Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart_ A Novel - Alice Walker [24]
Jerry introduced him with a nod and briefly explained why he was there. Yolo stepped back immediately, outside the circle of the men.
He did not leave, however. Later, he would wonder why he did not. He stood watching their expressions as each of the men looked at the body of the young man. On some faces there were tears. One of the men, an older version of the dead man, went swiftly to his knees and held the body in his arms. He was smoking a cigarette and Yolo thought how odd it was, how rarely seen, this scene: a living brother holding a dead one with cigarette smoke curling in the air behind them.
Working in silence two of the men wrapped the body in a tattered bedspread and hoisted it onto their shoulders. Yolo followed them to the parking lot and over to a battered pea-green van. After carefully laying the body inside, the men shut the door.
He stayed a long time in the parking lot, looking at the bare earth, the footprints, the occasional gum wrapper and beer can. Then he looked out to sea. Seeing the ocean reminded him of his vacation. He started back toward the hotel, back toward his lounge chair, his novel. But he doubted he could really return to any of it.
When Kate Had Visited
When Kate had visited a local shaman, an African-Amerindian woman who had studied with Armando years before, she had been charmed, before completely going under, by Armando’s voice as he sang icaros, healing songs that had come down to him through countless generations, which Anunu had on tape. Ya es el tiempo para abrir tu corazón. Now is the time to open your heart. This was the line that she always understood, no matter how distracted or apprehensive she was at the beginning of the journey. It never failed to make her feel the rightness of her decision to be where she was. Sitting in the dark, drinking a horrible-tasting mixture of an unseen, unknown tree and vine from another continent, and being totally dependent on a woman who was as unknown as either tree or vine. Anunu was small and dark and ageless with shrewd bright eyes that asked nothing of you except that you be willing to approach her as yourself. This was a lot, of course, and many people could not do it.
Grandmother will want to know all about you, she smiled, and She will find out, too. She laughed. You might as well tell me a little bit of what brought you here today so that I will be better able to help you on your journey.
Kate had not hesitated.
I believe all is up with us, she said. Us humans.
And whatever would make you believe that? asked Anunu, with a chuckle.
Kate laughed as well.
It’s all so fucked, she said. She was surprised she had used this term. Ordinarily she was more mindful in her speech. She had reasoned it wrong to use fuck as a curse, for instance. If fucking is used as a curse, she believed, soon the act of fucking, which she considered healthy and succulent, would cause its participants to self-destruct. AIDS did not surprise her, at this level of thought, because it had seemed to crawl out of the global human shadow bag into which sex had been consigned.
I am also unconvinced of the need to do anything further with my life, she said.
Anunu was silent, looking at her intently.
It is such a fine life, said Anunu.
Kate was surprised. Although she was widely published and was to some extent a public figure, she had the idea most of the time that she was unrecognizable and therefore incognito. This grew out of her feeling when she was a child that she had the power to be invisible, which grew out of the fact that frequently she had felt unseen.
And, said Kate into Anunu’s silence, there is the question of sex. One’s sexuality.
Ah, said Anunu.
I don’t seem to find much of a difference between women and men when it comes to loving them. If they’re wonderful, sexy, and cute, I want to snuggle up and be enchanted.
They both laughed.
Well, said Anunu. That’s not a problem. The other two might