The scabs on her feet fall away. The swelling leaves her face and her injured hand. Her moaning stops. Her eyes remain closed, but now she is radiant.
Kongo ends with a small song of supplication and then rises. He turns to the rear of the cave. To the darkness.
“The place you are searching for is back there,” he says, pointing into blackness.
He removes the white shawl from his shoulders and lays it over Delfina’s breasts and shoulders. He nods at Cormac, and then walks abruptly to the entrance, to climb the slope and go out into the wet New York night.
She sits up and faces Cormac, flexing her fingers, turning her feet as if they were adorned in spangles. She smiles in a shy way, she stretches, she rubs her hands on her belly. Her eyes move around the cave, wide in surprise and alarm.
“Where are we?” she says.
“In a cave in Inwood.”
“How did I get here?”
“I carried you.”
He holds her face in his hands and kisses her very lightly on the lips.
“I can feel him,” she whispers. “He’s there. He’s moving. He wants to meet you.”
He hugs Delfina, her golden warmth streaming into his own body, and he feels his own surging emotion, his need, his fear. They are quiet for a long time. And then she stares around her at the walls of the cave.
“I was in a staircase, packed with people, with lots of smoke,” she says, a kind of wonder in her voice. “There was thick smoke everywhere. I looked down and there were hands on banisters going down and down and down, all the way down.” She pauses. “There was a man in a wheelchair being carried by three men. Doors opened and the smoke was thicker, and we kept going down, and then there were firemen, lots of firemen, all going up, and we were reduced to one lane, and then we weren’t moving at all. Everybody was quiet. Nobody was crying. And I tried my cell phone, and it didn’t work, and I thought: I might die here. I might die here, carrying this baby, I might die here without… without ever saying good-bye to you.”
She begins to weep now, her body shaking with great wracking sobs.
“I was trying to find you too,” he says. “The cell phones didn’t work anywhere….”
Her weeping slows.
“After that, I don’t remember much of anything,” she says. “Just running and falling. Like a dream you have when you’re six.”
He tells her what happened, and how both towers fell, how many thousands are dead, how Islamic hijackers took four different airliners and smashed them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, a field in Pennsylvania, how everybody is talking of war. She listens and doesn’t listen; she hears but does not hear. She stares straight ahead. Cormac says nothing for almost a minute, as her lips move silently and she absorbs what he has said. She clears her throat.
“They’ve ruined the world,” she whispers. “They’ve ruined the world where this boy will walk. They’ve ruined it, haven’t they? God damn them all.”
Candlelight suffuses the part of the cave in which they sit upon the cape. He gazes at her, feeling seconds becoming minutes, and then rises to one knee and turns to face her. He takes her hand. She looks at him with wariness in her eyes.
“I have to tell you a story,” he says. “One that I’ve never told you, or anyone else, and one you never asked to hear.”
“So tell it, man.”
He takes a deep breath, then exhales slowly.
“I was born in 1723, in the north of Ireland,” he begins. She smiles up at him as if expecting a joke, but his serious face keeps her from saying anything. “When I was sixteen, my father was killed over a horse….”
And so he tells her about the Earl of Warren and how he crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of the man, intending to kill him. He tells her about the indentured Irish and the slaves in the hold of the Fury and how he helped give the Africans food and water. He explains about the revolt, and how he saved Kongo’s life, and how his blood merged with the African’s blood as they rode north to this cave.
“He was a babalawo,” Cormac says.
“A babalawo.”
“And in this cave, he gave me a gift.”
“Eternal life,” she says.
Cormac is surprised. “How did you know that?”
“A babalawo can do that,” she says. “The babalawo in Puerto Rico, the man who made my tattoos? Some people say that he’s been there since before the Spaniards arrived. That another babalawo gave him the gift… He was here just now, wasn’t he? I can smell him. I know that smell. And he healed me, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
She stands now too, pulling the white shawl tightly over her shoulders, bending her head to inhale its odor, gazing around the visible part of the cave.
“You really are a little old for me, man,” she says, and laughs. “I’m a little old for everybody.”
She turns with a wistful smile on her face.
“What’s the rest of it about?” she says. “There’s got to be more.”
“There is.”
“You’re gonna leave me, right?”
He doesn’t answer directly.
“There were terms to the gift,” he says. “I couldn’t leave Manhattan. If I did, I would die. And I’d be barred from the Other-world. It would be a form of suicide, and suicide was forbidden…. That’s why I couldn’t go to Brooklyn with you, or Orchard Beach. I was told by the babalawo that I would meet a dark-skinned woman adorned with spirals and that I would make love to her in this cave and then I could pass over…. I looked for the woman for many years and never found her. Until the day I saw you on Fourteenth Street. This might all sound preposterous, but it’s true. I’ve lived it. My life is the proof.”
He thinks: There is no time to tell her how he had lived through all the history of the city, how he absorbed its life, its menace, its cruelties, its toughness, its joys and sorrows and beauties. He could tell her about the women he knew and the friends he made and how Bill Tweed gave him the house on Duane Street, and how everybody he loved had died. But there’s no time. There is no time to tell her of the men he killed. No time to explain how his enemies had died, how houses had died, and neighborhoods had died, and how he kept going: through words and art and time.
She walks around him, looking at him. She pinches the flesh of his arm as if to verify his presence. Then she laughs in a bitter way.
“This is such a bitch,” she says. “I loved you so I could live. And you loved me so you could die.”
She leans down and lifts the cape, angrily shaking away its dust, and slips it over her shoulders with the white shawl beneath it. She picks up a candle.
“I’ll see you, Cormac,” she says, and begins to walk toward the deep part of the cave, the dark unknown place that Kongo pointed to for Cormac.
“Delfina—”
“If you want to die, go ahead,” she says, tossing the words over her shoulder. “I’m just not gonna help.”
Her candle bobs as he goes after her.
“Don’t go there,” he says, his voice echoing now. “That’s the wrong way out. That’s not for you.”
He reaches for her, finds her hand. In the light of the candle, her skin is the color of cinnamon, her eyes liquid with fear and hurt.
“Don’t go there,” he says.
She begins to bawl. A great hopeless weeping, filling the cave. The candle falls and goes out. He holds her, running hands through her hair, caressing her skin, kissing her eyes and ears and mouth, until they fall to the ground, fall upon the cape, fall together, and begin to make love.