Changó's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes

by William Kennedy

  “Then you don’t trust me.”

  “You’re a mysterious being.”

  “I’m a simple woman. The world is complex and Narciso is brilliant. He talks with the dead and with the gods. He has saved people.”

  “You really think he talks to the gods?”

  “I do.”

  “I’d like to see him do that.”

  “Come with me.”

  “Where is this Narciso?”

  “El Rincón, a very poor place. We will go in the morning.”

  “The morning? Where are you going to spend the night?”

  “At your apartment. Is that all right?”

  “Let me think about it.”

  “Yes, you should.”

  “I’ll lend you a shirt to wear to bed.”

  “That will add to your laundry bill.”

  “Some laundry is more important than other laundry.”

  “I will sleep with you but we will not do anything together.”

  “Of course not. Not on the first date in bed.”

  “Do you love me?”

  “More than I love guns.”

  “Sex is not love.”

  “It’s something like love. Having sex is often called making love. Will you wear my shirt?”

  “Yes. But we will only sleep. I must think of Diego.”

  “Who?”

  “And I should get my beads at my house.”

  “Tonight?”

  “In the morning.”

  “What if the police are there?”

  “I will go in the back way.”

  “The police sometimes know about back doors. If they arrest you I’ll lose you for a string of beads. What beads are you talking about?”

  “My Changó and my Oshun beads.”

  “Changó. Right. The guy whose wife had no food so she fed him her ear for dinner and he killed her for it.”

  “Changó is a warrior who helps people in trouble. I am in trouble.”

  “His wife was in trouble with only one ear.”

  “I am in more trouble than that.”

  “I suppose you are. I think I am too.”

  “You will be in trouble as long as you are with me.”

  “Then that’s that. I’ll always be in trouble.”

  In her family’s eyes Renata still lived as she had been raised, a strict Catholic who went to mass and communion. But in childhood she was introduced to Santeria by Olguita, a mulata who was first the housemaid, later Renata’s nana and, through enduring closeness, her spiritual godmother. Renata listened when Olguita talked about Santeria. She gave the child Renata holy artifacts which Renata the young woman added to in abundance—statues, flowers, herbs, amulets that fended off maleficent forces, paintings of the Orishas, necklaces and bracelets with the colored beads of each Orisha—so many objects that they filled a dresser drawer and covered two walls of her bedroom.

  When she began studying art she filled another wall with her own paintings of the Orishas, and came to prefer their mystical lives and miracles to Jesus and the assorted Holy Ghosts, and those ascetic virgins who keep finding the Blessed Mother in a French meadow. The Catholic saints and their divinely nebulous arguments toward redemption offered some mystery, but they bored her. The Orishas’ mysteries arose from jealousy, disgust, pride, womanizing, love, hatred, inability to keep a secret, their powers were earthly and practical, and their miracles embraced life.

  Renata called a close friend and asked her to tell Renata’s mother in person that she was well but wouldn’t be home tonight, that she would stay at a friend’s house and they would talk tomorrow. Then Renata, clad only in pantaletas and Quinn’s short-sleeved blue shirt, which she left unbuttoned, it was hot, came to Quinn’s bed and let herself be held in his uninvasive embrace. She sobbed openly over Diego, retelling herself that he truly was dead and she would never again feel his arms around her as she now felt a stranger’s arms, offering comfort and perhaps love. She closed her eyes against this uninvited truth and as she burrowed toward sleep she was invaded by a vision of the violent struggle between Changó’s women: Obba, his wife, who cut off her ear because Oshun told her this would win Changó’s heart, and Oshun, the duplicitous Venus who controls love, money, and the river.

  Renata saw them dueling with thunderbolts and herself as both wife and mistress, traitor and betrayed—very fickle of you to admit this, Renata—but she sensed, perhaps for the first time, that this was the true way of the world. She understood it better in the morning when she awoke without tears, Quinn’s head on the pillow, his eyes on her, his arm comfortably under her shoulder blades. His fingers were curled lightly on her upper arm and she thought, he is protecting me from my dreams. “It’s a comfort the way you hold me,” she said. “You know how to hold a woman. Have you had many loves?”

  “Not when it was really love. Half a dozen? Make that two. Three. One felt like love but it was only narcissism. Serious love did arrive, but it went away.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “We don’t stay in touch.”

  “What happened?”

  “She belongs to my cousin. He’s a lunatic, but that’s no excuse.”

  “You are guilty.”

  “Is that out of fashion?”

  “Love is the fashion. Nothing else matters.”

  “Very reckless. You will do damage.”

  “Love damaged me. I never feel guilty. I believe love will save us. I learned that through San Lázaro. We will see him today.”

  They were half an hour out of Havana, Quinn driving, en route to the home of Narciso Figueroa. They had gone through Santiago de Las Vegas and were on a ragged road that Quinn feared would snag the Buick’s low-slung undercarriage. He moved slowly past scattered clusters of wooden shacks and small concrete slab houses that seemed built in a swamp.

  “I came here when I was fifteen,” she said. “It was in December, tens of thousands of pilgrims walking to the church of San Lázaro. Olguita said San Lázaro will get rid of your trouble. I told her I didn’t have any trouble. ‘You will,’ she said.”

  “You certainly learned how to acquire it.”

  San Lázaro, Renata said, the Catholic saint resurrected from his tomb by Jesus, is also the Orisha called Babalu Aye, brother of Changó. Babalu Aye was young and handsome and trying to make love to every woman in the world. Olodumare, the owner of Heaven, told him to slow down, but he kept it up, so Olodumare turned him into a leprous beggar with leg sores that put him on crutches. Two dogs followed him, licking his sores clean as they all walked the world.

  “There he is,” Renata said, interrupting herself to point out a shack with an altar displaying Lázaro-Babalu on crutches. They passed another shack, another Lázaro. “He is all over Havana, but this is his road.”

  “How did Lázaro convince you love would save you?” he asked.

  “Olguita walked me three miles to the church with the pilgrims, some on crutches like Lázaro. One barefoot man carried a sack of rocks on his back, women crawled on hands and knees, a girl no more than six moved forward on the gravel road, on her bottom, her mother saying, ‘Ven, mi hija, ven,’ and the child slid toward Mama, leaving blood on the gravel.

  “‘Why is she making her do that?’ I asked. ‘For the child’s health, she is sick,’ Olguita said. ‘Won’t she get sicker from her bleeding?’ ‘San Lázaro will heal her all over,’ Olguita said.

  “I saw a man without a shirt sliding toward the church on his back, gripping a holy rag, one ankle chained to a concrete block. When he slid backward his leg pulled the block a few inches, and he had miles to go. His back looked raw and very scarred from years of this and when I asked why he did it he looked at the sky and said, ‘My wife is alive, San Lázaro, and you did it, twenty years ago. I promised you I would wound myself if you saved her, and you did. I love you, beggar man.’ He cried terribly, and then shouted to the sky, ‘San Lázaro will never die.’”

  “And this is what you call love?” Quinn said.
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  “Cure my legs, Babalu. Don’t let my child die, Lázaro. Give a brain to my idiot son. Bring my wife back from the grave. Let me see daylight again. Cure my pox, my pain, my sores, my terror, my cancer, my nightmares. Give me back my breath, Babalu. Let me walk the world like you, Lázaro. Love will save us and remake us. Love will do what parents and doctors and spouses cannot do. Love will do it all if you take it into your soul and caress it. I wonder if I had true love with Diego. I look at you and think maybe we will have love, but maybe we are liars and neither of us knows love. In the church I asked San Lázaro how love lived in the heart of that man pulling the concrete block and he told me.”

  “San Lázaro talked to you?”

  “Yes. He said, your love can be the beggar on crutches with the dogs of love trying to heal your sickness, and still you will perish. Nobody can know what love means, or how it arrives or how it lasts, or even if it exists, because we are never free of doubt. Since I was fifteen I have practiced love and I am good at it. I create love by making it, by believing in it even when it doesn’t exist. Love can make love exist, but love cannot make itself last. All I can do is try to make love exist, and sometimes I succeed. That’s what I do.”

  Narciso lived in the smallest house Quinn had seen on this road. Renata entered without knocking and Quinn followed her into a room with paintings of godly abstractions, masks, necklaces made with the Orishas’ colored beads, jars of kola nuts, cowrie shells, coconut fragments, icons dangling from the ceiling. Shelves were full of trinkets, cigar stubs and bits of paper that Quinn decided must be venerable trash. The room exuded ancient complexity, urging him to bow before its absurd mysteries.

  Narciso, with an unlit cigar at the corner of his mouth, made an effort to rise from his wooden rocking chair and failed. He tried again, pulled himself into a standing crouch, shuffled with baby steps and trembling arms to greet Renata. His skin was a deep black, his hair tight to his head and totally white, most of his teeth absent, and he did indeed look ninety, or beyond. He glanced at Quinn and then said to Renata, “Who is this? He is carrying fire.”

  Then, with sudden agility unimaginable in that worn body, he straightened his back and lifted over his head one of six necklaces he was wearing. He waved it in front of Renata and dropped it onto a table. The necklace was four feet in circumference and strung with sixteen oval-shaped, tortoise-shell disks.

  “The fire,” he said, pointing to the disks.

  “What are you saying?” Renata asked. “This is my friend, a writer. I wanted him to see San Lázaro.”

  “He is a carrier,” Narciso said, and he spoke to Renata in a chant:“He is carrying fire and fire does burn,

  He is bearing fire and the ashes it makes,

  The dead surround and claim him as their own,

  He wears the dead like the beads of Changó.”

  Renata’s face was blank and pale, but Quinn read her blankness as cogency, concealed under a mask of innocence. She was the carrier of the dead, all those dying rebels in the forefront of her memory. She was shamming for Narciso, passing her dead on to Quinn. He watched Narciso reading Renata, and he sensed the man really might be reading the thought of another, which Quinn did not want to believe. But it has been done, hasn’t it? Telepathy isn’t quite so disreputable anymore. Somebody might legitimize it any minute.

  “What have you been doing?” Narciso asked Renata.

  “Nothing at all,” she said, “nothing.”

  Narciso threw the shells again and spoke in a language Quinn did not understand. Renata translated: “He says you are in danger and that you must avoid the murderers walking the streets.”

  “Convey my thanks and say I’ll be cautious,” Quinn said. “Does he know which streets?”

  “I give you this necklace as a shield,” Narciso said to Renata. He took from around his neck a silvery chain with miniature cast-iron tools and weapons—hammer, anvil, pick and shovel, bow and arrow, machete, two-bladed axe—and circled it around Renata’s neck. “Show these tools of the Orishas to your enemy and tell him if he harms you Changó will plunge him into a long and painful death.”

  “Changó will help and we will fight,” Renata said in the rhythm of Narciso’s fire chant:“Changó will protect me

  And we will fire the days.”

  “Changó is listening,” Narciso said.

  “My friend needs Changó’s help,” Renata said. “I would give him my beads but I cannot get to where they are. Can you give Changó to my friend?”

  Narciso stared at Quinn, who saw himself being scrutinized as a skeptic. Does Changó help skeptics? Why help you if you don’t believe in him? Narciso took another necklace of small red and white beads from around his neck, put them on Quinn and said, “He wears the dead like the beads of Changó.” Then with abrupt finality he waved them toward the door and shuffled back to his chair.

  So the theme for today will continue to be the dead, not enough of them yet. When Quinn decided to come to Cuba and write about revolution in two centuries he accepted the likelihood of corpses, but at a distance; not in the air around him, not as mental transients. Renata was flummoxed not by death but by the death of what she thought was love. Fair enough. Quinn would not face such loss unless the relationship he was creating with her melted into sorrowful time. She is driven to track what was lost, follow where it leads; and Quinn silently signed on for the ride.

  “You’re the one who wears the dead like Changó’s beads,” he said to her. “You sent me images of those corpses at the Palace and Narciso saw them, which I consider a boffo performance. I may have to start believing in something.”

  “He says to get rid of the dead. I can’t.”

  “They’ll leave when they’re ready.”

  “I don’t want them to go. They’re with me for a reason.”

  At a farmacia she called her mother who told her everybody was in nervous collapse because of her, her father was furious and hoped it had nothing to do with politics, the police wanted her to call them, and someone called twice but left only a number. Renata took the number and said, I am all right, Mama, and I will be home soon and I do not want to see the police because Changó told me this was not a good week for seeing police.

  She called the number and recognized Aurelio and he said they must find Felipe Holtz and he knew how close Renata and Felipe were. Holtz, son of sugar baron Julio Holtz, was involved in a gun deal for the Directorio but it was aborted the day of the Palace attack. Holtz is the only one who knows the gun dealer and Aurelio has no one else to send, for all who survived the Palace are known, and traitors are riding with police looking for us all. Could Renata track down Holtz? Renata said she would.

  “Why are you telling me all this?” Quinn asked. “They might kill you for revealing so much, and kill me for knowing it.”

  “They will not kill you unless I tell them to.”

  “Well that’s a comfort.”

  She called the Holtz home in Santiago and talked to Natalia, her cousin, who said Felipe was in Mexico or Caracas, expected home next week. Renata didn’t believe her.

  “If your friends are in such a hurry,” Quinn said, “I know somebody who might help.”

  “You know somebody with guns?”

  “I told you I was writing about that in Miami.”

  “Who is this person?”

  “Alfie Rivero. You ever hear of him?”

  “Never. Can he be American intelligence?”

  “Anybody can be American intelligence. Alfie’s Cuban from New York with a tie to the Trafficante mob in Tampa, which means he can get you any gun you can pay for. I dated his cousin and I met him with her. He’s the real thing.”

  “Is he in Miami?”

  “I saw him at the Nacional two days ago. He’s staying there.”

  “He will talk to you about guns? He trusts you?”

  “He won’t trust me, but I can ask a question for you. I wouldn’t do it for anyone else.”

  “Will he take a wom
an seriously?”

  “You’re an unlikely buyer, but you seem trustworthy. If you aren’t then you’re a brilliant actress and a serious liar. But don’t even think about lying to Alfie.”

  Quinn drove to El Vedado where the Hotel Nacional had been standing in its eminence since it opened in 1930. It was one of the elite addresses in Havana and the walls of its bar were covered with photomontages of celebrated guests—Churchill, the Windsors, Spanish royalty, Chaplin, Garbo, Gable, John Wayne. Since 1946, when Batista returned to Havana from Florida with Meyer Lansky in tow, Havana and its major hotel had become mob-hospitable, and Lansky and his brother Jake now ran its casino, which was probably Alfie’s reason for staying there.

  Quinn and Renata crossed the marble lobby under lofty ceilings and chandeliers and Renata said, “My father was shot here in 1933 in the civil war—after Machado’s exile. Many Americans in Havana took refuge here from anti-American mobs, and a thousand army officers retreated here to protest Batista taking over the army. Batista shelled the hotel all day and many officers died. When they surrendered many more were killed by mobs for being with Machado. My father was shot in the chest but did not die. Batista sent him to prison in the Castillo del Principe and for a week my mother thought he was dead.”

  “Revolution haunts your family. I see where you get it,” Quinn said.

  “My father would have a stroke if he knew what I was doing here.”

  They went to the patio garden with its sculpted shrubbery and its long and beautiful lawn that rolled down toward the water. They took a table and watched two peacocks move imperially under the palms near the bottom of the garden. Beyond that you looked out at the Malecón, and then the sea.

  “Order me a rum on ice. I’ll see if Alfie is around.”

  Quinn knew from Alfie’s rap sheet that he’d been arrested twice on burglary charges that didn’t stick and had done ten months for a botched dope robbery. He had no convictions after that and when Quinn met him he heard his name linked to an armed excursion by two dozen young Cuban rebels full of invasion bravado who one day disappeared from Miami and turned up on Havana’s front pages, faces and chests caked with blood, eyes wide or shot away, lying alongside their rifles on a rocky beach like a fisherman’s catch, Batista’s catch.