A Cup of Water Under My Bed (6 page)

I march back to my church, up the stairs, and into the ornate wooden confessional. This time, I don’t have any sins to confess. I want an explanation because I have been reading my children’s Bible since I was seven and I believed every word of it. I believed that dead people came back to life, that women talked with angels, and that God kept track of any curse words I said.

“It’s okay to have doubts,” Father Carroll whispers through the screen window of the confessional. “But don’t lose your faith.”

That’s all he says. Not “Let me explain” or “Yes, I lied to you,” but an instruction to decide for myself what is true. I thank him and storm out of the church. I will not be part of a religion that lies to me. A few months later, the fat white man in the sky smacks me.

A friend’s cousin crashes his car into an electrical pole at close to a hundred miles an hour, almost cutting off electricity to parts of Jersey City. That is what I am told later, after I am pulled out of the car, after I wake up to find my body in the middle of the road, my right arm dangling above my shoulder, my left leg loose and twisted below my hip. Both the arm and leg are broken, as if God had cut a diagonal line across my body.

I know God has singled me out for punishment, because there were six people in the car that night and everyone else has minor bruises. I, on the other hand, spend three weeks in the hospital, undergo a blood transfusion (I’m anemic), hobble along for months on crutches, and undergo two surgeries. None of this convinces me to return to Catholicism. I would rather be alone on a hill with the truth and broken
huesos
than to be told stories that are
mentiras
.

My father comes to the hospital once.

He’s wearing his leather jacket and black work boots, and he yells at me about the mess I got myself into, about what I’ve done to my body, to him, to the family. My left leg is lifted in traction. My right arm is hidden in a cast. In a few days, on my
quinceañera
, surgeons will open my skin and slip steel-like rods into my body so the bones will grow straight alongside the metal.

I stare at the hospital wall while my father barks at me. My mother focuses on the floor; Tía Chuchi inspects the bed sheet. My father’s friend Pedro, who drove him to the hospital, searches for something out the window.

When my father and his friend leave, the room is silent. I will myself not to cry. Usually when my father has one of his rages, I run to my bedroom or to the pages of a book. But this time, I can’t move. The white bed sheet is draped over me like a giant bandage. I close my eyes and slip for a moment into my own made-up story about a boy who loves me but can’t exactly be with me, and yet in the end it all works out because really he does love me.

When I look over at my mother, her eyes are sad and quiet. My father hates hospitals. That much I know. Later on, I will learn that he hates anything that makes him afraid—syringes, broken bones, doctors. Yelling at us, about us, about the world, is the way he knows to talk about fear. But right now Tía Chuchi wants me to know that my father does love me.

“He kept vigil the night of the accident.” She pauses, but this is not another story from Colombia. This is true. “He prayed with the
velas
lit, with Elegguá and the
guerreros
. He didn’t sleep. He prayed all night.”

The sweetest part of my father is his candy dish.

A year after the car accident, we sell the house on Fourth Street. It has not been bulldozed. My parents have sold it to another family and found a new home a few blocks away. All the holy ones come with us.

In the new living room, Tía Chuchi hammers a thick nail into the wall and hangs the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It’s not a painting but a wood carving of Jesus with his white palms in supplication, his chest cut open to reveal his shiny red heart.

Elegguá and the plate of angry toys are tucked in the basement, where my father watches baseball on a portable television set and drinks Coors or Budweiser or whatever brand of beer is cheap that week.

The tin rooster is in the kitchen as always, atop the cupboard, his pale-silver eyes watching over us.

I interview two atheists in high school, not formally, but casually, over lunch, while waiting for a class to start, during group projects.

They have never had a god. They don’t miss the days when they prayed, sang songs, and read books about saints. They have not walked away from the feeling that a man in the sky is both punishing them and taking care of them. They are free and (it seems to me) lonely.

Tía Chuchi, on the other hand, places her miniature plastic saints on the board covering the radiator in the living room. In the basement, my father keeps his
santos
in an old cardboard box. I watch the two of them with envy and longing and awe that nothing has shattered their beliefs. And then I take a step back, proud that I have given up foolish ideas.

The only crack in my defense is Elegguá.

Alone in the basement with him, I say a quick prayer: Help me with this exam, keep me safe tonight, make it so I pass the driving test, please.

I don’t know why I do this except that the rock with cowrie shells and candies has been with me ever since I can remember, since before the saints on the radiator, since before Jesus even. And he has never lied to me.

December is the month of
visitas
.

We pull out the plastic Christmas tree from the attic and shop for paper icicles at C. H. Martin. On Bergenline, my mother stocks up on apples, popcorn, and white candles. Before Baby Jesus and Santa Claus reach us, San Lázaro arrives. It is the seventeenth of December, his feast day, and he is crippled.

San Lázaro is also half-naked. A single piece of muslin covers his private area. He has open sores on his body and a beard that hasn’t been shaved in weeks. He walks with two crutches and carries a halo over his head. Two stray dogs lick the wounds on his legs.

All statues of San Lázaro are like this, depicting the beggar from the Gospel of Luke who is repeatedly neglected by the rich man in this life but admitted into heaven after he dies. My father bought the statue, about seventeen inches in height, when he married my mother. When I ask why, he answers, “For protection.”

The statue takes its place on the dresser in my parents’ bedroom next to a cup of water and a picture of my mother’s dead mother, a short, white-haired woman with a matching violet skirt and blazer. At night, my mother plugs in a small electric candle on the dresser, like the ones they have in church for the saints. The candleholder is bright red with ornate gold-plate trimmings. The red light shines on my mother’s mother and the crippled saint with his two stray dogs.

One mid-December evening my mother clears the kitchen table of the paper-napkin holder, the salt and pepper shakers, and the bowl of oranges and saltine crackers. When she’s done, my father lifts San Lázaro off the dresser and carries him to the kitchen, where the saint stands at the center of the table. My mother arranges plates of popcorn and apples at the
santo
’s bruised feet, as well as white candles.

“Light a candle,” my father says, giving me the matches.

There is a
vela
on the table for everyone who lives in the house, and lighting one is our way of asking San Lázaro to protect us in the coming year. I examine each candle closely, anxious to choose the right one, the one that is only for me.

“Pick one already,” my father snaps.

I grab one, light it, and then sit at the table, watching the flame for any sign of what the coming year will bring. At times, it wavers and threatens to blow out, but then it rages back to its small stature, and I hope that this is a good sign.

My father is not alone in his devotion to San Lázaro. In Hialeah, Florida, people like him—Cubans, exiles—have built a church for the saint so that worshippers can travel there weekly or daily to pray at the foot of a statue that is almost seven feet in height, his open sores the size of my fingers. A thick purple robe covers his bony shoulders. At his feet, supplicants light candles and leave white carnations and dollar bills.

When visiting Hialeah, I love watching people’s lips moving in silent prayer and the bouquets of flowers exploding around San Lázaro’s feet; I love that the saint’s body—bruised, tortured, on the verge of collapse—does not repulse his worshippers but instead inspires grown women and men to press their fingers gently on San Lázaro’s legs and feet and crutches. The consensus is palpable: only a man who has suffered like this can know what we need and keep us safe from harm.

In December, at home in New Jersey, I sit in the dark with my father, staring at the saint’s crutches, relieved that the bones in my left leg and my right arm have healed since the surgeries, and I am grateful for my father’s silence.

After twenty minutes though, I grow sleepy and head to bed, wondering how my father can do this from dusk to dawn every year.

This is our home: Jesus and his chest cut open in the living room, a candy dish in the basement, a man with open sores on the kitchen table, and that rooster, always that tin rooster with gray eyes, way above our heads in the kitchen, a constant companion.

In graduate school, while researching colonial Cuba, I come across a book on Santería. The word is on the cover, which surprises me. Like Spanish, the word
Santería
—and also
Elegguá
and
guerreros
—are part of an oral language for me, and yet here in this book, the words are written down, stationed among commas and squeezed between periods. They are important and real, and I start reading. And then, I turn the page.

Here I will pause.

If I could sum up the lives of people like me—people whose parents don’t write books, whose aunties and cousins don’t step onto college campuses except for the time we graduate—I would write our lives with that one phrase: and then, I turn the page.

I turn the page in a book and find the words we use at home written down. Or I turn the page and come across a detailed passage describing the bananas and roses and coffee shipped from South to North America, which begins to explain what my mother and Tía Chuchi mean when they say they came here for work.

Or I turn the page and find a picture of the candy dish.

The photograph shows a rock in a clay plate. Cowrie shells form the familiar eyes and open mouth. The dish is filled with candies, including lollipops. It has objects my father’s dish does not, like bird feathers and beaded necklaces, and overall it is much cleaner. It is not a dish that has been kept hidden.

Elegguá, it turns out, is an orisha, a spirit, a god. In Africa, in Yorubaland, once upon a time, he sat at the entrance to marketplaces. He’s the god of the crossroads, of trickery, of helping people find their
camino
. He adores children.

Elegguá is not alone. The rivers and the woods, the soil and iron and wind belong to the spirits, and the spirits have lyrical names: Oshún, Yemayá, Changó, Oya. In the stories that are told about the orishas, they are like ordinary people. They have long-standing feuds with each other and intimate relations and favorite colors. Oggún works too much, and Ochosi is at the courthouse again. That’s who they are—the angry toys in my father’s second clay dish, the rake and the machete and the arrows. They are Oggún and Ochosi, the orishas of work and justice.

When the white men arrived in Africa, they failed to see the gods. They beat the Yorubans, shoved them onto ships, across the oceans, and never suspected that the holy ones were heading for Cuba, too. Once they realized it, that the orishas had arrived in the Americas—the Yorubans drummed and danced and sang, the spirits came down and took hold of their heads and wrists and feet—the Spaniards forbade their practice of the religion. They thought they could outsmart Elegguá.

It’s the end of the day. I can imagine dusk crawling across the sugarcane fields. A slave woman is working with a fractured arm. It’s in a makeshift sling. She’s worried the bone will grow crooked now. She needs the orisha Babalú-Ayé, but how? Where and when?

Someone knows. They’ve seen him here in Cuba, except the Spaniards call him San Lázaro. Like Babalú-Ayé in the Yoruban stories, the Catholic
santo
has open sores on his legs. And, so, the woman procures a small statue. She places San Lázaro on a table in her shack, offers the
santo frutas y tabaco
and begs for mercy. She can pray freely now and not worry about breaking the law.

It began like this perhaps: The saint in public and the orisha in secret. The bleeding Jesus in the living room and Elegguá in the basement. And high above our heads, the tin rooster my mother keeps above the kitchen cupboard: Ósun, the one who brings messages when your life is in danger.

I read more books in more libraries and learn that my father and my mother are protecting us with a divine army: Elegguá, Ochosi, Oggún, Ósun. In the religion, they are
los guerreros
, the warriors who protect the life of the practitioner and, by extension, his daughters.

The tricky thing with open secrets is that you can’t barge your way in. You can read all the books you find at the library and download unpublished theses. You can visit botánicas, buy candles, and have your questions, but to be let in, you have to wait for people. You have to learn when to ask a question and when to shut up.

It’s like dealing with someone’s heart. You can’t just knock at the door. You can’t show up and say, “I want to live here.” You have to prove yourself. You have to stick around. You have to wait until the other person is ready.

And in the end, you realize that it was you who had to wait. It was your own heart you couldn’t barge into.

My mother tells me matter-of-factly to not be home one day.

My hours during graduate school are largely unpredictable, and she needs to be sure that I’ll be out of the house. This time, I’m old enough to follow her cue.

“Who’s coming?” I ask.

“
Una señora
.”

I nod and when she doesn’t say anything else, I let the conversation end. That evening, the house is airy and light. A woman, I imagine, has swept a terry cloth across each room. The house feels satiated, as if the walls themselves had been thirsty and were watered.