The Navidad Incident (29 page)

Matías notices a pickup truck stopped along the road into the square, now half hidden in a sea of people. Some have jumped up onto the flatbed for a better view. Not a bad idea, he thinks, climbing up in back as nonchalantly as he can, and there he waits.

Long, quiet hours pass. Meanwhile, more and more pilgrims engulf the truck. Then, out of nowhere, a frisson of excitement sweeps through the crowd. Matías cranes his neck higher and can barely make out a thin white line—the Yuuka, virgins, and musical troupe—meandering slowly closer. As they approach, people hurriedly shuffle out of the way. Matías strains to see the seventh white figure, but from this distance he can't tell if it's Améliana. He doesn't know if the procession even reflects the order of the Yuuka.

The priestesses advance with resolute steps; they show no sign of having just conducted a three-hour ritual, then walked here without pausing to rest. They enter the square and kneel around a low dais of earth mounded in the center to await the arrival of the sacred barge. There they remain, silent and motionless, virtually asleep, though perhaps in some deeper state of consciousness. Whatever governs their bodies for forty hours straight is well out of the realm of normal metabolisms. Ordinary fatigue and pain and hunger no longer have any meaning.

After what seems like hours, though it might have been only a matter of minutes—Matías has lost all track of time—the sacred barge arrives by sea. Ten half-naked youths stow their oars, step out onto the beach, lift the hull up onto their shoulders and carry it into the square to place it on the dais, then vanish into the crowd. The actual ceremony has still not begun, yet their everyday labors have a natural dignity to them.

Once the oarsmen are gone, the crowd moves in one step closer. By now the back of the pickup truck is so overloaded with people that Matías can't see a thing. But then someone kindly gives him just enough room to squeeze his face through (at least he's too short to block anyone else's view), which effectively pushes someone else off the truck, but the person doesn't complain. Now there's an opening for Matías to crawl through on his hands and knees. After a while he's at the very front of the flatbed. From there, he gets a foothold on the truck door, reaches for an adjacent lamppost, then tries to swing himself up onto the roof of the driver's compartment only to find the space already occupied by three teenagers and a couple of kids. Okay, if he plants one foot on the roof and braces his weight against the lamppost, he has a sightline to the square straight across that sea of people. He can just see the boat and the priestesses kneeling around it.

The invocations are just beginning. The Yoi'i Yuuka mimes the act of sailing the barge across the high seas with the other Yuuka in their white robes and huge leaf crowns striding alongside, front to back, dancing like waves, while the virgins form a ring around them, spreading their arms and swaying to suggest a great ocean. The musicians accompany them with rhythms that, not surprisingly, emulate gently rolling waves. On board the barge he can just make out a sacred plaited palm-leaf box placed before the divine visitant, who sits covered head-to-toe in palm fronds. That role belongs, if Matías remembers correctly, to the third highest Melchor Elder. A lone man among women, his face is entirely hidden; only his arms and legs are visible. He neither moves nor utters a word. Not even when they move on to the next ceremonial site will he lift an oar. Transported together with the palm-leaf box, he is a ritual object whose immobility demands great self-control.

The boat ritual proceeds at a calm, even tempo. The vast sea has been invoked. Without the power of the sea, without the forces of current and wind and wave, the boat and its revered passenger—god or ancestor—go nowhere. These forces must deliver the barge safely to land where the Yuuka welcome it as human inhabitants—or no, perhaps as divinities now themselves?

The sacred barge arrives, the spirits alight and dispense blessings to the virgins, who then dance their joy at length and are answered in kind by the Yuuka, who also dance. The musicians stand, playing. The priestesses recite incantations blessing the ground of the square and, by extension, all of the earth. Then they chant a verse, praying that the boat and its holy of holies fare safely to the next ceremonial site, followed by a long, plaintive song of farewell and vows to meet again—if only two hours hence.

Matías watches all this from his precarious perch. How many hours has he been propped up against the lamppost? He has no idea. It's as if a transparent curtain had descended from heaven to earth, draping everyone and everything in a wholly different time. It hardly matters anymore which of the eight Yuuka is Améliana—or whether she's really here at all—Matías sees
her
, performing with chaste devotion.

The sad, slow song of departure drones on, finally fading into aftertones as the Yuuka and virgins all kneel in place. The more anxious pilgrims quickly break position and start off for the next rendezvous. After a prescribed interval, the Yuuka, virgins, and musicians all rise and also head toward the next ceremonial site via another, more secret path that does not cross any secular road. Their route may take them under bridges or through caves; some claim they must even traverse the treetops—no one knows for sure, though village kids are probably hiding and watching where they go. (Other kids, Matías recalls, never let him, the orphan boy who didn't know his own father, stand lookout.)

He climbs down from the pickup truck and wades into the crowd. Only now does he notice how tired he is—tired and hungry. The sky is now dark, and torches have been lashed to palm trees here and there. Looking up, he sees a brilliant, nearly full moon overhead. There's not a hint of cloud. He doesn't know where he's going, he just walks along with everyone else. Come to think of it, he missed lunch and dinner, but festival pilgrims are free to help themselves to the food set out on boards at each house. Some villagers even divine their fortunes good or bad for the next eight years from the popularity of their offerings: the faster the tidbits disappear, the better the family's prospects. The boards at the first few houses, however, are bare; earlier pilgrims must have eaten everything.
Got to keep going
, thinks Matías,
we're bound to find something eventually
.

“Hey you, where you from?” comes a voice, apparently intended as a greeting.

“You talking to me?” he asks back. It's been ages since anyone addressed him so casually.

“Yeah, you.”

The speaker turns out to be an older man—or no, could they be about the same age? At one time he must have been taller, but now the man's back is so bent that he's forced to talk up even to Matías.

“I'm from here, from Zaran originally, but now I live in Baltasár City.”

“And you come back for the festival?”

“Uh-huh,” says Matías, adding, “Sure am hungry, though.”

“Well, there's plenty around to eat,” says the old man. “Try the super up ahead.”

“The super's handing out food?”

“Yep. During Yuuka Yuumai, most stores got tables out front giving out free eats. Don't you know nothing?”

“I wasn't around last time. It's my first festival in years.”

“Started the time before last, musta been. Nice custom.”

The two of them walk along toward a halo of bright lights. It's a big storefront thronged with people. Others are standing just out of the light, all eagerly snacking on something.

“See, what'd I tell you? Guili Supermarket's doing a giveaway,” says the old man as he picks up his pace. He must be hungry too. Matías follows after him to join a spontaneous queue. It feels strange to be lining up at his own supermarket. He had no idea the Melchor store provided free food to festival-goers. Presumably it was all written up somewhere in the accounts sent to him as owner-operator; no doubt he also could have requested a full report on the scheme, but his presidential duties don't spare him that kind of time. The food chain's been flipped on its head. From highest in the hierarchy, he's down at the bottom begging for handouts. Festivals are funny, he thinks, trying to restrain his hunger.

The festival freebies turn out to be an evolved version of instant ramen—cup noodles. Lined up in front of the supermarket are several large tables piled with boxes of the stuff. Young clerks in uniform blue T-shirts stand by with utility knives to cut open the foil seals on the styrofoam cups, pour in hot water from a succession of large kettles that others relay from inside, and finally hand one hot product and a plastic fork to each taker.

“Step right up! Takes three minutes,” spiels a young assistant manager. “Just count to two hundred, nice and slow, while you wait. Or if you can't do the numbers, just watch how your neighbor does it. Gotta give it time, though, or it won't taste so good. Finish one, you can come get another. Eat as many as you like of these lip-smacking cup noodles, the Yuuka's snack food of choice. It's just Guili Super's little gift to all you hungry folks.”

Standing on a step stool, the man is a born huckster, ready and able to use any opportunity for publicity. Why sure, the festive atmosphere adds pleasant associations to the taste, tonight's free samples and free spirits helping to trap tomorrow's cash customers. One after another famished pilgrim passes up the traditional boiled taro and bananas set out by ordinary houses, or fried fingerlings lovingly prepared by poorer families, and reaches instead for the Japanese treat directly imported courtesy of M. Guili's capital advantage. Maybe it's a sign of the times? But now, for the first time, the man who rode his instant ramen breakthrough to the top of a new economic model is seeing that whole construct from the bottom up.

The old man gets his cup and fork and moves off, after which a plump girl in regulation blue quickly presses the identical items on Matías. Immediately, the queue ratchets up behind him, so he too moves to the side of the road. He slowly counts to two hundred, then carefully peels back the seal and savors the soy-scented steam before forking up some noodles. While they cool slightly, Matías watches the assistant manager working the crowd. He looks familiar; they must have been introduced at some company function. Good thing he didn't see his boss—the President of the Republic himself—standing right in front of him.

Matías, mouth full of
ramen, meditates on his present anonymity: to be nobody in a crowd out in front of Guili's Supermarket is quite different from being an anonymous participant in the festival. To enjoy the blessings that the sacred barge and Yuuka
share out is a privilege, but to get hooked on cup noodles merely makes a consumer keep coming back to spend his last handful of change. Even so, this little man in his aloha shirt, shorts, and sunglasses standing by the road eating noodles picks up enough pocket money from those consumers to run his political machine.

Can't a country operate any other way in this day and age? Are the capital interests that would exploit the Yuuka Yuumai so insatiable? Matías had imagined he was here for the age-old appeal of the festival (Améliana's spiritual pull adding an extra tug), but no, he sighs, the scheme of things inevitably involves his own secular connections.

Or no again, the real reason he sighed and hesitated to dig in was that the cup noodles were still too hot to swallow all at once. And honestly, to make things worse, the first slurp was so good—the pasta perfectly firm, each bite-sized ingredient releasing a new burst of flavor in a broth rich with pork fat and vegetable extracts and
MSG
to tease the taste buds—he can hardly wait for the temperature to come down a few notches so he doesn't burn his tongue. Hell, he may be president and supermarket tycoon and pilgrim all rolled into one, but there's nothing like a good ramen. Pure oral pleasures are the best.

Matías empties his cup down to the last drop of broth and decides to go queue up again, when he spies the same old man, flimsy styrofoam cup in hand, glancing over at him and grinning. For one brief second, Matías flinches—has he been found out?

At the third ceremonial site, Matías doesn't go all the way forward but stays deep in the crowd, letting the energy of the rituals carry to him through the waves of humanity. As the charged atmosphere buzzes late into the night, he can feel himself replenished—by the moonlight beaming down from high in the sky, by the strains of festival music floating nearer and farther, by the unseen motions of the Yuuka, by the mystic powers radiating from the boat at the center of it all. Everyone here feels much the same thing.

By the time the moon sinks in the sea to the west, just as the first intimations of dawn filter in, though the hills block direct view of the eastern sky growing light, the ceremony comes to a close. Not once this time did he see the Yuuka. The crowd starts to break up, carrying Matías along with it. Luckily the fourth location is not far away. As Matías stumbles along, he remembers he hasn't slept in over twenty-four hours. Of course he's been getting by on extremely little sleep of late, but he
is
over sixty-four after all. All eight ceremonies would be pushing his luck, but he feels confident that he can manage one more.