Cargo of Orchids Page 26

  If the rat knocked over the one remaining candle, Angel and I would be left in darkness. I reached in my pocket and hurled the bola at the rat. He didn’t blink, as if he was used to having high-octane cocaine thrown his way. He raised his pointed nose and sniffed the air, then he scooped the condom up between his paws and disappeared into the back of the cave again.

  I knew that in “controlled” experiments (as if anyone can control her cocaine use after a while), rats will keep doing the drug until it kills them. Cocaine is their drug of choice, and their death of choice also.

  Mine too, before I came to the Row and had to make another kind of choice, an ultimate one. I wonder if anyone will notice how, as I get closer to the end, more and more of my life on the Row seems to be imposing itself on my narrative? I suppose it’s because “the end” is what got me here in the beginning.

  The prosecutor said I killed my child rather than leave him in Consuelo’s hands. What mother, she said, wouldn’t do what she thinks best for her child? The prosecutor didn’t know how to open her mouth without sneering. In asking for the death penalty, she even quoted Oscar Wilde: “Each man kills the thing he loves, and so he has to die.”

  When Oscar Wilde wrote that, he wasn’t talking about infanticide. The line wouldn’t have worked if he’d written, “Each mother kills the thing she loves,” not in my case anyway, though maybe in Rainy’s. Wilde wasn’t even necessarily talking about killing people, but I’m losing my train again, getting away from that day on Chocolata’s mountain.

  We waded through the moat, back the way we came. The water in the pot had boiled away to nothing but a frothy sludge, and the bruja ladled a piece of kidney for each of us into a porous clay bowl.

  She gave Daisy a supply of coca leaves, told her how to make the tea and how much Angel would need. For me she had made a polvo out of the pollen of wild orchids: a legítimo polvo to help me make my way. If I applied the powder underneath my tongue, she said I would have an uneventful journey.

  Angel settled in Daisy’s arms as we started down the mountain and suddenly I felt dispensable, like the moon goddess, like the sicarios on the streets of the City of Orchids or the people of Tranquilandia itself, like Dixie Cups—use them once, then throw them away. I looked back briefly at the bruja, most of her blending in with the darkness of the doorway, except for the volatile lipstick, the emergency of red hair flaming from her head.

  When we passed the graveyard, I felt the grief of the wind, the same grief the earth must feel, year after year, admitting its dead. And I remember thinking, then, how full life was of moments that should have gone differently.

  chapter twenty-seven

  The keys dangled in the ignition. El Chopo sat slumped over the wheel, his face turned from the mountain as if he preferred a view of the valley. Daisy opened the rear door on the passenger side and climbed in. When El Chopo didn’t stir, Daisy tapped him on the shoulder. He didn’t move. She tapped him again, harder, and his body shifted, enough that we could see the blood on the side of his neck and in his hair, and that the top of his head had a hole in it the size of a Campbell’s Tomato Soup tin. When I described this to Rainy, she said Campbell’s could sue me for using their name if it made you think about a person with his brains blown out. Rainy thought it would be okay to use Campbell’s if I said a tin of chicken noodle soup, not tomato.

  At the time it was tomato soup I thought of, and I told her I couldn’t see the connection between a hole in a person’s head and chicken noodle soup.

  “Use your noodle,” Rainy said. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you to use your noodle?”

  She was right, and I revise my story in Rainy’s memory: the hole in El Chopo’s head was the size of a tin of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup. I stood dazed in the dry dust of the parking lot, and I remember Daisy shaking me and telling me to hurry, we had to get back to the hacienda.

  It took much manoeuvring for the two of us to slide El Chopo’s dead weight over into the passenger’s seat. Daisy held Angel as I drove, trying not to think about the sounds arising from El Chopo’s body, or about his blood, pooled and dark on the floor at my feet. I drove without thinking about the quiet man in the field below the church, what he must have heard or seen and how he went on turning the earth, trying to dig the sun into the soil so that its shining would not be wasted.

  Mucho sudor, mucho peligro. Everything inside me wept, but I fought to look composed. Until I got to my room and remembered I was to leave the next morning, and Angel wouldn’t be going with me. When I imagined Angel not being with me when I needed him, I felt a familiar panic in my body, starting in the pit of my stomach and lodging in my throat, so that by the time Nidia brought my evening meal, I couldn’t eat. She said I looked sadder than a monkey in a clump of cajica grass—that meant very, very sad. I said I didn’t want to leave my baby behind, and Nidia said, “Sí, sí” as if she understood. Those last hours at the Hacienda la Florida took something from me. When I gave Angel up, I lost a part of myself that has felt dispossessed ever since.

  I was sitting in my chair, staring into the darkness, when Daisy pounded on my door. She begged me to come quickly, but my door was locked. I began shouting for Nidia, who, when she finally came, told me, through her weeping, that Daisy had lost Señor Alias. I ran with her to the chapel, where the Holy Ghost orchids choked my nostrils with their scent. Four tapered white candles burned—two at the head of the coffin and two at the foot. Daisy knelt beside the small white coffin, rocking back and forth, moaning.

  His heart stopped beating, Nidia said, and not even the doctor could revive him. She opened his gown and showed me the enormous incision in the centre of Alias’s chest—the inside a brown-red pulp, like guava paste, blackening around the edges—where the doctor had inserted his hands and tried to massage his heart. It must have suited Daisy to believe her child had died naturally, the same way she believed the butterfly was better off crushed. Whether he died of natural causes or not, I knew it suited Consuelo to have him dead: she needed a body for me to take home in a coffin. I made a fist without even knowing it, and drove it softly through the thin crust of this world. Angel trembled in my arms, opened his lips, then closed them again and let out a sigh. The scent of the orchids reminded me of the night he had come into the world.

  I looked down at Alias again; this was the first time I’d seen him without his many layers of clothing, including his knee-high socks and knitted booties. I saw now that he would never have made any soccer team: one of his small legs ended in a stump, with miniature cauliflowers of flesh where his toes should have been. I looked away, and tried to turn Angel’s head away too, as if we hadn’t come face to face with that hard wall, the one with no handholds, the one we couldn’t climb.

  Nidia began washing Alias’s tiny body, his skin the colour of sour milk under the blue light bulb in the lamp beside the coffin that gave us all, I saw now, a terrifying pallor. When she had dried him and dressed him in a long white gown, she laid a cradle orchid beside his head and placed another in his hand. I helped her gather up every orchid in the room, and we arranged them around Alias’s body, then I undid the clasp of the emerald-encrusted coke spoon Consuelo had given me and put the chain around his neck. I wanted him to have something beautiful, something the other angelitos would envy. I hadn’t thought of it as symbolic, as a burial of my way of life. That’s the way Pile, Jr. presented it to the jury. He said the moment I gave up the coke spoon, I had turned my back on “the life.” The truth is I gave Alias the coke spoon because it was worth a pile of money, and I thought Daisy would appreciate that.

  Daisy, her eyes gulping back pain, stroked her baby’s head, pushed his hair out of his face, kissed his neck and buried her nose in his flesh, as if she could catch a last breath of her child and never let it go.

  That night I didn’t sleep, but lay guarding Angel. I held him close and tried to explain how I would never stop loving him. When I said that, he seemed to grow lighter in my arms, as if he understoo
d. He had always been such an ancient person. Some babies are born old, others never grow up—it takes all kinds, as Rainy always said. Rainy had a way of making everything seem simple, with her twerpy philosophy of life.

  What I did, I did out of love, because I wanted Angel to live. I chose life for my baby. It wasn’t like the prosecutor said—that I had only one thought in mind: drugs.

  In the drug world most of the jury had seen on television or read about in the papers, women smuggled drugs inside their babies’ diapers, their bottles, their plush toys— in one case, a dead baby had been gutted and stuffed with cocaine. A passenger sitting next to the mother became suspicious when the plane was delayed for several hours and the baby didn’t wake up.

  This jury had seen and heard it all, and I don’t think it occurred to any of them that I might consider it immoral to use a child in such a way. They had a dead baby, an airplane and twenty-five green army bags, each one containing ten of Consuelo’s “children” (kilos of cocaine). I had cocaine in my blood, in my vagina, on my mind and in my brain: what more evidence did they need?

  When Nidia came with Daisy in the morning I lay unable to move on my bed, and when Nidia asked me if I hadn’t slept well I could hardly get the words out—my throat felt as if I had swallowed a roll of quarters. Nidia promised she would help Daisy look after Angel; nothing was forever, she said—how could I begin to think I would never see Señor Angelito again? I said as long as Consuelo lived, there was no chance of Angel and I being together. “Consuelo won’t live forever,” Daisy said. She reminded me of what happened to El Chopo. “Even the unkillable have to die.”

  And then Daisy said, “I am a Colombian. I will always know where to find you.”

  Daisy assured me, as she’d done many times before, she would care for Angel “as if he were her own.” I wanted to trust her, I needed to, but I’d seen what had happened to her own. I went to my stash and set out two big rocks on the bathroom counter.

  I know I’d promised myself I’d quit, but these were to be my last lines, because I knew things would be different when I got home. At home I wouldn’t have this terrible need. Looking at me now, people don’t see how desperate I’d become. The tears and sweat and the dirt you pick up just walking around in your life, these all wash off. But you can’t wash your heart.

  I went to the place where I kept my pipe and my X-acto blade, and they were gone. Or else I’d put them somewhere different and forgotten where. Sometimes I even hid my stash, to test my memory, as a kind of game. I looked in all the obvious places, and then in the places where I’d only hide something if I was really boxed and not thinking straight. My pipe, my blade, my journal, Contigo Soy Feliz, had gone. All I had left were my drugs, the hundred-dollar bill, the photograph of my baby. Of Daisy and me and my baby, that is. And for the moment, I had Angel.

  I was crazed over Angel, and I wasn’t even parted from him yet. I crushed the rocks and snorted the lines, then washed my face and body, as if I could wash his memory from my skin and the tears from my face, which was swollen and looked frightening. Such a face might be an asset, if I ended up having to pretend I was a grieving mother going through immigration. But I almost looked too sad. There is sadness and there is beyond sadness. I had to be dignified in my grief, passionate but not over the line. I walked a fine line, and the fine lines in my brain had helped put me back on the right side of the road again. The road going on forever, the way in which we are led away from the self. I dried myself, feeling my body all over, as if my hands were detached. Then I sealed the cocaine inside a condom, inserted it deep in my vagina.

  Daisy helped me slip on the white silk dress I’d worn to Angel’s christening. She told me the Hotel Viper had burned to the ground during the night, and that Consuelo’s father had died in the fire. Consuelo believed it was the Drug Enforcement Administration, retaliating for Las Blancas having captured the Coast Guard cutter, that had killed El Chopo and her father; now she was forced to step up security all over the island.

  Nidia hugged me hard, and cried as she told me she’d seen Yepez and two men carrying Alias’s coffin out of the chapel to the car early this morning. She left the room; she wouldn’t say goodbye to me, because she knew she would see me again “in a better place.”

  I flattened my hundred-dollar bill and put it in my shoe with Angel’s picture, and I’d rinsed my face and smoothed my hair when Consuelo arrived to take Angel away from me. On the day following my arrest, my hair would be described as “torrential” on the front page of every newspaper in North America (it had rained that morning, and a muttersome wind had followed me from the detention centre to the courthouse), my skirt “slit up the side” (it had torn getting into the police van) and my face “expressionless.” My face expressionless? It was just that I had no other way left to look.

  La Madre Sin Corazón. The Mother without a Heart. The mother who had sinned in her heart, and so become heartless. The truth was Angel had taken a bite out of my heart, and grief had eaten the rest.

  Consuelo repeated her warning: no harm would come to him as long as I played my part. She poured me a glass of aguardiente, “for courage,” she said. I now believe I was burundunguiado, that Consuelo slipped the voodoo-powder burundanga into my drink, just as she might have slipped it into the basuco I’d smoked on other occasions, and even the cocaine I’d inhaled. I have read the reports, the ones Pile, Jr. submitted as evidence. “The victim may have no memory of the event, or may remember the event as a dream. Memories of events while on this drug may come into consciousness many years later. The CIA/FBI/DEA and most police departments know about this drug. It is used by security forces to ‘make people forget’; this tasteless and odourless substance can be given by liquid, cigarette or inhalant. Victims of this drug often report distorted vision, especially things being made wide and small, of things starting to stretch.”

  Things starting to stretch, beginning with the truth, the prosecutor said. How convenient to forget or to have no memory of the event when life and death and millions of dollars are at stake.

  ——

  I remember some things—the fountain being dry when we passed it, the stone pineapple the colour of rust. And outside, everywhere, guards dressed in army fatigues. Consuelo had enlisted the army to protect her mother’s hacienda, Yepez said. Especially against norteamericanos and their leader, El Presidente, who believed that by killing people, they could stop all negocios blancos on Tranquilandia. I don’t know, now, whether I remembered Yepez saying that at the time, or if memories of the events have recently, after I began writing this, flooded back into my mind.

  Everything about that day, and my journey, is far from clear, especially my motivation. The Mercedes idled in front of the house. I remember Yepez haranguing a soldier who had gone out hunting peacocks and brought one home alive, wrapped in his leather jacket. No one made a move to free the bird from its suffocating prison. Yepez told me to get into the car, and we sped away, my last view of the hacienda being of the crying leather jacket in the middle of the road.

  That and a wounded butterfly clinging to our windscreen. I asked Yepez to stop so I could free the butterfly, but he said there wasn’t enough time to kill anything; he had orders to get me to the airstrip, or else he would lose his life.

  Yepez was rattled. He nosed his way through the herd of miniature ponies that had gathered on the road. No amount of honking or cursing on Yepez’s part could make them budge. He started sweating and looking at his watch, then pounding the steering wheel. I thought he was going to run over one of the ponies, which refused to stand up, as if by laying down its life it could prevent me from laying down my own. I should have paid attention—but I needed another line, and the only drugs I had were stashed inside me.

  Yepez drove around the pony, onto the swampy grass. For a moment I thought he was stuck—permanently, this time—but he manoeuvred the car back onto the pavement as if nothing had happened, as if the sweat falling off his face could be blamed on the
humidity. The wounded butterfly flapped against the windscreen—“looking for a new body to try on,” Daisy had said—then fluttered, finally, to the ground as the sentries at the gate waved us through and we drove south from the hacienda, along the road I’d taken another lifetime ago, on my way north to the City of Orchids with Angel safely inside me. Within minutes we were headed down the dirt road past the basin where El Chopo’s ship was moored. Yepez approached the runway, looking more worried than ever, telling me to lie down on the back seat in case there was a problem.

  Soon I heard a vehicle approaching. Yepez got out of the car—I heard him greeting someone—and then he poked his head in the window to tell me it was safe. When I sat up and looked around, I saw the plane that would carry me away from Tranquilandia; it was in much better condition than the one I’d arrived in, though I can’t say the same about Tiny Cattle. I hadn’t expected to see him ever again, but when he climbed out of the Jeep, straw hat minus the crown, same dark glasses, I felt a mixture of relief and fear. Fear that he had been holed up at The Liver Does Not Exist since I last saw him, and relief to see a familiar face. His hands were shaking, and Yepez didn’t look much steadier after guzzling from the bottle Tiny produced from his coat pocket. As they loaded the coffin containing the remains of Daisy’s child, I smelled basuco and figured Tiny Cattle had probably been smoking all night, and was now levelling out by drinking.

  I felt both drowsy (the burundanga?) and pumped up, the high-grade cocaine humming in my veins, making my brain crave more, to stay alive, high, numb, dancing on the head of a pin, through the eye of a needle. Dancing all alone, except with my thoughts of Angel, my invisible dancing partner, as if by dancing into the unknown I could avoid inhabiting the menacing space of each present moment.