Felicia, her face and forearms blotchy with heat, looks up at her best friend.
“My father died last night and I have to be at work in an hour. They’re going to transfer me back to the butcher’s if I’m late again. They’re looking for an excuse since I singed Graciela Moreira’s hair. They dumped her on me. Nobody likes to do her hair because it’s so fine it tears like toilet paper. I’ve told her a million times she shouldn’t get a permanent but does she listen?”
“Did Lourdes call?”
“The nuns told her it was like a Holy Ascension except Papi was dressed to go dancing. Then he shows up at my mother’s house and nearly scares her half to death. I think she dove in the ocean after him.”
Felicia turns away.
“He didn’t even say good-bye.” The last time Felicia saw her father, he had smashed a chair over her ex-husband Hugo’s back. “If you leave with that sonofabitch, don’t ever come back!” her father had shouted as they fled.
“Maybe his spirit is still floating free. You must make your peace with him before he’s gone for good. I’ll call La Madrina. We’ll have an emergency session tonight.”
“I don’t know, Herminia.” Felicia believes in the gods’ benevolent powers, she just can’t stand the blood.
“Listen, girl, there’s always new hope for the dead. You must cleanse your soul of this or it will trail you all your days. It may even harm your children. Just a small offering to Santa Bárbara,” Herminia coaxes. “Be there at ten and I’ll take care of the rest.”
“Well, okay. But please, tell her no goats this time.”
That night, Felicia guides her car along a rutted road in the countryside a few miles from Santa Teresa del Mar. Her headlights have not worked since 1967 but she shines an oversized flashlight up the dirt pathway, startling two guinea hens and a dwarf monkey in a bamboo cage. The beam of light moves through the yard to the giant ceiba, thick as six lesser trees. Several identical red handkerchiefs are tied together around the trunk, midway up. The head of a freshly slaughtered rooster juts from one knot. Its beak hangs open, giving the bird a look of surprised indignation.
Herminia motions to her from a side door of the run-down house. She is wearing a cream-yellow blouse with a collar the luster of the absent moon. Her plump black arms stir the darkness. “Hurry up! La Madrina is ready!”
Felicia slides to the backseat of her car and opens the door with a scrape. Ferns and chicken feathers graze her ankles as she tiptoes in backless sandals toward her friend.
“Por Dios, we’ve been waiting for you for over an hour! What took you so long?” Herminia grabs Felicia’s arm and pulls her to the door. “Let’s go in before you make the gods angry.”
She steers Felicia down an airless passageway lit on one side with red votive candles set on wooden tables coated with hardened wax. At the end of the corridor, long strands of shells hang in an arched doorway, the mollusks separated by odd-shaped bits of polished onyx.
“Bienvenida, hija,” La Madrina beckons in a voice hoarse with a vocation to the unfortunate. “We have been expecting you.”
She gestures with upturned palms in an arc around her. Her face is an almond sheen of sweat under her white cotton turban, and her lace blouson, settled off her shoulders, reveals duplicate moles, big and black as beetles, at the base of her throat. Layers of gauze skirts, delicate as membranes, brush her feet, which are bare on the cold cement floor. The low-ceilinged sea-green room wavers with the flames and incense of a hundred candles.
Against the back wall, an ebony statue of Santa Bárbara, the Black Queen, presides. Apples and bananas sit in offering at her feet. Fragrant oblations crowd the shrines of the other saints and gods: toasted corn, pennies, and an aromatic cigar for Saint Lazarus, protector of paralytics; coconut and bitter kola for Obatalá, King of the White Cloth; roasted yams, palm wine, and a small sack of salt for Oggún, patron of metals.
In the front of the room, Elleguá, god of the crossroads, inhabits the clay eggs in nine rustic bowls of varying sizes. The eggs have cowrie-shell eyes and mouths, and soak in an elixir of herbs and holy water. Four mulattas, wearing gingham skirts and aprons, kneel before the shrines, praying. One man, a pure blue-black Yoruban, stands mute in the center of the room, a starched cotton fez on his head.
“Herminia has told us of your dystopia.” La Madrina is fond of melodious words, although she doesn’t always know what they mean. She places a hand heavily ringed with ivory and bezoar stones on Felicia’s shoulder and motions toward the santero. “He has traveled many hours from the south, from the mangroves, to be with us, to cleanse you of your infelicities. He will bring you and your father peace, a peace you never knew while he lived on this earth.”
“Elleguá wants a goat,” the santero says, his lips barely moving.
“Oh no, not another goat!” Felicia cries and turns to her friend accusingly. “You promised!”
“You have no choice,” Herminia implores. “You can’t dictate to the gods, Felicia. Elleguá needs fresh blood to do the job right.”
“We will open the future to you, hija, you will see,” La Madrina assures her. “We have a friendly contact with the complicated surfaces of the globe.”
La Madrina gathers the believers around Felicia. They wrap her in garlands of beads and stroke her face and eyelids with branches of rosemary. The santero returns with the goat, its mouth and ears tied with string. Felicia takes a mouthful of shredded coconut and spits it on the goat’s face, kissing its ears as it whines quietly. She rubs her breasts against its muzzle. “Kosí ikú, kosí arun, kosí araye,” the women sing.
The santero leads the goat over the offerings and quickly pierces its neck with a butcher knife, directing the stream of blood onto the clay eggs. The goat quivers, then is still. The santero shakes a box of salt on its head, then pours honey over the offering.
Felicia, reeling from the sweet scent of the blood and the candles and the women, faints on La Madrina’s saint-room floor, which is still warm with sacrifice.
Going South
The continents strain to unloose themselves, to drift reckless and heavy in the seas. Explosions tear and scar the land, spitting out black oaks and coal mines, street lamps and scorpions. Men lose the power of speech. The clocks stop. Lourdes Puente awakens.
It is 4:00 A.M. She turns to her husband sleeping beside her. His reddish hair is flecked with gray and his nearsighted eyes disappear under weary, fleshy lids. She has exhausted poor Rufino again.
Lourdes puts on a size 26 white uniform with wide hip pockets and flat, rubber-soled shoes. She has six identical outfits in the closet, and two more pair of shoes. Lourdes is pleased with her uniform’s implicit authority, with the severity of her unadorned face and blunt, round nose. The muscles in her right eye have been weak since she was a child, and every so often the eye drifts to one side, giving her a vaguely cyclopean air. It doesn’t diminish her 20/20 vision, only skews it a bit. Lourdes is convinced it enables her to see things that others don’t.
Lourdes pins a short braid against her head, twists on a hairnet, and leaves a note for her daughter on the kitchen table. She wants Pilar at the bakery after school. Lourdes fired the Pakistani yesterday and she’ll be alone behind the counter today if she doesn’t get help. “No excuses this time!!” she scrawls in her sharply slanted script.