“Shut up!”
“You shut up, woman! This is my house! If I say he stays – he stays!”
“Wait, wait, wait,” said Christmas, sitting up and shaking his hands before him, “I’ve got to – I can’t stay here; I have no money—” There was his jacket beside him on a chair. He clenched it. The book was there, thank God – but his passport ...Where was his passport? Christmas lay down. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he whispered. His passport was at Judith’s.
“Look at your face. You are still sick,” said the old man. “You are my friend. If you have no money, no problem. You get money later.”
“I’ve got to ... I have to—” whispered Christmas as a wave of shame broke over him. How had he ended up like this? What was happening to him? Something was very wrong. Something terrible was on it’s way. He could feel the last ray of alcohol disappear from his system and the approaching storm of suffering.
“God has brought you into this house for a purpose,” said Aldo.
“Pah!” Lola stormed off into the kitchen, clipping her son round the ear as she went.
“I agree,” said the old man.
“Eeeeee!” Lola shouted back. “See, gringo, only an idiot could make these two idiots agree.”
“Do you read the Bible?” said the boy.
Christmas closed his eyes. I am still dreaming, he thought, or I have died. “I ... No.”
“Are you a member of the Evangelical church?” the boy tried again. The old man started to cackle.
Christmas sighed. “Are you?”
“Yes. How long have you been an alcoholic?”
“How long have you been an Evangelical?”
“Five days,” shouted Lola from the kitchen, “Last week he wanted to be a computer engineer.” The tortoise was biting the boy’s flip-flops.
“Before that he wanted to be a tattooist,” said the old man. “But his mother only let him give tattoos to the pigs.” The boy, affecting serenity, picked up the tortoise and took it out into the yard.
“Peace be with you.”
“Bleeurrgh,” replied the old man, “So friend – your name is Arri?” He lit a cigarette.
“Harry.”
“Arri,” he nodded. “My name is Luis, but you can call me Papa.” Christmas looked over.
“No thanks.”
“You are from the United States?”
“England.”
“English ... really. Tell me, is it true?”
“What?”
“Is it true that you have carpet in your bathrooms?”
“Could I get a glass of water?”
“Have you been to Trinidad? It’s only an hour from here by boat. They speak English in Trinidad.” The old man reached for the remote control on the floor beside him and turned on the television to an incredible volume.
“So Lola tells me you make movies – you make any famous ones?” he shouted.
“No.”
“What kind of movies do you like?”
“I don’t like movies,” Christmas shouted back. Then, thinking it left an odd moment between them, he said, “What kind of movies do you like?”
“I like the type of movies that start with Stallone having a bad day,” shouted the old man. Then, “You want some rum?” and produced a bottle of Cacique from under the sofa. The old man took a swig and passed it over, but Christmas’ stretched, shaking fingers were denied the touch of glass. Lola snatched the bottle.
“You,” she said, taking a swig, “come here,” The old man raised his eyebrows at Christmas, pushing his lips out towards her. Such pouting was a popular gesture in the village of San Cristóbal. It replaced pointing, but with an added dash of mockery. Christmas got to his feet. He followed her through the kitchen, supporting himself where he could, a headache thumping him again and again in the back of the face.
Out in the yard, Lola took the lid off the back of the toilet, pulled up a length of wire and showed him how it flushed. Suddenly in the sun, Christmas thought he was going to vomit. “We have other toilet inside, but you use this one to make poo-poo, Ok, poo-poo man? I don’t want to clean up your poo-poo again, oíste, gringo? And no more drinking!”
The enclosed yard was full of junk and crisscrossed with washing lines. There were holes in the wall. It sloped to one side and at the far end was a concrete shower room, its blue metal door swinging loose. Christmas followed her back inside and caught himself in a mirror: belly hanging over the ill-fitting shorts, hair awry, a boiled face. His black eye was now a grim yellow, the whole right side of his upper body an ugly rainbow of harm. Repulsive, he thought.
As he re-entered the kitchen she told him to sit down at a round white plastic table. His knee joints cracked. On one side of the room there was a row of bedroom doors. On the other, an old cooker attached to a rusting gas cylinder, the sink, wooden cupboards with a rack for plates, a sideboard, a shelf stacked with some glasses, well-used pans and a fridge. Lola took out a griddle and put it on the cooker. Then she poured corn flour into a bowl with some water, kneading it until it was dough, pinching off a piece, rolling it into a ball, squeezing the ball into a disc, patting the disc between her hands until it was a flat, round arepa. She put the arepa on the griddle and turned on the hob. She repeated the process several times. When the griddle was full, she covered it with a saucepan lid, took a coffeepot from another hob and poured out two cups of coffee. Aldo stretched out on the camp bed to watch television with his grandfather. Christmas felt his face. He was struggling to come to terms with his situation. He knew he must lie down again. His mind prickled with the onset of a terrible sickness.
She put the cup down in front of him. Christmas’ hands were shaking so much he could barely lift it. The smell of coffee yanked him further into the world. Some magic had taken place, some stout movement of fate. He was with Lola Rosa. He was in her kitchen, sharing her coffee. Christmas took a sip. It hit his stomach. He only just made it to the toilet.
38
For four days Christmas lay there, churned by fever and withdrawal. Lola became less angry but only because she pitied him. He would wake, knowing he had been crying out, to find her holding his hand against fading horrors. He felt as if he was on a laboratory slab, exposed, observed, the subject of an undefined experiment. The television fused with his dreams and hallucinations; game shows and war. Sometimes he woke into darkness, trembling and fearful, a galaxy of bugs surrounding the naked bulb above him, thick shadows masking the roof while the pulsing screech of crickets raged at the moon. Sometimes he thought Slade was attacking him and he would shriek out for help, the family holding him down, calming him, before the tempest sleep of withdrawal pulled him back under. It rolled him and cast him out into a world where Emily was still alive, struggling from his bed to hold her before the vision receded into a horizon, erupting, a tidal wave of energy crackling with electrical charge which bulldozed desert towns. He saw a tiger about to attack suddenly lying down in defeat, conscious of its own extinction. He saw Emily with blisters around her neck as if strangled by a rope wet with acid. He saw a well full of chicken heads and Slade standing alone in an airfield, all the planes and terminal buildings burnt out and rained on. Then there was an awful howl, as if the earth itself was a beast, curved and folded in like a sleeping cat with a mouth at its core. He covered himself with the pillow as poison gas descended – thick, green and fast moving. It was dawn and everybody was dying. Christmas was by a low brick wall watching a crow that had a CCTV camera for a face. Then he was with Emily, walking by a canal full of oil. He dreamed he was in a room full of sculptors. They were on ladders. He watched one drive his chisel into the shoulder blades of a statue and take out something bloody and slippery. The sculptor dropped it into a bucket and it made a slapping sound. The bucket was full. He was in a field on bonfire night, eating a toffee apple and smelling the sparklers. The smell changed. It became sickening. It was a bonfire of wigs. Dark shapes danced through the flames. An unseen hand began throwing open beer ca
ns at him. He was bellowing at a field of cows. He was walking to the end of a pier, only to turn round and see the mainland break off and float away. He woke. He was eating roast swan. He woke again. He was suffocating, his face wrapped in caul. There was Aldo. There was the old man. He was on the floor in the shower room. They were washing him.
Lola fed him broth. Christmas began to feel a little stronger but he did not leave the house. He could not. He had chronic diarrhoea. A steady stream of observers came in to discuss him, most often an old woman with hardly any hair and a teenage mother with a baby attached to her hip. Christmas was too weak to respond. With the diarrhoea came a shivering fever. He could only drift and groan and perspire, his spirit as rankled as the sheet.
It rained often. He stared at it through the door. He listened to it against the roof. He felt the character of rain, its changing moods, as if it were alive and he but a season of pressure. He reviewed his life and found nothing but reasons for misery and regret. Mosquitoes whined and fed.
Privacy was out of the question: he was on a camp bed in the middle of the living room. From this bedroom without walls he struggled to his toilet without door, helpless to hide himself should anyone walk past. Nor could he mask the noises, the parp and splutter, which provoked laughter from the house, even the occasional ‘Epalé!’ Once, he sat down to see the old lady on a stool in the yard sewing up a plastic bucket with string and a hot needle. She was staring straight at him. It was too late for either to move. Christmas could only close his eyes, clothing himself in invisible dignities.
He watched Lola cook, sweep, dust, take out buckets of clothes, drink beers in the evening sun, argue with her father. She cajoled and insulted him. She wiped the invalid’s face with a cold cloth. In the evening she watched her favourite soap opera ‘Sin Tetas No Hay Paraíso’ – ‘Without Tits There is No Paradise’ – about a Columbian girl prostituting herself to afford breast implants which are then filled with drugs by an unscrupulous plastic surgeon. Christmas watched Lola bathed in the cathode light of Colombian nightclubs and pictured himself in her eyes. It was not a pleasant reproduction. What was he? Nothing more than a creature to be pitied, helped, made room for?
In the shower room’s cracked mirror he looked down at the protuberance of his body without flinching, without sucking in or tensing up. He was old, saggy, beaten. He looked at his head wound. Lola had removed the stitches that morning.
There was no pretending here, no Harry Strong.
There was no money to borrow, no city of dens in which to evaporate. He had nothing but this chance shipwrecking on Lola’s shore. He leant towards his reflection, pulling his cheek from his eye, examining it swivel in the socket. What would have happened to him if he had not landed here? Alcohol withdrawals could kill a man, he knew that. How close had he come to revealing the rest of his own skeleton? Christmas released the skin.
During the day Lola and Aldo left the house to work in their cacao plantation. It was clear that the old man had insisted Christmas stay with them so that, eventually, he could ask the foreigner for money.
“So with the movies you make good money?”
“Sometimes.”
“You have money in the bank?”
“Sometimes.”
“So later you can help me? Like I helped you?” nodded the old man, “Yes? But don’t say nothing to Lola.”
“I won’t,” said Christmas
The old man was his constant companion. He found almost anything on the television hysterically funny, as if still marvelling at the invention. Below the television there was a hi-fi system, all the plugs of which were hanging from a socket half way up the wall, crowded into an adapter and held in place by an arrangement of rubber bands. When the afternoon children’s cartoons were over, the old man turned off the television and turned on Vallenato, cowboy accordion music from Columbia. He played one particular song over and over again. It was the most popular song in the village. When the old man wasn’t playing it, Christmas could still hear the tune in the distance. The old man liked to sing along, pointing at the foreigner: “Que se acabe la plata / pero que goce yo / que se acabe el dinero / pero mi vida no.” – “All my money’s gone / but look how I have fun / All my money’s gone / but I’m still alive”. He offered the gringo rum. Christmas refused. He knew he must give the drinking a break.
Sometimes the old man would shuffle outside to talk to neighbours dropping by, and if there were no neighbours he would talk to his chicken. This was a fighting cock, winner of several bouts, and thus kept on his own and fed a special diet of corn, fish and the odd cooked egg. The feathers had been removed from its legs and back. The old man liked to discuss tactics with it, and then pick it up by the tail and toss it around so as to exercise the wing muscles. He tossed it at Christmas. He found this very funny.
39
After he raped Bridget, Slade drove for a couple of hours until he thought he was far enough away. He spent the night at a roadside posada – four small, low rooms at the back of a restaurant. His had a brand new fan, a lean bed and walls made of earth. There was a shared bathroom. He showered. As soon as he stepped out of the water, legions of mosquitoes began to attack his wet skin. He went back to his room and sat in front of the fan. Then he lay down and covered himself with the sheet so only his face could be bitten. The roof was bamboo. It had traces of paint on it.
In the morning, he told them he was heading to Caracas and then back to England. Instead he drove to the city of Cumana. There he bought new clothes. He went into a barber’s and had his hair and beard shaved off. He bought some round, mirrored sunglasses and a baseball cap. He found the Thrifty Car Rental office and parked his car there, leaving the keys on the roof. The seats were torn and ravaged. Pulling his rucksack onto his shoulder, he came out of the lot and saw an old fort overlooking the town, the Castillo de San Antonio. He walked up to it and came to a deserted roundabout at the top of the mount beside the fort. There was the sea. He stared out at the horizon and its false promise of an edge.
A man approached him on a motorbike. He was honking his horn. “Hola? Hello?” said the man. “Moto-taxi?” The man drove up beside him. “Hey, amigo, you want I can take you somewhere? Let’s go, no problem.”
“Fuck off,” said Slade
“Yes, yes, English, no problem.” The man was wearing a motorbike helmet. His face was auburn with the sun. He was tall with a broad, fixed smile and was offering his hand. Slade stopped. They were alone. He examined the motorbike. He had an idea.
“Oscar,” said the man, “I am friend of tourists.”
“Slade,” he replied, taking his hand.
“No problem. I have moto-taxi. You want go some place, I take you no problem.”
“Where is the bank?”
“Not far. Look, I take you bank, I bring you back here, no charge, OK? Then if you want me take you some place, I take you, OK?”
Slade took his rucksack and got onto the back of Oscar’s motorbike. They wound down into the town, past the Guaiqueri Park and down Calle Marino to Banesco Bank. There Slade took out the photo of Harry Christmas. He told Oscar that Christmas was his father and that he was looking for him. His father was in the Rio Caribe area. He needed someone to check all the posadas and find him.
Slade went into the bank with Oscar and took out his borrowing limit on his Visa card, three thousand dollars in cash. He let Oscar see the money. He told him he would pay one hundred dollars a day to look for his father. If he found him, he’d give Oscar a bonus: one thousand dollars.
“If he knows I am looking for him he will run away, understand? You’ve got to be –” Slade tapped his forehead, “– undercover.” Oscar nodded.
“So what happened? Why he here?”
“He has gone crazy. My mother wants me to find him and bring him back to England. That is why there is a big problem if he sees me or even knows that I am looking for him, so you tell no one, OK?” Oscar nodded. “Secret mission. Black Ops.”
“Dis
creto,” he said. “No problem. Entendio. I will say just a gringo owes me money.”
“When you find him you come back here, you get me, we go there, I pay you. Operation terminated.” Slade stuck out his hand. Oscar shook it. Slade looked up at the sun.
“So where you stay?” Slade didn’t respond. “My family have one room. Very cheap. Very nice. Better than hotel.”
“Barracks,” said Slade. “Perfect.”
Oscar took Slade through Cumana to his house. It was in a quiet street on the outskirts of town. The yard was enclosed by a blue wall and a sturdy metal gate decorated with barbed wire. Oscar lived with his wife, his children, his brother’s family and his elderly parents who slept in separate rooms and didn’t talk to each other.
Slade’s room was built onto the roof of the house, a makeshift first floor of naked breezeblocks and tin. Oscar charged him thirty bolívares a night. His door was a bed sheet. A fan faced his bed, a mattress on the floor, with a cane shelf in one corner that was empty but for a gold plastic Japanese cat, forever smiling and waving. Open concrete steps led up to it from the yard, a small ledge outside just big enough for the woven plastic chair that stood there.
Slade sat down. It was hot. He took off his shirt. He looked over the other rooftops of the street. Down below he watched Oscar push his moto-taxi back out of the gate and onto the road. He waved at Slade, revved his engine and headed off into Rio Caribe. His wife closed and locked the gate. She started talking to the little girl and boy who were hanging off her legs. Her name was Milagro. She looked up at Slade. The sun was caught in his glasses.
40
Christmas woke late. No one was there. His clothes, washed and folded, had appeared on a chair. He found a cold arepa in a basket, ate half, and fed half to the tortoise. For the first time in a long while, he stepped outside.
Lola’s house was set on the outskirts of San Cristóbal. Surrounded by a grove of cambur, there were flowers everywhere, the porch flooded with plant pots made from plastic bottles and paint tins. Tyres hung from the beams, cut and painted to look like parrots, their bodies stuffed with earth and spider plants. A serene flamboyan tree with orange and white flowers cast serried light onto the dirt and grass. Beside the house there was an adobe hut with a palm frond roof and next to that a pigpen. The fighting chicken was tied to a post, squawking and stamping about in a puddle of rice as if complaining about its lack of arms.
A Bright Moon for Fools Page 19