Night of the Jaguar (18 page)

Jennifer didn’t know and said so. In fact, the question had never vexed her mind.

“I’ll tell you, then,” he said. “The cells of our body contain a chemical code that causes our bodies to make us and nothing else, out of food and water and air. And we reproduce, don’t we? But, of course, not exactly. Nigel and Jennifer, let us say, have a baby, but the baby is neither Nigel nor Jennifer. Reproduction is a shake of the dice, not even considering the little changes that creep in from errors of various sorts during reproduction. Most errors are bad for baby, but some few are good. The baby might be even more beautiful than Nigel, even more brilliant than Jennifer.”

A small blush covered Jennifer’s cheeks at this. He didn’t seem to notice but went on. “Now, it’s a fact of nature that there is never enough to go around. Every creature needs a place to live and the means of life, food, and so on, and these are always in short supply; so what may we expect, given any population of creatures?”

It was not a rhetorical question. Jennifer realized he was waiting for her answer, and that a shrug and an “I don’t know” were not adequate. It was a kind of game he was playing, in which he really believed that answers would somehow spring into her mind if she thought about them. It was a little frightening, but exciting, too. She reached into what she had always thought was an empty bag and to her surprise came up with “Some of them die? Because I was in this home once, and they were real poor, and the mom, Mrs. McGrath, liked one of the kids the best and fed her the most food, and the others didn’t get hardly anything. The state closed her down, though.”

“Very good. Mrs. McGrath was practicing artificial selection. Charles Darwin made a similar observation, and that’s how he came to invent the whole idea. But in nature there’s no state to close her down. So we have both a struggle for existence and small variations among creatures from the same parent, and what follows?”

A shorter pause this time. Jennifer thought about foster-care families, and horrible low-end day care centers, and nasty fights over bits of food. “Some will do okay and some won’t, so that after a while there’ll be more of the better ones.”

“Because…?”

“They’ll have more babies, and the babies will be like them. How they changed.”

“Very good. A near perfect statement of the theory of evolution by natural selection. But as they say, God is in the details. Or the devil. It’s all very well to think great thoughts about the origin of all things, but let’s see if we can figure out how tiny pieces of it actually evolve, a test, as it were, of the theory. Here we are fortunate in the fig wasp and the fig. You recall what I told you about the life of the Agaoniids? It was the day you found Moie in the Gardens.”

“No,” she said.

“Really? I thought I was being perfectly lucid.”

She had to look away. “I kind of tuned all that out. I’m sorry.”

After a moment, he said brightly, “Well, never mind. I’m sure you’ll absorb it, by and by. For the moment we have to get you keying out specimens. That means telling one tiny bug from another one that looks almost the same. She might even
be
the same to the eye but have important differences in her genes. You see, in these little wasps we have the opportunity—the privilege, I should say—of observing the generation of new species. Their mode of life is so tightly constrained, the evolutionary
niche,
as we call it, is so small, that evolution itself is, one might say, squirted out so that we can observe it in a short human life span. Are you game?”

Jennifer nodded. “Uh-huh.” He smiled, showing his yellow teeth. “Splendid! If you’ll step over here…” He left his desk and went to a long wooden table on the other side of the room, where stood a binocular teaching microscope with two sets of eyepieces, along with racks and racks of shallow specimen drawers. From a shelf he reached down a plastic-covered chart, dull with age and use, and set it up before her. They sat on lab stools. “Today we have naming of parts. ‘Japonica glistens like coral in all the neighboring gardens, and today we have naming of parts.’”

“Say what?”

“A poem, but never mind that. I meant that you have to learn the parts of the bug before you can use the keys. Now, this long thing is the antenna. The tip is called the radicle. Say it!”

She did.

“Next the pedicle. Say ‘pedicle’! Good. Next the annelli.”

And so on, she repeating the meaningless words as he proceeded from the antenna to the head itself, the wings, with their diagnostic patterns of veins, to the thorax, the legs and the gaster, ending with the long ovipositor, all the little shields, knobs, and spikes with which taxonomists classify the insect world. This took half an hour. Then Cooksey pointed with the tip of his pencil to the tip of the model’s antenna. “What is this, please?” he asked.

She didn’t know. The pencil twitched down the hair-thin appendage. Blank. Blank again.

“I can’t do it!” she wailed.

“Nonsense! Of course you can. You’re resisting because you associate learning with pain. You must relax and let the names flow into you. We are made for memory, my dear, and there is a fruitful plain in your head that just needs some water and some seed.”

“I’m too stupid.” She was about to break down sobbing, and she bit her lip hard to stop it.

“No, you’re not. If you were stupid you’d be dead, or a drug addict, or a prostitute, or have three children. Think about it!”

Jennifer did, and it was true. She had thought it was just dumb luck. Something popped in her head, like snorting a long, long line of cocaine. The world looked different, and she knew that, unlike a drug rush, it was a difference from which she would not come down.

“In any case,” Cooksey continued, “some of the stupidest people I know are invertebrate systematists with international reputations. Now, from the beginning. This is the radicle. Say…”

“Radicle,” she said. “Radicle.”

On the evening after Paz brought Amelia to the
ilé,
he and Lola had fought a major fight, and Paz hoped that it had been the main battle and not a mere carpet-bombing prelude to further assaults. Although it was a family principle to settle such things before retiring for the night, Lola had fled the field and locked herself in the bedroom she used as an office, whence he could hear the sound of weeping, of cursing, of small missiles being flung. An overreaction, he thought,
and said so through the door, but received no intelligible response. This in itself was unusual and worrying. Lola was not one to avoid discussion about emotional states; to the contrary, she doted upon them, long explorations into their separate and conjoined-in-marriage psyches until sometimes Paz felt like a specimen on a slide. He bore up, however, this being a part of his beloved, and thought himself a better husband for it.

Maybe that was part of the problem, he mused as he sat in the early-morning garden with a cup of Cuban coffee in his hand: maybe he had been a little
too
accommodating. He considered the house itself, their home. Her house originally, a typical Florida ranch house in South Miami, made of white-painted stuccoed concrete block with a gray tile roof and aqua-blue-painted steel hurricane awnings. Charmless as architecture, it was, however, old enough to be surrounded with well-grown foliage: a huge bougainvillea covered one side wall and part of the roof with purple blossoms, and the backyard was shaded by a large mango, beyond which was a good assortment of fruit trees—lime, orange, grapefruit, guava, avocado. Inside she had furnished it with spare Scandinavian wood and leather, fanciful or abstract pictures in mirror-steel frames, and rya rugs. Not his taste; he preferred old stuff, eccentric junk, the
Last Supper
on velvet—no, not really, but that was occasionally implied by the wife. His mother claimed the house looked like a doctor’s office.

Yes, the mother—that had come up, too, big-time. Paz reviewed what he could recall of the charges and countercharges while he waited for the coffee to kick in. He had come home drunk, had endangered the life of their precious by driving drunk. How could he? Well, first of all, four beers did not make drunk. Then the lecture from the doctor on alcohol impairment. Okay, guilty, never again, at which point the kid pipes up with guess where we were today, and tells all, the voodoo ceremony, the yams, the stinky smoke, worshipping at false idols,
plus
the visit to the ladies who kiss boys for money and Daddy was talking to that lady who came to dinner. Easily explained, of course, although not the card from Morgensen. Paz had idly tossed it out onto his dresser, and when the wife, that skilled researcher, had discovered it lying there it proved to have on its reverse a set of lips imprinted in red lipstick. That Beth! What a kidder! And so the story of Beth and Jimmy way
back when had to be told, or wrenched out, each perfectly honest statement out of Paz’s mouth sounding like a philanderer’s evasion. Paz was in the peculiar position of having done nothing wrong with Beth Morgensen but also secretly knowing he had wanted to,
still
wanted to, if it came to that, but
wouldn’t,
being an honest guy, but
might
if this kind of shit went on much longer, and who could blame him?

Not a profitable line of thought. He was squelching it when Lola emerged from the house, dressed in her usual T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers and carrying a canvas bag with her work clothes in it. She shot him a venomous look and strode on through the patio and out to the shed in the yard where she stored her bike.

“Good morning!” Paz called. No answer. She got the bike and was wheeling it to the driveway when Paz got up and intercepted her.

“Are you ever going to talk to me again?” he asked, grasping the handlebars.

“I’m still too angry. Let go of the bike, please.”

“No. Not until we talk.”

“I have to get to work,” she said, struggling to free the handlebars. “I have patients…”

“Let them die,” said Paz. “This is more important.” At this, she sighed ostentatiously and folded her hands across her breasts. “Okay, have it your way. Talk.”

“Okay, we had a fight, I apologized, and now it’s over. You forgive me and we move on, just like always.”

“It’s not as simple as that.”

“Explain the complexity.”

“I feel totally betrayed. I don’t know if I can trust you now.”

“What, because I had a couple of beers?”

“Don’t be smart! I still can’t believe that you took our daughter to a voodoo ceremony, fortune-telling and blood sacrifices and…and yams. Without even the courtesy of discussing it with me. Filling her head with frightening toxic nonsense. How could you!”

“It’s not voodoo, Lola, as you know. I wish you’d stop calling Santería voodoo. It’s insulting.”

“It’s the same thing.”

“Right, like Catholic and Jewish is the same because they both
come from Palestine. I explained all this to you last night. It’s not a conspiracy. It was spur of the moment. Margarita was there, and Amy asked me, and I didn’t see the harm in—”

“It’s ridiculous barbaric nonsense. You don’t even
believe
in it!”

“Maybe that’s true, but my mother does, and I have to respect that. And Amy only has the one grandmother, and they love each other, and I’m not going to stand up and tell her her grandmother is full of shit because she follows the
santos
. It’s part of her culture, just like science, just like medicine.”

“Except medicine is real. That’s a slight difference. Medicine doesn’t cause nightmares in little girls.”

Something in her tone, a higher pitch, a shake in the voice, made Paz stop and examine his wife more closely. This stridency was not like her at all; a joke, a light mockery, was more in her line when discussing the peculiarities of his culture.

“What’s going on, Lola? This can’t just be about Santería. We been married seven years, and you never went nuts about it before.”

There
was
something wrong. She was not meeting his eye, and Lola was ordinarily a major fan of eye contact. “Maybe,” he added lightly, “you should’ve married a Jewish doctor after all.”

“Oh, and a little sneaky anti-Semitism added to the mix now? Look, I absolutely have to leave now or I’ll be late for rounds.”

Somewhat stunned at this last interchange, Paz lifted his hands. She jumped up on the bike and rolled clicking down the shell driveway.

Later that morning, Paz was at work in the restaurant, having deposited his daughter at school without incident and without discussion of any bad dreams. She had summoned him (he lying awake alone in the marriage bed) with a shrill cry in the night, and he had arrived at her side to find her still in a sense asleep, but whimpering and shaking, eyes open but unseeing—terrifying. Paz had neglected to mention this episode to the resident psychiatrist: Lola had (mercifully) slept through the whole thing. Nor did he intend to.

Paz was preparing yuca, a tedious task, which he now welcomed. The yuca is a pillar of Cuban cuisine, but it is a tricky tuber, devious like life itself, Paz was now thinking. It has an ugly rough bark, which
must be removed, and then the toxic green underskin must be carefully stripped off, without losing too much yuca. It bleeds a white liquid while this is happening. The core must also be removed, as it is inedible. Paz, too, felt stripped and bleeding, and he knew there was something poisonous at his own core. He laughed out loud.
The Yuca Way to Personal Growth,
a book he might write:
A Cuban Line-Cook’s Guide to Enlightenment.

He prepped a bushel of yuca and then ran it through a food processor. The sludge would be the basis of Guantanamera’s famous conch ’n’ crab fritters and also a new dish Paz was trying out, deep-fried prawns in yuca batter mixed with rum. He made a handful of these, adjusted the flavorings, shared samples with the rest of the kitchen crew, took counsel, and then played with seasonings and the temperature of the deep fryer. By eleven he’d decided it was good enough to serve as a special with a raw jicama salad, and so informed the waitstaff. His mother was absent, so there were no arguments that yuca tempura prawns had not been thought of in Cuba in 1956 and hence were not to be served in her restaurant. But where was she? She’d gone to pick up Amelia at the usual time. A little tick of concern started, which was quickly submerged in the violent amnesia of the lunch rush.