by Rita Indiana
As they come out of the mangrove swamp, Engombe and Roque turn back for him. They care about me and they’ve returned to find me, he thought. But as he arrives at the foot of the ceiba four hundred years before everyone gathered for the picnic, he realizes the barrel of Engombe’s arquebus is on his neck. Roque puts his hand on the gun, forcing Engombe to lower it just as Giorgio rolled up his sleeves, breathing uncomfortably in the heat. Both look at Argenis with the same eyes, creating a tunnel of silence; on one side, glasses clinked in toasts, on the other, an inexplicable and nauseating truth echoes. “And now what’s the matter with you?” asked Giorgio and Roque in unison. Argenis trembled in panic, unable to open his mouth. “Don’t waste the bullet,” Roque says to Engombe, as he takes the gun by the barrel and swings it like a bat, striking Argenis and knocking him down with a blow to the head, but not before moving his buccaneer mouth to say: “This is for Billy, you sonuvabitch.”
Monkey Magic
Malagueta knew their type: light-skinned mulatos, middle-class, without a dime or lineage to brag shit about, but who thought—because they were born in the city under a cement roof and not a zinc one—that they were better than everybody else. They’d come to his childhood beach and look at him and his little friends as though they were dirty pigeons from the plaza. They’d enjoy the sea and sun, avoiding their dark little bodies as if they were dirt balls obscuring the view. That’s why, when he saw Argenis disrupting the picnic with his madness, he couldn’t control himself. Giorgio had planned the event to make Linda feel better, and now Argenis had to come and screw it up. The day had been splendid—little tuna sandwiches, the breeze, and the joy in the face of the blonde, as Malagueta called Linda, dreaming about her future laboratory. Suddenly, the workers, who had started to dig a hole for the foundations ahead of the bulldozer’s arrival, stumbled onto something and called Giorgio over. He went to see, a look of surprise coming over his face, then called everyone over.
Argenis had spent a half hour staring at the checkered tablecloth when he suddenly stood up and pushed Giorgio. “You’re not going to trick me,” he said. “This is a sham, you sonuvabitch, you’re the devil himself, you cheated me, you all know it, you’re part of this, don’t pretend, you all did this together, the stuff you found is mine, it’s my treasure, I made them all, look, don’t do this to me, please, I don’t deserve it.” Argenis whimpered and screamed, his eyes orbiting as he kicked when Malagueta put a headlock on him with just one arm and dragged him away, toward the house. Argenis watched through tears and snot as the two workers pulled the chest out of the dirt with Nenuco’s help.
Malagueta slapped him twice with his baseball glove-sized hand and then, grabbing him by the collar and the seat of his pants, threw him in the shower. “Have you calmed down now, you goddamn freak?” He left him in a fetal position in the tub and picked up what little stuff he had. He threw away the dirty underwear piled up in a corner of the bathroom. He let him keep the same clothes he’d had on for days, which now, because of the water, smelled of pee and chicken shit. He borrowed Giorgio’s van and pushed Argenis inside, driving away and toward the group as it returned from the picnic. The two workers carried a chest turned red from dirt and rust. He honked the horn, pan-para-ran-pán, but without pausing, and got a glimpse of Linda’s face, the only one who expressed any kind of worry or embarrassment for the man in the passenger seat.
When they got to the bus stop, Argenis, head down and disoriented, kept bumping into couples kissing goodbye, old ladies buying orange sweets, and smokers on their last puff before climbing the bus. Malagueta didn’t say a word to him until he’d sat him next to a woman with two dozen eggs on her lap. “Bro,” he said, “they gave you a helluva opportunity and you blew it.” He gave him one hundred pesos so he could take a cab to his mother’s house once he got to the city, a small bottle of water, and a bag of chips.
On the way back, Malagueta felt a certain lightness in his shoulders and neck. He fired up a Marlboro Light, poked his left arm out the car window, and steered with the right. He’d just relieved himself of a burden. No one could stand Argenis anymore, no one wanted to take care of him. The dirty work, of course, had fallen on the black guy. “Black,” he heard himself say as he breathed smoke out of his mouth. A small word swollen over time by other meanings, all of them hateful. Every time somebody said it to mean poor, dirty, inferior, or criminal, the word grew; it must have been about to burst, and when it finally did, it would once again mean what it meant in the beginning: a color. His body was a vessel containing the word, inflated now and again by the odious stares from those others, the ones who thought they were white. He knew Argenis, curiously the darkest of them all after Malagueta, didn’t see it this way, and his condescending look, the same look he used with animals, women, and faggots, hurt him. He imagined Argenis’ mind like a table of colors, the kind he used when he bought acrylics; the darker the color, the more disdain. He’d gotten rid of a cocksucker who’d never be able to look himself in the mirror without fear. “Fucking nigger,” Malagueta said aloud, thinking of Argenis, and a burst of laughter made him shake; he had to stop the vehicle because he was crying from so much laughing.
Back at Playa Bo, all was curiosity and activity. The catering company was putting together a long table for the appetizers and the bar. With the help of a friend who’d come in from the city, Elizabeth was setting up the sound system, which included a tower of speakers seven feet tall. Giorgio was on his cell, talking about the morning’s events, pacing from one side of the terrace to the other, excited, with a nervous rasp in his voice, and trying to pressure whoever was on the other end of the line to come immediately. Inside the house, following Linda’s directions, workers moved the modular walls to enlarge the living room where now, as if by magic, there were two Le Corbusier sofas, retrieved from the warehouse at the rear of the house. Ananí had just finished cleaning what had been Argenis’ studio, filling a trash bag with linens, papers, stiffened socks, dried brushes, and cigarette butts. Nenuco rolled Argenis’ paintings into tubes; apparently, they would not be exhibited during the evening’s activities. When they were ready, they took out the bed and the desk and filled the space with candles, creating a kind of Eden for their guests.
In his room, Malagueta had a mirror he used to look at himself during his exercises and rehearsals. There was a photo of Ana Mendieta blending into the trunk of a tree on the frame; a second showed Pedro Martínez throwing one of the curveballs that won the Boston Red Sox the 1999 playoffs against the Cleveland Indians. Lastly, there was a drawing he’d done when he was nine years old of Goku, from Dragon Ball, with his monkey tail. When he was little, every time somebody called him “monkey,” or “goddamned monkey,” or “the devil’s monkey,” he’d draw Goku kicking something or using one of his special powers. He’d filled whole notebooks trying to survive the words that would sometimes come out even from his mother’s mouth, or his brothers’, dreaming that, someday, after he’d found a teacher like Mr. Miyagi or Yoda, he’d acquire powers to beat the enemy, that big dirty mouth that hurt him and made him weak. Lacking a sensei, Malagueta had come up with another way out: the foul air of the insults would swell his muscles, pumping his arms endlessly with weights and becoming the gorilla no one dared defy—a batting machine. When he got injured and had to set his baseball dreams aside, he had three options: work as a host in a hotel, fuck old European women in exchange for brand-name T-shirts, or both.
The Sosúa Project had saved him. There he’d found his teacher, that skinny Cuban who’d taught him to understand secret voices, use the invisible power of the history of his body, and plan a strategic attack against the repulsive and cruel mouths on everyone. In two months, Iván had broken down Jung, Foucault, Fanon, and Homi Bhabha without once cracking open a book. The multiple directions Iván’s anecdotes took, his jokes, his reflections, his questions, and his reprimands had helped Malagueta discover his body as an instrument with a voice that he could use c
onvincingly and completely, shutting down the repetitive and ignorant shouts of others. For his performance that night, he’d decided to continue using elements from baseball, like Iván had suggested. The accessories of the sport were beautiful and sterile and brought with them a solid current of meaning. For the first time, he’d confront the theme of race and Dominican masculinity head on; he wouldn’t be lacking much in the way of props. And, as Iván liked to say, he’d also apply marketing rules to his “show,” with an aesthetic proposal designed to satisfy the needs and anxieties of a particular audience who would read it as style instead of fashion, and a search instead of a trend. He’d had bleach in his hair for about an hour now. His Afro was too tight and his skin too dark, so that when he washed out the chemical, his hair was an orange, carrot color instead of Goku Super-Sayayín yellow. Elizabeth came to comb it out for him with a tool for punk styles and told him the orange was even stranger and that it would allude to Dragon Ball in a more indirect and interesting way. She was wearing a very tight pair of white pants. Malagueta heard himself say, “If I get my hands on you,” in his head, but kept his mouth shut. He looked at himself in the mirror one last time. He’d stopped drinking water two days ago so his muscles would be more defined. Now his skin was pure plastic.
The Water Stains
The news of his upcoming release came, like all the news from the Palace, in a little paper scroll inside a jar of peanut butter. After ten years in La Victoria—comfortable, calm, without any responsibilities other than to eat and breathe—he was now headed to the outside world, where the asphalt would stick to his soles like gum. He’d have to work now, that was certain. How would he deal with his stuff, his other lives, his businesses? He’d begged the president to do whatever it took to let him continue inside, with his little fridge, his friend, his free time. But Bona was sick and tired of waiting for the miracle that, according to Esther Escudero, Acilde was destined to bring forth. For the first time in years, he thought about Peri, Morla, and his life before he’d met Omicunlé. Bona was an idiot and Acilde had no way of explaining that he had access to the past via an extra body that was funding the research that would allow the Caribbean coral reefs to be repopulated in this shitty present.
Although the ceiling of his cell had been painted only a few weeks before, water stains had begun to reappear. In the past the humidity had allowed for the excessive fecundity that nourished the tropical jungle in Sosúa, but in 2037 it was an unbreathable and oppressive aggravation. The water stains had entertained him during nights of insomnia, while Giorgio and Roque slept. He could make out animal shapes and still lifes. He used them to distract himself during nights in the present that only made sense when dealing with other people in other times.
He got up off the floor where he’d been sleeping to check in on Iván de la Barra. They had been sharing a cell for months. He’d thought the old man, now disoriented and forgetful, would benefit from sleeping in an air-conditioned room. Later, when he saw the effort it took for him to get up off the floor, he’d given him his bed. Sleep, which Iván achieved thanks to pills his sisters sent from Cuba, gave the old man a healthy aspect that wakefulness stole away.
Acilde looked over at his little rusted fridge, at the green light from the hallway that streamed in through the also rusted cell bars, at the plastic rectangle he’d used to cover the door so the cool air wouldn’t escape, and at the bucket of water he used to flush the toilet. Now that he’d finally managed to complete almost all his plans, this, his control tower, seemed for the first time like a dirty and pathetic cell.
He waited until the sun rose. He woke Iván, shaking him a little carelessly. “C’mon, old man, get up—I need my bed.”
The National Anthem
In the hideous interpretation of “Angelitos negros” that was playing, the trumpets seemed to announce the reading of a royal edict at Playa Bo. The guests chatted and held their appetizers on little napkins, all local delicacies prepared in Giorgio’s restaurant. Eel sushi and green plantains, pigeon pea and coconut frittata, grouper and passion-fruit brochettes, etc. Nenuco, working as a valet that evening, arranged the cars and made sure the guests entered the property through the proper gate, walking the two hundred meters to the house through a garden filled with crotons, bromeliads, palms, cayenne, lemons, and avocados, at the center of which Malagueta performed his piece for the guests to enjoy. That’s why everyone turned to look when an ancient Lincoln Continental drove up to the very lip of the terrace, spitting gravel as it pushed through. From that black submarine emerged a rail-thin man wearing a long-sleeved, cream-colored guayabera and a pair of polyester khakis. He carried a locked portfolio in his right hand, the kind used only by medical suppliers for their samples and papers.
Orlando Kunhardt dug up corpses. He gave life back to objects from other times: archaeologist, anthropologist, restorer. His eyes—trained at UNAM in the seventies—didn’t need books, magnifying glasses, or chemicals to determine, in a minute, the authenticity of a find such as the chest now resting in Giorgio and Linda’s room, with the AC going, just as Orlando had recommended over the phone. Once in the room, he pulled on a pair of green latex gloves; outside the room the earth shook with apocalyptic hard techno and he signaled for Giorgio to close the bedroom door. He pulled a piece of hardened mud off the chest. It was possible to see ancient ant tunnels on the chunk of dirt. “It’s oak,” was the first thing he said as he caressed the chest’s bruised wood and felt the bass from the party music resonating through it. He walked around it while lighting up a menthol Nacional. He noticed the chest had a missing hinge. “For the chest alone, I can get you about 12,000 dollars,” he said, blinking because smoke had gotten in one of his eyes. “That is, unless you want to donate it,” he added, very seriously, as though it was no joke. He knelt to try and force the lock, but sensed his client’s impatience. “It’s okay, we’ll pretend it’s a young virgin,” he said. Giorgio had already described the discovery to him and Orlando had come prepared. He pulled a ring of antique keys from his portfolio, selected one in an F shape, and inserted it into the lock, which gave instantly. When the chest creaked open, the second hinge fell and the lid came loose; Giorgio had to rush to grab it so it wouldn’t fall to the floor. Inside they found a leather envelope, a tortoise shell, and a long braid of brown hair. Orlando lifted the envelope as the cigarette dangled from his lip. He pulled out a handful of thick papers. He thought his eyes were going to pop out. Giorgio pretended to be curious but decided to wait for Dr. Kunhardt’s verdict before asking questions. Foreign specialists would confirm his findings later. “Man alive, this is a real treasure,” said Kunhardt, not letting go of the Nacional between his lips. The first seven engravings, all signed by a certain Côte de Fer, showed buccaneer life in the seventeenth century. The technique was impeccable, the documentation of the details of domestic life, invaluable. The other engravings were an erotic series in which a woman, most likely a prostitute, was submitted to the desires of a group of men who joyfully filled all her orifices. The images were extremely graphic and bore some relation to the brutal aesthetic of Goya’s The Disasters of War. The poses were increasingly more violent until they reached the last one, in which a black man sodomized her while a one-armed man cut off her head with a scimitar. I should have killed him twice, thought Giorgio, who recognized the victim’s face as Linda’s. He took some pleasure in thinking they would soon find Côte de Fer’s skull, shattered by Roque’s sharp blow earlier that morning. Orlando was talking about pigments and rust and blood. “This is major league, Giorgio, this guy was a genius.” Was, thought Giorgio, and he left the room and let Iván de la Barra go in and conjecture with Orlando, imagining the moment when the engravings were created, trying to smell the smoked meat on the paper, speculating about the school the artist belonged to, making the presumption that he’d come from France, and calculating the possible prices the pieces would sell for at international art auctions. “Imagin
e, an artist as great as Goya one hundred years earlier in Hispaniola,” Giorgio heard the Cuban say.
Everything with Argenis had been an accident. Giorgio hadn’t imagined another human could replicate himself in the past the way he did. But maybe more than an accident, it had been a stroke of luck. As he walked through the party, he began to celebrate the final step of what he’d planned that morning when the English smuggler had shown him the press. He’d sell half the engravings to collectors and museums and exhibit the other half in the Casa Museo Côte de Fer, which would be housed on the first floor of the laboratory. On its outside walls, they’d recreate a buccaneer settlement; the guides would be dressed as pirates (although that might be too much). The government would give them a subsidy and the complex would live off the business from the nearby all-inclusive hotels.
This compulsive optimism was proof the ecstasy he’d taken a half hour earlier was beginning to take effect. Elizabeth had made him close his eyes and open his mouth to swallow the two green pills, the same color green as the Bayer anti-mosquito candles that burned in a spiral.
The first wave of pleasure forced him to sit down. He felt the drug-stimulated serotonin infusing his brain and making everything agreeable, desirable, and possible. Wearing a white halter and pants that were green like the pills, Linda danced in a corner of the terrace with a bottle of water in her hand. Surely she felt like he did. They exchanged a complicit look, like old friends. He loved her. She was his queen. Suddenly, the idea struck him as real: he was a king, the king of this world, the big head, the one who knew what was at the bottom of the sea. Generally speaking, he usually went on his way, not giving too much thought to any of that so he wouldn’t go crazy, pulling the strings on Giorgio and Roque from his cell in La Victoria as though he were playing a video game, accumulating goods, trophies, experience, enjoying the view, inexistent in that future of acid rains and epidemics in which prison was preferable to the outside.
