La inca, in decline

It’s all true, plataneros. Through the numinous power of prayer La Inca saved the girl’s life, laid an A-plus zafa on the Cabral family fukú (but at what cost to herself?). Everybody in the neighborhood will tell you how, shortly after the girl slipped out of the country, La Inca began to diminish, like Galadriel after the temptation of the ring — out of sadness for the girl’s failures, some would say, but others would point to that night of Herculean prayer. No matter what your take, it cannot be denied that soon after Beli’s departure La Inca’s hair began to turn a snowy white, and by the time Lola lived with her she was no longer the Great Power she had been. Yes, she had saved the girl’s life, but to what end? Beli was still profoundly vulnerable. At the end of The Return of the King, Sauron’s evil was taken by ‘a great wind’ and nearly ‘blown away,’ with no lasting consequences to our heroes;↓ but Trujillo was too powerful, too toxic a radiation to be dispelled so easily. ≡ ‘And as the Captains gazed south to the Land of Mordor, it seemed to them that, black against the pall of cloud, there rose a huge shape of shadow, impenetrable, lightning-crowned, filling all the sky. Enormous it reared above the world, and stretched out towards them a vast threatening hand, terrible but impotent; for even as it leaned over them, a great wind took it, and it was all blown away, and passed; and then a hush fell’.

Even after death his evil lingered. Within hours of El Jefe dancing bien pegao with those twenty-seven bullets, his minions ran amok — fulfilling, as it were, his last will and vengeance. A great darkness descended on the Island and for the third time since the rise of Fidel people were being rounded up by Trujillo’s son, Ramfis, and a good plenty were sacrificed in the most depraved fashion imaginable, the orgy of terror — funeral goods for the father from the son. Even a woman as potent as La Inca, who with the elvish ring of her will had forged within Baní her own personal Lothlórien, knew that she could not protect the girl against a direct assault from the Eye. What was to keep the assassins from returning to finish what they’d started? After all, they had killed the world-famous Mirabal Sisters,↓ who were of Name; what was to stop them from killing her poor orphaned negrita? ≡ And where were the Mirabal Sisters murdered? In a cane-field, of course. And then their bodies were put in a car and a crash was simulated! Talk about two for one!

La Inca felt the danger palpably, intimately. And perhaps it was the strain of her final prayer, but each time La Inca glanced at the girl she could swear that there was a shadow standing just behind her shoulder which disappeared as soon as you tried to focus on it. A dark horrible shadow that gripped her heart. And it seemed to be growing.

La Inca needed to do something, so, not yet recovered from her Hail Mary play, she called upon her ancestors and upon Jesú Cristo for help. Once again she prayed. But on top of that, to show her devotion, she fasted. Pulled a Mother Abigail. Ate nothing but one orange, drank nothing but water. After that last vast expenditure of piety her spirit was in an uproar. She did not know what to do. She had a mind like a mongoose but she was not, in the end, a worldly woman. She spoke to her friends, who argued for sending Beli to the campo. She’ll be safe there. She spoke to her priest. You should pray for her.

On the third day, it came to her. She was dreaming that she and her dead husband were on the beach where he had drowned. He was dark again as he always was in summer.

You have to send her away.

But they’ll find her in the campo.

You have to send her to Nueva York. I have it on great authority that it is the only way.

And then he strutted proudly into the water; she tried to call him back, Please, come back, but he did not listen.

His otherworldly advice was too terrible to consider. Exile to the North! To Nueva York, a city so foreign she herself had never had the ovaries to visit. The girl would be lost to her, and La Inca would have failed her great cause: to heal the wounds of the Fall, to bring House Cabral back from the dead. And who knows what might happen to the girl among the yanquis? In her mind the U.S. was nothing more and nothing less than a país overrun by gangsters, putas, and no-accounts. Its cities swarmed with machines and industry, as thick with sinvergüenceria as Santo Domingo was with heat, a cuco shod in iron, exhaling fumes, with the glittering promise of coin deep in the cold lightless shaft of its eyes. How La Inca wrestled with herself those long nights! But which side was Jacob and which side was the Angel? After all, who was to say that the Trujillos would remain in power much longer? Already the necromantic power of El Jefe was waning and in its place could be felt something like a wind. Rumors flew as thick as ciguas, rumors that the Cubans were preparing to invade, that the Marines had been spotted on the horizon. Who could know what tomorrow would bring? Why send her beloved girl away? Why be hasty?

La Inca found herself in practically the same predicament Beli’s father had found himself in sixteen years earlier, back when the House of Cabral had first come up against the might of the Trujillos. Trying to decide whether to act or to stay still.

Unable to choose, she prayed for further guidance — another three days without food. Who knows how it might have turned out had not the Elvises come calling? Our Benefactor might have gone out exactly like Mother Abigail. But thankfully the Elvises surprised her as she was sweeping the front of the house. Is your name Myotis Toribio? Their pompadours like the backs of beetles. African muscles encased in pale summer suits, and underneath their jackets the hard, oiled holsters of their fire-arms did creak.

We want to speak to your daughter, Elvis One growled.

Right now, Elvis Two added.

Por supuesto, she said and when she emerged from the house holding a machete the Elvises retreated to their car, laughing.

Elvis One: We’ll be back, vieja.

Elvis Two: believe us.

Who was that? Beli asked from her bed, her hands clutching at her nonexistent stomach. No one, La Inca said, putting the machete next to the bed. The next night, ‘no one’ shot a peephole clean through the front door of the house.

The next couple of nights she and the girl slept under the bed, and a little bit later in the week she told the girl: No matter what happens I want you to remember: your father was a doctor, a doctor. And your mother was a nurse.

And finally the words: You should leave.