Raul Palma‘s debut novel A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens is a genre-bending take on immigration, capitalism, and society through a lens of a magical realism ghost story. Palma follows a man named Hugo whose wife has died and a debt collector is hounding him. He uses his connection with spirits – one he doesn’t believe in – to pull some quick moves to get ahead in life. It all seems to be okay until… it isn’t.
Hialeah Gardens is an originally imaginative and sometimes quite hilarious book that will give readers something fresh that they haven’t really encountered before.
A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens is available now. You can read an excerpt from the novel below.
ALL SPIRITUAL PEOPLE, Hugo believes, walk upon this globe contending with the fear that they are imposters. Every time Hugo visits with a client, he puts on a grand show, but it’s all smoke and mirrors. It’s all garments and candles and sacrifices that divert the eye away from his primary mission—fact- finding. All that Hugo does in his role as babaláwo is set the atmosphere; he creates the perfect conditions for confession and revelation. He invokes the fear of God and of Satan in everyday objects. Then he uses that information to manufacture a ritual that fits the situation.
Some years ago, just months after Obama’s reelection, Lourdes put Hugo on a rather standard case. An older gentleman named Wilfredo had come into the botanica out of sorts because he believed that his father was trying to kill him—his father who’d died fifty-one years prior while fighting in the Bay of Pigs invasion. The story made no sense to Hugo. More so, during a preliminary meeting, Hugo found it difficult to take Wilfredo seriously—a fit man well into his seventies, balding, and covered with a thick mat of white body hair. He looked like the kind of guy who’d served in the military himself and still maintained a regimen of push-ups at home. He was a serious man, a general contractor who oversaw a fleet of other contractors. Yet there he was, nestled in the back room of the Miami Botanica & Spa in Hialeah, almost in tears over his torments.
“So your father, who is fifty-one years dead, has been trying to kill you?” Hugo asked.
“Yes.”
“And how do you know it’s him? This spirit?”
“Excuse me,” Wilfredo said. “Do you find this funny?”
Hugo could hardly contain himself. “No. No. Please. Answer my question.”
“I know it’s him because it looks like him.”
“But in what state? Is he young? Old? Is he returned from the grave?”
“Young. Old,” Wilfredo said. “What difference does it make? Can you help me, or not?”
It took three visits to the client’s home to figure out what was going on. During that time, Hugo learned much about Wilfredo. He learned, for example, that the first time he’d realized that his father was trying to kill him was during a lightning storm. Wilfredo had been out picking fallen mangoes from his family home when a single bolt of lightning struck down the tree that he and his father had planted together the spring before his death. One limb, overburdened by fruit, fell right on Wilfredo’s shoulder, knocking him out cold. When he awoke, he was soaked and muddy and covered in leaves, and he felt a voice with the warmth of burnt tobacco whisper, “No eres hijo mío.”
Another time, Wilfredo was fishing under the Rickenbacker Causeway at night when something seized his line and ran. Wilfredo said that he thought it might be a shark or a fucking whale. He reeled it in like his life depended on it, and when he pulled up that opaque mass, what he saw was his own father’s face, all mangled and decomposed—an eel slithering out where there’d once been an eye. This frightened Wilfredo so much that he slipped off the ledge and fell into the cold and powerful current. He reached for the shore, but the current was relentless, and in the moment when he thought he might be swept out to sea, he reached for the seafloor and realized that he was, in fact, in shallow water. He could stand. “That was my father,” he said. “It was the hand of my father, trying to drag me down to the bottom of the sea. Why does he hate me?”
Hugo was at a loss. Wilfredo’s father, in the brief luminous years before the Bay of Pigs, seemed like a good man. “He was amazing,” Wilfredo had said. “The best dad, truly!” His father would come home after training in the Everglades to kill Fidel, and in their small fenced-in yard, he’d play a round of Kill the Communists, brandishing sticks as guns, liberating Cuba before dinner.
On Hugo’s third visit, it all clicked for him. He noticed something that didn’t quite fit the picture. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed it before. There, on Wilfredo’s refrigerator, was a portrait of President Obama with a dedication: “Thank you, Willy, for your support! God bless.” It was practically vibrating, much in the way that the objects in Lourdes’s botanica would during consults. “What’s that?” Hugo asked, sliding the magnet off and holding it. “Did you vote for Obama?”
Wilfredo pushed his seat back and said, “I can vote for who I want.”
“Sure. Yeah,” Hugo said. “I like him, too, but what would your father say?”
“He’d be furious.”
“Why is that?”
At this, Wilfredo seemed to realize what Hugo was insinuating.
“When did the tree get struck by lightning again?” Hugo asked.
“I think it was November.”
“November sixth? His reelection?”
“No. But. Coño. It was the day after!”
“Yes. I thought so.”
Wilfredo took the picture, gazed at it longingly. “What do I have to do then?”
“Here’s what I recommend. Vanquish the photo.”
“What?”
“I’ll come here tonight, and we’ll destroy it.”
“You think that will work?” Wilfredo asked.
“Well, it’s a start. Listen. I’ll come tonight. Anything Obama- related, have it waiting on the back porch. And I mean anything. A pencil. A letter. A T-shirt. Hell, anything Democratic. Got it?”
“And how about Clinton?”
“Bill is okay. But if it’s Hillary, maybe toss that, too.”
That night, Hugo returned ready. He brought a spiritual bath.
He brought a Ziploc bag filled with chicken bones. Together, they marched into Wilfredo’s backyard, right beside the fallen mango tree. “After today, no more Obama memorabilia,” Hugo said. “After today, take your Democratic affiliation and tear it up. You don’t have to be a Republican, but you’re done. Do you understand?”
Wilfredo nodded.
“Should I proceed?”
“I can feel him watching me.”
“Feel him?”
Hugo lit the devotionals, tossed the Obama gear in the box, tossed the chicken bones in, then poured lighter fluid all over it and set the whole thing ablaze. For theatrics, he’d left a pouch of barium chloride in the box, which burned green. It must have looked, to Wilfredo, like Hugo was exorcising the devil himself. He must have seen, in the smoke and flames, the face of his father because during the ritual, Wilfredo buckled over in tears and yelled, “I’m sorry, Papi. I’m sorry.”
But what had Hugo actually done? Nothing. Hugo could boil it down to science. For Hugo, the thought of someone’s spirit staying behind after death was ridiculous. The thought of a soul made him laugh. How could people believe such a thing in an age of science and the internet? But watching Wilfredo arrive at an emotional high, and feeling nothing in return, made Hugo feel abject.
Reflecting on Wilfredo’s situation, Hugo was envious. How could it be, he wondered, that a stranger could have such a profound experience with the ghost of a loved one, and I can’t even remember Meli’s face? What he remembered were the things she wanted—all her incomplete dreams and wishes—the nice house in Coral Gables with the oak tree, the fancy white BMW, the walk-in closet with a floor-to-ceiling shoe rack. The list went on. There was so much. Meli had always felt that, maybe, one day, it would happen.
Her life depended on that idea. But Hugo knew better. The day would never come. He’d always known it. When Meli would blurt out her long lists of wants, or when she’d sit on the couch and circle various pieces of luxury furniture in catalogues, Hugo would feel his impotence burning in him, and when Meli would say, “This year is going to be our year,” Hugo would nod along, like he really believed her, and he’d let this lack fester and rot until he resented her dreams.
When she died, and when her aunt Lena had to be the one to buy the coffin, he felt useless—not her husband, not the man she deserved, who would move the world for the love of his life, but just a placeholder. He should have at least paid for the coffin, even if it wasn’t made of mahogany.
Remembering Wilfredo burning his possessions in order to mourn his father, Hugo wondered what he could burn of Meli’s. The lists she’d made? The things she’d never purchased? Wilfredo’s situation, at least, turned out positive. The hauntings stopped. Hugo knew because Wilfredo would visit to replenish the devotionals, convinced that if he ever forgot to light them, the spirit of his Obama-hating father would return to exact revenge. Even with this success, however, Hugo was not convinced that he’d done anything, or that anything supernatural had occurred. As far as Hugo knew, Wilfredo’s hauntings could be chalked up to some undigested Sarussi sandwich throwing off his equilibrium. The guilt had been in Wilfredo all along. That’s all it’d ever been. Most hauntings worked that way. Someone felt bad about something, and that negativity manifested as a ghost.