A Bright Moon for Fools (25 page)

Lola fed him broth. Christmas began to feel a little stronger but he did not leave the house. He could not. He had chronic diarrhoea. A steady stream of observers came in to
discuss him, most often an old woman with hardly any hair and a teenage mother with a baby attached to her hip. Christmas was too weak to respond. With the diarrhoea came a shivering fever. He
could only drift and groan and perspire, his spirit as rankled as the sheet.

It rained often. He stared at it through the door. He listened to it against the roof. He felt the character of rain, its changing moods, as if it were alive and he but a season of pressure. He
reviewed his life and found nothing but reasons for misery and regret. Mosquitoes whined and fed.

Privacy was out of the question: he was on a camp bed in the middle of the living room. From this bedroom without walls he struggled to his toilet without door, helpless to hide himself should
anyone walk past. Nor could he mask the noises, the parp and splutter, which provoked laughter from the house, even the occasional ‘
Epalé
!’ Once, he sat down to see the
old lady on a stool in the yard sewing up a plastic bucket with string and a hot needle. She was staring straight at him. It was too late for either to move. Christmas could only close his eyes,
clothing himself in invisible dignities.

He watched Lola cook, sweep, dust, take out buckets of clothes, drink beers in the evening sun, argue with her father. She cajoled and insulted him. She wiped the invalid’s face with a
cold cloth. In the evening she watched her favourite soap opera ‘
Sin Tetas No Hay Paraíso’
– ‘Without Tits There is No Paradise’ – about a
Columbian girl prostituting herself to afford breast implants which are then filled with drugs by an unscrupulous plastic surgeon. Christmas watched Lola bathed in the cathode light of Colombian
nightclubs and pictured himself in her eyes. It was not a pleasant reproduction. What was he? Nothing more than a creature to be pitied, helped, made room for?

In the shower room’s cracked mirror he looked down at the protuberance of his body without flinching, without sucking in or tensing up. He was old, saggy, beaten. He looked at his head
wound. Lola had removed the stitches that morning.

There was no pretending here, no Harry Strong.

There was no money to borrow, no city of dens in which to evaporate. He had nothing but this chance shipwrecking on Lola’s shore. He leant towards his reflection, pulling his cheek from
his eye, examining it swivel in the socket. What would have happened to him if he had not landed here? Alcohol withdrawals could kill a man, he knew that. How close had he come to revealing the
rest of his own skeleton? Christmas released the skin.

During the day Lola and Aldo left the house to work in their cacao plantation. It was clear that the old man had insisted Christmas stay with them so that, eventually, he could
ask the foreigner for money.

“So with the movies you make good money?”

“Sometimes.”

“You have money in the bank?”

“Sometimes.”

“So later you can help me? Like I helped you?” nodded the old man, “Yes? But don’t say nothing to Lola.”

“I won’t,” said Christmas

The old man was his constant companion. He found almost anything on the television hysterically funny, as if still marvelling at the invention. Below the television there was a hi-fi system, all
the plugs of which were hanging from a socket half way up the wall, crowded into an adapter and held in place by an arrangement of rubber bands. When the afternoon children’s cartoons were
over, the old man turned off the television and turned on
Vallenato
, cowboy accordion music from Columbia. He played one particular song over and over again. It was the most popular song in
the village. When the old man wasn’t playing it, Christmas could still hear the tune in the distance. The old man liked to sing along, pointing at the foreigner: “
Que se acabe la
plata / pero que goce yo / que se acabe el dinero / pero mi vida no.” – “All my money’s gone / but look how I have fun / All my money’s gone / but I’m still
alive
”. He offered the gringo rum. Christmas refused. He knew he must give the drinking a break.

Sometimes the old man would shuffle outside to talk to neighbours dropping by, and if there were no neighbours he would talk to his chicken. This was a fighting cock, winner of several bouts,
and thus kept on his own and fed a special diet of corn, fish and the odd cooked egg. The feathers had been removed from its legs and back. The old man liked to discuss tactics with it, and then
pick it up by the tail and toss it around so as to exercise the wing muscles. He tossed it at Christmas. He found this very funny.

A
fter he raped Bridget, Slade drove for a couple of hours until he thought he was far enough away. He spent the night at a roadside posada –
four small, low rooms at the back of a restaurant. His had a brand new fan, a lean bed and walls made of earth. There was a shared bathroom. He showered. As soon as he stepped out of the water,
legions of mosquitoes began to attack his wet skin. He went back to his room and sat in front of the fan. Then he lay down and covered himself with the sheet so only his face could be bitten. The
roof was bamboo. It had traces of paint on it.

In the morning, he told them he was heading to Caracas and then back to England. Instead he drove to the city of Cumana. There he bought new clothes. He went into a barber’s and had his
hair and beard shaved off. He bought some round, mirrored sunglasses and a baseball cap. He found the Thrifty Car Rental office and parked his car there, leaving the keys on the roof. The seats
were torn and ravaged. Pulling his rucksack onto his shoulder, he came out of the lot and saw an old fort overlooking the town, the Castillo de San Antonio. He walked up to it and came to a
deserted roundabout at the top of the mount beside the fort. There was the sea. He stared out at the horizon and its false promise of an edge.

A man approached him on a motorbike. He was honking his horn. “Hola? Hello?” said the man. “Moto-taxi?” The man drove up beside him. “Hey, amigo, you want I can
take you somewhere? Let’s go, no problem.”

“Fuck off,” said Slade

“Yes, yes, English, no problem.” The man was wearing a motorbike helmet. His face was auburn with the sun. He was tall with a broad, fixed smile and was offering his hand. Slade
stopped. They were alone. He examined the motorbike. He had an idea.

“Oscar,” said the man, “I am friend of tourists.”

“Slade,” he replied, taking his hand.

“No problem. I have moto-taxi. You want go some place, I take you no problem.”

“Where is the bank?”

“Not far. Look, I take you bank, I bring you back here, no charge, OK? Then if you want me take you some place, I take you, OK?”

Slade took his rucksack and got onto the back of Oscar’s motorbike. They wound down into the town, past the Guaiqueri Park and down Calle Marino to Banesco Bank. There Slade took out the
photo of Harry Christmas. He told Oscar that Christmas was his father and that he was looking for him. His father was in the Rio Caribe area. He needed someone to check all the posadas and find
him.

Slade went into the bank with Oscar and took out his borrowing limit on his Visa card, three thousand dollars in cash. He let Oscar see the money. He told him he would pay one hundred dollars a
day to look for his father. If he found him, he’d give Oscar a bonus: one thousand dollars.

“If he knows I am looking for him he will run away, understand? You’ve got to be –” Slade tapped his forehead, “– undercover.” Oscar nodded.

“So what happened? Why he here?”

“He has gone crazy. My mother wants me to find him and bring him back to England. That is why there is a big problem if he sees me or even knows that I am looking for him, so you tell no
one, OK?” Oscar nodded. “Secret mission. Black Ops.”

“
Discreto
,” he said. “No problem.
Entendio
. I will say just a gringo owes me money.”

“When you find him you come back here, you get me, we go there, I pay you. Operation terminated.” Slade stuck out his hand. Oscar shook it. Slade looked up at the sun.

“So where you stay?” Slade didn’t respond. “My family have one room. Very cheap. Very nice. Better than hotel.”

“Barracks,” said Slade. “Perfect.”

Oscar took Slade through Cumana to his house. It was in a quiet street on the outskirts of town. The yard was enclosed by a blue wall and a sturdy metal gate decorated with
barbed wire. Oscar lived with his wife, his children, his brother’s family and his elderly parents who slept in separate rooms and didn’t talk to each other.

Slade’s room was built onto the roof of the house, a makeshift first floor of naked breezeblocks and tin. Oscar charged him thirty bolívares a night. His door was a bed sheet. A fan
faced his bed, a mattress on the floor, with a cane shelf in one corner that was empty but for a gold plastic Japanese cat, forever smiling and waving. Open concrete steps led up to it from the
yard, a small ledge outside just big enough for the woven plastic chair that stood there.

Slade sat down. It was hot. He took off his shirt. He looked over the other rooftops of the street. Down below he watched Oscar push his moto-taxi back out of the gate and onto the road. He
waved at Slade, revved his engine and headed off into Rio Caribe. His wife closed and locked the gate. She started talking to the little girl and boy who were hanging off her legs. Her name was
Milagro. She looked up at Slade. The sun was caught in his glasses.

C
hristmas woke late. No one was there. His clothes, washed and folded, had appeared on a chair. He found a cold
arepa
in a basket, ate half,
and fed half to the tortoise. For the first time in a long while, he stepped outside.

Lola’s house was set on the outskirts of San Cristóbal. Surrounded by a grove of
cambur
, there were flowers everywhere, the porch flooded with plant pots made from plastic
bottles and paint tins. Tyres hung from the beams, cut and painted to look like parrots, their bodies stuffed with earth and spider plants. A serene
flamboyan
tree with orange and white
flowers cast serried light onto the dirt and grass. Beside the house there was an adobe hut with a palm frond roof and next to that a pigpen. The fighting chicken was tied to a post, squawking and
stamping about in a puddle of rice as if complaining about its lack of arms.

Christmas stood on the porch inhaling animal waste and blossom and soil baked in sun. Hands behind his back, he walked over to inspect the pigs, one black and one pale, both agitated by his
presence. Christmas pulled a face; the pale one had tattoos. They were bad tattoos: wonky gothic lettering; a Virgin Mary with a Mr Man face; a patterned band round one leg like a suspender belt.
Christmas wondered if this pig had been to prison.

In the hut, Christmas found the tattoo gun on a workbench amongst tools and old buckets. There were curled newspaper cuttings above it, tattoos of the famous, and a plastic water bottle full of
ink. The gun itself was a home-made marvel: a transformer connected to a three-volt motor from a cassette player and strapped to a bent strip of aluminium. This was taped to the shell of a
propelling pencil which had a wire soldered to a pin inside it. The wire ran up to a cog attached to the motor. As the motor and the cog turned, the pin was lifted up and down in rapid motion.
Mystified as to how Aldo got the pig to stay still, Christmas went back inside the house, put on his shoes and then took them off again. It was too hot for shoes. It was too hot for anything but
shorts and a hat. He found a red baseball cap and so, belly-led and barefoot, Christmas set off into the village.

He followed the path through the
cambur
, the small green bananas bunched as yet unripe beneath wide drooping leaves, and came out onto another path, following it alongside a stream strewn
with rubbish. He crossed it at a ford and came up through a narrowing of bushes into a wide street with one-storey homes set on either side, each one a different colour. The street looked deserted
but was full of noise – mothers shouting at children, a steady hammering.

Christmas walked down the road, his bare feet registering the change to weeds and sand. Villagers lounging in front of their houses noticed him. They waved and smiled. They shouted greetings. He
had felt uneasy in just shorts but all the men were dressed the same. Even if they wore a T-shirt, it was rolled up over the paunch. Some were drinking beer. It was whistling to him, at a frequency
only drunks can hear. He shut his ears to it. Kids cycled past. A group of young men clapped their hands, running out from under a tree to pass on incomprehensible information. He walked past a
medical centre then an evangelical meeting room on one side of the street, and the cockfighting rink on the other. “
Epalé
!” said the people as he passed, “
Como
va, gringo
?”

“
No gringo
,” he corrected, “
Yo soy Ingles
.”

A small Plaza Bolivar opened out on his right and beyond it a concrete stage with a mural of Christ and Columbus as its permanent set. Here the road was cobbled. The houses
were older and larger, pitted and weather-worn, remnants of posters hanging ghostly in the paint. He turned left towards the noise of a turbine and past a group of little girls beholding this pink
man in wonder. A car rumbled past. A donkey brayed. There was moss on the electricity lines and children asleep in the road. The buildings exhaled like the plants, the whole village sagging from
heat. ‘
Si! Con Chávez’
said the graffiti.
Maybe after lunch
said the birds.

He walked on towards the electricity generator, thundering in a grand shed. On one side there was the village jail, on the other a boat yard, upturned ribs in a ruined warehouse of some former
purpose. Opposite, a jetty ran out into the sea, boats rocking on tin-foil waves, while above them a great ridge stooped down to the headland that made up the eastern limit of San
Cristóbal’s bay. Men were seated on a low wall, smoking and looking to the horizon. They greeted Christmas with a cheer. He noted with satisfaction that in San Cristóbal the
moustache still reigned on faces of experience. They spoke in Spanish.