The cast had begun to harden and I had my first experience of its rigidity as my father entered. I tried to shift my wrist beyond a certain point and my thumb was stopped. There was a twinge inside the arm. When I attempted to touch it, I was distressed to find not my soft living flesh, but the unyielding hollow plaster. I got a hint of how frustrating and tedious wearing it for six weeks was going to be.
“Hey, my boy,” Francisco said, brushing past the doctor, the nurse and my mother. Although I was elevated by the examination table, he was so tall he had to bend down to reach me. He hugged and kissed me on the cheek. Remember, this was no physically frozen father of the Eisenhower years. Francisco was a proud Latin Papa who saw me as an extension of himself. That meant he was often very warm and loving — and, by the same logic, sometimes very careless.
The orthopedist and his nurse weren’t Latin. When the doctor began to examine my broken arm by moving it about in a painful way, he told me that little boys don’t cry although I hadn’t made a peep. My father’s hug and kiss of me provoked the doctor into nervous reassurance: “He’s fine. It was a simple break. Snapped it clean. I don’t think it even hurt him.”
“A simple break!” my father teased. He took my nose between his index and middle fingers and squeezed hard. So hard it made my eyes water. “That can’t be. We Nerudas don’t do anything simply.” Francisco looked great. His hair was long and almost entirely black. Only a smudge of white appeared above his ears, like racing stripes on the side of a car. He was tall, six feet three. His stomach was flat, his shoulders wide, his posture vigorous, his chest so proud it almost invited an attack. The setting for his eyes was deep and wide apart, a characteristic shape of the Nerudas. The jewels that peered out were a warm brown; they seemed insistently friendly, despite a gleam of mockery. His eyes were highlighted by thick brows that curved up and away at the corners, emphasizing his profile and intelligent forehead. Francisco was obviously handsome, almost a cliché of the Latin lover. When women got their first look at him, they invariably smiled. Indeed, the orthopedist’s nurse, a blotchy-skinned brunette with a harsh Southern accent, a sour woman who had disdained to address my bowed grandmother, who had barked at my mother when she first barged in, and who had told me several times to sit still although I was in pain and not really moving that much, broke into a smile at the sight of my father and roared with laughter as he continued his joke. “Maybe we should break it a few more times,” Francisco said. He put his arm around me, engulfing me into the crook as he squeezed. For a moment he shut out the world. He let me go. “Right, Rafael? Twist it into a pretzel. Make it into a Neruda fracture, a Cubist arm. After all, it was a Spaniard who began Cubism.”
“Cubism,” my mother mumbled with disgust, as though naming a social travesty. “He’s a glorified cartoonist,” she added to Francisco.
“No, he’s a genius.” My father hadn’t disagreed; he cheerfully wiped Ruth’s opinion away. “And loyal to the Republic,” Francisco added with a laugh. My father noticed that the doctor, the nurse, and I were all baffled by their discussion of Picasso’s politics. “Thank you, Doctor,” he said and clapped the physician on his back. The orthopedist was startled not only by the force of the contact, but by the fact of it. “My only question is: can the patient have ice cream?”
My father’s reaction to my injury was to treat it as a triumph. He announced we would stop at the Dairy Queen on Seventh Avenue and buy me a chocolate dip cone, my favorite. Grandma protested weakly that I shouldn’t have ice cream on an empty stomach. Normally Grandma would have been ferociously negative and stopped him, but she was still too enfeebled by the embarrassment of my injury occurring while I was in her care to argue with much conviction. Typically, my mother would also have overruled Francisco, but she had fallen into a moody silence since we left the orthopedist. She kept her arm around me and twice kissed my temple; otherwise she was disengaged, staring ahead at the Tampa streets, apparently bored by my grandmother’s account of events.
But Francisco was cheerful. He told me I was the first Neruda to break a bone in thirty years. “You know why it’s taken so long?” he asked me as we got out of the car to go up to the Dairy Queen counter. He grabbed my head again with his arm and squeezed. “I can’t get over how big you are! You’re a giant! I think you’re going to be taller than me.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
He laughed at that, squeezed my head hard once again and let go. The embrace of his arm made me deaf and dumb for a second and its release just as abruptly restored the bright world. It is no fanciful metaphor for me to say that my father could make the earth appear and disappear at will. “You’re a Gallego all right,” my father said, referring to the province of Galicia where Grandpa Pepín had been born. “You’ve got the hard-headed common sense of your peasant ancestors.” We had reached the counter. Behind it was another Southern woman who beamed at his approach. My father referred to the white Southerners in private as “crackers,” an insult, like so many ethnic slurs, that seemed utterly meaningless to me when I looked at its target, but he smiled back at the waitress with welcome. “We’re here to spoil our appetites for dinner,” my father announced.
“Well, darling,” the Dairy Queen waitress answered, “that’s what we’re here for. To spoil you men silly.” She might call him a spic or a wetback or God knows what in private and Dad would say she was a redneck or a cracker in Grandma’s spotless kitchen, but face-to-face they seemed to see other possibilities in each other. Dad chatted with her a bit before giving our orders. He told her he was going to be on radio that evening and she promised to listen. Eventually he ordered us both chocolate dips and watched her retreat to the stainless steel soft-ice-cream machines with careful interest. Then he returned the full glare of his attention to me. “What was I saying? Oh yes, you’re the first Neruda to break a bone in thirty years. You know why?” He didn’t bother to pause for my reply. (Sometimes I catch myself responding today to questions my father asked long ago without waiting for my answer.) “Because you’re the first Neruda to do anything physical in thirty years. We’ve turned into decadent intellectuals.” He grabbed my head and repeated the blackout of light and sound. He let go and continued, “I broke my leg sliding into home when I was twelve playing with the cigar-makers. I used to love playing ball in West Tampa on Sundays. You know there are a couple of Tampa boys in the major leagues. In fact, Al Lopez — he managed the Cleveland Indians to a World Series — was responsible for breaking my leg …” I knew. I had heard this story several times. My father was a natural celebrity. He had the knack of making conversation with strangers that suggests intimacy and yet didn’t truly expose him. He had a colorful fan of anecdotes that were amusing, credible and subtly self-aggrandizing. He spread it gracefully and with apparent spontaneity: like a peacock’s feathers, they were impressive and they distracted from the frail body at the center of all that brilliance. Unfortunately for members of his family, Francisco sometimes forgot that we weren’t strangers; we had already been seduced by his plumage; we didn’t need to be dazzled anymore.
When the Dairy Queen woman returned with our towering cones — she seemed to have given us twice the usual portion — Francisco was almost done with his Al Lopez-broken leg anecdote. She showed interest in it and he repeated the story for her. I bit off the tip of hardened chocolate syrup at the top, sucking up the interior cream. There was throbbing inside my hard cast. I wanted to touch my arm where it hurt. The pain was deep inside my forearm, unsoothable, an awkward ache that couldn’t be eased by any position I assumed. And it seemed to be getting worse. I sucked up more of the ice cream, determined to enjoy myself, to follow my father’s lead.