by I V Olokita
“Lord,” I sighed, unaware that my sigh was loud enough to be overheard. “What a wonderful life!” At that moment I could swear that if there was a God, he would have been pleased with my acts, or why should have he have endowed me with all the good fortunes I have enjoyed nearly all my life?
Carmela threw her head backwards violently, giving me a painful bite that startled and threw me back, too. She coughed a little, as if choking, yet her face betrayed no emotions: her look was icy, her eyes shrinking down to hardly visible stripes, and her mouth opening wide.
“What’s the matter?” I asked angrily, quickly pulling my pants up.
Her only response was a flow of tears, followed by a quiet sigh.
“What’s the matter with you?!” I repeated, yet in response, she just stood up and grabbed her belly.
“I think it’s coming out now,” she finally uttered, leaning heavily against the white fender of my Mercedes. “It really hurts!” she went on, pressing her hands against her stomach, which seemed to move autonomously. Then she rolled her body left and right, while still leaning against the flank of my car.
“What do you mean, coming out?!” I resented. “What about me? I paid you for an hour, and we haven’t even spent half of it!”
Carmela froze still, giving me an angry look, all her pains seemingly gone away at that moment. “Take your money back!” she finally sighed, reaching for the stash on the edge of her dress, handing my bills back to me, one by one.
“Keep your stinking money!” I responded with a mixture of anger and frustration, slapping in her face.
She looked me straight in the face, her eyes burning with fury. “Take me to the hospital now!” she hissed through her teeth, hinting that otherwise, I might live to regret it.
I succumbed, opening the car door. She crawled in, saying nothing more, perhaps amazed at her successful trick. She lay on the rear seat, occupying it entirely, with her legs bent against her belly. Slamming the door angrily, I took the driver’s seat.
We journeyed silently to the hospital through Rio’s darkness, she in the back, speechlessly groaning with pain, and myself, just thinking all the time. I gave occasional glances at the rearview mirror, to make sure she hasn’t delivered yet, keeping the shining white leather upholstery unstained with her blood. She did her best to hold it. At last, we reached a crammed emergency room. A well-mannered hospital attendant in white opened my car door, drawing her tightly towards him. Supporting her for a while, he suddenly turned towards me. “Would Senhor park his car and join his Senhora?” he either suggested or kindly commanded.
“I would,” I mumbled, having no intention to.
Returning to the hospital’s main entrance, after a long hesitation, I found no trace of either Carmela or that kind hospital attendant. Instead, I saw a bulky security guard who asked me for an ID. “Senhor,” I declared confidently. “My wife is in labor inside and I came to stand by her after I had parked my car,” I uttered a blatant untruth.
“Well, come in,” the guard conceded, showing me the way inside. I walked in with a deep sigh of relief, passing by him and walking all the way to the reception.
“May I help you?” I was addressed by a huge nurse in a white uniform and a pointy cap.
I gave her a long gaze, without breathing a word, hallucinating her into my life, visualizing that bulky woman with the little mustache on her upper lip chasing me with a baby in her arms, and myself, crying, “It’s not mine!” in a vain attempt to lose her.
“Where’s the maternity room?” I finally asked, waking up from this nightmarish vision.
“Second floor!” she replied, instantly turning her eyes to the person next in line.
Approaching the staircase leading to the second floor, I spotted two police officers leaning against the railing, chatting after their long shift. I stopped to look at them, and they returned a look of greeting. For a moment, one of them gave his partner a look and whispered something in his ear. I was startled. Pretending to have forgotten something in the reception, I walked back until I got out of their sight, and then took a quick pace out of the hospital, to never come back again. Even if she denied me love that night, she couldn’t deprive me of my freedom.
Meanwhile, as I was making my way to my car and then home, early in the morning, Carmela was struggling with the demons and angels hovering around her head, until she finally succumbed. The Grim Reaper has been long summoning her, desperate to claim her wretched life, and would wait no longer.
“Try harder, Carmela,” the midwife attending to her all the while, begged her. “Just a few pushes more, and it’s over,” she implored her, with tearful eyes.
Yet Carmela was exhausted, spending her remaining vital energy on whispering her last words to anyone willing to listen: “Deus!” she murmured, “Call him…Deus!” she went on, trying to raise her voice in vain.
“We’re all believers here,” a nurse tried to reassure her, yet she persisted.
“Name my son Deus,” Carmela murmured on, “that miracle which happened to me.”
Lisa, the chief nurse, caressed the mother’s feverish head. She, of all the nurses in the room, should have attributed the mother’s words exclusively to all the medications she had received. Yet this time, Lisa couldn’t help feeling for the young woman lying in front of her.
“Quiet!” she loudly rebuked the other nurses giggling behind her, “Leave the room now!” she commanded, and they obeyed immediately, leaving her alone in the room. She was the hospital’s longest-serving midwife, and there was small wonder that even the doctors held her in awe.
“I can see what you mean,” she told Carmela calmly, constantly caressing her head, when left alone with her.
“Can you?” Carmela wondered as if recalled from the dead.
“I was once what you are now,” she confessed to her.
“What, infertile?” Carmela asked, her pupils widening.
“No, a whore!” Lisa whispered, giggling. “But I met my knight in shining armor long ago, and since then, I have never done anything without love. After all,” she went on, confessing, “That knight of mine is a respectable hospital director,” she concluded proudly.
“I’m infertile,” Carmela repeated, realizing that if she kept silent, she would have to listen to the nurse’s whole life story, unable to make her hold her tongue. “Why should I,” she thought, “a moment before I die, listen to the story of a perfect stranger?! What good does it do either in this world or in the hereafter?!”
“So,” Lisa said, “who’s your knight?”
Carmela raised her head a little, arranging the pillow under her locks to enable her to look straight into the eyes of the woman who attended her. “He’s no knight,” she stated sadly. “He’s just the richest man I’ve ever known. He’s so rich, that I needed no other johns ever since I met him, three years ago. Our dates once a week helped me to a very nice living. Then, out of the blue, this happened,” Carmela suddenly raised her voice, opening her eyes wide.
“What?”
“All of a sudden, that little angel appeared inside me,” Carmela replied. “Even though I was convinced since I was a child I could never have children, I thanked God wholeheartedly.”
Lisa moved with discomfort. “Silly you!” a cry finally escaped her lips, “No woman can be sure, since childhood, she could never be a mother, certainly not if she is one of your kind!”
“My kind?” Carmela wondered.
“A whore,” Lisa explained quietly, casting her eyes down.
Carmela looked at that woman, who stood there patronizing her with such an insolence: “Yet I did know. Not since I was born, just since Joao stabbed me in the stomach. Yes, since that happened, I knew I could never have children,” Carmela concluded, closing her tear-flooded eyes.
Lisa started again caressing the hair of the woman lying in front of her: for a m
oment, she was overwhelmed again with compassion for that little helpless woman on the hospital bed drenched with her own blood. “Carmela,” Lisa whispered softly, “Carmela!” Yet she neither heard an answer nor saw any muscle move. All she heard was the weakening heartbeats of the fetus, while his mother’s dying body was rushed to the operation room.
Next day in the afternoon, while hospital staff were lowering Carmela’s corpse to a shallow grave in the hospital’s cemetery, bidding a last farewell to a woman they never knew, Deus, the newborn, was traveling inside a ragged straw cradle to the orphanage on 33 Rua Santa Anna where somebody called him by name for the first time.
Chapter 4
A true story
This was definitely the happiest day of his life, a moment he had long been waiting for. On that day, he was assigned Chief Investigator of US Army’s War Crimes Branch. The son of a Lebanese-American man and a Catalonian-American woman, Gabriel Balaguer seemed to have no personal motives to care about Nazi atrocities. However, despite or maybe because of that, he had done, since he was a child, everything he could to demonstrate that all men and women were created equal. Therefore, he made it his life’s principle to carry out every assignment meticulously, ardently and to perfection. Eventually, he has grown obsessive about Nazi atrocities, which drove him to study history, and certainly made the US Army give him that job. Anyway, today he was about to reap the fruits of his efforts, at last. He carefully donned the uniform especially purchased for the occasion, meticulously arranging all his war decorations and setting his cuffs precisely in place. Having no wife or kids, he asked his secretary to tighten his tie exactly according to protocol. In these moments, he had an especially hard time containing the memory of his deceased mother.
Graduating with distinction from Harvard’s History Department, Gabriel joined the US Army. At first, he served as Second Army’s historian, yet he soon rose from the ranks, gaining his superiors’ appreciation. After a two decades’ service, he has made Deputy Chief War Crimes Investigator in the world’s strongest military. So now, the long-hoped-for day has come, though surprisingly. Yet he persuaded himself, quite successfully, that even if the current Chief Investigator didn’t succumb to aneurysm, he would have had a serious chance of succeeding him in good time. Now he was perfectly ready, not only for the promotion ceremony but, most importantly, for assuming his new job most ardently, in a few minutes later. Heaving slightly, Gabriel climbed the stairs to the stage, where he saw everything in fast-motion through his tearful eyes: the promotion ceremony, the donning of a Brigadier General’s ranks, with all the other honors reserved to the top brass. He wholeheartedly believed it to be the happiest moment of his life.
For a few days after assuming his new job, Brigadier-General Balaguer spent most of his energy on enriching US Army’s databases with information on Nazi atrocities and their perpetrators. He fanatically believed that if he just caught all those fugitives who managed to escape under cover of the postwar chaos, this could guarantee the world would never witness such horrors again. Therefore, he spared neither time nor efforts in avenging the numerous victims of WW2, whom he only knew through the survivors’ testimonies. He was flying all over the globe for months on end, carefully questioning witnesses and anyone who came his way and might have provided useful information. He memorized the daily routines of senior Nazi fugitives, tracking them down until he brought nearly all to justice. He worked day and night in his office and in the field until he was convinced that the only Nazi fugitives from the law were Klara Von Spiegel and Klaus Holland, that is, yours truly. His diligence was well known among his subordinates and won him their admiration. One day, he came to the Holy Land, to the reestablished state of Jews who fled that atrocious war. He planned this visit long before: its purpose was to confirm some tip provided by Israeli Intelligence, about Klara and myself being alive and well somewhere in South America. Yet this visit turned out to be his last one, anywhere in the world, since he disappeared without reaching his destination. US Army didn’t have the slightest clue regarding either the circumstances of his disappearance or his present whereabouts. The newspapers suggested he had been kidnapped. Later on, he was rumored to have deserted. Finally, after a two-year intense search, he became as good as dead for the public, and his picture only decorated the corridors of the US Army’s Chief Investigator of War Crimes’ office.
However, he was neither dead nor held hostage. He just followed his life’s principle, which, unfortunately for him, led him into an abyss.
One sunny day, after spending half of his visit’s time on the world’s holiest city, Gabriel was walking back from Yad va Shem, Jerusalem, Israel’s national institution of Holocaust Documentation. Having half a day left to spend, Gabriel decided to pay a visit to one more place he had been planning to see for many years. Yet this was a challenging task: to reach the ruins of the Jewish Temple, across the Jordanian border, he had to travel 20 miles through crowded alleyways, under the scorching Middle Eastern sun. Never going easy on himself, he had no intentions to change any plans. After carefully thinking over his plan, as was his habit whenever he felt at a loss, he started his march to the Wailing Wall.
The burning heat and the exhaust gasses of the many cars driving by him hit his face, seriously burdening him; taking his suit off, he walked on in his boxer shorts and white T-shirt only, carefully keeping his English-Hebrew phrasebook in his pocket. After a few hours’ walk, he found himself in a dusted wasteland, striped with dirt trails and dotted with limestone hills, yet he assumed he was still in the right way.
Looking left and right, Gabriel detected no traces of civilization, except a lonesome large house in front of him. It looked deserted, yet this made him happy since he hoped to have a rest inside, regrouping for his journey back to his hotel. He hoped to find a phone inside the house, which he could use to call his team who probably waited for him in the hotel. However, approaching the house, he heard some faint sounds. At first, he deemed them animal sounds, but a few minutes later, he realized they were children’s voices. Gabriel pressed his face against a window yet saw nothing. Then he walked around the awkward-looking building until he reached its front. Turning his back to the door, he saw a kitchen garden with many beds of green, an unusual sight among all the stony urban mass of Jerusalem. He turned around to face the door once again, knocking on it. It opened, revealing a boy of about three years old. Gabriel bent down to him, yet the child retreated, yelling loudly some phrases Gabriel could not figure out. When he stood up again, nobody welcomed him at the door, and even all the sounds he had heard shortly before that fell silent. He opened the door, entering on shaking feet. Damning the moment he had decided to take this walk, he excused himself that he couldn’t have helped it even if he knew how this adventure would end up. He explored the house. It was marked with neither luxury nor penury. In his foreigner’s eyes, it looked like an ordinary Middle Eastern house: a slightly elevated black drinking-water tank by the front door, connected with a pipe to a tap in the kitchen basin; a huge shelf for shoes of various sizes; red cloth rugs covering the entire living room floor. In the kitchen, he saw a large iron fireplace and a large stove, next to a stack of firewood; in the living room, an old, large radio rested on a low eastern hemlock commode.
“Who are you?!” he heard a woman’s voice behind him, in Hebrew.
He froze in panic. Speaking no Hebrew at all, he turned slowly, raising his hands high. In front of him was a young girl, half woman and half child, of an angelic beauty. He couldn’t conceal his embarrassment at the sight of her, which turned him rose-red all over. “Dammit!” he resorted to cursing, realizing he was facing her practically naked, holding all his uniforms in his hand.
“Who are you?” she repeated, in that same foreign language, this time in a threatening tone.
Behind her, he noticed many more children crowding, both boys and girls. Some were very young, others, a little older, but there were no adults in sight
. Lowering the hand holding the phrasebook, he started turning its pages frantically. Yet before he could find the right phrase for an answer, he felt a hard blow in the head and hit the ground.
“Gosh, it’s too darn hot!” were the first words he uttered once he was awakened from his forced slumber. Rubbing the back of his aching head, he tried to rise from the floor but felt some burden on his leg. Looking at it, he saw it was bound to a short iron chain, affixed at its other end to a large wooden stake stuck deep in the ground. Gabriel was terrified, realizing he was exposed to the scorching sun just a few meters from the large stone building. “Unless they give me some water, I’ll drop dead soon,” he thought, sighing in fear, and then starting to cry with a parched throat, in English, “Help! Help me!” The beautiful girl came out, with the train of kids following her. Approaching Gabriel, she handed him a bowl of water. He emptied it quickly, calming down a little.
“Go away,” she commanded the other children, who ran inside, like a horde of rats. Then, bending over to Gabriel, she asked him quietly in English, with an evidently non-local accent, “Who are you?”
“Do you speak English?” he asked her back, and she nodded.
“Yes, English from radio,” she replied, making him grin with happiness.
“I am Gabriel. Brigadier-General Gabriel from the USA.”
“I love the USA,” the girl replied excitedly, standing up. She went to the house door, returning to him, holding a bundle. Then she bent down to unchain that massive man. Putting a mattock in his hand, she gestured to him with her head to start working the garden, yet he understood it as an order to dig his own grave, so he just froze, fearing for his fate. Taking the mattock from him, she started showing him what to do. “Thus, gently, like plowing,” she spoke quietly in Hebrew while demonstrating. Then, she gave him the mattock back. “After work, come in the house and you will eat,” she told him in English. Gabriel smiled, restoring his breath. Watching her walk away, her hard buttocks slightly arching with every step, he grinned.
