The Mistress of Spices (30 page)

“My days took on a silent, submarine quality as I prepared myself for my future. People receded from me, and I let them go gladly. The friends who scoffed or tried to incite me to fight, the teachers who discussed me in amazed whispers in the staff lounge, even my mother who watched me thankfully but without understanding. They were merely distractions, ripples on a distant surface which had little to do with my life. I would feel the same way about my classmates in college.

“This is what I discovered about myself in college: I understood money effortlessly, its strange logic. How it came, how it grew, its ebbs and flows. I delighted in its secret language. I had a knack for investments, and even in those first days—I was still a student—when I started playing the market I knew exactly what to buy and when to sell.”

“And did it bring you the power you dreamed of?”

My American looks down at the lines of his hands, then
into my eyes. “It brought me power, yes. And a—
solidity
. I could see why in the old tales the giants were always counting their gold. It assured them that they were real. There’s a headiness to money-power, the feeling that everything in the world is there for you to pick up and examine, choose or discard, like you might do with fruit at a produce stand. And you’ll be amazed at how many things you can buy, and people too. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy that.

“From the beginning I decided that I’d have fun with my money. I gathered around me all the things I thought would bring me that fun. You would probably think them infantile, coming as you do from a less materialistic culture.”

I let it pass. Another time, Raven, I think, we will discuss this. (But Tilo, Mistress of only a few hours more, when will that be.)

“I realize now that they were a poor boy’s fantasy of the rich life, gleaned from glossies and TV shows. Yachts, penthouse apartments, Porsches, Gucci underwear, vacations on the Riviera or at Vegas. All the stereotypes. People who’ve always been rich probably spend their money quite differently. But I didn’t care, and none of the new friends (if you could call them that) who gathered around me seemed to mind.”

“What about your mother?”

Sharp silence, like a shard of glass between us. Then Raven says, “When I made my first million I sent my mother a check for a hundred thousand dollars. It was the first time I’d corresponded with her since I left home. Oh, she’d write to me, not often but regularly, telling me what she was doing. Nothing exciting-church bazaars, planting petunias in the spring, getting the house
painted, things like that. After a while the letters would come and I’d leave them unopened. Sometimes they’d get misplaced before I read them. I never wrote back.

“Why should I, I told myself. There’s nothing between us anymore. But I think I wasn’t quite honest with myself. Somewhere in the back of my mind I wanted to show her that I’d done what she wanted to better than she ever had. I’d made it in a world she couldn’t even dream of being part of. That’s why I sent her the check, and with it a photo of myself and a bunch of friends—including my latest girl—at a beach house I’d just bought down in Malibu. It was to be the ultimate punishment.”

He gives a harsh laugh. “Well, the letter came back with a red stamp saying they couldn’t find anyone to deliver it to. And when I thought back, I couldn’t remember when her last letter had arrived.

“A couple years later, after some other things had happened, I made a trip back to the old neighborhood—something I’d never thought I’d do again. A Chicano family was living in our house. They told me they’d been there for quite a while. No, they didn’t know where the woman who sold them the house had moved to.

“I never did catch up with her, though I tried. I called around, asked the ladies at her church, even hired a detective for a time. I thought of going up to her folks—not that I was sure where that was, but I could have found out. But I couldn’t make myself. You know how certain childhood phobias can rule your life. So I persuaded myself they wouldn’t have known any more than I did.”

Ah Raven. I am wondering if you still search for her in all women, the lost mother. Forever beautiful forever young.

“I needed to tell her so many things,” says Raven. “That I was sorry for my earlier coldness, that I understood, at least a little, why she’d left her home and denied who she was.” He sighs. “I wanted to say, Let’s try to forgive each other and start over. And most of all I wanted to tell her about my dream. Because she might have known what it meant. After all, her grandfather had taught her, and you don’t forget those things even if you try.”

“What dream?” I say. My mouth is dry. Tilo, says my pounding heart, this is it.

But Raven continues as though he had not heard. “Things changed somehow when that letter was returned to me. Without my mother to show it to, my golden life seemed to lose some of its glitter. Some mornings, lying in bed next to my sleeping girlfriend, I’d feel boredom, just a twinge of it, like the first signs of age in one’s muscles. It frightened me.

“To counter that boredom, I began to take risks. First on the market—but I couldn’t seem to lose. Everything I touched went higher and higher, and there was no excitement there. Then I turned to physical things—whitewater rafting, skydiving. I even went on a trip down the Amazon. But that wasn’t satisfying either. There’d be a few moments of adrenaline rush, and next an irritated tiredness with a question pushing through it:
What the hell am I doing here
.

“Then one of my friends brought the mushrooms.

“I’d never been into drugs before. I’m not pretending virtue—I had nothing against providing them at parties. But I looked down on the people who took them. I thought of them as weak. It was distasteful to watch them come down from their high, to see
them dragging through the rest of their lives until the next one. The way they behaved when the craving was on them. And no matter what they claimed I never knew a single one who wasn’t in the grip of their drug of choice. Now that I was free (or so at least I believed) from all that I had once leaned on, I wasn’t about to take on a new dependency for the sake of a few moments of questionable delight.

“But the mushrooms, claimed my friend, were different. They were potent and sacred, not a commercial drug at all. You couldn’t buy them from a dealer, not for love or money. He’d managed to get hold of these only because he was lucky enough to possess a friend, an Indian from Guatemala, where they used these during special ceremonies to induce trances.

“You won’t believe the visions, said my friend. It’ll be like you died and went to heaven, only better. Ecstasy, acid, none of them can hold a candle to this one. And safe. Safe as mother’s milk.

“I was intrigued. Not that I had much trust in this particular friend’s capacities, mental or ethical. Still, all that talk of visions and Indians went straight to the vulnerable part of me that I tried to believe no longer existed.

I’d maintained a surreptitious interest in Indians all through college. Whenever there was a campus event involving them, I’d go sit in the back and watch. Earnest young men and women dressed neatly and formally spoke to us about the importance of the Native American Rights Fund or described the work being done by the United American Tribal Youth. I appreciated their struggles and admired their energy, but try as I might, I didn’t feel I was one of them, not in the gut-wrenching way I’d felt it on
my great-grandfather’s porch. And for all their knowledge of tradition and history, their lives seemed as bland, as lacking in mystery as mine.

“And so something leaped in me when my friend handed me the mushrooms.

I didn’t show it, of course. By now I was a master at hiding what I felt. I’d discovered that that was an important part of being powerful. I tossed the packet of mushrooms in a drawer, spoke a perfunctory word of thanks, handed him some money over which he protested profusely, and waited for him to leave. But as soon as the door closed after him I took them out. They were black and shrunken in my palm, and of an old rubbery texture. A strange excitement came over me as I looked at them, a feeling that perhaps at last I was back at the door which connected two worlds, the way I had been when my great-grandfather died.”

His breath grows quick and shallow, remembering. And mine, in fear of what is to come. I know of such substances. The Old One spoke to us about them many times.
Daughters, they will show you the forbidden, and in that showing break apart your mind
.

“My friend had told me that evening was a better time for the experience, but I couldn’t hold back. I put the first one in my mouth and chewed. It was the worst thing I’d ever tasted. He’d warned me about that—no pain, no gain, he’d said—but I hadn’t expected this—bitter is not the word for it—this vileness. I had to use all my willpower not to spit it out.

“Then I waited.

“Fifteen minutes max, my friend had said, and you’ll be zooming, but nothing happened.

“After half an hour I chewed another mushroom—it seemed less disgusting this time. I guess that’s the nature of repeated assault. After another half hour I took two more.

Nothing.

I was furious at being cheated. I went to the bathroom to wash out my mouth. Next I was going to call my friend—make that ex-friend—and have a few words with him. If he showed a reluctance to return my money I was prepared to phone certain gentlemen who had offered their services to me for just such tiresome situations. You’re shocked? I told you I’d hide nothing. This was the black side of the life of power I lived. Will you think too badly of me when I say that I found it as attractive as the other?”

I shake my head, I Tilo who know more than enough about the pull of darkness.

“I splashed water onto my face and looked in the mirror. And saw—no, nothing horrifying like you might expect, a monster head, or someone with snakes crawling from his mouth. And yet it
was
horrifying.”

“What was it?”

“Just myself, but when I looked in my eyes, they were dead. Dead eyes looking back at me. It struck me then that my life had been a total waste.”

“Why a waste, Raven?”

“Because in all my adult remembering I had not made anyone truly happy, nor been happy myself.”

American, the truth of what you speak strikes close. In the lightning flash of it I must re-examine my own life. I who pride myself on having fulfilled so many people’s desires, how happy have I made them? How happy have I made myself?

Raven continues, “My eyes showed me my heart, and it too was dead. What use was it, then, to keep this body, this sack of excrement, alive? I looked for something with which to end it. Nothing in the bathroom, so I started toward the kitchen for a knife.

“On the way the cramps hit me. I doubled over with the pain, vomiting. I vomited until there was nothing left, until it felt like I would throw up my guts. Between bouts of retching I remember thinking, At least I won’t have to kill myself, this’ll do it, I briefly wondered if my ‘friend’ had known this would happen, and had done it purposely. And then I passed out.

“I woke in the hospital. My housekeeper had found me the next morning and called the ambulance. They’d pumped my stomach, but it was too late to do much good. Some of the poison I’d vomited out, but some had spread through the system. I was lucky to be alive, they said. I had to smile at the irony of that. They kept me under close observation.

“I was feverish and sweaty in turns, and in between I shivered violently. My palms were clammy and my throat dry as sand. That was the worse part. I couldn’t drink anything because the doctors were afraid it would start the retching again. They’d put an IV in me but it didn’t help with the thirst. I couldn’t stop thinking of water, water in tall, cool glasses, water in pitchers and buckets, vats full of water that I could cup in my hands and drink and drink.

“Somewhere in that thirsty night the dream came.

“I stood on a hill of ashes amid a lake of fire while a searing wind blew over me. Grit of ash was in my mouth and nose, choking my throat. There was a smell like singed flesh all around. The thirst was worse than ever. I burned from it, literally, for
when I looked down my body was blistered and crisped, like my father’s must have been under the bandages. The pain was so great I couldn’t stand it. Help me, I cried through cracked lips. Someone help me. But no one approached me who had cut myself off from the human race in my heart and gloried in it. I knew then that there was one solution alone left to me. Death. And so I threw myself off the hilltop into the burning lake, and even as I fell I wondered, What if I don’t die, what if I continue to burn? “That was when the raven came.

“I don’t know where it came from, but it swooped to catch me in its wings. It was more beautiful than ever before, and its feathers glistened a rich blueblack with each wingbeat. As it soared, the rush of air on my face wiped off the stench of burning flesh. Ah, it was the best thing I’d ever felt. There was a song in my ear, harsh but not bitter, filled with strength, the bird’s voice. I realized it was giving me its name. I closed my eyes, drank it down, and my thirst receded.

“When I opened them the raven was gone, and I was in the place I told you of. Eucalyptus and pine, California quail, deer. Crags and ravines filled with sweet water which I drank without craving. A place of wildness and wet, to labor in and grow strong and pure again. A place with no people to spoil it. Then I woke up.

“I’m not sure what the dream means. Perhaps my mother could have told me. Can you?” But I do not know.

“It’s a real place,” says Raven. “I’m sure of that. It’s the place where my happiness lies. I think that’s what the bird came to tell me. To stop wasting my life on trivialities and find it. To go
back to the old ways, the ways of the earth before it was spoiled. To the earthly paradise.

“Only, I didn’t know how to get there. I went into the wilderness a number of times, with guides, then later alone. Found a lot of beautiful solitary places, but none that touched me like the place of my dream.

“Slowly I lost heart and convinced myself that it had been just a fever-hallucination. I resigned myself to living—if you could call it that—in a world from which the magic has been drained away.”