His dad isn’t injured… he’s perfectly lucid… the wall absorbed the momentum of the caja china… it just toppled over on I, Camilo Camacho… he’s not indicating any pain… Oh, no… he only wants to inflict it… Something close to despair sweeps through Nestor’s central nervous system… He has been helping his father carry the caja china out for the pig roasts ever since he was twelve… His father lifted it by the handles on one end, and Nestor lifted it by the handles on the other end… since he was twelve! It had become a little ritual of manhood! Now his father wants no part of him.
I, Camilo Camacho, doesn’t even want his son to lift a crash-stricken coffin off his prostrate form. You really know how to hurt a son, don’t you, Caudillo Camacho… But Nestor can’t find the words to say that or anything else.
“What happened!? What happened!?”
It’s his mother, running from the bedroom. “Oh, dear God—Cachi! What happened? Cachi!” That’s her loving nickname for the Master. “Are you all right? What was that terrible noise? What fell?”
She dropped to her knees beside him. He looked at her in an expressionless way, then put his tongue in his cheek and gave Nestor a baleful—and with his tongue in his cheek, accusing—stare. He held it like a laser beam… causing Nestor’s mother to turn to him… wide-eyed… baffled… frightened… fearing the worst… as much as asking, “Did you do this—to your father?”
“Dad, tell her! Tell Mami what happened!”
I, Camilo Camacho, said nothing. He just continued with his sinister beam fixed on Nestor.
Nestor turned to his mother. “Dad tried to carry the caja china all by himself, on his shoulder! He lost his balance—and it crashed into the wall!”
Nestor began hyperventilating… He couldn’t help himself, even though it cast a doubt upon what he was saying.
“Tell her why,” said the Lord of This Domain in his new soft, low, mysterious voice… implying that much remained unsaid.
Mami looked at Nestor. “What did happen?” Then at her husband. “Cachi, you must tell me! Are you injured?”
In a voice that rose an octave, a shaky octave, Nestor said, “I swear! Dad was trying to carry that thing by himself! Look how big it is! He lost control, and when I tried to help him, he jumped away, or sort of jumped—and he lost his balance, and the caja china crashed and ended up on top of him! Right, Dad? That’s exactly what happened—right?”
Down on her knees, Mami began crying. She pressed her hands against both sides of her face and kept saying, “Dear God… Dear God… Dear God… Dear God!…”
I, Camilo Camacho, maintained his stare at his son, pushing his tongue inside his cheek so forcefully, his lips parted on that side, showing teeth.
“Dad—you’ve got to tell her!” Nestor’s voice was becoming shrill. “Dad—I know what you’re doing! You’re playing Patience on a Monument, Smiling at Grief!”… Magdalena had introduced him to that expression. Somehow she picked up these things. “You’re playing Look What You Made Me Do!”
Same low soft voice: “You don’t talk to me that way. The Big Cop—but everybody knows what you really are.”
Mami broke into sobs, great blubbering sobs.
Nestor’s own eyes began to fill with tears. “This is not fair, Dad!” It was all he could do to keep his lips from trembling. “I’ll help you up, Dad! I’ll take the caja china out to the yard for you! But it’s not fair—you can’t treat me this way! It’s not right! You’re playing a game! Patience on a Monument, Smiling at Grief!”
He rose up from his crouch… He was getting out of here! Fighting back tears, he made his way into the little passageway that led from the extension to the rooms in the front of the house. A door opened behind him… a light… He knew immediately… Yeya and Yeyo—the last people on earth he needed at this moment, in the middle of all this.
Yeya, coming up behind him, said in Spanish, “What was that noise? Practically knocked us out of bed! What happened?”
Got to think fast… Nestor stopped, turned about, and gave Yeya the biggest, sweetest smile he could come up with. What a pair of guajiros stood before him. Keep them away from their son, I, Camilo Camacho, that was the main thing… Yeya was short and stout, with a sort of flowered muumuu covering her considerable bulk. But mainly there was her hair. It was the blue ball, the Blue Ball