Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [90]
You hear banshees in the distance, the off shore wind howling through the limestone caves overlooking Vinales. Soon as you turn the corner, the city disappears. You stand in front of a dense jungle carved into the midst of the urban landscape.
The babalao lived in a one-story rectangle, but I have no idea if the builders had constructed her home of wood or stone or some other material. Nature had reclaimed this structure. Thick ivy vines encased the house in a cocoon and a grove of tall trees formed a wall that semicircled the property. The branches of the trees on the side of the wide porch curved over the roof and met in the center; they resembled a pair of giant hands clasped in prayer.
Tropical flowers sprouted from the walls of the house. Their fragrance blended with the musky odor of fresh compost. Someone had scattered chunks of rotting melon on the ground near the front gate. While bending over to pick up a wedge of fruit, I saw something else on that fence, something that stared back at me: the dead eyes of a dismembered doll’s head. Then I noticed the other severed plastic heads and limbs tied to the pickets.
From the forest behind the babalao’s yard came the low whistle of metal slashing air. Machetes glinted in the moonlight slanting between the trees. I considered leaving until one camera crew member explained that the priestess and her family had left the fruit and mangled dolls as benign offerings. The people inside this house had just celebrated the feast of Santa Barbara, a sacred night in the Santería religion when the female deity devours the male god and all the women of the earth attain their full power to rule the world for twenty-four hours.
A woman stepped from the shadows in front of the house— the babalao’s daughter. She appeared to be in her early thirties, with head-spinning looks: onyx hair tumbling to her shoulders, high cheekbones, panther’s eyes, bare legs under a white skirt. She did not say a word, just gestured us inside with a wave of her hand.
As we walked up the path leading to the front door, I saw three bulky forms perched on the roof next to the chimney— turkey vultures with their wings black cowls drawn up around them. Those birds only eat dead flesh. Something on this place had died or was about to die. They swayed forward as we climbed the porch steps, and I could feel their eyes on us.
The sight of those figures chilled me, but as soon as we entered the house, I heard music, a soothing refrain from my childhood, coming from the next room:
“. . . a three-hour tour, a three-hour tour . . .”
Neighbors of the babalao crammed the front parlor watching a rerun of Gilligan’s Island. Now I felt at home.
Diana and I followed the film crew into the living room. We met a party of maybe ten Cubans sitting around the room, passing a bottle of rum among them. The babalao must have been in her late seventies, a tiny woman with a face as wrinkled as a chestnut. Nothing frail about her, though. You could feel her powerful presence from across the room. She came over and took my hand, studied my eyes for a moment, and pinched the skin on my face. “I have something for you,” she said.
She went out to the kitchen and came back with a bottle of thin white liquid. “You need this,” she insisted as she poured the stuff into a tablespoon. Whoa, I thought, what is this, some witch’s brew that will have me crawling around the room, braying like a jackal? Or do they think I’m Chango and is she giving me a sedative to knock me out before popping my carcass in the oven as an offering to Santa Barbara? The liquid gave off no telltale odor. What the hell, everybody’s got to die of something. I slurped down the spoonful and immediately recognized that vile chalky taste. A witch’s brew all right: milk of magnesia.
The