The Affliction

by C. Dale Young

  “Well, you don’t look sick like the people who come here to see Cassandra.” The Archbishop continued to use the present tense the way so many do when referring to someone who had recently died.

  “I’m actually very sick. I just don’t look it right now. Leukemia. I have good days and bad days.”

  “Well, we must get together again before you leave the island.” Again, such a statement from Alejandro Castillo was surprising considering what I know of him, but one must accept a story the way it is told without too many questions. The surprise that is inevitable usually justifies such inconsistencies. But as Alejandro Castillo sat there talking to Javier and Leenck, he picked up a pen and began his nervous tic of flipping it over and over in his fingers, the pen rotating in a counterclockwise circle over and over vertically in his left hand.

  “That is funny,” Leenck said. “I have that bad habit too.” As he said this, he pulled a small wooden triangle from his pocket and began doing the same motion with his fingers, flipping and flipping the item over and over with his left hand.

  “What is that?” asked the Archbishop as he put the pen down next to his drink on the small side table. As he said this, Javier Castillo rose and excused himself to the terrace to smoke. This went almost unnoticed by the Archbishop, who was at that point utterly transfixed by Leenck and the way he flipped the wooden triangle over and over in his left hand.

  “Not sure what it is exactly. A wooden coin?”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “My father. Apparently, the men in my family are all woodworkers, carpenters. I think they have been woodworkers for centuries. My father told me a long time ago that every boy born into our family gets one made for him. It is the only thing I have kept from my time growing up in Spain. I guess I brought it with me because, well, I doubt I will make it back to California...”

  “Let me see it. May I? See it?”

  Alejandro Castillo took the small thing Leenck had been turning over and over in his hand. Wooden. Triangular in shape. Polished smooth. And there in the center was the same small axe he had studied patiently and repeatedly for years on his own triangular wooden coin. He looked again at Leenck and saw again many of the features he could see on Javier’s face, on his own face. He turned the wooden amulet over and over in his left hand instinctively. In that moment, Alejandro Castillo was lost in his own head, that forest in his dreams suddenly present and dark yet vivid in detail. And for a brief moment, he believed he could smell the forest he had not set foot in for a lifetime. Can you blame a man for such ridiculous things when placed in such a circumstance?

  “You do that as if you have held such a strangely-shaped thing in your hands before,” Leenck said. Alejandro Castillo did not respond. He could not respond. He handed the small wooden triangle back to Leenck and excused himself. Within a minute, Father Juan Marquez appeared and announced the driver was ready. He explained the Archbishop was not feeling well. He then fetched Javier Castillo from the terrace and ushered both of them outside to the car. As the car made its way back down the long and winding driveway to the main road by the sea, Alejandro Castillo watched the red tail lights navigate the almost-darkness of evening transitioning to night. He turned to look at the small ornamental box he kept on his chest of drawers. He could hear Father Juan Marquez call out to him to check if he was okay, and he responded that he was fine but tired, that he had maybe had too much to drink. Alejandro Castillo stared at the small ornamental box in which he kept his own wooden triangle. He would never again open that box. He would never again hold that small wooden triangle almost exactly like the one I found years later, the one I know belonged to Leenck and which I have kept all these years.

  X. Practice

  No one likes to admit it, but preparing for death takes practice. For some, it takes many years of practice, though I know for some it is a much easier feat. Javier Castillo spent the majority of his life ignorant of death but, in the short span of six months, his mother, his aunt, and then his father passed away. And then, the one man he had taken pity on, taken into his home, the one who had traveled to the island as his final act, the one who arrived as his own mother had died, was dying. It was not as if Javier Castillo had not anticipated this young man dying. From the first day he met him, the man Leenck had been dying, made it a point of reminding him almost daily. He reminded everyone. But despite all of the recent practice he had with death and dying, Javier Castillo felt the strange need to do something now that a man was dying in front of him in his own house. He set out on that otherwise very dull Saturday morning for the Farmer’s Market. He set out to find Sister Juan Martín because he knew that week after week she would be there making her rounds around 9:30 a.m.

  Javier did not use the driver that morning, nor did he take the car himself. He was always very specific about this when he recounted the events of that day. He chose to walk. He chose, instead of driving, to make the thirty-five-minute walk: down the steps of the Great House, down the sinuous driveway, down past the stunted flamboyant tree standing near the gate holding its branches covered with red petals out over the road, down the road that followed the shore around the island. Like the majority of people, he walked in the dirt alongside the edge of the road because there was no sidewalk, the sea to his right and the sound of waves crashing along the cliff side below him. Like his mother, like the Reynolds family before her, everyone in Port Town knew Javier Castillo. I guess it is safer to say that everyone knew who he was. And as he walked, the old women on the side of the road drinking their coffee or talking in hushed voices lowered their heads and offered up a respectful “Morning, Sir.” Despite the fact they knew Javier Castillo was of Latin blood like many of them were, the son of Cassandra Diaz, even el pueblo offered up their salutations in English out of what some would assume to be respect for the man who lived in the Great House on the Reynolds Estate. English, they used English, something that does not go unnoticed for many like me. They used a language that, for many of us, is even more tainted than the Spanish we inherited.

  As Javier Castillo passed the Archbishop’s mansion, he kept an eye on the far-right window on the second floor. It wasn’t so much that he expected the shadow of his father the Archbishop to be found there. He looked up simply to check the window of his father’s room. In his mind, he was simply paying “respects” to the man others believed was his uncle, the man people had feared in ways quite different from the way they had feared his mother. As he followed the winding road, he stopped and looked back at the mansion. He felt quite sure he was being watched and, as he thought about this, he knew that in one of the windows up there Father Juan Marquez was surely watching him. As this thought registered, a young man came running through the gates to the mansion calling out “Señor Castillo, Señor Castillo.” The errand boy Javier had seen many times at the Mansion had been sent to check and make sure everything was okay, to tell him that a driver from the Archbishop’s Mansion could take him where he needed to go if his own car was unavailable. But Javier Castillo simply corrected the boy, told him everything was okay, told him that he simply desired a walk that morning.

  Within ten minutes, the Archbishop’s Mansion was far behind Javier Castillo, still visible up on the hill, but far enough away that he knew Father Juan Marquez was no longer watching him. And farther back, in the distance, farther up at the base of Mutton Hill, he could see the Great House perched there looking out over the town and the harbor. As he began the slow slope down to the marketplace near the docks, Javier Castillo would certainly have seen the people bustling near the stalls. The sea in the harbor glimmered and flickered its reflections of the morning sunlight that day much as it had centuries earlier, much as it still does today, the mountainsides remaining in shadow. He had been born on this island, but the sight of the harbor still surprised him at times. It continues to surprise me even today. Right there before him, this very sight that so easily convinced the Spaniards and then the English that this place must have been filled wit
h gold, with gems, the way it shimmered and reflected light the way those very things they loved did; I cannot say with any certainty what it convinces anyone of today.

  At the end of the main pass through the market, Javier Castillo could see Sister Juan Martín, the old Reverend Mother. She would slowly make her way through the market, as she always did, stopping to check with each stall’s occupants. The nuns ran the market, but everyone who had an ounce of sense in their heads knew this was the way the Sister kept an eye on everyone and what they were doing. Sister Juan Martín was a Reverend Mother, but no one called her anything but Sister. And she never asked for anything more, never asked to be called Mother, not even by the other nuns in the convent. As Javier Castillo made his way through the people, the respectful greetings they offered him were so commonplace he barely heard them. He had watched his mother when he was a young man and how she made her way through crowds of people on the rare occasion she left the Great House. Like her, he said nothing in response to these greetings but simply watched as they stopped whatever they were doing to move out of his way. Surely the ones offering greetings would have fallen over dead had Javier Castillo responded. It would have made no difference what language he had spoken, English, Spanish, gibberish. The mere act of response would have been a truly memorable thing for them, one they would likely recount for a long time to come. As he made a beeline for the old nun, she noticed him and paused to wait for him.

  “Javier? Is Teresita okay? Señora Grise?”

  “They are fine, Sister. They are both well.”

  “Then why are you here at the market? I assumed one of them must be sick for you to come here.”

  “They are at the house, Sister. I asked them to come another day. I came specifically to talk to you.”

  “To me? Whatever can I do for you, Javier?” As with many things Sister Juan Martín said, this was not really a question.

  “Is there somewhere we can sit and speak privately for a minute or two?”

  “Is this about your uncle? I know that his passing had to be difficult for you. It was difficult for all of us.”

  “No, Sister. This is about a different matter.”

  Sister Juan Martín asked Javier to wait for her by the patio outside the small restaurant near the end of the market, explained that she would only be another ten minutes. Javier Castillo complied without hesitation. He sat and listened to the fisherman haggle with the restaurant owner, a daily occurrence despite the fact the restaurant owner always won the battle of pricing. Sitting there quietly awaiting the Reverend Mother, Javier was like almost every other person that lived here. He would not be treated with even an ounce of preference by any of those nuns. They were, for lack of a better word, impartial. The sisters were never disrespected, much less disregarded. They were never ignored. And as she had promised, she found him at the patio exactly ten minutes later. “Javier, would you mind returning with me to the convent?” As usual, this was not a question. Even then, the old nun’s words carried a weight most of us could never explain. Her words entered the air with a decisive quality one would only expect from a noble woman in the Spanish Court, in the royal courts now found only in history books or period movies.

  As Javier entered the grounds of the tiny convent, as he looked around at the well-tempered gardens, many memories came back to him. It was there he remembered as a child going to visit his mother. He remembered the plum trees there and how in early spring the branches erupted in petals, the entire convent surrounded by the pinkish haze of them. What Javier Castillo did not remember, could not remember, was that he had been born in that very convent, born in a small cell of a room in which his mother had been locked away. And there, in the yard, the shak shak tree under which his grandmother one dark night had told him to concentrate on his mother inside the walls of the convent.

  The shak shak tree, the flamboyant tree, the one named the royal poinciana by the English, was brought to the island by the Spaniards. To be honest, they likely brought it inadvertently, brought it like they did their language, to the Canary Islands, Hong Kong, Florida, south-western Texas and even the Rio Grande Valley in Arizona. But let us be honest here, the Spaniards did very few things inadvertently. About the only thing they brought inadvertently was disease. Like the Spanish language itself, the shak shak tree could be found wherever the Spaniards had been, even in the Pacific. Even its seeds perpetuated the idea of Spain as they were used inside maracas.

  Javier had forgotten this, all of this. He was amazed that he had somehow forgotten this. He had forgotten his grandmother under that tree and her deep set eyes as she told him to concentrate on his mother, had forgotten the way she had placed both of her hands on his shoulders to calm him. She slowly told him over and over to concentrate on his mother inside the convent and the surprise when, minutes later, he found himself in his mother’s locked room standing in front of her, the tears running down her face as she marveled at the act he had just performed. The shak shak tree in front of him, covered in the blood-red petals like the one at the gate to the Reynolds Estate, had recovered this distant memory, one he couldn’t believe he had forgotten. It was the memory of the very first time he had “bent light” as his mother and his Tía Flora had called it.

  Why had he forgotten this? As he walked with Sister Juan Martín through the gardens toward the main building, Javier Castillo felt a desperation in his chest as he wondered what else he had forgotten, what else he had buried deeply and successfully within his own head. Instructed by his grandmother, yes. And yet he had forgotten, had spent his life believing that the first time he had performed this act of disappearing was years later in his childhood. But at five years old, he had already discovered what even to his final day he had called his “affliction.” And again, the image of his grandmother came to him, a woman about whom he knew so little. She had been there with him in the gardens of the convent, had somehow coached him to perform his first unnatural act.

  As they entered the main building of the convent, Sister Juan Martín directed him to a small parlor off the main entryway and motioned him to sit by a small desk. The nun took her place behind the desk and suddenly looked quite officious to Javier. With not a single word, she gathered up some loose papers on the desk, opened one of the desk drawers, and placed them inside it with the speed and ease of a long-standing bureaucrat.

  “Sister. A young man has been living at my house ...”

  “Yes, the American with cancer.”

  “Yes, Sister. In the last two days, he has become feverish and no longer makes sense when he speaks.”

  “Have you contacted the doctor?”

  “No, Sister, the young man asked me not to do that months ago when he arrived. And I am sure you know I would never contact that doctor. But the young man says he is not curable and did not want to prolong the whole thing anyway.”

  “But he came here to see your mother, did he not? People only came to this island to see your mother because they wanted to be cured of illness.”

  “Well, this brings me to why I am here, Sister. Leenck, the young man, says he came here not really to see my mother but because he wanted to appease a friend and because he didn’t want to die in the United States.”

  “I am not understanding you, Javier.”

  “I can speak in Spanish if you like, Sister.”

  “No, no. I understand the words you use, but I don’t understand what it is I can do for you.” As she said this, she picked up a pencil and placed it in a small box at the side of her desk. When Javier recounted this not long after the whole thing happened, he spared not even a single detail. I believe he even remembered the pencil appeared as if it had just, moments before, been sharpened.

  “I think Leenck wants to make amends with this friend of his before he dies, but I don’t know who he is.”

  “But Javier, isn’t it best to ask this young man where to find his friend?”

  “He doesn’t know where his friend is. And I don’t know the friend, ev
en though he is from the island and not a tourist. And, as I mentioned, he is no longer making much sense when he speaks.”

  “And you assume I know who this friend is and even where he can be found?”

  “Yes, Sister. And I hoped as a favor to my mother that you would help me.

  “Javier, I will help you because you ask for help, and not because of any favors owed to Cassandra.”

  Javier Castillo had not heard his mother’s formal name in many years. It unsettled him. When people spoke of his mother, she was always “Cassie.” Sister Juan Martín picked up a book from the desk, turned slightly, and reached behind her to place it on the bookshelf. She displayed no emotion that Javier could verify. He always described the old nun to me as a warm stone, though I have never encountered anything like warmth from her over the many years. As she turned back from the bookshelf to the desk, as she looked then directly into his face, she said: “Javier, you do not look well. Have you been sick?” Javier Castillo made some remarks about being tired, about the work of keeping the Estate running, the distillery etc. To this, the nun said nothing in response. She waited a minute as if deciding whether or not to speak. “Diego Flores, Gran Señor Flores’s only son. I am sure you could ask his sister about his whereabouts.”

  “Teresita has a brother?”

  “Yes, Javier. Her brother is the man you want to find. Diego Flores brought the young man staying at your house to the island.”

  On the walk back to the Great House, Javier Castillo felt both confused and the very real desire to laugh out loud. This is not dissimilar to the way I felt when I first heard all of this. The woman who took care of his house, had taken care of the house for his mother in her last years, Teresita Flores, was in fact my sister, the sister of the very man he needed to find. One part of him seemed surprised by this information, but another part of him thought only of the “threads” his Tía Flora had always talked about, the fact that there are threads between everyone, even when you cannot see them. The island was small, but it wasn’t small enough for this to feel like anything but the oddest of coincidences to Javier. Other people might have been disturbed by this coincidence, but not Javier Castillo. If anything, it now proved to him that he was meant to take in Leenck, the man then dying at the Great House. Diego Flores. He then felt certain he was meant to meet me, this man named Diego Flores. Javier Castillo had no idea then why he was meant to meet me, but he knew that throughout his life nothing had ever happened by coincidence, purely by coincidence.