Blinding Light (8 page)

Emerging from the steaming pool, they were chilled by the late-afternoon air and felt tired and stewed from sitting in the hot water. Drying themselves, they saw Manfred at the top of the slope. He always seemed to appear out of nowhere, as though dropping from an invisible line, like a pendulous insect. He was entirely naked and unembarrassed, thrashing himself with a loose towel, pink-fleshed from the scalding water, the hair on his head spiky and damp, his penis slack and swinging as he descended from stone to stone. He was wearing earphones and carrying a Walkman in one hand and had a small spray of flowers pinched in the fingers of his free hand, and he was smiling.

“Is a bromeliad!”—shouting because of the earphones.

Nestor said, “Next stop, Lago Agrio.”

“How many kilometers until Lago Agrio?”

“I will tell you later,” Nestor said.

“How many kilometers until ‘later'?” Hack demanded.

T
HE FIRST INDICATION
that they were nearing the town of Lago Agrio was a succession of signs, most of them lettered
Prohibido el Paso,
some of them showing a grinning stenciled skull, like a Halloween mask, and the single forbidding word
Peligro.

“What's that supposed to be?” Wood asked in the darkness of the van.

“Calavera,”
Hernán said. “Eskell.”

It was after midnight when they entered the empty streets, lurid in the glare of small orangy light bulbs, traveling first on a bumpy road and then the uneven pavement of the main street, flanked by the same ocherous shadows. All the shops were shuttered and dark. Only a handful of shadow-faced people lurked by pillars in the arcades, where some open fires were glowing, cut off oil drums serving as braziers. Ava and Steadman were first off the bus, and even in the semidarkness, smelling dampness, ant-chewed wood, moistened dirt, dog shit, rusty pipes, and the smutty smoke from the braziers, they sensed the town was ugly—not old but hastily built, a kind of blight in the jungle, a sudden wasteland of dead trees, a slum smelling of blackened pots and stale bread and frying and decay. Another stink in the air was subtly toxic, the sour-creamy tang of fuel oil.

“It's sensationally scruffy,” Janey said in a tone of gloating satisfaction. Then she yawned. “Promise you will tuck me in, darling? I am so knackered.”

Off the main road, down an alley, within a narrow courtyard that looked fortified by its high walls, the Hotel Colombiana lay in darkness. Hernán backed the van into the courtyard, stopping and starting.

“Wouldn't it be simpler just to park the van on the street?” Sabra said.

“Then the van would not be here tomorrow,” Nestor said. “We are less than twenty miles from the Colombia border. You know the
FARC?
Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia? They will take the van. They will take you.”

As he spoke, he worked, catching the bags that Hernán passed to him and stacking them beside the van.

“You mean kidnap?” Sabra said.

“They are too busy for that. They outsource the kidnapping,” Nestor said, and looked smug using the word “outsource” as he labored with the bags.

“So who does it?”

“Children kidnap you and then sell you to the
FARC
or anyone who will continue the ransom procedure.”

“Charming,” Janey said.

“What kind of kids would do that?” Hack asked.

“Hungry kids, with guns,” Nestor said, and headed for the hotel office. “I will give you room keys.”

The others complained about the hotel and were so aggrieved by Nestor's warnings that Steadman and Ava made a point of praising the place. They drank gin-and-lime in their hotel room, hearing distant voices, screeching women, roaring men.

While Ava sat facing the window and the wall of the hotel garden, which was fragrant with night-blooming jasmine, Steadman walked behind her and put a blindfold over her eyes.

They went on drinking, Steadman carefully filling Ava's glass, but she said, “It's not working.”

Steadman said nothing. Perhaps she was tired. Was the whole blindfold business a self-deceiving gimmick, or was it a step too far? He resisted giving it a name. Surely such intensity could not be blunted after one day. Steadman put tonight's failure down to the fact that they had spent all that time together in the van. Being so close for so long, elbow to elbow, had tired him and killed his desire. Hers too, it seemed.

They felt awkward climbing into the same bed, clinging briefly though not kissing. And then they were asleep.

They were woken at seven—the jangling phone, Nestor summoning them to the café at the front of the hotel, where coffee, fruit, and bread were being set out on a table by Hernán. The others yawned and muttered, sounding irritated and weary. The morning was already hot enough to melt the butter in its sticky dish, and the humidity glowed on the faces of the travelers. The low hideous town was loud with traffic and scurrying people and hawkers, with new and sharper stinks and monotonous music.

“Anyone get kidnapped last night?” Hack said, peeling a banana.

“Hack, you are awful,” Janey said, smiling in encouragement.

Nestor said, “Something stranger than that, my friends. Near here is the San Miguel Bridge to Colombia, at La Punta, the frontier. They call it Farafan. Early this morning, some people going across the bridge in their cars were stopped by the
FARC
soldiers at gunpoint. The soldiers gave them a choice. ‘Set your car on fire or we will shoot you.' Twenty-two cars were burned on the bridge. Just here.”

“That was this morning?” Sabra said, sounding terrified.

“It's okay, Beetle,” Wood said, and hugged his wife. With angry emphasis, he said to Nestor, “What is the point of that?”

Nestor said, “Maybe they don't want people using the bridge, or maybe it's a protest against the hit squads here. Or maybe you should ask Tiro Fijo.”

“Who's that?”

Hernán said, “‘Sure Shot,' the big man of the
FARC.”

“Let's get out of here,” Sabra said. She was squeezing her copy of
Trespassing
in anxious fingers.

“I think he's just winding us up,” Janey said. “All I see in this grotty little town are nig-nogs in market stalls trying to sell us wickerwork.”

Wood said, “Are we going to be leaving here in a timely fashion?” “After we go shopping. We need food for the jungle,” Nestor said. “There's not much gringo food down the river. Ah, here is the
estranjero
.”

Manfred appeared, walking into the café from the direction of the Hotel Colombiana passageway.

The others, expecting someone new, looked up with disappointment. Manfred was in jungle gear, which made him seem darker and more predatory, his shirt tucked in and sweat-stained, his thick thighs tight in his trousers. He looked hot and uncomfortable, bug-eyed and blinking, his mouth open, breathing hard as he smiled and muttered at the rest of the people. He then seemed to take possession of the table, snatching at fruit, twisting bread in his fingers.

“You hear about the kidnappings?” Wood asked.

Manfred said, “Of course. Everybody knows. They enjoy kidnapping the oil people. This was all rain forest until the oil companies came. Texaco and Occidental cleared it. Now it's drugs,
putas,
gun sellers, and oil pipelines. High toxicity. Criminals. You blame the people here for hating gringos?”

“So what are you doing here then?”

Manfred became serious and said, “I am on a quest, like you.”

“We're not on a fucking quest,” Hack said.

“No need for effing and blinding,” Janey said.

As a way of indicating that she was not interested in this abrasive back-and-forth, and loud enough for everyone to hear, in the manner of an announcement, Ava said to Steadman, “Let's look around town, shall we?” She glanced at Janey and added, “I want to see those nig-nogs and the wickerwork.”

“Meet back here at noon,” Nestor said. “Hernán will go with you. If you get lost, ask for the Colombiana.”

“I'm staying right here,” Sabra said. She opened
Trespassing
and lifted it to her face, as though to keep the world away.

Hernán led Ava and Steadman down a side street, explaining the stalls, some selling tapes and CDs—the music blaring—and others selling sneakers and sports jerseys and cheap clothes. Beyond the stalls were small shops, bars, and garages. The curio shops were stocked with blowguns of various lengths and darts, bows and iron-tipped arrows, crude knives, beaded belts, and woven baskets. Lining the walls were medicinal herbs in fat dusty burlap sacks.

“You want something special?” Hernán asked Steadman, and winked at a man in a curio shop.

The man took a long soot-blackened blowgun and inserted a dart into its tube and with bulging cheeks ostentatiously blew the dart into the ceiling of the shop. Then he led them past the sacks and more blowguns, behind a partition, saying “
Tigre, tigre”
and showed them a jaguar pelt and a jaguar skull with sharp gleaming teeth. The man spoke eagerly to Hernán.

“He will give you a good price.”

Tigre!

Steadman looked at the empty eye sockets of the jaguar skull. The thing had long fangs among its sharp teeth, but the hollows where its eyes had been made it the pathetic parched shell of a small blind monster. On the table were dishes of animal teeth, feathers, quills, and patches of fur. He picked up an even smaller skull, the size of a baseball.

“Look, a little baby,” Steadman said.

“Baby monkey,” Ava said.

Seeing Steadman's interest, the man pressed the small skull into Steadman's hand and said,
“Mono.
Ees mankee.
En peligro de extinción
!” He flashed his fingers at him, saying
“Cinco”

“Who kills these animals?” Steadman asked.

“Hungry people,” Hernán said. “Them too.
En peligro de extinción también

In a glossy box, propped on hatpins, was a large, hairy-legged, popeyed spider.

“Tarántula!”
the man said. He handed the box to Steadman.

Holding it up, Steadman looked hard at it. The creature that had seemed a horror in its box was, up close, a figure of sorrow. He marveled at its symmetry, its long jointed legs, its shiny bristles. But for all its complexity it was just another empty shell, like the animal skulls, a black thing crucified on the pins.

“Take.
Cómprala
/”

“I want a live one,” Steadman said.

“A live one will kill you,” Hernán said.

Now the shop owner was holding a dead bat, and he shook it in Steadman's face, calling out prices as Steadman backed away toward the door.

Outside, at the sidewalk table of a café, a teenage girl in a tight skirt and frilly blouse sipped a drink. When Steadman glanced at her, she stared at him and smiled, following him with her eyes. Steadman smiled back and greeted her.

“I think you've just made a friend,” Ava said.
“Chingada”

“So funny to hear a woman say this word,” Hernán said.

“What word do you say?”

“We say
chingada.
We say
puta.
We say”—he giggled—
“tiradora. Culeadora.
We say
araña.
We say many things.”

“Lots of words for them.”

“Because lots of them in Lago Agrio,” Hernán said.
“Personas aprovechadas”

“I heard some clicking up and down the street last night,” Ava said.

“Day and night,” Hernán said. “The ones on the street are old and—how you say—
muy fea?
Agli. Most are at the
burdeles
"

“What time do the
burdeles
open?” Steadman asked.

“Los prostíbulos están siempre abiertos
"

Steadman glanced at his watch. “It's nine in the morning. The whorehouses are open now?”

Hernán shrugged, and casually reaching toward the busy street and making a gesture with his fingers, he stepped back as a taxi drew to the curb. He said nothing more to them. Taking charge, he opened the rear door, and after Ava and Steadman got inside, he slid into the front seat. He muttered a word to the driver, “Pantera,” and they were off.

Within minutes they were going slowly on a bumpy back road, the tires thumping large loose rocks. It was more like a dry creekbed than a road, and as it narrowed it steepened. They climbed a low hill, where at its brow they were struck by the hard glare of the morning sun, and passed a neighborhood of shacks and dogs and snotty-faced children. Descending the hill, their taxi had to stop to let a large foul-smelling truck go by.

“Cargo of meat,” Hernán said, and looking back they saw carcasses and sides of beef swinging from hooks in the ceiling of the blood-splashed interior, and clouds of flies following.

More shacks, more children, and a short distance beyond this little slum the car stopped before a yellow-walled building. It was solid, made of cement, one story, with a big black cat crudely drawn on the wall and a painted sign:
La Pantera.

Hernán led them through the door, toward the music, which was loud and Latin with a pulsing beat of drums. The sound of syncopation filled the large room but competed with other sounds, low animal wails of complaint, an agonizing mooing. The strange, seemingly empty room was the size and shape of a dance hall, with a high ceiling, which was the tin roof of the building. The wide floor was like that in a dance hall, but no one was dancing. Only the music and that horrible mooing filled it. The middle, which could have been the dance floor, was littered with tipped-over chairs and some empty tables and made of cement—a boy was slapping at it with a dirty mop and dragging a bucket.

At first glance the place made no sense—a big hollow noisy space, the music, the animal howl, the clutter, the boy with the mop. Looking harder, Steadman saw activity at the margins, groups of men seated in chairs drinking beer from bottles, scraps of bright color that were the costumes of women, some standing, some seated, at the doorways—a door every six feet or so, around the entire perimeter of the dance floor.
Of the fifty or so doors, there were women at most of the thresholds. The women wore bathing suits, most of them were smoking cigarettes, and they seemed demure, patient, passive, and vaguely attentive, as though waiting for a bus that was overdue.