Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (8 page)

“Hey, my boy,” Francisco said, brushing past the doctor, the nurse and my mother. Although I was elevated by the examination table, he was so tall he had to bend down to reach me. He hugged and kissed me on the cheek. Remember, this was no physically frozen father of the Eisenhower years. Francisco was a proud Latin
Papa
who saw me as an extension of himself. That meant he was often very warm and loving—and, by the same logic, sometimes very careless.

The orthopedist and his nurse weren’t Latin. When the doctor began to examine my broken arm by moving it about in a painful way, he told me that little boys don’t cry although I hadn’t made a peep. My father’s hug and kiss of me provoked the doctor into nervous reassurance: “He’s fine. It was a simple break. Snapped it clean. I don’t think it even hurt him.”

“A simple break!” my father teased. He took my nose between his index and middle fingers and squeezed hard. So hard it made my eyes water. “That can’t be. We Nerudas don’t do anything simply.” Francisco looked great. His hair was long and almost entirely black. Only a smudge of white appeared above his ears, like racing stripes on the side of a car. He was tall, six feet three. His stomach was flat, his shoulders wide, his posture vigorous, his chest so proud it almost invited an attack. The setting for his eyes was deep and wide apart, a characteristic shape of the Nerudas. The jewels that peered out were a warm brown; they seemed insistently friendly, despite a gleam of mockery. His eyes were highlighted by thick brows that curved up and away at the corners, emphasizing his profile and intelligent forehead. Francisco was obviously handsome, almost a cliché of the Latin lover. When women got their first look at him, they invariably smiled. Indeed, the orthopedist’s nurse, a blotchy-skinned brunette with a harsh Southern accent, a sour woman who had disdained to address my bowed grandmother, who had barked at my mother when she first barged in, and who had told me several times to sit still although I was in pain and not really moving that much, broke into a smile at the sight of my father and roared with laughter as he continued his joke. “Maybe we should break it a few more times,” Francisco said. He put his arm around me, engulfing me into the crook as he squeezed. For a moment he shut out the world. He let me go. “Right, Rafael? Twist it into a pretzel. Make it into a Neruda fracture, a Cubist arm. After all, it was a Spaniard who began Cubism.”

“Cubism,” my mother mumbled with disgust, as though naming a social travesty. “He’s a glorified cartoonist,” she added to Francisco.

“No, he’s a genius.” My father hadn’t disagreed; he cheerfully wiped Ruth’s opinion away. “And loyal to the Republic,” Francisco added with a laugh. My father noticed that the doctor, the nurse, and I were all baffled by their discussion of Picasso’s politics. “Thank you, Doctor,” he said and clapped the physician on his back. The orthopedist was startled not only by the force of the contact, but by the fact of it. “My only question is: can the patient have ice cream?”

My father’s reaction to my injury was to treat it as a triumph. He announced we would stop at the Dairy Queen on Seventh Avenue and buy me a chocolate dip cone, my favorite. Grandma protested weakly that I shouldn’t have ice cream on an empty stomach. Normally Grandma would have been ferociously negative and stopped him, but she was still too enfeebled by the embarrassment of my injury occurring while I was in her care to argue with much conviction. Typically, my mother would also have overruled Francisco, but she had fallen into a moody silence since we left the orthopedist. She kept her arm around me and twice kissed my temple; otherwise she was disengaged, staring ahead at the Tampa streets, apparently bored by my grandmother’s account of events.

But Francisco was cheerful. He told me I was the first Neruda to break a bone in thirty years. “You know why it’s taken so long?” he asked me as we got out of the car to go up to the Dairy Queen counter. He grabbed my head again with his arm and squeezed. “I can’t
get
over how big you are! You’re a giant! I think you’re going to be taller than me.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

He laughed at that, squeezed my head hard once again and let go. The embrace of his arm made me deaf and dumb for a second and its release just as abruptly restored the bright world. It is no fanciful metaphor for me to say that my father could make the earth appear and disappear at will. “You’re a Gallego all right,” my father said, referring to the province of Galicia where Grandpa Pepín had been born. “You’ve got the hard-headed common sense of your peasant ancestors.” We had reached the counter. Behind it was another Southern woman who beamed at his approach. My father referred to the white Southerners in private as “crackers,” an insult, like so many ethnic slurs, that seemed utterly meaningless to me when I looked at its target, but he smiled back at the waitress with welcome. “We’re here to spoil our appetites for dinner,” my father announced.

“Well, darling,” the Dairy Queen waitress answered, “that’s what we’re here for. To spoil you men silly.” She might call him a spic or a wetback or God knows what in private and Dad would say she was a redneck or a cracker in Grandma’s spotless kitchen, but face-to-face they seemed to see other possibilities in each other. Dad chatted with her a bit before giving our orders. He told her he was going to be on radio that evening and she promised to listen. Eventually he ordered us both chocolate dips and watched her retreat to the stainless steel soft-ice-cream machines with careful interest. Then he returned the full glare of his attention to me. “What was I saying? Oh yes, you’re the first Neruda to break a bone in thirty years. You know why?” He didn’t bother to pause for my reply. (Sometimes I catch myself responding today to questions my father asked long ago without waiting for my answer.) “Because you’re the first Neruda to do anything physical in thirty years. We’ve turned into decadent intellectuals.” He grabbed my head and repeated the blackout of light and sound. He let go and continued, “I broke my leg sliding into home when I was twelve playing with the cigar-makers. I used to love playing ball in West Tampa on Sundays. You know there are a couple of Tampa boys in the major leagues. In fact, Al Lopez—he managed the Cleveland Indians to a World Series—was responsible for breaking my leg …” I knew. I had heard this story several times. My father was a natural celebrity. He had the knack of making conversation with strangers that suggests intimacy and yet didn’t truly expose him. He had a colorful fan of anecdotes that were amusing, credible and subtly self-aggrandizing. He spread it gracefully and with apparent spontaneity: like a peacock’s feathers, they were impressive and they distracted from the frail body at the center of all that brilliance. Unfortunately for members of his family, Francisco sometimes forgot that we weren’t strangers; we had already been seduced by his plumage; we didn’t need to be dazzled anymore.

When the Dairy Queen woman returned with our towering cones—she seemed to have given us twice the usual portion—Francisco was almost done with his Al Lopez-broken leg anecdote. She showed interest in it and he repeated the story for her. I bit off the tip of hardened chocolate syrup at the top, sucking up the interior cream. There was throbbing inside my hard cast. I wanted to touch my arm where it hurt. The pain was deep inside my forearm, unsoothable, an awkward ache that couldn’t be eased by any position I assumed. And it seemed to be getting worse. I sucked up more of the ice cream, determined to enjoy myself, to follow my father’s lead.

This was my favorite ice cream cone. But having it while I hurt was worse than not having it at all. I had the pleasure in my grasp but I tasted only discomfort. The soft ice cream leaked out of its chocolate cast and down the edges of the cone, streaking my hand.

“Eat up,” my father said as he finished the broken leg story. The cone fell. I hadn’t let it go, but I hadn’t held on either. I watched its graceful somersault and crushing splatter onto the concrete with morbid fascination. I was glad to see it destroyed.

My father and the waitress exclaimed with dismay. I looked up at Grandpa’s car and saw my mother staring at me. Grandma Jacinta was talking to her, again with an unusual animation and uncertainty. My mother’s curly flop of black hair, parted on one side and covering half of her brow, was still while she listened. That too was unusual. She always seemed to be in motion, especially her hair; it would tremble from her nervous energy. Her green eyes were wide as she stared at me. But she wasn’t seeing me. She didn’t react to the ice cream cone’s death.

I sagged. I didn’t keel over. I slumped against my father. I felt weak and exhausted. There was commotion. My mother came out of the car. Grandma called my name in a faraway panicked tone: “Rafa! Rafa!” The waitress said she’d get me water. Francisco picked me up.

“Ugh,” he groaned at my weight. “What a big boy you’ve become.”

“What’s wrong!” my mother said in an angry shout.

“He’s tired,” my father insisted. “You can lie down in the back, Rafael. We’ll go home and you’ll take a nap.”

I was horizontal in my father’s arms as he carried me to Grandpa’s car. The low Tampa buildings bounced. A blue car with a white hat bobbed up and down. It was across the avenue, stopped at a gas station, but not at a pump. I didn’t notice the occupants before my father turned away from them to angle me at the Plymouth. I wondered if the man with the baseball cap and aviator glasses was inside that blue and white car. I thought about mentioning the men and the car to my parents. Ruth had lectured me around Christmastime about strangers watching us. She told me to let her know if I saw men hanging around outside our apartment building. I asked why they would. She didn’t really answer. She said that some men had been questioning our neighbors about us. When I pressed for a fuller explanation, she was vague. (I had no idea that for a decade my parents had been subject on and off to harassment—some might prefer to call it surveillance—by the FBI. They had been members of the Communist Party until 1950 and then there was my father’s friendliness to Fidel’s Cuba.) She made me promise I would report any men lurking about. I wondered if these men in the blue and white car qualified.

I didn’t get a chance to bring it up. When Francisco maneuvered me to the rear door, a disagreement started between Ruth and Grandma about who was going to sit in the back with me. At first, they expressed their desires passively.

“Jacinta, you sit up front,” my mother said. “You’ll be more comfortable.”

“No,” Grandma said, “there’s not enough room for you in the back.”

“There’s plenty of room.”

“No, I’ll be fine. I’ll put Rafa’s head on my lap,” Grandma insisted.

“I can put his head on my lap,” Ruth said.

“It’ll wrinkle your dress,” Grandma objected.

“For God’s sake,” my father said. “Somebody open the door!” He was still holding me. It was hot. He shifted me in his arms, weary from the weight.

Jacinta opened the rear door and slid to the far seat. “No!” my mother protested. Francisco put me in and Grandma eased my head onto her lap.

“I
want to sit with him,” my mother insisted to Grandma. The sharp tone she used on Jacinta was rare—in fact, unique. She was always solicitous of Grandma. “Why aren’t you paying any attention to what I say? I’m his mother. I want to sit with him.”

“Take it easy,” my father mumbled.

“You take it easy,” my mother said loudly. She was angry, but she wasn’t hysterical. She had confidence. “It took over two hours to get Rafe treated. He hasn’t had anything to eat since breakfast and he threw that up. I think he’s dehydrated and your great solution is to give him ice cream and pinch him and shove him around like he’s some chum in a bar—”

And then something extraordinary happened. So extraordinary that I completely forgot about my pain. My grandmother began to cry. She talked through the tears, saying in English to my mother, “It’s my fault. I know that. You blame me. I know I was stupid. I got so nervous. I know I ought to take him to the hospital right away.” Big tears rolled down the old woman’s face. One splashed on the bridge of my nose and rolled into my left eye. It stung a little. To see my dignified and reserved Grandma cry was amazing. Also her tone of voice was amazing. She sounded like a little girl pleading to be forgiven; oddly, she spoke with much less of an accent than she usually did. If I were to shut my eyes I couldn’t have recognized that voice as hers. “I’m an old fool. I know. But he was not hurt by my stupidity. He’s okay.” Grandma looked down and stroked my face. More tears fell on me. She wiped them off with her fingertips. “I would never hurt my only grandson.”

“Oh Jesus,” my mother moaned. It was her turn to cry. She put her hands to her temples, rubbed them and then covered her eyes, pushing the tears back. “I give up.” She opened the front door and got in. “I’m never right about anything!” she shouted at the windshield.

I fell asleep. I wakened somewhat as my father carried me to the guest bedroom. I heard voices greet Francisco with enthusiasm and quickly modulate to whispered concern about me. I kept my eyes shut.

The air in the room was still and hot. Ruth and Jacinta each brought in a fan. They argued over which one was more effective. They didn’t convince each other. After an ominous silence, my mother said they should keep both fans going. Ruth took off my sneakers and Jacinta lifted my head to slip a pillow underneath. I pretended to be asleep. In fact, with the heavy cast lying across my chest, I wondered if I could ever sleep again.

The guest bedroom was right off the living room and had a window looking onto the porch. Wide horizontal Venetian blinds covered the screen, but the window was up and I could hear my father hold court out there. Judging from the chorus of exclamations, questions and laughter that punctuated his storytelling, a crowd as large as what one would expect in the evening had already gathered, although it was still midafternoon. Twice my grandmother complained to the group that Francisco needed to rest from his flight, especially because he was due to be on the Tampa radio show at eight o’clock. My mother joined with Jacinta on this issue and said to my father that he had to stop talking by five so that he could get himself ready and eat some dinner.