The Prince

The PrinceAuthor(s): Vernon WilsonSource: Callaloo, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Autumn, 2002), pp. 1083-1093Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3300270 .

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from THE PRINCE

by Vernon Wilson

"What was individual becomes a variety of a general pattern. Consciousness even in my sleep changes primary colors. Thefeatures of my face melt like a wax doll in the fire. And who can consent to see in the mirror the mere face of man?"

-Czeslaw Milosz

"Tlon sera un laberinto, pero es un laberinto urdido por hombres, un laberinto destinado a que lo descifren los hombres."

-Jorge Luis Borges, "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"

Chapter 1

El Papa, the deliverer, redeemer, guardian of faith and keeper of Scripture, procurer of chrism, protector and proselytizer of the sick, fountainlight of Latin wisdom to the wounded, rival of the worshippers of Earth and Sun and orphaned Moon, plural patriarch, rival of planetary Venus, beloved episcopal scion of bulls, receiver and receptacle of God's three-beamed glory, would be slow in dying.

He would be monotonous, solus even in passing. He could collapse, limp inside his window overlooking the sun-spinning crowd at

St. Peter's Square. Tasking in tawdry gold within some severe shadow, he would clasp close his constant staff, distant from his idolaters-flesh of him in this world-yet chastened and overwhelmed by the echoes in that distance, by that same solitude- his own flesh changed by the sound.

He could be shot by the glimpsing barrel of a gun, a camera careening: a blow imbued by the divine.

In the brilliant procession of the pageant on-screen Manwel witnessed something of an entirely different nature: the Holy Father stooped low, rabbit-eared, dressed in his costume of silken gold emerald, and white, his body as eerily rigid as that of a

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sunburned child-a solemn blushing kid in sensuous chrisom accoutrements-with a radiant magic lance in his grasp. Tense man, tense father. Like the firm felicitous

pounding of a soundless drum the beat of Manwel's heart played in his ears. A

swaying choir shouted a celebratory hymn of Hallelujah. A quick montage of images flashed on the screen-the Madonna and child sculpted and perfect, shiny and

splendent, then a manger, then the Pope himself in frail and maverick isolation, rebelliously closeup. He moved so minutely in dangling, titanic vesture that he seemed to be taking steps forward and back simultaneously, tunicle and chasuble

flying like tongues peeled free by the light. In this methodical dance-already a whiff of comedy transmogrified the sacred quiet-he made Manwel think of Charlie Chaplin: the tramp soundless and austere in his holiest getup, still so much the buffoon. Something in the angle of the shot invested the scene with the rigor of a photo of superb athleticism. A fluid moment of heavenly mystification: skyward, the broad

camera-eye ringing: the basilica of the Vatican Palace. Then, fulfilling atrium, nave and apse, from tower to tower, the mass voice of choristers singing rang sealike and

puerile: Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah

Running a hand through his unshorn curls, around his blurry eyes, and over the slight refuse of hair hiding under his bottom lip, Manwel took a deep, wistful breath. Before realizing it, he was changing the channels, catching here and there a glimpse of a contorted body, the sound of a siren or of bodiless, euphoric laughter, commen- tary on a rare genus of bird or fish, country weddings and city bric-a-brac, impotence in the male of the human animal, or the leaping of flames on the sun. Intermittent music played out, and feminine anatomies were revealed, aglow in special lights. A nasal androgynous tone explained eerily the natural habitat of the wild boar and stratified its evolutionary beauties. Violence without identity, or rather identical in common dispassion: bloated forms discarded and distended in a brook stilled by a

muddy wind, shootings of bodies made majuscule to the eye, the cinematic sense of it a visceral force majeure; everybody's anonymity was the chilling thing. The culmination came as a cow was branded with iron fire and herded in with her kin. A cattleman rode on horseback, corraling, spat a wild spray of black excretion, drops of which venom caught on the wiry threads of his red beard. His eyes were blond with summer sunlight. He turned his lips in a wry twist, his nostrils dancing with the thick scent of salted hogsbacon. A sense of man's grandiosity-his own grandeur magni- fied-and nausea ran through Manwel as he watched. At the stirring of his thumb the spectacle whirled. "Masterpiece Theatre presents the magical realms of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe ... "

With sleepy eyes Manwel attended the screen and its multiplications. He was

sitting in the living room next to his mother's altar, which she had had him erect in

memory of his father, Don Francisco Potente. The altar was just an old chest of drawers over which he'd draped a white tablecloth; across the top surface, which was scarred with the names of saints-Paul, Teresa, a halfscore of popes, and the epony-

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mous heroes of the Gospel-his mother, Altagracia, had strewn candles and photos of his father in the successive phases of his quickened, germ-eaten consumptive life. From the charms of the brightest days of his youth to the bleakest redolence of his hour of death-there he was. The man in the dark. Inside the chest some of his father's effects-diaries, bedclothes, false hair and teeth, crucifixes and futbol mementos, dictionaries and English grammars-remained, and would forever remain, intact. This was his body and soul; it spooked Manwel to think of it so near; at the same time he was lured to these artifacts by an impulse that might be deemed strange, by some, if not perverse. Looming above the altar, his grandmother sneered from beyond her

peculiar grave. His mother was called Altagracia after her mother. Although it wasn't her Christian name it had subsumed the other-Soledad-as soon as, aged fifty-five and full of bitterness and finesse, the older woman passed from this life literally to dust: by virtue of a thoroughly unexpected testament she had been cremated and returned to her daughter, Julia Altagracia in death becoming Altagracia (Soledad) in life just seven days after Manwel saw first the light of the new world. And so it was here that his mother, facing the fire of a life of imagined sin and failure, bent in daily prayer to her gods. She talked a language intimately, a language of one; she talked icons and walls, photographs of delicate, dry gardens and dry fountains of concrete, to Don Francisco's favorite picture, in which, haloed in sunlight, he stood dressed

impeccably in gruff interrogation of an arrogant pony-its tail was a transparent arc- with unmistakable resemblances to a gargoyle and furniture-concrete things. It was here, knelt effortfully between television and window, here in her sleepy, querulous voice, that she was haunted by visions of the dead. She had claimed the blessing of

ghosts. Here, too, was where Manwel was compelled, by guilt as much as her insistence,

to conduct his own supplications. .. ad nauseam ... The slope of her flaming cheek. She would peer at Jesus' body

with glassed eyes, hushing herself with famished crosses. She'd stand with a warped back: the curvature, pure and lean and sickly, conjured a sense of death.

Manwel awoke. All at once he remembered the magazine he'd brought out from his room and

secreted under the altar, thrilled with the canny minuteness of his sacrilege. He'd waited half-resentful in the hopes that his mother would venture outside. In the six months since his father's passing her leaving had acquired the sensation of a live event, such was its rarity; she'd done nothing but sleep, cook, bend to whispering knees. Manwel had been compelled by pangs of filial guilt to stay with her in denial of the sun, particularly in the past week or two, since losing his job at a theater downtown. It was as though he had stepped backward in time.

With heartless laughter he crossed himself, chin to breast, striding over the

burgundy rug in the center of the room. Briefly, crouching, he searched behind the altar's immaculate cloth, lifting it like a veil with one hand until he came to a slim solid

object. The pages were cool and slick. He brushed himself off abruptly. Then he beheld the glossy copy with a mix of mischief and high-spirited glee.

The blonde wore black stilettos, nothing more; and inside, just past the phantasma- gorical comics, he came across her again, bent over a blazing ebon-eared saddle. She

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unraveled the dark and coiled braid of a lengthy whip on the next page; she positioned the whip between her thighs, those tantalizingly thin and muscular thighs, stalks, teasing her shaven vulva with the blunt black end and pinching the nipples that rode her chest like missiles on twin globes.

Fear and repulsion, sympathy and naivete were numinous quadrants of his lust. Each possessed its obverse, a second side at the least. Pleasure became an integer with a hairless face, love, a voluptuous form.

... the explosion of the Hindu population of Australia is linked to the migration of a great ... The TV droned on. Static, towering cliffs of stone, sand, snow, sea, paved streets of a great city's commercial arena. Ceaseless topographical wonders.

Manwel readied himself, clinching his abdomen. His thighs seized. Suddenly, however, he could hear the sound of blows outside in the hallway, shuffling noise, and then a heavy knock came at the door. Manwel zipped his jeans, shaking himself as he rose, and stashed the magazine under the couch.

When he opened the door his eye jumped like a fish as he was met by the gaptoothed grin of his neighbor, Bienvenido Paredes. For a second neither of them knew what to say: Manwel leaned his shoulder against the door, his eyelid now throbbing, while Bienvenido rested both hands on his dropsical belly. Paredes was an old bachelor, seamless and in fact nearly artful in his inebriation; he had the knack of

seeming simultaneously crude and sophisticated; more than once he'd excused his crassness by referring to peculiar travels to places like Galveston, Texas, and Wheel- ing, West Virginia, implying thereby that Manwel, being less urbane than he, was thus more naive as well, a novitiate in worldly things. Paredes had children who were older than Manwel; and he hadn't worked in years. Don Francisco had told him that Bienvenido Paredes lived off money from a court settlement he'd won from Mass Transit for being electrocuted by a patch of thin wires at the back of a crowded bus.

Don Francisco had related the story with a hint of bitterness in his voice, shaking his head as if without hope of justice: he was convinced that Bienvenido Paredes had staged his seizures, which were suspiciously mild by all accounts. He kept referring to him as "El Vaquero Mentiroso." Once Manwel grew older Don Francisco hinted here and there that Paredes dealt in the drug trade.

"Como esta', Manwelito?" Paredes said, sniffling. "Bien bien," Manwel shrugged. "You?" His voice, he realized, was a long sigh. "Muy bien, my young handsome friend. Que hace'?" "TV." "Oh? Hmmm." Manwel nodded. Bienvenido's green eyes glistened as he craned his neck to peek

inside. Silver flashed roundly from his fat thumbs; a bracelet coiled tightly twice around his wrist.

"Tell me," he said "would you be interested in something?" "Depends what something means." Bienvenido Paredes lifted his hands from his stomach and rubbed his palms

together. Both of them heard the squeak and chirp of rubber soles from the stairwell, and then the building door rattled shut. Bienvenido Paredes started to talk of his plans to make a short movie about a young man who turns to violence to support his family.

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His youngest son, Alex, would play the lead, but he would need a close friend, sort of an accomplice. It was this part that Bienvenido Paredes envisioned for Manwel.

"Que piensas?" "I don't know, Mr. Bienvenido. I can't say. Not right now. Sounds like it could be

something, though. Never know." Manwel had tried to sound a tone melding amicability and strength.

"You think about it. And I be back Manwelito. No me olvides. Tu me conoce', Manwelito. Please. I see you. I know you too. I think you be perfect for this part, no

kidding, Manwel. Tell you madre I say buenos dias y muy buena' noches. Please, you do that for me?"

"I will." Manwel scratched his head. Bienvenido Paredes glared at him. There was something distinctly unsanitary in his demeanor. His face seemed to have been smudged with grease

"You know, Manwelito, I still see you padre. I still see him. I go out at night, for a walk, and I see him. He told me tell you he loves you. You never see him, eh?"

Manwel maintained an ironic silence, openeyed, shifting his feet. He suspected that Paredes was playing games, anyway, since that was the only way he knew to interact with others. That was what Altagracia had told him as much, and not long ago; it felt like the truth. Yet Bienvenido Paredes was always pleasant. He managed to be sincere in his way.

Bienvenido Paredes stifled a burp and scratched himself. He beheld his friend's son-he was startlingly mannish now-with kind eyes, and yet he was suspicious of his thinness and his steely youth. There was something stubborn in his mien. Paredes wished there were some way he could corrupt the young man while respecting the memory of Don Francisco.

He began backing away from the threshold, his pants swaying and sagging. "Please, you ever need a chica or two or three, my friend, you know, you come to me, eh? Don Bienvenido Paredes. I got plenty. My nieces need husbands, you know? Don'

forget, eh? I bring you to meet my son when he comes. Alejandro, I mean Alexander. You'll like him I'm sure. And then we talk about the movie. Together. Mira papi, please, here take this for your mother."

Bienvenido Paredes shuffled through the pockets of both his shirt and pants, struggling to shift his belly until finally he extricated an emerald bill, crinkled, from his pocket. Andrew Jackson. He pushed it into Manwel's hand so forcefully that Manwel saw no reason, much less any opportunity, to refuse him. Altagracia would never accept the money, but he himself could definitely use it. Bienvenido Paredes bowed and backed toward his apartment, halfway down the stark, dank corridor, with a look on his lips that courted the bounds of the vulnerable by virtue of being grotesque. The distance he was in was dark, sibilating, his feet sibilant against broken tiles in clumsy brogues. A circuit of revulsion coursed through Manwel, ear to eye, a cardiopulmonary visitation occasioned by the true quality of each shoe's fossiliferous size. His mouth made a laughing rictus, mirroring Bienvenido's, as the features of his visitor's face fell behind the pall.

Once Manwel was again alone an interval of oblivion ensued, quiet and imprecise, in which the television, the dull physical screen-eternal shoulder-and the polymor-

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phic image it played, spliced and juxtaposed and spun into redemption, subsumed his mind. He forgot his stash. The room brightened behind his lids to a burnished, butterfly glow, the couch enveloped in shadows of early afternoon.

Slowly, swimming along a stainless gash in time, he drifted into dreams.

His mouth was wet with spit when he woke for the second time. A film of mucus and inertia clouded his eyes-he imagined that Altagracia was kneeling behind her door, her shawl hemming humped shoulders in febrile blackness as she crossed herself nipple to nipple and sigh to sigh in grief and goodwill, crucifying her tits in the name of all God's lost and unsanctified souls.

... in nomine patris, et filii, et spiritus sancti . . .

... Amen. "Amen," Manwel whispered blindly, echoing the voice he heard issuing from the

screen. Turtledoves on screen were being captured by the camera in flight. Their bodies reeled; autonomous wings brutely battled the blue air as though to silence the

keening echo of the sun. "Que Dios le bendiga," Manwel muttered with an awkward accent.

Swiftly he crossed his chest, then laughed to himself in mild disgust; nausea tickled the back of his throat at the thought of God, the God who'd allowed his father to pale and perish. The laughter was tainted by dread, which is to say, by self-refracted horror, horror that immolates both mind and bone. His right eye twitched again, ablur.

Altagracia swayed into the living room with heavy feet, wheezing raspishly, and observed the television-John Paul the crouching bear-with something approaching awe.

She pulled her black shawl tightly against her body, over shoulders and the bosom's unmistakable pulse, keen yet wearied by the prospect of renewed grief and

prayer that this splendor might provoke. She had come in with a vigilant look, suspicious of the tube, and was taken completely by surprise. Here was Manwel

sitting looking at the picture of John Paul II, plump and as tortoiselike as he could be, irreducibly radiant, ornate and inspirited underneath the baldachin that was his

bishop's cape. All the more shocked was she to hear his Spanish again, as if for the first time, her native tongue, the sound of her memory and anger-memoria: conciencia: conocimiento-whose blessings she had bequeathed unto her only begotten child. She had matured in the rhythm of its cadences. She'd grown to be a woman, loved a restless, unraveling and unrepenting man-it was he, Don Francisco Potente, who had usurped the sound-in desperation and in solitude, abandoned in her time: too

proud for her own salvation, she was forsaken by fathers and suitors alike. Finally, she had loved in great pain, giving birth young like her own mother who was a hex, and recalcitrant at that, only to see the sun interposed, seasons and years with child and man, unredeeming.

"Como estas, mami?"

"Ay, bien, querido." Time had made it an unnatural torture for her to hear Manwel speak. The language

was mere mechanism on his lips, devoid of sense and smell; the words were held

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wrong by the lips, and warped, with what so often seemed like a sense of displeasure, if not of disgust.

Both of them, she could see, she knew, had their compulsions with language and sound, a beguiling gift and curse, the tongue, an omen as wide as the wet sea.

"May God Almighty have mercy on us and forgive us for our sins." Once more, in

spite of himself, Manwel cringed, feeling that nauseous, dreadly curve in his gut. It was a waking spirit, a surge in his conscience. The invisible voice rang out with

superstitious reverence, reboant, voice of a Briton. Inadvertently, yet with a shameless heed, he glimpsed the flesh of the wooden

Jesus on his mother's altar, shiny small and potent. There was no cross and thus none of the cross's weight but the body hung motionless and immaculate, waves of idle hair, with its arms uplifted-there was a sort of heat behind and beneath it-and Christ's eyes were shut in sensuous reproach. His head lolled back in a vulnerable crook. A secret holiness charged his limbs and bones, a veneer of femaleness.

"Jesus Christ." Manwel felt himself growing languid as he noticed the ravaged edges of the savior's earthen thong.

"May God Almighty have mercy on us ..." "A ver," Altagracia uttered absently, crossing her breasts in a subtle motion, "el

nuncio al mundo, hijo de Dios." The clarion of the world, son of God.

Altagracia came from the kitchen dragging her feet, clasping a glass of water in one hand. In the other, the nails of which were long, slender, translucent in their gradu- ation, she balanced gently two round white pills. Giving the TV a quick and ravishing eye, she swallowed deeply each and flushed with the water that seemed, in its coolness, to seep silver into her hand through the glass. The pills left a bitter powdery trace in the folds of her tongue, a result which in itself convinced her of their efficacy and appropriateness for her pain. Manwel looked up at her as he refolded the soft bill

given to him by Bienvenido Paredes, and she stared questioningly at him. He could see from the bend of the light in her eyes that they were wet, brimming with tears.

"Ahora ... ahora te parece' a Francisco." She paused to swallow, a harsh swallow. "He like to sound important, jost like him." Again she paused. "But you don't have no faith, papi? Yo se. E'to es la verdad....

"Pero porque? Porque no, Manwelito?" Here Altagracia raised her hands in grief. "I raise you to love Him, no?" She wrung her short, ashen fingers, interlocking them

gradually and resting them on the stubborn bulge of fat huddled at her waist. With urgency the Holy Father commenced to address the still-gathering crowd-

cloaks and cameras-under the spreading sky. He stroked the solid air, blessing it thrice with a laborious cross. Like each of his motions, this one was enhanced by the camera's devotional intensity, its cold yet charismatic swing and zoom, which invested that unique and benevolent motion with the subtlety of a flower's taxis.

Manwel nodded and glanced at her deliberately with dark, faithless eyes. He answered dumbly, lost in visions of himself: "Yes, Mami, yes, you raised me to love Dios." His impulses were not his own, they turned temperamental like his flesh, which crawled in minute horror and ecstasy as he met her tenuous gaze to see that tears had streamed down to her doubled chin, trembling and crystalline.

"Yo recuerdo." A pang of shame quelled his excitation.

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"En serio? Que recuerdas?" She asked out of a mixture of curiosity and anger. What did he remember? She held her fat chin up proudly, peering rigorously his way. Her nostrils quivered.

"Dime lo que recuerdas," she came out desperately. Queasiness and compunction compelled Manwel to speak. He mused for a second in silence, and then said quite simply: "Todo el tiempo

nosotro'-Papa y yo. Solamente leyendo, leyendo. Ingle'." Don Francisco had com-

pelled his young son to absorb the sense of the new language through daily lessons in pronunciation, grammar, and orthography. Unlike the other kids, jokingly obliv- ious even to the sun, with their ashen lips and snot-laced noses, splendid lashes

swiping fleshy eyes, Manwel's free time was systematically interrupted by extended

periods of in-house study, which were enlivened there and here by trips to the Fifth Avenue branch of the public library.

He recalled that he'd imagined his father an emperor of the culture-maestro of America-for he knew everything there was to know, and, more to the point, had come and conquered a land, this America, as well as a city, this Nueva York, filled as it was with echoes. What a remarkable and monstrous place! It was as if the country belonged to New York: the city offered all the vast destiny and fantasy of the whole America, all the hope any innocent could desire, certainly one from distant shores. To his young eyes the new island was a towering continent of construction and cars, a

place of fear and excitement, an empire of majesty. "I remember la iglesia, caminando contigo y con Papi. The estatuas." The Brit suspiring: "Pope John Paul the Second has conferred his blessings upon

the world. The news as of late has regarded the numerous exorcisms he has performed during his time and travels ..."

"Si, Si," his mother mumbled. Her blank stare swept the room vigilantly. A sullen

grin painted her features. "Recuerdo su cara, negra. The vestido ..." The image of his father's favorite suit-

it was a white, threepiece, doublebreasted affair-overwhelmed him, so that he was

momentarily speechless. He could see the old man now, pulling on the lapels and

buttoning with magical suavity the vest that had so fascinated him as a boy. Perfect-

fitting against his father's barrel chest and paunch, the vest seemed to contain the

wellspring of his omnipotence. Altagracia fawned over them endlessly. "Mis hombres" she would say in that rapid, mellifluous tongue, "grande y pequenito. Moreno, morenito."

His mother glanced at the holy procession. Manwel heard the Pope with the sense that something of grave significance had just transpired, and, with as much solemnity as he could muster, he crossed himself beside Altagracia. He followed her lead

reluctantly, pursing his lips tightly in sensual abnegation, yet he noted that the Pope, seated by his attendants, possessed a mysterious, luxuriant volition, he was in motion without being so, flat but autocratic in the air. He transported himself place to place with strength that superceded ease. Just so, the seers of ancient worlds-Alexandria, Athens, Machu Picchu-traveled majestically through bizarre states of consciousness and time burgeoning beyond the realms of the empirical.

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"Que mas?" she pursued, holding the raveling ends of her shawl loose in either hand. She crossed the room in quick strides, still listening intently but seized by the need to ignite the candles on the altar. Flame spilled across the livid wall.

"Nada mas." This Manwel whispered, resolutely. It was a strange predicament to be in. There was nothing vivid in his mind except

his father's face, his suit, his lust for America and all things American. It was a blind desire, that, a yearn for acceptance that had begun to rankle Manwel as of late. Personal visions haunted him, some images prone and precise-a bier in unqualified darkness, his father's gallant silhouette transposing the yawp of the dawning heav- ens-and others not as ornate or as surely composited, but voluminous, and edging against all sides of his brain.

"Nada mas?" repeated the mother. She was only vaguely surprised but she looked at him sternly. Then, snatching her breath in a suck of silence, Altagracia gazed at the dull golden urn.

"Nada." Manwel revolved, a refulgence came to him by the candle's glare. He was in need of rest and decided he would nap so that he could venture out later, smell and see the living city and walk through its arms for the first time in the cool, crepuscular evening before full dark, just as the sun set.

He grew exhausted but the television kept him awake; the television seemed to be keeping him alive. It was 3 o'clock.

Convinced that their conversation was done, Altagracia tidied the kitchen sink and headed back to her bedroom. She could always read herself to sleep; it was time she finished II Pedro.

An hour later Manwel awoke, alone, and sore, on the couch. Uncovering his magazine from under the couch, he retreated from the diaphanous

screen through the empty dark with its pages pressed privately to his chest. A

lightbulb blinked suspiciously overhead, the color of margarine. The hallway led to his mother's room; he passed his door on the way without disburdening himself and

tripped, cursing the stubbed toe in a voice that boomed ominously and ended by cutting the density of silence with a pursing squeak, which might just as suddenly have been a ray of cartoon light.

From the hinges outside his mother's bedroom door he recognized the separate pieces of his father's suit hanging, each wrapped in doubled bags of transparent plastic.

Inside his mother's room the dimness increased-it was far less penetrable here than in the rest of the apartment-because there was no clear window to the visible world, only an aperture, more a stained-glass porthole than a window, that opened onto an alleyway and gave a squalid view of the surrounding buildings. In here it seemed as if night had already fallen. Compared with the living room this room was smaller, squarer; it was cold and intense. Its dimensionality was its great intimacy. A

pretension of the ineluctable prevailed: you would here be overwhelmed by darkness in degrees of sleep; you would fall to dreaming, ensconced in varicose visions, and some thing would be remembered.

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Over the gargantuan bed where Altagracia lay snoring loomed a grand black-and- white blowup of his father in his youth. He wore an oversized black fedora under whose sweeping brim glimmered a fiercely mischievous, nearly miscreant gaze, and a loose, illfitting black suit that gave him an elegant, swashbuckling air. His right foot was perched on the bruised fender of an enormous boat of a car. The photograph, Manwel mused, was probably taken before they came to America, although the joy in his expression was timeless, universal, and could have been captured almost any- where.

A violent gasp broke from his mother's lips, shocking Manwel to attention. He checked to see that she was still breathing, and to his surprise and relief she lay there, underneath the shawl, as if nothing had transpired. He touched her elbow by allowing a hand to settle down over the bone. He saw that her hair was the hue of his flesh in this mock nightfall, swept back from her cheeks' eminence, and he grazed it acciden- tally, impinging softness and repulsion with his entire weight. He realized, of a sudden, how little he knew of that ancient- and ruinous-seeming past of which she was such an integral part; he had ideas: that time was dispossessed of face, inked in, though vividly, by conundrums-a history of ghostly relatives and waning sibilants. Tales vaguely told, maybe vaguely apprehended and misremembered, of love lost in aborted mountains somewhere in a wistfully shabby country, of luckless poker games in the city, Santo Domingo-Santo Sunday, his father'd called it-and of rum, and

sugarcane wine, and nameless, loveless whores. He stared at the picture for some time, motionless, sizing himself against it, and

then struck the same pose as Don Francisco held with such manifest arrogance. His mother lay wrapped up in her shawl and sheets in the wide bed, clutching her

face, ethereal in dark, smooth shadow. Manwel had the sensation that he was losing her to the dark. He squatted, and almost as abruptly got up again, unsure of

something. He stood there self-reflexively as a theory of action coursed through him, an idea that was both meditative and grotesque. A handful of images, some imbued with the color of a peculiar word, occupied him. A swath of blackness stretched in his mind unadorned, but vorticose, humming somehow.

As he stepped closer to the bed, Altagracia's head turned over on one side, and a silver sheen glowed at the corner of her lips; her mouth was soft and slick as a snail in rain, lips agape. She spread herself over the sheet, each limb extended and astir

minutely like the muscular limbs of Leonardo's homo mirabilis stretching forth within his circular infinity. Her shawl, coming loose in dreams, cleaved to the bed beneath her like a strange excrescence in, and peculiarly of, the mingling shadow and light. Manwel watched her closely: her feet, her breathing, the thinveiled stillness of her

eyes. Bizarrely, in that very moment he felt he was being inundated by a thing obscured by the darkness.

Once he'd stepped away and regained the proper distance he could see her body as he was used to seeing it in sleep-it was an island suspended in contravening streams of illumination, benumbed but alive with memory and history, holy and uncertain, naked yet wrapped with a widow's clothes. As if by a confusion of substantiations, the big bed itself became a darkening bier, a black carpet afloat on the air.

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CALLALOO

Then he was hearing the shrill voice, her exaltation: "Dio' . . . estar con mi Papi, co' Francisco ... yo quiero Fra'cisco ... "-she took a

gasping breath, her chest hurried in its rise and fall-" ... tengo que ... me voy, me voy, se fue, se fue! Me abandonaste, azucar ..."

Manwel did not interrupt her, did not wake her. He equated this episode with a mild epileptic seizure; but rather than stay until she was done he made sure that she was tucked under her sheets securely and left for the sanctuary of his own room. Once there he opened his blinds to the city, the loud vibrations of the early evening. Sun was

up still, cunning yolk of happiness, nothingness, distant relic of a distant season. Manwel undressed in a silence impinged only by the old, chipped-iron radiator's

hiss and purr, and he lay down luxuriantly, with one arm swinging free, clutching the poses of that pale woman in her disguises.

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The Prince

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