Flying ants and mosquitoes hovered and crawled everywhere despite the low fire of leaves crossing the workers with smoke. They fed on the foreigner, they made him dance and grunt, but Christmas felt Lola’s eyes upon him and was determined to endure. He kept his mind on the smooth, heavy pods that crashed to earth with a thud, making sure he wasn’t hit on the head. He didn’t want to be the patient any more.
At lunchtime they rested against tree trunks and ate fish and arepas and drank cold water from the brook. Smoke performed in the light shafts. Christmas closed his eyes. He felt Emily’s presence. Then she was gone. Things were crawling up his ankles.
While the family ate and talked, he considered his situation. As soon as he felt strong in his heart he must take a proper walk, explore the coastline and find the right spot for Emily. But what then? He had no money so he could not leave; he could not afford the bus fare to Caracas. He could not leave because he had no money; he could not repay Lola and her family. Only this work, the act of contributing, was doing something to loosen the hot tar of shame that cladded his ribs.
He hadn’t had a drink in several days, but his mind felt no clearer for it. There was only a rush of Emily. The noise she made when she turned over in her sleep. In that suit that showed off her hips. How she laughed. Her political opinions. Her funeral. The way her big toe lifted when she brushed her teeth. How belligerent and spiteful she could be when she drank white wine. Her dead body in the hospital bed. That superstition about magpies. The way she threaded her hair under her nose when she was concentrating. Preparing dinner. He was chopping carrots, and there was Ella Fitzgerald coming in from the living room. Emily was stuffing rosemary under the skin of a chicken. He cut himself. She ran his finger under the cold tap. She was wearing the apron they bought from the Chatsworth shop. She kissed his finger then his lips. They fell back against the wall map of Venezuela. His finger dragged blood across her shirt. She got cross.
The old woman was gabbling without pause. He understood it was for his benefit, though she only looked at her food.
“When I was a little girl, the people were happier. They worked hard but they were happy. My mother washed and ironed clothes every day of her life, but when she went to bed she went to sleep. Not like now. Now people go to bed to worry in peace. In my day the electricity went off at nine. People closed up their shops by putting a chair against the door – no locks! Oh no! You could go to Guiria and you knew someone would be looking after your children; you didn’t have to ask. Now there are all these drugs. Dios mio! Everybody wants to destroy themselves ...”
Christmas finished his plate and held out his hands as Aldo poured water over them. He returned the favour, holding out the bottle for the old woman and then Lola. Sweat and dirt brushed her cheeks. Her gold crucifix rested between her breasts. Crouching, she washed her hands, filled her mouth, spat, washed her face then her green eyes looked up at him from under her baseball cap. She laughed.
“What?” he said, but she only shook her head and stood up.
At the end of the day Lola stood over the pile of seeds and filled up two hessian sacks using an old metal plate. They packed up the containers and plastic bottles from lunch. Aldo pulled the billhook off the end of the bamboo pole while Christmas and the old woman folded up the plastic sheeting. Lola hacked off a young branch and laid the thick end of it against a log. She beat it with the end of the machete until the bark loosened and could be stripped to use as binding for the sacks. Once tied shut, Christmas and Aldo hauled them onto the wooden cross frame trussed to the donkey’s saddle, Aldo tying and retying until the two sides were balanced. Then they followed the donkey home, machetes swinging.
Christmas’ wrists, cheeks and ankles were red maps of attack. The next day he woke again determined to search the beaches for the right spot and was there, in the doorway with Montejo in his hand, but Aldo appeared with some gumboots and told him to put trousers on. Before he knew it they were walking together through the cacao, Aldo carrying an old paint tin stuffed with dry leaves and embers to drive off the worst of the mosquitoes.
Christmas’ sweat-sodden shirt cloyed on his back. There was silence but for birdsong and their trampling of the brake. A sea breeze blew through the grove. Perhaps this was what they meant by the nobility of labour, thought Christmas, nobly. Yes, it felt good to be doing something. It gave his mind a break from the torrent of memories that sobriety was pouring through him. For the first time in almost a week, he was in the mood for conversation.
“So Aldo, you are an Evangelical, correct?”
“Yes.”
“So you believe in hell?”
“Of course.”
“But if Christ died for our sins, shouldn’t hell be closed?”
“Closed?”
“Like a shop.”
“Gringo, you should come to a meeting and ask Christ for forgiveness and for his blessing.”
“The problem, Aldo, is that if Christ was alive now, the last thing he’d be is a Christian.”
“Have you sold your soul to the devil?” asked the boy.
“Everybody has sold their soul to the devil,” sighed Christmas. “That’s why you can’t get a decent bloody price.”
Every day he promised himself he would look for Emily’s beach, either before work or after it or at sundown, or at night, but the rhythm of their days took over. Sometimes Christmas chopped open the pods and scooped out the seeds, but mostly he and the boy wandered the boles, staring up into the leaves and the sun, trailing sack cloths and ash. They cut back the overgrowth. They cleaned the trees with the brunt of the billhook, chivvying at the ants’ nests that warted their groins. They peeled away the green veins of parasite weeds. They broke off dead limbs.
One afternoon he was sitting on a tree stump, rubbing the billhook against the flat sharpening stone, pouring water on it to cool the metal while Lola sewed up a hole in one of the sacks. They had been talking about her family when she rearranged herself and said, “So what was she like, your wife?” Christmas hacked the billhook into some rotten wood.
“You know, I remember one time when we were invited to these people’s house for dinner. We didn’t know them really. They lived in our town and I had this business deal I was going to do with the husband. That’s what you do in England – you go round to other people’s houses for dinner, apparently for the company, but really it’s just so you can have a nose about, and then bitch about their bad taste in the car home afterwards. Anyway, Emily had a bad stomach. I didn’t want to go to the dinner much. It was a weekend and I was much better off in the pub – which is like a bar here but with carpet and more than one type of beer. So I said, you know, let’s just call it off, darling, let’s just not go, but no – we’d said we’d do something, so we’d do it. That was Emily. No messing.
“So we were in the car on the way there and her stomach just got worse and worse, so we pull into this petrol station, which in England are pretty much like hotels, with shops and restaurants and that sort of thing – massive – so Ems can use the toilet. While we are there she bumps into this friend of hers, a great friend, one of her oldest, Claire her name was, and she takes one look at Emily and says, what do you mean you’re going to dinner, look at the state of you, you’ve got to cancel, you’ve got to get yourself into bed, but Emily wouldn’t hear of cancelling. What about the poor hostess who’s cooked all the food and cleaned her house and everything? We’re meant to be there in ten minutes, we can’t cancel now. That was Emily. Would never let anyone down, even if she didn’t know them. But then she got this wicked look in her eye and that’s what I miss really, this wicked, fun look, and she says to Claire, if you aren’t doing anything tonight, why don’t you go? You pretend to be me.
“Well, I was desperate for Emily to go home and look after herself, so I thought it was a brilliant idea and Claire was always up for anything, so off we went, you know? I introduced her as Emily and we start having dinner. After the first course, I skip upstairs to ri
ng the real Emily, see if she was all right, and she was asking me how Claire was performing and I told her what fun we were having, how delicious the food was, how good the wine was – basically that her plan was working perfectly.
“Well, Emily had driven home in Claire’s car and on the way back her stomach trouble had cleared up completely. So now she was at home, bored, and do you know what she did? We were eating dinner, the doorbell went, and there she was. She introduced herself as Claire, said she was my second wife, that we all lived together in a ménage a trois, which she didn’t think was anything to be ashamed of and could she come in.”
“De verdad?”
“I swear it. The look on those people’s faces ... Jesus Christ. That was the thing about Emily. Didn’t give a damn.”
“And how was the dinner?”
“They let her sit down, gave her some food. We all had a great time.”
“And how the business deal go?”
“Never heard from him again. Didn’t even answer my phone calls!”
“Wow. I like the sound of her.”
“Yes, yes. She was quite something. Her grandmother was Venezuelan, you know. From Guiria, actually. Before she got pregnant we – that’s why I was ... you know ...” he fell silent.
“Seven years ago is a long time, Harry.”
“I know, I know.”
“Another hour and we go home, OK?” She tugged on the sack. It was mended. “Well, it is good that you’re here.” She slung it over her shoulder. “Less work for me,” and off she went to find Aldo.
Christmas watched her go, smiling to himself. It’s good that you’re here. She had just said that, hadn’t she?
42
It was night. Slade was in his room, drinking whisky and masturbating. He was thinking about Bridget, reimagining his crime, her head pressed down against the sink. Now she was goading him, daring him to attack her. Now the noises she made were of grudging pleasure. He came into some toilet paper.
Slade had been there eight days. Some evenings Oscar came back to give him a report of where he had been and which villages he was going to try the following day. Some evenings he didn’t come back at all. Slade stayed in his room drinking or he sat in the plastic chair watching Oscar’s wife Milagro doing chores down there in the yard, her small, tight body in small, tight shorts.
Slade turned to the wall. He could hear Oscar’s estranged grandfather listen to the radio. He tried to follow the Spanish words. He could smell something cooking. It was burning. He was walking into the kitchen. He could hear his father beating Diana and she’d left carrots frying and they were spitting and blackened and flaring smoke. He turned the gas off and went into the corridor and Diana was on the floor and he went up to her hair and pulled it away from her ear and whispered, “The carrots are ready.”
Slade woke up. He was curled up against the wall. The house was silent. The bed sheet that was his door moved. He looked over. There was Oscar’s daughter. Next to her, in the corner of the room, was The General. The General opened its mouth and Milagro’s voice came out of it, calling her daughter downstairs.
Slade got to his feet. He parted the sheet and watched her take one step at a time down to her mother. Milagro glanced up at him and hurried her daughter inside.
“I want him gone!” she hissed, “I don’t like him!”
“Don’t be ridiculous and lower your voice!” said Oscar through a mouthful.
“Why? He can’t even speak Spanish.”
“We are making good money and soon he’ll be gone, OK?”
“I don’t like the way he looks at me! He is crazy!”
“We find his father and we make one thousand dollars. You want me to kick him out because you don’t like him?”
“I can hear him talking to himself.”
“Look, when I am not around, I’ll tell Alejandro to come by, OK? Make sure everything is all right and—”
“Shush!” Milagro and Oscar looked up at the ceiling. They could hear the rumble of Slade’s English.
“Why are you here?” Slade asked the cat again. “Where’s my father?”
“Boo-hoo,” The General replied. “You haven’t got the fat man. Boo-hoo. You can’t see him. Boo-hoo, boo-hoo.”
43
San Cristóbal was a nest of factions. The Evangelicals didn’t like the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Catholics cared for neither. The drinkers disapproved of the crackheads, except for that subsection that were crackheads themselves. Everyone smoked marijuana and agreed it was good for the health, except for the old people who broadly disapproved of the young people and new ideas in general. Countless familial and inter-generational rivalries bubbled away and yet even the most spiteful, back-stabbing neighbour was proud of how much nicer the people were here than in Caracas. The village greeting was to act as if you hadn’t seen that person in years: an ‘Epalé!’ cried out with open palms and an expression of surprise. As there were only six streets in San Cristóbal, they greeted each other like this continuously, perhaps only minutes passing since their last meeting, perhaps their twentieth that day. ‘Epalé!’ – it was like a big family of amnesiacs.
Striding through the village, his strength restored and the bruising much reduced, Christmas thought the whole thing was wonderful. ‘Epalé!’ cried the people from their stoops. ‘Epalé!’ he cried back. Christmas excelled at the cheerful insults that often followed and was buoyed by the feeling that, on the whole, the villagers had taken to him: “Hey gringo! You have sex with my donkey again last night? You wake me up with the noise, man!”
“I’d rather have sex with your donkey than your wife, Gustavo – she looks like a knee in a wig.”
Some asked for money, the refusal process infinitely eased by the truth: he was potless. The men asking him were always the same – members of the small but highly visible fraternity of serious crack smokers. They looked like Old Testament prophets, weather-beaten and bearded, with eyes like fire behind burnt glass. Robbed of the ability to steal – the village was far too small and remote – they were the hardest working men in the population. They ferried goods around in wheelbarrows. They collected the rubbish. They cleaned the streets, delivered beer crates, unloaded cargo boats, painted houses. Then, at night, they smoked their daily fortunes and forgot to wash.
Christmas entered into a routine with one of these men. He was known as El Perro, ‘the Dog’. He wore two baseball caps, one on top of the other, the visors parting left and right. His torso looked like a woven tree root.
“Give me ten bolívares,” said El Perro, putting down his wheelbarrow as Christmas walked by.
“No,” said Christmas.
So it continued, several times a day, with no animosity on either side. Christmas couldn’t help wondering if there was not some lesson here with these industrious addicts, some wider truth for the nation. Perhaps Chávez could employ all the crackheads in Caracas on community service projects, pay them one crack rock an hour, call it Misión Crack. Perhaps the mayors of Britain should do the same. Perhaps crime would plummet, perhaps cities would be clean, perhaps junkies would be taken care of. Had not these men just slipped as he had, though down a different mountain? Christmas resolved to think about it some more, wondering once again if he had not missed his vocation as a politician.
There was one basic shop in the village that sold ocumo, yucca, pan de año, onions, garlic, eggs, oil, rice, curry powder, salt, pepper, tinned sardines, corn flour, fizzy pop, soap, detergent, shampoo, toilet roll, razors and Alka Seltzer, but he soon learnt behind which doors mothers made freshly baked bread, home-made sorbet, pastries and cakes of every type, hamburgers and hotdogs, sweetbread, yoghurts, cheese and ice-cold fruit juices. For a village surrounded by cacao, there didn’t seem to be much chocolate. “The people don’t have the machines here,” the old man explained. “We do it all by hand. It’s too much work. But we’ll make some for the festival. Arri, it’s going to taste like whooompf! You mix it with rum and whaboooof!”
> “Whooompf and whaboooof? In the same glass?”
“That’s right, gringo man!”
“I am not a—”
“Bleurrgh,” said the old man, changing channel.
When Saturday came the fishermen got paid. As Christmas walked through the village, men with bottles of Cacique stuffed into their belts cornered him and demanded he take a swig. He declined.
The night was hot. The sea was the colour of wine. Music hammered out the dents in their lives and everyone wanted to talk to the foreigner. There was a great deal of interest in England amongst the men, largely because of football, and Christmas secured impact by describing the country as a ghost story: “It is dark. Fierce winds howl through the streets. Everybody is angry. Then suddenly the snow arrives and everything turns pure white, everything you can see, and the people are happy. For one morning. Then they are angry again for six months until the sun arrives. You wake up one morning and there it is. Everybody goes crazy and strips naked. They get drunk in the sun and they are happy. Until they get too drunk. Then they are angry again.”
“Is it true,” asked a woman, “that men in your country ...” and she made a V-shape with her fingers and began to simulate oral sex. The other women with her cackled uncontrollably.
“I’ll tell you this,” he replied, putting one foot on their stoop and pushing up the brim of his baseball cap, “whatever you ladies think, there are plenty of husbands here who do it. Only they make their wives not tell anyone.” The women hooted. “You, for example,” he pointed to the youngest, who was covering her mouth. “Definitely you.” Stifling giggles, she raised a finger in denial as the others pushed and poked her. Christmas straightened up. He saw Lola walking down the street eating a mango. He readied himself to greet her. She threw the mango stone at his head.
A Bright Moon for Fools Page 21
