The Devil's Garden (12 page)

We had walked no more than three-quarters of a mile but it felt many times that distance. We stopped at a liquor shop guarded by a man with a gun on his lap and a military cap. Felipe went and
found a truck and driver to take us through the centre – a narrow grid of dirt roads parallel to the river roughly three miles end to end. We climbed in and shook and thumped and juddered
into town, Yolanda murmuring and Virima grimacing all the way.

My time at the Station had altered my perception. I remembered thinking before how dangerous the bare wires seemed – strung up roof to roof between the shacks and sagging as if to garrotte
the unwary. I remembered how the dim bulbs threw an incongruous fairground light on the mud and the dogs at dark. But now this felt like a high street and Laberinto all but a metropolis with its
bars and ready supplies and motorbikes and the possibility of strangers and a life beyond nightfall.

I remembered the San Mateo, too, the town’s only boarding house. I had stayed a single noisy night – full of an anticipation that was half fear and half elation. And it was the same
stout manageress who now stood to greet us as we came in through the swinging doors, her biscuit-fed features as attentive as I had remembered them indifferent before. Sole must have worked her
magic.

‘Hello, Doctor. Your room is number three.’

‘Thanks. Do you have the other keys as well?’

‘Yes, Doctor.’

‘Please bring them up with us? We all want to wash.’

She hesitated by her desk.

‘I’ll come and settle all the bills straight away – as soon as we have this girl in a bed. Is there a doctor?’

Confusion slackened her jowls still further.

I asked again: ‘Is there another doctor?’

‘The señora has gone to look on the boats.’

I turned as best I could with the stretcher. The short lift in from the truck had nearly killed us.

‘Everyone OK? Or do we need to put her down?’

‘I’m OK,’ Felipe replied.

Across from me, Kim tried to blow her hair from her forehead but it was stuck with the heat. ‘Never felt better,’ she said.

‘Tord?’ I asked, over my shoulder.

‘Ready.’

‘OK. Let’s go straight,’ I said. ‘Can you bring us twelve big bottles of water?’

The manageress nodded and forced herself to smile. ‘Please, this way.’

We were lucky: the stretcher went through the door frame. But if the room was really the San Mateo’s largest, then it was by a matter of no more than two or three square inches. There was
a bed, a clothes rail, a chest on which a television squatted and two tattered chairs – exactly the same as I remembered mine on the way through. Mercifully, Sole had found three separate
fans from somewhere and at least the air was moving. We crowded in. I lifted Yolanda in my arms and the others pulled the stretcher out from beneath her.

The door opened, pressing Felipe against the wall. It was the manager. I remembered him from before, too: porcupine hair and a face that always seemed to be calling in a favour. He eyed the
fans: ‘How long will you be staying?’ he asked.

‘We’re not all staying.’ I turned so that he could not approach the bed. ‘We’ve just spoken with your wife. I’m going to check us in – and settle the
bills in advance. Is there a problem?’

‘I’m the boss,’ he said.

Felipe’s thumb knuckle went to his eye. Tord appeared to be praying over Yolanda’s feet. Kim was busy in the tiny bathroom wetting a towel.

‘This woman will be here with her sister until the boat leaves for the river city tomorrow,’ I continued. ‘My friend will also be staying. She’s the one who spoke with
your wife. The other rooms you can have back this evening at six – that’s what has been agreed.’

He leered. ‘We don’t do day rooms. You pay for the night. We’re busy.’

‘But you do rooms by the hour – right?’ I took a step towards him, widening my arms to sweep everyone out of the door before me. ‘Let’s go and sort this out. Tord
– come on – Jesus hasn’t helped anyone here yet. I don’t think he’s going to start now.’

The manager backed out but stood waiting in the corridor, picking his teeth. At the door I paused. Kim looked up and I acknowledged her expression of exasperation. Sitting on the other side of
the bed, Virima was stroking her sister’s forehead. Quietly, she began to sing.

IV

The ceiling fan was broken. I lay down, clean if not cool, and I listened to the voices, the fizz of the electricity and the motorbikes in the street below. Two men were
discussing the price of petrol and the price of women, the one rising as the other fell. They must have been sat on the porch directly beneath my window. Our other rooms were all upstairs –
something of a novelty since this was one of only half a dozen buildings in Laberinto to have a second storey.

Everybody passed through the San Mateo. Downstairs, at the bar, young working girls smoked and joked together, fussing with their counterfeit handbags in various simulations of sorority.
Middle-ranking cocaine and logging bosses sat down at the tables for fried river fish with scientists and missionaries and the occasional anthropologist from Paris. The prospectors were the first
joke in common – mad from the mercury, everyone said, crazed on hope. The environmentalists were the second. Lothar had told me of a zealous faction of undercover activists who blithely
talked football and bought drinks all night for two gun-runners, who had convinced them that they were elders from a local village come in to campaign for clean water. I had some sympathy with the
poor fools; I, too, had found it impossible to know the real provenance of any man or woman beyond their claims – the various Indian tribes, the
mestizos
, the
ribereños
,
some moved down from the mountains, others left behind after previous booms, others again terrorized into stasis by the recent guerrillas; farmers, miners, adventurers, pioneers, narcotics,
counter-narcotics, soldiers, rebels. Quinn’s words: ‘Whatever people say, in the end, the only sure measure of a man is what he does – everything else is commentary. You’ll
understand when you get here.’

There was a knock on the door. I rose and slid the buckled chain. She slipped inside. I trapped her against the wall and we kissed.

‘The doctor was like you,’ she said, looking up at me.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Not a doctor.’

She had a way of only just touching me with her fingertips.

‘Does the water work?’

‘Yes.’

She ducked beneath my arms.

‘It’s a rubber pipe but the floor is clean.’ I passed the towel that I had stolen for her from another room then lay back down on the bed watching her. ‘How is
Yolanda?’

‘I don’t know.’ She undid her shirt. ‘Alive. Drinking water. Some juice. No worse.’

‘I’ve arranged a truck and four men to carry her to your boat tomorrow morning.’

‘Good.’ She stepped from her jeans.

‘I will leave you the money to pay them.’

‘You have given me enough money. Just leave me the men.’

She stood naked a moment at the end of the bed but before I could reach her she had stepped back and edged round into the washroom laughing. She turned on the tap and held the pipe away to test
the temperature. Then she raised it to her head and let the water run down. I lay on my side so that I could see her through the door frame; there was something to do with the casualness of her
beauty about other business that touched me deeply, something that summoned feeling again from my blistered heart. Sometimes, when she slept, I would press myself against her and she would murmur
and seem hardly to wake, hardly to acknowledge me, save to shift by slow degrees until I was inside her and she was pushing her body against mine – and afterwards, without once speaking, she
would sleep again and I would imagine that I had made love to some night creature now vanished, leaving sleeping Sole behind.

I rose from the bed. She started to laugh and sprayed me. I cornered her, twisted the hose from her hands and carried her back. We twined together and soon we were alone in the world. When she
was close, she opened her eyes and looked up at me, reaching for my hand and spreading it wide across her stomach.

V

We walked the late afternoon across the broken kerbs. At the Bar Gotica – painted in startlingly clean bands of yellow and blue – we stopped and chose two
plastic chairs and sat down. We were protected a little from the worst of the fumes and the mud by a moped propped against a weathered wooden pillar and a row of sacks that might have contained
nuts or beans or anything.

‘We have an hour,’ Sole said. ‘Time for three or four drinks – if we go at your speed.’

‘I wish you were coming.’

She raised a single shoulder in her favourite shrug. ‘When I was a girl, we went every year. My father took me.’

The barefooted waiter must have been no more than seven. The simplest thing for everyone was beer.

‘Two bottles of Cusqueña,’ I said.

He nodded – oddly formal – and set off for the ramshackle stack of crates at the back.

‘Did your father take you everywhere?’

The shoulder again. ‘He had no sons.’

‘It must have been fun.’

‘Not always. He had no money either. And most of the time we were fighting for something or other with crooked lawyers and bent politicians and then there was our own people and, well, you
know the mess of everything . . .’

I nodded.

‘And there are some things a daughter shouldn’t see,’ she added.

The boy came back and flipped the lids with his prize opener. I lit a cigarette and watched Sole watching the street. Her eyes were so dark that it was impossible to distinguish her pupils. The
boy hovered, still holding the necks of the bottles. I dug out some money and paid him; clearly, lines of credit in Laberinto did not extend even as far as two beers. He nodded and then pushed the
bills into the front of his underwear.

‘How long will you be away?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. As long as we need to be. Will you survive without me?’

I smiled but beneath I was startled. Not once had Sole acknowledged our relationship in such a way, let alone joke about it. Neither had I.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But that’s different from . . .’

‘From what?’

‘From being alive.’

I was sure that a reciprocal smile quivered at the corner of her mouth but just then the boy arrived with the change.

‘And you?’ I asked.

‘And me what?’

‘Will you survive?’

‘I don’t need you. I can take care of myself.’ She sipped her beer but looked at me over the top of the bottle. ‘But if you are serious, then I am serious. I like your
company. You make me laugh. Not so many men do that.’

I felt something I could not articulate so I said, simply: ‘I am serious.’

Immediately she danced backwards into mockery. ‘How do you know I am not just after your money?’

‘I don’t think you are. But just in case: you should know that I don’t have all that much.’

‘And you should know that we don’t trust anyone from outside.’

‘I can understand that.’

‘Why are you really here?’

‘I’m a scientist.’

She curled her lip. ‘Oh, please – don’t – you say the same thing to everybody. You’re worse than Tord.’

‘I’m here because . . . I was trying to get away from myself. The man I was before – I didn’t like him.’

She shook her head slowly – half in ridicule, half in earnest. ‘The Judge is right. Everyone thinks that the lost tribes have been looking after their souls for them here –
while they have been busy filling their lives with poison and crap.’

The dogs rose. Above the noise of music from the other bars came the sound of a larger engine labouring in first gear. Opposite, a group of women sitting outside the grilled-chicken shack
stopped shelling nuts and looked up. An American off-road vehicle with tinted windows lurched into view, leaning precariously into a pot hole while the wheels spun axle-deep in mud.

‘Who’s that?’ I asked.

‘Cocaine,’ she said.

‘Did he have to boat that car all the way in here just so he could drive it up and down this street?’

The shoulder again. ‘Yes.’

This time I shook my head.

‘I know him,’ she said. ‘Everybody does. He is a nice man. He doesn’t shoot anybody if he doesn’t have to.’

I put out my cigarette.

‘And everybody knows?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’ The car drew level and Sole must not have liked my expression because now she narrowed her eyes. ‘Why shouldn’t he have his men drive him around in whatever car he
likes? The people in your country who buy and sell his cocaine – they do.’

‘Cocaine is illegal in my country. They still—’

‘Listen,’ she scoffed, ‘sometimes the Americans come and they give us money so that they can take it away and stuff it up their noses. Sometimes they give us money so that they
can burn it. But then what happens? All the farmers who are not already growing coca start to do so – as fast as they can – because the money they make if they give over their crops for
this burning – guaranteed – is way more than they could make from anything else. They – you – you’re the same – you have no idea what you want. Cocaine is not
our problem. It’s your problem. Your presidents and your leaders – most of them take it – or they have done – before. Their sons and their daughters – for sure. But
what do they say? What do
you
say? That it’s illegal.’ She laughed. ‘So why should we care about your hypocrisy? Why not buy a stupid car and boat it here all the way? At
least this guy is a good criminal – he keeps the peace.’ She sneered. ‘I told you. Nobody cares. Not when it comes down to it.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘It
is
true.’ She put down her empty bottle and leaned in. ‘On the TV, when I was working in the capital, just for that one year, there were maybe fifty things on the
news or on the documentary channels about cocaine or the trees or beef or soya or something. Maybe a new thing every week. And I bet there is ten times that in your country. Do you think that there
can be anybody left – really – who does not know all the bad stuff about what happens? No. Everybody knows everything. Or they know
enough
. Lothar says that in Europe it’s
even taught in the schools – everything – about the drugs and the guns and how many acres we lose a day. And, Jesus Christ, everybody has computers. So who doesn’t know? Which
people? Where are they?’ She looked around as if to find them. ‘So what is the answer? The only answer is that they don’t care. How many times do I have to tell you? People are
killed here – casually – all the time. It’s the same with diamonds and heroin and weapons and oil and everything like that. Everybody knows. Nobody cares. Simple. This is the
world we live in.’