Spirit (45 page)

‘What do you think?' he asked. He was red in the face from doing up his belt.

‘Drink less wine, eat fewer enchiladas,' Laura remarked.

‘You look fine,' said Elizabeth. ‘It says in the book that Captain Figueredo's uniform is “ill-fitting and stained with sweat”.'

Bronco lifted his arm to see if his uniform was stained with sweat, too, and the stitching ripped.

‘There, you look seedier still,' Laura teased him.

‘Are you ready,
senor?
' asked Eusebio, dourly. He plainly thought that this was all madness, and was impatient to get back to his beans and his corn and his collard greens.

Oh, wait up one minute,' said Bronco. ‘You never see a police chief without a gun.'

‘You don't need a gun, do you?' Elizabeth asked him. ‘It's only imaginary, after all.'

Then, however, she thought of the rabbit-fur glove lying on her desk. For some reason, she hadn't wanted to tell Bronco and Laura about it, particularly Bronco. She knew how desperate he was to exorcize Billy from his life, and she hadn't wanted to unnerve him. ‘All right,' she said. ‘You'd better have a gun. There are some pretty tough types in this novel.'

Bronco went to his gun-closet in the living-room, unlocked it, and took out a long-barrelled Colt .45 revolver. He loaded it, and pushed it into his belt.

‘Now you really look the part,' said Laura, as he came back in.

Eusebio stepped forward with a small parcel of greaseproof paper, and unwrapped four dried slices of cactus. ‘These are the mescal buttons,' he said. ‘You must think of who you want to be, think about them strong, so you don't think nothing else. Then you chew the button slow and even, let the juices flow down your throat. They make you nauseous, you understand? Some people never get the peyote dream because they sick too soon. Let the
dream come into you. Let it rise up inside you. You will be feeling plenty strange. You will see the peyote plant. You will
become
the peyote plant. Everything become vegetable. Then vegetable will open and out you will step . . . spirit-form, yes?'

Bronco picked up one of the mescal buttons, and sniffed it. ‘We can't smoke these, no?'

‘No,' said Eusebio, shaking his head. ‘No smoke, chew.'

Elizabeth lay back on the cot. Laura knelt down beside her and held her hand.

‘You'll watch me, won't you?' said Elizabeth.

‘Every moment,' Laura promised her. ‘If it looks like any thing's wrong, I'll wake you up immediately, I promise.'

Eusebio handed her one of the buttons. ‘Think of your spirit-shape first, then start to chew. Try to hold back your sickness. The peyote changes your breathing, same as strangling, same as hanging. Too much peyote and you don't breathe at all, and you die.'

‘Thanks for the reassurance,' said Bronco. ‘Let's just get on with it, before I change my mind.'

Elizabeth settled herself down. Then she reached across, and held Bronco's hand. They were taking this journey together, and she wanted them to stay together. She looked at him, and tried to smile, and he winked back at her, and said, ‘God be with us, what do you say?'

Elizabeth nodded.

‘Close your eyes now,' Eusebio instructed them. ‘Close your eyes and think of your spirit-form. Think of its appearance, think of what it looks like. Make out that it's somebody you know, somebody real. Make out that you can touch this spirit-form, and talk to it. Make out that you know it better than you know yourself. Then slide inside it, one person inside another, like two photographs, one on top of the other one. Then you can be that spirit-form, then you can know what they know, and talk like they talk, and go to places where only
they
can go.'

Elizabeth closed her eyes, although the room was still so bright that she could see the scarlet veins in her eyelids. She tried to forget that she was lying on a canvas cot, holding hands with Bronco, with Laura leaning over her, and Eusebio impatiently sniffing and fidgeting in the corner.

She tried to imagine that she knew Rosita; that she had met her in New York. She tried to imagine her face, and her voice, and the way she walked. According to
Nights in Havana
, she always wiggled her hips when she walked, and shook out her black curly hair, and when she could get it she ceaselessly chewed Wrigley's gum. She tried to imagine that she could actually hear Rosita, smell her perfume, feel her skin. Rosita had a tiny tattoo of a flying owl on her left shoulder, carrying a bell in its claws. ‘Death's fatal bellman', that was what the Cubans called owls. It was a symbol of mortality – live your life to the utmost, because tomorrow the ground may open up and swallow you, or a drunken client may slash you with a cut- throat razor.

Hesitantly, she dropped the mescal button into her mouth. It tasted bitter and dry, and she almost spat it out at once. But she knew that she had to help Bronco to hunt down Billy, and that she herself had to exorcize the Peggy-girl, and if this was the only way to do it, then she would have to chew this hard, disgusting slice of cactus until she took on Rosita's spirit-form, until she
became
Rosita.

‘Slow – chew
slow
,' she heard Eusebio telling her, quite crossly.

She thought: I'm chewing as slow as I can. This cactus is absolutely disgusting, it's hard and it's fibrous and this sickening bile-tasting juice keeps squidging out of it. How can I be Rosita when I'm chewing this stuff?

There was a moment when she almost vomited. The juice was so foul that her stomach contracted, and she gripped Bronco's hand and let out a loud cackling retch. She kept her eyes closed, though, and lay back again, and even though she knew that Laura was kneeling beside her, stroking her
forehead, she began to feel less like herself and more like –

– she didn't know. She felt as if she were poised in the desert, with the sun blazing down. She felt as if she would never move again. She heard drums softly beating, and voices chanting, and the sky rotated around her like a smoky kaleidoscope. She felt as if lying here motionless were her natural state. There was no need to move to have insight. She felt as if time were slowing down, slower and slower by the second, until her thoughts were moving like treacle, and a second lasted for hour. No need to move.

Yet the drums kept on softly beating, they were mamba drums; guitars began to strum. She was opening, she was flowering. She felt almost as if she were being born.

She journeyed an infinite journey across the desert, sliding sideways on her own unconsciousness. Days and nights went past, like a fanblade flickering in front of a shaded electric lamp. She heard women talking and laughing: she heard men shouting and fighting. She saw a cockroach on a plaster wall. She bought the dress because she wanted to buy the dress, it reminded her of flowering gardens, where fountains splashed, and cherubs stood blind-eyed and toupeed with moss. She got drunk on American whiskey and screamed with laughter. Then she was falling downstairs and jarring her back. She screamed and swore. She was sure that she would lose the baby. Later, bewildered and exhausted, she sat in an armchair watching a man in a dirty sweat-stained vest dealing cards. His name was Esmeralda and he never looked up once. On the other side of the room a dark-skinned girl of no more than fifteen years old was dancing for him, swaying her hips. She was naked except for 7-inch high-heeled shoes and a cluster of rainbow-coloured combs in her hair. All the time she was dancing she was stretching her vagina open wide with two fingers, glistening and crimson. Still the man didn't look up. The cards were more important. Fate was more important.

She sat up. She had a hangover and her mouth was dry. Next
to her, Captain Figueredo lay snoring. They must have finished that whole bottle of whiskey and fallen asleep. He stank like a pig, like he always stank. He never washed his penis, either. A girl had to be drunk to suck on that. Opera music was playing in the next room, on a scratchy gramophone record. She looked around. She had the extraordinary impression that she was in two places at once. She was sitting up in her own bed in her room in the Hotel Nacional, but at the same time she was sitting in somebody's office, with a half-transparent desk, and ghostly shelves that were filled with books. She could see the faint shadowy outline of a man standing by the window, and when she turned to climb out of bed she saw another shadowy outline that looked like a girl, kneeling close beside her.

She rubbed her eyes, but the shadowy outlines remained. The whiskey, she thought. The whiskey was bad. That fucker Perez. She had paid him $6 for that bottle of whiskey, and what had it done to her? The opera went screeching and warbling on and on, and she felt like going through to the next room and snapping the record over her knee.

‘Jesus,' she said, shaking Captain Figueredo's arm.

He breathed in sharply, and then let out an extraordinary bellowing snort. ‘What? What's the matter? What time is it?'

‘I don't know, afternoon. The whiskey was bad. I keep seeing double.'

Jesus Figueredo rolled himself into a sitting position. He blinked towards the window, and then he said, ‘You're right. I see double too. I see books, and a table, and a man.'

‘Perez must have sold me some of that bootleg stuff”.'

‘I'll kill him. I'll bite off his fucking kneecaps.'

Rosita stood up. She felt nauseous, and strange, but there was something more. She felt as if she could hear people speaking in her ear – sometimes loudly, sometimes scarcely audible. She shook her head so that her long black ringlets shivered, but she could still hear them.

‘What do you think?' she asked Captain Figueredo. ‘What do you think, the whiskey's made us crazy?'

Captain Figueredo stood up. He licked his lips like a lizard, as if he would have given anything for a drink, and paced around the room. ‘We're here,' he said, after a while. ‘And yet, we're
here
, too. Bedroom, library – library, bedroom. We're in
both.
'

‘What does it mean? Does it mean we're still drunk?'

‘No. I don't think so. It means . . . we've done something. I know I've done something, but I can't for the life of me remember what it is.'

‘It has to do with . . .' Elizabeth began. But her memory was so fragile and fleeting that she didn't have time to articulate it before it twisted out of sight, and off it went, like a freshly-opened but unread love letter being caught by the wind. She hesitated for another reason, too. She was concerned that Captain Figueredo might not want her again, if she turned out to be difficult. He always paid well, and brought his friends, and that was what survival was all about. She had a reputation as the girl who would do anything, from dancing the mamba to letting you fuck her with the leg of a kitchen chair.

Captain Figueredo pressed his hand over his eyes, and counted to ten in a loud, obvious whisper. Then he opened his eyes again, and looked around. ‘It's still here,' he said. ‘Books, people. Nothing's changed at all . . . except that man was standing further to the right.'

‘Maybe he's waiting for something. He looks the impatient type.'

‘He's not impatient. He's frightened of me. He's just a peon, look at him.'

‘I'm going mad,' said Rosita. ‘Fuck that Perez.'

‘Don't you fret about Perez,' Captain Figueredo reassured her, clapping his hand on her back. ‘Perez is a dead person from now. Besides – '

He hesitated, thinking, thinking. He touched his forehead with his fingers.

‘What is it?' asked Rosita. ‘You have a headache, what?'

‘I . . . I don't know who I am.'

‘What do you mean? Don't frighten me!'

‘I am Jesus Figueredo. I am Jesus Figueredo. But why? I feel like I was somebody else, and now I'm me.'

‘It's that fucker Perez.'

‘No, no,' said Captain Figueredo. ‘It's more than that. I
am
somebody else; and you are, too. Don't you feel it?' He looked around the room, at the bare-plastered walls of the Hotel Nacional, but at the bookshelves, too, and the people who were watching them but weren't really there.

Rosita knew what Jesus was trying to say. She
did
feel like somebody else. She also knew that she was supposed to do something important – more important than meeting Manuel at the Mamba Bar, more important than collecting her money from Dr Cifuentes.

At almost the same moment, both of them looked down at Rosita's bed and saw the book. It didn't look like a real book. It was semi-transparent, like the pencil-sketch of a book which an artist might have added to a finished painting. But they could read the title clearly enough,
Nights in Havana
.

‘Raul Palma,' said Rosita.

Captain Figueredo nodded in agreement. Then he checked his wristwatch. ‘You know him better than me. It's nearly four o'clock. Where can we find him now?'

‘The San Francisco brothel maybe. Or the Super Bar on the corner of Virdudes.'

‘What does he do at the San Francisco brothel?'

‘He has friends there. You would say co-conspirators.'

Captain Figueredo dragged a filthy handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose. Then he stuck his finger up his nostril
and twisted it around. ‘We'll try the Super Bar first. Are you ready? Do you want to wash?'

Rosita moved through two worlds at once, out of the bedroom and into the bathroom. She could see ghostly furniture that wasn't there, and windows letting in light where there were solid walls, and pictures hanging in mid-air, and potted palms in the middle of doorways. She went to the bathroom and switched on the light over the mirror. She peered at herself and thought she looked haggard. She lifted her dress in front of the basin and washed herself with her hand. She watched herself in the mirror while she did it. She saw somebody else in her eyes but she didn't know who it was.