The Hotel Viper lay coiled on the shady side of the square, as if waiting for some hapless traveller to stumble into its fangs. It was high tide in the hotel’s front garden, and the lobby was literally awash. The only light came from a dim bulb in a tiny plastic seashell fixed to the ceiling, with a thick layer of dead flies on the bottom. A dark, nervous little man smelling of hair cream and cheap cologne sat behind a desk reading a crime magazine. The cologne mixed with hair cream made me feel dizzy; I reached to grab hold of his desk so I wouldn’t fall. Consuelo told him I was suffering from soroche, acute mountain sickness, which he didn’t seem to question, even though the hotel appeared to be highly below sea level.
Consuelo asked to see el viejo, the old man, at which the clerk insisted we rest ourselves on a termite-infested sofa in the dining room. He brought aguardiente and a plate of cold fried eggs and guava jelly, the eggs redolent of his hair cream, and left us sitting beneath two eighteen-foot-long anaconda skins nailed to the wall.
The dining room was also home to a scarlet macaw, a green cockatoo and a bald parrot named Edgar, who had a neurotic habit of pulling his feathers out. He sidled up and down a beam under the dining-room roof, defecating and plucking. Suddenly, he swooped down and flew straight into a wall, lying stunned on the ground, screeching, “Quiero una mujer!” (I want a woman!).
The water continued to rise, and I started to shiver. Wet feet were unhealthy feet, Consuelo said; you only had to think of the feet of the men and women we’d seen along the road to know what happened if you spent your life without adequate drainage. She made me put my feet up on the sofa, and then covered me with a blanket that smelled of wet feathers.
I don’t know if it was the bumpy ride from the south end of the island or the aguardiente, but I woke as it was growing dark, stretched out on the sofa with bugs crawling in my hair. I had dreamed I was travelling on a fast boat up the west coast of Vancouver Island with a load of cocaine. The landscape kept getting colder, icier. Birds were frozen in mid-flight and all the fish had frozen in silver arcs across an icy river.
There was no sign of Consuelo or El Chopo or the little man who had served us the drinks, but an equally mournful woman called Nidia, who said she was the maid, told me the termites were harmless unless I was made of wood.
I swung my legs over the side of the couch onto the floor and found the tide had receded. Nidia said she had prepared a meal for me, and took me down a musty passageway into a courtyard filled with pots of busy lizzie and morning glory the colour of licked bones. A balcony surrounded the courtyard, much like a catwalk around a prison range. A single table had been set for dinner under a shedding almond tree. I took the one chair, next to an old man with thin red lips and black, black eyes who told me he was dying, and about how much more interesting life had been during the war, and how this was a godforsaken island because you couldn’t get good natural ices.
Nidia served us chicken necks, rice with gravel and warm Coca-Cola under a crackling bug-zapper; the scorched remains of flying insects fluttered down onto our food. When the old man asked for dessert, Nidia said the kitchen was closed. The man requested his brandy drink, but the bar, she said, was closed too. He told her he was going to take a stroll in the garden. “I don’t have many nights left to squander.”
Apart from the old gentleman, the hotel appeared to be deserted. I asked Nidia where everyone had gone, but either she didn’t understand my question or she didn’t want to answer it.
I tried my question another way: I asked her where were all the other guests who would be staying in the hotel that night.
She looked at me in surprise. “This is not that kind of a hotel,” she said. “Guests do not stay here.”
——
There are many ways of remembering, ways to forget. I have tried to forget my room in the Hotel Viper, my whitewashed cell with wooden floorboards that creaked, my sad bed, with a cross full of insect exit holes hanging above it. The ceiling, too, had been eaten away, dirty plastic and newspaper showing through, and wires leading to a single light bulb. Nidia told me not to worry about the little bits of plaster that kept falling; men were replacing part of the old roof, and she would sweep my bed every morning.
There were no curtains, and the iron fretwork over the window was para seguridad, Nidia said, the first security measure I was aware of, and one I suspected had more to do with keeping people in than keeping anyone out. I hadn’t seen anything at the Hotel Viper worth stealing. I asked where the bathroom was, and Nidia pointed to a door in the wall, a section of the wall that had been cut away, so you had to pry it open. I convinced Nidia to leave the baño door ajar, asked for some soap, a toothbrush and a towel. Nidia shrugged. Más tarde. Later.
I remember Nidia leaving, and the despair I felt as I entered my walk-in baño (a quarter the size of my walk-in closet back home), where the heat and humidity had caused the one cupboard to split and break. Mosquitoes were lined up on the back of the toilet like jumbo jets waiting for take-off; a column of giant black ants marched across the wall. I undressed, hung my clothes on a wire hanger (hoping they wouldn’t rust), and edged my way around the toilet into the shower-bath. There was no shower curtain and nowhere but a clogged hole in the corner of the room for the water to drain, which meant the water flooded my bedroom as I stood letting it trickle over my hair and face.
A roll of toilet paper that had been chewed by rats was all I had to dry myself with. I waded to my bed, still dripping wet; the pillow felt as small and hard as the kilo Consuelo had tried to give Tiny Cattle, the sheets thin and mournful as Nidia, who had made the bed, tucking the sheets in so tightly I had to fight to squeeze my body between them. I left the light on for comfort, but a colony of termites became attracted to the bulb hanging on a cord from the ceiling above the bedstead; they hurled themselves against it, shedding their wings, which then fell on me. I covered my head with one corner of a miserly sheet, but then I heard an explosion somewhere in the distance, and all the lights went out. Cockroaches kept me awake most of that night, skittering in the walls.
The next morning, I waited for my door to be unlocked or for someone to bring me food; I was hungry, and felt my baby’s need too, which left me feeling even more desperate. My clothes were gone—the thought that someone could sneak in without waking me alarmed me. Two extra-large dresses—one grey, one pink—had been placed at the foot of my bed, along with two sets of underwear and a pair of alparagatas—sandals made of strands of coloured rope, the kind the indígenas, the local Indians, wore—that looked as if they were waiting to be stepped into, to walk me away from this life. With the sun hitting the tin roof, my room was like a steam bath; my arms and the backs of my legs were red and swollen with bites. I dressed, then tried the door, but it wouldn’t open, and when I began banging on it, I managed only to arouse Edgar, who screeched that he wanted a woman, so I gave up and tried beating on the iron bars covering the window instead, hoping to catch the attention of the half-naked Indian still sleeping on the stone bench outside the church of Cristo Víctima.
The bench was directly opposite my window. I watched the Indian for a while, until he came all the way awake and began to stagger, in circles, around the fountain—I realized he’d never be able to save me. He wore a collection of battered tin cups around his waist on a piece of fraying rope. I watched him try to walk, then stop to catch his breath, undo the rope at his waist and set the tin cups in a row along the edge of the fountain. I counted nine of them. His goal seemed to be to try to fill each of the cups with water.
I watched as I waited for my door to be unlocked, watched the gamines waiting, often until the last moment, then darting in and knocking over one of the cups. When this happened, the Indian would pursue the fleeing boys, shouting at them and cursing as they fired their make-believe guns back at him.
It wasn’t until mid-afternoon that Nidia arrived with food, a plate of arepas—a kind of primitive-looking cornbread—and a slice off a massive roast called a muchacho (boy), which had been larded with pork fat and overcooked. When Nidia left I pounded on the door, shouting at her to bring me something edible. Had I known how much worse my meals would get, I think I would have kicked down the door and begged for a quicker death.
“Más tarde,” Nidia called back to me. Later. Everything was más tarde. I remembered Tiny Cattle saying the whole fucking Spanish day takes place más tarde. “Tarde means afternoon or it means evening or it means we’re late.” To Nidia it meant, always, never.
Day after day, I was kept prisoner in my room. Day after day, I watched the mad Indian lay his cups in a neat row on the fountain’s edge, fill each one to the brim, and then, as he started to fill the last, wait for a gamine to dart in and knock the first two cups into the dust.
If I hadn’t known better, I would have mistaken his routine for Zen practice—until the moment the old man grew angry, flailing his arms, yellow froth appearing at the edges of his mouth, pursuing the boys around and around the square. When he failed to catch them, the old man knelt below the statue of Cristo Víctima and prayed, while back at the fountain, water from the spilled cup trickled into the dirt and the boys resumed their torture of a crippled dog with blind eyes, and I watched. And waited.
My room was humid, a heat you couldn’t escape from, exploding off the tin roof of the hotel, the iron fretwork over the window like a corrosive bloom. Whenever I did try to sleep, my dreams were interrupted by a demented rooster, which I heard but never saw, who crowed regardless of the hour. Every night, around midnight, the lights went out all over the City of Orchids. Nidia told me somewhere on the island a generator kept failing, and every night they were without power for seven, eight, sometimes nine hours at a time.
Always, right after blackout, Consuelo came to check on me. Some nights she would bring a lamp, and we would play chess with a crumbling set of black and red wooden pieces that often disintegrated in our hands. Playing against Consuelo was unsatisfying, for even when I won, which was half the time, I felt she had let me win, that she had cunningly set up positions where I couldn’t avoid capturing her pieces, so I always ended up questioning my own strategies. One night, she accused me of cheating because I let her win. I told her she should learn to accept her victories, no matter how small, and she stood up—her eyes a deep darkness flaring in the lamplight—crumbled her queen into dust and walked out of my room into the dark. I watched her, through my open door, on the balcony, pointing her assault rifle at the stars—those million faint campfires illuminating the dark—and picking them off in her silence. I asked her once if she wasn’t afraid the world might blow up in her hands.
“Quién nos quita lo gozao?” she said, lighting a cigarette. Who can take away the good times we’ve had?
I saw no one else but Nidia for days at a time, though the old man I’d met on my first night took great pleasure in sneaking into my room occasionally when I was sleeping, standing over my bed and pretending his arms were wings, swooping down over my head and belly and doing his bird imitations, so I woke up thinking I was being attacked by the deranged rooster with no sense of time. I awoke shrieking and shaking and covered in sweat, and then he would leave again, to smoke mejoral—a stimulant that you cut into tiny bits and mix with cobwebs, that “paralyzes you, like basuco,” Nidia said.
Nidia brought food three times a day. After several months of being kept locked up, I began to record in my journal—another attempt to relieve the boredom—a list of the food I was given to eat, as if by describing each piece of greasy offal, each mouthful of rock-hard plantain, I could make the reality more palatable.
I know it is fashionable these days to include recipes in books, but I don’t think anybody would covet my recipe for mondongo, a murky broth made from the lining of a cow’s stomach, with a dish of coconut and cold potatoes on the side.
Day One: Breakfast: Rice and noodles and hot (weak, mostly water) chocolate; Lunch: Rice topped with a mixture of pasta and chopped sardines, a glass of Coke (flat); Dinner: Rice and potatoes and a boiled chicken wing.
Day Two: Breakfast: Stew of thick beef bones (no meat), a bowl of unsweetened milk; Lunch: Stew of potatoes and noodles, with a can of chopped fish (when I asked Nidia, “What type of fish?” she said, “Tipo de atún”; what, I wonder, is a tuna “type” fish?); Dinner: A greasy piece of fried cheese on a greasier piece of deep-fried bread.
Day Three: Breakfast: A piece of refried white cheese; Lunch: A bowl of thin oatmeal (as far as I could tell) and pasta; Dinner: Lump of pork fat, fried plantains, boiled manioc.
Day Four: Breakfast: Pineapple stewed in cane syrup, fever grass tea; Lunch: Boiled fish, beans and rice; Dinner: A soup of sardines, pasta and potatoes—which I threw up later.
Day Five: Breakfast: Mondongo (cold); Lunch: Curried crayfish, rice with gravel, pumpkin pudding (no sugar); Gourmet Dinner: can of Del Monte pilchards in tomato sauce (Nidia says they are spoiling me!!!).
Day Six: Breakfast: Coffee and a corncake with sausage on top (which arrived ten minutes before lunch, so I didn’t eat it); Lunch: Beans mixed with lentils in greyish water, a few bits of tough meat in puddles of grease, a spoonful of rice and a gaseosa. (When I showed Rainy my menu, she pointed out something that is true: I had a more varied diet when I was a hostage than I have here, on the Row.)
On Day Seven, I didn’t eat. I made a list, instead, of everything I hated in the room, and didn’t stop writing until I realized there was nothing I didn’t hate, including my own list.
On Day Eleven, I gave up recording what I was expected to eat and watched the column of black ants still marching across my bathroom walls, wondered where they were coming from, where they were going, and then found where they disappeared into a crack in the cupboard, inside which they had rounded up a group of smaller red ants. Any time a red ant tried to escape the circle it was trapped in, a bigger black ant attacked it, biting it and squeezing it, and, after what seemed to me like prolonged torture, dismembering it and killing it. Feeling an immediate sympathy with the victim, I freed as many of the red ants as I could, brought them into my bedroom and let them eat whatever they wanted of the meals I barely touched. They still preferred my own flesh, and on Day Twenty-Eight I awoke to find myself covered with hundreds of itchy bites. I stripped my bed; if I had found any red ants, I would have taken them back to the boño and fed them to the black ones, feeler by feeler.
After Day Fifty-Five, because I’d taken to flushing most of my meals down the toilet, I woke every morning to find my pillow covered with strands of my hair, and, weeping, I collected the hair and wove it into a braid, adding to it every day, so that the braid grew thicker as the hair on my head thinned. Nidia must have spoken to Consuelo, because one afternoon Consuelo took the rope-braid away, saying she didn’t want me hanging myself, and made Nidia stay with me while I tried washing down a plate full of sobrebarriga (hard, cheap meat) with a bowl of agua panela, a sweet drink made from sugar cane and served like coffee.
I knew Nidia must have a family to return to—a husband, children—but I was so desperate for company I was glad she had to stay. While I sucked on my dessert—a piece of gummy, sweet candy called gelatina (made from the bones of cows, I learned later)—she made herself busy, picking up the bits of plaster that had fallen from the ceiling during the day, saying she wished the men would stop this destruction. I told her I often prayed the whole ceiling would cave in on me, anything to get out of my deplorable situation. She looked shocked, but then whispered that a bruja could help me if I didn’t want the baby. I said I wanted the baby, but not here in this airless prison, in the Hotel Viper, with no one to care. I worried that I had grown too weak and too unhappy to be a proper mother. Nidia said giving birth was very easy—you just lay down and the Fallen Virgin of Perpetual Suffering did the rest. As far as being a mother went, the Virgin of Miracles could be called upon at any hour of the day or night.
She said, too, that my room, no matter how much it felt like a prison to me, was “happier” than any room in the Hospital of the Freed: she knew because one of her daughters worked there as a nurse. Babies who were born in that hospital never came home. Their organs were transplanted into the bodies of the very rich, who came from as far away as Japan, Israel, England—many were norteamericanos. The body parts of children were the most desirable, her daughter had told her, because they were healthy, growing body parts, not yet contaminated by the excesses of life.
I thought Nidia was a child, a peasant, full of superstition and gossip, and a tendency to believe what she saw on television about the lifestyles of the rich. But when Nidia said she had eight grown children and three angelitos, I was shocked. I’d thought she was in her early twenties, but she said she was forty-three. Her husband was seldom home any longer, which was why she looked younger these days. He was a cascarero, like a travelling salesman: he sold nylon socks for men and a face powder, which, she confided in me, contained mostly flour. Nidia rubbed her own cheek, pursing her lips. “If only he would give me something,” she said, “to soften my nights.”
I asked if she still had children at home, and she sighed and said she hadn’t seen any of her sons since they started working as sicarios. Anyone interested in a trabajito, could stop on any street corner and hire a child for an assassin nowadays. It was hard work with very little pay and not much future.
After she left I lay on the bed, amidst the little bits of plaster that continued falling on me, feeling the volume of my life bearing down on me. I lay listening to my heart, a lonely muscle, opening and closing in the darkness inside my body. When I fell asleep, eventually, I dreamed of a dark blue sea of babies rolling in the waves, being tossed ashore, sightless, into my arms, which could neither hold them, nor let them go.