HONKY IN THE WOODPILE Page 9

  “Negligible,” Moril said firmly. “We are strict about that sort of thing. We have heavy fines for a company that lets oil leak.”

  “But you can hardly impose fines on the American navy, surely?”

  “Oh, the Americans are as they say ‘good neighbors.’ One would hardly know that the base is there, except naturally that some of the personnel come to Brascoso at weekends. Also now and then it’s a sight for tourists in boats to watch a submarine or some other ship moving around the harbor. That’s all.”

  “You can’t get to it from the landward side, can you?” I murmured. Fierro had told me about that. About one-third of the surface of Petty Madrugada had been fenced off to provide training-grounds for the army and coastguard, under the direction of the US Marine Corps, and all the former inhabitants evicted. The insurgents had been delighted in an upside-down kind of way, because this meant that about three or four thousand people who had been grossly offended by the government had been scattered all over the place, boiling with rage. Most of them had fled to the remotest of all the islands, like Galejo, in the hope that the government might not be able to meddle with them again.

  Unfortunately they hadn’t sparked off enough support for Juan Bautiz’ to make Deniz’s uprising successful. Nonetheless Fierro had assured me that according to recent reports he’d received in Havana that resentment was still there just below the surface, waiting to blow off. Another few years and it would be forgotten, though, and that naturally was what the garzos were relying on.

  I told myself to stop thinking about the matter. I was here for a strictly limited purpose. Biting off more than I could chew had long been a bad habit of mine, and I was trying to cure myself of it.

  In any case three or four thousand people out of a total population approaching six million was a pretty small proportion.

  “And there,” Moril said proudly, “is the Ocean Bridge.”

  Yes, that certainly was impressive. At this point the Toblino, the straight between the two big islands, was no more than three hundred yards wide. The bridge itself, though, was three-quarters of a mile long. Had to be. The rock at the water’s edge was too friable to support its full weight, and had been eroded and undercut by the constant gnawing of the sea. So they had divided it into three separate suspension-spans. Immense concrete towers two hundred feet high were set back from the strait where the bedrock was more solid; the roadway crossed them some fifty feet below their tops, and over them swooped the thick cables anchored at each end by vast concrete buttresses sunk in the steep hillside. It was effectively three bridges in one… and beautifully proportioned, too.

  “The first design they tried,” Moril said, “called for a pier in the middle of the Toblino. It was impossible to build that. The first day, three workmen were washed away.”

  Looking down as the approach road twined towards the bridge I saw the water swirling and sucking in the miniature maelstroms which had given the channel its name—from torbellino, whirlpool.

  Oh, Christ, why can’t human beings learn a bit of common sense? I was aching—aching—with nostalgia. Every curve of the road kept bringing me in sight of things that reminded me of home. Some day, when I feel up to it, I’ll go back; I left with a load of rage and hate which it’ll take a year or two yet for me to digest.

  But here the air smelled like home; the plants with their fat dark-green leaves and their gorgeous flowers looked like home; the sound of the sea was like home; when up there on the hillside a girl carrying water caught sight of us and waved, she looked like the girls at home, dressed in much the same way, built the same way, grinning the same way. Kids wandering around with nothing much to do because here only the children of garzos got any education past the age of eleven—and a quarter of the population didn’t even get that much—yelled and threw pebbles after the car the way I used to when I was a boy.

  And earned a scowl from Jerry, the apprentice Sabatano in the front seat.

  I can’t figure out this damnfool species. I just can’t. The balmiest climates, the loveliest beaches, the richest soils, the starriest nights—nothing, nothing is enough for human beings. Black, white, or pin-striped.

  What was the life-expectancy of those pretty girls trudging back with full water-cans to their hillside hovels: thirty, thirty-five? (I remembered what Dolly had said last evening.) And wouldn’t they look old long before then, toothless and bleary-eyed, because even though the means and the knowledge existed to give them happy healthy lives someone else down the hill was too damned greedy to let them have their share of the new goodies?

  “What’s that?” I asked as the car nosed on to the bridge, and pointed. Tied with a straw rope to one side of the dominating concrete tower, at about the height you could reach by balancing dangerously on the railings along the sidewalk, was a bunch of flowers with the stems upward, and underneath a smear of what looked like dried blood.

  “That? Oh!” Moril hesitated, wondering whether to be frank. He opted in favor. “It’s badoan, I’m afraid. A charm of some kind.”

  “I thought you said it had been reduced to mere folklore?” I countered, not without malice.

  “Oh, here and there one does still find people who take it seriously.”

  “Fascinating,” I said. “Do you know what the charm means?”

  He hesitated again, longer this time, and eventually sighed.

  “I hear that a young man from a village up the hill went out of his mind last week and threw himself off the bridge. The charm will be to prevent his spirit returning to haunt his family.”

  “Fascinating!” I repeated, and made a note.

  At the far end of the bridge there was a guardpost—manned not by the police but by the army. What few police I’d seen since my arrival had been on routine traffic-duty and the like. They also, of course, dealt with criminal offences—according to Fierro with incredible laxity, having a detection and conviction rate of about one case in every fourteen or fifteen reported—and such administrative matters as registration of aliens. When they could be bothered. He’d told me that packs of registration fichas forwarded by hotel managers, as was obligatory, sometimes went straight into the garbage-cans, so there was little chance of anyone paying special attention to me directly after my arrival.

  If only he’d known! I stopped myself glancing resentfully at Moril.

  Having had no external enemies during the greater part of Madrugada’s history, the army had for a long time been mainly ceremonial. Real power rested with the Sabatanos; informally, but with access to gossip, scandal, rumor and the reports of paid spies, they had been the people who underpinned the wealthy garzo families. And there had never been compulsory military service for the excellent reason that it would have trained men not so much to defend the country as to overthrow its rulers. There had always been a lot of muted hate here.

  Things had changed a great deal in the past few years, though. Under American guidance the army was being turned into a highly efficient fighting force, and—since it still had no external enemies—that meant into a highly efficient means of internal repression. The people, however, identified with the army because it had offered a haven to so many young men who would otherwise have been out of work. There had been a slump in formerly prosperous industries such as fishing and there had been several bad harvests recently which bankrupted farmers. No doubt they would continue to like the army until it was used to put down a genuinely popular revolution, not a half-cock affair like Deniz’s.

  Still, as yet the power remained with the Sabatanos, and most likely would do so for another generation if there weren’t that revolution. I had a neat demonstration of the fact. Another car was approaching the guardpost from the opposite direction, with American naval plates on it—from the submarine base, no doubt. As it came in sight one of the soldiers flagged it down.

  Our own driver, though, who had been taking it easy on the bridge to let me shoot a few pictures, merely tapped his horn—long-short-long—and they waved u
s by without stopping. The American car had no such privileged treatment; it was almost at a halt when we drew level.

  Curious, I glanced at its passengers—and my heart fell clear to my shoes.

  Riding in the back, looking worried and miserable, was Gilbert Quentin.

  Had he noticed me? Hadn’t he? I hoped he hadn’t had time—but he had turned his eyes in my direction as the cars passed each other, and he might have recognized my face…

  “Señor Curfew, you are all right?” Moril inquired solicitously.

  “Me? I’m fine,” I lied. “The sun’s a bit bright, I guess. I ought to be wearing my dark glasses.” They were in my pocket. I slipped them on.

  “This really is the red carpet treatment you’ve laid on,” I added.

  “Good, I’m glad you find it so. And now soon there will be lunch, at one of the finest restaurants in Madrugada.”

  I hoped I’d have regained my appetite by the time we reached it. Right now I was sick. I could already see myself having to leave the country even before Fierro’s message arrived to vouch for me.

  THIRTEEN

  They fed me at a very exclusive hotel indeed, whose normal clients were probably all millionaires. Dollar-type, maybe even pound-type. It was called the Santiago and sat atop a high headland overlooking the sea on the outskirts of a small port named Lastilas. The meal was fantastic, with a choice of local or international cuisine; I picked the local, found it delicious, and discovered that I did have my appetite back in spite of all.

  The restaurant was in the open air, on a marble-floored terrace, and from it I had a fine view of the twin islands of Aragon and Asturias simmering in the sun four and six miles off-shore respectively. We were shaded by palm-thatch and cooled by electric fans.

  Partway through the meal there was a loud chugging noise and a broken-down old ferry laden with ramshackle lorries, its rail lined with black women clutching market-baskets, crossed the strait from Aragon. It left a smear of diesel-fumes like a graffito on the sky. I read a rusty sign on its wheelhouse which said LASTILAS-CAYACHUPO blur-smear DOBL. Obviously the galloping inflation due to the spending power of tourists was now running too fast for anyone to bother to repaint the obliterated fare.

  “Afterwards we shall go to Aragon,” Moril said. “Not of course in that leaky tub.”

  In fact we crossed to Cayachupo in a sparkling-white launch belonging to the hotel and piloted by the manager’s oldest son who was to act as our guide. Our fellow-passengers included an American naval officer and his wife—he was in plain clothes but I gathered by a bit of judicious eavesdropping that he was at least an admiral—another American, a businessman here for the fishing who had hurt his hand and was filling in time, and two middle-aged Spanish-speaking couples, all white. Moril accompanied me, but left his bodyguards Tom and Jerry with the car.

  The ferry had made its turnaround at the quay beyond the headland where the hotel stood, and we overtook it after a few minutes. It was even more crowded than before, and I hated to think what it would be like on, say, a saint’s day. One or two of the passengers on it waved, but most stared at us in sullen apathy.

  “Aragon is an island of great interest to tourists,” Moril informed me. “It is the most important center of badoan, about which we talked already, and performers from here will be a great feature of the president’s birthday fiesta. Yet even Cayachupo remains extremely quaint. One might almost call it unspoiled.”

  Well, if by “unspoiled” you mean it stinks of sewage leaking from cracked earthenware pipes running down the middle of the main street…

  Briskly our young guide led us along the beach from the spot where he had grounded the launch with help from a couple of teenage boys who received a hundred doblones apiece for their trouble, to see the quaint fishermen mending their quaint nets, and then up some quaint cobbled alleys to interrupt some quaint old craftsmen in their quaint little shops making quaint ornaments and trinkets. Resignedly they ceased work and tried to wheedle us into buying something.

  “But everything’s so cheap here!” the admiral’s wife marveled.

  Life too, lady, I told her in the privacy of my skull. I was remembering the last time I’d got involved with a tour like this. In South Africa. Only that time I hadn’t been one of the visitors. I’d been pretending to be a Bantu to escape Oom Vorster’s secret police, and I didn’t get away with it because I was obviously so much healthier and better fed than anyone else for miles.

  Speaking of secret police, though…

  Mixed up with a lot of chit-chat, our guide had mentioned one point about Aragon which interested me considerably. According to him, this was the only one of the—how many were there? Forty-something?—inhabited islands composing Madrugada which didn’t have a single church on it, because the badoan cult was so strong.

  The rest of the party had been content to react with comments you might have expected, like, “You don’t say!”

  But I was damned sure I’d seen, over the roofs of the low-built thatched houses composing most of the little town, at least one church. At any rate there was a tower with a bell hanging in it. And I was eager for a close sight of that. I’ve never made any secret of the fact that I think the black man is superior to the white because the black didn’t invent H-bombs, nerve-gas, concentration camps… or the Christianity which excuses all these things. But I’d never before been in a place where a black religion was holding its own against the white man’s faith, and I wanted to be assured that the claim was true.

  It was the American with the bandaged hand who gave me my chance to slip away from Moril. He spoke fluent Spanish with a strong Mexican accent, and he was plying the Sabatano with questions about local crops, labor resources, wages and standards of literacy, as though he were seriously interested in persuading his company to set up a branch here. Fine. I devoted a few minutes to establishing that I was anyhow liable to dart off from the group without warning, to find a better angle for a picture, and after the third or fourth time Moril gave up worrying about clinging to my coat-tails.

  So I hung back as the rest of the visitors adjourned to the next shop on the itinerary, and when Moril’s attention was fully distracted I dodged into a side-way.

  It was steep, and roughly cobbled, and it twisted and wound like a schizophrenic snake, but I’d kept the direction of that suspect church in my head, and within about three minutes I found myself in plain sight of my goal. The guide had been right. This building must have been intended as a church, granted, but it certainly wasn’t one any longer. It had been turned into a—what was the word I’d heard from Adelita Fal? Oh, yes: a geraba.

  At any rate, I’d never seen a Christian church decorated all over with the sort of symbols I’d seen on Lorreo’s guitar, as well as in paintings by Rafé Ponza that his brother had shown me photos of: watching eyes, outlines of hands, mouths full of exaggerated teeth. And most definitely of all you do not find a church ornamented with drawings of an erect penis about to enter a big hairy vagina.

  Well, what do you know?

  Chuckling, I halted in the mouth of the alley and looked about me. Very few people were in sight. An old man was sitting on the front steps of the ex-church, very black, very bald and with one eye nearly shut, engaged in picking over some odds and ends on a cloth spread across his lap. But on spotting me he hissed and folded the corners of the cloth together to hide the contents, after which he stared at me with his good eye.

  I let him stare while I took in details of my surroundings, and stopped chuckling.

  This was a sort of tiny plaza, ten yards on a side. Under a tree planted in the middle for shade some men were listlessly playing with plastic dice. Presumably they lived here. Facing the geraba was one fairly substantial building, its original tiled roof replaced partly by the universal palm-thatch, partly by sheets of black polythene and a few bits of corrugated iron. For the rest, the plaza was fronted by hovels; I guessed most of them had only one room. They were built of adobe, raw stone, and
of course thatch. Tin washtubs hung on nails by some of the doorways. There was a heap of rusting cans to my right, and a dull-faced kid about eight years old was carefully washing them one by one in a plastic bucket, because they were too useful to be thrown away. One—sort of—shop, with two baskets outside, the left containing a few small eggs, the right empty… but there were what looked like fishguts on the ground next to it, and flies buzzed there in a black swarm. Ragged washing draped to dry on a pole. In the shade which the shabby clothes cast a baby naked in a wicker cradle. More flies were walking on its face, drinking the moisture from its eyes, but it wasn’t crying. Why should it complain when it had never known anything else?

  Madrugada in the late twentieth century.

  Abruptly the left half of the point-topped double west door of the geraba opened and a girl came out. I glanced at her automatically, and the glance turned into a stare. She was staring at me, too. She wasn’t wearing her cheap finery today—that would no doubt be reserved for high-days and for trips to Brascoso, the Big City—but a shabby black dress with a plaited straw belt, a straw hat with a bite out of its brim, and bare feet.

  Yes, it was the girl I’d seen at Praxas’s repository. And I’d been right; even though she was thin as matchsticks, she was pretty when she wasn’t scowling with rage.

  The old man sitting by the door, still holding together the edges of the cloth spread on his lap so that the contents were concealed, looked from her to me, then back again, and asked a question in a creaking voice. She answered in a sharp tone which indicated these two were not exactly best friends, brushed by him, and approached me.

  “It is the señor who stopped that man hitting me in Brascoso,” she said. Her accent was thick, but not by any means the worst I’d heard since I arrived; I understood her pretty well. “What did he tell you about me to excuse himself?”