Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

“No I’m not,” I said bitterly.

“Yes you are.”

“No I’m not!” Tears came with the anger.

My father shouted, “Goddamnit!” He stood up, his soup spoon still in his hand. “I can’t say anything right!” He looked at the spoon as if it were the cause. He threw it at the sink. It clattered into the well and slid up, bouncing off the wall, and landed on the stove with a bang. “I can’t satisfy everybody!” He shouted at Carmelita in Spanish, “I told you!” And he walked out. In a moment we heard the front door slam.

She hadn’t looked up from her bowl during the explosion. She calmly took anther sip. My tears and rage had scurried into a cubby in my soul and I doubt I could have found its opening with a team of searchers. What a bad boy I was! I counted my sins and my secrets and my bad feelings. No wonder I would no longer be my father’s only child — I didn’t deserve that honor.

The dreadful silence that followed my father’s exit lasted too long. I wanted to fetch my father’s spoon from the stove, but I was scared to break the tableau. Finally, Carmelita looked up at me. Her round face seemed serene. She said softly, “You shouldn’t be rude to your father. Especially when he compliments you.”

She was right, I believed, and yet I hated her for saying it. And, yes, I hated her for carrying the usurper in her belly. I didn’t deserve to be the only son, but if not for her, I would be anyway.

While Carmelita washed the dishes, I reclaimed the comics from the doormat, went to my room, locked myself in, and started to read. I was halfway through my favorite, an X-Men Special Edition introducing a new character, when my door shook so hard the floor vibrated. My father’s voice boomed, “Rafael. Open this door.”

I shoved the comics under my bed and hurried.

Francisco was so friendly and charming in his manner that you could forget at times how big he was. He filled my doorway, all six foot three of him, trim, but still two hundred pounds, his smooth tanned skin not at that moment a pleasant contrast to his white teeth, but dark and menacing. His warm light brown eyes were cold with rage. He stared down at me and said nothing.

I have tried to portray how scary he looked, yet I wasn’t intimidated. I was a foot shorter and a hundred pounds lighter, but in me there was a full-sized rage. “What do you want?” I asked rudely. “I’m busy.”

He slapped me with his open palm. My head jerked to the side and snapped back to confront him. My legs trembled, my heart pounded, but my face seemed to have disconnected from those cowards, and remained still: eyes fixed on him, unflinching and tearless.

“You disobeyed me,” he said.

I said nothing.

He flinched, rubbing his eyes with the hand he used to hit me. He uncovered to add, “Gabby told me what you’re planning. Do you know how humiliating it is to tell a stranger that your son is a liar?”

“No,” I said.

Francisco breathed in through his nose, snorting. His lips parted, showing teeth, and he raised his hand again.

I turned aside as if already struck. I watched the threatening hand out of the corner of my eye. It stayed aloft for a moment and then dropped to my shoulder. He pushed me. Like a frustrated kid in the schoolyard, my father shoved me as if testing whether I was willing to fight him. I was staggered but didn’t fall. I certainly didn’t shove him back.

“You’re riding for a fall, young man,” he said. His tone and manner were so unlike him that he seemed almost comical. He reached for the handle of my door. “You’re staying in this room until you’ve had a chance to think about what you’ve done.” He closed it halfway and added, “Think long and hard.” He slammed it shut.

I pretended to be asleep when he looked in on me a few hours later. I read all the comics twice. I cried for a while, not satisfyingly. Finally, after locking my door, I kicked off the sheets and allowed the ocean breeze to tickle my hairless penis as I pumped, remembering those dark embraces with my mother. This time, perhaps because of the fresh wafting air, perhaps because, although I was merely ten years old, puberty had finally begun, the familiar pleasant sensation was more intense, almost painful. I teased that new sensation, re-creating the motion that localized it and then something terrible and wonderful happened: a spasm from knees to my chest and with it, a single drop of almost totally clear liquid hit my belly. I was confused and scared until I recognized the famous seed I had read about in the book on sex my mother had given to me years ago when everything was normal and safe.

So, I thought, trying to calm down from my initial horror: I am a man, after all.

I WASN‘T RELEASED FROM MY ROOM UNTIL NOON. CARMELITA BROUGHT my breakfast in, but she called me out for lunch. My father was at the table. His smile, his animated eyebrows, his musical voice continued to be absent. He showed no teeth, his brows were a line and he spoke in the drone of a bureaucrat. It wasn’t really frightening; the imitation of sternness was just that — inauthentic and comic.

“Rafe,” he said, “I have tried to understand why you would disobey a direct order from me. I can’t think of a single instance of your being deprived or forbidden anything you want. And the first time I say no, you disobey me. I’m afraid that’s exactly the problem — it was the first time I said no. You’re spoiled. You’re spoiled and you’re ungrateful. Do you have any conception of how many children would like to change places with you?” He let that hang for a moment and then, with atypical clumsiness, answered his own rhetorical question: “Millions. The answer is that millions of children would give their right arm to have your privileges.” (The truth of my father’s estimate seems to me a damning indictment of the condition of children. It burns in my consciousness, a constant nag. And it is still true, that for the Rafael’s of today, no matter how great their pain, in the eyes of the world it isn’t pain at all.)

I believed at that moment, as a ten-year-old, two things: my father was right to be disappointed in me; and that if he knew my true self he would despise me. I had to find a place in this world, choose between my good father and my evil uncle. I chose my uncle because it seemed inevitable that only in his dark realm would I find admiration and love.

I lied energetically to my father. I told him I knew I was bad and spoiled and that I was glad to be sent to school in Barcelona. Francisco was startled by the apparent totality of his victory. I understood I was confirming his belief that I needed discipline, but that didn’t matter since I was going to do everything in my power to escape my father, to be free of his impossible goodness. I would somehow get word to my uncle and thrive in the truer uncertainty of living as his ward.

Chastened, I was permitted to go out. I bumped into Gabby as I lingered near the office eyeing the public phone, heart pounding, mind racing, trying to think how I could call Uncle. Gabby scolded me, gently, for having lied. “Your father is very angry,” he said. He saw that I was upset and added, “But hell get over it. Want a Coke?” he asked brightly.

I declined. I had one avenue, perhaps, of escape. It wouldn’t be through good-hearted Gabby; he belonged to my father’s world. It was Tommy. He was a bad man, even if my suspicions were exaggerated. He drank too much, he admired a “foolish, decadent woman,” as my father once called the Tennessee Williams heroine, and he owned comic books—“worthless trash” in Francisco’s eyes. He wanted my company and that was wrong, no matter how far he intended to take it, and I could use that.