Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (70 page)

“You don’t speak to her?”

“You don’t know?” Cuco frowned. He looked at the remains of our lunch, moving one of the bread crumbs with a thick index finger into a puddle of water. It floated a little and then he crushed it. “She defected,” he said, obviously ashamed. “At the last Pan-American Games, she disappeared. We heard she was in Miami.” He sighed and returned his gaze to me. “They don’t tell you about me, but they tell me about you. He tells me,” he nodded toward Francisco, counting his change, still talking in great good humor with one of what he calls “the
Gusanos,”
the worms who deserted Cuba in her hour of need. “He says you are a great man in this country.”

“He doesn’t mean that as a compliment.”

“Yes. He does. He says you are a great doctor. He says you work for the poor. He says you could be wealthy and treat only the privileged classes, but you fight for the black children. That is what he says of you.”

I couldn’t answer right away. I found myself watching Francisco. Another man had come up to the register and now there was a three-way conversation going. I didn’t look at Cuco when I said, “I betrayed him.”

“Yo sé,”
Cuco whispered. “My mother told me what you did. She didn’t forgive you.” He grunted bitterly, presumably at this irony, and then continued, “But he does. He says you don’t want to be a Neruda, but you have no choice. You can’t escape your blood.”

“What?” I couldn’t help myself from chuckling at Francisco’s melodramatic narcissistic fantasy. I forgot about studying him, and instead looked at my brother. I put a hand on his bicep. I was startled by the size and strength of his muscle.

“He says, you
are
a Neruda.” Cuco was grave. And his eyes were sad. “That is a compliment.”

I understood the sadness. I kept my hand on his powerful arm. “So are you,” I said.

It was Cuco’s turn to watch Francisco talking. We could hear the music of our father’s voice, not the individual notes. Eyes on Francisco, Cuco asked, softly, “You think I am?” And then asked me again, this time with his wounded eyes.

“Oh yes.” I nodded. “We’re both Nerudas.”

When Diane returned she said, “Sally’s got messages for you.” Francisco had finished talking with his new pals and was headed our way.

“Anything urgent?”

“They’re
your
messages,” Diane said with mock primness. “I told Sally you’ll call back.”

I went to the pay phone. My messages weren’t urgent, but one alarmed me anyway. Phil Samuel had called to ask if I wanted a copy of his new study. He could fax it or mail it. If the latter, he wanted to know whether he ought to send it to my home address.

“That’s weird,” Sally commented.

“Did he leave his number?”

“Yeah. Do you have a pen?”

I copied the number down on an old American Express receipt I found in my wallet. The phone was next to the two restroom doors. I looked back and saw Diane waiting for me. I decided to call Phil later.

Grandpa was already in the back seat of the car, head resting on Cuco’s shoulder, asleep. Francisco stood on the curb. The sun blinded me as I got near, gleaming off the chrome trim of Pepín’s Buick. While I blinked at him, Francisco said, “Unless you have an objection, I’ll arrange for my father to go in next month. He seems to like
it.”

“You’re staying until he’s settled?”

“Yes, of course,” Francisco said haughtily.

“Remember,” Diane said, “if you transfer all his assets to you, then Medicaid picks up the bills. Otherwise they’ll clean him out first.”

Francisco squinted at the shimmering windows of the restaurant. “I don’t know …”

Diane touched his arm. “I’ll get the name of someone down here who can advise you how to handle it. There’s no reason for his life savings to be wasted. You and Cuco should have it, that’s what your father would want.”

“There’s no legal danger,” I said.

“What?” Francisco’s tone was sharp, ready to discipline. “Who said I was worried about trouble with the law?”

“You didn’t, I just—” I began.

He cut me off. “Do you have reservations for a flight tonight?”

“We’re going back tonight?” Diane asked me.

“I haven’t had a chance to make reservations,” I said to my father.

“We should stay until tomorrow,” Diane said.

For the first time he was cold to her. “No,” he said, opening the rear passenger door, “you’re leaving tonight.”

We rode in silence. Grandpa didn’t wake up when we stopped in his driveway. Cuco called his name several times, but not until he gently eased the old head off his shoulder, did Pepín’s eyes open. “Are we here?” he said in Spanish. He peered at the overgrown azalea bushes he used to trim every weekend. “But this is my house,” he continued.

“Yes, we’re home,” Cuco said.

Pepín asked plaintively, “Aren’t we going to the old people’s home?”

I stayed behind the wheel, silent, unable to move. Francisco didn’t reply or shift his eyes from staring ahead at his father’s porch. While they helped him out of the car, Cuco and Diane explained to Pepín that we had already been to the nursing homes. Pepín remembered as they shut the rear door. “They were nice,” I heard him say as it slammed. We were alone in the car, becoming uncomfortably hot the instant its air-conditioning was off.

“Life is hateful,” my father said with quiet conviction, seemingly to himself. I heard him pull on the door handle and quickly, faster than I could think to stop myself, I touched his arm.

“Wait,” I said. Out of the corner of my eye I watched him let go of the handle. I removed my hand. I didn’t have the courage to look at him. Nor did he want to see me. We faced forward, watching Cuco and Diane guide Pepín up the steps. Diane glanced back at one point, noted us, and moved on. Cuco also gave us a hard look while he held the door for them to enter, and again as he shut it behind him.

“Well?” my father demanded. “In a few minutes, we’ll suffocate in here.”

“Do you want me to turn the air on?”

“No. Just say what you have to say.”

“I was a very disturbed child,” I said, letting go of the wheel, my hands feeling the sloping dash. The vinyl was warm to the touch and the sun bleached my hands.

“There’s no reason to go over all that,” my father said impatiently, but without rancor. “You’re sorry. I know. You wrote that in your letters. Of course you’re sorry. I believe you. Is that it?” He shifted closer to the door, ready to leave.

“I was ten years old, Dad. My mother had committed—”

He cut me off quickly, fearfully I felt, but also in a declaiming voice, as if he were making a speech. “This is a new thing that’s happened here. I was amazed when I picked up
Newsweek
at the airport. And I found some of this nonsense in the
Nation
magazine. I mean, it’s everywhere, even the
New York Review of Books.
And television, too. All those silly chat shows. Not chat, I don’t mean chat—”

“Talk shows.”

“That’s right. They call them talk shows. God. It’s hilarious, their idea of talk. I mean, it just saturates the culture.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. I rested my forehead against the steering wheel, neck exposed, and indeed, felt ready for decapitation.

“You
don’t
?” He was so emphatic I had the illusion I felt his breath on my cheek. “You really don’t? Well, it makes sense. If you live surrounded by it, and it’s part of your work too, of course, so … Well, we’re all creatures of our time and place. I suppose I can’t blame you for falling for it.”

“Please,” I begged the odometer. “Just say what you mean.”

“I
mean
this nonsense that no one is responsible for their actions. Everything is excusable because of its supposed root cause. It’s as if we were to decide Hitler had a perfect right to murder twelve million people in the camps because, after all, he was traumatized as a boy. Probably it was a Communist who rejected him when he applied to be an architect. Or was it a Jew? Anyway, that was abuse, wasn’t it? Or perhaps his father spanked him when he got poor grades and it was a Jew who gave him the F, so naturally he had to kill six million of them. You know, I can’t forgive the WASPs for what they did to Latin America, or their terrible arrogance about making money, as if it were a sacred act, a duty performed for God, but there was one thing you can give those Episcopalians, when they fucked up they believed it was their fault, not their toilet training.”

I turned to look at him, my head still resting on the wheel. My skin squeaked against the fake leather. Francisco’s face was flushed, eyes alive, staring through the window but not seeing what was there, a look of abstraction I remembered from my childhood. He wasn’t in Tampa with me. He was debating somewhere else, to a grander audience. “You were the one who taught me that the simpleminded morality of society isn’t the truth.”

“What?” He looked at me, annoyed. I had called him down from the thrilling heights.

“You were the one who taught me that property is theft, that ignorance isn’t stupidity, that slavery didn’t end with the Civil War, that—”

“Look.” Francisco waved a finger at me. He probably wished he had a rolled newspaper. “Of course. Of course. Everybody knows that. Only a cretin, a reactionary cretin, believes laws are the natural order, instead of rules made by the winner. But let’s say it happens one day. I mean, it’s laughable to say right now, but let’s say one day the earth is one government, a perfect communist world, with an abundance of goods, power completely decentralized, everything shared, everything democratic. There will still be thieves. There will still be criminals. I don’t know. Maybe it’s only ten percent of the population, maybe it’s five, maybe it’s twenty. Doesn’t matter. There will always be criminals. All of them,” he nodded toward Nebraska Avenue, empty now in the midday sun, but the night inhabitants were easy to recall, the whores and drug dealers and addicts—“all of those godforsaken people aren’t criminals. Some of them are without hope, without any reason to care. But some of them are bad, that’s all, pure and simple. And the same is true for the ruling classes. Many of them do what they do because they think it’s right. Some of them are scum who love to rule others. What people do, in the end, in their personal lives, is their responsibility. Understanding history doesn’t mean individuals aren’t to blame. It’s an incredible phenomenon what’s happening here. I don’t understand it. Politically, I mean.”

“Sure you do,” I mumbled. Sighing, I raised my head from the wheel, trying to straighten out. I was going to have to move on, get reservations, fly to New York, forget last night and today, call Phil Samuel, finish the book on Joseph’s work, get married, have children, age and die … I needed to sit up straight, look forward, and drive on, without clemency or pardon. “Of course Americans don’t want to accept responsibility for anything. We can’t, or we won’t, solve our problems on a social scale. It’s easier to go to a shrink than to rebuild our infrastructure.”

“So that’s what you think.” Francisco shifted in his seat. Sweat rolled down the sides of his temples.

“Do you want me to turn on the air?”

“Let’s open the windows.”

We rolled them down. Francisco breathed in Tampa’s warm pollution and sneezed. A finger under his nose he asked, “Then how can you be a psychiatrist?”

“I don’t treat those people, I treat …” I sighed. My father’s point of view, his impatience with child abuse, wasn’t as unusual as he liked to believe. People just don’t know. They hadn’t sat with me for all those hours, not with criminals trying to get a lighter sentence, not with celebrities looking for a hook to their autobiographies, but with the broken bodies and the lonely eyes of the abandoned. I sighed again and found my father regarding me with genuine curiosity, waiting for me to answer, perhaps for the first time in thirty years, actually prepared to listen. “I can’t make racism go away, Dad. I can’t convince my fellow citizens that owning a Mercedes isn’t as satisfying as having a just world. But I can pull a few of their discards out of the sewer and try to wash them clean.”

Francisco smiled with his lips closed, a gentle smile of regret and, I fancied, a smile of forgiveness. “You can’t change the world a person at a time.”

“I don’t think I can change the world, Dad.”

He turned away, looking at his childhood home. “What you mean is: the world can’t be changed. That’s what you think Cuba proves. That’s what you think this”—he gestured to the barred houses and the baking, empty streets—“this so-called triumph of capitalism proves. But you’re wrong.” He rolled up his window and opened the door. He put one foot out, then twisted his torso back in my direction, showing his handsome face, convinced of his command of me. “I’m seventy-four years old and I can assure you, the world can be changed. It
has
been changed. It’s been changed for the worse.”

C
HAPTER
F
IFTEEN
Catastrophic Failure

“I
DON‘T THINK YOU‘RE GOING TO FIND THE PEDIATRICIAN STUDY TO BE
good news,” Phil told me when I reached him at home on Sunday. Diane was out, having brunch with an old friend. I sat on the couch, morosely watching the weekly television news roundup shows, listening to reporters and columnists pretend they were historians or psychics, making sweeping judgments about the importance of yesterday’s presidential news conference or equally confident predictions about the year ahead. (When the Berlin Wall came down none of them had been able to imagine a single brick would be chipped merely a few weeks before the event. Watching Tom & Jerry cartoons would have told me more about our political future.)

“Why is that?” I asked Phil, my finger on the remote’s mute button, wondering why Sam Donaldson didn’t spend more money on his toupee. At least, I hoped it was a toupee.

“Well, the best thing is for you to read it and you should look at one of the videos. I’ll send a video too, okay?”

“Sure. But give me the short version. What did you find?”