I sat up with a jolt: Something had plopped down on my bed by my feet with a forceful thump.
The dog sleeping nearby raised its head, pricked its ears, but hearing nothing other than my mumbled imprecations, put its muzzle back on its forepaws.
For a moment, I was totally disoriented as to where I was, but when I heard dona Mercedes' soft, yet persistent murmur, I realized I was in the house of Leon Chirino's brother, in a small town an hour's drive from Curmina.
I was on the cot they had set up for me in the kitchen. I had driven Leon Chirino and dona Mercedes there in the middle of the night, for they had to conduct a private seance for his brother.
Closing my eyes, I settled back on the lumpy pillow and abandoned myself to the comforting sound of the healer's voice. I felt the sound wrap itself around me. I was definitely falling asleep when another thumping noise woke me up again.
The musty blanket I was covered with was all bunched up around my neck.
I half rose to straighten it out and screamed upon seeing Agustin's cat perched on my knee.
"Why do you always shriek when you see my pet?" His voice coming from the darkness was full of gentle mockery. Agustin, sitting cross-legged at the foot of my cot, reached for his cat.
"I've come to protect you from the dog," he explained, his dazzling blue eyes fixed on my face. "Dogs don't really sleep at night. If you open your eyes in the darkness you can see how a dog watches you all night long. That's why they are called watchdogs." He laughed at his own joke.
I opened my mouth to speak to him, but no sound crossed my lips. I reached out, but Agustin and the cat wavered indistinctly before my eyes until they finally faded away.
Perhaps they are all outside, I thought, and stepped into the yard, still shrouded by the shadows of dawn. There was no one about.
I looked at my wristwatch. Only two hours had passed since dona Mercedes, Leon Chirino, and I had arrived.
Realizing that I had had far too little sleep, I went back to my cot, pulled the blanket over my head, and dozed off.
I awoke to the sound of voices and music and the scent of coffee.
Leon Chirino, bent over the kerosene stove, was listening to the radio as he strained freshly made coffee through a flannel sieve.
"Did you have a good sleep?" he asked, motioning me to sit down by him.
I joined him at a big, square table covered with brand-new oilcloth. He half filled two cups with coffee and added to each a generous amount of cane liquor.
"For strength," he said, pushing the steaming porcelain cup toward me.
Afraid to get drunk, I took a few hesitant sips. The cup had golden edges and painted roses on its surface.
He replenished his own cup with more coffee and cane liquor.
"Dona Mercedes says that you're clairvoyant," I said. "Can you tell me what fate has in store for me?" I hoped that my abrupt question would elicit a candid response.
"My dear," he said in that charming forbearance older people show when addressing someone much younger. "I'm an old friend of dona Mercedes.
"I live with her ghosts and her memories. I share her solitude." He spat through his teeth, then taking two cigarettes from the pack on the table, he put one behind each ear.
"You'd better go and see Agustin," he advised. "He starts early. Let me show you the way into town."
"You really haven't answered my question," I said undaunted by his eagerness to get me out of the house.
A sardonic, bemused expression appeared on his face. "I can't tell you what's in store for you," he affirmed.
"Clairvoyants have glimpses of things they don't understand and then make up the rest."
He took my arm and practically pulled me outside. "Let me show you the way to Agustin's house," he repeated.
He pointed to a trail winding down the hill. "If you follow this path, you'll reach town. Anyone there will tell you where Agustin lives."
"What about dona Mercedes?" I asked.
"We'll come and get you in the evening," he replied, then bent toward me and in a conspiratorial whisper he added, "Dona Mercedes and I will be busy the whole day with my brother's business."
The twittering of bluebirds in the trees and the fragrance of the ripe mangoes, shimmering amid the dark foliage like clumps of gold, filled the air.
A well-trodden path winding down the slope ran into a wide dirt-packed street and branched off again into the hills at the other end of the hot, sunlit town.
Women sweeping the cement sidewalks in front of their brightly painted houses paused for an instant to return my greeting as I walked by.
"Can you tell me where the healer Agustin lives?" I asked one of the women.
"I sure can," she replied, resting her chin on her hands cupped over the end of the broom handle. In a loud voice- no doubt for the benefit of her curious neighbors- she directed me to the green stucco house at the very end of the street. "It's the one with the big antenna on the roof. You can't miss it."
She lowered her voice to a murmur and in a confidential tone assured me that Agustin could cure anything from insomnia to snakebites. Even cancer and leprosy were not too much for him. His young patients always got well.
I knocked repeatedly on Agustin's front door, but there was no answer.
"Just walk right in," a young girl shouted, leaning out a window across the street. "Agustin can't hear you. He's way in the back."
Following her advice, I stepped through the front door that opened into the inside patio. I peeked into each of the three rooms I passed, which also opened onto the patio.
Except for a hammock in each of them, the first two rooms were empty.
The third one was the living room. Calendars and magazine pictures decorated the walls. A row of straight-backed chairs and a plastic-covered couch faced an enormous television set.
Farther back was the kitchen. Beyond the kitchen through an alcove was yet another room. I saw Agustin there, seated at a large table.
As I approached, he rose smiling and stood scratching his head, his other hand thrust deep into the pocket of his worn khaki pants. His white shirt had patches, and the cutoff sleeves were frayed at the unhemmed cuffs.
"This is my working room!" he exclaimed proudly, extending his arm about in a circle. "I've got everything in here. And I'm about to open. My patients come through the side door. That door brings both of us luck."
The room, well lit and ventilated by two windows facing the hills, smelled of disinfectant.
There were rows of unvarnished, unpainted shelves on all the walls. On the shelves, neatly arranged and all properly labeled, stood various-sized flasks, bottles, jars, and boxes filled with dried roots, bark, leaves, and flowers. These items were not only identified by their common names but also by their scientific Latin nomenclature.
The table was hand carved and faced the open windows. Bottles, bowls, pestles, books, and two scales were lined up on the highly polished surface.
A cot and the three-foot-tall crucifix hanging in a corner with its votive candle burning on a triangular ledge beneath it indeed confirmed that I had stepped into the working room of a healer, not an old-fashioned apothecary.
Without much ado, Agustin brought in another chair from the kitchen and invited me to observe him at work.
He opened the lucky side door he had pointed out earlier. There were three women and four children in the adjacent room.
The hours passed swiftly. He treated each patient by first examining a jar filled with the child's urine that had been brought in by the mother. Prompted by each woman's account of her child's symptoms, Agustin proceeded to "read the waters."
The odor, the color, and the kind of microbes, or filaments, as he preferred to call them and which he claimed to see with the naked eye, were all carefully considered before he arrived at a diagnosis.
Fevers, colds, indigestion, parasites, asthma, rashes, allergies, anemia, and even measles and smallpox were among the most prevalent illnesses Agustin claimed to recognize after a thorough "reading of the waters."
In respectful silence, each woman waited for Agustin to invoke the help of Christ before he prescribed the appropriate medication.
He mixed his own herbal concoctions. Being familiar with, and a believer in, modern pharmacopoeia, Agustin was inclined to supplement his own remedies with milk of magnesia, antibiotics, aspirins, and vitamins, which he had repacked and rebottled in his own containers.
Like Mercedes Peralta, he charged no set fee but left it to the judgment of his clients: That is, they paid whatever they could afford.
Our late lunch of chicken and pork empanadas, brought to us by a woman in the neighborhood, came to an abrupt end when a man carrying a small boy walked into the kitchen. The child, perhaps six or seven years old, had cut the calf of his leg while playing in the field with his father's machete.
In his calm, sure manner, Agustin carried the child to the cot in his working room and undid the makeshift, blood-soaked bandage. First he bathed the deep gash with rosemary water, and then with peroxide.
It was hard to tell whether the child was being hypnotized by Agustin's soothing touch, as he massaged the anxious little face, or by his soft voice, as he recited an incantation, but in a matter of moments, the boy was asleep.
And then Agustin began the most important part of his treatment. To stop the bleeding, he applied to the wound a poultice of leaves that had been soaked in clear, sugarcane liquor.
Then he prepared a paste that, he claimed, would heal the wound in less than ten days and leave no scar.
Invoking the guidance of Christ, Agustin sprinkled a few drops of a milky substance on an abalone shell. With slow, rhythmic motions he began to grind the shell with a broad wooden pestle. A half hour elapsed before he had little less than a half teaspoon of a greenish, musky-smelling substance.
He examined the cut once more, pressed the wound closed with his fingers, and carefully spread the paste over the gash. Mumbling a prayer, he expertly bandaged the leg with strips of white cloth.
A satisfied smile lit his face as he handed the sleeping boy into the father's arms and told him to bring him every other day to change the dressing.
Late in the afternoon, certain that there would be no more patients that day, Agustin gave me a tour of his yard.
His medicinal plants grew in neat rows and square patches, arranged as carefully as the jars and bottles were on the table and shelves in his working room.
At the far end of the yard, leaning against a tool shed, stood an old kerosene refrigerator.
"Don't open it!" Agustin cried out, holding my arm in a firm grip.
"How could I?" I protested. "It's padlocked. What secrets do you keep in there?"
"My witchcraft," he whispered. "You do know that I practice witchcraft, don't you?"
His tone was mocking, but his face was somber when he added, "I'm a specialist in healing children and bewitching adults."
"Do you really practice witchcraft?" I asked incredulously.
"Don't be obtuse, Musiua," Agustin chided.
He paused for a moment, then in an emphatic tone, added, "Dona Mercedes must have told you that the other side of healing is bewitching. They go together because one is useless without the other. I heal children. I bewitch adults," he repeated, knocking on the top of the refrigerator. "I'm very good at both.
"Dona Mercedes says that one day I will bewitch the same ones I healed when they were children." He smiled at my startled face. "I don't think I will. But only time will tell."
Taking advantage of his expansive mood, I finally told him what had been on my mind the whole day. That I had seen and talked to him when I was in a dreamlike state.
Agustin listened attentively, but his gaze betrayed nothing.
"I can't quite define what it was," I said, "but it wasn't a dream!" Exasperated by his unwillingness to comment or to explain, I urged him to say something.
"I like you so much that I wanted to know if you're really a medium," he said, smiling. "Now I know you are."
"I think you're humoring me," I said, even more exasperated.
Agustin's eyebrows raised in arcs of astonishment. "It must be horrible to have big feet."
"Big feet?" I stammered uncomprehendingly, looking down at my sandals. "My feet are in perfect proportion to my size."
"They should be smaller," Agustin insisted, putting his fingers to his lips as though to suppress a smile. "Your feet are too large.
"That's why you live in perpetual reality. That's why you want everything explained." There was mockery in his voice, mixed with a tinge of compassion that did nothing to reassure me.
"Witchcraft follows rules that cannot be empirically demonstrated or repeated, unlike other laws of nature. Witchcraft is precisely the act of persuading reason to rise above itself or, if you wish, to move below itself." He chuckled and gave me a push.
I stumbled over my feet, and he quickly grabbed my arm to keep me from falling.
"Do you see now that your feet are too big?" Agustin asked and then laughed.
I wondered if he was trying to hypnotize me, for he gazed at me without blinking. I was held captive by his eyes. Like two drops of water, they seemed to spread wider and wider, blurring everything around me. All I was aware of was his voice.
"A sorcerer chooses to be different from what he was raised to be," he continued. "He has to understand that witchcraft is a lifelong task.
"A sorcerer, through witchcraft, weaves patterns like webs; patterns that transmit invoked powers to some superior mystery.
Human actions have an endless, spreading network of results; he accepts and reinterprets these results in a magical way."
He brought his face even closer to mine and lowered his voice to a soft whisper. "A sorcerer's hold on reality is absolute. His grip is so powerful, he can bend reality every which way in the service of his art. But he never forgets what reality is or was."
Without another word he turned and walked toward the living room.
Swiftly, I followed after him.
He plopped down on the sofa and crossed his legs the way I had seen him do on my cot.
Smiling up at me, he patted the place beside him. "Let's have some real witchcraft," he said, switching on the remote control of the enormous TV set.
There was no time to ask any more questions. In the next instant, we were surrounded by a group of giggling children from the neighborhood.
"Each evening they come here to watch TV with me for an hour or so," Agustin explained. "Later on, you and I will have time to talk."
After that initial meeting, I became Agustin's unbiased admirer. Attracted not only by his healing skills but by his haunting personality, I practically moved into one of the empty rooms of his house.
He wove countless stories for me, including the one Mercedes Peralta wanted me to hear.
Startled by a faint moan, Agustin opened his eyes.
In a shaft of light, a spider suspended on invisible thread dropped from the crumbling cane ceiling all the way to the ground where Agustin lay curled up like a cat.
He reached toward the spider, crushed it between his fingers, and ate it. Sighing, he drew his knees even closer to his chest as he felt the cold of dawn seep through the cracks of the weather-beaten mud walls.
Agustin couldn't remember whether days or weeks had passed since his mother brought him to this dilapidated, abandoned hut, where bats hung from the ceiling like unlit bulbs and cockroaches swarmed around in daylight and in darkness.
All he knew was that he had been hungry ever since; that the slugs, spiders, and grasshoppers he caught never stilled the gnawing pain in his swollen belly.
Agustin heard the faint moan again. It came from the shadowy corner at the far end of the room.
He saw an apparition of his mother sitting on the mattress, her mouth slightly open as she rubbed her naked belly. She was riding the mattress as though she were on a donkey, her naked shadow moving up and down on the soot-stained wall.
Only a few hours before, he had seen his mother struggling with a man. He had seen her thin legs, like black snakes, wrapped tightly around the man's torso, squeezing the breath out of him. And when he heard his mother's piercing scream, followed by a silence that had lasted for the rest of the night, he knew that the man had won the struggle. He had killed her.
Agustin's tired eyes closed with pleasure at the thought that he was now an orphan. He was safe. They would take him at the mission.
Half-conscious of his mother's ghostly sighs, giggles, and whispers whirling about the room, he dozed off again.
A loud groan shattered the morning stillness. Agustin opened his eyes and pressed his fist against his lips to stifle a scream as he saw the same man from the night before sit up on the mattress.
Agustin didn't know the man, yet he was sure he was from Ipairi. Agustin vaguely remembered seeing him talking to his mother in the plaza.
Had the women from the small hamlet in the hills sent the man to take Agustin back? To perhaps kill him? It couldn't be. He must be having a vivid horrible dream.
The man cleared his throat and spat on the ground. His voice filled the room. "I'll take you away today. But I can't take the boy. Why didn't you leave him with the Protestants? You know that they have a place for children: Even if they won't take him, they'll feed him."
When Agustin heard his mother's harsh reply he knew that he was wide awake: He knew that she was not a ghost.
"The Protestants won't take any children unless they are orphaned," his mother said. "There was nothing else I could do but bring the boy to this abandoned shack. I'm waiting for him to die."
"I know of a woman who'll take him," the man said. "She'll know what to do with him. She's a witch."
"It's too late now," his mother said. "I wish I had given Agustin to a witch when he was born.
"Ever since he was a baby, a witch in Ipairi wanted him. She used to feed him strange potions and hang amulets around his wrists and neck, allegedly to guard him from calamities and disease.
"I know she cast a spell on the boy. That witch is responsible for all my misfortune."
His mother was silent for a moment; then in a strangled whisper, as though she were under attack by an unseen enemy, she added, "I'm terrified of witches. If I went to one now, she'd know that I haven't been feeding the boy. She'd kill me."
Tears rolled down Agustin's cheeks as he remembered the days in Ipairi when his mother used to cradle him in her arms. She would smother him with kisses and tell him that his eyes were like pieces of the sky.
But when the women in the neighboring shacks forbade their children to play with him, his mother became a different person. She no longer touched or kissed him. Finally, she ceased speaking to him altogether.
One afternoon, a woman carrying a dead child in her arms burst into their shack. "Blue eyes in a black face," she screamed at Agustin's mother, "that's the work of the devil. That's the devil himself. He killed my baby with the evil eye. If you don't get rid of that boy, I will."
That same night, his mother fled with him to the hills. Agustin was certain that it was that woman who had cast a spell on his mother so she would hate him.
The man's loud voice cut into Agustin's reveries.
"You don't have to take him to the witch yourself. I can leave word with her to pick the kid up tonight.
"We'll be gone by then. I'll take you far away from here, where no witch will ever find you," the man promised.
His mother remained silent for a long time; then she flung her head back and laughed hysterically.
She rose from the mattress and wrapped the dirty blanket tightly around her body. Stepping around the broken table and the few crates scattered about, she made her way across the room.
"Look at him," she hissed, jerking her chin toward the comer where Agustfn lay curled up, pretending to be asleep. "He's only six years old, yet he looks like an evil old man.
"His hair has fallen out. His body is covered with scabs. His stomach is swollen with parasites. Yet, he survives.
"He has no clothes. He sleeps without a blanket. Yet, he doesn't even catch cold."
She turned toward the man on the mattress. "Can't you see that he is indeed the devil? The devil will find me wherever I go."
His mother's eyes shone feverishly bright under her disheveled hair. "The thought of having suckled the devil at my own breast fills me with fear and revulsion."
She reached up to a niche in the wall where she had hidden the corncakes the man had brought her last night. She gave one to the man, and nibbling on the other one, she lowered herself beside him on the mattress.
In a monotonous, trancelike tone she recounted that Agustfn was a changeling.
"One of the nurses at the hospital changed my own baby for the devil," she continued, her tone suddenly vehement.
"Everyone knew that I was going to have a girl. My pregnant belly was broad instead of pointed. My hair began to fall out. Blotches and blemishes appeared on my skin. My legs swelled. Those are the symptoms of carrying a girl.
"At first, even though I knew he was a changeling, I couldn't help but love him. He was so beautiful and so clever. He never cried. He spoke before he walked, and he sang like an angel.
"I refused to believe any of the women in Ipairi who accused Agustin of having the evil eye. Even after my stillborn pregnancy I didn't pay any attention to the neighbors' insinuations.
"I just thought they were ignorant, and worst of all, envious of the boy's beautiful eyes. After all, who ever heard of a child having the evil eye?"
She scraped out the white, soft center of the corncake and flung the dry crust across the room. "But when my man died in an accident at the mill, I had to agree with the women." She covered her face with her hands, and quietly added, "Agustin has never been ill in his life. I should have left him to his fate in Ipairi. Then his death would not be on my conscience."
"Let me get word to the woman I've been telling you about," the man said, his voice soft, yet persuasive. "I know she'll take him."
At great length he explained about his job at the pharmaceutical laboratory. He worked in the storeroom and was on very good terms with his boss. He foresaw no difficulties in convincing the man of his need for an advance.
"With the money, the two of us can go to Caracas," he said. He rose and dressed. "Wait for me at the laboratory. I'll be out by five. I'll have everything arranged by then."
Agustin reached for the dry crust on the ground. On unsteady legs, he walked toward the narrow, back doorway, which no longer had a door, and stepped out into what had once been a yard.
He headed toward his favorite place, the gnarled, no-longer-blooming acacia tree overhanging the ravine. He sat on the ground, his legs extended in front of him, his naked back resting against a portion of the crumbling low wall that had once encircled the grounds.
The scrawny, sickly looking cat that had followed him all the way from Ipairi rubbed its coarse fur against his thigh. Agustin gave it a small piece of the crust, then pushed the cat away toward the lizards scuttling in and out of the crevices in the mud wall.
He would not part with another crumb. He was never capable of satisfying his own relentless hunger; a hunger that filled his days and nights with dreams of food. With a sigh on his lips he dozed off.
Startled by a gust of wind, he woke up. Dead leaves swirled in a circle around him. The leaves rose high up in the air and then descended in brown rustling whirlpools into the ravine.
He could hear the murmuring stream below. When it rained the shallow water grew into a seething river, sweeping along trees and dead animals from the hamlets in the mountains.
Agustin turned his head slightly and gazed at the silent hills around him. Thin columns of smoke drifted up into the sky, melting with the moving clouds. Could the Protestant mission be that close? he asked himself. Or perhaps the smoke was from the house of the woman who wasn't afraid to take him.
He rested his cheek on his small bony hand. Flies buzzed around his open mouth. He pressed his parched lips together, spread his legs, and urinated. He was hungry. He could feel the pain inside him as he again fell asleep.
The sun was high when Agustin awoke. The cat was nearby, devouring a large lizard. He crawled toward the feline. It snarled viciously, holding the half-eaten reptile tightly under its paw. Agustin kicked the cat in the stomach, then reached for the slippery entrails and swallowed them. He looked up and found his mother watching him from the doorway.
"Holy Virgin!" she exclaimed. "He isn't human." She crossed herself. "It won't be long before he poisons himself."
Again she made the sign of the cross and, folding her hands in prayer, murmured, "Holy Father. Get him out of my way. Make him die a natural death, so I won't have him on my conscience."
She went inside, lifted the mattress, and pulled out her only dress. She caressed it and lovingly pressed the wrinkled dress against her body, then shook it repeatedly and laid it out on the mattress with great care.
Curiously, Agustin watched her light a fire in the cooking pit. Humming a little tune, she retrieved the coffee and the pieces of sugar loaf she kept in a crate nailed high up on the wall.
Agustin wanted a piece of that sugar. He tried to stand up, but overcome by nausea he crouched with his elbows against the ground and vomited unchewed pieces of lizard.
Salty tears dribbled down his sunken cheeks. He gagged repeatedly, foam and bile spurting from his trembling lips.
He wiped his mouth and chin on his shoulders. With a painful moan he tried to straighten up but slumped forward on the ground.
The sound of the murmuring ravine engulfed him like a soft veil. When the smell of coffee filtered through his nostrils and he heard his mother say that she had made him sweet coffee, he knew that he was dreaming. His dry lips grimaced.
He wanted to smile when he heard her laugh; that high, abrupt, happy laughter he used to know so well. He wondered if she would put on her red dress and meet the man at the pharmaceutical laboratory.
Agustin opened his eyes. On the ground next to him stood a small tin filled with coffee. Afraid the vision would vanish, he reached out and lifted the can to his mouth. Indifferent to the burning pain on his lips and tongue, he sipped the strong, very sweet brew. It cleared his head and stopped his nausea.
Dreamily, Agustin gazed at the slanted rain lines in the distance. Within moments dark clouds, edged with gold, floated across the sky. The clouds stained the hills with purple shadows and turned the sky a smoky black.
A cold wind, followed by a deafening roar, rose from the bottom of the ravine. The rainwater from the distant hills gushed down the deep gorge with outrageous force. Within moments large heavy drops burst from the sky.
Agustin rose, tilted his face skyward, and, with arms outstretched, welcomed the soothing coolness that washed him clean. Driven by an inexplicable impulse, he went into the house and picked up the dress on the mattress.
Clutching it with trembling hands, he hurried outside to the very edge of the ravine and threw the garment into the wind. It flew like a kite, landing on a leafless branch of the old acacia tree overhanging the steep slope.
"You devil! You monster!" his mother screamed, rushing toward him, her hair tumbling wildly about her face, her arms extended. As if transfixed by the sound of the roaring water, she just stood there between the boy and the fluttering dress, her eyes filled with hatred, unable to say a word.
Then, holding on to weeds and exposed roots, she carefully eased herself toward the overhanging branch of the acacia tree.
Agustin watched her from behind the gnarled trunk with fascinated interest. Her feet moved with unerring agility on the steep slippery ground.
She will get the dress by any means, he thought. He felt anger and fear.
She was only a few inches away from it. She stretched her arm as far as she could. She touched the dress with the tip of her fingers and then lost her footing and tumbled over the brink.
Her horror-stricken scream mingled with the sound of the roaring water was carried away by the wind.
Agustin moved closer to the edge. His eyes shone with a hollow depth as he saw his mother's body spin helplessly in the thick brown water on its journey to the sea.
The storm died away. The rain ceased. The wind dropped: All but the turbulent water in the ravine regained its habitual murmuring calm.
Agustin walked into the house, lay down on the mattress, and covered himself with the thin, dirty blanket. He felt the coarse, wet fur of the cat seeking the warmth of his body. He pulled the blanket over his eyes and fell into a deep dreamless sleep.
It was night when he awoke. Through the open doorway he could see the moon entangled in the barren branches of the acacia tree. "We'll go now," he murmured, stroking the cat.
He felt strong. It would be easy to walk across the hills, he decided. With each other as companions, he had the vague certainty that he and the cat would find the Protestant mission or the house of the woman who was not afraid to take him.