Cargo of Orchids (19 page)

They don’t allow us dental floss or our own deodorant. If you want deodorant, you have to stand by the door of your house, naked from the waist up, arms raised above your head, at five to eight every morning. At 8 a.m., a nurse walks down the row with a can of Right Guard and sprays your armpits.

We are allowed lipstick, even though none of us wears any. There’s no point trying to figure out the way the guards think—why we can have lipstick, eyeliner and face powder, but no deodorant. No use trying to figure out where they get their ideas, or what they think about when they’re alone, driving home after their shift, or if they
have
a world-view that doesn’t come with bars around it. I know one thing for certain: guards are the only people who come to prison every day voluntarily. Their own unhappiness, I believe, causes them to behave even more cruelly towards others, as though cruelty could prove to them that they have a hold on life.

In victims, Pile, Jr. told my judge and jury, what starts out as a primitive urge for survival can turn into a fondness for one’s captors. Psychologically, it is explained as a return to infancy, to the days when the human baby depends on others for food, warmth and comfort. When, as adults, we find ourselves in a similar state of dependency, as I had found myself when I had initially been taken hostage, we revert to the same tactics we used to please our mother to win over the person or persons who now hold over us the power of life and death. To all this add the fact that I was pregnant, and had my own baby to protect—didn’t it make perfect
sense that I would wish to befriend Consuelo de Corazón? All I had been trying to do, in fact, was to become, in the eyes of my captor, a human being.

The reporter from
Newsmakers
called Rainy “a cruel and heartless mother.” Rainy says even though she now has a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, she still can’t forgive herself for leaving her twins on those railway tracks. If she’d only left one of them, she would only feel half as bad, but she could never have afforded the operation.

Newsmakers
had a picture of Rainy with her twins. They had been born joined at the hip and shoulder. They also shared the same brain. Rainy said they had screamed all the time because they were in constant pain, and she had to learn how to give them needles every four hours. She took to using the drugs herself, and that made her babies worse.

If she could turn back the clock, she would pick her babies off the tracks before the train turned them into a fine red mist and hug them to death (her words). She’d hug those kids so hard her arms would snap off like sugar peas.

How you feeling? I’d asked her one day when she was sitting with the photograph in her hands, staring somewhere beyond it.

“I used to think only good things hurt,” Rainy said to me.

I say, next time someone asks her to compare being given the death penalty to being hit by a train, tell him this: no mother is so heartless and cruel as the society that executes her.

I dreamed I was trying to bury Angel again. His body was lowered into the earth. I woke up as one of the guards lit a cigarette, took a few drags, then tossed it in after the coffin.

Dawn coloured the eastern sky, and when I looked out my window, I got my first glimpse of the island that looked like an upside-down fish hook. I had pictured it as being flat, a speed bump above sea level, but Tranquilandia was bisected by a range of bottle green, black-ridged mountains.

We began our descent, flying south along the coastline, very spooky and piratical, with pelicans massing over the crags. Tiny Cattle circled a sheltered cove where Las Blancas moored its fleet—a sailboat,
Conejo Blanco
; a cruiser,
La Mordida
; a cigarette boat,
Pablito E
; and their most recent acquisition, a U.S. Coast Guard cutter.

The airport runway, on a thin spit of sand leading up to the edge of the dense forest, looked quiet—suspiciously so. “I’m going to give it a fly-by,” Tiny said. “They didn’t let me get in this close last time, so we may be in luck.”

He took a low pass across the strip, buzzing the harbour.
“Basuco,”
he said, pointing to the
Fat Lady
’s predecessor, a half-submerged Convair. “I got so addled that time, I must have missed the runway.”

I closed my eyes, half expecting the same thing to happen now, but Tiny touched down and stood heavily on the brake pedal to bring the plane to a halt before the dirt strip ran out.

“Whoooooaaa little dowgie!” he cried, pumping harder and harder on the brakes. “Whoooooaaaa little dowgie,” again, as we bumped up the runway.

Even after Tiny had shut down the plane’s engines, the air continued to hum. I think the mosquitoes, which must have sensed fresh blood, would have broken down the door if Consuelo hadn’t punched it open first.

A lone figure in a white suit strode towards us from the direction of the yacht basin. His hair was cropped short, making his head seem almost too big for the rest of his body. He carried a machete in a yellow holster.

Consuelo embraced the man, who looked as if he had just finished shaving—with the machete. El Chopo (the Gun) had applied little pieces of toilet paper to the places on his neck and cheeks where he had nicked himself. His suit was made of sharkskin, his designer cowboy boots from a couple of unlucky pythons. He had a blood-red orchid pinned to his lapel.

Consuelo pushed the man away, held him at arm’s length so she could get a good look at him. “
Cómo estás, tío mío?
” she asked.

Her uncle said everything was “copacetic,” a word, I learned, he used every chance he got, and asked if she liked his new suit, said he’d got it off a butcher in Baton Rouge who’d reneged on a loan. He lifted up the orchid to show two clean bullet holes, then grinned. El Chopo had Consuelo’s lips, unusually red for a man, so thin they could have been razor-nicks that had never healed. When he grinned, which he did often and without provocation, the lips got even redder, as his cheeks pulled them tight.

Consuelo told him to get rid of the suit, that he looked like a pimp or a drug dealer in it. Looking back, with the objectivity I’ve since gained, I think, had I been on my jury, I would have concluded we were
all
criminals. El Chopo’s sawed-off cowboy boots were as much a part of him as the .38 Consuelo carried tucked in the waistband of her army fatigues.

We left the plane, and I was led to the basin where the boats were moored, a bay ringed by ancient mango roots. The bare roots pointed out of the mud like bony fingers. Consuelo seemed impressed by the Coast Guard cutter, her uncle’s new lodgings, which had anti-aircraft guns mounted on its foredeck and a swivelling M60 on its bridge. The warship’s bridge house was decorated with symbols—four giant red marijuana leaves (each looked like the maple leaf on the Canadian flag), signifying that the ship had made four marijuana busts, and three white tear-shaped snowflakes, each representing a seizure of cocaine. These
had been his sister’s loads, El Chopo said, which is why she finally got fed up and ordered Las Blancas to apprehend the vessel, and why he had been appointed to guard the ship.

He showed us into the galley and told us to make ourselves at home. “Take a pew. Sit. Over there. Not on that,” he said to Consuelo, pointing to a worn-out sofa. “It’s falling apart. Everything around here’s falling apart, present company included. That chair’s still copacetic. Sit.
Siéntense.
”

Consuelo removed a gun holster and a box of vicious-looking knives that El Chopo said he had made “for therapy”; she told me to sit on the pile of newspapers on the chair. There were weapons everywhere, even hanging on the walls, along with a series of paintings, on velvet, of a woman looking bereaved. I could have been looking at Consuelo a few more years of suffering from now.

“The sister is always in mourning,” El Chopo said when he saw me studying the paintings. “It is all she lives for, the death of others. That and making money.” He paused and looked at me sideways. “She has an instinct about people. You know, she will tell you if your
nenito
will make a lot of money when he grows up or end up like his father in prison.”

I said I hoped my child would have other choices.

El Chopo looked past me to where his sister, the Black Widow, wept tears of velvet from the wall.
“Tu eres inocente,”
he said. You are still innocent. And then, “It doesn’t matter what you believe.”

A true innocent is a person who doesn’t know the meaning of the word. “It matters to me,” I said.

“The two of you, you think too much,” said Consuelo, making a dismissive gesture towards El Chopo, frowning at me. She opened a cupboard door, then closed it again. “At this moment, we do not need your philosophy of life,
tío grande.
We need food.”

El Chopo tossed a handful of coffee grounds in a blue enamel pan and added water. “I live alone,” he said. “I have time to think.”

“
Amor
, stick to killing. It is what you do best,” Consuelo said. Carmen had said the same thing about Consuelo. I wondered if these words applied to
everyone
in this family.

“My mother has always said my uncle is unkillable,” Consuelo continued, as if for my benefit. “Time will tell.
Verdad?
”

El Chopo grinned, and set about frying a flying fish in coconut oil, preparing boiled yams spiced with ginger and red beans. I watched the way he worked, using his machete for slicing and chopping the ginger, and for flipping the fish, even for decapitating the bottle of coconut oil. Every so often, he would stop and stare at a blank space on the wall, or the floor, or out the window, as if he had forgotten where he was and had to descend into a trance to remember.

After this “small meal,” he served figs from Buga, in southern Colombia, and licorice-flavoured
aguardiente
, and when Consuelo asked about her mother’s deteriorating mind, he motioned me out of my chair and flipped through the pile of papers. El Chopo said his sister had become so irritated by the frequent raids the combined forces of the Drug Enforcement Administration and the United States
Coast Guard had attempted to make on the island ever since the cutter had been apprehended, she had threatened to cut off everyone who relied on her.

“She is fed up. She is paying bribes to the
campesinos
, to the army, the port authorities in La Ciudad, as well as to the DEA in Miami, customs and the Coast Guard, and they can all go to hell, she told them. They can all starve. Now look at the lies they are telling about her in the papers.”

He spread the paper open on the table. “Black Widow Bites Back: Drug Baroness to Dump Chocolata’s Paradise?” the headline read, followed by an article speculating on whether the Black Widow would soon be putting her whole operation on the market, and how this would effect
“la otra economía.”

El Chopo pulled a crumpled pack of Pielrojas from his pocket and a box of tiny, waxy white matches. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke over his shoulder towards Tiny Cattle. While Consuelo and her uncle discussed whether the Black Widow had lost what was left of her faculties, I tried to read the rest of the article.

The Black Widow’s paradise, Hacienda la Florida, was an eight-thousand-acre
finca
, big enough to encompass a small city within its borders. The Black Widow, who got her start flying 1,200-pound loads of marijuana from Colombia via Tranquilandia into Florida at fifty dollars a pound, and from there spread her operation west and north, had now acquired real estate all over the southern states, and carved landing strips in the swamp lands there the way she had in Colombia. On Tranquilandia she had built a network of roads, three artificial lakes, an airstrip with two
hangars (inside which her planes could be loaded and unloaded), her large, sprawling country-style mansion, a cluster of thatched bungalows to house her staff and security guards, a clubhouse, restaurant, stable for her miniature pet ponies, and other outbuildings amid gardens filled with rare orchids and wild animals roaming at large, and aviaries filled with exotic birds.

The Black Widow had continued to control Tranquilandia, even if it was now from the shadows. People put up altars with her picture, and lit candles for her, all over the island. They believed she could perform miracles. No woman in their history, with the exception of Chocolata herself, had ever possessed a talent like hers for getting what she wanted out of her people.

There was an aerial photograph of the estate, including the mud-flats, the black fringe of mangrove swamp around the yacht basin and the remnants of a dark river wriggling out to the distant sea. El Río Negro flowed down from Nevada Chocolata and wound through the Black Widow’s land. The first time the Hacienda la Florida got busted, the bodies of twelve soldiers killed by Las Blancas were pulled from the river. During the second bust, the raiding party dumped so much cocaine into the river that its once-clear waters turned white. Two file photographs pictured the dead soldiers on the riverbank and the drugs being dumped out of fifty-five-gallon drums into the river. “The river takes blood without changing colour—but not cocaine,” the caption read.

Tiny had begun fanning the air, as if the smoke insulted him, and fiddling with the dial on the short-wave radio.
He wanted to get the weather; he asked Consuelo if he could have gas for the plane, because he had done what he’d been paid to do and wanted to get home to pick up his foot ointment at the pharmacy. He began scratching his feet, picking at the dead skin between his toes and letting it fall to the floor.

“Feet giving you problems? I cut off both feet for you,” said El Chopo, chopping the air with his machete, exhaling more smoke in Tiny Cattle’s direction.

Tiny repeated that he needed fuel, not surgery.

“Sure, we got gas.” said El Chopo. “Lots of it.” He could make something innocent sound sinister. It had to do with the way the words he spoke poked out at you, from the tip of his tongue into the slits of his lips.

Tiny turned red in the face. He stared at Consuelo, blowing air, then sucking it in again through his open mouth. El Chopo left the room and returned with a package the size of an airline pillow, wrapped in red cellophane and coded with symbols. He set it on the table and handed Tiny Cattle a small knife with a retractable blade. “Take a look for yourself.
Está muy puro.
”