Cargo of Orchids Read online

  I didn’t see Rainy until the morning after. Frenchy had asked Rainy to be there “for immoral support.” Frenchy said she knew what to expect. She told Rainy she would signal her if she found the ordeal worse than she had anticipated. She would make a fist.

  Rainy wants me to write about Frenchy’s execution as she remembers it, starting with the guard taking a long stick that looks like a lollipop with the word Ready on it and raising it to the back window of the chamber as a signal to the warden. At 2:00 the first jolt of electricity shoots through her body, which breaks from the straps that are holding her to the Chair. The electrode on the shaved part of her leg bursts from the strap holding it in place and catches on fire.

  A cloud of greyish smoke and sparks pour out from under the hood covering her face. Her body straightens and quivers, and Rainy smells burnt clothing and flesh in the witness room and wishes she could open a window. She can even taste the smoke, like Frenchy’s a T-bone on a barbecue and Rainy’s standing too close. But there are no windows in this dancehall. The current stops, and Frenchy falls back in the Chair.

  Two croakers go into chamber to pronounce her dead. One puts his stethoscope on her heart, turns around and nods to the warden and the witnesses, the usual sign that a person is dead. Rainy’s eyes are still dry, and she’s mad at herself for not crying because she knows it will go on her record: “Failure to react to friend’s health alteration.” But then it’s okay that she isn’t weeping, because the croaker is explaining that he meant the opposite—he has found a heartbeat. The second doctor examines Frenchy and confirms it. Frenchy is still alive.

  A guard reattaches the electrode to Frenchy’s leg and fixes the straps she’s broken. This takes a bunch of time, Rainy says, and while he’s making repairs and setting up the power lines again, Frenchy starts breathing. Her chest rises evenly. A gush of saliva oozes from her face, dribbles out from under the black hood. There’s blood in the spit and it stains her white T-shirt, and Rainy says I should write how much the colour white suited Frenchy, even though she would never wear it by choice because she was prejudiced against it.

  Her breathing comes slow and regular. But then a second jolt of current is sent into Frenchy’s body. The stench of burning flesh causes one reporter to toss his cookies (another Rainyism), and more and more smoke shoots out of Frenchy’s head and legs. Rainy sees Frenchy’s hands gripping the Chair, and wonders if she is trying to make a fist to show that being electrocuted is worse than she’d expected it to be.

  Again the croakers go in to examine her. Everything is out of control; the warden says something must be wrong with the generator and the guard’s eyes are tearing and Rainy’s shouting that they’re all fucking killers, even though she knows it won’t look good on her record. Frenchy’s lawyer screams for clemency; Rainy says she’s never heard a lawyer scream like that before, unless he hasn’t been paid. “This is cruel and unusual punishment. Communicate that to the governor,” he keeps raving.

  But the governor won’t interfere. He’s mad because so much taxpayer’s money has already been wasted trying to kill Frenchy he’s afraid he won’t get re-elected. Rainy says she’s in tears now, and hopes her counsellor notices and writes it down in her report. Then she forgets all about her counsellor and gets ready for the third jolt, Frenchy’s “third time lucky.” And once again her head and leg boil, and the room fills up with smoke, and sparks shoot from her body like stars. This time the croakers stand gaping at Frenchy’s charred and smouldering body, with her skin falling off her bones like a steamed chicken’s. The time is 2:16 p.m. Rainy says she knew because the lights dimmed and the train was right on schedule. And Rainy knew Frenchy for sure must have rode the lightning over the wall this time, because when that train whistled she didn’t even blink.

  Prison time is chicken bones. Something to be sucked clean. That was Frenchy. More power to you, girl.

  chapter twenty-two

  The first time Daisy brought her son to my room, I thought he looked sadly ugly compared to my Angel. He was small for his age, and Daisy said he hadn’t gained much weight since the day he’d come out of her, “fighting all the way.”

  She had named her baby after his father, with whom she’d played Space Invaders at the Hotel Bacata in Bogotá, and who’d shown her enough love to break her heart forever. She printed his name for me on the back of a cigarette package, as if a name, once written, was evidence of existence. When I called her baby Elijas (accent on the second syllable), she corrected me. The name, she said, was Alias.

  I told Daisy I had named my son after his father too, but before I could explain Alias let out a high-pitched wail, which startled Angel; he began crying again. He hardly slept any more, and I had taken to doing lines all night to stay awake and keep him company.

  After nursing her baby, Daisy put him in Angel’s cot and said she hoped the two nenitos would make friends. It didn’t seem as if babies needed friends, only—and always— their mothers. I told Daisy I wished Angel would develop other interests—interests other than me—and she laughed and said when that happened, I’d wish he was a baby again because a baby couldn’t roll over, sit up, run away or talk back. A baby just sucked you dry.

  When Alias continued to fuss, Daisy picked him up and scolded him for not working harder at making friends. Scolding him didn’t stop him crying, so Daisy covered his tiny mouth with her hand. The screams oozed out between her fingers like bread dough when you try to close it in your fist. You can’t contain a scream. I offered to hold him—this was the closest I ever came to seeing Daisy lose her temper—but when he turned his head towards my breast and began to grope, I quickly passed him back to his mother. Daisy fed him again, and then left the room with both boys and put them in the bath.

  I stayed out of their sight, snorted a couple of rails, then cooked up the rest of the gram and smoked it. Daisy watched our babies while they splashed around making noises like newborn killer whales, and afterwards, when she’d dried them off and dressed them again, I had to argue with her about the clothes she’d chosen for Angel to wear. I never saw Alias in anything but layers of clothing— woollen sweaters and knee socks and booties that covered his tiny legs. I even accused her of having bathed him with his clothes on.

  Daisy wanted to show me the walled garden, and went to find Yepez. Yepez, I could tell, was smitten with Daisy and the squeak of her cobra high heels. He offered her a piece of his chocolate bar, which was melting faster than he could eat it, before unlocking the gates to the Garden of Statues for us.

  I stood for a moment, looking out over tangles of orchids and flitting clouds of blue and orange butterflies that filled the garden where Our Lady of Perpetual Help kept watch over the men and women, most of whom, with the exception of Lennon, had died for their country in the United States’ war on drugs.

  We laid our babies side by side on a carpet of tiny orange petals that had fallen from a guaiac tree, next to a clump of yellow orchids. A light breeze turned the orchids’ physical similarity to bees into the frenetic appearance of a swarm, a mime show in motion. A swarm of real bees attacked the flowers repeatedly.

  Daisy had brought along a textbook called The King’s English As She Is Spoken. She wanted me to help her study English, because one day she hoped to visit los Estados Unidos. Yepez didn’t leave the garden right away, but instead stood close by, pretending not to listen to us practising locusiones útiles (useful phrases), such as “Over the hill to the poorhouse go I,” and “I say, your skin is bone white, like an English teacup!” He was reading the plaques at the base of the statues that informed viewers how many bullets each victim had taken, and how “interested parties” would find the entry and exit wounds clearly marked on each body. Yepez kept making cow eyes at Daisy. After a while, Daisy closed her textbook and leaned back against the statue of Pablo Escobar Gavira, the Godfather, “who died trying to make the world a safer place for crime.”

  We sat quietly watching our babies, who spit up every so often and
kicked their feet. When Alias kicked Angel in the shins, Daisy said her berroquito (courageous little one) was going to play soccer for the City of Orchids when he grew up, that he was “already practising.” I thought Angel showed great restraint when he didn’t kick him back.

  Angel had a habit of balling his hands into fists and pummelling the air, a good sign, Daisy said—if you didn’t fight back against life, it would quickly kill you. It would kill those who did fight, as well as the very good and the very gentle. If you were very bad, you could be sure it would kill you too, but it would be in no particular hurry.

  “They take over your life if you let them,” Daisy said. “Los muertos.”

  Daisy had watched many people die. She thought maybe it was the death of others that made her own life seem so very long. She’d asked her old grandmother, who hadn’t moved from her bed since the blackness had begun eating her, “When do you know you are ready to die?” “When you can no longer make a fist,” her grandmother had said.

  Daisy finally got up and went to speak to Yepez, and after that he scurried away, locking the gate behind him. Not long after, Nidia came with a tray, which she left outside the gate. We had to reach our hands through the iron bars if we wanted the drinks, sapodillas, and the churros (little doughnut sticks).

  While we ate, and fed our babies again, I asked Daisy how long she planned to go on nursing Alias. I said Angel seemed to fuss more after he took my milk; I felt I wasn’t producing enough to satisfy him. Daisy said she would breast-feed for as long as possible, because once Alias had been weaned, and if he wasn’t still too sickly, he would be sent to La Ciudad, like all the other boys born to Las Blancas, to work as a sicario.

  The freebase tokes were starting to wear off, so I already felt disconnected and edgy. When I said the thought of my tiny, innocent son growing up to become a teenage thug, assassinating people from the back of a motorcycle, was unthinkable, she laughed and said I didn’t have anything to worry about because my baby would never become one of the desechables, the disposables, the born to be used once, then thrown away. Hadn’t I seen the way Consuelo’s face softened when she looked at him?

  If I am honest with myself, I resented Consuelo’s affection for my child; she treated him as if he were her own. On the other hand, I knew his survival depended upon her love, so found myself encouraging the bond forming between them.

  We laid our babies down again—Angel fully naked and Alias dressed like a tiny Arctic explorer—their earnest limbs jerking in unison, as if they were practising running away. I asked Daisy if she stayed at the hacienda by choice, and she said she hadn’t thought about it, but that she was treated better here than she would be treated anywhere else. She had made so much money for Las Blancas, covering loads and never getting caught, that she now received special favours, including freedom of the house, a place in Consuelo’s bed and the chance to make friends with Consuelo’s guests, like me. A place in Consuelo’s bed? I didn’t question Daisy about this, but it answered a lot of my own questions about Consuelo. I said I did not consider myself a guest; guests were free to come and go as they pleased, but a doctor in the City of Orchids had told me no one ever got away from Las Blancas except in a coffin.

  Daisy simply shrugged and said, “Why would anyone want to get away from Las Blancas?” Alias had fallen asleep with orange blossoms settling onto his face and in his hair, and Daisy said this was his favourite spot in the garden, here under the guaiac tree. Alias could spend hours watching the petals fall, would open his mouth as if trying to catch one on the end of his tongue or bat them away with his little hands until the game wore him out. She’d never seen him as happy as when he slept under this tree, the weight of blossoms on his sleeping eyes like coins.

  Daisy knew the names of all the trees that grew at the Hacienda la Florida—the scarlet ceiba, with its brilliant japonica-like blooms, the yellow, daffodil-like araguaney. She pointed to the far side of the walled garden, to a tree not unlike one I’d noticed growing in the courtyard outside my window—this was a very dangerous tree, she said, the borrachio, or “drunken” tree, the source of a drug that caused victims to lose their will and their memory, a voodoo powder called burundanga, used in prophecy and witchcraft. I must not go near that tree or else I might get burundanguiando. In rural Colombia, she said, where she grew up, the tree was grown in every front yard as a warning.

  When Yepez came to the gate and called Daisy’s name, we trundled our babies back to the air-conditioned sanctuary of my room. Daisy repeated she didn’t know why anyone would want to leave this life at Hacienda la Florida as she cut out four lines on the table, did two herself and left the others for me. She said the only thing she’d ever liked about cocaine was the smell of it; she didn’t know why she bothered using it. She said she should have learned her lesson the first time she tried it and everything exploded in her face.

  Daisy became talkative and outgoing when she got high. She told me that when was eleven years old, and her sister was eight, they’d been abducted from their parents’ house in the country and taken to the city of Medellín, to a fortified mansion belonging to a famous drug lord. He had been kind to her—not like many of the other young girls, including her sister, who were killed and dumped at the side of the road when they were no longer useful—and had even paid for the operation when she was badly burned smoking the drugs (skin from her fleshy bum had to be used to rebuild her cheeks). “Now if you kiss my cheek, you kiss my ass,” she liked to joke.

  “I was one of the fortunate ones,” she told me. “He took me back to my village [she pronounced it ‘bee-lidge’] so they could return for me another time.”

  Her parents, she said, were given basuco—their reward for not protesting when their daughters were kidnapped. Now her whole community had collapsed as a result of basuco addiction. Livestock had starved, people killed each other, crops rotted on the vine. No one in her village lived for any other reason than the hope that their daughter would be abducted again and they’d get more drugs.

  A year after she’d been returned to the village, she was taken again by the same drug lord. He had changed, she said, and now he wanted her to have sex with boys almost young enough to cut their gums on her body, and with old men whose gums bled when they sucked her breasts.

  When the drug lord went away for a long time, to el norte, Consuelo liberated Daisy and set her up as a cover girl, posing as a tourist on a plane that was used to smuggle contraband. Meanwhile Daisy met her baby’s father, who kept her in a hotel room, looking after her, even when she got pregnant. “Alias gave me a chance to make a new life for myself. I was very young to be starting out, and he didn’t want me carrying in my chocha (where Consuelo had told her to stash the drugs) because I was embarazada (pregnant). That’s the kind of man he was. We both ate a big meal of bolas (elongated condoms stuffed with cocaine) before we got on our plane. Alias said you carry it in your stomach— it’s the one place they can’t see into with their flashlights.

  “We flew from Tranquilandia to Panama City. Alias said he liked that route because in Panama you didn’t have to make payoffs at immigration; you could bribe the other, less corrupt officials. By the time we got to our hotel, one of the capsules had lodged itself at the entrance to his large intestine. He was in a lot of pain, and sent me to the farmacia for a tónico.

  “I didn’t go to the farmacia, I went to the bar. I had two choices: take him to the hospital, where they would have X-rayed him and found the bolas and sent him to prison, or watch him die. I had to decide which would be the worse fate: losing the product or death. Las Blancas has a saying: ‘If you succeed, send money. If you fail, don’t come home.’ ”

  When Daisy got back to the hotel room, Alias had made the decision for her. “He blew himself out through the stomach so no one would find the drugs and I wouldn’t get into trouble. That’s the kind of man he was.”

  Daisy went back alone, with the money she’d made from selling her share of the drugs, to face Con
suelo. Consuelo gave her another chance. “I think she felt badly for the way her husband had used me,” Daisy said.

  “Her husband?” I asked. “The drug lord?”

  “El más famoso en el país” said Daisy, who sounded surprised I didn’t know. The most famous man in the country. “Angel Corazón Gaviria.”

  Alias had developed a rash and wouldn’t eat. Daisy told me Consuelo was worried that he might have an amoeba in his intestines and had put him on a special diet. I told Daisy the rash might have more to do with the wool she dressed him in.

  Consuelo had brought me another envelope after dinner, and I cut out four big lines—twice my usual amount— and snorted it. Then Daisy introduced me to the pleasures of smoking mejoral, and we became paralizados together.

  After she left I cut out another line, even though, sensibly, I didn’t need it, then sat in a chair by the window, with Angel in my arms, until the morning light began to fill the sky. There is nothing sensible about cocaine. I had a love-hate relationship with the drug: if there was any in the room I couldn’t let it go unused, but the minute I’d done a line I wanted to be straight again, and then I’d do another line, and another, until it was all gone and I found some sort of peace in coming down. I realized, too, that I’d begun to think less and less about my captivity, that every line I snorted, every base toke I took, helped obliterate my life.

  I kissed each of Angel’s tiny, perfect toes, kissed his eyes, his earlobes, his fists, his soft baby-head. I lifted his nightgown and ran my fingers over the little hollow in the centre of his chest, stroking it, burying my nose in it. He made a gurgling sound, like the pineapple in the fountain when the blood gushed out of it.

  That night I dreamed I stood once again inside the gates of the Mountjoy Cemetery, watching the guards in their fake-fur-trimmed jackets standing over Angel’s grave, stamping their feet to keep warm. I picked up a handful of earth, threw it high into the air. And as the earth rained down on me, I buried Angel Corazón Gaviria for good.