Joshua they brought out the door, his head bloodied but he still able to walk, and at the sight of him John broke into a run and pushed his way toward the center yelling, “Don’t kill him!” only to be met by the one-armed giant and his cudgel and dealt such a blow as would have killed two normal men. John fell unconscious, bloodied, dead I thought, and death might have been his lot had not the mob’s focus been on the preferred quarry: Joshua. The swarm turned its attention from the dissenter, and I pulled John off the street and toward the basement of the nearest house, found it doorless, black, and empty. I propped John in a corner, and as best I could, tried stanching the flow of his blood. He was breathing, but I dared not move him toward help now, for the sight of that bloody head was too likely to whet the mob’s appetite for another kill. And so I was fated to guard the wounded John and watch from my darkness as the mob took its pleasure with Joshua. Here is what they did to him:
They beat him with their cudgels
And they stabbed him with their knives
and he did not die
They dropped stones onto his chest
They dropped stones onto his head
and he did not die
They poked holes in him with sticks
They roped his legs and dragged him
and he did not die
They gave him to the harpies
And they opened up his flesh
and he did not die
Then the harpies oiled his wounds
And they lit him with a match
and he did not die
Then they hanged him from a lamppost
Lit a fire underneath him
and he died
The mob moved on, and so I was able to get help from a family on the block to carry John to a bed; and a woman bandaged his head. Two samaritans cut down Joshua but a fragment of the mob came back and found him on the ground and hanged him a second time. When quiet came upon the street I shinnied up the lamppost and cut him down again. His left hand had been severed. I could not find it. I dragged him into my cellar and left him, then explored the neighborhood until I found a peddler with a pushcart. I rented him for two dollars, but when I told him my purpose he reneged. I threatened him and he went with me. When we got to the cellar, Joshua was gone.
WHEN MAGDALENA COLÓN DECIDED she was about to die for the second time, she announced from her bed that the only way she could die properly was lying by the water under a tree. Her intuition about death came at home at midafternoon, two hours after she collapsed in the gallery in my arms. She summoned Obadiah, Maud, her doctor, and her servants to her bedroom and insisted that someone find John McGee and bring him to her to reorganize the evening. Instead of a birthday party to celebrate her being alive for fifty-five years, what she now wanted was a wake to acknowledge her passing over into lovely death, but held while she was still alive and able to enjoy both sides of existence at the same time.
“You can’t have a wake if you’re not dead,” said Obadiah by her bedside.
“I won’t even let you come to the wake if you don’t mind your mouth,” said Magdalena.
The doctor had diagnosed her condition as palpitation, arrhythmia, and syncope, and ordered her to sip brandy, lie with her head below the level of her ankles, with her clothing loosened at neck and waist, with smelling salts on hand for revival in the event of further fainting, a coffee enema if necessary, and with the utmost ventilation to her room.
Maud entered into a weeping rage at Magdalena’s plight, but Magdalena delighted in the attention, ordered her maid to find her a loose-fitting blouse, strip her of all undergarments, daub her face with powder, etch with pale crimson the lines of her lips and the hollows of her cheeks, brush her hair forty strokes, impose upon her throat the pendant emerald Obadiah gave her for her fiftieth birthday, heighten her eyebrows and eyelashes with charcoal, push her feet into her silver slippers, and find a pair of strong men to carry her out onto the lawn beneath a tree, where she might freely breathe her anticipated last. She then sent for me to ask my advice in publicizing her wake, since she wanted all her friends and enemies to come. I suggested a handbill.
“Fine,” said Magdalena, “and I also want you to write something about me and how I changed the world.”
“How did you change the world?” I asked.
“I have no idea. That’s why I want you to write it.”
“I’ll do what I can,” I said.
“Splendid. And you can read it tonight at the wake instead of some poopy old prayer.”
I was alone at this point in the day, John off in places unknown, and Oba, as people called him, having donned his at-home costume of dressing gown and thigh-length kid boots, puttering around the servants’ quarters. Maud closeted herself in her private reverie, emerging only to check on Magdalena’s condition, which was improving. When she collapsed in my arms her face was ashen, but by now she had become sanguine and relaxed and was moving toward death with all her summonable beauty.
I took myself to the library, where Oba’s butler brought me Magdalena’s half-dozen scrapbooks, thick with newspaper cuttings in Spanish and English. I browsed through them and saw an outline of her life, the topography of a notorious career, the mockery of her first death, and on forward into the social notices of her life with Obadiah. What she wanted me to write, I supposed, was an obituary that would heap glory upon her achievements as performer, as mystic, as hostess; but the very thought of that bored me. If I was to do justice to the woman, I needed to move beyond the barricade of empty facts into some grander sphere — charting, for instance, what I myself found significant: her ability to survive as a solitary woman in a hostile world; her love affair with death; and, most important of all (to me), her nurturing of the incredible Maud, and then imposing that hallowed creature on my life.
The decision I had made so long ago, to live my life according to the word, reached its apogee in the war and then descended into the bathetic dumps of faceless slaughter. Yet in writing about what was worst in this world an unconscionable pang of pleasure dogged my every line. Mine was clearly a life fulfilled by language, and I was coming to see that through that, and only that, could I perhaps in some unknown way gild the eccentric life of Magdalena, or the tragedy of Joshua, or my own thrumming symphony of mysteries. By devising a set of images that did not rot on me overnight, I might confront what was worth confronting, with no expectation of solving the mysteries, but content merely to stare at them until they became as beautiful and valuable as Magdalena had always been, and as Maud now was.
It was in this elated frame of mind that I picked up a pen and set down a handful of words that I hoped would begin the recovery not only of what had been lost but also of what I did not know had been lost, yet surely must have been. I was persuading myself that if I used the words well, the harmony that lurked beneath all contraries and cacophonies must be revealed. This was an act of faith, not reason.
And so, rather than writing Magdalena’s obituary, I began to write her story, taking the facts not from her cuttings but from my imagination, where, like a jungle flower, she had long since taken root.