Pete Hamill - Forever

“Hey, it’s not much, but it’s mine,” she says.

More than half the books are in Spanish: histories, treatises, reference books, novels, and poetry.

“I had a friend,” she says, leaning close so he can hear over the music, “an old Dominican man who lived on a top floor on 116th Street. He was a schoolteacher back home and an exile for forty-five years. When he died, his grandchildren wanted to throw his books in the garbage. So I rescued them…. You know what I really mean: I stole them.”

She laughs.

One shelf is packed with books on physics, the legacy of Hunter. Another is jammed with histories of the Dominican Republic, including a few oversize volumes from the nineteenth century, and she points at them in an excited way, tells him how rare they are and how the first editions were lucky to reach three hundred copies, and her excitement reminds Cormac of talks they’ve had across the summer, scattered over dinners and long evenings together. Then she turns away from the books and pulls him again into the dancing, into the music, into the rising heat of the rooms, into the bumping collisions of bodies, into the drum breaks, and the scratching of gourds, and the sound of vowels: and he is for a moment back in Stone Street, in Hughson’s when the Africans played for themselves, when they took Africa into New York to stay; when they joined the Irish in filling their laments with defiant joy.

He takes Delfina Cintron by the hand and dances to the music of her time. And his.

Food becomes feast. A deep covered dish of steamed string-beans cut lengthwise in a vinaigrette of olive oil and lemon juice. Bowls of moros, black beans, or red beans, to spread wetly on a field of white rice. “Blacks, Indians, and white guys,” she says. “Mix ’em all together and you’ve got me. Una trigueña. ” Then two kinds of chicken, roasted and boiled, and slices of pork, and pescado en coco, red snapper with a coconut milk sauce, reddened with annatto (she explains) and laced with cilantro. On the side, platters of sliced avocado and limes. The band breaks, descends upon the food, and everybody pauses while Benny More sings from the grave on the CD player. Hello. Welcome. Happy birthday. How old are you? Too old. Yeah, like everybody. I hope you’re not married, man, or Delfina gonna put you in a river.

Cormac feels pleasured by the small perfections of spice, of taste and texture, the flow of vowels, the humid warmth. Thinking: How many meals have I consumed on this passage? How many as good as this one? And then remembers the Cuban barber: I star’ thinkin’ abou’ things like that, ’mano, I go nuts.

Music again from the CD player in the first room off the kitchen: Juan Luis Guerra (Delfina says). Fragments of grief and anger behind the smooth vowels; here, timbales serve as consonants. Then the front door opens, and three kids come in with a birthday cake on a platter, huge and creamy and bearing a single candle. A large beaming brown-skinned woman is behind the kids and the platter, and Delfina directs her to a space on the table and then lights the candle, and then Pancho, the Mexican from the second floor, pushes in with a steel guitar, plays a few notes, and starts to sing “Las Mañanitas,” a song as sad as Done-gal, a song about all the little mornings of life, and then everyone is singing. Estas son las mañanitasQue cantaba el rey David…

The emotion fills the room, one woman sobbing, not for Cormac, and not for herself, but for loss itself, for vanished mornings, for years that won’t come back. At the end, cheers, and shouts of vaya! Cormac bows to Pancho from the second floor and the Mexican smiles and bows back, holding the guitar as if it were the weapon of a glad warrior, the way Bobby Simmons held his alto in homage to Horse Campbell. Then here comes the coffee, the aroma permeating the entire flat, the taste rich and sweet, brewed in a greca, sipped from demitasse cups. Dos cafecitos, corazón . She tells him it’s Café Santo Domingo, but if he wants American coffee, they have that too. Then an immense plate of guava paste and queso blanco . And the band playing again, after shots of dark Barcelo rum. Cormac lights a cigarette and Delfina points at an ashtray, where three cigars are smoldering while their smokers dance. He tamps out his own cigarette after a few drags, grabs her, and they dance, Cormac leading her now, moving her body with his, leaving behind his past for this present, for this room, for this woman before him, for all the other joyous dancers. Cuidado, man: Don’t mistake this for a Happy Nigger scene. No, he answers himself: I know better. His head then fills with images of verandas, tropical foliage, the bougainvillea on a wall in Sargent’s watercolors, the wind in Winslow Homer. Que tropical, señorita. And white men in white suits unleashing machetes with a nod and a grunt upon the brown necks of Dominicans. Upon the bodies of slaves and Indians and rebels. The world that sent Delfina here, as remote now as the arctic Irish wind that sent him on his own long voyage to Manhattan’s granite shores.

She reaches for his face.

“Why are you crying?” she says.

The band leaves first, bound for another gig, all smiles and carrying away pieces of cake wrapped in napkins, refusing money. Cormac tries to help with the dishes, but Elba and Rosa and Marisol and Doris and María Elena and Ramona push him aside. “It’s your birthday, man,” says Elba (bony and a bit worn around the eyes). “You just be nice to Delfina, you hear me?”

Delfina comes in from the other rooms with glasses and plates and one of the women (Marisol? Doris?) takes them and washes them and stacks them on a drainer (for there is no dishwasher), while someone else (María Elena?) scours pots and pans and another wraps unfinished dishes with Saran Wrap. “You can eat here for a month,” says the woman named Rosa. “Maybe more!”

In the bathroom off the kitchen, the door closed and the guests all gone, Cormac sees lotions and vials and soap, towels and facecloths, all arranged on shelves as neatly as her books. Over the toilet, there’s a portrait of Trujillo, the old dictator, with his white pancake makeup and killer’s eyes. When Cormac comes out, the women are gone, as if on command, and Delfina is leaning against the opening to the rest of the flat. She has changed into a long high-collared yellow gown. Cotton. A kimono. Her feet in red thong slippers. Nails painted yellow too.

“Thank you,” he says in a soft voice.

“You danced.”

“I did. Thanks for that too. Maybe most of all.”

She says nothing, then flicks off the kitchen lights. The flat is now dark. She takes his hand, and her palm is damp. She leads him through the dark book-lined rooms to the place where she has pitched her bed. In the darkness, he hears her kick off slippers, and he sits on the edge of the bed and unlaces his shoes.

“I want to pray first,” she says. “Do you mind?’

“Of course not.”

She opens the door to the small room. Slowly. As if revealing something about herself that she fears might frighten him. But he has been here before, at the bottom of an Atlantic slaver, in the vanished streets around the Battery, in the small house of Quaco, in sealed rooms in the Five Points. He has been here with Kongo. He has been here with men and women now dead. For he knows he is in a chapel of the old religion of Africa. Which is like the Old Religion of Ireland, with different names and similar verbs. Here in Tir-na-Nog.

Before them stands a long table made of a door set upon wooden sawhorses. A dark green cloth covers its top, and set upon the cloth are sixteen burning votive candles. In their flickering, ancient light, Cormac sees other things: glasses of water, unlit cigars in ashtrays, a plate of broken chocolate, crackers, a slice of coconut. He counts nine brass bells of different sizes. On the table there are two fetishes. To the left stands a double-edged ax adorned with silvery beads, for Chango, god of fire and thunder, iron and male power. It is set at an angle facing the goddess Oshun. Cormac knows her too: the goddess of water, of rivers and streams and wells. A cool, liquid deity. Tender, healing, yielding, cleansing, free of jealousy and avarice. She is cradled in a yellow wooden boat and adorned with fans, amber beads, cowrie shells like tiny vulvas. She is flanked by a mound of parrot feathers and a wooden mortar and pestle containing smooth black stones, shaped by the lightning. Above Oshun on the wall hangs a machete with a red handle. Oshun wears spiral earrings.