Sometimes my father reassures me by imitating the noises spirits make. I shouldn’t believe my book with the pictures of hell, they’re only images made to scare people. Dark pictures full of mountains, caves, water and fire, full of ghosts and demons scrambling all over like ants. He knows how much I like that book, even if I shouldn’t on account of the people aren’t wearing any clothes. He hid it the day my brother tore out the ogre page. But sometimes he lets me look at it. The shadows in the pictures remind me of the ones on the wall in the spirit house. It’s dark, and they’re suffering. My mother thinks the pictures are photos of hell. She’s afraid of the book. Not my father. He likes looking at the drawings even if he doesn’t believe what’s written on the pages. He says it’s all the priests’ doing, to exploit the women and make them go to mass.
Father is always making fun of my mother, but he doesn’t try to stop her from doing the macumba stuff. She prepares the little bundles when he’s not there, because he doesn’t like to waste. She and the fat black lady wrap up food, a bottle of cachaça, cigars and little cakes she’s had blessed at another spirit house. Then she drops off her bundle at a street corner in town, adding to the pile that the poor leave for the spirits.
My mother says they’re offerings that ask for something specific, messages, people call them. If the spirits are pleased with the gift, they’ll make the wish come true. People shouldn’t expect anything from a bunch of spirits drunk on cachaça, Father says. Besides, the women never ask for anything good, all they want is to hurt one another. My mother gets angry because she knows my father fishes out the bottles of cachaça from the bundles, and cigars, too, especially if they’re the kind he likes to smoke. I’ve seen him do it on our Sunday walks and nothing bad happened to him. Only you shouldn’t touch the food or the little cakes because women poison them or put dirty stuff inside them. It’s true.
Once I heard my mother ask the black lady to find her a placenta to send a special message in the name of one of her girlfriends. I don’t exactly know what a placenta is, but from listening to them talk, I figured it was something disgusting, a kind of octopus or intestine. The black lady’s neighbour caught a placenta and got very sick; she was all skin and bones from loss of blood. They say that anyone who kicks a macumba bundle will die within the year. Father doesn’t agree with that either. They say that just to keep people from practising their penalty kicks with messages, he says. Our country suffers from soccer fever, and it’s hard to resist a well-placed bundle.
My parents disagree about almost everything. But people respect my father’s opinion, while my mother has to wait for the black ladies to know what to do. My father knows how to repair all kinds of things: radios, toasters, heated cushions for women with tummy-aches, lamps, floor polishers, even lighted halos for the statues of saints. He also knows how to give shots if you’re sick. The women in the building use his services. That way they don’t have to show their behinds to the drugstore clerk who’s a hapless half-wit.
Once he took me to see a Portuguese woman because her husband wasn’t home, and it wouldn’t be right for him to be going there by himself. The woman lived a little further down the street. Her apartment overlooked a damp inner courtyard filled with bird cages. The verdigris of the stucco blended with the moss crawling between the paving stones and flowerpots. Under the pale yellow light filtering down from the glass roof, the place looked like a forest. But it smelled of boiled vegetables and toilets. The Portuguese woman was pretty, but she was nervous because she didn’t want my father to see her behind. She wanted him to give her the shot through her fluffy panties. He lost his temper, and she quickly obeyed. With a stern look on his face, he sterilized the needle by heating it without so much as a glance at her housecoat, which was gaping wide open. As precise as a watch, he snapped open the ampoule, filled the syringe, squeezed a few drops into the air and soaked a cotton wad in ether. The woman leaned over the table like she was going to get spanked, nearly lying down. She pulled down her panties and exposed her enormous ass. It was whiter than her half-spread legs, separated by a black, velvety slit. He rubbed her buttocks looking for a solid spot, and pow! Right in the meat. She grunted like a ghost. Some more rubbing, then he gave her another smack on the other cheek. Instead of crying, the Portuguese woman broke into laughter, as if she were happy, turning in his direction with her black hair on her white belly. She slowly pulled up her panties with her eyes averted and thanked him. It hadn’t hurt a bit, his shots were just fine. I was surprised she didn’t cry, especially after that good whack, but that’s how women are. She even wanted more shots after that. Now he goes there by himself because he knows her. The woman doesn’t look sick at all, even if my mother says she’s syphilitic.
Tuberculosis is the worst. Three of my mother’s brothers died of tuberculosis. She keeps repeating it to show she’s an expert. Since I cough a lot, she thinks I’m weak in the lungs, too. The more I cough, the angrier she gets. At night my coughing is terrible. It keeps everyone from sleeping and reminds her that it’s contagious. Her brothers used to cough at night, too. When I don’t cough, I stay awake anyway because I feel like I’m suffocating, and that’s when I think about ghosts. Sometimes she shakes me awake to give me coffee with butter to calm my cough, or herbal tea especially for the lungs that she buys in the herb shops her girlfriends tell her about. She loves herbal brews of all kinds, for the liver, the bowels, the head, to ward off worms, bad blood or the influence of the spirits. Even if it tastes awful, there’s no use making a fuss because she’s armed with her whip like a real witch, to protect us against the curse of the netherworld.
Because of my tuberculosis, I get a lot of special things, double doses of macerated leaves, dried fish skins and other things so disgusting that sometimes Father won’t let her give them to me. Maybe all these remedies have given me a strong constitution, because aside from tuberculosis, I’m never sick. Meanwhile, my brother and the baby are always coming down with earaches and stomachaches and fevers.
Thanks to tuberculosis, I know the public health clinic inside out, with all its sick people. I don’t like to go there, but my mother makes me. My brothers rarely come along because their skin puffs up after the vaccination, and that shows they’re not tubercular. Not mine. No matter how I scratch, I don’t get infected, not even a hint of irritation. My blood doesn’t fight germs, everything gets into my body and I don’t react, my mother says. It’s not true, the doctors say, the vaccination has taken. But nothing will change her mind, and a month later she takes me for a new one. The doctors don’t want to give me another BCG. It’s not good for me, they tell her, a vaccination isn’t like a dose of vitamins, and they get angry when they see her coming.
I dread those visits to the clinic. What a nightmare! She wakes me up early in the morning, irritated because we’re going to be late. I’m not allowed to eat anything. Half asleep, I pull on my clothes and before I know it we’re on the streetcar heading for the harbour. There are all kinds of things to see on the trip, but I’m worried. Not because the vaccination hurts. I know it’s only superficial, it itches a little and the way the skin puffs up isn’t pretty to look at, but that’s all. What I don’t like is the clinic. Maybe one day they’ll agree with her, and I’ll have to stay there for the rest of my life, the way they kept her brothers in the sanitarium until they died. I’m not tubercular enough for the doctors, and that disappoints her. She starts calling them good-for-nothings who only look after the rich, and who don’t know what they’re doing. Just look at me: no doubt about it, I’m like her brothers. Suddenly people start staring. They’re afraid because I’m contagious.
A throng of wretched souls is lined up at the clinic door. Mostly women and children, because men don’t get sick much, except old men and syphilitics. Inside, the place is filthy and the corridors are dark. Through the glass doors, you can see into the waiting rooms filled with suffering and fatigue, crying children and emaciated, greenish babies that their mothers try to suckle at their flaccid breasts. At my leisure, I observe legs swollen fat from the heat and the long road, toes protruding from too-short sandals, sometimes nothing but stumps of limbs. Groups of bent-over, vitreous-eyed old women who seem to be weeping continuously as they hide their coughing behind crumpled bits of fabric. Everything takes on the piss-yellow tint of the tiled walls. The nurses bustle about their business, irritated by the people waiting for them. The smells of ether, iodine and bitter substances mingle with sweat,