The Penalty (14 page)

The colonel lent me three field men and one of the carpenters from the mill, a giant called Baltasar. The work was harder and took much longer than I had pictured. Three weeks just to clear the ground and cut and trim the trees. We had to shape the trunks where they had fallen, turning them on branches laid on the ground. Without a saw pit, we had to work the big two-handled saw flat-ways, pulling the teeth into the wood. Our backs and shoulders hurt us all the time we did this.

At the end of every day I stopped in the graveyard and told Blessing and Achasha how the work was going.

When at last the frame was built we thatched the roof with two coverings of palm leaves, held fast by lines of thin branches pinned down by sharpened twists of green wood. Looking at it, I felt a sorrowful pain that made me dizzy. I was reminded of the house where I was born. The shadow of a memory, of a life, that was lost.

We had nothing for walls. There was little stone in or near the place. Baltasar said it would take months to cut enough planks, and months to dry them. So we made mud bricks and it was a hard and filthy labour.

To give the bricks strength and lightness we mixed the mud with used litter from the floor of the animal pens. Coarse yellow grass, dried cane leaves and the droppings of horses, cattle and pigs. We brought it up to the clearing in great baskets on the backs of two mules; we arrived inside black clouds of flies. We had to chop it up small with a sharpened spade before mixing it with red soil and river water. When we had stirred all into a foul brown porridge we slopped it into the shaping frames that Baltasar had made and pressed it down with our hands. We did this work naked, to save our poor clothes.

At the end of each cruel day we washed ourselves in the river, but I thought we would never be free of the stink. The field men hated this work. Twice I had to frighten their souls to make them go on. More than once savage rain ruined the bricks, sluicing them from the frames.

When three of the walls were built I washed carefully, put on my house clothes and asked to speak to the colonel. There was something else that I wanted. It had grown in me, this want, like the fingers of plants that force apart little cracks in baked earth, and it had flowered.

In the storehouse on the river there was a high and dusty stack of wooden crates. I knew what was inside them. One after another, layers of straw and some strange hairy cloth, and glass. Glass of the most beautiful colours, so that looking through it you might be looking through blood or the sky or green water or into the sun. The colonel had brought this glass halfway round the world for a window in his church. A window that was a picture. I also knew what this picture was meant to be, because I had seen it painted on paper pinned on the wall of his writing room. It was the ghost of the white man’s god showing his wounds to the half-believer whose name was Tomas. The crates were grey and dusty because the colonel would never have his picture window.

“I hear the work on the hermitage is going well,” the colonel said. That was what he had decided to call it. “I also hear that you are stealing manure from the pens. I imagine that is why you reek like the outhouse.”

“I am sorry, Señor.”

“For the theft, or for the stink?”

“Both, Señor.”

“It doesn’t matter.” He stood and walked to the open window and clasped his hands behind his back. “Why did you want to speak to me?”

I told him. He kept his back to me, looking out. After a long minute he lowered his head the way white people do and call it praying.

He said, “You ask too much.”

I kept quiet.

“I paid more for one sheet of the blue glass than I paid for you.”

There were things I might have said. But I did not have to. Young voices and laughter came in through the window. The colonel’s sons on their ponies. Luis, the younger one, leading, looking back at Felipe and pointing. I remembered the grey-purple of their sick flesh, their watery leakages. How they had retreated so quickly from death when I gave their bodies what they needed. How I could have let them go out like candles.

The colonel lifted his head and watched them pass. He put his hand to the back of his neck and worked the narrow muscles there.

“Very well,” he said, “damn you.”

“Thank you, Señor.”

I was at the door when he spoke again. “Remind me. Do I own you, or is it vice versa now?”

Because I did not know what it meant I said, “Señor?”

He said, “Hurry up and finish it and get your black arse back here. I need you.”

Together, Baltasar and I made the window in the carpentry shop next to the mill. We used only the smaller panes of glass. Few of them were the same size, but Baltasar took pleasure in the complication of the task, enjoyed making the frame, using his beloved planes and drills and chisels.

I had time to study the glass closely. Some of the panes, when I held them at a certain angle in the light, had faint ripples and eddies in them. They were like thin slices of halted water or smoke. There was no white glass, no black glass, and I wondered why this was so.

When the frame was made we fixed it between two of the uprights and built the rest of the wall around it. Then we put in the glass, a pane for each of the thirteen ancestors. I spoke thirteen devotions. We went into the house and stood bathed in light. When we moved, a rainbow passed its hand over us.

I told all this to Blessing and Achasha. Sorrowing, because they had not seen it.

Yet another month passed before all was done. We had to coat the walls inside and out with clay and smooth it. When it was dry, we painted it with white limewash. We used long-handled brushes to do this, but sometimes it splashed us. Then we had to make haste to wash in a bucket of water because it burned our skin.

At last, on a night of the full moon, I made my first Worship in my house. On the little altar that Baltasar had made I arranged the things that I had hoarded and traded and gathered and stolen. Thirteen smooth white stones marked with the signs of the ancestors, written with my blood. Twenty-six white seashells, thirty-nine knuckle bones. Three wax candles, a small dish of salt, an iron knife with a wooden handle that I had carved myself. Fish for the ancestors of the waters, meat for the ancestors of the land. And last of all, my most treasured thing: the little tin box that had inside two twists of hair: one from Blessing’s head, one from Achasha’s.

I lit a small fire in a metal bowl and burned tobacco and sweet tree gum. Then I sat and began.

And They came. They all came.

O
NE AFTERNOON
, I was giving the colonel his shave. For many years I had been the only other person to enter his room, and the only person – except for his sons and grandchildren – allowed to touch him. I twisted the hot water out of the cloths and laid them on his face. I sharpened the razor.

The colonel said, “I went into the forest again this morning.”

He had taken to doing so. I could picture him closed up in its green darkness, feeling it swarm in on him, shrinking him.

“You should not do it, Señor,” I said.

“I need to conquer my horror of it. It is an insult to God that I loathe anything He has created.”

I looked at his shrouded face. The colonel had two men who worked full-time in the graveyard, keeping the forest away from his dead. He feared especially the snaking vines that creep then swell. He knew they wanted to slither into the white tombs, prise open the coffins, squirm and thicken among the bones of his wife, the tiny bones of his daughter. It was not greed that drove him, year after year, to hack away and burn the forest, to replace it with his measured ranks of sugar cane.

“Fear is the root of worship,” I said, lifting the cloths from his face.

He smiled a little. “If that is so,” he said, “I am becoming saintly.”

I worked perfumed oil into his white stubble, my fingers denting deep into his cheeks where he had lost teeth. I wiped my hands, tested the blade of the razor against my thumb, and went to stand behind him. In the mirror his eyes met mine.

He said, “I wish I had built my church.”

So I knew he was thinking of dying.

“It was struck, Señor. It was not your fault.”

“It was struck twice,” he said, so fierce that his face looked young. “Twice, and by bolts from heaven. The Bishop said it was a judgement. He was a fool, but even fools are sometimes right.”

Perhaps I should have given him some comfort. But all I said was, “It is a priest’s work to say such things. To give meanings to accidents.”

He looked at me in the glass for a long, long second. A little bit of time outside time.

“You wear a mask, Paracleto. You all do, all your people. I have lived my whole life among masks.”

“Yes, Señor,” I said.

He sighed and closed his eyes. With the tips of my fingers I lifted his chin, then made my first smooth stroke with the razor, up over the skin of his throat to the ridge of the jawbone.

A few months later four men carried the colonel’s coffin to the tomb. His two sons; his secretary, Marquez; I was the fourth. The white priests could not hide their disgust, but the colonel had commanded it on his deathbed, and they were powerless to prevent it.

Beyond the railings of the graveyard the forest watched our procession, flexing its fingers.

Later, after the funeral breakfast, I was called to the colonel’s writing room. Don Felipe and his wife, Doña Celestina, stood waiting for me. He, in his black coat and breeches, his white wig, with his long sunburnt nose, looked like a comical marionette. La doña, black-veiled, black-gloved, was a shadow among the room’s other shadows.

Don Felipe said, “This is my father’s dying gift to you, Paracleto.”

He held out a piece of parchment, folded three times. I took it and opened it out. I recognized the writing of Marquez and the colonel’s hooked and wandering signature.

“It is your manumission,” Don Felipe said.

I did not know the word.

“Your freedom. This document declares that you are now a free man.” He held out his hand. “I am very happy for you, Paracleto,” he said.

I took his hand. It was the first time I had touched him since the cholera.

Doña Celestina spoke from behind the veil. “But we would like you to stay with us, if it is your wish. We value you very highly, as you know.”

Oxufa the Revealer entered the room, disguised as a pedlar carrying bolts of cloth. I could hear the skulls on his belt chattering beneath his cloak, smell his travels on his breath. Don Felipe and Doña Celestina did not see him. He grinned at me. There was a white worm inside each of his eyes.

“Look,” he said.

He unfolded one of his fabrics, year by year. A blue muslin on which the pattern shifted like light on the sea. He hung it in the air and sliced it bottom to top with his iron shears, and when it parted the room was alive. The leather bindings of the colonel’s books bloomed grey flowers of mould and their pages writhed with termites. The heavy curtains dissolved into tattered webs; the increase in light disturbed the bats that clustered among the branches of the chandelier. The floorboards buckled and sprang; vines and blind grasping roots spread to the walls and seized the furniture. Orange gourds and thorny fruit ripened on the decaying velvet of the colonel’s couch. Hummingbirds sucked nectar from the shameless orchids that displayed themselves on the colonel’s bureau. Where Don Felipe and Doña Celestina had stood there were now two piles of black and dusty rags. A fat rat clambered into an upturned wig and gave birth to a litter of bald and sightless young.

“Look,” Oxufa said again, unfolding another of his fabrics, year by year: a jet-black silk with a crimson shimmer. He hung it in the air and cut it, and the room was filled with night. Outside, a great clamour of furious voices and the light of many burning torches. Then the window glass exploded inwards and thick tongues of fire came in; and where they licked all was split and charred and blackened. The walls wept tears of burning sap. The parchment in my hand burned away and fell as flakes of ash on which the words still glittered. My hand also burned, but was not consumed; it was as if I wore a fiery glove. The room fell away, and the fire spread in all directions, springing up in the darkness like bright flowers which quickly joined together to make a riotous garden of flame; and with every new growth there was a tumult of voices.

Then, as quickly as it had grown, the fire shrank and retreated until it had gathered itself into a single pyre beneath a gallows. A human body hung in the pyre, shrunken and congealed like a roasted grasshopper. I shared its unbearable torment for a flicker of time; then I departed from it, as if I had stepped through a glass door. I found myself walking, grieving and invisible, among the roaring multitudes gathered around the scaffold.

“Look once more,” Oxufa said, and unfolded a fabric, year by year: a material that glittered like light on water, hurting my eyes. It was strong; Oxufa grunted and complained, working the shears. When it parted I could see nothing at first, although I knew that far behind me there was a great city of pale towers that touched the sky. Then, slowly, the darkness formed shapes and I knew where I was. I walked through the graveyard, looking but not searching, until I came to Blessing’s grave. She was awake, and gazed up at me, smiling. The white dress was high on her legs.

She lifted her arms to me and said, “Husband, you are young and handsome again. Come. Come down and lie with me.”

I said, “I cannot. We will wake our daughter.”

Blessing reached through the narrow wall of earth into the neighbouring grave where Achasha lay with her thumb in her mouth. Her hand caressed the child’s shoulder.

“She will not wake,” she said.

“I have business to do,” I told her.

Blessing closed her eyes and spoke sadly. “Ah, business. Forever work to do.”

“The whites gave me my freedom,” I said, “but it burned.”

Blessing said nothing. Perhaps she was asleep.

I walked along the track. It was blue in the moonlight and I had five shadows. My house did not look like my house. A boy sat alone inside it, holding a white globe without the world painted on it. Coloured light played across his face. I reached out my hand to him and was puzzled to see that it was covered in blood.