My life was mine to live. The answer to Imperio’s impertinent question had been a simple no. Maybe she believed me, maybe not. For all I knew, and from the glances they exchanged, she and Caridad would later discuss, reinterpret, even cast doubts on my answer. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that in my heart I knew I would not be writing any letters to Pepe Medina Ynclán. Particularly now that I’d caught Mr. O’Reilly’s eye. Maybe I’m too romantic, maybe I watch too many telenovelas. Maybe my mother was right. I didn’t care. Those looks from Mr. O’Reilly made me feel alive again. Suddenly I felt free to dream again.
And as Esperanza said in the telenovela Mil Millas Entre Nosotros (A Million Miles Between Us), what is a woman if not her dreams?
chapter ten
Imperio
I was furious. Furious! After the so- called Triumph of the Revolution, it was as if a plague had swept through Palmagria, taking with it all the decent women. Caridad was gone, Cuca Soto was gone, Azucena Martínez was gone, and I had not made any new friends. Por Dios! There was no one to replace them, no one I could trust. Graciela was definitely out of the question. She could rot in her father’s house for all I cared. She had done it to herself, and now she had to pay the price. If things had been different, maybe if she hadn’t been so cheap—quién sabe? But the way things were, with that cloud of shame hanging over her, I knew to keep my distance. It wasn’t just about me, I never much cared what people thought, but I had Mario to consider.
For a time I thought Caridad would return. How long could this son of a bitch in La Habana last? I asked myself. Everyone was wondering the same—even said as much, after they made sure all the windows and doors were shut.
“The Revolution was a success,” people started saying, “but everything after that has been a complete disaster.”
My husband, Mario, owned a restaurant at the railway station. It did a good business and afforded us a good life. But not long after the Revolution, the restaurant was nationalized, along with the trains and anything else in Cuba that smelled of money. No more private enterprise. We didn’t feel we had much of a choice. How did it happen? How did we become like those unfortunate people that sad and senseless things happen to?
Mario didn’t take it well, to say the least. He’d always liked to drink, but now he felt he had every reason. I didn’t blame him; he was heartbroken.
“Let’s just wait it out a little,” I told Mario. “Let’s see what happens with this crazy man in La Habana. Por Dios, somebody’s got to put a bullet between his eyes sooner or later, and then everything will return to normal.”
But while I was waiting for Castro’s assassination, Mario developed a very strange illness. A red rash about two inches wide erupted on his back and continued spreading until it circled around his chest. But rather than itch, the way rashes do, Mario screamed that it was tightening, like a belt or a snake. We took him to the doctor, who prescribed useless ointments while Mario could hardly get out of bed for lack of breath.
I took him to every doctor, looked for every possible explanation. I even took him to a specialist in Yara, who looked him over and over and could find no explanation.
“This is Santería,” he said, and I just looked at him, wanting to kill him. We had traveled all the way to Yara just to be told that nonsense.
Finally Mario’s mother, Liliana, insisted that we take him to see El Haitiano, a man from Jacmel who practiced some superior sort of Santería that was said to be very effective. I had heard about him. Everybody was always talking about El Haitiano in those days. I was never the kind of woman who believed in Santería or any of that voodoo nonsense. My family always looked down on that sort of thing, because, truth is, those are the beliefs of the very poor—you know, the same people who play the lottery. I’m not saying we were wealthy. The restaurant afforded us a comfortable life. I didn’t have to work, I had help with the house, a girl who came in to clean and do the wash. I was never the kind of person who needed fancy things, but I could buy what I wanted. We even took vacations to Playa Girón twice a year. And we did it without offerings to the saints or buying lottery tickets. It just wasn’t in me to believe those sorts of things. We had what we had because of hard work. Although my mother- in- law would argue that point.
But Mario’s condition got so bad that there were times when I thought he wouldn’t make it through the night. He’d wake up gasping for breath and would actually roll off the bed. He would lie on the floor, his face turning colors I had never seen before on a human being, pounding his fists hard on his chest while I desperately tried to help him.
“Mario, por Dios,” I shouted, shaking him. It looked like he was dying. I was not about to let him die and have his mother giving me the evil eye for the rest of my life.
“An ounce of faith is worth a pound of priests,” Liliana said. To tell you the truth, at that point I was willing to try anything. Anything!
*
EL HAITIANO LIVED OUT IN THE COUNTRY, off the main highway, in an area that couldn’t be reached by car. In fact, there were no roads at all where he lived. We were told to follow the Aguadulce River to his house. Liliana arranged for a friend, Genarísimo, to drive us to the designated spot on the highway. But he just left us there, frying in the sun.
“Imperio,” Genarísimo said, “I can’t leave my car here in the middle of nowhere.” I understood. There was a very good chance that the car could get stolen or gutted for parts. But what was I going to do? Mario could hardly walk. We’d had to carry him to the car, and even though he had lost a lot of weight, he was still a heavy man.
To my relief a boy of about twelve, pushing a wooden gurney, met us there.
“Are you here to see El Haitiano?” he asked.
We laid Mario down on the gurney and started our bumpy walk though the sweltering foliage. I felt as if we were traveling deep into the primeval jungle. Even though it was early in the day, the heat was already unbearable. Insects of every shape and size attacked us. At times the vegetation was so thick that the boy, whose name was Chevy, had to stop and cut through with a machete.
It was slow going, with Chevy pulling and me pushing over thick roots that grew in the footpath, and then stopping to cut branches and weeds. There were parts where the soil was wet and soft and the wheels sank in and we had to lift and pull at the same time. After what seemed like an eternity but if you think about it was probably less than an hour from the highway, I started to hear the strangest sounds. I immediately wanted to turn around. I stopped.
“Espera,” I said to Chevy. Wait.
I think he could see the fear in my eyes.
“No falta mucho,” he said. We’re almost there.
I looked at Mario, who hadn’t said a word. His chest was heaving as if it wanted to break open. I had come this far, but what had I been thinking? What had I gotten us into? If Chevy was right, there was no point in turning back. What would I say to Liliana? I would never hear the end of it. I nodded, and Chevy started pulling again and I, pushing.
Not much later we came to a clearing. All the thickness of the jungle opened up on a small, brown shack surrounded by a wire fence. The front yard of the shack was a combination of flat dirt and trenches. The trenches were full of brown water. Scattered around the holes at least a dozen crocodiles seemed to be sleeping.
I remembered Liliana mentioning that El Haitiano worked with their blood. The thought of it disgusted me.
The place had the creepy feeling of an abandoned gypsy camp, a place where anything could happen. Anything! Again, I wanted to turn right around and take Mario home, but when I looked at him, thin and pale, I knew I had to keep moving forward. I also remembered I didn’t want to face his mother, who had wanted to come along. She had ranted and raved when we left her behind. But it had been a good decision not to bring her, or we would have needed two gurneys, one for Mario and one for her.
Liliana had always been a strong, practical woman. She was as firm in her Catholic faith as in her faith i
n the Santeros. But she held the love of her country above all else. She believed that Cuba, even with all its problems, was the best possible place in the world.
“This is the Pearl of the Caribbean,” she liked to say.
I had never heard her say a word against Batista or any of the previous dictators. Of course she had always been well cared for.
She got to stay home and give money to the Catholic charities and to the Santeros, and left the rest up to God and the saints.
“I have no use for politics,” she’d say. “Machado, Batista, Grau, Prio, Batista again—as long as they leave me alone, it’s all the same to me.”
Then when Fidel Castro took to the mountains and his face started appearing almost daily in the newspapers, she took a sudden turn. One afternoon while sitting on the front porch, she pointed at his picture.
“Look at him, Imperio. Doesn’t he remind you of Jesus Christ?”
I will admit that in those days Castro’s face, desiccated by months of starving and marching in the mountains, had the clear- eyed look of a hermit monk’s. As far as I was concerned, that’s where the similarity ended. But Liliana, driven by a revolutionary zeal that bordered on lunacy, sold bonds to raise money for the Revolution, an activity that was punishable by firing squad without trial. Mario had been worried to death, because she kept the illegal bonds in her underwear drawer.
“You’re insane,” Mario told her over and over again. “If they find out, we’re all as good as dead.”
Even I tried to reason with her.
“Por el amor de Dios, Liliana, we could lose everything,” I said. “Everything!”
Liliana would just click her tongue at us and continue out the door to see how many of her friends she could embroil in her clandestine activities. Even with her legs stiff from arthritis, she’d hobble from door to door and try to get her cronies involved.
When that son of a bitch in La Habana came down from the mountains in victory, no one was more excited than Liliana. It was her own personal victory, and she savored it like a juicy mango.
“Didn’t I tell you?” she chirped happily from the wooden rocking chair she kept right next to our radio. She spent all of her free time sitting on that chair, her back bolstered by a pillow, listening to the speeches of the rebels, as well as to the trials that were now being broadcast daily.
“He’s a messenger from God, come to save the poor,” she insisted, her eyes glowing with fanaticism. Even when things started to change for the worse, even after Mario lost the restaurant, she remained strong in her support of the Revolution.
It ate away at me like you wouldn’t believe that she could be so stubborn. She could see as well as any of us that the increasingly oppressive regime was killing her only son. But she refused to see the connection between Castro’s triumph and Mario’s condition.
“Go to El Haitiano and see what happens” was all she said. She had heard about El Haitiano from one of her church friends and that was all the proof she needed that the man could work miracles.
*
SO I FOUND MYSELF in that bizarre place full of crocodiles in the middle of a swamp with a half- dead man while she sat by the radio, happily listening to Castro’s latest delusion and congratulating herself on the triumph of the Revolution and worrying her rosary beads to dust.
I ignored my fears and inched closer to the shack. Suddenly the crocodiles began to crawl toward the shack as if to protect it. I could hear the chirping sounds of the jungle, the roaring of a river, the wind through the branches of the trees that surrounded us. In spite of the heat, I felt cold; the sweat that was pouring out of me felt like freezing rain.
“Imperio, take me home,” Mario said. They were the first words he had said since we left. Most of the time he was coming in and out of consciousness. I could only imagine what he must have felt, lying on that wooden gurney, completely helpless. And with just me to protect him.
“Tranquilo” was all I could think to say, for my mind was shutting down, my thoughts were coming to me thick and lazy from exhaustion and fear. I missed Caridad so much. She would have come with me. My mind was so weak that I even wished Graciela had come with me. That’s how desperate I felt.
After dropping us off and collecting a tip, Chevy had left. I was suddenly aware that I was alone with Mario, who by now was really of no use at all. The sun began to feel even hotter on my uncovered head, and I felt a strong wave of nausea cloud my eyes.
Just then the door to the shack opened and a small, brown man with shoulder- length hair, neatly dressed in white, was fearlessly walking past the crocodiles the way you would walk through a flowering garden.
“Bienvenidos,” he said, with a strange French accent. It was as if he’d been expecting us. The man opened a small gate, walked up closer, and glanced down at Mario, whose pale face had become flushed and alarmingly red from the heat.
“Don’t worry, brother,” El Haitiano said to Mario in a kind of singsongy voice, patting Mario’s shoulder. “Don’t worry about anything.”
With that he looked up at me and smiled.
El Haitiano had a kind smile; it made his brown, leathery face crinkle around his eyes, but I had my eyes on the big, ugly lizards.
“You don’t expect us to go in there,” I said, my voice loud and strong.
“Come with me,” he said. Mario struggled to get up, and El Haitiano helped me get him to his feet. He took hold of Mario from one side and I from the other. Mario’s back felt unfamiliar. I could feel his bones where there had always been muscles. What will I do without you? I wondered. I’ll be stuck with that crazy old woman and that voice on the radio.
Mario was wobbling, hardly able to place one foot in front of the other. His body was weighing down toward the ground, as if he just wanted to fall, as if he didn’t have the strength to remain upright for one more second.
To my relief El Haitiano directed us away from his shack, toward the river. We half pushed, half carried Mario. And there, on the peaceful and sunny bank of the Aguadulce, with the soft rumbling of the waters behind us, El Haitiano cured my husband. To this day I don’t know how he did it, and I don’t care. As they say, if you knew what the river carries, you would never drink the water.
I watched as he took a large, smooth- edged knife and dipped it in the river. Then slowly, without actually cutting the flesh, he pressed the blade against Mario’s rash, creating a cross while at the same time dividing the rash in two. He dipped his finger into a small vial of blood and dabbed at the rash exactly where the knife met the skin.
Mario let out a deep howl, and tears poured out of him. But he hadn’t been cut or harmed in any way, it was just the simple contact of the blood upon his skin. Still, I was alarmed. I had never seen him cry. I had heard him say horrible words and seen him throw things across a room. Of course—he was a man after all. But cry? Never.
“What are you doing?” I asked El Haitiano.
“Shhh . . . crocodile blood. Very powerful,” El Haitiano whispered to me. “It’s helping to drain the poison out of his soul.”
What poison, you fraud? I wanted to say. Instead I nodded, pretending to understand, to believe that something as common as crocodile blood had any sort of power over a man’s soul. He must have read my mind, because he looked at me and said, “Crocodiles attack each other all the time. Like the humans, they are territorial. They tear each other apart, gaping wounds, missing limbs, just for a piece of land. They live in mud and filth, but they never get infections, they heal very fast. Something in their blood protects them.”
“Por Dios,” I said.
“But crocodile blood alone cannot heal your husband,” he added.
El Haitiano took my hand and asked me to pray with him. I could feel one of my eyebrows involuntarily arch with skepticism, but I prayed. I prayed like I never had before, intoning novenas and supplications I hadn’t uttered in years. And then the snake began to disappear, to fade from my husband’s flesh, and a few moments later, it had vani
shed completely. Mario opened his eyes, still weak from everything that had gone on before, and looked around. When he looked at me, he smiled. He was breathing without effort. I could tell from his face that the pain was completely gone.
“I felt it happen,” Liliana said when we got home. “I was getting too nervous here in the house, so I went to church. It was empty, just me and my rosary beads, and I tell you, I felt it. I felt the release, and I knew my son would survive. Look, I’m getting chicken skin just telling you!”
Mario’s affliction, I learned, was called La Culebra. It was a common curse that can actually strangle a person to death. I had never before believed in the curses of the Santeros. I chose instead to believe that it was just another of the countless superstitions that abounded in Palmagria, supported by tales made up to frighten ignorant people and to keep their lives in the hands of others.
But that morning by the Aguadulce River opened my eyes.
I was more than impressed by El Haitiano’s miraculous abilities. If anyone could bring people back to life, I said to myself, this was the man.
As we were leaving, he took me aside and told me to pay very close attention.
“While I was working on Mario I had a very disturbing vision,” he said. “La Culebra is the work of bad magic. Someone is trying to harm you.”
“I don’t have any enemies,” I said. “Who would do something like that?”
He looked away. “There is a way out, but you’re resisting. Mario could get very sick again, and maybe the next time he won’t be so lucky. Sometimes even the crocodiles can’t help.”
I searched my mind but could think of no one. Truth is, there were people who didn’t care for us, but not to such extremes. Just recently we’d had a bit of a struggle with our next-door neighbor over the building of a fence between our properties, but that had been settled somewhat amicably. And Mario did have the tendency to tell people the truth when he’d had a few drinks. But that sort of thing went on all the time with lots of folks. People loved Mario. They loved him! When word had gotten around about his illness, many stopped by the house with gifts of eggs and cheese, and to offer their help.
Tomorrow They Will Kiss Page 14