the welcome shade of the great tree.
Unconvivial Paz, no former hippie, no artist, followed his daughter’s lead into the green center of the ficus. Here he observed a demonstration of tree climbing and was forced to admit that he could not swing upside down from a low limb by his knees. He could, however, still tickle her so that, giggling, she lost her grip and fell into his arms.
“Daddy, do you know there’s a monster in this tree?”
“I didn’t know that. Is it scary?”
She considered this briefly. “A little scary. Not very scary, likearrrrrgh! ” She demonstrated what scary would be like by physical gestures and a snarling face. “He talks to me,” she added. “In Spanish.”
“Really. What about?”
“Oh, stuff. He’s from a real jungle, and he can talk to animals. I showed him to Britney Riley, but she couldn’t see him. She said I wasstupid. I hate her now.”
“I thought she was your best friend.”
“Uh-uh. She’s a total dummy. My new best friend is Adriana Steinfels. Can she come to our house?”
“Not today, honey. Can you show me the monster?”
“Okay,” with which she took his hand in hers and led him deeper into the maze of prop-roots. The air there was damp, cool, and filled with the spicy-rotten smell of the leaf and fruit litter below. They came to a gray-green vertical column that looked as big around as a dump truck: the main trunk of the state’s largest tree. Amelia pointed upward. “He lives up there,” she said, and waited for a moment, listening, then shrugged. “I think he’s not there now. Where’s Abuela?”
“Something came up. She had to go to herile.”
“Could we go, too?”
“We could,” said Paz, somewhat to his own surprise. It would mean a fight with his wife. Did he want that? Maybe it was time to have the whole thing out. Whether Paz believed in Santeria or not, the thing was part of his child’s heritage, not to mention his own, and this absolute ban had suddenly become unbearable. Amelia was not a Britney or an Adriana, a white bread…the word gusano, a maggot, floated into consciousness, and was shoved down again. The kid was a mutt, and seven was not too early for her to learn where she came from. Okay, now they’d have it out. He loved his wife dearly, in parts, but her materialist self-righteousness he did not love, and he’d come to the end of avoiding the issue. So he told himself, and ran a few little testing arguments through his head, as husbands so often do, as he left the bowels of the fig tree and entered the open air, clutching the little warm hand. The monster in the tree, though-also not a good sign. Amelia had gone through a number of imaginary playmates, and Dr. Mom had explained at length that it was perfectly natural at the appropriate age. Was this the appropriate age? Nearly seven? Paz had thought that real friends took over the social impulse about now, and dumping a real friend because of an imaginary one could not be right. Now he was about to take the child to a place where nearly every adult had an imaginary friend who emerged unpredictably from the spirit world and took them over completely-would that betherapeutic under the circumstances? He knew what her mother would say to that. Paz told this line of thought to stop and it did but promised to come back real soon.
Theile, the Santeria congregation, was lodged in the unprepossessing home of Pedro Ortiz, located in the largely Cuban-inhabited area southwest of the original Little Havana on SW Eighth Street, which bore therefore the Spanglish name of Souesera. He had to park the Volvo two blocks away, so great was the number of cars-mostly venerable and including a number of well-used pickup trucks-that crowded the streets nearby and also the small former lawns of the houses, now converted into green-painted asphalt parking lots. It was the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, an important day in Santeria, for when the African slaves first saw statues of that saint, they had conflated the beads of his rosary with the palm-nut chains used in Yoruba divination and so associated the Italian saint with Ifa-Orunmila, the orisha, or spirit, of prophecy. It was considered particularly auspicious to get your fortune told on this day, hence the crowd and hence the presence here of Margarita Paz. Paz explained some of this to his daughter as they walked; she took in the information in the perfectly accepting manner of children, and then asked, “Will they tell a fortune for me?”
“I don’t know,” said Paz honestly. “You could ask Abuela. She knows more about this stuff than me.”
“What’s in that bag?”
Paz hefted the plastic sack. “Yams.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Do we have to eat them?” Not a yam fan, Amelia, despite his best efforts. “No, they’re for the orisha, ” he said. “Ifa loves yams.”
“Yuck,” said Amelia, unimpressed by the tastes of the Lord of Fate.
They went into the house. Paz’s nostrils were immediately full of the typical smell of such places-burning wax from scores of candles, the sweet incense sold in botanicas throughout the city, the earth smell of piles of yams, the sweetness of coconut and rum, and beneath all, the acrid odor of live fowl. Despite the murmur of the crowd, these could be heard clucking from their pens in a room at the back of the house.
He held tight to Amelia’s hand, although the place was full of children running free. Besides these, the people were of all ages, as one would expect at any church, and of all colors, too, although tending to the darker shades indigenous to the Cuban community.
“Look, Abuela!” Amelia cried and tore away to greet her grandmother. Paz liked to see the two of them together, because of the expression that came over his mother’s face when she embraced her nieta. It was joy unrestrained, an expression he did not recall seeing there during his own youth. Once he had felt a pang of resentment at such times, but no longer. None of that mattered anymore, whether or not his wife the shrink agreed. Some of the joy even carried over to him. Mrs. Paz embraced him, kissed him on both cheeks, smiled, showing the gold teeth.
“You brought her,” said Mrs. Paz.
“Sure, why not?”-a question that had a real answer, which they both knew.
“Thank you,” she said, and Paz had to keep from gaping. It was the first time his mother had ever thanked him for anything.
The grandmother and the child moved through the crowd, greetings and cooings arising in their wake. Paz followed, bemused, feeling the removal of a weight he had not realized he was carrying. The child was no stranger to praise, but her immediate family was small, and praise was associated with accomplishment. She had not ever received a flood like this, and he saw her shyly blossom. Paz got the feeling that the members of theile had been prepped for this by grandmotherly boastings. And why not? he thought; she’s had a rough life, this is a small enough pleasure to give her. His mother seemed to have transformed herself into an entirely different woman from the stern field marshal of the restaurant and his childhood home. Not for the first time he wondered why she had not raised him in Santeria. Apparently age was no barrier, as the many children here proved. Again he suppressed resentment.
They approached the sanctuary, a tent of yellow and green silk partially enclosing a squat cylinder covered with satin brocade in the same colors-the fundamentos, or sacred ritual symbols, of Ifa-Orunmila. Dozens of candles in glass holders burned around this shrine, and the floor was covered with layers of yams and coconuts. Amelia was allowed to deposit a yam and then taken to see the cake, a huge wedding-style confection of many tiers, on which was inscribed in icing Maferefun Orunmila.
“Is that a birthday cake?”
“Yes, in a way,” said Mrs. Paz. “It’s the day we celebrate and give thanks to Orunmila. See here, it says ‘thanks be to Orunmila,’ in Lucumi.”
“Could we eat it?”
“Later, dear. First we have to see our babalawo. Now, he’s a very holy man, so when we meet him, we bow and say ‘iboru iboya ibochiche.’” They practiced this a few times and then pushed through a thicker crowd to where Pedro Ortiz, the babalawo, sat on a simple caned chair. Mrs. Paz and Amelia dropped to their knees and said “may Ifa accept the sacrifice” in the modified Yoruba language called Lucumi by Cubans. Mrs. Paz introduced Amelia to the santero. Paz watched from a short distance. Ortiz was a slight cordovan-colored man with a thick head of black hair just starting to go gray and large dark eyes that seemed all pupil. He embraced both Mrs. Paz and Amelia and then looked over the heads of his followers directly at Paz, who understood that the babalawo knew pretty much what he was thinking. It interested Paz that he had expected this and was untroubled by it. Yes, weird stuff happened, weird stuff would continue to happen. It was a permanent part of his life, and it looked like it would start
