Avram Davidson - The Avram Davidson Treasury - a tribute collection

The house was dim (naturally, properly) and smelled (not at all dimly) of wood smoke, herbs, rum, and a number of other things, including — recognized at once although for the first time — Ysidro Chache himself.

Who was squatting on the floor, singing his strange song, scattering his colored seeds from a painted gourd onto the floor and examining the pattern in the single thin shaft of sunlight, then scooping up the seeds to cast them down again. Abruptly his song ceased. “ Abuelita Ana must die,” he said, matter-of-factly. His voice no longer high and weak, but deep and strong.

Carlos tensed. Was the curandero intending — Then he remembered who Abuelita Ana was, and relaxed. “She has been dying for as long as I can remember her,” he said. Grandma Ana, with her twenty layers of garments, her tray of pills and salves and lotions and elixirs, palms and beads and holy pictures, her good luck charms and her patent medicines with the likenesses and signatures of grave and bearded Spanish doctors…and most of all, her long and thick and filthy yellow-gray and black fingernails.

Ysidro Chache nodded. “I have been keeping her alive,” he said. “But I can’t do it any longer. Perhaps today… Perhaps tomorrow …” He shrugged. “Who knows?”

“And how are you, Sir Healer?”

“I? I am very well. The Lord and the saints love me.” He snickered.

Remembering that he was a policeman and that the good offices of a policeman were not despised, Carlos said, “No one has been bothering you, I hope.”

The medicine man opened his good and bad eyes very wide. “Bothering me? Who would dare?” he said, “but someone has been bothering you .”

Carlos Rodriguez Nuñez stared. He sighed, and his sigh broke into a sob. With his voice not always under control, he told the healer of his troubles…the ugly voices heard, the ugly faces seen, the pains of body and head, dizziness, doubling of vision, unfriendliness and enmity of people, and — finally — fear that he might lose his job.

Or worse.

The curandero’ s expression, as he listened and nodded was not totally dissimilar from that of Doctor Olivera. “ Pues … I don’t think we have to deal here with the results of impiety,” he said slowly, with a reflective air. “You’re not a hunter or a woodcutter; you’d have little occasion to offend the Deer people or the Small People…even if you had, this is not the way in which they generally take revenge. I say, generally . But — for the moment — this is something we’ll leave to one side.

“What then? The Evil Eye? One hears a lot of nonsense about it. As a matter of fact, grown men are very rarely the victims of the Evil Eye: it is the children whom one must look out for …”

He discussed various possibilities, including malfunctioning of the stomach, or its functioning with insufficient frequency, a difficulty for which he, Ysidro Chache, had many excellent herbs. “But—” the policeman protested, “it is not that. I assure you.”

Chache shrugged. “What do you suspect, yourself, then?”

In a low, low voice, Carlos murmured, “Witchcraft. Or, poison.”

Chache nodded, slowly, sadly. “Eighty percent of the infirmities of the corpus,” he admitted, “proceed from one or the other of these two causes.”

“But who—? But why—?”

“Don’t speak like an idiot!” the medicine man snapped. “You are a police officer, you have a hundred thousand enemies, and each one has a hundred thousand reasons. Why is a little consequence; as for who , while it would be helpful if we knew and could lay a counter-curse, it is not essential. We do not know who , we only know you , and it is with you that we must concern ourselves.”

Humbly, Carlos muttered, “I know. I know.”

He watched while Chache cast the seeds again, made him a guardero out of shells and stones and tufts of bright red wool, censed him with aromatic gum and fumed him with choking herbs, and performed the other rituals of the healer’s arts, concluding his instructions with a warning to be exceedingly careful of what he ate and drank.

The officer threw up his head and hands in despair. “A man with a thousand eyes could be taken off guard for long enough — If I turn my head in the cantina for a second, someone could drop a pinch of something into my food or drink—”

“Then eat only food of your wife’s preparing, and as for drink, I will give you a little charm which will protect you for either rum or aguardiente.”

Vague about the amount of his honorario, Chache would say only that the cost of the first visit was twenty pesos, including the two charms. He directed that the next visit be in three days. Carlos walked away feeling partly reassured and partly re-afraid. The smell of the magic infumations was still in his nostrils, but, gradually, in the vanishing day, it was succeeded by others. A haze hung over everything. Despite official exhortations in the name of science and patriotism, the ignorant small farmers, and the people of the Indian ejidos, whose lands ringed around the municipality had begun the annual practice of burning their fields and thickets to prepare for the corn crop. It was perhaps not the best season, this one chosen by the Forestal , to have forbidden illicit wood cutting and burning; it would be difficult to distinguish one smoke from another at any distance — or, at night, one fire from another. It was a season when the land seemed to have reverted, in a way, to pagan times; there was fire all around, and always fire, and not infrequently some confused and terrified animal would find itself cut off, surrounded, and would burn to death. But these offenses against, say, the Deer People, Carlos left to the offending Indios, and to the curandero.

Another and lighter haze hung over the town and its immediate environs. It was present twice daily, at early morning and at dusk: the haze of wood and charcoal fires which bore the faint but distinctive odor of tortillas, reminiscent of their faint but distinctive flavor, toasting on griddles. And the pat-pat-pat of the hands of the women making them.

Carlos had come to prefer the darkness. In it he could see no hostile, no distorted faces. Seeing fewer objects, he would be disturbed by fewer objects malevolently doubling themselves. If only at such times his irregular pains and distress would diminish as well… They seemed to, a little. But a little was not enough. Perhaps the things the curandero Ysidro Chache had done would diminish them much. Hastily, furtively, in the gathering darkness, Carlos fell to his knees and said a short, quick prayer to La Guadalupana .

It was in his mind that his wife’s full name was, after all, Maria de Guadalupe.

“ Tu cafe ,” she said, pouring it as soon as he entered; hot and strong and sweet. “ ¿Tu quieres una torta? ”

He proceeded cautiously with his supper at first. But although his sense of taste was distorted, imparting a faintly odd flavor to the food, it seemed that tonight his throat at least would give him no difficulty. Afterwards, as she finished washing the dishes, he approached and embraced her, one arm around her waist, one hand on her breast, and thoughtfully and gently took her ear between his teeth. She said, “ ¿Como no ?” as usual.

But afterward she did not, as usual, say, “ ¡Ay, bueno! ”

And afterward, also, in the bitterness of failure and the fatigue of despair, turning his thoughts to other things, he had his idea.

Surely, if he were to pull off a great coup — arrest someone besides a troublesome borracho for a change, for example — surely this would restore his so-greatly fallen credit with the police department, to wit, Don Juan Antonio. At least so he reasoned. He had the vague notion that the plan was not perfect, that, if he considered it carefully, he might find flaws in it. But he didn’t wish to consider it that carefully; the effort was too great; there were too many voices muttering ugly things and distracting and bothering him, and besides, if he were to decide against the plan, he would have no reason for getting up. His pains were worse, and he knew he could not get back to sleep again. Therefore he should get up, and if he got up, there was nothing to do but leave the house.