Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

I was terrified, of course. Don’t be fooled by the cold-blooded manipulativeness I had to affect to carry off my desperate act. All the fanciful ideas of neurotic, traumatized Rafe were an elaborate camouflage for the simple, although apparently paradoxical truth — I was fighting for survival. I climbed the stairs to be alone with a man I believed was a child molester so that he could help me become the ward of an evil man. In order to feel worthwhile, I had to live among people who were worse than me.

Tommy wore a bathing suit and nothing else. He reeked of cologne.

“Hey,” Tommy said, startled. “You alone?” he asked nervously, although the answer was obvious.

He pulled me in roughly and shut the door fast. I saw all that pink flesh, soft belly overhanging the elastic band of his suit, droopy breasts, smelled his perfume and knew my suspicion was correct. He pushed me into his living room. The sun filled the room.

“Look who showed up,” Tommy said to someone. I saw a figure in a chair, shadowed by the day’s brilliance behind him. He was skinny and dressed in a seersucker suit.

I was convinced that Tommy had lured me here for this man. I was sure they would do something dirty to me and then kill me, perhaps because the killing was part of their pleasure.

“What’s your name?” the thin man asked.

I was ready to accept my fate. A slow death as the disappointing son seemed worse than this quick one.

“Come on, kid. We know, anyway,” Tommy said. He put his thick hand on my neck and pushed me forward.

The thin man stood up. “Well …?”

“I’m Rafael Neruda,” I said.

“Do you know a Bernard Rabinowitz?” the thin man asked. His tone was as formal and dry as Perry Mason’s on TV.

I didn’t answer at first, amazed that in this death there was resurrection.

“He’s my uncle,” I said. “Is he here?”

“He’s on his way. He wants to see you. Find out how you’re—”

“Can I go home with him?” I interrupted.

The thin man moved closer, appearing out of the sun as he blocked it. His nose was long and thin. He had pale blue eyes.

“How the hell do you like that?” Tommy said and grunted.

“You want to go back to the United States and live with your uncle?” Perry Mason asked.

“Yes.”

“Don’t you want to live with your father?”

“No.”

“He mean to you, kid?” Tommy asked, massaging my neck.

“I’ll ask the questions,” the thin man said sharply.

“Okay, okay,” Tommy said and backed away from me.

“My father is mean to me,” I said.

The thin man turned his head to one side. He brought a long elegant hand to his ear and pulled on the lobe thoughtfully. “Call the Madrid office,” he said to Tommy. “Tell them to have Mr. Rabinowitz phone here as soon as he lands.”

“Maybe we should take—” Tommy began.

“Do it,” the thin man said in a soft voice but with such conviction it had the effect of a barked command. Tommy left the room.

“How did your father get you out of the country?” he asked me.

“We took a plane from New York.”

“No, that isn’t what I meant.” He reached into his jacket pocket and produced one of those light green passports with the gold embossed letters and the terrible eagle. “Did he have one of these for you?”

“Yes.”

He was disappointed. “I see …”

“But it was fake,” I pleaded. “A man brought it to him. It isn’t my picture inside.”

The thin man smiled without showing teeth. “Whose picture is it?”

“I don’t know. Some other boy’s.”

The thin man put his passport away. Tommy entered and reported, “He’s coming though customs right now. He’ll call in a few minutes.”

“There won’t be any difficulties,” the thin man said and he smiled again without showing a single tooth.

Two months later, in the chambers of a judge on Long Island, I was seated across from a small man in his sixties who had a bad cold. Beside him sat a black woman typing on a stenographic machine. As the judge asked me each of his questions, he blew his nose, so that I had to wait before answering if I wanted him to hear me. I gave the answers I was instructed to by my uncle’s lawyer. I said my father was a Communist employed by Fidel Castro. I said he had taken me out of the United States against my will using a fake passport. The judge showed me the fake passport and asked if that was it. I said yes. When asked, I said I wanted to live with my uncle and that I was frightened even to see my father, much less visit him. I had had to say the same things to a Spanish official in Madrid. Other than those two nauseating confrontations, my return as a ward of my uncle was undramatic. I never saw my father. Later, I learned he had been put under arrest until we were back in the States. That was a matter of several days. In exchange for not contesting Bernie’s custody, no charges in Spain or the United States were brought for his use of a fake passport.

The events of my life were at last tranquil. I worked hard to please my uncle. I tried to become a winner at all things, from academics to athletics. My pursuit ran all day and night, from early practice for the basketball team to college-level courses for advanced students offered by a community college. I gathered As, chess tournament awards, swimming meet medals, praise from my teachers and offered the harvest to my beaming uncle with the innocent air of a maiden, revealing no personal motive for the bounty but to confirm the power of his fertile soil. By the time I was sixteen I had no conscious memory of the choice I had made in Spain. I believed simply that I had been raised by a madwoman and a Communist coward. I thought of myself — with the preposterous arrogance of the young — as a genius.

Uncle casually referred to me as a genius, in the way someone might comment that a teenager was tall or could run fast. His son, meanwhile, defied all his values, disappearing into the burgeoning counterculture of the sixties, abandoning contact altogether after Bernie cut off his trust fund allowance. His daughter married a vice-president in Bernie’s company, moved to a grand house nearby and had three miscarriages. With each failure, her weight shrank and her drinking became more noticeable. Bernie spent little time with his wife — he had a mistress in the city I discovered later — and not much with me either except on the high holidays when he ignored his immediate family to talk to me about my future.

He decided I ought to be a scientist. “You’re too smart to be wasted on business,” he told me in his study, by the pool, or late at night in my room. Always the same words: “You’re too smart to be wasted on business. Of course you could turn my millions into billions but that would be a disgrace. With my resources you could cure cancer.” He confided to me, on my fifteenth birthday, that he had disinherited his son, taken care of his daughter through stock options for his son-in-law and that I would receive at least fifty percent of the bulk of his estate if he died before his wife, and all of it if she predeceased him. “But she’ll bury me is my guess,” he added in a neutral tone. “You take those millions and do something that the world will remember forever.” He paused and looked thoughtful. His eyes glistened. I wondered if the shimmering was incipient tears. He stood up and said casually, “Just remember to mention my name at the Nobel ceremony.”

“Thank you, Uncle.”

He came over, ran his thick warm hand across the wispy hairs of my baby beard and whispered, “You’re a good son,” hurrying out before I could answer.

I thought myself so clever and deceiving. I didn’t like him. I was grateful and moved that he had thrown over his son for me and I thought him bad and weak for doing so. Such ambivalence, this dual judgment of every situation, was my continual state.