Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

You’re with Daddy, I repeated in my head. And you’re happy, I insisted, more intensely to myself, the prayer reverberating in my aching skull. I hoped this would not only get us past the ticket agent but also cure my illness.

To my horror, the agent didn’t merely glance at my passport. He kept it open and started writing something on my ticket. Later I discovered he was copying my passport number onto the stub.

But I panicked while the copying went on. You’re with Daddy and you’re happy, I screamed to my throbbing temples. We got through without incident and started the long walk to the gate. You’re with Daddy and you’re happy, I said, softer to my hurting head.

“They’ll look at it again there,” Pablo said. “Just a glance before you go in.”

“It’s okay,” Francisco said to me. “They didn’t notice. Like I told you.”

Our successful fraud didn’t relieve my symptoms. Instead, nausea accumulated with the other pains. You’re with Daddy, I whispered to myself, and you’re safe.

Francisco’s anxieties seemed to have abated. As we walked, he talked eagerly of seeing Spain again, of the poets and actors and radicals he was going to look up, of the hellos and love he would carry to them on behalf of Pablo. Pablo interrupted to call my father’s attention to my condition. We had reached the waiting area at the gate; it was already crowded with fellow passengers and their well-wishers.

“What’s wrong?” Francisco put a hand on my forehead. “Are you sick?”

“I feel crummy,” I said.

“You don’t have a fever,” he commented. “You’re probably hungry and tired.”

“I don’t wanna eat,” I said. I had a horror of vomiting. I associated it with the day of my mother’s funeral when I stayed home, throwing up almost continuously for hours.

“You can rest on the plane.” He swung my hand up and down. My arm wobbled as if it were boneless. “Be cheerful. Even if it kills you. That’s the only lesson about life I can teach you: life is too sad not to laugh at it.” He turned to Pablo and half-mockingly, half-seriously began to sing: “Adios, muchacho! Compañero de mi vida!” He let go of my exhausted hand and embraced Pablo. This was still the early sixties in America: two men embracing earned us many stares. I was embarrassed by the looks from our fellow passengers. My father seemed to think we were safe. But Uncle was still out there, convinced I wanted him to rescue me, sure that I didn’t want to be with my own father. I had told him so, hadn’t I?

I was going to be sick. I couldn’t bear the sensation of food rising. I sunk to my knees, put my hands on the cold floor and squeezed my body tight, flexing every muscle to keep the airport doughnut and the school lunch of macaroni and cheese and my breakfast of Cheerios down, safe within me, because I couldn’t let it out, couldn’t let them see the gunk inside.

“Rafael!” my father said, horrified. He pulled me up effortlessly. “What’s the matter with you!” There was more annoyance than concern in his voice.

“Pobrecito,” Pablo said.

“You need to sleep,” my father said, softer now. He hugged me tight; tight enough that I didn’t have to make any effort to stand on my own. I breathed the slightly stale odor of his Old Spice cologne, combined with a fresher whiff of his real smell. Oddly, it cured me of my queasiness. I breathed in his heat and his animal nerves. He was a big, hot strong man. Of course he could prevent Bernie from taking me. I was safe, after all.

CARMELITA WAS WAITING FOR US AS WE EMERGED FROM THE ANXIETY OF clearing customs in Madrid. This time, when my phony passport was presented to the Spanish official, I was too scared to pray in my head for happiness. But the official’s comparison of the photograph against me was perfunctory. He chatted with my father about why we were in España: were we looking up relatives? In this confrontation my father seemed brilliant to me. He relaxed on his heels, smiled, and told the story of my grandfather’s emigration from Galicia to Tampa; he even began to recount the quaint anecdote of how Pepín romanced Jacinta by making up for her slow rolling of the cigars with his own superhuman speed. The customs man was charmed, but a supervisor (I think; or perhaps a stern colleague) looked cross and that spurred the agent to interrupt Francisco, stamp my passport without a glance and use a nub of white chalk to check off each of our bags, although there had been no investigation of their contents.

I was surprised by the lax security of this running dog of fascism. On the tedious flight Francisco had told me his version of the Spanish Civil War. It amazed me that we — and especially that I, a half-Jewish boy — were en route to a nation ruled by a man whose staunchest and most crucial ally had been Hitler.

“Did they exterminate Jews?” I asked.

He laughed. “Why am I laughing?” he caught himself. “There was the Spanish Inquisition, after all.” And he explained about Spain’s peculiar Jewish history, of the almost total annihilation of the literate, prosperous, and talented Spanish Jews, accomplished for the most part by murder and exile but also by massive conversion, the hiding of thousands behind new names and the adoption of Catholicism. My father told me — accurately, by the way — of the Spanish families who, to this day, turn their paintings of the saints to the wall at sundown on Fridays and then light candles, but don’t know why. “You don’t have to worry about anti-Semitism today,” he concluded as we began our airplane meal.

But with his coffee and my scoop of ice cream, he changed his mind. “Maybe, just to be careful, you shouldn’t mention to anyone that you’re half-Jewish.”

After that talk I had expected more vigilance from the guardians of the fascist Spain than we experienced at customs.

So had my father, evidently. “We made it,” he whispered with a smirk of triumph as we walked, officially sanctioned, under a sign that welcomed us to Madrid in Spanish, English and German. I thought — we’re safe, it’s over, everything’s okay — while barely noticing that there was a young Negro woman, tall and thin, except for large breasts and a pronounced potbelly, clapping and calling to us. Carmelita had broad lips painted vermilion and huge brown eyes whose whites brimmed with happiness at the sight of my father. She stopped her applause, came toward Francisco with measured speed and single-minded purpose, her skinny arms casting for him, gathering him with the blind confident greed of an octopus; a beautiful, exotic and apparently harmless octopus, but nevertheless a creature whose reach seemed boundless and whose grip looked unbreakable.

All eyes were on them. As I was to discover shortly, any black-skinned woman, much less one as exquisite as Carmelita, would have attracted stares in Spain during the sixties. I had a specifically American racist response to her: as a right-thinking red-diaper baby I saw her as Negro, noble and oppressed, and therefore probably a cleaning woman or a singer, since those were the only activities permitted by American culture and economics. I was amazed, therefore, when Carmelita spoke. She had a rich voice, deep and amused, which certainly would have made for a good chanteuse, but what stunned me was that she talked in Spanish, in the cackling, speedy Cuban of my Tampa relatives.

“Y tú eres Rafael?” she yammered at me with a broad smile of brilliant teeth. She had a remarkable mouth, huge and almost always parted, flashing her pink tongue and cheerful smile. Not liking her was impossible. “Es muy guapo, verdad?” she said to Francisco and then commented to me, “Como tu padre.” These compliments on my looks — any likening of my appearance to my father’s had to be praise — increased my confusion. Why wasn’t she speaking in English, in the sassy trill of my former classmates from P.S. 173, or the slow Southern drawl of the Great Neck serving women? Obviously she had learned Spanish from my father, but why was she using it on me?