Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

It was a Saturday. She took me to the Museum of Modern Art where, in a narrow, stark white screening room they showed Charles Chaplin movies to serious-minded film lovers. My mother enjoyed herself. For the first time since Tampa, I heard her laugh long and loud. And she cried, of course. That was almost as unusual as her laughter. She whispered to me again and again, “He’s a genius. Isn’t this great?”

I hated Chaplin. I thought the pathetic tramp grotesque, the absence of dialogue a dreary reminder of my home’s inarticulate misery. I wanted to see a James Bond movie — I think Dr. No was playing then. Friends of mine had been given the 007 attaché kit for their birthdays. It included a plastic copy of Bond’s Walther PPK that fired red bullets. My friends let me play in their hide-and-seek spy games, but I had to hide all the time, since I had nothing with which to defend myself. Worse, I had nothing to shoot at them.

I told Ruth I thought Chaplin was great. I watched her out of the corner of my eye and echoed her laughs, smiling when she turned her head to confirm that I was enjoying it.

“You have such good taste,” she told me over my birthday dessert at Rumpelmayer’s. “Is it good?” she asked about the piece of dark chocolate cake she had ordered for me. She had vetoed my request for Black Forest saying it was vulgar. (I liked cherries — still do.)

“Yes,” I lied. The dark chocolate was too rich and too bitter for my unsophisticated child’s palate. (Still is.)

We crossed the street to Central Park. Ruth found an empty bench, in an odd spot, near a stone bridge. (I can’t find it today.) Occasionally a bicyclist went by; once, a couple walked past. She fell silent each time until they were gone. She took my hand, looked toward the trees, not at me, and made a speech.

“You’re nine years old today. It’s amazing to me. It’s absolutely amazing. I can remember how you looked the day you were born. You had a full head of black hair. You weren’t one of those wrinkled old men. Your eyes were the shape of almonds. And they were so bright. The nurse said you couldn’t really see yet, but you seemed to look right into my heart and I swear you knew who I was. The nurse showed me your full head of hair and then she straightened your fingers to show me how long they were.” Ruth gently lifted the tips of my fingers away from their curvature toward my palm. “‘He’s going to be tall,’” she said. She was right,” Ruth commented with a note of surprise. “I don’t think her method was scientific. Well, she had seen Francisco. So it wasn’t that brilliant of her, was it?” she chuckled. She must love Chaplin, I remember thinking. Her mood hadn’t been this gentle and easy since the attack.

“That was the happiest day of my life. Not the day you were born. I was too scared and too foggy from the anesthesia to enjoy it. The next day, when I got to hold you and feed you and everyone came—” she narrowed her eyes, “even people I hated were nice and so impressed by you.” She stopped here, I think because of a passerby. When she resumed, tension had returned to her voice. “I had lots of days when I was happy. I don’t want you to think I was always like this. I wasn’t. I wasn’t always angry and scared.” She glanced at me. Her eyes were wet. I hoped she wouldn’t cry. “I was happy when I used to dance. Before Bernie put a stop to it. Put a stop to it quickly. Put a stop to that. And to a lot of other things.”

She rapidly turned her head as if she were going to catch someone hidden behind us, eavesdropping. When she saw no one she turned back and resumed. “But there was always something that turned things sour. Not the day after you were born. Everything was gorgeous. I didn’t feel sore or any pain. I did the next day. But not your first full day on earth. I remember everyone saying how well I looked. I looked well because I was happy.” She didn’t glance at me. She squeezed my hand for emphasis, but her green eyes nervously scanned the trees and nude lawns. She raised her voice, abandoned the hunted whisper of her paranoia, and spoke clearly above the distant surf of traffic on Fifth Avenue. “I want you to know that. No matter what happens to me, remember the day I got to see you, really see you for the first time, was the happiest day of my life.”

We returned to our apartment building around five o’clock. As we were about to go into the lobby, a voice called from a window. It was Joseph. Outside of contact in school I hadn’t played with him since the day I was branded a liar to his parents. (I was wrong about the label becoming general throughout the neighborhood. Either the Steins had no credibility or they didn’t talk to anyone.) He called down, “Rafe!” and then glanced back furtively into his apartment. Something appeared in his hands. “Happy birthday!” It was a package. He indicated he was going to drop it. “Catch!”

I moved under his window. He let go. He had wrapped the present in brown paper and written “Happy Birthday” in Magic Marker on both sides. His handwriting was as neat as a girl’s. Inside the wrapping was a paperback book. Not new; very well used, in fact. And on the inside cover there was a sticker with Joseph’s name. The title suggested the book would solve a mystery: How to Play the Opening in Chess. Upstairs, I got out my plastic pieces and tested my assumption. Sure enough, the dramatic advantages Joseph used to gain at the start of our games came from that book. My opponent for the openings had been the advice of generations of chess geniuses who had explored the first twenty moves or so and recorded the best options. Joseph had never let on. The rest of Joseph’s books were on the shelves for all to see, but this one hadn’t been on display. Indeed, I suspected (I was correct) that he must own more than one chess book. I noticed an advertisement on the back jacket that said there was a companion volume, How to Play the Endgame. I wanted to thank him. And I wanted to play chess again. I tried to think of how I could convince first my mother and then his mother that neither the CIA nor the Nazis would gain anything by Joseph and me playing together. I guess it’s a sad indication about my life that I didn’t laugh at this summation of my obstacle but seriously began to compose speeches to surmount it.

My attempt to puzzle out a convincing brief for parole was interrupted by Mother breaking the radio silence of our apartment. She shouted my name, “Rafe!” with urgency and horror.

I ran to her. She was in the hall off the kitchen. In happier days my parents used to serve meals at the long pine table in this room to argumentative Communist and ex-Communist Party members. For large groups they cooked Cuban peasant food: Francisco prepared great pots of black beans and rice; Ruth had learned from my grandmother how to make ropa vieja. Truly huge crowds were sometimes invited for dessert. Ruth baked delicious blueberry and apple tarts. She explained how she kept their crusts flaky during the brief lulls of political debate. And in the corner, sometimes to illustrate the subject of their discussions, was a small black and white television. Not the huge consoles of my friends and certainly not a hypermodern color set. It was the kind of portable television that soap-opera addicted women kept in the kitchen or indulgent parents bought for teenage children to watch in their bedroom.

I found Ruth kneeling in front of it. The news was on. Probably Walter Cronkite, but I don’t remember.

She said, “They’ve bombed Havana.” Havana was where I understood my father to be living. At my local public school there had been atomic bomb drills, later satirized or solemnly re-created by many works of the anti-war culture of the late sixties. We practiced getting under our desks. I saw my father under a desk. I saw him under my grandmother’s kitchen table winking at me.