Mandragon Page 5

  It may be I intuited all this, and didn’t want the cataracts and blinders words tend to fasten on their users. Or it may be the conditions of my life made words unnecessary, inappropriate.

  I lived with a black woman, called simply La Negra. She dealt in love spells and the like. Her clients were mainly women whose husbands, legal or common-law, were unfaithful to them—had taken up with other, usually younger, women, or simply wallowed in loose fucking here and there. Since most men here fit one of those two categories, business was good.

  It made no difference that La Negra was a fraud. Her clients came to her crammed with the desire to believe, and she gave them a convincing show.

  La Negra was so ugly even the plainest, most decrepit woman began to feel attractive in her company. She was ancient, wizened, toothless; black as a telephone, bald as a brick: a proper witch, in looks at any rate. And like most successful frauds, she’d conned herself. She believed in her nonexistent arts, and thus exuded confidence and passed it on.

  Her remedies were so disgusting they appeared infallible: what else could explain their being recommended? And most were so complicated they contained excuses for their failure. A woman whose man had no established concubine but sprayed his love hither and yon, everywhere save in its proper vessel, might, for example, recapture his affections by serving him hot, strong, richly sugared coffee laced with her menstrual blood and strained through the panties of a virgin—two cups at breakfast and two cups at noon, the panties to have been worn for three days running, the noon draught to be freshly brewed in a new pot. If, though, he monkeyed regularly with the same chippy, then it was likely that he was bewitched. The suffering spouse must bring La Negra some of her man’s sperm and one of her rival’s nightgowns, the sample to be pure, the shift unlaundered. A pomade mixed with these would, if applied strictly as directed, break the spell. A woman who had captured a man’s love and wished to hold it should stuff a toad with scraps of his evening meal, sew up the toad’s mouth and bunghole, and keep it in a pot under her bed. An unfaithful wife or girlfriend—and we got some of these too—who wished to cheat without fear of detection should thread a needle with green silk, make the sign of the cross with it over the bobo’s face while he was sleeping, then use it to sew up the eyes of an owl.

  Besides all this, La Negra had her Fenómeno. She acquired me while I was still a baby—when, how, and from whom she never said. Most likely I was offered up in sale; most likely she bought gladly. A double-sexed monster! Human to boot! I was a valuable asset in her trade.

  The mere presence in her house of my extraordinary groin greatly enhanced La Negra’s prestige as an expert in love’s mysteries. Clients were informed of my endowment, and encouraged to inspect it at their leisure. One glimpse brought admiration and respect, which were transferred to La Negra and her potions. And she would then point out that her monster’s hair cured frigidity, and its nail parings kept a man from coming too soon. Her Abortito’s sweat, daubed on a woman’s throat, made her irresistible. Dump it in a man’s drink and he’d keep humping the night long. Its excrement had an opposite effect, would make the randiest cocksman limp for hours, and turn the hottest sexpot dry as chalk. Just the thing to give your husband before he visited his chippy! Just the thing to feed the whore herself!

  La Negra sold this stuff at flexible prices. She sold it well. To Domitila Braithwaite, laundress, whose fireman consort was useless when it came to quenching blazes in her loins. To Nuris Ciervo, doe-eyed file clerk at the National Registry. One day a gentleman both rich and famous, a man too prominent for her to name, had pulled her into a storeroom and wanked her bolt upright against the dusty shelves, and she longed for the favor to be repeated. To Señora Fulvia Punzón, whose wedded husband, Captain Franco Punzón, had no less than three official mistresses, each with a bungalow he paid the rent on and a brood of kids he’d recognized at law. To Doña Irene Manta de Hormiga. She had no need of La Negra’s services herself. She was the reigning love goddess of the country, as everyone but her husband knew. She came to buy something for her forty-year-old virginal first cousin, and stayed to view La Monstrua’s amazing crotch, and went away wishing she were equipped similarly. To housemaids and office girls. To housewives and professional women. To matrons of the ruling class. My hair hung in lockets on some of the best pedigreed throats in Tinieblas. Some of the most important gullets downed my crap.

  A valuable asset. I was treated accordingly. I was fed well and clothed very well, in dresses or short trousers as the day’s whim fell. La Negra had a filthy temper, but she never raised hand or voice to Abortito. If I did anything untoward, she took it out on Nena, the mestiza woman who cleaned and cooked. And Nena took it out on her daughter, Vilma, my keeper and my slave. And Vilma cooed and crooned and stroked and fondled. Vilma was soft and brown and gentle. She fed me bathed me dressed me brushed me combed me. She sang and chattered to me. She waited on me by day and soothed me by night. I was pampered, in short, like a sacred ibis, like a rare egret, like a performing duck.

  I was also guarded against loss or theft. From as early as I can remember, for as long as I stayed with La Negra, I wore a stout leather collar fitted with a padlock and a chain.

  This bothered me less at the time than later on when I remembered it. Vilma cleaned under my collar, pushing it first up, then down. From time to time, as I grew, La Negra unlocked it and let it out a notch. But since it never left me till I left La Negra, I scarcely was aware of it till then.

  My chain was twenty-odd feet long, of light steel figure-8-shaped links badly rusted by the soaked hair of rainy seasons. It was pad-locked to the bedstead every night, and by day to the big bamboo sofa in the sala. Its weight was that of a natural appendage, its limit was my natural estate. Others weren’t collared and chained, but I was different from others anyway. My chain and collar, like my private parts, were appropriate to me.

  I didn’t feel impoverished by captivity. The stimulations available to me within the limits of my chain were almost unbearably rich.

  Dry-season morning at La Negra’s. A brown child in a pink pinafore sits at the edge of the worn, manila-brown straw mat that covers all the center of the floor. A rusted chain droops from the collar on my neck and snakes off to the triple-dowel base of the sofa. Sunlight flows in through long chinks between the wall planks, across the floor and up into my lap, revealing galaxies of dust specks. They swing and gyre, making visual music my eyes hear. My shoulders tremble. My mouth twists in a rictus of delight. Each speck is a soloist. All sing in contrapuntal harmony. As the sun strengthens, as puffs of breeze grow rarer, the song crescendos and the rhythm slows toward a fortissimo of immobility—with which the sun lifts past the chinks, the dust-speck universes vanish, the music stills. La Monstrua rolls her eyes ceilingward and collapses, seized by joy.

  The kitchen, in whose doorway I could squat without taking up all my chain’s slack, poured out experience. I learned, for instance, that vegetables know their destiny and accept it, await it eagerly in fact, since to be eaten’s not extinction but rebirth. I came to know the exultation of newly dug tubers, and the expectant serenity, like that of brides being adorned, of the tomatoes Nena peeled and sliced. Flesh, though, is ignorant and anguished. A cut of meat, the kitchen taught me, feels unlucky, as though the cow or pig it came from would have lived forever if there were no butchers. Flesh goes resentful to the pan and table.

  Now and then a man would come through the barrio hawking lobsters. He carried them piled in a wire basket and passed between the houses, singing:

  “Lan-GOHHHHHHHH-stas!

  Vivas y sab-ROHHHHHHHH-sas!”

  Nena would consult La Negra and then, perhaps, call down. Presently the vendor and his lobsters would appear at the head of the kitchen stairs. None of the lobsters were con tented in the basket, the way yucca or limes would be. They missed the sea and felt unlucky. They sulked in various ways. Those near the bottom were fearfully dispirited. They’d given up, and yet weren’t resigned.
Those in the middle took no comfort from not being farther down but struggled to climb over one another toward the top. And those on top worried about staying there. When the vendor filled Nena’s order and took out two or three, the accidentally promoted lobsters just beneath them felt intense satisfaction, as from a victory achieved on their own merit, then instantly grew anxious about retaining their high rank. Those picked and dropped into the sink congratulated themselves. They were out of the basket and near a little moisture. Soon they would be home in the cool sea. So when Nena brought the pot to a boil and dumped them in, their disillusionment was greater than their pain. Their pain was hideous. It set me wailing and raised welts on my loins and stomach, though after one close-up attendance at a lobster boiling I always withdrew as far as my chain would let me from the kitchen. Their pain was terrible, but their disillusionment was worse.

  The sala window, to which my chain reached easily, paid out bounties of emotion. I came to know the raindrop’s anguish as it clung, with growing unsuccess, to a slick mango leaf, and the tree’s maternal generosity toward birds that pecked its fruit. I came to know the tree’s patience during the dry months, and its relief at the first rains. Or suppose a rich client arrived in her finned Melbourne at La Negra’s, a wooden house set up on cement stilts in an outlying barriada of the capital. I felt the car’s peevishness at having been guided onto unpaved streets, and its disgust at being parked there in the slop; its worry over whether, when it was started up again, its tires would find traction; its fear of being trapped and left the night. And if another car passed it at speed, I knew the mud’s glee at being splashed on its waxed fender.

  I came to know the sleepless famine of the termite colony whose nest hung in the crotch of a ruined tree and whose collective mouth rose in a quivering tentacle along the wall to munch the joists under La Negra’s eaves. I came to know the yoga trance of mantids. I came to know the restlessness of flies. And oh those children’s voices raised beyond the frontier of my world! The shouts of children striving on an impromptu soccer field, the squeals of children dancing in the warm rain. The screams of children being whipped in nearby houses. The yelps of children taunting one another. I came to know human childhood through such noises.

  Sometimes, as I stood at the window, a group of children would collect below, for the whole barrio knew La Negra kept a monster. They’d point and whisper, snicker, gasp disgust, and I would hop about in agitation, claw at the screening, and make weird moans—“Come closer! Come and visit me!” Until La Negra’s squawk would bring Nena and Vilma, the one to howl the kids off, the other to coo me calm. That never took long. I floated in contentment, not of infants but of household pets. Nothing ever muddled it for long.

  But no amount of careful tending could keep weed humanity from sprouting in me. In time I began to resent being displayed.

  For a long time I never minded. For a long time I found it nice to be the focus of attention, the object of La Negra’s toutings, and of the clients’ oohs and ahs. For a long time I took pleasure in being probed and stared at. But then I began to think of myself as too good for La Negra and her clientela.

  I was soon to meet much less selective publics. I was to learn that all impresarios degrade the attractions they put on display, collar and chain them, look down upon them for the freaks they are; and that few are as generous as La Negra, or as careful to restrain their native cruelty. But in my ignorance I began to resent the touch of alien fingers, the pull of fingers spreading me, the push of fingers peeling me back, the timid waverings of lotioned pinkies, the pokings of plump kitchen-coarsened thumbs. Sometimes no fingers touched me, but I began to resent the palping of thirsty eyes. Now and then the eyes merely brushed me, then darted off, but I began to resent having to lie exposed on the low table by the sofa, with my knees lifted and my thighs spread and my butt propped on a cushion. I began to resent La Negra’s explanations and extolments, the guided tours she offered of my loins. I began to resent the mistress-of-ceremonies flourish with which she raised my dress or pulled my trousers down, the soft tugs on my chain by which she summoned me, the reverential whisper she assumed when telling a new client what I was. I began to resent the clothes she bought me and the treats that Nena made me and the care than Vilma gave me night and day. I became curdled with resentment.

  All without cause! La Negra’s was a paradise! At La Negra’s I was valued and well treated, coddled beyond measure, gratified in every wordless whim—merely for being what I was. What princess gets more? Though she’s cameo perfect? Though her blood’s pure through a hundred quarterings? And I was the sort of thing that usually gets stuffed in ash cans, or dumped in garbage chutes, or hacked apart and flushed down toilets. A bastard monstrosity. A failed abortion. One of nature’s stupider confusions, sicker jokes. The world owes nothing to any creature in it, but I hadn’t learned that. So in my ignorance I studied resentment.

  I sulked. I squalled. I spat toothpaste in Vilma’s face and dribbled Nena’s treats onto my clothing. I wailed when clients came and bellowed while La Negra counseled them.

  I stopped heeding her gentle tugs so that she had to drag me to the table. I squirmed when she undressed me. I wriggled when she placed me for display. I clamped my knees shut till she pried them open, glared in the clients’ eyes, fouled their fingers with my precious piss. I bit the hand that fed me.

  This was at the end of the dry season in 1957, when my resentment had been festering for some months. One afternoon a for-hire Beaufort from the Hotel El Opulento thumped slowly down our rutted street and trundled to La Negra’s. The chauffeur leaped out and skipped around to open the rear door. A passenger emerged.

  He was of middle height, though he looked shorter because of his roundness. He was a few years under forty, though he looked older because of his hair, which was entirely grey and thinning at the temples. I watched him from the window that day and spent the next thirteen years circling with his circus. Don Lorenzo Amichevole.

  He wore a double-breasted, cream-color linen suit that covered his paunch sleekly, and tiny black-and-white pumps with tasseled laces. He told the driver to wait, took a large canvas zipper bag from the rear seat, and moved lightly toward the front stairs. Presently his knuckles rapped the front door.

  By then I was crouched in a corner, so I didn’t see his entrance. I had set up my customary howling, so I didn’t hear his conversation with La Negra. Almost at once she hauled her Fenómeno to the sofa and tried to arrange me for display. I struggled, La Negra cursed, Don Lorenzo watched in amusement. After a time he touched La Negra politely on the shoulder, smiled broadly, and said in a courtly tone: “If you will permit me, madam.” Then he seized the waist of my trousers and tore them open so that the buttons popped, so that the crotch seam ripped back to the seat. He snatched one of my ankles in each hand and, rising, jerked me in air. I hung limply, paralyzed by the violence of his attack.

  Don Lorenzo held my legs apart and rested my bottom on his paunch. He studied my groin.

  “Astonishing!” he murmured. “Astonishing!”

  He set me on the sofa and turned to La Negra.

  “Even if we cannot do business, madam, this has been worth my trouble and your fee—and, of course, the cost of the trousers. A true hermaphrodite! I am astonished.”

  He dipped a plump pink hand into his jacket pocket and pulled out a lime sourball. He peeled the cellophane and held the candy near my mouth. I bit him fiercely on the base of his thumb.

  I was born with all my milk teeth cut. I cut my second teeth a few years later—two sets, sixty-four teeth arranged in double rows, an unmistakable sign. My teeth are small but very, very sharp. They sliced Don Lorenzo’s flesh like lard. They grated on bone. Blood spurted, hot and salt, into my mouth.

  “OOOGH!”

  Don Lorenzo’s eyes widened. He jerked his hand back, but my teeth held fast. Then he smiled, relaxed the hand I gnawed on, twined his free hand in my chain close to my collar. Slowly, apparently without effort, he ra
ised me by the chain and held me out over the table so that my mouth, with his hand in it, was at the level of his eyes. I choked and spat his thumb out.

  “Do you see, madam?” he said, still holding me aloft and taking care that his wound bled on the table not his suit. “The beast is vicious. And will become more dangerous as it grows larger. I counsel you to sell it whilst you may.” I hung from my collar, choking, kicking my feet.

  “How much?” said La Negra.

  That was the last I heard before I lost consciousness. That was the last I saw of her or Nena or Vilma. That was the last I had of the easy life.

  9

  “Our common denominator,” said Angela, when I told her of my connection with Don Lorenzo. “He bought you, and he sold me.”

  In the same town, but not in the same season. Angela left Amichevole’s Universal Circus almost eight years before I joined it, quit circusing for good about the time I began toddling, but I caught part of her act on ecstativision the first time I saw her. Truth coshed me into trance and flung me backward, and I watched her, bikinied in rhinestones, poise on the tabbed nub of a teeterboard, tuck her butt and point her spangled bubbies, until her salmon-tighted brother Pedro finished his handspring ramble across the sawdust and catapulted her off. Soaring back flip-and-a-half toward her brother Pablo, who stood facing away from her, reading a newspaper. Feather descent into a one-hand balance on his head. Entrechat flutter of naked feet aloft. Upside-down grin for applauders. Pretty toes curling in the warm bath of the spotlight, while a recomposed Pedro saluted with raised hands and Don Lorenzo skipped into the ring, beamed, and waved his top hat.

  That’s what it’s supposed to mean when journalists refer to her as a former entertainer. In fact, though, she gave her most memorable performances outside the ring. For publics of one, and without Pedro and Pablo. Without a spotlight either, or even a costume. When Don Lorenzo had to deal with functionaries of the countries his troupe toured, he sent Angela in first to entertain them. They were so tractable afterward. Mouths open and tongues lolling, saliva dribbling slowly down their chins. Eyes glazed with bliss and faces wreathed in the beatific grins of idiots.