The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho (9 page)

Chapter 10

B
ut where
do
you come from? Who are these people you were born into? That moment, when they first hold you, and the moment in which your eyes meet theirs for the first time, are like coordinates marking the direction of your entire life. Because families are the all-important clues to the questions you will spend a lifetime answering, to your strengths and weaknesses, and sometimes, unwittingly, the cause of your sorrows.

I, for example, come from a family of non-seers who, nevertheless, had seers scattered all over their genealogical tree like freckles. This is because clairvoyance comes in strains, like a disease, and the particular variety that seemed to run in my family was partial to women, arrived with puberty, and as my mother found out much after I was born, behaved pretty much the same as blue eyes and dimples, skipping a generation like a recessive genetic trait.

Ana Cecilia Valdes, my maternal grandmother, had it. According to my mother, she was a strikingly beautiful young Cuban woman from a well-to-do Havana family that frowned on “all that nonsense and heresy.”

When Ana Cecilia “got” her gift along with her first period, her maternal grandmother (my great-great-grandmother) moved into her bedroom with the pretense of keeping a better eye on her now that she was of a “dangerous” age. Using an unassuming handmade journal to write down each lesson, she began to secretly teach her all she knew about divination, intuition, white magic, and clairvoyance.

My grandmother studied it all avidly, happy to please her beloved nana, reading and rereading this bespoke clairvoyance textbook made just for her, guarding it jealously, and speaking of it to no one.

Later, in college, she began doing private readings for her friends, almost as a joke or an excuse for conversation at their living room parties, or
fiestas de marquesina,
as they were called. Until a new fellow, just arrived from some small town or other to study medicine, sat in front of her at a friend's impromptu birthday party and gave her his open palms.

“So tell me. What do you see?” he'd said, smiling.

“I don't do palms,” she retorted.

“Okay. What do you do?”

“Nothing. I just . . . feel something . . . and—” She'd stopped, panicked because she could usually get a stranger's “scent” the moment he spoke to her, and here she was, incapable of thinking, feeling, or seeing anything other than the smile on this boy's half-expectant, half-curious face. “I feel something,” she began again, “and just know . . . something else. And then, I tell you. And . . . it makes sense to you.” She swallowed. “Or . . . it doesn't.”

“So you're saying you guess?”

“No. What . . . I feel something, and then something comes . . . into my head, and feels . . . like truth.”

He considered that for a moment.

“Can you ‘feel' what I'm thinking right now?” he asked, roping her in with his eyes and holding her there, wherever it was he'd begun taking her with his voice from the very first word he'd said to her.

“No. Not really. I'm not getting anything right now. Maybe later. Excuse me.”

But I guess she did “get” something, because she married him against her family's wishes and moved to the town of Violeta, where she had my mother and lived a simple but happy existence, to hear my mother talk about it.

And that's the reason little Mercedes, my mother, spent her childhood hearing the wonderful things my grandmother foresaw for others while sitting at the kitchen table, and anxiously waiting for puberty (and for her own gift) to kick in. To my mother, clairvoyance was like Santa Claus: the provider of amazing gifts you got only if you were very, very good.

Then came the revolution, and my grandparents sent her to the United States as part of Operation Peter Pan. It was the early sixties, Fidel Castro was firmly in power, and there were rumors that the children of parents who opposed the Cuban revolution were going to be shipped off to Soviet work camps. The United States government (mostly the State Department and the CIA) and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Miami coordinated the effort, and hundreds of children were placed with friends or relatives in over thirty-five states as a preventative measure, until they could be reunited with their parents. Others, like my mother, were placed in group homes in the Midwest.

Mercedita was twelve going on thirteen when she arrived in Iowa with a valise that was bigger than she was, and her mother's inherited clairvoyance journal snug among the carefully folded clothes inside it.

You may have heard of other Pedro Pan kids. Some are famous like the writer Carlos Eire and Ana Mendieta, the famous performance artist, and I've always thought that, maybe, if my mother had had a sister to talk to about how desperately she missed her own bedroom back in Violeta, if she'd been able to understand some of what people were saying to her, or if someone at the home where she was had celebrated her first period, good-naturedly teasing her about becoming a woman like her mom and dad would have, then the fact that it didn't bring her gift with it wouldn't have hit her so hard, and she would've become a famous writer or an artist too. Instead, not knowing that it skipped a generation, she thought the cold Iowa nights had chased it away, robbing her of the only thing that could've reminded her that she was loved and missed on an island that felt farther away than it really was.

Who knows what things happened to her in the years that followed? I just know that the minute she turned eighteen, she ran away to Miami with the idea of figuring out a way to either bring her parents to the United States or go back to Cuba.

But by that time, they couldn't leave because my grandfather was a doctor, and as such, a nationalized commodity. Being a
gusana,
a worm who'd defected from her country, she was not allowed to go back, not even to visit, and not even later, for their funerals. And since having my grandparents risk their lives on a raft would have never been an option for my mother, I can see how the only path she saw was to pay someone to somehow smuggle them out.

Without a high school diploma, she began working as a waitress to sustain herself while sending money to her parents and saving even more money to get them out of Cuba.

Time passed, and I don't know when or why she gave up and decided to become a self-managed call girl. She never talked about that part of it, and she didn't leave enough random bits of runaway comments for me to piece together. But I know that it was sometime within this gray area of her life that I was born. When I was little, I'd beg to know my father's name, and she'd never tell me, until I finally realized that she really didn't remember, or didn't know, and I stopped asking.

She was clever, and fun, and kind, and five minutes after meeting her, you'd decide she really was the most beautiful woman in the entire world. You'd forget all about that separate entrance for an entire area of our house that I wasn't allowed into unless it was cleaning day or Sunday, or about the fact that our garage door would be open at predetermined times when a car would roll in, its driver staying inside it until my mother had closed the garage door and led him through a door that discreetly deposited him into the forbidden area of the house, before neighbors could catch a glimpse of him, maybe recognize him from news video of a county hearing or public zoning meeting.

Whenever people asked about her job, I was to tell them that she had a disability and couldn't work. This was designed to make people uncomfortable so they'd refrain from asking questions. I didn't like making people uncomfortable, so I just avoided making friends.

Then I hit puberty and began knowing things.

It was my mother who first caught on. After the third time of my making an out of nowhere comment about something I had no way of knowing, she took me to a
babalaó
or wise one, several spiritual pay grades above a
santera
.

“Alabaó,”
he said, peering down at me with his huge, round eyes, the whites of them as white against his dark cacao skin as his carefully pressed guayabera shirt. “My, my, she's got it all right, but—”

“What?” my mother asked anxiously.

He gestured to my mother to follow him to the other side of the room where I could still hear him talking in Spanish, while I sat on the little stool next to his scary altar and his life-sized gesso Yemayá.

“Mercedita, this child needs guidance. There's a lot going on there.”

“Spit it out, Sergio.”

“Trouble. Storms, darkness, death, and then more death! I've never seen so much turmoil in someone this young.”

When my mother couldn't get him to make a more positive prognosis, we hastened out of there with her muttering all the way home, calling him too old to see his own nose in about fifty different ways that now remind me of the “your mama” jokes told by schoolkids. You know the ones: “Your mama is so old I told her to act her age and she died,” or “Your mama's so old I asked for her birth certificate and she handed me a rock,” etc.

Finally, she got it out of her system.

“Well, anyway, he's so old, Matusalén was his baby brother. Forget him. We'll get you read by someone else.”

Which we never did. Instead, I became very, very special: the link to her long, lost family, the proof that she came from a line of “someones.”

On ever-more-frequent nights without clients, we'd lie on my bed reading the tattered journal my great-great-grandmother had put together, and my own grandmother had given to her only daughter for protection in a strange country. The smell of Cuba on the pages, which my mother swore she could still smell, was long gone, but the black coffee stains remained, so faded they looked translucent, like tears someone had traced lightly around.

We were no longer lost luggage left unclaimed in the wrong airport. We were part of a family tradition. We belonged to a group of people who knew things, destined to be wise and use their gift to bring happiness and comfort to others.

Slowly, surprise at my good fortune became pride in my ability to know secrets that made people smile, believe, and hope again. A message from a loved one presumed lost was like an IV filled with life instead of fluids, and I was capable of delivering it.

I became cocky, never reading my great-great-grandmother's journal on my own, doing nothing to learn the rules and responsibilities of my gift. All I cared about was that my mother told me stories about her childhood, asked what I thought she should cook for us that afternoon, and shared her real estate plans with me, as if I knew anything about houses and money.

That was the best part: feeling like I had given something back to my mother, as if my fabulous gift was the connection that allowed her to remember she'd also had a mother who loved her once.

Just before she got sick, she looked the happiest I'd ever seen her. She seemed to have fewer but better “boyfriends,” her special “niche” finally paying off in the form of generous clients “appreciating” her with properties and money that she turned into even more or bigger properties.

“You'll see, baby. Soon you'll be going off to college, and I'm going to retire so I can go with you. We'll hire someone to manage the rentals and only come back here to vacation in South Beach like the millionaires.”

That's how she talked about it, by the way, as if her job and our lives were like everyone else's.

And then cancer happened.

My mother began to walk around with the shell-shocked expression of a war refugee on her face. I dropped out of school, took the high school equivalency exam, and ran from her properties to the hospital every day, doing everything she told me in order to rent the houses and apartments she owned, seven in total, before her illness took three away. Every night, I'd give her a report, as she struggled to sit up in bed and did her best to look like she was still proud of me.

But where before she'd insisted I go to college because a famous psychic had to know the world, be able to express herself when she was invited to Oprah's, now she told me it would make her feel good that I study “something.”

Three times a week a hospital volunteer would pick us both up and take us to Jackson Memorial Hospital for the chemotherapy sessions. The other two days I took computer software courses in a drab room deep within the arteries of a vocational school that closely resembled a prison and was located in one of the worst parts of town close to the hospital.

It's a wonder I learned anything, spending most school days with my head bowed, crying all over the dusty keyboards no one seemed to care much about. I was eighteen years old, and my life consisted of wrangling renters, going to computer school until I could bear it no longer, hating myself for giving my mother the false security that killed her, and watching the only person in the world who loved me wither to nothing. Of course she said it wasn't my fault. But I knew better. Less than a year later, she checked herself into the hospital one more time. And then she died.

I dealt with my regret over my failure to foresee her illness by sending clairvoyance to rest with her, forcing it out of my mind and heart. But I saved my great-great-grandmother's clairvoyance journal, unable to destroy something my mother, and her mother before her, had treasured so dearly. I no longer wanted to see beyond what was right in front of me, and I never told anyone of my “feelings,” purposely thinking of something else whenever I met someone and felt “something coming.”

I began automatically disregarding all of my own gut-instinct perceptions, thinking that if I “felt” it or “saw” it, it was either wrong, my own imagination, or ironically irrelevant. After a while, the dreams, the feelings, the visions, the smells, and the whispers stopped, and I could once again look people in the eye without “knowing” things about them that I had no business knowing, like I could when I was a child.