Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (67 page)

“He can’t help himself. He needs someone to cook and clean.”

“But there’s a woman who comes,” I began, again referring to something I had arranged. There was no shaking off my guilty desire to prove I had made some attempt to be good. I was ashamed that Grandpa Pepín had lapsed into senility and I hadn’t noticed from our phone conversations.

“Yes? A woman comes?” My brother seemed surprised.

I heard someone in the background call out, “Cuco?”

“A moment, please,” he said. He talked to the voice in Spanish.

I held my breath. I became conscious of my heart beating. I swallowed the welling in my throat. I was sure the voice I heard answer faintly was my father’s.

My brother resumed speaking to me. “Understand,” he said, meaning, I think, not that I should understand, but that he understood.
“Abuelo
needs help twenty-four hours. He’s,” he lowered his voice as if trying not to be overhead, “forgetting. He doesn’t always know you. Excuse me. I don’t mean you. I mean any person.”

“I understand. Are you looking for a full-time nurse or a home? What kind of care are you—”

“Excuse me,” Cuco interrupted. He spoke to the voice in the background. Again, I remained still, straining to hear. There was a distant groan of irritation. Cuco said, “Wait.”

Immediately, a deep resonant voice took over the line. A voice I had known all my life.

“Rafe, it’s me.” The strength and self-assurance was unmistakable, and also unchanged, as though not a day had passed. “Your grandfather insisted I inform you. We have to find him a nursing home. Goddammit,” he mumbled, not to me, presumably about the situation. “He wants you here,” he resumed in a commanding voice. “Come or not as you like. I don’t give a fuck,” he added casually, without the malice his curse implied. “I promised him I would call. I’ve kept my promise.” I heard the hollow noise of the receiver clatter home to its cradle and the connection died.

I felt for a while that I, not Ma Bell, had been silenced. Mine did last longer. The phone rang—actually it doesn’t ring, it coos like an electronic bird. I answered mechanically and made up some excuse, saying I had to call back, instead of finding out what was wanted. I recovered from the shock by thinking about how to go. Straight to the airport? Not bother to pack, just
get
on the first plane? Should I tell Diane and let her come along? Would she insist? Should I go at all? I have to admit I was tempted to ignore them. If I pretended they were phantoms perhaps I would be guilty of nothing. I knew myself too well to do that; this was one of the times in my life when I wished I had never read a psychology book.

And yet I did behave as if I had never been analyzed or was capable of self-analysis. I called Julie. I had to look up her office number and it turned out to be wrong anyway. The person who answered told me her new one. I got through the area code and the exchange before stopping. What in God’s name could Julie say that would help?

At least I had come out of my paralysis. I phoned several airlines and booked two tickets on a flight in four hours. That should be enough time to go home, pack, and
get
to the airport. I went down the hall to catch Diane as one of her sessions ended. First, I told her I had to find a nursing home for Grandpa. She asked how long I thought I would be gone. Then I said that my father was down there. She walked to the receptionist and asked her to cancel our appointments for Friday. I guess I was testing her. She passed.

On the flight I told her stories of Tampa. What she knew of my childhood was really the big picture, the lurid highlights, but it wasn’t those things that lived in my head. I ended up talking mostly about Grandmother Jacinta’s indulgences of me: making grilled cheese sandwiches at ten o’clock at night, storing up
natillas
in the refrigerator, watching me through the screen door while I played on the street, calling out that I should come in for lemonade. I could feel the cool hand of her palm on my forehead as I sat at her yellow Formica table and gulped the drink. I was moved by the memories. Diane held my hand. I stayed quiet after that, surprised by the spreading lights of Tampa at night. I didn’t remember the city being so big. I mentioned that to Diane. She surprised me by saying that she’d read in the
Times
it was one of the fastest growing cities in America. The airport was certainly large, as if they expected millions to arrive. In fact it was eerily deserted.

When I gave the address to the cab driver, he picked up a book of city street maps, looked in an index, then flipped to a brightly colored page. He said, “What was that address?”

I told him again. “Sixteen fifty-three St. Claire Street.”

“You sure you got the right address?”

“Yes,” I said.

“That’s not a hotel. There are no hotels there.”

“No. We’re staying in a house.”

He looked in the rearview mirror at me. “You been there before?”

“What’s the problem?” Diane asked me.

“It’s the right address,” I said to him and continued to Diane in a normal tone, so the driver could hear, “Since the area is mostly black he’s assuming I’ve got the wrong address. It used to be a very poor, but respectable Latin working-class neighborhood. Now it’s crack heaven. And worse,” I added, “the spies have moved out and the niggers have moved in.”

The driver pulled away from the curb, but he glanced at me in the mirror, checking whether I was being sarcastic. I showed nothing. “Is it safe for your grandfather to live there?” Diane asked.

“He’s lived there for seventy years. I couldn’t get him to move.”

“That’s a shame,” the driver said. “So Grandpa’s stuck with the house. Probably can’t sell it.”

“Probably not,” I agreed.

“You never said anything about that,” Diane commented. It sounded like a complaint to me. “Weren’t you worried about an old man living in a neighborhood like that?”

“Who me? You know I never worry about anything.” She didn’t laugh. “He told me once he would rather be dead than move. I thought that closed the subject.”

She peered at me, squinting at the flashing lights of passing cars, saying nothing, waiting as if my answer wasn’t satisfactory.

“His politics,” I said softly. “Remember their politics? ‘Rise with your class,’” I quoted, “‘not out of it.’ He would never move.”

She looked away, at the window on her side. “I guess it’s hard to leave a place you’ve lived in your whole life,” she commented. I was annoyed. That was a shrink talking: arguing with my understanding of my world.

“His closest friend left about twenty-five years ago,” I said, “when the first blacks moved to St. Claire Street. So did all the cousins of my generation. They moved to nice middle-class neighborhoods. If he’d gone with them he’d have familiar people and things around him. It’s not so clear that staying was timidity on his part. When his block was integrated, the black families who moved in were respectable working-class people. Grandpa was the first Latin to knock on their doors and invite them over. He’s still good friends with the family next door. In fact, they keep an eye on him. They’re not any happier than he is about what crack has done to the neighborhood. I know it’s hard for those of us who live in New York to remember, Diane, but there
are
people who act out of principle, rather than neurosis.”

Diane put her hand on my leg and rubbed. “Take it easy,” she said in a whisper.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

We both watched the streets as we neared Pepín’s house. Whores patrolled the avenue where I had once stopped at the Dairy Queen for a Brown Bonnet. There was a racial joke somewhere in there—Brown Bonnets of some kind were still for sale. On my grandfather’s street most of the houses and tiny lawns were well-kept. But there were bars on the windows and no one on the porches. On a humid spring night they used to be full of people gossiping and arguing politics, calling across to each other, their kids strolling to a now abandoned store on the corner for candy. Our driver was nervous when he had to stop at the light on Nebraska to make the turn onto St. Claire. Eyes checking and rechecking his side and rearview mirrors, he crept forward gradually so he was virtually through before it went green. I gave him a big tip. Some cabbies would have refused to take us.

We carried our overnight bags to the dark porch. A gate covered the door. To ring the bell you had to reach through its bars; Grandpa’s sounded a plaintive pair of notes, a corny ding-dong. From the avenue a block away I heard a series of popping sounds, like distant firecrackers.

“What’s that?” Diane asked.

“Who is it?” called a thin voice that had told me on the phone he was my brother.

“It’s Rafael,” I said, rolling the R and lingering on the L. Diane glanced at me.

Inside, another voice spoke inaudibly. A light came on in the front room. There was a sliding noise and an eye peered through a circular peephole. “That’s him,” I heard my father say and the eye disappeared. After that came another pause, then some fumbling with locks. At last the door opened.

Cuco filled the entrance, dressed in a white T-shirt and what looked like new blue-jeans. He was at least three inches taller than me, six seven or six eight, his eyes the warm brown of my father’s. Otherwise, the family resemblance was not obvious. His skin was coffee-colored, his hair kinky, and his features were rounder, less defined than my father’s. His chin, for example, barely existed. And although he was far from fat, he had inherited Carmelita’s big bones and square shape: he did not have the wide shoulders and narrow hips of the Gallego that my father used to brag about. In fact, he looked as if he would be an excellent outside linebacker, a big man whose long legs and thick body could make him both quick and punishing. I thought of Albert, graduating high school that spring. He was being heavily recruited by top colleges as just that—a premier defensive player, the next Lawrence Taylor, his hyperbolic coach liked to say. Cuco’s voice, however, was far from suggesting brute force: high, thin, and gentle. “Rafael?” he said and smiled sweetly, his broad cheeks opening to show little teeth set in a crooked jumble, like a Mediterranean hillside town. “Come in,” he urged, easily lifting our bags with one hand, as if they were empty.

“Were those gunshots?” Diane asked him as she entered.

“I think so,” he said with a sad shake of his head as he shut the door behind us. “All night, there are crazy noises.”

“I’m Diane Rosenberg,” she said and offered a hand that looked preposterously small. The two of them made a hilarious sight; Diane is a foot and a half shorter than Cuco.

I looked around. The furniture was unchanged from thirty years ago, except that the couch had been re-covered. Everything looked neat and tidy, but if Grandmother Jacinta had seen it she would have fainted. The rug wasn’t shampooed, the credenza’s surface wasn’t polished, and the drapes needed washing. Behind Cuco was the door to the bedroom where I had napped after returning with my arm in a cast. It was dark. I maneuvered to see the dining room and beyond to the kitchen. There was a light on in the kitchen, but no one in evidence.
“Abuelo
is asleep,” Cuco said, gesturing to the front bedroom.

“Is my—” I changed my mind about how to put it. “Is Francisco here?”

Cuco looked toward the kitchen, then back at me. His pleasant face now seemed pained. “Yes. He said if you need a bed, take that room.” Cuco indicated the doorway off the dining room, where my parents used to sleep when they visited.

I gestured to the kitchen. “I’m going to say hello.” I asked Diane, “You’ll be okay?”

Cuco took Diane’s elbow with a huge hand and gently urged her toward the couch. “We’ll talk and become friends,” he said.

Diane beamed at him. “It’s not fair.”

“Not fair?” Cuco was puzzled.

She sat on the couch. “Your family. God made all the Nerudas too big.”

I walked through the dark dining room toward the kitchen. The house had seemed small to me even as a boy. To my adult eyes, it was so shrunken from the memories of childhood that I felt as if I were dreaming. I was a giant now beside these tokens of the past. At least, I was physically. Stepping into the kitchen I could swear my legs buckled. I paused to look at them, surprised I hadn’t collapsed. The linoleum was the same black and white squares. Out of the corner of my eyes, I saw the yellow Formica table with its aluminum legs. I looked up at the sink to see if my grandmother was cleaning a plate I had dirtied from a late-night snack. There were bars on the window she used to look out while preparing meals, but, of course, no Jacinta. I inhaled for courage and turned to survey the table. My father wasn’t there.

I heard a step behind me. I jumped. At least it felt as if my heart did. I turned to face the small television room where they kept the fold-out couch that had been my bed as a child. My father stood astride the door sill. His hair was all white, thinner of course and receding, completely exposing his high forehead. His thick eyebrows were still mostly black. He stood straight, just as I remembered him, his chest out, proudly. He had no paunch, although his face was full. He was very tan. I was impressed by his handsome, dignified, and commanding appearance. That had not been an illusion created by my childhood, after all. My father was no fantasy.

“Hi Dad,” I said, and now I had shrunk to the size of a boy. The sound of my voice was foreign to me: unsure, sweet and scared.

He said nothing. He watched me as if he were seeing something that didn’t require a reaction, as if I were an image, not a living thing.

“You look great,” I said. I seemed to have no defenses, no ability to plan what came out of my mouth. “I’m really glad to see you.” I studied him again, amazed that this vigorous figure was seventy-four years old. Perhaps because of the stories of Cuba’s economic woes, or more likely some sort of guilty projection, or worse, a deeper wish from buried rage, I expected the years to have treated him harshly, to find a withered broken man.

“I’m not glad to see you,” he said in that extraordinary voice, so convinced of its correctness, so musical and dramatic—the kind of voice that sells us cars, beckons us to fly the friendly skies, and reads us the news headlines. “I hoped you wouldn’t come.” He glanced down pensively. When he looked up again, he nodded toward the dining room. “You brought someone? Your wife?”