to be a part of his daughter’s life, too. His mother was beckoning him. Ortiz rose and shook hands. No bow was apparently expected from the great quasi-agnostic. Mrs. Paz said, “He has agreed to throw Ifa for Amelia. It’s very important, but you’re the father, and so you have to agree.”
“Um, right. What’s going to happen?”
“Just agree, Iago!” she said sharply.
“Okay, Mami,” he said. “Your show. I trust you.” As the words came out, he found that he actually did.
Ortiz led the way into a smaller room in the back of the house. In it were vases full of tropical blooms and trays of fruit, and there were depictions of the orishas on the walls: Ifa in his guise as St. Francis, Shango as St. Barbara, Babaluaye as St. Lazarus, and the rest. In one corner was a life-size statue of St. Caridad, the patroness of Cuba, and along one wall was a large mahogany cabinet, the canistillero, repository of the sacred objects. The only other furnishings were a folding bridge table with a round wooden box in its center, and four straight chairs. Ortiz sat in one of these and waited while the others sat. Ortiz looked into Paz’s eyes and said, “We don’t usually ask Ifa to tell the future of children, you know. Their future is so little formed that it would be disrespectful to ask. In a way, their little spirits are still held in the hands of their ancestors, such as yourself and Yetunde here.” Here Ortiz smiled briefly at Mrs. Paz, who nodded when she heard her name-in-religion. “And of course the child’s mother. So, what I will do is throw Ifa for you yourself, asking if there is anything that needs to be done or not done for the child’s sake. It’s difficult to make such a reading, but I have agreed because of the love and respect I have for Yetunde. So, now I need you to give me five dollars and twenty-five cents.”
“Oh-kay,” said Paz, “five and a quarter. Here you go.” He handed the man a bill and a coin. Ortiz wrapped the coin in the bill using a complex origamilike fold. He opened the box on the table and took from it a chain made of eight curved pieces of tortoiseshell connected by brass links, and an ordinary drugstore notebook and pencil. The word opele floated up from memory. Paz had seen one of these before but never in actual use. Ortiz pinched the currency and coin around the center of the opele and pressed this to Paz’s forehead, breast, hands, and shoulders, and then did the same to Amelia. He placed the money in the box, and after a low humming incantation that proceeded for some minutes he raised the chain and let it fall with a small tinkling clatter on the table.
The babalawo studied the line of the shells, observing which had fallen concave side up and which ones concave side down. This, Paz knew, is how Ifa speaks to men. Ortiz made marks on a sheet of paper torn from the notebook, a vertical stroke for concave-up and a circle for concave-down, two columns of four marks. He studied these, frowning, looked sharply at Paz, frowned more deeply, studied Amelia. Finally he uttered a soft grunt and asked Paz if he had a dog.
“A dog? No, we don’t. We have a cat.”
Ortiz shook his head. “No, it would be a large dog, or…something. Are there neighbors with such an animal?”
“There’s a poodle down the block. Why are you asking this?”
“Because…hm, this is very strange, very strange. I have been doing this for forty years and I don’t recall the orisha ever sending this. You know, all this was born in Africa and there are some things that happen in Africa that don’t happen here. The locusts don’t come and eat our crops. We don’t give cows in exchange for our wives. Very strange.” He stared at the opele as if he hoped it would change itself into another shape.
“But it involves a dog?” Paz asked.
“Not really. But what else could it be? Here we have no lions. Lions don’t carry off our children here in America. But here it is, ‘the oldest child is taken by the lion.’ That’s how the verse goes.”
“You could do it again,” Paz suggested after a moment. There was a peculiar cold chill in his belly, and without thinking he reached out and grasped his daughter’s hand.
But Ortiz shook his head. “No, we don’t mock the orisha. What is given is given. But it’s certainly a great puzzle. I will have to pray about this, and make a sacrifice, too. Oh, and that is another peculiar thing. There is a sacrifice required.”
“You mean an animal, right?”
“No, the oracle speaks about a human sacrifice, but it’s not definite. The verse reads ‘who is so brave as to sacrifice the dear one?’ When such things appear, we always take it to mean a spiritual sacrifice, a purification. But, as I say, in forty years, this has not been told to me. There are very many figures, not only two hundred fifty-six from the one throw, as you see, but changing with the days and the seasons. Not all babalawo know this. Come back and see me again, and may Orunmila give us more light then.”
The three of them walked out of the room, and an elderly woman passed them going in. A long line of people had formed, like that outside the toilets at a theater, all chattering softly in Spanish, waiting to know the future. Paz felt a ferocious anger displacing the fear from his mind, together with whatever small scraps of credulity he had so carefully assembled. After sending Amelia off to where they were serving cake, he directed it at his mother.
“What was that all about?”
“You’re angry.”
“Ofcourse, I’m angry. Animals eating kids? Human sacrifice? Do you have any idea what it’s going to take to get her to bed now? She already has dreams about animals eating her up.”
His mother’s eyes grew wide. “What! She has dreams like that! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Why? Because they’re just dreams, Mother. All kids have nightmares at her age, and this kind of crazy…stuff doesn’t help. Speaking of which, I must have been nuts to bring her here. All of this…” He gestured to the room, the devotees in their standing clusters. He couldn’t think of any word that was not vile, for all of this.
“You don’t understand,” she said with uncharacteristic calm. “You should be made to the santos, like a man. But you hold back, and this is why Orunmila can’t speak to you clearly.”
She spoke as to a child, and this made Paz even angrier. His mother wasn’t supposed to be calm like this, he wanted a fight. He said, “I’m taking tonight off,” a statement normally guaranteed to produce a battle.
But she only nodded and said, “If you like.”
“I’ll see you later, then,” he said and turned away to collect Amelia.
Who was not to be found.
Paz strode through the rooms, pushing past crowds that seemed to have grown thicker, and thicker, too, the odor of the candle and incense, and warmer the rooms. Sweat ran into his eyes and soaked the sides of his shirt. He called her name, he asked strangers if they had seen a little girl (pink shirt and jeans, pink sneakers) and got concerned but unhelpful looks, shakes of the head. With panic rising in him, he ran outside and looked up and down the block. The air felt wonderfully cool against his hot skin, but he plunged back into the heat and the noise, with his stomach lodged in his throat.
And found Amelia sitting peacefully on her grandmother’s lap, having bits of smeared yellow and green icing wiped from her mouth. She said, “Daddy, I got a piece with Orunmila’s name written on it.”
“That’s nice,” said Paz from an arid mouth. “Where were you? I was looking all over for you.”
“I was right here with Abuela all the time.”
Paz could not meet his mother’s glance. He would have sworn out a federal affidavit that he had been in this very room four times in the past ten minutes, and that it had contained neither Margarita Paz nor her small descendant.
Paz let Amelia sit in the shotgun seat of the Volvo like the irresponsible daredevil dad he was. The wife always made her sit in the backseat for that extra level of safety, but Paz as a cop had seen a lot more car wrecks than she had, and he thought that safetywise it was a toss-up. Also he liked having her up there with him. He himself had spent what seemed like years in the front seat of an old Ford pickup with a bright stainless catering rig on the bed, sans seat belt in an interior vaunting any number of steel edges capable of piercing young skulls. He had survived this, and such riding with his mother remained among his dearest memories of childhood.
He was now driving in a dreamlike state, more or less southward toward home, but when he reached the turnoff to South Miami he passed it by and headed farther south on Dixie Highway. I could keep going, he thought, down to the Keys, to Key West, the end of the road. He could get a boat and a hose-rig and dive for conch, and Amelia could sit up topside and mind the regulator. He could open a little shack and serve conch fritters to the tourists and drink a lot of rum and let Amelia take care of him. That was a kind of life. He knew guys who had it, and they seemed pretty happy until their livers crumpled or they went boating in their rusty old automobiles. He wanted a beer to go with these stupid thoughts.
He pulled into a truck stop just north of Perrine, at the point where suburban Miami fades into rough and rural. It comprised a squalid array of gas stalls and a low office/grocery made of peeling white concrete, somewhat
