by Tom Anderson
‘Colombia?’ I said.
‘Yes! Cartagena de Indias,’ he smiled – hitting the ‘g’ sound with a ‘h’ instead. ‘What tells you this?’
‘The pesos,’ I said. It seemed embarrassing to mention Mrs Rogoff’s Art lessons right now. Not fair on the real life Cartagena that was all around me, along with its real life people.
‘Lucky guess, my friend,’ Alex laughed. ‘Seven other countries use pesos too.’
‘I suppose I just had a hunch.’
‘Well. You are happy to be here anyway,’ he said. ‘Cartagena is most beautiful city in all of Colombia, and maybe in all of north of South America.’
‘Why am I here?’ I said.
‘You’ve come from the sea,’ he said. ‘Tell me about this first. About how you’re finding the way through the sea. You tell me how. Maybe I tell you then why.’
‘I swam,’ I said. ‘I think I chose it.’
So I told Alex everything I could think of, trying to speak slowly and staying away from English words he might not know. As I gave him the story of the figures on the sand, the maybe-false dune, the warm water, the music of Bunny, Alex kept nodding as if it was all a story he knew well.
‘Have you seen these guys yourself?’ I asked eventually.
‘Not seen,’ said Alex. ‘But I hear them. I hear them all the time, and you are not the first boy or girl to come here with this story. Always either they see these men, or they are hearing the voice.’
‘What does the voice sound like, Alex?’
‘A man. I think. But it is very low. It sounds like the deep water thinking very hard. It’s like a vibration, no? You hear it too?’
‘I think I do,’ I said.
‘I have not been to swim in the sea, though,’ he said. ‘I am not sure if I can. Maybe one day. How long were you swimming?’
‘Oh, not long,’ I said. ‘It couldn’t have been. I mean, I’m alive, aren’t I? So how long can someone hold their breath?’
‘I think breathing is okay when you journey with this style of swim,’ he said. ‘Can be normal to swim for hours.’
‘It wasn’t hours,’ I told him. ‘It just sort of… went light straightaway, then I knew to swim up, and then when I felt for the bottom it was shallow and next thing I’m walking up the beach here. Why have I come, Alex? Why were you expecting me?’
‘My father paints me like this,’ Alex said. ‘I’ss hard work! But this what I do. My father, he is same. We are artisanos. My father is poet, and he is playing guitar, and he is singer, and he can sometimes dance in the ballets.’
Alex frowned at me, and patted me on the knee, his hand sticky with tar-like paint. It left a little smear on my jeans, next to the salt powder from where the ocean water had dried out of them in patches.
‘It is a hard way to live.’
‘So why do you do it?’ I asked.
‘We need the money.’ Alex smiled. He was getting surer. ‘I think this is why you have come from the sea. You have come to help.’
* * *
We cut through the narrow streets and up to the edges of the fort. This part was right on the edge of the sea. From here I could see the coastline bending away to the right, and more of the city over to our left.
‘Mar Caribe,’ said Alex. ‘Caribbean Sea.’
The ocean looked dirty and frustrated. It was muddy brown and windblown into hundreds of crumbling white-caps. The breeze felt salty and the air was thick with it – a warm breeze. In Chapel Shores, the wind coming off the sea normally meant it got colder but here you could feel the heat crank up every step closer to the shoreline.
‘Look, Luca,’ said Alex. ‘This is where you can swim back to the sea.’ He pointed at a little swirl of even muddier water, with patches of churned sand and foam around it. ‘Water here, it move. Swim and pass. Other side, who knows.’
‘How d’you…’
‘Everyone here say this is place where you can swim to another country. But nobody tries it.’
‘Why?’
‘Because we must help Cartagena to be a great city. We must try to build our artisans here. You understand? Yes, you understand. Now, I am to show you…’
He led me back from the ramparts again and down a slope of concrete to a smaller square. There was a church on one side of it and what looked like an old hotel on the other side with balconies and people sitting drinking from tall glasses as the sun got lower in the sky. The reds, yellows and oranges of the buildings were thickening in their colour as the blue overhead dropped into a deeper dark. The rumbling drums from the procession were in the distance again, but so quiet it would take them ages to get anywhere near.
‘This corner,’ Alex said. ‘This is where we work many of the days.’
There were four pairs of shoes laid out neatly along a cracked kerb. Next to them was a box similar to the one he had stood on in the other square. He fiddled with the side of it and suddenly the box popped open like a chest.
‘I can explain,’ he said, and began pulling objects out of it. First came a set of facemasks, held together with a ribbon that had been bound over them in quarter-knots, like you’d wrap an important gift. Under this were cloths and hats, waistcoats and then a pair of shoes that had yellow and white strips of leather, polished perfectly like some kind of 1920s gangster outfit.
‘These are how we perform!’ Alex said, lifting objects out quicker, and shorter of breath.
‘These also, nobody else can use but my father!’
And then he pulled out four batons – like wide drumsticks made of metal – and without realising it, suddenly I was interrupting him, just as excited myself. I knew what they were right away.
‘I’ve seen these!’ I yelled at him. ‘Amazing! I’ve seen these.’
‘Where?’ he asked.
‘Well, I’ve seen one of them. It was old and rusty – but it was definitely one of these. Can I hold it? What are they? I think one of these was…’
‘These,’ interrupted Alex, bursting with pride. ‘These are for eating fire.’
‘They’re yours?’
‘No. They are property of my father.’
Feeling the weight, and the shape of the handle, I was sure this had to be the same thing me and Gaby had seen on Bunkers Beach. Would they get to Chapel Shores though, these fire sticks, as Alex was calling them, without someone carrying them there?
Alex showed me how the top end, the bit that had covered itself in rust on the one we had, was rough because it could be dipped in fuel. It had some kind of thick, wet cord wrapped around it at that end, while the rest of the baton was smooth metal, coming down to a small rubber covering at the bottom so that the hands didn’t get burned by the metal heating up. The handle fitted tightly around the square-shaped end and made it easy to grip safely. It must have fallen off the one Gaby had found.
Alex was pushing one end of it towards his mouth and tilting his head back. He showed me how there was an angle at which you could lower something almost straight down into the stomach. Next he showed me their juggling cords, packs of cheater cards for magic tricks and knives that had false handles. He showed me magnetic blocks that looked like model books and which could stack end-to-end in a way that looked like they’d beaten gravity. He had a saw that oozed fake blood. Under those objects were various mini carpets and cloths for marking out on-the-spot stage areas, and then, at the very bottom, the polishes and paints for when they made human statues.‘Yes!’ he said, tossing a pot of black tar in the air and catching it behind his head with the other hand. ‘My favourite. The statue is best. Always. When we do this, people pay well. Hey, where’s your dollar?’ He tried to pull a serious face at me, but dropped it straightaway, along with the pot which he flicked back into the tub. ‘I’ss okay! I joke. You’re not taking a dollar in the sea. I know this.’
I rubbed the rear of my jeans, feeling the out
line of the doubloon through the crusty denim. Could I give him this? Would he want it? Could he even do anything with it?
‘Yes, the tourists, they love the statue,’ Alex went on. ‘Me and my father don’t love it because wearing statue clothes and paints is very, very hot. The dollars make it good work, so we learn to love.’ He laughed. ‘It’s six hours sometimes. I can stand six hours without to have a piss.’
‘In that sun?’ I could feel the cruelty of these rays even now, late afternoon. Earlier it had wanted to scorch everything underneath its gaze, and even now the land and sea both seemed to sigh with warmth from its energy.
‘And so you are here,’ he said, turning to me, and beginning to put the objects back in the chest.
‘I am,’ I said.
‘To help,’ he said.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘To help.’
‘Yes,’ he said, again, nodding.
‘You are to help me find my father. I know places he might be. One of them is with the police.’
‘That doesn’t sound good.’
I thought about my father with his dodgy deals and his false hopes.
‘No. See, Luca, the problem here is they are making what they call “licence”. We – me and my father – we have to have “licence” now or we cannot make our life here. We are now getting ten dollars a day. Without licence we will be getting one or two dollars a day because then we can only perform in Cartagena city outside of the walls, where there’s no tourists. Local people will not pay us well. But to be in tourist streets we need licence. ’
I thought about my father with his dodgy deals and his false hopes. Maybe I’d be in Alex’s position one day. But he was looking even more worried.
‘There is a possibility even more bad. My father, if he is not with the police for his licence, he is trying to be a farmer, and this is terrible.’
We were back now in that square near the city gates, where these crazy sculptures were watching their own shadows grow long in the dropping sun. The colours from the bright painted buildings, at this time of day, were so thick they might burst or melt, while the sky overhead had filled out into a blue even darker than the murky sea out front.
‘Why is that terrible?’ I asked.
‘Because if he is farmer again, he will be killed,’ said Alex.
* * *
If you thought my dad could get himself into some scrapes then Alex had it on another level altogether. He had come down from the inland mountains when he was a little kid, along with his family – three sisters who were all younger than him – to perform in the streets of Cartagena with his father. Before that, his dad had been a farm hand, a worker on some local coffee field, eventually taking charge of a whole crop.
That was when they got into trouble with the army. Only, this wasn’t the army we’d all think of as fighting to keep us safe. No, this was a militia. I’d heard the word in school from Mr Lloyd, but now Alex was telling me more about what it meant. Hired soldiers were throwing farmers off the land if they refused to grow drugs instead of coffee. The militias were making all sorts of violent threats, and Alex looked like he wanted to cry when I asked him to tell me more. He was sure that if street-performing didn’t work out, his father would try to farm again and get into trouble with these soldiers.
‘Why would he do that?’ I asked.
‘Because he cannot live as a father who is not able to find money. If he cannot find it on the street he will return to mountains for farming because he wants to help his family. But if he is farming with the people from before, we will lose him,’ said Alex. ‘He will be killed quickly because they will not trust each other. This is happening to my friend’s father too. He is now dead.’
‘Where do I come in?’ I asked him. ‘I don’t think I’m gonna be much use to you if we have to hike into the mountains looking for armed militias who sell drugs.’
‘Not necessary. You can do something simple, by talking to the police,’ said Alex. ‘They are not going to listen to me, but you are a tourist so you can walk in and they will make you coffee!’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. Colombian policemen will be very kind to a Gales. Speak English with them. They will like it.’
‘You just want me to go and ask the police to look for your father?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m fifteen.’
‘I’ss no problem. They listen because you are tourist and they are to listen to tourist people.’
‘So, go into a police station and get them to listen to your story?’
‘Yes please, Luca. This is kind.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘No problem. And that’s all?’
‘I think. Maybe also… maybe you can say you think fire eaters and human statues in Cartagena should have licence for performances without paying much money to the government!’
‘D’you realise how cool you’d be, eating fire or dressed in that stuff in Wales?’ I asked him. ‘You could go to London or Cardiff or Birmingham. You’d be “cool” as in “look at that guy, he’s amazing”.’
Alex looked thoughtful. Eventually he spoke again.
‘I have tried to swim like you have done. This is not working for me. I can hear the voice but I cannot go under the sea.’
‘Can you hear what the voice says?’
‘It told me to wait. I am believing the voice is a good man, because it is helping me. The voice tells me today you will come and see my statue. Then you come!’
‘How’s that make it good?’
‘I asked who is speaking,’ said Alex, stopping walking and standing square to face me.
‘And they say “Wait” and then no more.’
‘Wait for what?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Alex, shaking his head. ‘No answer. But another day the voice comes back and says I cannot leave Colombia before the Ingles and the Gales help me.’
‘There have been others?’
‘Yes. I meet lots of Ingles and Americano young people, but you are the first one who comes from the sea! This makes you special. You come from the voice!’
‘I heard it,’ I said. ‘But I couldn’t understand what it said. D’you think it’s one of the men I saw on the beach, the voice?’
Alex shrugged his shoulders.
‘I will maybe use the sea someday too.’
He nodded back towards the coast, where, over the rampart, that swirl of turbulent water supposedly marked my way out of this town.
‘I’ss dark soon,’ he said. ‘In Colombia dark will come quickly. Cartagena outside of walls is not nice when is dark. Better you at home country.’
‘So can we go to the police now then?’ I asked.
‘Of course.’
* * *
Alex was right. The Colombian police were over the moon to get a visit from a ‘Gringo’. As for my new human-statue mate himself, well, he got more and more terrified as we approached on the station. ‘Yes, Luca. I am scared. They are not nice to Colombia people, these police. Thank you thank you thank you thank you.’
‘No worries, Alex,’ I said.
I felt none of the inferiority I would have done strolling up to a policeman, or any grown-up in authority back in Chapel Shores. Here with these once-in-a-lifetime people, I was free to speak and laugh with confidence. This wasn’t Mr Kleener or any of the many who had it in for me back home. The tunes of Bunny wandered into my head…‘Cool Runnings’…
‘Welcome Gringo!’ shouted the chubby and smartly dressed chief of police, smiling at me, before snarling something at Alex. Alex winced as if he was about to get hit but I said, ‘No! He’s with me,’ and they calmed right down and fetched a load of old newspaper to put across the office chairs so that Alex could sit on them without his black polish going over everything.
The police station was echoey and empty, but the chi
ef of police’s office was carpeted and furnished and had air conditioning that you hit into like a wall as soon as we went in and which made Alex gasp.
His happiness didn’t last, though. His dad wasn’t in their custody, and they didn’t know anything else. It took about twenty seconds to find out, from the grinning, white teeth of the chief.
I watched the dark paint on Alex’s skin dry in the cool air and start to crack, kept moist only by a trace of a tear from his eye as he scratched some details about his father into a missing-persons report. Then came the process of sticking an old Polaroid picture Alex was carrying of his dad to the top of the page. He looked somehow familiar, like someone I’d always known. He had the same dangling curls of hair as Gigi Carranero in Gaby’s sketch, or that man, Haz, from the jewel market. Lately everyone I’d never met would stare at me as if they were one of those nineteen ghostly figures on the nightime shore at home. It doesn’t mean anything, I told myself. Nothing at all.
‘You like tea-coffee-CocaCola-Fanta?’ asked the chief of police.
Alex scratched the tarry tears from his eyes, and pointed at himself.
‘Lo?’ he asked.
‘Yes. Very cold and sweet,’ said the chief, sticking to English and winking at me.
Light began to come back to the space behind Alex’s eyes.
‘Okay. I would like,’ he said, and was handed a Fanta out of their fridge. It was in a big glass bottle with a straw coming out of it. Alex slurped the whole thing as if was going to be taken away from him any second, before standing up and heading towards the door.
‘Come back anytime,’ said the chief.
And then we were back out into the heat and the darkening skies of Cartagena. It would be night any moment now.
‘Where do you sleep?’ I asked Alex, as a food cart near the city gates started playing ‘Ninety-six Degrees in the Shade’. Three girls of about our age were waiting for the seller to cook them something, and shook their hips against the slow beat as they watched.
‘Outside the fort,’ Alex said. ‘We have a cabin near the beach. My mother and my sisters will be there. I need to go back and collect my box from the plaza. There may be a few pesos in it. We can eat fish if the old man who lives in our cabins has caught one.’
