Ballad & Dagger, page 11
There are no right answers.
Around us, the cemetery seems like part of some faraway world. It forms a wide, walled-in half circle around the front and side of the synagogue and winds around to the back. Little lanterns blink to life in the twilight, and I realize they have solar panels on them. This place looks decrepit and chaotic at first, but the grass is cut, the live oak overhead well taken care of. There’s no trash, no wilted flowers on the graves. “You did all this?” I ask, waving my hand in a vague arc around us.
She smiles for real now, and it’s pure pride. “Someone had to.”
“Anyway, yeah,” I say, taking her in cautiously. “Together. We’re in this together.” I’m not sure what that means exactly, but it feels true. And if nothing else, it’ll be a way for me to get more information, like Tía Lucia said.
Chela perks up even more. It’s a sight to behold. “Great!” She fast-walks back down the little path toward the gate. “We can get started now!”
“Wait, what do you mean ‘get started’? I thought you just meant—”
“The redo of last night! It’s about to begin!”
I wish people would stop calling it that. Last night was the worst night of my life for, like, ten different reasons.
But Chela’s already taken off. “I’ll explain more on the way!”
I head after her. Everything is happening too fast. “You’re just going to drag me out here to Betahayim Cemetery and—”
“Do you know what Betahayim means?” I freeze as the deep baritone rumbles out. I know that voice well—Chela’s dad, Rabbi Hidalgo. Usually, it’s a comforting sound, like the thickness and breadth of each sonorous tone lets you know how big the man’s heart is, his endless capacity to care for so many people in our community.
But after what Chela just told me, I don’t know what to think anymore. Up ahead, she turns to me slowly, and I can sense her eyes rolling. When I look, Rabbi Hidalgo stands on the side portico of the synagogue next to his wife, Aviva, a normally cheerful, slender woman who doesn’t speak much but smiles a lot. “Hey, Rabbi,” I say, with a little wave. “Hey, Mrs. Hidalgo. And, ah, no? I just figured Betahayim was some dead guy that they named the place after.”
Rabbi Hidalgo smirks, but it’s not cruel. You can see a twinkle in his eyes beneath all that bunched-up flesh, like his whole dark face is one big smile behind his big, bushy beard. “Aha, ahh, manseviko, that would be a remarkable coincidence indeed.” Young man, manseviko means, with that -iko giving an added twist of fatherly affection. He walks down the little stone stairwell and joins us on the path. Mrs. Hidalgo stays perfectly still, her eyes glued to her husband. “But no, the answer holds great mystery and wonder, in fact. Perhaps even one that is relevant to you.”
“Jaime,” Mrs. Hidalgo warns from behind him. “Be careful.”
“Betahayim means cemetery,” Chela says with a groan. “It’s not the name of the cemetery—it just is the cemetery. And we’re all sick of these riddles, Dad. This is no time for that.”
I hold up both hands, because what?! “Wait, wait, wait.”
Chela puts her face in her hands and groans.
“You mean to tell me,” I demand, “that all this time I’ve been saying the Cemetery Cemetery? And everyone just let me?”
Rabbi Hidalgo smiles even wider, arms apart like he’s come to the end of a great sermon. “Should’ve paid attention in Ladino class, manseviko.”
Look, every San Madrigalero kid has to go to three hours of Sunday school every week. We learn Spanish and Hebrew and Ladino, which is a combination of the two plus some Turkish and other things. It’s not modern Spanish, it’s like ye-olde-pyrate-type Spanish that they spoke back in the days when folks first washed up on the shores of San Madrigal. Plus, we study Lucumí, the Cubanized version of Yoruba that Santeros speak. I’m just saying, it’s a lot. And since I was only around some of the time and my parents are sticklers for me keeping up with lessons, I had to do half that learning from books and crappy 8-bit language-learning games.
“How does that—”
“Every word means many things,” he says, leaning all the way into super-extra rabbi mode now. “The meaning we know—or some of us, anyway”—he winks at me, and it’s so corny and avuncular I can’t even be mad that he’s clearly shading my entire existence—“and also the hidden meanings from the many layers of history and mythology it carries with it.”
“That’s deep, Dad,” Chela says. “But we need answers now, not poems.”
Rabbi Hidalgo looks down, shoulders hunched, his entire body a sagging question mark. “I know, fijika mia, I know. I wish I could…” He shakes his head, and for a moment, I think he might burst into tears, which would be…intense. Instead, he perks up again and nods at me. “Next time, you come in the house, hmm, Mateo?” He means the synagogue, which also serves as the Hidalgos’ home. “Aviva makes a tremendous baklava.”
Mrs. Hidalgo, still on the portico, finds a smile for me, but it’s a tight one, her lips pressed firmly together. “And send our love to your tía, please. Now, Jaime…”
The rabbi nods, sadness descending on him like a shroud. “Chela, you’re not going—”
“I’m not doing this with you again, Dad,” she says flatly. Then she softens it with: “I promise I’ll be careful.”
And she turns and slips through the cemetery like a ghost into the night.
“HEY!” I CALL, CATCHING UP with Chela. She’s hasn’t slowed her pace since leaving the cemetery—the betahayim, as it turns out. She hooked a right onto Cypress and has been flitting along at a half jog past bodegas and beauty salons for three blocks while I tall-walk along in her wake. “What…What happened back there?”
She whirls on me so suddenly that I trip over myself trying not to crash into her. “What happened is what’s been happening since last night, and since…forever!”
“Which is?”
There’s pure fire in her eyes. “Lies and obfuscation! Pretty poems and broken promises. I have had it!”
“Last night…” I say, trying to be the calm rock she can storm around, an anchor.
But the words—the question, really—send the same look of sadness over her that the rabbi just had. The fire blinks out in an instant.
“I’m sorry,” I say quickly. “You don’t have to—”
“No, it’s okay. Just come on.” She falls back into a smooth saunter, moving like a slo-mo splash of water through the October night. “It’s easier to talk about it while we walk.”
You know when you put on a great song and it starts out with just a little strut, the deep drop of the bass and a round or two through the chords, piano jangling away, just simple? That’s what it’s like every time I stroll through these streets. I can’t help it. These buildings, all those elaborate storefronts with tacky sea vistas painted on them, or images of santos or pirate ships, the famous three peaks—they’re the bass line, the tumbao. That constant rumble. Whoooom! And then I’ve passed them and more appear on the next block, Simpatico’s Peluqería, La Altereria de Pedro Chavetz—whoh-whoom!—Chacho’s Kosher Bakery—whoom!
Outside each place, and all along the street around us, neighbors chatter at each other, voices rising and falling amid traffic and the ambient jumble of city sounds. Last night it was a bubbling excitement, about to overflow. Today it’s more nervousness, uncertainty about what’s ahead. But the regular chitchat persists—it’s unstoppable. That’s the piano part, scattered but ongoing, a whole world of banter and bochinche, now harmonious, now dissonant, resolving and breaking apart and resolving again. Gossip and barter and the churn of my people in all our messiness and glory.
And now, by my side, there is Chela.
Her voice is the single horn call that rises above the ramble and boom of the rest. Then it becomes a melody, and a whole story unfolds as each note emerges from the last, becomes the next, relates to others and the larger world around it.
Chela tells her story, and I do my best to pay attention, I do. And I catch it, what she’s saying, for real. But also, all I hear is music.
“I can’t explain everything, Mateo. And I know I’m probably going to sound like I’ve lost it, but then again we both saw Galanika last night. He was there for you.”
Pause.
She studies me as we walk. The world, Brooklyn, Little Madrigal, swim forever forward. Whoom! The Biblioteka Club. Whoom! La Chankleta Divina. Whoom! Botanika Madrigalera. The shimmy and shuffle of old men arguing over a chessboard, kids swarming past on the way home from school.
He was, my nod says. I may not understand it all, but I know you’re not making it up. I know it’s real, too.
“I don’t see Okanla,” says Chela, “but I feel her. I know she’s in me; she moves through me. I’ve always known. I was only ten when Tío Si took me aside and explained what had happened, but it felt like someone was finally saying out loud a fairy tale that I’d already known my whole life. It felt like the truth. Because it was. It is.”
Pause. Little Madrigal swooshes around us, and somehow San Madrigal, the lost island, glides along the warm October breeze, too. It’s all over this place, these people.
“I know how to destroy things, Mateo.” Pause. “People.” Pause. “It’s in me. Part of me. I can see it happen like a spirit version of myself is running forward in time, ahead of me, showing me each cut and where it goes, where to slide my knife, when to cut, where to put my fingers. How much pressure to apply and when to let go, walk away; when to run. But I don’t do it randomly.”
The city. The block. The buildings. Four hundred years of wars and revolutions, trade, and culture and lovemaking. Music. All around us.
“I know how because my body knows. It’s like dance, the way your body knows how to tell the story, find the beat, without ever being taught sometimes. I never had to learn how to do what I do—it’s a language I was born with. Or…I guess it was born into me when I initiated.” Pause. She stops walking, and the world stops, too. “Do you know what that feels like, Mateo?” Her whisper is a tiny prayer that I do.
I nod. Quietly say, “Yes.” Then I shake my head. “I mean, for what I do, of course. And I’m not a great dancer. But it’s music for me. I know I’m supposed to be a healer—I am a healer, I guess. But it doesn’t make sense to me. Not like music does. Nothing makes sense to me like music does.”
There’s silence now, but not the horrible earth-shattering kind—it’s the kind that’s heavy with what just happened and all that lies ahead. Like the moment when a solo reaches its peak and the other players just hang back and let it soar, and then even that stops and silently the beat still pulses inside us so when all that sound blows back in we feel it coming. We can almost hear the echo of it before it happens, and we let it wrap around us like the ocean.
The music comes in again on her sad, simple smile. “It’s all still new for you,” she says, not unkindly. Then she wiggles her eyebrows. “Who knows what’ll happen next.”
I want to ask about Trucks, about what Tolo knows and what the beef is between him and Gerval, but I refuse to do anything to shatter this moment.
And anyway, what comes next looms up very suddenly, as we round the corner onto Fulton and a whole world of chaos opens around us.
IF THERE WAS MUSIC FOR this moment, it would be drums, all drums.
You know those solos when the whole band stops and the drummer just goes ham on their kit? Bagahh bagahhhhh brrrrrrrrap brap bap SHASHAA! And folks are watching with their eyes wide, now standing, not even realizing they stood up, because the sheer force of that rumble and crash shoved them to their feet, and then it swings their asses into motion as the chaos and clatter resolves back to the steady swing of the song?
That.
Except here on the streets, there’s no resolution in sight, no steady beat underneath—just sheer chaos and that gut-in-your-throat feeling of being about to tilt over the edge of something and plummet.
The whole neighborhood is out, crowded in that now-infamous intersection in front of Tolo’s club where everything went bonkers last night. Santeros in their whites with beaded necklaces and bracelets. Sefaradim, some in kaftans with fezzes or silken head scarves. Pirates all over the place, some looking scraggily and audacious, others dressed to the nines, cool/calm/collected.
The rapid-fire bang of the snare blasts through me as I take it all in, the shimmer of cymbals. No rhythm, just vibes. Bad ones.
My people are divided—that much I can see. Arguments have broken out, shouting matches with fistfights dangling in the air, waiting to happen. Escalation comes so easily: a yell becomes a shove becomes a tackle becomes a full-on beat-down. I’ve seen it so many times. Been in it once or twice. The air is prickly, about to snap.
“Whoa,” I say. “This is bad already.”
Chela shakes her head, brow creased. “Yeah…”
“In some ways, it’s been this bad for a while, hasn’t it? I just haven’t been paying attention.”
She nods.
“It’s all just breaking out into the open now. Why do people care so much about the island rising again? It barely seems possible, just a dream.”
“It’s still home,” Chela says. “They—we—never let go of the island, even after it sank. We’re still tied to it. If a dream is what’s keeping you alive, you cling to it as tight as you can. No matter how ridiculous it may seem.”
“What if the dream is what’s killing you?” It sure looks like that’s what’s happening as we make our way through the angry faces in the bristling crowd.
Chela scowls and shrugs. “If you take poison for long enough, it’ll save your life.”
I get the feeling that’s only halfway a metaphor for her.
Up ahead, Davos the hairstylist and one of the guitarists I used to play events with, Ursula Ka, are cursing each other out in three languages.
“And Trucks?” I finally say, the question that’s been sitting on my tongue, growing sour for hours. It feels like kicking the bass drum, a low growl beneath this sharp cacophony.
Chela gets up in my face so fast I barely see her move. Her eyes glint with that same threat—no, promise—of violence that sparkled in them last night after I interrupted her midway through an assassination. “Listen to me, Mateo Matisse. Don’t you ever speak a word of that to my cousin. Is that clear?”
I nod, blinking.
“Tolo has no idea I did that, and it has to stay that way. No one knows except you, Mateo. And that’s how it’s gonna stay. And anyway”—she gets down from her tiptoes and starts walking normally like she didn’t just threaten me—“that was my first time ever doing that.” She exhales. “Taking a life. I hate that I had to, but I had to.”
I stay quiet. This is her moment.
But inside I have a million questions. Most of all: Does what happened last night mean she awakened her powers of destruction, just like I did with healing?
“I don’t even like sneaking up on people like that, I really don’t,” she continues, smoothly dodging some middle-aged pirate guy as he stumbles past and two more people hurl themselves after him. “I’m more of a direct-approach-type person. But it had to be done, and it had to be done clean. They were planning a move on my cousin.”
“You mean— Who’s ‘they’?”
Chela shakes her head, frustrated at herself. “I don’t know,” she admits. “And now I might not be able to find out. I’d been keeping an eye on Trucks because he doesn’t make sense—dude just showed up a couple years ago, was Anisette’s bodyguard before he was in Gerval’s crew, and yeah, she kinda raised Gerval, but the whole thing is just weird. Who is Trucks?” She pauses, realizing again, maybe, the everlastingness of what she’s done. “Was. We never saw his face under his helmet, didn’t know his family. But I’ve learned…It’s hard to explain.” Her eyes meet mine. “Maybe only you can understand, Mateo. If you haven’t felt this yet, maybe you will someday, but it’s like there’s a truth I know in my soul even if I can’t explain why. It’s Okanla. I feel her. I feel her knowledge—wisdom, maybe—within me sometimes.”
“Yes,” I say quietly, because that’s exactly what healing was like: a knowledge that I didn’t totally understand. A knowledge beyond understanding. Like my hands knew what to do before I did. And the only way it worked was when I let go and trusted them.
She takes in my serious face, and I think I see her soften, ever so slightly. “There was something wrong with that guy, Mateo. Something very wrong. Every alarm in me was going off when I saw him earlier in the day yesterday. Like a primordial warning of danger rising from the deep.”
“So, what’d you do?”
A little mischievous grin crosses her face, and I can’t lie, it’s wildly enticing. “I stole his phone.”
“What?”
She shrugs, Galerano-style. “Wasn’t hard. Point is, I was right. Sure enough, the latest message was a photo of Tolo and a single word: Tonight.”
“Whoa! Who—”
“Just another burner phone, from what I could tell. But between that and what every instinct in me was screaming, I knew what I had to do. I wasn’t about to wait until it was too late, I know that. Why? So I could sit around for the rest of my life and go, Damn, if only I’d listened to my gut, my cousin would still be alive? No thanks, buddy.”
“Damn,” I say, nodding because she’s making some points. If I’d heard this story before everything that happened to me last night, I might’ve been way more skeptical. But the truth is, I get it now. I don’t know if I would’ve done the same thing, but I’m pretty sure that if I hadn’t, I would’ve regretted it.
“Anyway,” Chela says, “when Si had me initiated to Okanla, he was just following what your aunt’s divination said. But pirates don’t do stuff in public, and they seemed to think none of it should ever get out, especially to my dad. Of course, he found out, anyway. But the family still kept it quiet. And when Tolo trained me, it wasn’t so I could become one of his hired guns. He’s always taught me not to use my skills for anything like that. Not for revenge. And not for my own enrichment.”
