Anatomy of Fear

49

We walked six blocks, my grandmother nervously playing with a strand of rosary beads. We turned onto 118th Street and I saw it, the bótanica. It looked like a junk shop, signs in English for party favors and gifts mixed in with hand-painted lettering in Spanish.

“It looks closed,” I said, with a sense of relief. A part of me wanted to run.

“No para nosotros.” My grandmother rapped on the window. “I know the consejos espirituales. She is expecting us, and she will help.”

A moment later a big dark-skinned woman opened the door.

“Nato,” said my grandmother. “This is Maria Guerrero.”

Guerrero, the Spanish word for warrior. She looked it.

“Entra, mi hijo.” She put her hand on my arm to steer me in.

Inside, the place was small, crowded with herbal remedies, statuary, glass-encased candles, fake flowers and real ones, a large plastic Madonna beside one painted black. There were rows of multicolored beaded necklaces hanging from hooks above mundane religious articles one could find in a Christian gift shop. On the floor near the door, a shrine with cowrie shells not unlike the one I’d created at home. A few weeks ago I would have been shaking my head and sighing, but I had just made my own Eleggua, so how could I?

“You know Quincy Jones?” asked Maria Guerrero. “A very nice man. He comes whenever he is in Nueva York.” She smiled, showing two front teeth plated with gold. “My customers are black and white, Catholics and Jews. Only two days ago, a rabbi. I am a Catholic, but I welcome all people. But I am also a santera, and before that an espiritista. I was born an espiritista.” She looked me over and said she was glad I was wearing a white shirt or she would have made me change. I remembered what my abuela had said the last time about my white shirt, and I knew white was an important color for Santeria, the bóveda referred to as the Mesa Blanca, the white table, a color of purity, empowerment, associated with Obatala, the sculptor of human form, all the lessons my abuela had taught me coming back to me.

Maria Guerrero laid her hand on my chest and told me there was much pain in my heart. At first I flinched, but she kept it there for several minutes and I began to relax, the warmth from her hand spreading through me. Then she touched my forehead and asked how long I had suffered from dolor de cabeza.

“Headache,” my grandmother translated.

How did she know?

She recommended tea made from rosemary, plucked a statue off the Mesa Blanca, Saint Jude, patron of the hopeless, waved him over my head, and said, “For the dolor de cabeza.” It seemed ridiculous, but seconds later my headache disappeared. I touched my head, trying to locate the pain that had been there a moment ago.

“Muy bien,” she said, and was right. I was much better.

But how was it possible?

She closed her eyes and said, “Dios está en la atmósfera.”

“God is in the air,” said my grandmother.

I looked around the shop, at the beads and candles, dusty shelves crowded with herbal remedies and statuary, my rational brain still protesting. There isn’t room for God among this mess.

Maria Guerrero said, “This is no bilongo.”

“Witchcraft,” said my grandmother and frowned at me.

Then the espiritista said it was time, and my grandmother handed her a wad of bills. I didn’t know how much, but the bill on the outside was a twenty and the wad was thick; it could have been a couple of hundred. I was appalled, but my grandmother gave me a look and I didn’t say anything.

Maria Guerrero led us into the back room. It was stark and simple, in contrast to the packed storefront-white walls dotted with a few pictures of saints and a Mesa Blanca, the focal point, with plastic saints, glasses of water, a wooden crucifix wrapped with beads, angel figurines, books, and candles waiting to be lit.

I was trying hard to be open-minded-was it really any different from a church, a synagogue, a Buddhist temple?-but a part of me was still resisting, having trouble giving myself over, believing.

“Is importante to believe.” Maria Guerrera touched my head, then my heart.

It was as if she’d just read my mind. She smiled, then excused herself.

When she was out of the room I turned to my grandmother. “You gave her money.”

“Por supuesto. She is working. It is the derecho, and expected.”

“This is crazy, ulea.”

My grandmother put a finger to my lips and told me to be “tranquilo,” that Maria Guerrero would hear me. Then she took my hand and held it firmly. “There are things we do not understand, Nato. Things that are not easy to explain because they come from another place, el más alto, from the espiritus. But when we see them we start to believe. You must believe.” She looked into my eyes. “Sometimes it is necessary to believe in something to get out of something else, entiendes?”

I didn’t know if I understood or not. I had spent a lifetime of not believing. Could I start believing now? I took a couple of deep breaths and tried to relax. My grandmother squeezed my hand, sending support and love while trying to telegraph her entire belief system into my being. I could see it in her face, every muscle constricted with concentration.

Maria Guerrero returned wearing a white smock. In her right hand she was holding a knife.

I took a step backward.

“The cuchilla,” she said softly. “Used to cut through problems.” She laid it on the Mesa Blanca and picked up one of the books. “Colección de Oraciones escogidas,” she said, and my abuela translated, “Prayer book.”

She crushed some powdered incense into a small iron pot and lit it, whisked the smoke into the air, handed me a box of wooden matches, and asked me to light two white candles on the table.

My hands were shaking, but I did.

She recited a prayer from the book, turned off the lights, and the room took on a warm glow. She touched my hands and they stopped shaking; tapped my forehead and my thoughts stopped racing; drew her fingers across my chest and my breathing and heartbeat slowed. Then she said she was going to perform a limpia, a ritual cleansing. She sent my grandmother into the front of the bótanica. She came back with an aerosol dispenser decorated with a bird and a Native American in full feather headdress, the words CAST OFF EVIL printed on the label. She gave it to Maria Guerrero, who sprayed it toward the ceiling, the altar, and finally on me. It didn’t have any detectable scent and it seemed like nothing but bottled air with a fancy label.

But I felt something, a sense of being physically lighter, as if I’d lost weight or someone had lifted something off my chest.

Then she started lighting the other candles, and explained they were for “protección,” brown to ward off ill will, the black to help me against my enemies. I tried hard to believe her. I wanted it to be true.

She closed her eyes. “I see a man and he means to do you harm. And I see a corona.”

“He’s wearing a crown?” I asked.

“No.” She shook her head, eyes still closed. “Not on the man. The corona is…está dentro del circulo.”

The crown symbol in The White Man’s Bible that had appeared in my grandmother’s vision and in the crime scene drawing.

There were things to be done, she said, and sprinkled me with powders and pungent herbs and spoke of Eleggua, who would either open or close the roads for me, and I thought: Please open them. She told me to stop eating red meat and potato chips-and how she knew I lived on burgers and chips I didn’t know, but she was making a believer out of me. She said I had to change my life patterns, start eating well and exercising, stop drinking beer and engaging in premarital sex. That last one got to me, but I nodded. She slipped a beaded necklace around my neck. “Un collar,” she said. As she did, the muscles in my neck eased in a way they had not in weeks.

She asked me to take off my shirt, and when I hesitated my grandmother started tugging it out of my waistband like I was a kid, so I took it off and stood before the two women feeling vulnerable and naked.

Maria Guerrero broke an egg into a pitcher of water and poured it over my neck. It oozed down my back and chest. I shivered, a kind of electric energy coursing through my body. Maybe it was nerves, but I didn’t think so. It was unlike anything I’d ever felt before, anything I had ever experienced.

Then she snapped blossoms off gladiolas, crushed them in her hands and rubbed them onto my chest. There was a slight burning sensation, not unpleasant, but it sent more shivers rippling through my body, and my gut churned.

“Somos parte de la naturaleza,” said Maria Guerrero, talking about plants versus people, and how human beings were consumed with vanity and how I had to give up my ego or I would be in trouble.

My desire to believe was battling with my doubt and cynicism, and standing there covered in slimy water, crushed flowers over my heart, the room began to spin, pictures of saints coming in and out of focus, and I thought I might faint. The women took hold of my arms. My grandmother hummed an old lullaby she’d sing to me when I was a boy and Maria Guerrero mumbled some Spanish incantation, and I started to feel better, the dizziness abating, my mind clearing, stomach settling.

Maria Guerrero cleaned the egg off my chest with my white shirt. She rolled it into a ball and told me I had to dump it into a trash bin as soon as I left the store, that the shirt had absorbed the evil spirits, and I must now cast them off. Then she prepared a jar of water with crushed herbs and colored it with a blue dye and told me that over the next week I was to pour portions of it over my hands and it would keep me safe and pure.

When she was quiet I asked a question. “This man who you saw, the one who wants to do me harm, how do I find him?”

Maria Guerrero opened my sketch pad and looked at my drawings.

“Tienes un talento,” she said. “You can see things other people tell you and you can see this man.” She reached out with her fingertips and gently closed my eyes.

When she did, he was there. But just for a second. Like the burning man I’d seen with Denton, but much faster.

“He was there,” I said. “But he’s vanished.”

Maria Guerrero took one of my pencils and swirled it over the votive candles. Then she handed it to me and I started to draw.

Time became elastic, impossible to gauge. I just kept working, the image coming to me.

When I looked at my drawings, I had done it. He was there. On the page.

I was amazed, speechless, staring at this face I had drawn: the tightly knit brows, the taut scowling mouth, all the facial anatomy conspiring to create a classic face of anger to the point of fury and hatred.

“You have seen this man,” said Maria Guerrero. It wasn’t a question and she was right-I had seen him.

“But where?” I had no idea.

“Eleggua will open the road,” she said. “Es tuyo. Tú lo tienes.”

He is yours now. You have him.

What I always said to victims but never fully believed until this moment.

“You will no longer see him in your mind,” she said.

“But how will I find him?” I asked.

“In your own way,” she said.

Outside, I tossed my stained white shirt into a garbage can and felt another wave of unexpected relief. I walked my grandmother home, jacket buttoned up against the cold and to hide the fact that I was shirtless. I kept trying to remember where I had seen the man I had just drawn.

“Para empezar,” my grandmother said. “You are trying too hard. Deja que suceda.”

I knew she was right, but I couldn’t stop.

At the entrance to her apartment building she told me she was proud of me and loved me, that she would pray to Jesus for me. She was going to change clothes now and go to church. Then she kissed my cheek and made the sign of the cross.