Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

by Rafael Yglesias

  Ruth and I were in a room down the hall from the studio where we had been graciously invited by the producer to make ourselves comfortable. We could listen to the show over a speaker mounted flush into the ceiling.

  “My God,” she whispered, shocked. I glanced at her and worried about the beat of silence. My father didn’t answer immediately. If he was feeling anything like the way my mother looked, then it was going to be a quiet program.

  Francisco’s voice finally did come down from on high. He sounded calm and amused. “I’m not sure I know what your question is, Ron. I didn’t write that murder and robbery is understandable. I did write that there aren’t revolutions without people being killed. There were lots of killings on both sides. As for these family businesses you mentioned—I don’t know what families you’re talking about. Ninety percent of Cuban assets were owned by foreign corporations. They weren’t mom-and-pop operations. I’ve heard ITT called a lot of things, but never a family business.”

  My father’s first cousin, Pancho, taped the broadcast on a reel-to-reel machine. His daughter, Marisa, sent me a copy a few months ago and, listening to my father refute the seemingly endless stream of anti-Castro questions and arguments from the host and his callers, I’m not surprised that I admired my father as much as I did while listening in the station’s waiting room. Francisco was funny, he was full of facts, he told stories that made the Cubans and their struggle real. No matter how alone he seemed in his convictions, no matter how angry his opposition, he sounded serene. I think his perfectly sincere account of Cubans as a people who love American culture, from baseball to movies to rock music, was the most effective. Certainly it made an impression on me since Francisco used me as an example of the contrast between an American boy’s opportunities and a Cuban’s under Batista.

  “My son Rafael broke his arm today. He was able to find treatment within a short distance for a modest cost. Under Batista a Cuban peasant boy might have had to travel for miles on foot and could easily have had his arm set incorrectly by an unskilled nurse. Here there are no shortages of doctors, no scarcities of antibiotics in case Rafael’s fracture should infect. When we return to New York this fall Rafael will go to a well-equipped school, a free school, whose teachers and facilities would be the envy of Havana’s most expensive private schools under Batista. The illiteracy rate at the time the revolution triumphed was over ninety percent. The Cuban government has announced a goal of one hundred percent literacy in five years. I spent two days in shacks in the sugarcane fields, shacks with no windows, no desks, just a few hard benches, where people of all ages and sexes were squeezed together as they were taught to read and write. And, after the lesson, everyone, including the teachers, went out to work side by side in the fields, converting the acres of sugarcane—profitable to the United Fruit Company, but unbalanced economically for the Cuban people—to useful crops that can lower their import costs and improve their nutrition. Of course all these wonderful changes would be undone by a U.S. embargo of Cuba. Cuba is a poor country. With our markets closed to them, with all their imports having to come from much farther away than the industrial giant only ninety miles off their shore, that Cuban peasant boy who roots for the Yankees like my son Rafael, who’d like nothing better than to go to the Saturday morning movies at the Loew’s on 175th Street along with all of Rafe’s school friends, may not, in spite of Fidel’s reforms, have enough food, or the antibiotics he needs, or the books to learn from. You say, Ron, that Cuba is an ally of the Soviet Union and therefore our enemy. I’m not sure that’s true. Yet. But it we continue to cut off Cuba from our resources, they’ll have no choice but to be Russia’s friend. Their lives will depend on it.”

  My happy life was an accident of geography. I saw myself, poor, my broken arm twisted, walking barefoot across a desert (I pictured lush Cuba as a wasteland) to a shack presided over by a sad-faced nurse who cried out, “I don’t know what I’m doing,” as she wrenched my arm this way and that. Tapeworms crawled into cuts on my feet. I was so badly educated I didn’t have the vocabulary to tell the frantic nurse about my stomachache.

  Absurd, no? My Coke was suddenly tasteless. The red velvet seats of Loew’s theater in Washington Heights seemed a monstrosity of waste. Did Francisco have any idea what it meant to associate all the commonplaces of my life with inequity and injustice? And yet what my father said was perfectly true. That poor peasant boy did exist and he still doesn’t have the medicine or food or the learning of his middle-class American equivalent. Of course, thirty years has made a difference—nowadays that deprived child can also be found in New York City. (Please bear in mind, I don’t approve or disapprove of any particular bias as to the solutions of these social problems, including the bias that nothing can be done.)

  We left the station in high spirits. By the end of the broadcast, even the hostile radio host seemed won over. There were so many phone calls the producer ran the show for an extra hour. She followed us down the stairs alternately thanking my father and asking how long he would be in Tampa. She wanted to do another broadcast with him. They agreed to be in touch in the morning.

  Grandpas Plymouth was alone on the street. It was dark, after ten-thirty, and humid again. Tampa out-of-doors seemed as close as a room with all the windows shut.

  We started home, my parents in front, me in back, leaning forward to peer over Francisco’s shoulder. My mother sang his praises. She reminisced over particular rejoinders he had made; she laughed at his jokes; she teared up as she recalled his account of the Cuban peasant woman learning to read at age sixty-eight. She made love to him with her admiration.

  We stopped at a light a few blocks from the radio station. We were still in a deserted commercial neighborhood. There was only one other car on the road. Its lights came up behind us, getting brighter than they should, like a big wave set to engulf us. My mother turned toward it. Her features were bleached by the intensity. And then we were hit.

  I smacked into the vinyl and tumbled into the ditch of the car floor. I rolled over my cast. In fact it punched me in the stomach. My first thought was that I must have broken it.

  I heard furious male voices. There were snatches of obscenities and words in Spanish. Doors opened. My mother shouted, “No, Frank!”

  The cast wasn’t damaged. I didn’t move, though. My nose was pressed into the hump that divided the back. I was terrified. Outside something horrible was happening and I was too frightened to look.

  I heard my mother scream. It was unlike any sound she had ever made. I raised myself to see. Her dreadful cry had summoned me from my cowardice and would, I’m sure, have summoned any mother’s son.

  The impact of the rear-end collision had pushed us completely across the intersection. My mother was on the hood of the Plymouth, her face cut and bleeding. Her dress—I know she looked beautiful and young in it, but I can’t remember its color—had been torn apart down the front. Her bra had also been cut or pulled off. I don’t know about her panties—I assume she had been stripped of them as well. At first I thought her condition had been caused by the accident.

  I saw the man in the aviator glasses off to the side. He had my father’s head in his hands. It seemed, in the glare of the shattered lights from both cars, that he was holding Francisco’s decapitated head. Actually, my father was on his knees, bleeding from a head wound caused by the collision. He was conscious but woozy. The man with the aviator glasses had him by the hair, pulling to keep my father’s head up so he would see what his companions were doing to Ruth.

  They had thrown her across the hood like a slain deer. Her vulnerable skin trembled in the light of their car. One man climbed up and knelt above her chest, his knees pinning her arms. He urinated on her bloody face. She screamed in pain. I never looked to see what his friend was doing to the bottom half of my mother’s body. These snapshots of what I remember were difficult enough to process.

  I was abruptly outside the car. I don’t remember doing that. I don’t know why the men in the whi
te and blue car had left me alone. Perhaps my collapsed body in the rear was presumed to be unconscious. Certainly the force of the crash could have knocked me out.

  What I did may seem strange to someone who isn’t knowledgeable about behavior in such situations. I didn’t rush to my mother’s aid. I couldn’t accept that the abused body on the car was my mother. I ran at the man holding my father’s head. I didn’t see that in his free hand he had a gun.

  I smashed into his arm with all my eight-year-old body. My cast led the impact.

  His gun went off. There was a howl from one of the men assaulting my mother. Presumably he had been hit. I fell against Francisco. I expected my father, now that I had freed him, to take over and rescue us. My head was near his. The man in the aviator glasses, who was cursing in Spanish, came at us. I heard my father whimper something in Spanish. I still don’t know what he said, but I know the beginning of the phrase was, “Don’t …” and I know from his tone that he was pleading.

  I was kicked in the face. My head whacked into my father’s. I saw bright flashes of light that people sometimes call seeing stars. After that, there were shouts around me and sirens in the distance.

  My mother’s horrible screams stopped. I told myself to keep quiet as well. My father was still beside me. I thought he was dead. I didn’t want to think about my mother. I just wanted to pretend to be dead so they would leave me alone.

  As it turned out, my mother was badly beaten, but alive. My father had a gash on his forehead, and seemed incoherent but was otherwise unhurt. My cheekbone was broken and my cast had to be refitted.

  I thought that I was playing possum, lying on the ground, silent and still. I wasn’t. The police found me standing beside my mother’s naked body, clutching her right hand. My eyes were shut and I was screaming.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Basic Anxiety

  NO ONE WAS ARRESTED. BOTH MY PARENTS WERE ABLE TO IDENTIFY THE attackers as Cuban. My father was convinced that, because of their accents, he could specify on which part of the island they had been reared. But they weren’t caught by the Tampa police. I don’t know how thoroughly they searched. I know they checked the hospitals for someone who had been shot. From a trail of blood at the scene, evidently one of them had been wounded thanks to my collision with his confederate’s gun.

  My mother later insisted that I had saved our lives. I assume she said so to my father as well, but I don’t know. He returned to Cuba the day after the attack, presumably to escape another attempt on his life. If the purpose of the assault was to stop Francisco from continuing his radio and television appearances, it succeeded.

  My mother was hospitalized for two days because of the beating and rape. (Of course, at the time I didn’t know she had been raped; and I’m not sure who, besides my father and the police, knew that she had been.)

  In the early morning, my father came to my bed and woke me to say goodbye.

  “I must go, Rafael. You understand? That way you and your mother will be safe.”

  I remember his words exactly. They are oddly phrased for English. In fact they translate naturally into Spanish. But I know he said them in English. He kissed me. He hugged me. My lips did not answer. My arms stayed at my side. He embraced a lifeless body.

  I had retreated into a schizoid state. Forgive me for that term, but it is a good specific description. I mean I sat mute in front of the television, with no outward evidence of a mood, not seeing the shows, absorbed by fantasies that denied the existence of the attack, or replayed it in literal horror, or rewrote it to an ending in which my father killed the three men. At night I didn’t sleep. Grandma kept me company in the television room, gently rocking in a chair beside the sofa bed where I was supposed to sleep. She would nod off and startle awake. I honestly can’t recall having slept at all. The hot nights, the suffocating feeling that I lived in a world with no ventilation, became a new terror. I lay still; but my heart beat furiously. I saw those men and the images of what they did to my parents and I struggled to breathe. But there were no tears or sobs: nothing to cool me off or give me air.

  My mother returned on the third night. I clung to her. Literally. I held her hand without permitting a break. A couple of times she tried to let go, but I protested immediately and she resumed the contact. My relentless grip through dinner didn’t inconvenience her too much. She wasn’t eating any solid food. Since her jaw was swollen and bruised she was limited to my grandmother’s natilla. I ate well that night. Grandma had to cut up the food since I wouldn’t let go of Ruth, leaving me with just one hand to feed myself.

  I got my first full night of sleep sharing a bed with my mother in the guest room. I woke up only once.

  Ruth was out of the bed. She stood in the doorway, on her toes, attentive and still.

  “Mom …” I called sleepily.

  She rushed back on tiptoe. She sat against the headboard and pulled her legs under her. Her attention stayed focused on the open door.

  I put my head in her lap. Because of the hot night she wore something thin and satiny. The warmth of her belly, her sweet smell, proximity to the origin of my life, were all a thrilling comfort. Is that sexual? Is that reassurance? Is that regression? Am I being unintentionally trained to confuse sex with comfort? Or are they the same? Does the interpretation matter? Is it more or less important than the fact of the action? Would I have been better served by the touch of my father’s strength than my mother’s consolation? Is that sexist? When I am done answering these questions will I be improved?

  How silly introspection can seem or be made to seem, and how silly it is in fact, until self-examination becomes a matter of life and death. Whatever you make of this tableau—a frightened boy atop the heat of his mother’s belly—it restored me to the world.

  “He feels better when he’s with his Mama,” was how Jacinta put it as she watched me eat a stack of her pancakes the following morning.

  I started talking again. My cheek ached when I did and that’s how I knew I had been silent. That night, when my mother and I were in a train heading for New York, if you had stopped me as I squirmed by you in the narrow passageway (Do you see me: the little boy with a swollen and discolored cheek, a deep tan and a cast on his left arm?) to ask how I had gotten hurt, I might have cheerfully told you it was playing baseball. I had begun a repression of the direct memory of the attack that was complete by week’s end. I do not mean traumatic amnesia. I knew the assault had happened. But details faded and only a knowledgeable interrogator would have been able to summon the unwholesome creature from the dismal basement where it skulked.

  [It is an interesting question to me (obviously) whether immediate psychological intervention in a case such as mine could prevent the distortions and deformations that seem inevitable after an overwhelming and terrifying experience. Some of the great theorists of my profession are convinced of human resilience, especially a child’s. Not to become bogged down in arguments between “schools” of psychology, but I refer to those who deemphasize the absolute significance Freud and his many revisionists place on infancy and early childhood as the real crux of our drama, with adulthood more or less the predictable final scene, or perhaps something duller, merely the cup of coffee one has after the show to rehash its highlights. In fact, to be fair to poor overscrutinized Freud, it is an overstatement to attribute such pessimism about mature life to him. His championing of the talking cure itself shows he thought more of adulthood than that. But where would he, or does any psychologist, stand on this question: should there be trauma psychologists rushing to scenes of tragedy, like paramedics of the mind, giving mouth-to-mouth to prevent further damage? Of course, I am ignoring those neurologists who believe traumatic events trigger biochemical changes in the brain. They do want to rush in with stupefying drugs whose exact effects they admit we do not understand. I am grateful they have no mandate to experiment on us, beyond their already sweeping powers. But, if they are right, why not? Shouldn’t an immediate chemical prophylactic be
administered? And as for the behaviorists, if they are correct, shouldn’t they too be on the scene, able to prevent engineers of self-defeat from digging deep tracks? There are of course the beginnings of such a response with support groups and the like. My point is that psychology is the only branch of medicine that has no systematized emergency procedures or established preventative care. We wait until the problem is full-blown. Perhaps none of the various “schools” can honestly claim “cures” because we have all waited too long to begin our work.]

  Sometimes merely the image of my poor mother and me, alone in our terrors, shuddering side by side with the train’s movement, believing the worst was over while really the damage had just begun, brings heartache and sorrow. When I shed tears for my mother (and I do) I cry for her because of those apparently quiet months of the summer and fall of 1960. Although it may seem she could have been saved later on, that was the Ruth I wish I could have had as a patient. Though they were dull and uninteresting days to a casual observer, that was when her accident became an illness.

  My lay readers are probably more interested in why my raped and beaten mother traveled alone with her terrorized child to New York. Why she did and why she was allowed to. My father’s stated reasons have already been given. Jacinta and Pepín were too timid to travel to New York under normal circumstances. I know they believed we would be safer in New York; I suspect they were also overwhelmed by a reaction to the events of that night which was informed by 19th century attitudes toward sexuality and moral strength. I sensed their disapproval of Francisco and their embarrassment about Ruth.

  My mother’s desire to flee the scene of the disaster was natural and typical of brutalized women of that time. The assault was shameful to her. I know she never told any member of her family about the rape. She told her sister Sadie a sanitized version of the attack after we were back in Washington Heights. And she requested that Sadie keep even that bowdlerized account to herself.