The Affliction

by C. Dale Young

  “You know, it is terrible to pray for bad things, but I pray every night that you suffer the way I have.”

  “Everyone suffers, Rosa. Everyone. Not just you.” With that, Flora had the strength to slam the door shut.

  Rosa Blanco kicked the door, hit it with her fists, and continued to do so for almost three minutes. Flora Diaz sat in a chair in the corner of her living room and stared at the door. She stared at it as if by doing so she could make Rosa Blanco disappear. She tried to charm the woman from down the street to leave, but she couldn’t calm her mind enough to effect the charm. But Rosa tired of hitting and kicking the door. And she eventually tired of yelling obscenities and curses in both English and Spanish. But long after the ruckus of Rosa Blanco ceased, Flora Diaz continued staring at the door. It may have been thirty minutes later, possibly even an hour, when the mail slot swung upward and the even rectangle of light in the door spit an envelope on the floor in front it. She could hear the postman walking off the porch and down the steps.

  I like to believe this was a relief for her to hear the postman’s predictable steps. At least those steps told her this wasn’t a note from the crazy woman down the street who, as far as Flora was concerned, should be locked away in an institution like her one remaining son. Javier Castillo had charmed her husband, and the story of their lives had been changed. She knew that. I knew that. Javier changed everything around him so easily. We know that the Blanco man leaving made his wife Rosa crazy. One thing after another, the dominoes had fallen and, as they did, other dominoes had to fall. Mail usually came around 1:00 p.m. Flora Diaz left the envelope lying on the floor. How she was able to do that, to leave it there, is the one part of the story I will never completely understand. I could never have left a letter lying there like that.

  Flora Diaz stood in her kitchen staring at the ficus in the corner. She could see that one of the three trunks had not just a white patch but also a full ring of white. She studied it and realized there were flecks of yellow as well. Rot. The plant had acquired rot. As she studied the other parts of the trunk, she found another ring, this time on one of the other three components of the trunk. Flora Diaz had gotten the ficus as a gift as a young girl. It was a gift from her great aunt, her mother’s aunt, Clara Diaz. It reminded Flora of the plant her great aunt had kept in her own kitchen, a small tree with a twisted trunk, a ficus, the weeping fig. In Flora’s mind, the ficus was her great aunt or, to be more precise, a symbol of her great aunt. And to see the ficus now with rot after so many years of care had to make Flora angry.

  The way Javier explained it, Flora Diaz almost never dreamed. When she discovered that other people dreamed all the time, Flora had gone to her mother for answers. Her mother had no answers but told her not to worry about this because she had the ability to “dream” in the daytime, to dream while awake. Her mother knew little about the gift of Reading, but she knew it existed and was an important gift in her family. Flora Diaz’s mother was the child of a Mover, and her mother’s aunt, the one who gave her the ficus, was a Reader. But her mother and her great aunt never talked about their gifts with each other. They rarely talked at all. What Flora knew about her grandmother was the fact she viewed the English and Spanish, the white men who had claimed much of the Caribbean in times past, as devils. And though Flora never met her grandmother, she heard her grandmother’s words from her mother’s mouth all the time as a child. Her great aunt spoke of the devils as well.

  But the night after the visits from Carmen Jiménez and Rosa Blanco, Flora Diaz supposedly had odd dreams. In one she could see trees twisting and bending and, in the branches of a very large shak shak tree, her nephew was sitting and clutching the branches as the tree swayed, its obscene elongated pods swinging back and forth due to heavy gusts of wind, the blood-red petals fluttering away from the tree almost as if in slow motion. When Flora woke, she couldn’t shake the odd sensation that the dreams were both real and not real. What did the dreams mean? Why was Javier Castillo stuck in a tree? Was there a hurricane coming that would damage the island? This was the difficulty with dreams. One had to interpret them, which was a skill Flora Diaz did not possess.

  When Flora rose from bed, dressed herself and went to the kitchen the next morning, she did what she had done her entire life, she boiled water and crushed a pepper in a glass with the back of a tablespoon. She poured the hot water over the crushed pepper and let it sit a minute or two. Her mother had taught her this as a young girl, taught her by example. The pepper was to clear the chest and the mind. After so many years, the powerfully hot pepper barely made her tongue tingle. I never saw Javier do this. If my memory serves me correctly, only his mother and aunt did this faithfully, though he admitted he did it almost every day as a child. As Flora Diaz drank the hot water that morning, she looked over at the ficus, her weeping fig, and saw quite clearly that the rot had spread to all three of the individual trunks twisted together to make up the trunk of the plant. As she stared at the ficus, she had to have seen that many of the leaves had yellowed specks on them. Rot. Someone had brought rot into her house. One of the many people who brought leaves for her to read had brought it into her house. And try as she might, she couldn’t see who had done it.

  After an hour at the kitchen table thinking and rethinking the events of the past two weeks, Flora decided she should get some of her daily errands out of the way. As she walked through her small living room, she saw the letter that had been delivered the previous day lying on the floor in front of the door. She had forgotten it had come. No other mail had come, so the lone letter seemed all the more pronounced lying there on the hardwood floor. She crossed the room and picked up the letter, tore it open unevenly. She pulled the white paper from the bluish-tinged envelope and read it standing there in front of the door.

  TELEGRAM

  Mama died last night. Tried to come to you to tell you but unable. Not sure why. Unable to travel. Sister Juan Martín sent this for me.—Javi

  Why was Javier Castillo unable to come to her? How had Flora Diaz of all people not felt her sister’s passing, which now, had taken place days prior? She had not foreseen any of this. Her mother and grandmother’s hushed whispers came to her, but she had to have remembered those whispers in their negative versions: “the white men won, they had finally won.” As she stood there, one thing had to be very clear to her. There would be no more of them. There would be no more of her kind. Her sister was dead. Something had changed. Her family was now at its end. The white men had won, had finally killed them off. She stammered and paced and read the note over and over. Can you see this? She had helped Cassie all those years ago, helped her to do unspeakable things. And didn’t she always know Cassie having a boy was a terrible omen, a violation of sorts? A boy. There was no one now to continue the family. Javier Castillo possessed one of the gifts, something that had been reserved for women for as long as her people had existed. But that boy would never bear children. There was no place in him to pass on a gift to another. The white men had finally won, had finally exterminated them. They had done it many years ago, but she hadn’t realized it until that moment. There would be no more of them.

  Flora became aware of the fact she was kneeling on the floor of her kitchen. She must have tried to see Javier Castillo back on the island in the Great House. But we all know she saw nothing. The white patches of rot now stretched inches between the soil and the canopy of branches. It involved all three of the trunks twisted together. I would wager money that she touched the leaves of the ficus then and concentrated but saw only the kitchen around her. The light in the windows flickered and shimmered as the wind moved one of the tree’s limbs in the backyard. She must have believed it was Javier Castillo taking shape in her kitchen, but that simply would have been wishful thinking. Flora and her sister had done terrible things to their own family, even if they were only half-brothers and half-sisters. And Cassie had a boy despite being warned not to do so. And Flora Diaz must have known it was the end. She lay herself down
on the floor of her kitchen, her face sticking to the linoleum, her left hand clutching the telegram. And the shadows of the large tree outside kept shifting the light as the wind moved the limbs over and over. One wonders what Flora Diaz saw as she lay there. One wonders what any of us sees at the end.

  IX. The Order of Things

  There were many things Alejandro Castillo did not know. For a start, he did not know his given name or the people who were his parents. In this, he was one who embraced mystery not because he had that special talent but because he had no choice. When Father Guillermo Rojas found him on the streets of that small town in Spain, the boy who became Alejandro Castillo could not even speak Spanish. He was dirty and wearing clothes that were filthy and torn. He spoke what people then believed was gibberish. Despite this, the boy had smart eyes, intelligent eyes, and a persistence in his demeanor. Father Guillermo Rojas took in the boy and raised him as his own child. Castillo, because the boy was sitting in front of the old mayor’s dilapidated house that the locals in their mean-spiritedness called “the castle,” and Alejandro, because Father Rojas had been reading a dense but fascinating history of Pope Alexander VI. The boy looked like a gypsy who had been abandoned by gypsies. But Alejandro Castillo was, as Father Guillermo Rojas deduced, a clever child. He learned Spanish easily and spoke properly within a year. By the age of six, one would never have known Spanish wasn’t the boy’s original language.

  “Pardon me. Your Grace? Did you hear me? Your nephew was here asking to see you.” Alejandro Castillo turned to look at his assistant. It was clear then that he had been caught in daydream. For almost a minute, the Archbishop stared at his assistant before saying a word. Why had Javier come to see him? It had been many years since he had been seen on the island. It was rumored he was living abroad. Javier brought with him a mix of emotions for Alejandro Castillo, most of which were not remotely pleasant. Javier made it a habit of creating such responses in those who knew him.

  “Your Grace? Your nephew?”

  “Yes, yes. I was just reviewing the events of the past week in my head.”

  “I asked him to come back later.”

  “Today? Later today?”

  “Yes, Your Grace. I thought you were lying down and didn’t want to simply announce him to you.”

  “Did he seem upset?”

  Father Juan Marquez had been the Archbishop’s assistant for decades. He likely had many suspicions about the Archbishop, but he was a faithful man of God who felt serving the Archbishop was his calling, his own small way of serving Holy Mother Church. In many ways, he took care of the day-to-day activities of the Church on the island. He was the one who spoke to the other two priests on the island, instructed them on finances, reviewed their sermons, etc. His voice was essentially the voice of Alejandro Castillo, the voice of the Church in that small place.

  “No, Your Grace. He seemed pleasant, if not somewhat sad.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “No, Your Grace. Just that he needed to speak with you. Today, if possible.”

  “Very well.”

  Some men join the military to escape a life of poverty. Others join the work force, enter a life of sales and meetings like I did. But Alejandro Castillo at an early age, living with Father Rojas, saw that the Church was a kingdom on earth as much as it was the gateway to heaven. And like his namesake, the Borgia Pope, he decided early that the Church would be his escape from a common life. He entered the seminary as a teenager. And he became a priest in his early twenties, a bishop by age thirty. Others would have scoffed at accepting the role of Bishop when it was presented as something tied to moving to this island, but Alejandro Castillo had already deduced that being a bishop in a remote area would allow him to be a prince of sorts. And in this, he was one hundred percent correct. With minimal effort on his part, Alejandro Castillo convinced his elders that he should be made an archbishop instead of a simple bishop, and this gave him authority over priests on other nearby islands as well. A prince, he had transformed himself into a prince.

  “I will take my lunch on the back terrace today. When Javier returns, you can bring him to me.”

  “Of course, Your Grace. Will he be joining you for lunch?”

  “No. Send a boy to the Reynolds Estate to tell him to come at 1:30. I assume he is staying at the Great House with his mother.”

  “Yes, Your Grace. I have word he is at the Reynolds Estate. I will send a boy.”

  “Set no place for him at my table. I don’t expect him to be here for very long.”

  “Of course, Your Grace.”

  Father Juan Marquez left the room as quietly as he had entered minutes earlier. And in the Archbishop’s mind, the question turned and turned: why was Javier coming to see him? The boy was clever, that he knew. In this he was much like his father. Even in that instance, the Archbishop couldn’t help but compliment himself. He knew quite well that Javier Castillo was not his nephew but his own son. And maybe the fact he never knew his own given name was why he allowed Cassandra Diaz to name their child Castillo. Pride, maybe, but also a strange challenge to the order of things.

  The Diaz sisters were by no means the first women with whom Alejandro Castillo had sexual relations. I sometimes wonder if he slept with my own mother when she was a young woman, but my sister and I look too much like our father for me to believe that. Before and after Alejandro Castillo’s vow of celibacy, the man had many indiscretions. In this, too, he was like his namesake, the Borgia Pope. But the Diaz sisters were different. In a way, he loved them more than any other women he had taken to bed. He had gone to great lengths to have them, something he had never done before or after. He couldn’t remember which of the two had first caught his eye, but he knew back then they would never acquiesce to his advances the way other women had. So, because he wanted them, desperately wanted them, he convinced the Reynolds man and his jealous wife to have them placed in the convent. Alejandro Castillo was no fool. And neither was his son.

  At exactly 1:15 p.m., the table on the back terrace overlooking the gardens was set with linen, silverware and china. It was a Saturday, so wine was opened and the appropriate glasses placed. Father Juan Marquez had already instructed the gardener to pick some of the purple calla lilies from the edge of the small pond, and he found them resting on the side table that sometimes served as a bar in the evenings on the rare occasion the Archbishop had guests and wanted to take after-dinner drinks and a cigar on the terrace. He quickly found a small crystal vase and placed the lilies in it with some carbonated soda water. He artfully set the three lilies pointing away from each other so that they made a triangle. Always threes because Father Juan Marquez understood the unquestionable power of that number.

  At 1:25 p.m., after ensuring that everything was in order, Father Juan Marquez left the terrace and took his place in the dark entryway of the mansion to greet Javier Castillo. At 1:27 p.m., Gran Señora Hernandez brought the covered lunch and set it for the Archbishop. At exactly 1:30 p.m., Alejandro Castillo sat at the table. And a minute later, after the steward had placed the napkin on the Archbishop’s lap, after the white wine had been poured and the plate uncovered, releasing its pent-up steam, after he could hear the creak of the door confirming Javier’s arrival, he started his lunch.

  Father Juan Marquez ushered Javier Castillo to the terrace and waved his hand toward a chair set near the table but not at the table. Before Javier Castillo sat, he said good afternoon to the Archbishop.

  “You have cut your hair, Javier.”

  “Yes, Your Grace. It seemed the right thing to do.”

  “You look more like a man now with your hair short. How long have you been here?” The Archbishop continued eating his lunch of grilled chicken and rice with a mango salsa, the knife and fork clinking against the china punctuating his questions.

  “Two weeks now. Mama died four days ago.”

  “What did you say? Died? I have heard of no funeral arrangements this week.”

  “Mama didn’t w
ant a funeral, much less a burial.”

  “Yes, but people will find out she is dead. And they will question who owns the Reynolds Estate now.”

  “Yes, Father. That is why I am here. I plan to stay. I need to stay. And I am her only child, but there is no will.”

  “And your grandfather’s brother, the Governor General, is aware of this?”

  “No, Father. But I need a statement from you in case he questions, something in writing to say Mama left everything to me, that I am her heir and that the estate is now mine.”

  “Why would I do such a thing, Javier?”

  “I have never . . . asked much of you, though we both know I have every right to ask.”

  “A statement from me would carry little if any legal weight, Javier.”

  “You are a leader in the Church, Father. If you state in writing that my mother desired her belongings be left to me, it will go unchallenged.”

  A younger Alejandro Castillo would have been outraged, but instead he was calm and responded: “Well, I guess it is true; you have never asked much of me.”

  Alejandro Castillo had never done anything for his son. Javier was always quick to point that out. His stories of his father were incredible. Part of the reason he did little for Javier stemmed from the fact Cassandra Diaz had forbidden it, threatened to contact the Governor General and even Rome, if it came to that. For two years, Alejandro Castillo believed he had the upper hand when it came to the Diaz sisters. Once they were in the convent, he had them confined, beaten and tortured. How better to be their savior? How better to bed them? He made himself into their savior. It certainly was not the first time a man had done something like that. But in the end, he came to know them for what they really were: brujas. He came to understand that he never forced himself on either of them, much as he loved to believe he had back then, but that they had allowed the entire thing to happen, willed it to happen, he believed. At times he had to have known they had orchestrated the entire thing. Once Cassandra had delivered Javier, there within the convent’s walls, everything changed. He learned with time that the Diaz sisters were powerful women, powerful in ways he would never understand. And here sat this man who was the very proof. As he looked at Javier, he had to have seen the Diaz sisters. Javier Castillo had their nose, their aquiline nose. But it was difficult for him to look at Javier Castillo and not also see himself. And this troubled him more than anything. Like his mother and aunt, Javier Castillo was a dangerous man, something wicked and untrustworthy. Like me, the Archbishop knew far more about Javier Castillo than he likely realized.