A Bright Moon for Fools (23 page)

C
hristmas walked into Chacaracuar with the aggressive looseness of the drunk. He flagged down a passing taxi, a 1970’s Chevrolet that looked
as if it had been driven straight off the scrapheap. Christmas eased himself in, took off his jacket and opened the window. They pulled out onto the road and, sipping at the rum, he let the breeze
cool his face. The village became dark countryside. He rolled up his jacket as a pillow and fell asleep.

They crossed the Paria Peninsula and arrived in Guiria three hours later. It was the middle of the night. Christmas paid the driver, got out of the car and watched it drive
away all before he was fully awake. He’d left his bottle of Cacique on the floor of the taxi. He looked at the money in his hand. Forty bolívares. It was less than a ticket to Caracas.
Where had the dollars gone? He looked around. He was in the town’s main square, a Plaza Bolivar, geometric red tiling inlaid with quadrants of trees and scraps of grass. It was deserted.
Christmas had no idea what he was going to do. He put his jacket on, lay down on a stone bench and fell back to sleep. He awoke to the atrocities of dawn.

A madman was going through his pockets. Christmas pushed him away. The man giggled and cursed, his face cast in a Kabuki pose of suffering. Christmas sat up. A woman walked past trying to hold
five children by the wrist. There was a dog underneath him. It had bits missing from its scalp, the wounds still raw. It panted. Christmas inspected his clothes. They were filthy. His mouth cried
out for water. His brain wriggled with distress.

Guiria was starting its day. He was here, finally, in Guiria, the Caribbean outpost where Emily’s grandmother had grown up. But this was no beach paradise. It was a concrete port town,
half-built and hellish. He gripped Emily’s book against his heart. He could not perform his ritual here, not in a place like this. He wasn’t ready. He must rest, get his bearings, get
himself straight. He must ... Panic was overtaking him.

He could see queues for buses,
empanada
and coffee stands crowded with workers, people crossing the plaza in every direction. On the other side of the square there was a tall blue and
white church. Beside it, on the corner, he thought he could make out the word ‘posada’. He got to his feet. His legs trembled. His bones snapped. Everyone he walked past looked at him
and whispered.

At the posada he asked for a room. The man was opening shutters that revealed a
licorería
, the metal clatter some dread applause to the vision of bottles, rows and rows and rows,
dark brown and deep in promises of magic. The man took Christmas through the back, into a small restaurant with a television on full volume hanging from the ceiling like a head. On the far wall
there was a row of rough wooden doors with painted numbers one to seven. They were padlocked shut. The man opened number one. It was a blue cell, not much wider than Christmas, with a fan missing
its front guard and the mattress covered in a slightly burnt sheet. Christmas sat down, the black mandrake of the hangover now unfurling a new, even more savage character in his guts. The man told
him it was forty bolívares for a night. Forty bolívares was all he had left. Forty bolívares for this pen in which to thrash. They walked back out front. Christmas bought a
cold beer. Then he spent twenty-five bolívares on a bottle of Cacique and left.

The temperature rose. He walked to a seafront lapped with rubbish. Had he crossed the world for this? He walked back into the streets of Guiria, looking for a place in which to dissolve. He
walked past nervous and forgotten buildings, market traders setting up their stalls, pavements piled with shoes. Children and beggars asked him for money. One made a grab for his bottle. Christmas
was a specimen, pale and alien, wandering past pharmacies and banks, shelves of bootleg music, stiff mannequins in bras and tracksuits. “I want to go home,” he whispered.

In some streets he was warned to turn back with the sign language of guns and robbery. In others, people beckoned him into their restaurants, into the shops, into their internet cafés.
Eventually he turned a corner and found himself back in the Plaza Bolivar. He sought the shade of a tree, cracking open the seal on his Cacique. To his lips he held his last idea.

All morning he drank as the sun wrought shadows from the earth, splayed and half-mad from the heat. His shirt was open, his belly loose, his jacket folded neatly beside him.
Every so often he picked it up, shook it, felt for the book, folded it again, and placed it beside him once more, neatly and with great care. He watched the women of Guiria go about their day.

Like all desperate people, he was hungry for omens. A little girl with a dog on a lead stopped in front of him. The dog crapped in the middle of the street. The girl left the crap but took out a
tissue and wiped the dog’s backside. Then she left the tissue on the crap.

Hunger came and went. He acquired drinking companions, boz-eyed alkys with faces of bark and dirt for shoes. They wittered and argued, grabbing him by the shoulder in friendship, in
confrontation, in sympathy, in plea. He drank anis.

By the afternoon he couldn’t hear anything. He was aware of noises, of people talking but as if through water. There was only the pressing of lips to glass, patting his
jacket and his hat, sweat and the sun and broken pieces of thought. Policemen were talking to him. Then a group of youth on mopeds. He understood there were warnings. He laughed at the idiot logic.
In the afternoon he saw the town was scorched and yellow, the clouds dark and wet. It was as if some northern continent had made off with the sky, swapping it for its own. He understood it was
raining. He laughed at the idiot logic.

Christmas fell in and out of sleep. It grew dark. He got to his feet, the cause of great drama amongst his drinking companions, who held his arms and face. The world pitched like a boat.
Christmas lurched and straightened. He picked up his jacket, walking away to piss messily against a tree. In his pocket he found his last banknote. He did up his shirt. He put on his jacket. He saw
a sign for a karaoke bar.

At the bar he ordered beer. The barman asked him several times if he was OK. People watched the screen as song lyrics were highlighted in sequence, hopeful mimics droning along
in tandem. The man next to him at the bar was almost as drunk as he was. They began to talk to themselves in the posture of talking to each other. Christmas argued with his own spirit. The song
changed. The microphone was passed to a young woman sitting with a large group at the central table. Her voice was soft and ruthless. She sang of loss, of the unspeakable sadness of life, of all
lives. Christmas felt what little was left of himself corrode. The man at the bar was explaining how to eat an iguana. “I have pieces of coal,” Christmas agreed, “in my
heart.” He got off his stool to congratulate the singer, but someone passed him the microphone. He was in the middle of the bar. Everyone was cheering. The video started, couples on bridges
and visions of rural paradise. He tried to give the microphone away but his hand was pushed back. He couldn’t follow the words. The tables were laughing. He heard his own voice behind him,
cracked and low. “Emily,” he said. Then he began to weep.

Someone took the microphone. He was led to a chair and sat down. He wiped his eyes. “Em ... Emily?” She wasn’t there. “Disgusting!” he cried out loud. Someone
patted his shoulder. A man at the bar began another song. Christmas pulled a sneer across his face then slammed both hands on the table.

“So that’s it? That’s? You people, eh? That’s it!” He stood up. “You? Eh? You people that’s?” He was shouting. The barman had his hand on his
neck. The next thing he knew he was out on the street, cast back into night, stumbling across the Plaza Bolivar. The church reared up beside him and sent him reeling against a tree. He flung his
arms round it. He couldn’t breathe. He sensed people around him and growled. He sank down to the base of the tree and looked up to the branches.
But soon you’ll be dead
, they
seemed to say,
and all you will taste is the earth
. He turned from their snickering leaves to a rock that jumped forward and hit him in the head. His face fell into the soil, then he rolled
onto his back. His mind began to vomit; song lyrics, memories of his dead wife, Bridget’s voice:
don’t you want to be good
? He coughed and coughed, his face washed in rheum and
muck. He felt thieves were grabbing at him, but perhaps they were demons. Then someone was picking him up, helping him to his feet. Christmas pushed them away. He looked up at the church. Emily
jumped from its roof. He yelled out but she turned into a seagull.

He stumbled off into the dark. He passed a children’s playground padlocked shut, heading down a road of shadows to the sea. Mosquitoes whined in his ear. Through cars and trees he could
see the lights of a dock, cranes and derricks. There were oil drums and rusted gas canisters lined up along the water’s edge, upturned boats rotting without masters. He could smell gasoline.
He fought his way under a tree, into the mud and rubbish and bog-shrubs, towards the nothing of the black ocean. He fell forward between two boats and tried to steady himself on their sides but one
hand missed, so he swung down into the bilge, the slum of the land, plastic bags and bottles texturing the mire. Wetness spread through clothes to skin, his face raised but then defeated as it fell
against the ooze with a smack.

The mud stank, stewed and shitty. He heard himself laugh inside his chest. He began to whisper, “Em ... Emily ...” mouth caked and foul tastes leaking onto his tongue. He began to
shout, to splutter, making noises of explosion, “Psccchhewwww ... Boom!” Then he was silent. Harry Christmas pushed his face into the sop. He was still.

Someone was rolling him round. There was a commotion. He was being yanked and raised. He glimpsed a policeman’s uniform and the ragged dress of his drinking companions.
Sounds veered closer to his ear. He was being hooked by his armpits, lifted up, a half-dead seal, squinting with marine eyes at the mouths and their sounds. There were arguments, hands in his
pockets, more arms around him. He was being helped into a boat. Someone was wiping his face. There was cheering and music and the yearning of an engine. There was a bottle of rum at his mouth.
Christmas’ lips were moving but he spoke no human language. It was a dialect of the dead. He went into the oceans of the night.

W
hen Christmas came to, something was wrong. He was upside down. So this was hell: simple, cruel, upside down. Some kind of parched territory
see-sawed in front of him. He was swinging by one leg from a tree. He was drunk. So – they let people stay drunk in hell. He might have laughed, but his entire body felt as if it was trying
to cram itself into his face. Sweat ran off his neck over his chin. There were raised voices. He thought he must be in the courtyard of some kind of factory until he identified the pounding noise
as his own heart. He struggled. He spun even faster. The voices stopped. He understood there was someone before him holding a machete.

“What you doing, stupid gringo?”

“I am not a gringo,” Christmas croaked, “I am an Englishman.” He heard a chopping sound. Then he was on the floor. He passed out.

He woke in a bed. He could hear trumpets. There were people standing about him, talking too fast. He realised he was no longer in his clothes. Christmas dared not open his
eyes. Different species of headache were warring over his skull and spirits raced across his eyeballs. Someone was near him. Others were laughing; judges, jesters, torturer-generals. There were
chair-scrapes. He could hear a television and the rasping choke of beasts at feed. Christmas turned further into the pillow, praying that it would destroy him. He fell asleep and dreamed of mud in
his throat. When he woke again it was the middle of the night. He was on a camp bed under a corrugated roof set high on thin beams. Raising himself onto his elbows, he realised was in the middle of
a living room. He could hear snoring. He was naked except for a pair of Bermuda shorts. Behind him was a kitchen area.

Christmas staggered to the sink and drank mouthful after mouthful of water. His insides clenched and shook. He vomited. He needed to shit but didn’t know where to go. The shit almost came
out of him. He held himself, shuffling across the kitchen, and came out into a yard and the violent noise of crickets. In the middle there was a toilet with no door, next to an upturned skiff.
Christmas sat on the toilet and released a torrent of black sand. The flush didn’t work. He was sweating but his bones were cold. He went back to bed, one thousand years old.

Christmas dreamed in broken fury: eating a chicken sandwich then shitting out a live chicken; being alone in a wood; some problem with buying an electric fan. He dreamed a tortoise doctor was
inspecting him while a boy prayed at the end of his bed. When he finally opened his eyes, head hanging from the mattress, there was the tortoise. The skin on its neck was like an old sock. It
staggered forward and raised its powerful jaw to clamp at Christmas’ chin. A woman’s hand gripped his cheeks. They were calloused and smelt of coconut oil, and turned his head in firm
inspection. Then the woman’s face was in front of him. Her eyes were the colour of morning light through leaves.

She walked off to a chair by the front door letting in a blare of day. Christmas pulled his cheeks to his forehead, watching her huge thighs in a tight pink tracksuit turn and sit down. The
woman crossed her legs, picking her T-shirt from her belly. She was wearing big hooped earrings, hair cocked up to one side. She was drinking a beer. She was Lola Rosa.

“
Idiota
!” she spat. Christmas didn’t understand what was happening. Yet he knew it was no dream. The hangover made every cell in his body wretched with consciousness.
Never had he felt so bad after drinking. It was punishment. It was revenge. Memories of Guiria revealed themselves all at once. Then Judith at her wheel. Being introduced to Slade’s mother.
Emily’s funeral. His whole rotten life.