“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.
117.
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.
118.
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.
“We can send out for pizza,” Warren said, and laughed. “And by the way, bring me back my bloody sword.”
The rest of Monday morning had been spent on final things. The news from Delfina moved in and out of him, swinging back and forth. A child. Absurd. Too strange. He cleaned the loft while listening to Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony and the CD of Charlie Parker with strings, and an album of Spanish monks singing Gregorian chant. The music of farewell. I won’t even see this child. He dusted the bookshelves. He tied up all the newspapers, his eyes weary of the shrapnel of the world beyond New York. Killings on the West Bank. Assaults in Belfast. The endless violence of believers. Won’t hear him squalling. He carried two roped bundles down to the bin at the back of the ground floor. Where is Kongo? What will he tell me about the child? For lunch, he ate a bowl of yogurt filled with grapes, sliced papaya, and mango, and then emptied the refrigerator.
Safe in Delfina’s womb, right down there, seven blocks south, at a desk on the eighty-fourth floor. Listen, son. Pay close attention. I made a vow to my father, and I must keep it, or live in damnation. Everything truly serious is absurd. He called Delfina. Just to hear her voice. And got her recorded voice, with its curl of a Spanish accent, explaining she was away from her desk, please leave a message. “It’s me,” Cormac said. “I love you.”
Around four, he walked down to Chambers Street under an iron-colored sky. Can I look at this world from the Otherworld? Can I see the boy learn to walk? Three Africans were emptying a truck outside a Big Sale shop named Great Expectations (how Dickens would have embraced them), talking in the percussive rhythms of Ashanti. Cormac couldn’t make out all the words and wished they were speaking in Yoruba, but the subject seemed to be soccer. I won’t see him run.
He bought some things he needed from an Indian shopkeeper, and then went into a Korean deli on the corner of Church Street. He bought a black coffee and then stepped outside and stood beside a pay phone, using its back wall to shield him from the river wind. He lit a cigarette. The view down Church Street was as always: the post office, the towers in gray fog, all lights burning. He wanted to be in Mary’s with Healey, hearing his booming voice, but Mary’s was closed now forever, and he hadn’t been able to find Healey since his expedition to the Hamptons. He might still be there. He might be lashed to a bed in a hospital, lost on Long Island, cursing fate and Hollywood. Cormac thought: Where are the morning sirens who called us sweetheart? Healey’s my last friend. The only friend in the great dense city. I couldn’t bear to bury another.