In Flames (9 page)

“General Arbusto's wife paints watercolors.” Reg Townsley was insistent. “This is an opportunity for us, Dan. Give her a show at the gallery.”

“Her stuff sucks.” Even to my half-trained eye, her work was mediocre. “It's pretentious, Reg, she has no talent.”

“So? Otherwise, it's great. In a world of mediocrity, genius is dangerous. So's real talent. We got a break here, Dan, you can make up for that pathetically worthless priest business, in spades this time, and no pun intended, I'm not a bigot. This time it's the brass ring.”

Seeing no choice—blinded and deluded—I relented, bracing myself for the general and his big brass ring. The police major wasn't invited, and the general wasn't packing Glocks at the opening show of his wife's watercolors. Armando Arbusto strutted in wearing dress whites, looking quite pleased with his appearance, gold-braided cap carried in the crook of his arm. He had the air of being the most serious person in the room, perhaps wondering how his wife's success as a watercolorist might help his career. He greeted Elaine cordially, without hesitation, no trace of suspicion or grudge in his voice. Jimmy Padgett the golf pro brought a friend, a woman he was sleeping with, a sculptor with a huge afro, tight designer jeans, high-pitched voice, and a free-floating air of being self-consciously out of place among the formally dressed. “How soon can we get out of here?” she wailed. Her accent betrayed her English as acquired in New York. “This rum is piss, how 'bout some pricey stuff, whites are tighter than a clam's ass.” Hers was the only voice audible above a murmuring din, a continuous low drone like that of plane engines, and I thought she might cry out something more practical, like “Fold up your trays and put your seats in an upright position.”

“I'm grateful,” the general said quietly, shaking my hand. “Your taste in art is excellent, señor, you're a welcome addition to San Iñigo.” His wife painted watercolors of the sea, always the sea, always viewed from shore. Wherever she planted her easel, the general's wife kept her eyes resolutely turned away from land. The gallery walls were covered in water views, two basic colors—blue and green—a depressingly limited palette on an island so alive with color. Señora Arbusto wore a white lace gown and, around her neck, a chunky gold cross hanging from a golden chain gleamed like a medal for distinguished merit. “I'm interested,” she said to me, ruffling her gown, fingering the gold cross, “in why the sky is blue or the sea turns pale green at certain hours. Aren't you?”

“My day job is in the new harbor, señora, and the sea is all around me, but I keep my mind on work.”

“You ever try painting pictures of the sea?”

“I draw renderings of my assignment, I'm an architect, but no, I've never done watercolors of the sea.”

“You should try, señor, it's very relaxing, painting watercolors of anything, but especially the sea. And you do seem tense, if you'll forgive me saying so, you ought to loosen up more. Enjoy yourself. San Iñigo is a place for pleasure, not pain, I promise you.”

Elaine was also dressed for the occasion. No gown, but clinging silk, the same outfit she'd worn to her husband's funeral, basic black, including her panties, and she let me know exactly this. I wore my knowing look, the best I could muster if I were to get through the evening without revealing myself as a fraud, fake gallery owner, dubious spy, questionable lover exposed in a public affair. Construction site junior architect was about the only role I felt able to play with any confidence, and the part was very junior. The rest of my recently acquired personalities exhausted what little talent I had for deceptive performance. I stepped into the gallery office for a break from all the playacting, and the general followed in right behind me. I wasn't about to try anything rash, not that evening, not with the general or anyone else in the crowd of island elite, not after the fiasco with Padre Cardenio. Señora Arbusto's opening was supposed to establish my artsy credentials with the best San Iñigo had to offer—
Crème de la crème of their stratum
, according to Reg—but not until I had their confidence was I supposed to mine this uppermost layer for whatever he wanted.

The general sank into a chair. Behind a closed door, we were far enough away from hubbub for him to speak openly without being overheard. “Señor, your personal life is none of my business. Still, you should try to get yourself out as soon as you can.”

I looked at him questioningly…
out of what?
I didn't dare ask.

“Of course she's a lovely woman. And she's splendid in bed. I'm aware of all that. But then after, she's something else—you understand? She changes. She has a taste for being bad.”

I struggled to keep a knowing look.

“You're young, señor, full of energy, so of course you have needs. Have you visited the house of Señora Francesca?” He leaned forward and gripped my shoulder, his hand kneading my muscles as if he might consider buying me for breeding purposes. “You should, you know, a visit to her place calms the body, her girls are remarkably pretty and very clean. A doctor visits every month, and the girls get checkups, blood tests, everything the doctor orders—they have to, or Señora Francesca loses her license. It's a disciplined establishment, in a lovely old villa quite airy and open, the sea views are impeccable. More like a home than a place of business. No one hustles you there. Each girl has to pay for her own laundry, so they keep the place quite orderly. I recommend it, señor, think of your health. It's simpler and more wholesome. I must go back now, I believe the woman with the loud voice has cornered my wife, I have to rescue her.” With a wink and avuncular pat on my shoulder, the general rose and departed, saying no more. I left the office after him and went straight to the drinks table. At least he wasn't treating me like an enemy, a rival in love, or an accessory to homicide, that much was a relief. For a few moments, I deceived myself into thinking he'd actually taken me into his trust. Who knows, but we might even run into each other again one evening, both of us looking out for our health at Señora Francesca's. I'd never been to a brothel, and didn't imagine places like that existed in Princeton, New Jersey. I had no intention of following his advice about Elaine, that much I still discounted as ex-lover's jealousy, but the general's friendly attitude was perhaps something I could build on to please Reg Townsley, a sign of progress. I was adapting, and if not exactly fitting in yet, at least beginning to be accepted in the chaos that was San Iñigo. This was what I told myself, as I downed a fourth rum and soda. Reaching for a fifth, I felt the web around me growing tighter. Aside from my job in the new harbor, honest work, I'd become a liar from the time I woke up in the morning to the time I went to bed, Elaine's bed.

After Señora Arbusto's
vernissage
, Elaine and I arrived back at the club as another power failure darkened the city, blackouts a near-weekly occurrence in San Iñigo, an island surrounded by energy.

Elaine picked up a flashlight from the bar and left the terrace ahead of me. She hesitated a moment at her door.

“Your bed tonight, okay?”

Utterly at ease, she followed me to my room. She placed the flashlight on the bedside table, pulled down the top sheet and fluffed the pillows, before slipping straight into my bed. “You've had quite an evening, Dan, you're a big success. Our man of the hour. You tired?”

“I'm okay, I'm fine.”

“C'mon over here.” She patted the pillow next to hers.

I didn't want to be tired, but I could barely wrap my arms around her. Too much rum. The general's warnings. The police major's persistence. It all added up, inexorably, the peculiar symptoms a hollowness in my head, a formless anxiety about letting Elaine always have her way, whichever way it was, and then somehow I too was implicated. As if she felt my hesitation, she threw herself on me, passionately, and even in the grip of her embrace, I went on asking myself questions that had no answers.
She love me? I love her?
One merit of a place like Señora Francesca's, I felt sure, was that the word
love
seldom if ever entered into conversation. In my dialogue with myself, questions raced…
Was the general setting me up, and if so, for what?
Did she really kill Delgado Vinny? Or was someone manipulating her, someone like the general, or the police major, positioning her to take a fall, and me their dupe, their naive tool. I didn't ask Elaine any of these questions, I couldn't, I didn't have the nerve. In my situation, who could? I was frightened of what she might say. Maybe if I uncovered something more than lust driving me, my obsession would have been killed off like a trauma at the end of successful therapy. I could have blown away my fixation with Elaine like a shotgun blast had blown off Delgado Vinny's head, brutal but effective. That she drove me crazy was understatement. Clingy dresses, no underwear, night after night in her bed, and her husband's grave still fresh. Who needed Señora Francesca, forget wholesome and healthy. Maybe most disturbing of all was Elaine's gaze when she watched me from behind the terrace bar, or by the fence when I was playing tennis or swimming laps, her watching like studied surveillance, striking strange terror in my heart. Even in the dark, as she straddled me, my hands on her breasts, I could feel her eyes fixed on my face. Judgment lurked in her look, perhaps appeasing, maybe indulgent, but judgment no less. A constant sizing up.

“You should go easy on the rum,” she said, sliding off when we were both done. “Try vodka. You'll have less hangover.” She caressed the inside of my thigh and ran her lips down my chest and stomach, but I felt little more than speculative interest, a curiosity to see if she could arouse me a second time. “You still up for touring?” Her tone was playful invitation. “You want to see more of the island?”

“Sure, where do you recommend?” Certainly not Señora Francesca's.

“Up in the hills, not quite as far as the mountains. Señora Arbusto sent over passes for a Santería ritual in the forest. She appreciates what you're doing for her. Tickets like these are hard to get. Especially for outsiders, you need permission from contacts high up, and that usually costs an arm and a leg. She's so happy club members are buying her watercolors.”

“So am I.”

“Do you good to get out, Dan, lift your spirits. In all the years I've been here, I've never been allowed in a Santería ceremony. I think the general's wife is a secret follower of their goddess, holy María Lionza, all those fluffy white gowns she wears, it's like a uniform with some of the believers.”

“I'd like to go. You make it sound exciting. Something different…” Although the Santería sect was simply part of the way things were in San Iñigo, the arcane cult stayed semisecret, rarely seen even while present everywhere. Few if any San Iñigans doubted the powers of saints and ghosts, mystical visions were ubiquitous on the island, and not only among the poor, even bankers and generals claimed intimate friendship with sacred spirits. Señora Arbusto had promised me her country was a place for pleasures, not pain, Santería mysteries promised exotic diversion, and I was game for distraction.

On the night of the hill forest ceremony, an easterly sea breeze blew across the grounds of the club, stirring palm trees, long leaves bending like piano keys pressed by invisible fingers, as if a ghostly hand of a clandestine goddess or blessed María Lionza were playing melodies unheard by any who doubted the existence of spirits.

Although my life had become transient, I still felt strong links to New York and Princeton, and to my surprise I started feeling a tie to this strange island as well, to sad and confounding San Iñigo. And I was eager to see more.

At half past eleven we gathered on the club terrace. The Santería ceremony would start sometime after midnight. Island timing was rarely precise. A couple of cars filled up in the club parking lot, Elaine and I along with a driver in one, Klauer and the poker regulars in another, and we embarked on a tortuous fifteen-mile ride up into the darkened foothills. Halfway along the winding route, an old bus cut in front of us, a dilapidated vehicle striped in bright blues, yellows, reds, the colors of the San Iñigo flag melding into night black lava rocks until suddenly illuminated in the glare of headlights. The old bus led the way, driving with almost reckless speed along the increasingly rutted road, covering our cars with dust lacking all pigment.

Somewhere high in the foothills, we stopped and parked in a forest grove. A band of tipsy worshippers stumbled from the bus. Four Santería guides arrived, and led us through the forest, how far and in what direction, I couldn't tell. We heard muffled drums beating nearby, the rhythm as gentle as a tired heart, the night exhausted and out of breath. We reached an opening in the woods, ahead of us a large thatched hut exposed on all sides to night breezes. Here candles flickered, illuminating flashes of bright-colored cloth on many of the congregants gathered inside. The guides conducted us, the white spectators, to a separate place in a corner of the ritual hut, opposite dark island faces of Santería faithful, worshippers of Saint Lazarus and holy María Lionza, the believers standing beside a simple wooden altar in front of which a ceremonial pole rose up into a thatched roof.

During the ceaseless drumming and chanting of the prefatory, the images of white sweating faces close to me captured my interest. Saint Ignatius club members were well tanned, but theirs were pale inexperienced faces, ludicrously out of place compared to the ecstatic and credulous congregation in darkness on the other side. For a moment I closed my eyes and listened to the drums beating less softly, rhythms growing more insistent, the drummers a chorus line of dusky young women in frilly white dresses. They faced the ritual pole, a sturdy wooden staff nearly twelve feet high erected like a bird trap to catch the night passage of saints rising from the dead. Hanging from the pole were a rusted chain, wrist and leg shackles, an iron grille head mask, mementos of centuries in slavery, and at the top of the pole a government permit to hold the ceremony mounted on a framed color photograph of
el presidente
and the beribboned vice president General Arbusto, watchful reminders of a San Iñigo present. Across the beaten dirt floor between the flower-strewn altar and a brazier fire at the base of the pole, a hieroglyph message was traced in cinders, a secret prayer to the saints for the miracle of Saint Lazarus, a plea for resurrection from the dead. Only initiates were supposed to know for certain the precise meanings drawn in the ashes. Among the exotic prayers, familiar phrases from my Catholic boyhood paraded past on sacred flags laid on the altar by the celebrants…
Pater Noster…panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie
…
Ave Maria, gratia plena
…
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi
…From behind the altar, a white-masked
Conde Moro
, the Black Count,
un
brujo
, a spiritualist priest, only his eyes visible, soft gentle charismatic eyes, approached the brazier fire, swinging what looked like a prayer wheel or an incense burner, but on closer view was a live rooster gripped by the neck, legs tied, tiny eyes flashing terror. The high priest circled the fire, twirling the bird aloft, the flag of Saint Lazarus following him. The priest bowed his head and passed the rooster to an elderly priestess, a wrinkled leathery crone in black—yes, the spirit reader Sister Emma, who unhesitatingly put the bird's head in her mouth, her teeth glinting in firelight, and with a loud crunch bit the head clean off. The bird's wings went on flapping, and the old woman spit the rooster's head into the brazier fire, where the head sizzled on glowing coals like a child's discarded broken toy. Squeezing the dying bird's severed neck, she added the rust color of its blood to the secret prayers in the ashes at the foot of the ritual pole. I began feeling nauseated, but the club poker players, otherwise so straight-faced, appeared amused, and Elaine looked positively transported. We were startled when a rustling rolled forward like a wave from the rear of the congregation. Bearers carried in a body on a stretcher covered with a white sheet, only the body's bare black feet poking out, the soles gray and smooth. Would the ritual's celebrants raise a corpse from the dead? They settled the stretcher at the base of the pole between fire and altar, over the ashes with the secret bloodstained prayer. The sheet remained still, dark feet motionless, drummers speeding up their beating, chanting louder, feverish with faith, not a word of which I understood. The language must have been a San Iñigo dialect closer to an African tongue than Spanish, the words Banta and Ganga shouted frequently. The
Conde Moro
circled the stretcher, the pupils of his eyes rolling back in his head, only fever-yellowed whites visible. He lurched forward and nearly fell over the body, his hands stretched out as if pleading for great favors, and as he tore off his white mask he began babbling wildly, and I remembered where I last saw those soft charismatic eyes, the despairing eyes of a humiliated priest whose common-law wife and daughter in Cuba missed him deeply, a man I'd caught red-handed at being only human. Padre Cardenio Morena. My heart pounded like a small animal straining to break free of my chest. Opposite us, worshippers leaned forward with grave anticipation, as if expecting the corpse to stand at any moment and walk off, proof of the living saint in their midst. The drumming stopped and chanters fell silent, reaching out and embracing the air, shedding tears of passion, bringing all their senses into play as though clutching at the earthly substance of Saint Lazarus and holy María Lionza, addressing their patron saints, believing the venerated dead were alive again and at that moment with them in the flesh, and they held the sacred beings in their arms.

Sister Emma went on speaking in a language so strange, the secret words surely descended from ancestral Africa, and when the body on the stretcher sat up, sheet cover still over its head, only the white faces near me were startled. The hushed congregation seemed to expect exactly this. The high priest moved closer to the body and pulled away the sheet, revealing a near-naked young woman, her hands bound in plaited reeds. The white faces gasped. Was she a confirmed initiate or a personality in collapse, a lunatic; these credulous people, who never ceased to amaze me, at once shocked and puzzled. The elderly priestess Sister Emma barked a command, and the “cadaver” rose to her feet. Leading the young woman to the pole, Padre Cardenio,
El Conde Moro
, grasped her bound hands, raising them over her head and attaching the reed binding to a hook in the pole. Like a sacrificial victim, the risen body hung suspended, the balls of her feet resting in cinders and the blood of the rooster.

Padre Cardenio knelt beside the brazier and blew the glowing coals into flames, and when he took her feet and passed the soles quickly over the fire, maybe she screamed, but I couldn't hear her, the drums and chanting at a deafening pitch. I thought I smelled her skin burning, or perhaps it was only the stench of the rooster's smoldering head. Bearers carried her out, and brought in another stretcher, and yet another, in a long theology of suffering. As night breezes died, the heat from the fire, and from sweating bodies of excited congregants, beat against my face. The young women in white stopped drumming and put their hands to their eyes, swaying gently and moaning. Stretching his arms before him in benediction, Padre Cardenio walked in a circle, and with intense gravity congregants leaned forward as though searching for some signal a saint or god was in their midst. Padre Cardenio slowly lowered and raised his right hand gripping a machete about eighteen inches long. He swung the blade, cutting and slashing, and the initiates in front rows ducked and fell to the ground. In an instant, he was no longer high priest, but avenging angel, face dripping sweat as he ran in circles with the grace and assurance of an acrobat.

The first young woman to rise from a stretcher reappeared in a frilly white dress and slumped to her knees. She offered a bottle of rum to the avenging angel, who seized it and poured the spirit into her throat, until it overflowed down her cheeks like water surging from a roof drain in a tropical storm. The women choristers chanted, drums beat, the saints and gods now with everyone as the ceremony blurred into repetition, a flurry of faked flagellations, a crying out of sins in confessions recited by rote, absolution from high priest Cardenio laying on hands. Chanting and drumming faded to moaning, and the congregation shuffled in small circles, trancelike, their revels ending as Elaine and I and the club members left the ritual hut, emerging into forest night.

We followed the guides back to our vehicles, and at every step Elaine held my arm tightly, swarms of insects sweeping around us as if seized in panicky flight, rising and falling in giant clouds.

No one spoke.

Flickering lights from the ritual hut drifted out over trees and underbrush, melting into humid air, taller trees looming like shredded masts of ghostly ships, shifting in ever lengthening shadows, late-night heat intensifying smells of forest rot. Bells of animal voices shot out from the tree line, sharp howls of monkeys echoing like sudden cracks of thunder before an oncoming storm. We entered the clearing where the cars were parked, and along the edges of vegetation, tree frogs burst into a brainless chorale, erupting in screeches of fear as if startled by danger.

Swatting gusts of insects, Elaine and I approached the car, where our club driver dozed in the front seat. I grew anxious to get in and leave, as a line of drunken worshippers staggered up from the ceremony, lurching along the path into the rays of headlights. They reeked of rum and were laughing, hilarity heightened to manic levels as they pushed past us, their eyes swiveling glassy and wild, and their bus rumbled off leaving a great cloud of dark dust. Klauer and the poker players formed a tableau of frozen fright, unsure whether to ride back to the city with those madmen on the road. Elaine's face mirrored similar hesitation, but my instinct was to hop into the car and leave at once.

I didn't get the chance, as a tall indistinct figure abruptly emerged from the forest wall beside me, and without warning whacked the side of my head with a pistol, the pain blunt and blinding. Spinning around, he jammed the gun into Elaine's stomach, and she collapsed to her knees, breathless from the blow, as the thug immediately shifted his weapon back to my head. No question he'd fire at the slightest provocation. Gripping the car door handle, I struggled to stay on my feet. Other dark figures appeared, slipping out silently from behind trees, standing like sentinels, murky features hidden in shadow, bodies outlined in dim light as they emerged from tree-line darkness. The intruders wore old khakis and carried rifles, and they moved with an air of knowing exactly what they were about, an air of sinister determination, the signature iron-hard focus of militants.

A squat figure cradling a shotgun approached. “You like my gun, señora?” He stroked the barrel of his weapon and laughed.

Elaine didn't answer him.

I coughed. “What do you people want?”

No one responded. The gunmen moved closer, wordlessly encircling us, their enmity seemingly ancient. One of them jabbed Klauer with a rifle and motioned him and the other poker players to get into a car. They seemed to anticipate no surprises, as if they checked out the vehicles and were counting potential prisoners.
Yanqui
woman,
yanqui
man, this appeared to fit expectations. My eyes adjusted, and I discerned the features of the brute cradling a shotgun. He had a bare tight potbelly protruding from his unbuttoned shirt like a swallowed soccer ball. A lifetime of hard labor must have toughened his arm muscles, tensed and alert, skin burnished to the leathery shine of an old suitcase. The rebel with the pistol to my head was tall, lean, had a mustache. His face in the glare of headlights radiated a bronzed yellow as if from malaria as well as genes, a face carved close around high cheekbones and a tight mouth, a weathered face, expression locked so firmly his deep eyes seem to burn through a tough animal-hide mask. These were lunatic eyes, madder than the eyes of any Santería disciple. His eyes closed the mind and snapped shut the heart, caused my head and entire frame to shake. I was so startled, I coughed again, perhaps to convince myself this hideousness was real. The shotgun bearer squinted at Elaine, as though peering out of some dark corner of a cave, or down from a tree, a killer grogged dumb from life under jungle sun and the endless drone of insects, the absolute brutishness of a fugitive insurgent's existence. Night air grew lifeless, no more bird calls or animal cries, even the buzzing of insects faded to silence. With nowhere to hide, nowhere to flee, Elaine and I were like a pair of pitiful creatures fallen down a well, and our fear would now strangle us or stop our hearts. The thug with the gun to my head snarled a brusque question in dialect.

“No, no,” Elaine said. “I'm not his wife. He's not my husband—”

“You're a fucking liar.” The gunman's English was nearly unaccented. “Your wife comes with us, señor, you can buy her back.” Elaine said something quickly to him in his language that I couldn't make out. Something about oil—
petro
—a topic I found unexpected and bizarre. “You.” His tone was all command. “Señor Petro, we discover you now, we're blessed, we find oil.” He laughed as if he couldn't believe his good luck. “You, señor, you're our oil.”