Tarot Sour (17 page)

I spend these hours peering out our window at her apartment, which is on the second floor of a small brick building just across the dirt road from us. I watch for her to come home, and when she does, I watch the loose swaying hem of her skirt pulse around her knees. I watch the breeze blow it back behind her like a tail as she climbs the rickety wooden stairs and catwalk to her front door on the higher of the two-tiered bungalows. I watch her disappear into the darkness of her home. And I fantasize about what goes on in there. Doña Garcià is a fortuneteller, and though she is eons younger than Father, she is obviously unobtainable to a boy who is still seasons from the frontier edge of puberty. I am desperately in love with her, though, and I spend sleepless nights watching the stain of moonlight glide across the second floor of that building just waiting for it to illuminate the strings of hay that curtain her window, the thin plank of door crested with a rusted bolt discovered at the edge of a Chilean bay and used now as a knob. It is only after the moon passes, or on nights dark with starlessness, that I can find rest. Nights when I can see her shadow walking about behind the strings of hay I nearly leap out of bed to squint and try to interpret the actions by those vague shiftings of light.

Still ignorant of the pleasures one can find in a woman's body, my greatest desire is to sit at her table with my arm outstretched, and to let her take my hand and trace the dimples of the rough skin there, to feel the quickened pulse of my lust for her, and to tell me my future. To watch her baby blue-ringed eyes scan my body and take me in so that she will remember me for eternity. She has a young son, a few years younger than me, though she is unmarried and, as far as I can tell, never has any male visitors at her apartment. After a year of admiring her from my bedroom window, from which I gather her brief images like a collection I might later assemble into a reasonable facsimile of her whole self, this son suddenly disappears.

Rumors abound as to what has happened to the boy. He was carried off by panthers who will raise him as one of their own. His father has come late one night to steal him back, though I know that one is untrue on account of keeping her under near-constant surveillance. Half a dozen others that spread quietly through town, particularly amongst the children, along with the explicit instructions not to ask her about it. Doña Garcià has always had the distinct disadvantage of, having been born, raised, and giving birth to her son in another country before coming here to a village full of natives, being an outsider. But after the disappearance of her son, she becomes bitter and withdrawn entirely. What little interaction she had with the villagers before now becomes purely professional, and even then, tinted with the unfriendliness of grief. For me, her withdrawal only makes her more fascinating.

Unfortunately, as it so happens, Doña Garcià is only a fortuneteller by day. By night, she is a prostitute, serving herself to the American excavators who are set up at the edge of the village in their canvas tents, many of which are better equipped than our stick-built huts. I am too young to understand this and why Father has strictly forbidden me from going anywhere near Doña Garcià, and it only makes me want her to feel my palm all the more. Soon, the yearly Carnivàle is upon us, and the village transforms itself into a varicolored celebration. Booths are set up in the streets, with games and merchandise and activities, for the villagers and the Americans to entertain themselves while they drink. Doña Garcià has a booth where she will read palms, and for the entire week before the festival, I am sleepless with the anticipation of finally being able to sit with her. When the day comes, I dress in my best suit and Father takes me out to explore the booths. He takes me to play the games, we eat all the sweet corn and fried dough and candied cockroaches we can, but when I ask to have my future read, he simply refuses, leads me away from that booth by the collar and preaches to me about disease and impropriety.

We go home after that and I pout as the musicians wander up and down the streets and the drunken crowds laugh in raucous clouds. But I had seen the lines formed outside Doña Garcià's booth and I have a new determination to fulfill my dream of having my palms read and my future told. I watch her apartment from my window as I always do, though tonight I am waiting for Father to fall asleep rather than for Doña Garcià to return. It is my good fortune that he has taken more to drink than he is used to and passes out before the moon even touches her door. When he does, I pull a blanket over his body to keep it warm and comfortable and I sneak out the front door. I have never climbed the wooden stairway that I've spent so many hours observing, though I have come to know every step that will creak and every position from which I will be visible from the windows of our hut. I creep up to the second floor and into Doña Garcià's apartment where I wait for her to return from the festival.

The reek of her home is overwhelming from the very moment I close her door behind me. It is a thick and sour fog that rises up off the furniture and the walls. I can imagine thin streams of it rising up with my hand as it leaves the doorknob. On top of that, I am blind in the darkness until the moon hits her front window and dips her apartment in ephemeral titanium. It is a small and quaint place. One room, plus a small bathroom that doesn't have a door, off to the side. An old round table is set up in the center of the room, with several piles of cards lain out in what appears to be a specific order, though I can't determine what that order is. I go to it and draw a card. There is a picture of a moth hovering above a hornet's nest that hangs from a thin, bony branch. Another card has the picture of a faceless uniformed soldier. One has a lion tamer. One shows a vagabond in rags, traveling through a wide desert. A witchdoctor. A hooded executioner with an axe slung over one shoulder. A priest with a burning cross hanging on the wall behind him. A woman with feathered arms outstretched and falling from the peak of a mountain.

It is then that I notice the odd geography of the rest of her apartment. I place the cards back down in the order I had drawn them. There is a small steel bed frame in the corner of the room, topped with a straw mattress that is covered with a pile of blankets placed like rolling hills or the dunes. The sour smell of her home grows as I approach that bed. And when I pull the blanket off with a deft swipe, I see the body of a young boy, his stomach has caved in and his face is dripping off his bones. Wet strings of muscle and tissue connect him to the blanket and snap with wet splatters that dot my face. I don't have time to react because from behind me comes a shrill and vulgar Portuguese curse.

I spin around to see the beauty that is Doña Garcià standing in the doorway with the moonlight spotlighting her like a Broadway actress I had seen once on the television. She shuts the door and comes to me, shouting and crying.
What have you done
, she asks me.
Who are you and what am I doing here
? I won't deny my little boy's disappointment to hear that she didn't even know that I existed, that she doesn't even know my name. She grabs me by the wrist and tears me away from the body of her son. I try to explain to her that I am an admirer, I live here with Father and have loved her for quite some time. I came because he refuses to let me have my future read and that is all that I want.

“Your future read?” she scolds. “You come here to have your
future
read?” She drags me toward the door, threatening my shoulder out of its socket, but stops when we pass the small card table. She throws down my arm and I fall to the floor in tears. She goes to the table and leans over it. I am terrified of what she is going to do to me, petrified of what Father will do when he discovers that I sneaked out to come here. At the same time, I can't help but notice that she is not wearing underpants beneath the shortness of her skirt and a quick flutter of heartbeat excites me. Then she turns back to me with horror on her face. “Did you touch my cards?” she asks. She whispers those words, the words that will haunt me for years to follow, worse than the disappearance of Father from our hut nearly a dozen years later, as though there is someone listening she does not want to hear them.

“Yes, Ma'am. I'm sorry, I didn't mean—”

Then, she laughs, so hard that she has to curve her body back to let it out smoothly. It only horrifies me more. “You want your future read, boy? Come here!” I stand up and go to the table. “Do you know what these are?” she points at the cards and I shake my head. “These cards were not to have been read, you stupid little bitch. They've gone
sour
.” And then she tells me my future. I dream this scene every time I sleep and, every time, I wake before she tells me what is to come to me. Only, in my dreams, Doña Garcià is not the beautiful young woman I am in love with as a boy, she is a haggard old bony thing with skin hanging off her body like drapes, with ugly bristles of hair atop her head crawling with red-eyed insects. Her apartment is a cave dripping with stale water and squirming with nubile cockroaches and spiders the size of my head. The old bed is an altar on which her son is crawling with those same hungry insects. The card table, though, the card table is always unchanged from what it was. I wake fortunate enough not to hear her damning words, a prediction too miserable for me to relive night after night. But it is, after all, why I've come back here. To keep it from coming true.

* * *

When I wake I notice that the sun is already going down. My back aches but I feel refreshed, widely awoken before my eyes even open. I let the dream fade and then I sit up. I think the words,
I'm coming for you
. And then I see that there is a woman sitting at the foot of my bed with her back to me. At first I think it must be Elizabeth Hesse, but the frame is all wrong. The hair is all wrong. And then she turns. It is the woman I met on the train last night, the one who got drunk on tarot sours. She doesn't realize yet that I'm awake. I can't imagine how she could have found me, but I have a few guesses as to why she's come here. Most of them are simply the manifestations of the fantasies I'd derived watching her move on the train. She's a beautiful woman, but as she turns to look at me I see that she still wears that beauty like a woman who either doesn't know she has it or thinks she doesn't deserve to know it.

“Good morning,” she says as she stands up from the bed.

“Can you hand me my pants?” I ask. “Or would it be more efficient if I just kept them off?” I sit up and scoot back to lean against the headboard. I check to make sure the bedroom door is closed. She smiles shyly and leans over, picks up my jeans and tosses them at me. I slide out of the covers and pull them on without standing. “How did you find me?” I ask her.

“The hotel was full. I described you to the woman behind the desk. She remembered you. Mrs. Hesse let me in, I told her I'm a coworker.”

“Mm. And what are you doing here? I think I remember you saying that you're married.”

“I am. Though I never said happily. But that's really got nothing to do with why I'm here.”

“So why?”

“I want to hear more about what you're doing here. You said you were looking for someone. Someone who wanted to kill the General. You said something about Asam Cifezzo.”

I tell her all there is to tell. That Father raised me preaching about the teachings and tenets of the thirteenth century Italian philosopher, Asam Cifezzo. That he was—
obsessed
was the wrong word so I choose
preoccupied
—
preoccupied
with the belief that the world is slowly ending. That it is an animal caught in its own death throes and acting irrationally, and we all have only two choices, to help it die or to help keep it alive. Years ago I was separated from Father when, for some reason unknown to me, he left in the middle of the night without a word. It is Father I am seeking, and I am seeking him for two reasons. First, that in the years between then and now, the years after he had left me, I spent my life researching Cifezzo and had discovered something that I absolutely needed to discuss with him.

“What was it?”

“What was what?” I ask her.

“What you learned about Cifezzo? Your father abandons you twenty years ago and it takes something about an eight hundred year old philosopher to send you looking for him?”

I think about telling her what I discovered. The truth was that it took me nearly all of this twenty-year interim just to discover what it is about Cifezzo that I had been seeking. And it is only after finally finding it that I am able to begin searching for Father. Instead I tell her, “The second reason I am trying to find him now is because I've come to believe that he was right about the world coming to an end, and that he was also right about the fact that General Anselmo is trying to hasten it along.” The woman gives a funny little smirk and looks down at the floor. “His aim all those years ago was to hunt down the General and kill him. He obviously never achieved it. I don't know what happened to him, but I want to help him. And—I miss him.”

She thinks for a long moment. I stand up and I go to where she's standing. I can smell her, she smells like sweat and sex. I lean down and pick up my shirt, pull it on over my head, then pick up my socks and sit on the edge of the bed to put them on. Finally she says, “I
found
Asam Cifezzo.”

I laugh. “What do you mean, you found him?”

“Last night, after the train broke down, I got off and I walked here, through the woods. There was a cabin, out about an hour north of here. Obviously, he can't be the real Cifezzo. But, if he goes by the name, he probably knows something about the man.”

“You found Asam Cifezzo,” I repeat.

“I can take you there now,” she offers. She goes to the window. I notice a small flap of black cloth sticking out of her back pocket.

“I can't now. There's something I need to do before I leave. When I get back—”