Tentacle

by Rita Indiana

  Eric was nine years old when, playing marbles one afternoon in the hallway of his home, his eyes rolled back when he tried to look at his mother, as if he were having an epileptic fit, and he shot out of the house.

  They found him on the outskirts of the city, at a ritual in honor of Yemayá, where he’d come by himself, speaking in tongues, speaking in Yoruba. That same year, Omidina, who was also Esther Escudero’s godfather, initiated Eric as Babalosha.

  In the prophecy delivered at his initiation, it was revealed he would be the one to find Olokun’s legitimate son, the one with the seven perfections, the Lord of the Deep. That’s why his godfather called him Omioloyu, the Eyes of Yemayá, convinced that one day this clever young boy would discover in the flesh the one who knew what lies at the bottom of the sea.

  The oracle had told Esther Escudero, Omicunlé, that she would receive the Chosen One in her own home, and that she would meet her death at his hands. She’d accepted that future calamity with equanimity. She trusted Eric to carry out her plan to have him initiate Omo Olokun when she was no longer here. Eric loved the old woman like a mother and, wanting to avoid the prophecy’s fatal outcome, he’d tried to improvise a way out. If he crowned himself as Omo Olokun, he could get rid of Acilde, the supposed Chosen One, but his experiments with the anemone behind Esther’s back had ended up making him ill and angering her.

  Their evangelical neighbors grew ever more strident. The new Acilde, still dazed, asked Eric what he was doing when he saw him, with a sporadic pulse, writing symbols on the floors and walls. Startled with a sudden fervor, Eric brought the anemone out of the jar. Acilde was still strapped to the bed and asked for a mirror. Eric didn’t have time to explain and knelt by the head of the bed, the anemone’s tentacles pointing to Acilde’s shaved head. Acilde had a crown of moles, dark spots that made a circle all the way around his head. Eric had noticed it when the girl, now finally in the male form she’d so desired, had knelt before him to suck him off that night at the Mirador.

  Acting as a priest now, Eric began to pray in a sharp and nasal voice: “Iba Olokun fe mi lo’re. Iba Olokun omo re wa se fun oyío.” As he prayed, he joined the tentacles to the moles on Acilde’s head. A weak Acilde whimpered and cursed, unable to move. The tentacles stayed put, as though with Velcro, and the marine creature’s smell supplanted the neighborhood’s garbage stink, transporting Eric back to Matanzas Bay, to the silver lights the sun set moving on the water, and a strong smell of iodine and algae that infused him with the vigor he needed to finish the ritual. “Olokun nuni osi oki elu reye toray. Olokun ni’ka le. Moyugba, Aché.” He let go of the creature and brought his face next to Acilde’s. “Olokun, here is your child, Eric Vitier, Omioloyu, Omo Yemayá, Okana Di en si Awofaka, paying homage and asking for a blessing.” He got even closer to the ear of this newborn man and used his last breath to let him know: “Esther knew what was going to happen. I’m done for. We gave you the body you wanted and now you’ve given us the body we needed.”

  ‌

  ‌Cow’s Blood

  They brought Argenis back to the house looking like a blowfish, his eyes and teeth hidden by the swelling, an allergic reaction to the anemone. Luckily, Linda had an epinephrine pen and gave him an injection. She was aware that the anemone, Condylactis gigantea, was in abundance in Playa Bo, but that its poison wasn’t enough to do harm unless the person was allergic to it. Hours later, Argenis’ face began to turn back to normal, but not before he’d asked Elizabeth to take a photo so he could have a souvenir of himself as this curious monstrosity.

  He spent the next week sweating with fever, unable to sleep, and suffering from vertigo that kept him from standing for any amount of time. Malagueta brought over a mattress to sleep in his room and take care of him. His guest entertained Argenis with stories of his childhood in Los Charamicos.

  Malagueta was the only one of the artists who was born in Sosúa. As a teenager, he’d been accepted into the baseball academy the Dodgers had on the island, where they educated and trained future major league talents. “But just when I was going to be signed, I screwed up my knee,” he explained. He’d stay up all night talking with Argenis about the pitching speeds of his ex-teammates and the stats and whereabouts of those who’d managed to become professional baseball stars. His long arms and legs were typical of a batter’s body, but less so his belly, which he’d cultivated tenderly with Presidente beers and pica pollo. He had a peculiar way with the word “faggot,” which he used to refer to everyone, including Argenis: “Drink that soup, faggot; go to sleep, faggot; are you dizzy, faggot?” Argenis thought he was taking it too far, but the guy was taking care of him and he couldn’t afford to let things get sour with him.

  The mystery as to how this human lump had ended up as a conceptual artist had a lot to do with his love of the Japanese animation they aired on Dominican TV. Malagueta was a fan of Dragon Ball Z and as a kid he’d filled seventy notebooks with muscular men with hairy veins and shocking yellow manes floating in a violet or orange sky. When he’d gotten injured, his father—who worked at Giorgio’s restaurant—reminded him of his drawing skills, taking him to meet Giorgio and see if he really had talent. Some of Malagueta’s photos of Ana Mendieta captured Giorgio’s interest. In one, the artist appeared nude and covered in feathers; in another, her silhouette was carved into the ground and set on fire. These strange images were connected with Malagueta’s childhood obsession with animated heroes; the body, as it was when on the baseball field, was the protagonist, presenting itself to all who might see it with an elemental and magical fury, like a ball of fire. Not long ago he’d participated in the First Performance Festival in Puerto Plata with a piece called Home, in which, standing nude in a batting cage, without a bat or glove, he was hit over and over on his belly and chest by a stream of baseballs from the machine, each coming at him at seventy miles an hour.

  During the day, Malagueta worked on his next project—that is, he attended the daily sessions with Iván, worked out, and read about the performance art scene on the internet. In the afternoons he would work one-on-one with Iván, jotting down even his sighs in his little notebook. These talks took place on a stone bench right in the center of the artists’ complex of cabins and Argenis would watch them from his bed like a jealous lover. At noon, Nenuco, the gardener, would bring him pumpkin and yautía soups prepared by Ananí, the woman who worked in the house, and later Ananí herself would bring him chamomile tea so he could get some rest. One morning, Giorgio came in to see how he was doing and to drop off a bunch of materials he’d picked up in the city. Billy didn’t want to come in, so he stayed outside, barking, diminishing even further what little love Argenis had for him. When he saw the huge new roll of canvas against the wall, he felt better and told Malagueta he could go back to his own room.

  That afternoon, finally free of the vertigo, Argenis sleeps and dreams. He drowns. He flaps around like crazy but can’t move; his chest hurts from his violent efforts to breathe in air instead of salt water. On the horizon, an infinite green and gray line of rocks and palms. Several bearded white men with stained clothes approach him in a canoe, pulling him out of the water and taking him to shore. They’re carrying knives and antique pistols on their belts and wearing sandals made from braided leather. There’s a dark one with very straight black hair who, though he dresses like the others, appears to be Taíno. The only one wearing boots is the one who seems most nervous. He has curly brown hair and wears a long, dark beard. Later, they’re in a peasant’s hut and they throw Argenis on a leather cot. The Taíno comes in and talks to him in a strange language while the bearded guy in boots brushes the soles of his feet as though he were trying to activate his circulation. There’s a smell of meat that wafts in from outside and he wakes up drooling.

  After sleeping fourteen whole hours, Argenis felt phenomenal.

  At the breakfast table, the conversation touched on the usual themes: art, politics, and environmentalism. John Kelly, the UCLA professor Linda was developi
ng the Playa Bo ecological project with, had joined them that morning and was talking about the increase in the water temperature and the coming crisis that would result from the fatal bleaching of coral in the Caribbean. Argenis was ravenous and putting away his Spanish omelet and garlic toast, catching only bits of information. In his mind, there were fragments of conversations with Malagueta, the dream, and the memory of the moment when he was trapped by the mouth of the rock underwater. Iván got his attention when he said that in the coming weeks they’d be studying Goya and would do an exercise at the end based on the work of the maestro from Aragón. The idea was to complicate the notion of contemporaneity in art and analyze the ways in which Goya, two centuries ago, had articulated his philosophical and formal observations, divorcing himself from the expectations of the work he was commissioned to do and thus inaugurating modern art.

  Iván never shut up. He had a special talent for closing down the most disparate and extreme arguments, which had nothing to do with Cuban history, with anecdotes about Cuba, Fernando Ortiz, or Fidel. Argenis was completely out of it. This had happened to him in high school all the time: the teacher would talk and, in his mind, he’d be concocting fantasies, usually sexual and involving classmates, while the teacher, the desk, and his companions all disappeared, lost to the hormonal onslaught of his mental movie. But this was different. He hadn’t tried to conjure anything, and he wasn’t inventing; he had no control whatsoever over what he was seeing as clear as a memory. He was once more in the hut from his dreams.

  A few men are working on something near the door. The bearded man in boots supervises and gives orders. When he sees Argenis he comes up to him and starts to talk. Argenis can hear his voice. “You’re better,” he says. Argenis hoped the others heard it too, but they all kept yakking, except Giorgio, who had left the table and was now on the couch out on the terrace reading Rumbo magazine. The guy in the boots introduces himself: “I’m Roque, and these are my men.” Argenis takes a few steps. He sees what they’re doing: pulling the hair from cattle skins, scraping at them with knives while kneeling on the orange dirt.

  They’re the same guys who pulled him from the sea. “Do you remember your name?” Roque asks. Argenis doesn’t dare utter a word; he makes a superhuman effort to focus on what Elizabeth is saying now at the table. She complained that if Goya was modern, then Velázquez was too.

  While Ananí brings in the coffee pot, Roque the bearded man tells Argenis he is the only survivor of a shipwreck: “You must have hit your head, that’s why you don’t remember anything.” While Elizabeth puts on a Morcheeba CD out on the terrace, Roque shows him the modest equipment they use to cure the skins from the cattle they hunt inland. While Malagueta digs between his teeth with a wooden toothpick, Argenis gets a nose full of urine, smoke, and flesh in that other place. What the fuck is this? Unlike dreams, with their weird transitions and time portals and stuff like that, the story that’s unfolding inside him is coherent and linear.

  The others got up from the table to attend the day’s session with Iván de la Barra. Argenis remained seated, closing his eyes so he could focus on his internal vision, then extending his right hand to touch Roque and verify the tactile reality of the bearded man and his world. He touches the warm, damp arm of the man who is now smiling at him and suddenly opened his eyes. He was back at the table, on the terrace, and Giorgio, who had raised his eyes from behind his magazine, had seen him making that strange gesture with his arm while his eyes were closed. Embarrassed, Argenis repeated the movement as if he were trying to get rid of a cramp, afraid Giorgio would think he was crazy. “All those days in bed have fucked up my shoulder,” he said, trying to cover his butt, and then ran to catch up with the group.

  When they closed the curtains, the living room went dark. Iván turned on the projector and there on the wall was print number sixty-six from Los caprichos. “In this series of engravings—besides fusing techniques—Goya presents a subjective satire that cannot be tied to any single reading, destabilizing the sociopolitical paradigms of his time with characters and situations that oscillate between the locally eccentric and the universally mythological.” A twisted, androgynous body held a flying broomstick above his head, obscuring the more feminine figure behind him, who also held on to the broomstick and sprouted bat wings to facilitate the magic ride. With Iván still talking in the background, Argenis again closed his eyes. He feels the sun on his skin of that other morning opening up to him.

  They’re in the hut again, which is a single room with several beds and hammocks. Roque hands him a pair of rough linen pants to wear; that’s when Argenis notices he’s naked. “If you want to eat, you have to work,” Roque says. He hands him a short knife and points to the group curing the skins. “Regardez! Celui qui a survécu à la Côte de Fer,” one of the men says as he walks up to them. The man pulls on his pants to make him kneel while showing him what he has to do with the knife on the skin.

  When Iván turned on the lights to end the session, Argenis, intent on the involuntary projections in his head, focuses on the skin he’s been given to work on. At lunch, Giorgio served some juicy fillets he’d thrown on the terrace grill. The men curing the skins also pause to eat because the Taíno has called them by hitting a rock on a cowbell.

  Argenis tried to look calm as he served himself a glass of water from an ice-filled jug, while in his head he is checking out what’s going on behind the hut, where strips of meat are being smoked on a green wooden grill. Argenis has seen this before in history books. He brought Giorgio’s fillet to his mouth—it was exquisite—but the taste of the hard and salty jerky he was chewing in his other mouth killed his appetite and he ended up leaving both plates untouched. His fellow artists in the Sosúa Project were comparing the PRD and PLD governments: Elizabeth, who was from a family with old money, and not the new stuff politicians took turns stealing, accused both parties of piracy. “Excuse me, but they’re all thieves,” she said, trying to bait Argenis, whose father was one of them. But it was as if he’d never heard her. The word “pirate” had made him remember Professor Duvergé from fifth grade, when he listed the causes and consequences of Osorio’s devastations on the blackboard.

  In 1606, Governor Osorio had ordered the depopulation of the island’s northern coast to avoid the illegal trade with English, French, and Dutch smugglers, who had been providing the people with what Spain could not. After they were emptied, several towns—among them Puerto Plata, where Sosúa was now—became a refuge for French and English castaways and runaway slaves, the result of abandonment by all military and civilians. They had joined forces to survive, hunting the abandoned cattle, of which there was plenty, to produce leather and smoked meats, which they traded with the smugglers who still made stops on the coasts. These are buccaneers, thought Argenis, somewhere in the space between the two planes he was now navigating. I can see the past, he said to himself. I’d heard about this but I never imagined it could be like this.

  They were supposed to watch a movie, Goya in Bordeaux, after lunch, but Iván excused himself so he could talk to Giorgio, and Elizabeth and Malagueta insisted on going into town for a stroll. Los Charamicos was a backwards town, dirty and small, and completely dependent on tourism—in other words, prostitution, in all its varieties. The stroll was short and boring: a bunch of little wooden stalls with Haitian paintings, towels, and souvenirs with the words “Sosúa No Problem.” Argenis dropped back and walked alone, resuming his work curing the skins while very aware of the rugged faces of the people working around him on the other side of his mind. The Taíno was a man of blunt movements who’d just started to go gray; the man who’d said “Côte de Fer” was blond with a narrow back, a prominent chin, and a fuzzy peach mustache. There was also a one-armed man with black hair and a beard, a black man they called Engombe, and Roque. They were all bags of bone and sinew, encased in skin that had been marbled by permanent sunburn.

  Elizabeth was recording their outing through the neighborhood ruins with one of he
r cameras to “document” their visit, while Malagueta greeted a few people who recognized him. For a moment Argenis set aside the curing of skins in his parallel world and felt a sudden embarrassment. What were they doing strolling like kings through a poor neighborhood? Fucking cultural tourists. “Allez, allez,” says the blond buccaneer, urging him to cure another skin, but Argenis was too busy feeling out of place in 2001 Sosúa. What would happen if I didn’t do what they asked? As though he’d heard his question, Engombe punches him in the ear, which frees him of embarrassments and distractions. He picks up the knife and starts anew, fearful the black man will hit him again. I’m screwed, he thinks. Where do I turn off this shit? On their way back to Playa Bo, Argenis pretended he’d fallen asleep in Elizabeth’s car so he could finish peeling his skin. Afterward, they give him a little jug of moonshine that he drinks while leaning on a guayacán tree, watching the black man stack the smoked meats, now cold, in a barrel. The sun is going down for the buccaneers, with the same tones in the sky as in Playa Bo, and for Argenis two suns dropped below the horizon. Experiencing these two realities at once was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle on the table while watching the news on TV. The news was his present, predictable and harmless; the world of the buccaneers was the jigsaw puzzle he had to focus on, lifting his head now and again without dropping any pieces. The two suns didn’t compete for his attention, instead appearing one on top of the other, like stacked negatives. When they vanished, and with them his strange internal movie, Argenis felt relief and fear in equal parts. But the worry and curiosity about what had happened lasted as long as the excitement over an interesting dream. He dragged a chair over to the cliff. Alone, he took in and savored the blackening view. Iván and Giorgio were drinking wine out on the lightless terrace, listening to a recording of John Cage talking about a tie. Someone lit a candle and the light attracted Argenis, who saw from afar the illuminated face of his prosperous patron. He followed the black line of Giorgio’s mouth and jaw, calculating the colors he’d need to mix to achieve the brick tones that the flame gave his skin. It had been a very long time since he’d looked at anyone the way he was looking at Giorgio now, translating every detail his eyes perceived into the technical steps he’d need to make a facsimile. In his mind, Argenis was already painting, and then he rushed toward them. “Don’t move,” he ordered. He darted back to his cabin, imagining how he would apply the perfect color already mixed, and selected the tubes he’d need. He returned to the cliff with a chair, the small easel he’d had since high school, and the battery-powered lamp he’d clamped on the side. He turned his back to the sea to arrange his instruments, looking at the terrace. A jungle of palms, sea grapes, and almond trees framed the house in a cloud of deep gray. An intense black broke only in the very center, where Giorgio Menicucci, his precise features and body lost in the gloom, had become an igneous mask floating in the air. In front of it, Argenis decided to paint another face: his own, the one he’d worn after the accident with the anemone, the one Elizabeth had photographed. The face lit by the candle was haughty and beautiful; it seemed to be giving an order with which the deformed monster, given the inclination of its head, would comply.