Cargo of Orchids (34 page)

His heart stopped beating, Nidia said, and not even the doctor could revive him. She opened his gown and showed me the enormous incision in the centre of Alias’s chest—the inside a brown-red pulp, like guava paste, blackening around the edges—where the doctor had inserted his hands and tried to massage his heart. It must have suited Daisy to believe her child had died naturally, the same way she believed the butterfly was better off crushed. Whether he died of natural causes or not, I knew it suited Consuelo to have him dead: she needed a body for me to take home in a coffin. I made a fist without even knowing it, and drove it softly through the thin crust of this world. Angel trembled in my arms, opened his lips, then closed them again and let out a sigh. The scent of the orchids reminded me of the night he had come into the world.

I looked down at Alias again; this was the first time I’d seen him without his many layers of clothing, including his knee-high socks and knitted booties. I saw now that he
would never have made any soccer team: one of his small legs ended in a stump, with miniature cauliflowers of flesh where his toes should have been. I looked away, and tried to turn Angel’s head away too, as if we hadn’t come face to face with that hard wall, the one with no handholds, the one we couldn’t climb.

Nidia began washing Alias’s tiny body, his skin the colour of sour milk under the blue light bulb in the lamp beside the coffin that gave us all, I saw now, a terrifying pallor. When she had dried him and dressed him in a long white gown, she laid a cradle orchid beside his head and placed another in his hand. I helped her gather up every orchid in the room, and we arranged them around Alias’s body, then I undid the clasp of the emerald-encrusted coke spoon Consuelo had given me and put the chain around his neck. I wanted him to have something beautiful, something the other
angelitos
would envy. I hadn’t thought of it as symbolic, as a burial of my way of life. That’s the way Pile, Jr. presented it to the jury. He said the moment I gave up the coke spoon, I had turned my back on “the life.” The truth is I gave Alias the coke spoon because it was worth a pile of money, and I thought Daisy would appreciate that.

Daisy, her eyes gulping back pain, stroked her baby’s head, pushed his hair out of his face, kissed his neck and buried her nose in his flesh, as if she could catch a last breath of her child and never let it go.

That night I didn’t sleep, but lay guarding Angel. I held him close and tried to explain how I would never stop loving him. When I said that, he seemed to grow lighter in my
arms, as if he understood. He had always been such an ancient person. Some babies are born old, others never grow up—it takes all kinds, as Rainy always said. Rainy had a way of making everything seem simple, with her twerpy philosophy of life.

What I did, I did out of love, because I wanted Angel to live. I chose life for my baby. It wasn’t like the prosecutor said—that I had only one thought in mind: drugs.

In the drug world most of the jury had seen on television or read about in the papers, women smuggled drugs inside their babies’ diapers, their bottles, their plush toys— in one case, a dead baby had been gutted and stuffed with cocaine. A passenger sitting next to the mother became suspicious when the plane was delayed for several hours and the baby didn’t wake up.

This jury had seen and heard it all, and I don’t think it occurred to any of them that I might consider it immoral to use a child in such a way. They had a dead baby, an airplane and twenty-five green army bags, each one containing ten of Consuelo’s “children” (kilos of cocaine). I had cocaine in my blood, in my vagina, on my mind and in my brain: what more evidence did they need?

When Nidia came with Daisy in the morning I lay unable to move on my bed, and when Nidia asked me if I hadn’t slept well I could hardly get the words out—my throat felt as if I had swallowed a roll of quarters. Nidia promised she would help Daisy look after Angel; nothing was forever, she said—how could I begin to think I would never see Señor Angelito again? I said as long as Consuelo lived, there was no chance of Angel and I being together.
“Consuelo won’t live forever,” Daisy said. She reminded me of what happened to El Chopo. “Even the unkillable have to die.”

And then Daisy said, “I am a Colombian. I will always know where to find you.”

Daisy assured me, as she’d done many times before, she would care for Angel “as if he were her own.” I wanted to trust her, I
needed
to, but I’d seen what had happened to her own. I went to my stash and set out two big rocks on the bathroom counter.

I know I’d promised myself I’d quit, but these were to be my last lines, because I knew things would be different when I got home. At home I wouldn’t have this terrible need. Looking at me now, people don’t see how desperate I’d become. The tears and sweat and the dirt you pick up just walking around in your life, these all wash off. But you can’t wash your heart.

I went to the place where I kept my pipe and my X-acto blade, and they were gone. Or else I’d put them somewhere different and forgotten where. Sometimes I even hid my stash, to test my memory, as a kind of game. I looked in all the obvious places, and then in the places where I’d only hide something if I was really boxed and not thinking straight. My pipe, my blade, my journal,
Contigo Soy Feliz
, had gone. All I had left were my drugs, the hundred-dollar bill, the photograph of my baby. Of Daisy and me and my baby, that is. And for the moment, I had Angel.

I was crazed over Angel, and I wasn’t even parted from him yet. I crushed the rocks and snorted the lines, then washed my face and body, as if I could wash his memory
from my skin and the tears from my face, which was swollen and looked frightening. Such a face might be an asset, if I ended up having to pretend I was a grieving mother going through immigration. But I almost looked
too
sad. There is sadness and there is beyond sadness. I had to be dignified in my grief, passionate but not over the line. I walked a fine line, and the fine lines in my brain had helped put me back on the right side of the road again. The road going on forever, the way in which we are led away from the self. I dried myself, feeling my body all over, as if my hands were detached. Then I sealed the cocaine inside a condom, inserted it deep in my vagina.

Daisy helped me slip on the white silk dress I’d worn to Angel’s christening. She told me the Hotel Viper had burned to the ground during the night, and that Consuelo’s father had died in the fire. Consuelo believed it was the Drug Enforcement Administration, retaliating for Las Blancas having captured the Coast Guard cutter, that had killed El Chopo and her father; now she was forced to step up security all over the island.

Nidia hugged me hard, and cried as she told me she’d seen Yepez and two men carrying Alias’s coffin out of the chapel to the car early this morning. She left the room; she wouldn’t say goodbye to me, because she knew she would see me again “in a better place.”

I flattened my hundred-dollar bill and put it in my shoe with Angel’s picture, and I’d rinsed my face and smoothed my hair when Consuelo arrived to take Angel away from me. On the day following my arrest, my hair would be described as “torrential” on the front page of every newspaper
in North America (it had rained that morning, and a muttersome wind had followed me from the detention centre to the courthouse), my skirt “slit up the side” (it had torn getting into the police van) and my face “expressionless.” My face expressionless? It was just that I had no other way left to look.

La Madre Sin Corazón. The Mother without a Heart. The mother who had sinned in her heart, and so become heartless. The truth was Angel had taken a bite out of my heart, and grief had eaten the rest.

Consuelo repeated her warning: no harm would come to him as long as I played my part. She poured me a glass of
aguardiente
, “for courage,” she said. I now believe I was
burundunguiado
, that Consuelo slipped the voodoo-powder
burundanga
into my drink, just as she might have slipped it into the
basuco
I’d smoked on other occasions, and even the cocaine I’d inhaled. I have read the reports, the ones Pile, Jr. submitted as evidence. “The victim may have no memory of the event, or may remember the event as a dream. Memories of events while on this drug may come into consciousness many years later. The CIA/FBI/DEA and most police departments know about this drug. It is used by security forces to ‘make people forget’; this tasteless and odourless substance can be given by liquid, cigarette or inhalant. Victims of this drug often report distorted vision, especially things being made wide and small, of things starting to stretch.”

Things starting to stretch, beginning with the truth, the prosecutor said. How convenient to forget or to have no memory of the event when life and death and millions of dollars are at stake.

——

I remember some things—the fountain being dry when we passed it, the stone pineapple the colour of rust. And outside, everywhere, guards dressed in army fatigues. Consuelo had enlisted the army to protect her mother’s hacienda, Yepez said. Especially against
norteamericanos
and their leader, El Presidente, who believed that by killing people, they could stop all
negocios blancos
on Tranquilandia. I don’t know, now, whether I remembered Yepez saying that at the time, or if memories of the events have recently, after I began writing this, flooded back into my mind.

Everything about that day, and my journey, is far from clear, especially my motivation. The Mercedes idled in front of the house. I remember Yepez haranguing a soldier who had gone out hunting peacocks and brought one home alive, wrapped in his leather jacket. No one made a move to free the bird from its suffocating prison. Yepez told me to get into the car, and we sped away, my last view of the hacienda being of the crying leather jacket in the middle of the road.

That and a wounded butterfly clinging to our windscreen. I asked Yepez to stop so I could free the butterfly, but he said there wasn’t enough time to kill anything; he had orders to get me to the airstrip, or else
he
would lose his life.

Yepez was rattled. He nosed his way through the herd of miniature ponies that had gathered on the road. No amount of honking or cursing on Yepez’s part could make them budge. He started sweating and looking at his watch, then pounding the steering wheel. I thought he was going
to run over one of the ponies, which refused to stand up, as if by laying down its life it could prevent me from laying down my own. I should have paid attention—but I needed another line, and the only drugs I had were stashed inside me.

Yepez drove around the pony, onto the swampy grass. For a moment I thought he was stuck—permanently, this time—but he manoeuvred the car back onto the pavement as if nothing had happened, as if the sweat falling off his face could be blamed on the humidity. The wounded butterfly flapped against the windscreen—
“looking for a new body to try on
,” Daisy had said—then fluttered, finally, to the ground as the sentries at the gate waved us through and we drove south from the hacienda, along the road I’d taken another lifetime ago, on my way north to the City of Orchids with Angel safely inside me. Within minutes we were headed down the dirt road past the basin where El Chopo’s ship was moored. Yepez approached the runway, looking more worried than ever, telling me to lie down on the back seat in case there was a problem.

Soon I heard a vehicle approaching. Yepez got out of the car—I heard him greeting someone—and then he poked his head in the window to tell me it was safe. When I sat up and looked around, I saw the plane that would carry me away from Tranquilandia; it was in much better condition than the one I’d arrived in, though I can’t say the same about Tiny Cattle. I hadn’t expected to see him ever again, but when he climbed out of the Jeep, straw hat minus the crown, same dark glasses, I felt a mixture of relief and fear. Fear that he had been holed up at The Liver Does Not Exist
since I last saw him, and relief to see a familiar face. His hands were shaking, and Yepez didn’t look much steadier after guzzling from the bottle Tiny produced from his coat pocket. As they loaded the coffin containing the remains of Daisy’s child, I smelled
basuco
and figured Tiny Cattle had probably been smoking all night, and was now levelling out by drinking.

I felt both drowsy (the
burundanga?
) and pumped up, the high-grade cocaine humming in my veins, making my brain crave more, to stay alive, high, numb, dancing on the head of a pin, through the eye of a needle. Dancing all alone, except with my thoughts of Angel, my invisible dancing partner, as if by dancing into the unknown I could avoid inhabiting the menacing space of each present moment.

I climbed aboard the plane, which was filled with orchids, the scent as rich and numbing as the smell inside the Black Widow’s solarium. Each orchid was wet, as if it had been picked weeping. There were orchids with flushed lips and slashed purple throats; orchids with white beards and bloodshot eyes. I even recognized one—
“with flowers more curious than beautiful, and a scent,”
Yepez had said,
“that may be intoxicating or fetid, depending on the species.”
I squeezed past the coffin on its bed of crushed virgin orchids, releasing their strong smell of sex and death. The scent made me want to take off my clothes and roll around in them, let their beautiful sensuous tongues lick off some of the hurt.

I felt as if the orchids were alive—human, alert presences on board the plane—as if they had me under surveillance,
each with their own version of my story to tell How she got here. Why she stayed. What she planned to do with the rest of her life. When the rest of her life would begin. What her death would feel like. What the sweet hereafter would bring. I wondered, too, as I buckled myself in next to Tiny Cattle, whether the plane itself wasn’t a coffin meant for me—if we would drop into the sea, and I would cling to the wreckage in an ocean alive with orchids, before sinking forever into an orchid darkness.