CHAPTER 3
SEVILLE
SPAIN
May 1963
Encarnación Consuelo Ocampo whore and black-marketeer had taken her son out of her dark second-floor apartment for the first time in his life. The child had spent his first winter sequestered in two chilly tiled rooms. Within these walls he’d slept, fed, excreted, crawled, babbled, played, cried, and despite his extreme youth and small size learned to walk so that by late spring his mother had summoned the courage to lead him upstairs into the sun.
Like Cantinflas in a comedy playing in a theatre near her tenement Encarnación was an analfebeto, an illiterate. She was also mute. If she’d named her child no one knew that name. Mute she couldn’t speak it. Letterless she couldn’t write it. The infant had therefore grown to toddlerhood in a thunderstorm of nearly continuous silence. Only his own cries, extraneous tenement noises, and the half-heard murmurings of his mother’s clients had broken that silence. Encarnación realized that if her son was ever to have a chance amid the terrible babel of adult life she must remedy this situation. For too long she’d kept him from feeling the afternoon sun on his pert spider-monkeyish face. That she had deprived him of this blessing, mostly because her neighbors saw her as a fallen female and a witch, unwomaned her.
Today she would articulate her shame by trying to exorcise it.
With the boy on her hip Encarnación steeled herself to the ordeal of carrying him roofward. Her dirty clothes she’d knotted inside one of her cheap capacious skirts such as gypsy women wore and this makeshift laundry bag provided a counterweight to the child. So laden she left her apartment, walked along the gallery landing, and climbed a set of dingy interior stairs to the building’s concrete wash house. Looks of wonder and fear played across the boy’s face but he hung on and never averted his gaze from a single challenge. Only the angry circle of sun peering down into the stairwell made him blink. Near the roof Encarnación heard a sound like a single tiny fish frying in a skillet. Emerging into the open she saw an old woman clad from pate to toes in rusty ebony, all about her the sodden flags of washday. This person gazed raptly at the Giralda the tower of the great cathedral of Seville while peeing into a tin can thrust beneath her concealing black skirts. The arrival of unexpected company startled the vieja but with a stoop and a whirl dazzling in one so old she yanked the can from between her legs, made a toasting motion with it, and thereby salvaged her composure and her pride.
Encarnación froze. His every didy in need of laundering her boy wore a stained cotton jersey and this old woman hardly a friend, for no one in the building was hurried over to examine him. After easing her tin can onto the lid of the water drum by the stairwell entrance she poked the child with stiff fingers while gabbling madly. Although he recoiled from the woman her pokes seemed to fret him less than did the noises spilling from the vieja’s foul-smelling mouth.
He’d heard Encarnación vent many strange sounds tongue clicks meant to warn him away from mischief but the crone’s performance was of a different order, vigorous and rhythmic. It hypnotized and cowed him.
Qué alerto, declared the old woman addressing Encarnación while studying the child. Is it true he’s never heard the talk of other people? Is it true you’ve not taken him to the priests for christening? Por Dios, Señorita Ocampo, if these accusations are true you arm all those who call you bruja, giving them cause to dishonor your name.
Spoken to her face bruja meaning witch made Encarnación cringe. This calumny, she knew, derived from her singular appearance and her neighbors’ astute surmise that her ancestors were Moriscos, Christianized Moors, of uncertain steadfastness in their new faith. Disciples of Mahomet the Moors had arrived in Iberia from northern Africa but what spiritual allegiance had bound them before their conversion to Islam? Black magic, Encarnación’s neighbors held. Imbued with misinformation and prejudice they believed her a stalking horse for Satan and the hag haranguing her now on the rooftop ascribed to her cruelly point-blank an odious personal trait known among Spaniards as mal ángel or negative charm.
A christening would save this child from the realm of devils. Why deny him? To increase your stores of mal ángel? Do you wish him to converse just with your titties or your sins’ evil spirits? Por Dios, Señorita, it hurts to ask such things.
Ignoring these gibes Encarnación set her child down and brushed past the vieja to the laundry shed’s stone basin. Her neighbor followed while the toddler squatted in a wet spot under flapping clothes fascinated by Seville’s pigeons schooling overhead like half-charred paper scraps caught in an updraft. Heedless of the birds Encarnación flooded the catchment with water and unwrapped her clothes as the boy gazed heavenward.
How marvelous. Your baby walks at what? Seven months? He looks younger though his head is muy grande. It’s the blackness in him, I believe, this power to walk so young. Do you fear he’ll lose this power if you have him christened? Do you think you must raise him a brujito or warlock to ensure his survival?
In the black mirror of the water Encarnación saw her own unsmiling face. She resembled even to herself the bemused last member of some lost tribe of humanity: sloe-black eyes, sensuous mouth, and eyebrows knit together above her broad pug nose. In the water under her hands her swarthiness was shadowed by an even deeper shadow. Many Spaniards thought her a Negro. She shattered her image with a handful of cheap detergent and the limp bludgeon of a diaper.
Señorita Ocampo, you are fattening this baby for another’s feast depriving him of baptism and the comfort of human speech. Should you die no one will stoop to help him. Never mind that he scrambles about your flat like a Barbary ape. Outside he won’t be able to survive. At present he is his selfish mother’s juguete, a plaything. If you suffer a fatal accident or sicken unto death he would be doomed. It’s wicked of you not to have thought of this.
At these words the child hooted while ambling to the railing overlooking the inner courtyard. Encarnación not seeing him behind her interrupted her washing to fetch the boy back. To reach him she bumped the old woman aside but the contact was less fleeting than she would have liked. The vieja’s meddling in her affairs was insupportable. It sapped her energy and self-esteem.
What of the boy’s father? If he knew that you’ve borne his child he would wish to rescue it from the folly of its upbringing. A black man sired this one anyone can see that but even black men have tongues with which to speak their preferences. You must tell him of his son.
Encarnación returned to the washhouse but the boy toddled over to the old woman and grabbed her skirts. She touched a finger to the middle of his woolly pate and rubbed it there as if to ward off any evil inhering in him. Cruelty and pride, the crone said, still rubbing. It’s pride that makes you assume a responsibility of which you are not worthy. Elsewise you would know that what you’ve done ensures the ruin of your brujo pequeño. Time will undo your pride and your son. And the shameful occupations you pursue? They will kill you sooner than you suspect.
Hands and arms dripping Encarnación whirled about and broke her child’s grip on the vieja’s skirts. The woman blinked but did not draw back. Although skinny as a cadaver she towered over Encarnación and her height advantage made her foolhardy for in a moment her mouth was at work again spilling recriminations, advice, and ominous prophecies. Encarnación espied the tin can into which her tormentor had emptied her bladder. She snatched it up. Shaking it before the crone’s face she circled her prey to cut off any escape down the stairs. The woman darted beneath a wire holding the threadbare burden of her wash. Tenga merced, she cried ducking behind a pair of trousers. Have mercy. Hooting the boy pivoted to keep the action in view. He’d forgotten the pigeons if just for this moment. The chase continued and Encarnación let the woman sweep back beneath the clotheslines to the stairwell. She had turned the corner on the first lower landing when Encarnación upending the can scored a liquid bull’s-eye on her retreating head and shoulders.
Gibbering the vieja vanished into the building’s bowels, her cries echoing in the tiled enclosure.