There was a plaque at the base of the tree, placed by the South Florida Horticultural Society. This plaque proclaimed it the largest tree in Florida, and informed the interested that it was aFICUS MACROPHYLLA, a banyan fig, and had been planted around 1890 by a minister to provide shade for his church. It still provided shade to the large brick-built steepled building that had replaced the tin-roofed original, and also, in the late afternoon, to the low, modern structure that housed the Providence Day School, K through six. The tree covered an area the size of a big-league baseball diamond, a vast ball of dark green elongate shiny leaves suspended over dozens of trunks and subtrunks, smooth and gray as elephants, and in the spooky cloud-stopped light of this afternoon, like elephants these seemed to march with infinite slowness across the lawn that surrounded it. There was a wooden bench established under one of its boughs, slung cleverly between two living buttresses. Upon this sat Miss Milliken, the first-grade teacher, who read to her class fromTik-Tok of Oz, a special treat at the end of the day. The parents knew to collect their children there on paradisiacal afternoons such as this, and there was a small circle of adults, almost all well-turned-out local matrons or young nannies, standing around the clump of sitting children, listening while the chapter was read out. The sole listener who was neither matron nor nanny was Jimmy Paz.
The book closed, the children sprang up and began to chatter, the parents moved in. Some grabbed their youngsters and moved off in a determined manner, to tightly scheduled activities meant to build up résumés. The students at Providence Day came from a social stratum that did not believe in wasting the unforgiving minute, whose members believed that it was never too early to sacrifice to the gods of success. Jimmy Paz was not one of these either, nor were several others, who demonstrated by their costumes and vehicles that they were the heirs of the former indigenes of Coconut Grove-the laid-back, the artistic-even if wealthy enough to afford Providence’s stiff fees. These gathered around Miss Milliken to chat, to discuss their children briefly, to hang out with one another in the welcome shade of the great tree.
Unconvivial Paz, no former hippie, no artist, followed his daughter’s lead into the green center of the ficus. Here he observed a demonstration of tree climbing and was forced to admit that he could not swing upside down from a low limb by his knees. He could, however, still tickle her so that, giggling, she lost her grip and fell into his arms.
“Daddy, do you know there’s a monster in this tree?”
“I didn’t know that. Is it scary?”
She considered this briefly. “A little scary. Notvery scary, likearrrrrgh! ” She demonstrated what scary would be like by physical gestures and a snarling face. “He talks to me,” she added. “In Spanish.”
“Really. What about?”
“Oh, stuff. He’s from a real jungle, and he can talk to animals. I showed him to Britney Riley, but she couldn’t see him. She said I wasstupid. I hate her now.”
“I thought she was your best friend.”
“Uh-uh. She’s a total dummy. My new best friend is Adriana Steinfels. Can she come to our house?”
“Not today, honey. Can you show me the monster?”
“Okay,” with which she took his hand in hers and led him deeper into the maze of prop-roots. The air there was damp, cool, and filled with the spicy-rotten smell of the leaf and fruit litter below. They came to a gray-green vertical column that looked as big around as a dump truck: the main trunk of the state’s largest tree. Amelia pointed upward. “He lives up there,” she said, and waited for a moment, listening, then shrugged. “I think he’s not there now. Where’s Abuela?”
“Something came up. She had to go to herilé.”
“Could we go, too?”
“We could,” said Paz, somewhat to his own surprise. It would mean a fight with his wife. Did he want that? Maybe it was time to have the whole thing out. Whether Paz believed in Santería or not, the thing was part of his child’s heritage, not to mention his own, and this absolute ban had suddenly become unbearable. Amelia was not a Britney or an Adriana, a white bread…the wordgusano, a maggot, floated into consciousness, and was shoved down again. The kid was a mutt, and seven was not too early for her to learn where she came from. Okay, now they’d have it out. He loved his wife dearly, in parts, but her materialist self-righteousness he did not love, and he’d come to the end of avoiding the issue. So he told himself, and ran a few little testing arguments through his head, as husbands so often do, as he left the bowels of the fig tree and entered the open air, clutching the little warm hand. The monster in the tree, though-also not a good sign. Amelia had gone through a number of imaginary playmates, and Dr. Mom had explained at length that it was perfectly natural at the appropriate age. Was this the appropriate age? Nearly seven? Paz had thought that real friends took over the social impulse about now, and dumping a real friend because of an imaginary one could not be right. Now he was about to take the child to a place where nearly every adult had an imaginary friend who emerged unpredictably from the spirit world and took them over completely-would that betherapeutic under the circumstances? He knew what her mother would say to that. Paz told this line of thought to stop and it did but promised to come backreal soon.
Theilé, the Santería congregation, was lodged in the unprepossessing home of Pedro Ortiz, located in the largely Cuban-inhabited area southwest of the original Little Havana on SW Eighth Street, which bore therefore the Spanglish name of Souesera. He had to park the Volvo two blocks away, so great was the number of cars-mostly venerable and including a number of well-used pickup trucks-that crowded the streets nearby and also the small former lawns of the houses, now converted into green-painted asphalt parking lots. It was the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, an important day in Santería, for when the African slaves first saw statues of that saint, they had conflated the beads of his rosary with the palm-nut chains used in Yoruba divination and so associated the Italian saint with Ifa-Orunmila, theorisha, or spirit, of prophecy. It was considered particularly auspicious to get your fortune told on this day, hence the crowd and hence the presence here of Margarita Paz. Paz explained some of this to his daughter as they walked; she took in the information in the perfectly accepting manner of children, and then asked, “Will they tell a fortune for me?”
“I don’t know,” said Paz honestly. “You could ask Abuela. She knows more about this stuff than me.”
“What’s in that bag?”
Paz hefted the plastic sack. “Yams.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Do we have to eat them?” Not a yam fan, Amelia, despite his best efforts. “No, they’re for theorisha, ” he said. “Ifaloves yams.”
“Yuck,” said Amelia, unimpressed by the tastes of the Lord of Fate.
They went into the house. Paz’s nostrils were immediately full of the typical smell of such places-burning wax from scores of candles, the sweet incense sold inbotánicas throughout the city, the earth smell of piles of yams, the sweetness of coconut and rum, and beneath all, the acrid odor of live fowl. Despite the murmur of the crowd, these could be heard clucking from their pens in a room at the back of the house.
He held tight to Amelia’s hand, although the place was full of children running free. Besides these, the people were of all ages, as one would expect at any church, and of all colors, too, although tending to the darker shades indigenous to the Cuban community.
“Look, Abuela!” Amelia cried and tore away to greet her grandmother. Paz liked to see the two of them together, because of the expression that came over his mother’s face when she embraced hernieta. It was joy unrestrained, an expression he did not recall seeing there during his own youth. Once he had felt a pang of resentment at such times, but no longer. None of that mattered anymore, whether or not his wife the shrink agreed. Some of the joy even carried over to him. Mrs. Paz embraced him, kissed him on both cheeks, smiled, showing the gold teeth.