Page 74 of An Immaculate Deception

Once again, Mother has flashed for a moment, briefly come to life, then disappeared inside the alien mind of the younger Madalena. I feel myself deflate. Will this be the rest of my life? Living with Strange Madalena? Death, the fate that seemed so horrible months ago when Mother first fell ill, now seems peaceful and preferable to the situation we find ourselves in, and the life that stands before us now.

I should have done as Mother asked: called for a priest and accepted her natural death. I would have been parted from her only temporarily, only in the four or so decades that are left of my time on earth. Doctor Amado was right—I should have learned to live with my new reality.

Mother rises from the table abruptly. There’s something robotic and strange about the way she moves, almost like she’s sleepwalking.

She goes into the kitchen.

I sit up, alert. What is Mother doing in the kitchen in the middle of dinner?

I overhear Maria das Dores speaking to her. “Do you need something, Sinhá Madalena?”

I don’t hear a response.

Alarm bells ring inside my head.

A moment later, Maria das Dores’s voice rings again, this time louder and laced with concern: “Sinhá Madalena…?”

I push back the chair and rush to the kitchen.

Strange Madalena stands with a firm grip on the glass dome that encases Mother’s fubá cake. Mother made the fubá cake when she first got sick. It was always my favorite. Then she fell ill, and I set it aside for us to eat later when she recovered. But she got worse. I told Maria das Dores not to discard it, hoping that Mother would recover. Each day I hoped that the next day she would turn a corner. Weeks passed. As I hardly come into the kitchen, I didn’t notice how putrid the cake got. One day Maria das Dores came into my study and asked about discarding it. It irritated me and I snapped, saying, “Why must you bring this up again?” She hasn’t brought it up since.

Strange Madalena shoots me a hateful look as she clutches the dome. I don’t know what she’s thinking, but it can’t be good.

With whatever faculties remain of me, I try to choose my words carefully. “What are you doing?”

“This is connected to her somehow.” Strange Madalena’s voice is full of poison. She’s breathy and shaky and there’s a broken thread in it that makes my heart twist. “It is why you cannot dispose of it.”

She is hovering in the vicinity of the truth, yet she’s not there. It wasn’t the last thing she ate before she died, and we didn’t share it as a last meal, and I don’t intend to keep it forever. It’s so much more mundane than that.

But the cake could have reminded her, and it didn’t. I fear she’ll never come to remember who she is, or who I am. Her mind will twist and turn and reframe events forever, according to the framework of June 1877. She understands herself now as a separate person from Mother. Even though she doesn’t know, still she knows.

Doctor Lobo comes up behind me now, watching the spectacle.

She starts asking me pointed questions. “Is that why you’re so distraught here? You’re haunted by her? Who was down in the senzala?”

Doctor Lobo tries to placate her. “No one’s haunted, Madalena. Just come back to the table.”

“I would believe it,” she says, “if only it were Leandro saying it.”

She looks at me, as though daring me. In the silence that follows, I can feel Doctor Lobo and Maria das Dores watching me, waiting, wondering why I’m not saying anything.

But I can’t. I won’t keep lying to Mother. I won’t pretend to be my father, rattling off lie after lie without conscience, like Lobo does. I won’t add another lie to the little box of lies.

The room spins. Her asking about herself without realizing, past and future going around in circles in my head like a spinning wheel. I’m not sure what is true anymore, what is a lie. What might be a subtle hint or what might give everything away and trigger a terrible stupor.

“And you’ve decided that based on what,” Doctor Lobo says, “a moldy cake?”

She bites her lip and looks between him and me. I search for Mother in her expression, but don’t see it. There is only the anguish of the more naïve Madalena. And she doesn’t seem at all appeased by Lobo’s cajoling words.

“Let’s just go back to dinner,” Doctor Lobo says. “Come now.”

“If I’m wrong,” she insists, “then surely it’s fine if I discard this cake right now?”

“I…” I start. “I simply forgot about the cake. It slipped my mind. I’ll take care of it later.”

Doubt creeps into her eyes. “What of…what of the renovations? Who slept in the room upstairs? Who was down in the senzala?”

The mention of the senzala makes me freeze.