The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria (30 page)

Nobody talked to her, interacted with her, or, by the way, tried to stop her. We just watched from a distance and tittered and judged. So imagine her surprise when one day, a ten-year-old boy who didn’t quite look all-the-way American came up to her and asked, “What’s your name?”

She stopped dead. She looked at him as if through a fog. She squinted, cogitated. And then she said, “Maggie.”

“Thank you,” said the little boy. Miss Pigeon immediately turned back to her cart and started pushing. The little boy ran home. He was happy. Excited. He now had the last ingredient he needed for his ebo. One that would compel Miss Pigeon to help him. One he made up himself, though it was based on many others he has read. “An Ebo to
Make Someone Help You,” he would call it. He wondered if it would end up in a book someday.

An Ebo to Make Someone Help You

One iron nail

One coconut

Black, red, and yellow ribbon

Rum (aguardiente is preferred, but if you live in Connecticut, rum will do)

Wash the coconut with a sponge dipped in rum, asking Elegua     to assist you. Heat a nail over a flame (a gas stovetop     works perfectly). Drive it into the coconut, then yank it     out. Pour some rum into the small hole (but not so much that     your Pápi will notice you stole his rum). Tie black, red,     and yellow ribbons to the nail. Push it back into the same     hole in the coconut you made before. As you do, repeat seven times the name of the person you want to help you. Sleep with the coconut in your arms that night. The person will be willing to help you the following day.

Miss Pigeon—Maggie—didn’t recognize me the following day. I caught up with her as she approached the pigeon wall, yelling, “Miss Maggie, Miss Maggie!” She slowly turned around and stared at me,
squinting and straining her memory to figure out how this little boy had come to know her name. “Hello?” she said cautiously.

“Hello, Miss Maggie. I’m the little boy from yesterday.”

“I don’t remember anything,” she said.

“That’s okay.”

She laughed. “Says you.”

I held out an empty 100-pound rice sack. (Pápi always had some lying around.) “I was hoping you would do me a favor.”

She stared at the rice sack and said nothing.

“I was hoping you would catch a pigeon for me.”

Instantly she said, “Okay.”

“Thank you. It means a lot.”

“Okay.”

We stood there looking at each other. Stood. There. Looking.

I said, “So should we go now?”

“Okay,” said Miss Pigeon, and took the rice sack out of my hand. She trundled over to the wall, took her customary place. The pigeons danced for her. She threw her patented left hook and swept one into my bag; the pigeon pecked ineffectually at her yellow kitchen glove as it went in. For a few seconds it looked like grenades were going off in the rice sack, but soon the pigeon stopped rioting. Miss Pigeon took a crust of bread out of a pocket and threw it to the other pigeons on the wall, who fell upon it in a catastrophe of wings. Then she trundled back over to me, the sack held before in modest triumph.

“Here you go,” she said, handing me the sack. After a second, she
added, “You gonna eat it?”

The pigeon came to life again in the bag, but I held on firmly. “Yes. Santeros always eat their sacrifices, unless they’re using it to remove a curse or an evil spirit from themselves. Then they can’t eat them. But most of the time they do.”

She understood nothing of what I had said, I could plainly see. Still, she said, “If you’re going to eat it, make sure you deep-fry it.”

“Why?”

“Because pigeons are filthy. Full of lice and disease. You got to kill the germs, okay?”

“Okay,” I said. After a moment’s thought, I asked, “Miss Maggie, if pigeons are so gross, why do you eat them?”

“’Cause they’re free, okay? That’s a whole wall of free food over there. And they taste good, once you kill the germs.” Then she gave me a look that I think was meant to be motherly and said, “You’re a boy. You’re young. You want me to kill the pigeon for you, okay?”

“No thank you, ma’am,” I said. “I have to perform the sacrifice myself, or Elegua won’t help me.”

Though again she didn’t understand me, she said, “You’re a good boy, okay? Remember to kill the germs.” Without another word she turned and headed back to the wall to catch herself tomorrow’s lunch. The pigeons cavorted with joy.

On some of the points mapped on time’s grid, at least a few of the
Salvadors, marching beside me on my right and left like my reflection in a pair of opposed mirrors, must have felt a little trepidation about killing the pigeon I had in the bag. But not this Salvador. I was excited. My test ebo had worked perfectly: Miss Pigeon agreed to help me so quickly that she must have been enchanted. And that meant, even though I had no idea what I was doing, even though I had never been initiated into Santeria, the gods were on my side. They wanted to help me, had accepted the ebo I had made up on my own. Maybe Mámi, my main eggun, had helped convince them. And that led to one evitable conclusion: if the gods and my mom were willing to help me, that meant they thought I was on the right track.

Pápi was almost always home: except that day, he was running an SAT-prep seminar at Samuel Adams after school. This was my one chance to kill, eviscerate, cook, eat, and dispose of the pigeon without Pápi ever knowing. I had even bookmarked a recipe for deep-frying a pigeon in
The Joy of Cooking.
(Actually, it was a recipe for squab, but close enough: I wasn’t eating it to delight my palette.) Pápi had the 1962 edition, which begins with an epigram from Goethe’s
Faust
that reads: “That which thy fathers have bequeathed to thee, earn it anew if thou wouldst possess it.” Yet another clear sign from the gods.

All the way home, the pigeon insisted on reminding me it was alive. It batted its wings and tossed itself around the bag and, during periods of rest, cooed plaintively. I didn’t feel bad for it, exactly. But all the way home I wondered if its primitive bird brain had figured out it was going to die. That would be just like Elegua, trickster that he
was—to whisper into the pigeon’s ear the fate that was about to befall it, inspire fear in it, make my job that much harder.

I opened the front door, shed my bookbag in the entranceway, and trotted, the rice sack still struggling for its freedom, to the kitchen. I switched the sack to my left hand and got to work: emptied the sink of the breakfast cereal bowls; brought out the cutting board; took out Pápi’s Cutco French Chef knife; decided it was too small and went to the garage and got his machete; slowly, one-handedly, washed the machete in the sink; got a bowl for the blood and the entrails and the heart; another, bigger one for the feathers. Okay. Everything was ready.

Now then. How to get the bird out of the sack. Hadn’t thought of that.

Suddenly, I was terrified that it would fly out of the bag and perch somewhere where I wouldn’t be able to get it. Pápi would come home and hear the pigeon cooing and then look up and see the pigeon and it was obviously my fault that it was there and how would I explain it?

I gripped the sack in both hands. With all my strength I heaved it in the air, and brought it crashing to the floor. The pigeon cried, flapped, fought for its life. I heaved it again. Again. Four, five, six times. It stopped fighting after the third, crying after the fifth. I had to be sure. Seven. Eight. Nine.

Ten.

I bent over, huffing. I hadn’t noticed I’d started crying. I wanted to wipe the tears off my face, but I was afraid to release my two-handed
chokehold on the neck of the sack. So I just let them fall. They beaded on the rice sack before scurrying off.

I looked at the kitchen clock—it was one of those weirdo Kit-Kat clocks with the moving eyes and tail—and watched it for two full minutes. All the while I listened. No sound came from the sack. No movement.

Slowly, cautiously, I grabbed the lips of the sack and opened its mouth a little, ready to squeeze it shut if the bird tried to escape, and peered in.

The pigeon blinked. It was alive. But it lay crumpled at the bottom of the sack. Awkwardly angled: living Cubism. I’d broken the one wing I could see and a lot of bones I couldn’t. Blood pooled behind its blinking eye.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I opened the sack as wide as it could go. “I’m sorry,” I said, and cautiously reached into the bag. The bird seemed to watch me, but I thought with all the blood filling its eye it was probably blind. “I’m sorry,” I said, and gently grasped the pigeon in both my hands. It should not have felt that soft, that cartilaginous. It did not resist. I lifted it up; the head swung loosely on its shoulder. It opened its beak in surrender, but then, slowly, willfully, closed it. “I’m sorry,” I said, and carried it to the sink.

I placed it in the sink on its side as gently as I could. There was no risk of it flying away now. I put the bowl for the blood and innards in the sink next to it, brought the feather bowl a little closer to my work area. Guess I wouldn’t need the cutting board after all. Or the
machete.

I took a breath.
It’s okay
, I thought.
Just stay calm and work fast.

I clutched the knife in my right hand, held the pigeon steady in my left. Should I cut off its head first, put it out of its misery? I was afraid I would do it wrong, that I would cut indecisively and have to hack at the neck, torturing the bird even more. I was desperate to kill it mercifully, quickly. With my left hand I lifted its useless wing. With my right I guided the knifepoint to where I thought its heart was. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I honor your sacrifice. Thank you.” Then as hard as I could I pushed the knife all the way through the bird. My brain burst into a swarm of bees. The knifepoint gouged the sink’s porcelain.

The front door opened. Pápi. Home early. The pigeon lay dead in the sink, transfixed by the knife still in my hand. I looked around wildly, sought any means of escape, but it was as if my fingers were glued to the knife. I couldn’t let go.

Wait. No. I could let go. I just didn’t want to. I wanted to be punished for what I had done. I took a breath and faced the kitchen’s swinging doors.

Mámi shouldered her way into the kitchen, struggling with three paper bags overflowing with groceries. She couldn’t see me over the bags. “Sal, I’m home!” she yelled, loud enough for me to hear her in any room of the house. In English.

“Hi, Mámi?” I asked.

“¡Oh! ¿Jou’re in here?” She laughed. “¡Bueno, no te queda parado cómo un bobo! Come hel’ jour Mámi with these bags.” But she was
already putting them down on the kitchen table. “¡Tonigh’ we’re goin’ to have a feas’! I goin’ to ma’e jour favorite. ¡Boliche! I was at the estore, and I saw … ¿Qué te pasa?”

She stopped dead, stared at me, her eyes following my arm, to the hand, to the knifegrip. I stared back. Then I started to cry.

“¿Qué te pasa?” she repeated, terrified, running over. She looked in the sink.

Covered her mouth. Screamed into her hands.

“¿Qué hiciste?, Sal?” She yelled. She started crying too. “Bendito sea Dios. ¿Qué hiciste?”

I started to respond through my bawling, but Mámi slapped me. I instantly tasted blood, stopped crying. She slapped me again. “¡Dime que diablera hiciste aquí!”

Oh yeah. I’d forgotten Mámi was a hitter. She took off a sneaker and proceeded to give me the walloping of my life.

It was the happiest moment of my childhood.

When Mámi disappeared again, slipped off the tightrope of my timeline and tumbled into another, I knew I had to look for conclusive evidence to prove to Pápi she had returned. And of course I found none: time retroactively righted itself the moment she vanished. The only thing it left were the marks she left on me. Shoe-welts on my back and legs. The cut she slapped into my lip.

Nevertheless, when Pápi got home, I told him everything: I showed
him
The Ebos of Santeria
and described my encounter with Ms. Pigeon and showed him the pigeon I sacrificed, still in the sink, and pointed to my lip. “Mámi did this,” I said.

“Did you get in a fight at school?” he asked.

“No. I told you what happened.”

He picked up The Ebos of Santeria. “This book told you to kill a pigeon?”