by Pablo Medina
Today is the day of the nuns. A small one Amadeo has never seen before enters the room. Her name, she says, is Sor Diminuta. She is dressed in a brown habit made of uncombed cotton that hangs loosely over a long-sleeved white shirt. It is impossible for Amadeo to guess her age, but her hands, wrinkled and veined, are not a young woman’s. Her hair is hidden by a white band around her forehead and over it the veil of her order. She has a triangular face splotched with red as if she had been out in the sun too long. From her neck hangs a large silver crucifix, her only adornment besides the wedding band on the left hand. Sor Diminuta begins with a prayer to St. Albenius, the patron saint of the ill and those about to die. Amadeo listens to the nun’s dreamy voice but it is difficult for him to follow the words. Like all the prayers he has heard during his lifetime, hers is mind-numbing and he lets his thoughts wander to the most recondite places of his memory, where he finds fragments of his previous life—a face, a view of the sea from a deserted beach, the street in front of his house, the jewelry box where his father kept his billfold and watch. St. Albenius, you who have interceded on behalf of so many unfortunate and suffering servants of Our Lord, raise your voice to him on Amadeo’s behalf, who calls to you humbly in his hour of greatest need. Who was this Saint Albenius who had God’s ear? What martyrdom did he suffer? Amadeo observes Sor Diminuta from his bed and notices that she has her eyes closed and hands open upward in supplication. She looks like a sparrow about to take flight. The jewelry box: It was made of a dark wood, rectangular with scalloped edges, and on the cover there was an etching of a map of the world. Every afternoon when he arrived home from the fields or the store, his father emptied his pockets. First, the loose change, then the scraps of paper with the names of people he talked to that day, then the gold key chain. He unclasped it from his vest and pulled the chain up as if it were a fish line heavy with a fresh catch until the bunch of little fishes came out of his pocket and dangled before Amadeo’s eyes. It hung there for a moment before descending into the confines of the jewelry box.
Sor Diminuta is about to finish her prayer. He can tell by the way her voice has reached a crescendo and entered another register. She is standing over the bed and her eyelids, suspended halfway down the balls of her eyes, are fluttering. We exhort you to bring Christ Our Lord this request that your faithful servant Amadeo Terra and all of the sick and dying who surround us may be touched by the grace of the Holy Spirit, amen. As she ends the oration she lets out a deep breath and smiles down at Amadeo, exposing a set of large stained teeth. Sor Diminuta then takes out a brush from the pocket of her habit and begins to brush his hair, pushing back with her free hand the longer strands on the sides of his scalp. She takes her time and although he cannot feel her hands, he knows they are delicate and soft. He imagines them moving against his ears and the top of his forehead. He looks down and notices that the crucifix suspended from her neck is resting on his chest, and he remembers how it would unsettle him to have Julia’s crucifix dangle over him while they made love. Take it off, he said one night. She refused, claiming she had made a vow to the Virgin of Charity not to take it off until the day of her death. He threatened reprisals. She did not say anything in response but put on an ankle-length nightgown, got in bed, and turned her back to him. For a month the Terra household was celibate. Every night Amadeo commanded her to get rid of the thing, it meant nothing anyway, and every night Julia stormed out of the bedroom and sat on the front porch reciting the rosary until sex was the farthest thing from her mind. On the thirtieth day, when Amadeo was contemplating visiting one of the bordellos on the other side of the city to relieve himself, Julia approached him in the living room and said I will not take it off but I will wear it down my back. Amadeo consented and the standoff was broken. In time the crucifix found its way back to the front, but by then Amadeo had accepted the fact that Christ would be forever between them in bed.
When she is finished combing the strands of white hair that are still left on his scalp, Sor Diminuta leans over him to arrange the pillows around his head. She doesn’t know—how could she?—that he does not feel any more comfortable or uncomfortable than before, that it does not matter whether his head is this way or that. He can smell the strong ascetic odor of her unwashed body through the heavy fabric of her habit. Acrid and penetrating, it is not a pleasant smell but it makes him think of women he has known and how they smelled of raw milk or incense or the bottom of a well or the sea or a wild mare. Some smelled like castile soap, others like a sugarcane field after rain. One smelled like an outhouse, another like tar, a third like the sulfur of hell. Many smelled like garlic. Many more smelled like flowers. At least two smelled like his mother. He catches himself getting worked up over an odorous nun and waits for her to finish accommodating him. She smiles her crooked smile again and Amadeo blinks in recognition. She sits down next to the head of the bed on the chair where Nurse sits to feed him and begins to recite a rosary, whispering each prayer softly, rocking back and forth surrounded by the mist of an intolerable monotony. He sees the beads passing through her fingers and the susurrus of Aves broken by the occasional Pater Noster. Sitting away from him Sor Diminuta smells more like ripe hay ready for harvesting, like those fields he passed in the Catskills in the early fall once years ago. Beautiful country. He could have moved up there to do union work in Albany, but Tampa was the farthest north Julia was willing to go. Up north Sor Diminuta can go days without bathing and no one will notice. People will pass by her on the street and think she is just another nun on her way to vespers. They will say, Good afternoon, Sister, and never imagine the irresistible scent of a wild she-wolf that lurks within the folds of her habit. Here in this heat is another matter, and Amadeo is surprised her mother superior has not discussed with her the sanctifying properties of bathing.
Julia’s scent, on the other hand, changed throughout the day. In the morning after waking she smelled like a beach. When stoking the stove for dinner she smelled like coal smoke and when cooking she smelled like beans or ajiaco or stewed pigs’ feet. He’d keep his distance then. He can see her through the steam: hair tied back, a few strands of it loose, and her eyes looking down at the pot with the concentration of an alchemist. Sometimes she smelled like oranges, other times like clove. When her elbow hurt she smelled like iguana oil, which she claimed cured her arthritis, and when plucking chickens, well, he didn’t want to think about that. At night after her bath Julia gave off the scent of a field of flowers, or what he imagined to be a field of flowers since he’d never been in one, and in bed naked, she smelled like desire itself. Then, one afternoon while he was rummaging through a kitchen cabinet in search of a sharpener for his chaveta, he found a bottle of lilac water. He opened the bottle and was surprised to find Julia’s odor wafting out. This happened several days into one of the strikes at the factory. When he confronted her with the fact that she was wasting their money on frivolous things, she responded that it was her prerogative to smell however she wanted, and she wanted to smell like a lady, not a street cleaner. The strike could last a long time, he said. It was a gift, she said. Her statement caught him by surprise and with his mind occupied by union matters, he dropped the subject. The question he did not ask, however, remained in his mind like a splinter that made its presence felt whenever he was about to embark on one of his escapades. Why would she hide the bottle? The conclusion he reached, that the intentions of the giver were far from innocent and that she had somehow encouraged his behavior, angered him at times, but he kept from saying anything not wanting to reveal a weakness for her he would just as soon keep hidden. What if her loyalty was not as absolute as he had once assumed? What would he do? Years later, when their marriage was dying, he learned that Julia had been receiving a monthly bottle of cologne from a destitute poet who had been her paramour in Havana before Amadeo had come upon her at her father’s store and changed the course of her life. It is a good thing I did not learn about the poet then, he said to her. I would have choked the poor fellow to death. He
was a nice man, she said. The world is full of nice men, Amadeo said lying back on his chair. Julia waited a few moments before adding that the poet had died of tuberculosis. A fitting death, Amadeo said. He died in the hospital without anyone to keep him company. All the better. They buried him in a potter’s field. A perfect poet’s death, he said, then asked her how she knew all this. His mother wrote to me. You knew his mother? The whole family. We were going to be married. You were going to marry a poet? How quaint, Amadeo said. He can remember the conversation as clearly as he can smell the nun. When was the last time you received a bottle of cologne from him? Two years ago. But you still smell of lilacs. How can that be? His mother sends me the cologne now. Lilacs are my favorite flowers. What do poets know about flowers, he thinks with the drone of Sor Diminuta’s prayers in the background. When the strike was over Amadeo started buying Julia lilac water on a regular basis. The poet died as a poet should, poor, forlorn, and consumptive. No big loss, he thought. Cuba is cursed with too many poets and too many queers and the women who pamper them.
Nurse comes in bearing the food tray followed by Orderly. Sor Diminuta intercepts her as she is about to place the tray on the rolling table and volunteers to feed him. Nurse gladly obliges but first they have to put him into the chair. He doesn’t weigh as much as you think, Nurse offers by way of comment. Amadeo sees the ceiling suddenly get near, then far again, and hears his body flop softly onto the plastic chair. Orderly quickly ties him up and places a paper bib on his chest before following Nurse out of the room. Sor Diminuta rearranges Amadeo’s shoulders and head and rolls the table next to the chair. Her smell is approaching again but he is much more interested in reading the baby food labels. If she gives him mango he will rise from his bed, he will shout out, he will get an erection the size of Florida. But it is not mango. Her holy woman’s hand drops the anonymous pastes carefully into his mouth. One is earthy and gray like liver; the other is airy like apricot. Sor Diminuta is smiling all the while. He is docile, opening his mouth as far as it goes for each spoonful. Once he swallows too quickly and chokes, spitting the paste back up. The nun wipes his chin and keeps smiling. He smiles back or imagines smiling back and is overcome. There is goodness in her eyes, and in her lips, full and moist over bad teeth, a hint of past sensuality. Are you enjoying yourself, Sor Diminuta? Yes, Mr. Terra, and so are you. Have you ever had a man? Yes, Mr. Terra, I have Christ. Leave Christ out of this. I don’t need any other men. Tell me you love men, tell me you love me. But she is saying something else, she is trying to settle him down; then he notices he has choked again and spit up more of the paste onto his chin and neck. She is rubbing his temples and he feels like heaven and hell combined. Do you shave your armpits, Sor Diminuta? Do you bleed on your underwear, do you scratch your itch? He takes a deep breath and it smells like God, the Devil, all the angels singing off key and the damned ones grunting like pigs. He opens his eyes, he closes them. Imagining her touch brings a calm like the sun rising over palm trees.
When Amadeo awakens Sor Diminuta is gone. The late afternoon light is streaking in through the blinds once again and hitting him squarely in the face. This time he tries to occupy himself by looking around the room. On the corner where the window meets the wall, about halfway up, he sees a black spot he has not noticed before. The glare makes him close his eyes and when he opens them again, the spot has moved farther to the left away from the corner. He focuses on it to see if it is alive or simply a smudge of dirt distorted by the sunlight on his face. Just as he is about to make out its shape, the thing scurries up to the left, then laterally to the right and stops in a spot of wall out of the light. A spider is not a creature he can tolerate, a spider leaves blank places in his reasoning that he can only fill with more spiders, hundreds of them, crawling over and under each other. They move down the wall and scamper across the floor, five hundred sets of legs scratching the linoleum, jaws clacking together until all other noises are drowned out. A pungent oily smell suffuses the room. The spiders reach Amadeo’s chair and start climbing up the sides. Some fall off but many more take their place, clinging to the varnished wood of the legs and the plastic of the armrests. He tries to tell himself that his imagination is confusing past with present, memory and reality but by the time the first spider crawls onto the horizontal plane of the seat, Amadeo is six years old and has just awakened to find the creatures are everywhere on his lap and arms, their hairy legs and beady eyes moving toward his face. He is paralyzed with fear and the spiders, tiny newly hatched tarantulas are on his cheeks now, scratching his nostrils, crawling into the folds of his ears. He can hear the humming sounds they make to communicate among themselves, the small ones sliding over his forehead, tangled in the thicket of his hair. Then a wave of water falls on him and his mother’s face appears illumined by kerosene light. His father is behind her holding a metal bucket. She rushes over to Amadeo and begins brushing spiders off his body. He can breathe now and he is shivering from the cold water his father has thrown at him but he will not cry. Why not, he wonders now. Because his father is there and Amadeo will not cry in front of his father, no matter how much fear is in him. As his mother is drying him with a towel, his father is slapping at the spiders on the bed with a broom and crushing them under his heel on the floor. Later, when his fear turns to disgust, Amadeo vows to himself he will kill every spider he comes across. They become his enemies. His hatred of them will be embodied in the act of extermination he will perform with a machine-like efficiency for the rest of his life. The spider, small, innocuous on the beige surface, is moving toward the door. Amadeo remembers back to the thousands of spiders he has flattened under his heel, crushed under rocks, buried in sand, sprayed with insecticide, or bathed in gasoline and torched. This one strolling across the wall of his room will get away.
Time falls into a deep well. He hears a splash, sees the water turn into his friend Chano’s face, doomed, moon-smeared. He smells the dampness rising, the moss on the stones, Chano floating between the darkness and the light, his clothes in tatters, his skin bloated and blue. The practice in those days was to have lectores, or readers, distract the cigar rollers by reading to them. Lectores were men of great learning and polish and Chano wanted very much to be one of them. He used to wait outside the factory door hoping the workers would one day hire him to read, but they always picked one of the more established readers from Havana or Key West. The more this happened, the more flamboyant Chano became, dressing up in outrageous costumes, accentuating his s’s and trilling his r’s and otherwise carrying on like a clown, hoping to stand out from all the others vying to sit at the reader’s platform. The workers coming into the factory said, Payaso, who let you out of the circus, but Chano waved off the insults and persisted until one day when the regular lector failed to show, and he was granted an audition. Chano was ready. As his text he chose a selection from Pérez Galdñs’s Juan Martín el empecinado that describes the manner in which the Spaniards met the invading Napoleonic forces, and he declaimed it from memory with such skill and eloquence that the workers did what they had never done before: they stopped their rolling, stood in place, and gave Chano a rousing applause. At that moment Chano went from being a fool to being a lector, which is how Amadeo met him, a flamboyant but respected member of his profession. Amadeo never learned exactly why he died, but he knew Chano was involved in some unsavory deals with the Sicilians on Fourteenth Street—prostitution and bolita, mostly. It was common knowledge that the Sicilians wanted control, but Chano was intent on standing his ground. They cut his throat and threw him down a well. Amadeo was present when they pulled up the body.
What do Nurse and Orderly and Sor Diminuta and Nurse II and Physical Therapist know about him? There is information in his file about his condition, his age, weight, blood pressure, marital status, his sons’ addresses and phone numbers (his sons wait for those phones to ring with the ultimate news). There is even a statement about his profession but no indication as to what that means: the time he spent perfect
ing his art, the hours and days rolling, the years at the bench. Do they know the satisfaction of holding a cigar you made yourself, perfectly shaped and sized, that a man will smoke and draw deep pleasure from? Do they know what he thinks about as he lies in bed waiting for them to come and relieve him of his solitude? All they see is a large piece of breathing flesh that must be changed twice a day, fed three times, moved in and out of the bed and kept in minimal working order until such time as the mechanism fails conclusively and there is nothing else to do but carry the worthless hunk of meat out of here, notify the family and get the bed ready for the next patient. There is a long waiting list to join this club.
If he had a mirror what would he see? He would see a face as flat as a cartoon, he would see the eyes inflamed with the past, he would see no future, he would see faint eyebrows where before there were thick bushes, he would see pale skin and thin veins spreading under his cheeks like blue rivers, blue canals in a distant planet, he would see the eyes of a toad, green, then brown, then bleared with time, then straining sideways to keep watch of the dark shadow that refuses to leave his bedside, in that shadow almost a smile, almost a dance in and out of the mirror’s frame, he would see a mockingbird on a fence post, flicking its tail up and down, up and down, before flying off into memory, he would see his sunken lips turned downward like a general who has just sent his army to certain defeat, he will see fate, he will see fear, he will see a nose that has lost its shape, sharp bone cutting air, he will see the smoke of the incense of his wistfulness, he will see what he did not do, he will see money turning into leafmeal, he will see the broken body of his son, he will feel his throat throttled by grief, by guilt, soft creases in the temple where the blood has pulsed, he will see the scarred face of the man he mutilated, of the men he should have killed but thought the better of it, he will see a chin where the stubble of white beard is growing, he will not see his tongue, he will not see his body, he will see the mole on his forehead over the left eyebrow, touch of the woman, his wife would say, hair tousled, thinned out over the dome of his skull, he will see anguish and peace fighting a battle to the death, pride crumbling like a chimney, a broom sweeping a wood floor, the hands holding the broom, he will see the dry bed of his intelligence, the garden of his love beginning to blossom, many struggles with others but many more with himself, he will see the crud of his body, he will see his wife, her closed and dreaming eyes, he will see that it is not the money or the women or the houses, he will see clouds, a field of grass, he wishes he could see his island, a storm gathering over the sea, water pooling into puddles, he will see the aftermath of battle, piled bodies, burning trees, torn clothes, hungry men, he will see the happy fool of his brother Tavito who was always in love, he will see an empty mirror, end of the straight line, end of the self.
