The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria (27 page)

I had to. The heart of a pigeon was the last ingredient I needed for the Santeria ritual I was performing so that Pápi could find love again.

Mámi died the summer before third grade. Doctors were removing a benign tumor from her uterus when … well, we weren’t allowed to know exactly what had happened. One of the conditions of the settlement was that all documents relating to the case remain sealed. The official cause of death on her death certificate is “cardiac arrest,”
but her heart was doing just fine prior to surgery. They must’ve done something to her.

Once the settlement came through, Pápi didn’t work full-time anymore. He had been teaching senior math at Samuel Adams High School in Handcock, Connecticut, since before I was born, and substitute teaches there to this day. At Samuel Adams they call him “The Professor,” partly because he has a Ph.D., but mostly because he
is
a Professor, capital P.

You know the type: the kind of man who has to bite down on a pipe (or in his case, a puro) to remind himself that he has a body as well as a mind, whose eyes are always looking past you and into a reality that is somehow less substantial and more consequential than the one you exist in. It’s one thing when these professor-types are tall, bearded, tie-choked, corduroy-jacket-wearing sages who are as white as the faces on Mount Rushmore. Then they’re easy to spot. But on the outside, Pápi is as Cuban as they come: 5’5”, fat as a top and just as agile, with a nose like a head of cauliflower and Wolfman hair growing off his ears—and always, always wearing a pastel guayabera, even in the ice-age middle of a Connecticut winter. He looks like a guajiro who just needs to pick up his machete to be ready for a full day of cutting cane. But then, just as people start feeling superior to him, he starts talking mathematics—in virtuoso English that will send responsible listeners scrabbling for their dictionaries. It just takes one meeting. After that they call him “Professor.”

We were the only Cubans in town. Therefore, the Connecticut
Yankees of Handcock thought all Cubans were like Pápi. So did I. Using a kind of commutative-property logic, I reasoned that, since Pápi was Cuban, all Cubans were Pápi: intellectual, distracted, blunt, cheerful, apolitical, and immune to neurosis of any kind. Kind of like Mr. Spock, but with a better sense of humor. And a
lot
more body hair.

I got to hear from other kids how much better Cubans were than other Latinos, who sent their kids to American schools even though they were illegal. They were poor because they were lazy, and the only reason they couldn’t speak English was because they didn’t try hard enough. You speak English, Salvador, why can’t they? Stick those stupid spics in Special Ed with the other retards.

I agreed with them completely. You see, while they were insulting those other Latinos, they were complimenting me.

I forgot at those moments that, as hard as she tried, even after years of study at the Vo Tech, Mámi still struggled with English, that whenever we went shopping without Pápi she always sent me to talk to Customer Service. But at night I would remember. When I spoke to Mámi then—surrounded by a darkness so complete I wasn’t sure I still had a body—and asked her why she left Pápi and me alone, and when she was coming back, I spoke to her in halting, failing Spanish.

When I was eight, it was dinosaurs. When I was nine, it was magic. And when I was ten, I got into Santeria.

Not even a month after starting third grade, I got in a fight with
a kid at school because he said Mámi didn’t die, she’d been deported, because eventually that’s what happens to all spics. I was Latino small, so the kid, Timmy Andersen, thought I was an easy mark. Big mistake. I rushed him, but instead of taking a swing, I yanked down his pants. And his underwear, perhaps understanding the justness of my cause, slid down like they’d been buttered. I will never forget the sight of his tiny white penis: it looked like one of those miniature rosettes adorning the edge of a wedding cake. Little Timmy screamed and tried to pull his pants up, while I, almost leisurely, pushed him to the ground, grabbed his hair in two fists, and bashed his head into the playground loam. It’s the third happiest moment of my childhood.

Because little Timmy was more embarrassed than hurt—his forehead was red and plenty dirty, but no lump emerged—the principal took it easy on me. He just sent me home for the day with a note for Pápi to sign. Because it was too early to take the bus, Mrs. Dravlin, one of the assistant principals, drove me home. She and I were buds; I had known her since I was in Kindergarten and had always been one of her favorites. She wasn’t as pretty as Mámi or as chubby as Mámi or as vivacious as Mámi, and she didn’t know any more Spanish than you need to get licensed as a teacher in Connecticut. But she smiled as big as Mámi, a huge, scary, dental-exam smile, as if she wanted you to be able to count her teeth.

I loved her teeth.

She wasn’t smiling then, though; she had to watch traffic as she drove, but she kept sneaking fretful, motherly looks at me and saying
things like, “Salvador, you’re too smart to get in fights,” and “I want you to apologize to Tim tomorrow,” and “Maybe you should have your dad call me.”

I wasn’t at all sorry about pounding stupid Timmy’s head into the ground, but Pápi had taught me to respect teachers, even when they’re wrong. So I agreed with everything she said, and, once she had parked in my driveway, I said to her, “I’m sorry I was bad, Mrs. Dravlin.”

Something in the way I said it? She cried exactly three tears. The first two tumbled out of her eyes like the boulders of a surprise avalanche. I was a little scared; I’d never seen an assistant principal cry before. As she erased the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand, a third skittered down her face without her knowing and hung pendulously from her chin. It refused to let go of her face as she spoke. “Listen to me, Salvador. You are not bad. You’re a very, very, very good boy.” Then she leaned over to the passenger side and hugged me. The tear on her chin sank through my t-shirt. Long after it must have evaporated, I felt its warmth and wetness on my shoulder.

I waved goodbye to Mrs. Dravlin, who was waiting to make sure I could get in the house, and “snuck” past Pápi. After the settlement came, he was always home. He sat in the living room with his chin in his hand, studying a Rithomachy board on the coffee table; I could’ve brought a dead cat into the house and he wouldn’t have noticed me. To prove it, when I was nine I actually did bring a dead cat into the house, but I’ll tell you about that later. For now, I went to my room.

On the bed lay an illustrated encyclopedia of dinosaurs. It was the
biggest book I’d ever seen, even bigger than Mámi’s Bible. The inscription inside read, in Pápi’s plain and serious script, “The best way to honor Mámi is to better ourselves.”

At the end of that school year I became the youngest winner ever of the school’s Science Fair for my project “How the Dinosaurs Really Died,” where I explained, based on the exciting new research of this wicked-smart Latino named Walter Alvarez, that the dinosaurs had actually been killed by a huge chondritic asteroid with the cool name of Chicxulub that had blasted the Yucatan Peninsula about 65 million years ago. The judges must’ve known Pápi wrote it, gathered the research, made the graphs—this was stuff even the science teachers hadn’t heard about yet. But, in my defense, I
memorized
every last bit of it. I won because it’s cute to hear an eight-year-old say phrases like “unusually high concentrations of iridium” and “nemesis parabolic impactors.”

To celebrate, Dad bought us tickets to go see locally famous prestidigitator Gary Starr make a giraffe disappear. But Pápi was unimpressed by Gary Starr; he told me after the show, “That guy couldn’t even fool his own giraffe.” But after seeing with my own eyes a full-grown camelopard disappear off the stage and reappear in the theater’s parking lot, where it was waiting for us, next to a Gary Starr flunky selling Gary Starr t-shirts and Gary Starr prepackaged magic tricks, I was hooked. Pápi wouldn’t buy me any Gary Starr tschochkes,
of course, but he would gladly take me to the library. I checked out the fattest magic books they had.

By the time I was nine, I had become a not-too-shabby magician and could even fool adults right in front of their faces. You know the trick where you cut the rope into pieces, only to pull on both ends and—tada!—it’s back together again? I did that one for show-and-tell and pissed off my fourth grade teacher, Mr. Liss, when he couldn’t figure out how I did it. And of course I wouldn’t tell him. Magician’s code.

But my best trick of all was a bit I did with the help of Roadkill the Magic Dead Cat. Roadkill wasn’t a stuffed animal. Roadkill was a dead black cat, stuffed and mounted and made—why?—into a piggybank. The taxidermist had done a good, if clichéd, job with her: she had a permanent arch in her back, an eternal horripilation of the hair along her spine, and a look in her glass eyes that said “I am three-quarters demon.” I got her for ten bucks from Mr. Strauss at the magic shop I frequented after school because he was getting remarried and his wife hated it, had threatened to call off the wedding if he didn’t get rid of it. I think he made up that story just to get a sale, but who cares. A dead-cat bank for ten bucks?

Here’s how the trick went down, as per the performance I gave to Mr. Liss’s class. I went to the front of the room and put Roadkill on Mr. Liss’s desk. Everyone said “Ooh!” One girl, Jenny Chalder, said, “That’s gross.”

I said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to
Roadkill the Magic Dead Cat!” I pulled out a phone book and handed it to Mr. Liss. Then I turned back to the class. “My dad’s a math teacher, and he’s always saying that math lets you do magic, but I didn’t believe him until I got Roadkill. Roadkill’s going to predict what name we pick out of a phone book, using math.”

Jenny Chalder said, “Cats can’t do math.”

I pulled a slip of paper and a new, sharpened pencil out of my bag. “First, we have to give Roadkill stuff so she can write her answer down.” I stuck the piece of paper in Roadkill’s mouth, then used the eraser-end of the pencil like a ramrod to jam it down her throat.

Jenny Chalder said “Don’t hurt her!”

And I said, “You think that hurts, watch this!” Then I took the pencil and strugglingly pushed it all the way in Roadkill’s mouth. Kids squealed and laughed, in that order.

“Okay,” I said, “Roadkill has paper and pencil. She’s ready to predict which name we pick out of the phone book. So now we have to pick the name. Mr. Liss, call on someone.”

“Why?” asked Mr. Liss. His brain was working overtime, trying with all its might to figure out the trick.

“So everyone will know I’m not cheating. Everyone knows you would never help me.”

“You got that right.” He scanned the room, then villainously smiled. “Okay. Jenny Chalder.”

Everyone oohed. Perfect choice.

“Okay. Jenny, say a three-digit number.”

She scrunched her face at me. “What’s a three-whatever number?”

“Pick a number between 100 and 999, Jenny,” Mr. Liss explained.

She scrunched her face again and said, “I don’t know. 1-2-3.”

I said, “Okay, one-hundred and twenty-three. Mr. Liss, can you go to the board to do some math for us?”