Tentacle

by Rita Indiana

  In the first engraving, a black man armed with an arquebus points it at some cattle in the distance. In the second, a bearded one-armed man is carrying the trunk of a palm tree over the shoulder of his good arm, helped by the little French guy, who Argenis has drawn from memory. He has gone all out to capture the folds of the fabric of their pants, of the linen shirts they all wear, and he’s made the one-armed man’s Danish clay pipe bigger; he smokes that pipe as much when he works as when he’s resting. The third engraving is of a tropical jungle in which a man with a triangular back, his hair in a bun, raises a saber over his head to cut a path through the thicket. The fourth is of the Taíno squatting and stirring the fire on a grill where meat is smoking. In the fifth, Roque poses with an arquebus on his shoulder over the cliff at Playa Bo, wearing a crimson felt hat and two pistols on his belt. The sixth shows Engombe tied to a tree. They’ll think he’s a slave, thinks Argenis, who signs the engravings “Côte de Fer.” The final engraving illustrates the inside of their hut and the clay pot where they keep fresh water in the corner. Under a window, Argenis has captured where his savior sleeps.

  The seven plates all come from the same caoba tree. Despite his disability, the one-armed man is very skilled with wood and, following Roque’s orders, helps Argenis prepare the plates. The idea of making engravings came to him one evening on the way back from a slaughter. Roque, whose boots were dirty with blood, was leaving red footprints with each step on the rocks to the stream where they’d gone to drink and bathe. His wet curls caressed the muscular definition of his back, which ended in an almost feminine waist. When he turns, Argenis continues carving with his gaze the hairy pelvis that hides a small and relaxed penis and, further up, a brown beard full of even more curls that end at the base of his neck, and from which hangs a copper key on a braided leather necklace.

  As he prepares other plates, while the others gut animals or cure skins, Roque lets him stay behind with the Taíno, who marvels at the magical images Côte de Fer produces using just cow blood and caoba. By the glow of the fire they light each night, Argenis gouges the remaining wood with a drawing of Engombe and Roque skinning a cow when he hears screaming. It’s coming from the present. This time the screams weren’t his but Linda’s, who’d come back from the city and her meetings with the Minister of Natural Resources. Stunned, Argenis rushed over and, as he neared the house, he could clearly hear Linda’s diatribe: complaining that Playa Bo had become a mess of lazy good-for-nothings eating and drinking, consuming money they could be using to build a lab, the real reason for all this in the first place. “Or did you forget?” she asked. And then he heard Giorgio’s voice trying to calm her down, telling her to wait and see what Argenis had produced. “They’re treasures,” he said. “They will sell for sure.”

  Giorgio’s carefully phrased whispers, as though he were afraid Linda would hit him, made Argenis want to kill her. In his head, Giorgio was an altruistic man who believed in him and she was a conceited and selfish slut. He fantasized about raping and strangling her, then about beating her head in with the aluminum baseball bat Malagueta kept in his studio. Fucking cocksucker. He waited in the dark until the argument was over and imagined Giorgio would come out to give himself a break from the white Jew, giving Argenis the opportunity he so wanted to counsel him, to gratefully be a friend to him, to put his arm around him and let his chest finally touch his patron’s. But what he heard instead, after a brief silence, were the whimpers of pleasure from a moist and hasty reconciliation between the Menicuccis. He remained crouched among the dwarf palms until they were whispering sweet nothings to one another in English and Italian, making the return to his studio so bitter he could feel it in his bones.

  He threw himself onto his bed. He stared at the ceiling fan, its blades covered with dust. In his other night, he walks feverishly to the hut with the printing press, where by candlelight he carves, one by one, the plates the one-armed man has prepared for him. He attacks the wood with the same vehemence, insomnia, and alienation he feels attacking him. At dawn he covers the plates with canvas and contemplates the loneliness of the landscape surrounding him, neither prosperous nor cozy, the border between the beach and the forest at the mercy of a lethal attack from a Spanish crew that could arrive, noiselessly, at any moment to cut off their heads, unless a drunk among their own did it first. Why did he have to see this? Who had put him in this place? He remembers the gardener’s words and he knows the men with whom he lives and works died a long time ago and that he was wasting his time chasing a beautiful bearded man while carving engravings no one would ever see. Later, in both his bodies, that of Argenis and of Côte de Fer, he went to the beach muttering, “Faggot, loco, crazy faggot,” and those words cut him inside with a sharpness like the edges of the reef in whose nooks and crannies he recognized the broad nose and thick lips of his father’s profile as if in a paranoid painting by Dalí.

  At breakfast, Linda sat on her husband’s lap while he brought morsels of fruit salad to her mouth with a little fork. A FedEx truck struggled on the gravel path from the street to the house and they all got up and watched Elizabeth sign some papers and announce, as she opened boxes with a kitchen knife, that her project would be taking a new direction. She pulled out Technics 1200 turntables, a mixer, and about twenty vinyl records: goodbye video art, hello DJ Elizabeth Méndez.

  Iván was radiant with his student’s malleability and raised his mimosa in a toast to her future. He’d been pushing her in this direction from the moment he’d heard the music she produced for her videos, which was much more interesting and complex than the images it accompanied. Malagueta proposed that for the presentation of their Goya projects, on which they’d been working for more than a month, they should throw a party, and that it should serve as Elizabeth’s debut. In the meantime, Argenis, gutting his fourth animal of the day, froze a hollow smile at the table on the terrace, watching as his paintings shrank before all the shiny silver electronic paraphernalia. Victim to a deep drop in his self-esteem, he felt nauseous and a criminal self-pity. His dreadlocks hung like rotten strings of garlic and the bags under his eyes looked like two used tea bags. “Miss Méndez,” he said sarcastically to Elizabeth, “you’re a woman of many talents.” She lifted her gaze from her new toys for just a second and, without a word, looked him in the eye for the first time in her life. Keen to blow away the black cloud Argenis had once more created with his obvious personality problems, Linda spoke in a voice she hoped would sound concerned: “Argenis, you should see a doctor,” she said. “Man, you look like shit.”

  ‌

  ‌Lamentations

  Where others saw scenery, Linda Goldman saw desolation. Where others heard relaxing subaquatic silence, she heard the shrieks of life disappearing. Where others saw a gift from God, given for the enjoyment of humankind, she saw an ecosystem fallen victim to a systematic and criminal attack. When she looked at the coral reef, she felt like an oncologist standing before her patient’s body. She knew she could save it, although she also understood the disproportionate capacity of evil and its reach down to its finest detail. In order to make the miracle happen, it was necessary to have a measure of extreme optimism and critical realism that would drive anybody crazy. In the reef’s case, it wasn’t just up to Linda and her team. Salvation depended on re-educating an entire community, and on the government and its long-term protection plan. It was work that would require years, and she’d sworn her life to it. There were days she felt her commitment was irrelevant, when confronted, for example, with a local fisherman’s anchor that, in a single minute, had torn a reef hundreds of years old, destroying a valuable specimen and the fish habitat the very same fisherman needed to subsist. The guards charged with enforcing environmental laws in the Cove of Sosúa were the first to ignore them: throwing garbage, fishing with harpoons, and stealing coral to sell—they lacked a comprehensive education and adequate salaries. For their part, the fishermen had enough problems finding anything to fish to listen to those telling them w
here and how often they could fish.

  Urgency and danger ran through her veins, they were the reason she had been brought up by this sea. In 1939, her father arrived from Austria with his parents. Back then, Sosúa was a jungle, the abandoned lands of the United Fruit Company. There, with 800 other Jews who’d managed to avoid being exterminated, they built a dairy that soon fed the entire country. As a child, she’d spent her free time collecting shells, rocks, and coral at the beach. She’d classify them by shape and color back at the gazebo in her yard. During a trip to New York, her father, Saúl, took Linda and her brothers to the Museum of Natural History. She told her father she wanted to see live animals, not dead ones filled with cotton and formaldehyde. Watching Jacques Cousteau documentaries on local TV, she came to an understanding of the tragedy evolving right under their noses. The sea had been pillaged for centuries and it would soon be empty and sterile. In college, as she worked on her thesis about coral reef diseases in the Caribbean, she went a whole week without sleep. Her friends found her at daybreak, walking naked around campus and carrying a flashlight. After attending her graduation jacked up on pills, she returned to Puerto Plata with a conservation plan her father rejected and with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder.

  When Giorgio first laid eyes on her, he was attracted to her spirited ways and her confidence, which he at first mistook for a byproduct of her parents’ money. All the men in Cabarete, Sosúa, Playa Dorada, and Playa Cofresí had tried to hit on her without success. Stung by her rejection, some of them had started a rumor that she was a lesbian, when in fact she just had no time for anybody. She gave windsurfing lessons during the day. At night, she wrote letters and proposals, trying to get international organizations to carry out preliminary investigations on which she would be able to base her conservation project. She relied on scientific articles that became increasingly more pessimistic about the reefs in the Caribbean, illustrated with photographs that showed white patches gaining more and more territory on the hard but fragile coral. Refusing to use medication, she managed her moods on her own. She’d dive into deep depressions, shutting herself up in her studio and eating only Chef Boyardee straight from the can, convinced the end of the world was irreversible and widespread ignorance would continue to prevent her from saving the ocean. Her older brother would come and dig her out of her hole, stick her in the shower, and give her the money Linda had sworn never to ask for from her father; he’d tell her not to abandon her dreams, that the world needed people like her, and other ready-made self-help phrases that had proven effective over time. When at the end of this therapy Adam would ask her to come work at the dairy for a while, she’d kick him out with enough fury to fill her with energy for days, and that would get her back on track with a kind of manic focus on her embryonic project: a compulsive search for grants and the messianic hope that had led her to fall in love with Giorgio Menicucci.

  In the last few years, thanks to 500 daily milligrams of Seroquel and her husband’s luck with business, plus an inheritance, they’d been able to buy a parcel of beach and Linda was no longer a human yo-yo. The meds made it possible for her to do her work without euphoria and tragedy, but not a day went by when the vision that had been haunting her since her youth did not stop her dead in her tracks with anguish: she’d descend to the bottom of a cold and dark sea where the heavy, industrial net of a commercial fishing ship would destroy everything in its path without mercy. In the Gulf of Mexico she’d seen with her own eyes what the nets brought up after shaving the marine floor for miles at a time. Once they had removed everything useful, they’d toss thousands of dead fish too small to be consumed, dolphins, tortoises, and enough coral to build a castle back into the sea, all products of the demolition of an ecosystem that had no resources left to regenerate. She knew how many times these nets were tossed into the waters and she lived each day working against that sinister clock.

  Giorgio, on the other hand, hadn’t planned on falling in love. His life on the north coast at the end of the twentieth century was going along just fine. He had what he’d always wanted: the body of a man and his own business, a chic pizzeria on a beautiful beach. The mission for which he’d been created had begun to appear on the horizon, but still hadn’t indicated a path for him to follow. Linda had left him a note at the restaurant: “Giorgio, I left my windsurfing boards in your alley. Hope it’s OK! Linda.” He liked that she felt comfortable enough to do that and the next day, when he saw her come in in her cobalt blue wetsuit, he invited her to lunch. He already knew just about everything about Linda: that she was a marine biologist, obsessive and temperamental, that her parents were filthy rich, and that she’d inherit that money even though she was the black sheep of the family. It took her about twenty minutes to feel relaxed enough to open her backpack and pull out a folder full of photos of dying coral, stained and deformed like cancerous livers in a brochure for Alcoholics Anonymous. The folder was worn in a way that gave away how often it was handled. When he saw the source of Linda’s anxieties under that pink plastic, his chest tightened and he felt an urgent need to help her solve all her problems.

  In the same way he used to use the PriceSpy, Acilde now used the computer in his cell to look up words or names he didn’t recognize when they came up in conversation, or to confirm the assertions of a future business partner. Confronted with Linda’s interests, he typed the word coral into the search engine and a site listing all the coral reefs that had disappeared in the tsunami of 2024 popped up on the screen. Giorgio was then able to talk to her about her favorite ones using their names, Diploria labyrinthiformis and Millepora alcicornis, as though he’d been a fan his whole life. Thanks to this he ended up fucking her right on the shore of Playa Bo that very afternoon. And when she came, she screamed as though she were being murdered.

  ‌

  ‌The Shadow of Days

  A blond boy in a loincloth waits on a blue beach, spear in his hand, for the fish he’ll pierce with it. The sky is the same color as the water.

  The movie is Blue Lagoon and it’s being screened in the dining room of La Victoria prison, while the inmates swallow their portions of synthetic protein and water. It’s summer. A row of industrial ceiling fans is useless against the temperature, forty-six degrees Celsius in the shade. Movies in which the sea is full of fish and humans run in bare skin under the sun are now part of the required programming during this season, just like movies about Christ during Holy Week.

  “Isn’t that something, that now that the sea’s dead, that’s when they come round to believing in its power?” says an old man with a Cuban accent. He cleans one of his teeth with a toothpick while he makes his way to the trashcan, where he tosses the yellow tray that had carried his lunch. The old man throws the toothpick as though he were shooting a basketball and misses. “In a few years, when those of us who saw it are no longer around, people will talk about the fish in the sea as though they were unicorns,” he says as he bends to pick up the toothpick and throw it away.

  “Do you want to get some air?” Acilde asked him. He was the only person in the entire prison with his own AC, a little Samsung Mini. Only 12,000 BTUs, it was small enough to fit in a shoebox, which is how the agent who visited him once a month had brought it to him. The agent pretended to be a cousin who brought him groceries, which always included a jar of Peter Pan peanut butter with a message from President Bona buried inside.

  “Dude, turn on that air,” the old man said, stepping into Acilde’s cell. He patted down his bald head with a handkerchief. After aiming the vents so they’d blow in the old Cuban’s face (who was panting so hard he seemed on the verge of a heart attack), Acilde opened a small rusty fridge and brought out two mini-bottles of vodka, like the kind they give out on planes, and a can of grapefruit juice. Acilde had met Iván de la Barra a few days after arriving at La Victoria. He had been imprisoned for selling fake Lydia Cabrera and Alejo Carpentier manuscripts, among many other things he’d falsified. As curator of the Havana Biennale, he’d helped launc
h the careers of several stars of late twentieth-century contemporary art. But as he got older, he’d been marginalized and had survived by selling documents and art, both real and fake, to Latin America’s communist oligarchy.

  Acilde would kill time with old Iván looking for photos and articles on the computer; he loved the ease with which the ex-curator combined gossip and critical theory in his anecdotes. In one of their conversations, Iván had confessed he’d been receiving messages since he was young from a spirit to whom he owed everything; the dead soul would even advise him on which artists to back and which to avoid. He’d gone against his counsel when, desperate, he’d falsified a draft of a supposedly unpublished manuscript by Lydia Cabrera, titled Olokun. “And look how badly things turned out,” he said, apologetically. Although he had no religious affiliation, Iván de la Barra may as well have been a PhD when it came to Afro-Cuban cults. “I got the idea for the book when a collector in Miami showed me a letter from Lydia Cabrera to Pierre Verger; in this letter she recounts how she had managed, finally, to have a conversation with an old woman in Matanzas about the cult of Olokun, the most mysterious of the orishas, about whom even her most cooperative sources had kept quiet. According to the letter, black Cubans called a certain marine creature Olokun. It could travel back in time, dude, very Lovecraftian. First I thought about writing a novel, but the idea of writing a book by a dead person seemed much more interesting.”