A Fierce and Subtle Poison - Samantha Mabry Page 0,56

he said.”

“Wait,” I said, staring up at the water-stained ceiling. “What’s a cacique?”

“A cacique’s a Taíno chieftain,” Isabel replied. “She leads the community. Anyway, my mom ate the bread, told the cacique what she’d been doing, what the man had looked like, and what he’d said. The old lady then patted my mom on the head and told her she was very brave. That night, four men came to my mom’s family’s house and took Tino away. As he was being dragged through the door, he placed a curse on my mother. He said that he hoped her belly would be full of poison and that any of her children and her children’s children would die in the streets like dogs. My mom stood frozen and said nothing. She said she could feel his words. They landed all over her body, and like worms, they burrowed through her skin and into her organs.

“The next morning the cacique told my mom she was a bohique—a priestess—and the man she had spoken to on the beach was a god. He’d come to give her a message because he knew she was one of the few people who could receive it. Because of that message, the cacique said, my mom saved many lives.”

Isabel paused briefly. “Of course there was never any proof of that. My dad has told me this story dozens of times, and he always stops right here and snorts and says, ‘Of course there was never any proof of that.’”

“Regardless . . . ” Isabel sighed. “The cacique told my grandma that her daughter was a rare gift to her people, but my mom never believed it; what she did believe was that Tino cursed her and that she could feel that curse festering inside her belly.”

Even though Isabel had lied to me in a variety of unforgivable ways, I believed this story. It was about magic and disappearing. Zabana was special, but her village eventually forgot her. Then it forgot itself. I thought about my mother again, though this time about the story of la ciguapa with the backward feet, and then her asking me: What’s there not to believe?

“According to my dad, the world spun very quickly in the following years,” Isabel said. “The island got bigger and smaller at the same time. People starting moving out of their villages to the bigger cities, like Ponce and San Juan, and my mom stopped going to the beach where the god had woven the basket for her. The cacique died, and no one replaced her. In addition to Borinquen, my mom learned to speak both Spanish and English. She dreamed of moving away.

“She and my dad met when she was still a teenager. She’d taken a trip to Ponce with a boy she’d pretended to like, but really she was just using him for his car. They’d gone to a bar, and that’s where she’d seen my dad, with his lighter brown hair and a suit she thought was too old-fashioned. When my dad told my mom he was a scientist, that he’d come to the island to study its tropical plants, she told him about how, when she was a little girl, she would weave bowls out of palm fronds.”

“My dad always claimed he loved my mom madly, but she told him she thought that he loved her like an imperialist would, that he found her ‘exotic’ or ‘curious.’ After all, she was just a jíbara from a tiny beach village, who’d grown up with next to nothing and whose parents worked in sugar fields and died too young. He swore up and down that wasn’t the case. The word he’d used to describe her all those warm nights they’d kissed under the swaying trees was ‘magical.’ My dad would say to me, ‘Isa, you are magical just like your mother.’ ”

There was a hitch in Isabel’s voice, either from being overwhelmed by emotion or from trouble with her breathing. She paused before gathering her waves of hair into a thick coil and tossing it over one shoulder.

“My dad still won’t believe in the curse. I know he loved my mom very much, but he never understood. He’s a scientist. He’ll always try to find the most logical solution. That’s why we’re here right now.”

“We’re here right now,” I said, “because of how petty and jealous you are.”

The needle on Isabel’s machine to screeched to a halt.

“We’re here right now,” Isabel repeated, “because of how petty and jealous