I pushed myself up on the wheelchair armrests, set the balls of my feet down, and then released my arms. The pain was blinding. When I came to, I was at the bottom of the steps. I must have collapsed and rolled down. My arms were bruised, but my nose was intact. Another blow to it and I would be exhibited as a descendant of the australopithecine. When I recovered, I fell on my knees, not to thank God, but to crawl on them. Luckily, crawling comes naturally to spics. Didn’t it win José Ferrer an Oscar last century? I wished I had had his Lautrec kneepads. I left bloody strips of knee skin on the floor. I think of José Lautrec now, but that day my model was not him, but Saint Lazarus and the thousands who walked on their knees to the old leprosy colony at El Rincón, in my parent’s native island, where he has a sanctuary. My grandmother was a dyed-in-the-wool, absolutist Deist. She hated priests, nuns, pastors, santeros, and all other intermediaries as fervently as she believed that there was Something Big Up There. I don’t believe in miracles, she said, and most of those saints and miracles we hear about are frauds. However, God is great and he does sometimes grant especially good people the power to work miracles, not thousands or hundreds of miracles, but one here or there. Saint Lazarus was one of these. But not all cures attributed to him are true. Ten percent, maybe—the other “cured” are lying or under the power of suggestion. People like to fool themselves. That is why the power of suggestion is so dangerous, she warned me.
My pilgrimage on my knees around the Judge’s house did not end in a miracle. I found no dead or unconscious bodies. The kitchen was as clean as an operating room, with no traces of the cooking of the day before, not even a faint smell. The garbage cans must have been washed and disinfected before new bags were put in. The refrigerator, gleaming and freshly defrosted, contained a modest amount of new, strategically chosen staples (eggs, milk, butter, my tofu, hot dogs, tomatoes, lettuce). No cooked food. The freezer was packed with the meats McCabe consumed. Judging from the even layer of frost on the top, it had not been disturbed recently. Whatever McCabe, Petrona, and Mrs. Crandall had cooked the day before (and I was sure it was not last night’s Rabelaisian dinner, which bore Petrona’s lone imprint) had disappeared, and no forensic analysis could reconstruct it. They had literally erased their fingerprints from every surface. The bulky shape wrapped in Mrs. Crandall’s blanket could have been a very large turkey, or a small pig, although the latter was doubtful even as speculation, given that Mrs. Crandall was not, even remotely, a spic. The living room was equally spotless.
At the end of the pilgrimage, after walking two, ten, twenty miles on their knees, the devotees of Saint Lazarus must climb the steep staircase leading to his shrine, still on their knees. It is only if and when they reach it that supplicants may beg the saint for a miracle. The gray stone steps have turned pink and shiny from the blood of a hundred thousand ulcerated knees. I went up the twenty-seven steps to McCabe’s room, one knee first, then the other, fifty-four times in total, unable to decide what miracle I would ask for: McCabe ill or sleeping, dead or unconscious, or in perfect and oblivious health, counting her money, signing her sale contracts, looking at the package of Joseph Beuys slides that her German agent had sent her on Monday, which she was carrying when she brought my breakfast, not knowing that I can read upside down at lightning speed. Anything, anything, anything but gone. Arriving at the landing before her door, I paused like all supplicants must when they reach the top, and their mouths are level with the rotting feet of the saint, being licked by his mangy dog. You lick the saint’s feet then, careful not to touch the dog, until he gives you what you want, or before the next sad biped piece of meat in line behind you elbows you away. McCabe’s door was locked. I looked through the generous keyhole, an 1820 Cutler Brothers model installed when the house was built, the Judge told me. There was no one inside the bedroom, or in the bathroom, or the closet, whose doors had been helpfully left open. There was nothing on any surface, anywhere: no FedEx packages, books, magazines, candy wrappers, no signs of human occupation. That did not mean the massive oak armoire was empty, or the chest of drawers, two night tables, bureau, medicine cabinet. I had never seen this, or any other McCabe habitat before, so I could not tell if this was the way this room normally looked, or if it had been especially cleansed like the rest of the house, as if State Security was expected any moment. The room exuded a jasmine fragrance. I stuck my nose to the keyhole and inhaled. My stomach rumbled at the memory of last night’s delicate rice. I descended the stairs on my ass. The house was empty. McCabe had flown the coop.
20
A Daughter
When Serafina was twelve, her mother, who had lost half of her nose and one ear to syphilis and was waiting to die, told her that her real father was not the man who had been killed in a knife fight when she was seven, nor any of the men who had been in and out of their shack ever since, but the most beautiful man that human eyes had ever seen—white, young, golden-haired, tall, strong, sweet, smart, generous, rich, well-spoken. Jacinto Benavides, the love of her life. She had reached that conclusion after repeatedly reliving their drunken, fornicating week together, which the man that she now thought of as the Beast had put an end to. She told Serafina how Jacinto was killed and dumped in the bay, but not by whom, and how his body had been found a week later by a fisherman, intact, as if he were just sleeping. Jacinto Benavides was then burned and his ashes strewn in the sea, as was done with men like him. Serafina asked what kind of men, but her mother could only tell her that it had to do with some quarrel among Spaniards. “What was this quarrel about?” Serafina asked, with a premature tinge of the sarcasm that would later serve her well. She had been raised in the certainty that Spaniards were quarrelsome, greedy, and stupid. “It was about their dicks,” her mother said, in a spasm of laughter so violent and prolonged that she almost died then, and not the next morning. When she recovered, she explained that some Spaniards like Jacinto Benavides cut the skin off the tips of their dicks. Most don’t, maybe because they are afraid of pain. They must be jealous of the brave ones, because they have gotten the King of Spain to forbid any dick trimming, and to punish those like Jacinto Benavides who dare to do it. Her mother advised Serafina to keep this information to herself. The less anyone knows about you, the safer you are, as her own mother had told her after revealing why she had been freed. Both of these things were family secrets. Serafina was now their keeper. Her mother made her swear on the Blessed Virgin, and on the holy wounds of Saint Glykeria, Martyr that she would pass on those secrets to one of her children, the smartest one. “Unless you only have one child, like me, in which case you better pray you’re as lucky as I’ve been.” This was the first and only time her mother praised Serafina out loud, although she did so to herself every day. She was afraid Serafina would become too vain for her own good. “Children talk too much. Only one of them should know. Don’t tell them all, and don’t tell too soon,” she added, before a gale of coughing carried her away. Serafina went to bed that night with a picture of her father in her mind. He looked just like her, fully grown and in men’s clothing. It was not too far off the mark. Serafina was the spitting image of Jacinto Benavides.