The Navidad Incident

by Natsuki Ikezawa

  By this final ceremony, how utterly exhausted they all must be. How can the Yuuka and attendants, musicians and rowers have stayed so focused in body and mind for so long with no food or sleep, when he dropped out midway? How can he presume to even ask? And yet there’s something very odd about the way he dropped out—or seemed to be driven away by unseen forces that conspired to tell him, “You don’t deserve to take part in more than half the ceremonies. You are denied the full eight-fold purification.”

  Even so, Matías feels elated. To be here on this spot with the festival air filling one’s body is to reconfirm the joy of being alive. To be born into this world and feel, looking up at the sky, smelling the sweet breeze, that for once one is truly in touch with the world, that is happiness. Even if it lasts no longer than three days, those days are bliss. Whether born a bird or a sea urchin or a ylang-ylang flower or a human being, all births seem equally precious; every bite of food, every footstep and blink of the eye, every ray of sunlight and molecule of oxygen is an increment of that happiness.

  By the last dance to send off the barge, Matías realizes he is crying. His tears make the moon swim, the entire torchlit scene shimmer. His eyes blur with saltwater delivered from otherworldly seas to wash away the silt of day-to-day authority. His coming here was a homecoming. Blessed are the nameless for they alone shall know this state of grace.

  No one here is a spectator. All are celebrants. They alone guarantee the rituals will be passed on and performed next time. Those who witnessed all eight ceremonies, those who skipped the middle part and those who caught only the finale expecting a few spiritual perks, all now stagger home under a weight of god-given gifts—or perhaps simply stiff from standing or sitting for hours—to get a good rest before returning to their lives.

  Matías sits quietly watching the crowd disperse. He’s tired, but there are things he still has to do. The rowers carry the sacred barge off to a boat shed five minutes from Sarisaran. There it will stay, save for an annual paddle around the lagoon to check for leaks, until the next Yuuka Yuumai cycle. The Yuuka and their attendants change out of their robes on the beach, two dozen of them forming a ring and, several at a time beginning with the youngest, slipping inside to put on street clothes. Matías sees the circle gradually transformed from pure white and vermilion to denim blue and floral-print pastels and brash T-shirt primaries—the casually chaotic colors of a marketplace. Nothing quite spells the end of the festivities as this does.

  Ten minutes later, the women have shed all holy mystery and returned to their secular selves: housewives and schoolgirls who, taxed far beyond ordinary exhaustion, now go their separate ways without any parting words. Out of the corner of his eye, Matías sees them leave, but he’s looking for Améliana. At no point in the ceremonies could he single her out with any certainty, but now back in regular clothes with no kava leaf crown to hide her face she’s easy to spot. She’s wearing the white cotton dress with large red buttons down the front she wore the day she left Baltasár City. He gets up and approaches, cutting in front of her as she starts to move off in a daze.

  “A real effort you put in there. You must be exhausted,” he says in a voice recognizable as her employer’s, back at the Presidential Villa.

  She looks at him blankly, as though lacking the strength to even show surprise at finding him here in beachcomber clothes. “So you came.”

  “Yes, I just got the urge. Dropped my work and came.” He hopes his expression shows sufficient admiration for her forty-hour spiritual ordeal.

  “From when?”

  “From the beginning. I rested out the middle, though. I’ve got a place here, if you need to sleep.” At that, he forges ahead like a guide, not even knowing whether she’ll follow. She might have a place of her own, after all. Then, after a few steps, he turns to see her hobbling mechanically close behind like a wind-up doll, no spare energy to consider where she’s going or why she’s following this man. All her powers have been spent on the festival, for the sake of the island, for the inhabitants of Navidad, for everyone on earth. All to wrest some assurance of eight years of calm and quiet for others, however wrong their ways.

  People are heading back to home and hotel as Matías leads Améliana to the house where he blacked out just hours before. She steps inside and, doing as Matías tells her, goes to the bedroom and collapses onto the bed in her clothes.

  Matías takes a seat on the sofa in the front room. As he gazes at the morning light pouring in through the window, the tides of festival elation steadily ebb, leaving him grounded in his normal sober self. It feels strange to be out of the Presidential Villa for so long, though equally unsettling—probably because he’s been doing something so unusual—to be on his own here. He doesn’t really believe Katsumata or anyone else will attempt a coup in his absence, but the driving obsessions, thoughts that the country needs him, are reemerging. Still, he has a few hours before his pilot is supposed to pick him up. He can relax and bask in the sun a while, with a sleeping woman nearby.

  Again he dozes off and reawakens with his head in a fog, some afterglow of the festival in his system. He vaguely recalls his official duties, but more than any immediate policy decision or dealings with legislators, the deployment of subordinates or negotiations with Japan, he feels an urge to just go on sitting here and consider his own options. Something’s pushing him in a new direction. Something’s about to give. Call it a premonition, but some major change is coming; it’s that time. Time to think not about the days and weeks and months ahead, but much further off, though he can’t picture himself as old and wizened like the Melchor Elders, he can’t imagine Angelina with a head of white hair like María Guili.

  But no, wait, he finds he can look down on himself from high above, from Lee Bo’s perspective. There’s the bustling village square. The friendly everyday Navidadians. What’s going on here? Has he died? How can he be seeing these things? Well, sure, he has to die sometime. No telling when, but this body will perish, another spirit lodged in another body will walk the earth, think and love and work for others, laugh and cry and bear children. A happy soul. With his dead self watching over it.

  Will anyone remember him? Once upon a time there was a man named Matías Guili who went as far as to become president and shape the workings of this country, pulled people up to the living standards they enjoy today, skillfully created a network of promises with other more powerful nations and, in exchange for all that, skimmed a lot off the top. He saw the presidential system firmly established here, made various arrangements for the next generation of politicians to carry on, then withdrew—will people remember that? Will they put as many flowers on his grave—or more—than on the grave of Cornelius?

  It’s not the number of flowers, though. It’s not whether people remember him or not. Dying ends all that. All posthumous glory is pointless. An instant after death none of it will matter; all acquisitions and debts will be set back to zero so the mind can rest in peace. Rest in nothingness. So much the better. He can just relax and have nice long talks with Lee Bo or the ghost of Cornelius or Ryuzoji or Micael and María Guili. Eventually Angelina will show up too. And it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to see Bonhomme Tamang and apologize. He’ll probably never forgive and forget, but in the afterlife how bad can that be?

  What is he thinking? He must be burned out from the festival, that’s what’s putting these crazy ideas in his head. He’s in this alone and he’s going to the next world alone. And anything that happens between now and then, no matter how grand and glorious it looks from the wings, is really just liquidating holdings. No matter how many more terms he serves as president, it’s straight on from here for Matías Guili, and that’s fine with him.

  But what if people do forget all about him after he’s gone? Who’s to guarantee they won’t? His name will become a footnote in the history books, his memorial stone obscured by moss, while Angelina goes on to find another lover an
d the next president (who’s it to be?) sets the country on a totally different course. Fair enough, though he’d have liked to leave some lasting mark. Not a soft spot in people’s hearts, nothing so iffy as warm feelings or respect—something more indelible.

  Ah, if only he had an heir. Why wasn’t he so lucky? Tsuneko wouldn’t keep quiet on the subject. The desire to give love a tangible shape in the form of a child, it’s not like he didn’t understand it. Young, ignorant, and bursting with sex drive as he was, he did it twice a day, morning and night with an older and, frankly, ugly woman, and never tired. Took her at her word that she didn’t want children—but really she did. She took no precautions. All right, Matías was foreign-born, but he was her last chance to father her child, clearly that’s what she believed. Almost fooled him too—squeezed every last drop of semen out of him. And yet, for all the incessant fucking, not once did she get pregnant. Not a hint. And then in the end, as he was boarding ship, she said it—“You have dead seed.”

  Never considered that. All that time he’d thought the trouble was on Tsuneko’s side. It must have been simply ego that prevented Matías from thinking it through further. Maybe that’s what made him not go after younger women and shack up so cozily with María. Fidelity to her meant he never needed to find out whether the infertility was on his side or not. With any other young and willing and fecund partner, of whom there must have been many when M. Guili Trading Company was just hitting its stride, he couldn’t have not known. Not having risen to the occasion, he sees now, was enough to raze any erection. He blew it twice and for all eternity.

  Wait, maybe all is not lost after all. Maybe he just hasn’t given it a decent try. What about the girl asleep in the next room? She’s young, body brimming with all the blessings of the Yuuka Yuumai, and she’s completely conked out. She bore her brothers and cousins a son, didn’t she? Maybe she can be persuaded to give him one last chance.

  As if germinating in the morning sunlight, strange thoughts arise in his mind, expanding with a life of their own. What if Tsuneko was wrong? There’s one way to find out. He gets up, drawn to this available sleeping partner not by some vague, uncontrollable urge, but a specific desire to procreate, an aim so far-off it will almost justify anything.

  He walks quietly into the next room and goes over to the bed. He looks down at Améliana lying innocently in her white cotton dress on the floral print sheets, sleeping face-up, eyes firmly shut, arms stretched out to either side. She’s barefoot, her kicked-off rubber sandals lying beside the bed. Deep asleep, her breathing is scarcely discernible. He must look like this when he sleeps. She’s completely unconscious, in no state to refuse anything, enjoying a special respite granted by the gods. Would the gods punish him for disturbing her? No, the gods have baited this seductive trap and will laugh at whoever is lured in.

  He wants to feel her bare skin. Her upper arm shows below her short balloon sleeves. He reaches out and touches the soft warmth, a resilience underpinned by the hardness of bone. But for now he doesn’t press; he merely runs his fingers lightly over her. Améliana doesn’t move. He places his entire palm on her and waits for her body heat to come across. There are truly all sorts of sensations in this world—hard and soft, rough and sharp, cool and warm, wet and dry—but none as familiar and thrilling as touching the skin of another human being.

  He kneels down on the wooden floor and moves closer on his hands. He’s near enough to smell the odor of sweat and wind and dust and torch smoke on her. For forty hours, all eyes have been on her as she performed one complicated ritual procedure after another, feet in step, arms waving in supplication to the gods. Eight ceremonies, the dark paths in between, the fierce sun and full moon, the spiritual communion with the seven other priestesses, all the dense, long hours have left layers of scent on her skin.

  Améliana does not move. Her sleeping figure doesn’t beckon by any stretch of the imagination, but defenseless it is. Will the gods not protect her? Or will lightning strike if he takes another step? This is the body that invited her seven brothers and cousins to have their fun. A body that bore a baby boy. He reaches out and unfastens the first of the large red buttons that run down the center of her torso. He’s as nervous as if he’d broken into a house in the owner’s absence. Another button. The skin of her neckline is beautiful, dark and gleaming smooth. Another button. She’s young. Beauty is no excuse; beauty is always seductive, and whoever falls for it is lost. Which is maybe not such a bad thing.

  To his credit, the notion that he is entitled to do anything he wants because he’s president does not spring to mind. Given his position, he easily could have told Island Security to abduct her and bring her to his bed at the Presidential Villa, and he knows the world is full of leaders capable of doing so (and not a few young women who would consider it an honor). But Matías was never the womanizer, he was satisfied in the past with just María and now with just Angelina; the few occasions he slept with new girls at her brothel, it was less out of lust than curiosity, a shadow partner’s dutiful curiosity. In most cases, one time was enough (the few second times served only to reexamine qualities he may have missed), after which he always reported his findings to Angelina as accurately as possible. No, lust is not his principal vice.

  He undoes two more buttons to finally expose her breasts. Just the right size and shape. Small nipples and large areolas nicely set off from the surrounding skin. Springy to the touch of a finger. Améliana doesn’t even twitch. Ever so slightly, her breasts rise and fall with her breathing, two sacred vessels gently resting on her chest. Her expression never changes. One by one he continues unbuttoning. She’s not wearing underwear. During the ceremonies, she wouldn’t have worn anything so Western under her robes.

  The tender swell of her belly comes into view, and beneath that a tuft of pubic hair sprouting like reeds in rich soil. The last two buttons. Below her mons, her body divides into two firm thighs, ending in shapely shins and ankles. Fallen limply to either side, her dress no longer protects her. Can the white folds really abandon their duty so easily?

  Her pubic hair is a tiny flame, burning with an intensity concentrated in that secret inner chamber, signaling that inside resides an energy just waiting to be coaxed into form.

  He puts his hands between her knees and gently forces her legs apart, then reaches under her calves to spread them wider with only the least passive reflexes of the dormant body—not will or habit, but simply bone and muscle tissue reacting to external pressure.

  She doesn’t wake. The gods are not with her. She can put up no resistance.

  Parted genitals: a complexity that at once forbids and invites. Who can really tell what’s open or not? Yet whatever makes it through that doorway counts as intercourse. And in the warm dark interior of the womb, the child will grow for nine months until it’s born. At which point, there’s no question of with or without consent. His own mother obviously thought so. As did the father. The end result is everything.

  She sleeps on. Her pubic hair is beautiful. Her thighs are spread, her genitals glisten. He takes off his clothes, then climbs onto the bed and settles in between her thighs. With his skin touching her legs, her breasts, her midriff—already he’s getting a hard-on. Is it him or the gods wanting the deed done? Whichever, the cock is his and it’s erect enough by now. His pudgy belly gets in the way of seeing any more than the very tip of his cock, but he knows what to do. He spreads her wide open, presses up close and shoves in.

  It’s no use. No lack of lubrication, but something isn’t right. Can he do this completely without her cooperation? She’s still fast asleep, no change in her crotch at all. He’s the only one getting off here. Like Heinrich, he gets frenzied, driven to penetrate despite the discomfort. He rocks back and forth, but the tip slips out. No, this won’t work. He’s got to spread her thighs more … He rides up on top of her, struggling to thrust in on his own solitary power. He pushes her thighs wide, he can feel h
is tension mounting, he grabs at her ass to press harder and harder, and in the confusion, just when he thinks he’s there all the way inside—an illusion … —he ejaculates.

  Suddenly the room swarms with tiny butterflies, swirling about the two of them on the bed, diving at their sweat, choking all the air in the room. Matías looks up in alarm, unable to make out the walls; all he sees is a fluttering lilac storm. The girl and her butterflies, it’s a wonder he didn’t see any during the ceremonies. No matter, he’s done, he’s finished.

  He pulls out. Suddenly all the butterflies have vanished. Did he actually see them? Now he’s starting to doubt he even got his sperm all the way in, though the close, contained heat he felt was all too real. No, he remembers the spurt of release. Simultaneously, sitting on the edge of the bed in a haze, it comes back to him that his own mother was violated like this. His own act has now come full circle to something that has dogged him since puberty, the notion that he himself is the result of rape. How could he go and do the same thing?

  His cock slowly shriveling, he gets up off the creaky bed. Améliana still doesn’t move, her legs still splayed apart. Look at your handiwork, thinks Matías, reaching over to close them, the very least he can do to cover up his crime. How can she possibly sleep through all this? Should he button up her dress the way it was? That’s when he sees it: the stain. A bright red spot on the white cotton fabric just under her behind. No, it can’t be. Was it her period? She’s bleeding all right. He wipes himself off—semen and fresh blood.

  Didn’t she say she had a son by her brothers and cousins? How the hell can she still have been a virgin? This is crazy. He gets a towel from the bathroom and wipes Améliana’s thighs and genitals. But what to do about her stained dress? She can’t help but notice when she eventually wakes up. She’ll know.

  Matías is starting to get scared, doubt creeping toward paranoia, the fear that he’s being pushed about by forces he can’t begin to comprehend. Was Améliana really a virgin? Then why would she have lied about bearing a child? No, maybe she wasn’t lying. Those were words put in her mouth on that occasion, lines she recited. She’s just a pawn in a much larger game. The mistake was seeing her until just now as innocent. She’s not young and attractive; she’s part of a huge plot, and this was her assigned role.