Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (23 page)

“No kidding. Funny place to meet.” He peered at my father, was puzzled by his frank and friendly face, and lowered his eyes. “None of my business,” he added.

“Let me go get a doughnut,” I said.

“No. It’ll just be a little bit longer.”

“You keep saying that! Let me go get a doughnut.”

“No.”

“I’ll be okay.”

Francisco moved to the window to evaluate the journey. It was roughly a block to the coffee shop. I would have to cross one airport intersection. But there was a light and the only traffic seemed to be slow-moving buses and vans. Otherwise it was easy—a straight line.

“Okay.” Francisco gave me a five-dollar bill. “Get yourself a chocolate doughnut and a soda. Also
get
me a black coffee and two packets of sugar. Although it won’t be the honest sugar of Havana,” he added with a feeble smile. Earlier he had tried to distract me from my fatigue and hunger with stories about Cuba. I had expected to hear thrilling accounts of fighting with Fidel’s revolutionary army against the invaders; instead I heard about sitting on porches and drinking espresso and of cutting sugarcane in the field with happy peasants who were being taught how to read. To me his stories were a letdown. His time in Cuba either sounded too similar to being with our relatives in Tampa or it sounded like a fairy tale about a place where the good king is beloved by all the people for his generosity. I knew my reaction would reveal my embarrassing political ignorance and naiveté—the thoughts of a bourgeois American boy—so I suppressed them. Francisco told many details about harvesting the beautiful sugarcane, including how if you peeled it and chewed the softer interior, a moist liquid was released that tasted sweet. “When I visited Havana at about your age, I used to chew it. The candy bar of the poor, Cousin Pancho called it. And the kids in Cuba still do. I saw them when I volunteered to help in the fields. I saw a gang of kids ask one of the cutters and they shared it on their way home.”

“Give you cavities,” I said with solemn disapproval.

“No, no. It’s not like processed sugar. The sugar of the sugarcane is pure. Doesn’t bother your teeth or make you fat.”

“Really?” I asked and was again assured of the cane’s innocence. It really was a fairy tale kingdom, I decided. The sugar didn’t even rot your teeth.

Crossing the intersection was a breeze and I was glad—unaccountably glad—to be alone. My father’s unending talk about Havana, about my height, the relentless self-consciousness of being with him was exhausting. I bought myself a thick chocolate doughnut and was quite happy with its unnatural sweetness.

My father enjoyed his coffee, too. “Ah,” he smacked as he finished it. “Not your grandmother’s coffee. But I feel refreshed. You were right. We needed something.” He squinted at the gray airport roads. “He’s late,” he commented anxiously. “We have plenty of time,” he added, but sounded unconvinced.

I fell asleep leaning against the wall. The weight on my eyes felt especially heavy, so heavy I couldn’t open them when I heard a voice penetrate my dreams, a voice I thought I had forgotten, and that I wasn’t happy to hear. It was the man I discovered in our old Washington Heights hallway, the Asturian who had brought my father’s letter to my mother. He was grinning and telling me that message again, or trying to, only his mouth was full of gooey, oozing sugarcane. I struggled to open my eyes.

I woke up to see him, the real Asturian, standing beside my father (actually dwarfed by my father) and studying my face doubtfully. He wore a brand-new blue pin-striped suit, with a white shirt and a blue tie. He was little and looked littler in this outfit, a man stuck into a box of fabric with a hole for his head. I noticed and remembered because Francisco made a fuss about it.

“Pablo!” Francisco smacked the Asturian on the shoulder with his hand and let it linger while his fingers squeezed with affection. “You’re dressed like the chairman of the board of ITT,” he continued. “I don’t know whether to shoot you or ask for a job.”

Pablo ducked his head and smiled sheepishly, both pleased and embarrassed. He answered in Spanish and I understood that he said something about looking respectable for the authorities. He specified which authority but I didn’t know that word. It must have had to do with getting a passport for me since that’s what he produced from his pocket, a pale green object, somewhat larger than a wallet, with the word PASSPORT in embossed gold letters and below it, also embossed in gold, the bald eagle, head turned ominously sideways to fix us with one eye, clutching arrows in its left talon and an olive branch in its right one. E PLURIBUS UNUM was written on a ribbon streaming from its mouth, and beneath the fearsome bird,
United States of America
was impressed in gold script.

“Mira,”
Pablo said, opening it.

I scurried over to see what he showed my father. It was page four, mostly blank except for this on top—

THIS PASSPORT IS NOT VALID FOR TRAVEL TO OR IN COMMUNIST CONTROLLED PORTIONS OF

CHINA

KOREA

VIET-NAM

OR TO OR IN

ALBANIA

CUBA

A PERSON WHO TRAVELS TO OR IN THE LISTED COUNTRIES OR AREAS MAY BE LIABLE FOR PROSECUTION UNDER SECTION 1185, TITLE 8 U.S. CODE, AND SECTION 1544, TITLE 18, U.S. CODE.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Shh,” my father said and clumsily pulled both me and Pablo away from the package counter. From the moment Pablo joined us, we had the clerks full attention. He leaned forward to get a look at the object that so interested us; he could easily see it was a passport.

I thought my father was inept at how he reacted to the clerk’s scrutiny. He backed us out of the anteroom and onto the airport road. We left without watching where we were going. A taxi honked at us. We had to scurry away as it passed, missing us by inches. I looked down at my feet to make sure they weren’t squashed. During my nap, the sunny winter day had become a raw, foggy night. A heavy mist oozed moisture, a fine drizzle. We were quickly covered by a sheen of water. We hustled under a covered sidewalk leading to the terminal. I looked back. The clerk stared after us, not amused at our comic departure.

“That was dumb,” I said to my father. “Now he’s watching us. You should have acted like it wasn’t anything special.”

Pablo laughed. He had a row of tiny bottom teeth; two were black. “Sam Spade,” he said and rumpled my hair. His fingers smelled of tobacco.

“Nevertheless, Rafael is right.” My father straightened and appeared loftily unconcerned. “Let’s walk casually into the terminal.”

There were molded plastic seats in the Trans World Airlines terminal. I had never seen that kind before and I was amused that their slippery surface caused me to slide right off. I had to make an effort not to fall to the floor.

Pablo took out a
Daily News.
He spread it open in front of him, the passport concealed inside, so that to an observer he and my father appeared to be studying a news item together. I couldn’t see that well from my angle, but I could tell they were looking at a small black and white photograph stapled inside the passport. It was of a boy, a boy who had dark hair like mine and a nose like mine and high cheekbones with deep-set wide-apart eyes that also resembled the general look of my face. But my prospective doppelgänger had spread his mouth into a smile for the photographer, a broad goofy smile that revealed a missing front tooth. A tooth that I certainly still had in my head.
“Coño,”
my father said as he looked at me and then returned to the photograph.

“Let me see,” I said, trying to climb onto my father. I was too big for his lap. I leaned across his body and rustled the
Daily News.
“Is that supposed to be me?” I asked, I guess too loudly, because Francisco shushed me and Pablo groaned.

“Now
you
are not careful,” he said.

“Well, I have all my teeth,” I whispered with so much intensity that my father shushed me again. “And he has too much hair.”

“Your hair could have been …” Pablo used the fingers of his right hand to imitate a scissor cutting. Half the
Daily News
began to unfurl and he grabbed for it.

“Oh, right,” I said. And then I cried out with inspiration: “And I’ll keep my mouth closed!”

They shushed me. My father seemed quite angry this time. “How many times do I have to tell you? Don’t shout.”

“Sorry.” I slunk back onto my seat. “But he doesn’t look like me,” I said, having had a closer inspection. The resemblance was superficial. His face was narrower than mine, his eyes were almost in shadow they were so far back, and his nose was fatter, more squashed.

“Listen.” My father took hold of my bicep. His fingers were long and strong; they seemed to wrap around my skinny arm twice over. “This is very important. We had to use another boy to get the passport. I didn’t have time to get you to take the picture. There’s nothing seriously wrong about what we’re doing, but you can’t talk about it. They won’t look at it carefully. Just keep your mouth closed so they can’t see your teeth. Okay?”

“Okay. I said that first.” I pulled my arm free. It felt numb.

“And don’t talk about it to anyone. Okay?”

“Okay.”

I was miserable. My legs ached, my eyes burned. Was I sick? There was an uncomfortable heat snaking throughout my body and pulsing in my head.

We approached the ticket counter. My father held out the passports, ready to hand them over to the clerk.

You’re with Daddy, I said in my head, and you’re happy.

Francisco gave the ticket agent my passport. He opened it.

You’re with Daddy, I repeated in my head. And you’re happy, I insisted, more intensely to myself, the prayer reverberating in my aching skull. I hoped this would not only get us past the ticket agent but also cure my illness.

To my horror, the agent didn’t merely glance at my passport. He kept it open and started writing something on my ticket. Later I discovered he was copying my passport number onto the stub.

But I panicked while the copying went on. You’re with Daddy and you’re happy, I screamed to my throbbing temples. We got through without incident and started the long walk to the gate. You’re with Daddy and you’re happy, I said, softer to my hurting head.

“They’ll look at it again there,” Pablo said. “Just a glance before you go in.”

“It’s okay,” Francisco said to me. “They didn’t notice. Like I told you.”

Our successful fraud didn’t relieve my symptoms. Instead, nausea accumulated with the other pains. You’re with Daddy, I whispered to myself, and you’re safe.

Francisco’s anxieties seemed to have abated. As we walked, he talked eagerly of seeing Spain again, of the poets and actors and radicals he was going to look up, of the hellos and love he would carry to them on behalf of Pablo. Pablo interrupted to call my father’s attention to my condition. We had reached the waiting area at the gate; it was already crowded with fellow passengers and their well-wishers.

“What’s wrong?” Francisco put a hand on my forehead. “Are you sick?”

“I feel crummy,” I said.

“You don’t have a fever,” he commented. “You’re probably hungry and tired.”

“I don’t wanna eat,” I said. I had a horror of vomiting. I associated it with the day of my mother’s funeral when I stayed home, throwing up almost continuously for hours.

“You can rest on the plane.” He swung my hand up and down. My arm wobbled as if it were boneless. “Be cheerful. Even if it kills you. That’s the only lesson about life I can teach you: life is too sad not to laugh at it.” He turned to Pablo and half-mockingly, half-seriously began to sing:
“Adios, muchacho! Compañero de mi vida!”
He let go of my exhausted hand and embraced Pablo. This was still the early sixties in America: two men embracing earned us many stares. I was embarrassed by the looks from our fellow passengers. My father seemed to think we were safe. But Uncle was still out there, convinced I wanted him to rescue me, sure that I didn’t want to be with my own father. I had told him so, hadn’t I?

I was going to be sick. I couldn’t bear the sensation of food rising. I sunk to my knees, put my hands on the cold floor and squeezed my body tight, flexing every muscle to keep the airport doughnut and the school lunch of macaroni and cheese and my breakfast of Cheerios down, safe within me, because I couldn’t let it out, couldn’t let them see the gunk inside.

“Rafael!” my father said, horrified. He pulled me up effortlessly. “What’s the matter with you!” There was more annoyance than concern in his voice.

“Pobrecito,”
Pablo said.

“You need to sleep,” my father said, softer now. He hugged me tight; tight enough that I didn’t have to make any effort to stand on my own. I breathed the slightly stale odor of his Old Spice cologne, combined with a fresher whiff of his real smell. Oddly, it cured me of my queasiness. I breathed in his heat and his animal nerves. He was a big, hot strong man. Of course he could prevent Bernie from taking me. I was safe, after all.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT
Sibling Rivalry

C
ARMELITA WAS WAITING FOR US AS WE EMERGED FROM THE ANXIETY OF
clearing customs in Madrid. This time, when my phony passport was presented to the Spanish official, I was too scared to pray in my head for happiness. But the official’s comparison of the photograph against me was perfunctory. He chatted with my father about why we were in
España:
were we looking up relatives? In this confrontation my father seemed brilliant to me. He relaxed on his heels, smiled, and told the story of my grandfather’s emigration from Galicia to Tampa; he even began to recount the quaint anecdote of how Pepín romanced Jacinta by making up for her slow rolling of the cigars with his own superhuman speed. The customs man was charmed, but a supervisor (I think; or perhaps a stern colleague) looked cross and that spurred the agent to interrupt Francisco, stamp my passport without a glance and use a nub of white chalk to check off each of our bags, although there had been no investigation of their contents.