Diablo Baby

Which one of you is my father?

I know what you, with the twitching lips, and you, and you-with the knotting eyebrows and bulging notebook-will say. The obvious tiling. Ask your mother.

I have. She speaks to me (and sings to me and dances for me) just as a mother should. And I, Diablo Baby, talk to her. I never gooed and gaaed and gurgled like other mothers' babies. Why pretend to be ordinary when you are not?

But when I ask her the big question, all she can do is show me a tattered rag of a sari. It is bleached cotton, so old, frayed and grimy that it could be a strip of dry bark curling at the edges. But the picture on it glistens; white chalk flesh, yellow and red hibiscus of vegetable dye. There is a body in the picture, a body that has trapped the glint of silver in its bulges and ripples and folds. A piece of bloated moon that sits on a carpet of succulent forest flowers, on a sheet of smooth, fiery blood.

I have looked at this image many times. In it my reflection holds still. (When I look at myself in the stream, the water trembles, afraid of my steady gaze, my horns, my tattoos.)

My mother made the picture. She also made me. She thinks she had some help there, though she knows no names to name. When I ask her, Where is my father, she replies, In my head.

Then you came, she says, so we don't need him any more. And we have the picture, don't we? And the story in the picture?

So if I want a father, I must mine a story as strange and raggedy as my mother. A story with a forest girl, a temple, a church, a baby. And a blue- white, horned, phantom lover.

On the edge of the forest was a village and in the heart of the village were two buildings, one on the right side of the dusty street, one on the left. The buildings could have been brothers, so alike were their mortared, whitewashed walls. But like many brothers, their heads were...