Daughters of Babylon (22 page)

Little Fiendy Whozit has a weeny voice;

he rips away his little gifts and claims he had no choice.

Little Fiendy Whozit thinks he knows what’s right from wrong,

and he likes to teach you lessons with a big bang-bong.

—Wiley Forrest, circa A.D. 1170,
translated from Middle English by Vivian Lansdowne

San Matías Hospital
Oaxaca, Mexico
LATE SUMMER, 1972

White, white, there was too much white! On the walls, on the ceiling, on the screen between Dely’s bed and the patient on the other side with a stab wound through the liver. The floor was black and white linoleum squares, a checkerboard that made ugly farting sounds against the soles of Lupo’s city shoes. This was Mexico! His Delia
sabrosa, mujer
amorosa
was Mexican—where were the goddamn colours?

Best question you’ve asked all week.

Go away!
Lupo’s inside voice had been silent since the accident. Nights of prayer, days of sacred ceremony, flowers at their doorstep, gifts of food and rosaries, special masses at the church, visits from the priest, nine days of supplication and caring muted through a waterfall of tears that no one saw and that never stopped. The Nagual Lupo Sanchez had been bested by a burro, a stupid donkey ass too dumb to look both ways. And still his beautiful, black-eyed Dely lay here, strapped and tubed and wired to a machine that translated vital signs into blips and bleeps and wavy lines but as for leading her to her own vitality, was no smarter than the burro.

It could have been so much worse. Seven passengers, four of them with bruises and lacerations, some muscle pain and whiplash, and not a scratch on the baby who was found lying on the pop-up roof in a bed of carnations. It could have been so much worse.

Nine days he heard this from people in Las Cuevas and here in Oaxaca where he was staying at the YMCA and spending every waking hour at Dely’s side in the Hospital San Matías. The doctors took her off life support because they didn’t know her the way Lupo knew her; they said she’d be gone within the hour. Too many internal injuries. That was three days ago, and although Bill Carver’s insurance plan with UPenn was covering expenses—the trip to Oaxaca had been anthropological research—Lupo could feel the
vibraciones
snaking up and down the hall.

That Indian
palurda
has no business taking up bed space that ought to go to Mexicans with good education and light skin. Why doesn’t she die already? If that gringo professor down the hall with a fractured cranium and both legs in a cast weren’t asking about her every day, making it plain that whatever happened in the hospital with regard to his friend’s care would find its way into journals and lectures read and heard by professionals with greenback $$ bank accounts and even lighter skin, they’d have emptied the bed by now. It wasn’t as though she’d have felt anything.

Lupo slipped his hand under Dely’s hand, careful not to disturb the IV needle. Lupo was nagual; he knew the pulses and the passageways, the vortices and planes of All That Is, but he did not know this. Dely’s hand was neither hot nor cold. He could feel, like the nurses did, for a pulse at her wrist and find one, but she had no beat. He wiped his eyes and squeezed her fingers. The waterfall was threatening to flood again. No good.

“Dely,
mi amor
, it’s me, Lupo, your peskiest, most persistent
novio
and nagual.” He spoke softly in Mixtec and Spanish. “I know you can hear me—no, I don’t know that, but I hope you can. I’m thinking I should tell you the news from Las Cuevas and down the hall. The professor sends his best. He’s enjoying the morphine. So far, no infection where they put in the steel rods.

“I spoke to Malvine. Ívano is doing well. He misses you, but he’s eating, and he’s eating so you’ll come back and tell him what a good boy he is for eating and sleeping through the night. Tita is nearly finished repairing the van. The headlights she bought during the fiesta fit perfectly. It may always pull to the left, but as she explained to the professor, vehicles too carry trauma. Talk to your van, she told Bill. Tell her the accident wasn’t her fault.”

Lupo thought he heard a snort of laughter, although nothing of the sort had registered in Dely’s hand or on the machine of blips and bleeps.

“
La suequita
, Karin, tried sleeping alone in the
casita
, but she gave it up halfway through the third night. Too many nightmares, she said, of shipwrecks and confined spaces—but they aren’t just nightmares, she told me, they’re all-the-time-in-my-thought-mares. You know what that means! But our witches’ party is complete, I don’t know what to do. Anyway, the
casita
is empty, just the way toloache likes it, and Karin is staying with the
brujas
, and seems to be more successful than the professor who sends his love—oh, I told you that already, didn’t I?—in asking
rurales
about their bathroom habits.”

Ha ha ha! To be a cockroach on the wall for that!

“—the hell?” Lupo crossed himself. “Sorry, Mother.” He looked around the room.

You don’t recognize me, do you? It’s the whiteness, all that antiseptic—hurts my eyes just thinking about it.

“Pantera? La Pantera Negra, is that you?”

She is not here. You should know better. You are nagual.

“Who is not here? Are you talking about Dely?” Lupo’s eyes began to sting. The odours of floor wax, quinine, sawdust, blood, disinfectant, urine, stale tortillas, sweat, and the gel-capped contents of locked cabinets vomited their warring selves into his eardrums and travelled through inner tubes and cavities to exhale their stink through his nostrils. On his subsequent inhale, he nearly passed out. “
Puta madre chingada
, how does anyone breathe around here?”

He couldn’t even cross himself; the swimmy motion of arm to forehead, left breast, right breast would have toppled him.

Your mother’s here. Swear away, she says.

“Mamita is with you?”

From the other side of the white curtained divider: “Could you keep it quiet, Mister? My husband took a knife to the liver, and it was not a healthy liver to begin with. He needs his rest.”

“Sorry.” Lupo hadn’t known there was anyone in the room besides Dely, the stab victim, and himself. He was losing his touch.

You’re not losing your touch. We need to go somewhere we can talk.

La Pantera’s voice boomed around him, amplified and coming out of everywhere like a small earthquake, like the bullhorned emanations of the foreman at Delgado-Obregón, minus the weeny dick arrogance. Lupo wondered how the entire ward didn’t shake apart, but everything around him seemed oblivious, unchanged, including Dely.

I told you, she’s not here. She’s dining in the house of the Giver of Life. Quite enjoying the tamales.

And in that instant of mentioning the Divine Provider, Creator of Flower Song, Giver of Life, Holy Cleft and pre-division form of Feathered Serpent/Smoking Mirror, time tunneled, space stretched out in front of Lupo with himself in the middle, staring down a length of furrows like a pulsing infinite parade of bangle bracelets. Then, just as quickly, the tunnel collapsed to a single bangle, circus ring, and he landed in the middle of…

…no where

…on no thing

…on his butt. Ow!

A yellowish, desert-like terrain surrounded him, and there was La Pantera. Or rather, two blurry, bilateral versions of her. One was the sultry-eyed cantina owner whose perfect melon breasts beneath a white cotton huipil and hips like swaying palms kept male customers drinking and hoping, and the birth rate in the Sierra Madres Occidentales higher than anywhere in Mexico. The other was her essence self, Black Panther, golden-eyed and richly whiskered, sitting on his/her haunches in such a way that his
cojones
—call them spirit balls, if you like—were fully evident.

“You’ll have to single-eye me,” she said, “one or the other, else the multi-sensory feedback will make you crazy.”

Lupo checked himself for arms, legs and torso; he appeared to have them all. He covered his right eye; she was cat. Left eye, Mexican Indian pin-up goddess. He stayed where he was.

“Right, then,” she said, and they were in her cantina after-hours or pre-hours with a full, dimpled canteloupe moon shining through the window onto a table for two with a bowl of lime wedges, salt shaker, and a row of tequila shooters. She spared no detail, that Pantera.

“You want Dely back,” she said.

“Of course, I do.”

“What if she doesn’t want to come back?”

“She has a baby who needs her. I need her.” He could hear the warbling cant of his neediness. It sounded like rusty water draining through algae-clogged pipes. He didn’t care.

Pantera licked the web of flesh between her right thumb and forefinger with a long, slow, languorous tongue. “You are aware of
Guelaquetza
?”

“The festival? Sure, we just came back from it—or we were, until...”

“Not the dancing, eating, pseudo-nostalgic version. I mean the original, the Word Itself.”

Guelaquetza.

It was a Zapotec word—that is, the Zapotec nation had inherited the word from an older, much older, originating tongue. It meant:

…offering, sacrifice, presence, receiving, wholeness, standing, cycle, depletion, offering, sacrifice, presence, receiving, wholeness…

That was the trouble with original meanings. They were always loopy. Step onto the loop any one place, it was hard to get off.

“I am aware,” he said, “of
Guelaquetza
.”

The nagual woman sprinkled salt on her wet skin, licked it off, knocked back a shot of tequila, and sucked a lime wedge between her lips in a single, fluid, erotic motion. “We have need of your knowing and your action.”

“
Una
maniobra
?”

“A maneuver, yes.”

The maneuver was the most powerful act a nagual could take on, and the most dangerous. It could never be self-initiated, only requested, and never forced. Because it was an act that, once initiated, changed everything, the
maniobra
was not to be entered into lightly—or heavily.

“Who is we?”

“Names don’t matter, numbers don’t count. The more successful your maneuver, the larger the participation. I’m banking on Infinite.”

“If I agree to this,” he said, “will Dely return to Ívano and me?”

“You know better than to ask. No
maniobra
steals choice from another. We can give you some suggestions. Get her out of the hospital. Talk to the
gringo
, use insurance loopholes to transport her to the
casita
. She must not spend another hour in that cesspool of hypocrisy.”

The part of him that was man, lover, husband, friend latched onto the practical. “I can do those things.”

“And the rest?”

The nagual gave his answer by licking the wedge of skin between his thumb and forefinger and sprinkling salt. He gave his answer by knocking back the shot of tequila and slamming the glass on the table. He gave his answer by sucking on the wedge of tart, fresh lime.

“Very well,” she said.

La Pantera Negra leaned forward, heavy breasts resting on the table. Her instructions were a combination of eye contact, breath, scent, flavour, touch, and things for which there are no words. Lupo fell into the loop of his mentor’s
guelaquetza
like chunks of mango in a blender turned on High.

Reine du Ciel
French Pyrenees
PRESENT DAY

All night long, Silvina Kestral dreamed of making money. Not in the sense of earning an income or cranking out banknotes in a national mint but making it, manifesting, creating, pulling out of thin air. On every flat surface of the house, wherever she laid her hand, stacks of dollar bills and euros piled up—dollars (US) from the right hand, euros from the left. She’d been quite deliberate in paying attention to which hand “raised” which currency. On the vanity in Viv’s bedroom, beside the Bakelite brush and mirror, a stack of dollars lifted her hand like a rising tide. In the bathroom, on the tank cover of the toilet, where magenta petals of an African violet had fallen, euros amassed.

She descended the stairs, resting her palms lightly along the walls and money rippled out, cascading, gently carpeting the stairs like rectangular confetti, euros and dollars left and right. And they didn’t just flutter and land, they interwove, coming together like two halves of a card deck in the hands of a croupier, self-shuffling cash. By the time Silvie got the water boiling for French press coffee, she’d figured out that money appeared only when she lay her palms flat, allowing her, thereby, to engage in ordinary activities like slicing bread and opening a jar of honey. The surface didn’t have to be large. Every one of the copper-bottomed pots hanging on the tongue and groove wall panel in the
foganha
produced cash; so did the side of the toaster. The small speckled dipper at the sink and its larger enamel counterpart on the wall did not.

Silvie noticed, too, the bills weren’t crisp, fresh-off-the-press stacks one saw in briefcases in thriller films but ordinary, circulating, individually worn legal tender. And then the phone on the wall rang. She picked up the receiver. “Hello?”