Little, Big

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, titi,” 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.”

“I’ll do what you ask,” La Negra said in a low voice that didn’t sound like hers. “Whatever you ask.”

Sylvie looked at her, a frisson of blue magic stealing up her spine. The old black woman sat in her chair as though enervated, her eyes not leaving Sylvie but not quite seeing her either. “Well,” Sylvie said doubtfully. “Like the time you came to our house, and put the evil spirits on a coconut, and rolled them out the door? And down the hall and out to the garbage?” She had told this story to Auberon, laughing uproariously over it with him, but here it didn’t seem funny. “Titi?” she said. But her aunt (though sitting in her plastic-covered armchair all the time) was no longer there.

No, the Destiny could not be put on a coconut, it was too heavy; it could not be rubbed away with oils or washed off in herbbaths, it went too deep. La Negra, if she were to do what Sylvie commanded, if her old heart could bear it, would have to draw it from Sylvie and swallow it herself. Where was it, first of all? She approached Sylvie’s heart with careful steps. Most of these doors she knew: love, money, health, children. That portal there, ajar, she didn’t know. “Bueno, bueno,” she said, desperately afraid that when the Destiny she let out of Sylvie rushed upon her it would kill her, or so transform her that she might as well be dead. Her spirit guides, when she turned to look for them, had fled in terror. And yet she must do what Sylvie had commanded. She put her hand on the door, and began to open it, glimpsing a golden daylight beyond, a rush of wind, the murmur of many voices.

“No!” Sylvie shouted. “No, no, no, I was wrong, don’t!”

The portal slammed shut. La Negra, with heart-sickening vertigo, tumbled back into her armchair in her little apartment. Sylvie was shaking her.

“I take it back, I take it back!” Sylvie cried. But it hadn’t ever left her.

La Negra, recovering, patted her heaving breast with her hand. “Don’t ever do that again, child,” she said, weak with relief that Sylvie had done it this time. “You could kill a person.”

“I’m sorry, sorry,” Sylvie said, “but this was all just a big mistake…”

“Rest, rest,” La Negra said, still immobile in the chair, watching Sylvie scramble into her coat. “Rest.” But Sylvie wanted only to get out of this room, where strong currents of brujeria seemed to play around her like lightning; she was desperately sorry she’d even thought of this move and hoping against hope that her foolishness hadn’t wounded her Destiny, or caused it to turn on her, or waked it at all, why hadn’t she just let it sleep where it lay, peaceful, not bothering anybody? Her invaded heart thudded reproachfully, she pulled out her purse with trembling fingers, looking for the wadded bills she had brought to pay for this crazy operation.

La Negra drew away from the money Sylvie offered her as though it might sting her. If Sylvie had offered her gold coins, potent herbs, a medallion heavy with power, a book of secrets, she would have taken them, she had passed the test put to her and deserved something: but not dirty bills for buying groceries, not money passed through a thousand hands.

Out on the street, hurrying away, Sylvie thought: I’m all right, I’m all right; and hoped that it was so. Sure she could have her Destiny removed; she could cut off her nose, too. No, it was with her for good, she was still burdened with it, and if not glad to be then glad anyway that it hadn’t been taken from her; and though she still knew little enough of it she had learned one thing when La Negra had tried to open her, one thing that made her hurry fast away, searching for a train station that would take her downtown: she had learned that whatever her Destiny was, Auberon was in it. And for sure she would not want it at all if he were not.

La Negra rose heavily from her armchair, still baffled. Had that been she? It could not have been, not in the flesh, not unless all of La Negra’s calculations were wrong; yet there on the table lay the fruits she had brought, and the half-eaten dulces.

But if that had been her who had been with La Negra just now, then who was it who had these many years helped La Negra in her prayers and spells? If she was still here, untransmogrified still in the same City La Negra inhabited, then how could she, at La Negra’s invocation, have cured, and told truths, and brought lovers together?

She went to her bureau and drew off the scrap of black silk that covered the central image of her spirit altar. She half-expected it to be gone, but it was there: an old cracked photograph, an apartment much like the one La Negra stood in; a birthday party, and a dark, skinny, pigtailed girl seated (on a thick phone book no doubt) behind her cake, a paper crown on her head, her large eyes compelling and weirdly wise.

Was she so old now, La Negra wondered, that she could no longer tell spirits from flesh, visitors from visitations? And if that were so, what might it portend for her practice?

She lit a fresh candle, and pressed it down into the red glass before the picture.

The Seventh Saint

Long years before, George Mouse had showed the City to Auberon’s father, making him a City man; now Sylvie did the same for Auberon. But this was a changed town. The difficulties that everywhere had been cropping up in even the best laid plans of men, the inexplicable yet Somehow inevitable failure that seemed built into their manifold schemes, were sharpest in the City, and caused the greatest pain and anger there—the fixed anger Smoky hadn’t seen but which Auberon saw in nearly every City face he looked into.

For the City, even more than the nation, lived on Change: rapid, ruthless, always for the better. Change was the lifeblood of the City, the animator of all dreams there, the power that coursed in the veins of the men of the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club, the fire that boiled up wealth and bustle and satisfaction. The City Auberon came to, though, had slowed. The quick eddies of fashion had grown sluggish; the great waves of enterprise had become a still lagoon. The permanent depression that the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club struggled against but was unable to reverse began in this grinding-to-a-halt, this unwonted cumbersome loginess of the greatest City, and spread outward from it in slow ripples of weary exhaustion to benumb the republic. Except in small ways (and that as constantly and pointlessly as ever) the City had stopped changing: the City Smoky knew had changed utterly, had changed by ceasing to change.