“The padre of course. He’s all you ever wanted…a sad fate for women, to live only for a man. There is so much more and at least there are better men… but…ah well.” He brushed his hands off and licked the diamond, polishing it on his shirt. “Let me explain it so that you might understand little fat one…if you are married to me then Julián will see you as unattainable and then ...well …I know how men’s minds work. He will want you then.”
“And what about God? That relationship seemed to exclude me well enough.”
“That was his excuse...but you were still willing, you were constantly throwing yourself at him, making a nuisance of yourself. Where’s the challenge in that? Men don’t want compliance honey…they want refusal and challenge...they want to hunt, and stalk you, and take you down, not scrape you off the floor and carry you home.”
I considered my loose and revealing nightgown, my softened curvier flesh. I hung on his every word and licked his offerings from my fingers. “It worked well enough on you.” I told him.
“Don’t mistake my offer for interest.”
“Then there is something else then.”
He steepled his fingers and watched me carefully. “Do you have any ideas?”
“If I marry you I have no advantage with you at all. In fact I belong to you more than ever. And then you are legally entitled to what is mine, forever.”
“I am anyway.”
“But you told me that there was a way to free myself...and I don’t see how this can be it.”
I tried to clear the fog from my brain, to remember the Dante before this one, before the one that held me captive, back to the man in the cool linen suit with the corporation behind him and the smuggler’s instinct for a pawn. “You are a betting man.”
He nodded.
“So this is just another wager isn’t it? If I do this then…”
“The marriage is not the wager…it is only the cards, face down on the table.”
“And if I pick them up...what then?”
“I will tell you after you put on this ring.”
“I have to accept the bet before I even know the stakes?”
“Honey there are no stakes if you don’t take the wager.”
“Quit calling me honey.” The orange juice and champagne were drying in my lap now, making me feel dirty and uncomfortable. I felt my thighs sticking together. “Fine.” I snatched the ring from his hand and crammed it onto my finger. He was right. It fit perfectly. It doesn’t matter I told myself. One lie was as good as another.
“Now…what is it Dante...what do I have to do to…to get rid of you?”
“Father Julián, to put it succinctly.”
“What?”
“Seduce the good father, seduce him well, take him body and soul...and then if you can do that you can have your freedom back.”
My head hurt all the way to the outline of my face, the one I kept hidden and the one I showed him. “All I have to do is make love to Julián and you’ll let me go?”
“Body and soul I said.” He poured himself another glass of champagne, omitted the orange juice. “You have to catch him and keep him, enthrall him more than God. You have to make him beg for you. Give everything for you.”
“So I have to take his freedom to earn mine?”
“In a manner of speaking. He might find himself very happy to be liberated. If he can accept it.”
I shivered. “You just said that if I married you he would want me. You said it would be easy.” I lifted the champagne bottle and drank from it.
“Never trust me, you have no reason to trust me.”
“So how do I know you’ll do what you say even if I win this bet?” I convinced myself I was only making conversation, sleuthing him out, keeping him at bay. I thought I had no intention of defrocking Julián for Dante’s pleasure and a chance at escape.
“You don’t know. But that is part of the risk of gambling isn’t it?” He leaned forward and put his finger on my throat, right where the pulse beat. In his eyes there were eerie flecks of ginger and feline gold. “What you do know is what will happen if you do not take it, or if you lose.”
“Why? Why would you do this monstrous thing, tempt me this way? You wouldn’t offer me something if the odds weren’t in your favor.”
“It may be, señorita, that I get enough pleasure out of your dilemma that I do not need to win in an actual sense. But it also might be that I have more faith in Father Julián than you do. I am not necessarily testing your strength, maybe just his.” He got up and straightened his shirt, hitched his trousers and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Decide …and then I’ll let you call your mother.” At the door he stopped, surveyed his handiwork “Maybe I just want to know that I can beat God,” he said.
My mother and Frank came to the wedding after I had cabled them. Frank looked slightly dazed, but that was his natural state when it came to the affairs of women. My mother told him only what he needed to know. She on the other hand looked, right through me as I stood in the registrar’s office in a new white suit that hugged my recent breasts and hips. I had made a veil at the last moment from the white lace curtains in the apartment and pinned it atop my head where it hung halfway down over my face obscuring the world from me just enough. Still I could see her eyeing me and my bridegroom with a sort of distaste that pursed her mouth. “Talk about selling yourself down the river.” she said.
In my hand I held a bouquet made from white roses. She plucked the head off of one and squeezed it between her fingers scattering its brown-bruised petals around my pumps. “You’re going to regret this,” she said under her breath.
That was all she said to me from the time she arrived until after the twenty minute ceremony and the dinner afterwards where we ate silently while Dante talked. That was all she said as she saw us to our car. I knew she loved me. I felt it even if I did not hear it. I sensed her recounting her mistakes, the lessons she had errantly taught me. She kissed me on the cheek and left a round red print, a bloody oval, an unopened rose on my cheek.
I returned to my apartment alone.
The day after our wedding Dante took me to the headquarters of the United Fruit Company. It was an imposing façade, its double doors top heavy with a neo-classic frieze and ubiquitous southern Corinthian columns. The inside of the huge building was tastefully appointed, all marble slabs, and lush pink carpet, and glinting surfaces. The boardrooms were full of glass and heavy oak desks. The men all wore blue suits and smoked cigars. This machine ran far from the sweat-slick black and brown jungle bodies that greased its gears. Dante knocked back scotch while I sipped at a soda water with a lady-like dash of gin and a curving moon of lime. While they talked about bananas I grew homesick for my poor desecrated farm. I missed the castanets of rain on palm and banana leaves, and the nearby hum and pull of the ocean as it licked the shore.
I did not recognize myself in this seersucker skirt and ample bosom. I was anchored by the massive ring, all my chips on the table.
The men asked questions and when Dante allowed, I answered their questions of yield and labor demands with an automatic knowledge I had not known I had.
They were pleased by the expansion and the marriage. They thought we could acquire several of the nearby farms and tracts of land if we wished.
“Most of it that belongs to the Maya,” I said
A hush fell over the gathering of suits. They all looked to Dante as though he had spoken, not I. “Is that a problem?” one of them asked.
“Only if you’re an Indian,” Dante said. He leveled a look at me that stoppered my protests.
They all nodded relieved, and the discussion recommenced without me. They discussed all aspects of running a banana plantation with the ignorant certainty of those that spoke of things they had never seen, those that paid others to have the experience and report back. They wound each other up with fallacy and inconstant facts, and then patted themselves on the back for agreeing with one another. Dante just sat at their ce
nter, let them believe they were right. For him right and wrong were arbitrary. He chose whichever was the most profitable at the moment.
At dinner that night I ate a steak that was too undercooked. When I pressed it with my knife, bloody juice filled the plate and soaked into my potatoes.
I opened my mouth wanting to discuss the day’s events, the gross misperceptions of the business men even in practical matters. I had just parted my lips to speak.
Dante said, “Silence is golden.”
“Amen,” I told him.
I woke to find my bags piled by the door, and a hired driver waiting to take me back to the Sea King. Without warning my sojourn was over. My silence had been bought, my future contracted and sealed. I was thrust back into the deep waiting blue of Dante’s fathomless plans.
This time when we traveled he slept in the bed beside me, initially at a respectful distance. I was kept awake by his snoring and wallowing, his trips to the bathroom, his two am cigarettes. After several days he began to attend to himself, brought to tumescence either by my nearness, or his own restraint for the first leg of the journey. The bed jiggled and squeaked with his movements, the final frantic tumult before he grunted and wiped himself off with the sheet. He did not care or notice that I was there, that I was the waking witness to his private business.
Perhaps he did it to torment me. He must have known that it would, that the rocking shook my breasts and rubbed my legs together. The constant friction beside me began to generate a heat I was disgusted with and enthralled by. I held my breath and felt it fill those folds and shadowed places in my loins, swelling them like helium balloons seeking the sky.
He moved closer each night stripping away the sheer layers between us until he and I jiggled and shook together, until he came in warm erratic spurts against my back, soaking my nightgown and the inches between us.
We never spoke of it the next day. We ate together in silence while he read the paper and then disappeared above to stay with the men. I watched the ocean unfold endlessly, hypnotized by the swell and roll that never changed.
On the fifth day he pressed up against me, using my solid flesh as a foil for his pleasure, stroking me and himself at the same time. Until on the seventh night I turned onto my back as he began and he lapped and slurped at my flesh, a wolfish suckling child, pulling my body into his mouth in painful drawing swallows. Until he found his way into my sweet dark caverns and pushed me back into the resistant mattress in a grunting rut of slapping flesh.
I gave myself to the sticky darkness, grappled with his ample body, his sweat slippery back and pulled him as deep as I could into myself to snuff out the fire.
Until I became exactly what he was. Until I became what he wanted me to be.
Until all the veils were torn away.
PART FIVE
THE GODHEAD
Chapter Thirteen
OFFERINGS AND ALTARS
Dante returned to his own ministrations and let the lush discoveries I had made of myself go rancid. “I have had my fill of your dark chocolate quim,” he told me and turned his back.
I lay jostled and hot, the sheets clinging to me, until I was driven upwards and outside most nights, taking deep gulps of air and eating ice, crunching crisp frosty shards to quell the fire he had stoked in my belly. I could not eat, the food roiled and boiled in my guts. I drank cold vodka and sucked limes until they were desiccated.
I was mad with the heat that attacked me from the inside out; I had to change clothes at least twice a day because of the sweat and scent of my frustrated desires. At night I found a sheltered spot above deck, a narrow passage the crew did not frequent at night, and here I took down the straps of my nightgowns and lifted my breasts to the sea air. I ran the ice cubes around and under all that kissing flesh and fanned the tops of my legs.
Dante found me there catching the last of the fading evening balm, the sun gold, catching prisms on the small hairs of my arms. He merely watched me for a few minutes and in the path of his eyes I thought I saw affection, and admiration, and a possessiveness that would suffice for love. I rose and went to him, put my arms around his neck, and offered him my mouth open and warm and filled with the taste of the sea.
No sooner had my lips rested on his than he gripped my wrists and yanked them away from his neck and downward bringing me to my knees. He held them in one hand while he reared the other back and slapped me with a hard open palm across the cheek, sinking my own molars into my tender flesh, and knocking me sideways to the still warm wood of the deck.
“I told you not to mistake my offers for interest,” he told me and left me lying there stunned.
My emotional footing was as precarious as my feet on the rolling swells of the deck. One moment I thought I was placed firmly, and the next I was reminded to watch my step.
Dante did not come back to the round bed, and that was just as well as I continued to wander the decks at night. I kept returning to my sheltered place seeking respite and privacy, an unhappy animal in its den. Since I saw no one in this alcove I took off all but my clean white underwear and tried to coax the air around my skin to enter and lift me.
At first I did not know I was watched, and then when I discovered it with that sense, those fine hairs a woman possesses, I was driven to a silent frenzy to discover who it was. I posed and fondled myself trying to entice them into the open, letting them fill their eyes just enough to draw them out. And when at last he did emerge, a nameless Garifuna sailor that blended with the saucy night, I let him come close and touch those hot places until he was satisfied, until I cooled at my core just long enough to sleep.
He was the only man brave enough to meet with me, though the others had to have known. Three nights he found me there, until he did not show on the fourth, and then never again. I saw him at a distance polishing the brass or coiling the ropes, but he did not look in my direction. Dante must have known then, must have admonished him, or alluded. It did not seem to bother him, being made a cuckold, I sensed that he derived a certain lurid pleasure from it. This ate at me more than the burn, this deliberate spurning. I was inexperienced enough that I did not know what I might have done wrong. It never occurred to me that it was what I had done right that drove him away. He was a man that pursued objects of desire and then quickly discarded them, passed them to a promising buyer, another pair of hands. He had simply smuggled my body and now he was waiting to see who had the best offer.
He said I had locked my own door; I was now guarding myself, until it was time to transfer the goods.
We did not sail home to British Honduras as I expected, putting in at an unknown port that was thick with scum and rancid green jungle. Indians came and tied the boat, dark men with suspicious eyes and bowed legs. They took cigarettes from the Sea King’s sailors and smoked them awkwardly, holding them like fourteen year old boys learning how to be cool. It stank of mire and heat here, the water was clammy and the shores were a slick and poisonous yellow. Occasionally the head of a snake broke the surface of the water followed by a switchblade ripple as it swam. Herons picked at mudfish in the flat muck of the shoreline and squabbled with smaller brown birds over the choice scraps. The chainsaw buzz of insects seemed to deepen the heat of noon, ringing it in our ears as they mated and winged in a choking mass over a canopy, the thick olive green of molded shoe leather.
There was a town made up of the broken teeth of old shacks and a cinder block bar tended by a fat woman without a shirt. I imagine she had reached her proportions by eating the local inhabitants. Everyone else was as skinny as the frayed vines clinging to the trees, and I saw no food offered anywhere.
The buildings were centered around a muddy plaza where two naked pot-bellied children played in the goop pushing twigs along and spearing worms with them. We sat on the edge of the sink hole at the bar on tattered lawn chairs under a thatched porch roof. Flies came over to investigate my toes and I kicked my feet incessantly.
“Stop that you’re making me nervous.” Dante s
aid.
The bruise on my cheek had faded to green pinstripes the length of his fingertips. I did not want to make him nervous. The flies crawled undisturbed on my toes.
“Where on earth are we?” I asked him.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “A million places are just like this.”
“Why are we in this one?”
“This one has something we want. Button your blouse.”
Everyone around us was virtually naked. “It’s hot,” I protested, buttoning.
“You’re giving off pheromones; we’ve all got other things to think about.”
“Are we here because of the fruit company?” My questions were irritating him, but I was taking perverse pleasure in it, I was a fly on his foot.
“We’re here because of my own business, you’ll see soon enough, now be quiet.”
The afternoon was a drudge parade of local dialect, handshakes, card games, and home brew. Occasionally one of the sailors disappeared with the fat bartender and returned a few minutes later with a smile on his face. She hitched up her skirt matter of factly and waited for the next business prospect, be it beer or otherwise.
I drowsed on and off and resisted the urge to wander around. Ironically I was safer next to Dante than on my own. Evening came and mosquitoes replaced the flies. The lanterns made our surroundings anemic and ghostly. Long fingered shadows reached into the jungle. The children were called in from the mud. The Indians had a better handle on their smoking ability and the bartender no longer stood behind her counter.
Everyone helped themselves to the bar while she played a party game of laps. I felt the heat returning. A bottle was passed and I drank from it every time it merry-go-rounded to me. The shadows tickled my feet. The bartender had me in her lap, she tweaked my nipple and mumbled into my ear when she passed me the bottle. I laughed at the joke even though I didn’t get it. “Aren’t you hot?” I asked her. “Of course not,” I answered myself giggling. I was the only one of us that understood.
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