The women crowd around, it’s already late at night, the lights have all been switched off. First they light candles in every corner of the room. Their dim flickering glow throws moving shadows on the walls when the black lady gets up to dance. She moves around a large shallow basin that Maria uses to wash herself. But Maria isn’t in it, and the water in the basin is crystal clear, shimmering, yellowish in colour, then dark blue when the candles are blown out. In her raucous, moaning voice, the old lady captures the moon in the water, which then becomes just as holy as the water blessed by the parish priest. Only you can’t piss in holy water or rub it between your thighs; you just touch it to your face when you make the sign of the cross. Moon-water is stronger, like medicine from the pharmacy. You have to use it with care. The black lady says a few more prayers and pours egg white into the basin. The other women light candles, even more candles than before, to see better. Her mouth gleams red with incantations. Just then, one of the women squats down and pisses a few drops into the basin. She lifts up her skirt to keep from wetting herself, showing her buttocks and her thing full of shadows and reflections from the moon-water. When several woman are looking for a man, they pour water into other basins, into plates or glasses, so no one’s man gets mixed up with anyone else’s. Sometimes that makes for funny situations: the women get so excited that they trip over each other, spill the sacred water and piss on the floor.
That’s when I’m most likely to be found out, because I can’t keep from laughing, and the blows can be something. They’ll kick me out, and my mother will whip me. You can’t make fun of sacred things.
“Crux Credo, may this little monster end up in hell! Devil child! Hellion!”
Sometimes it’s not even my fault. But my big brother can hide quicker, getting away like he’s innocent while I’m still trying to make out the details in the darkness. I forget the danger and get too close in order to look at the shapes the egg-white makes in the mixture of piss and water. If my brother starts laughing, I get trapped in the middle of that horde of jittery women, right in the path of their blows and their vengeful fingernails.
But if they don’t catch me at that crucial moment, then everything turns out fine. The women are so happy with the black lady’s visions in the moon-water pots that they don’t see anything else. In a deep voice, she describes the men in detail, talking with each woman and helping her find out who he might be, to remember his face and connect her description with a man in the neighbourhood. A clerk or a truck driver perhaps, a policeman or a fireman, even a bar owner. Tempers flare, and their voices are shrill. Sometimes the man in question is already married, and more services from the black lady will be needed to open the door. Secret things, things spoken in low voices, in which my mother has a certain influence, since she knows plenty of other black ladies. All the same, the atmosphere is light-hearted. The toothless black lady laughs, she knows how to talk and provide the intimate details. She vaunts the qualities of her imaginary man like a butcher selling a scrawny chicken. The complete opposite of the poor monk who stands there muttering in Latin, not even looking at the rear-ends and breasts rising and falling around him. The black woman rarely admits defeat, even when the moon-water turns opaque and milky, a bad omen. Her eyes see through everything. Even if she can’t provide all the details, a man is there, that much is clear. A man who reveals himself timidly, who wants his woman to be braver and show more of herself, everything will depend on her and her alone ... The other women console the poor creature, showering her with advice about how to display her best qualities, whispering to her that it’s probably this man or that one, how he loves her secretly, she’ll have to coax him out by moving her backside better, and letting him see her tongue when she smiles. The conversation catches fire, confidences fly thick and fast, broken by bursts of laughter. The more experienced women give the younger ones lessons in seduction, what to do with the part below the belt, how to lead while pretending to follow. Men like it that way ...
My father always says that women are stupid animals, and he won’t tolerate macumba in his house, he claims they’re all whores, starting with Lili. Her little routine must be getting on his nerves. All day long she’s flashing her panties, and she never closes the door to the toilet. Plus the house is always full of my mother’s friends, other aunts coming and going, older than Lili but younger than my mother. When they come to our house to visit, which can last for months, bras and panties are everywhere. Open dressing-gowns, thighs being shaved, breasts showing while they remove their hair, lineups at the shower door. There’s always something going on, women yelling, weeping or locking themselves in their rooms if my father says the wrong thing. Then he has to go in and console them, and beg their pardon. Sometimes he’s so successful that my mother starts shouting obscenities at her sisters, threatening to throw the lot of them out, calling them shameless bitches who’ll end up with tuberculosis or syphilis ...These are bad times, dangerous ones, and we kids hide as best we can while my father takes advantage of the chaos to step out for a breath of fresh air.
My hiding place is under the big bed. Quickly, I slip under it and make the whole world disappear. Until tempers cool down. From my foxhole, all I can see is legs, fat dust balls and cobwebs. But when I close my eyes tight I can make all kinds of things appear, people, colours, even lights if I push down on my eyeballs with clenched fists. There, alone, protected by darkness, the things that flow through my head are so entertaining that I end up blind to what’s going on outside. Sometimes I combine the two and make a new world. That’s my brand of moon-water.
I know it’s dangerous, I’ve got to be careful because it can put you to sleep like the mind-numbing perfume of certain flowers. If I fall asleep, my goose is cooked. They’ll catch me and say I was doing it on purpose, trying to give my poor mother a heart attack ... The women will grab me by the legs or the hair and drag me from my hiding place. That’s my nightmare. After I’ve been punished I realize what a mistake I’ve made. My stupidity, my lack of attention, my inexperience caused me to fall asleep and lose track of the world around me. Once they’ve calmed down and dried their tears, the women realize that one of the little vermin, the nastiest of the lot, must have slipped out into the street, on purpose, to cause even more trouble. Shouting, they search high and low for me through the tiny apartment and in the corridors, waking up the neighbours as they go. It’s the same routine every time, the one my brother enjoys so much. He always remembers my hiding place. They’ve got to take it out on someone and discharge the fury that’s gnawing at them, and they feel better once they’ve punished a hooligan caught in the act.
I’ve got to be on my guard. Moon-water is dangerous stuff. I can’t say a word about it, I’ve got to learn to keep it to myself, and hold it in behind my eyes, clenching my teeth so it won’t slip out. I can’t let myself go. My brother already beat me up once on account of my cobweb stories. He even tore a page out of one of my father’s illustrated books because it showed a monster that scared him. It’s true that I ran after him with the book open, just to spook him a little. He grabbed it and threw it out the window. There it went, the only weapon I had against him. I miss that picture of the ogre holding its severed head by the hair, like a lantern. I try to imitate it by lurching towards my brother, but the effect just isn’t the same.
No use trying to talk with the women. They won’t listen, they look away in boredom. The doctor taught me to keep my mouth shut. He didn’t look mean, he and his ruddy grandfather’s face. But my mother must have cooked up a plot with him, by telling him I was too thin and how I’m always falling asleep. I have trouble breathing at night, and sometimes it gets so bad I hurt myself tearing at the walls with my fingernails. For no good reason, just for a change. When it’s dark, I’m afraid of the ghosts under the beds. At night, the bedroom is completely filled by my parents’ big bed, plus the two cots, mine and my brother’s. Beneath mine is an enormous dark cave that I can see through the webbing. I curl up in a ball to keep the ghosts from grabbing me by the legs. Ghosts always pull on the legs of bad little boys. During the day I crawl under the bed and my ghost stories don’t scare me. But at night, since I can’t sleep,