Cargo of Orchids Read online

  Nidia rose to her feet and stumbled towards the stairs. I followed, as if she were the prisoner and I the one who could leave.

  Once a week, a doctor began coming to “inspect” me. He was young, well-dressed, wearing a yellow silk mask that complemented his yellow waistcoat, and a tailored suit. At first I found it hard to take a hooded physician seriously, but he had a gentle manner, and as long as he was in the room with me, I felt oddly safe. He asked how I liked Tranquilandia, and I said I was enjoying myself immensely—I especially liked being locked in my room all day. I planned to devote a whole chapter to the island in A Hostage’s Guide to South America, a book I was going to write just as soon as I escaped, and he smiled and said that was one book he would look forward to reading because he knew of no one who’d ever got away from Las Blancas, except in a coffin. I asked him if he considered it ethical to treat a woman, a pregnant woman at that, who was being held hostage without reporting it to the authorities. He replied that Consuelo de Corazón and her mother were the only authorities on Tranquilandia. He recommended I eat helado con sabor de sangre at least once a day—he claimed it was natural for women to lose hair when they were pregnant, and that blood-flavoured ice cream was one of the best sources of iron he could recommend. He asked me to be sure to look up some relations of his in Montreal if I ever made it back there.

  Consuelo said the only place to get fresh helado con sabor de sangre was at the North Pole Tropical Bar and Restaurant. Even though I was almost too weak to walk, she made me get out of bed and go with her, then sit next to her in the Jeep and watch for assassins.

  The break in my routine worried me. Even though I had come to believe I was in no physical harm—at least not until my baby was born—I didn’t trust Consuelo. I was on my guard the moment I was in her presence. I remembered Angel’s warning: “It is a sin to be surprised.”

  “Aquí, se sube a pie y se baja en ambulancia” (in this neighbourhood, you go in walking and come out in a ambulance), Consuelo said as she manoeuvred the Jeep through the narrow streets, where there were no road signs, no streetlights, not even any manhole covers left. I saw men and women wrapped in blankets made of rags, pigs and dogs rooting alongside them, through piles of garbage; some families had set up housekeeping in the twisted hulks of rust-eaten cars. The olla (literally, “the pot” or a dangerous place) had the feel of a battle camp back in the Dark Ages.

  We parked beside the charred remains of a fire hydrant, and Consuelo gave a gamine a few centavos to guard the Jeep. We had started up the hill towards the mercado when a scrawny dog came snarling at me from the shadows and a small boy ran after it, beating it about the head with a thick piece of rope. Consuelo told me to ignore him and stay close to her, but then the boy appeared in front of me, asking for un regalo, a present, because he had saved my life. The boy’s head was shaved, his eyes were drained pools. I said I had nothing, opened my empty hands.

  “Yo creo que tiene algo, señora. Deme un peaje,” he said, and he raised the rope over his head as if he was going to strike me, the way he had the dog, which now stood cringing against a wall. I covered my belly, instinctively, and turned my body to protect my child.

  “He believes everyone has to have something,” Consuelo said, reaching into her pocket. “He expects us to pay his toll. He calls it a peaje, but it’s not, it’s a rescate, a ransom payment we are forced to pay just to be able to walk on our own streets. We are hostages to children in this city.”

  I thought she might shoot the snarling dog, but she filled the boy’s palm with change instead, and he slipped into the shadows. “I am too tired to argue with him. We have bigger wars to fight, and all they can think of is their stomachs. Someone should get rid of him before he is old enough to make all of us pay in more unpleasant ways.” Where I come from, it is considered more hygienic and effective to kill guerrilleras while they are in the womb.

  We turned a corner onto a street that took on a friendlier air. There were bars, fritanga stands, juguerías and churrasquerías, jewellery shops and, by local standards, fashionable clothing boutiques. Crouched in the doorway of Hot American-Style Fashions, a woman, covered from head to foot in newspapers and garbage bags, held out her begging bowl; Consuelo dropped a few coins in it, then continued on to a juguería, which sold juices made from fruits I’d never heard of—star apples, marmalade plums, tree tomatoes, honey berries. Consuelo ordered zapote (sapodilla) for herself, turnip-like on the outside but rich with orange flesh when you cut into it, and for me a lulo—bitter tasting, green—which, she said, would also help fortify my blood.

  We walked on into the funeral-parlour district and cut through the mercado popular, which was beginning to empty. Consuelo led me through a maze of fragrant orchids beneath rows of yellow, blood-dripping entrails of cattle slaughtered that morning. No wonder the orchids hadn’t sold, I said. Who would buy bloodstained flowers?

  Consuelo said people expected orchids from the market to have blood on them; if the blood hadn’t dried, you knew the orchids had been picked that morning. Once, she said, she’d bought a bouquet of nun’s orchids because they looked fresh, like sardinas, young girls, but by the next morning they had become old crones, and she’d had to throw them out.

  The heady scent of the orchids clung to me as we neared the back entrance to the market, where two brujas invited us to try their love charms: legítimos polvos to “dominate your man”; polvos para las celosas, sticky powders to ward off jealousy; tiny blue bottles in which to collect your tears. They could get anything we wanted, they cried after us: powerful bilongos to protect female warriors, emeralds from Muzo for fertility, dolls wrapped in grave cloth taken from ancient burial sites, dolls to protect you from insanity and the evil eye, fertility dolls, dolls to bewitch unwanted foetuses.

  “Brujas chimbas,” Consuelo said disgustedly. Charlatans. Fakes. “There is only one real bruja left on Tranquilandia, and she does not come to the market to cheat and rob.”

  A single red geranium fought for its life amongst a holocaust of cigarette butts in a pot by the entrance to the North Pole Tropical Bar and Restaurant; a horseshoe and a piece of aloe vera hung over the only window for buena suerte. The sagging roof was made of corrugated iron and cardboard; shreds of last year’s political posters flapped from the walls, which were painted with a blue wash.

  The green door, bleached and flaked by the sun, was bolted, and when Consuelo knocked, an eye appeared in the judas hole. A man brandishing a handgun hastened to let us in.

  Red- and blue-coloured light bulbs flashed over the bar, where a polar-bear rug had been nailed to the wall above a selection of alcoholic drinks. Another wall was taken up by a photo mural of the sun going down behind an igloo, a grinning Eskimo and a dogsled. Música tropical blared from two coffin-sized speakers nailed to the mural so that they appeared to be resting on a snowbank. I wondered if anyone who still lived in an igloo listened to música tropical or dreamed of getting sunburned in paradise. And I thought of the restaurant’s counterparts up North, the wall-size photographs of white sand beaches, without a footprint to spoil the illusion, and thatched huts beside an ocean the colour of power-line insulators.

  Young waitresses wearing white gloves, lace camisoles and white aprons over black leather skirts zipped their way from table to table taking customers’ orders. I squinted through a fog bank of cigarette smoke mixed with basuco as Consuelo pointed me to an empty table at the back of the room. We were brought a clean ashtray and a bottle of dark rum called Ron Medellín. Consuelo sat with her back to the wall and ordered the fish fried in coconut oil, served with “plantain in temptation” and deep-fried Yucca for herself, the Mired Seafood, a non-alcoholic drink that came in a baby’s bottle with a nipple, and a large bowl of blood-flavoured ice cream for me.

  She lit an Indio and inhaled. “You never took up smoking?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Bad habit,” she said, then lifted and jutted out her chin to exhale the smoke through pu
rsed red lips. She kept glancing around the room, and then over at the door: I think she lived her life in constant fear of being ambushed. As my eyes followed hers, I saw a tall, elegantly dressed woman enter the restaurant. Her gaze never landed on anyone in particular, but took in the whole crowd—the women leaning at the bar, or sitting on customers’ knees, in tight red dresses slit up the side, knee-high boots or shiny black stilettos—chulitas who wore more eyeshadow than the night.

  This beautiful woman looked as if she knew she didn’t belong; she was hard to ignore, in her simple white silk dress that barely covered her knees. Her thick black hair fell in ringlets over her breasts, and her body had a carnal quality about it, her skin giving off an eerie, almost luminous glow. She wore a lot of expensive jewellery: the fingernails on her right hand, painted a moony, opalescent pearl, had been pierced and were linked together by a thread of gold chain, so when she spread her fingers wide her hands looked webbed.

  It might have been her look, one of pity and sadness mixed, that made me avert my eyes from her full, pregnant belly and poke around in my Mired Seafood while Consuelo took her aside and said something I couldn’t hear. She nodded and went away again, and Consuelo sat down and lit another cigarette.

  “She used to work for us, for Las Blancas,” she said, still watching the woman, who now stood speaking quietly to the triggerman at the door, “but she wanted to be independent.”

  Consuelo rubbed a hand over her face, leaned back in her chair and stretched. I watched the moon goddess leave the bar, alone. Consuelo shook her head. “You can’t be independent,” she said. “Only banks are independent.”

  Every evening, Consuelo took me to the North Pole Tropical Bar and Restaurant. When I continued to lose my hair, she accused me of not eating my ice cream but spitting it on the floor when she wasn’t looking.

  One night (I had long since given up keeping track of the days), as I lay on my bed with plaster dust falling down on me, thinking that even the Fallen Virgin of Perpetual Suffering must have grown tired of watching over me by now, I went into labour. After eating ubre (cow udder) for breakfast and a big piece of liver and arepas for lunch, I had snuffed a few red ants playing hide-and-go-seek in a fold of my sheet, then slept and dreamed of Angel again, and this time woke as the guards began shovelling earth in on top of him, and my water broke as the world outside turned to darkness. I pulled myself out of bed, hobbled to the door and began striking it with my fists. Nidia arrived, more quickly than usual; she looked at me and knew at once, and went to fetch Consuelo. When Consuelo came, she told me she had called the doctor but he wasn’t answering his phone. He spent most of his evenings at the morgue, she said, conducting autopsies, and since my labour pains were now less than two minutes apart, that was where we would have to go.

  chapter nineteen

  A vast, corrupt energy filled the air as we sped into the scabby outskirts of the olla; I exhaled and held my breath, as if by refusing to breathe I could prevent the corruption from entering me. Consuelo began to drive faster, and seemed to aim for the potholes, as if the constant jarring might take my mind off the small earthquakes rocking my body on the inside.

  I should have felt grateful to my baby: he was the one escape I had from the mindless birds tearing the air with their screeching, the fluttering presence of the old man, the biting ants, and my view of the madman with his cups chasing the young boys round and round the fountain. But I could not imagine a world, at that time, where I would feel grateful for anything.

  We passed a scrapyard and a row of derelict buildings; I was beginning to contemplate giving birth on a bed of rotting vegetable matter, when I heard an explosion and Consuelo brought the Jeep to a sudden stop in the middle of the road. A crowd prevented us from passing. No one paid her the slightest attention as she leant on the horn and shouted at everyone to get out of her way. Just as I thought she was going to pull out her .38 and shoot her way through the mob, we heard another explosion.

  Consuelo sprang from the Jeep, grabbed me out of my seat and began pulling me up the road. She shouted again for people to let us pass, but was once again ignored: we were sucked along with the crowd in the humid darkness. When we reached the bottom of the hill, a gamine came hobbling towards us out of his cardboard shelter to tell us a food concession had caught on fire and two cylinders of gas had exploded.

  Consuelo, using me as a shield, pushed through the surge of bodies. My belly was being elbowed and bumped, and I tried to protect it with my hands. One minute my labour pains no longer seemed as intense, or as frequent, the next minute I wanted to lie down in the middle of the road and give birth where I lay. It was as if my baby, sensing what he was about to be born into, would think again. Perhaps my body was unconsciously giving him messages: stay where you are; stay put; don’t come out, whoever you are.

  I’d become expert at understanding the degree of danger I was in by the darkness in Consuelo’s eyes. I could read her eyes the way some people read palms or sign language. Now, looking into her eyes was like looking into the smoking end of a double-barrelled shotgun. She steered me up the hill towards the North Pole, past the churrasquerias, where a group of shoeshine boys sat on their shoeboxes in a little circle, gnawing the gristle off bones people had tossed them. One, smaller than the rest, sat apart, trying to eat a bowl of grey, greasy broth with his fingers. I pleaded with Consuelo to let me rest, and she pulled me into the recessed doorway of the joyería next door to the churrasquería, where emerald rings, necklaces and bracelets were displayed draped over braided loaves of glazed French bread. I slumped against the barred windows, closed my eyes and began massaging my belly, only wanting to lie down.

  “Mire, mire, el fuego verde!” Look at the green fire in it. Consuelo pointed to a gold-and-ivory, emerald-encrusted coke spoon and said someone should buy that spoon for the shoeshine boy so he’d know what it felt like to eat like a civilized human being.

  I breathed—in through the nose, out through the mouth—feeling dizzy and nauseated by the sour, unwashed smells of the street. When I had caught my breath, we continued on up the hill towards the mercado popular. I saw myself giving birth beneath the great, bleeding slabs of beef, on a bed of bloodstained orchids, and told Consuelo I couldn’t walk any further, she would have to leave me. Then I sat down.

  She looked around and then made me crawl to where I wouldn’t be seen, to the piss-smelling doorway of the Hot American-Style Fashion boutique; she told me to wait while she went to get the doctor. She took off up the hill as I sat doubled over in the doorway, panting and groaning.

  “Ayúdeme,” I whispered—help me—to the first person walking by who didn’t look like a beggar or a thief. He was well dressed, I could see; he stopped, stooped to look at me, then reached into his pocket and threw a handful of coins in my face.

  I curled up on my side and began to weep. I lay that way for what seemed a very long time, until I felt a firm, warm hand slip into my own. I pulled back, thinking it was a shoeshine boy asking for pesos, and begged him to go away.

  “Venga conmigo,” he said softly. Come with me. And then the doctor in the yellow silk mask lifted me from the doorway.

  Candles burned in the hallway where he set me down; there was a strong chemical smell and a cloying scent of flowers. A series of Italian oil paintings depicting religious themes—the decapitation of John the Baptist, a saint having his intestines slowly unwound from his body on a reel— hung on the walls, alongside an old Spanish proverb carefully penned in Italic script: God Does Not Send Anything We Can’t Bear.

  The doctor took my arm, trying to keep me on my feet, as he steered me down the hall into a spacious, high-ceilinged room with rows of slabs in the centre of it. I heard a faint whirring sound, and as he lit a candelabrum, in the blackness I made out the jut of feet, the bulge of heads and bellies under the thin, yellowed sheets.

  A nauseating wave of cold air hit my face; I recognized now the chemical smell of embalming fluid. At that moment, I felt a shar
p kick in my side and a pain that buckled my knees. It was as if the smell of death surrounding me had given my child a new sense of urgency.

  My teeth started to rattle, my body shook, my legs crumpled from under me and I collapsed to the ground. I fought to control both the contractions in my belly and my breathing. With each small breath I took, I felt as if my own intestines were being unwound on a reel, the tears icing over in my eyes before they had time to drop, like pebbles of frozen rain, onto my face.

  I breathed through another contraction, saw the doctor leaning over me in his mask, then felt myself being lifted onto one of the mortuary slabs. I turned my head to one side, to avoid having to look at either Consuelo or the doctor, and saw, on the slab next to me, a woman’s arm sticking out from under the sheet that covered her, the fingernails a moony, opalescent pearl, pierced and linked together by a thread of gold chain. A shunt protruded from her neck. The whirring sound came from a pump next to the slab, draining her blood.

  Only banks are independent. Sitting where I am now, on the Row, I can see this was Consuelo’s way of letting me know what happened to women who tried to go out on their own, women who didn’t want to dedicate the rest of their lives to Las Blancas’ cause. But I didn’t think of her then, the moon goddess, or of what had become of her baby—everything in that place, even the reproduction of John the Baptist’s decapitation, became part of my own pain. God wouldn’t send anything I couldn’t bear.

  It was more than I could bear. But I would bear it, bear everything. I would bear this pain for my child; I would bear a son. But not for God: God doesn’t send anything. My baby had not been sent; my child had come to me.

  He came to me in that room smelling of embalming fluid, with orchid blades cutting shadows across the grim slabs. I lay on my back, hard against the marble where countless corpses had lain. I remember closing my eyes for a long time, then opening them and turning my head to one side to see a wreath of crucifix orchids in the middle of which a pair of baby boots sprouted miniature wings. Clipped to one of the wings in metal lettering, the one word: angel.