The Sea of Light (48 page)

There was fire in my hands then, but it was in them for the first time, and I did not know it. I had given myself to the fire, and the Powers, without understanding how they worked—that fire and power would also give itself to me—and I could not feel yet how to sense it, control it, how to use it all correctly.

But there was fire in my hands and, reaching, I stumbled, then fell against the fine soft ruffled white clothes and jewels of this pale, rich, perfumed boy. He caught me. Held me up. He was barely strong enough. I clutched his hands with mine. And heard the crackle, smelled the searing of pale flesh as, within mine, his own hands burned, and he looked at me with his frightened little eyes, his thin ridiculous mustache twitching, and screamed—just once—and sweated with pain, but kept holding my black hands with his own horribly burned ones, and both of us held on, and neither one let go.

Later, it would be the scandal of his family. That one of their bright and pretty sons had wed the daughter of sugarcane slaves. A heretic. Revolutionary. Common black girl whose lip was scarred by a drunken man’s knife; whose left eye sometimes rolled straight up into her head; who had been jilted at the altar by some handsome dark laborer and murderer and thief; whose heart had been broken and mind gone mad; who put a curse on things; who walked through flames untouched, and carried the heat of fire in her hands.

I burned his hands; it’s true. So badly that he bore the scars on his knuckles and palms for life.

I gave him no children.

But I healed his heart.

He became a man who could breathe, and love. He ate what I fed him. It put strength in his flesh and flesh on his bones. He stopped wearing fancy clothes. Began to build things with wood. His scarred palms grew hard. He smoked, and danced, and swore, and loved. All because of the fire.

They cast us out—but not completely. When a Delgado was sick, or hurt, they brought him or her to me. They knew about the power. They could feel it in my hands, see it in my eye; they detested me, but they were also full of fear and of belief. I learned to use the fire. I healed them when I could.

Old age and Castro came. The brothers of Antonio and their wives and sons and daughters got ready to leave. To America, of course. I told them I would go. But it was not for me but for them that I left; to accompany them to Miami, and be there to heal them. Because I had seen a picture of Castro, and the heat in his beady little eyes, and love of his people in his face—from there, from that, came the fire. I knew he would walk through the cane fields unscathed. He would fight, burning, all the way to Havana. A part of me wanted to stay—to meet him, face to face, to be in the presence of another cunning and terrible witch. But the Delgados were rich—though not for long—and were desperately preparing to flee. And I was a Delgado.

*

To heal. To heal.
Como una bruja.

So when the son of Antonio’s brother came with his child, it was the worst illness—but not the first one.

Land of liberty. Land without compassion.

It made them all much sicker.

They were bright, and worked hard—at all the wrong things. Because they were pale the way my Antonio had been, before I seared his hands, and put some righteous color back into the man—almost white, almost colorless; and, when they wanted to, they could pass for one of the pale white money-making ghosts. So they did.

Me, I stayed out of it all, especially after Antonio died. In a concrete room in Miami, with my food stamps, and my Medicaid. Did not move. Sometimes shut the crazy eye. With it saw into the heart of the place. Me a ball of fire flying invisible through the streets of this city in the new money country, howling past beaches glutted with tourists, the fake planted palms on white-hot sidewalks, broad flat avenues where old people who had come down here to die hobbled along and barely looked up; barely recognized the fire, and its searing light—they were so used to their fear of it, of the flame and the light that would one day soon come, and signal their own end.

Como una bruja.
Fire from the fire. Invisible, burning, I sat in a white concrete kitchen and sent the heart out of me, went flying through the streets of the city in this new land of money and of liberty. Through blinking red lights, past shopping malls where empty grocery carts glinted in the sunlight. White matrons loaded bags into car trunks, paused to listen as I went by. Purses hung from their shoulders, heavy with the handguns they carried as protection against demented Cuban refugees.

Black girl. Old ugly lady, bent body. Went flying, screaming without sound into the city’s core, where buildings squeezed together and streets narrowed. Heat steamed from iron grating over sewers. Lampposts were bent, useless, some with filthy shoes strung from their tops in place of lights. Fire hydrants gushed water along the curbs. In the cool wet rush children danced, twirled hair ribbons, sang rhyming songs in Spanish. Down one alley, men fought with knives—for drugs, and the love of a woman. Their blood flew up to spatter the white undershirts hanging from windows on twine. A terrier barked at them from behind some garbage caps. Boys trying to grow their first mustaches hung from fire escapes, watching, cigarettes dangling from their lips, sweat speckling their chests. Now and then to yell hoarse encouragement to one bleeding man, or the other.

Como una bruja.
Invisible, I flew. Burning. From the Powers. From the fire. Like a witch. Black witch. Past an open storefront from which blared the music of a steel band once popular in Havana, before the days of the great witch Castro. Sound of a feeling hot, bouncing, metallic, like the rays of sun gleaming off polished silver bracelets. Irrepressible. Inescapable. It would have you dancing in ecstatic delirium forever, if you listened long enough. You’d leap and spin, reach out for the beckoning, sparkling platinum of moonlight on the sea. Like a fool, try to hold it in your hand.

Past all this, I flew.

To a late afternoon. Shifts changing in a hospital. Cars funneled from the parking lots surrounding it like broad concrete moats. Some drivers still wore nurses’ caps, or plastic identification cards on their chest, or stethoscopes. An ambulance took the emergency entrance. Outside waited reporters, and cameras. The story of Angelita’s only survivors would make the first edition of the evening news.

Inside this place a large group of witches took over. They did not have the fire, or the Powers, but they did command an impressive collection of delicate tools and magical machines. They could cut into the body of my nephew’s daughter without waking her. Sense her life power rise and fall and the inside fire smoke back to life, flickering, flickering, by use of strange wires. Her skin was washed and salved until every ash-colored, swollen, water-bruised inch of it glistened. They put a bag of colorless liquid food on a hanging metal thing beside her, and from the bag came a string, and this string they sank deep into her arm. Her legs, her chest, her head—all were wired to various witch devices. Tubes invaded her nose and forearms. One went right up into the secret part of her. So that she looked like some discarded toy rescued from a puddle: floppy and beaten, internal substance exposed, a vague imitation of something human.

Like this, she slept.

The Delgados came to claim her. They stood around her, sobbing.

I went inside her sleeping head. Burned a flame high to see it all. The water and the waves. Metal and the shattering pain. A demented man who wanted to lead the children; who sought to be a witch, but in the end was merely demented, a boyhood murderer of animals. Smearing himself with blood. Calling it the task of a warrior. He made their bodies strong; he made them ill inside.

Como una bruja.
Burned a flame. I saw it all. The boy who loved her. The girl she loved. The water that she loved and hated. And I saw, clearly, that she had traveled into the place beyond life for a very little while; that she had seen it, and heard it, the light, and the thunder, and been afraid. And so had come back—to continue the work of quelling this fear. Such is the way of the Powers: by fire, or by water.

Under the spells and tools of the white-coated witches, she did not know this. She’d forgotten. What she experienced, now, was a vague sensation of rising and of falling. What she heard, now, was nothing but the sounds of her body: an agonizingly slow heart thud that seemed to rack each vein; the suck and pull of precious air into her throat and lungs. She was aware of little else—neither pain, nor thirst, nor hunger nor terror—except of maybe a dim but persistent sense that she was traveling somewhere, somewhere important, and so it was essential to keep moving. She was too ruined, too broken, too drugged, to know that she didn’t have to swim any more. So she kept on trying. It seemed important. For this reason, her muscles twitched.

It was like that, for me—when I lived through fire, when I kept on walking. When my ears heard the thunder and my crossed round eye saw it, saw it, saw the light. Reached for it. Saying, I am broken, take me, I give myself to you. All the pieces of this heart, shattered by love. But the light said, no, Corazón, not yet. Go back, and love more, and suffer. Go back and heal them.
Como una bruja.
Here, here. There is fire in your hands. Live one more life. And learn how to use it.

Watching her, I knew: Here was the one, a child I never bore; and it was time to pass on the power. Felipe’s daughter would live. And then, one day, would come to me.

*

Looking sorrowful, crazy, half drowned again, she is here. About to knock on my door. I’m there before she does, and open it.

“Tita?”

“Sure, child. Come in. You stayed away too long.”

With her father’s money she’s bought things, puts crackling paper bags on the little table in the middle of the square white room. Expensive sauces. Canned beans. Frozen vegetables. Fancy boxes of sugared fruit. Chocolate and coffee. Coca-Cola. An envelope, sealed and unaddressed, which she sets on the table, blushing. I know there’s money in it, hundred-dollar bills from a Delgado.

“Dad said to ask you is the air-conditioning working.”

“I never use it.”

“But it’s working? Good. And when you go to the clinic, he said, be sure to take a taxi.”

She sits in the still white heat, sweating.

I limp around the buzzing refrigerator. Store food away. Limp around the cupboards. Bent back. Old black
bruja.
Grab tall glasses with colored flowers decorating the sides, crack into them ice, fill them with soda. One for her. One for me.

“You’re here alone?”

“Kenny died, Tita.”

“His poor little mother,” I say, “how can she live now? What a tragedy.”

But neither of us cry.

I take her into another room. This one darker, worn, filled with good and magic things—not modern, more humane. Stack of newspapers and old magazines in one corner. Butt end of a Kool or two in metal ashtrays on the beaten coffee table; I am not supposed to smoke any more, but maybe the child won’t tell what she saw. A pair of worn terry-cloth bedroom slippers set near the armchair, stained and molded to the contours of my hardened, crooked feet. One shelf crowded with books, in Spanish. The shelf above it is mobbed with framed photos of the Delgado family: in-laws, nieces, nephews, children and their spouses, and one single old black and white of my slave grandparents, dressed in skin and rags. On a sidetable, a mug from Disneyland filled with pennies. Also a telephone, dusty from lack of use. Placed in the most appropriate spot, next to these images of relatives—who call frequently, but I never respond; because there’s something unsound and terrifying about their money, their solicitude, their American way of speaking.

Against one wall, the altar. Feathers. Water. Flower petals, and drops of perfume. Tapestry. Some half-melted, unlit candles. We sit on the torn sofa, watching it.

“Um. I don’t know why I’m here, Tita. For Kenny, I guess. And to see you. But, I mean, I really just don’t know.”

Many flights below, traffic on the streets. The sounds come from far away. Fade into a void. Along with the hum of fans and air conditioners, refrigerators, TV sets. There is silence now. I feel her waiting.

“It’s okay, child.”

The voice of an old woman, measured and thin, cracked in the middle of each word. Still, it reassures her.

“I went back to school, Tita. I’ve been swimming again, on this little team there. And I love this—I think, that I fell in love. Except I kind of don’t know. I’m still afraid all the time.”

“Why,” says my old voice, “why are you afraid?”

“I don’t know exactly; It’s like I’m stuck in this fear. I wake up in the night afraid. Even when I’m laughing I feel sad all the time. Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I can’t even imagine anything—the only thing that comes to me is this black, black space. I mean”—the young face struggles—“I want to feel good, really good, you know, like, joy, like other people seem to feel—but I can’t. Something stops me.”

“How long have you been afraid?”

“A long time.”

“What is it about Kenny dying that makes you come here?”

“Angelita,” she says. And weeps.

“Why are you crying?”

“I think I’m queer.”

“What? Strange?”

“Yes. No. I mean, homosexual.”

“Ah. So you’re afraid of that.”

“Maybe. Of not having children. Or hope.”

She forgot the rest, she tells me, what happened the night before Angelita. But now remembers. Sometimes, as she talks, she’s enraged, almost taunting, or near tears, at other times sounding calm and dead. Saying, it wasn’t Liz who came running downstairs after me, Tita, the night in San Juan, not her and not Kenny, it was Sager.