Cargo of Orchids (24 page)

But she didn’t go anywhere—except back to her cell. Something went wrong—or right, depending on your point of view—and the trap door wouldn’t open. Frenchy survived—again. “Death is not just dying” was all she had to say about it.

A week later, an article in the local paper revealed that Frenchy’s
femme
was not so
fatale
after all. Shortly after the publication of the article in
Lifestyles
, the hangwoman’s roadhouse had been exposed as a notorious hang-out for cross-dressers, Leetia her/himself a female impersonator. She took early retirement. “I never liked to hang a woman,” she said. “It always made me shiver like a leaf.”

I don’t know how many days, weeks or months went by. Sometimes I would be let out “for air,” which meant a trip onto the balcony, but one evening I was taken down to the courtyard, where Consuelo sat on a partially submerged deck-chair, drinking
tinto
(strong, sweet black coffee) and eating
pandebono
, a kind of bread with cheese you bought on the street. She signalled for me to sit and help myself to her leftovers. Nidia, who said the power was still out in the kitchen, began frying zucchini strips on a charcoal griddle on top of an oil drum on the patio.

The old man—nobody had introduced us and he hadn’t volunteered his name, so I’d nicknamed him Don Drano (he simply used people as a kind of sink, to push everything down)—had reappeared, and was complaining that communism had ruined this island, which was why you couldn’t
get decent natural ices. One other thing he didn’t like about living here was the poverty, but you got used to it, he claimed, like the bad water and the noise and the unhealthy climate. He wanted to know what I thought of the squalid mess his daughter had left him to live in. The place was infested with every kind of living insect but fleas, and the only reason there were no fleas, he said, was that the bedbugs ate them.

His daughter? I sat watching his lips as he talked, realizing now why he looked so familiar. Consuelo, meanwhile, paid more attention to the dying almond tree than she did to her dying father. Someone had decorated the tree with milk cartons, split open down the sides, to make ornaments that spun in the wind (though in the protected courtyard, I never saw them spin).

When Nidia finally produced a meal, it was
sobrebarriga
, and other mysterious parts of a cow, and zucchini fried in an oil slick on the side. The food of the
indígenas.
I left my plate untouched.

El Chopo came back drunk from the North Pole Tropical Bar and Restaurant.
Perfectamente borracho
, he said: the manager had been aggressive and forced him to drink whisky. Nidia served
sabayon
, a milky drink made from
aguardiente
, instead of coffee, but I wasn’t going to risk passing out from the effect of the potent liquor again. Consuelo told El Chopo she had business to take care of, and when she left El Chopo sat staring at the immobile milk cartons, then, after a drink that seemed to render him even more catatonic, passed out with his head down next to his cup.

Don Drano got up from his chair and asked if I would like to accompany him to the garden. It was the first time in many months I had been
asked
if I’d like to do anything, and for a moment I hesitated, not certain how to respond. This could be the moment, I realized slowly, to try to make my escape.

I looked to make sure no one was watching, then followed him, making myself as small as possible, out of the courtyard, over a weedy lawn, to a footpath that led to an iron gate and then through a walled garden of straggling fruit trees, big-leaved avocados and orchids with fleshy, tongue-shaped leaves. In the twilight I could make out only shapes and smells—the blousey ruffled lips, the fragrance of sweet, wet orchid blossoms, the enormous odour of the sea and the wind. Through the garden gate—which Don Drano locked behind me, proving to me he was more aware than he pretended to be—I could see the dark sea rolling in waves, moving further and further away from the shore, and the mouth of El Río Negro. I stood staring out to sea as, overhead, the sad pelicans flew south, hundreds of them. Don Drano told me this meant it was going to rain.

I have now read Chocolata’s story in a book I found in the prison library. When she and her crew were hanged, their bodies had been gradually submerged by the swirling waters of the incoming tide. Three tides were allowed to pass over the women before their bodies were cut down and hung in chains in the port of the City of Orchids.

Don Drano told me when they cut Chocolata down and carried her ashore, her body was covered in white plumage. Some said her soul had become a pelican, and
after that whenever a pelican flew south the rains would come; these were Chocolata’s tears.

A green-grey mist rose off the glazed sea, where a fleet of banana boats drifted. The book,
The Pirate
Queen, said the executioner was almost as famous on the island as Chocolata herself. He had a club foot, and as she stood waiting to die on the gallows, the fierce woman pirate had cursed all male children born on the island by giving them bad legs so they would be doomed to be led by women.

The islanders worshipped their pirate queen. She was a hero to many, a goddess to some, Don Drano said; some islanders stole her body from the authorities and laid her to rest on a bed of orchids at the summit of Nevada Chocolata. The place was, to this day, known as Chocolata’s Shrine.

“Virgin orchids,” he said, “like these.” He showed me the white, fragrant orchids, still favoured by the islanders, that grew wild along the Tranquilandian seacoast and were inhabited by biting fire ants. “You never pick them,” he said. “They are not what they appear to be.”

Consuelo was waiting for us in the courtyard. She scolded Don Drano for taking me away without her permission. The old man muttered his excuses and went to bed.

After my brief taste of freedom, I despaired of returning to my room and being locked in again. But Consuelo told me to sit as Nidia brought more food—frijoles, fried rice and guacamole. For a long time I sat gazing out at the ocean, listening to the screeching of the birds in the dining room, until Consuelo started an argument with Nidia over the best way to cook rice. When she seemed to be losing
the argument, Consuelo broke a chair over the table and stormed off the terrace.

Nidia began wailing; she didn’t want to lose her life on her night off. Consuelo soon returned—not, as Nidia had expected, with her .38, but with the keys to the Jeep. She told Nidia to take me upstairs to my room and lock my door properly before she went home for the evening.

When Nidia wouldn’t stop sobbing, Consuelo picked up a piece of the chair she had broken and lifted it over her head. I thought she was going to kill the poor woman right there, and felt my arm reaching up, as if it were someone else’s arm, and saw, out of the corner of my eye, Consuelo hurl the piece of wood over her shoulder. I saw the red stain of the bougainvillea.

Nidia rose to her feet and stumbled towards the stairs. I followed, as if she were the prisoner and I the one who could leave.

Once a week, a doctor began coming to “inspect” me. He was young, well-dressed, wearing a yellow silk mask that complemented his yellow waistcoat, and a tailored suit. At first I found it hard to take a hooded physician seriously, but he had a gentle manner, and as long as he was in the room with me, I felt oddly safe. He asked how I liked Tranquilandia, and I said I was enjoying myself immensely—I especially liked being locked in my room all day. I planned to devote a whole chapter to the island in A
Hostage’s Guide to South America
, a book I was going to write just as soon as I escaped, and he smiled and said that was one book he would look forward to reading because he
knew of no one who’d ever got away from Las Blancas, except in a coffin. I asked him if he considered it ethical to treat a woman, a
pregnant
woman at that, who was being held hostage without reporting it to the authorities. He replied that Consuelo de Corazón and her mother were the only authorities on Tranquilandia. He recommended I eat
helado con sabor de sangre
at least once a day—he claimed it was natural for women to lose hair when they were pregnant, and that blood-flavoured ice cream was one of the best sources of iron he could recommend. He asked me to be sure to look up some relations of his in Montreal if I ever made it back there.

Consuelo said the only place to get fresh
helado con sabor de sangre
was at the North Pole Tropical Bar and Restaurant. Even though I was almost too weak to walk, she made me get out of bed and go with her, then sit next to her in the Jeep and watch for assassins.

The break in my routine worried me. Even though I had come to believe I was in no physical harm—at least not until my baby was born—I didn’t trust Consuelo. I was on my guard the moment I was in her presence. I remembered Angel’s warning: “It is a sin to be surprised.”

“Aquí, se sube a pie y se baja en ambulancia”
(in this neighbourhood, you go in walking and come out in a ambulance), Consuelo said as she manoeuvred the Jeep through the narrow streets, where there were no road signs, no streetlights, not even any manhole covers left. I saw men and women wrapped in blankets made of rags, pigs and dogs rooting alongside them, through piles of
garbage; some families had set up housekeeping in the twisted hulks of rust-eaten cars. The
olla
(literally, “the pot” or a dangerous place) had the feel of a battle camp back in the Dark Ages.

We parked beside the charred remains of a fire hydrant, and Consuelo gave a
gamine
a few centavos to guard the Jeep. We had started up the hill towards the
mercado
when a scrawny dog came snarling at me from the shadows and a small boy ran after it, beating it about the head with a thick piece of rope. Consuelo told me to ignore him and stay close to her, but then the boy appeared in front of me, asking for
un regalo
, a present, because he had saved my life. The boy’s head was shaved, his eyes were drained pools. I said I had nothing, opened my empty hands.

“Yo creo que tiene algo, señora. Deme un peaje,”
he said, and he raised the rope over his head as if he was going to strike me, the way he had the dog, which now stood cringing against a wall. I covered my belly, instinctively, and turned my body to protect my child.

“He believes everyone has to have
something
,” Consuelo said, reaching into her pocket. “He expects us to pay his toll. He calls it a
peaje
, but it’s not, it’s a
rescate
, a ransom payment we are forced to pay just to be able to walk on our own streets. We are hostages to children in this city.”

I thought she might shoot the snarling dog, but she filled the boy’s palm with change instead, and he slipped into the shadows. “I am too tired to argue with him. We have bigger wars to fight, and all they can think of is their stomachs. Someone should get rid of him before he is old enough to make all of us pay in more unpleasant ways.”
Where I come from, it is considered more hygienic and effective to kill
guerrilleras
while they are in the womb.

We turned a corner onto a street that took on a friendlier air. There were bars, fritanga stands,
juguerías
and
churrasquerías
, jewellery shops and, by local standards, fashionable clothing boutiques. Crouched in the doorway of Hot American-Style Fashions, a woman, covered from head to foot in newspapers and garbage bags, held out her begging bowl; Consuelo dropped a few coins in it, then continued on to a
juguería
, which sold juices made from fruits I’d never heard of—star apples, marmalade plums, tree tomatoes, honey berries. Consuelo ordered
zapote
(sapodilla) for herself, turnip-like on the outside but rich with orange flesh when you cut into it, and for me a
lulo
—bitter tasting, green—which, she said, would also help fortify my blood.

We walked on into the funeral-parlour district and cut through the
mercado popular
, which was beginning to empty. Consuelo led me through a maze of fragrant orchids beneath rows of yellow, blood-dripping entrails of cattle slaughtered that morning. No wonder the orchids hadn’t sold, I said. Who would buy bloodstained flowers?

Consuelo said people expected orchids from the market to have blood on them; if the blood hadn’t dried, you knew the orchids had been picked that morning. Once, she said, she’d bought a bouquet of nun’s orchids because they looked fresh, like
sardinas
, young girls, but by the next morning they had become old crones, and she’d had to throw them out.

The heady scent of the orchids clung to me as we neared the back entrance to the market, where two
brujas
invited us to try their love charms:
legítimos polvos
to “dominate your man”;
polvos para las celosas
, sticky powders to ward off jealousy; tiny blue bottles in which to collect your tears. They could get anything we wanted, they cried after us: powerful
bilongos
to protect female warriors, emeralds from Muzo for fertility, dolls wrapped in grave cloth taken from ancient burial sites, dolls to protect you from insanity and the evil eye, fertility dolls, dolls to bewitch unwanted foetuses.

“Brujas chimbas,”
Consuelo said disgustedly. Charlatans. Fakes. “There is only one real
bruja
left on Tranquilandia, and she does not come to the market to cheat and rob.”

A single red geranium fought for its life amongst a holocaust of cigarette butts in a pot by the entrance to the North Pole Tropical Bar and Restaurant; a horseshoe and a piece of aloe vera hung over the only window for
buena suerte.
The sagging roof was made of corrugated iron and cardboard; shreds of last year’s political posters flapped from the walls, which were painted with a blue wash.

The green door, bleached and flaked by the sun, was bolted, and when Consuelo knocked, an eye appeared in the judas hole. A man brandishing a handgun hastened to let us in.