15. Sam Of Marvels
Sam: Of Marvels
Reducir : One of the oldest known castings, and adaptable to many uses. It may lessen the size of a thing, it may gather several things in one space, and it may, with sufficient dead worth, eliminate a thing entirely. It is useful for cleaning.
—Euphemia Parra, Encantos de palabra (translation mine)
This is, assuredly, Clementine’s story. But I cannot aptly explain how I came to be part of it without telling you a bit more about myself: enough so that you can appreciate the ties that bound us, me and Clem, even across the great divide of life and death.
You see, Clementine was not the only one who disguised herself in order to study enchantment.
Though she did not know it, she was following in my footsteps.
To understand how alike we were, how much we were brought together not just by a common enemy but by a common strategy, I will ask you to suffer through a little of my own story—I promise I will not diverge for long.
I came to Salem in 1877 with my parents and my older brother.
I was nine—old enough to remember the island we came from, a place where the air was always heavy and scented, the insects asserted their unchallenged dominion inside and out, and the hurricanes were like a god’s tantrums, terrible and devastating and arbitrary.
We left Havana in the wake of a hurricane that ruined the season’s crops.
My father, who had already braved the ocean once to leave Yucatán for Havana, believed the long journey to New England would be less perilous than the ceaseless warfare in Havana.
After he established us safely in a small wooden house on Saddle Street, he succumbed to a pernicious illness that stole him away by degrees.
Five months after we’d arrived in Salem, he departed the world of the living and left us alone, bereft.
I will pass over those dreadful days. You have no need to hear about them, and I have no wish to relive them.
Saddle Street took us in. For many years I had little conception of Salem beyond it, much less Boston.
I thought the entire city of Salem consisted of Africans, islanders like us, some French Canadians, and many Irish.
My mother, a gifted seamstress and lacemaker, found employment almost instantly.
Her fine needle soon landed her customers from far beyond modest Saddle Street, and our small household flourished.
I remember the first time I saw the marvels of enchantment with my own eyes.
It’s not that there were no enchanters in Havana, but their acts were designed to assist and protect, to bolster and heal, and they often did so invisibly.
They didn’t aim to impress and entertain.
A child, lamentably, is far more impressed by showmanship than by the slow, steady work of good care.
It must have been a year or so after we settled in Saddle Street.
I had walked with my brother, Cristóbal, to a plot of land nearby that made perfect grounds for our ballgames.
Sometimes men tethered their horses to the fence along one side and took their ease, talking and resting.
A few were there that day, and one I didn’t recognize: short, bearded, wearing a black coat and a costly hat.
His manner was cheerful and talkative; though he clearly lived somewhere finer than Saddle Street, he could pass for a neighbor.
In the midst of our game with a few other boys, Cris hit the ball so hard that it flew into the air and toward the men at the edge of the lot.
We watched, horrified and helpless, shouting warnings that went unheeded, until the flying ball hit its unintended target: the stranger’s hat.
He picked up the hat and the ball, his face unreadable.
The men around him said nothing. Then he untied his horse, placed the ball in the animal’s mouth, and spoke in its ear.
Dumbly, we observed the approach of the stranger’s horse. It trailed its reins and took measured steps, its slow gait seeming to radiate disapproval. When it reached us, the horse dropped the ball. Then it drew back its thick lips and spoke. “Next time try hitting his brainless head.”
We must have made a pretty picture, all us boys standing there dumbfounded while the horse plodded back to its master.
For a moment I truly believed that horses could talk, and my head spun with readjustments, known things upended and new possibilities bursting like firecrackers.
Then we heard their laughter, and my mind began to wonder what my eyes had seen, and by and by I realized that what I had just witnessed was enchantment.
We took up our ballgame again for a little while longer. When we were done, the stranger was still there, and I couldn’t help myself—I walked over to him. “How did you make your horse speak, sir?”
Up close, I could see that he was a man full of lively mischief.
Red-nosed, with a scraggly beard and eyes a little pink from frequent drink.
“Oh, I was a grand enchanter once,” he said to me wryly.
“I used my talents to make a fortune, which I promptly lost in the most foolish pursuit of vanities.”
I was a little in awe of him. “Why did you do that?”
He smiled at me without any bitterness at all. “Because even the most brilliant man can be as dense as a brick. And I was.”
“I’m sorry to hear it, sir,” I said solemnly.
He shrugged, and his eyes twinkled a little.
“My aims are different now. Before, I wanted to make a fortune and master the world. Now, I merely seek to be amusing.” He gestured toward his horse.
“A horse making fun of its master. Now that’s funny.
” He chuckled to himself. “I could make every pot and pan in your kitchen talk, you know.”
“That would be alarming,” I said.
He laughed. “Perhaps one day, when you’ve learned the art of enchantment, you’ll put it to better use, then.”
That was it. The seed was planted.
The lively stranger made it seem utterly possible, even natural, that I would go on to study enchantment.
I can see now, with hindsight, that this exchange first awoke not only my interest but my sense of entitlement to the trade.
The man said nothing to make evident that to practice enchantment was a privilege reserved for some and prohibited to most.
For weeks, my dreams continued to build, the fantasy growing ever more elaborate in my young mind.
I had told my mother and Cris about my ambition, but mostly I cultivated the vision in silence: I saw myself in twenty years, with my own enchantment practice, setting right all the little wrongs of Saddle Street.
The broken pump at the end of the street would overflow with water; the nasty landlord of the brick building across the way would undergo a glorious transformation; the old couple in 37 would find a purse of silver, or maybe a pot of gold, under the floorboards.
I imagined myself something between a magical repairman and a fairy godmother.
But it did not take too long for my dreams to collide with reality.
On Saddle Street, where we were accustomed to providing everything for ourselves, a man called Père Joseph attended to the illnesses and injuries of the neighborhood.
He was from Haiti, a robust older man who held himself very upright and laughed generously, his eyes disappearing into wrinkles.
Most of the time he sat on his front porch in a straight-backed chair, smoking a pipe and handing out licorice.
I’d assumed he practiced ordinary medicine; after Father’s death, so early and precipitous, we’d all remained healthy enough to avoid such consultations.
It wasn’t until a pair of constables from the Office of Criminal Enchantment came to Père Joseph’s porch, escorting him into the wagon without explanation, that I learned the truth: Père Joseph cured with enchantment.
My first reaction was outrage. How could I not have known?
All this time, Père Joseph had been practicing enchantment only a few steps away?
And then my next thought was to wonder: What had Père Joseph done to attract the attention of the constables?
My mother broke the news to me gently, for she’d already fathomed what I could never have imagined: only men who had a license to practice enchantment could practice it legally in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and only certain men—of the correct education, station, and background—were eligible for a license. Père Joseph was not.
Indeed, from this small crisis on Saddle Street my mother had learned several lessons about how our new country functioned.
Although she still knew very little English, she was an astute observer of human nature; she had survived by her wits where others had not.
Consider that she had worked, along with so many others, in the sticky, boiling heat of the sugar mills, and she was only fifteen when she fled that life alone.
For weeks she’d survived in the wilds, the smell of burnt sugarcane still clinging to her skin, until she arrived at the ragged edges of the city of Havana and insinuated herself carefully into that larger, more anonymous world.
To know whom to trust and whom to avoid in such a situation requires a talent of perception that goes beyond language.