Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (5 page)

My mother, in fact, took Papa seriously. She hugged me, asked if I had been scared. I said no. She explained to me almost apologetically and fearfully, as if I were a stern boss, that she had gone instead of me because she could find the nurse faster.

“No, no, I’m fine,” Papa was saying to the nurse, who hadn’t accepted his reassurances. “I couldn’t get my breathing for a second. It was nothing. Forget it. Go away.” He waved energetically and struggled to lift himself higher on the bed.

“You want to sit, Mr. Rabinowitz?” the nurse asked. She arranged his pillows so they would prop up his head.

When she tried to rearrange his blanket, he held it down firmly and said, “Stop. I want that—leave me alone. Everybody but my grandson—go. Right, Bernie?”

Uncle agreed with a nod. He took my mother’s hand affectionately. She reacted with a startled look and then smiled. Uncle tugged her toward the door.

“Go,” Papa said to the nurse. “Have your coffee.” He encouraged my mother, “Go. I’ll send your boy out to you.”

“Okay?” my mother asked me softly.

“Yeah,” I answered honestly. My fear of the old man’s decay—and of the relentless presence waiting for him—was gone. Besides, I liked being called the Little Gentleman. I preferred to stay in the ordinary room (much more like the rooms in Washington Heights) with this relative who approved of me. Who had, moreover, some use for me other than as a hostage to his ideology. Or so I thought.

Papa waited until we were alone before speaking. He nodded at an untouched plate on a folding table by the foot of the bed. “There’s a piece of cake. You want?”

I went to see. It was plain pound cake. “No thank you.”

Papa smiled. “So polite.” He waved for me to come close. I obeyed. This time I noticed that my assumption he would smell bad was wrong. In fact he smelled of talcum powder. His eyes were still bright from the struggle he’d just won. “Do you know you’re Jewish?” he said. The Yiddish pronunciation made a whooshing sound out of “Jewish”; it was comical to me. I guess I didn’t react. “You may think you’re half-Jewish.” Again, the swishing sound he made saying “Jewish” tickled me. He nodded no. “According to Jewish law, you’re Jewish.” This rapid repetition of the word almost had me giggling out loud. I didn’t want to offend the old man so I kept a solemn face. “The reason is: your mother is Jewish. Now, if it was the other way round. If your father was Jewish and your mother a …” he hesitated. “A … well, not Jewish. Then you wouldn’t be considered Jewish unless you converted.”

Naturally, this seemed preposterous to me. I suspected he had made up this law to convert me into a whole Jew. (In fact, he was accurate.) Obviously, I reasoned, he was disappointed that I wasn’t completely Jewish (in the same way that it bothered my Latin relatives that I wasn’t completely Spanish) and he had concocted this sophistry to dispose of my Jewish deficit. But I admired him for his direct approach, for his honesty in admitting that he wanted me to belong entirely to him. And I was pleased. Why shouldn’t I have preferred being wanted? It was flattering.

“It’s true,” he insisted. I must have looked dubious. “Israel will take you just as you are under the Law of Return. But they wouldn’t if it was your father and not your mother who’s Jewish. It’s true. It’s in the Torah.”

All that, to my eight-year-old ears, was gibberish. I nodded yes to mollify him. I already knew how to behave in these situations: with Jews I was Jewish; with Latins I was Latin; with Americans I was a New Yorker.

“Come,” he beckoned. He squirmed to sit higher. “I’ll tell you something else.” I had reached the side of his bed. “Raise your hand. Your right hand.” I did. I felt as if I were at an assembly at P.S. 173 and I was about to Pledge Allegiance to the Flag. That is, I felt foolish and grave, embarrassed and awed. “I saw it while I was dying—” Papa lowered his voice to a whisper. “I’m serious—I was about to go. And then I saw your hand on my chest. Do you know what you were doing?” Papa illustrated with his own hand. He raised it, palm out, fingers together. He gradually moved his pinky and ring fingers away from his middle and index fingers while keeping the separated pairs flush together. He was able to separate them quite a lot: he made a broad V in the air. “That’s what you were doing. Can you do it again?”

I looked at my fingers and waited as if the volition to act belonged to my hand and not my mind. Indeed, they seemed to move on their own. Sure enough, I could separate my fingers in the same way as Papa.

Papa still had his hand up in the symbolic position. He said, “Not everybody can do this. Know what it means? It means you are a Cohen.” He pronounced it CO-AIN. “The Cohens were the best Jews of the old days. They were the wise men, the healers, the generals. Of all the Jewish people, who were God’s chosen people, they were the highest, the best. I’m a Cohen. You wouldn’t think it to look at me. But I am. And you are too. You have my blood in you.”

Years later—much to my amusement—I saw an actor named Leonard Nimoy on the
Star Trek
television series make the same sign with his hand as a traditional greeting for his character’s alien species, the Vulcans, who seemed to have been thought up as a kind of crude version of a Jungian archetype to combine with the equally crude archetypes of Captain Kirk and Dr. McCoy. [I used
Star Trek
as the subject of my paper on Jung’s theory of the Collective Unconscious. Not as a joke. I didn’t intend disrespect. As readers of my books know, I like to use modern popular culture to test the viability of psychological theory. For one thing, Freud and his disciples thoroughly mined the classics. For another, since contemporary culture is often a reaction to theory as well as a confirmation of it, the ore it yields, although perhaps corrupted by self-consciousness, has greater practical value to a therapist. And practicality, after all, is the great challenge that faces analysis in the next millennium.]

But I’m sorry to have broken the spell that my grandfather created at that moment on his deathbed. I didn’t know Leonard Nimoy would make the gesture foolish; I didn’t know that my grandfather hadn’t reproduced accurate Jewish lore in what he told me. All I knew for certain was that he had been dying moments ago and that I had wished him back to life while holding my fingers apart in that mysterious V.

We held up our hands in the sign of our genetic bond. Papa nodded toward the door, presumably to the house full of cousins, aunts, uncles. “None of them can do it. None of them have the Cohen blood. You’re the only one I know about.” My aristocratic V pressed against his. His palm was warm, and his eyes glowed, the same eyes that had looked so dead before.

For a time we touched like that. Finally, he folded his long fingers around my hand and pulled me close. He hugged me, squeezing my head awkwardly next to his while not rising from the pillows. There was something stiff beside his chest under the plaid blanket. He whispered into my ear, “Who gave you your name?”

Papa let me go to answer him. One ear was irritated from his embrace. I rubbed it while thinking. “My parents,” I said.

“Which one? Do you know?”

“My Daddy. It’s a Spanish name.”

“No, it’s a very old name. It’s a Hebrew name. Do you know what it means in Hebrew?” I shook my head. “It’s a good name for you. Rafael.” He almost said it the way my Latin relatives did: RA-FIE-EL. I preferred that pronunciation. The usual accent given to it by my friends, teachers or other non-Latin adults was RAY-FEEL. Papa said, “Ra-fie-el,” again. Slowly, lovingly, he said a third time, “Rafael. It’s a good name. And a very good name for you. I’ll tell you what it means. It’s a promise from Him.” Papa pointed to the ceiling. “It means: God will heal.” He stroked my head. “You’re a good boy. You will keep the Lord’s promise, Rafael.”

I was impressed by the intensity of his gaze, of his expectation. I wanted it to come true.

“You should go back,” Papa said as he withdrew his petting hand. “But first I have something for you.” He lifted the plaid blanket aside and revealed the stiff object I had brushed against a moment before: the
Afikomen
lay next to his frail body, wrapped in its satin-edged napkin. Papa extended it to me. “Your uncle said I should give this to the child who came to visit and showed me he deserves it. Do you know what it is?”

The look on my face must have been transparently happy; I can still hear Papa’s chest laugh at my reaction.

That was the last time I saw him. He said, “Go!” and away I ran. I ran wildly into the entrance hall, splitting a knot of cousins; I jumped over a startled Daniel as he inspected the living room cabinets; I dodged the seated, exhausted figure of my mother in the dining room, still talking about the scare over Papa; I bumped into Uncle Harry, who said, “Whoa!,” and kept going, right up to the dark round face of Bernard Rabinowitz.

This time, when my uncle’s clever eyes focused on me, I held them without flinching.

“I found it,” I said.

He smiled: bright teeth against olive skin. “Good for you,” he answered.

C
HAPTER
T
WO
The Triumph of Oedipus

T
AMPA
, F
LORIDA, IS AS HUMID AS A STEAM BATH FROM LATE SPRING TO
early fall. Even in winter the air is heavy. It is no accident that it was chosen by the cigar industry as a location for its factories. Tampa is an open-air humidor, as an eminent American writer pointed out. No need to fear the long green tongue of the tobacco leaf will dry out.

My mother and I traveled to Ybor City for the July 4th weekend in 1960. Papa Sam had died in May. Ruth didn’t take me to the funeral. Indeed, she didn’t tell me Papa Sam had died until late June, not until she could promise me that my father was returning from Havana and that he would meet us in Tampa in July. Years later, Aunt Sadie explained that my mother delayed informing me about Papa Sam’s death because she didn’t want to upset me while the next occasion for seeing my father was still uncertain. According to Sadie, without the reassurance of an upcoming meeting, my mother feared I would imagine my Daddy was dead since hers had died. Of course she was projecting her own worry about Francisco onto me. But it was not entirely fanciful on her part. She had reason to fear that her husband might be killed.

My father returned to the States before finishing research for his book because of the excitement generated by an article he had written for
The New York Times Magazine
about the Cuban revolution. The article provoked interest from publishers who wanted to buy my father’s book before its completion; he was to meet with the editors who had made offers. Meanwhile,
Esquire
had commissioned another piece that was due on the stands around July 4th, and some sort of primitive early media tour developed, mostly on radio.

Francisco was scheduled to do a radio call-in show in Tampa on July 2nd. He was to do two such programs in Miami on the 1st. More radio programs were set up in New York for later in the month. There was also talk of an appearance on the Dave Garroway show. I suspect, but don’t know, that Dad’s media appearances were encouraged by the Cuban government, which was desperate to counteract the mounting anti-Castro propaganda emanating from the White House. (Building support for the coming Bay of Pigs invasion, of course.) In any event, whether my father was or was not directly encouraged by Fidel’s government, the anti-Castro community in Miami, New York, and New Jersey had decided he was. There were threats both by anonymous letters to the
Times
and crank calls to the radio stations in Miami.

I should pause here to note that many people have strong feelings about politics and are made uneasy when they cannot identify someone’s ideological bias. In case you are experiencing strong reactions to my parents’ activities and opinions, or to Uncle Bernie’s equally convinced behavior and ideas, and wonder where I stand, I must confess that I do not have an answer to satisfy you. I have known many brilliant people and read many more. Certainly I was lectured by experts. I grew up surrounded by dogma: political, philosophical, and scientific. What I can say with conviction is that no one is stronger than, or independent of, the people and things that surround him. Ideas are objective, but their truth is not the glue that makes them stick to us.

Nevertheless, I recognize there are times in history when one must choose one side or the other, when there is no room for doubt. In the summer of 1960 I had no doubts. I was eight years old. My father and mother told me that Fidel Castro was a great man and I believed them. They said that the United States was an imperialist country responsible for the degradation of the Cuban people, that our government had supported a cruel dictator (Batista) in order for American corporations, such as the United Fruit Company, ITT, and the like, to make huge profits and I believed them, just as millions of American children believed their parents when they were informed that anyone who called himself a Communist was evil and that Fidel was an absurd, strutting madman. My parents instructed me that anyone who said the Cuban revolution was bad, including the President of the United States, was wrong and I believed them. At eight, those were my politics.

However, at eight I was not passionate about politics. I was passionate about the New York Yankees. Unfortunately, even that commitment wasn’t free of ideological scrutiny. My grandfather Pepín was a Dodger fan and a Yankee hater. I didn’t understand the reason why until years later when I learned the sociology of baseball for his generation. The working class rooted for the Dodgers and Giants (or the Sox or the Indians) while the middle and upper classes were Yankee fans. What I saw as virtues about the Yankees, namely their wealth of talent and consistent success, made them symbols of privilege to Grandpa Pepín. Sure, they won more games than anybody else, he conceded, but they had bought their championships, not earned them. Besides, they were a racist franchise, unwilling to use “the colored ballplayers.” I didn’t argue with the old man. After all, the reason I became a Yankee fan wasn’t so high-falutin: in 1960 they were the only baseball team in New York City.