by James Canon
“After that, you’ll follow me,” the one named Cecilia said. “I’m responsible for the community’s diet, and so I’ll take you to one of our communal kitchens, where you’ll eat a warm meal.”
“I’m the administrator,” Rosalba said. “I oversee everything, but especially our community’s farming and housing. I’ll make sure that you get a clean room furnished with everything you might need for tonight.”
“And I’m responsible for the community’s school and the town’s bell,” said the old Señorita Cleotilde. “In other words, I’m the clock of New Mariquita. I’ll see to it that you get up early enough to leave our village before sunrise.”
AFTER BEING RELEASED from the infirmary, Gordon was taken to the community’s second best kitchen: the Villegas’s. The Morales kitchen was rated number one, Cecilia said, but she had been instructed to keep him away from Julia Morales.
By the time Gordon and Cecilia arrived, only three couples were in the dining room, feeding one another what remained of their meals. Wearing matching aprons on top of their nude anatomies, Flor (formerly the Villegas widow) and her spouse Elvia (formerly the López widow) welcomed Gordon and sat him in a corner table all by himself. The reporter was fascinated with the community, its operating system, its people and customs. Since Ubaldina had forbidden him to speak to any of the villagers more than was necessary, he dictated his thoughts, in English, into his miniature tape recorder. Cecilia didn’t object to it. She was unusually friendly and kind toward him, and soon Gordon understood why:
“Señor Esmís, you said you’ve been interviewing guerrillas. I was wondering if perhaps…if maybe you’ve come across my son. His name’s Ángel Alberto Tamacá, and he joined the guerrillas a long time ago. He’s tall, and—”
“Do you know for sure if he…if he’s alive?”
“My heart tells me he is,” she said. “Do you think there’s any way that I can get news to him that I’m alive too?”
“I have some connections. Write him a note and give me all his information. I’ll do my best to have it delivered to him. If he’s around, you know?”
The few diners present looked curiously at Gordon, as though surprised to see him eat the same things they were eating: a meal of rice, fried yucca and a small piece of a roasted, strong-flavored meatlike thing the origins of which he didn’t dare ask because he was afraid to learn the answer. When he was finished, he complimented the cooks. Elvia said it was an honor to have such a distinguished gentleman dining in their humble kitchen.
Gordon and Cecilia were getting ready to leave when Julia Morales arrived. She now had on a red polka-dot dress. The dress was old-fashioned and had a few patches, but was tight in all the right places. The girl stood by the door with her hands on her hips and gave Gordon a daring look followed by a timid smile, disconcerting him. It all appeared to be part of a well-devised seduction plan that was working beautifully. His eyelid began twitching, and this symptom, as well as an erection that wasn’t as visible on account of his loose pants, clearly indicated how much he desired her. Cecilia hastened to stand in front of the reporter, as though her small figure could keep the long-legged man from seeing anything. “Hurry up, son,” she said to Gordon, though addressing Julia. “Rosalba is waiting for us in the church.” Julia crossed her arms and leaned her back against the doorframe, making room for them to pass. As he went by, all Gordon managed was a wink. He walked off with Cecilia right next to him, thinking that Julia was the most exotic creature he’d ever seen.
THE REAR OF the church had been fitted out with a hammock and a blanket. Next to it, on an upside-down wooden crate that served as a night table, sat a lit lamp, a rag and a piece of soap.
“Is there a bathroom in here?” Gordon said.
“No, Míster Esmís. Not in here,” Rosalba said. “We only have one bathroom in the village. It’s a communal bathroom with ten showers and ten latrines, so clean you wouldn’t believe it.”
“Great! Can you show me where it is?”
“I’m sorry, Míster Esmís, but you’re not allowed to use it. Another council decision. You’ll have to use that empty bucket.” She pointed at two buckets, one filled with water, which had been set to the side. “There are more blankets in that corner if you need them. Nights are getting much cooler. I hope you have a good night and a safe trip back tomorrow.” She said this with a lingering smile. Her lips parted, as though she wanted to say something else but couldn’t. She waited for Gordon’s reply—a close-lipped smile—and then turned around and walked toward the door looking somewhat sad.
He followed her with his eyes till she left the building, and was surprised to realize that he had paid no heed to her nudity. Amazing how quickly the human eye adjusts, he thought, and for a moment he imagined himself and hundreds of people walking naked down Fifth Avenue in New York City, stopping now and then to see their genitals and buttocks reflected in the tall show windows of fancy stores that sold everything but clothes. He chuckled, then walked over to the empty bucket and peed in it. Next he took off his dirty sneakers and socks and got in the hammock with his long legs hanging down on each side of it and a beat-up copy of García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which he’d been reading and rereading for some time now. There he lay stretched out, looking at the white ceiling upon which the light of the lamp had created an immense sun in soft yellow tones. He read for a little while, then put out the light of the lamp and in utter darkness swung himself a little with his feet till the motion gradually sent him to sleep.
GORDON WOKE UP in a sweat in the middle of the night, removed his clothes and shoes out of instinct, and then, completely naked, tossed and turned in the hammock, breathing heavily and moaning. He was ill. Suddenly, he felt a soft, small hand on his burning forehead and cheeks. Then a wet cloth, patting his face and neck, his arms, his chest. It must be a dream, he thought in his delirium. A few drops of water fell on his lips, which parted to let them in. He felt more patting on his face and neck, more water falling on his lips, and then a kiss: smooth, fleshy lips lightly pressing against his, traveling to his ear, down his neck and back to his mouth, where they lingered. A wild scent in the air made him think of Julia, and he quickly realized he wasn’t dreaming. She leapt onto the hammock, and he felt her light and smooth naked body struggling to settle itself on top of him. She was twisting her bony hips like a cat. Gordon also twisted his hips, passionately at first and then violently—for he had just felt an unexpected and unwelcome swelling in the midsection of the body lying over him. Theirs was a furious battle, a battle of aroused hips in which Gordon, betrayed by his libido, eventually lost all his power of resistance. The soft and small hands that just a while ago had stroked his forehead now landed firmly on his chest for support, while a couple of muscular calves encircled his waist with rocking motions. Julia sat on his crotch and began to dance in a seductive way, drawing all of him toward her with increasing strain as though something inside her was claiming him. And so he moved inside her and she wailed, and she wriggled and squirmed and her muscular calves tightened around his waist as she pushed herself down on him. They moved together in an invisible mambo, the hammock swaying under the weight of their restless bodies, he moaning, she wailing, until they exploded, he inside her, she on his abdomen, and a wild feline scent instantly filled up the otherwise empty room.
Julia glided over Gordon’s body and quietly laid her head on the man’s chest, listening to the throbbing of his heart. He ran his long fingers through her long, thick hair. “What’s your real name?” he asked. She didn’t answer. Or perhaps she did in her own language of graceful motions that Gordon never saw, for there was no light to see them by. And so they lay there in a feverish silence, listening to each other’s hearts, until Gordon fell into a deep sleep that kept him from hearing the click of the door when she left.
BEFORE SUNRISE, THE teacher Cleotilde found Gordon lying naked outside the church, shivering. An army of red ants surrounded his body, determined to carry it back
to their nest. The old woman knelt down to feel his forehead: he was burning with fever. His lips trembled and his teeth chattered as he mumbled something incomprehensible. She grabbed him by one of his arms with the intention of dragging him inside the building, but her bones were too old and his too heavy. She frowned under her thick spectacles, less concerned with the reporter’s condition than with the impossibility of his leaving town at sunrise as he’d been ordered. She went inside the church and rang the bell, signaling rising time. Then she went to Rosalba and Eloísa’s house and told them about the sick reporter. “I suggest we call a council meeting to decide what to do with that man,” she said.
“There’s no time for meetings,” Rosalba replied in her former magisterial tone, which reappeared occasionally and involuntarily, to the annoyance of the other council members. “Eloísa and I will assist Míster Esmís. You go get Nurse Ramírez,” she ordered Cleotilde. “And hurry up.” Cleotilde was no longer brave enough to confront Rosalba as she used to do. Off she went, tapping her cane and muttering a long and incomprehensible complaint. Outside the church, Rosalba swept the ants off Gordon’s body, then grabbed him by the legs while Eloísa seized him by the arms. Together they carried him inside, both women stealing furtive glances at the man’s large genitalia, but acting as though they saw penises and testicles every sun. They couldn’t lift Gordon back in the hammock, so they piled up a few blankets in a corner, laid him on them and tried to cover him with a thin blue sheet, but he was sweating profusely and refused it. He complained of an excruciating headache and pain in his muscles, joints and behind his eyes.
Before long, Cleotilde arrived with Nurse Ramírez, who wore nothing but a mask and a pair of gloves she had made long ago from a discarded white plastic tablecloth patterned with a variety of colorful fruits and vegetables. She brought along her late husband’s old medical reference book and bag of instruments, and a notebook in which she’d been recording her own findings and herbal remedies for every malady she’d seen and treated. When the nurse saw the naked man lying on the pile of blankets, she stood in awe. The only naked man she had ever seen was her late husband. Seeing another one after so many ladders suddenly stirred up something in her, a sort of desire that was similar—though not quite the same—to what she recurrently felt toward Erlinda, her present partner. The difference lay in its intensity. The desire she was feeling at the moment was much stronger, almost irrepressible, shameful. She made a tremendous effort not to reveal it to the other three women in the room. With her brow sweating and her hands shaking, Nurse Ramírez knelt down next to Gordon and examined him thoroughly to the best of her ability, which wasn’t much. And when she pressed her ear against the man’s chest to listen to his heart, her aroused nipples brushed the man’s feverish skin, making her own vital signs go out of control. She found that the man’s pulse was accelerated, his blood pressure low and he had a high fever. (She couldn’t tell exactly how high his fever was, because every line and number above forty degrees Celsius had faded from her husband’s thermometer with use and time.) Once she finished her examination, she covered Gordon from his waist down with a sheet and asked him a series of questions, some of which were completely irrelevant to his affliction, like, “Is everyone in your country as pale as you are?” She wrote all his answers in her notebook, including, “No, they’re paler,” and then compared them against previous notes and against the medical reference book. Finally, through the piece of plastic covering her mouth she gave her diagnosis: dengue fever.
“Please tell me it isn’t contagious.” Rosalba said.
The nurse replied that it wasn’t. The dengue virus could only be transmitted from the bite of an infected mosquito, and a mosquito could only catch the virus after biting an infected human. Therefore the one precaution they must take was to make sure that the Míster didn’t get bitten by any kind of mosquito.
“Is it hemorrhagic dengue?” Gordon asked in a faint voice. He knew that type of dengue was often fatal.
She said that it wasn’t, but that it could turn into it if they weren’t careful. She would prepare a potion to ease the intensity of his symptoms, but he should know that there was no specific treatment for dengue. He had to rest and drink plenty of fluids until he recovered, which would take ten to fifteen suns.
Rosalba ordered Cleotilde to ask the cleaning and maintenance team to shut the two windows of the church and hang a large mosquito net over Gordon’s improvised mattress. Eloísa excused herself and left for work. She led a team of sturdy plumbers who had taken on the almost impossible task of restoring the old aqueduct. Nurse Ramírez asked Rosalba to please watch over the Míster for a while. She had to collect all the herbs she needed for the potion and then pay a visit to the Pérez widow, who had sent word that this time she was really dying.
“You go ahead, Ramírez,” Rosalba said. “Do what you need to do. I’ll take care of Míster Esmís until you’re back.”
UPON HEARING THE news about Gordon’s condition, Julia Morales went to the church with a pot of soup and gestured to Rosalba that she wished to volunteer to take care of him.
“We don’t need help taking care of him,” Rosalba told Julia through the small metal grating. “Leave the soup on the steps if you want. I’ll make sure Míster Esmís knows it’s from you.”
Julia shook her head. She wanted to feed him the soup herself, herself, herself. Three times she beat upon her chest with her palm.
“I already told you, Julia. Leave the soup on the steps and go back to work.”
The girl turned red with anger. She began making a series of swift gestures with her free hand—and especially with her middle finger—which she complemented with a variety of grotesque sounds in an insufferably high-pitched tone. Finally she sat on the sidewalk with the container of soup between her legs and buried her face in her hands, crying and sobbing.
Softened by such pitiful scene, Rosalba offered to let her in on the condition that she leave as soon as Gordon ate the soup. Julia agreed and went in, all smiles after her tantrum. She laid a blanket next to Gordon, under the mosquito net, and fed him very slowly so that she could stay longer tending to him. She made him drink cup after cup of dark grape juice that the López-Villegas couple had delivered. “A natural virus-killer,” Flor Villegas had said. Gordon fell asleep, and when he woke up he stared at Julia indifferently, as if she were painted on the wall. But that didn’t discourage her; she continued patting his sunburned face with a wet rag, bringing relief to his red, swollen eyes and his parched, chapped lips.
From the opposite corner, sitting on a wooden folding chair with her arms crossed over her stomach, Rosalba watched the ingenuous girl with sympathy. Poor silly girl! she thought. As soon as that gringo is cured, he’ll go, and you’ll be left with a broken heart. Even if he likes you now, once he finds out what’s between your legs, he’ll despise you for having the same thing he’s got.
Before going home, Julia gave Gordon a passionate kiss on the mouth—a lost kiss that was never acknowledged nor noticed, because the recipient of it was delirious, and Rosalba had fallen asleep on the chair. A while later, when Rosalba woke up, she found Gordon on his knees fighting with the mosquito net, struggling to get up. She ran to his side.
“What are you doing, Míster Esmís? You’re going to hurt yourself.”
“I’ve got to pee,” he mumbled, a hand covering his genitalia.
“Here, do your business in here.” She grabbed the bucket, already reeking with Gordon’s urine from the night before, lifted a corner of the net and handed it to him.
He took the bucket in one hand and turned around on his knees and breathed deeply. A loud, prolonged splash filled the room.
“It’s getting dark in here,” he said, setting the bucket at the lower end of the mattress, within the netted area. “What time is it?”
Rosalba hadn’t been asked that question in ladders. “It’s almost the end of the working day.” She noticed Gordon was going through his bag, looking for somethi
ng. He took out a pair of boxer shorts and swiftly slipped into them. He was having a lucid moment, she thought, but before night fell he’d be burning with fever again.
Still on his knees, Gordon began to scrutinize each corner of the spacious room. “What makes this building a church?” he suddenly said. “There isn’t one thing in here that makes me think of God.”
Rosalba also looked around the room and smiled, obviously pleased with the emptiness of the view. “We call it the church out of habit,” she said, “because that’s what it once was. Just like we used to call God God and heaven heaven.”
“What do you call God now?”
“We don’t call it anything. It’s just an empty word, like this church.”
“And heaven?”
“Also empty. Without God there’s no heaven, or hell. Life’s better that way.”
Gordon gazed curiously at her. “Do you worship anything?”
“Nature. We’ve learned to fully appreciate the beauty and benefits of our land, our plants and animals.”
Gordon sat on the mattress with his back against the wall. He was too tired to pursue a discussion about belief. “Where did she go?” he said.
“Who?” Rosalba reached for the lamp.
“The girl who was here before.”
“Julia? I expect she went back to work.” She lit the lamp and set it on the upside-down crate next to him.
The nearness of the light reduced Gordon’s visibility beyond the net but let him see clearly everything within. He noticed several holes in the fabric. “She can’t talk, can’t she?”
“No.”
“What’s her real name? I mean, his real name?”
Rosalba stared at the reporter through the meshed fabric, as though she wanted to see or learn something personal and unique about him. So he knows about Julia, she thought. He might be a different kind of gringo after all: a curious one, who’s willing to experiment with new things, new sensations. All gringos can’t be narrow-minded, materialistic and full of themselves.
