A madman was going through his pockets. Christmas pushed him away. The man giggled and cursed, his face cast in a Kabuki pose of suffering. Christmas sat up. A woman walked past trying to hold five children by the wrist. There was a dog underneath him. It had bits missing from its scalp, the wounds still raw. It panted. Christmas inspected his clothes. They were filthy. His mouth cried out for water. His brain wriggled with distress.
Guiria was starting its day. He was here, finally, in Guiria, the Caribbean outpost where Emily’s grandmother had grown up. But this was no beach paradise. It was a concrete port town, half-built and hellish. He gripped Emily’s book against his heart. He could not perform his ritual here, not in a place like this. He wasn’t ready. He must rest, get his bearings, get himself straight. He must ... Panic was overtaking him.
He could see queues for buses, empanada and coffee stands crowded with workers, people crossing the plaza in every direction. On the other side of the square there was a tall blue and white church. Beside it, on the corner, he thought he could make out the word ‘posada’. He got to his feet. His legs trembled. His bones snapped. Everyone he walked past looked at him and whispered.
At the posada he asked for a room. The man was opening shutters that revealed a licorería, the metal clatter some dread applause to the vision of bottles, rows and rows and rows, dark brown and deep in promises of magic. The man took Christmas through the back, into a small restaurant with a television on full volume hanging from the ceiling like a head. On the far wall there was a row of rough wooden doors with painted numbers one to seven. They were padlocked shut. The man opened number one. It was a blue cell, not much wider than Christmas, with a fan missing its front guard and the mattress covered in a slightly burnt sheet. Christmas sat down, the black mandrake of the hangover now unfurling a new, even more savage character in his guts. The man told him it was forty bolívares for a night. Forty bolívares was all he had left. Forty bolívares for this pen in which to thrash. They walked back out front. Christmas bought a cold beer. Then he spent twenty-five bolívares on a bottle of Cacique and left.
The temperature rose. He walked to a seafront lapped with rubbish. Had he crossed the world for this? He walked back into the streets of Guiria, looking for a place in which to dissolve. He walked past nervous and forgotten buildings, market traders setting up their stalls, pavements piled with shoes. Children and beggars asked him for money. One made a grab for his bottle. Christmas was a specimen, pale and alien, wandering past pharmacies and banks, shelves of bootleg music, stiff mannequins in bras and tracksuits. “I want to go home,” he whispered.
In some streets he was warned to turn back with the sign language of guns and robbery. In others, people beckoned him into their restaurants, into the shops, into their internet cafés. Eventually he turned a corner and found himself back in the Plaza Bolivar. He sought the shade of a tree, cracking open the seal on his Cacique. To his lips he held his last idea.
All morning he drank as the sun wrought shadows from the earth, splayed and half-mad from the heat. His shirt was open, his belly loose, his jacket folded neatly beside him. Every so often he picked it up, shook it, felt for the book, folded it again, and placed it beside him once more, neatly and with great care. He watched the women of Guiria go about their day.
Like all desperate people, he was hungry for omens. A little girl with a dog on a lead stopped in front of him. The dog crapped in the middle of the street. The girl left the crap but took out a tissue and wiped the dog’s backside. Then she left the tissue on the crap.
Hunger came and went. He acquired drinking companions, boz-eyed alkys with faces of bark and dirt for shoes. They wittered and argued, grabbing him by the shoulder in friendship, in confrontation, in sympathy, in plea. He drank anis.
By the afternoon he couldn’t hear anything. He was aware of noises, of people talking but as if through water. There was only the pressing of lips to glass, patting his jacket and his hat, sweat and the sun and broken pieces of thought. Policemen were talking to him. Then a group of youth on mopeds. He understood there were warnings. He laughed at the idiot logic. In the afternoon he saw the town was scorched and yellow, the clouds dark and wet. It was as if some northern continent had made off with the sky, swapping it for its own. He understood it was raining. He laughed at the idiot logic.
Christmas fell in and out of sleep. It grew dark. He got to his feet, the cause of great drama amongst his drinking companions, who held his arms and face. The world pitched like a boat. Christmas lurched and straightened. He picked up his jacket, walking away to piss messily against a tree. In his pocket he found his last banknote. He did up his shirt. He put on his jacket. He saw a sign for a karaoke bar.
At the bar he ordered beer. The barman asked him several times if he was OK. People watched the screen as song lyrics were highlighted in sequence, hopeful mimics droning along in tandem. The man next to him at the bar was almost as drunk as he was. They began to talk to themselves in the posture of talking to each other. Christmas argued with his own spirit. The song changed. The microphone was passed to a young woman sitting with a large group at the central table. Her voice was soft and ruthless. She sang of loss, of the unspeakable sadness of life, of all lives. Christmas felt what little was left of himself corrode. The man at the bar was explaining how to eat an iguana. “I have pieces of coal,” Christmas agreed, “in my heart.” He got off his stool to congratulate the singer, but someone passed him the microphone. He was in the middle of the bar. Everyone was cheering. The video started, couples on bridges and visions of rural paradise. He tried to give the microphone away but his hand was pushed back. He couldn’t follow the words. The tables were laughing. He heard his own voice behind him, cracked and low. “Emily,” he said. Then he began to weep.
Someone took the microphone. He was led to a chair and sat down. He wiped his eyes. “Em ... Emily?” She wasn’t there. “Disgusting!” he cried out loud. Someone patted his shoulder. A man at the bar began another song. Christmas pulled a sneer across his face then slammed both hands on the table.
“So that’s it? That’s? You people, eh? That’s it!” He stood up. “You? Eh? You people that’s?” He was shouting. The barman had his hand on his neck. The next thing he knew he was out on the street, cast back into night, stumbling across the Plaza Bolivar. The church reared up beside him and sent him reeling against a tree. He flung his arms round it. He couldn’t breathe. He sensed people around him and growled. He sank down to the base of the tree and looked up to the branches. But soon you’ll be dead, they seemed to say, and all you will taste is the earth. He turned from their snickering leaves to a rock that jumped forward and hit him in the head. His face fell into the soil, then he rolled onto his back. His mind began to vomit; song lyrics, memories of his dead wife, Bridget’s voice: don’t you want to be good? He coughed and coughed, his face washed in rheum and muck. He felt thieves were grabbing at him, but perhaps they were demons. Then someone was picking him up, helping him to his feet. Christmas pushed them away. He looked up at the church. Emily jumped from its roof. He yelled out but she turned into a seagull.
He stumbled off into the dark. He passed a children’s playground padlocked shut, heading down a road of shadows to the sea. Mosquitoes whined in his ear. Through cars and trees he could see the lights of a dock, cranes and derricks. There were oil drums and rusted gas canisters lined up along the water’s edge, upturned boats rotting without masters. He could smell gasoline. He fought his way under a tree, into the mud and rubbish and bog-shrubs, towards the nothing of the black ocean. He fell forward between two boats and tried to steady himself on their sides but one hand missed, so he swung down into the bilge, the slum of the land, plastic bags and bottles texturing the mire. Wetness spread through clothes to skin, his face raised but then defeated as it fell against the ooze with a smack.
The mud stank, stewed and shitty. He heard himself laugh inside his chest. He began to whisper, “Em ... Emily ...” mouth caked and fo
ul tastes leaking onto his tongue. He began to shout, to splutter, making noises of explosion, “Psccchhewwww ... Boom!” Then he was silent. Harry Christmas pushed his face into the sop. He was still.
Someone was rolling him round. There was a commotion. He was being yanked and raised. He glimpsed a policeman’s uniform and the ragged dress of his drinking companions. Sounds veered closer to his ear. He was being hooked by his armpits, lifted up, a half-dead seal, squinting with marine eyes at the mouths and their sounds. There were arguments, hands in his pockets, more arms around him. He was being helped into a boat. Someone was wiping his face. There was cheering and music and the yearning of an engine. There was a bottle of rum at his mouth. Christmas’ lips were moving but he spoke no human language. It was a dialect of the dead. He went into the oceans of the night.
37
When Christmas came to, something was wrong. He was upside down. So this was hell: simple, cruel, upside down. Some kind of parched territory see-sawed in front of him. He was swinging by one leg from a tree. He was drunk. So – they let people stay drunk in hell. He might have laughed, but his entire body felt as if it was trying to cram itself into his face. Sweat ran off his neck over his chin. There were raised voices. He thought he must be in the courtyard of some kind of factory until he identified the pounding noise as his own heart. He struggled. He spun even faster. The voices stopped. He understood there was someone before him holding a machete.
“What you doing, stupid gringo?”
“I am not a gringo,” Christmas croaked, “I am an Englishman.” He heard a chopping sound. Then he was on the floor. He passed out.
He woke in a bed. He could hear trumpets. There were people standing about him, talking too fast. He realised he was no longer in his clothes. Christmas dared not open his eyes. Different species of headache were warring over his skull and spirits raced across his eyeballs. Someone was near him. Others were laughing; judges, jesters, torturer-generals. There were chair-scrapes. He could hear a television and the rasping choke of beasts at feed. Christmas turned further into the pillow, praying that it would destroy him. He fell asleep and dreamed of mud in his throat. When he woke again it was the middle of the night. He was on a camp bed under a corrugated roof set high on thin beams. Raising himself onto his elbows, he realised was in the middle of a living room. He could hear snoring. He was naked except for a pair of Bermuda shorts. Behind him was a kitchen area.
Christmas staggered to the sink and drank mouthful after mouthful of water. His insides clenched and shook. He vomited. He needed to shit but didn’t know where to go. The shit almost came out of him. He held himself, shuffling across the kitchen, and came out into a yard and the violent noise of crickets. In the middle there was a toilet with no door, next to an upturned skiff. Christmas sat on the toilet and released a torrent of black sand. The flush didn’t work. He was sweating but his bones were cold. He went back to bed, one thousand years old.
Christmas dreamed in broken fury: eating a chicken sandwich then shitting out a live chicken; being alone in a wood; some problem with buying an electric fan. He dreamed a tortoise doctor was inspecting him while a boy prayed at the end of his bed. When he finally opened his eyes, head hanging from the mattress, there was the tortoise. The skin on its neck was like an old sock. It staggered forward and raised its powerful jaw to clamp at Christmas’ chin. A woman’s hand gripped his cheeks. They were calloused and smelt of coconut oil, and turned his head in firm inspection. Then the woman’s face was in front of him. Her eyes were the colour of morning light through leaves.
She walked off to a chair by the front door letting in a blare of day. Christmas pulled his cheeks to his forehead, watching her huge thighs in a tight pink tracksuit turn and sit down. The woman crossed her legs, picking her T-shirt from her belly. She was wearing big hooped earrings, hair cocked up to one side. She was drinking a beer. She was Lola Rosa.
“Idiota!” she spat. Christmas didn’t understand what was happening. Yet he knew it was no dream. The hangover made every cell in his body wretched with consciousness. Never had he felt so bad after drinking. It was punishment. It was revenge. Memories of Guiria revealed themselves all at once. Then Judith at her wheel. Being introduced to Slade’s mother. Emily’s funeral. His whole rotten life.
“Habla pues!” Christmas blinked and looked about. The room was turquoise. There were diplomas on the wall, photographs of dead relatives, a clock made out of a ship’s wheel and a thickly painted scene of a beach at sunset. The boy from his dream was still kneeling at the end of his bed. The tortoise snapped its jaw. Lola stared at him with eyebrows raised. He tried to say her name. His throat made a high-pitched squeak.
Lola Rosa was from the village of San Cristóbal, thirty kilometres from Guiria along the southern coast of the Paria peninsula. Lola told all her friends about the preening gringo she had picked up on her last trip to Caracas, enjoying many laughs at his expense, so it had been no small surprise to go out one night into her own village and find him hanging from a tree.
News spread quickly about the foreigner who had arrived on a boat full of drunk fishermen, initially unconscious, then springing into a fit of dangerous activity. Raving and gabbling, he had fought walls and bushes and other more invisible foes until his companions caught his foot, wrapped it in rope, and winched him to safety. Lola went to check on the commotion with everyone else, only to be engulfed in double-takes. That she not only knew this foreigner, but had slept with him, was the kind of electric gossip that lights up any village. He had obviously remembered where she lived and tracked her down.
“What you do in my village? Why you in San Cristóbal?”
“Lola ...?”
“What happen to you? Why you drunk like crazy man? Look at your face – why they hit your face? And the rest of you! Someone hit you with a car? What happened? What you doing here?”
“Where ...?”
“You come from Guiria. You in San Cristóbal. You in Estado Sucre, coño, you in Venezuela!”
“You ...”
“Me! Why you come here, gringo? Why you come to this village? Why you here? You come to see me, like this, like a drunk? Because I don’t want to see you! Idiota! Hijo de puta!” The boy at the end of the bed glared at his mother in reprimand. “You shut up!” she said to him in Spanish.
“How did I get here?”
“That is what I want to know! Why you here? Verga!” and with that she drained her beer and threw it out the door.
“Where is you hotel? Where you bags? You money? You stay in Guiria?”
“I don’t have anything” wheezed Christmas, more fragments of Guiria returning, “I had ... some bad luck.”
“It’s me with the bad luck, gringo, oíste? You don’t have no money?”
“I ... was robbed.”
“Of course you was robbed! You gringo. You can not to drink like that, the people will see you and they will take everything.”
“I was robbed before I got drunk.”
“And you think drink like that going to help you? Verga!”
“I was trying to get to Guiria ...”
“By drinking rum? You try to go to Guiria by drinking rum? Rum don’t take you Guiria, gringo. Boat take you Guiria!”
“But you ... Caracas ...”
“That was the house of my sister. This is my house. This is my son. He don’t speak no English.” The boy stretched forward to shake Christmas by the hand. He had an oval face and a teenage moustache.
“Aldo,” said the boy, “Peace be with you.” There was a curious silence.
“I – I don’t understand ... ” Christmas began, “It’s too ... how did you find me?”
“Verga, coño! I didn’t find you, oíste? I didn’t find you. You come here on a boat with borrachos and you so drunk they tie you to tree and then I see you. I don’t want to see you again! You come here drunk and without shame. Everybody see you! Like crazy man! Why you here!” She stood up. “I can’t to believe it! En todo Venezuela
¿estás aquí? En San Cristóbal? You tell me you not come to find me?”
“I had no idea ... I don’t even know where I am.”
“You lie!”
“It’s a miracle,” said the boy in Spanish.
“It’s a bad miracle!” she replied.
“There are no such things as bad miracles.”
“We’re all bad miracles. He,” she pointed at Christmas, “is just bad.”
“You didn’t – we were going to have dinner ...” started Christmas.
“Are you joking?” Lola folded her arms. “Eeeee,” she groaned, “You deaf, gringo? I said ‘no’ because I don’t want to see you again. And now I must to see you again! In a tree! Verga, look at your face! Someone hit your face! Why are you here? Why are you in my house?”
“But you ... you must have brought me here.” Lola blew a note of disagreement through tight lips.
“That was the idea of him!” Christmas followed her finger to the other side of the room. “He don’t speak no English.” There, on a sofa, lay an old man the colour of cigars. He was grinning.
“I’m very sick,” said the old man in Spanish, “my legs don’t work.”
“Your legs stopped working because you smoke crack!” thundered Lola, “Last week your legs were fine!” The old man looked as if he had been poured onto the sofa. His head was too big for his body. He had a long face with brown teeth that fanned out like monkey toes, except for the front two which were gold. He smiled at Christmas, twirling a finger next to his ear in a ‘she’s crazy’ gesture.
“Now he’s awake, he can go back to Caracas!”
“He can stay as long as he likes.”
“No! He goes!”
“I am her father,” he confided to Christmas, pushing out his lips towards her, “and she shows me no respect.”
“You show yourself no respect!”
“You’re just in a bad mood because everyone’s laughing at you.”
A Bright Moon for Fools Page 18
