Chapter 5 The Dead Man’s Kiss
The Dead Man’s Kiss
The interior was dark, and it took a while for his eyes to become accustomed to the gloom.
The first thing that hit him was the acrid smell, a mixture of stale sweat, cooking, and stuffiness, and under it all a faint hint of decay.
The house was little more than a hovel, consisting of a single room, crammed with the most varied collection of objects imaginable.
Glancing at a corner, separated from the rest of the room by a moth-eaten curtain, Roberto made out the filthy bed where the woman no doubt slept.
Nearly every square inch of the walls was covered by shelves on which stood tins, dried-out plants, stones, pieces of wood, and items Roberto didn’t even want to know about.
The woman cleared a pile of old newspapers from a wooden stool and gestured to him to take a seat. Roberto obeyed.
“Okay, tell me what’s happened,” she grunted, drying her hands on the grubby cloth. “The whole story, please.”
I might as well, he thought to himself. I don’t see what harm can come of it.
Roberto told her everything that had happened since the moment he had been confronted with the rabbit’s head on the doorstep.
The woman interrupted from time to time to ask him to expand on some detail, in a manner that struck him as surprisingly methodical and professional.
When he had finished, he squared his shoulders and looked expectantly at the woman.
“So?” he said. “Do you have any explanation for all this?”
“I most certainly do,” she replied with a bitter laugh that sounded like a truck unloading gravel. “But you aren’t going to like it. They’ve cast a meigallo on you.”
“A what?”
“A meigallo. A curse,” she said, as if talking to a child. “The dead man’s kiss.”
Roberto raised his eyebrows. “You can’t be serious.”
“Do I look like I’m joking?”
“The dead man’s kiss.” He swallowed, incredulous. “What’s that?”
“A powerful spell,” the woman muttered. “It will dry your life out, bit by bit. You’ll gradually become weaker and weaker. First, you’ll stop eating; then you won’t be able to sleep; and finally . . . you’ll die.”
“That doesn’t sound like much fun.”
Roberto was a rational person. During his lifetime, he had seen evil incarnate more than once, but on each and every occasion, there had been a common denominator: the darkness of the human soul—fratricidal hatred, a thirst for vengeance, mindless pillage.
He’d seen suckling infants murdered, women raped by guerrilla fighters, ditches piled with corpses.
The horror always arose from the blackness of somebody’s heart, but it took forms you could recognize.
What the old woman had told him sounded more like a tale to scare children.
It couldn’t be true, even if Elvira Couto’s expression was utterly somber.
“I don’t believe in all that stuff. A rabbit’s head is just that . . . a head. It can’t harm me.”
“Ah, but whether you believe or not makes no difference,” she replied. “Evil doesn’t need your consent to exist.”
“Well, that’s one thing we agree on,” he said. “And I don’t suppose you have any idea who could be responsible for this . . . dead man’s kiss?”
“There are dark forces at work on this island,” she muttered, rubbing her hands. “Something arrived on Ons many years ago, and it stayed among us.”
He had hoped the woman might give him a clear answer: This is a trick we play on tourists. Or It’s a gory local custom. We’re on an island in the middle of nowhere, and we do strange things to pass the time. He certainly hadn’t expected to be dealing with some kind of voodoo.
“Okay. So what do I have to do to get rid of the curse?” he asked impatiently. “Dance in the rain? Throw salt over my shoulder? Walk under a ladder?”
“You shouldn’t joke about these things.”
Roberto raised his hands placatingly. This was a waste of time.
“Okay, I didn’t mean to upset you. What do I have to do?”
But Elvira had turned away and was rummaging through a pile of junk in the corner. Finally, she let out a victorious yelp and held up a bundle of dried twigs, held together with some elaborately knotted red thread.
“What’s that?” Roberto asked. “What are you—” The woman had struck him across the face with the bundle of twigs as she muttered something unintelligible. “Ouch! What the hell are you doing?” Before Roberto could stop her, she whipped him three more times in quick succession, mumbling as she did so.
“The graves of the dead, from near and far, from sea and land, from streams and mountains . . .”
The rest was incomprehensible gibberish that Roberto couldn’t decipher. He patiently allowed the woman to hit him nine more times, hoping that the ridiculous ritual would eventually come to an end.
“And now you have to jump over the fire.” The woman pointed at the hearth. The flames had almost consumed the log that was burning in it, leaving just a few embers. “Three times.”
“How am I meant to jump there?” Roberto answered, losing his patience. “Do you want me to get into the fireplace?”
Her only response was to walk over to the hearth and kick the embers, scattering them across the stone floor of the hovel. One of the embers rolled into a corner and almost set light to the cloth hanging down from an old side table, but Elvira stamped it out.
“Jump,” she ordered in a voice that brooked no dissent. “Jump if you want to save yourself. Three times, neither one more nor one less.”
Roberto was tempted to make a run for it, but eventually he groaned and stood up. Feeling ridiculous, he jumped three times across the embers while Elvira observed him with a clinical gaze, watchful for anything the ritual might be missing. When he was done, she seemed satisfied.
“Nearly done.” She leaned toward Roberto, who wrinkled his nose at the acrid odor. “Keep this in your pocket for protection,” she said, pressing something into his hand.
It was a short length of fishing line tied around some dried leaves with a fragrant smell. Not wanting to argue, he did as he was told.
“So?” he said. “Is that it?”
“That depends on the strength of the meigallo,” she answered as she gathered up the embers in her hands and tossed them back into the hearth as if they were already cold. “But in principle, yes. You’re clean.”
“You don’t have any idea who might have done it, do you?” insisted Roberto.
“This is the Tangarano’s doing,” Elvira muttered, making a sign to ward off the evil eye. “It’s always him.”
“Who’s the Tangarano? It’s not the first time someone has mentioned him.”
“I’m not going to say anything else.” The woman shook her head.
“Is he a local?” Roberto asked. “I only arrived on the island yesterday, and I haven’t had time to make enemies.”
“Who have you met?”
“Let’s see,” he replied, counting on his fingers. “Antía and Diego Freire. One of the Docampos. Víctor Pampín, who told me to come and find you . . . and yourself. It isn’t a very long list.”
“Don’t trust the Docampos or the Freires,” she muttered. “Both families have dark secrets. And don’t forget that, however friendly they may seem, they’ll always want something from you, even if you don’t realize it.”
The same warning as the poacher gave me, he thought to himself. They might be powerful on the island, but they aren’t exactly popular.
“Dark secrets? What do you mean?”
“That’s not for me to say.” She held out her hand. “And now, my payment.”
Roberto looked at the open palm for a moment, until he realized that the woman was demanding compensation for the ritual. Feeling like a tourist trapped by a sideshow huckster, he wondered as he took out his wallet how many innocents the old woman fleeced each summer.
“I don’t want money,” she hissed. “Don’t insult me.”
“So what do you want?”
“Something personal,” she replied bluntly. “It doesn’t have to be valuable. It just has to be something of yours. Something you really care about.”
He hadn’t expected that. It clearly wasn’t some ruse for tricking unwary tourists.
He patted his pockets, looking for something that might satisfy the strange woman’s demands. Finally, he found an old fountain pen. It wasn’t expensive, but it had accompanied him on his many journeys, starting with his very first trip as a reporter, in Aleppo. He hoped it would suffice as payment.
He offered it to the woman, who snatched it from his hands and inspected it, her eyes glinting. After a moment, she gave a satisfied grunt and tossed it nonchalantly into a nearby chest.
“We’re done.” She pointed at the door. “You can go now. And remember what I said: Don’t trust anybody on this island. Appearances can be deceptive.”
Roberto left the hovel, mystified. When the door slammed behind him and he heard the key turning in the lock once again, he stretched and let out a loud sigh. The salty air provided a refreshing contrast with the strange atmosphere inside the house.
He took one final look around and shook his head.
What a waste of time.
He walked away, his head already back in his book. Perhaps he could even make use of this episode.
Before long, he was on the beach again, sitting on a rock, watching the waves break on the shore. A hungry seagull, perhaps the same one as before, approached hesitantly, on the lookout for a free morsel.
“This place is full of lunatics,” he muttered to the seagull as he took out a cigarette. “And I seem to have met all of them.”
The seagull spread its wings and let out a squawk. He tossed a handful of sand at it, and the bird took flight indignantly.
He lit the cigarette, no mean feat in the wind, took out his notebook, and started to search for his pen when he remembered that he no longer had it. He looked at the notebook again.