Cargo of Orchids

by Susan Musgrave

  “The warden is going to hear about this,” hissed the matron. The doctor removed his black hood and put it over my own head, just as the guard pulled the trigger and all the lights went out.

  I could write the rest of my story as if the hood they placed over my head has never been lifted, because that is the way it has seemed to me ever since.

  I lay with my eyes wide open, still trying to push away the dream. The pain in my womb had subsided, but I felt scared. I curled back into a ball. Then I saw a light go on in the corridor. I called again for Consuelo, who came in her own time and unlocked the door, then led me back to the ship’s galley. She seemed very uneasy, and asked me if I thought I was going to lose the baby. I said I didn’t know, I was having what felt like bad menstrual cramps.

  El Chopo, dressed in a skimpy pair of yellow bathing trunks and a black plastic apron, was frying another fish, and I could smell beans and rice mixed with the smell of gun oil. I doubled over and threw up a little black bile. Consuelo wiped the floor, saying she did not intend to nurse me for much longer.

  El Chopo flipped the fish once in the frying pan, then slid it onto a serving plate. He was looking away out a porthole again. I was getting familiar with his trances, the way he’d stare forever at some fixed spot on the horizon, like an Easter Island statue on Thorazine.

  Consuelo wiped her nose with the back of her hand. The pain had eased; I asked if I could go outside for air. She nodded but made a slapping gesture at her head to remind me of the mosquitoes. I didn’t care, and pushed open the heavy door and let it close behind me. I wanted to be alone in the predawn stillness. The jungle sounds were already becoming familiar—the strange deep gurglings of the howler monkeys, like underwater sirens, whirling through the forest; the warning cries of birds; the constant mosquito drone; the occasional splash of a fish.

  There was a shameless sensuality to Chocolata’s island—the bold greens and blues I’d seen pulsating under the mid-morning sun when we’d arrived, the erotic reds and purples of the eggplant sunset I’d glimpsed through the ship’s porthole. I could smell the salty female smell of the sea, the bittersweet clinging scent of rotting fruit and dying copra. Now, as the first grey and pink strokes of dawn daubed at the night sky, I could smell, too, the sultry odour of frangipani fading with the darkness as a flood-tide began sweeping an incessant stream of bobbing jungle growth back up the river—long strings of water hyacinths and tiny white orchids, their green leaves full of air bubbles to keep them afloat. Some of the strands caught onto the anchor chain of the Conejo Blanco and clung there as if they had grown weary of floating back and forth on the tides, waiting to be swept into the gulf.

  Consuelo’s voice calling me inside made the pain come on again, even worse than before; I sat down heavily at the table.

  “I’d like the morning a whole lot better if it started a little later,” Tiny Cattle said, getting up off the sofa where he’d been dozing and taking the bottle of aguardiente from the cupboard. He was complaining, still, about his feet, about getting home—how Consuelo had promised him one thing and now expected him to hang around until she was ready to do another.

  Consuelo got up, took the bottle from him and emptied it in the sink. She poured him a large glass of water.

  She forced me to drink water, too, but I knew I wouldn’t keep it down. I heard the liquid travelling through my upper body and falling into my stomach. I closed my eyes as it started back up. Consuelo watched me gag and retch, then went over to the counter and cut a huge slab of papaya. She picked out a handful of black seeds and told me to chew them. I tried to do what she asked, but they were too bitter, so she crushed them and made me wash them down with a pink gaseosa called Colombiana. Then she took me back to my cabin, where I was sick again.

  I heard her lock the door and check the lock twice. I pushed the strands of wet hair from my face, strands stuck together by vomit and tears. I kicked on the wall beside my bunk, but all I heard was laughter from up above, and the sound of my own panic, in darkness, tearing in my head.

  I had not known, before Consuelo opened my cabin door again, tied my hands, then led me outside into the fierce heat of the day, that life could permit me so much pain. The sun had come out from behind clouds; the ship’s deck was steaming. Consuelo seemed confused, one minute ordering me to move faster as I hobbled towards the waiting vehicle, the next ordering me to slow down.

  She had been considerate enough to give me a cushion to lie on; the Jeep, although it looked new, lacked any system to absorb the shocks from the deeply cratered road. She untied my hands so I could hang on to the back of the passenger seat, where she sat on Tiny Cattle’s lap. The door on the driver’s side had been removed.

  El Chopo kept asking Consuelo if everything was copacetic. At one point, Consuelo insisted I chew a handful of cardamom seeds that she produced from one of her bags—her “natural tranquillizer”—after which she tried to make me drink a whole bottle of water.

  In Carmen’s memoir, Rescate, she wrote about being tortured by the guerrillas. Torturers, she said, did not want you to die; if you died, you were beyond their realm of influence. To lose a victim could mean you might lose your livelihood.

  I’d always thought that if tortured, I wouldn’t resist, I’d reveal everything, that resistance meant unnecessary suffering. It hadn’t occurred to me then that people tortured others for sport, or a sexual or psychological thrill, or simply to see another human being suffer. Carmen had withheld no secrets, was not an enemy or even a rival; she was simply a political prisoner. Yet her baby had been starved to death and Carmen had accepted his fate with a kind of stoicism I found unimaginable.

  “There are good reasons for death” was as much as she’d had to say about it.

  A pump shotgun and a box of shotgun shells lay on the floor, rolling from one side of the Jeep to the other as El Chopo negotiated the road’s curves. Beside me on the floor I saw a vial of yellow pills, a hamburger with a bite taken out of it, a Coke tin someone had crushed in his hand. Little Yellow Pills. Vial. Hamburger. Bite. I said the words inside my head, as if they could be possible names for the baby that might any minute be shaken out of me.

  I tried to sit up, taking the shallowest breaths I could to avoid inhaling the vehicle’s exhaust. We were passing through a plumed forest of bamboo, with the occasional stand of goatwood or cedar trees opening onto a broad plain where ceibu cattle grazed. White egrets perched on their humps, taking refuge from the sun in the shade of crimson trees, the tips of every branch glowing with fiery candelabra. Birds with foot-long ribbons for tails, and iridescent doves, landed on the red road in front of us, then flew up.

  The road narrowed into a single track as we entered a valley of little wood and palm-thatch villages. Above us rose the steep and steamy bourbon-coloured Nevada Chocolata, fringed with wispy mists. Young girls in floral-print dresses with dishes of green plantains on their heads called out to us as we passed. Barefooted boys, their black feet swollen and ulcerated, ran along beside the Jeep, waving packages of white cheese wrapped in banana leaves. We crossed a river where the grass was flooded and cattle fed on blue hyacinths and women scrubbed their children’s thin bodies with lemons and mud.

  My cramps had grown more infrequent. I shifted my position, propping myself up on one elbow so I could still see. I saw dusty greyish trees, scrub brush and the occasional pink-washed farmhouse smothered with scarlet bougainvillea.

  I sat fully upright, this time to be sick into a plastic bag that smelled of cigarette butts and overripe fruit. I asked El Chopo to slow down, but he paid no attention.

  We had reached the outskirts of the City of Orchids. The road wound through a hard-shell shantytown of bamboo huts with rusted tin roofs. El Chopo ploughed the Jeep though potholes and ruts filled with black scummy water, streets heady with fruit and vegetable debris, the cloying sweetness of decay, and stinking river mud like deposits around a clogged drain, everywhere you looked. A small boy, naked, with six inches of umbili
cal cord protruding from his distended belly, picked a drowned rat out of a puddle and hurled it onto our windshield.

  Heat, a heat so lazy and intoxicating you feel as though you are always just waking from a wine-drugged nap: this is what I remember of the City of Orchids. Mud and rats and mosquitoes and flying cockroaches three inches long—I remember these, and feral children too, eating guava jelly with their hands at the side of the road, and old men with diseased feet, and young men who looked like assassins on every corner.

  Driving through the balconied streets in the centre of town, where every ground-floor window was covered with ornate wrought-iron bars, everywhere I looked I saw funeral homes. I learned later, from Nidia, the maid at the Hotel Viper, that poor people always waited until a family member was on her deathbed before bringing her to the hospital, reinforcing their idea that a hospital was a place you went to die. Poor people did not own cars, so funeral parlours were positioned close to the hospital for convenience.

  One funeraria offered cut-rate coffins for those who had lost their legs. Another specialized in thin boxes for the poor, thick hardwood ones for the rich and “designer coffins” for los vivos, those “full of life.”

  A graffiti-covered bus, whose windows had been removed, lurched up the street, listing like a boat about to discharge its cargo. El Chopo cursed and veered onto the curb, almost knocking down a flower vendor and his sign, Flores Para Los Muertos, at the entrance to the mercado popular. A bald, shirtless man spat at us from the back of the bus, as if the near accident had been our fault. Tiny Cattle said he believed they took the windows out of the local buses to make it easier for passengers to spit on people.

  El Chopo parked in the No Parking Emergency Parking Only zone outside the hospital. A mestizo in bare feet hobbled up to the Jeep and tried to sell Tiny a pair of black-market sunglasses. When Consuelo helped me out, I almost tripped over a limbless man on a little plank with wheels.

  “Hay cigarillos?” he asked. He nudged me and held up, between his teeth, an official-looking stamped document, complete with gruesome photographs, that showed his disability had been incurred in a bona fide accident when he was a young army recruit. Consuelo said the paper was most likely a forgery, but tossed him a package of Pielrojas anyway.

  A bronze statue of an Indian, his naked legs and arms breaking free of his chains, stood at the entrance to El Hospital De Los Libres (the Hospital of the Freed). A man sat in a wheelchair next to the statue, smoking through a little hole in his neck.

  Inside, a receptionist instructed Consuelo to take the elevator to the second floor. A nurse hurrying a bouquet of dead flowers out of a room that was being fumigated showed us where we could wait, in a cubicle partitioned off by thin wainscot panels topped with a grille of chicken-wire. A small newspaper clipping, in English, warned, “The Pill is a Killer.” There was a sink with a dirty coffee cup in it, and beside the sink two white plastic containers, one labelled “Needles Limpias?”, the other “Needles Sucias?” There was some question, it seemed, as to which needles needed sterilizing.

  By the time a doctor came to examine me, the cramps had stopped but panic had set in again. The doctor prodded me on either side of my abdomen and said my severe pains were possibly caused by amoebas, unless it was my appendix.

  I soon wondered if he had been to the same school of quackery as Consuelo. He wanted to do blood work, but I said I refused to allow him or anyone else in that hospital to stick one of their filthy needles in any of my veins. He shrugged and checked my blood pressure, then asked me to stick out my tongue. The morgue, he warned, was already overpopulated with people who had refused to co-operate.

  Consuelo advised me to do what he asked, but when I stuck out my tongue, the doctor told Consuelo—in Spanish—that I had a very beautiful tongue and that he would like to arrange a bed for me in a “private part” of the hospital.

  Consuelo thanked him but said that wouldn’t be necessary. “She will be staying in a safe place,” she told the doctor. If anyone asked, she said as she smoothed the creases out of a hundred-dollar bill, he had never laid eyes on me.

  We got back in the Jeep and drove a short distance across town. El Chopo crossed himself as he parked outside a church presided over by a twenty-foot-high statue of “Cristo Rey, Víctima.” A half-naked Indian lay passed out on a stone bench at the statue’s feet.

  As we started across the plaza, which seemed to be a gathering place for vagrants, stray dogs and gamines who fired at one another with sticks for make-believe machine guns, we were accosted by three police officers. They asked to see my papers. There had been kidnappings in the area. Tiny Cattle lit the jefe a cigarette while the other two began rifling through my knapsack. Consuelo said my papers had been misplaced and gave the jefe a hundred-dollar bill “for his trouble.” The jefe tipped his hat, and the three, plus Tiny Cattle, wandered across the square and disappeared through the steel door of a bar called El hígado no existe (The Liver Does Not Exist).

  chapter sixteen

  The Hotel Viper lay coiled on the shady side of the square, as if waiting for some hapless traveller to stumble into its fangs. It was high tide in the hotel’s front garden, and the lobby was literally awash. The only light came from a dim bulb in a tiny plastic seashell fixed to the ceiling, with a thick layer of dead flies on the bottom. A dark, nervous little man smelling of hair cream and cheap cologne sat behind a desk reading a crime magazine. The cologne mixed with hair cream made me feel dizzy; I reached to grab hold of his desk so I wouldn’t fall. Consuelo told him I was suffering from soroche, acute mountain sickness, which he didn’t seem to question, even though the hotel appeared to be highly below sea level.

  Consuelo asked to see el viejo, the old man, at which the clerk insisted we rest ourselves on a termite-infested sofa in the dining room. He brought aguardiente and a plate of cold fried eggs and guava jelly, the eggs redolent of his hair cream, and left us sitting beneath two eighteen-foot-long anaconda skins nailed to the wall.

  The dining room was also home to a scarlet macaw, a green cockatoo and a bald parrot named Edgar, who had a neurotic habit of pulling his feathers out. He sidled up and down a beam under the dining-room roof, defecating and plucking. Suddenly, he swooped down and flew straight into a wall, lying stunned on the ground, screeching, “Quiero una mujer!” (I want a woman!).

  The water continued to rise, and I started to shiver. Wet feet were unhealthy feet, Consuelo said; you only had to think of the feet of the men and women we’d seen along the road to know what happened if you spent your life without adequate drainage. She made me put my feet up on the sofa, and then covered me with a blanket that smelled of wet feathers.

  I don’t know if it was the bumpy ride from the south end of the island or the aguardiente, but I woke as it was growing dark, stretched out on the sofa with bugs crawling in my hair. I had dreamed I was travelling on a fast boat up the west coast of Vancouver Island with a load of cocaine. The landscape kept getting colder, icier. Birds were frozen in mid-flight and all the fish had frozen in silver arcs across an icy river.

  There was no sign of Consuelo or El Chopo or the little man who had served us the drinks, but an equally mournful woman called Nidia, who said she was the maid, told me the termites were harmless unless I was made of wood.

  I swung my legs over the side of the couch onto the floor and found the tide had receded. Nidia said she had prepared a meal for me, and took me down a musty passageway into a courtyard filled with pots of busy lizzie and morning glory the colour of licked bones. A balcony surrounded the courtyard, much like a catwalk around a prison range. A single table had been set for dinner under a shedding almond tree. I took the one chair, next to an old man with thin red lips and black, black eyes who told me he was dying, and about how much more interesting life had been during the war, and how this was a godforsaken island because you couldn’t get good natural ices.

  Nidia served us chicken necks, rice with gravel and warm Coca-Cola under a crackling bu
g-zapper; the scorched remains of flying insects fluttered down onto our food. When the old man asked for dessert, Nidia said the kitchen was closed. The man requested his brandy drink, but the bar, she said, was closed too. He told her he was going to take a stroll in the garden. “I don’t have many nights left to squander.”

  Apart from the old gentleman, the hotel appeared to be deserted. I asked Nidia where everyone had gone, but either she didn’t understand my question or she didn’t want to answer it.

  I tried my question another way: I asked her where were all the other guests who would be staying in the hotel that night.

  She looked at me in surprise. “This is not that kind of a hotel,” she said. “Guests do not stay here.”

  ——

  There are many ways of remembering, ways to forget. I have tried to forget my room in the Hotel Viper, my whitewashed cell with wooden floorboards that creaked, my sad bed, with a cross full of insect exit holes hanging above it. The ceiling, too, had been eaten away, dirty plastic and newspaper showing through, and wires leading to a single light bulb. Nidia told me not to worry about the little bits of plaster that kept falling; men were replacing part of the old roof, and she would sweep my bed every morning.

  There were no curtains, and the iron fretwork over the window was para seguridad, Nidia said, the first security measure I was aware of, and one I suspected had more to do with keeping people in than keeping anyone out. I hadn’t seen anything at the Hotel Viper worth stealing. I asked where the bathroom was, and Nidia pointed to a door in the wall, a section of the wall that had been cut away, so you had to pry it open. I convinced Nidia to leave the baño door ajar, asked for some soap, a toothbrush and a towel. Nidia shrugged. Más tarde. Later.

  I remember Nidia leaving, and the despair I felt as I entered my walk-in baño (a quarter the size of my walk-in closet back home), where the heat and humidity had caused the one cupboard to split and break. Mosquitoes were lined up on the back of the toilet like jumbo jets waiting for take-off; a column of giant black ants marched across the wall. I undressed, hung my clothes on a wire hanger (hoping they wouldn’t rust), and edged my way around the toilet into the shower-bath. There was no shower curtain and nowhere but a clogged hole in the corner of the room for the water to drain, which meant the water flooded my bedroom as I stood letting it trickle over my hair and face.