The Iron Bridge: Short Stories of 20th Century Dictators as Teenagers (20 page)

“Hey,” says Pétan, “smell this.” He sticks a couple of fingers underneath his brother’s nose and grins his wry smile.

Rafael breaks his concentration and pulls away from the offending fingers invading his treasured personal space. “What’s that?”

“You know that girl María over on Padre Ayala.”

“What about her?” hisses Rafael.

“The nectar of that flower,” says Pétan. “That’s what’s on my fingers.” He sticks his fingers underneath his own nose, inhales, and shakes his head in wonder at the intoxicating scent. “My, my, my. So sweet!”

“You’re lying,” says Rafael. “Her brother would have killed you.”

“No way,” says Pétan. “And I might go back tonight for seconds over there.”

“You’re a fool,” says Rafael, his tone rising. He tenses his upper lip and turns back to his bottle caps. “I don’t believe you.”

“Whether you believe me or not doesn’t much affect the sweetness of the flowers of San Cristóbal, eh, Rafi?”

“Get out of here,” says Rafael as he fumbles with a stack of ten Holsteins, trying to recall if he’s already handled them. “I’m busy.”

“So it’s agreed? Good. I’ll go get Alvarez. Maybe he can come back here with his horses around midnight?”

“I’m not doing it,” says Rafael. “They’ll catch us.”

“They won’t catch—”

“I said I’m not doing it. And that’s it.”

Pétan throws his head back in fury and grunts. “Fine,” he says. “Terrific!” He sweeps his hand across the windowsill and knocks over the bottle cap towers, hopelessly mixing their brands, crashing some on the bed, and flinging others onto the floor. Rafael is too stunned to react, but Pétan, realizing he’s made an impetuous and terrible mistake, quickly stands and heads for the door. “What, are you so rich and powerful, Rafael,” he calls back without looking at his brother, “that you don’t want to make a few extra pesos?” He slams the door behind him, rattling the few remaining bottle caps on the windowsill.

Rafael’s precious bottle caps lie scattered and disorganized, the new ones unidentifiable against the old—a scrambling that negates the good omen of surplus dots for the day and magnifies its opposite, virtually guaranteeing he’ll get cancer or some other illness of slow, withering decline. It’s his own fault, really, for having tempted Pétan with that harsh dismissal, for not appeasing his stupid and callous brother as he knew he should have. Appeasement would’ve shown proper respect for the power of the bottle cap ritual. Instead, he dismissed his work as some minor task that could be completed while holding a conversation. No, he did not protect his treasures.

Rafael’s frantic eyes search for the upturned, flipped, and disorganized bottle caps, which are wildly dispersed along the rough tiles, by the closet door with the spiderwebs, and in
the dust underneath Pétan’s filthy bed. He realizes it will be impossible for him to absorb their images in a single glance as required, let alone to account for their proper positions in relation to one another. His stomach constricts and his dread feels as heavy as an anchor chained to his ankles. The rock in his belly must be the hard mass of disease eating him from the inside. He wants to cry, and he’s gripped by a compulsion to powder his brow, which is now so rank and sweaty that he can feel the drops of perspiration clinging to his forehead like the ticks he sometimes picks up in the sugar cane. He tries to whisper to himself, out loud, that it’s unmanly to cry, undignified, but any clear articulation of those words is impossible. He moans low like a cow in the throes of labour as the dreaded tears escape down his cheeks.

“Rafael,” his mother calls from the dining room. “Your supper is on the table.”

He scoops bottle caps off his quilt and piles them in a heap on the windowsill. He jumps up and scurries around, picking the others up off the floor as fast as he can, trying to prevent himself from assessing their condition or registering their brands on the spot. All the while, he’s thinking that even if the bad portent proves not to be cancer or some comparable disease, it will be a horrible event, like a brutal beating from Fernando that results in lost and cracked teeth, or a massive, disfiguring gash on his forehead that could never be hidden with powder. He piles the bottle caps he’s gathered on the sill and pulls back the bed so he can access the few strays that have slipped to the floor against the wall. These too he stacks.

The spasms in his belly are so painful now that he feels like throwing up. He surveys his work. The sight of all those distinct brands piled together willy-nilly without respect to colouring or condition, without accounting for dates and places of discovery, and, most importantly, not stacked in proper towers of ten weakens his knees and forces him to sit on his bed. His thoughts spiral into a familiar looping pattern of
if, then
statements:
if you don’t separate the Malta Nutrines, then the tumour will grow a millimetre per day; if you don’t stack the Daisys bottom to top from least to most faded, then the tumour will snuff out your ability to breathe
, and so on and so forth.

Rafael uses his weight to push the bed back against the wall. He knows his family is waiting for him at the dinner table. He doesn’t have time to stack the bottle caps in their correct groups, but he wonders if he can’t at least separate them from this single, unholy clash of types, origins, and colours. Yes, there’s time enough for that. He wipes his brow with his sleeve and focuses on his task.

As Rafael works, he begins to calm down. His breath slows and his legs regain some of their lost strength. He tells himself that things will most certainly be bad for a while, but that he has dealt with bad times before and will have to deal with them again in the future. As he separates the brands, a frisson of unexpected joy tenses his arms. Rafael realizes he’s grinning. He remembers that he is a strong and disciplined young man, one who can show fortitude when under attack. If he can survive this sudden misfortune, he will certainly have the strength for other perils thrown his
way. He sits taller. He begins to imagine himself wearing a fine wool suit imported from Madrid, seated at the head of a long table of stained mahogany—the kind of majestic table one supposes would be used by a wealthy family in its dining room. He’s surrounded by aristocrats and other high-ranking military officials, with oxtail bones on their plates and half-filled goblets of wine and heaping fresh fruit platters placed on either end for dessert, and a Cuban cigar in every mouth. He imagines telling all his cultured guests, who are descendants of the great families of the Cibao, that
a true man is never forged in the ease and luxury of life. No, he is born from hardship and strife, as I have been, from those grim occasions when omens turned against me and called upon the strength of my character. A man
, he tells the rapt guests,
is the product of his own virility and determination. Nothing more and nothing less
. His hands work quickly, stacking and aligning bottle caps. Order rises from chaos before him. Yes, Rafael is man enough to handle any bad omen.

“Rafi,” his mother calls. “Are you coming?”

“One moment!”

He has to stop for now. The reorganization is incomplete, certainly not far enough along to reinstate the good omen, but it might be sufficient to ensure survival through his upcoming tough times. Rafael takes care to straighten the quilt on his bed, erasing the wrinkles. He goes to his closet and opens the door so he can compose himself in the small mirror he’s installed. Before he sees his reflection, Rafael is struck by the dismal state of his two suits hanging from the bar. Yes, they’re clean and pressed and ready to wear, but the
fabric of his favourite jacket is distressed on one shoulder, and the knees have thinned considerably on the other suit.

His three neckties hang limply from a single hook. He fingers one tie, made of a rich purple silk with a faint floral print, smooth to the touch. It is probably the best-quality tie in all of San Cristóbal, with the exception of the two dozen or so hanging in Uncle Plinio’s closet. Still, he’s worn each of his three ties a thousand times, and he can’t keep tying the same damn piece of silk around his neck each and every morning. But what can he do? There is no choice. There will be no gifts coming his way any time soon; the bad omen of tipped bottle caps has, at the least, guaranteed that. Rafael’s mind races with rough calculations of how long it will take working at the telegraph office before he can save enough money to import another tie from Santo Domingo. Given the hefty percentage he offers his beloved mama each month, and will be forced to continue offering her until his infuriating papa stops drinking and finally humbles himself enough to plead with José at the postal office for a second chance and another job, and of course the absolute fortune that ties cost nowadays, Rafael realizes it will take him at least four months. Four months in three ties is unacceptable. Neither the Espaillats nor the Mejias, who are arrogant and strident in matters of comportment, would ever let one of their prissy daughters marry a boy from San Cristóbal who has only three suits and ties to his name. And there will be no temporary fixes to the problem either, as Rafael will have no further access to Plinio’s collection unless he prostrates himself before his uncle like a bitch in heat.

“Rafael!”

“Yes, coming!”

Rafael studies his reflection in the mirror: the slicked-back hair, the fuzz growing on his upper lip, the strength and stoicism of his gaze. The whitening powder has faded since he began to sweat, and now Rafael can detect the slight mulatto hue to his skin underneath.

“We’re starting,” his father cries from the other room.

“I’ll be right there!” he calls back.

He snatches the whitening powder from the shelf in his closet and begins to dust his face. As he works, he thinks:
You are a small-town
campesino
with black blood tainting your veins
. In the mirror, Rafael sees a hick from a lazy family of nothings and nobodies. He knows that he’s been plagued by more than just bad omens, more than just the overturned bottle caps of this evening; he’s been plagued by the meanness of his birth. He dabs his chin and cheeks and forehead, the excess gritty powder suspending in the air like a thick fog. As he watches his skin whiten into magnificent, matted formality, Rafael silently tells himself that it will take concentrated effort, mammoth discipline and power, and more than a little bit of daring to overcome the curse of his origins and achieve all that he deserves.

He finishes, replaces the powder, and straightens his collar and jacket. He both looks and feels better with this lighter face, with the oil of his skin blotted away. He considers putting on a tie, but decides against it. “Later,” he tells his image as he closes his closet door, “you shall wear your very best.”

By the time Rafael joins his family in the dining room, the casual meal has lapsed into disarray. Only his mother and two older sisters remain seated at the long table, eating their beans, rice, and mashed yucca. His father and Uncle Plinio have already wolfed down their food and left their bowls on the table for the women to clear. They’re now reclining on the worn sofa in the living room, thickening the air with coarse smoke from their cigars, seemingly oblivious to the constant hair-pulling and spitting of Pípi and Pedro on the floor beneath them. Julieta’s inexplicable crying has stopped at last, but she’s still barricaded in her bedroom and nobody cares enough to investigate how she’s doing. In his parents’ bedroom, Héctor babbles in his crib. Pétan crouches in the corner with his bowl of beans. Although there’s a chair for him to use, he’s too enamoured of Aníbal’s snake to sit at the table, cooing at the creature with more affection than he’s ever displayed to any one of his sexual conquests. When he notices that Rafael has entered, Pétan stands and grins sheepishly at his older brother. There’s no use apologizing for his stupidity. He’s not the least bit sorry, but he’s clearly afraid. Maybe a shit-eating grin will show enough contrition for the powdered boy to change his mind and help him cows at midnight.

Rafael gives Pétan a harsh glare, but relaxes into a smile when he turns towards his mother. “Mama,” he says as he stands tall by the end of the table and bows his head, as he would to a matron he’d only just met. “Thank you so much for this meal.”

“You’re welcome,” says Doña Julia. She flashes a sharp
sideways glance at Japonesa, letting the lazy and rude daughter know that she might pick up a few good manners from her gallant brother.

Rafael sits, tucks a napkin into his shirt, and begins to eat his meal, careful to push small bites onto his fork and to chew with his mouth closed. He dabs the corners of his lips with his napkin and requests a glass of water from his brother, if that wouldn’t be too much trouble. Pétan passes Rafael the jug and nods formally, as Rafael did to their mother, but he’s unable to make it look natural with his omnipresent crooked smirk.

“Plinio told me you took one of his ties again,” Doña Julia says as she sits back in her chair at the head of the table and watches him eat.

“Yes,” says Rafael.

“You should know better than that.”

“It’s important I look respectable at work,” he replies with a shrug. “It’s very important—and Uncle Plinio has the best ties.”

“That’s true,” calls Plinio from the living room. “I do have very good taste.”

“Don’t steal your uncle’s ties,” warns Doña Julia.

“I’ve been over this with Papa already and it’s resolved, I promise you.”

“Is it resolved?” His mother frowns and shakes her head. “I’m not so sure, Rafael. This is not the first time Plinio’s asked you to stop.”

Rafael lays his spoon down gently and stares hard at his mother. “Thank you for your concern, Mama, but I tell you
once and for all, the problem has been resolved. I promise you it will not happen again.”

The intensity and seriousness of Rafael’s expression is enough to make Doña Julia turn away, raise her hands, and refrain from questioning him any further.

Rafael finishes his beans, cleans his lips, and folds his napkin into a perfect square, which he lays on the table. Doña Julia, Marína, and Japonesa gather bowls and carry them into the kitchen. Only when they’ve left the room does Rafael stand and turn to his brother Pétan.