Angel's Water

Angel’s Water

“At all events, not even the most contagious disease can deter them from flocking, adults and children, to the house where the corpse lies on the table, and later to the church where it is exhibited in the coffin, to touch it, to kiss its hands.”

Carmen Sylva, The Queen of Roumania
The Forum, June 1889

“Pull it! Pull it! You got him! You got him!” My uncle Albert sounded so proud of me, but he was really proud of himself for being such a good teacher. I pulled with my right hand the string of green nylon wound up around the short wooden stick in my left. The sun was scorching despite the breeze that swept the calm blue waters of the lake. There were only gentle waves rocking the small boat, so it wasn’t difficult at all to stand, with my legs slightly apart, my tennis shoes firmly planted on the wooden bottom, where a decayed blue snorkel, a pair of equally decayed blue fins, and a dirty rag, which used to be red in a distant life, competed with the space left over by puddles of water. He was on the opposite side of the boat, with his professional fishing cane and metal rod on guard. I could hear the swoosh! Of the nylon and the hook with live worm baits each time he sent it yonder on the water.

I managed to pull the fluttering fish to the surface; in its desperation to escape, it splashed some water on my khaki shorts and my red tanned face. My uncle came over carefully setting the cane inside the boat, on a bench, and came in my direction. He was making movements and faces as if managing my arms by remote control, a proxy fisherman in action. He wore long khakis and the same US Army boots that took him through German territory during World War II. He had taken off his white t-shirt to get some sun; I could see his hairy chest and the scars, entry and exit, that a Nazi bullet had marked him forever.

“You son of a gun! That’s not one but two fish in one hook! I am damned! That’s what I call beginners luck!” Still today I cannot say if we was happy for me or upset that I, in my first fishing excursion, had beat him and his own game. He had not caught anything during the two hours we had been there, while this was my third catch of the day. He took both fish; they were two black ghost knife with their typical white caudal fin frantically flapping left and right. He carefully unhooked them and placed them both in a plastic yellow bucket that had seen many lakes and rivers. Then without saying another word, put his shirt back on and started to row towards the shore.

My mom and my dad, my aunt Rosy and her daughter, Ana, were all sitting under a wide sycamore, as old as a cave, as tall as a building, as wide as a train, on portable aluminum and canvas chairs we had brought in my uncle’s Army-green Jeep. I liked that Jeep. It was the same model he had driven in the streets of Washington, D.C. chauffeuring General Eisenhower before his transfer to the German front. It was the Willys brand, with the folding windshield, eighty inch base wheels, and three bucket seats.

“Please sing ‘besame mucho’,for me mamita” my Dad pleaded to my mom like a little boy asking to stay up late in bed a few more minutes or have a third helping of Hershey chocolate, bobbing his head towards her sitting on his right. She never said no to any of his supplications, and so started the tune, guitar on her lap and arms, the angelic voice, the beautiful face. There were no other people in sight so we had the entire lake to ourselves. I overheard Ana asking his mother “what is so fun about fishing? Daniel should be doing something else”, “like what?” my aunt replied, “This is what eleven year old boys do, besides playing with toy soldiers or reading The Fantastic Four comics, or flying kites, or throwing spin tops”, “That’s stupid!” interrupted my cousin exasperated. I could only guess her long face and bored demeanor by the scoff that followed. “At least he’s not a jerk like you know who”, aunt Rosy remarked. Now, Rosy was not really Ana’s mother, but Uncle Albert’s fourth wife, and she was trying really hard to win Ana’s acceptance; even I could see that. She never could, so my uncle moved on to his fifth, and then sixth, wives.

My uncle had a large property with a really nice cottage in the mountains, about 5 miles from the lake we were fishing at. This was his third year at trying to test his skills, or rather luck, at farming and had sub-leased a portion of his land to a cooperative of peasants interested in harvesting okra, potatoes, and lettuce, in accordance with a new program the government had implemented through the Alliance for Progress sponsored by the USAIS. Some times the peasants had no way to pay him, so they would give him a percentage of the crop as payment, or a couple of chicken for Christmas or a turkey for New Year’s Eve. It was obvious that he and the peasants had developed a very friendly relationship. He even had hired some of them for household work. He had Jose as a gardener, Agustin as a driver, and Leonor and Zoila for cooking and doing the laundry.

My mom was finalizing his song when Agustin came in racing his horse Alpino; it was the descendant of old Colonial Spanish horses, the Jennet-type, with dark brown buck-skin and a long mane. Agustin dismounted rapidly, took off his cowboy hat and, after shyly nodding to us in salute, he went directly to where my uncle was sitting and whispered something to his ear, covering his mouth with the hat. My uncle listened attentively, blinking slowly and looking at the nothingness of the horizon in the lake. All eyes were on him and Agustin. It was one of those uncomfortable silences interrupted only by the soft breaking of waves on the shore and the sound of the wind singing through the branches above our heads. “We have to go back right away” he said looking at no one, standing up, folding his chair, providing no explanations.

The dirt road that led to the cottage was barely wide enough for two Jeeps travelling in opposite directions. A dense forest of pines, oaks, and balsams framed the way; clouds were slowly forming hiding the sun every now and then. Discreet thunders cascaded in the distance. The house was surrounded by a white picket fence; it had a porch where three colorful hammocks hung. The wooden floor and walls creaked when we cousins ran around playing noisy Indian and cowboy games, so we were always sent to the wide surroundings, where the St. Agustin grass grew wild and rubber trees abounded. My uncle went to his room and left almost immediately. I was on one of the hammocks when I saw him almost running and getting on the Jeep. He was going alone. He looked for the key struggling a little bit to find the ignition, suddenly he stopped. He went back into the house; apparently he had forgotten something. I don’t know what got into me, but I took that window of opportunity to jump off the hammock, walk towards the back of the Jeep, and hide under a large plastic cover he kept there, as in a prison escape.

He drove along bumpy roads for what to me was a time without end. Under the cover I could only see a darkness getting darker. He finally stopped, turned off the ignition and got off the Jeep. I could hear his footsteps on a gravely soil moving away. I heard horses huffing and, as if coming from inside a closed box, mourner women wailing and weeping inconsolable. When I thought no one was around, I slowly lifted the edge of the cover, took a peak, and started to get out. I felt the same way I felt the times my elder sister Lani and I would offer my grandpa to light up his Valencia cigarette, steal one from the pack and sneak to the back patio to smoke it. I’m pretty sure today he knew what we were doing.

I got off the Jeep and walked towards the structure in front of me. It was a small shack made of vertical reeds tied together, wood pylons made the columns and beams of the house. It had a roof made of dried palm tree leaves weaved together; a truly peasant’s home. I had been in one before, when my dad went to offer her condolences to Leonor, a maid we had, when his husband passed away. It was crowded with relatives. The women were crying around the open coffin. The men were divided in two groups. One was playing a game with an old deck of carton cards while drinking rum in small shot glasses a young girl, barefooted and not older than nine, was passing around in a rattan tray. The other group was outside, smoking buttless cigarettes, drinking black coffee in clay cups, and telling dirty jokes. My mom wondered around the small space. She sat at a small beaten table with a stack of old newspapers on it, a Bohemia magazine with Fidel Castro’s face on the cover, a dark green glass vase holding a visibly deteriorated plastic rose, and a tin can with no label and loose change inside. My mom, as if moved by an unknown spirit, went straight to the tin can and turned it over. The coins fell disorderly on the table, clinking and running in all directions; a twenty five cent currency rolled on the surface and fell to the floor spinning and few times. I watched it flatten on the ground. When I turned my eyes back to the table, my mother was holding between her index and thumb fingers the wedding ring my dad had lost several weeks ago. She fired Leonor on the spot.

As I approached the shack the wailings grew louder. Afraid of being caught, I went around and look for a crack in the wall. I found it and what I saw through it was as much as appalling as it was morbid.

I stepped back for a few seconds. Rushing to my mind came in the image of a family trip we had made two summers before to the beach. There was this row of rustic changing rooms on the sand made of the same reeds this wall was made of. While taking off my shirt I heard noises coming from the room adjacent to mine. These were very strange noises, a cross between pain and laughter, between the asthma attacks my mom often suffered and the murmurs I sometimes heard coming from my parents bedroom. I put my eye through a crack in the wall. There was this gigantic man on top of a dark skinned woman; they were lying on a large towel on the floor. He was sucking on her big breasts with fury, one on each hand, as if trying to tear a large fruit from a tree trunk.

I went back to the crack. Scores of people, old and young, men and women, children even, were circling a mahogany table chanting and praying; some where holding candles in their hands, others held improvised fans made of newspaper to hush the heat and the flies from their sweating faces. The table was about four feet by eight feet, or so it seemed in my mind at the time. Things you see as a child appear to be much smaller when you return to them as an adult; houses, streets, rooms, people… everything appears to shrink by some magic spell of time and space. A rattan cradle was placed on top of the table. At the beginning the people circulating in front of my sightline did not allow me to see all. But there was a moment when I had a clear view of the table and the rattan cradle on top of it. Long white linens were placed on the cradle, their folds falling to the dirt floor and on the linen… the corpse of a baby girl, naked. Her eyes were still open, expressionless. An old woman, dressed all in black with her hair tied in a bow behind her back, carried with both hands a large clay pitcher or tinaja.. Every now and then she would pour water on the baby’s corpse and white sacuanjoche flower petals would come out of the pitcher. These people had devised a system to collect the water washing off the baby’s corpse into a wooden bucket placed at the feet of the table. People would go around the table in circles and take water from this bucket with small clay cups, and, after saying a short prayer and making the sign of the cross; they would slowly, but eagerly, drink the water.

I could not believe my eyes. My chest was pounding with a force only felt after I had finished number one at the 100 meter competition race in school. Filled with a mixture of remorse, fear, horror, and disgust, I listened to the prayer my uncle recited after gulping his share: “Holy angel’s water, may your juices give me strength and prowess, may your blessings be dispensed upon me, so my body, my mind and my soul will be cleansed of evil spirits and unwanted diseases”.

As quiet as I could, I went back to the Jeep, got beneath the cover, and quietly waited his return, shivering under the freezing rain.