The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria Read online

  She’d lost the real one a few years back when we were walking in Miami Beach, both of us dolled up after having seen a terrific production of Man of La Mancha. As we headed for the car, some puto ran up and punched her in the face and tried to steal her purse. I grabbed him by the belt before he could get away, and some of the other theater-goers came over, and together we kicked the everliving shit out of him. That hijo de la gran puta was in his twenties and we were a bunch of gray-headed men, but one of the best things about having Cuban blood is that no matter how old you are, you always think you’re the baddest motherfucker alive. We had no trouble at all throwing him to the ground and booting him to pieces. We stomped on his balls like we were making wine.

  Police came; they took my side; they hauled that knee-knocked loser off to jail, bleeding and crying. But the damage to Sophie was done. Not only had he knocked out her tooth, but we couldn’t find it to have it put back in. So she had to get a fake one.

  I had failed her as her husband. I know that’s old-fashioned to say, but that’s how I felt. ¿How could I have let that punk do that to her? But she saw things differently. She called me her hero. Mind you, this is a woman who’s worked as a freelance journalist all over the world. She didn’t need a man to play gallant; she knew how to take care of herself. But she told me many times afterward that in her hour of need, I didn’t hesitate. I turned into a wild animal to protect her. In fact, it was she who had to pull me off the guy so I wouldn’t kill him and get charged with murder. She literally had to wrap herself around my leg so I’d stop kicking him in the huevos.

  There she was, frightened, bleeding from the mouth, awash in adrenaline, and now clinging to my leg to save me from my own temporary insanity. She had never felt more loved than at that moment, she told me. That’s what her fake incisor represented for her. And, over time, she taught me to think of it that way, too. It became the most important thing we owned together.

  I turned around to face her. She was 5’2”, and her bushy gray-white hair burned like a star’s corona. She thought she was overweight, but I thought she had acquired the exact shape of the Forbidden Fruit over the years, and had become exactly that irresistible. “Sophie,” I said in English, “you saw Jesús change; we both did. We’re not in Kansas. And Jesús said it was dangerous to put another soul inside you. You can’t do this.”

  She smiled that gorgeous, scary-ass gap-toothed smile. “This is your mother we’re talking about. The great Milhuevos! She died to save you, Pedrito. She wouldn’t hurt me. And anyway, I’m doing it. I decided, and you can’t stop—whoa, Pedrito!”

  I embraced her, kissed her, licked the socket of her missing tooth until she laughed and pulled away. Then I turned to Jesús and, straightening my shirt, said to him, “That tooth is the most important thing we own.”

  Gustavito was exultant; his scheme was going to work out after all. But Jesús looked uneasy. “Sophie, this is risky. Too risky. I don’t think I can agree to this.”

  “But I can always take out the tooth,” she argued, “just like you can take out your knife. Whenever I feel Milhuevos getting too grabby, I’ll pull the tooth. But while she’s in my mouth—”

  “—she can speak through you,” Jesús completed. He smiled at Sophie. “¿Are you sure you aren’t a spiritualist yourself?”

  “Why? Do you have a job opening?”

  We all laughed, Gustavito most of all. He went around me and slapped Sophie on the back. “¡What a woman! You don’t deserve her, Pedrito.”

  “You’re right about that,” I said.

  “Bueno,” said Jesús. Without another word, he took the aguardiente from me, swigged some, then slipped the tooth under his tongue and walked to the wall.

  Even though by this point I was pretty sure he wasn’t a babalawo, I was still expecting some Santeria-like elements to the ceremony. But there was no ceremony to speak of. Jesús just approached each bullet-hole, poured some aguardiente over it (I think just to sanitize it a little), sealed the hole with his mouth, and sucked, hard. He started with Helms’s eyeball, then moved to the several holes in his chest, then finished by giving Helms a happy ending. Sophie snuck a picture of that.

  He backed away from the wall, slowly turned toward us. He drank more aguardiente, swished it around in his mouth. He sucked on Sophie’s tooth like it was candy. After thoroughly churning it in his mouth, he spit the tooth into his palm and bathed it in more alcohol. He held it up to the sun like a prospector assessing a nugget. Then, pleased with his work, he rejoined our little group.

  “¿Did you get her?” asked Gustavito.

  He nodded, dropped the tooth into Sophie’s hand. “Once you put it in your mouth, there’s no going back,” he said to her.

  Sophie jammed the tooth back into place with her thumb. It always took an unsettling amount of force, but now her smile was perfect again.

  We watched her.

  Watched her.

  Watched.

  Her.

  She shrugged. “I don’t feel anything.”

  “A good sign,” said Jesús. “With luck, Milhuevos will always ask your permission before she speaks.”

  “And I’ll be sure to say yes.”

  “¡And now we’ll have a pig-roast for dinner!” said Gustavito, grabbing the pig by her forelegs and dancing with her. “¡Everything is working out perfectly!”

  The pig, smiling but put-out, looked at us as if to say, “¿Isn’t Gustavito incorrigible?”

  We arrived too late at Santa Clara to prepare a full-on puerco asado, the kind you cook underground for half a day, so we butchered our sweet pig into chops and chicharones. In fact, I did the butchering, with Gustavito as my sous-butcher and my extended family in attendance. They like to tease me about being a soft overfed American, so expertly deconstructing a pig was one of the quickest ways I could remind them that I was Cubano to the marrow. They were pleased with how good I was at it, and a little stunned. Good. It was nice to stun them for a change.

  And thus Sophie and I and my extended family—there must have been thirty of us, spontaneously-generating aunts and uncles and cousins and nietos—began our feast of Cuban pleasures. Because of the farm, my family always had food, but this was the kind of spread these days you only saw at weddings: the aforementioned pork chops and chicharones, but also ropa vieja and Tía Prieta’s boliche, complete with a juicy chorizo running through its center; yucca and boñato and other viands, all studded with sea-green garlic; enough rice and black beans and garbanzos to feed all the devils in Hell; and fruit for dessert, guava and mango and mamey and papaya and my favorite, mamoncillos. They look like mini limes but have a peach-orange pome inside with the consistency of lychee. They’re sour and sweet and a little hard to eat because of their large seed; we sucked the fruit off the seeds with our legs spread so the juice wouldn’t stain our pant legs, and spit the seeds into a bucket we passed around. We’d roast the seeds tomorrow, and were already looking forward to them.

  Then I broke out the suitcase full of Cafe Bustelo so we could have coffee to finish the meal. ¡What a cheer went up from my family! Tía Prieta, who was always wonderful and a bit exagerada, actually wept. “¡Café!” she said over and over.

  I distributed gifts from the other three huge suitcases as well. Everybody got something. We spent a long time laughing over all my old-lady tías pressing bras and underwear over their clothes and posing like chulas. When I gave Gustavito the synthroid, he put a hand on my shoulder and said, gravely, “You saved my life, Pedrito.” To Jesús, who was staying the night and I hadn’t known would be there, I gave my own Kindle. He hugged me and called me his brother.

  As we embraced, he whispered, “Watch her closely tonight.”

  By the time Sophie and I headed to bed we were stuffed and drunk—¿did I forget to mention all the rum?—and overcaffeinated and, most of all, high on family. Every time I came to Cuba I felt the same way. In spite of the poverty and the terrible politics, I never felt more alive, more myself than wh
en I was with my Cuban relatives. Sophie felt it too. We’ve daydreamed together about moving to Cuba, bringing our American savings to our family here. Maybe one day. Maybe once the Castro brothers die.

  We fell asleep somehow, but uneasy dreams opened my eyes. 3:23 AM.

  Sophie wasn’t next to me anymore. I padded to the bathroom; she wasn’t there. So I went to Gustavito’s room and, careful not to disturb his wife, woke him. Then together we went to find Jesús.

  He was sleeping outside on a hammock, shirtless, the knife in his chest rising and falling. Gustavito did the honors. We gave Jesús a few seconds to let his mind rejoin our shared world. Then I asked, “¿Have you seen Sophie?”

  He sat with his legs dangling from the hammock, deep in thought. Then he pointed at the barn. “Someone unbarred the door.”

  He was right. We walked over and Gustavito pulled one door open.

  Sophie sat on a rusted-out kitchen chair. Her hair was streaked with black now, and she had it tied into a bun (a style she abhorred). She faced forward, but her eyes were closed. The horses and chickens were pressed to the barn walls, as far as they could get from her.

  Sophie lifted her chin, her eyes still shut. “Mi’jo,” she said.

  There was none of Sophie’s American accent in the way she called me son. Her voice was throaty, coarse, as if from disuse. “¿Mámi?” I asked. I took a step toward Sophie.

  A hand gripped my shoulder. I turned to Jesús. His other hand clutched the knife. He shook his head no. Then he exposed his teeth and, releasing his grip on me, tapped one of his incisors.

  I turned back to Sophie. Still seated, her eyes still closed, she reached out to me. “Come to me,” she said. “Come and embrace your mother, whom you pulled out of time and rescued from death itself.”

  This time, as she spoke, I saw what Jesús had seen before. Sophie’s fake tooth was gone.

  I was reeling. Mámi’s soul was in the tooth, but the tooth was missing. Yet the woman in front of me was clearly no longer my Sophie. “Mámi,” I said. My voice cracked. “¿Mámi, where’s the tooth? ¿How did you get inside Sophie? Please don’t hurt her, Mámi. Please give her back.” I felt my knees crumpling under the weight of me.

  Gusvativo caught me before I fell, hoisted me erect. I had no idea he was still this strong. Once he had me steadied, he said to me, but loud enough for everyone to hear, “That’s not Milhuevos.”

  “¿What?” I asked.

  Sophie’s eyes opened. Then came the gap-toothed smile, a laugh Sophie’s throat could never generate. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Felicio Alberto Costas y Fernández.”

  “The executed mayor of Brota Flor,” said Gustavito.

  Anger grew from the middle of me and reinvigorated my limbs. “¿What did you do to my wife?”

  Sophie’s shoulders shrugged. “I killed her. That tooth you stuck me in was much too constraining. So, as she slept, I shook the tooth free of her gums and dropped it down her throat. She choked to death quickly. Once she was dead, I was free to move in.”

  He ran Sophie’s hands over her arms and torso, ending on her breasts. “She’s a little old for my taste, but I’m not complaining.”

  “Hijo de puta,” Gustavito whispered.

  “She’s still in there,” Jesús said to me. “Her hair is black and white. It’s not all black.”

  “¿Can she fight him?”

  “She needs to learn how. That will take time. But we can help her.”

  “I can tell you about your mother,” said Felicio. He stood Sophie up on shaky legs, spread his arms to steady himself. “You obviously don’t know a thing about her. A hard worker. Smart. A total prude, though. Pretty boring to be around day after day. A lot of times I look a long lunch just to get away from her.

  “How dare you speak of my mother like that,” I said.

  “Oh, don’t get me wrong. She was a great woman. I wouldn’t have traded her for five beautiful new secretaries. And even before we were killed, I knew that woman was pure courage. She did not fear death. And then, on the fateful day Che came to town, she died for you, her only son. She chose to die to save you, her husband, her brothers. The very definition of bravery.

  “Now I, well, I was a different story. I didn’t want to die, I was scared to die, and so I resisted death. I was carried by a bullet out of my body and into the paredón. There I waited, decade after decade, concentrating only on my persistence, raging at the unfairness, refusing to leave life behind. I was too afraid to let my ego go, for if I did, ¿what would happen to me? ¿Hell? ¿Nothingness? I never wanted to find out. I would do anything to live again.

  “And that’s the difference. ¿Haven’t you ever wondered why the only spirits the living ever encounter are either wrecked by sorrow or irredeemably wicked? It’s because the ones that are good enough and strong enough would rather die than harm someone else. That’s what it takes in this world. Others die so you can live.”

  “Kill him,” said Gustavito. He was still holding on to me; I could feel rage coursing through him, joining with and augmenting my own.

  “¿How?” I asked.

  “¡I don’t know!” he yelled. “¡But get him out of her!”

  “Take Gladys,” said Jesús. I turned to him. His skin was spotless, uniformly dark; he held his knife-wife out to me handle-first. “She will search out Sophie and guide her back to us.”

  I took the knife. “Don’t stab her anywhere vital,” said Gustavito. “Whatever wound you make we’ll have to heal.”

  I nodded, then, knife-first, I made my way toward Felicio.

  “¿What are you doing?” he asked. Amazing: already dead, and he was ready to piss himself. Once a coward, I guess.

  He lurched away from me like a rusted tin man; he hadn’t had a chance to learn to use Sophie’s body very well. It was nothing at all to collar him and lay him down face-down on the chair like I was about to spank him.

  “¡I’ll kill her!” Felicio yelled. “¡I’ll kill her, I swear!”

  “You would have already if you could have. But you couldn’t. And now I am coming for you.”

  I sat on Sophie’s back to immobilize Felicio and kissed the knife-blade. “Go get her, Gladys,” I said. Then, wishing I’d never come here but infinitely grateful that I had, and feeling for the first time that I truly understood what Mámi had done for me, what it means to see yourself at the brink of losing everything, not knowing what will happen, yet digging up the courage to make the best move you can, to do the only thing that has a chance of making everything … not okay, not right, but as right as it can be, I put my faith in everything I did not understand about our world and stabbed my wife in the ass.

  Bone of My Bone

  1.

  It arrived all at once the day after the school closed for the Christmas holiday. At first he thought it was some species of unbridled acne: a hard slippery mountain of red flesh, just above the right eyebrow, that culminated in a white tip typical of your garden-variety pimple. But the white tip felt too sharp and hard to be acne; it felt more like the business end of a tooth.

  He thought perhaps time would take care of it, but by Christmas the pimple’s base had grown significantly and the white tip extended out by measurable millimeters, defying gravity and, increasingly, identification. His Pre-Med daughter, visiting for the holiday, said in her pre-professional opinion that he should “lance that sucker,” and so he tried to, but quickly discovered that he couldn’t: the pimple was as hard and insensitive as a pebble, and the white tip completely imperturbable. Worst of all, he had felt no pain during the attempted lancing, though he stabbed at it for close to half an hour. It was as if that little lump of acne was no longer a part of his face.

  That worried him. But he didn’t want to worry his daughter; Pre-Med is a tough major, after all. He decided to wait until she left—she was going on the 29th to spend New Year’s with his estranged wife—before making a doctor’s appointment.

  By the time she left and he was ready to m
ake the call, however, the white tip had grown to the size of something that could no longer be called a tip; it demanded to be classified as a thing unto itself. Gray-white, striated, solid, pointed, he did not have much trouble trying to name it. It was, unmistakably, the beginnings of a horn.

  2.

  He could not think of a doctor in the world who would not contact the local news and spread the word about the man who had a horn growing out of his forehead. So he did not contact the doctor after all. Instead, he drank a shitload and went to bed, hoping things would be better in the morning.

  When he woke up the next morning, thirsty and woozy, he found that the horn had mercilessly shredded his pillow. The poor old pillow, hemorrhaging polyester pillow-guts, looked like Prometheus’s abdomen after Zeus’s eagle had done its daily duty.

  At least that’s what the man thought to himself. He was a high school English teacher who always made sure to cover Greek mythology. He knew other people would think him a pretentious prick for drawing that kind of metaphor from his crusty old pillow, so he never made those kinds of comparisons out loud. But in his head he made them all the time.

  After one last forlorn look at his massacred pillow, he got up and looked at himself in the mirror. It was bigger: much bigger. Too big to ignore anymore.

  He scrambled through every drawer in his bathroom until he found what he was looking for: a pair of scissors. Once he had them, he assailed the horn with consequences-be-damned gusto. He tried cutting, sawing, poking, digging, and even, out of frustration, hammering until he was spent. He looked at himself, heaving and sweating, in the mirror.

  Neither the horn nor even the scissors seemed noticeably impacted by his efforts. He sighed and made himself a Bloody Mary that was almost all alcohol, almost no tomato juice. He called it a “Hail Mary” and thought it pretty clever.

  3.

  By the next day, the horn had grown enough to begin to curve upward. It now looked, he thought, like one of the diabolical canine teeth of the fearsome Fenris Wolf, the creature so powerful it was destined to eat Norse father-god Odin.