Tentacle

by Rita Indiana

  “Get out of here,” said Nenuco, with his broad forehead and slanted eyes. “Go before I blow your brains out, you son of a fucking whore.” Willito reached his skiff in just three strokes, with a fear that had nothing to do with Nenuco’s shotgun. He told Pachico, who still had a limp, what he’d seen and they went back to the local officials, trying to sell the idea that Nenuco had killed somebody and hidden the body in the hole. Corporal Fonso didn’t give them the time of day until, after a week of nonstop pestering, he decided to go take a look.

  Fonso had never liked Nenuco. To his mind, Nenuco might have been the owner of the land at Playa Bo but water was nobody’s property. In spite of that, his supervisors had made it crystal clear that Nenuco had people in government and Fonso couldn’t mess with him. Nenuco’s property had three parcels of land on the coast. They were partly fertile black earth where his family grew plantains, cassava, squash, and avocados, and partly red dirt and reef with an abundance of almond trees, sea grapes, and coconut trees. In fact, the real owner of the land was Ananí, Nenuco’s cousin, whom he had married. She was very small, black, with cinnamon skin and very straight black hair she’d inherited from her parents.

  The coconut trunks that grew along the path to Playa Bo had been painted red, with white letters spelling out “Balaguer 90-94,” vestiges of the most recent electoral campaign. Nenuco’s fence posts were painted the governing party’s colors, too, and the door of the house had a photo of the “Doctor” giving a speech. Fonso parked his Honda 70 at the edge of the house and, taking off his hat, greeted a woman who was cleaning rice in a bowl as she swayed in a rocking chair by the door. “What do you want?” said Ananí. She picked out a bad grain and threw it toward his feet. “I came to talk with Nenuco,” said Fonso, peeking in at the tiny kitchen, which smelled of fresh fish and lemon. Nenuco was cleaning a grouper skillfully and tossed its roe at the floor for a ginger cat. At the back of the living room, a young woman was watching El Gordo de la Semana on TV. A contestant was throwing the Knorr Lucky Dice, trying to win a refrigerator, an electric knife, or a toaster. “Did someone complain about me, Fonso?”

  “Those boys make up a lot of stuff,” he said, feeling like an idiot.

  “So what did they make up now?” Nenuco asked, leaving his task to pick up a pewter cup and offer the officer some coffee.

  “Crazy stuff,” said Fonso, who drank the coffee without bringing the subject up again, talking instead about the week’s local news: the old people who’d died, the mothers who’d given birth, and a machete fight that had broken out when someone put up a fence a meter farther than what had been agreed. For his part, Nenuco told the corporal about the new mansions the Russians and Australians were building all over Puerto Plata, where he’d been working for years as a gardener to help with the family’s cash flow. Nenuco’s son, who had slanted eyes like his father and long hair like his mother, brought over a bunch of green plantains and a bag of cassava for the corporal, as he had been trained to do when they had company. Fonso thanked him and asked to use the latrine. Next to the wooden structure near the back of the house, he saw a cement basin painted blue and filled with a white liquid. Piled by the basin were the young coconuts from which they’d stripped the meat. What do they need so much milk for? Fonso asked himself as he tied the bunch of plantains to the back of the Honda 70.

  As soon as the roar of Fonso’s motor had faded, Nenuco abandoned his chores and ran to the back bedroom, where a man lay covered with a white sheet on a bed raised by four cement blocks. A cemí made of yellow cotton and attached to a trembling string hung over the body. There was a cross and a circle drawn in chalk on the untreated wood that made up the back wall. A line snaked diagonally from the center of the cross. If the corporal had come in here, thought Nenuco, he would have run away in horror, people are that stupid. He lifted up the man, who was half asleep, and draped him across his shoulders to help him walk. Out in the yard, Ananí knelt before their naked guest, who was approaching while leaning on her husband. She spoke to him with the words she’d been taught, words she knew she had to use to receive the one who came from the water: “Bayacú Bosiba Guamikeni.” They eased his body into the cement basin with utmost care. Then they submerged him up to his neck and poured coconut milk on the moles that circled the top of his head.

  Ananí had been born in water, but not like the Great Lord they now bathed; he had not been born of woman. Mama Guama, the old blind woman who still lived with them, had given birth to Ananí in a pool at Playa Bo all by herself. Ananí’s father, Jacinto Guabá, had disappeared on orders from Trujillo, who wanted to take his land and add them to those he was giving the Jews to whom he’d offered refuge during the great war. In the end, something made Trujillo reconsider and he left them with a quarter of what they had once had, including Playa Bo.

  Since then, Ananí had wanted nothing to do with politics. Nenuco had to convince her to not spurn the gifts the current president sent from the city. At Christmas, a van with the party logo would show up, filled with sacks of rice, wine, apples, chocolate, bikes, balls and dolls for the kids, and some electric appliances. The gifts would be accompanied by a card addressed to Princess Ananí and signed by his Excellency, asking for her blessing. Her response was always the same: she’d tear the card and throw the pieces in the latrine before ordering Nenuco to distribute everything among the neighbors, except for the toys, which she kept for her own kids, Guaroa and Yararí.

  She didn’t accept the gifts because she believed Balaguer was complicit in her father’s death, and she tore up the cards because she didn’t want anything to do with letters; Ananí always said they were pure lies, trash. When she was little and it became compulsory to go to school, Ananí learned her letters and numbers. She loved to look at the images of her ancestors in the illustrated history books, hunting, sowing, fishing, and dancing the areíto, though she knew what was written in those books wasn’t true. The books said there were fewer than six hundred Taínos by 1531 and that, a little later, they had completely disappeared. Her family, descended from caciques and behíques, had survived, like many others in the Republic they’d stayed in contact with to marry their young people and enact their rituals. The books said nothing of the men from the water, who came every so often to help them, nor of the Spanish, who’d stolen power from the Arawaks to conquer the other tribes on the continent. Ananí had been taught never to speak of these things with anyone, and she had always complied with that order. She left school in fourth grade. Nenuco made it to eighth grade; his parents had said that to deal with those who were sleeping, you had to know what they were thinking.

  Nenuco was born in Barahona, on the southern part of the island, where his father, Ananí’s uncle, had gone on to marry a descendant of Enriquillo. In 1973, when he was seventeen, his parents had sent Nenuco on a bus with a sack of clothes, a golden vest, a machete, some shears to cut grass with, and the family cemí, to marry his cousin.

  The first thing he did when he got to Playa Bo was plant flowers in front of the house, red, yellow, and white blooms that grew with the health and beauty of everything Nenuco planted in the earth. He didn’t speak directly, only through Mama Guama, and only about the garden, which he slowly brought to life all around the house.

  Even amidst the dryness of the beach, the garden blossomed in the shade of the almond trees, roses, bromeliads, dwarf palms, and ferns, which Nenuco brought from the gardens he tended so beautifully in the houses and hotels where he found work. When she was ready to be in love, Ananí gave him a clay potiza in the shape of a heart, from whose breasts emerged a penis as a symbol of their union: they would cease being male and female to become one single beating organism.

  Beyond their love and their children, what united them was taking care of the Great Lord, Playa Bo, where the most precious and sacred creature on the island dwelled, the portal to the land of the beginning, through which the men of the water would come, the big heads, whenever they were needed. That was why every summer
Nenuco would pay special attention to the pool, monitoring the tunnel with the anemones where the phenomenon took place.

  Their supervision had become routine until one day when, during the night, a blister about a foot long broke out on the main anemone. Mama Guama, blind now, came down every evening with Nenuco to play a gourd and give thanks to Yocahú, the creator, for letting her live so she could experience the miracle. Nenuco would sleep on the beach with a shotgun on his shoulder to protect the nest from the boys who hoped to sneak in to fish at first light; their hooks and harpoons could hurt the envoy, as fragile as an embryo in the water.

  Willito had had the misfortune of running into that half-finished body, but Nenuco hadn’t killed him because he knew his grandfather and prayed the boy wouldn’t go talk all over town.

  Yararí was fourteen years old and sick of all the ceremony and weird stuff. She didn’t want to belong to her parents’ world of mystery and whispers and had convinced Ananí to keep the Sony Trinitron TV Balaguer had sent her the previous Christmas. She didn’t convince her exactly: she’d threatened to kill herself if Ananí said no. In the afternoons, she’d ride by the houses of the rich on her bike and pretend she lived in one of them. Unlike her brother, she didn’t know a single word of Taíno and she loved school, especially her English teacher, who was a gringo priest with blue eyes. When Nenuco came home from the beach one afternoon with a man in his arms and asked everyone to help him, she stayed on the couch, feet up, watching the Coco Band play live on Súper Tarde on Channel 9. “Girl, turn that down,” Mama Guama begged her. Yararí, full of malice, turned the volume up a little: “I already did,” she said. The worst part was she and Guaroa now had to sleep on the hammocks in the living room to give their room to the damned sick man. She was sure the guy was just a drunk tourist her father had rescued from the waves, even if her parents had spent a lifetime telling her otherwise. Yararí would choose what she wanted to believe, and every time she bruised her knuckles washing her father and brother’s pants, she’d curse her mother for having given away the Korean washing machine she’d received as a gift alongside the TV. She was hanging clothes on the fence when Willito, whose curiosity had not been satisfied by Fonso’s visit, passed in front of her on a mule. He’d seen her before at school in town, slender and vibrant, with still-growing breasts and that black mane kissing her ass. She didn’t even glance at him; she dismissed him because he was riding an animal. Willito realized this. The next day he rode past on a Sanyang motorbike he’d borrowed, except this time Yararí wasn’t outside and didn’t see him, though Nenuco did, and wondered if the little thief was still trying to find out more about what he’d seen at the reef.

  We have to speed this up, the gardener said to himself. That night, while everyone slept, he took a hand mirror over to the guest’s room; the man had dropped the scales from his eyes and was now sitting up on the edge of the bed. “We’ve been waiting for you,” Nenuco said in a very gentle voice. “You came from far away, bright star of the waters, and now I’m going to help you remember.” The man said nothing. He seemed scared, confused, and moved his eyes around all over the place, as though he were seeing things that weren’t in the room with them. Nenuco put the mirror in his hand and guided it in front of his face, with its wide jaw and dark brow. “Where am I?” the man asked in a sweet and raspy voice. “You’re in Playa Bo, in Sosúa, in the Dominican Republic.” He tried to get up but he still didn’t have the strength. Nenuco made him get back in bed, turning on the pedestal fan and switching the electric light as he left.

  The man’s gaze went past his penis, which rested on his testicles, to the window in front of the bed, where the smell of the Atlantic came in to penetrate the darkened room. The waves roared against the cliff and the recurring sound brought him the image of a woman bleeding from her belly and looking at him with both resignation and urgency. “Esther Escudero,” he said, without knowing what that meant, although he discovered a certain familiarity in his own voice. The marine smells brought other memories: an animal with tentacles at the bottom of a jar, a steaming coffee pot, a penis entering his mouth. “Esther Escudero,” he said again, and the resonance of his voice in his body made him aware of its limits and those of the objects around him. He repeated the name several times. It was as though the letters of that name were fishing hooks searching the depths of his mind as he captured fragments of images that, just as they were taking shape, would once more dissolve. “Fan,” he said, watching the blades on the machine turn and turn as he got up, naked, and started toward the light in the living room. Yararí was sitting on the couch watching TV. Al Pacino had just ordered pizza for his hostages in Dog Day Afternoon. The man sat down next to her, looked curiously at the small screen, the furniture, the pots and pans hanging from nails on the kitchen walls, and the 1991 Nestlé calendar. Without taking her eyes off the movie, Yararí closed her fingers around his olive-colored penis and pumped it rhythmically with her right hand; when it got hard she took off her panties and sat on top of him, never taking her eyes off the TV, using her hand to guide him inside her and then moving up and down as he directed her with his hands on her waist. In minutes he’d filled her with cum. A cold sensation in his head brought the past rushing back. Just before he’d come, he’d seen Eric Vitier’s face telling him: “You’re the chosen one,” as though he were completely drunk, followed by the foamy, coherent recollection of his days back in the Santo Domingo of 2027. In the same way he’d muttered the name of the priestess before, he now pronounced his own: “Acilde Figueroa,” and his mind, reacting to it like a password, made all its contents accessible as the daughter of his hosts put her panties back on and changed the channel.

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  ‌Update

  Do I have two bodies or is my mind capable of broadcasting two different channels simultaneously? Acilde asked himself, his eyes fixed on the small fake-pearl necklace worn by the nurse who was changing his IV. The day’s news was being projected in front of his hospital bed: “During a raid in Villa Mella, after a tip from the leaders of the Pentecostal terrorists, the Servants of the Apocalypse, the Special Police accidentally rounded up one of the suspects in the murder of Esther Escudero, an Africanist religious leader and personal friend of the president, murdered last week during a robbery of her home. The suspect, Acilde Figueroa, who according to her digital footprint was a woman, is now a man, and was found strapped to a bed, unconscious and dehydrated, next to the corpse of Dr. Eric Vitier, who appeared to have suffered respiratory failure hours before. Authorities also found a sea anemone, valued at sixty-five thousand dollars. The specimen has been transferred to a private laboratory, where it is currently receiving specialized care.” Photos of a happy Acilde, Eric, Esther, and Morla that had nothing to do with the news appeared on the screen during the voiceover: Acilde at a birthday party, Eric at his medical school graduation in Cuba, and a selfie of Morla in a yellow Indiana Pacers T-shirt.

  A helicopter landed noisily on the roof of the hospital. Outside Acilde’s room, next to the half-open door, the police officer keeping guard swatted away mosquitos with his hand as he watched a baseball game on an old tablet. Acilde walked to the bathroom unassisted. He lifted the hospital robe to look at himself in the mirror, pleased with the results of the drug: the new broadness to his back and thickness to his forearms, the absence of fat from his hips, the sad little sac holding his balls, and a chest so flat it was incapable of nourishing another human being. He thought the late twentieth-century life in Sosúa playing out in his head might be a side effect of the Rainbow Brite. Back in Sosúa, in the little house where the natives revered him, in front of the mirror that hung from a nail over the faucet in the yard, he assured himself, like a midwife with a newborn, that this new body didn’t need anything else. It’s identical, he thought, entranced, as he pinched the nipples and buttocks and opened and closed the mouth of this 1991 version of himself, and said, “I’m hungry,” then ate with his fingers from the cold fish a hopeful Nenuco offered him
on a Duralex dish.

  Satisfied, he made his way back to the hospital bed. The officer at the door opened it with the formality and efficiency of someone being watched by his superiors. A huge red-haired mulato, in a very red Adidas tracksuit and with a Holy Infant of Atocha medal hanging from his neck on a gold chain, came in with two suited bodyguards. He snapped his fingers to make them leave, then dropped onto the couch.

  He bit a nail and spit it out. “So then, you’re the little queer who’s going to save the country?” he asked. Acilde did not respond. He made his way to the bed with effort, embarrassed by the little robe in which the President of the Republic had surprised him. “Esther Escudero was my sister, you little faggot,” he said, closing his fist. He was making Acilde nervous, with his voice like Balaguer’s and face like Malcolm X. “I’m not ordering them to break your ass because I promised her, I swore to her, that no matter what happened we would give you whatever you needed to realize your mission.”

  It seemed the entire world, past and present, was expecting something very important from him and, in front of Said Bona, Acilde felt an urgent need to pretend he knew what they were talking about. This man had captured the country’s will for fifteen years and his charisma had the same effect on Acilde as on the masses he had seduced via YouTube videos in which he criticized the government and used Dominican street Spanish. Once in power, Said had declared himself a socialist, signing a bunch of treaties with the Latin American Bolivarian Alliance, which was pursuing its dream of a Great Colombia in each of its totalitarian member states. He imprisoned all the corrupt ex-government bureaucrats with real charges, and used false charges against the leaders of the opposition. He expropriated companies and properties, celebrating his first anniversary in power by changing the party’s colors from purple and yellow to red and black, in honor of Legbá, Elegguá, the African deity who ruled his destiny, Lord of the Four Paths and messenger of the gods, and declaring Dominican voodoo and all its mysteries as the official religion.