Cargo of Orchids (33 page)

When we reached open, swampy ground, where only small clumps of grass and mosses grew, I thought I could smell a fire burning, the smut of cooking. We continued upwards until the ground levelled off again, and there in a huddle of rocky outcrops I saw a crude shelter constructed of wooden beams and different kinds of palm bound together with vines. Daisy stopped and called the
bruja’s
name.

An unusually tall, black-skinned woman with a halo of wild red hair came to greet us. She hugged Daisy, her eyes fixed, all the while, on Angel, eyes the colour of Mejool dates, so soft and brown they made you want to bite into them and suck the sweetness from their centres.

The
bruja
said she’d been expecting us—she’d seen us in a dream. We followed her into the hut, which offered little shelter from the elements; when my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw dismembered bits of goat hanging from iron hooks suspended at different heights over a low fire. Lumps of meat, and maize and cabbage slices, floated in a watery broth that simmered in a pot, moon-shaped wedges of onion undulating through the greyish foam.

The
bruja
prepared thin slices of black bread spread with thick layers of sweet guava jam, and Daisy began to
tell her the reason for our visit. The
bruja
held up her hand. She already knew why we had come.

The odour of death simmered on the fire. The
bruja
filled a blackened kettle with water from a jug and set it over the flames. She added more logs to the fire, and Angel started to cough as the room filled with smoke. I felt sleepy and relaxed one minute, wide awake and edgy the next.

When the water boiled, the
bruja
made coca tea, which she said would help clear my head—the air on the mountain was something you became acclimatized to. She prepared a glass bottle with a nipple on it for Angel too (she’d had to bottle-feed her baby goats after their mother died, she said), saying the coca tea would take away his hunger and make him very calm. She said
la coca te cuida el cuerpo
, takes care of the body, and Angel drank it all down without pushing the bottle away even once.

The wind round the hut made a sound like a baby getting ready to cry, but Angel himself looked more contented than ever. Unlike me: every time I thought of the cocaine I had in my pocket, my palms started to sweat. The
bruja
must have recognized the desire in my eyes—there were black holes in my aura, she said, and where there were holes, there was
mucho sudor, mucho peligro
(lots of sweat and danger). She sighed, as if expelling the grief of the world that had suddenly burdened her.

I drank another cup of tea when she offered it. It gave me an excuse to go outside to relieve myself and do a line. I have to admit, there’s no point at
this
hour of my life pretending I had any control left. Around the back of the hut, out of the wind, I reached into my pocket for the
bola
,
opened it and crushed one of the rocks between my thumb and forefinger After I’d snorted as much as I could, I promised myself, again, I would get rid of my poison. Quit cocaine. Forever. Again.

When I went back inside, the
bruja
asked if I was ready to visit the shrine; she said I should wrap my baby well, because the four winds could be very cold on the mountain and his body was very thin. She said she always paid attention to the different voices of the wind: the angry voice, like words being raked over a gutted road; the low, soft voice that speaks of the wet undersides of leaves; the complaining wind, like the sound of worn shoes dragging along wet pavement in autumn; the sensual wind that wafts towards your face carrying the scent of bruised guavas.

Today, she said, it was a bitter wind that blew, and I heard the rasp of it through the green bamboo.

We left the sound of the wind behind and climbed a path that wound up through a forest of clouds, beneath thin silver waterfalls and black, hanging orchids that looked like executioner’s hoods, and blue butterflies the size of bats. A fountain of water gushed out from a crack in the crown of a massive boulder, spilled over and flowed down the sides of the rock, surrounding the cave that sheltered Chocolata’s shrine like a moat. The cave, which had been carved by the wind and rain, and the constant waterfall of tears, was now sealed off from the elements by a roughly hewn door studded with iron nails.

The
bruja
took three white candles from her pocket, saying she had to bring new ones each time she came to the
shrine because the
anti-sociales
stole any she left, even the partially burned ones. In the old days, she’d kept a box of them in the cave so the true pilgrims didn’t have to knock on her window and ask for her
velas.

I’d read of pilgrims who walked seven times between a volcanic monotony of hills, fulfilling a private quest, and of those who left behind tiny silver images of their ailing body parts, which they had rubbed in medicinal earth, and of the penitents who sought transcendence through fire-walking or piercing their bodies with iron hooks then hanging from scaffolds wheeled to the shrine. But what had
I
expected to find? Hope? Something that would make sense of all that had happened to me since I’d been taken hostage and arrived on Tranquilandia? The
bruja
lit one of the thin white candles. In the yellow darkness the flame gave off a green light, making the cave feel like a crypt.

I hadn’t expected a coffin, let alone one overflowing with offerings from those who had made the trek to Chocolata’s shrine to have their bullets or money or crops blessed—passport photographs; plastic Diet Coke bottles marked “Holy Water, Do Not Consume”; three Miami telephone directories and a worn copy of Che Guevara’s handbook on guerrilla warfare;
Soldier of Fortune
magazines and
Penthouse
centrefolds; cigar cutters; rosaries; tins of sardines; empty bottles of
aguardiente.
The coffin was set in a recess in the cave wall, and as I stood taking inventory, I saw the red, burning eyes of a white rat as he scuttled back into the darker chambers.

I heard him squeal as he shuffled away, heard his frantic
rustling sounds, and then only the wind, wheezing for breath, at the mouth of the cave.

The
bruja
lit the other candles and set them on the stone ledge next to the coffin. Even when she was a
jovencita
, she said, she remembered coming here to view what was left of the pirate’s remains. In recent years people had taken away
recuerdos
, had worn the pieces of her body like amulets around their necks so that they might inherit the pirate’s female power.

The
bruja
said she remembered a time on Tranquilandia when the crops were bountiful and the bullets Chocolata blessed always hit the targets they were intended for. There was money for hospitals, a soccer field in the City of Orchids. Planes touched down on the island every day, and boats, laden to the gunwales with their white cargo, sailed away. The law kept its distance, well offshore. But as Chocolata’s body disappeared, so did the good times, the prosperity.

Orphanages and schools closed down because the drug barons could no longer afford their endowments. The soccer field had become a place where addicts smoked
basuco.
Hospital wards became haunted by the ghosts of the
angelitos.
For many years, the islanders had prayed for a boy to be born with strong legs and feet: only one such as this could break Chocolata’s curse and restore prosperity and happiness to Tranquilandia.

“He is the one,” said the
bruja
, smiling at Angel, “El Narcosanto is what the people are already calling him.” There was no hope, as I’d said to Daisy earlier, for any of us; the
bruja
, like Consuelo and the Black Widow, believed my baby was fated to become Tranquilandia’s Big Narco Saint.

As the
bruja
turned to leave the cave, I saw the rat’s red eyes again, his skin whiter than a winding sheet, humping out of the darkness towards the coffin. I gripped Angel tight; then, as I backed away, the rat knocked over one of the candles and began gnawing the end of it.

I watched, unable to take my eyes off his teeth. A quarter of the way through, he abandoned the candle, knocked down a second one and began chewing
it.

I remember my father comparing rats to bad land developers, how they eat up everything in sight. Their greed is selfish and goes beyond basic survival: rather than eating one apple or one potato, a rat will take a bite out of every potato or apple in the basket, spoiling the rest for everyone else.

If the rat knocked over the one remaining candle, Angel and I would be left in darkness. I reached in my pocket and hurled the
bola
at the rat. He didn’t blink, as if he was used to having high-octane cocaine thrown his way. He raised his pointed nose and sniffed the air, then he scooped the condom up between his paws and disappeared into the back of the cave again.

I knew that in “controlled” experiments (as if
anyone
can control her cocaine use after a while), rats will keep doing the drug until it kills them. Cocaine is their drug of choice, and their death of choice also.

Mine too, before I came to the Row and had to make another kind of choice, an ultimate one. I wonder if anyone will notice how, as I get closer to the end, more and more of my life on the Row seems to be imposing itself on my narrative? I suppose it’s because “the end” is what got me here in the beginning.

The prosecutor said I killed my child rather than leave him in Consuelo’s hands. What mother, she said, wouldn’t do what she thinks best for her child? The prosecutor didn’t know how to open her mouth without sneering. In asking for the death penalty, she even quoted Oscar Wilde: “Each man kills the thing he loves, and so he has to die.”

When Oscar Wilde wrote that, he wasn’t talking about infanticide. The line wouldn’t have worked if he’d written, “Each mother kills the thing she loves,” not in my case anyway, though maybe in Rainy’s. Wilde wasn’t even necessarily talking about killing
people
, but I’m losing my train again, getting away from that day on Chocolata’s mountain.

We waded through the moat, back the way we came. The water in the pot had boiled away to nothing but a frothy sludge, and the
bruja
ladled a piece of kidney for each of us into a porous clay bowl.

She gave Daisy a supply of coca leaves, told her how to make the tea and how much Angel would need. For me she had made a
polvo
out of the pollen of wild orchids: a
legítimo polvo
to help me make my way. If I applied the powder underneath my tongue, she said I would have an uneventful journey.

Angel settled in Daisy’s arms as we started down the mountain and suddenly I felt dispensable, like the moon goddess, like the
sicarios
on the streets of the City of Orchids or the people of Tranquilandia itself,
like Dixie Cups—use them once, then throw them away.
I looked back briefly at the
bruja
, most of her blending in with the darkness of the doorway, except for the volatile lipstick, the emergency of red hair flaming from her head.

When we passed the graveyard, I felt the grief of the wind, the same grief the earth must feel, year after year, admitting its dead. And I remember thinking, then, how full life was of moments that should have gone differently.

The keys dangled in the ignition. El Chopo sat slumped over the wheel, his face turned from the mountain as if he preferred a view of the valley. Daisy opened the rear door on the passenger side and climbed in. When El Chopo didn’t stir, Daisy tapped him on the shoulder. He didn’t move. She tapped him again, harder, and his body shifted, enough that we could see the blood on the side of his neck and in his hair, and that the top of his head had a hole in it the size of a Campbell’s Tomato Soup tin. When I described this to Rainy, she said Campbell’s could sue me for using their name if it made you think about a person with his brains blown out. Rainy thought it would be okay to use Campbell’s if I said a tin of chicken noodle soup, not tomato.

At the time it was tomato soup I thought of, and I told
her I couldn’t see the connection between a hole in a person’s head and chicken noodle soup.

“Use your noodle,” Rainy said. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you to use your noodle?”

She was right, and I revise my story in Rainy’s memory: the hole in El Chopo’s head was the size of a tin of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup. I stood dazed in the dry dust of the parking lot, and I remember Daisy shaking me and telling me to hurry, we had to get back to the hacienda.

It took much manoeuvring for the two of us to slide El Chopo’s dead weight over into the passenger’s seat. Daisy held Angel as I drove, trying not to think about the sounds arising from El Chopo’s body, or about his blood, pooled and dark on the floor at my feet. I drove without thinking about the quiet man in the field below the church, what he must have heard or seen and how he went on turning the earth, trying to dig the sun into the soil so that its shining would not be wasted.

Mucho sudor, mucho peligro.
Everything inside me wept, but I fought to look composed. Until I got to my room and remembered I was to leave the next morning, and Angel wouldn’t be going with me. When I imagined Angel not being with me when I needed him, I felt a familiar panic in my body, starting in the pit of my stomach and lodging in my throat, so that by the time Nidia brought my evening meal, I couldn’t eat. She said I looked sadder than a monkey in a clump of
cajica
grass—that meant very, very sad. I said I didn’t want to leave my baby behind, and Nidia said,
“Sí, sí”
as if she understood. Those last hours at the Hacienda la
Florida took something from me. When I gave Angel up, I lost a part of myself that has felt dispossessed ever since.

I was sitting in my chair, staring into the darkness, when Daisy pounded on my door. She begged me to come quickly, but my door was locked. I began shouting for Nidia, who, when she finally came, told me, through her weeping, that Daisy had lost Señor Alias. I ran with her to the chapel, where the Holy Ghost orchids choked my nostrils with their scent. Four tapered white candles burned—two at the head of the coffin and two at the foot. Daisy knelt beside the small white coffin, rocking back and forth, moaning.