Tortuga

by Rudolfo Anaya

  I pushed the door open. The rusty hinges squeaked. I felt my body wet with sweat. I peered into the dark room and could see no end to it. Shadows moved from bed to bed, old women dressed like nuns who seemed to be the keepers of the ward. I entered and the door closed behind me. I struggled to turn my chair, to get out, when one of the nurses appeared over me, her wrinkled face so close to mine I could smell her putrid breath. I cried out in horror, suddenly trapped, deceived by Salomón.

  “So you have come to visit us … Come,” she nodded gently and pushed my chair towards the iron lungs which lined the room.

  “No,” I cried, “it’s a mistake! I came by mistake!” Now I knew what Salomón had planned for me. This was another one of his wards, but it held even worse cases than his. He wanted me to see them.

  “No!” I shouted again, but the old nurse paid no attention. She pushed my chair against one of the iron lungs. What I saw was burned into my memory forever. Even after I closed my eyes I could still see the comatose, shriveled body of the small child, and I could smell the putrid odor of the excrement that passed from the withered cocoon as it twisted with pain.

  “They’re all like this … helpless … more dead than alive,” the nurse said, and she pushed me to another lung. The scene repeated itself, down the long line of iron lungs which lined the room, the scene repeated itself. In each lung lay a twisted pretzel, kept alive only by the forced air of the lung and the i-v tubes which fed them. Except for an occasional spasm of pain there was no sign of life, and yet they were alive. One thin filament of life ran in their bodies, made the heart beat, created dreams in their burnt brains.

  “No!” I pleaded, “Salomón! No! Please no more! I’ve seen enough! I’ve suffered enough! Let them die! Dear God, please let them die!”

  I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth. I would see no more. I had seen enough. I had not asked to see the awful sight of this ward. I kicked with my feet and pushed the nurse aside.

  “There’s more,” she said, startled that I had broken loose. “See.” She pointed, and at the end of the room there was another door which led to another ward. “There’s more—”

  “Oh, God, no,” I cried. I felt my teeth splinter as I gritted them. A terrible anger swept over me. I heard myself curse. “Damn you!” I shouted. “Damn all of you! You’re all crazy! This is a hell you’ve created! Pull the plug and let them die! Let them die! Please … dear God, let them die …”

  I whipped my chair around and raced out of the room, still cursing, still hot with the rage which made me push like a madman. Damn you, I cursed myself, how stupid of you to think that there is a special destiny! It’s only a nightmare! Life is a nightmare! And part of that nightmare is shared by these freaks which lie suspended between life and death! Better to pull the plug and let them die! Better to end this perversity! Even for us the end should come! There is no meaning! There is no special destiny! Nothing! Nothing! Only the stories! Only the empty words which try to give meaning to this hell!

  I raced out of the dark wards, gasping for breath, feeling the terrible erosion of everything I had pieced together while I had been at the hospital. Now it meant nothing. Now only my anger could keep me alive. Faces rushed past me, hands reached out to stop me, and I cursed them all and fought them. The weight of the mountain was falling on me, darkness was settling over me as I burrowed into my shell … but first I wanted to see Salomón, I wanted to tell him that he had deceived me and his stories were false … I wanted to tell Ismelda that even she had been unfaithful … She hadn’t warned me, she hadn’t told me that it could be that terrible in the wards which lay like a labyrinth in the subterranean tunnels beneath the earth. No one could stop my mad rush until one face came into focus, and I recognized Mike.

  “You sonofabitch!” I snarled, “Why didn’t you tell me!”

  Then I swung as hard as I could and drove my fist into his face, sending my chair crashing into his, sending both of us toppling over into the frightful darkness which opened like a monstrous mouth to receive me.

  16

  When I awoke Mike was sitting by my bed. I tried to move but my arms and legs were tied down.

  “I’m sorry—” he said.

  “How long have I been under?” I asked.

  “A few days … they had to tie you down and drug you, because you were kicking a lot … they were afraid you’d hurt yourself.”

  “Those poor slobs,” I mumbled through gritting teeth, “those poor sonofabitchin’ slobs—”

  I looked around me. I was back in my room. An i-v bottle hung over me. Around me the oxygen tent shimmered with light. I looked at Mike through the plastic. His face looked grotesque in the refracted light.

  “It’s good for you to stay angry,” he said, “at least for awhile.”

  I had been angry, but it had passed, like a wave of nausea sweeping over me, it had emptied itself. And I had retreated from the anger as I had retreated from the pity I first felt when I saw the ward of comatose orphans … the images of the twisted, dying bodies which had filled my nightmares were burned into my brain, I saw them now, reflected on the slabs of light on the clear plastic. They were a part of me; I would never be free of them. But they would only live in the farthest niche I had found in my shell, the shell which would protect me from the searing acid of the damned path of the sun and the pain of the bitter songs, which were really not songs, but the whimpering of the babes of limbo, the living dead … I was empty … that’s all I felt, emptiness.

  “I’m not angry,” I said. “I just don’t care …”

  “Hey, don’t say that,” Mike answered. “You got to care. If you don’t care … then it’s all over. You have to care! That’s the first rule, remember! Care enough to get out! That’s what you have to do! Get angry! Strike out! Hit me! Come on, hit me again like you did out there in the hall! Hit anyone, but just hit! Don’t give up on us, Tortuga, don’t give up … Don’t you see, we’re all depending on you? Don’t be a Sadsack … Get mad at what you’ve seen and stay mad!”

  I wasn’t listening … I was retreating, moving deeper and farther into my shell, covering my hurt and pain with layer after layer of silence … meaningless silence.

  We don’t know what you saw. Most of us have seen Salomón’s ward, but we never went any deeper … There’s only rumors of the other wards and the kids that are in there, but most of us mind our own business. We don’t want to know. We can’t take it. But Salomón had to send somebody, someone had to see … I don’t know why … hell, nobody knows why he does things like that, why he picked you. Maybe it’s just the way you are, Tortuga, just the way you are …

  I closed my eyes. Tell Salomón to shove it, I thought. Tell him to take his stories and his singing and his path of the sun and shove them up his ass. And you take your number one rule, which you’re always preaching and which you never obey, and shove it. All of you, leave me alone, go away, I have no need for you. Go and show your cripples and your mummies and your living dead to someone else. I’ve broken loose from you. I don’t believe in anything anymore. I am free. I am nothing. I won’t be responsible for anything. I denounce my destiny. There is no destiny … there is no fate … there is no God, no universe … only my thoughts, and I can learn to silence those. I have given up sadness, because I can’t understand the reason for the existence of those poor slobs, those poor withered vegetables that look like plucked carrots and turnips drying and shriveling in the sun … and I couldn’t love them or touch them … I hated their depravity, the cruel, obscene joke which allows them to exist in that plane of life, that shade beyond life, that first circle of hell where pain is still felt, where love is dead … and they don’t know they’re alive; and they don’t even know who’s feeding them the juices which keep them alive …

  Beyond the last ward, where the shriveled infants slept, there lay the wharf. In the mist I heard the slapping of the water, looked and saw Filomón’s boat. I waved and he drew close for me. I am ready, Filomón, I cried, and
pulled my shroud around my shoulders and stepped onto his rocking boat.

  Return to my love, Ismelda called from the shore.

  Fight him! Mike shouted. Rule number one is to fight! Get mad and fight!

  Spur the sonofabitch! Buck yahooed. That boat is death itself! Spur him! Treat ’im like your first hoss!

  Fear death by drowning! Ronco cried. Head for the mountain! The top of the mountain!

  The green fields! Sadsack laughed, where there are no cripples and all we do is make love all day …

  Dr. Steel jolted me with stabs of electricity, forced air into my lungs and cursed, Don’t give up on me now. He slit my throat and pushed his tubes into my lungs.

  KC mounted me and covered me with her hot flesh to drive away the chills.

  I cannot fight their power, Filomón cried, and he returned to the decaying beach where the rotting bodies of the vegetables lay scattered. With Clepo’s help he tossed me on the sun-baked beach with the rest of the suffering turtles.

  You must run again, he shouted above the crashing waves of the sea, and he pointed to the gray figure of Salomón who stood on a bluff and watched the race.

  The paralysis seemed to return … my muscles went limp, my bedsores opened again and bled. Time cradled me with its patience and allowed me some rest. Outside the window the earth changed her colors, and the months of the calendar fell like leaves. The dry winds came from the west, rattling the hospital with their fury. Great dust storms rose over the land and hid the sun. The empty rooms moaned like the wheezing of the dying bodies in their iron coffins. Ismelda called me in the storm … and her cry was the cry of la Llorona seeking her lover. When I opened my eyes I looked for Tortuga, but the howling winds and dust obscured everything. Tumbleweeds moved across the bleak landscape, the dry souls of the vegetables, lost and by the wind grieved. Dry electricity plauged the air and burned the desert dry. The thunder cracked and bolts of green lightning seared the sky. Nothing grew. The land was burned raw. Trails vanished. The springs went dry. The carcasses of Josefa’s goats littered the dunes of the desert. I saw my mother lost in the storm … praying to a God who didn’t answer … Then the cold weather came and I shivered in my nakedness as the great horned owls struck, screeching as they hunted us down, grasping us in their talons and uprooting us from the meager earth which held us, covering the land with a shroud of ice and blood as their feathers fell … their mournful call silenced the nights, the never-ending nights. Dread and nausea drove itself into our souls … I withdrew into my shell, dug into it like a root burrows for protection after the stalk has been cut … nothing mattered, shadows moved around me, spoke, wiped away my vomit and excrement … racking fevers shook my withering body … My rage and anger were dead … the hoax of life no longer concerned me … I gave up everything … only Salomón’s perverse and stubborn flame kept my heart beating, kept my lungs sucking air … that much I shared with his vegetables. I thought of dying, but I was beyond death. Inside my cast my body dried and shriveled like the nut of an old peach pit … maggots gathered in the stench and mold and consumed my flesh … sometimes in the dark I awoke, and I heard my laughter echo in the room, and I heard my curses hurl themselves into the dark wind … I felt the eyes of the vegetables on me, the pitiful eyes, the mournful eyes. Sometimes I was awake long enough to hear the rushing of water as Tortuga’s underground springs washed and refreshed the thin roots and tentacles which kept us clinging to the dry earth. I imagined the water bitter and hard with crystalline minerals which washed over my soul, leaving layer after layer of calcareous material which dried and formed a shell, a white shell which protected the frail body … and inside I felt the constant throb of an aching heart.

  Perhaps it was that ache which I could not dissolve and which I could no longer beat that made me say yes to Danny when he asked me if I wanted to die.

  He had been my constant companion. Whenever I opened my eyes he was lurking nearby, like a vulture waiting for death to peck the answer from the riddle of life. He stood waiting, yellow eyes burning with the insanity which drove him to mumble God’s phrases over and over, his dry arm hanging uselessly by his side, bent over by the hump that was beginning to develop on his back … Sometimes he talked to me, wished me to die, confessed his fears, cursed the vegetables, blamed me for listening to Salomón and not to God … I never listened … not until that afternoon when he drew close and whispered his story.

  “It was a story on TV,” he said, “about a woman who had been in a car accident, and she was crippled, and she couldn’t talk. She was a beautiful woman, but she couldn’t move one muscle, just like you when you came here, Tortuga. All she could do was smile. Her husband took good care of her, because she was so beautiful and he loved her … and he would sit and talk to her and she would smile, so he thought she was happy. But in her thoughts she wanted to die … Wanna know why? She had a friend, and she was a beautiful woman. They had grown up together. When they were young they had both been in love with the husband, but this woman married him. Now she knew she couldn’t make him happy, ever again, so she wanted her friend to marry him. She wanted her husband to be free and marry her best friend, and to be happy ever after. But she knew her husband was loyal, and he would never do anything. So she wanted to die because she was only in everybody’s way. She was like one of those damned vegetables Salomón takes care of, she couldn’t do anything! She couldn’t even kill herself! She tried to tell her husband she wanted to die, and all she could do was smile, and so he thought she was happy and he went on taking care of her. She was trapped to go on living like that; they were all trapped.

  “But one day the husband hired a gardener to take care of the lawn, cause they lived in a great, big beautiful house, cause they were rich, but even the money he had hadn’t been able to cure her even though he hired the best specialists. The gardener saw the woman lying in her bed, and he came in and brought her flowers, and every day he came in and talked to her and brought her flowers. Soon he fell in love with her. He told her he loved her and he would do anything for her. One day he kissed her and he realized she wasn’t happy and she wanted to die. That’s what she was trying to say when she smiled. He knew what he had to do, so he got real close to her and told her that if she wanted to die she should blink her eyes twice, like this. And she blinked twice. He got real sad and started crying, and he was kinda hunch-back and ugly, but he loved her and he knew he had to obey her wish. So that night he covered her face with a pillow until she suffocated. Then he took her to the garden and he buried her in the middle of all the roses, and at the end of the movie he picked up one rose and put it over her grave …”

  Then Danny bent close, so close I could smell the decaying smell of his arm and his bad breath. “I think you want to die,” he whispered in my ear.

  I blinked twice and it was done.

  Late that night he and Tuerto and Mudo came for me. Like three grave robbers they stole into my room and quickly and quietly lifted me into a chair and carted me away. I didn’t know where we were going and I didn’t care. As they pushed me down the dark hall I had the feeling they had done this before. Tuerto went ahead of us to watch for the nurses. Mudo and Danny pushed the chair. They kept to the shadows.

  The wheelchair sounded like rats squeaking in the dark. Outside the wind had stopped; the moon bathed the hill with its light. Across the way I caught a quick glimpse of Tortuga sleeping in the moonlight. It was the first time I had been aware of my surroundings in a long time. I rubbed my arm and felt the soreness where Danny had pulled away the i-v needle. I had no sense of direction, so I didn’t know where we were going, but I could hear the sound of water, and I thought I heard Clepo’s gurgling laughter.

  “Where are we?” I asked. In the mist which rolled over the lapping water I thought I recognized Filomón. I called to him. This time he could not deny me, Danny would see to that.

  I shivered. The fever had returned quickly, enveloping me like a thick fog. Water gurgled at my feet. Its shar
p smell filled my lungs. On the other side of the lake Filomón’s boat tossed gently on the swells.

  “Where are we?” I asked again. I didn’t remember the lake, but I was sure I recognized Filomón. A woman stood at his side. It was Ismelda.

  Why are you here? I asked them … and they waited, patiently, in silence.

  “We gonna throw him in?” Tuerto whispered.

  “Yes, we’re gonna drown him,” Danny answered.

  I smiled. So Danny’s insanity would return me to Tortuga’s water. I laughed. I was ready.

  “Why he laughin’ Danny?” Tuerto asked nervously.

  “He’s crazy,” Danny answered.

  “We-we, r-ready, Da-Dan-ny,” Mudo stuttered. He held the chair at the edge of the water.

  Through an opening in the sky I could see the moon. It was full and blue, like the moon Steel had seen. Its light danced on the waves like mermaids dancing on the water. I felt happy with myself, at peace, unafraid … I had run the race and come to the edge of Salomón’s sea … I was rejoining Filomón for another journey …

  “Can he swim?” Tuerto asked.

  The spray of the sea washed across my face and startled me from my reverie. I looked for Filomón, but his boat was gone. The singing of the siren at his side had ceased. The chlorinated water of the swimming pool pierced my nostrils. The huge room was deserted except for the four of us standing at the edge. The only light was the light of the moon as it shone through the skylight and illumined the room. Suddenly I felt panic fill my lungs; I gasped for breath and pushed back. No, I heard myself whisper.

  “Can-can, h-he sw-swim?”

  “No, he can’t swim,” Danny laughed, “he’s a turtle, but he can’t swim! But a turtle should die in his home!”

  “Filomón!” I called, but there was no one there. “Ismelda?” Still no answer. They were gone. They weren’t going to make the journey with me. I looked closely into the water and churning in the dark depths lay Salomón’s headless turtle. The water was wine-colored with its blood.