by E. J. Swift
He has not lost his good looks. His hair is cut and sculpted in the style that seems to be in vogue now; on Alejandro it is flattering. His face is clean-shaven, revealing unblemished skin and that determined jawline. What was boyish charm fifteen years ago has matured into handsome suavity, and he knows it. He greets her like an old friend, kissing her on both cheeks. Ramona wonders how she appears to him, whether he sees the awkward teenager she was or a woman who has changed. Her skin has weathered; she has lines and muscles that were not there before. She feels both more confident in herself and more conflicted about the world than she did back then.
Alejandro offers her a glass of water with a slice of lemon floating in it. He is unable to resist commenting on the lemon.
‘From the groves,’ he says. ‘But I’m afraid there is no ice. Do you have ice in Fuego? I wouldn’t know, I haven’t been there.’ He laughs lightly. The laugh is enough to tell her the friendliness is a display.
‘You’re not missing much, Alejandro,’ she says. ‘I’m sure Cataveiro offers far better entertainment than Fuego.’
‘We have the most diverse music scene, of course, and the theatre, and the carnival. Yes, we have many things in the city. Really, it’s a shame you don’t have the time to visit more regularly.’
Ramona takes a mouthful of her lemon water, savouring its fresh tartness on her tongue before she swallows. She pictures the private lemon groves where this fruit grew, the rows of trees with their swollen fruits. She pictures the people that Alejandro must know to drink lemon-scented water. He is restless. His eyes flick past her shoulder, to either side of her. Ramona studies him quietly. He is three years older than she. When they were teenagers pressed up against one another in the back of whichever car she was fixing, that seemed an unbridgeable gap, but looking at him now, three years holds no weight at all.
‘Maybe one day I’ll have more time,’ she says.
‘Perhaps you will.’ Alejandro sits back. His eyes are still roving. She notices a mask dangling from his belt, an elegant black one with hairline gold swirls. ‘The mayor comes up to this promenade sometimes. He seems to think of me as quite the protégé. Any day now I expect to be offered a position in the hall.’
‘I’ve heard you’re doing well,’ she says. It is true, although not for the reasons she might hope. Alejandro was always hungry for power. He craved it in cars, always wishing to move faster, to harness the sense of supremacy that he assumed came with ownership. He used to loiter about the garage looking at the cars, and Ramona noticed him. At first each of them imagined that the other felt the same about the thing they loved most. It proved otherwise. Ramona loved the cars not for their power but for the beauty of the mechanics behind them. She recognized that the cars had personalities: some were resistant, some anxious to please, while others were battered, heroic survivors, refusing to expire. Alejandro did not understand this. He wanted to exert his will upon them. It had been a mistake to tell him when she first heard the story of the plane. That was when they had fallen out.
‘I will do well,’ he says, almost aggressively. ‘There is much to be done. Cataveiro is too subservient to the government. We intend to deal with that. And you? You’re still flying, I hear?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sometimes I wonder how it might have been if we’d gone to look for it together. Do you ever wonder that?’
‘No,’ she says firmly. ‘What would be the point of that?’
‘It was a long time ago, I suppose.’
‘A very long time ago. Fifteen years ago.’
A whining note creeps into Alejandro’s voice. ‘It still amazes me you were allowed to keep it. Neon planes have been illegal for decades. But you have one, and nobody questions it.’
‘You know why. I said I would make maps, and I do. Besides, you wouldn’t enjoy my work. Cartography is a painstaking process. It’s slow and meticulous.’
‘But you do, evidently.’
‘It allows me to do something useful.’ She sips again from the sweating glass.
‘Very altruistic of you,’ says Alejandro sourly. The grudge is still there, after all these years. Was it another mistake to contact him?
‘Alejandro, I’m short of time. You know people now. I was hoping you could help me.’
Alejandro leans his chin on his hand, a contrived, thoughtful pose.
‘“I know people,” she says. Yes it’s true, I do know people now.’
‘There is someone in particular. Señorita Xiomara.’
He raises an eyebrow, as well he might. It is not without misgivings that she says the name.
‘What could you want with Señorita Xiomara?’
‘My mother has the jinn.’ Ramona lowers her voice. ‘Everyone knows that there are people in Cataveiro who buy Boreal medicine. If anyone has a cure, it will be her. I need a meeting.’
Xiomara controls the water supply. Her family are dead; the desalination empire is her inheritance. The salt woman has wealth unimaginable to a girl from the barren highlands. Wealth enough to buy Boreal medicine in abundance. She also has a particular reputation. Those who oppose Xiomara tend to disappear. It is said that her enemies are transported to a ravine, some alive, some already dead, but none come back, and afterwards, it is as though they never existed at all.
Ramona watches Alejandro’s face. The slight contraction of the eyelids. She feels her hunch solidify into certainty.
‘It’s true,’ he says. ‘We are friendly, Xiomara and I.’
The Antarctican’s cash is a hard little wad in Ramona’s pocket.
‘I have money,’ she says.
Alejandro tilts his head, squinting up at the glaring light beyond the shadow of the awning.
‘I like to hear you say you need things, Ramona. It pleases me.’
‘Alejandro. I’m talking about help for a dying woman. You’re the only connection I have in the city. Do you want me to beg you or what?’
Alejandro’s gaze flicks over her shoulder, focuses on something, then draws back. Ramona feels a familiar prickle at the back of her neck. Once again she takes note of the bystanders: the yawning server, idly rolling a yellow lemon back and forth along the counter; the woman slumped under a parasol, her eyes apparently closed beneath her red-rimmed sunglasses; the solitaire player, turning over his cards one by one.
‘Ramona, you know I don’t like to be harsh, but if she is dying already …’
Her grip tightens around the glass of lemon water and its condensation shell. She can feel movement behind her. Not the languid sun worshippers, but purposeful, direct, careful movement, the way a snake winds its way through dry grasses.
‘Alejandro,’ she says. ‘You’re a clever man. But you have never been subtle.’
He smiles. A glimmer of uncertainty. She stands and dashes the glass of water into his face. Alejandro’s eyelids screw up tight and in that moment Ramona grabs her pack, vaults the table and knocks his chair sideways. Glancing back as she lands, she sees two men hastening across the terrace. Casual attire, but she recognizes them instantly as enforcers. What the fuck? Enforcers? The solitaire player has abandoned his cards and is moving swiftly in her direction.
‘You little shit, Alejandro!’
Sprawled on the floor, he splutters something. She ignores it and runs. Her flight attracts a flurry of protests from the sunbathers and curious glances as she dodges around the tables, but it is too hot for them to move. She sprints across the rooftops, retracing the path she walked before the meeting. Past the humitas sellers, past the banjo player. A group of students scatters before her. She risks a look back. The solitaire player is close. He is younger and fitter than the other two, easily navigating the crowds in her wake. She is hampered by the weight of the pack.
Fucking Alejandro. What is he playing at?
The end of the promenade looms: a metre gap between this line of buildings and the next. She gathers speed and leaps, narrowly clearing the drop, lands heavily and rolls. Up on her feet and on ag
ain. Solar panels, open attic windows, washing lines, sparrows resting on radio antennae. She looks back. The solitaire player has cleared the gap. He is right on her tail. He is fast.
She veers to the edge of the rooftops, looking for ladders and balconies below. She fixes her sights on a balcony one floor down and jumps again. The fall is sharper this time and her ankle jars with the landing. Ignore it! Get down, get off the roofs. She swings over the balcony edge and reaches for a ladder. Two flights down, left along a walkway, scramble down another ladder. The solitaire player is above, mimicking her route. She drops into the streets and runs.
It is easier to hide down here. It’s darker. There are rickshaws to duck behind, carts and bicycles to upset and disrupt the solitaire player’s pursuit. A tram approaching ahead: good, use that to cover you. Within a few streets she has lost him; now it is safer to slow, merge her movements with the crowd, but she keeps walking. The exhilaration of the chase is wearing off. Her ankle aches. The crowds flow around her, hard-faced and menacing, each man, woman or child a potential threat were she to be recognized. Now is the time to become invisible; become like the dust. Remember your roots, highland girl. Remember those days in the ruins of the sliding city, when a tremor could bring down a building, when you crept and tiptoed and looted.
She tries to calm her breathing, but she can feel the tremor in her legs and hands, the adrenaline slowly draining away in the wake of her flight. She has foiled her pursuers but she leaves the meeting empty-handed. She has nothing for her mother. Failure.
What was Alejandro thinking? City enforcers? Was he planning to arrest her? On what grounds?
You know what he’s after. He wants Colibrí. After all this time, he’s still obsessed with the idea of the plane.
You never should have contacted him.
But who else is there?
She walks. Her stomach is growling. Her shoulders ache. When she feels she has calmed enough to keep her voice steady she stops at a vendor and purchases tamales with the Antarctican’s cash. The paper parcel is hot and steaming and she feels almost faint at the sudden scent of food.
‘New in town?’ asks the vendor, looking at her pack.
‘Visiting friends,’ she says.
The radio on his stall issues bursts of crackly, fast-fingered guitar. It jostles with other stations from other windows: incessant beats pattering on drums and skin, a guttural voice singing a ballad, the verses rhythmic, repetitive. Ramona decided long ago that Cataveiro’s music is not an expression of joy, or even artistry. Cataveiro is full of spies; people sing so that no one will hear what they say. There are spies for the army and spies for the guerrillas. There are spies from the north and spies from the south. There are Alejandro’s spies, who have contacts.
‘Have you been to Cataveiro before?’
‘A couple of times.’
‘There’s always something new to see. That’s what I say, and I see it every day.’
Ramona glances up at the strip of sky above the narrow street. A bird wings past and she wills herself back in the plane, speeding north, escaping the city’s tenacious clutch. The afternoon is tailing away, and Cataveiro streets are not a place to linger at night. She had hoped to be in and out in a day. The hope seems foolish now.
She bites greedily into the tamale. Hot morsels of vegetable explode in her mouth. Then she tastes meat. She stops chewing abruptly.
‘Is that goat?’
‘Chicken,’ says the vendor proudly.
‘Where’s it from?’
The vendor shrugs. Does it matter? Grown in a glass tube or raised eating grain, it’s chicken, it’s hot, it’s good for the soul.
It matters to Ramona but she is stuck with it now; she cannot insult the vendor by refusing to finish the meat. She chews and swallows. As she walks away from the vendor, a young man leans out from a doorway.
‘Sing you a serenade, lovely lady.’
‘No need for that.’
‘No, I’ll sing you a serenade. The tale of the condor, that’s a one for you.’ There is something insistent, aggressive, about his tone, and she hurries on, not too slowly, not too fast, dipping once more into the river of the crowd, the bicycles, the rickshaws, thinking, thinking.
What now?
She reconstructs Alejandro’s face, the moment where she mentioned the cure. He knows. He knows it exists. That’s why he is befriending those people. Because deep down, Alejandro has the same fears as everyone else. Fear that the jinn will get him, or the pox will rob him of his good looks, or a new epidemic will come that he is powerless to escape. Alejandro’s life consists of the construction of barriers against those things.
Acquiring the plane would be one more weapon in such an arsenal.
She finds a House of the Nazca and ducks inside. There is little light, except that which illuminates the hearths of the hummingbird and the spider and others, the basin lined with a centimetre of still water. Ramona sits quietly. An acolyte acknowledges her with a nod of the head, but leaves her in peace to contemplate. The Nazca Houses have humble beginnings. Their first advocates emerged as a cult in the Blackout years, a zealous, intense community who worshipped the glyphs as gods. Over the decades, their strictures have been diluted; communal houses sprang up, sub-groups and sidelines flourished, religious creed evolved into practical teachings, and those became the recitations and fables of children: the hummingbird who stole the winds; the monkey who drank the world’s water. Nowadays, anyone can be a prophet.
An old man is kneeling at the altar of the hummingbird. His lips move silently and although she cannot hear the words, Ramona can guess what they are.
In this place she should be thinking of her pilgrimage to Cerro Blanco. Her mind should be thoughtful of the laws of conservation and community. Instead it is turmoiled. Her respects will have to wait.
Thanks to somebody, she is being hunted. Perhaps Eduardo gave in to gossip, but city enforcers are not Lygia’s style; her boss is too subtle for such blatant measures, and besides, it is less than twenty-four hours since she left the island. Lygia would wait, and analyse. No, this is Alejandro’s doing. She underestimated him. She underestimated his ability to hold a grudge: all these years he has lived believing that the plane should have been his. Her message must have been first a surprise, then an opportunity. Ramona made it easy for him.
She feels hot with anger at her own stupidity. Up in the sliding city, time is running out for Inés. Ramona cannot afford to make mistakes. As long as she flies, she will always be hunted. That is Colibrí’s price. She should know it by now.
Alejandro won’t give up easily. The sensible thing would be to get out of the city tonight, but that means nothing for her mother.
Ravine or no ravine, I’ll have to find Señorita Xiomara myself.
12 ¦
THE ALASKAN WATCHES as the fly she has been stalking for the past twenty minutes alights on her wrist. She moves with exquisite, fastidious precision. Millimetre by millimetre she stretches out her hand. So close. So very close. The fly so suddenly quiet. She can see the lines on its wings. She can see its rotating eyes, the feelers quivering. Then she smacks. Got you! There it is. A plump bloody smear against the swollen veins of her forearm.
Grunting with the effort, the Alaskan reaches for the sling and hauls herself to a sitting position in the bed. Her legs no longer work. If she was still in the north, they could provide her with the exact terminology for the state of her spine. Here, it is all jinns and spirits. The Alaskan prefers it. Sometimes it is not useful to know such a thing. Sometimes the fact is all that is needed. Her legs do not work. Who needs the truth? She pulls a pillow behind her and settles back into the cushioning. She can feel the wall through the pillow. The wall pushes against her vertebrae, which stick out more each day. When she was young and fit, the Alaskan would never have believed that this deterioration could happen to her body. She abandoned mirrors a long time ago, but she can imagine the skeletal appearance she presents.
I
t is appropriate then that she is living in a country which is dying, as far as the Alaskan is concerned. And the Alaskan knows a lot.
Patagonia is an information market. It has no value in the world’s eyes except for the messages that flow in and out. That is why the Alaskan likes it. She likes to value the things others see no value in. She likes the way people come to her as if she holds a secret power when all that she does is listen. Here where they worship the spider – no, worship is the wrong word – where they uphold the teachings of the Nazca, the Alaskan feels at home. The spider was revered because its scuttling presence signalled the coming of the rains. But the spider is also a weaver. A linker. A maker of mazes and a designer of threads. This is the role of the Alaskan: to know, and to understand when it is not good to know, all the while holding the threads together.
She reaches for the radio on the bedside table and turns the dial. The crackle of white noise, slips of voices sifting through like fingers in quicksand. A minute twist to the left and sudden sharp sound.
Here is the news she has been listening to on and off all day. A guerrilla rebel renowned for machete attacks has been released from jail. Riots followed, and now civilians are complaining about injuries sustained in the violence. The rebel woman has been granted a full pardon. How, the broadcaster demands, her tone suitably outraged, could this breach of justice have happened?
The Alaskan nods to herself. She knows how.
‘Maria?’
She appears, sponge in hand. A little runt of a girl, that peculiar, gnomic face hiding behind the hair as usual. It makes the Alaskan impatient. Why must the girl always hide?
‘Yes, señora?’
‘Get the book.’
The girl obeys; she does not need instructing as to which book. It is a tattered paper artefact, with some of the pages loose in the binding, but the state of it is unimportant. Maria opens the notebook carefully and angles it towards the Alaskan. The page contains a list of names.
