Cargo of Orchids (29 page)

Angel had a habit of balling his hands into fists and pummelling the air, a good sign, Daisy said—if you didn’t fight back against life, it would quickly kill you. It would kill those who did fight, as well as the very good and the very gentle. If you were very bad, you could be sure it would kill you too, but it would be in no particular hurry.

“They take over your life if you let them,” Daisy said.
“Los muertos.”

Daisy had watched many people die. She thought maybe it was the death of others that made her own life seem so very long. She’d asked her old grandmother, who hadn’t moved from her bed since the blackness had begun eating her, “When do you know you are ready to die?” “When you can no longer make a fist,” her grandmother had said.

Daisy finally got up and went to speak to Yepez, and after that he scurried away, locking the gate behind him. Not long after, Nidia came with a tray, which she left outside the gate. We had to reach our hands through the iron
bars if we wanted the drinks, sapodillas, and the
churros
(little doughnut sticks).

While we ate, and fed our babies again, I asked Daisy how long she planned to go on nursing Alias. I said Angel seemed to fuss more after he took my milk; I felt I wasn’t producing enough to satisfy him. Daisy said she would breast-feed for as long as possible, because once Alias had been weaned, and if he wasn’t still too sickly, he would be sent to La Ciudad, like all the other boys born to Las Blancas, to work as a
sicario.

The freebase tokes were starting to wear off, so I already felt disconnected and edgy. When I said the thought of my tiny, innocent son growing up to become a teenage thug, assassinating people from the back of a motorcycle, was unthinkable, she laughed and said I didn’t have anything to worry about because my baby would never become one of the
desechables
, the disposables, the born to be used once, then thrown away. Hadn’t I seen the way Consuelo’s face softened when she looked at him?

If I am honest with myself, I resented Consuelo’s affection for my child; she treated him as if he were her own. On the other hand, I knew his survival depended upon her love, so found myself encouraging the bond forming between them.

We laid our babies down again—Angel fully naked and Alias dressed like a tiny Arctic explorer—their earnest limbs jerking in unison, as if they were practising running away. I asked Daisy if she stayed at the hacienda by choice, and she said she hadn’t thought about it, but that she was treated better here than she would be treated anywhere
else. She had made so much money for Las Blancas, covering loads and never getting caught, that she now received special favours, including freedom of the house, a place in Consuelo’s bed and the chance to make friends with Consuelo’s guests, like me. A place in Consuelo’s bed? I didn’t question Daisy about this, but it answered a lot of my own questions about Consuelo. I said I did not consider myself a guest; guests were free to come and go as they pleased, but a doctor in the City of Orchids had told me no one ever got away from Las Blancas except in a coffin.

Daisy simply shrugged and said, “Why would anyone
want
to get away from Las Blancas?” Alias had fallen asleep with orange blossoms settling onto his face and in his hair, and Daisy said this was his favourite spot in the garden, here under the
guaiac
tree. Alias could spend hours watching the petals fall, would open his mouth as if trying to catch one on the end of his tongue or bat them away with his little hands until the game wore him out. She’d never seen him as happy as when he slept under this tree, the weight of blossoms on his sleeping eyes like coins.

Daisy knew the names of all the trees that grew at the Hacienda la Florida—the scarlet
ceiba
, with its brilliant japonica-like blooms, the yellow, daffodil-like
araguaney.
She pointed to the far side of the walled garden, to a tree not unlike one I’d noticed growing in the courtyard outside my window—this was a very dangerous tree, she said, the
borrachio
, or “drunken” tree, the source of a drug that caused victims to lose their will and their memory, a voodoo powder called
burundanga
, used in prophecy and witchcraft. I must not go near that tree or else I might get
burundanguiando.
In
rural Colombia, she said, where she grew up, the tree was grown in every front yard as a warning.

When Yepez came to the gate and called Daisy’s name, we trundled our babies back to the air-conditioned sanctuary of my room. Daisy repeated she didn’t know
why
anyone would want to leave this life at Hacienda la Florida as she cut out four lines on the table, did two herself and left the others for me. She said the only thing she’d ever liked about cocaine was the smell of it; she didn’t know why she bothered using it. She said she should have learned her lesson the first time she tried it and everything exploded in her face.

Daisy became talkative and outgoing when she got high. She told me that when was eleven years old, and her sister was eight, they’d been abducted from their parents’ house in the country and taken to the city of Medellín, to a fortified mansion belonging to a famous drug lord. He had been kind to her—not like many of the other young girls, including her sister, who were killed and dumped at the side of the road when they were no longer useful—and had even paid for the operation when she was badly burned smoking the drugs (skin from her fleshy bum had to be used to rebuild her cheeks). “Now if you kiss my cheek, you kiss my ass,” she liked to joke.

“I was one of the fortunate ones,” she told me. “He took me back to my village [she pronounced it ‘bee-lidge’] so they could return for me another time.”

Her parents, she said, were given
basuco
—their reward for not protesting when their daughters were kidnapped. Now her whole community had collapsed as a result of
basuco
addiction. Livestock had starved, people killed each
other, crops rotted on the vine. No one in her village lived for any other reason than the hope that their daughter would be abducted again and they’d get more drugs.

A year after she’d been returned to the village, she was taken again by the same drug lord. He had changed, she said, and now he wanted her to have sex with boys almost young enough to cut their gums on her body, and with old men whose gums bled when they sucked her breasts.

When the drug lord went away for a long time, to
el norte
, Consuelo liberated Daisy and set her up as a cover girl, posing as a tourist on a plane that was used to smuggle contraband. Meanwhile Daisy met her baby’s father, who kept her in a hotel room, looking after her, even when she got pregnant. “Alias gave me a chance to make a new life for myself. I was very young to be starting out, and he didn’t want me carrying in my
chocha
(where Consuelo had told her to stash the drugs) because I was
embarazada
(pregnant). That’s the kind of man he was. We both ate a big meal of
bolas
(elongated condoms stuffed with cocaine) before we got on our plane. Alias said you carry it in your stomach— it’s the one place they can’t see into with their flashlights.

“We flew from Tranquilandia to Panama City. Alias said he liked that route because in Panama you didn’t have to make payoffs at immigration; you could bribe the other, less corrupt officials. By the time we got to our hotel, one of the capsules had lodged itself at the entrance to his large intestine. He was in a lot of pain, and sent me to the
farmacia
for a
tónico.

“I didn’t go to the
farmacia
, I went to the bar. I had two choices: take him to the hospital, where they would have
X-rayed him and found the
bolas
and sent him to prison, or watch him die. I had to decide which would be the worse fate: losing the product or death. Las Blancas has a saying: ‘If you succeed, send money. If you fail, don’t come home.’ ”

When Daisy got back to the hotel room, Alias had made the decision for her. “He blew himself out through the stomach so no one would find the drugs and I wouldn’t get into trouble. That’s the kind of man he was.”

Daisy went back alone, with the money she’d made from selling her share of the drugs, to face Consuelo. Consuelo gave her another chance. “I think she felt badly for the way her husband had used me,” Daisy said.

“Her husband?” I asked. “The drug lord?”

“El más famoso en el país”
said Daisy, who sounded surprised I didn’t know. The most famous man in the country. “Angel Corazón Gaviria.”

Alias had developed a rash and wouldn’t eat. Daisy told me Consuelo was worried that he might have an amoeba in his intestines and had put him on a special diet. I told Daisy the rash might have more to do with the wool she dressed him in.

Consuelo had brought me another envelope after dinner, and I cut out four big lines—twice my usual amount— and snorted it. Then Daisy introduced me to the pleasures of smoking
mejoral
, and we became
paralizados
together.

After she left I cut out another line, even though, sensibly, I didn’t need it, then sat in a chair by the window, with Angel in my arms, until the morning light began to fill the sky. There is nothing sensible about cocaine. I had a
love-hate relationship with the drug: if there was any in the room I couldn’t let it go unused, but the minute I’d done a line I wanted to be straight again, and then I’d do another line, and another, until it was all gone and I found some sort of peace in coming down. I realized, too, that I’d begun to think less and less about my captivity, that every line I snorted, every base toke I took, helped obliterate my life.

I kissed each of Angel’s tiny, perfect toes, kissed his eyes, his earlobes, his fists, his soft baby-head. I lifted his nightgown and ran my fingers over the little hollow in the centre of his chest, stroking it, burying my nose in it. He made a gurgling sound, like the pineapple in the fountain when the blood gushed out of it.

That night I dreamed I stood once again inside the gates of the Mountjoy Cemetery, watching the guards in their fake-fur-trimmed jackets standing over Angel’s grave, stamping their feet to keep warm. I picked up a handful of earth, threw it high into the air. And as the earth rained down on me, I buried Angel Corazón Gaviria for good.

I must have dozed off watching the moon hike in the branches of the
borrachio
tree, because I dreamed Jesus and I were in bed together, having a threesome with the Virgin of Perpetual Help, who had wet black skin. From that dream I moved to another, where I climbed a sheer wet rock and kept slipping backwards. When I got to the top (I can’t explain how I got there—it’s the way dreams work), an old woman with a disembowelled goat was waiting for me. I panicked because I realized I’d dropped my baby somewhere on the mountain during my climb and couldn’t remember how to get back down to him.

I had enough cocaine in my veins to make a vampire dizzy. My nerves had grown used to keeping odd hours, but that morning they had decided to go out dancing, and
nothing I could do, except another line, would make them sit the next one out.

Daisy came with Alias around lunchtime and said she hadn’t slept all night, that Alias had been coughing up more of the “black stuff.” I saw fear in the corners of her mouth, a twitch in her cheek as she spoke of the trouble she had getting Alias to swallow the cow’s udder Consuelo had prescribed for him.

I picked up Angel and tried to make him nurse, but my ears were ringing and the feel of his lips on my nipples made me tense; I told Daisy I might be getting sick too, that maybe I’d caught whatever Alias was suffering from. She didn’t think so. “Two people don’t get sick the same way,” she said.

After she left, I finished off my gram and didn’t move from my chair again, but sat gazing at my baby. He didn’t cry as much any more, as if he was getting used to his life. I’d even swear I could see his whole body try to kick a smile onto his face whenever he saw me looking at him. I don’t know why a mother should feel so flattered about being adored by her own child, but the way Angel smiled at me made me feel as if I were full of God. I bent and kissed him all over his tiny, serious body; I wanted to drink each minute of his life, to wrap my lips around the melting sweetness of each breath he took. For a moment, he was all the drug I needed. I breathed him in, I got so high sniffing him I felt I was talking to angels. I even worried I might overdose on the scent of him, that’s how good it felt.

The next day Yepez let us out into the Garden of Statues so our babies could enjoy the sun. We walked down the Avenue
of the Statues, across the stone bridge over the Brook of Tears, then sat on the bench in front of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. We laid Angel and Alias under the orange-flowering tree, and I told Daisy about my dreams: I was perplexed by the one about Jesus and the Virgin of Perpetual Help.

“Sometimes we are sent dreams to make us laugh at this life,” Daisy said. Daisy said she would not take such a dream seriously—like all sex dreams, it was sent for pleasure, and pleasure, after it was over, usually meant you would suffer for having felt so good.

Daisy insisted the dream about my baby was the important one, and that I should pay attention to it. She told me I had to “clear my brain out,” otherwise I might make the “wrong mistake” and lose my baby, or even my own life. The first thing I had to do was get rid of the drugs, and whenever Consuelo gave me more, I should get rid of those also.
Perico
(what she called cocaine) was a personality robber. “Get rid of your poison,” Daisy said. “It is easier for Consuelo if you are like me,
trabado
[stoned] all your life.”

Her words had little effect on me. Maybe the drug
had
taken me away from myself, from who I was, used to be, but I can’t blame the drug, can I? My counsellor says it’s convenient to blame drugs, but deep down we do what we want to do anyway.

I heard a pony whinnying in the distance, and the scream of a peacock and a howling in my brain caused by a single fly buzzing around my eyes. Daisy, who said my face looked bone white, “like an English teacup,” watched Angel bat at an orange butterfly that kept swooping over his head. Daisy said the butterfly was a lost soul, fluttering
about, looking for a new body to try on. She took a swipe at it herself, and this time it fell, stunned, onto the foot of a bullet-ridden statue. I cried out as it tried to escape from Daisy’s fist, dragging its one torn wing.