Strega - Andrew H. Vachss [108]
"No," I lied.
"What does this woman make you feel—that is more important than the sum total of everything else. Close your eyes, Burke. Think her name into your mind. Feel it—let it come to you."
I closed my eyes, playing it square. Letting it come into me. Pablo floated away from me—I could feel him in the room, but we weren't alone.
"What?" he asked.
"A cold wind," I told him. "A chill…"
"All this sex, and no fire?"
"No fire. Dark sex. It happens like it's supposed to, everything works, but nobody smiles. Only part of her is with me like she's standing somewhere else …a movie director…She's someone else when she wants to be."
Pablo was quiet, waiting for me to say something else. But I was tapped out.
"Burke, when you make love with her—do you think of making a baby?"
"It can't be. I can't say why…but we couldn't make a baby with what we do. She has the only child she wants. It's like…if she wanted…she could make acid run inside her."
"Even her kiss is cold?"
"I never kissed her," I said.
Pablo watched as I lit another cigarette, his eyes playing over the pictures of his children sitting on his desk. "You know that Puerto Ricans are a special tribe, my friend? You know we are not 'Spanish' like some gringos think we are? And like some of us wish to be? Puerto Ricans are African, Indian, Spanish. Our roots are in many continents, and the knowledge of our people is that mixture in our blood. We call it 'racial knowledge,' and it is deeper than you could ever imagine."
I looked at Pablo—at his dark skin and tightly curled hair. I thought back to when the cops would bust the fighting gangs when we were kids. The dark–skinned Puerto Ricans would never speak English—they didn't want to be taken for black. I thought of the black face of the soldier on São Tomé, talking to me in a bar just before we went over the water to Biafra. Showing me a picture of his wife, smiling. Saying 'Muy blanco, no?" to get my approval. Liberals wanted to find their roots—survivors wanted to keep from getting strangled by them.
"When you first talked about this woman, I thought you were describing a Santería priestess. You know them—they mix voodoo and Christianity the way a chemist mixes two drugs. But this woman, she is nothing like that. Her rituals are in her head—they are not handed down from another—they are her own creation."
"Yeah. But…"
"What does she call herself, my friend?"
"That's a funny thing—her name is Gina, the name her people gave her. But when she got older, they started to call her something else. Strega. You know what it means?"
"Sí, compadre. But it means nothing…or everything. It depends on who is talking. On the tone of their voice—their relationship to the woman. We have the same word in Spanish. Bruja. It mean switch, perhaps. A woman with great powers, but maybe with evil in her heart. It can even be a term of affection…a bitch with fire in her eye and the devil in her hips, you understand?"
"Witch. Bitch. It doesn't help me."
"One is inside the other—but, remember, the witch includes all else. A woman who is a witch can be anything she wants to be—she can take many forms. An old woman, a child. A saint, a devil. And this is always her choice. We can never see such a woman—only the manifestation of herself she allows us to see. If ten men see her, they see ten different women. And each will believe he has seen the truth. A man cannot see a witch."
"Pablo, come on. You believe that shit?"
"I believe what is true," he said, his voice grave. "I believe this wisdom handed down to us over the years has survived for a reason. To ignore the truth is to fail to understand why the truth has survived."
Survival. My specialty—my birthday present from the state. "What does she want?" I asked him.
"Only she knows that, Burke. Bruja is a fire—she must have fuel."
I ground out my cigarette. "The best thing for me to do is make tracks, right?"
Pablo nodded.
"But I have this job to do," I told him.
"You will not always be this confused, Burke. When Bruja