Cargo of Orchids (21 page)

I tried to sit up, taking the shallowest breaths I could to avoid inhaling the vehicle’s exhaust. We were passing through a plumed forest of bamboo, with the occasional stand of goatwood or cedar trees opening onto a broad plain where ceibu cattle grazed. White egrets perched on their humps, taking refuge from the sun in the shade of crimson trees, the tips of every branch glowing with fiery candelabra. Birds with foot-long ribbons for tails, and iridescent doves, landed on the red road in front of us, then flew up.

The road narrowed into a single track as we entered a valley of little wood and palm-thatch villages. Above us rose the steep and steamy bourbon-coloured Nevada Chocolata, fringed with wispy mists. Young girls in floral-print dresses with dishes of green plantains on their heads called out to us as we passed. Barefooted boys, their black feet swollen and ulcerated, ran along beside the Jeep, waving packages of white cheese wrapped in banana leaves. We crossed a river where the grass was flooded and cattle fed on blue hyacinths and women scrubbed their children’s thin bodies with lemons and mud.

My cramps had grown more infrequent. I shifted my position, propping myself up on one elbow so I could still see. I saw dusty greyish trees, scrub brush and the occasional pink-washed farmhouse smothered with scarlet bougainvillea.

I sat fully upright, this time to be sick into a plastic bag that smelled of cigarette butts and overripe fruit. I asked El Chopo to slow down, but he paid no attention.

We had reached the outskirts of the City of Orchids. The road wound through a hard-shell shantytown of
bamboo huts with rusted tin roofs. El Chopo ploughed the Jeep though potholes and ruts filled with black scummy water, streets heady with fruit and vegetable debris, the cloying sweetness of decay, and stinking river mud like deposits around a clogged drain, everywhere you looked. A small boy, naked, with six inches of umbilical cord protruding from his distended belly, picked a drowned rat out of a puddle and hurled it onto our windshield.

Heat, a heat so lazy and intoxicating you feel as though you are always just waking from a wine-drugged nap: this is what I remember of the City of Orchids. Mud and rats and mosquitoes and flying cockroaches three inches long—I remember these, and feral children too, eating guava jelly with their hands at the side of the road, and old men with diseased feet, and young men who looked like assassins on every corner.

Driving through the balconied streets in the centre of town, where every ground-floor window was covered with ornate wrought-iron bars, everywhere I looked I saw funeral homes. I learned later, from Nidia, the maid at the Hotel Viper, that poor people always waited until a family member was on her deathbed before bringing her to the hospital, reinforcing their idea that a hospital was a place you went to die. Poor people did not own cars, so funeral parlours were positioned close to the hospital for convenience.

One
funeraria
offered cut-rate coffins for those who had lost their legs. Another specialized in thin boxes for the poor, thick hardwood ones for the rich and “designer coffins” for
los vivos
, those “full of life.”

A graffiti-covered bus, whose windows had been removed, lurched up the street, listing like a boat about to discharge its cargo. El Chopo cursed and veered onto the curb, almost knocking down a flower vendor and his sign,
Flores Para Los Muertos
, at the entrance to the
mercado popular.
A bald, shirtless man spat at us from the back of the bus, as if the near accident had been our fault. Tiny Cattle said he believed they took the windows out of the local buses to make it easier for passengers to spit on people.

El Chopo parked in the No Parking Emergency Parking Only zone outside the hospital. A
mestizo
in bare feet hobbled up to the Jeep and tried to sell Tiny a pair of black-market sunglasses. When Consuelo helped me out, I almost tripped over a limbless man on a little plank with wheels.

“Hay cigarillos?”
he asked. He nudged me and held up, between his teeth, an official-looking stamped document, complete with gruesome photographs, that showed his disability had been incurred in a bona fide accident when he was a young army recruit. Consuelo said the paper was most likely a forgery, but tossed him a package of Pielrojas anyway.

A bronze statue of an Indian, his naked legs and arms breaking free of his chains, stood at the entrance to El Hospital De Los Libres (the Hospital of the Freed). A man sat in a wheelchair next to the statue, smoking through a little hole in his neck.

Inside, a receptionist instructed Consuelo to take the elevator to the second floor. A nurse hurrying a bouquet of dead flowers out of a room that was being fumigated showed us where we could wait, in a cubicle partitioned off
by thin wainscot panels topped with a grille of chicken-wire. A small newspaper clipping, in English, warned, “The Pill is a Killer.” There was a sink with a dirty coffee cup in it, and beside the sink two white plastic containers, one labelled “Needles
Limpias?
”, the other “Needles
Sucias?
” There was some question, it seemed, as to which needles needed sterilizing.

By the time a doctor came to examine me, the cramps had stopped but panic had set in again. The doctor prodded me on either side of my abdomen and said my severe pains were possibly caused by amoebas, unless it was my appendix.

I soon wondered if he had been to the same school of quackery as Consuelo. He wanted to do blood work, but I said I refused to allow him or anyone else in that hospital to stick one of their filthy needles in any of my veins. He shrugged and checked my blood pressure, then asked me to stick out my tongue. The morgue, he warned, was already overpopulated with people who had refused to co-operate.

Consuelo advised me to do what he asked, but when I stuck out my tongue, the doctor told Consuelo—in Spanish—that I had a very beautiful tongue and that he would like to arrange a bed for me in a “private part” of the hospital.

Consuelo thanked him but said that wouldn’t be necessary. “She will be staying in a safe place,” she told the doctor. If anyone asked, she said as she smoothed the creases out of a hundred-dollar bill, he had never laid eyes on me.

We got back in the Jeep and drove a short distance across town. El Chopo crossed himself as he parked outside a church presided over by a twenty-foot-high statue of
“Cristo Rey, Víctima.” A half-naked Indian lay passed out on a stone bench at the statue’s feet.

As we started across the
plaza
, which seemed to be a gathering place for vagrants, stray dogs and
gamines
who fired at one another with sticks for make-believe machine guns, we were accosted by three police officers. They asked to see my papers. There had been kidnappings in the area. Tiny Cattle lit the
jefe
a cigarette while the other two began rifling through my knapsack. Consuelo said my papers had been misplaced and gave the
jefe
a hundred-dollar bill “for his trouble.” The
jefe
tipped his hat, and the three, plus Tiny Cattle, wandered across the square and disappeared through the steel door of a bar called El hígado no existe (The Liver Does Not Exist).

The Hotel Viper lay coiled on the shady side of the square, as if waiting for some hapless traveller to stumble into its fangs. It was high tide in the hotel’s front garden, and the lobby was literally awash. The only light came from a dim bulb in a tiny plastic seashell fixed to the ceiling, with a thick layer of dead flies on the bottom. A dark, nervous little man smelling of hair cream and cheap cologne sat behind a desk reading a crime magazine. The cologne mixed with hair cream made me feel dizzy; I reached to grab hold of his desk so I wouldn’t fall. Consuelo told him I was suffering from
soroche
, acute mountain sickness, which he didn’t seem to question, even though the hotel appeared to be highly below sea level.

Consuelo asked to see
el viejo
, the old man, at which the clerk insisted we rest ourselves on a termite-infested
sofa in the dining room. He brought
aguardiente
and a plate of cold fried eggs and guava jelly, the eggs redolent of his hair cream, and left us sitting beneath two eighteen-foot-long anaconda skins nailed to the wall.

The dining room was also home to a scarlet macaw, a green cockatoo and a bald parrot named Edgar, who had a neurotic habit of pulling his feathers out. He sidled up and down a beam under the dining-room roof, defecating and plucking. Suddenly, he swooped down and flew straight into a wall, lying stunned on the ground, screeching,
“Quiero una mujer!”
(I want a woman!).

The water continued to rise, and I started to shiver. Wet feet were unhealthy feet, Consuelo said; you only had to think of the feet of the men and women we’d seen along the road to know what happened if you spent your life without adequate drainage. She made me put my feet up on the sofa, and then covered me with a blanket that smelled of wet feathers.

I don’t know if it was the bumpy ride from the south end of the island or the
aguardiente
, but I woke as it was growing dark, stretched out on the sofa with bugs crawling in my hair. I had dreamed I was travelling on a fast boat up the west coast of Vancouver Island with a load of cocaine. The landscape kept getting colder, icier. Birds were frozen in mid-flight and all the fish had frozen in silver arcs across an icy river.

There was no sign of Consuelo or El Chopo or the little man who had served us the drinks, but an equally mournful woman called Nidia, who said she was the maid, told me the termites were harmless unless I was made of wood.

I swung my legs over the side of the couch onto the floor and found the tide had receded. Nidia said she had prepared a meal for me, and took me down a musty passageway into a courtyard filled with pots of busy lizzie and morning glory the colour of licked bones. A balcony surrounded the courtyard, much like a catwalk around a prison range. A single table had been set for dinner under a shedding almond tree. I took the one chair, next to an old man with thin red lips and black, black eyes who told me he was dying, and about how much more interesting life had been during the war, and how this was a godforsaken island because you couldn’t get good natural ices.

Nidia served us chicken necks, rice with gravel and warm Coca-Cola under a crackling bug-zapper; the scorched remains of flying insects fluttered down onto our food. When the old man asked for dessert, Nidia said the kitchen was closed. The man requested his brandy drink, but the bar, she said, was closed too. He told her he was going to take a stroll in the garden. “I don’t have many nights left to squander.”

Apart from the old gentleman, the hotel appeared to be deserted. I asked Nidia where everyone had gone, but either she didn’t understand my question or she didn’t want to answer it.

I tried my question another way: I asked her where were all the other guests who would be staying in the hotel that night.

She looked at me in surprise. “This is not that kind of a hotel,” she said. “Guests do not stay here.”

——

There are many ways of remembering, ways to forget. I have tried to forget my room in the Hotel Viper, my whitewashed cell with wooden floorboards that creaked, my sad bed, with a cross full of insect exit holes hanging above it. The ceiling, too, had been eaten away, dirty plastic and newspaper showing through, and wires leading to a single light bulb. Nidia told me not to worry about the little bits of plaster that kept falling; men were replacing part of the old roof, and she would sweep my bed every morning.

There were no curtains, and the iron fretwork over the window was
para seguridad
, Nidia said, the first security measure I was aware of, and one I suspected had more to do with keeping people in than keeping anyone out. I hadn’t seen anything at the Hotel Viper worth stealing. I asked where the bathroom was, and Nidia pointed to a door in the wall, a section of the wall that had been cut away, so you had to pry it open. I convinced Nidia to leave the
baño
door ajar, asked for some soap, a toothbrush and a towel. Nidia shrugged.
Más tarde.
Later.

I remember Nidia leaving, and the despair I felt as I entered my walk-in
baño
(a quarter the size of my walk-in closet back home), where the heat and humidity had caused the one cupboard to split and break. Mosquitoes were lined up on the back of the toilet like jumbo jets waiting for take-off; a column of giant black ants marched across the wall. I undressed, hung my clothes on a wire hanger (hoping they wouldn’t rust), and edged my way around the toilet into the shower-bath. There was no shower curtain and nowhere but a clogged hole in the corner of the room for the water to drain, which meant the water
flooded my bedroom as I stood letting it trickle over my hair and face.

A roll of toilet paper that had been chewed by rats was all I had to dry myself with. I waded to my bed, still dripping wet; the pillow felt as small and hard as the kilo Consuelo had tried to give Tiny Cattle, the sheets thin and mournful as Nidia, who had made the bed, tucking the sheets in so tightly I had to fight to squeeze my body between them. I left the light on for comfort, but a colony of termites became attracted to the bulb hanging on a cord from the ceiling above the bedstead; they hurled themselves against it, shedding their wings, which then fell on me. I covered my head with one corner of a miserly sheet, but then I heard an explosion somewhere in the distance, and all the lights went out. Cockroaches kept me awake most of that night, skittering in the walls.

The next morning, I waited for my door to be unlocked or for someone to bring me food; I was hungry, and felt my baby’s need too, which left me feeling even more desperate. My clothes were gone—the thought that someone could sneak in without waking me alarmed me. Two extra-large dresses—one grey, one pink—had been placed at the foot of my bed, along with two sets of underwear and a pair of
alparagatas
—sandals made of strands of coloured rope, the kind the
indígenas
, the local Indians, wore—that looked as if they were waiting to be stepped into, to walk me away from this life. With the sun hitting the tin roof, my room was like a steam bath; my arms and the backs of my legs were red and swollen with bites. I dressed, then tried the
door, but it wouldn’t open, and when I began banging on it, I managed only to arouse Edgar, who screeched that he wanted a woman, so I gave up and tried beating on the iron bars covering the window instead, hoping to catch the attention of the half-naked Indian still sleeping on the stone bench outside the church of Cristo Víctima.