Black Flower (26 page)

“I feel strange,” said Kim Seokcheol as he loafed around in their room. “We could sleep for the whole day and there is no one to say anything.” Seo Gijung chided him: “Surely you don’t miss the hacienda, do you?” Kim Seokcheol waved his hand. “No, of course not.”

But their bodies were far too familiar with the rhythm of a henequen hacienda to easily deny it. In Mérida they still woke up at four o’clock. When they dressed and went outside, the light in the cathedral’s belfry was looking down on them. The money they brought with them gradually dwindled, and there weren’t that many ways to earn more in Mérida. “Maybe we should just go back to Korea.” But they didn’t have the money to do that. Even if they had had enough to travel, they would be just as hard-pressed to make a living when they returned.

Jo Jangyun stayed at the hacienda for the time being. During the course of a few strikes, he lived up to his reputation as the workers’ representative of Chenché. “I can’t leave,” he would say, but the truth was that something was writhing inside him. He already understood that many Koreans would ultimately have no choice but to remain in Mexico. If that was so, there would be a need for an organization to rally the Koreans scattered across the country. Now we may be contract laborers at the haciendas, shackled as bond slaves, but next year will be different. Jo Jangyun naturally began to imagine himself as the head of this organization. Is not this a place where there is no discrimination between high and low? It had been long since the few aristocrats at each hacienda had been reduced to pariahs. There was no way that those who could not properly handle a single task entrusted to them could secure political hegemony. Unlike them, Jo Jangyun had learned how to organize groups and had acquired leadership skills and a strong will in the Russian-style new military. Or maybe he was born that way: when his mother carried him in her womb, she dreamt that a tiger with two heads had leaped into the folds of her skirt. When he thought of it like that, his plans grew bigger. Why should I not be able to form a righteous army organization here that would cross the border between Manchuria and Hamgyeong province to attack and harass the Japanese army? Our nation has long revered culture and scorned the military, so we have come to this state of affairs. Mexico, where there were some two hundred retired soldiers, was the perfect place to establish a new independence army. Furthermore, there was no Japanese surveillance here, so attempting this task would be even easier.

From then on, Jo Jangyun began to spread the philosophy of “revering the military,” which he himself had devised, to those around him. The new nation that he imagined on that Yucatán hacienda would be ruled by a charismatic soldier or retired soldier, and it would pour all its strength into building independent military power. Under a universal conscription system, all citizens would have a duty to national defense. The press—he thought of those young scholars who wrote appeals to the emperor—would have to be subject to appropriate limitations. First, the military had to marshal all its strength to repel the surrounding strong nations, represented by Japan and Russia. Gojong’s followers, who had relied on diplomacy, were utterly naïve.

The number of people who sympathized with Jo Jangyun’s ideas grew. “When our contracts are finished and we leave the haciendas, let us collect money and found a school, one that reveres the military. And we will have to create an army.” “And weapons?” “For the time being, we concentrate on an organization; the weapons will gradually come about somehow. Might not a war break out between the United States and Japan? If Japan is fighting Russia, there is no reason why they might not fight the United States. If that happens, the United States will give us weapons. Who knows the mountains and rivers of Hamgyeong and Pyeongan better than we do? We will return with dignity to our homeland as part of the American army and crush the Japanese. If we are to do this, however, we must organize the army in advance.”

Jo Jangyun began to write down these ideas. Great beads of sweat dropped from his forehead and soaked the paper.

C
HOE
S
EONGIL WAS
in a good mood as he swayed on his horse and headed toward the henequen fields. He wore a stylish, broad-brimmed sombrero, and a leather whip was tucked in his saddle. The cross that he had snatched from Father Paul sparkled in the light on his exposed chest. Seen from afar, he looked every inch a native Mexican overseer. When he arrived at the henequen fields, the Koreans greeted him. He slowly circled the fields, barely acknowledging their greetings. The henequen leaves cut by the machetes helplessly fell to the ground. The women and children bound them. Everything looked peaceful.

From afar, Choe Seongil saw the shaman moving about with difficulty. He lightly prodded the horse’s flanks with his spurs and trotted over to him. “Hey!” At Choe Seongil’s call, the shaman took off his hat and looked up. His eyes were blinded by the sunlight and his face scrunched up as he squinted. “How are you doing? Are you handling it?” The shaman nodded his head. “Well, do a good job, otherwise you’ll end up like Bak Gwangsu.”

When Choe Seongil had gone, the shaman spit violently. Mr. Lee, who had been working beside him, came up to him and sympathized: “That bastard thief. That hacendado’s bitch.” The shaman looked up resentfully at the sky, empty of even a single speck of cloud. “I wonder if Mr. Bak has died,” said Mr. Lee to no one in particular, as if talking to himself. “Well, whether he died from sickness or starved to death, one way or another he must be gone.” Mr. Lee struck a henequen leaf hard in his rage. “They keep saying believe, believe, but that hacendado and that bastard thief shut him up in that hut just because he’s sick, so who would want to believe what they believe? Even the grandmother goddess from our old neighborhood wouldn’t do something like that.”

When the day’s work had ended and it grew dark, the shaman packed some corn pancakes and cabbage kimchi and secretly climbed over the hacienda wall. He walked thirty minutes to a ramshackle hut that was used for quarantining the sick. A stench wafted out from the hut, which was barely sturdy enough to withstand a stiff wind. “Hey, Mr. Bak.” He went inside to find Bak Gwangsu Paul lying on a mat, sunken-eyed. The shaman slowly raised him, offered him food, and said, “Do you intend to die in a foreign land?” Bak Gwangsu shook his head to say that he wasn’t hungry, but then he ate a bit of the cabbage kimchi. “What’s that?” The shaman pointed at a small mound of earth in the field, and Bak Gwangsu laughed, saying, “Do you know what I did for the first time since I came here?” The shaman narrowed his eyes. “So you buried a dead body. But with what?” Bak Gwangsu lifted his hands and laughed weakly.

“You had no choice,” the shaman said. “You couldn’t very well sleep among rotting corpses.” He looked blankly at Bak Gwangsu. “Still the same as always?” “Yes. I cannot do anything because I have no strength in my hands, and there is not a spot on my body that doesn’t hurt, but then again it’s not a fatal illness. I can’t sleep at night. I see too many things. When I close my eyes, everything turns white. It feels like someone is gnawing away at my bones.”

The shaman grimaced and closed his eyes. “That’s why you need to listen to me. There is no other choice. I don’t do this because I want to either. But there is no other way.” Bak Gwangsu shook his head. “I cannot do that.” But the shaman pressed him: “Why on earth can’t you?” After a long silence, Bak Gwangsu opened his mouth. “I was a Catholic priest.” There was little change in the shaman’s expression; he didn’t understand what difference that made. That put Bak Gwangsu at ease. The shaman said, “No one knows. The spirit just comes. You cannot resist him. You’ll die. You have no choice but to receive him. The spirit says he wants to come in, so you have no choice, do you?”

The shaman left and Bak Gwangsu’s suffering continued. When night fell, a woman came. She was not from Buena Vista hacienda. “Who are you?” The woman wordlessly prepared a table for him. She fried a yellow corvina and laid it on white rice. Next to that she put crunchy cabbage kimchi, red chili pepper paste, unripe chili peppers, pickled oysters, pickled clams, and steamed crab. Bak Gwangsu glanced at the woman as he wolfed down the food. It was a table of which he could only have dreamt. He dug into the yellow corvina and grabbed a large, steaming chunk of its white flesh with his chopsticks. The woman went outside to boil water in the rice pot. He called out to her, “Mom?” The woman laughed and shook her head. “Do you not know me?” Bak Gwangsu, now full, slowly examined the woman’s face. She set down the tray with the boiled rice water on it and sat quietly next to him. He gripped the woman’s wrist; it was warm and comfortable, an indescribably pleasant feeling. He closed his eyes. Far away, he saw a single tree. “Let us meet there.” He ran with all his might. From the great spirit tree, which grew clearer in the early dawn mist, something large hung and swayed, like a branch that had been struck and split by lightning. He realized what it was. Suddenly a pain like a squeezing of his limbs washed over him. Here was the woman who had hanged herself, the woman who had become a young widow at the age of twenty and who whirled about him every night. He did not understand. Early one morning, she had invited him to the entrance of a foggy village and showed him her corpse, though he had done nothing wrong. Had she waited, weaving her web, just to show him that? The absurdity of it took his breath away. It was like a trap that God had prepared to test and punish him. The judgment had already been handed down when he had succumbed to temptation. Perhaps everything that had happened after that was the tedious process of carrying out the judgment that had been handed down.

Time passed by again in a flash, and twelve spirits galloped on horseback into his hut, waving swords and flags. On another day, an old man appeared and fed him, but when he received the food he went up to heaven and shared it with the birds and beasts. Finally, the horrible shamaness from Gomso Ferry appeared, thundering, “It is no use to run away. I chose you not because I liked you, but because I needed your body. Now I have come for it!” The religion that had saved him when he fled from Gomso Ferry had no satisfying reply to a situation like this. At last, his eyes met those of the woman who had hung like a fruit. He recoiled in fright and opened his eyes. There was nothing in the dank and gloomy hut. No yellow corvina, no beautiful woman.

A few days later, the shaman, with a few dozen others, came to see Bak Gwangsu. To avoid being seen, they arrived after midnight. They took a great risk to witness the curious sight of the shaman presiding over the initiation ritual of another shaman. They had bribed the Mayan guards and made sure that Choe Seongil was asleep. They had also found out that Ignacio Velásquez had gone to Mérida and was not returning that night. Many people from nearby haciendas, including several musicians, had heard about the ritual and flocked to the hut. Among them was the eunuch Kim Okseon, who had grown very gaunt over the past three years. He said he would play the flute. Made from some unknown Mexican grass, his flute produced a sound similar to that of a Korean flute. If one listened closely, the high notes brought to mind a Korean small horn. Someone else brought a double-headed Mexican drum made of cowhide, so it was a proper ritual to a certain extent.

The initiation took place in the yard in front of the hut, in the middle of an abandoned wasteland where even henequen did not grow. The land stretched out in all directions, with no mountains or rivers, and the ritual lasted for over five hours. The musicians and the shaman had never practiced together in their lives, but they performed in time with each other as if they had been a team all along. The palace eunuch, the spirit-possessed shaman from Incheon, and the leader of a folk percussion troupe from a mountain village played the flute, danced, and beat the drum for the former priest. The women, tired from their hard labor, surrendered themselves to the familiar melody that ran through their veins and to the rhythm that was engraved on their bones. In an instant, the yard was swept up in a carnival-like frenzy that transcended nationality. Laughing and crying as if mad, the women danced and the men drank for the whole five hours. Bak Gwangsu lost his senses. Like one in a trance, he did what the shaman said, undressing if he was told to undress and dressing if he was told to dress, standing up when he was told to stand up and sitting down when he was told to sit down. At the end, the vision that came to Bak Gwangsu was, strangely enough, a white horse. The white horse galloped toward him from the distant horizon and swallowed him. He immediately came out again and rode the white horse, carrying a red flag and a white flag. And he shouted, “I am the white horse general!”

This was the spirit that the shamaness of Gomso Ferry had served. Suddenly, between visions, the groundless certainty that the shamaness of Gomso Ferry had finally died flashed into Bak Gwangsu’s mind and then disappeared.

I
T WAS LATE AT NIGHT
by the time Gwon Yongjun and Yi Yeonsu arrived at the port of Veracruz. They found a room in an inn near the train station. Gwon Yongjun, who had so much luggage that he had to hire a porter, felt good at the thought of leaving this loathsome land. He was also happy to be taking Yeonsu with him. He went down to the bar on the first floor of the inn and drank rum. He offered some to Yeonsu, but she refused. He drank one glass after another. When the sailors next to him sang a song from their hometown, Gwon Yongjun sang a song from his. He bought them a bottle of rum and they applauded him.

Yeonsu helped him back to their room and he fell fast asleep. Yeonsu took off his clothes. She neatly folded his shirt and pants and put them in her pack, then threw his socks and shoes out the window. She took about 50 pesos from his pocket. The rest of the money he kept in a money belt strapped to his waist, so she couldn’t take any of that. Still, Yeonsu had enough to return to Mérida and pay for her son Seobi’s release. She quietly opened the door and went downstairs, going out through the side door of the bar where the sailors were chattering. She made her way down a dark alley and walked in a daze to the piers. She did not know when Gwon Yongjun might come after her. Her clothes were sure to catch people’s eyes. And she didn’t speak any Spanish.