Adolfo Ortega grinned smugly at the thought of having reached a ripe old age without losing his teeth, his hair and, most important, his mind, as had befallen most of his blood kin on both sides his family.
A maternal aunt had died of malnutrition, because her household saint had informed her in a dream that all food, except raw sugar, was cow dung.
A maternal uncle spent the last five years of his life combing the streets of Havana for shards of broken beer bottles, convinced that they held diamonds. Other kinds of bottles, he explained, were made of ordinary glass. Only beer-bottle glass had diamonds melted in it, as any fool could see by the way it reflected sunlight.
Another maternal uncle earned a decent living peddling brushes, fruit, cosmetics, rum-laced homeopathic remedies, fruits, vegetable, and any such saleable thing he could load on his hand cart. Though he had never attended school and could not read or even sign his name, he could calculate transactions in a flash and make change by merely feeling through the coins jingling in his pocket. He would say to a customer: “Three avocados at 12 centavos each, four plantains at 8 centavos each, and a 16-centavo bottle of cologne—that comes to 84 centavos. Here’s your change, 6 centavos, for the three pesetas and the three reales, total 90 centavos, that you gave me. Gracias, señora.”
Then one night, at age 63, he awoke from a nightmare crying that his aptitude for numbers was a gift from the devil. “Fue El Diablo quien me dio ese don!” (It was the Devil who gave me that talent.) Thenceforth, to avoid any connection with El Diablo, he would say to a customer: “You want to buy three avocados, señora? Muy bien. You put 12 centavos in my hand, and I will give you one avocado. Put another 12 centavos in my hand, and I will give you another avocado. Another 12 centavos, another avocado. The exact amount each time, please. I do not make change. I do not need to calculate numbers to sell avocados.”
The man soon went out of business, and two years later accidentally killed himself trying to punch a hole in his belt with an ice-pick without bothering to take off the belt. The money he had made peddling, thousands of pesos, he had put in bottles and buried the bottles in an empty lot, but did not get around to telling his heirs until after a fort-like police station was built on the lot.
On his father’s side of the family insanity usually took a violent turn. His granduncle, José, a physician, and a grandaunt, Tomasa, a pharmacist, had in their late 60's immigrated the U.S. Both were soon committed to psychiatric nursing homes, the names of which—Whispering Pines and Green Acres—utterly belied the unbridled madness within their walls.
The fiercest fight Ortega Romero had witnessed during a his stint as a public school substitute teacher was between two huge eighth-grade girls over a boy half their size, the girls rolling under a staircase, where no one could separate them, and there fighting on for a good 20 minutes, snarling and hissing, until their fury was spent.
Yet even more fierce was a fight he broke up one day between his grandaunt Tomasa and another female resident, the widow of a New York Mafioso. The two ladies had been scuffling for possession of a plastic fork and had gone berserk when the fork snapped in half. Between flurries of punching, kicking and clawing, they would pause for a moment to catch their breath and lick the blood off each other’s faces. It was all that Ortega, then a strong man of 35, and a burly security guard could do to pry them apart.
At the Whispering Pines, granduncle José had to be carefully guarded. A former medical officer in the Cuban army and, as rumors had it, head of a right-wing death squad, he had a penchant for attacking other male residents. Once, he and another resident, a former Cuban army officer like himself, challenged each other to a duel. The two sneaked into the maintenance room that night, and, while one stood guard to make sure that no one was watching, the other stole two 22-ounce claw hammers. Next day they met in the Catholic chapel, each armed with a hammer, prepared for mortal combat. Fortunately, a nun who happened to be tidying up the altar, alerted the guards just in time to thwart the violence.
The cause of the duel was a dispute over the historical veracity of an illustration of the Cuban patriot, Antonio Maceo, astride a white horse. José vehemently argued that Maceo had never owned a white horse, while the other man just as vehemently held that he did. When the other man died in his sleep six months later, José prayed for his soul, while at the same time cursing him for dying before he could kill him. The two old Cubans had been arguing over all sorts of things since day they met, but, for some reason, the color of Maceo’s horse had become an issue of personal honor, too important to settle with mere words.
Though not as inclined to violence but just as a crazy in his mature years was, Ortega’s great-grandfather, Juan. A European-educated obstetrician. Juan could speak French, English, and German, and read classical Greek and Latin fluently. When the U.S. medical team headed by Walter Reed came to Cuba in 1900 to test the theory advanced by the Cuban epidemiologist Carlos Finlay that yellow fever was transmitted by the mosquito Aedes aegypti, Juan was invited to join the research team. In the course of his work as observer and translator, he became so impressed by the Americans’ scientific advances, that he decided to give up his lucrative medical practice and dedicate his life entirely to scientific research.
Entrusting the care of his children and wife to his brothers, he perused all the major biological journals of the time and set up a state-of-the art laboratory in a remote village of Pinar del Rio, his native province (home of the famous Cuban tobacco). Unfortunately, the man had no head for scientific research, nor did any of the local semi-literates he trained as assistants, among whom was a brujo, sorcerer, who earned a good deal of money on the side hexing people for a fee.
For 11 years, seven days a week, from dawn till midnight, Adolfo Ortega’s great-grandfather labored in his lab, achieving nothing. That did not, however, disabuse him of the conviction that he was on the verge of discovering cures for leprosy, diabetes, syphilis, tuberculosis, emphysema, and pyorrhea. He died one night in his lab, apparently of a stroke, at age 66. Scientists from the University of Havana who at the request of Juan’s relatives read his notes, politely informed them in so many words that the notes were gibberish.
That Adolfo Ortega had managed to avoid the fate of his kin, he attributed in part to good luck but, mostly, to the fact that he was a life-long practitioner of clean, healthful living, mentally and physically. After high school, he served four years in the U.S. Marines, embarked on rigorous exercise routine from which he never departed, earned a Ph.D. in mathematics, and taught in various universities. He ate meat sparingly, never drank, smoked, or did drugs.
After retirement, at age 65, he kept his mind active by submitting to on-line zoology journals his observations of the behavior of animals that came to feed on the food he left for them in his backyard. A passage from a his latest submission read:
”The new generation of squirrels this spring has developed the ability to suddenly transmute into fast-flying crows when a predator approaches, then back to squirrels when the danger is past. I have noted similar transmutations in other species, of birds and insects, as well as mammals, and I further hypothesize that, if they so willed, humans could do the same. The ancient myths of people turning into animals or half animals—werewolves, satyrs, minotaurs, and the like.—are based on fact. The tradition of athletic teams assuming ananimal identity—-bears, lions, eagles and such—reinforces my theory. Then there are those animal fables and cartoon characters we enjoyed as children.”
Like all 122 of his previous submissions, this one was also rejected, but that did not deter Ortega. Figuring that he was too far ahead of his time, that it would take decades for the science of zoology to catch up with his theories, he archived each rejected submission chronologically in a web page addressed to future zoologists, titled: “The Synergy of the Species.” His next submission, Number 123, described his near success in exchanging anatomies with his pet German Shepherd.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment