City Without Stars

by Tim Baker

  She grabs him by the shoulders. His cheeks are grimed from the trace of tears. He’s never been this bad before. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Nobody saw it coming. The IPOs were spectacular. And now they’re collapsing. Just like that. It’s over before it ever really began.’

  Ventura can’t mask the alarm in her voice. ‘What’s over?’

  ‘Everything.’ He grabs two suitcases, but then throws them across the hallway. ‘Don’t you understand? I’m finished!’ He kicks the front door, making her start. ‘It wasn’t my fault. Nobody saw it coming. Try explaining that to them. It doesn’t matter anymore. I’m dead.’

  ‘Carlos, whatever it is, we can work something out. It’s only money.’

  ‘It’s not just money. It’s where the money came from. It’s the people who gave me their fucking money.’ He stares at her with those eyes again. Seeing but not registering. Familiar yet foreign, like her dog when she was a girl, just before they had to put him down. Eyes she had known and loved, transformed into a stranger’s by fear, illness and the knowledge of the proximity of death. Eyes that broke her heart because they were no longer the ones she had loved.

  ‘What people?’ A stupid question, knowing there can only be one answer; especially here in Ciudad Real. She asks another stupid question, her voice dropping to a whisper. ‘How much did you lose?’ His silence says it all. Everything. ‘I’m going with you.’ He shakes his head, picking up the suitcases he’d thrown and opening the door. ‘But I want to go with you.’

  ‘I thought you’d understand … I thought you were smart. Why the fuck don’t you understand?’

  She follows, dragging the last two suitcases across the rutted concrete.

  He stops in front of a car she’s never seen before. ‘I hired it. In your name. That’ll give me an extra hour.’ He puts the four cases into the trunk, then slams it shut. ‘Have you got any money?’ He snaps the question at her, as though he’ll hit her if she doesn’t answer. She rummages through her bag; gives him everything she has. ‘That’s it?’ She stares at this stranger’s panicked face. She tries one last time to take his hands. Something glitters on her wrist. He wants it. ‘The Rolex.’ The way he spits the word – brutal and commanding – makes her lose all notion of its meaning. He may as well have said the rhino. ‘The watch, for Christ’s sake.’ She starts to unclip it, but he yanks it off, hurting her. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get you another,’ he says, looking away in embarrassment at the paucity of his lie.

  ‘I don’t care about the watch. I care about you. I’m worried. We need to go to the police.’

  He slaps her.

  It’s not the physical blow itself that hurts so much; it’s the anger it unleashes inside her. Her disbelief at what he’s just done. Her shock at something she never expected to happen. Something she thought he was incapable of ever doing. She loved this man. She thought she knew him. Self-disgust floods her. There’s acid in his voice. ‘Don’t ever mention the police again.’

  She takes a step away from him, surprised at how much better it makes her feel, rubbing her cheek not just to alleviate the pain, but almost to ensure that she’s still there – that this is not a dream. Something is broken. Forever. It’s like she’s just let go of the rope and is watching a small craft drifting away, already disappearing into the night. She feels something. She doesn’t know it yet, but it’s an angry freedom.

  She stares at this stranger for the first and last time, hating his tear-streaks. So weak. So narcissistic.

  So male.

  He gets into the car, slamming the door fast, as though expecting her to try to follow him. As though she ever would. Now. ‘I’ll call you when I get to Phoenix.’ It sounds like a line from a pathetic song. The car starts to pull away, then lurches to a stop. ‘Don’t stay in the house tonight. Understand? It’s the first place they’ll look.’

  Ventura watches the car slurring around the corner, and then it’s gone, the night settling back into an uneasy silence. She looks around the street. Deserted. Curtains drawn across barred windows. Doors double-bolted. This has been her street – her home – for the past fifteen months. Now it’s altered. She feels threatened. It’s a physical reality. No money. Nowhere to go. And she’s standing outside the first place they’ll come to look.

  A dog barks. She shivers and peers up at the sky. There should be stars up there on a night like tonight. She should be able to see them glittering, the way she did when she was a girl, staring out her window, listening to the regular pant of her dog beside her bed; feeling safe with his great, warm presence next to her, loyal and grateful for her love; protecting her as she slept.

  But when she lay awake, unable to sleep, she was the one who was on guard, as though she could already see across the tunnel of years to the time when her beloved dog would be old and sick and afraid; to the time when Ciudad Real would lose its stars to the yellow stain of smog and factory fumes and the great flare of security lights that lit the periphery of the maquiladoras, and the exhaust of the highways that linked the north with the south in an unending river of traffic and money, balancing greed and false hopes – never ever stopping. It was a restless tide, surging or ebbing to the sea-change mood swing of market forces.

  Tonight, like all the nights of these last few years, there is no room for stars, their celestial light leached out by the vagaries of progress. No stars, no constellations, no horoscopes. No future. No prognosis or predictions; no escape into the vast mysteries of space, existence and prophecy. She is grounded on this empty earth as surely as the asteroids that once pounded the desert; that led to the great extinction. She is locked into a gravity that holds her to the earth; that will never let her rise.

  And she is alone.

  Ventura is afraid. But most of all, she is angry at Carlos; furious at someone she has given her unconditional love to, someone she thought loved her in return. Someone she considered a good man, a true friend; a kind and honest person. A man who has struck her. A man who has run not just like a coward, but like a criminal. A man who has left her behind, knowing the risks she faces. How could she have let a man like that put himself inside her; how could she have accepted him as her partner?

  She packs quickly, thankfully finding money in her other handbag. Not much but enough to get out, to escape. Can she really guarantee her own safety right now, in her hometown? The fact that she has to ask that question makes her sick with doubt; with rage at what her hometown has become. And fills her with contempt for herself for only confronting it now.

  When she is vulnerable.

  She sits down on the edge of their bed … her bed, and thinks about the injustice of the situation. She found this house for them on her own, when he was too busy to help. She has done nothing wrong. So why flee? She has just decided she is going to be defiant and spend the night in her own home when the phone rings. ‘Who is this?’ a man’s voice says when she answers.

  ‘Who is this?’ she responds.

  ‘Where’s Carlos?’ the caller demands.

  She hesitates, just a moment too long. El Santo swears and hangs up before she can improvise a lie. They know he’s gone. And she knows, right then and there, that she needs to go too.

  As fast as she can.

  22

  Padre Márcio

  When Vicente Salinas was a child, over half a century ago, magazine articles were warning their readers about the dangers of falling into ‘bad habits’ and offering advice on how best to avoid them. But for the future Padre Márcio, his habits – neither good nor bad but merely essential – were his salvation. Every morning, as soon as he woke up, the boy would start the day by picking at the scabs on his palms.

  The pain had not really registered when he had first drilled the holes into his flesh with the pencil. He’d been in another state of distress – a terrified boy rushing towards a fatal door because death had to be better than what his life had become.

  He realized many years later that his attempted suici
de had been a ramification of the metaphysical pain that had sheltered him from all somatic suffering. And when he had discovered the loose nail squirming out of the floorboard, he had been protected from pain by his initial relief – no, joy – at finding a way of keeping his subterfuge alive.

  But after those two moments – one of anguish and the other of elation – he had quickly found that his physical suffering could no longer be ignored. Vicente endured extreme agony for months and months, made all the worse by the fact that it was so deliberately and carefully self-inflicted.

  After nearly two years, he thought he had started to master what the Little Brothers of Perpetual Succour might have referred to as the torments of the flesh; not realizing that he had begun to neutralize the map of nerves inside his hands, an achievement that was hastened by the destructive arrival of the nests of maggots.

  Wounds, like people, are also creatures of habit. If you don’t allow them to heal, eventually they give up and do what they’ve become used to doing: remain open and fester.

  Thanks to His Grace’s pious gullibility, the normal transitory period of small-minded suspicion that befalls even the most venerated saints, such as Bernadette or the Children of Fátima, was completely ignored in Vicente’s case. There was an eschatological rationale to the bishop’s stance. When he first found the boy, the wounds in his palms had already appeared. Vicente had clearly been ordained a saint by the very manifestation of the Holy Sign of Christ: proof that the child was blessed; his miraculous lesions nothing less than the confirmation of a divine confidence in an innocent soul. And perhaps an urgent Final Days message for those who believed.

  Vicente was unaware of the finer points of this ecclesiastical logic. He only knew that he was going to bed without fear and on a full stomach. For the first time in his life he felt that comforting sanctuary every child should experience. But all fairy tales end when the infant falls asleep.

  Being a fraud himself, the vice-rector sensed not just the deceit in Vicente’s condition but also the opportunity. He visited the bishop with a bottle of Dimple Haig and a bowl of escamoles and spoke in a respectful yet authoritative manner. Vicente was a boy unlike any other, true, yet he was also undeniably a child, and as such required what all children needed most: a Christian education. It would be unthinkable to deprive him of such, just as it would be unthinkable to expose such an innocent creature to the temptations posed by fellow pupils of his own age. Vicente merited a private tutor, not the anarchy of the classroom, and the vice-rector was prepared to sacrifice his vocation to volunteer for the position.

  The bishop accepted the pious offer with gratitude.

  When Vicente found out what had been agreed, he sank into a terrible depression. He wasn’t filled with rage, or even fear. It was far simpler than that. It was an elemental awakening to the knowledge that everything that had been given to him – everything which had saved him – had been granted solely to accumulate the devastation when it was all finally stripped away. For, truly, how can one know real damnation when one hasn’t first known paradise?

  His consequential fall was immeasurable. Vicente wasn’t just in shock, he was rendered mute; comatose. Years later, when he was a student in the seminary and reading Dante, he would understand what had happened to him the day the vice-rector returned to his life. It was as though he had leapt from the First Circle of Hell straight into the center of the Ninth Circle. Like Satan himself, he had become frozen in his torment.

  The bishop was so concerned by the sudden physical collapse of Vicente that he called in his cook and gardener, Pablo Grande, who – although only twenty-seven – was already a noted herbalist and curandero in the region. Some people might have found it amusing that this small, wiry man, with eyes the color of the mole he was famous for, was called Grande, but those who knew him did not think it odd. His Grace suspected that Pablo Grande, although a practicing Catholic, harbored secret ties to obscure occult rituals, but was prepared to overlook this as he normally got results, whether it was making a single chicken feed a table of ten, or bringing a half-dead garden or parishioner back to life. Besides, if the bishop was capable of giving communion to the mayor and the police chief every Sunday morning and turning his back on their activities for the rest of the week, he was certainly capable of doing the same for Pablo Grande, who was – unlike the mayor and the police chief – an honest man and, more importantly, a talented one.

  Pablo Grande was deeply concerned by the condition of Vicente and secretly performed a sequence of limpias. He discovered through the magic of the healing ceremonies that Vicente was a victim of terrible crimes and that his worst tormentor lay close by, waiting for an opportunity to attack again.

  Of course, Pablo Grande didn’t share any of his knowledge with the bishop, whom he thought of as a kind, if naïve, person. His first priority was to lift the child out of his trancelike stupor. It was a severe battle that lasted several days. During the combat, Pablo Grande found and extracted a worm of malice, a spider of spite and a scorpion of violence, all buried inside the boy by his enemies.

  He killed the first two, stomping on them with sandaled feet and then setting the crushed remnants aflame. The third invasive spell was much harder to extract and he almost lost two fingers from its stings. He smashed the evil creature with a club his grandfather had fashioned from a Montezuma cypress, then spat upon the powdery heap of shattered shell. His saliva bubbled into a hot froth, forming the profile of a face he did not know, but which he recognized five days later when the vice-rector passed him in the gardens.

  Pablo Grande of course identified the wounds in Vicente’s hands for what they were: a desperate defense against a cruel world. He placed a tiny rock crystal of hope in each palm, knowing that hope never dies and that the crystals would keep the wounds open and raw as long as the boy lived. (Pablo Grande may have done an immense job of liberating the child from the curses of others, however he did miss two seeds that were in Vicente’s chest, hidden behind his heart; seeds that were not invasive but of the boy’s own making: anger and pride. By the time Pablo Grande became aware of them, it would be too late. They had already sprouted roots and could not be extracted from Vicente without killing him.)

  The child began to show signs of improvement almost immediately after the limpias. Pablo Grande gave him various herbal teas to build up his strength, and radicles to chew on to induce the growth of a protective bark around his soul. That would at least provide some initial defense from predators like the vice-rector.

  Pablo Grande watched the vice-rector the way brujos do, not out of the corner of the eye but the back of the head, and perceived slowly but irrevocably the manifold sins and crimes of the evil brother. He decided the best course of action for both the boy and the world would be to poison the vice-rector with kieri. He went to the part of his garden that lay forever in shadow, where he kept what he thought of as the extreme remedies: all the fatal plants.

  In a corner, nestled between the wall of the church and a buried crow, was a datura plant; its blossoms hanging heavy and sentient as a sleeping bat, petals enfolded around the horns of death like webbed wings. Deadly nightshade. Belladonna, thorn-apple, moonflower. Devil’s trumpet. The bell of madness. The common names given to Datura stramonium revealed both the wisdom of the ancients and their fear of a plant that rendered people mute and mad, that stole their senses and then their minds, that sent them flying through the air, contorting one moment in ecstasy, the next in agony. Devil’s snare. Jimson weed. Kieri loca. The plant that promised enlightenment but instead bestowed the very opposite, trapping you in time and space, then sending you insane within the airless prison of invariable repetition.

  The results of anticholinergic poisoning are always disturbing to behold, let alone experience. The multifold symptoms include frightening aural hallucinations of the most menacing sounds imaginable. Respiratory collapse. Renal failure. Hydrocephalus. Such extreme lobar and nuchal rigidity that the scapulae muscle can snap of its ow
n accord. Paralysis so severe and terrifying as to cause death through panic attack and resultant cardiac arrest. Paranoia. Severe dehydration. Astral and time travel. Third sight. Transmutation of self into animal or plant or even demon. Flight and contact with the dead. Pablo Grande did not take lightly what he was about to do. He plucked a single stalk from the plant, containing five leaves, a flower and its seedpod, ready to rupture.

  He macerated the stem, leaves and flower, put them in a pot with chili, garlic, onions, sugar, cilantro and sunflower oil and stewed the contents gently over a low heat for thirteen hours and eighteen minutes, that being the period of sunlight at the summer solstice. He then poured his concoction into a thick mole sauce that was served with extra cinnamon, chocolate and nuts, because he knew the added fructose would help mask the fibrous atropine aftertaste. He ground the seeds into a hazardous mixture of powder and husks and lightly marinated them in orange juice.

  That evening at dinner, Pablo Grande informed the brother that he would be dining alone, as His Grace had succumbed to a stomach complaint – brought on by Pablo Grande putting immoderate amounts of olive oil, flaxseed oil, aloe pulp, molasses and prune juice into a spicy lunchtime soup.

  After the vice-rector had finished his chicken mole, Pablo Grande served him a piece of caramelized lime tart topped with cooked slices of Seville orange that had been deglazed with vinegar and sprinkled with the crushed seeds. The neutering mix of sweet and sour would further conceal the poison’s taste at this most delicate of times, when it started to repeat on the victim. During his meal the vice-rector drank four carafes of water and three bottles of beer, unaware that his unquenchable thirst was the first symptom of an onset of fatal polydipsia.

  Pablo Grande watched silently out of the back of his head. The vice-rector sat satiated and stupefied at the table after his three-hour feast, feeling his salivary glands slowly withering like a premature coyote pup abandoned in the desert. The mucus in his nasal cavities and the natural lubricants coating his pharynx also began to desiccate, creating the distressing feeling that he couldn’t breathe without tearing the lining of his trachea. Strangely, despite this acute internal dehydration, the vice-rector’s body felt as though it were awash in fluid. Sweat beaded his brow and cheeks, pooled abundant under his arms, stretched wet and sticky across his back, making his damp shirt cling to his body like a parasite. His thighs were so wet, his feet so sodden, that he thought he must have pissed himself, fluid pooling inside his shoes.