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The Colombian Exchange By Peter
Edington The
taxi swept away from the hotel and the doorman carried our bags into the cool of
the foyer. 'Señor
Robertson-Nash, so nice to see you here again.'
The manager flicked his fingers as soon as he saw us, and a porter
appeared from thin air. 'Take Señor
Robertson-Nash's bags to 507' he said. The
double-barrelled surname sounded really funny in Spanish.
'Señorita Mitchell,' he handed me a key. 'Welcome to Nicaragua. You
are in room 506,' he said, in English. The
hotel was an odd mixture of Spanish Colonial and American Chromium.
The lift was all glass and you could look down on people's heads as you
went up, but the architecture was marble and columns.
The room, when the porter opened the door, had a huge bunch of flowers on
the table in the middle and the whole wall opposite was glass, with doors
opening onto a veranda that looked out into a sunset over Lake Managua. I
gave the bellboy a tip and never even noticed him leave the room.
I just stood there looking out across the lake at the sun.
The clouds were on fire. It
was so beautiful. I watched every
drop of colour drain from the sky into the lake until the room was almost dark.
I'd forgotten how quickly dusk falls out here. Suddenly
there was a knock at the door, the door that connected my room to his.
When I opened it, he was standing there, struggling with a bow tie that
didn't want to tie. 'Can
you do one of these?' he asked. We
fought with it for a while before he got it about right.
'I've got a meeting with some people in an hour,' he said.
'Then we're going out to dinner. I'd
love you to join us. Could you make
it?' I
panicked. 'How long have I got?'
and he smiled. 'Lots
of time. The meeting's at eight,
but we'll not be dining till about ten.' He
shrugged into his dinner jacket. 'How
do I look?' 'Great.'
I straightened his collar. 'You'll
have to tell me where to go.' 'I'll
book you a taxi for nine-thirty. Speak
to Alfonso, the manager, when you come down.
He'll have it all under control.' He
turned and kissed me. 'I'll look
forward to you coming.' The
restaurant, when I got there, had tables round a polished dance floor.
And great chandeliers. I
remember the chandeliers and the music! Sambas,
endless sambas from this six-piece band on a stage in one corner; all very
subdued, but so carnal, so Latin, ticking away like clockwork, winding you up
without you realising it. The
men at his table were very formal. There
was much scraping of chairs when I arrived and they all stood up and made little
bows as he introduced them to me. Of
course, I don't remember any of their names, but they were all important men
from the city – maybe one or two of them were in the government, or perhaps
the army. Anyway, they were very charming and the dinner went on till
well after midnight. He chose for
me - lamb with artichokes. It was
wonderful, with some incredibly expensive red wine and, at the end of it, the
men all asked me if they might smoke. It
was unreal, like something out of pre-war Hollywood. I
didn't really know what their meeting had been about.
They spoke too fast, except when they were talking directly to me, but
they were spending so much money - in a city that was half in ruins.
Just a mile from where we were eating, my taxi had driven round the edge
of the earthquake zone, past fires - actual bonfires - outside shanty huts of
wood and cardboard. The homeless
were living in amongst the wreckage of office blocks while these people had
everything. That's not how it's
supposed to be, is it? And
as the daylight crept in over the lake, we had lain together in my bed at the
hotel. That
was the first time he had made love to me, carefully to begin with, gently till
I cried out and pulled him to me. Later
we watched the sun light up the crater of Mount Masaya and drank fruit juice and
strong coffee and watched the new day. I
don't think he even went to bed after that.
He just got dressed and went back out. * In
the darkness, the girl feels the sharp prick on her face as another mosquito
draws blood from her cheek. She slaps listlessly at it.
The insects no longer anger her; they have become as much part of her
life as the filth of the room she is imprisoned in. She does not consciously notice them, any more than she
consciously notices the sweet stench of her own clothing or the reeking bucket
in the corner of her cell. But,
despite the lethargy that drains her, she is angry; angry to find herself awake
again, returned by consciousness to the squalor of this place. She
rolls onto her back on the hard, metal bed and stares at the invisible ceiling,
listening. Something moves in the
darkness, high up in the corner. She
relaxes. It is her friend, the only
one of God's creatures that cares about her in this tropical nightmare.
It is the tiny green-grey gecko that shares her prison.
Every night it patrols the dripping walls, hunting for the mosquitoes
that plague this coast of Nicaragua. Another
insect is moving over her sweating skin. It
has crawled out of the bedding. The
girl snarls and throws off the coarse woollen blanket.
She rolls clumsily out of bed, her bare feet on the earth floor.
The gecko is gone, frozen into silent immobility by her unexpected
movement. In
only underwear and a khaki shirt that bulges over her pregnant belly, Tanya
Mitchell scratches at herself in the darkness and listens for the sounds of the
jungle outside, but all the creatures have fallen still, as though they too have
been frightened by her sudden action. In
that moment, a piercing shaft of soundless lightning etches the bars of the high
window and, for an instant, she sees the lizard dwarfed by its own huge flat
shadow. Then it is gone. The
girl flinches in the total darkness as thunder explodes round her tiny prison,
then incandescent light sears the air again and the storm arrives, starting with
the staccato drumming of drops of rain on the corrugated iron roof.
It grows to a violent crescendo and she drags the rickety chair up, under
the high window. As she always does
when a storm comes, she stands on the chair and presses her face against the
bars, thrusting her arms out into the cleansing rain.
She draws the wet hands across her face, drinking the clear water,
scrubbing at the filth, running cool fingers through her dank hair, once
bleached by the Caribbean sun, but now matted and dark with sweat. Under
the hammering of the rain, a waterfall gushes from the roof, cascading to the
ground, turning the earth to mud. The
girl drags off her soiled shirt and holds it in the torrent - gathering water.
The cold, wet cloth caresses her face, her arms, her breasts, her naked
body. Suddenly
her hands stop on the swell of her belly, distended with her unborn child.
My baby will be born in this God-forsaken room! She touches her body, feeling the foetus move within her.
I don't want this child!
Oh God, I do not want this baby. Not
here. Not like this. The
rain forgotten, she throws the shirt down on the earth floor and drops exhausted
onto the rough bed. Rage
wells up inside her, overcoming fear, feeding defiance till she is on her feet
again, staggering across the black room, groping for the invisible walls until
she finds herself crashing bare hands against the hard wood of the door,
shouting for someone to come. Anyone.
Someone. For God's sake, is
there nobody? Finally, she sinks to
her knees on the hard ground, begging, pleading but there is nothing.
Only emptiness. Even
the storm has become subdued, growling away across the forest, leaving only
dripping trees and the returning black of night. The
gecko moves again across the room and slowly the girl fumbles in the blackness
on her hands and knees, feeling blindly on the floor for her shirt.
When she finds it, it is muddy with the foul earth.
She pulls it over her bare shoulders. In
a moment of clarity, she knows exactly how long she has been in this prison.
There is a record, scraped on the white-washed walls.
She feels the scratches with her fingers. She cannot see them in the darkness, but she knows them off
by heart. It would be nearly two
hundred days, when the dawn light comes. She
had not started carving the marks at first, when she had thought they would let
her out - take her somewhere else - send her back to England.
But now, when she remembers, she marks one every day, just after the
wizened native woman brings the pitcher of stale water and bowl of peas and
rice. If she is lucky, she
sometimes finds some pieces of fish in amongst the rice.
She bears the Indian no ill will. She
is only doing what somebody pays her to do - bring food and empty the stinking
bucket. The
girl lies down again on the hard bed. There
was a time, it must have been two weeks ago, when she hoped she might die.
During the fever, she had not ticked off those days.
They had passed in a shivering nightmare. The old Indian had nursed her, in her simple way, with wet
cloths and a small gourd of bitter medicine.
The girl had thought that the soldiers would move her then, but the
moment had passed and they had done nothing. Eventually
the shaking had left her and she had waited to see if the baby would still move
within her body. Then when it did, she started to eat the food again, to watch
the sun moving across the wall, to scratch the marks in the white-wash.
Nothing had changed. |