The Navidad Incident (6 page)

No chat with them tonight, however. Matías heads on into Angelina's room and pulls a half-hidden cord. The bell makes only the faintest ring, yet Angelina never misses it. At this hour she'll be downstairs directing drinks to different tables, catching up on the talk of the town, fielding gripes from the girls, but as soon as she hears the tinkle she's out of there.

“Evening,” says Angelina, a slight Filipina lilt to her English. “What you drinking?”

“Whew, am I tired. Today's been a killer.”

“You always say that. But really you got plenty of spring in you.”

“It's just pretend bounce. Better give me a hit. Yeah, and a small bottle of champagne.”

“Oh? That's fresh,” she says, pulling a thin gold chain from her cleavage to retrieve a tiny pendant key. She unlocks an ebony chest and takes out a tiny jar. Then, opening the icebox fitted into the lower compartment of the chest, she extracts a half-bottle of Moët & Chandon.

“What, no glasses? How many times do I got to tell them? Always keep a pair chilled!” She picks up the telephone by the door and calls down to one of the girls. The maid's gone home by now, and Ketch and Joel only work days, their noontime energies evaporated in a cloud of alcohol.

Unexpectedly, a slim young woman Matías has never seen before appears. Not Filipina by the look of her. Dark rosewood complexion, with big eyes. Big lips too, but drawn tight, giving the impression of someone who gets her own way. Where's this face from, thinks Matías, watching her deposit the glasses and leave.

“Who was that?”

“New face. Now don't you get ideas. Hired her as a maid,” chides Angelina as she pops open the champagne and pours two glasses. “Remember Magda, used to work here?”

“Not really.”

“You had her once. Short girl, big tits. From Melchor?”

That jogs the President's memory. Another Melchor islander, eh? “Ah yes, her.”

“Well, this one comes by her introduction. Said she's a friend of a friend. Come looking for cleaning work. But you never know, once she see how much the other girls make, she might change her mind.”

Matías is still eyeing the door where she disappeared, champagne flute held between his chubby fingers. He meets a hundred people a day and forgets ninety-nine. Others remember him, of course; that's the privilege of position. Somehow, though, he just knows he'll remember her tomorrow. Hard to forget such an unusual face.

“Something about her,” says Angelina. “She sees things. Usually doesn't say a word, just cleans and does laundry. But sometimes she look up and say, ‘Storm coming.' And honest to god, storm really does come.”

“She can predict the weather?”

“And not just weather. She see a new customer, she say, ‘He gonna get drunk and fall asleep.' Thing is, it's true. The john just drink himself to sleep on the sofa.”

“Think she can predict the future of the country?”

“Oh c'mon, she's not
that
good.”

His face clouds over, he's said something he shouldn't have. He drops the subject and concentrates on the bubbles in his glass.

Meanwhile, Angelina scoops a dab of thick black paste from the jar onto a miniature plate, lights it with a match, and carefully lowers the smoking resin into a coffee cup. Then, covering the cup with a saucer, she passes it to the President. Putting aside his glass, he slides back the saucer lid and inhales. A warm, familiar, mown-grass smell fills the room. The smoke soon takes effect: pleasure liquefies in the depths of his brain, drowning him happily.

“Makes the champagne taste completely different.”

“Even turns water into champagne. Still, you asking for a hit, been a long time.”

“Mm. Just so dead tired today. Don't like dealing with the Japanese.”

“You, the leader of the pro-Japan faction?”

“That's ideology. Business. Personal feelings are something else. Undress, will you?”

Angelina rises to her feet and peels off what she's wearing, one piece at a time. Not making any special show of stripping for him, nor simply going through the motions, but enjoying the feel of letting each layer lightly graze her skin and fall away.

“No, everything,” drones Matías, drowsily pointing to her underwear. “I see you there and the whole world is mine. All the women in the world stand before me while I just watch. You know why?”

Ignoring the query, Angelina reaches around behind her back and unhooks. She bends over, holding her breasts, and lays the bra on the chaise longue. One leg at a time, she steps out of her last article of clothing.

“Give it to me,” says Matías, handing her the hash cup. She savors the warmth in the palm of her hands, the smoky sweet fragrance infusing upwards. “I'd be happy just to spend each night like this.”

“So why don't you? Just hole up with me someplace.”

“Can't. This is what every man in the world wants, and yet it's still not enough. It's the workday that makes the night such magic. Or am I wrong?”

“Do I look like a philosopher?” Angelina stands just out of reach, running her hands leisurely over her skin, midriff to breasts. She takes three steps back and pulls aside a heavy velvet curtain to reveal an alcove bed, where she now reclines. Matías grabs up both champagne flutes together with the hash cup and moves to the bedside chair.

“Really ought to export more of this stuff to Japan. Not for the money. I just want that country to loosen up a bit.”

“One diplomatic pouch at a time's not much business,” says Angelina.

“And I can't say I much care for dealing with Kurokawa on the receiving end either. Got to branch out. Such a big, rich country, and they're so uptight. They think they're so together, no foreign riffraff. Too damn well behaved for their own good, never making waves. Flood the country with this shit, and we might see some real honest-to-goodness egos.”

“Egotists, the whole lot of 'em, but each one alone's such a wimp,” slurs Angelina, breathing in a puff of hash. She raises one knee to spread before him the part of her she's most proud of, the part he loves the best. That tuft of pubic hair
is
beautiful: wispy brown against her pale skin, the way it divides into whorls left and right as it covers her little mound, fertile with promise of joys to come. He feels an urge to put his hands together and pray to her, a divinity liberated from the individual person of Angelina. The least bead of dew glistens in the chandelier light. Is this the sanctum, the transcendence that Matías seeks? To worship or not to worship?

“Aw, fuck 'em,” he concurs. “They're so simple, so bound to morals. Swallowing every word from the top down, no questions asked. No one thinks for himself. Just give me the proper endorsement, every corner convenience store'd be selling the stuff.”

“Worth a try. Team up with some bigwig.”

“Not bad. Not bad at all. Get it legalized, supply it single-handed. It'd be fun,” he mumbles, fingertips poised not in prayer, but ready to dive in.

Two hours later, the President heads out without a word to anyone, just like when he arrived. Angelina sees him to the door in her dressing gown, then returns to her room. Stepping back inside, she notices the lingering hash odor. She takes a deep breath and yawns. The salon downstairs is quiet, with probably only Ketch and Joel still around.

She goes to her ebony chest, kneels to open a drawer, and pulls out what looks like a letter. Stripping off her dressing gown, she climbs back onto the messy bed and unfolds the paper. She stares at it for a long time—five minutes, ten minutes—then silently, secretly, begins to cry. Her tears drip onto the page, and soon it's all wet. Big wet words. Words that someone has been posting all over town for more than a week now:

The earth shall accept thee

Angelina doesn't understand what it's supposed to mean. Nobody does. Nobody but the person or persons who stuck them up. All she knows is, it has something to do with the President. Why does she cry when she looks at it? It's been like this for five nights running. Why can't she bring herself to tell Matías, whom this surely concerns—why keep the handbill hidden away? She doesn't even want to think about it. But at night, after the President returns to his villa, she takes it out and contemplates what must bode some grave fate for the President and herself. Just how and when that fate will disclose itself, she has no idea. She feels like praying to this handbill, just as Matías felt the urge to pray to her pubic hair and moistened lips—but she too refrains. She touches the page and goes on weeping.

Geographically, the Navidad Archipelago comprises three large islands and a number of lesser outlying islets in the South Pacific. Two of the large islands are surrounded by a common barrier reef; the third lies some three hundred kilometers away within its own reef. All share a common language and an ancient network of trade, a distinct sphere of Navidadian culture generally conducive to a united political destiny. Somehow the islands just belonged together, though nationhood, it goes without saying, was decided elsewhere—so far away, in fact, that to the islanders it might as well have been ordained in heaven.

Significantly, most small countries emerging on the international horizon see their origins tagged with the phrase “it goes without saying.” When discussing these countries, it is customary—that is, banal—for writers to trot out truisms about “discovery,” the events that introduced them to the world without the locals even knowing they'd been “discovered.” No, they are mere accessories to the “historical fact”—and so it was with Navidad.

The archipelago entered the annals of world history in 1645, when the otherwise unremarkable Spanish explorer Baltasár Jarán de Valencia discovered an island surrounded by a coral reef. Warily venturing ashore, the ship's crew found it was in fact two islands separated by a small inner lagoon and inhabited by people who came out to meet them just as warily. Both sides simply stood there eyeing each other from opposite ends of the beach. Narrowly resisting the temptation to open fire, the Spaniards traded glass beads and other European trinkets for island food and water. They refrained from using their muskets, as the ship's log records, because the encounter fell felicitously on the twenty-fifth day of December; hence in the joyous spirit of the season these two vastly different races did not massacre one another. For that same reason, Jarán christened the islands
Las Navidades
after the Nativity, taking the liberty of naming the larger of them Baltasár after himself. What the islanders called the place he didn't ask. Thus, Gagigula appears on no world map.

As Baltasár was also one of the Three Magi, the other main island became Gaspar, and a third distant island, spied but unexplored the previous week, was dubbed Melchor (again ignoring the fact that the inhabitants called it Sa'an). The Spaniards then celebrated by tapping a cask of Maldivian madeira. Did the holy names of
Los Tres Reyes Magos
just happen to mirror this island trinity, or should we read in it some prophetic manifest destiny?

Granted, people had lived here long before this “discovery,” and a handful of white men sailing caravels halfway around the globe to plot islands on maps in no way affected their day-to-day happiness. Not for the time being at least. The waters abounded in fish, and should they have wanted for boats to sail beyond the coral reefs—though catches were plentiful in the lagoon alone—the hills were thick with trees. Taro and bananas grew readily, and ma'a, which the Europeans saw fit to call “breadfruit,” sprouted everywhere. In short, the islands were generously endowed to support a sizeable population.

Baltasár and Gaspar are shaped like two battling beasts, a variation on the lion rampant. Or rather, to our more peaceable Rorschach-tested eyes, like twins conversing embryonically inside a coral-ringed amniotic sac. The resemblance, however, only became apparent to local inhabitants in the last hundred years. Prior to that, none had ever viewed their homeland from the air, and by the time they had, the islands were swamped in confusing developments even more foreign to the populace.

Baltasár City was not, for instance, laid out on the island of the same name; this capital of twenty thousand strong is actually on Gaspar Island. Were there only a Gaspar Town on Baltasár Island the story would have a happy symmetry, but alas, it was not to be. The main town on Baltasár is simply called Colonia, “the colony.” Baltasár City sits on Gaspar exactly where the male member would be on the lion, a built-up quarter of government offices, market halls and port facilities occupying a small cape that thrusts out into the lagoon. Colored urban-red on the map, it all the more resembles a phallus, a correspondence that tickled the cartographers of the Instituto Real de Estúdias Oceanográficas.

But back to the Spaniard Baltasár Jarán de Valencia, the principal agent in “discovering” the islands. About his character, records have little to say. One supposes he was just another sailor of whom Spain, Portugal, and England had a great number at the time. Born in 1605, he came into an early inheritance from his father at the age of twenty, and with that money he bought a small trading concession. Still ship shy, he boarded one and then another of the company's Atlantic charters as a “privileged crewman,” and thus gained his sea legs. By the age of thirty-five, having increased his late father's fortunes to a goodly sum, he sailed off for the fabled East Indies. Reversing a route charted by Magellan some hundred and twenty years before, he hoped to veer north to Cathay, but was beset for weeks on end by easterlies that drove him to these Navidads, where he dropped anchor for a few days' respite.

As one who sought adventure only after having first laid up funds for his old age, we can assume he was none too ambitious. After weeks of fighting the winds, he was apparently satisfied with this small claim to posterity; he gave up entirely on Cathay and instead made for Java, where he filled his hold with “divers and sundrie” for the return voyage. Yet even then, this middling mariner was financially favored, for the Javanese cargo tripled his investment. Nothing else comes down to us about this unremarkable avatar of the Christmas spirit. One imagines him back home surrounded by children and grandchildren, recounting his exploits in the Eastern Seas, until eventually he passes on (though of course it's perfectly possible that once back in Spain he was shot dead while making moves on another man's wife).

As a result of Baltasár's reports, the Navidads came to grace the charts of the Empire of Spain. It was something of a miracle that islands this size remained undiscovered in the Pacific, considering the number of fortune-seeking vessels—Spanish, Dutch, and English—that plied those waters. Had it not been Baltasár but instead Garcia Jofre de Loaysa or Miguel López de Legaspi or Sir Francis Drake (knighted despite being an outright pirate) or Thomas Cavendish or Olivier van Noort or Joris Spielbergen or any other less Christian rogue who sighted the islands, their fate might have been quite different.

When the Navidads were claimed as Spanish territory in 1668, it goes without saying (that phrase again), no islanders were consulted. The Navidads were ideally located for guarding the sea route via which Mexican silver was transported to pay for silk and spices and tea from the Philippines. As to legalities, the discoverer was a Spanish subject, reporting directly to the Spanish crown—thus, who could question Spain's sacrosanct right to the territory?

Catholic priests arrived with the galleons. They offered the unbaptized savages a magnanimous choice: either convert to Catholicism—which would save their souls—or else. Of course, the Spaniards had firearms and the islanders had only stone adzes and bows and arrows. Within fifty years, the Vatican received the joyous tidings that all the islanders were now good Catholics, though only a scant ten percent of its original population. The effects of this religious decimation were long-lasting: to this day some sixty percent of Navidadians are Catholics, whose given names are to be found in the Book of Saints.

Much later came the Germans, who were still in the throes of national unification and latecomers to European imperialism. They desperately wanted a colony of their own, but the best places were already taken. Even tiny Belgium had carved out the Congo, leaving only a parched tract of sand called German West Africa.

In the Pacific it was the same story. Tahiti, Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, all the earthly paradises had been snatched up in rapid succession. Fortunately for Germany, Spain had already lost the Philippines and Guam to America in the Spanish–American War. Her other Pacific colonies, the Carolines and Navidads, were merely jewels encrusting an ornate altarpiece, no longer of any real benefit. They'd converted thousands of islanders and continued to baptize a few hundred children each year, which kept a score of missionaries occupied but was hardly reason for holding on to the territories. Rudely awakened by defeat, Spain understood a full century ahead of her peers that the age of colonialism was over. Sometimes the decline of the state spells better times for everyone; as with certain foods and the opposite sex, countries are most delectable past their prime. Thus at the very end of the nineteenth century, an enlightened Spain sold the islands for 250 million
pesetas
to a gullible Germany that still doggedly believed in the vogue for colonies. And once again, it goes without … whatever, no one bothered to inform the natives.

Together with the Germans arrived, not missionaries, but businessmen. They came to the South Pacific with more immediate goals: to invest a minimum of capital to generate a profit from their colonial enterprise. The question was, what could they ship to Europe from the tropical Pacific? What could these Navidads possibly have to offer to people who wore woolens, ate beef, lived in brick houses, and enjoyed opera? There was only one likely product: copra, the thick, fatty flesh of the coconut, which provides a rich, all-purpose oil for cooking, candles, and soap, and once the oil is extracted, a nutritious press cake for animal fodder. To the captains of industry, it was quite a find.

Not that these Germans saw themselves making millions of marks per annum the moment they saw a coco palm. They had their trials and errors before they finally succeeded in turning the throwaway nodule of this peculiar tree into something they could sell. The move from sun-drying to wasteful but quality-controllable kiln-drying was the inspiration of one T. Weber, Direktor, J.C. Godeffroy Gmbf and simultaneously German Federation Councillor in Samoa. Likewise, it was an agronomist—name unknown, but attached to a German trading firm—who encouraged wrapping the trunks with spiny pandanus leaves to prevent rats and coconut crabs from eating into profits (nowadays they band the trees with tin collars).

If the Spanish enlightened the islanders to the existence of heaven, then it was the Germans who showed them the world at large (life in hell was left for the Japanese and Americans to demonstrate). The copra they produced was shipped far away, and foreign exchange arrived in the form of goods. Did they understand the process? Hardly. The world of commerce, whereby their copra was shipped to cold northern ports, landed, stored in warehouses, sold in the abstract, made into soap and margarine, then shipped off again, was scarcely more imaginable than the economic circuits that looped back. The islanders' world went only as far as the eye can see; what they saw was copra disappearing over the horizon, then returning as cotton print clothes, canned mackerel, matches, steel fishhooks, and nets. To them, the connection outbound-to-inbound was pretty much like the relationship between sex and procreation. Only with copra, the fun part came at the end.

Germany discovered marketable phosphates on other islands, but unlike Nauru or Angaur or Yaluit, the Navidads sadly had none. Nor did fluctuating prices for copra necessarily guarantee quantities of matches and mackerel, hooks and nets on the return voyage. Still, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the islands had a presence in the world economy, proudly standing in one small corner of the same stage with everyone else.

The commodity market for copra also imposed certain rules. When the German trade representative-cum-diplomat said, “Plant coco palms,” then everyone planted coco palms. Up until then every island had these trees aplenty, and short of a typhoon knocking down swaths of jungle, who ever heard of making any special effort to plant them? Why harvest more than you could eat? To people living in nature, it was simple common sense. But no, now they had to deal with capitalist nature; they had to plant as many trees as the land allowed, carefully maintain the stock, and harvest it for export. In Ponape, every adult was required to plant ten coco palms a month; in Yap, it was four. In Truk, the numbers were similar, but duties were held individually accountable, subject to forced labor. At one point, each Navidadian was obliged to plant a hundred trees a year. Thus, under the maxim “No responsibilities, no rights,” the advent of the modern world tightened the thumbscrews of social management. German policy toward the islanders is masterfully expressed in the words of Minister of Colonial Affairs Dernburgs: “The aboriginals are our most valuable asset in the colonies.”

On the other hand, the Germans taught them not to think twice about wasting things. What they were after was copra—nothing else. Of the hundreds of ways to make use of palm trees, the Germans valued only one. No German wove palm leaves into baskets to carry taro and fruit to the village. No German plaited fish toys for the kids, or drank the sweet coconut water, or fashioned coco shells into bowls, or made ropes from the husk fiber, or ate the fresh young shoots, or even took an afternoon nap in the shade of those big swaying fronds (after first making sure not to sit directly under a coconut). To think that they neglected all these blessings and only had eyes for copra! The islanders learned to accept many odd market dictates without really understanding them. Latecomers to the school of international business, they could only memorize their lessons, no questions asked.

After the Spanish and Germans came the Japanese, and in their wake the Americans. Only after extended domination by these four peoples with their various different principles did Navidad finally become independent.