“Not when it was really love. Half a dozen? Make that two. Three. One felt like love but it was only narcissism. Serious love did arrive, but it went away.”
“Where is she now?”
“We don’t stay in touch.”
“What happened?”
“She belongs to my cousin. He’s a lunatic, but that’s no excuse.”
“You are guilty.”
“Is that out of fashion?”
“Love is the fashion. Nothing else matters.”
“Very reckless. You will do damage.”
“Love damaged me. I never feel guilty. I believe love will save us. I learned that through San Lázaro. We will see him today.”
They were half an hour out of Havana, Quinn driving, en route to the home of Narciso Figueroa. They had gone through Santiago de Las Vegas and were on a ragged road that Quinn feared would snag the Buick’s low-slung undercarriage. He moved slowly past scattered clusters of wooden shacks and small concrete slab houses that seemed built in a swamp.
“I came here when I was fifteen,” she said. “It was in December, tens of thousands of pilgrims walking to the church of San Lázaro. Olguita said San Lázaro will get rid of your trouble. I told her I didn’t have any trouble. ‘You will,’ she said.”
“You certainly learned how to acquire it.”
San Lázaro, Renata said, the Catholic saint resurrected from his tomb by Jesus, is also the Orisha called Babalu Aye, brother of Changó. Babalu Aye was young and handsome and trying to make love to every woman in the world. Olodumare, the owner of Heaven, told him to slow down, but he kept it up, so Olodumare turned him into a leprous beggar with leg sores that put him on crutches. Two dogs followed him, licking his sores clean as they all walked the world.
“There he is,” Renata said, interrupting herself to point out a shack with an altar displaying Lázaro-Babalu on crutches. They passed another shack, another Lázaro. “He is all over Havana, but this is his road.”
“How did Lázaro convince you love would save you?” he asked.
“Olguita walked me three miles to the church with the pilgrims, some on crutches like Lázaro. One barefoot man carried a sack of rocks on his back, women crawled on hands and knees, a girl no more than six moved forward on the gravel road, on her bottom, her mother saying, ‘Ven, mi hija, ven,’ and the child slid toward Mama, leaving blood on the gravel.
“‘Why is she making her do that?’ I asked. ‘For the child’s health, she is sick,’ Olguita said. ‘Won’t she get sicker from her bleeding?’ ‘San Lázaro will heal her all over,’ Olguita said.
“I saw a man without a shirt sliding toward the church on his back, gripping a holy rag, one ankle chained to a concrete block. When he slid backward his leg pulled the block a few inches, and he had miles to go. His back looked raw and very scarred from years of this and when I asked why he did it he looked at the sky and said, ‘My wife is alive, San Lázaro, and you did it, twenty years ago. I promised you I would wound myself if you saved her, and you did. I love you, beggar man.’ He cried terribly, and then shouted to the sky, ‘San Lázaro will never die.’”
“And this is what you call love?” Quinn said.
“Cure my legs, Babalu. Don’t let my child die, Lázaro. Give a brain to my idiot son. Bring my wife back from the grave. Let me see daylight again. Cure my pox, my pain, my sores, my terror, my cancer, my nightmares. Give me back my breath, Babalu. Let me walk the world like you, Lázaro. Love will save us and remake us. Love will do what parents and doctors and spouses cannot do. Love will do it all if you take it into your soul and caress it. I wonder if I had true love with Diego. I look at you and think maybe we will have love, but maybe we are liars and neither of us knows love. In the church I asked San Lázaro how love lived in the heart of that man pulling the concrete block and he told me.”
“San Lázaro talked to you?”
“Yes. He said, your love can be the beggar on crutches with the dogs of love trying to heal your sickness, and still you will perish. Nobody can know what love means, or how it arrives or how it lasts, or even if it exists, because we are never free of doubt. Since I was fifteen I have practiced love and I am good at it. I create love by making it, by believing in it even when it doesn’t exist. Love can make love exist, but love cannot make itself last. All I can do is try to make love exist, and sometimes I succeed. That’s what I do.”
Narciso lived in the smallest house Quinn had seen on this road. Renata entered without knocking and Quinn followed her into a room with paintings of godly abstractions, masks, necklaces made with the Orishas’ colored beads, jars of kola nuts, cowrie shells, coconut fragments, icons dangling from the ceiling. Shelves were full of trinkets, cigar stubs and bits of paper that Quinn decided must be venerable trash. The room exuded ancient complexity, urging him to bow before its absurd mysteries.
Narciso, with an unlit cigar at the corner of his mouth, made an effort to rise from his wooden rocking chair and failed. He tried again, pulled himself into a standing crouch, shuffled with baby steps and trembling arms to greet Renata. His skin was a deep black, his hair tight to his head and totally white, most of his teeth absent, and he did indeed look ninety, or beyond. He glanced at Quinn and then said to Renata, “Who is this? He is carrying fire.”
Then, with sudden agility unimaginable in that worn body, he straightened his back and lifted over his head one of six necklaces he was wearing. He waved it in front of Renata and dropped it onto a table. The necklace was four feet in circumference and strung with sixteen oval-shaped, tortoise-shell disks.
“The fire,” he said, pointing to the disks.
“What are you saying?” Renata asked. “This is my friend, a writer. I wanted him to see San Lázaro.”
“He is a carrier,” Narciso said, and he spoke to Renata in a chant:“He is carrying fire and fire does burn,
He is bearing fire and the ashes it makes,
The dead surround and claim him as their own,
He wears the dead like the beads of Changó.”
Renata’s face was blank and pale, but Quinn read her blankness as cogency, concealed under a mask of innocence. She was the carrier of the dead, all those dying rebels in the forefront of her memory. She was shamming for Narciso, passing her dead on to Quinn. He watched Narciso reading Renata, and he sensed the man really might be reading the thought of another, which Quinn did not want to believe. But it has been done, hasn’t it? Telepathy isn’t quite so disreputable anymore. Somebody might legitimize it any minute.
“What have you been doing?” Narciso asked Renata.
“Nothing at all,” she said, “nothing.”
Narciso threw the shells again and spoke in a language Quinn did not understand. Renata translated: “He says you are in danger and that you must avoid the murderers walking the streets.”
“Convey my thanks and say I’ll be cautious,” Quinn said. “Does he know which streets?”
“I give you this necklace as a shield,” Narciso said to Renata. He took from around his neck a silvery chain with miniature cast-iron tools and weapons — hammer, anvil, pick and shovel, bow and arrow, machete, two-bladed axe — and circled it around Renata’s neck. “Show these tools of the Orishas to your enemy and tell him if he harms you Changó will plunge him into a long and painful death.”