Pete Hamill - Forever

“Moyuba ,” Delfina says in a supplicant’s voice, a Yoruba word that Cormac knows means “I salute you.” She lifts one of the bells.

Then she kneels on a straw mat spread before the altar, stretches in her yellow gown, facedown, and rings the bell. Oshun, Cormac thinks. Like Oisin. Or Usheen. Kongo gave me his gods, those words, with his blood; as I gave him mine from the Sacred Grove of Ireland. Delfina rings the bell sixteen times. Then chants: Olokun, OlokunBaba Baba, OlokunMoyuba—Baba Olokun…

A submission to the God of Gods, the Owner of the Ocean, the Owner of all Destinies, the god above Chango and Oshun. Above Yahweh and Jesus and Allah, and all the other gods. She must be thanking her god for food and drink and music and dance, and perhaps even the gift of love. When she rises, she turns to Cormac and reaches for him with her hand.

“Don’t step on the mat,” she says.

“I know.”

Then she leads him out of the small chapel and lights a votive candle on a small table beside the bed. He sees a bowl, beads, a jar. She tells him to undress and then she touches a switch. From the far end of the flat, he hears music from the CD player. All drums. A sharp bata drum, and then counterpoint from smaller drums, the toques, like altos playing into and against the baritone of the bata. The rhythm is insistent, caressing, suddenly explosive, then returning to a steady texture, and he surrenders to it.

Delfina opens the buttons of the yellow kimono. There’s a slight, ironical smile on her face. She wears a high collar de mazo on her neck, like the many-layered necklaces of sculpture from Benin. Cormac knows that there’s a bead for each ancestor, and nine strings sewn into a single piece. On each wrist and ankle she wears an ide made of amber beads, the color of Oshun. Her orisha . Her Santeria guardian angel. The drums are joined by the sounds of shaking gourds filled with gravel or nuts. She climbs on the bed and leans toward Cormac and kisses him.

“I don’t want you to cry,” she says.

They lie together for a long time, the flesh of her body cooling against his in the dark. They hear a siren somewhere in the night. And from the street, a muted shout, a bottle breaking. Candles still flicker from the chapel of Oshun. She reaches behind her neck and unclips the collar de mazo . He kisses her naked neck.

“I have a couple of things to tell you,” she says.

“Tell me.”

“First? I’m not twenty-eight. I’m thirty-two.” Her voice is remote. “I left out four years when I told you the story of my life. The four years I lived in Puerto Rico, in a town called Loiza Aldea. A black town up in the mountains, with jungle all around it, and Oshun living in the rivers. In the old days, cimarrónes hid there, escaped slaves, the wild men. I went there with a priest. One of our priests. He gave me the tattoos, not some man in the Bronx. I didn’t know one day from another, one month from the next.” A pause. “But I saw the gods there.”

“Why did you come back?”

“He told me to come back. He said he had read my shells, and they said I should go back. He didn’t say why. Maybe he didn’t know. But when I saw you that first time, I knew why. I could smell the blood of a babalawo from you.”

The smell of Kongo.

“Mi Chango,” she whispers with affection, and a hint of irony, and then chuckles.

Their breathing merges in the darkness.

“You said there were two things you had to tell me. What’s the other one?”

She’s silent for a long moment, then exhales softly.

“I’m pregnant,” she says.

In the morning, leaving her to dress for her downtown job, he goes to the street, his head swirling. He lights a cigarette, trying to steady himself, to focus. He sees kids playing, and traffic thickening, as cars peel off the FDR drive into the streets, coming in from the Bronx and Long Island, pushing for passage. A boy of ten or eleven pitches a pink rubber spaldeen hard against a box painted on a factory wall. He uses a complete windup, mixing Roger Clemens with El Duque Hernandez. He throws one strike after another. A thickset woman in a yellow dress turns a corner pushing a child in a stroller, her eyes puffy with morning or the loss of sleep. She has a blue sweater over her shoulders and pulls it tighter with a free hand. Autumn is coming now.

Cormac feels a heaviness rising in him. It’s as if too many events are pushing for his attention and combining to block all focus: the party, the musicians, the women, the food, the dancing, and his yearning to live in a crowded, intimate world. The heaviest presence of all is Delfina. And the creature she says she is carrying. Could this be true? They talked and talked, and she is certain that the boy���she knows it is a boy—could not be from Reynoso, she made certain, and there has been nobody else except Cormac. He did not ask her any of these questions. She raised the subject, blurting it out to him, her voice trembling with emotion, swearing on Oshun. The words coming in a rush: I lied about my age, yes, but every woman lies about her age. This I can’t lie about. She saw a doctor in the Dominican, just to be sure, but never thought for ten seconds of staying for an abortion. I want this child because I’ve already lost one, do you understand me? Yes, he said to her, I understand, I do understand. I do. And she said, fiercely: I want this boy.

He walks now toward the Lexington Avenue subway and tries to remember Delfina’s words and what he said to her in reply and what he thought and didn’t say. A lifetime of caution still caged him; he promised her nothing, neither marriage nor money nor the best doctors. He could speak none of the oily clichés, none of the plastic language of paternal joy. Five thousand movies and a hundred thousand television commercials have robbed those words of meaning. He knew he would take care of her, would make her richer than she could imagine, but he couldn’t say that, couldn’t bring those words to her like a gift, and she wasn’t demanding them. She asked him for nothing. Not even love.

Which made him love her more. He loved her toughness. He loved the way she faced the world.

And as he reaches the subway, he asks himself again: How can this be? He feels in his bones that it is true. Everything is now altered by the arrival of a life. All plans. All old vows. The end of the Warren line. The journey to the cave and the passing into the Otherworld. The sense of time too. All changed. His blood will live on, no matter what happens in the next forty-eight hours. How can this be?

Kongo will know. Of course. When Kongo returned to the city, Cormac thinks, something must have changed. He must have seen something in me. Or in Delfina. Or in this big scary heartbreaking piece of the world. He must be here as a messenger.

Yes: Kongo will know.

He hears a woman’s voice, sibilant and tough, speaking under the roll of music: You better be nice to this girl, man.

At 7:30 on Monday evening Cormac left Duane Street for the home of William Hancock Warren. There was no passion in his movements, no tingling anticipation, no feeling that he was rising out of a trench to confront the enemy. He was going uptown to fulfill an ancient contract, its terms set many years before and remembered now in the voices of Mary Morrigan and his father. He had an appointment to keep, the day and hour set by Elizabeth, but an appointment that could fulfill an old vow. In the morning Warren had called to confirm. We’ll have to rough it, he said on the phone, his voice waxy with the effort at good cheer. Everybody will be gone, he explained. Even Elizabeth, who’s off somewhere for a few days.