Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

“But she can teach you to be an Olympic swimmer.” Over my protests, he walked into the kitchen to find Carmelita. She was preparing a fish soup for dinner. She stopped chopping up the vegetables when he told her his notion and answered in an irritated tone. That was when the evidence became too obvious for me to deny it. I had learned a lot of Spanish in the previous two months so I understood her reply and by now the obvious visual clue of her belly had become more pronounced — a round jutting shape that couldn’t be mistaken for fat. She complained she didn’t have a suit that would fit her with the baby. I knew I wasn’t the baby she referred to. Besides, to illustrate, she pulled her loose dress taut around the basketball in her stomach. She talked about the baby ruining her stroke so she couldn’t show me the correct moves and what my unconscious had known for weeks vaulted to the foreground. My mouth dried up. I interrupted their discussion of buying her a new bathing suit and said in parched English to my father: “She’s having a baby.”

He glanced at me and smiled. “Isn’t that great? You’re going to have a baby brother.”

I couldn’t answer. My mouth was too dry.

“Or maybe a sister,” he added. There was no wariness or self-consciousness in his voice. He was unaware that this news might trouble or displease me. If that seems astonishing, my father being a sophisticated intellectual, all I can say is that I agree; it is astonishing, but entirely consistent with his narcissistic and sentimental personality.

“I can’t swim like this,” Carmelita insisted. Tears came into her eyes. Again, I understood a lot in a flash: why she slept so much and seemed so unhappy. She was distressed by the malformation of her athlete’s body.

“You can stand on the shore and instruct him,” my father said.

“No.” She was firm. “You are his father. You teach him.” She walked out. A moment later, the door to their bedroom slammed.

Francisco turned to me. “Women,” he said in Spanish, accompanied by a look of rueful exasperation, a man-to-man look of our shared burden. “I’d better calm her down,” he added in English.

They were in the bedroom, with the door shut, long enough for me to examine thoroughly the unwieldy box of this information: all its edges were razor-sharp; I saw no way to embrace the contents without wounding myself fatally. To my mind I had one asset in my fathers eyes and that was my status as his only son. Countless times Francisco had thrown his powerful arm around my head and squeezed while saying, “You are my only son, the last of the Nerudas. Someday the world will say, Took at this man, the grandson of a Gallego peasant, who is so brilliant and handsome. How did he come so far?’ And I’ll answer, That’s my son, my only child, my heir.’” From my point of view I had so little left: no mother, no home, no friends, no family other than this man and his unique relationship to me and now even that was lost forever.

I left the apartment and went to find Gabby. He wasn’t behind the bar. But my Tennessee Williams heroine was on a stool beside a new boozy middle-age flirtation, this one an American who, surprisingly, seemed to be attracted by her garrulous self-aggrandizing style. In fact, he was so responsive, she was glad to see me. (The prospect of a successful consummation of a flirtation obviously appalled her.) She introduced me. His name was Tommy, an odd diminutive for a man who looked like a retired football player: six feet tall, thick-necked, face blotched by liquor, his crew cut almost entirely gray.

“Hey kid,” he said. “You sound like an American. Ever been there?”

I explained the apparent contradiction of my name and my fluency in English.

Her strategy worked. Tommy removed the hand he had put on her shoulder and asked me how I came to be in Spain. I answered briefly, said I was traveling with my father. I asked the Tennessee Williams heroine where Gabby was. She told me he’d gone to the kitchen.

I was welcome in there and I excused myself, ignoring Tommy’s call for me to stay. I found Gabby being chewed out by one of the waiters. The harangue stopped at my appearance. The waiter asked if I needed anything.

“I want a Coke,” I said and Gabby was released from the dressing down to attend to me.

Gabby called the waiter a cunt under his breath as we walked out the back way to get a case of Coke. That was why he had gone into the kitchen in the first place, he said. Once outside, on the gravel of the service entrance to the kitchen, I told him my father had given me permission to fight the baby bulls.

“Good,” he said. “We can go tomorrow. We have to leave early. Be ready by seven.”

That was good news because Carmelita and Francisco never woke before nine.

We returned to the bar. Gabby, the Tennessee Williams heroine, Tommy and I made a talkative foursome. Tommy seemed fascinated by us. He asked lots of questions and listened with enthusiasm to our life stories. He especially liked the fact that Gabby was going to teach me to be a bullfighter.

When the light faded, I said I had to go upstairs for dinner. Tommy said, “Hey, you like comics?”

Of course I did. I hadn’t been able to read any of my favorites for two months.

“Come with me to my car for a second,” he said.

“Another man’s going to leave me flat, darling,” our Tennessee Williams star said to Gabby.

“I’ll be back, babe,” Tommy said. He lurched forward and caught her unprepared to dodge a loud wet smack on the lips.

Only when, in the fading light, I was in the passenger seat of Tommy’s car, greedily holding the six brand-new comic books, did I feel odd about being with him. He put his hand on my neck and rubbed it. “You’re a good-looking kid,” he said. “How old are you?”

I was alarmed. Only vaguely, of course, and I thought I was being silly and cowardly, but his manner was sufficiently worrisome for me to toss the comic books into his lap. “I have to go home.”

Tommy shoved them back. “Hey, don’t be like that. I gave ’em to you. Take ’em. I got more in my apartment. You can come up tomorrow and take what you like.” He put a hand high up on my left thigh and squeezed. “After you fight the bulls.”

I cursed myself for having told him about my plans with Gabby. If I insulted him, he might tell on me. “Okay …”

“I’m in Three-A. Come tomorrow after lunch. Right?” He patted my thigh gently, interpolating each tap with quick strokes toward my groin.

I opened the car door, carrying the comics in my free hand. “Okay.”

“Good boy,” he slapped my behind as I got out. I raced into the building. I was overwhelmed with guilt by the time I reached the door. I was a fugitive again, a boy of secrets and rebellion. What should I do with the comic books? If I had to explain them to my father, then he might, in his infuriating gregarious way, befriend Tommy and learn about my plan. I put the comics under our doormat, intending to retrieve them after they fell asleep.

Carmelita and Francisco were in a good mood. She seemed especially affectionate toward me, stroking my hair after she served me a bowl of soup. My father told me they had decided to leave Alicante at the end of the month rather than stay for four months as originally planned. We would go to Barcelona. A really cosmopolitan city, my father added enthusiastically. “You’re not making much use of the beach, anyway, right? And we can find you an American school in Barcelona.”

“You said I didn’t have to go to school.”

“There’ll be other American kids there. God knows what they’ll be like. They’ll be the children of corporate executives. But they’re kids, after all. You’ll like them and they’ll love you.” He said to Carmelita in Spanish, “Rafael is always the most popular kid in his class.”