The Wanderess (7 page)

“‘And so, some months later, the grand negress gave birth
on the floor in the couple’s shabby apartment. For all her size and
strength, the poor new mother was made weak from childbirth
and suffered a fever, so it was up to the father to cradle the infant,
wash it, etc…

“‘You can believe the horror suffered by Juan Gomérez
when he first saw the child and looked at its face and saw how
black, how very coal-black, the baby’s skin was. You see, his wife
was an African negress, but she was sweet-chocolate in color.
While Juan was extremely fair, almost blond, being a pure
Spaniard of entirely European descent. So the baby should have
been a mixture of white milk, and milk chocolate. But he wasn’t,
he was coal-black! His color matched the color of the great negro
cousin that had stayed with the couple up until seven months
prior when he was sent back to Africa. Little Juanito, you see, was
not Juan’s child. The baby began to cry the moment he was born
and didn’t ever stop. Now a babe just born, his crying resembles
nothing in this world; while this little baby’s crying voice sounded
just like its mother’s husky cousin, and nothing like her gently
swooning husband. That, and his face was darker than a sky
without moon or stars. Nothing so black could be born of a light
cheese-colored man and a toffee colored woman. No, this could
not be Juan’s child. And yet, Juan had given nine months of his
life to feeding that strange baby inside its mother. Our little palefaced Spaniard was horrified. While his wife was in a fever from
child-birth, Juan went to the kitchen and took a large carving
knife, the kind that is used to carve pork-ham, and in order to
prevent his having to toil sixteen-hour days any longer to put food
in the mouth of that creature whose genes didn’t belong to him,
he went and sliced the newborn baby through the chest twice
with the knife. His eyes gushed tears, spilling over the iron
carving knife and the infant’s corpse—meanwhile, as Juan servedup tears, he saw his wife looking at him through her own eyes
veiled in fever that bulged with horror—horror, for they knew
what had happened. She squealed with terror and fell
unconscious.

“‘Juan, aware of his guilt, and of his own accord, walked to
the police station and gave a clear testimony of what he had done.
He was promptly arrested and a picture of the crime was
portrayed for the citizens of Sevilla and all of Spain, and
surprisingly, many people took Juan’s side—
especially the women!
Those in the courthouse saw how small and fearful and trembling
this man was. His lawyer explained how long he worked day and
night to feed the gluttonous, loose-legged woman who went
boozing and carousing with the little money he earned. While
Juan had slaved in the kitchen cooking food for his pregnant wife,
she had sat at the table patting her stomach in full awareness that
the baby inside wasn’t his, but rather her cousin’s. Still, she let
her poor husband slave to nourish the child that was conceived in
incest and out of adultery. So when the child was born and Juan
discovered the truth, he was overcome with rage. He was like a
man who was drunk. He ran for that carving knife and sliced the
baby up and that is all that he could have done. The press and the
public were undecided. The majority of ‘sensible’ citizens wanted
to see Juan set free. He was dying in prison—almost dead from
fever, you see, his moral suffering was killing him. Night and day,
Juan trembled in his cell in terror from the fact of his own crime.’

“When Master Dragomir finished telling me of the crime,”
Pulpawrecho went on, lowering his tone and slowing the pace of
his story, putting his newspaper down. He looked down his
strange nose at me. He asked me then what I thought of the court
case. “Should Juan Gomérez hang? Or should he be set free?”

“Enough, Pulpawrecho! Let me tell our guest a little of the
events that followed…” And Dragomir continued the night the
two of them met…

“So I set down my paper after telling Pulpy here about
Juan Gomérez and asked Pulpawrecho what he would do if he
were the judges. ‘Would you have him hanged? Would you set
him free?’ . . . Pulpawrecho all the while sat trembling in the chair
you’re sitting in now, his fingertips white as all the blood had left
them. He gripped the edge of the desk. I heard the clock on the
wall tick:
tock, tick, tock.
Just then, Pulpawrecho darted off out of
this room and down the stairs. I was sure I’d scared him with my
story. I heard him out on the street a moment later, his shoes
slapping on the stones as the sound grew fainter and fainter…

“So I went on reading my paper. And to be honest, within
minutes, I forgot all about this strange visitor; and I was surprised
when he later returned. It’s easy to forget such little men as
Pulpawrecho until they do startling things! Pulpawrecho returned
an hour later and rang the buzzer quickly, impatiently. I went
and opened the door myself—of course,
myself
, I had no servant
then! So, I opened my door and Pulpawrecho entered into my
study and held out a bundle wrapped in a wool blanket.

“‘Master,’ he said to me, ‘Please, let me call you
Master
… I
found what you were asking me for.’ He outstretched his arms
with a frenzied look on his face. I looked at the bundle and
realized it was an infant child, all bundled-up.

“‘A baby?” I inquired, “I asked you for a baby?’ … ‘More or
less,’ panted Pulpawrecho, ‘You asked me what I would do in this
situation, in this court case, how I would handle the adulteress
and her cuckolded husband, the murderer of the child. Well, here
is my response…’ Pulpawrecho thrust the baby into my arms. Its
little infant feet stuck out black, like two lumps of coal, from
beneath the wool blanket. His little hands flopped out of the
blanket and I saw that even the fingertips were midnight black. It
seemed only the bottoms of the feet were a little rosy. They were
rosy and they quivered lightly as the wind blew.

“‘I brought you
the
baby,’ said Pulpawrecho.
“‘So you did.’

Dragomir turned to me, delivering the final blow to the
story, “So then I drew back the blanket. I drew back the blanket
and saw that the little black baby was dead!”

A cold silence fell over Dragomir’s study, here and now in
the present moment where we found ourselves; the clock ticked
on the wall and it caught my attention and I wondered if it was
the same clock that had ticked back on that first night when
Pulpawrecho had entered this room with a dead infant wrapped in
a blanket.

“Do you understand, Saul, what this all means?”
“No, Dragomir.”

“I knew by Pulpawrecho’s gesture of bringing the child,
(and
he
knew that
I
knew), that if he would listen to my story
about a dead child and hear me ask him what he would do in such
a situation, and then immediately run out and come back within
an hour holding a dead child that is very much like,
if not the
exact same child
as the one in my story, then I knew that he would
do anything for me—
anything!
Pulpawrecho proved himself in
that one hour to be…”

“To be…?”
“The perfect servant!”

Upon hearing this, I recoiled with a mixture of revulsion
and awe.
“…El sirviente perfecto!”
he roared with laughter.

I turned to the side and spat. Pulpawrecho looked at my
reaction and rubbed his moist palms together, grinning with wet
teeth and eyes that shone with self-satisfaction, for he knew that
he
was
the perfect servant, and that he would stop at nothing to
serve his master.

When I looked back up, Dragomir was gone from his
chair. He came up behind me and placed in my hand a ball of
sticky black opium.

“Give me fifty
reales
, unless if you prefer to pay in gold.”

I examined the opium and smelled it. It appeared to be
the same that we had just smoked; yet looking at the ball in the
light, I noticed there was a strange green shimmer to it. I had
never seen opium with a similar green shimmer, although it
smelled fine and I just smoked some with them without ill-effect.
I gave the green shimmer no more thought and placed three gold
escudos
on the desk where the opium had been.

“Where else in Spain are you going to go visit?”

I told him I was going to Madrid, then to Valencia, then to
Barcelona, before heading to France. When I said Barcelona, he
lit up and grew very spirited.

“You’re going to Barcelona? When? In one month you
will be there? Here, I have an idea. Give me your opium back, I’ll
give you a bit more.”

I gave the drug dealer back the two-gram ball of opium he
had sold me and watched him slice and weigh a larger block
equaling four times what he had originally sold me. Those eight
grams, he cut down the center. “Here is for you,” he said,
presenting me with one four-gram block. Before I wrapped it in a
piece of vellum paper I inspected it again near the candle and saw
that this piece too had the same strange green shimmer that the
last piece had. I gave it no more thought, though, and put it in
the vellum paper and tucked it into my pocket. Green, I would
find out soon enough, was my unlucky color.

“Why don’t we make this a proper commission?”

“What sort of commission?” I wasn’t interested in
business. I had the money my old business partner Juhani sent
me in Alexandria, and I would have much more money as soon as
I got to Madrid.

“First, take your three escudos back.”

Dragomir took the other four gram block and placed it
inside a silver snuffbox. “Have a look beneath the lid.” I opened
the box and saw a portrait of Dragomir’s face in miniature. It was
a shocking portrait. Dragomir looked grim and haunting.

“I compliment your portrait artist. The resemblance is
truly startling.”

“Please put that snuffbox in your pocket. I want you to
take it to someone. You see, Barcelona is a city I know well. I
lived there for six years before coming here to Andalusia. The
mistress I was in love with then, she is still in Barcelona now. I
haven’t written or visited her in six years but lately I cannot stop
thinking about her. Please honor me with this commission, my
friend Saul, and when you fulfill my request, I will reward you
handsomely with money.”

“As I told you, money doesn’t interest me.”

“Well then please, for the sake of your honor and elegance,
return the favor of tonight’s hospitality by swearing to me that
you will take this commission to my mistress in Catalonia
.
I’m
entrusting you with my only remaining portrait, and my last silver
snuffbox. Make sure that she gets it. I don’t want anything from
her in return, and you might enjoy her company, she must still be
very beautiful. Her name is Penelope Baena, she is still at the
same address, I verified this recently, it’s right in the center of the
city and you just have to give her the box and maybe have coffee
with her, and pay her my respects.”

“Why don’t you send it by courier? It’s a safer bet. I might
eat up your opium and melt down your silver.”

“Surely Saul is joking! You would never do a thing like
that! Certainly not a Homeric man such as yourself. And
certainly not to Dragomir, anyhow!”

I was puzzled why he trusted me, and why he didn’t send
his present via courier. I would find out.

“Please, no jokes, damn it! For the sake of your honor and
your elegance, return the favor of tonight’s hospitality by swearing
to me that you will take this commission to Señorita Baena. The
opium, the snuffbox, and my portrait, you must deliver them into
no hand other than that of Señorita Baena’s. The other four
grams is my gift to you for your troubles. Señorita Baena is a
lovely creature, she lives in a tiny apartment on the first floor in
Barcelona’s Barrio Gòtico, and she runs the
herborista
¹
downstairs
on the ground floor at street-level. I did some checking and she is
still there. She sells herbal blends for magic spells, purges,
anesthesia, health tonics and the like. I left all my old mistresses
for her and was completely happy until one night Penelope had a
vision that I would contract a plague within six months and die
three days later. All the people who were near me when I had the
plague would all die within three days of my death; according to
her vision, I was doomed.

“She’d closed-up her shop early when I came one night to
see her and a man in the shadows approached me and begged me
to come around the corner to talk to him. I put my hand on the
handle of my gun in my pocket and followed him. When we
reached a dark place, he opened his hands and showed me a roll
of gold doubloons. He said this was a gift from Señorita Baena.
He told me of her vision and said that she was too cowardly to tell
me in person because she didn’t want to catch my sickness and
die. The man in the shadows told me to go down south and cure
myself with heat and a good diet, and to return to Barcelona if I
wasn’t dead in no less than a year’s time. I loved the crazy woman
and I dropped a tear on the roll of money as I handed the
messenger a doubloon and told him to tell her I was going to
Andalusia and that I would never return, for I would certainly die
within the year. That was five years ago.

“…Knowing that that crazy woman is still in Barcelona, I
am charmed that you are going there. Revenge is gentle when the
wronged-one seeks to avenge what was done out of madness, and
the victim didn’t lose his fortune. That woman gave me enough
money to set up business here in Málaga. She did me a favor with
her stupid
vision
. Now you may fall in love with her. I don’t
want
you to love her; but if you do end-up loving her, please treat her
well and love no others. She was the only woman good enough
for me in all of Barcelona. She was a genius at this, clever at that,
stupid at nothing. An ardent temptress with a beautiful body, she
put spells on all men around her. So please, travel with the
snuffbox, and when she sees my portrait and numbs herself with
my opium, tell her that I am alive and in perfect health, that I am
well-known in Málaga and I speak fondly of her. Remember her
address…”