“Let’s make cocoa,” he said.
She got up. “It seems so unfair,” she said, casting her eyes upward at the ceiling. “All of them up there fast asleep and I have to haunt the place.”
But in fact—besides Smoky leading the way by candlelight to the kitchen—Momdy had just awakened with arthritic pains, and was thinking whether it would hurt more to get up and get aspirin or lie there and ignore them; and Tacey and Lucy had never gone to bed at all, but sat up by candlelight in quiet talk about their lovers and friends and family, about the fate of their brother and the shortcomings and virtues of the sister not present, Lily. Lily’s twins had just awakened, one because he’d wet the bed, and the other because she felt the wetness, and their wakefulness was about to wake Lily. The only one asleep then in the house was Daily Alice, who lay on her stomach with her head deep in two feather pillows, dreaming of a hill where there stood an oak tree and a thorn in deep embrace.
La Negra
On a winter day, Sylvie paid a visit to her old neighborhood, where she had not lived since her mother had gone back to the Island and farmed Sylvie out to aunts. In a furnished room down that street, with her mother, her brother, a child of her mother’s, her grandmother and the odd visitor, Sylvie had grown, and grown Somehow the Destiny that she had today brought back with her to these littered streets.
Though only a few subway stops away from Old Law Farm, it seemed a great distance, across a border, another country altogether; so dense was the City that it could contain many such foreign countries cheek by jowl; there were several which Sylvie had never visited at all, their old Dutch or quaintly rural names suggestive and remote to her. But these blocks she knew. Hands in the pockets of her old black fur, double socks on her feet, she went down streets she walked often in her dreams, and they weren’t much different than she dreamed them to be, they were preserved as though in memory: the landmarks by which she had mapped them as a child were mostly still there, the candy store, the evangelical church where women with moustaches and powdered faces sang hymns, the squalid credit grocer, the notaria scary and dark. She found, by following these markers, the building where the woman called La Negra lived; and though it was smaller, dirtier, with darker and more urinous hallways than it had been or than she remembered it, it was the same, and her heart beat fast with apprehension as she tried to remember what door was hers. From out an apartment, as she climbed up, a family argument accompanied by jíbaro music suddenly burst, husband, wife, crying children, mother-in-law. He was drunk, and going out to get drunker; the wife railed at him, the mother-inlaw railed at the wife, the music sang of love. Sylvie asked where La Negra’s house was. They all fell silent, all but the radio, and pointed upward, studying Sylvie. “Thanks,” she said, and went up; behind her the sextet (well and long rehearsed) resumed.
From behind her door studded with locks La Negra questioned Sylvie, unable, apparently, despite her powers, to place her. Then Sylvie remembered that La Negra had known her only by a childhood diminutive, and she gave that. There was a shocked silence (Sylvie could sense it) and the locks were opened.
“I thought you were gone,” the black woman said, eyes wide, mouth corners drawn down in fearful surprise.
“Well, I am,” Sylvie said. “Years ago.”
“I mean far,” La Negra said. “Far, far.”
“No,” Sylvie said. “Not so far.”
She herself was a shock to Sylvie, for she had grown a lot smaller, and a lot less fearsome as she was smaller. Her hair had grown gray as steel wool. But the apartment, when La Negra at last stood aside and let Sylvie enter, was the same: mostly a smell, or many smells together, that brought back, as though she inhaled them with the odors, the fear and wonder she had felt here.
“Tití,” she said, touching the old woman’s arm (for La Negra still stared at her in something like surprise and didn’t speak), “Tití, I need some help.”
“Yes,” La Negra said. “Anything.”
But Sylvie, looking around the small, small apartment, was less sure than she had been an hour ago about what help she wanted. “Gee, the same,” she said. There was the bureau, done up as a composite altar, with the chipped statues of black Santa Barbara and black Martin de Porres, the red candles lit before them, the plastic lace tablecloth beneath; there was the picture of Our Lady pouring blessings that turned to roses into the gas-flame-colored sea. On another wall was the Guardian Angel picture which also hung, oddly, on George Mouse’s kitchen walclass="underline" the dangerous bridge, the two children, the potent angel watching to see that they crossed safely. “Who’s that?” Sylvie asked. Between the saints, before the talismanic hand, was a picture shrouded in black silk, a candle before it also, burning low.
“Come sit, come sit,” La Negra said quickly. “She’s not being punished, even if it looks like it. I never meant that.”
Sylvie decided not to question this. “Oh, hey, I brought some stuff.” She offered the bag, some fruit, some dulces, some coffee she had begged from George, who got it when no one else could, for she had remembered her aunt drinking it with relish, hot white and sweet.
La Negra, blessing her profusely, grew easier. When she had, as a precaution, taken the glass of water she kept on the bureau to catch evil spirits in and flushed it down the noisy toilet and replaced it, they made the coffee and talked about old things, Sylvie in her nervousness rattling on a little.
“So I heard from your mother,” La Negra said. “She called long-distance. Not me. But I heard. And your father.”
“He’s not my father,” Sylvie said, dismissively.
“Well…”
“Just somebody my mother married.” She smiled at her aunt. “I got no father.”
“Ay, bendita.”
“A virgin birth,” Sylvie said, “just ask my mother,” and then, though laughing, clapped her hand over her mouth at the blasphemy.
Coffee made, they drank it and ate the dulces, and Sylvie told her aunt why she had come: to get the Destiny that once upon a time La Negra had seen in the cards and in her child’s palm removed from her: to have it pulled, like a tooth.
“See, I met this man,” she said, looking down, suddenly shy to feel the warmth that bloomed in her heart. “And I love him, and…”
“Is he rich?” La Negra asked.
“I don’t know, I think his family is, sort of.”
“Then,” her aunt said, “maybe he’s the Destiny.”
“Ay, tití,” Sylvie said. “He’s not that rich.”
“Well…”
“But I love him,” Sylvie said. “And I don’t want some big Destiny coming along and snatching me away from him.”
“Ay, no,” La Negra said, “but where would it go? If it left you.”
“I don’t know,” Sylvie said. “Couldn’t we just throw it away.
La Negra slowly shook her head, her eyes growing round. Sylvie felt suddenly both afraid and foolish. Wouldn’t it have been easier to simply cease believing that any destiny was hers; or to believe that love was as high a destiny as anyone could want or have, and which she did have? What if messing in it with spells and potions didn’t ward it off at all, but only turned it bitter, and sour, and cost her love as well… “I don’t know, I don’t know,” she said. “All I know is that I love him, and that’s enough; I want to be with him, and be good to him, and make him rice and beans and have his babies and… and just go on and on.”