Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

by Rafael Yglesias

  Unfortunately, in my case, in this athletic moment of absolute concentration, there was misjudgment and a hard surface. On the downward arc the ball picked up speed. I wasn’t gaining on its forward movement as readily as I thought. I leaped, without any conscious decision to do so, my left arm fully extended. When I landed I was surprised. I caught the ball all right, a brilliant diving save for the Yankees, but my right arm hadn’t hit the soft grass. It flopped against the paved walkway to the neighbor’s door. I heard a bone snap; the sound was as loud and clear as if I had stepped on a stick in the woods.

  I didn’t feel any pain at first, but my stomach contracted and I was nauseated. I was humiliated also. I had made the catch, but who would believe me? Only the clumsy injury would be remembered. Then the pain started—a stabbing inside my right forearm. And yet I didn’t let go of the glove and ball in my left hand. I wanted to prove that I had in fact made the catch and saved the Yankees.

  I pulled up my knees and rolled a bit onto my side. Moving my broken arm scared me. I imagined the loose bone would poke out through my skin into the air. I threw up.

  At the end of my grandparents’ street you could turn right or left—but straight ahead stood a large church. Lying on my side, askew on the neighbor’s lawn, I saw a pastel blue car parked by the church’s curbside. Three men were seated in it. The two in front, both wearing hats, didn’t see me. But the man in back looked right at me. He had on a baseball cap and aviator sunglasses. The roof of their car was white, a satin white that made a brilliant contrast with the car body’s pale color. It looked to me as if the vehicle was also wearing a hat, a broad panama like the one my Grandpa put on when we went out to a restaurant.

  I called to the man in the back. I was scared to move my arm and anyway I had no energy left: no water in my body, no food in my belly. I doubt that I managed to shout loudly or say much more than a feeble, “Help.” Evidently he didn’t care I was hurt. My mother and father were atheists and at eight I had a suspicion of churches and the people who liked to go to them. The indifference of these parishioners didn’t surprise me. In fact I gave up on them, suddenly afraid to accept their help.

  I removed my hand from the glove. Although scared to touch it, I put my left hand underneath my broken right arm and raised it gingerly. The block of small houses and palm trees blurred as I sat up. For a moment I thought I would retch again.

  “Rafael … ?” My grandmother had noticed the cessation of my ball throwing. She appeared on the interior side of the screen door. Because of her position, I saw only her white hair floating, a disembodied wig. “I broke it,” I croaked.

  She didn’t hear me. She opened the screen door and came out onto the porch, carrying her dust mop. I called to her again, but a nearby car started up and drowned out my plea.

  I struggled to my feet. My legs were wobbly; holding my arm across my stomach also defeated an attempt to balance. I managed to stand for a second and then sagged to my knees.

  “Rafa!” Grandma cried out. She dropped her dust mop and rushed across the street to me. Within a minute, other elderly Latin women—two were lifelong neighbors—appeared and they surrounded us as I walked gingerly toward the house. Grandma, I’m sorry to report, was not her usual commanding self in this crisis. She was frightened and helpless. She didn’t drive, and she didn’t want the one friend of hers who did to take me to the hospital. In fact, she didn’t want me to go to the hospital at all, but preferred that her GP see me. I suspect what she really wanted was to wait until my grandfather returned and then my parents could take me. Twice she asked if I was sure that my arm was broken. The other women argued with her—very gently, I noticed—that whether it was broken or not, I was in pain; that something was wrong with my arm since I couldn’t move it; that it might be hours before Grandpa appeared, and so on. This distrust of the outside world and relegation of duties to certain family members (only Grandpa drove; only he was fit to deal with doctors; and anyway only their Latin doctor should see me) was characteristic of my Tampa relatives. My grandmother loved me very much, acutely in fact. To see me in pain must have hurt, but leaving her house in a strange car (even if it belonged to a lifelong friend) to go to a strange hospital and allow strange people to take care of her grandsons broken arm was an overwhelming series of unusual decisions and tasks, all outside her range of expertise and security.

  The conflict brought a flush to her pale cheeks (she almost never went out in the sun). She looked discombobulated: her apron was askew; she had a smudge of dirt on her forehead from when she helped me up off the lawn. Her neatness and self-possession had fled.

  I wasn’t feeling well and I was frightened. Both were exacerbated by the absence of my mother. Grandma’s unusual hysteria was also worrisome. They led me to Grandma’s porch where I sat in a wicker chair, my limp arm laid across my lap. It was throbbing from the inside out, a peculiar reversal of my normal experience of injury. Grandma gave me aspirin and a Coke. She put a straw in the glass bottle and held it to my lips while she and her friends argued about what to do. I understood their discussion in bits and pieces, since it was played in the almost musical hysteria of their Spanish; had they spoken in English, the interruptions and speed of their argument still would have made it difficult to follow them.

  At first the soda’s sugar was helpful. The nausea and light-headedness were relieved. But with the recovery of my blood sugar came fear. It was vague, appropriately enough. I knew that eventually my parents would arrive, I knew that my arm was going to be all right sooner or later, but I was afraid that somehow it all wasn’t going to work out, that I was going to be crippled forever and that I would never see my mother or father again.

  “Miralo,” one of the women said. They stopped talking and watched me, heads tilted sympathetically. I had collapsed into uncertainty and fear. I was crying. “Pobrecito” another said and stroked my cheeks. They were wet with tears.

  That settled it for Grandma. She would accept her friend’s offer to drive us to the GP. She told me later that she hadn’t seen me cry since I was a baby; she explained in detail that I wasn’t crying when she first found me on the lawn or moved me to the porch; that I didn’t cry when I had the measles, or a painful earache; that I … and so on, making a myth (a flattering myth) of me as a stoic and thus this exceptional moment of weakness proved the intensity of my agony. (In fact, I believe that I cried as easily as most children, maybe more easily. Anyway, the tears weren’t caused by physical pain. I was disoriented and there was much in the air, understood imperfectly by me, to provoke anxiety and fear. Just the simple fact that I hadn’t seen my father for more than four months increased my vulnerability.)

  Jacinta refused her friend’s advice to phone her GP before we left to ask if we should to go the hospital instead. Having hesitated for too long, now she was in too great a rush. She insisted we leave immediately. She removed her twisted apron while her friend ran off to get her car.

  Her friend was Dolores, a woman with a very wrinkled face, a brassy voice, and an arthritic skinny body. I can still easily summon the image of her elderly form hobbling across the street in a rushed and yet crippled walk.

  I also remember that the gray roots of Dolores’s hair were visible, particularly from the rear. Riding in the back, I got a good view of them during the drive. Grandma Jacinta sat alongside me en route. I was fascinated by Dolores’s two-tone hair because the explanation for the gray’s weird stoppage and sudden conversion to pitch black was unknown to me. Sometime during the drive I tried to point out the phenomenon to Grandma. “Look at how her hair—” I began.

  “Shh,” Grandma interrupted. She kept her eyes on the road and called out turns to Dolores, who knew them anyway.

  “Honey, I’ve only driven to Dr. Perez a million times,” Dolores answered Grandma’s prompts in English, with that odd juxtaposition of accents typical of my Tampa relatives and their friends. Their English was spoken in deep South and Spanish tones, not within the same word, but alte
rnating, one word with a Southern drawl followed by another with a Latin accent.

  “Look at her hair,” I started again and this time my grandmother put a hand over my mouth. I was astonished and looked to her for an explanation. She shook her head from side to side with brows furrowed: a stern no.

  I was impressed and fell silent. Only then did Jacinta drop the gag from my mouth. She also allowed herself a smile.

  “What did you say, honey?” Dolores asked in English.

  I didn’t reply. “He’s fine,” Grandma said in Spanish.

  There was a brief silence. Jacinta said, “Did you miss Seventh Avenue?” She had asked this twice before.

  Dolores ignored the question. “Are my roots showing?” she asked me in English.

  Grandma leaned forward and pointed emphatically at Seventh Avenue as we passed it. She shouted something I didn’t understand in Spanish. We had missed the turn and now we had to double back. That took no more than an extra couple of minutes, but it exacerbated my grandmother’s anxiety. She berated Dolores for not paying attention. Dolores defended herself—for a change. By the time we pulled up to Dr. Perez’s clinic, Dolores was screeching at my grandmother, who returned the abuse in a deeper, softer and yet somehow much more furious tone. Meanwhile, I was distracted by Dolores’s question. What roots? I knew about tree roots and that the part of the carrot you eat is a root and I wondered if women, or very old women perhaps, grew roots, and where or what they might be for. In the mild state of shock that I was in, this dream-like notion took hold and I imagined all sort of grotesqueries emerging from Dolores’s thin and buckled body.

  I was so entranced by the question that as Dolores joined my grandmother at the curb to help me get out of the car, I said to her, “Your roots don’t show.”

  Dolores smiled. Her severely wrinkled face became all lines and cracks, as if the whole facade of flesh were about to shatter. “Good, honey,” she said.

  “But I would like to see them,” I added.

  “Some other time,” my grandmother said, already preoccupied with the task now facing her, namely entering the doctor’s office and managing this unfamiliar situation—overseeing the care of an injured grandchild.

  The doctor’s waiting room was very cold and dark, because the air-conditioning was on high and heavy drapes were drawn across a wall of windows. I shivered while Jacinta explained the whole story to the doctor’s receptionist in Spanish. I could see the woman trying to interrupt, but Grandma needed to delineate everything about the accident and her decision to bring me. She also said that my parents were at the airport and that she was concerned they would be frightened if we weren’t back home by the time they arrived. I trembled so from the cold that my teeth clicked together. Dolores put her hands on my shoulders and gently rubbed them to warm me up.

  When the receptionist was at last permitted to speak she said she would check whether the doctor could see me right away.

  My grandmother’s trust in Dr. Perez was well-placed. He came out immediately and painlessly inspected my broken arm at the receptionist’s desk. He said it was probably fractured; a simple one he thought. He said it was pointless for him to take an X-ray, that she should get me to an orthopedist and let him make the determination as well as treat me. He gave the name and address and said he would phone ahead to make sure we were taken care of.

  But, at the orthopedists, although we were expected, there was a long wait—at least it seemed long to me. The discomfort and debilitation of the shock were having an effect—I felt sad, tired, and irritated. It must have taken a long time before my arm was X-rayed and the cast fitted because Grandma sent Dolores back to the house to greet Pepin, Francisco and Ruth and tell them our whereabouts.

  Grandma sat next to me, except during the X-ray and fitting of the cast. She was too timid to insist on following me into the examining rooms. But, during the intervals, she placed my head on her chest and stroked my cheek while she kept her eyes fixed on the door, anxious about my parents’ arrival. I was uncomfortable in the position, and I didn’t like the worry and possessiveness of her petting. But I didn’t have the energy or nerve to tell her to stop. I felt weak. I felt I had failed: I had upset my Grandma; I had ruined my father’s return; and I would never play center field for the Yankees.

  My mother came into the examining room while the cast was being set. Unlike my grandmother, Ruth was not only unawed by the doctor and nurse—she seemed to be their boss. She hugged me awkwardly—because of the wet cast—and immediately fired off questions about the fracture and its treatment. Mom had left the door open and I could see a sliver of the waiting room between her body and the nurse’s.

  My father was out there, talking loudly and cheerfully to his mother in Spanish. Jacinta hugged him with abandon. The difference in their sizes made it appear she clung to him, calling up for his attention the way a dog greets his master. Her usually composed face was animated with emotion. She looked younger. Her eyes shone and she smiled joyfully. She loves him so much, I remember thinking. I was surprised. I thought Grandma only loved me that way

  “Frank,” Ruth called to my father. “Frank!” she called a little too loudly for my taste. “Your son’s in here.”

  The cast had begun to harden and I had my first experience of its rigidity as my father entered. I tried to shift my wrist beyond a certain point and my thumb was stopped. There was a twinge inside the arm. When I attempted to touch it, I was distressed to find not my soft living flesh, but the unyielding hollow plaster. I got a hint of how frustrating and tedious wearing it for six weeks was going to be.

  “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.