by Rita Indiana
But now Said Bona was in a tight spot. After he agreed to warehouse Venezuelan biological weapons in Ocoa, the 2024 seaquake had done away with the base where they’d been kept and dispersed their contents into the Caribbean sea. Entire species had vanished in a matter of weeks. The environmental crisis had spread to the Atlantic.
As he lost support, Said struggled to accuse the United States and the European Union of having fabricated the tsunami with the goal of destabilizing the region.
Acilde intuited that the task they wanted him to take on had something to do with that disaster, which had made Esther Escudero cry during her morning prayers. It was because of that disaster that oceanographers and doctors were streaming into the country and the Caribbean was a dark and putrid stew. Said used his index finger to touch the tip of his huge Dolce & Gabbana glasses and a hologram of Esther Escudero materialized next to the bed. Omicunlé was wearing a white dress with a long and broad skirt, a dark blue turban, and the infinite number of necklaces and bracelets appropriate to her priestly vocation. She looked like what Acilde imagined her ghost would look like. “If you’re seeing this, it means everything’s gone well,” said the ghost, smiling and calm. “Eric initiated you and now you know you are Omo Olokun: the one who knows what lies at the bottom of the sea. Said depends on me, so use the powers you have begun to discover for the good of humanity. Save the sea, Maferefún Olokun, Maferefún Yemayá.” The message over and the ghost gone, Said took off his glasses and discovered his eyes were wet, the very same eyes that had so delighted the women of the nation when, impassioned during the electoral campaign, he’d declared that the children of single mothers were children of the mother country and, as such, his children. “What do you need?” Said asked Acilde, now with respect.
Because of the discreet and unspecific way in which Esther had referred to his powers, he understood he had no need to reveal the window to the past that had opened in his mind, nor the clone there whom he maneuvered by remote control. So far, this was his only power, and he wanted to test the reality of the past he’d reached with the anemone he’d once thought of selling for mere cents. “I need a quiet and private place, because these are the Days of Remembering, in which I will recover the memory of my past lives and of my mission,” said Acilde, using the ceremonious language of those who had pulled him from the waters in 1991 and awakening the president’s curiosity for the first time.
They came to an agreement: Acilde would go to jail for a few months to calm down the followers of Esther who were asking for his head. Said would guarantee his stint was pleasant and later, after finding incontrovertible proof of his innocence, would set him free.
Acilde’s cell had a toilet, a sink, an oven, a little fridge, a bed, and a table with an old forty-four-inch monitor connected to a keyboard. On the gray, carpeted floor there was a handprint with orange specks, as though someone had dumped a sardine and rice dish there for a couple of days. He was not allowed a data plan in jail because hackers might be able to detect it and accuse the government of favoring certain prisoners. While there, Acilde rested for most of the day now that the man he’d started to become in Sosúa had started to move at his command. He learned many things about that time and its people and he got a good idea of what was expected of him. A month after he had arrived, Nenuco had already shared with him all he knew: the portal with the anemones, the name of all the animals in the pool in both Spanish and Taíno, recipes for cooking them, the purpose and origin of all of the herbs they grew in the yard, and the nature of the other world that Acilde was from. Acilde let Nenuco fantasize because, if he realized the other world was a prison cell in 2027, he would have put a bullet in his brain.
Yararí had run off with Willito and they’d heard she was pregnant. As soon as he kidnapped her, Willito had her cooking what he fished with a little net at the beach. Nenuco had gone to get her but the girl told him she was never going back to that “damned shack ever again.”
During the day, Acilde would lie in bed with his eyes closed so his other self could run around Sosúa on the back of Nenuco’s motorcycle, asking questions and taking notes of the street and business names, the names of people, with the excuse that he was writing a book. In the darkness of his cell, he would compare these notes on the old computer he had been allowed to have. When he entered the names from his notes in the search engine, he’d get lots of historical information: the success of certain businesses, the misfortune of others, the future criminality of an innocent-seeming young man or the promotion to mayor of an illiterate woman. How lost and obtuse the people of that small town looked now, how sad their small plans and projections, how comedic the desperation of someone who does not yet know a marvelous destiny awaits around the corner.
He had still not been able to confirm his own existence in the historical Sosúa, nor that his double had been there among its people and that, like everybody else, he’d left a mark. To confirm his presence he needed to be someone, he needed a name, he needed papers, and so that very night Nenuco took him to see Stephan, a German who owned a bar and falsified documents for Europeans with dubious pasts who’d retired in Sosúa with the kind of money that wouldn’t even buy a stick of gum back in their own countries.
The bar, two blocks from the beach, was full of elderly tourists, mostly in their seventies, and young mulatos from the neighborhood. They sat around little plywood tables and drank Brugal and Coca-Cola, their attention fixed on the host up on the small concrete stage greeting the audience. He wore a Lycra T-shirt, under which his bulging muscles looked like fluorescent sausages.
“Señoras y señores, signore e signori, ladies and gentlemen, mesdames et messieurs, meine Damen und Herren, willkommen, benvenuti, welcome to tonight’s show at One-Eyed Willy’s, where your dreams come true. Opening this great evening of fun, I introduce you to Sosúa’s very own: El Asco!” And immediately a drag queen appeared on stage who had obviously undergone all kinds of homemade experiments to achieve her womanly curves. The Crisol oil injections had completely deformed her, creating strange bubbles in all the wrong places, and the tight silver muslin dress added a bone-chilling touch to her gray and cadaveric skin. Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” came thundering out of the towers of speakers on either side of the stage, pumping the synthesizers that the electro genius Giorgio Moroder had inaugurated the future with in 1977. Even in Stephan’s office, behind the bar, the song’s chorus could be heard vibrating, rallying the audience that whistled and clapped to El Asco’s deathly sensuality as she mimicked Summers: “looooove.”
“Where did you dig up this doll?” asked the German with a strong accent and then, laughing: “You’re going to do fine: in this country being white is a profession.” Thirty years in the future, Acilde wrote Stephan’s complete name in the search engine and saw how, thanks to the popularity of that little bar and its drag show, he had become a well-known impresario with restaurants all over the north coast. Acilde hadn’t thought about the cost of the fake IDs and he made a mental note, next to the other mental notes of all the other favors Nenuco had done for him, to pay him back the hundred dollars he was now pulling from his pocket to buy the documents. As Stephan took his photo in front of a white sheet hung on the door, he asked Acilde what name he wanted on the papers. In the bar, the song was coming to a close and the audience was clapping wildly. “Giorgio,” said Acilde, and then added the surname his mother had seen on his father’s ID when he’d opened his wallet to pay her: “Giorgio Menicucci.”
Côte de Fer
A piece of blood sausage drops into each of the wooden bowls held by Roque’s men. He has cooked the meal himself to celebrate the sale of the seventy skins they’d had ready when the English returned to Playa Bo. This delicacy is made with wild pig intestines marinated in a Jamaican pepper Captain Ball had brought back from Cuba. Roque is a good cook and he tells Argenis that was how he had made a living on the Spanish galleon that brought him from the Canary Islands. Where there are ca
ttle, there is work. They slaughter and gut the cows so they will always have something to offer the ships that stop on the coast, without which there would be no wine, no oil, no wheat, no gunpowder, nor the pieces of gold and silver accumulating in the chests in which each one of the men also keeps his dreams. Engombe’s dream is to be captain of his own ship. The French pirate who he’d been indentured to abandoned him on the north coast with a bucket of water because he had killed a fellow crew member by hitting him on the head with a hammer. The little French guy’s: to go back to his homeland and marry a neighbor of his with enormous breasts for whom he’s been beating his meat to death. The one-armed man is happy and eating better and more frequently here than in the English dungeon where he was recruited. The Taíno does not have a treasure chest and wine makes him ill; his dreams are of a sacred geometry that charts the earth from its first days, where a legion of ancestors calls his name.
They’ve sacrificed two dozen cattle and Roque gives each man a bottle to accompany supper. They eat in peace and snap their fingers to the rhythm of the crickets in the background until Engombe gets up to get another piece of cassava and the little French guy, playfully, sticks his hand in the black man’s dish to steal his leftovers. Before he can even touch them, Engombe slices his head off with a scimitar. The head rolls until it stops at Argenis’ feet, who sees it blink several times, as if it had something in its eye, and then go completely still. In an extraordinary rage, Argenis knocks Engombe down with a single punch to the chest. Argenis cries with grief over the poor French guy and the one-armed man curses and the Taíno drops to his knees and screams. They all jump on the murderer, and manage to immobilize him and tie him to the base of a guayacán tree. Roque grabs the severed head by the hair and puts it next to Engombe so he’ll have to look at it all night long. Argenis cries inconsolably, repeating “Côte de Fer, Côte de Fer,” just like the poor innocent man used to do. Giorgio and Iván made Nenuco break down Argenis’ studio door to wake him up; his screams could be heard all the way to the house.
For weeks, Argenis had been sleeping during the day and painting at night. He would get up almost always around ten in the evening, his head down and with no appetite. What he was painting, however, had Giorgio very enthused. He’d go see him in his studio with a bag of pot, a bottle of vodka, and a gallon of grapefruit juice. Malagueta would frequently accompany them. Elizabeth was beyond painting, or at the very least it didn’t interest her very much, although every now and again she’d come to Argenis’ studio with Iván and they would play music and talk. Argenis would paint on the unstretched canvas on the floor, in a silence broken only by the extraordinarily strange theories he’d spout in response to the simplest questions. Giorgio would ask him things just to see what he would come up with, winking at Elizabeth, who’d make faces and laugh behind his back while playing “Silence is Sexy” by Einstürzende Neubauten, “Traigo de todo” by Ismael Rivera, “Contacto espacial con el tercer sexo” by Sukia, “The Bells” by Lou Reed, “Into the Sun” by Sean Lennon, “Killing Puritans” by Armand Van Helden, “Remain in Light” by Talking Heads, or “Superimposition” by Eddie Palmieri. Whenever Elizabeth opened her mouth, it was to comment on something she’d seen in a magazine or the internet, or to criticize the work of the other local artists who weren’t present—these she categorized as black holes, stuck, mediocre, zeros. Argenis knew she had him in that category too, and while he painted he’d make a few interesting efforts to pull himself out of that grouping.
At some point, after she had abandoned one of the three careers her daddy had paid for before art school at Altos de Chavón (sound engineering, creative writing, and cosmetology), Elizabeth had read the Fluxus Manifesto in a classmate’s scrapbook. Afterward, she’d ordered a bunch of books on conceptual art and various digital cameras from Amazon and she’d declared herself a video artist. She created a series called Seco y latigoso, which was, basically, nine loops of scenes of prostitutes working the streets in different zones in Santo Domingo. She’d put them up on the Web on a site with the same name and had managed to get a French curator to include her in a textbook on Third World Contemporary Art. Since then, the whole world kissed her ass. Because of that, and because she had a BMW, a house in Las Terrenas, all the music in the world, and the best pills in the Caribbean. She had no need to be in the Sosúa Project, but she was there because she felt like it and because, of all of them, she was the only one who was really friends with the Menicuccis.
One day the power went out, but they lit candles and Argenis kept painting. “Monsieur, what do you think about the energy crisis our country has been suffering from for the past thirty years?” Giorgio asked, elbowing Malagueta so he’d pay attention. “In the Caribbean we live on the dark side of the planetary brain, just like with LSD; the neurons that correspond to our islands are very rarely lit, but when they are…” responded Argenis as he poured his glass of ice and grapefruit juice onto the canvas to create a watery effect.
Needless to say, the night of the screaming there was no painting party. After waking Argenis, Giorgio brought him a glass of water and, without turning on the light, Iván sat on the bed and told them with that kind of screaming while sleeping the souls of the dead were always involved. “Each person has a spiritual guide, a soul who guides them, a light that helps them; there are also very dark spirits who want to take advantage of you and play tricks and pretend to be good.”
Nenuco interrupted. “There was one in Don Frank’s house. I work in Don Frank’s garden and they found a jug full of gold coins. Now he never has to work again. And you know how he found it? There was an ant invasion in the house and every night he dreamt a black man would eat them. One day he comes to me and says, ‘Let me hose them down with hot water to kill them.’ He goes to the yard and says, ‘Nenuco, help me.’ We take a shovel to unearth the ant tunnels and we hit something hard and it was an earthenware jug. There used to be a lot of pirates and runaway slaves who would bury their money around here.”
Awake, Argenis kept crying. He felt the true weight of the expectations his talent had generated and felt certain he would never meet them. The experience he was having with the buccaneers was exhausting. Plus, he had to make something some future collector would want to pay thousands of dollars for, something with a seductive power that would stand the test of time. Lulled by Nenuco’s soft singing while Giorgio leaned on the doorframe and looked at him worriedly, he thought about Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, and about Yeyo, and that if he had been born three hundred years earlier, his technique would have opened doors to the courts of kings. He hated Professor Herman and the pretensions he had picked up from her. I have to get committed to an insane asylum or become an evangelical, he thought, wishing for a relief that neither painting nor the comforts of Playa Bo had brought him.
He was awake at night in two worlds but trying to close the door to the one with the severed head. Giorgio took his hand and Argenis squeezed it as if he were afraid he would fall off a cliff. When he let go, Giorgio pulled his away and lightly touched the palm of his hand. With all eyes closed, Argenis feels as though another body is getting into his bed, cradling and rocking him. A hand caresses his belly, which tenses, then squeezes his glutes. He guesses the route the hand will take and he lets it happen. He has been waiting centuries to be sucked like this, by lips that pull evenly, with a soft and agile tongue, for someone who swallows without fear of gagging on his big dick and who covers his chest and legs with a mantle of long hair that smells of salt and pepper. He forgets about the little French guy, about art, and Playa Bo, he forgets his own name and that of the organ around which the concentric universe now turns. He comes hard, as though emptying his balls forever. He opens his eyes, anesthetized, and sees Roque finally lift his head and throw himself at his side on the cot, snoring almost immediately. Back in the present, Nenuco, Iván, and Giorgio had gone, leaving him disheveled and alone, with the door to his studio broken and open to the world.
Accompanied b
y an anecdote about the state of Cuban hospitals and how easy it was to get prescription drugs on the black market, Iván had given Argenis a strip of Valium, thanks to which he was now spending more time in seventeenth-century Sosúa. Either they didn’t miss him at the curatorial sessions or his paintings had exonerated him from having to attend. After many days and nights torturing Engombe to make him pay for his crime, Roque has set him free because he needs him to work and fire the arquebus. But Argenis doesn’t take his eyes off him, waiting for an excuse to hit him on the head with a rock. After what happened in the cot, he feels disoriented and happy, protected by time, because for him, that past he still didn’t recognize as totally his had no repercussions in the present, where he was still a true macho and where no one knew anything. Now he had more reason not to talk about what was happening to him and to keep using the excuse of being the crazy artist to do whatever he wanted with his time. He wants to protect Roque, he wants to impress him. He asks permission to use the press to try and make some engravings and shows the buccaneer a portrait of him he’d carved on an old plank. Roque lets him use the tools that came with the press, which is now in the little hut built by the one-armed man and the dead French guy, thinking that if the engravings are good they could sell some to the smugglers. The first seven hang on the wall with rough nails. Lacking ink, Argenis uses cow’s blood, running from the slaughtering with a bucket and applying it immediately, before it can coagulate.