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Blacaman the Good, Vendor of Miracles
Translated by Gregory Rabassa
From the first Sunday I saw him he reminded me of a bullring mule, with
his white suspenders that were backstitched with gold thread, his rings with
colored stones on every finger, and his braid of jingle bells, standing on a
table by the docks of Santa Maria del Darien in the middle of the flasks of
specifics and herbs of consolation that he prepared himself and hawked through
the towns along the Caribbean with his wounded shout, except that at that time
he wasn't trying to sell any of that Indian mess but was asking them to bring
him a real snake so that he could demonstrate on his own flesh an antidote he had invented,
the only infallible one, ladies and gentlemen, for the bites of serpents,
tarantulas, and centipedes plus all manner of poisonous animals. Someone who
seemed quite impressed by his determination managed to get a bushmaster of the
worst kind somewhere (the snake that kills by poisoning the respiration) and
brought it to him in a bottle, and he uncorked it with such eagerness that we
all thought he was going to eat it, but as soon as the creature felt itself
free it jumped right out of the bottle and struck him on the neck, leaving him
right then and there without any wind for his oratory and with barely enough time to take the
antidote, and the vest-pocket pharmacist tumbled down into the crowd and rolled
about on the ground, his huge body wasted away as if he had nothing inside of
it, but laughing all the while with all of his gold teeth. The hubbub was so
great that a cruiser from the north that had been docked there for twenty years
on a goodwill mission declared a quarantine so that the snake poison wouldn't
get on board, and the people who were sanctifying Palm Sunday came out of
church with their blessed palms, because no one wanted to miss the show of the poisoned
man, who had already begun to puff up with the air of death and was twice as
fat as he'd been before, giving off a froth of gall from his mouth and panting
through his pores, but still laughing with so much life that the jingle bells
tinkled all over his body. The swelling snapped the laces of his leggings and
the seams of his clothes, his fingers grew purple from the pressure of the
rings, he turned the color of venison in brine, and from his rear end came a
hint of the last moments of death, so that everyone who had seen a person
bitten by a snake knew that he was rotting away before dying and that he would be so crumpled up
that they'd have to pick him up with a shovel to put him into a sack,but they
also thought that even in his sawdust state he'd keep on laughing. It was so
incredible that the marines came up on deck to take colored pictures of him
with long-distance lenses, but the women who'd come out of church blocked their
intentions by covering up the dying man with a blanket and laying blessed palms
on top of him, some because they didn't want the soldiers to profane the body
with their Adventist instruments, others because they were afraid to continue
looking at that idolater who was ready to die dying with laughter, and others
because in that way perhaps his soul at least would not be poisoned. Everybody had given him up for dead when he pushed aside the palms with one arm,
still half-dazed and not completely recovered from the bad moment he'd had, but
he set the table up without anyone's help, climbed on it like a crab once more,
shouting that his antidote was nothing but the hand of God in a bottle, as we
had all seen with our own eyes, but it only cost two cuartillos because he
hadn't invented it as an item for sale but for the good of all humanity, and as
soon he said that, ladies and gentlemen, I only ask you not to crowd around,
there's enough for everybody.
They crowded around, of course, and they did well to do so, because in
the end there wasn't enough for everybody. Even the admiral from the cruiser
bought a bottle, convinced by him that it was also good for the poisoned
bullets of anarchists, and the sailors weren't satisfied with just taking
colored pictures of him up on the table, pictures they had been unable to take
of him dead, but they had him signing autographs until his arm was twisted with
cramps. It was getting to be night and only the most perplexed of us were left
by the docks when with his eyes he searched for someone with the look of an idiot to help him
put the bottles away, and naturally he spotted me. It was like the look of
destiny, not just mine, but his too, for that was more than a century ago and
we both remember it as if it had been last Sunday. What happened was that we
were putting his circus drugstore into that trunk with purple straps that
looked more like a scholar's casket, when he must have noticed some light
inside of me that he hadn't seen in me before, because he asked me in a surly
way who are you, and I answered that I was an orphan on both sides whose papa
hadn't died, and he gave out with laughter that was louder than what he had given with the poison
and then he asked me what do you do for a living, and I answered that I didn't
do anything except stay alive, because nothing else was worth the trouble, and
still weeping with laughter he asked me what science in the world do you most
want to learn, and that was the only time I answered the truth without any
fooling, I wanted to be a fortune- teller, and then he didn't laugh again but
told me as if thinking out loud that I didn't need much for that because I already
had the hardest thing to learn, which was my face of an idiot. That same night he spoke to my father and for one real and two cuartillos and a deck of cards that
foretold adultery he bought me forevermore.
That was what Blacaman was like, Blacaman the Bad, because I'm Blacaman
the Good. He was capable of convincing an astronomer that the month of February
was nothing but a herd of invisible elephants, but when his good luck turned on
him he became a heart-deep brute. In his days of glory he had been an embalmer
of viceroys, and they say that he gave them faces with such authority that for
many years they went on governing better than when they were alive, and that no one dared
bury them until he gave them back their dead-man look, but his prestige was
ruined by the invention of an endless chess game that drove a chaplain mad and
brought on two illustrious suicides, and so he was on the decline, from an
interpreter of dreams to a birthday hypnotist, from an extractor of molars by
suggestion to a marketplace healer; therefore, at the time we met, people were
already looking at him askance, even the freebooters. We drifted along with our
trick stand and life was an eternal uncertainty as we tried to sell escape
suppositories that turned smugglers transparent, furtive drops that baptized wives threw into the soup
to instill the fear of God in Dutch husbands, and anything you might want to
buy of your own free will, ladies and gentlemen, because this isn't a command,
it's advice, and, after all, happiness isn't an obligation either.
Nevertheless, as much as we died with laughter at his witticisms, the truth is
that it was quite hard for us to manage enough to eat, and his last hope was
founded on my vocation as a fortune-teller. He shut me up in a sepulchral trunk
disguised as a Japanese and bound with starboard chains so that I could attempt
to foretell what I could while he disemboweled the grammar book looking for the best way to convince
the world of my new science, and here, ladies and gentlemen, you have this
child tormented by Ezequiel's glowworms, and those of you who've been standing
there with faces of disbelief, let's see if you dare ask him when you're going
to die, but I was never able even to guess what day it was at that time, so he
gave up on me as a soothsayer because the drowsiness of digestion disturbs your
prediction gland, and after whacking me over the head for good luck, he decided
to take me to my father and get his money back. But at that time he happened to find
a practical application for the electricity of suffering, and he set about
building a sewing machine that ran connected by cupping glasses to the part of
the body where there was a pain. Since I spent the night moaning over the
whacks he'd given me to conjure away misfortune, he had to keep me on as the
one who could test his invention, and so our return was delayed and he was
getting back his good humor until the machine worked so well that it not only
sewed better than a novice nun but also embroidered birds or astromelias
according to the position and intensity of the pain. That was what we were up
to, convinced of our triumph over bad luck, when the news reached us that in
Philadelphia that commander of the cruiser had tried to repeat the experiment
with the antidote and that he'd changed into a glob of admiral jelly in front of
his staff.
He didn't laugh again for a long time. We fled through Indian passes and
the more lost we became, the clearer the news reached us that the marines had
invaded the country under the pretext of exterminating yellow fever and were
going about beheading every invertebrate or eventual potter they found in their
path, and not only the natives, out of precaution, but also the Chinese, for
distraction, the Negroes, from habit, and the Hindus, because they were snake charmers, and
then they wiped out the flora and fauna and all the mineral wealth they were
able to because their specialists in our affairs had taught them that the
people along the Caribbean had the ability to change their nature in order to
confuse gringos. I couldn't understand where that fury came from or why we were
so frightened until we found ourselves safe and sound in the eternal winds of
La Guajira, and only then did he have the courage to confess to me that his
antidote was nothing but rhubarb and turpentine and that he'd paid a drifter
two cuartillos to bring him that bushmaster with all the poison gone. We stayed
in the ruins of a colonial mission, deluded by the hope that some smugglers would
pass, because they were men to be trusted and the only ones capable of
venturing out under the mercurial sun of those salt flats. At first we ate
smoked salamanders and flowers from the ruins and we still had enough spirit to
laugh when we tried to eat his boiled leggings, but finally we even ate the
water cobwebs from the cisterns and only then did we realize how much we missed
the world. Since I didn't know of any recourse against death at that time, I simply lay down to wait for
it where it would hurt me least, while he was delirious remembering a woman who
was so tender that she could pass through walls just by sighing, but that
contrived recollection was also a trick of his genius to fool death with
lovesickness. Still, at the moment we should have died, he came to me more
alive than ever and spent the whole night watching over my agony, thinking with
such great strength that I still haven't been able to tell whether what was
whistling through the ruins was the wind or his thoughts, and before dawn he
told me with the same voice and the same determination of past times that now
he knew the truth, that I was the one who had twisted up his luck again, so get
your pants ready, because the same way as you twisted it up for me, you're
going to straighten it out.
That was when I lost the little affection I had for him. He took off the
last rags I had on, rolled me up in some barbed wire, rubbed rock salt on the
sores, put me in brine from my own waters, and hung me by the ankles for the
sun to flay me, and he kept on shouting that all that mortification wasn't
enough to pacify his persecutors. Finally he threw me to rot in my own misery
inside the penance dungeon where the colonial missionaries regenerated heretics,
and with the perfidy of a ventriloquist, which he still had more than enough
of, he began to imitate the voices of edible animals, the noise of ripe beets,
and the sound of fresh springs so as to torture me with the illusion that I was dying of indigence
in the midst of paradise. When the smugglers finally supplied him, he came down
to the dungeon to give me something to eat so that I wouldn't die, but then he
made me pay for that charity by pulling out my nails with pliers and filing my
teeth down with a grindstone, and my only consolation was the wish that life would
give me time and the good fortune to be quit of so much infamy with even worse
martyrdoms. I myself was surprised that I could resist the plague of my own putrefaction and he kept throwing the leftovers of his meals onto me and
tossed me pieces of rotten lizards and hawks into the corners so that the air
of the dungeon would end up poisoning me. I don't know how much time had passed
when he brought me the carcass of a rabbit in order to show me that he
preferred throwing it away to rot than giving it to me to eat, but my patience
only went so far and all I had left was rancor, so I grabbed the rabbit by the
ears and flung it against the wall with the illusion that it was he and not the
animal that was going to explode, and then it happened, as if in a dream. The
rabbit not only revived with a squeal of fright, but came back to my hands, hopping through
the air.
That was how my great life began. Since then I've gone through the world
drawing the fever out of malaria victims for two pesos, visioning blind men for
four-fifty, draining the water from dropsy victims for eighteen, putting
cripples back together for twenty pesos if they were that way from birth, for twenty-two
if they were that way because of wars, earthquakes, infantry landings, or any
other kind of public calamity, taking care of the common sick at wholesale
according to a special arrangement, madmen according to their theme, children
at half price, and idiots out of gratitude, and who dares say that I'm not a philanthropist,
ladies and gentlemen, and now, yes, sir, commandant of the twentieth fleet,
order your boys to take down the barricades and let the suffering humanity
pass, lepers to the left, epileptics to the right, cripples where they won't
get in the way, and there in the back the least urgent cases, only please don't
crowd in on me because then I won't be responsible if the sicknesses get all
mixed up and people are cured of what they don't have, and keep the music
playing until the brass boils, and the rockets firing until the angels burn,
and the liquor flowing until ideas are killed, and bring on the wenches and the acrobats, the
butchers and the photographers, and all at my expense, ladies and gentlemen,
for here ends the evil fame of the Blacamans and the universal tumult starts. That's
how I go along putting them to sleep with the techniques of a congressman in
case my judgment fails and some turn out worse than they were before on me. The
only thing I don't do is revive the dead, because as soon as they open their
eyes they're murderous with rage at the one who disturbed their state, and when
it's all done, those who don't commit suicide die again of disillusionment. At
first I was pursued by a group of wise men investigating the legality of my
industry, and when they were convinced, they threatened me with the hell of
Simon Magus and recommended a life of penitence so that I could get to be a saint,
but I answered them, with no disrespect for their authority, that it was
precisely along those lines that I had started. The truth is that I’d gain
nothing by being a saint after being dead, an artist is what I am, and the only
thing I want is to be alive so I can keep going along at donkey level in this
six-cylinder touring car I bought from the marines' consul, with this
Trinidadian chauffer who was a baritone in the New Orleans pirates' opera, with my genuine silk shirts, my Oriental
lotions, my topaz teeth, my flat straw hat, and my bicolored buttons, sleeping without
an alarm clock, dancing with beauty queens, and leaving them hallucinated with
my dictionary rhetoric, and with no flutter in my spleen if some Ash Wednesday
my faculties wither away, because in order to go on with this life of a
minister, all I need is my idiot face, and I have more than enough with the
string of shops I own from here to beyond the sunset, where the same tourists
who used to go around collecting from us through the admiral, now go stumbling
after my autographed pictures, almanacs with my love poetry, medals with my profile,
bits of my clothing, and all of that without the glorious plague of spending
all day and all night sculpted in equestrian marble and shat on by swallows
like the fathers of our country.
It's a pity that Blacaman the Bad can't repeat this story so that people
will see that there's nothing invented in it. The last time anyone saw him in
this world he'd lost even the studs of his former splendor, and his soul was a
shambles and his bones in disorder from the rigors of the desert, but he still
had enough jingle bells left to reappear that Sunday on the docks of Santa
Maria del Darien with his eternal sepulchral trunk, except that this time he
wasn't trying to sell any antidotes, but was asking in a voice cracking with
emotion for the marines to shoot him in a public spectacle so that he could
demonstrate on his own flesh the life- restoring properties of this
supernatural creature, ladies and gentlemen, and even though you have more than enough right not to believe me after
suffering so long from my evil tricks as a deceiver and a falsifier, I swear on
the bones of my mother that this proof today is nothing from the other world,
merely the humble truth, and in case you have any doubts left, notice that I'm
not laughing now the way I used to, but holding back a desire to cry. How
convincing he must have been, unbuttoning his shirt, his eyes drowning with
tears, and giving himself mule kicks on his heart to indicate the best place
for death, and yet the marines didn't dare shoot, out of fear that the Sunday crowd would discover
their loss of prestige. Someone who may not have forgotten the
blacamanipulations of past times managed, no one knew how, to get and bring him
in a can enough barbasco roots to bring to the surface all the corvinas in the
Caribbean, and he opened it with great desire, as if he really was going to eat
them, and, indeed, he did eat them, ladies and gentlemen, but please don't be
moved or pray for the repose of my soul, because this death is nothing but a
visit. That time he was so honest that he didn't break into operatic death rattles, but got off the
table like a crab, looked on the ground for the most worthy place to lie down
after some hesitation, and from there he looked at me as he would have at a
mother and exhaled his last breath in his own arms, still holding back his
manly tears all twisted up by the tetanus of eternity. That was the only time,
of course, that my science failed me. I put him in that trunk of premonitory
size where there was room for him laid out. I had a requiem mass sung for him
which cost me fifty four-peso doubloons, because the officiant was dressed in
gold and there were also three seated bishops. I had the mausoleum of an
emperor built for him on a hill exposed to the best seaside weather, with a
chapel just for him and an iron plaque on which there was written in Gothic capitals here lies blacamAn
the dead, badly called the bad, deceiver of marines and victim OF science, and
when those honors were sufficient for me to do justice to his virtues, I began
to get my revenge for his infamy, and then I revived him inside the armored
tomb and left him there rolling about in horror. That was long before the fire
ants devoured Santa Maria del Darien, but the mausoleum is still intact on the
hill in the shadow of the dragons that climb up to sleep in the Atlantic winds,
and every time I pass through here I bring him an automobile load of roses and
my heart pains with pity for his virtues, but then I put my ear to the plaque to
hear him weeping in the ruins of the crumbling trunk, and if by chance he has
died again, I bring him back to life once more, for the beauty of the punishment
is that he will keep on living in his tomb as long as I'm alive, that is,
forever.
(1968)
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SHORT STORIES
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