Cargo of Orchids Read online

  A roll of toilet paper that had been chewed by rats was all I had to dry myself with. I waded to my bed, still dripping wet; the pillow felt as small and hard as the kilo Consuelo had tried to give Tiny Cattle, the sheets thin and mournful as Nidia, who had made the bed, tucking the sheets in so tightly I had to fight to squeeze my body between them. I left the light on for comfort, but a colony of termites became attracted to the bulb hanging on a cord from the ceiling above the bedstead; they hurled themselves against it, shedding their wings, which then fell on me. I covered my head with one corner of a miserly sheet, but then I heard an explosion somewhere in the distance, and all the lights went out. Cockroaches kept me awake most of that night, skittering in the walls.

  The next morning, I waited for my door to be unlocked or for someone to bring me food; I was hungry, and felt my baby’s need too, which left me feeling even more desperate. My clothes were gone—the thought that someone could sneak in without waking me alarmed me. Two extra-large dresses—one grey, one pink—had been placed at the foot of my bed, along with two sets of underwear and a pair of alparagatas—sandals made of strands of coloured rope, the kind the indígenas, the local Indians, wore—that looked as if they were waiting to be stepped into, to walk me away from this life. With the sun hitting the tin roof, my room was like a steam bath; my arms and the backs of my legs were red and swollen with bites. I dressed, then tried the door, but it wouldn’t open, and when I began banging on it, I managed only to arouse Edgar, who screeched that he wanted a woman, so I gave up and tried beating on the iron bars covering the window instead, hoping to catch the attention of the half-naked Indian still sleeping on the stone bench outside the church of Cristo Víctima.

  The bench was directly opposite my window. I watched the Indian for a while, until he came all the way awake and began to stagger, in circles, around the fountain—I realized he’d never be able to save me. He wore a collection of battered tin cups around his waist on a piece of fraying rope. I watched him try to walk, then stop to catch his breath, undo the rope at his waist and set the tin cups in a row along the edge of the fountain. I counted nine of them. His goal seemed to be to try to fill each of the cups with water.

  I watched as I waited for my door to be unlocked, watched the gamines waiting, often until the last moment, then darting in and knocking over one of the cups. When this happened, the Indian would pursue the fleeing boys, shouting at them and cursing as they fired their make-believe guns back at him.

  It wasn’t until mid-afternoon that Nidia arrived with food, a plate of arepas—a kind of primitive-looking cornbread—and a slice off a massive roast called a muchacho (boy), which had been larded with pork fat and overcooked. When Nidia left I pounded on the door, shouting at her to bring me something edible. Had I known how much worse my meals would get, I think I would have kicked down the door and begged for a quicker death.

  “Más tarde,” Nidia called back to me. Later. Everything was más tarde. I remembered Tiny Cattle saying the whole fucking Spanish day takes place más tarde. “Tarde means afternoon or it means evening or it means we’re late.” To Nidia it meant, always, never.

  Day after day, I was kept prisoner in my room. Day after day, I watched the mad Indian lay his cups in a neat row on the fountain’s edge, fill each one to the brim, and then, as he started to fill the last, wait for a gamine to dart in and knock the first two cups into the dust.

  If I hadn’t known better, I would have mistaken his routine for Zen practice—until the moment the old man grew angry, flailing his arms, yellow froth appearing at the edges of his mouth, pursuing the boys around and around the square. When he failed to catch them, the old man knelt below the statue of Cristo Víctima and prayed, while back at the fountain, water from the spilled cup trickled into the dirt and the boys resumed their torture of a crippled dog with blind eyes, and I watched. And waited.

  My room was humid, a heat you couldn’t escape from, exploding off the tin roof of the hotel, the iron fretwork over the window like a corrosive bloom. Whenever I did try to sleep, my dreams were interrupted by a demented rooster, which I heard but never saw, who crowed regardless of the hour. Every night, around midnight, the lights went out all over the City of Orchids. Nidia told me somewhere on the island a generator kept failing, and every night they were without power for seven, eight, sometimes nine hours at a time.

  Always, right after blackout, Consuelo came to check on me. Some nights she would bring a lamp, and we would play chess with a crumbling set of black and red wooden pieces that often disintegrated in our hands. Playing against Consuelo was unsatisfying, for even when I won, which was half the time, I felt she had let me win, that she had cunningly set up positions where I couldn’t avoid capturing her pieces, so I always ended up questioning my own strategies. One night, she accused me of cheating because I let her win. I told her she should learn to accept her victories, no matter how small, and she stood up—her eyes a deep darkness flaring in the lamplight—crumbled her queen into dust and walked out of my room into the dark. I watched her, through my open door, on the balcony, pointing her assault rifle at the stars—those million faint campfires illuminating the dark—and picking them off in her silence. I asked her once if she wasn’t afraid the world might blow up in her hands.

  “Quién nos quita lo gozao?” she said, lighting a cigarette. Who can take away the good times we’ve had?

  I saw no one else but Nidia for days at a time, though the old man I’d met on my first night took great pleasure in sneaking into my room occasionally when I was sleeping, standing over my bed and pretending his arms were wings, swooping down over my head and belly and doing his bird imitations, so I woke up thinking I was being attacked by the deranged rooster with no sense of time. I awoke shrieking and shaking and covered in sweat, and then he would leave again, to smoke mejoral—a stimulant that you cut into tiny bits and mix with cobwebs, that “paralyzes you, like basuco,” Nidia said.

  Nidia brought food three times a day. After several months of being kept locked up, I began to record in my journal—another attempt to relieve the boredom—a list of the food I was given to eat, as if by describing each piece of greasy offal, each mouthful of rock-hard plantain, I could make the reality more palatable.

  I know it is fashionable these days to include recipes in books, but I don’t think anybody would covet my recipe for mondongo, a murky broth made from the lining of a cow’s stomach, with a dish of coconut and cold potatoes on the side.

  Day One: Breakfast: Rice and noodles and hot (weak, mostly water) chocolate; Lunch: Rice topped with a mixture of pasta and chopped sardines, a glass of Coke (flat); Dinner: Rice and potatoes and a boiled chicken wing.

  Day Two: Breakfast: Stew of thick beef bones (no meat), a bowl of unsweetened milk; Lunch: Stew of potatoes and noodles, with a can of chopped fish (when I asked Nidia, “What type of fish?” she said, “Tipo de atún”; what, I wonder, is a tuna “type” fish?); Dinner: A greasy piece of fried cheese on a greasier piece of deep-fried bread.

  Day Three: Breakfast: A piece of refried white cheese; Lunch: A bowl of thin oatmeal (as far as I could tell) and pasta; Dinner: Lump of pork fat, fried plantains, boiled manioc.

  Day Four: Breakfast: Pineapple stewed in cane syrup, fever grass tea; Lunch: Boiled fish, beans and rice; Dinner: A soup of sardines, pasta and potatoes—which I threw up later.

  Day Five: Breakfast: Mondongo (cold); Lunch: Curried crayfish, rice with gravel, pumpkin pudding (no sugar); Gourmet Dinner: can of Del Monte pilchards in tomato sauce (Nidia says they are spoiling me!!!).

  Day Six: Breakfast: Coffee and a corncake with sausage on top (which arrived ten minutes before lunch, so I didn’t eat it); Lunch: Beans mixed with lentils in greyish water, a few bits of tough meat in puddles of grease, a spoonful of rice and a gaseosa. (When I showed Rainy my menu, she pointed out something that is true: I had a more varied diet when I was a hostage than I have here, on the Row.)

  On Day Seven, I didn’t eat. I made
a list, instead, of everything I hated in the room, and didn’t stop writing until I realized there was nothing I didn’t hate, including my own list.

  On Day Eleven, I gave up recording what I was expected to eat and watched the column of black ants still marching across my bathroom walls, wondered where they were coming from, where they were going, and then found where they disappeared into a crack in the cupboard, inside which they had rounded up a group of smaller red ants. Any time a red ant tried to escape the circle it was trapped in, a bigger black ant attacked it, biting it and squeezing it, and, after what seemed to me like prolonged torture, dismembering it and killing it. Feeling an immediate sympathy with the victim, I freed as many of the red ants as I could, brought them into my bedroom and let them eat whatever they wanted of the meals I barely touched. They still preferred my own flesh, and on Day Twenty-Eight I awoke to find myself covered with hundreds of itchy bites. I stripped my bed; if I had found any red ants, I would have taken them back to the boño and fed them to the black ones, feeler by feeler.

  After Day Fifty-Five, because I’d taken to flushing most of my meals down the toilet, I woke every morning to find my pillow covered with strands of my hair, and, weeping, I collected the hair and wove it into a braid, adding to it every day, so that the braid grew thicker as the hair on my head thinned. Nidia must have spoken to Consuelo, because one afternoon Consuelo took the rope-braid away, saying she didn’t want me hanging myself, and made Nidia stay with me while I tried washing down a plate full of sobrebarriga (hard, cheap meat) with a bowl of agua panela, a sweet drink made from sugar cane and served like coffee.

  I knew Nidia must have a family to return to—a husband, children—but I was so desperate for company I was glad she had to stay. While I sucked on my dessert—a piece of gummy, sweet candy called gelatina (made from the bones of cows, I learned later)—she made herself busy, picking up the bits of plaster that had fallen from the ceiling during the day, saying she wished the men would stop this destruction. I told her I often prayed the whole ceiling would cave in on me, anything to get out of my deplorable situation. She looked shocked, but then whispered that a bruja could help me if I didn’t want the baby. I said I wanted the baby, but not here in this airless prison, in the Hotel Viper, with no one to care. I worried that I had grown too weak and too unhappy to be a proper mother. Nidia said giving birth was very easy—you just lay down and the Fallen Virgin of Perpetual Suffering did the rest. As far as being a mother went, the Virgin of Miracles could be called upon at any hour of the day or night.

  She said, too, that my room, no matter how much it felt like a prison to me, was “happier” than any room in the Hospital of the Freed: she knew because one of her daughters worked there as a nurse. Babies who were born in that hospital never came home. Their organs were transplanted into the bodies of the very rich, who came from as far away as Japan, Israel, England—many were norteamericanos. The body parts of children were the most desirable, her daughter had told her, because they were healthy, growing body parts, not yet contaminated by the excesses of life.

  I thought Nidia was a child, a peasant, full of superstition and gossip, and a tendency to believe what she saw on television about the lifestyles of the rich. But when Nidia said she had eight grown children and three angelitos, I was shocked. I’d thought she was in her early twenties, but she said she was forty-three. Her husband was seldom home any longer, which was why she looked younger these days. He was a cascarero, like a travelling salesman: he sold nylon socks for men and a face powder, which, she confided in me, contained mostly flour. Nidia rubbed her own cheek, pursing her lips. “If only he would give me something,” she said, “to soften my nights.”

  I asked if she still had children at home, and she sighed and said she hadn’t seen any of her sons since they started working as sicarios. Anyone interested in a trabajito, could stop on any street corner and hire a child for an assassin nowadays. It was hard work with very little pay and not much future.

  After she left I lay on the bed, amidst the little bits of plaster that continued falling on me, feeling the volume of my life bearing down on me. I lay listening to my heart, a lonely muscle, opening and closing in the darkness inside my body. When I fell asleep, eventually, I dreamed of a dark blue sea of babies rolling in the waves, being tossed ashore, sightless, into my arms, which could neither hold them, nor let them go.

  part five / hotel viper

  When that wall is erected within us as a safe place to hide from the misery of others, we become imprisoned in the delusion just as surely as those bound by suffering in the outside world.

  —Tim Ward, What the Buddha Never Taught

  chapter seventeen

  Death Clinic, Heaven Valley State Facility for Women

  You are not allowed to pin on any safety pins or paper crips [sic] on any part of the anatomy. Tatooting [sic] or changing hairstyles or eyebrows in unusual forms is strictly forbidden.

  — Inmate Information Handbook

  We are the prisoners of infinite choice.

  — Derek Mahon

  The HV executioners were profiled in this month’s Lifestyles magazine. The five femmes fatales could not be photographed, but were middle-aged and Caucasian, the writer said, except for “Leetia” who was in her late twenties and African-American. All used aliases.

  “Some people would make a hero out of you if they found out what you do to make ends meet,” said “Wanda,” in charge of the electric chair, who lived on a farm with her husband and their four foster kids. “To me it is just a job—all you’re doing is pulling a switch. Before this I worked up the packing plant, hog kill. A pig is the hardest thing to kill. I done it so many times [the writer said that here she made a throat-slitting gesture] I got one arm bigger than the other as a result.” He described her hands—one almost twice the size of the other.

  “Cecile,” the gas-chamber executioner, was a forty-year-old nurse who had wanted a career change; “Valerie,” responsible for lethal injections, a former corrections officer. The hangwoman, “Leetia,” owned a roadhouse. She was a vegetarian, a churchgoer, and had never married.

  “Rejean,” who “manned” (her word) the firing-squad, said that when it came to executing anyone, even “women of her own gender,” she had learned to be philosophical. She had no misgivings about the death penalty. She compared a person’s time on earth to a landlord-tenant relationship. “You trash the place, you don’t pay the rent, you get evicted.”

  What made them want to work at Heaven Valley State Facility for Women? Rejean applied for the job because she needed money and “because somebody’s got to do it.” Leetia didn’t have an answer. Valerie’s reasons were complex: she had had a bad relationship with her mother, and said the job helped her heal “old wounds.” Cecile said she liked the job because you met a lot of different people, but seldom the same one twice. Wanda had rewired her own toaster and become interested in “home electronics”; when she saw the position advertised, she’d thought it wouldn’t be much of a leap.

  The writer asked each of them if she felt capital punishment was a deterrent to crime, or just something to satisfy the public’s need for revenge.

  “I think some people are over-sensitive,” Rejean said. “I’ve executed a lot of women. Do I look like I’ve been losing sleep?” Leetia said yes, in that a dead woman will never offend again. Valerie thought deterrent was a pretty big word, which probably meant she didn’t understand it; Wanda said yes and no to both questions; Cecile wished there were a better way sometimes, but mostly she had no complaints and would go on doing the job until she had enough experience to get a better-paying one that didn’t take up so much of her life.

  Asked for survival tips, the women all said there was only one rule: Never establish eye contact with a person you were about to execute. Each one, except for Rejean, said she would sleep better if she hadn’t had to look into a walking-dead woman’s eyes before putting the trash out at night and turning off the lights.
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br />   Didn’t they ever feel tainted? When you dealt in death every day, didn’t you lose an important connection to life? the writer asked.

  Valerie said no woman she’d ever executed was anything important. Cecile said if you’re going to have mental problems about it, get another job. Wanda said yes and no, but that killing people had to rub off. “You can’t shovel manure without getting shit on you.”

  I read this and felt only sadness. How is blindness cured by plucking out the eyes of the sightless?

  The one other woman on death row who had been granted clemency, even though she didn’t want it, was a serial killer whose cause had also been taken up by the Women’s Empowerment Coalition. Her modus operandi was to gouge out men’s eyes (“They could never see me, anyway, for who I was inside”). “Go ahead,” she’d say to them. “Now let’s see you fuck me blind.”

  Shortly after she was granted clemency (she was found too insane to be executed), she hanged herself in her cell.

  Hanging used to be more popular than it is now. In the bestselling Do-It-Yourself: The Science of Neck-Breaking (I’m kidding, of course, about the bestseller and do-it-yourself parts, but because Rainy can’t read, I make things up, just to see how much she’ll swallow), you’ll find one of the saddest stories you’ll ever read, about a girl hanged in England in the early nineteenth century. She had been sentenced to death for trying to take her own life, which was a capital offence in those days. She slit her throat, and would have succeeded in bleeding to death if her father hadn’t come home unexpectedly. He saved her life, a doctor stitched up her throat and then she was charged with trying to commit suicide. She pled guilty, got convicted. She was given the death penalty, and she chose hanging.