I asked.
“You know, you’re getting pimples. They’ll go away once you start using your thing again like a man.” She giggled and her wide face that in repose could appear as sullen as Genaro’s seemed to partake completely of her smile. She tilted her head back as she looked at me, a habit of hers. Her mouth curled downward, which gave her an expression that was almost French. Her dark complexion was flawless, smooth as pond water, but her face seemed flattened. She wore a very faded dress that was cut much to short for her; it revealed her heavy legs and thighs and the outlines of her large breasts, which had nurtured seven children. Four of them died, she had said; the others grew up.
“Do you talk to Genaro like that?” I asked.
“Much worse, Meester. Much worse.” She put the tray on my lap and said, “Eat, you’ll feel better.”
“What the hell is it?” I asked. The last thing I wanted was food; the very thought of eating made me queasy.
“Do you want me to feed you?” she asked.
“Don’t talk to me that way,” I snapped. “I can’t eat...but you can tell me what it is.”
“It’s made from the manioc, which I mashed up and add some things.”
“What other things?”
“Some carapanauba bark, a little paxuri seeds, and cachaça, and maybe something else, I maybe forget. You know what they are?”
“Cachaça I know, but the rest...I’m not eating—”
Try it, you’ll see. I promise it won’t hurt you. Would I be stupid enough to kill the golden fleece?”
I couldn’t help but smile. Over the years I had always read to her once or twice a week, for she didn’t know how to read, nor would she learn. But she loved fairy tales, and I tried to bring back new books to read her. Those stories would turn her into a child, an odd and wonderful thing to watch, for to me at least she seemed like the embodiment of the earth mother. She even looked like the prehistoric statues archaeologists had found all over the world; they were small, but had overdeveloped breasts and large stomachs. She was somehow natural, idiosyncratic, and universal.
“It’s goose, not fleece,” I said, and, giving in, I took a spoonful of the glassy-looking gruel; it had no taste at all, but then my mouth became numb, as if the mush had been spiked with Novocain. I could feel it numb my throat and more as the stuff worked its way down my esophagus to my stomach. There was a dish popular in Belém called pato no tucupi, which was famous for numbing the mouth. She must have used some of the same ingredients.
“Try some more,” she insisted. “It will help your stomach. It will make the pain go away for a while.”
But I couldn’t keep the food from trickling out of the side of my mouth. “What’s the ice cream for?” I asked.
“It makes the herbs work better.”
That was true. As the ice-cream went down, I felt as if my insides were being air-conditioned, as if there were great cold places where my throat and chest and stomach had been, and I felt muzzy and light-headed, as if everything was slowly floating around me. “Genaro told me you knew I was dying,” I said.
“I told him that.”
“How did you know?”
“I had a dream about it when Genaro was making love to me. Sometimes I dream then. Often I do.”
I felt myself blushing as she told me that, although I’ve never been a prude. Yet I felt embarrassed and chilled that she should see my death as she made love to her silent husband. I stared out the window at the neatly tended garden of jungle flowers and the evergreen trees that were in lavender bloom, but the white sash window-bars wavered and went out of focus. I did not feel pain in my stomach, only coolness. Now I imagined that dry breezes were passing though me. Onca must have used more than herbs in the gruel; I hoped it wasn’t anything hallucinogenic. Probably not, I could trust her.
But she had put something in there....
I didn’t want to ask her any more questions, yet I couldn’t help myself; and she was standing before me, waiting, knowing that I would ask, and prepared to answer, as if she had dreamed this, too. Perhaps she had.
“What about your dream?” I asked. “Tell me about it.”
“I dreamed about you and Genaro. Maybe because I was trying to make babies with Genaro. Sometimes dreams and truth get mixed up for me and I can’t pull out one part from another. Do you understand?”
I didn’t, but I nodded.
“And your dream?”
She turned toward the window and looked out. She seemed to be looking past the trees and gardens and yard and miles of pastureland that was as level as Iowa grassland. Deep in the distance was the rainforest, the real ruler of this land. “It was a good dream, but it wasn’t good to dream it. You were with my Genaro in a boat. He was driving this boat. You sat in the front, but you were your own dream and it was a terrible dream. You were bones without flesh, yet you weren’t dead; and your bones were the color as the water. Brown as mud, just like the Amazonas. And Genaro was taking you to meet death so you could get yourself back.” She shivered and made a gesture in the air. “He told me he would do that for you.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, my words slurred from the Novocain-like herb she had put in the food. “Do what for me?”
“I feel close to you, Meester, but I told him not to do this, but he believes it is a matter of honor.”
“You’re not making sense,” I said, frustrated with all this mumbo-jumbo.
“He will take you to meet your death so you may live. That is what your dream told me when I had my dream. Dreams come from people, but they can be alive on their own, to talk to each other, just like people.”
“Onca, how you found out about my disease, I don’t know. I’ll give you that. But you—”
“We know someone who can help you,” Onca said.
“If I wouldn’t go to hospital to have them radiate me and do everything else, I certainly wouldn’t go to a witch doctor. But I thank you, I appreciate your concern.”
“This person isn’t a witch doctor, Meester.”
“Than what is he?”
“He’s a white man. A doctor. You know him, I think.”
“Who?”
“That’s all I have from the dream,” she said. “Maybe later I will have more. Then maybe you will be ready.” With that she took the tray, leaving me only the milk on my bed stand, and left the room.
“Onca,” I shouted, but she didn’t—and I knew she wouldn’t—come back. The image that had formed in my mind was, of course, that of Mengele. Death. But that was impossible, and yet I still felt the hackles raise on my back, cold as the scales of a fish.
* * * *
That
