Turtle soup.
Three Australian hikers are huddled around the fireplace in a high mountain hut in the cloud forests of the North-Central Highlands of Nicaragua. One of the men is stoking the fire, one blowing on it, while the woman adds water to a gravel of desiccated stew in a pot dangling above it. She is talking excitedly about a bird she has seen that day. A crested caracara. ‘Did you see it, Matt? My God. It makes our rosella look like a house sparrow.’ The hut is lit by four quivering candles and in this shifting light-play the Gore-Tex suits of the hikers leaning hollow by the door move like haunted armour.
Unmoving in the shadows, waiting their turn at the fire, sit five Red Guards of the Nicaraguan Liberation. Torn between the need for camouflage and the need to proclaim their revolution they are dressed in army greens with bright red bandanas. They are wet, but uncomplaining.
Chris Barlow, having stoked the fire, stands and unscrews a hip flask of grappa and hands it by the capful to his sister Amelia and his old rowing chum Matt. They throw it back and flash their burning tongues in the candlelight and wow and whistle at its potency. Chris manages a fund for the Catholic Church in Sydney, one of whose charities is the Street Urchins of Managua. He is in this country to deliver two mobile kitchens to the local church for these children. As an adjunct he has organised this hike into the high cloud forests of the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve. For he and Matt, in the confines of their double-scull at Sydney University, found they shared an appetite for exotic places and high mountains, for ruffling the hair of scrawny village kids as they trudged on through to a summit. Since this discovery they have travelled together many times to the world’s highest ranges.
This is Amelia’s first trip overseas for some years because she has become a star of the Sydney social scene since becoming a door bitch at Full Moon Rut in Woollahra, where she refused Leonardo DiCaprio entry, saying, ‘DiCapri … oh. You think you can mince around in a trainwreck of a shipwreck pic and then towel yourself off and wander in here like we forgive that shit? We don’t. Try the Angler’s Club on Watsons Bay, there’s a sackload of sunburnt drunks over there that’ll be delighted to see you aren’t drowned.’ She’d had four lines of coke when she said it and only did it for a laugh, and was, absolutely, going to let him into the club. But before she could take the remark back DiCaprio and his floozies and muscle had turned on their heels and stormed off into the night. And made Amelia famous.
Because Sydney, taken as a personality, is a sycophant who floods her pants with anxious waters when addressed directly by a Californian governor or an English duchess. A stout and sneering monarch over the many dunghills such as Goulburn, Brisbane and Auckland, she is cap-in-hand suckhole to any northern hemisphere notable. But on this night she discovers, through Amelia, how good it feels to spurn the gods. Suddenly, with this DiCaprio story doing the rounds, Sydney seems a place A-list internationals are desperate to get into, and it makes the town feel good to bar their entry. DiCaprio’s mojo becomes Amelia’s. Hollywood’s mojo becomes Sydney’s, Sydney thinks.
So in the two years since the inhospitable spurning of that boy-faced Hollywood hero, Amelia has been invited to and photographed at all the openings and closings and comings and goings and anniversaries and exhibitions in a proud town. She’s become one of Sydney’s muses and only comes alive at night now in a five-star festivity after six lines of coke and a pill or two.
Her family is concerned at the turn her life has taken. Every time she appears in the social pages draped over some designer or rapper with his own boutique, the magazine lies open for days on the kitchen table of her parents’ house for them to grieve over and wince at in passing. What to do? How to put the genie of celebrity back in the bottle? She was studying Fine Arts before this dreadful DiCaprio fellow burdened her with such plausible cool she fell for it herself. She was a serious anatomical artist who could spend days drawing the wing of a pallid cuckoo or a Bogong moth, before that bastard stormed off into the night with his entourage leaving her status impossibly enhanced.
When their parents hear of Chris’ trip to Nicaragua they think it might do Amelia good to accompany him. First of all seeing Chris help the poor children of that desecrated place might give her perspective. Then an exploration into the cloud forests where she can reconnect with the natural world and rediscover her love of wild things and of capturing them with a pencil or a brush. They beg him to take her. They want her to see the fêted wildlife of the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve; the quetzal and macaw, the puma and jaguar. They reason that when magical creatures such as these are set alongside such dull creatures as the fashion designer, the magazine editor, the photographer and the gallery owner, they will trounce them and maul them and bring Amelia back to sanity.
Her brother doubts the power of the quetzal and the puma to trounce the celebrities of Sydney, but he knows she has become a drug-addled socialite, so anything is worth a try. Thus he asks her to come with him to Nicaragua. And to his delight the crested caracara today does seem to have inflamed her.
Chris has travelled widely and is respectful of other cultures and therefore sees the ambush and slaughter of Nicaraguan peasants as an in-house affair that you have to be Nicaraguan to understand and/or condemn. Thus he has shaken the hands of the Red Guards of the Nicaraguan Liberation one by one and given them health bars. Knowing they do not speak English, he has waggled the bars at them and said, ‘Health bars. Muchos healthy. Very special goodly good. Make im fit. Make im strong.’ And pointed at his hunched bicep. In the dark the Red Guards of the Nicaraguan Liberation have sniffed the health bars and laid them aside.
The Red Guards of the Nicaraguan Liberation are one of the many fragments of political ideology that chipped off the great stone of Nicaraguan independence when the United States brought down the sledgehammer of invasion in the nineties. They have haunted the vast parks of the Central Highlands ever since, patrolling the cloud forests, loosing automatic fire on fleeing jaguars and dreaming of a Marxist utopia stretching from Vancouver to Uruguay in which Red Soldiers stroll the streets of the cities with beautiful American blondes on leashes.
Though it is clear the Red Guards of the Nicaraguan Liberation can’t speak English, conversation between the three Australians is stilted with their five sets of ears listening. To lighten the air Chris decides to tell the turtle soup joke he heard from a Jesuit accountant in Wollongong. ‘You boys can listen in,’ he tells the Red Guards of the Nicaraguan Liberation, knowing they can’t. ‘It’s funny. It’s a funny joke.’ He puts his hand flat on his belly and mimes laughter. ‘You remember Russ Hinze? Well … you boys wouldn’t, but, anyway, a great big fat pollie. A minister in Joh Bjelke’s hillbilly government. Enormous dude.’
He turns then and begins to tell the joke to his sister and friend. ‘So, anyway, one time his chauffeur drives Russ down to Sydney for a big conference of politicians and Russ checks into the Hilton and he’s feeling a bit peckish, like always, so he rings room service and says he’d like a bowl of turtle soup sent up, which is a favourite of his. He waits quarter-of-an-hour. No soup. Waits half-an-hour. No soup. And big Russ isn’t a dude who likes to be kept waiting, you know. He says “jump” and people Fosbury flop all over the shop. So he sends his chauffeur down to the kitchen to see what the hell’s going on.
‘This chauffeur is really his secretary and manservant and everything, you know, but we’ll just call him a chauffeur. So, the chauffeur bursts into the kitchen at the Hilton. “What the hell’s goin’ on here?” he asks. “Big Russ Hinze is up there waiting for his turtle soup.” And he sees this French chef guy, tall hat and all, with a turtle up on the bench and a cleaver raised over it. “Eez not possible,” says the Frenchy. He’s crying, at his wits’ end, dabbing at his eyes with his apron. “I cannot kill zis turtle. Every time I raise zee cleaver to chop off his head he pull it into zee shell.” “Here, give us a go,” says Russ’ chauffeur. And he takes the cleaver in one hand and with the other he jams a finger right up the turtle’s arse.
The turtle thrusts its head out of its shell all popeyed with surprise and the chauffeur brings the cleaver down, wham, and voila, the turtle’s history. Decapitated. Well the French chef, he’s in raptures. “Oh, sank you, sir. Sank you. You are the genius, sir. A master chef of the marine creature. You have made much turtle soup in your life, yes?” “Never made any turtle soup at all, mate,” the chauffeur says. “But, sir, it must be that you have made turtle soup before. How else do you have zee technique?” The chauffeur shrugs his shoulders. “How do you reckon I get Russ’ tie on in the morning?”’
The three Australians laugh and when they are finished a soft voice asks from the darkness, ‘Did you tell this tale because our Great Leader Jorge Luis Enriquez is an obese man?’ From the darkness into the candlelight, the face of El Capitan Zambro of the Red Guards of Nicaraguan Liberation. An ugly, chiselled face covered in a craterscape of acne scars. ‘No. It was a joke,’ Chris tells this face.
‘Did you tell it because of the mythic appetite and subsequent morphology of the Great Leader, my friend? Did you, perhaps, know of our Great Leader’s predilection for turtle soup?’
‘No, dude. Hey, I didn’t even know turtles lived in Nicaragua.’
‘Could it be …’ El Capitan Zambro leans further forward into the candlelight, ‘you were speaking of Jorge Luis Enriquez?’
‘Hey, come on,’ Amelia chips in. ‘Presumably a revolutionary leader doesn’t wear a necktie, the trademark garment of the bourgeois capitalist.’ She smiles at the undeniable logic of her argument.
‘A red cravat,’ El Capitan Zambro tells her. ‘Made from the silk shirt of a would-be assassin hired by the imperialist Satan United States to kill Fidel Castro. A well-known story. This bumbling Oswald was inches from success when he stepped upon the husk of a martyr beetle on the floor of Castro’s bedroom. The great man woke and sprayed the room with bullets and the assassin’s finery was donated throughout the length and breadth of revolutionary Latin America where the leaders wear it as charms to keep off the hireling killers of the West.’
‘Well, this wasn’t about Jorge Luis Enriquez and his famous cravat. This was about Russ Hinze and his tie,’ Chris says.
‘Sadly, my friend,’ and El Capitan Zambro’s face droops with a plausible sadness, ‘you have left me with a demeaning image in my mind of Lieutenant Coetzel, hero of the October Thrust and adjutant to Jorge Luis Enriquez, adorning the Great Leader with his red cravat in the very manner you suggest your chauffeur has adopted. It is an awful image. Treasonous and heretical. The neck of Jorge Luis Enriquez extends like a giraffe and his eyes bug as if with a vast voltage, whereupon Lieutenant Coetzel completes a hasty double-Windsor. My friend you should not have suggested this thing.’
‘I … I didn’t even know you spoke English.’
‘And yet you told us of the surprising properties of the healthy bars.’ A busy silence falls then. The three Australians scrambling to think what this man’s accusation might mean. Does he seriously believe they were mocking his Great Leader? Is he making a joke of our joke? Is he about to laugh? They are two days’ walk from the nearest village with a government military post. Up here the Red Guards are the political reality. Why would they mock paramilitary zealots who live in the jungle sleeping with AK-47s? And how could they know Jorge Luis Enriquez was fat? No outsider has seen him for years.
‘How could I know Jorge Luis Enriquez was fat?’ Chris asks.
‘Perhaps you are a spy.’
‘No, man. I’m with the church. Here for the street kids. You can check that. Listen, I’m sorry. It was just a stupid joke about a fat Australian guy.’
‘Yet, my friend, and I think my logic is correct here, if your Russ Hinze is, being fat, then also laughable, contemptible … then aren’t all fat men equally guilty? Eh? My friend? Isn’t Jorge Luis Enriquez also a man whose size makes him shameful? In your mind?’ No one answers this question. It has become horrifically apparent to the Australians this man is committed to taking offence.
El Capitan Zambro takes a greasy red scarf from his jacket pocket and says to Amelia, ‘You are sweating. Understandable.’ He throws the scarf into her lap. ‘It is never nice being in a strange land surrounded by gun-toting necrophiliacs.’ She recoils from the scarf, standing and letting it fall, and he tells her, ‘Oh, it carries my secretions? No reason not to use it. Soon enough you will be covered in those.’ Amelia grimaces. Her teeth are whiter and more perfect than any these men have ever seen or broken.
‘Hey.’ As Matt Downey gets to his feet four candle-lit AK-47 foresights track his rise. Matt is a lawyer. His chances of survival are slim, being brave and chivalrous, in this land where bravery is a serious condition and chivalry a terminal disease. Slowly, softly, El Capitan Zambro spells out their crime and their predicament. ‘You have mocked Jorge Luis Enriquez, my friend. It is not your time to say “Hey” or to say “You there” or to say “Well now”.’
‘You guys can have the hut. We’ll sleep in the open. We’re sorry for all this Russ Hinze crap.’ Matt takes a step toward the door and one of the soldiers fires a shot. The candle flames leap in the muzzle blast, making the hut quiver. Amelia screams. The billy swings wildly on its handle bleeding gouts of stew from a wound onto the fire which hisses, filling the room with a smell of burning meat.
The soldier who has fired the shot shouts, ‘Viva la Patria!’ Then points at Matt with his gun and says, ‘I will have those boots now.’
Another shouts at Chris, ‘Libertad. Libertad.’ Then says, ‘You are wearing a rugged watch, made for a man of action. I am such a man.’ Thus leavening their demands for loot with cries for liberty, revolution and equality, the Red Guards of the Nicaraguan Liberation strip the Australians of their valuables.
When they are sitting in their underwear shivering by the fire trying not to look at the Red Guards of the Nicaraguan Liberation bedecked in their Gore-Tex and Rolex, El Capitan Zambro tells them, ‘In the morning you will meet Jorge Luis Enriquez. You will tell him your turtle soup story in which appears the chauffeur and the Russ Hinze and the Frenchman. You will tell an obese God a joke of which a fat man is the butt. We will see if he laughs.’
At first light the Australians, shoeless and treading carefully, are marched out into the jungle of the Central Highlands. The Red Guards of the Nicaraguan Liberation follow behind watching Amelia hungrily. The jungle is like a cathedral with many different coloured shafts of light falling from its ceiling to its dark floor. At another time it would be beautiful. But El Capitan Zambro directs them from behind. And Jorge Luis Enriquez awaits them. They imagine him a grossly obese savage. Pity and compassion just two of the constraints he has cast off in order to remain president of this failed revolution.
After walking for an hour they emerge from the jungle onto a black sand beach on the shore of a lake in a caldera surrounded by high forested peaks. The water of the lake is likewise black from the many tannins leeched into it from the jungle. ‘Wait,’ El Capitan Zambro calls when they have walked part way along this beach. ‘I have forgotten something.’ He stops, puts his chin in his hand searching for a memory, until his eyes light with its discovery. ‘Oh, yes. Debauchery.’
The three Australians are ordered to strip their remaining clothes, and with these in the black sand at their feet they feel more naked than they have ever felt before. Their beautiful bodies, which have caused so much lust and tenderness in the past, might spark any form of depravity here. One soldier, boggling at Amelia’s pubic hair trimmed into a heart shape, lays a hand on his own heart and pulls his chin back into his neck in astonishment and blinks slowly. The West … the West … evermore new heights of depravity, evermore fresh corruptions. Amelia places a hand in front of her crotch and closes her eyes. In Sydney that heart was, happily, a provocation and an excitement … it is, sadly, a provocation and excitement now. Matt places himself between her and the soldiers.
The first the Australians know of the plane is El Capitan Zambro snapping a hateful look sk
yward and hissing ‘Bastardo’ at the clouds. They don’t hear the plane for some seconds and they wonder is he cursing some personal ghost. Then, a violin note rising and falling on the air, a surging vibrato slowly getting closer.
Through the cerebrally bulging cumulus comes one of the despised fleet of Cessnas flying out of Colombia owned by the Medellin Cartel, carrying cocaine to the Baptist politicians and strutting negro rappers of the United States. This river of cocaine, wending and interlacing its way through the sky above the Central Highlands of Nicaragua, is the means by which the evil drug lords of Colombia maintain their wealth and power and deny the people of that country, brothers and sisters of the Red Guards of the Nicaraguan Liberation, a revolution of their own.
‘Disparen contra estos bastardos malvados,’ El Capitan Zambro shouts. The guards, knowing this a cosmetic aggression only, performed for form’s sake, begin to fire their guns from the hip at the plane. And when their ammunition is expended the plane is unhurt, as usual, and flying on with its evil payload. But as they widen their mouths in awe at their own marksmanship it begins a spiralling dive bleeding a corkscrew trail of black smoke. Closer and closer it dives toward them, screaming in death before breaking apart hundreds of metres above them and raining its innards into the sky.
Scores of twenty-kilo cellophane bags of purest Colombian cocaine begin to strike down like bombs on the beach around them. The Red Guards of the Nicaraguan Liberation, who had a moment before been whooping and chittering delight at their victory, now begin to stampede this way and that to escape the deadly barrage, never moving more than ten paces from their starting point before doubling back to rush away again in another direction. As the bales of cocaine strike they explode into vicious rolling clouds that crash slowly into each other, their bulbous storm fronts fusing together until the whole beach is whited-out in a fog of coke.
Pepsi Bears and Other Stories Page 8