Back to Blood: A Novel

by Tom Wolfe

  Christ! It was getting on toward 6:30, and he was just standing here letting his thoughts run wild… The whole bunch of them would be up soon… Camilo the Caudillo, the Caudillo’s ever-worried, hand-flensing wife, Lourdes, and Yeya and Yeyo—

  Yeya!

  It had completely slipped his mind! Today was her birthday! There was no way he could finesse Yeya’s birthday. There was always a pig roast… a pig big enough for a hundred people or so… all the relatives… innumerable, here in Hialeah alone… plus all the neighbors from the wet concrete yards. His parents and Yeya and Yeyo and even he himself knew the neighbors so well, they had come to call them Tía and Tío, as if they were real aunts and uncles. If he went AWOL from this party, he would never be forgiven. Celebrating Grandmother’s birthday was a very big thing in the Camacho domain… it was practically a holiday… and the older she got, the more sacred it got.

  There were grandparents living in the same house as their middle-aged children all over the place in Hialeah. Until his brother and his sister married their way out of the house, this casita was like the YMCA. There was one bathroom for seven people from three generations. Talk about people getting into each other’s hair…

  Oh, Magdalena! If only she were beside him right now! He would have his arm around her… in front of everybody… right now… and she would be joking about all the concrete front yards and all the put-upon wives of Hialeah. Why didn’t everybody get together and water just one tree? That was what she’d be saying. She’d bet there weren’t a dozen trees in all of Hialeah. Hialeah started out as a dirt prairie, and now it was a concrete prairie. That was the kind of thing she would say, if only she were here… He could feel her body leaning against his. She was so beautiful—and so smart! She had this… way… of looking at the world. How lucky he was! He had a girl more gorgeous, quicker, brighter than—than—than a TV star. He could feel her body against his in bed. ::::::Oh, my Manena.:::::: His body hadn’t touched hers in that way for almost two weeks. If it wasn’t the hours he worked, it was the hours she worked. He never knew that nurses for psychiatrists had to work so long and so hard. This psychiatrist was a big deal, apparently. He had patients practically stacked up at the hospital, Jackson Memorial, plus the ones who came in to his office all day long, and Manena had to tend to patients at both places. Nestor never knew psychiatrists had so many hospital patients. Oh, but he’s very prominent, very much in demand, Manena explained. She was working day and night. Recently it had become so hard, there was no time to see her at all. When he finished his Marine Patrol shift at midnight, she would be in bed asleep, and he didn’t dare call her. She had to start work at 7:00 a.m., she had explained, because first she had to go by the hospital for a “pre-check” and then to the office for a full day of patients that ended at 5:00 p.m., but Nestor’s shift began at 4:00 p.m. Just to make things worse, they had different days off. The whole thing had become impossible. What was to be done?

  He had called her cell phone not all that long after he got back to the marina. No answer. He texted her. She didn’t text back… and she must have known about it. If his father was right, everybody knew about it.

  He had to see his Manena!… if only on Facebook. He rushed back to his room, got dressed as fast as he had ever gotten dressed in his life, and sat down at his laptop, which he kept on a table that only barely fit into the room, and went online… Manena! There she was… It was a picture he had taken of her… long luxurious dark hair streaming down to her shoulders… her dark eyes, her slightly parted, slightly smiling lips—that promised… ecstasy didn’t even begin to say it! ::::::But stop fantasizing, Nestor! Go to the kitchen and get some coffee… before you’re afflicted with company you don’t want to have.::::::

  He sat in the kitchen in the dark, drinking a second cup of coffee, trying to wake up… and thinking… thinking… thinking… thinking… He couldn’t very well call her this early, 6:45 on a Saturday morning… shouldn’t text, either. Even the beep beep beep of a text message might wake her up.

  A light came on, and he heard a familiar flush and glug-glug-glug of a toilet. Damn! His parents were getting up… Camilo the Caudillo would be heading right here… A wisp of hope!… His father had had a chance to sleep on it and wanted to make peace—

  Click—the kitchen light comes on. His father is in the doorway… He has his eyebrows flexed downward, creating a ditch between them. He’s wearing his Relaxed-Fits, an XXL T-shirt whose short sleeves droop down below his elbows… yet it’s barely big enough to cover his watermelon belly. He hasn’t shaved. The undersides of his jowls are grizzly. He still has sleepers in his eyes. He’s a real mess.

  “Buenos días…?” ventures Nestor. It starts out as a greeting but winds up more of a question than anything else.

  His father says, “Whaddaya doing sitting here in the dark?” Don’t you even know how to sit in a kitchen?

  “I… didn’t want to wake anybody up.”

  “Who the hell’s this little light gonna wake up?” Don’t you know anything?

  He brushed past Nestor without another word and fixed himself a cup of coffee… Nestor kept his eyes on Him, Camilo the Caudillo, Lord of This Domain. He feared another detonation. I, Camilo Camacho, downed his cup of coffee without lingering over a single sip. Then he marched out of the kitchen like a man with a job to do. He didn’t acknowledge Nestor’s presence in any way as he left… didn’t so much as glance at him out of the corner of his eye…

  Nestor turned back to his coffee, but by now it was cool, too black, too bitter… and beside the point. He thought and thought and thought and thought… and still couldn’t figure out where he stood…

  He asked himself, “Do I exist?”

  The next moment… every manner of grunting, moaning, panting, and gasping for breath known to backbreaking labor commences just outside the kitchen.

  It’s his father—but what the hell is he doing? His body is tilted to the right because he’s carrying an enormous thing on his right shoulder. It’s long, it’s bulky—it’s a coffin. His father is wrestling with it and staggering under the thing… It seesaws up and down on the old man’s shoulder… lurches sideways against his neck… It’s about to flip out of his grip… He wrestles it back on top of his shoulder… One arm battles the lurches… the other one tries to stop the seesawing… He’s red in the face… He’s gulping for breath… He’s making every inarticulate sound known to heavy labor…

  “—messh… cinnghh… neetz… guhn arrrgh… muhfughh… nooonmp… shit… boggghh… frimp… ssslooosh… gessssuh hujuh… neench… arrrgh… eeeeeooomp.”

  The old man’s legs are buckling. It’s not a coffin—it’s the caja china they always use to roast the pig—but when did anybody ever try to carry the damn thing by himself? There—the metal slots on the end where you insert handles for carrying it, one man on this end, one on the other… What fool ever tried to carry it over the shoulder? I, Camilo, built it himself years ago… an inch-thick plywood coffin-shaped box lined with roofing metal… must weigh seventy pounds… so long, so big, nobody could get an arm around it and hold it steady—

  Nestor cries out, “DAD, LET ME HELP YOU!”

  With that, the old man tries to move away from him… you mustn’t lay a finger on it, traitor… “Arggggh”… That one little move—that does it! Now the caja china calls the shots! The damned thing is a huge raging bull riding on top of a little rider… Nestor can see it happening… it’s like slow motion… but is in fact happening so fast, he’s rooted to the floor… inert… the caja china is going into a spin. His father goes into a spin to try to keep up with it… his legs get wound around each other… he’s keeling over… “Arrrggh”… the raging caja china is coming down on top of him… “Errrnafumph”… one end of it hits the wall—

  C R A A A S H!

  —sounds like a train wreck in a little casita like this—

  “Dad!” Nestor is already crouched over the wreck, starting to lift the huge box off his father’
s chest—

  “No!” His father is looking straight up into Nestor’s face. “No! No!”… has the full grimace now… eyes aflame… upper teeth bared… “You—no!”

  Nestor lifts the caja china off his father anyway and puts it down on the floor… To someone with lats, traps, biceps, bracs, and quads like his—pumped up to the max by adrenaline—it’s nothing… might as well be a cardboard box.

  “Dad! Are you okay!?”

  I, Camilo Camacho… lying on his back… glowering at his son, growling at his son, “Keep your hands off that caja china,” he says in a low but clear growl.

  His dad isn’t injured… he’s perfectly lucid… the wall absorbed the momentum of the caja china… it just toppled over on I, Camilo Camacho… he’s not indicating any pain… Oh, no… he only wants to inflict it… Something close to despair sweeps through Nestor’s central nervous system… He has been helping his father carry the caja china out for the pig roasts ever since he was twelve… His father lifted it by the handles on one end, and Nestor lifted it by the handles on the other end… since he was twelve! It had become a little ritual of manhood! Now his father wants no part of him.

  I, Camilo Camacho, doesn’t even want his son to lift a crash-stricken coffin off his prostrate form. You really know how to hurt a son, don’t you, Caudillo Camacho… But Nestor can’t find the words to say that or anything else.

  “What happened!? What happened!?”

  It’s his mother, running from the bedroom. “Oh, dear God—Cachi! What happened? Cachi!” That’s her loving nickname for the Master. “Are you all right? What was that terrible noise? What fell?”

  She dropped to her knees beside him. He looked at her in an expressionless way, then put his tongue in his cheek and gave Nestor a baleful—and with his tongue in his cheek, accusing—stare. He held it like a laser beam… causing Nestor’s mother to turn to him… wide-eyed… baffled… frightened… fearing the worst… as much as asking, “Did you do this—to your father?”

  “Dad, tell her! Tell Mami what happened!”

  I, Camilo Camacho, said nothing. He just continued with his sinister beam fixed on Nestor.

  Nestor turned to his mother. “Dad tried to carry the caja china all by himself, on his shoulder! He lost his balance—and it crashed into the wall!”

  Nestor began hyperventilating… He couldn’t help himself, even though it cast a doubt upon what he was saying.

  “Tell her why,” said the Lord of This Domain in his new soft, low, mysterious voice… implying that much remained unsaid.

  Mami looked at Nestor. “What did happen?” Then at her husband. “Cachi, you must tell me! Are you injured?”

  In a voice that rose an octave, a shaky octave, Nestor said, “I swear! Dad was trying to carry that thing by himself! Look how big it is! He lost control, and when I tried to help him, he jumped away, or sort of jumped—and he lost his balance, and the caja china crashed and ended up on top of him! Right, Dad? That’s exactly what happened—right?”

  Down on her knees, Mami began crying. She pressed her hands against both sides of her face and kept saying, “Dear God… Dear God… Dear God… Dear God!…”

  I, Camilo Camacho, maintained his stare at his son, pushing his tongue inside his cheek so forcefully, his lips parted on that side, showing teeth.

  “Dad—you’ve got to tell her!” Nestor’s voice was becoming shrill. “Dad—I know what you’re doing! You’re playing Patience on a Monument, Smiling at Grief!”… Magdalena had introduced him to that expression. Somehow she picked up these things. “You’re playing Look What You Made Me Do!”

  Same low soft voice: “You don’t talk to me that way. The Big Cop—but everybody knows what you really are.”

  Mami broke into sobs, great blubbering sobs.

  Nestor’s own eyes began to fill with tears. “This is not fair, Dad!” It was all he could do to keep his lips from trembling. “I’ll help you up, Dad! I’ll take the caja china out to the yard for you! But it’s not fair—you can’t treat me this way! It’s not right! You’re playing a game! Patience on a Monument, Smiling at Grief!”

  He rose up from his crouch… He was getting out of here! Fighting back tears, he made his way into the little passageway that led from the extension to the rooms in the front of the house. A door opened behind him… a light… He knew immediately… Yeya and Yeyo—the last people on earth he needed at this moment, in the middle of all this.

  Yeya, coming up behind him, said in Spanish, “What was that noise? Practically knocked us out of bed! What happened?”

  Got to think fast… Nestor stopped, turned about, and gave Yeya the biggest, sweetest smile he could come up with. What a pair of guajiros stood before him. Keep them away from their son, I, Camilo Camacho, that was the main thing… Yeya was short and stout, with a sort of flowered muumuu covering her considerable bulk. But mainly there was her hair. It was the blue ball, the Blue Ball of Hialeah for ladies of a certain age. Old ladies didn’t dye their white hair in Hialeah, at least not in the usual way… Forty-eight hours ago, getting ready for her big birthday party, she went to the hairdresser. He cut it suitably short… for a woman of a certain age, added some—“blueing” in English—to give the gray a blue cast, and then blow-dried, back-combed, and teased it until it became a gossamer blue ball, a Hialeah crash helmet, as it was called. Hers was flattened a bit on one side from sleeping on it, but re-fluffing and reviving the helmet seemed to be no problem, as long as it hadn’t been pulled apart. Just above her brow her hair was wound about a pair of rollers. Yeyo, right behind her, was a tall man. He had once been big and meaty and strong. He still had a tall wide frame, albeit slightly stooped. By now he was more like a wide but bony rack for the old-fashioned pajamas and bathrobe he had on. At this moment he looked like someone who had just arisen unwillingly from a pleasant time with the Sandman. His gray hair was marvelously thick. God must have nailed down every hair upon his head for the duration. He had been a really handsome man, who fairly rippled with confidence and strength—not to mention an overbearing nature… But at this unwilling moment his hair was sticking out every which way, like a broken broom—

  All of that Nestor took in instantly… that, and their expressions. This morning they were not his loving abuelo and abuela. Not at all. If he read those faces correctly, they resented his breathing the same air they were…

  How to distract them. That was the idea.

  “Hap—feliz cumpleaños, Yeya!”

  Damn. Kind of blew it there. Almost said “Happy birthday.” Things like that truly rubbed Yeya and Yeyo the wrong way—the next generation using English instead of Spanish for something as traditional as Feliz cumpleaños. Yeya gave Nestor a look. Was he simple? A booby? Was he firing blanks? She glanced at his intentionally too-small shirt.

  “Ahhh, the strongman,” she said. “Our TV star. We saw you, Nestorcito. We saw a lot of you.” She began nodding her head repeatedly with her lips drawn together and scrunched up beneath her nose like a little pouch with its string pulled tight… Oh, yes, Nestorcito, we saw all too much of you…

  Before Nestor could say anything, Yeyo said (in Spanish), “Why did you tell them your name?”

  “Tell who, Yeyo?”

  “The TV.”

  “I didn’t tell them.”

  “Who did?” said Yeya. “A little bird?”

  “I don’t know. They just got it.”

  “Do you know it’s my name, too?” said Yeyo. “And your father’s? Do you know we care about our name? Do you know we Camachos go back many generations? Do you know we have a proud history?”

  ::::::Do I know you added to that proud history by defying the raging shit-flow in the Havana waterworks? Yes, I know that, you overbearing old crock.:::::: Real anger, not mixed with hurt, was now rising up Nestor’s brain stem. He had to get away from them before the words actually popped out.

  His mouth was so dry, and his throat was constricted. “Yes, Yeyo,” he managed to say. “I know th
at. I have to go now.”

  He had turned around to leave the house when… clop-groan-squeak thump… clop-groan-squeak thump… clop-groan-squeak thump… in the rear of the passageway… Oh, for God’s sake… his mother was trying to support his father… I, Camilo’s elbow rested on top of Mami’s forearm, which was trembling from the weight of the invalid. He was gimping along as if he had hurt his leg… clop—he took a step, putting all his weight on his “good” leg, causing the jerry-built wooden floor of the passageway to groan and squeak… then the lighter thump of the “bad” leg gingerly… “painfully”… trying to come along… What an outrageous faker Patience was!

  Yeya screamed. “Camilito—oh, dear God—what’s happened to you?!”

  In an instant she was at her Camilito’s side, trying to give him more support by jacking her forearms up under his other arm.

  “It’s all right, Mami,” he said. “You don’t have to do that. I’m okay.” How courageous he sounded! How stoic! thought Nestor. In fact, it couldn’t have been very pleasant, having the heels of her hands jacked up into the soft spot of his armpit.