a black market arms dealer as well as a scholar whose interests remain in philosophies concerning the sun, particularly those of a man named Asam Cifezzo. I approach his bamboo-thatched building eagerly, sidestepping around a group of sun-darkened children playing some variation of soccer with a ball of guava rinds stitched to the skull of a wild cat. I knock and enter upon the muffled entreaty to let myself in. The room is dark but for a single window uncurtained at the back that spills the hot tropical sun onto Gustav, who is sitting at a thin table built from ocean flotsam, bent over a wide leather-bound text. He waves at a seat across from him after taking a quick peek through the upper halves of his bifocals. I come and join him at the table and I inspect his book. The dry, yellowed pages of parchment loosely strung to the spine of the chipping leather hide. The ink is in a script I can’t recognize, and mostly faded into ghostly ciphers.
He explains to me that he sells weapons merely as a financial venture, to earn money to keep his estate and to continue researching those things with which he keeps himself truly occupied. He explains that he is a brother in a fraternal order of conjurors, of wizardly magicians. Not the glittered petty prestidigitators, the entertainers who use sleight of hand and suggestion to mock their audience and mimic magic. But one of the few tuned to understand and manipulate the rarified forces of the universe, forces that bind atoms and spin electrons. I ask him to tell me about Asam Cifezzo and he laughs, he shuts his book and sends up a plume of dust. He says, “I am in a dangerous line of work. I cannot survive by trusting everyone who comes to me asking for a favor. Work for me, three years, and I will tell you what I know about Asam Cifezzo.”
I agree, and I spend three years trafficking weapons and cocaine to Chinese businessmen and Arab terrorists and a small conglomerate of elitist French survivalists who believe themselves to be the chosen few who will survive the coming apocalypse. At the end of those three years, I go back to Gustav and I ask him again, “Tell me what you know about Asam Cifezzo.”
From his briefcase he pulls a small folder containing a glossy photograph, which he places on the table and slides to me. After fifteen years, I find myself sitting in a shithole that stinks of goats and staring at a picture of Father wearing a military uniform and standing in front of a towering twist of steel that stands on the edge of a cliff overlooking a great sea. “General Anselmo is an American general currently operating a Cannery in southern California. He uses the alias of Signor Asam Cifezzo in select circles, though the purpose for that, I do not know and don’t particularly care. Under the name Anselmo, he purchases a rather large quantity from me every few years of assault rifles and explosives. And that is all I know about Asam Cifezzo.”
I tell him, “I didn’t come to you looking for information on the alias of one of your clients. I came looking for information on Asam Cifezzo, the thirteenth century Italian philosopher who believed that he had gained all the knowledge of the universe by trading eyes with the sun for an afternoon, who believed that the world will be coming to an end soon and when it does, it will twist the laws of physics like a scared animal fighting for its life.”
Gustav only looks at me slyly. “If that’s why you came to me, you must know that I specialize in cult religions and philosophies of the dark ages. I am sorry to tell you, no Italian philosopher has ever gone by that name. There is little that I do not know. Knowledge is not a matter of discovery or invention. It’s a matter of knowing where to look and how to bind the tatters of a secret hidden amongst dozens o
f books into a unified whole. And as far as I know, there never has been a man by the name of Asam Cifezzo, except for—” He taps the photograph with one long, yellow fingernail, and then he leans back in his chair.
* * *
From the island of San Marco di Paolo, I take a plane to southern California, and from there a train back to the town in which I had been born. I stop briefly at that twisting steel spire on the edge of a great coast, graced with the mercy of Gustav who, pleased by my years of service, sends me in his place to discuss the General’s demands for the upcoming year. I study the man as I speak to him. At his tired eyes, his fattened cheeks, and the crackle of ivory dice in the cup of his withered fingers and splintered joints. And no, I decide, this is not Father after all. A shard, perhaps, split from the same soul as Father. But twisted by a different life, by more unfortunate decisions, and with more perverse intentions.
And now I stand with the moon rising off beyond the slopes of the dunes, watching Father Benjamin Johns sitting on his sofa in a dark living room picking at his dinner. I remember an old story Father used to tell me, after he had taken me to South America, a story about how he was once presented with a decision so difficult that the only way for him to make it was to simultaneously choose both options. And by doing so, he had split himself physically in two. It happens once more after the first time, though one of those is murdered shortly after as a result of the decision that produces them; a crime of passion, a murder of lovers. I had always dismissed it as a parable of sorts, a lesson that you can’t have everything you want without giving up something great. But staring at him now through his window, I know that he is not the man Gustav showed me in that photograph. He is not the man I had spoken with just the day before. Close enough to be twins, but I had spent a dozen years living with him and I know my Father from an imposter.
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