The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho Read Online Free PDF

fresh lime juice, half a cup of fresh orange juice, half a cup of club soda, and four heaping tablespoons of brown sugar. Chill. Serve with a sprig of mint.) and sex, I made a mistake. I told him my secret: that I used to have to cover my ears to avoid the whispering and the calling of people I couldn’t always see, that I’d known what it was like to feel the dark weight of strangers’ secrets when they walked past me, and how I’d murdered it all the same way he’d be able to someday murder his nostalgia for the friends, the streets, and the little rituals of poverty he thought he’d left behind. I told him this to give him faith that his sadness too would pass. To give him something to hang on to. To keep him from partying his life away.
    The next day, he begged me to go with him to see his godmother. She was Dominican but had fallen in love with a Cuban man and had lived in Cuba until the day he died. Now she lived in the Miami neighborhood of Allapattah, in a little blue frame house that was almost completely obscured by shrubs and fruit trees, and I had only to lay eyes on her to be scared out of my freckles.
    She had brown skin and freaky green eyes, so intense they seemed fluorescent. But what scared me was her voice. The moment she spoke, it’s as if her voice’s shadow went off on its own to tell stories of women who threw themselves at the coffins of men they’d loved, of the trembling palms of young men about to pull triggers while looking into the eyes of other boys, and of the hearts of mothers, lurching and shaking in the knowledge that their daughters would not be coming home that night, or any night. It was a bit like a double sound track. One song is saying hello and asking Jorge how he knows me, and the other is performing a spoken poem made up of the world’s saddest headlines.
    I think I scared her too, because two minutes after first taking my hands in hers, she opened her eyes wide as if urgently displeased with whatever I had “brought in with me.” Then both her voices became one, and this section of the poem was composed of the events of my entire life. She told me I could’ve had children but that it was too late now, and that I’d be tragically unhappy until I started respecting Yemayá’s will for my life, and started to see again like I was supposed to. Then she told her godson to stay away from me if he knew what was good for him because I’d have nothing to give him but problems, and proceeded to pretty much shoo and push us out of her house.
    â€œMariela, pero no le hagas caso a la vieja, por tu vida, tatica,” he said over and over again on the drive home, one hand on the wheel, the other holding my hands to his face, asking me to please forgive the crazy old woman, and to forgive him for bringing me, and even stopping the car on the side of the road to hug me until I’d stopped trembling, promising it would be a long time before he’d go see the dratted witch ( bruja de mierda esa ) again, even if she was his godmother. He’d only wanted to help. To show me I had nothing to be ashamed of. He’d wanted his godmother to figure out the perfectly logical reason I hadn’t seen my mother’s illness so I could understand it. But the experience had shaken me up so much that I continued to cry all the way home, and when a week later, he got notice of his wife’s release date two months hence, I convinced him it was a good idea to start preparing for his new life with fidelity and made him promise not to call me again, no matter what. I also promised myself I’d forget him and never again make the mistake of telling anyone about my truncated gift.
    But my clairvoyance was not the only reason I ran away from him. I also did it because there’d been something there. Maybe not enough of a something to survive his crazy lifestyle, his even crazier godmother, and my own crazy habit of being drawn only