Cargo of Orchids (20 page)

Tiny slit open the package containing his
plata de polvo.
He broke off a piece of the flake—it came away like a chunk of shale—and crushed it in his hand. “There’s too much glitter in this,” he said, fingering the sample as he spoke. Cocaine began leaking from the slit he’d made, like an infection from under the scab of tape.

Consuelo, after touching some of the white flake to her fingers and tasting it, said,
“No, señor, es muy puro. Primera calidad.”

Tiny made a face.
“Es bastante ordinario,”
he said. He told Consuelo that the stuff was
basura
, garbage, and that snorting lines of this so-called primo-grade merchandise would be an insult to his nostrils.

“Then I will keep it for someone whose nostrils are not so easily offended,” said Consuelo. The powder trickled from the package as she picked it up and turned it over in her hands. She scooped out a couple of rocks and put them in her pocket.

Tiny groaned, grabbed the package from her and turned it right side up again on the table. Then he went down on his hands and knees, trying to sweep up the trail of white powder that had spilled onto the floor, separating it from the flecks of dirt, the tiny particles of dust. He gave up finally, and strode out onto the deck.

“His father would not like to see him now,” said Consuelo.

El Chopo too looked disgusted, and muttered something under his breath about unpleasant black people from the coast, before tossing back another shot of
aguardiente
and joining Tiny Cattle on the deck. The two men disappeared from sight.

At first I had been confused by Consuelo’s attitude towards drugs. Now I was beginning to understand. Those who dealt drugs in large quantities looked down on people who used any substantial amounts. Users were referred to as “niggers” or by other racial epithets. You did not, as I often heard Consuelo say, sleep on your own poison.

Consuelo poured more
aguardiente
for herself, then turned to me. “When I was at school, my sisters and I used
to chase the other girls to the wall—we had a wall around our school for security—and kiss them and marry them,” she said. “Only the smart girls would let themselves be kissed. The stupid ones, and the beautiful ones, used to scream and get away.

“When I grew up I wanted to kiss someone, to marry someone, who could give me children. Someone like Angel.”

Rule #3: Keep the hostage-taker talking; the more personal she gets, the better. “You must miss him,” trying to sound as if I cared.

“Talk of love isn’t for people like us,” she said. She looked at me, hard. “You don’t
miss
Angel. You remember him.

“Recordar.
It means to remember, to pass again through the heart.
El corazón.”
She toasted one of her mother’s pictures on the wall. “And Gustavo,” she said, “and Mugre too. Even though he was a bad brother-in-law sometimes, I remember him.”

She downed the shot, adding that
aguardiente
was not known as a women’s drink, and that if I was ever seen drinking it in public, I would be assumed to be either an intellectual or a whore. Then she bit into a quarter section of lime that had been soaking in salt and chewed it until her eyes watered.

I had expected to hear the
Fat Lady
’s engines turning over and the plane idling on the runway, but I heard nothing. “Ten years ago, Señor Cattle got shot down in the jungle. He was captured and tortured by the Mujeres Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (the Armed Women
Revolutionaries of Colombia, the most powerful guerrilla group next to Las Blancas), who thought he worked for the CIA.” She paused. “Do you want to know what they did to him, the Mujeres Armadas?”

She emptied her pocket on the table, took the knife Tiny Cattle had used to slit open the kilo and drew up a small amount of mother-of-pearl-like flake on the blade’s flat side, then held it under her nose. I thought she was going to snort it, rocks and all, but then she lowered the knife, tapped the cocaine onto the table and began chopping it, cursing whenever one of the tiny crystal rocks jumped away.

“The revolutionaries, they did unnecessary things to Señor Cattle. They stripped him and tied him to the bed. They put a curling iron up inside him … like this,” she demonstrated, making a circle with her finger and thumb, and poking the knife in and out through the centre of the hole. “Then they plugged in the iron. They left him like that all night.”

She cut the coke into two thin lines. “They let him live, only so he could see what they did to his wife. They were amateurs. You saw their work? That ugly head?” She wrinkled her nose, as if to say these revolutionaries couldn’t even shrink a head without destroying it.

She took a crisp hundred-dollar bill and rolled it into a thin straw. Bending her head low to the table, she vacuumed a line into her right nostril with a single snort. She shuddered, held her breath, jerked her neck back.

“Smuggling is like a drug to him now,” she said. “It is his therapy, what gets him through the day.”

She bent down to repeat the procedure through her other nostril, wiping up the leftover cocaine dust with her finger, massaging it into her gums, making a face.

“My uncle is right,” she said. “Drugs are for the niggers.”

The matron unlocked my handcuffs so I could bear down. She wore an apron with “Happi Flour: It Rises to the Occasion” printed on it, and there were dark smudges where her dirty fingers scratched continually at her groin. I saw rusty tongs on a red Formica counter, nests of lice under the matron’s arms.

The doctor wore a black hood over his head. Two young guards stood outside the steel doors that kept opening and then slamming shut. One guard, off guard, caught his reflection in the mirror they’d placed between my legs so I could see the baby’s head when it came out; he raised his rifle and took aim.

The baby wanted to stay deep inside me, attached to me, dressed in camouflaged fatigues, size 0.

I rolled over and stared at the ceiling. I lay that way for a long time, on the hard bunk in the dark cabin where I’d been left, afraid to go back to sleep because I knew the
dream hadn’t ended. I called for Consuelo, but she didn’t come: now I felt the pain inside me, and brought my knees up to my chest and rocked my body from side to side, wondering what was going to happen to me, if I was going to lose my baby. I felt the nausea coming in waves, closed my eyes again and heard the open moan of the sea, the waves breaking on the reef beyond the lagoon, the wind wearing a sailor suit, a blouse with anchors, puffing and heaving towards me, her skirts blowing up over her face.

“Hey, hey, take it away! Get that ball and fight!” the greasy matron chanted. If my feet hadn’t been in stirrups, I would have kicked her. The doctor told me to relax my shoulders, and gave me a shot in the hip. He said he wanted to get this over with because he had an appointment on death row.

The doctor had on a bloodstained baseball mitt. Without warning, he reached up inside me. “There’s nothing in there,” he said. I could hear his irritation, see his beady eyes through a slit in the hood.

“Fuck a priest, there’s nothing in there.”

Then I heard Angel say, “You shouldn’t worry so much. Don’t start worrying until they start shooting, and even then you shouldn’t worry. Don’t start worrying until they hit you, because then they might catch you.” And I laughed because the doctor couldn’t catch the baby, not even with the mitt.

The doctor put his hand on my stomach, punched it hard, and it started to go down. “Happi Flour. It Rises to the Occasion.” The matron snapped the handcuffs back in place, breathing on me with her swampy breath. The doctor began rinsing off his mitt.

“The warden is going to hear about this,” hissed the matron. The doctor removed his black hood and put it over my
own head, just as the guard pulled the trigger and all the lights went out.

I could write the rest of my story as if the hood they placed over my head has never been lifted, because that is the way it has seemed to me ever since.

I lay with my eyes wide open, still trying to push away the dream. The pain in my womb had subsided, but I felt scared. I curled back into a ball. Then I saw a light go on in the corridor. I called again for Consuelo, who came in her own time and unlocked the door, then led me back to the ship’s galley. She seemed very uneasy, and asked me if I thought I was going to lose the baby. I said I didn’t know, I was having what felt like bad menstrual cramps.

El Chopo, dressed in a skimpy pair of yellow bathing trunks and a black plastic apron, was frying another fish, and I could smell beans and rice mixed with the smell of gun oil. I doubled over and threw up a little black bile. Consuelo wiped the floor, saying she did not intend to nurse me for much longer.

El Chopo flipped the fish once in the frying pan, then slid it onto a serving plate. He was looking away out a porthole again. I was getting familiar with his trances, the way he’d stare forever at some fixed spot on the horizon, like an Easter Island statue on Thorazine.

Consuelo wiped her nose with the back of her hand. The pain had eased; I asked if I could go outside for air. She nodded but made a slapping gesture at her head to remind me of the mosquitoes. I didn’t care, and pushed open the heavy door and let it close behind me. I wanted to be alone in the predawn stillness. The jungle sounds were already
becoming familiar—the strange deep gurglings of the howler monkeys, like underwater sirens, whirling through the forest; the warning cries of birds; the constant mosquito drone; the occasional splash of a fish.

There was a shameless sensuality to Chocolata’s island—the bold greens and blues I’d seen pulsating under the mid-morning sun when we’d arrived, the erotic reds and purples of the eggplant sunset I’d glimpsed through the ship’s porthole. I could smell the salty female smell of the sea, the bittersweet clinging scent of rotting fruit and dying copra. Now, as the first grey and pink strokes of dawn daubed at the night sky, I could smell, too, the sultry odour of frangipani fading with the darkness as a flood-tide began sweeping an incessant stream of bobbing jungle growth back up the river—long strings of water hyacinths and tiny white orchids, their green leaves full of air bubbles to keep them afloat. Some of the strands caught onto the anchor chain of the
Conejo Blanco
and clung there as if they had grown weary of floating back and forth on the tides, waiting to be swept into the gulf.

Consuelo’s voice calling me inside made the pain come on again, even worse than before; I sat down heavily at the table.

“I’d like the morning a whole lot better if it started a little later,” Tiny Cattle said, getting up off the sofa where he’d been dozing and taking the bottle of
aguardiente
from the cupboard. He was complaining, still, about his feet, about getting home—how Consuelo had promised him one thing and now expected him to hang around until she was ready to do another.

Consuelo got up, took the bottle from him and emptied it in the sink. She poured him a large glass of water.

She forced me to drink water, too, but I knew I wouldn’t keep it down. I heard the liquid travelling through my upper body and falling into my stomach. I closed my eyes as it started back up. Consuelo watched me gag and retch, then went over to the counter and cut a huge slab of papaya. She picked out a handful of black seeds and told me to chew them. I tried to do what she asked, but they were too bitter, so she crushed them and made me wash them down with a pink
gaseosa
called Colombiana. Then she took me back to my cabin, where I was sick again.

I heard her lock the door and check the lock twice. I pushed the strands of wet hair from my face, strands stuck together by vomit and tears. I kicked on the wall beside my bunk, but all I heard was laughter from up above, and the sound of my own panic, in darkness, tearing in my head.

I had not known, before Consuelo opened my cabin door again, tied my hands, then led me outside into the fierce heat of the day, that life could permit me so much pain. The sun had come out from behind clouds; the ship’s deck was steaming. Consuelo seemed confused, one minute ordering me to move faster as I hobbled towards the waiting vehicle, the next ordering me to slow down.

She had been considerate enough to give me a cushion to lie on; the Jeep, although it looked new, lacked any system to absorb the shocks from the deeply cratered road. She untied my hands so I could hang on to the back of the
passenger seat, where she sat on Tiny Cattle’s lap. The door on the driver’s side had been removed.

El Chopo kept asking Consuelo if everything was copacetic. At one point, Consuelo insisted I chew a handful of cardamom seeds that she produced from one of her bags—her “natural tranquillizer”—after which she tried to make me drink a whole bottle of water.

In Carmen’s memoir,
Rescate
, she wrote about being tortured by the guerrillas. Torturers, she said, did not want you to die; if you died, you were beyond their realm of influence. To lose a victim could mean you might lose your livelihood.

I’d always thought that if tortured, I wouldn’t resist, I’d reveal everything, that resistance meant unnecessary suffering. It hadn’t occurred to me then that people tortured others for sport, or a sexual or psychological thrill, or simply to see another human being suffer. Carmen had withheld no secrets, was not an enemy or even a rival; she was simply a political prisoner. Yet her baby had been starved to death and Carmen had accepted his fate with a kind of stoicism I found unimaginable.

“There are good reasons for death” was as much as she’d had to say about it.

A pump shotgun and a box of shotgun shells lay on the floor, rolling from one side of the Jeep to the other as El Chopo negotiated the road’s curves. Beside me on the floor I saw a vial of yellow pills, a hamburger with a bite taken out of it, a Coke tin someone had crushed in his hand.
Little Yellow Pills. Vial. Hamburger. Bite.
I said the words inside my head, as if they could be possible names for the baby that might any minute be shaken out of me.