In the hideous interpretation of “Angelitos negros” that was playing, the trumpets seemed to announce the reading of a royal edict at Playa Bo. The guests chatted and held their appetizers on little napkins, all local delicacies prepared in Giorgio’s restaurant. Eel sushi and green plantains, pigeon pea and coconut frittata, grouper and passion-fruit brochettes, etc. Nenuco, working as a valet that evening, arranged the cars and made sure the guests entered the property through the proper gate, walking the two hundred meters to the house through a garden filled with crotons, bromeliads, palms, cayenne, lemons, and avocados, at the center of which Malagueta performed his piece for the guests to enjoy. That’s why everyone turned to look when an ancient Lincoln Continental drove up to the very lip of the terrace, spitting gravel as it pushed through. From that black submarine emerged a rail-thin man wearing a long-sleeved, cream-colored guayabera and a pair of polyester khakis. He carried a locked portfolio in his right hand, the kind used only by medical suppliers for their samples and papers.
Orlando Kunhardt dug up corpses. He gave life back to objects from other times: archaeologist, anthropologist, restorer. His eyes—trained at UNAM in the seventies—didn’t need books, magnifying glasses, or chemicals to determine, in a minute, the authenticity of a find such as the chest now resting in Giorgio and Linda’s room, with the AC going, just as Orlando had recommended over the phone. Once in the room, he pulled on a pair of green latex gloves; outside the room the earth shook with apocalyptic hard techno and he signaled for Giorgio to close the bedroom door. He pulled a piece of hardened mud off the chest. It was possible to see ancient ant tunnels on the chunk of dirt. “It’s oak,” was the first thing he said as he caressed the chest’s bruised wood and felt the bass from the party music resonating through it. He walked around it while lighting up a menthol Nacional. He noticed the chest had a missing hinge. “For the chest alone, I can get you about 12,000 dollars,” he said, blinking because smoke had gotten in one of his eyes. “That is, unless you want to donate it,” he added, very seriously, as though it was no joke. He knelt to try and force the lock, but sensed his client’s impatience. “It’s okay, we’ll pretend it’s a young virgin,” he said. Giorgio had already described the discovery to him and Orlando had come prepared. He pulled a ring of antique keys from his portfolio, selected one in an F shape, and inserted it into the lock, which gave instantly. When the chest creaked open, the second hinge fell and the lid came loose; Giorgio had to rush to grab it so it wouldn’t fall to the floor. Inside they found a leather envelope, a tortoise shell, and a long braid of brown hair. Orlando lifted the envelope as the cigarette dangled from his lip. He pulled out a handful of thick papers. He thought his eyes were going to pop out. Giorgio pretended to be curious but decided to wait for Dr. Kunhardt’s verdict before asking questions. Foreign specialists would confirm his findings later. “Man alive, this is a real treasure,” said Kunhardt, not letting go of the Nacional between his lips. The first seven engravings, all signed by a certain Côte de Fer, showed buccaneer life in the seventeenth century. The technique was impeccable, the documentation of the details of domestic life, invaluable. The other engravings were an erotic series in which a woman, most likely a prostitute, was submitted to the desires of a group of men who joyfully filled all her orifices. The images were extremely graphic and bore some relation to the brutal aesthetic of Goya’s The Disasters of War. The poses were increasingly more violent until they reached the last one, in which a black man sodomized her while a one-armed man cut off her head with a scimitar. I should have killed him twice, thought Giorgio, who recognized the victim’s face as Linda’s. He took some pleasure in thinking they would soon find Côte de Fer’s skull, shattered by Roque’s sharp blow earlier that morning. Orlando was talking about pigments and rust and blood. “This is major league, Giorgio, this guy was a genius.” Was, thought Giorgio, and he left the room and let Iván de la Barra go in and conjecture with Orlando, imagining the moment when the engravings were created, trying to smell the smoked meat on the paper, speculating about the school the artist belonged to, making the presumption that he’d come from France, and calculating the possible prices the pieces would sell for at international art auctions. “Imagine, an artist as great as Goya one hundred years earlier in Hispaniola,” Giorgio heard the Cuban say.
Everything with Argenis had been an accident. Giorgio hadn’t imagined another human could replicate himself in the past the way he did. But maybe more than an accident, it had been a stroke of luck. As he walked through the party, he began to celebrate the final step of what he’d planned that morning when the English smuggler had shown him the press. He’d sell half the engravings to collectors and museums and exhibit the other half in the Casa Museo Côte de Fer, which would be housed on the first floor of the laboratory. On its outside walls, they’d recreate a buccaneer settlement; the guides would be dressed as pirates (although that might be too much). The government would give them a subsidy and the complex would live off the business from the nearby all-inclusive hotels.
This compulsive optimism was proof the ecstasy he’d taken a half hour earlier was beginning to take effect. Elizabeth had made him close his eyes and open his mouth to swallow the two green pills, the same color green as the Bayer anti-mosquito candles that burned in a spiral.
The first wave of pleasure forced him to sit down. He felt the drug-stimulated serotonin infusing his brain and making everything agreeable, desirable, and possible. Wearing a white halter and pants that were green like the pills, Linda danced in a corner of the terrace with a bottle of water in her hand. Surely she felt like he did. They exchanged a complicit look, like old friends. He loved her. She was his queen. Suddenly, the idea struck him as real: he was a king, the king of this world, the big head, the one who knew what was at the bottom of the sea. Generally speaking, he usually went on his way, not giving too much thought to any of that so he wouldn’t go crazy, pulling the strings on Giorgio and Roque from his cell in La Victoria as though he were playing a video game, accumulating goods, trophies, experience, enjoying the view, inexistent in that future of acid rains and epidemics in which prison was preferable to the outside.
Thanks to the establishment of this lab, he thought, Said’s government will have something to help regenerate part of what was lost. This lab is the altar I’m going to build for Olokun, in which I’ll turn Omicunlé’s Yoruba prayers into an environmental call to action. His work was finished. Elizabeth was making the dancers grind out on the floor with the Chemical Brothers’ “Out of Control”; a huddle formed in the center, where something was happening. Giorgio got up to see, proud and happy. He peered between the heads of his guests and saw a young man breakdancing. He was going in circles at a breathtaking speed, posed on the axis of his back while holding a fetal position. In Giorgio’s dilated pupils, his figure seemed to become a lotus flower in a cloudscape. Without slowing down, he froze, his elbow on the ground and a fist under his defiant chin while his other hand went to his waist, as if waiting for a photo. It was Said Bona, now twenty-two years old.
The victory odes Giorgio had been singing to himself came to a dead halt. He was terrified. The flashes from the disco ball made everything move in slow motion. Here was the person responsible for the deplorable state of the sea a few decades from now. Here was the reason for his initiation. All that for this. Quickly and overwhelmingly, he had before him the real goal of his mission: to give Said Bona a message—as president, to avoid accepting biological weapons from Venezuela. To tell him that, in the future, when he was elected president, he needed to reject them: Giorgio had to convince him. But just as quickly, he began to think about the other consequences of that decision: if Said Bona followed his advice and there was no chemical spill after the tsunami, would Esther Escudero go looking for him? Would Eric Vitier find him among the hustlers at El Mirador? Would he be crowned in that shanty in Villa Mella and allowed the life he’d come to so appreciate? Would Giorgio disappear? He imagined Linda covering her head with her hands, out of her mind when her seas turned into a shit shake, while here, in the past of those seas destined to disappear, she was dancing happily with the prospect of the new lab next to a young and charming Iván. Giorgio walked toward the cliff. A little group was sitting on the rocks, smoking a blunt while looking at the stars. In his mind, he reviewed all he’d experienced and accumulated, then sat down among those passing around that giant joint. He felt the intense pulse of his three lives at the same time and the weight of the sacrifice his little game was demanding of him now. The pot had given the ecstasy a second wind. He went back to the house to talk to Said, who was hanging out with Elizabeth behind the turntables. She was clearly enchanted. “This is Said,” she said, introducing him. “He’s a graffiti artist and does spoken word. And he’s great.”
“I know who he is,” said Giorgio, immediately capturing the attention of the future president, who was all ears when it came to flattery.