Tortuga

by Rudolfo Anaya

  “Did Danny learn his lesson?” Buck asked.

  “Hell no. You know Danny, never learns. Well, brothers, I’ve enjoyed rapping with you, but I gotta get to therapy. You know KC, she don’t wait for no one. See you in the funny papers.…”

  I heard the wheelchair squeak out of the room. “Who was that?” I asked Buck.

  “I don’t know,” Buck answered, “never saw him before.”

  I had been listening to bits of the story, weaving them into my thoughts, thinking about Filomón taking Christ across the desert to a hospital with its adobe colored, cracked walls shimmering in the desert heat, the green of palms suggesting water, and to the south the dead salt sea. In every time, in every place, a desert, a sanitorium for those crippled by the pharaohs, a gathering of twisted bodies reeking sweat, sore feet cut by the desert, and the doctors and attendants waiting by the huge wooden door which sagged and weathered with age … there was an Ismelda there, at the door, waiting, smiling, her seven bracelets jangling in the cool breeze, tinkling to the tune of the camel harnesses and the squeaking leather of the donkey saddle … broken bodies of men, old warriors, young boys, the outcasts, Christ the cripple himself, slightly bent from the germ of polio, perhaps twitching with the fever of the desert or the epilepsy which at times fell over him like the wrath of God … What did it mean? Ismelda smiled. The date palm was heavy with fruit … bees buzzed in the sun. It was a journey, and I had come to one station, and this young woman of the desert who bathed me with the water from the springs and dried my broken body with her long, dark hair was mine. I would take her with me. Come with me, I said and reached for her hand … she was a desert bride, clothed in a flowing white gown. My white stallion waited nervously, pawing the wet earth of the oasis pool, anxious to feel my weight and the weight of my bride, ready for flight across the desert.

  “Come with me,” I said.

  “What?” Mike asked.

  “Tortuga’s talking to himself again,” Ronco grinned.

  “He goes like that all day,” Buck laughed, “and I have to be shut up with him. Sometimes I don’t know if he’s talking to me or to God … and he tells weird stories. Man, I sure do wish I could lasso me one of those chairs and take a ride … Hey! Where you two been?”

  “Girls’ ward,” Mike smiled.

  “But I thought that was off limits!” Buck cried. He could sit up now, but he was still completely bandaged. When his eyes opened wide in surprise he reminded me of the Halloween ghosts children draw in grade school.

  “What’s off limits?” Sadsack asked. He had followed Mike and Ronco into the room.

  “The girls’ ward! These two have been over there!” Buck exclaimed.

  “So what else is new?” Sadsack scowled. “Ronco’s girl is as ugly as a horse!” He twisted his rubbery lips into a grin. “And Mike’s girl has only one leg! They’re all like that over there!”

  “Who cares!” Buck groaned, “We’re no Hollywood heroes! Just seeing a woman would get my rocks off!”

  “You see the Nurse everyday,” Sadsack smiled.

  “That’s not a woman! That’s a battle tank!”

  “Tortuga’s the lucky one, he’s got Ismelda looking after him,” Ronco teased.

  “And he’s got KC rubbing him every day!” Buck exclaimed. “Oh is she built like a brick shithouse! I can hardly wait to get to therapy with her! And I’d like to get me a chair!”

  “You’ll get there,” Mike said, “but you gotta work at it—”

  “Damn, this room stinks … Danny been here?”

  “Smells like fish—”

  “Get back to the girls,” Buck cut in, “how are they?”

  “They won’t win any beauty contests, but they’re real women. They take care of us and we take care of them.”

  I stopped listening and watched the sunset on Tortuga. Franco had a song which compared the color on the mountain when the sun set to the color of the blood of Christ. I never thought of the red color as the bright red of blood, for me it was the red of an ember which slowly turned to ripe apricot. The soft pastel lilacs grew mauve and seemed to glow from within the mountain, and as the colors changed the mountain seemed to move. He drew in his huge legs and head and settled easily into the earth. It was time to rest, and a time to remember home. The ward usually grew quiet at sunset. Sometimes someone would call down the hall that the mountain was moving, and that was always a good omen, because good luck always followed the movement of the mountain.

  14

  The Committee met one cold, gusty day. Our hunch-back, crippled mountain raised his head to look at the gaggle of old women that came yackity-yaking down the hall. He blinked his leathery eyelids and went back to sleep. There was no hope in the powdered, wrinkled faces and the thin lips painted red. Their cheap perfume mixing with the stale urine smell of the hospital made my stomach churn.

  I wondered how they had crossed the desert … Did they come with Filomón, singing siren songs across the sand dunes which looked like sea waves? Or did they come alone, driving the large, black state cars which came from time to time to the hospital? They made the rounds of our ward, cackling like old witches, touching my cheeks with bony fingers, asking me what I needed, promising to deliver everything … I knew they lied. They were the same women I had seen in air-conditioned homes with rich carpets and expanses of lawns to break the monotony of the sand which drifted around the city. They drove their cars with windows locked so they could not smell the stench. They wore dark glasses and did not see the crippling of the orphans …

  Tears filled my eyes. Ismelda was quickly at my side. She touched my forehead and I felt better. Oh, Tortuga, she said with her eyes of love, you were born to feel too deeply … Then she straightened my sheets and pillow to try to make me forget the bad memories, and she sat by the side of the bed and tried as best she could to ease the itching I felt inside the cast. She cooled it with alcohol. The inside of my shell was rotting, like Danny’s arm. It itched inside and tormented me, a torment worse than pain, a punishment which couldn’t be relieved.

  Just wait till spring, Salomón said, in the spring all turtles throw off their shells and become lizards, like snakes sluffing off their skins, like butterflies leaving their cocoons, like the earth shuddering after a long winter’s sleep … then the sun returns and warms the sand and the naked lizards run and play with each other, run in the sand and make love! Oh, just wait till spring, Tortuga!

  “Do you know what Salomón said?” I asked Ismelda.

  “About lizards?” she smiled. “He calls me a lizard woman because I’m thin and I like to run in the sun.”

  “I want to run in the sun too—”

  “You will,” she assured me, “you will …”

  “In the spring—”

  “Yes,” she nodded, “in the spring.” Her dark eyes grew sad. “Believe in what Salomón says … believe his stories.”

  “I do,” I answered, “they come like whispers in my dreams …” She smiled, touched my cheek and was gone.

  A few moments later Mike and Ronco came roaring into the room, cursing like mad hummingbirds.

  “Hey! What’s up?” Buck asked.

  “Ah, those damn old biddies!” Mike swore and tossed the papers he had shown the Committee on the bed. Then he swung and hit the nightstand as hard as he could.

  “What they do?” Buck asked.

  “They didn’t,” Ronco explained, “they didn’t do anything about Jerry. They said it was his fault. He ran away when he had everything he needed right here. One of them said, ‘Runaways are inexcusable, you boys have everything you need right here. Runaways will not be tolerated’.” He mimiced a shrill voice. “Oh, you should have seen the smile on the Director’s face. Got him off the hook. Steel suggested a few things, but he doesn’t count. He’s only a doctor. He’s supposed to cut and splice us together, but he doesn’t have anything to say about the way the hospital is run. That’s a matter for the state!”

  “So whad you do
?”

  “We protested, but it didn’t do any good. Everybody started shouting, but they wouldn’t listen …”

  “Danny jumped in front of them and shouted:

  Order in the court!

  Order in the court!

  The judge is eating beans!

  The Committee’s in the toilet,

  Making submarines!”

  “The Nurse carted him off for another dose of castor oil …”

  “That’s the trouble with these people!” Mike cursed, “They think a bowel movement is a goddamned cure for everything! I swear I was nearly dead the day I got here, and the Nurse held my wrist, looked at her watch and asked me, ‘Have you had your bm today?’ Damn! I nearly fainted.”

  He made us laugh with his imitation of the Nurse. Ronco picked it up and sang, “A bm a day makes all your headaches go a-wayyy—Lotta doo-doo …”

  “Regulars make better lovers!” Buck chimed in, “and better cowboys!”

  Even Sadsack joined the chorus. His long, awkward hands beat the nightstand for a beat as he sang, “A bm a day will help us all walk away … yaaaah man!”

  “It gets rid of acne, blackheads, club feet and sooo-rye-es-sessss!”

  “It chases the blues awayyyy …”

  “… and the long and restless lonely nights …”

  “It helps us make it through the day …”

  Adn when you get to heaven

  and St. Peter meets you at the gate

  The first thing he’ll ask is:

  ‘Have you had your bm today?’

  We laughed at the crazy words and the improvised, snappy tune. Even Mike smiled.

  “How in the hell do they expect us to be regular if they don’t feed us soul food, huh? I haven’t had a good meal of chile and beans since I got here! That’s what Jerry was trying to tell them, there was nothing for his soul here … sure the medical care is the best in the world, but what good does that do you if your spirit is dying …”

  “I can believe that,” Ronco agreed. “When I go home my old man pinches me and says I’m too thin and pale, then he tosses me in the jeep and we go down to Hondo and buy a fat lamb from Casi, an old Indian who has a little flock there, and we take it back to the cabin where he hangs it by its hind legs, and I hold the bucket for the blood—sometimes we bring some big mamasan who wants to eat, drink and screw with us, and we’ll fry up a batch of blood pudding, fried with onions, a little oregano … ah, that’s living! And we throw the sheep’s head in the oven so by late evening it’s well done, and we sit around drinking wine and picking at the bits of meat, the eyes, slicing the tongue for sandwiches, and when that’s done we split the head open and spread the brain on tortillas, salt it down and eat till it’s coming out of our ears! That stuff is good for the pecker too …”

  Sadsack twisted his face and spit. “You must be half Indian, Ronco …”

  “No lie,” Ronco smiled. “Ain’t we all half something or other?” He winked. “And later we make menudo—”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a soup made with the sheep’s tripe—”

  “Aow, damn!” Sadsack gagged.

  “Yeah, you clean out the intestines real good, cook them all day with some red chile, a little oregano, maybe some posole if you want it thick, and man, that’s a meal for the gods …”

  … Menudo was the meal of the dark gods, Tortuga, and in ancient times it was made from the flesh of young virgins, young women who had been sacrificed to the sun … man ate the flesh of his own kind, made the stew from tender pieces of the virgin’s thighs … the priests misled them. They told the people the sun needed blood, and it wasn’t true. The sun only needed love to speed it on its way …

  “And we’re still sacrificing each other—”

  “What you say, Tortuga?”

  “He’s talking to himself again.”

  “Hey, remember the truck load of turtle soup that overturned on the highway just south of here? They were going to lose it anyway, so they donated it to the hospital and for weeks we ate nothing but turtle soup and stew! God, it was awful! The chunks of green meat tasted like it wasn’t dead yet! It gave me the creeps … I felt like I was eating something alive …”

  “I swore I’d never eat turtle soup again!”

  “Hey, how do you feel about that, Tortuga? You’re a turtle. How would you feel about getting cut up in little pieces and dumped into the soup?” They looked my way and laughed.

  “That’s what la Llorona will do if she gets hold of you. Snip, one cut and she makes soup out of the old tool.”

  “That old wailing woman’s not going to get Tortuga, brothers, cause he’s got Ismelda to take care of him. She’s not goin’ let no Llorona get her baby!”

  They laughed.

  “How do you know Ismelda’s not la Llorona? She lives near the river, doesn’t she? Some of the janitors say she and Josefa are witches.”

  “Hey, she’s not a witch, ask Salomón.”

  “Ah, what does he know!” Sadsack frowned. “I’m tired of listening to his stories. What good do they do?”

  “Pass the time,” Ronco said.

  They didn’t know. They didn’t understand what Salomón was working. Perhaps it wasn’t affecting them, but I felt it was drawing me into a complex web. Somehow Ismelda and Salomón and Filomón and all the others I had met were bound together, and the force created was sucking me into it. When Ismelda sat by me I felt another presence hovering over us. When I looked into her eyes I often saw the outline of the mountain. When I asked her questions she would smile and tell me that my concern should be with getting well. But I had the vague, uneasy feeling that other things were in store for me.

  “… You’ll never change as long as you’re meat eaters,” Danny said. He had come into the room unobserved.

  “So I’m a meat eater,” Ronco shrugged, “what difference does it make if you eat meat or vegetables? Vegetables feel the same as animals. How do you know when you take a bite into a carrot that that poor carrot isn’t going ‘Ouch, ouch, here come the big, bad cutting teeth!’”

  “Ohhhh my—”

  “But that’s besides the point. Everything gets used in one way or another, right? Salomón said it’s how it gets taken in that’s important. Does anybody remember what he said?”

  I listened carefully. I thought I heard Salomón say, we’re all bound together, one great force binds us all, it’s the light of the sun that binds all life, the mountain and the desert, the plains and the sea. I listened, and the stories came clearly and vividly, as if I was there at the time the story took place, that’s how good Salomón was when he told a story. I listened, and time ceased to flow; it became the light of the sun; it became a liquid in which we all swam. Sometimes I worried, because I found myself struggling to leave the vortex of time the story created. I worried because I was afraid to remain fixed forever in the story being told. Sometimes I looked around me and thought that everyone would remain forever in the hospital, that no one was ever really going to get out, that we had created our own time and place and nobody was breaking free. Were we one of Salomón’s stories, and would he let us free when he was ready?

  When I felt like that I pushed harder to get out, and I made KC push harder. I swallowed the pain and begged for extra time in therapy.

  “You’re working too hard,” she said, and surprised me because I never expected that from her.

  “I want out,” I said.

  “I know,” she nodded, “but sometimes you work your body to a peak … then it drops. You have to know that there’s highs and lows …”

  “I’ve had my low,” I said, “I want a high … and that’s going to come the day I walk out of here …”

  When she was done Ismelda would come in and bathe my sweating body. She massaged my tired muscles with a special ointment Josefa had given me. I was growing stronger every day. Dr. Steel said it was a miracle.

  “You’re going to beat a lot of these sadsacks out of here
,” he smiled.

  “I have good help,” I answered.

  “It’s more than that—” he nodded vaguely in the direction of Salomón’s ward.

  “What?” I asked.

  He muttered something and walked away. He didn’t know.

  “It’s your destiny,” Ismelda whispered as she rubbed my legs. “Every person has a destiny which follows him like a shadow. And every destiny must be fulfilled …”

  “But what is mine?” I asked.

  “You will know when you meet it,” she said, “you might try to fight it, at first you might not accept it, but you can never escape it …”

  “Does it have to do with what has happened to me?” I wondered. Is coming to the hospital part of my destiny, and how do you and Salomón and the mountain fit into my destiny? I knew Salomón held the key to my questions; I had to see him, I had to talk to him.

  You know, I said, my grandfather believed in the destiny. He said some men are born to a good destiny. He told me the story about a man he knew at El Puerto who was like that. It seemed that everything the man touched turned to good luck. When the years of drought came a spring appeared on this man’s land, and his herds increased and he made money while others were going broke. In the summer the worms came and ruined the herds that were left, but his weren’t infected. He took life easy, while others slaved just to keep their families alive, he gambled every night at the saloon and never lost. He became very rich, and he had many beautiful women. He was robbed once and left for dead by the bandits, but he recovered and in a few months he made twice over the amount he had lost. In other ways, he lost his fortune many times, but it always kept coming back to him. He bought worthless land and in a year the railroad was built on it and he was rich again. Some people said he had sold his soul to the devil, but that wasn’t what my grandfather said, it was just that the man was destined to be lucky and he wasn’t afraid of his destiny. That man met his destiny face to face, and he was in harmony with it.