Cargo of Orchids Read online

  I could hear a baby crying, my baby. The doctor covered me with a sheet; I was exhausted and cold but felt a strong desire to hold my child, to comfort him.

  I tried to sit up, get a glimpse of him, but the doctor stood in my way, urging me to rest: I could hear only the sounds my baby made wanting his mother. Consuelo, her back towards me, had him laid out on a slab. I barely stopped myself from rolling off onto the floor, trying to reach him.

  “I wish his father could be here,” Consuelo said finally. “Your nenito is everything he would have wanted.”

  She turned to face me, and lowered my baby into my arms. His legs kicked at air. He had his father’s eyes, my very own pushed-in nose. He nuzzled my breast, groped with his mouth to find my nipple. He had made it this far. So far. A fighter. I counted: ten fingers, ten toes.

  “He has a ponytail too,” Consuelo said. I wanted to push her evil hands away as she smoothed the wet black hair on my baby’s head, pulled a long, single strand straight up, as far as it would go. “And look.” She indicated the depression in his chest. “Soon he will be taking women to bed and making them weep.”

  I rolled over on my side, put my baby on his back and pulled his arms away from the front of his body. He did, he had the same hollow place in his chest as his father. “I was born with this …” And I curled my hand into a fist and placed it in the little hollow, the way I’d done with Angel in the prison chapel, so many lives ago. “My mother used to say it would fill up with the tears she would shed for me during her lifetime.”

  I kissed the hollow place, let the first of my tears fall into it. How long would the rest of my lifetime be? I loved him from that moment. I would never have done anything to harm him.

  “Angel,” I whispered. I spoke his name aloud, to the room, as if the gods that live within names could keep him from harm. Angel began to tremble, and I directed his mouth to my nipple again. My body, after giving birth, sagged like a puppet with no hand inside it.

  Why couldn’t my baby have been born in a hospital birthing room, under subdued lights, with Pachelbel’s Canon piped in through speakers surrounded by welcoming bouquets of flowers: yellow and white roses, and tiny irises like little kingfishers, mixed with baby’s breath? Angel began sucking angrily. His tiny hand opened and closed on air. I could feel the milk in my breasts trying to come in, and hated my own helplessness. I wished for sleep, for the gauze of home.

  ——

  The world was dark when Consuelo led me back into it, the stars high in the sky and the moon chasing the wind. The doctor waited with me in the doorway while Consuelo went to get the Jeep and rouse El Chopo. She took Angel with her.

  When they arrived back at the morgue, half an hour later, El Chopo—sweating basuco and aguardiente—said why couldn’t women have babies at a more civilized hour of the night. Nidia, looking both sad and terrified, sat squeezed between Consuelo—who held Angel close, as if trying to decide whether she should give him back to me—and El Chopo. I knew better than to try to reach for my baby, even when he began to fuss, as if he sensed I was near.

  Consuelo made Nidia get in the back of the Jeep, then told me to climb in beside her. She handed me my baby, who was dressed now in a nightgown and a pair of white knitted booties, and the doctor wished me buena suerte and reminded me to look up his cousins in Canada.

  As we entered the plaza, the thought of being delivered back to my cell at the Hotel Viper filled me with gloom. I swept the stars with my eyes, the moon sinking over the empty square. The small boys had laid down their imaginary weapons and gone to sleep, and now there was nothing but fading moonlight on the stones, the slow splash of the fountain. The madman, if he had wanted to, could have filled each of his cups in the darkness, but that would have been too easy. Because then, having succeeded in what he’d spent a lifetime trying to achieve, this fullness, what would there have been left?

  Consuelo got out at the entrance to the Hotel Viper, but told Nidia and me to stay in the Jeep. She instructed El Chopo to take us to the Hacienda la Florida. Nidia looked as if she would weep, but I thought only of Angel as we set off through that dirty city, loving him more with each bump, each swerve in the road; each second I spent with my son made me fall in love with my life and want it all, want everything. Even a future. For the first time since I had conceived this baby, I wanted both of us to live. But I was tired then, and allowed myself the luxury of hope. I sniffed Angel’s silken hair, let him take my little finger in his hand, bury his face in between my breasts—each one bigger than his own head. How mountainous my breasts must have appeared in his eyes as he tried to nurse, the darkness rolling us away into the red dawn of another day. Nidia soon fell asleep, her head resting on my shoulder.

  It was light by the time we reached the gates of the Black Widow’s finca. Two heavily armed guards stood at attention beneath a cement pillar with a small airplane mounted on top, the plane that had flown the Black Widow’s first load to America.

  The guards opened the gates and waved us past. We drove through a landscape of man-made lakes and islands, and a maze of narrow roads overwhelmed by trees shedding their bright petals. I saw, too, what appeared to be a lion lying in the shade, tearing strips of meat off the remains of a gazelle. El Chopo said his sister collected animals from every part of the world and freed them on her land. She’d never been interested in protected species, but rather in species that protected themselves—lions, snakes, tigers, jaguars and, of course, human beings.

  Beside a formal garden with a pergola and an aviary filled with birds of prey, we encountered a herd of miniature horses. At first sight, I thought they were rangy dogs. El Chopo pulled over and let the ponies, who seemed so loving and so trusting, snuffle and bunt the Jeep’s door like affectionate puppies. I wondered how they survived, with tigers and lions roaming at large.

  El Chopo drove on to the main house. I watched two jaguar kittens with oversized ears and whiskers romp in a flowerbed full of eye-searing poinsettias as Nidia helped me out of the Jeep, clutching my tiny bundle, who fought to keep from letting go of my nipple. A bronzed John Lennon, nude except for a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, a bullet hole the size of a man’s fist through his chest and back, stared down at us from the top of a knoll in the centre of a walled garden full of statues. He looked hot and bewildered and far, far from home.

  As we approached the house, a low-slung, sprawling country-style mansion with a red-tile roof, we passed a fountain where blood-coloured water issued from the core of a stone pineapple.

  “La Fuente de Lágrimas—that’s Consuelo’s doing,” El Chopo told me, seeing me recoil at this “fountain of tears.” “She made the mistake of telling her mother, ‘You can’t get blood from a stone.’ If I’ve learned one lesson in my life, it’s never to tell the sister anything is impossible.”

  The pineapple, he said, was illuminated at night and also equipped with stereo speakers: after dark, “revolutionary tunes by Lennon himself” would issue from the lighted pineapple, I wondered if he was confusing Lennon with Lenin, and if they used the trusting horses’ blood to supply the fountain. I shuddered, thinking, too, of the moon goddess on the slab next to me in the morgue, the shunt in her neck, her lifeblood draining away.

  A black-haired Indian with a square, stocky body and sad night eyes let us into the house. He shook El Chopo’s hand and Angel’s baby finger. I don’t know if I was supposed to be taken in by his manner, but it is hard not to feel kindly towards someone who takes an interest in your baby. He told me to call him Yepez and, pointing to a bench, to make myself at home, and then he began speaking to Angel in an Indian language while El Chopo conferred with two security guards. One of them, her jaw working overtime as she chewed a wad of gum, strolled over to examine my baby. She bent down, breathing cinnamon in his face, pulling his gown open with a buffed red fingernail so long it curled under at the end. She told me he was a very thin bebé, very homely and sickly looking. I felt like hitting her. Angel began to cry louder still, and
Yepez gave him his little finger to suck. The woman frowned, as if she had never heard a baby cry, and offered him a piece of her chewing gum. I pushed her hand away.

  Angel grew rigid in my arms—I didn’t know a baby was capable of such fury. I stood up and began to walk with him, rocking him. Maybe he howled because he knew how I felt. I kissed the end of his nose, his perfect lips, drinking his tiny life. The only way I could stop his cries, I knew, was to put him back on my breast. He stopped screaming the moment I undid my dress and his mouth found what he had been missing.

  El Chopo looked annoyed. The baby was a newborn, he said, almost apologetically, to one of the women, and hadn’t learned how to behave. He told me and Nidia, who had started trembling the moment we set foot inside the house, to come with him, and we followed him down a wide corridor with doors opening to rooms on one side and a giant courtyard, with a swimming pool, tropical garden and waterfall, on the other. There was a library, a solarium, a private chapel and a bar, where a sign informed you to check your pistolas at the door. His sister’s parties were famous, El Chopo said: something always happened when she entertained—like the time two French models and a German shepherd drowned in the pool. A tragedy was always an icebreaker, he told us. “It gets people talking.”

  We continued through the house and came out on a terrace overlooking fields that stretched to the horizon; this was where the old matriarch, the legend who controlled everything from the shadows, awaited us. She sat propped up in her wheelchair, her crumpled face fixed, in great sorrow, on the door; I recognized her at once from the velvet paintings. Her loose silk jacket was open to reveal the pistol she carried in a shoulder holster, her gold monogram inlaid in the mother-of-pearl handle.

  She wore her long grey hair braided and coiled on top of her head like a nest of mating snakes. In her lap lay the carcass of a dead chicken. She had been plucking it with her teeth, and small white feathers stuck to her clothes, her hair, her face. Too frail to raise the bird as far as her lips, she lowered her face, took a feather between her teeth, pulled it out and began chewing. When El Chopo cleared his throat, she spat out a mouthful of white feathers and giggled, her small laughter like the ping of empty pop cans rolling away over stones.

  A white rat with red eyes poked its head out of the Black Widow’s armpit and sniffed the air. He slithered down her body and made for my leg. I clutched Angel, who refused to let go of my nipple, and took a step backwards, almost falling on Nidia, who hung back in the shadows, her eyes downcast, her body shaking harder than before.

  El Chopo bent to retrieve the rat, then kissed the top of his sister’s head. But she had noticed me and kept peering over his shoulder, and coughing, until finally she caught her breath and asked to see her daughter’s baby, the one who had been born “with a full complement of limbs” (no way to correctly translate what she said, but it had sinister overtones). I thought she must have made a mistake in thinking my baby belonged to Consuelo, but I know now the old woman believed Angel had belonged to them right from the start. El Chopo told me to show her the child, but not to let her hold him. Her bones were so brittle they could break if anyone so much as hugged her.

  She couldn’t have reached for her gun even if she’d wanted to. This was the woman who lived for the death of others, and to make money. She was the one who would tell me if Angel would grow up to be wealthy or spend his life in jail. Or if he would grow up at all.

  I took my nipple away from Angel, who went stiff in my arms. The old woman told El Chopo she wanted to see the baby’s feet, and when I took off his little booties for her, she took a long time examining his toes. I put Angel to my breast again and his body relaxed. The Black Widow sighed, as if she were very pleased, and asked El Chopo where her daughter was. El Chopo said in La Ciudad, but that she would be coming to visit as soon as she could. The old woman asked where her son-in-law was, and why he never came to see her any more either.

  “En el norte,” El Chopo replied. “En canado. En Canadá.”

  “Sí, cómo no,” the Black Widow said sadly. Then she added how clumsy of Angel to end up in prison.

  Clumsy? Unlucky, I thought, but clumsy? I could see how her mind worked, like Consuelo’s. “He couldn’t have been paying attention, otherwise such a thing would not have happened.”

  The Black Widow closed her eyes, her chin dropped onto her chest and she began snoring. El Chopo reached to remove the feathers from the corners of her mouth. The white rat poked its head out from under her arm again, plucked a feather from El Chopo’s hand and scuttled back into her dress. This was my first and last view of the Black Widow, though she continued to control my life from the shadowy kingdom of her failing mind.

  chapter twenty

  If my room at the Hotel Viper had been meant to demoralize me, break me down, my room at Hacienda la Florida softened me up, indulged me, prepared me for what I was to become—the person portrayed by the press, that is—a woman “seduced into a life of debauchery and drugs.” La Reina de la Cocaína, La Madre Sin Corazón. I only know I did what I did in order to survive, and when you have nothing, sometimes you will take anything. Just to have anything—that can be enough.

  If you deprive a person of beauty, lock her in a bug-infested cell, feed her sardines and pork gristle and then give her the opposite, wouldn’t what I did be understandable? Not forgivable, maybe, but understandable? At Hacienda la Florida my vices were pampered so attentively they began to feel like virtues.

  Pile, Jr. told the court when I arrived at the hacienda I was in shock, but shock was what I’d been in since the day I’d been taken hostage. This felt different. This felt true and clear and sweet—like love, when you’re climbing the stairs, key in hand, and he or she is waiting for you in a room, before the night train comes stumbling past and you remember that love is the one lesson you never got right.

  That afternoon it felt like love—the walls of my air-conditioned room the muted colours of corsages. Angel’s cot stood in a sun-drenched window framed with flaming bougainvillea and overlooking a terraced garden.

  Then there was my bed: an antique four-poster with linen sheets and a thick, lavender-smelling quilt for nights when the temperature dropped. Bowls of autumn-coloured orchids had been arranged on glass tables beneath black lampshades mounted on silver globes, next to chairs upholstered in purple velvet and treasures made of pre-Columbian gold in antique cases. I had a pitcher of purified water, and a bowl filled with papayas and mangoes. There was a bureau full of clean baby clothes, and a cupboard crammed with stylish dresses, hats, shoes and tasty lingerie, with shirred edging and tiny heart-shaped buttons of pure silk, for me.

  I never believed love would last, but that first day in my beautiful room I didn’t know what lay ahead of me; I just remember feeling … hopeful. One of the women who interviewed me when I was arrested asked if I’d ever known the meaning of hope. I didn’t try to explain how my captors had given me hope, then taken it away, or how I was conditioned to find pleasure even more unbearable than pain. My life took on shades of the film Caligula, in which any kind of tenderness was followed by a scene of such terrible mutilation you found yourself cringing whenever two people embraced, anticipating the hurt to come. As Frenchy would have said, hope rhymes with dope—you got any?

  Nidia arrived with meals meant to tempt me—four, sometimes five times a day. She said I need only ask and whatever I wanted would be prepared for me. It is not true, as one of the tabloids reported, that I dined on the flesh of peasants (Nidia tried to force pheasant on me once, and wild peacock—the Black Widow’s bodyguards, on their days off, cruised the island in their cars, spraying submachine gunfire at the peacocks in the bushes for target practice), nor that the Black Widow kept virgins chained in dungeons, fattened them on fermented mare’s milk until they grew plump, then slit their veins and bathed in their blood to ensure eternal youth. I suppose people heard about the pineapple spouting blood and embellished the story.

  Nidia worried that if I did
n’t eat, my milk would dry up, but Angel seemed happy enough as long as I didn’t try to take my nipple away. I know I wasn’t producing enough milk, but nothing else I did, other than nursing him, seemed to satisfy him. We played “This Little Piggie Went to Market” on the bed, and even then he cried until his face was red. We took baths (the first time Nidia showed me how to bathe him, I thought, I’ll never get the hang of that!), and even after I stopped being afraid that I’d drop him and he’d drown, he still screamed. He was my life—it sounds strange, but I would have given up anything at that time just to make him smile. I would have given my own life, even then.

  His crying was the only thing wrong with my life, other than the fact that I had no appetite and my hair hadn’t grown back. That’s how deluded I had become: I thought if Angel would only stop crying, my life would be … close to perfect.

  One evening not long after I had arrived, Consuelo came with a gift: the emerald-encrusted coke spoon I’d seen in the window of the joyería in the City of Orchids. She said she wanted me to have it as a reminder of the night I’d given birth, but when I held it in my hand, all I could think of was the shoeshine boy eating thin soup with his fingers and the rich man throwing money in my face and the doctor’s warm hand—the first warmth I’d felt in such a long time, before the morgue: God Sends Nothing We Can’t Bear.

  Consuelo fastened the spoon around my neck on a gold chain; it was the most garish piece of jewellery I’d ever worn next to my skin. She also gave me an envelope containing a hundred-dollar bill, an X-acto knife blade and a flap of paper. When I opened the paper (one hand was always busy holding Angel’s head or wiping the sick away from his mouth, but I had got quite good at doing everything one-handed), a lot of the cocaine spilled into his hair.