Read Online Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes by William Kennedy - Free Book Online Page A

let herself be held in his uninvasive embrace. She sobbed openly over Diego, retelling herself that he truly was dead and she would never again feel his arms around her as she now felt a stranger’s arms, offering comfort and perhaps love. She closed her eyes against this uninvited truth and as she burrowed toward sleep she was invaded by a vision of the violent struggle between Changó’s women: Obba, his wife, who cut off her ear because Oshun told her this would win Changó’s heart, and Oshun, the duplicitous Venus who controls love, money, and the river.
    Renata saw them dueling with thunderbolts and herself as both wife and mistress, traitor and betrayed—very fickle of you to admit this, Renata—but she sensed, perhaps for the first time, that this was the true way of the world. She understood it better in the morning when she awoke without tears, Quinn’s head on the pillow, his eyes on her, his arm comfortably under her shoulder blades. His fingers were curled lightly on her upper arm and she thought, he is protecting me from my dreams. “It’s a comfort the way you hold me,” she said. “You know how to hold a woman. Have you had many loves?”
    “Not when it was really love. Half a dozen? Make that two. Three. One felt like love but it was only narcissism. Serious love did arrive, but it went away.”
    “Where is she now?”
    “We don’t stay in touch.”
    “What happened?”
    “She belongs to my cousin. He’s a lunatic, but that’s no excuse.”
    “You are guilty.”
    “Is that out of fashion?”
    “Love is the fashion. Nothing else matters.”
    “Very reckless. You will do damage.”
    “Love damaged me. I never feel guilty. I believe love will save us. I learned that through San Lázaro. We will see him today.”

    They were half an hour out of Havana, Quinn driving, en route to the home of Narciso Figueroa. They had gone through Santiago de Las Vegas and were on a ragged road that Quinn feared would snag the Buick’s low-slung undercarriage. He moved slowly past scattered clusters of wooden shacks and small concrete slab houses that seemed built in a swamp.
    “I came here when I was fifteen,” she said. “It was in December, tens of thousands of pilgrims walking to the church of San Lázaro. Olguita said San Lázaro will get rid of your trouble. I told her I didn’t have any trouble. ‘You will,’ she said.”
    “You certainly learned how to acquire it.”
    San Lázaro, Renata said, the Catholic saint resurrected from his tomb by Jesus, is also the Orisha called Babalu Aye, brother of Changó. Babalu Aye was young and handsome and trying to make love to every woman in the world. Olodumare, the owner of Heaven, told him to slow down, but he kept it up, so Olodumare turned him into a leprous beggar with leg sores that put him on crutches. Two dogs followed him, licking his sores clean as they all walked the world.
    “There he is,” Renata said, interrupting herself to point out a shack with an altar displaying Lázaro-Babalu on crutches. They passed another shack, another Lázaro. “He is all over Havana, but this is his road.”
    “How did Lázaro convince you love would save you?” he asked.
    “Olguita walked me three miles to the church with the pilgrims, some on crutches like Lázaro. One barefoot man carried a sack of rocks on his back, women crawled on hands and knees, a girl no more than six moved forward on the gravel road, on her bottom, her mother saying, ‘ Ven, mi hija, ven, ’ and the child slid toward Mama, leaving blood on the gravel.
    “‘Why is she making her do that?’ I asked. ‘For the child’s health, she is sick,’ Olguita said. ‘Won’t she get sicker from her bleeding?’ ‘San Lázaro will heal her all over,’ Olguita said.
    “I saw a man without a shirt sliding toward the church on his back, gripping a holy rag, one ankle chained to a concrete block. When he slid backward his leg pulled the block a few inches, and he had miles to go. His