Sleeping Dragons

by Magela Baudoin; Wendy Burk; M. J. Fièvre

  Gabriel nudged Natalia to change the subject when the story became explicit, but our absolute silence encouraged her to continue. “Journalism is like an immunological disease,” he offered as an apology. “Sometimes you can inoculate yourself,” Natalia rejoined, “but sometimes you just have to let yourself get sick.” Natalia couldn’t stop fighting with Gabriel, even though her victories were insignificant, like having the last word, cleverly finishing a sentence, or generally being much more attractive and charming than he was. Suddenly I noticed how very tired she looked. She hadn’t slept well for the last few days and, consequently, Gabriel hadn’t either. During her prolonged insomnia, she tried to mentally reconstruct Rebecca’s murder, but it was impossible. Gabriel had been supportive at the beginning, but he’d given up: “Go to sleep, go to sleep, woman.” Gabriel laughed. We all laughed, even Natalia, who by then was as freezing as I was.

  When they opened up another couple bottles of beer and started filling the glasses, I escaped to the bathroom. I sat down on the toilet, comforted by the warm, suffocating microclimate inside the stall, untouched by the bar’s artificial winter. Only for a race like ours was this kind of curiosity possible—scientific, but also a little morbid—allowing us to speak of rape and death without losing our appetite. I pinched my cheeks in front of the mirror after rinsing my face. Natalia was strong enough for this kind of story. I knew it all too well. She had been there for me, carrying me on her back, dragging me to the bus stop, because we had no money, then soothing my fever with wet rags and mumbling between her prayers: “Crazy. Fucking crazy. Hail Mary, full of grace …”

  I went back to the table, where the story continued.

  Not much time had passed—at least not from the official, investigative point of view—between the discovery of Rebecca’s body and the police being forced to arrive at the gates of the community to apprehend the culprit. “Fifteen hours at most,” Natalia said. Her choice of verb was deliberate: the police really were “forced” to come because the community was not willing to wait for the leisurely unfolding of “official” and “investigative” procedures. Fifteen hours—in a country where justice can take centuries. “But of course,” Natalia said, “time never works in favor of the condemned…” It hadn’t in my case: as the doctors put it, everything might have been different if I had been seen just a few hours earlier. Those few hours haunted Natalia, even now. She had lost all sense of time, and in the end it was Gabriel who had forced her to leave the room, called a taxi and dragged us to the hospital. I was ashen, as cold as a corpse; my sister was frail and trembling, her eyes emptied by weariness and the horror of all that blood.

  By three o’clock in the morning, we were the only ones left in the bar. The photographer spoke, giving the tale its epilogue: “We’re so used to this shit,” he said, “no one should be surprised by how fast it all went down. But are you telling me you’re going to accept the way they identified the killer?” According to what certain anonymous witnesses had told Natalia, the women were sitting together on the broken curb when a boy came up to them. He was freshly bathed, his shirt tucked into his pants, with some kind of wooden board in his hands. Without saying a word, guided by their knowing, they gave each other a sidelong glance, like birds. The boy even smiled at them before he asked for Rebecca. And they responded to him in chorus, with violent shouts, attracting a mob: drunken men blinded by alcohol, hungry for blood. At this point Natalia condensed the tale: they hung the boy from a lamppost, whose yellow rays outlined his body like a spotlight. And what happened next was indeed a form of theater. Men, women and children surrounded the crucified body, exorcising their fury as if this were their Carnival. But instead of dancing, they were striking him with stones, sticks and belts, in the name of the dead Queen.

  Gabriel said that when the police lowered him from the lamppost, the boy was half dead, his head and body smashed and his clothes reduced to rags. Natalia added a sentimental note: Angelica still had the wooden board. He had brought as a present for Rebecca, a cutting board for her grandmother’s kitchen. He was a carpenter, she said, eighteen years old and five and a half feet tall. In his statement, he confessed to having paid for Rebecca twice. As they spoke, Gabriel and Natalia looked like a couple of television newscasters. They complemented each other perfectly. No wonder they’d had three children together. Not one but three. And every time she got pregnant, my sister looked at me with guilty eyes, as if she wanted to avoid hurting me, even though I’d told her not to worry, that I was happy for her.

  “A clock strikes at the heart of every newspaper,” Natalia said. She said it a little before closing time, that night when she had to file her profile of a murderer without believing a word. “He could have easily been an innocent bystander,” she had told her editor; but she confessed to us that she just didn’t know. Her face held a cloud of remorse, even though her words were resigned. She had done her job. Isaac Chingano, Saul Rosales, Roque Pando, Juan Bustos, Juana Nomine, the prosecutor, the investigator, the village cacique, the grandmother, everyone she talked to told her that the case was closed, that the community had spoken, that justice had been done because the culprit had been caught. “Of course they needed to catch someone,” Gabriel said. Someone whose sacrifice would smooth the waters and allow them to keep on living. “Someone to save them,” I thought, just like Natalia had always saved me. Just like she wanted to do now, trying to convince Gabriel to let her carry my baby for me.

  They finally turned off the air conditioning, and as they did, there was a clear, almost echoing silence. I felt as if the lights had been switched on in a darkened room. Then Gabriel asked, “But how did they know it was him? What reason did they give?” And Natalia answered with a bitter smile. They knew it was him because they had bound a red ribbon on Rebecca’s left foot, to bring the murderer forward, and he was the first one to come asking for her. “And then what did you do?” I asked, unfairly, as if my sister was supposed to have the answer for everything. “I just wrote the story,” Natalia responded, “as best I could.”

  THE GIRL

  I

  THE GIRL HAD LEFT THE TABLE in a hurry, and although the others feigned indifference, they couldn’t conceal their curiosity for long. With dinner at an end and the coffee cups half empty, they came around to the only subject that remained both untouched and unavoidable. Eda, for one, couldn’t wait to bring it up.

  “Well,” she said. “Looks like you’ve broken the mold this time, haven’t you?”

  The corners of their mouths twitched.

  “It’s no big deal, Eda,” Blas said with a forced smile.

  “You’re such a puritan,” Duke told her.

  “Here you go again! We can’t say shit ever since you’ve become an ecologist.”

  “Ecologist” was what Eda called anyone who was being politically correct. Of late, this seemed to particularly annoy her, as did Duke himself.

  “Tell the truth, Eda. What are you most upset about?” Duke asked, and with his usual power of synthesis, he added: “the tattoos, or the fact that she’s a spic?”

  Blas, who’d been playing with his napkin, looked up to weigh the impact of these words on Eda.

  “Don’t exaggerate.” Eda turned to her right and lightly touched Blas’s hand clutching his napkin. “Blas, forgive me for saying this, but that girl is trash. End of story.”

  “End of story?” Duke laughed and patted Blas on the shoulder. “Don’t mind her! That girl is smoking hot, man. And one more thing—” This time he raised his right eyebrow, looking straight at Eda: “She’s more worldly than anyone at this table.”

  The girl, whom they would never call by name, had many more tattoos than were visible to the naked eye. It’s true she was gorgeous, so Eda had tried her best not to undress her with her eyes. But she’d caught a glimpse of the bird spread out across the nape of her neck. “It’s Maori,” the girl had explained with a wink, well aware of Eda’s curiosity. Duke, the forever brazen one, took to staring openly w
henever Blas ran his fingers over the snake curled like a ring around the girl’s finger. As for Blas, he got an erection every time he considered the crown of flowers that hugged the girl’s knee and traveled down her calf to reach her ankle.

  Blas was not a guy with a lot of experience. And, for Eda, that was precisely the problem: he lacked street smarts; anyone could deceive him. Sweet as he was, trusting and open as he was, what a pity that he gave in to the very first girl to show him serious interest! Eda didn’t care that the girl might be a gold digger—although in truth she didn’t appear to be—because Blas was well off and many others had gone after his money before, without leaving him hanging out to dry. With the others, though, Blas had been tender and flirty, and even a little vulnerable, but in the end he never lost his lucidity. He enjoyed showing them off, although he didn’t seem to take them to bed very often; the girls drank summer drinks, occupied the dressing rooms at the mall, and then disappeared when either they or Blas got bored. They’d all been out of the same mold: bottle blondes with careful haircuts and shapely figures, cardigans casually knotted around their necks. Slightly prudish, they spoke little, and when they did open their mouths, it left much to be desired. Eda ambushed them, and later laughed at their expense. With the last one, it went something like this:

  “But what the fuck got into you, asking her about the economy?” Duke scolded her.

  “I never thought she’d take it so seriously,” Eda said, faking embarrassment. “Blas, you’ll forgive me, right?”

  And Blas had joined in their laughter, acknowledging that he could never have seen himself growing old with someone who expressed herself thusly: “Well, even if the economic crisis doesn’t directly affect you, it still does affect you. I mean, I can see how bad some people have it. I’m not talking about myself or anything, but I do have friends, people from good families, who are totally broke now, you know?” (Blas could not believe that she was still talking.) “And that’s even worse than it is for bums who have always been out on the street—poor souls, but at least they’re used to it … ” (Did she seriously just refer to them as “poor souls”?) “Poverty is only a real problem for people who know what it’s like to live comfortably, and all of a sudden they’re losing their home and their job. That is the real tragedy!”

  The girl, the new girl that is, couldn’t be written off so easily. You noticed her miles away, even in the heart of a city like Barcelona. She was so different that Blas began to imagine their life together, using the plural to speak of his plans—“we” or “we’re going to” or “we are”—which infuriated Eda and touched Duke, who was secretly relieved that Blas could finally stop being the third wheel. The girl, for one, had no patience for etiquette or the rules set by society; she was anything but intimidated by the ethical, aesthetic, or intellectual formalities of a world in which she knew she was an outsider. She was intelligent but distracted. She wasn’t afraid to laugh at herself or at others, especially at Eda. It was quite clear that she wasn’t made to sit quietly and look pretty; for starters, she didn’t keep a lid on anything. And that was what Blas liked best, her noisy presence, her lack of respect for personal space, and most of all the way she sucked out the oxygen around Eda, extinguishing her light.

  “You shouldn’t trust her,” Eda said. “Just look into her eyes and you’ll know that she’s crazy. She told us herself that she drove her first husband insane. She almost killed him, and here you are now: offering yourself up like a sacrificial lamb.”

  “The guy was loco, Eda, and a real scumbag,” Duke interjected. “If she hadn’t shot him, he’d have killed her. What else could she do?” Blas was silent.

  “Only a madwoman marries a loon!” Eda wailed.

  Over time, Blas felt a quiet relief as Eda’s jabs at the girl lost their power. What seemed to Eda to be a sign of insanity, Blas and Duke accepted as part of the girl’s exuberant personality. But this didn’t stop Eda from mumbling. A tattooed scalp hiding under a shock of hair—was that not pathological? The girl had given her two-year old son a tattoo as a symbol of their “spiritual connection”—didn’t she belong in a psych ward? How is it that a mother, who speaks three languages and has a college degree, leaves her child behind with his grandparents, on another continent, to try her luck bartending on the beach? “Fuck it, she’s crazy!” Eda repeated. But her words had become unobtrusive, like rain.

  “She doesn’t like me, does she? If I were going to be childish about it, I’d even say that she hates me,” the girl, faced with Eda’s disapproval, mused from time to time.

  “Nonsense. She doesn’t hate you. Eda is difficult, but she’s not that kind of person. Don’t take it the wrong way.”

  “No, I’m not taking it the wrong way.” The girl added with a touch of malice, “The poor thing is so—” Blas held his breath, waiting for the blow.

  “Stuck up? Is that the word?” He smiled, nodding, and she let out a deep laugh. “She’s got a stick up her ass.” As she spoke, Blas watched her lips move, so appetizingly vulgar. The girl galvanized him, and he was eager to possess her.

  “Come on, forget Eda. You’ll get used to each other.”

  And Eda had no other choice than to get used to the situation. It was either that or get used to not seeing Blas, who no longer took her phone calls. However, her forced acquiescence didn’t make it easier for her to embrace the girl, nor did it stop her from cooking up all kinds of mischief aimed at ridiculing her or getting rid of her entirely. Eda couldn’t stop herself, even though her powers of ingenuity seemed to wane as she saw her influence on Blas shrink to nothing.

  In any case, Duke was the first to see the writing on the wall. Not that it wasn’t obvious after a while: Blas was getting married, and a certain someone would have to accept it. It was as if Blas needed to prove to Eda and to the world that he was a real man, that he could handle a girl of her caliber. That’s why, in Eda’s opinion and to the girl’s delight, he planned a hopelessly tacky wedding. Everything was kitschy and drenched in symbolism, from the gold and fuchsia chair covers to the white doves released at the end of the ceremony. Christmas lights dangled from every tree, and an overpowering scent of incense filled the air. Blas, in his tuxedo, glowed with self-satisfaction. He couldn’t stop talking about their honeymoon plans. The girl had set her heart on a voyage to the Amazon. And that was something none of his friends could fathom: Blas in a canoe, surrounded by alligators, mosquitoes, and bioluminescent plants. But postcards from Blas soon arrived as proof: he’d overcome his childhood fears and submerged himself in that muddy river called Madre de Dios, surrounded by pink dolphins with foreheads like melons. “Unbelievable” was how Eda put it.

  “Extraordinary” was how Blas himself put it. The girl, who believed that the river could cure everything, threw her naked body into the water, swam with the dolphins, and then splashed on the banks until her hair, shoulders, and entire body were covered with mud and clouds of insects. The insects were dangerous, Blas reminded her, as he watched the sunlight gleaming on her curves. Blas believed he could see the movements of a divine hand: one from which he ate turtle eggs, wild boar, piranha, ants, mashed cassava and sweet potato; one from which he drank brandy, sugarcane juice and, with the guidance of a shaman, a hallucinogenic brew of sacred flowering vines, which caused him to shit and puke all night long, as a form of purification.

  II

  When they returned from their honeymoon, Blas took the girl straight to an apartment he’d rented in Horta Guinardó, near Gaudí’s Park Güell, because he wanted to surprise her and he thought that, very soon, her son could come live with them and they’d take him to the park to play. Blas had even spoken with the child’s grandparents. But the girl became infuriated, considering it an ambush. She made quite the scene.

  “I will not allow you to control my life!” she screamed. “And don’t you mess with my son.”

  Blas—who wasn’t the type to beg—begged this time, promising her that they would do everything her way: fro
m grocery lists to vacation plans. The girl did not respond. From music selections to holiday menus. Still, an icy silence. From contraception to home decor. Nothing. Then Blas got down on his knees. Movies and walks, towels and pets: everything would be the way she liked it. At last, the girl laughed. She’d taken her sweet time, but in the end she granted him the forgiveness he yearned for, absolving herself from guilt and earning the right, in Eda’s words, “to fill the apartment with crap.” She hung brightly patterned sarongs over the tasteful paintings that Blas favored, and covered the white armchairs with colorful Andean textiles. An elaborate wire ornament dangled from every lamp, and to these she attached images of the Buddha, self-help mottos, and suicidal poems that Eda couldn’t even bring herself to laugh at: now she was worried for real.

  “Who puts shit like that in their house?”

  “Let it go, Eda,” Duke said. “She puts them up when she’s not feeling well. The girl gets migraines.”

  “When this thing goes south—and it will—I’ll be the one with the migraines,” Eda told him. “You guys can see it coming, but you’ve chosen to turn a blind eye. Blas is nothing but a puppet,” she mumbled, while she rinsed out the lettuce for Sunday brunch.