Cargo of Orchids Read online

  chapter twenty-three

  I must have dozed off watching the moon hike in the branches of the borrachio tree, because I dreamed Jesus and I were in bed together, having a threesome with the Virgin of Perpetual Help, who had wet black skin. From that dream I moved to another, where I climbed a sheer wet rock and kept slipping backwards. When I got to the top (I can’t explain how I got there—it’s the way dreams work), an old woman with a disembowelled goat was waiting for me. I panicked because I realized I’d dropped my baby somewhere on the mountain during my climb and couldn’t remember how to get back down to him.

  I had enough cocaine in my veins to make a vampire dizzy. My nerves had grown used to keeping odd hours, but that morning they had decided to go out dancing, and nothing I could do, except another line, would make them sit the next one out.

  Daisy came with Alias around lunchtime and said she hadn’t slept all night, that Alias had been coughing up more of the “black stuff.” I saw fear in the corners of her mouth, a twitch in her cheek as she spoke of the trouble she had getting Alias to swallow the cow’s udder Consuelo had prescribed for him.

  I picked up Angel and tried to make him nurse, but my ears were ringing and the feel of his lips on my nipples made me tense; I told Daisy I might be getting sick too, that maybe I’d caught whatever Alias was suffering from. She didn’t think so. “Two people don’t get sick the same way,” she said.

  After she left, I finished off my gram and didn’t move from my chair again, but sat gazing at my baby. He didn’t cry as much any more, as if he was getting used to his life. I’d even swear I could see his whole body try to kick a smile onto his face whenever he saw me looking at him. I don’t know why a mother should feel so flattered about being adored by her own child, but the way Angel smiled at me made me feel as if I were full of God. I bent and kissed him all over his tiny, serious body; I wanted to drink each minute of his life, to wrap my lips around the melting sweetness of each breath he took. For a moment, he was all the drug I needed. I breathed him in, I got so high sniffing him I felt I was talking to angels. I even worried I might overdose on the scent of him, that’s how good it felt.

  The next day Yepez let us out into the Garden of Statues so our babies could enjoy the sun. We walked down the Avenue of the Statues, across the stone bridge over the Brook of Tears, then sat on the bench in front of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. We laid Angel and Alias under the orange-flowering tree, and I told Daisy about my dreams: I was perplexed by the one about Jesus and the Virgin of Perpetual Help.

  “Sometimes we are sent dreams to make us laugh at this life,” Daisy said. Daisy said she would not take such a dream seriously—like all sex dreams, it was sent for pleasure, and pleasure, after it was over, usually meant you would suffer for having felt so good.

  Daisy insisted the dream about my baby was the important one, and that I should pay attention to it. She told me I had to “clear my brain out,” otherwise I might make the “wrong mistake” and lose my baby, or even my own life. The first thing I had to do was get rid of the drugs, and whenever Consuelo gave me more, I should get rid of those also. Perico (what she called cocaine) was a personality robber. “Get rid of your poison,” Daisy said. “It is easier for Consuelo if you are like me, trabado [stoned] all your life.”

  Her words had little effect on me. Maybe the drug had taken me away from myself, from who I was, used to be, but I can’t blame the drug, can I? My counsellor says it’s convenient to blame drugs, but deep down we do what we want to do anyway.

  I heard a pony whinnying in the distance, and the scream of a peacock and a howling in my brain caused by a single fly buzzing around my eyes. Daisy, who said my face looked bone white, “like an English teacup,” watched Angel bat at an orange butterfly that kept swooping over his head. Daisy said the butterfly was a lost soul, fluttering about, looking for a new body to try on. She took a swipe at it herself, and this time it fell, stunned, onto the foot of a bullet-ridden statue. I cried out as it tried to escape from Daisy’s fist, dragging its one torn wing.

  “You will thank me for this,” said Daisy, killing the butterfly, then flicking its dead body into the clump of bee orchids. “A wounded butterfly is very bad luck. The dead one can tell no stories.”

  When Consuelo learned I had twice taken Angel into the Garden of Statues, I thought I might not live to leave the house ever again. I had put his mortal soul in danger, she said; Daisy should have known better. The first outing after coming home from the hospital had to be to the church, to have the baby baptized. And if Angel died before he was baptized, she said, he wouldn’t go to heaven or hell—he would remain forever in limbo.

  I wanted to say that a walk in the garden hardly constituted an outing, besides which both our souls had been in limbo ever since she’d taken me hostage. But I let her speak, holding Angel close and trying to stroke his head, even though my hands were shaking. Consuelo was shaking, too, as she began rummaging through my closet, picking out a white silk dress for me (I tried not to think, at such times, of the moon goddess on the slab in the morgue, her fingernails, even in death, an opalescent pearl) and a creamy lace gown for Angel. She told me to be ready to leave for the church by the time she returned.

  As soon as Consuelo left I did a line to calm myself, and then gave Angel another shot of my milk. He always watched me as he nursed, one eye on my face, the other on my breast. It intrigued me, the way his eyes could move independently of one another, each looking out for itself, leery of shadows, as if he had been trained, even before birth, to see movement. The curtain sighing in the slight breeze along the wall was enough to make him stop nursing and turn his head from my breast, as if he were listening to something I couldn’t hear. Nació de pie. He was born on his feet, born all-knowing and street-wise; he could have picked a pocket or hot-wired a car with those newborn eyes. He grew bolder as he nursed, stretching his tiny limbs into each new morning, punching the air with his fists. That morning he seemed more eager than ever to fight, and he kicked his way out of the constricting baptismal robe Consuelo had chosen. When I tried to slip his feet into the pair of soft leather botas, he curled up his toes: I had to tickle his tiny soles to make him straighten his feet so I could lace them into the boots.

  Nidia was late bringing breakfast, and this upset me more than it should have. I looked forward to her arrival every morning, with my blanco y negro—two big rails of cocaine and two tiny cups of tinto. An unshakeable daily routine was what, I think now, kept me sane. I didn’t want anything to change. I wanted to cut out my sweet, white lines and drink my sweet, black coffee, and let the rest of my life, the world, float away. I wanted to feel the hum in my veins, the freeze creeping into my gums, the nosola burn, the bitter tang of cocaine mucus run down the back of my throat.

  When Nidia finally arrived, I broke down in tears and couldn’t eat. I left the coffee but snorted the rails, then gave Angel, who had started to sniffle too, to Nidia. Nidia tried to comfort him while I changed out of my dressing gown into the white dress, fumbling with the pearl buttons the size of chick-peas up the front.

  The house felt chilly that morning: only the fountain of blood pulsed with life. Yepez opened the back door of a white Mercedes that smelled like the inside of a coconut. Daisy, who sat with Alias, waiting for us, smiled when she saw my baby in his robe and said now he looked like a real angel.

  Yepez, after a short argument with Consuelo—I’d yet to see anyone have any other kind of argument with her— took a back road through fields that were part pasture, part rock, and a few coffee bushes guarded by banana trees or shaded by the branches of the guamos. I saw women, many of them pregnant, with rifles strapped across their bent backs, on bended knees between rows of onions and potatoes intercropped with red-flowering poppies.

  Beyond the pasture land lay the Río Negro. The dirt road we travelled followed the river, and in places the water had overflowed its banks. Consuelo cursed Yepez, calling him a gordo maricón (a fat queer) as he plowed th
e Mercedes over the muddy ruts. He didn’t dare say it had been her idea to take this seldom-used road, but I could read it in his silence. If we got stuck, she said, he would have to get out and push us to the church. If we arrived too late, my baby would belong to the devil and we would have him to thank for that. He crossed himself, and the crease between his eyebrows grew deeper every time the car’s wheels started spinning in another mudhole.

  He should have turned around, Consuelo said, when he saw we were in danger. He was nothing but an ignorant peasant. I kissed Angel, covering his face with my hair, so that Consuelo wouldn’t see his smirk. Perhaps I was projecting, but I think he had Consuelo pegged.

  Daisy lit a cigarette, and when I rolled my window down for air, the car filled with a greasy heat that steamed from the jungle river. I rolled the window up again, just as the car came to a standstill.

  None of Consuelo’s curses moved the car, so we all got out and Yepez kicked a tire, splashing mud all over his uniform and Angel’s gown. Consuelo told me to go and wash it off in the river: I was glad of the chance to get away from her. My last line of cocaine was beginning to wear off, and her mood, like the drug, worked its way under my skin and made me sweat from the outside in. Coming down, I felt numb. Daisy sat beside the dirty river, smoking while I tried to sponge off Angel’s gown, which soon turned the colour of the yellow mud.

  I could hear Yepez grunting and pushing, and Consuelo berating him even more; Angel’s eyes had become fixed on a rock in the middle of the river. At first I thought I saw the rock move, and then I saw two naked boys, blacker than the rock, pointing at us and making faces. Something had died on the rock—I could see bones still partly covered with meat. One of the boys stood up and, with a stick, flicked a rib bone across the water in my direction.

  The rib was so dry it floated on the river’s oily surface. Daisy stood up, and for a moment I thought she was going to wade in, pick up the rib and throw it back at the boys, who slapped their thighs and thrust their loins towards her, mimicking lewd sexual gestures. Instead, she turned her back on them and strode to the car.

  The boys had made a mistake by not blending in with the rock a while longer. Consuelo took her .38 out of her waistband and shouted at them to come and lie down on the road so we could use their bodies for planks. The boys jeered at this, but when she emptied her .38 into the rock, they struggled ashore and helped Yepez push the car out of the rut, crying and pleading for mercy. Consuelo made the boys run in front of the Mercedes on their twisted feet until the road turned away from the river and we were no longer in danger of getting mired.

  The Church of Our Virgin of Mercy stood on a ridge at the foot of Nevada Chocolata. A parade of cars that looked as though they were only dusted off for weddings and funerals lined both sides of the steep access road. The fields surrounding the church were filled with more people, who had arrived either on foot or on one of the gaudy city buses parked at the bottom of the hill. Men and women sat gossiping in small groups, ignoring the service, which was being relayed to those outside the church through an ancient, very crackly, loudspeaker system hidden behind the ten-foot Virgin agonizing in white-and-blue plaster. Her long-suffering eyes were fixed on the ribbons of clouds spread out over the sky like little flags of truce.

  A hearse, painted the same woozy colours as the buses and dedicated to Mis Amorcitas, Olga y Elizabeth, with a painting of two voluptuaries embracing across the hood, pulled up alongside the Virgin. It looked look more like an escort-service limo than a vehicle in which the dead took their final ride.

  Consuelo walked over to the hearse, said a few words to her bodyguards, then disappeared into the packed church. I watched the coffin, white, pint-sized, being unloaded from the hearse. When Consuelo came to a nenito’s funeral, Daisy said, it made the pain much easier for a mother to bear. She picked at one of her peeling fingernails as she spoke. God sends nothing we can’t bear, I thought, but if he does, he sends Consuelo to comfort us.

  Consuelo emerged again, grabbed me by the arm, made sure her .38 was concealed under her jacket, nodded to Daisy and said, “We’re going in,” as if we were about to rob a bank. She began elbowing her way through the crowd, until we were inside the church, overflowing with babies and their mothers, and grandmothers, and great-grandmothers, aunts, sisters and cousins—all jockeying to be first in line, even though there was no line, only a swarming, a madness of mothers and their female relations. It didn’t seem to matter who she trampled—the elderly or the infirm, a pregnant or nursing mother— Consuelo was determined to get to the front of the church, where a huge and bleeding Christ child hung crucified above the altar.

  It was horrifying, in every baroque detail: the tears of blood, the tiny crown of thorns. Women bludgeoned each other for a chance to kiss his bleeding feet, while a harried-looking priest tried to keep order using a microphone. It was impossible to hear anything he said. I had never attended a church service where worshippers heckled the priest, or swore at him to get on with the blessing.

  Consuelo wrenched Angel from my arms: he became the first of more than twenty babies that day to have holy water sprinkled on his head and the Salt of Life on his tongue. The baptism took less time than it takes to soft-boil an egg, and after he had been christened Angel Segundo Corazón Gaviria and we had fought our way out of the church, we had our picture taken beneath Our Virgin of Mercy, Consuelo declaring herself Angel’s madrina and El Chopo, in absentia, the godfather.

  I remember an interminable wait under the hot sky while, one by one, the remainder of the babies were baptized and photographed beneath the sorrowing Virgin. I could almost hear the misanthropic undergrowth surrounding the church gasping and straining for air as I stood, wanting only to return to the cool air of my room and to lie with Angel, nursing him, nursing our tiny, shared history. Daisy said that Angel looked different to her now he was baptized, that his face had softened, like a tomato held over a fire. To me he looked the same. He will always look the same.

  When the baptisms were over, the priest prayed for the babies’ souls. No one joined in his prayers—except to utter the odd “Amen,” as if they wished he’d get it over with. There was a further wait while the funeral service was broadcast through the speakers. I wondered aloud where the baby’s mother was, and Daisy whispered to me that she had known the woman, that she’d worked for Las Blancas but tried to go out on her own. “I think they buried her in a different place.”

  I saw, again, the moon goddess’s arm sticking out from under the sheet in the morgue. Now I knew what had happened to the babies of women who wanted their independence.

  When the small white coffin was carried from the church, silence fell I watched the burial clouds that had appeared suddenly over the peak of the mountain, spreading in black masses across the sky, as Consuelo and five others shouldered the baby’s coffin and walked with it up the mountainside, the men with their cursed feet, limping and stumbling behind. Daisy said she’d never seen Consuelo look more peaceful than when she carried a coffin up this hill, that a person could learn all she’d need to know about suffering just by watching her. As we reached the entrance to the graveyard, I felt Angel’s small body shrink beneath his robe.

  The Cementerio de Niños, with its endless rows of small, forsaken graves, sulked away up the mountain as far as the eye could see, to where the small white crosses became indistinguishable from the slopes of crucifix orchids. Most of the crosses, leaning at odd angles, gave nothing but the baby’s name and dates. A few were blank; others bore plaintive inscriptions. In places the earth had cracked, as if those down below had moved over to make room for the new arrivals.

  Angel’s hungry mouth groped for something to comfort him, and I undid the top buttons on my dress. I felt a little milk coming in as he gummed my nipple, and I watched the coffin being lowered into the grave, and Consuelo throwing a handful of earth in after it. Daisy stood by herself, rocking Alias, until the grave was piled high. Consuelo thrust a cross into the mound, jamm
ing it in hard, as if it were a stake meant to keep the baby down.

  The priest asked us to help him pray. He mopped his head, looking around as if he expected to be punished for his part, as if the earth might open again and he would be sucked down into an unforgiving hell. He knelt beside the coffin, his hands folded together before his face, as if eating his own hands, in prayer.

  Consuelo paid no attention to the priest; she glanced at her watch, then at her gum-chewing bodyguards, who never stopped looking wary, the way those paid to die first often do.

  Daisy told me later that if Alias died, she would die of grief too. But she would want to be buried somewhere else, far away from this graveyard. That way, she would never have to hear her angelito cry.

  chapter twenty-four

  I lost track of the days—not hard when you are locked in a room with nothing to do but feed and bathe your baby, eat, sleep and get high. Here, on the Condemned Row, I keep track of the days by X-ing them off on the calendar. It’s not as if I have anything to look forward to, though Freud maintained that death is our ultimate goal in life.

  Nidia let me out of my room for a few hours a day; sometimes Angel and I sat by the pool, where just before dusk the garden filled with hundreds of doves. We’d sit beside the waterfall and watch Yepez shoo them up into the trees, until the branches appeared to be covered with feathery snow.

  One afternoon, Yepez took me to the solarium to show me the Black Widow’s prized orchids—orchids with wine-streaked lips and brilliant yellow throats; green and pink orchids hovering like a formation of helicopters. One had waxy orange petals that looked like wings; for a moment I mistook it for a butterfly, like the one Daisy had crushed in the garden. Yepez knew most of their names—the spice orchid, the jewel orchid, the Medusa’s head orchid (with flowers more curious than beautiful and a scent, he said, that may be intoxicating or fetid, depending on the species). The two he himself would always recognize anywhere were the Holy Ghost orchid, by its overpowering smell, and the goblin orchid, by its twisted shape. The Black Widow, though, could still tell you the difference between a scorpion orchid and a leopard orchid, blind-folded.