It was hideously muggy in the airport and no one on the ground spoke anything except Spanish. The air had the cloying dampness of doom-freighted dreams, and as I wandered under the vaulted ceiling of the upper deck, details of the previous night’s dream came back to me. It had involved a restaurant kitchen and an exchange of automobiles and repeatedly thwarted escapes from a setting my brain had manufactured from bits of my hometown outside Rochester, the housing projects near the Fourteenth Street exit of FDR Drive, and the island of Santorini in Greece. The green bag slung over my shoulder had also been with me in the dream.
Unhelpful phrases drifted into my mind from some flight-numb Babel of movie lingo. Las teclas de mando. El cristal opaco. Dispositivo de sincronization. Chaotic crowds surged through the building, marching over the shiny ecru floors and strips of crimson carpeting, up and down stubby escalators. I pictured tropically costumed fire ants gnawing their way through the landscape, bearing off shreds of linoleum, wrought iron, plastic, and plush leatherette in their clacking mandibles. They would leave nothing behind but the building outline, a blueprint of filaments that would stand for a moment like something in a cartoon before it collapsed into smouldering dust.
Loudspeakers layered the confusion. Flights were boarding, flights were departing, flights were delayed. But which flights, at what gates, how soon, how long, it was impossible to tell. Through the massive windows a sky dotted with white pastry clouds. From the density of human traffic it looked as though the entire population had chosen to flee on the same afternoon. Yet there was something inertial and self-defeating in all the excited motion, a feeling that the swarm was really going nowhere, circling boarding lounges and duty-free shops and the incongruous neon cocktail bars like jaded shoppers picking over a depleted mall.
It was the kind of airport where inconvenient political types and luckless bystanders were sometimes mowed down in crossfire. Fear wafted off certain people, rolled through the air of departure gates, pooled around public telephones and ticket counters. Fear laced the ambient chill of souvenir shops and boutiques, and in the sultry open passages that caught the heat of the day, fear led the fearful traveler to anticipate the stench of something large and dead trapped under the glistening floor.
Sound and image peeled apart. In a men’s room mirror I saw a short, narrow man, his face lined by incipient jowls, shaggy black hair turning glossy with sweat. “That’s you,’’ I told myself disgustedly. I had “retired” from acting and now acknowledged my reluctance to commit my postsurgical face to celluloid, tracing the lines of my scars with a finger. Blue sunglasses completed a punky abstraction. I removed the shades and examined my Levi’s, ripped at the knees in advance of the fashion, my hand-stitched shirt wilting in the heat, my clown-white skin. I looked enough like a queer to cause trouble in South America. I hoped the trouble would come later on. At a row of urinals behind me, men pulled their cocks out wearily, as if handling unreliable appliances.
I leaned into my reflection and bared my teeth. My mouth is one of my better features. Somewhere along the gum behind the last of my upper molars, I felt the jagged outcrop of what I concluded was an emerging wisdom tooth. It felt like a tiny chicken bone or metal spoke. The tissue around it was raw, since my finger came out red.
It was easy to lose my identity in a place that was more or less nowhere. If someone had asked my business, I might have pulled Paul’s film script from my bag and pointed out my lines, run through with yellow marker. On the other hand, my link to any film set or indeed to any narrative felt extremely tenuous.
The agent at the Avianca counter had the wary face of a scavenging owl, puce fingernails honed into lethal weapons. With insistent gestures, irritatingly overdrawn for the amusement of people behind me on line, she indicated that connecting flights to Barranquilla Santa Marta Cartagena departed from a different airport. I had missed the 2:30 shuttle. I could get another one. Yes, I could use the same ticket. The bus was outside.
As she enumerated these facts in a brutal parody of Americanese, the agent’s face conveyed disgust at my presence in the airport, and in the country generally. She threw in “have a nice day” as a parting malediction.
I stumbled through automatic doors into the glare of day. A fluttering, fiery wind smelling of gasoline and putrefaction rolled across my face and clattered through the diseased palms along the road divider. On the bus, I pretended not to understand that the driver wanted money for the trip. I waved my ticket, gestured at the receding airport. I emitted a variety of frustrated noises to convey my belief that the ticket included the price of the bus ride.
Through the oblong windows, a landscape of agricultural monotony refuted the myth of El Dorado. The driver did not insist. He was a round man with a pencil moustache and mousy brown eyes who could not use any trouble. I considered this a good omen. It would have been difficult to surrender the five-dollar fare, since I had boarded the plane in New York with eight dollars and some change.
At a smaller version of the main airport, I booked a seat on the coastbound shuttle. I discovered that I’d left the sunglasses on the bus—a bad sign, I thought, that canceled out the free ride. On the upper deck I found an empty cafeteria with a view of the airfield. The diffuse sunlight falling into the gray-carpeted gallery gave it a spectral chill, like a black-and-white crime scene photo. I drank a beer and ate a pork sandwich at a littered formica table. I lit cigarettes and smoked them and crushed them out on a gold cardboard ashtray and watched planes touch down and lift off. Through the soundproof windows they looked like fragile silver toys.
From the table I could view the departure gate. A spectacularly ugly soldier with a stringy moustache rocked on his boot heels beside a phallus-shaped trash cylinder. Accidentally catching his eye, I found myself engaging his vulpine gaze with something like defiance, working a gradual, ambiguous smile onto my perspiring face.
The soldier spat thoughtfully through his fingers. He wiped the snot on his snot-green trousers. I swallowed a mouthful of beer suds. I put down the cup. I willed a foggy look into my eyes and fisted all but my middle finger, which I tapped “absently” against my lips. His scowl expanded. He stroked his submachine gun with unconscious lubricity. The possibility of senseless homicide flickered briefly in humid eyes, followed by a glaze of tropical lassitude.
I had only one book in my bag, The Portable Prescott. I dug it out and began reading about the trial of Atahuallpa, the last of the Incas, who had been condemned for breaking the laws of a church he did not belong to. The arrival of white men and their microbes into the Americas coincided with apocalyptic prophecies, astral portents, comets, shooting stars, the superstitious tokens of an ancient, flawed science.
The flight was delayed. The boarding area filled with flashy Colombians exuding a Halloween esprit. I purchased another waxed paper cup of beer with a U.S. dollar. I now had six dollars. I pictured my late arrival in Cartagena, and related complications. I was not clear about my destination, having written “Plaza de Bolivar” on the back of an envelope while Paul gabbed my ear off on the phone. “Write it down,” he’d said, “if we’re not at the airport go there and look for us.” Paul had told me a lot of things I hadn’t really paid attention to. “You’re going to love how stupid everything is,” he had assured me with asperity. Perhaps Plaza de Bolivar was not a hotel but a general location, there could be many hotels there. A pleasant feeling of alcoholic decrepitude warred inside me with a mildly alarmist trend. I wondered how things would play out if I blew my remaining dollars on drink. Not so wonderfully, perhaps.
Across the airfield, the sun sank behind a perimeter of plane trees and umbrella pines. Orange and purple wrinkles fissured the lower sky, furrowed clouds like watered silk catching in a cosmic drain. I hauled my bag to the boarding gate. Very Mardi Gras. Several swarthy Medellín-cartel types, their open shirts baring medallions and chains nestled in rampant chest hair, were traveling with large, effervescent women with dramatically piled hair and livid eye makeup who resembled professional transvestites. It was some sort of ghoul party of Bogotá high rollers, nerved up for a weekend of fancy fucking. A cocktail wagon had been rolled out. A stewardess ladled punch from a plastic punchbowl, handing it out with sacramental fervor.
I felt that these large, awful people were using the air I needed to breathe. Olfactory surprises mined the area—patchouli oil, Paco Rabanne, Opium, sweat. A cloud of tobacco smoke swirled at waist level, roiling under metallic ceiling lights. The airfield darkened against the glowing necklaces of runway lights.
Time lumbered along. A sour, overdrawn feeling spread among the crowd. Finally a rope barring the boarding corridor was unhooked. The revelers nearest the drinks wagon scrambled onto the DC-10 first, shrieking, tripping over luggage carts, their laughter swallowed by the roar of idling jet engines.
When the plane reached altitude the seatbelt sign blinked off. A number of people interpreted this as a signal to amble through the cabin. I was strapped in beside an ample woman wearing a cowrie necklace and the maquillage of a Times Square B-girl. Pumpkin faces inflamed with liquor and dread floated through the cabin on waves of rancid cologne. I heard singing. Hearty, off-key choruses about fiesta time in Cali. The plane entered a lightning storm that knocked it violently through the clouds.
Screams rose as the plane dipped sickeningly down, slashing through strata of atmospheric muck. It quickly fell to an altitude where the quiltwork land became visible through the double plastic windows. Moisture was condensing between the thicknesses of Plexiglas. The aubergine veins of river tributaries suggested ideal crash sites. The evening light was dissolving in darkness. Suddenly the plane lurched back up into the clouds, obeying some fixed, suicidal instrumentation. I felt my bowels turn to pudding.
In scattered moments of equilibrium the more determined passengers resumed singing and stumbling down the aisles, as if to fill the stale recycled air with proof of their calypso élan.
The storm broke a few moments before landing. Then the plane went in so smoothly it surprised everybody, provoking a big ovation for the pilots.
The aircraft emptied in a curious hush. Rainwater stippled the oily tarmac. Amber floodlights marked the route into the terminal.
The desuetude of a jungle backwater greeted me. Two military cops stood near a closed customs table beside the arrival gate, yawning as they waved the debarking passengers through. The rain-slaked air muffled footsteps, absorbed voices like thicknesses of cotton. I walked down an empty corridor parallel to the building entrance. Behind me the clamor of footsteps was matched, outside the building, with car engines coughing into life. The corridor led nowhere. Shuttered kiosks and darkened ticket counters lined the way to a metal gate drawn across a black thruway linking separate wings of the building. Through the rust-smeared gate I watched a mound of rags squirming inside a wet cardboard tent. A black foot livid with scabs poked from the rags, its yellow heel planted in a long, shallow puddle.
I hurried back toward the echoes of departing passengers. After the flight crew left the building, the whole airport would shut down like an unplugged refrigerator. In the main hall, the police were now sapping derelicts in the shadowy boarding lounges. Tacky rows of modular seating ranged beneath framed tourist posters, SEE PICO COLON read one, reminding me that intestinal parasites were a common hazard of the tropics.
A policeman whose moist pink lips and shiny teeth looked terrifying from seven feet away smashed his club against a prostrate, emaciated beggar’s medulla oblongata. He pounded the man’s skull methodically, each blow crisply audible and followed by howls of brain-obliterating pain. The last passengers of the Bogotá flight hurried past the cop and his victim, eyes fixed on the cream paneling and aluminum trim of the arrivals corridor, the backlit Duratrans ads for American Express, Bacardi, and Avianca. The lunging club and its supine target were met by the determined, discreet march of expensive heels toward the exit doors. The prone body, dressed in a gray shirt and red shorts, thrashed from side to side avoiding the club, which nevertheless sank into shoulders, biceps, and hips. When the body stopped moving the cop tucked the club into his thick belt with a snort of flustered satisfaction. He mopped sweat from his face with a soiled white handkerchief and then began kicking the moaning body at his feet. His thick boots struck ribs, making sharp sounds like the snapping of tree branches. The squirming derelict coiled in a fetal position, guarding his belly and groin with knees and elbows, hawking and spitting for breath.
The cop retracted a fastidiously pressed pantleg and slammed his boot into the man’s face, mashing the nose, shattering the teeth, muttering amused curses in a language I didn’t recognize. To my complete horror, he glanced up at me standing there and broke into a wide, idiotic grin, his pink tongue slavering behind his teeth like some giant, malefic infant.
“You go along now.” The rubbery black face spoke with maniacal benevolence, grinning as his boot continued kicking the pulped, dusky face on the floor. I saw a meat-red wound where the skin around the sallow eyes had been kicked open. Blood dappled the floor under his head, spidery filaments of blood had sprayed for from the body, like the trail of an insect brood emerging from hibernation underground.
The air in the carport was fresher than on the tarmac. Men wearing shorts and straw hats lounged against vintage sedans. A taxi caravan rumbled away from the building, exhaust trailing across slick pavement. Across the road, billboards for hotels hovered above a stone wall, overhanging vines casting intricate shadows over pastel swimming pools and deluxe cabanas.
A shirtless driver with coal-black skin and angular features waved from a fender. I nodded and went over. He mumbled something in Spanish.
“Plaza de Bolivar?” I asked in a hopeful way.
“Plaza de Bolivar,” he said thoughtfully, to himself, eyes fixed on the curb. He wore white shorts stained with what looked like pomegranate juice and plastic flipflops on wide feet. The nails on his big toes were raised and rocklike as if they had grown back deformed after an accident. His nappy hair was shorn in artistic tiers close to the scalp of a delicate oval head. He hawked up a bright green oyster of phlegm and studied its configuration on the asphalt for a moment, then said, “Okay, okay.”
I climbed into the rusted sedan. The car was a color redolent of the 1950s, a dusky avocado. Matted excelsior and sharp springs poked through tears in the seat cover. A tangled scapular swayed from the rearview mirror. The radio was picking up a crackly offshore station.
Where the road went into the rain forest it crumbled into cracks, lumps, and flooded trenches, like the cursed path in a Gothic opera. Lagoons of shallow mud slithered through pitch black villages of wattled shacks. The headlights swept overgrown savannahs of rubbish and spectral wooden longhouses. Brackish roadside ponds brimmed with hacked-up industrial tires, smashed wooden debris, and copious fecal matter. The road and the passing villages were solemn as graves, the only movement that of wandering livestock, blocky mammalian shapes lumbering through vegetal blackness. The passing landscape stank of rotting compost, mixed with gusting odors of polluted seawater.
The driver’s fierce, narrow face shifted with jolts of the road. A silver crucifix glinted on his sweat-dappled chest. I stared at him in the gleam of dashboard instruments, wondering what sort of living he made and what he spent his money on. Paul had touted Cartagena as a “fun town,” but Paul’s ideas of fun encompassed many places where half the people were starving to death.
“Antonio,” the driver said abruptly, pointing at his own chest.
“Antonio,” I repeated, and gave my own name. My pulse was still racing from the scene in the terminal. “A clear case where one can do nothing,” I thought, uncomfortably aware that an earlier generation of travelers, the kind you find in Graham Greene novels, would certainly have tried to intervene, even if it involved a lot of unpleasantness for themselves. I have often been forced to see that I belong to the race that sings under torture. Like most people.
I lit a cigarette and passed it to Antonio. He grunted and slowed the car. I let my fingertips rest on his hand a few seconds too long. He did not move his hand away. I had been a passive sack of water trapped in the machinery of travel for many hours, and almost instinctively wanted to make something happen. He gave me a look of frank inquiry. I nodded and made a gesture with my fingers.
He left the engine running while we coupled against the rear fender. Drizzle coated us like an aerosol spray. His long, skinny penis thrusting inside my rectum felt like a toothache dulled with Novocaine. I thought, “just like dogs,” and the animal spontaneity of this jungle fuck suggested a rich, secret world older than money, family, and private property. The radio throbbed eerily in the hushed forest. I would not have been surprised if, after the act, Antonio had thrown me in the ditch like a used condom.
Woody odors spread through the forest on the soft rain. On the far threshold of the forest floor, a rime of ghostly phosphorescence, a red-violet tracery skimmed the ground like a furry band of moving hieroglyphics.
The slippery flesh of the Colombian’s hips and stomach slapped against my buttocks. He came with a grunt and we got back in the car, heading for the sea. The moon lit up greenish mists between the trees. The crumbling road ultimately segued into a smooth coastal highway.
We arrived in Cartagena. The sea filled one side of a lunar landscape, penciled waves like corrugated iron fibrillating on a slithery column of moonlight. A blue moon hung over the bay, brushed by dark clouds. The walled city rose on the left, a giant pastry crust with cannons poking from its crenellations. Flood-lights spiking across the grass moat lit the massive stones as if for a Hollywood premiere.
The curving road revealed the outer city. Fishing boats clustered in a marina that flowed to a T-shaped esplanade and continued on the other side as a narrow, unnavigable canal. At the head of the esplanade stood a gelid bronze figure of Bolivar. At its far end, set back from the street, a gaudy nest of gingerbread baroque buildings with arched windows and sagging balconies crowded above a long, rotting arcade. Palms lined the sidewalks, fronds half-brown from dessication. A glass-and-steel cakebox palace, its flag-lined plaza adrool with fountains, floated on the black water of the marina.
Human figures crowded the esplanade, which had the look of a perpetual carnival. There were wagons selling boiled peanuts and ices, wheeled steam tables, people in straw hats and sandwich boards hawking lottery tickets, balloons, grotesquely fat women working the crowd with trays of smashed coconuts and sliced papaya balanced on their heads, refugees from a Botero painting.
The cab slipped through an opening in the walls. The inner city was a maze of Spanish houses crowded on cobbled streets. Dank gardens flashed behind wrought iron gates. Balconies overhung the wet streets. We passed several squares built around statues of saints and conquistadors. Odd patches of sidewalk and street were floodlit and occupied by slight soldiers who ambled, guns drawn, in the blue-white glare of mobile klieg lights. Antonio pointed out the soldiers, snorting contemptuously: “Cheeldren,” he explained.
A curtain of warm rain obscured the Plaza de Bolivar. There was a long arcade, anchored at one end by the Banco Nacionale de la Republica. At another corner of the park, the Palace of the Inquisition with thick wooden pillars. The desultory square itself, flower beds bristling with jasmine and birds of paradise, coconut palms soaring to the rooftops.
Antonio stopped the taxi in front of the hotel. I handed him the rest of my cash.
“I see you again,” he said. He rubbed his crotch and grinned. “Some night, here in the Plaza.”
I smiled awkwardly and lurched from the taxi into the rain, stepping into the protection of the arcade. The cab farted off down the jigsaw streets. I wondered what I would do if I had come to the wrong place, who would rescue an American without money in the asshole of the world.