Ballad & Dagger, page 20
“Right!” I yell.
“Maza, aren’t you always building apps and stuff?” Tolo says, standing and moving toward me like a tank. “Can you put all this in some graphic form that’s understandable to a mere mort—”
“On it,” they report, already opening a laptop.
“Safiya and Tams, run the code on the rest of the songs, and let’s see what we got.”
He stands beside me and crosses his arms, face stern. “That’s great work, Mateo. Only thing I don’t understand is this top line.” He points to the staff labeled voz that has the same weird melody for every song.
I shake my head. “Me neither. It just says one word over and over. A name, maybe? V-I-Z-V-A-R-G-A-L. I was hoping you’d have heard of it.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell, no. I think I’d remember that. Safiya?”
My phone buzzes with another text.
“Not one I’ve ever come across,” Safiya says.
It’s Gerval: Outside. Where are you?
Tolo sighs, pulling a book down from his shelf. “Well, we can keep looking for that part. The rest is enough to get us what we need.”
“Good,” I say. “I’ll be back.”
“Where is she?”
Maestro Grilo Juan Gerval cuts an impressive image in the lights of the alley. He’s all dressed up in a shiny crimson outfit, top buttons undone just so, sleeves wide and droopy. It’d look utterly ridiculous on anyone else, but somehow he makes it work. Shimmering rings adorn his fingers, and a gold chain hangs around his neck with an antique pendant of some kind dangling off the end.
“I wouldn’t know,” I say, standing in the doorway, arms crossed over my chest. “Just here to say I’m not bringing her to you.”
He shakes his head, eyes still on the ground, a wry smile on his face. Raises his eyebrows in mock admiration. “Oh, wow.” Finally, he looks at me. “And why is that, Healer? Hmm?”
“Because I—” The words stop short because I don’t know how to explain it. My fists are clenched at my sides suddenly, my whole body wound tight. I feel like all the tension that’s built up from the past couple of days is rolling through me in one thick, rising wave. It’s the secret history, that ledger, the terrible songs…the bambarúto tearing through the crowd, attacking Chela. Whatever’s going on with Tía Lucia that she won’t tell me about. It’s everything. “You know, don’t you? About all of it.”
He’s still smiling, which I really don’t like. “So it was you who took the books. I thought Chela, maybe.” He tilts his head, appraising me. “Or was it both of you? That’d be something.”
“You haven’t answered my question.”
“Yes, Mateo, I know about it all. And no, I don’t like it, either. But I also know what it means. Sure, a lot of the things we thought were true are a lie, but that lie has sustained us, and it’s hiding a truth that has sustained us, too.”
“Sustained us?” I spit.
“You don’t have to like it—I already said I don’t—but that doesn’t make it untrue. Crunch the numbers when you have a chance. It wasn’t just pocket change that came out of all that trade. It’s our economy, Mateo. It’s how you and I even exist. Do you understand that? San Madrigal is just like every other country, and that’s sad. But it’s what we have to deal with.”
“Right,” I say. “We have to deal with it. Out in the open. We can’t hide it like Anisette has been doing. We have to—” I stop, because he’s just staring at me blankly, and I realize what a fool I’ve been for even hoping he wasn’t like her. That lie has sustained us. “You’re going to go along with it, aren’t you? Hiding the whole history.”
“Do you have any idea what will happen if that history gets out, Mateo? It will destroy us. That’s not a guess; it’s not what I think will happen; it’s a fact. That truth will destroy us. We are already hanging on by barely a thread. In another generation, we might not really exist at all, just get swallowed up by the great generic masses of the United States. If this gets out, if you let this out, all you’ll do is accelerate that. I give us a year, tops, as a people.”
“But—”
“But if we raise the island…” His eyes are alight with everything he seems so sure of now, and he takes a step toward me, not threatening but excited. “If we raise that island, Mateo—and we will, we definitely will—and open it to the world, tell them exactly who we are, then we will have a national identity for real. One that everyone will see, recognize, and respect. Not hidden in the shadows, not a lost island of lost people—a found one! A miracle! Seen and acknowledged, we will be unkillable, invincible. That’s what I want for us. That’s what I would do anything for.”
I just stare at him. I don’t have a response, not one made out of words, anyway.
“I’m asking you to join me,” Gerval says. “Will you?” Words I’d longed to hear for so long. Words I’d anchored all my hopes for my own future to.
Words that sound like pure garbage to me now. I narrow my eyes at him. “Not on your life, you pathetic clown.”
He laughs, looking off into the distance, and I wonder if this is going to come to blows. My fists tighten, ready. Instead, Gerval sighs and says, “I guess that’s the difference between you and me, Mateo. I’d do anything to save San Madrigal. And you’re willing to throw it all away for a truth no one wants to know, anyway.”
“Nothing based on a lie is worth fighting for,” I say. “At least not without undoing the lie first.” Pretty sure I read that in a book somewhere. But it doesn’t matter—it’s true.
“You know what? Okay!” Gerval moves toward me so fast I don’t have time to dodge. He wraps a long arm around my shoulders and, propelling both of us on the sheer momentum of his frantic stride, fastwalks us back into the building and down the backstage corridor toward the event hall.
“Wait!” I yell. “Listen!”
Everything’s happening so fast, I can barely keep up with his steps or his logic, but I can’t slow down, either. “You listen!” he snaps. “You don’t get to control what happens. It’s not for you to decide.”
He kicks open the stage door and bursts through it, still with his arm around my shoulder, then pushes us onto the stage.
The whole event hall, all of Little Madrigal, falls into a stunned silence.
“Ah, hello, mi gente!” Gerval yells into the emptiness, squeezing me tightly to him. “I was just chatting with my friend Mateo here, and he’s told me so many interesting things!”
Suddenly, the lie kills the liar feels like much more than some old-time Santero saying—it feels like a prayer. I imagine his words becoming solid things, gridlocking against each other in his mouth and toppling down his throat; then, that lying airway clogged with them, he collapses with a whimper and a bleat.
But that’s not what happens. Instead, Gerval croons triumphantly, “Shall we get this second round of voting underway?”
One face stands out in the crowd, bright eyes staring deep daggers into my own. Chela Hidalgo’s.
I’M SHAKING MY HEAD NO, staring at Chela’s disbelieving eyes. I’m even yelling “No!” with everything in me, but nothing can be heard over Gerval’s booming voice. He’s grabbed one of the mics—the only one nearby, since Tolo and Anisette are down working the crowd—and he’s practically yelling into it, x-ing out any protest I try to make.
“It’s fitting that the once-divided Hidalgo-Baracasa clan has seen fit to close ranks yet again,” Gerval booms to a rapt audience. “Because they’re trying to protect someone dear to them. Family. And I understand that.” He laughs sadly, shakes his head at the tragedy of it. “We can all understand that. But what we can’t understand, because it wasn’t shared with us, is the terrible secret that the family harbors—the secret that girl harbors!”
He points a finger directly at Chela, who now turns her murdergaze onto him.
“No!” I yell. “Stop!”
But no one cares. Everyone’s lost in Gerval’s hypnotic bochinche.
“I know this will be hard to understand, what I’m about to say. It’ll sound like myth and fairy tale. But who are we if not a people made from myth? After all, we’re gathered here tonight to decide who will guide us into a new era in which we will raise our lost island from beneath the waves. We worship rare gods made of stones and water; we hold sacred the words of our hidden texts and believe the secrets of the shells to be divine messages. We don’t just understand myth—we live it! It’s built into us. It’s in our blood!”
It’s a good speech, I’ll give him that, and it only makes me hate him more.
“So you’ll understand, mi gente, my good people,” Gerval continues, “that I’m not being facetious or fantastical when I tell you that the being who roams among us disguised as a regular mortal girl is not simply the daughter of a goddess, not an initiate to our precious santo, no…”
A murmur of fear and anger rises all around.
“The child is an actual creature of the darkness—Okanla, the Destroyer, incarnate!”
Everyone gasps, and Chela stands. She’s wearing a stunning low-cut black gown with purple lace netting that extends over her shoulders and up her neck. I’ve never seen her so dressed up before. At her bat mitzvah, she’d worn some unremarkable frock-type thing. This is something else entirely.
“How?” people demand. “What does it mean?”
Something flickers through the darkness above us—a beam from the projector—and I whirl around to see grainy video moving in slo-mo across the screen. Surveillance footage. It shows the alley Gerval and I were just standing in, but in the video it’s Trucks, facing the street.
I turn back around, because I know what’s about to happen, and hundreds of wide eyes reflect the flickering images back at me.
They’ve been planning this all along.
I don’t know how, and I’m not totally sure who, even—Anisette Bisconte, surely, and Gerval, among others—but whoever it was, this has been in the works for a long time now. And they’ve been trying to use me throughout, one way or another.
And now, if nothing else, they’ve created the impression that I’ve sided with them and passed along information.
“You see?” Gerval says, shaking his head. “My man Trucks, murdered in cold blood. No normal girl would do this. No child of God. This is a demon that walks among us.”
A kind of rage I’ve never known before unfurls inside me.
“Isn’t that right?” Gerval has them now; the whole of Little Madrigal sits in the palm of his hand, ready to hear whatever comes next. And Chela stands like a statue in the middle of it all, her glare fixed on him.
The footage cuts off, and the three voting charts return. Already the numbers have started tilting back toward Gerval.
“Yes,” Chela says calmly into the silence of the room. “It’s all true.”
“Chela, no!” Tolo yells, shoving his way through the stunned crowd toward her. “What are you doing?”
“Stop!” she commands him. “What Gerval says is true. I haven’t always known it, not really—” She shakes her head, the moment suddenly intimate, and she looks like just a regular teenager, like me. “But maybe deep down, I did. I dunno. I wasn’t hiding it, though. No one else was, either. And whatever I am or am not, it has nothing to do with Tolo joining the Cabildo or raising the island.”
“Oh, but it does,” Gerval snarls, a prosecutor coming to the crux of his closing argument. And then, slowly, as if it breaks his heart: “Oh, but it does.”
“What are you talking about, man?” someone yells.
“Okanla the Destroyer wasn’t satisfied moving about in our midst disguised as a mere child—deceiving us. No. Okanla also went ahead and destroyed our island, all those years ago. On the day of her initiation the spirit became flesh, and the Destroyer was reborn. Chela is the reason we have no home! The cause of our infinite exile!”
“No!” Chela yells, but her protest is swallowed immediately by what seems like the whole room, the whole world, screaming at once.
Gerval’s voice carries over all of it. “With one thing the world begins; with one thing the world ends. With that same thing, we will bring back the world we lost. And there it is—Okanla!”
Except Chela’s already gone, vanished into the crowd somewhere. Tolo and Rabbi Hidalgo tear frantically after her.
“With the destruction of that one thing, our world will be reborn!” Gerval yells. “The girl is not a girl—she’s a demon. And the demon must die!”
On the screen above us, hardly anyone pays attention as the voting clock ticks away its last few seconds once again. The election has gone almost entirely to Gerval in all three circles.
I can’t pretend I understand the larger play at hand, or who is lying to whom. But I know I hate Gerval with everything in me. And demon or not, I’ll take Chela’s side over his.
I just hope it’s not too late.
Tams meets my eyes from in front of the stage. Her nod is all I need to know everything is set. Over by the tech stand, Maza gets in position.
Gerval is distracted, grinning out at the chaos he’s sown and reveling in his victory, so he doesn’t notice me walk slowly up behind him, doesn’t see it coming when I snatch the mic out of his loose grip, doesn’t have time to stop me as I take a few long steps away and yell into it as loud as I can, “I call for a revote! Right now!”
ALL THOSE EYES.
My entire community glares back at me, and the words that had been burning to explode out of me seem to just crinkle up and turn to dust in my mouth.
This is just like the night of the fete, except now I’m onstage.
But also, it’s just been a few days since then, and already my whole world is completely different. The world I knew then seems as far away as my globe-trotting parents. Another lifetime. Everything I thought I knew has been shattered. Something infinitely better and infinitely worse showed up to fill the vacancy.
And now I have called their attention to me. I chose this, despite how much I hate it. And I do hate it, the way their eyes seem to mark me, stain my skin. The way my knees tremble and all I can think about are the many ways this will go wrong.
But there’s one thing, and only one thing, I hate even more than this, and that’s Chela’s face when she thought I’d betrayed her.
“What is this, Mateo?” Councilwoman Bisconte demands. “We have voted! Twice already! The people have spoken. They reject the Destroyer and her dangerous family! A third vote is unprecedented.”
The Destroyer. I wonder, for a moment, whether or not what Gerval said is true. Chela said it was. I’m not even sure what that means, and suddenly, I just don’t care. So what if she’s Okanla incarnate? It’s still better than the secrets San Madrigal has been hiding all along. Okanla didn’t enslave people or prop up empires for blood money.
“Look,” I say, the words finally starting to come to me on the strength of all this wrath. “Listen, I—”
“Who is this kid?” a voice says, railroading right over mine. Gerval. “I’ll tell you. This is the kid who decided he was better off spending his childhood traveling the world with his fancy doctor parents than being here with us!”
Each word feels like a punch in the face. I don’t think the audience expected any of it, either. Everyone just sort of gapes at us for what feels like forever.
“He’s not one of us,” Gerval says, bringing it home. “He just learned our songs. A tourist.”
Another silence. I can’t make out individuals through the glare of the stage lights in my face. All I see are wide eyes and open mouths. Hundreds of them.
They hate me. I am 100 percent positive that everything Gerval just said is only giving voice to what they’ve all been thinking this whole time.
Tourist. That’s all I am. A tourist in my own neighborhood. A man at home nowhere.
I can almost hear their accusations, feel their visions of me slide beneath my skin and become even more true as they shape me, hurl me farther and farther away from this place, from myself.
Panic rises. My whole body screams at me to run, just turn around and run.
I glance at the muttering crowd, avoiding their angry faces, trying to decide if it makes sense to try to barge through them or take the back way. Then I catch Tía Lucia’s stare.
She’s sitting right up front, her eyes boring into mine. Escucha, she mouths, like an incantation, and like an incantation, it works. All those shrieking voices inside me suddenly go quiet.
Go deeper.
I’m trying, Tía. My body still demands that I run, but I hold my ground. Close my eyes. And finally, finally, I listen.
“He played at my sister’s funeral,” someone says. Bertol Alahambra, I think. “He’s a good kid.”
“He killed it at my bar mitzvah,” someone else yells. “That boy has magic hands.”
“And he was just little when his parents took him traveling! That’s not fair!”
Fear is a lie, Tía had said. Because it’s not the whole truth.
“Beside the point,” Gerval insists, but the crowd is already talking among themselves. They’re talking about me.
“That’s even more impressive, if you ask me—the kid was gone all that time and still made the effort to learn the music so he could play for us.”
“Where were you all that time, Gerval?”
“He was jet-setting!”
“On the YouTube!”
“Hanging out with Christina Aguilera!”
“Don’t drag that nice lady into this, Paka!”
“Mateo healed me the other night! ¡Hijo de Galanika!”
“Mateo is one of us!”
They see me. People I barely know and barely know me, see me. I’m not just a ghost. I’m not a pretender. I’ve been so deep in my head for so long, and all I could do was tell myself horror stories about what other people must be thinking. Lies, really.
“Lies,” I say into the mic.
“Huh?” someone calls.
“This man has been lying to you, to all of us. Just like Anisette here.”
Some people sound concerned; others mutter their disbelief. I sound like some kid making baseless accusations to save face. Easy to dismiss.
