DAY OF THE DEAD
by
WILL LORIMER
Dedicated to my father
(wherever he is)
Copyright, Will Lorimer 2011
This Smashwords Edition Published by Will Lorimer
Cover artwork by the Author, photograph by Dougie Barnett. Thanks also to Alexandra.
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Author’s Disclaimer
I’m sworn to secrecy,
I cannot tell,
And yet I do
By sense of smell,
Staged fright, hesitation
Pauses, and the rest.
I’m not a person
To share a secret with
For I’ll give it away,
In careless jest, or ,
Write it in a story...
If it’s good enough.
Author’s note:
The story is informed by some curious correspondences between the folkloric traditions of Northern Europe and Central America, and also by legends of pale skinned voyagers from the East, which point to cross Atlantic cultural contacts in the late Bronze Age. That covers much of the background, however the vital spark came through a study of Nahualism, a native belief system of Mexico, its key concepts of the paired nature of every living thing, and an underlying reality where our troublesome doubles coexist in a world that can be reached by diverse means such as mirrors, crossroads, tunnels…
The story also concerns the eternal family – their relationships, family retainers, hangers on, near and distant cousins. And, as this is also about a family tree, it concerns the two bookends, the progenitor and the last of the line, who are both opposed and oddly paired. Of course, those family members in the here-and-now are only in their forgotten dreams, fully cognisant of the constant chatter going on between the generations. However that does not apply to their doubles who are intimate, or not, as the case may be. For those condemned to live in the here-and-now, all of this means that the missing memory is a lost treasure, the recovery of which is what the novel is also about.
THE PLAYERS:
Inkhetaton: Egyptian scribe who became Pharaoh. Progenitor of the Family and the Founding Father of the Americas. His personality has three aspects – his Ka (his double); his Ba (guarding the Treasure); and, in his immortal aspect (his La, or Nagual), he serves as the Lord of Death in the Underworld, Mictlan.
Helga: Quinton’s mother from the Norwegian Lofoften Islands. Qualified nurse. Seconded from the Swedish Arms Ministry. Procured whores for rich men’s club. Circus artiste. Serial killer. Several marriages. Manages the hotel.
Quinton:(also goes by the name of Peter Pilgrim) bastard son of the Bishop. Educated at top public school, flunked University. Fancies himself as an anthropologist. His amnesia related to childhood trauma. Looking for the last whereabouts of his father, and seeking the Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
The Father: Defrocked Catholic bishop. Unnamed. Coptic in origin. Secret Kabalist involved in occult societies. Owned the silver mines around the town.
Malinche x 3: Identical sisters. Kitchen maids at the hotel. In their double aspect, the Three Fates.
Cantina Joe: Master story teller, barman and cartel banker. Involved with revolutionaries. Old friend of the bishop. Watches Quinton’s back.
Jaime Everarrdez de Leon: Narcotrafficante revolutionary, wanted by every police agency, north and south of the Rio Grande. Cross-dresser and nobody’s fool. Joe’s nephew and Quinton’s idol.
Gomez: Police chief. Involved in the drugs trade. A dangerous man.
Father O’Flattery: Black Friar at the Cathedral. His double is Mr Crook, a lawyer.
The Old Gringo: Half of his brain removed because he knew too much about the ‘Company’. Never talks below 16,000 feet. Knows the mountain trails to the lost canyon. Involved with revolutionaries.
Baron Von Hapsburg: Belgian descendent of Maximillian, last Emperor of Mexico. Former lover of Helga. Livonian Knight and NSA agent.
Bus passenger: Appears at the start and in the epilogue. He is a shaman.
Tzitzimime: legendary thunderbirds seen hovering over Tenochitlan before the Aztec Capital fell to the Conquistadors. The mountains are their last refuge.
Also appearing are: Pancho Villa, and his second in command, Fiero; Wee Donald, an ex-pat from the Old County; Graham Greene; Grandma –Helga’s mother and her Nagual aspect; Bob the Demon; and various distinguished personages in the Underworld who tell the Ferryman the stories they never could confide when still alive.
PART 1
Chapter 1.
Return to Sender,
Address unknown,
Yonder, spiked on a coven of peaks, the sun with a sombrero on, going down to do battle with the armies of the stars. To return? No say. Once that depended on the valour of the vanquished, sacrificed on Aztec pyramids cascading blood…
‘Mirar el sol del muerte!’ interrupting my mental drift, the smoker from the seat behind, leaning on my shoulder, rasping in my ear, jabbing the burning end of his cigarro at an angry face glaring in the bus window.
‘The Sun of Death,’ I recycled, shielding my eyes against the glare, finding detail hard to make out with dust thick on the window outside and the telegraph poles strobing past. Do ra mi, the wires carrying messages I didn’t want to hear. This joker with the shaggy black dog moustache breathing brimstone and beer in my ear, giving me the local weather lore, wanting me to believe the solar corona indicated bad weather on the road ahead. Peering up at the wispy outriders of a weather front, Iguessed he was probably right. Advancing cirrus putting me in mind of racks of drifting seaweed seen from the deck of the Marie Celeste, spiralling down to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
‘Es muy malo para gringo!’ he said in gutteral Spanish that suggested he was a native of the mountains and Nahuatl, the ancient language of the Aztecs, was his mother tongue.
But when I just shrugged, wondering what was so bad for gringos in particular, he seemed to take the hump and sat back down with a bump, raising a squawk from his prize fighting cockerel in a crate on the seat beside him.
Bemused, I turned away and got the picture. Glaring in the bus window, not the Sun King in a sombrero, his honour guard of the vanquished trailing sparks over the Sierras, but the grinning skull of a ghostly bandit chief – Pancho Villa or some such masked desperado, holed up since the Revolution – every evening come hail, thunder and lightning, going down on three sisters, riding out on the broomstick of the tarbush horizon, flying over bandit badlands, cactus splintered as the cloak of a flagellant. Me obviously.
Mexico, more than a pilgrimage, mucho mas.
On a black mass, a huddle of cowls in conclave over the sun as it slipped from the new world into the next. Reminding me of a nest high in a tree, hatching a baby snake, that changed into a golden oriel bird before it was gone into the ink of night.
Was that a scene replaying from the never neverland my lost childhood, or something seen in a dream? How could I ever know, my memory was so porous, I reflected, turning to look out the window again as it was swept by the shadow of a large bird passing low overhead.
Another sign as the little bus banded red and green the colours of Lineas Fronteras, the only bus company serving these remote parts, lurched from uncertain asphalt to certain cobbles; paused, gathering energy before the long assault on bandit foothills. There, at the turn, a crude sign with the ‘Tropico de Cancer’ grooved on bleached wood, marking the crossing of a boundary and another journey about to begin…
Back there all routes Norte and the junk of my past. What glittered was but baubles and trinkets. The slow lane on the fast track, jumping saddle to saddle. Haymaking in the fields of my golden youth where skirts and shirts blew chaff in the wind, but now, entering my thirties, all I had to show was a fistful of corn slipping my grasp.
I was here too, sheltering in a geological book so vast I couldn’t make out the pages –my name, high on the haunch of some antediluvian beast, streaking the shifting sands copper and red, proving I had made it – if not hereafter, then sic-gloria-transit, as my learned father might have opined. Quinton, after my paternal grandfather; Eric, from a Laplander great Uncle on my mother’s side, no doubt a tall straw haired numbskull like myself; Diogenes, from when I slept in a bathtub in a flat shared by three girls who took pity on my homeless condition and nicknamed me after the cynic philosopher. I loved them so much I adopted it by deed poll, and signed QED on a bouncing cheque at the restaurant where we dined, after I flunked out of University without a degree, but got sad parting kisses from all three, who might have been sisters they were so similar in looks, though not nature. In the plain words of a dead language, quo erat demonstrandum, meaning thus is proved the proposition. An absent father’s pronouncement, I imagined, upon receiving the news of my latest failure from the family lawyer, Mr Crook. Not that the well worn Latin phrase would have meant anything to the other bus passengers, all mestizos, I supposed, Native American genes predominating, all moustachioed, machos and muchachas, bumping two and three to a seat, like this was the love bus to Can-Cun, hanging on, hanging in, even the goggle eyed turkey, dangling the back of a porta-cabin squaw blocking the aisle, joining in the fun. I was alone, a stranger in the midst of one big happy family, and I wondered how the fuck I had gotten there…
New York, mid-August is no place for pale Nordic types like me. Only in the cool of the Public Library on 5th was any respite from the clammy heat. But even there I was oppressed, by text messages from my rich girlfriend who had set me a deadline to move into her swank duplex overlooking the Met in Central Park.
My analyst, part of the care package, said that my amnesia was a classic case of faulty programming. Instead of walking away, I should confront my fears with my girlfriend, who obviously cared. Unlike my poor ex, who clearly had not.
As an explanation it was pap. But I was caught in a trap with no place to go. Until, in the small hours of the day when the lease on my Greenwich Village apartment was up, I was awoken by the phone ringing off the hook, with a name tipping my tongue. Ignoring the persistent clamour, I thumbed the dog-eared pages of my address book, until my finger stopped on the name of a professor of Meso-American Studies, under a college address in Mexico City. I couldn’t fix his face, but to my mind our chance meeting in the Old Country was significant, for it was the day my divorce papers came through, and occurred on an ancient mound in a blasted heath, by some standing stones called the Three Sisters.
My packing done, I left the ‘phone to ring in the one room apartment, so much more oppressive with the large acrylic portrait of my hard to please Manhattan landlady, in the buff as when I got to know her, spreading perfect legs– every follicle in photo-real detail, in a heavy gilt frame screwed to the wall. The painting re labelled the ‘Bitch’, after I pasted her sour-dough face with a close up photograph of a wolf with Gina Lollinbrigida eyes, cut out of a Life Magazine photo-feature on the rutting habits of Timber Wolves in Nebraska. As far as I was concerned, she could stay there.
Up on the roof there was a breeze but no relief. Over the city sounds of sirens, and shrieks from nearby canyons, downstairs that ‘phone still ringing. So, there was no escape. Well, not unless I got into the ‘Now’, a stratagem advised by my analyst, when the tug of the pain body makes the present intolerable. Mine he said was magnetic and all-consuming, even though I felt the tongues of the women in my life were the flames and I was a moth..
In my skin mine wanted to beg forgiveness from an imperious caller hanging on the line. But I didn’t want to be food. But then, as I closed the door the ringing stopped,. I took that as a sign, and was resolved from then on, like Diogenes before me, to steer clear of women who only wanted me for my pain body.
The little bus was parked perilously close to the roofs of a shamble of shacks shedding tiles – telescoping terracotta dammed by the roadside ridge. A whole tribe lived down there. By the open bus door, three, maybe four generations. Gaunt, wide eyed pubescents, shivering in the cold mountain air, tots saddled on hips, children clutching the torn skirts of bent benefactresses, passing back cracked containers of water, careful not to spill a precious drop. Out front el Comandante bus driver refilling the radiator, just the shiny brim of his cap and gold star, lost in a rush of steam. Ahead, cresting the long spine of the canyon, a pair of lofty pines, black against the electric Sierra twilight, marking a gateway, and a couple of stars pirouetting in the azure – astral outriders from the netherworld.
I was brought back to the Now by a young girl outside the window, staring out of my reflection on darkening glass. Under the black brim of my hat that we now shared, my foreign face, her Toltec eyes, my Castilian chin, her chapped cheeks, my mercenary jowl, her tribe’s pain, absolved in a new world trigonometry, proving that victim and oppressor can be the same. Of course I was a gringo, with my green eyes and white skin, no local could mistake me for anything else. But she was safe with me, and could keep her virtue intact, the only treasure she had left. No, not I. Not a drop of red Conquistador blood in these blue veins. Well, none that I knew of anyway.
‘… neh… neh... neh…’ the nasal sound issuing the barrel-chested hombre, sitting next to me, snoring since Chihuahua with his sombrero over his face. Now the brim was pushed back on glittering black eyes focused on the ‘super lites’ in my denim breast pocket – Yankee cigarettes, another form of currency in out of the way places South of the Rio Grande. Good for petty bribes and breaking the ice.
‘… neh… neh... neh...’ the sniggers continued as I split the soft pack, and, with a slap to the base, raised a couple of butts to order. Slyly he took one, tucked that behind an ear, winked, and, reached out again.
‘Go on,’ I said, staring at his fingernails, ‘they’re only dirty frees.’
Of course I meant to say duty. Same difference, sometimes.
‘…neh-neh-neh… Gracias Senor,’ he somehow managed between nasal snickers. Grinning hugely, revealing a mouth full of gum boils pegged down by a few decayed stumps, like the remnants of an old sea pier washed by black tides.
‘De nada,’ I shrugged, flicking a flame on my old brass zippo, thinking of neurotics I had known who would have expired at such a sight. Yet he seemed hale and hearty. Perhaps those pustules actually kept him healthy.
After cogitating long and hard on nicotine, recycling smoke via stained moustaches and flaring nostrils, perhaps an economy measure born of hard times, his black fingernail prodded in my direction again…
‘Ahem…’ he coughed. Perhaps he thought I was Alto Anglo and this was the correct manner of address for a Caballero dressed in the best of British worsted gear – in Mexico apparel denoting a gentleman of worth. ‘Tienes ninos Senor?’
‘Si…’ I replied as termite eyes bored into mine.
‘Hijos o hijas?’ He was asking if I had sons or daughters.
Thinking that the Toltec girl last seen through a bus window, would have been the same age as my daughter had not my ex miscarried, ‘Ninas,’ I sighed, ‘Ey tu?’
‘Hijos!’ he snapped, shooting up a fist – a hard-on for the Universe, the bus, and me.
I smiled thinly.
‘Quantas ninas tienes Senor?’ He said, eyes like he was hypnotising a snake. That snake was me. Perhaps he was after my cigarettes, or my wallet, or both? The Third World over, card carrying gringos are excluded from age-old laws of hospitality. I guessed, given half the chance, those mountain natives would rob you of all you owned, but – since they were mountain natives – if they found you hungry and alone, they would snatch the tortillas from bambino mouths to feed you. Probably put you up in the shoulder, settling back in his seat with a satisfied look that said he’d completely sussed me out.
More than I had at that moment, I reflected. But the detail of the eyes suggested I was on the right track. For a bruja with green eyes was first object of my quest... A woman whose profile strangely accorded with that of a legendary giantess entrusted with Votan’s treasure after he left the pyramids of Palenque for some mountains in the North. Her silhouette conjured by the hand play of an Tzendal story teller, by the light of a full moon rising over the Mayan Highlands casting her witchy features on a whitewashed wall, spellbinding children huddled in blankets, lying about his feet. A silhouette that penetrated the fogs of an amnesia my New York analyst struggled to dispel, connected to an early trauma, haunting my dreams as a child, in my nightmares ever since, reaching across the years like the left hand of Darkness, reminding me of the winged shadow, passing over the bus a few minutes before…
Chapter 2.The Tunnel
We had reached capstone canyon. Sheer ice ascending to Asgard via haberdasheries and a black void. Dead ahead, the way through to Valhalla where Woden and Votan were waiting. Mixing my mythic metaphors again, but then ours was not the first Global Village. Both gods were travelling tricksters associated with crows, who ‘measured the world’ and affected the same dress code –a black hat and matching cloak: The same as Cortez adopted on the advice of the Witch Malinche who had him delay landfall in the Americas to coincide with the prophesied day of Votan’s return. Like myself, cloaked in darkness, hiding my pale face below a big black brim.
Ahead, the dark tunnel – at first glance, less an entrance and more a canine bite, ice spectral fangs in the beam of a lone headlight. Cerberus or just the Hound of the Baskervilles? Closer, a rustic cabin like it had been helicopter’d up from the Tyrol. The shingle roof dusted by snow. Under the eaves a billy goat, bearded as Satan at a sabbatt, yellow eyes turning luminescent in the wavering glare of the one headlight,, tethered to wooden boards banded familiar red and green, suggesting a far flung outpost of empire. Confirmed when, out of my old picture book of Mexican History, goose-stepped a major-domo buttoned up to his chin in the livery of Lineas Fronteras. A hat to cap our bus driver’s, bigger, grander, more gold braiding. Seven pointed stars like on the Australian flag, suggesting that the story of the Ozzie explosives experts once employed in the mines hereabouts, might be true. An impressive sight as his hells clicking on the frozen ground, he marched over to the driver’s window and tore a ticket out of a little book, receiving a grubby peso note in exchange, then saluting smartly stepped back, and we were moving once more, heading for an icy black hole.
Mary Mother of God. Jesus, blessed redeemer, protect us from the ‘malo gnomos’ that dwell under the earth... Well something like that. Then, more gabbled prayers from the passengers, as we entered a rough hewn passage, the walls riddled with voids, which I supposed were old mines. But that wasn’t all. After about five minutes, the little bus stopped before a branching of the passageway, prompting another mad session of furtive crossing, and native mumbo-jumbo. Not because of uncertainty over directions, as I first thought but a candle lit grotto to the right side. The bus exhausts fanning an avenue of wavering flames, leading to an altar hewn out of living rock, below an albino looking Christ impaled on stellate silver pickaxes and shovels, the polished metal of the implements gleaming in the gloom.
‘Neh neh neh,’ a familiar nasal snicker sounded in my right ear, ‘Es una MADERA!’
‘Yea, yea, I can see that,’ I nodded, ‘it’s made out of wood.’
‘No no, Senor,’ he leaned across me, pointing, ‘estas Christos es nacio en la madera.’
‘Born in the wood,’ I repeated, ‘yes I can see now it’s naturally formed,’ I said, peering therough the dusty window glass, noticing the bark was pale and stippled like white oak. ‘How odd.’
‘Es un milagroso,’ he insisted.
‘Sure,’ I smiled, reminded of the frequency of miracles in Mexico, thinking how much more ubiquitous then in the last unmapped range in Mexico. Unmapped? Because, my informant had gone on to explain, the Three Sisters were invariably blanketed in cloud, while magnetic anomalies and frequent storms, made aerial reconnaissance too dangerous.
‘De hace mucho tiempo.’
‘From the old days, uh-huh,’ I nodded.
‘Quando las Tres Hermanitas es cubierta del arboles.’ ‘When trees covered the Three Little Sisters?’ I exclaimed, in my excitement forgetting a pair of lofty pines, last seen from the bus stop, silhouetted on the sierra skyline. ‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Si Senor, antes el Conquistadores, las Sierras es una jardin mas sagrado.’
‘A sacred garden my god, yes, I can see that.’ I muttered, the lost pieces of a scattered jig saw that had baffled scholars down the ages, reforming in my mind, as I pictured the Garden mentioned by Herodotus in his Histories, where Menes, the first of the Pharaohs ended his days in a garden in his Empire of the West, later called the Garden of the Hesperides by the Ancient Greeks, who believed it lay in a land beyond the setting Sun, and was tended by the Three daughters of Night. Still there after all this time, the mountains, though the garden, the orchards and their fabled golden apples of the sun were long gone, even if their after-glow weren’t quite extinguished in the dark bus.
‘Then, after the Conquest,’ I said, fitting more pieces together, ‘all the trees were cut-down for pit props. Yea, all the locals converted and indentured in the new mines. Their only solace, Jesus the living spirit of the Garden, pointing the way through to the…’
Fortunately, before my exposition could turn pedantic, movement, blessed movement. Up-front our steersman, silhouetted against a plexi-glass screen and the moving picture projected by the bus’s wayward eye. The headlight illuminating incoming… rough-cut, choppy waves, the walls flashing silver as if shoals of swordtails were passing through. Once a phantom party shouldering picks and shovels, shielding their eyes as we shaved past. Miners I supposed, heading to the Chapel of the Lost Christ, to kneel before starting the back-shift, in one of the many shafts leading off the tunnel.
‘Hey ho, hey ho, it’s off to work we go…’ strains of the seven dwarves in Snow White, recycling my mind. Was that them or me? I wondered, remembering the last time I hummed the tune, peering out of a porthole into the lace undergarments of the Mistress of the Skies – the way the wispy clouds looked through the window, as the Boeing 747 I had boarded a few hours before, descended towards Mexico City.
The runway was slicked with rain when I stepped from the plane, kneeled and kissed the tarmac, a trick picked up from watching the Pope genuflecting upon landing. Mexico tasted of diesel, as most runways do, but had a distinctive chili after burn that lasted through checkout to the taxi rank outside where, in heavy rain, I hailed a cab and, deciding against a cheap hotel, as initially I had planned, instead directed the driver to an address of a college on the other side of Mexico City. A fare that given my available travel funds from my cards, emptied at the ATMs of La Guardia, seemed more than reckless.
Rain was falling in sheets, the college campus was deserted. All the windows were boarded, with the exception of one on the ground floor of the building opposite. Inside, two men, blurry behind steamy glass. The nearest, a borderline midget, standing with his broad back turned my way, the flaming red of his hair and the bright mustard of his oversized jacket, vivid in the low wattage of the dimly-lit room. By his white shirt and black tie, the other man was an official of some sort, and taller by a good six inches, though he remained seated behind a desk. Both were arguing. After a moment, the official sighed, opened a drawer in his desk, and handed an envelope over. The stocky man then turned around, presenting a face I didn’t recognize.
But at least I had his name right. It seemed to fit his angry glare as he stepped out into the rain and, though he did not have a moustache, I saw him as the mad Mexican in the Loony Tunes Bugs Bunny cartoons I so loved as a child.
As I introduced myself wee Donald’s beady eyes glinted dangerously, but then he flashed a broken toothed smile and punched me hard on the shoulder, ‘Ach, I remember ye now!’ he growled in a thick accent of the old Country. ‘Just when I needed ye. Today, I learned my brother was swept away in a flood in Canada.’ He laughed, ‘In Spanish that’s ca nada, meaning there’s nothing there, no now onyhow, now he’s fucking deid!’ He grinned, a characteristic of hard men from the Old Country imparting bad news, ‘I wuz sacked six months ago from this dump.’ Squaring his jaw, he gave me a new look that implied a quantum of respect, ‘You’re fucking lucky tae catch me. I wuz only here tae collect the outstanding.’ triumphantly, he brandished the thin envelope. ‘This, my wife says is all that’s standing between wir family an’ destitution,’ his jaw jutted, ‘But I say it’s beer money,’ he said extending both hands, ‘and you’re my first foot from hame in mair than twen’y years,’ he wiped a tear from an eye, openly crying as he embraced me. ‘I love you brother,’ he sobbed, resting his red head against my chest.
Despite all the threats and insults, or perhaps because of them, the taxi driver refused point blank to drive his VW beetle into wee Donald’s neighbourhood, and instead set us down in pouring rain at a deserted street corner.
‘Pussy!’ Wee Donald called after the departing cab, the one functioning tail light blurring in the rain before it disappeared in a red streak into a maze of unlighted streets.
‘What’s the problem?’ I asked, looking down at my bags and the case of beer wee Donald had just bought at a Cerveceria.
‘Och,’ Wee Donald shrugged. ‘a few mair murders and kidnappings than usual.’
‘Really?’ I said, more alarmed by his nonchalance than anything.
‘Ach dae fuss ye’r self. You’re wi’ me. Perrrfectly safe! I’ll show ye’s,’ wee Donald cupped hands about his mouth, ‘Fuck yuz cunts!’ he bellowed, challenging anyone watching behind shuttered windows of the tenements on all sides, ‘Come and get us assholes.’
‘That just proves you’re mental.’ I laughed, as his challenge boomed back, echoing the dark streets.
‘Aye,’ wee Donald nodded, ‘But mental means too much fucking bother tae the mob round here. Besides,’ he grinned, ‘they’re a’ boys, no real men like uz. C’mon,’ he said, heaving the case of beer onto a broad shoulder, ‘we’ve a wake tae get oan wi’.’
The block where Donald lived, appeared semi-derelict. On the street level were small shops, all shuttered, while above the windows were oddly juxtaposed, suggesting that the old building had been rebuilt many times.
‘Bonny, eh?’ wee Donald said, nodding at a pinched face appearing in a lighted first floor window, above a fizzing neon sign showing a cherry, a lime, and a straw in a cocktail glass, blinking red and green, at the corner of the block.
‘If you say so,’ I shrugged, wondering whether the woman was his wife.
‘No her,’ wee Donald grinned, ‘HER,’ he waved his free hand, taking in the whole building. ‘Look at thae lines mon, magnificent eh? Dae they no remind ye o’ a ship o’ state? Originally that was whaur Prince Falling Eagle hung out. Yes, it was Cuhuatomec’s fuckin’ Palace. The last Aztec building left stonding in the City, though o’ course it’s much broken doon noo. Dates back tae ‘afore the Conquest,’ he pointed to the lower facade, ‘see whaur that plaister’s fallen awa’, yon stane’s the pink o’ auld Tenochitlan.’
‘Pay any nae heed tae the missus,’ wee Donald cautioned over a heavy Latin beat, issuing a cavern somewhere below, leading the way up worn wooden steps, ‘she cannae abide me drinkin’ but that’s her fuckin’ problem no mine.’ Throwing open the front door, he laughed, waving me in.
In a small dingy Kitchen, Wee Donald’s wife was on her knees, polishing her children’s shoes. By the tears stains on her sallow cheeks and bleary red eyes, she had been weeping a week. Hung on the back of a chair were two school uniforms, neatly pressed. . .
‘Oh god, not more beer!’ She looked up, flicking a couple of strands of hair from eyes that hardened as she noticed me looming over the precarious case of beer on Donald’s shoulder, ‘And who’s this,’ her thin lips twisted, ‘another stray from the street?’
‘A freend a’ the wi’ frae the Auld Country, so you be mindin’ yer manners hen,’ Wee Donald’s jaw jutted dangerously.
‘Welcome, I’m sure,’ the wife muttered, resuming polishing shoes that already shone with a brilliance that in the dingy kitchen was almost supernatural, ‘Your other friends are in the back,’ she added miserably as, from downstairs, the Latin music suddenly increased in volume.
‘How do you put up with that racket? I asked, following Donald’s dancing zigzag course, hefting the beer crate with surprising agility, tripping around tins, strategically positioned to catch rainwater dripping the exposed lath of gaping holes in the plaster ceiling above, past the half glass door of a bedroom where two children lay sleeping, their faces lit red and green by the blinking neon sign outside, along a dark passage, throbbing with the sounds of Santana from below.
‘That’s wir resident DJ doon stairs in the transvestite brothel.’
‘A transvestite brothel? You’re putting me on,’ I laughed.
‘See for yourself,’ wee Donald said, his face under lit by a roseate glow as he pointed to a crack in the bare boards by his feet. Enough of a gap to make out a giant pink puffball and the bouffant hairstyle of an Elvis wanna-be in a sequin suit, on a stage, directly below.
‘That’s the tosser at his decks,’ wee Donald went on, ‘Think’s he’s the King o’ fuckin’ Graceland. I only wish he’d play something apart frae fuckin’ Black Magic Wumman.’
At the end of the passage a door opened onto the lounge which was uninhabitable because a large section of the plaster ceiling had fallen in after the seasonal rains started a few days before.
Six bearded anthropologists were crammed into a smoke filled study, between narrow walls incongruously decorated with railway memorabilia from the Old Country, and black and white photographs of wee Donald’s school days. The general familiarity of the images, together with rusting enamel signs from the Age of Steam, making me feel I was trapped in a time tunnel as I sat on the edge of a chaise-longue beside two Mexican men – obviously Caballeros, since both wore tweed jackets –- swapping insults as they played backgammon for high stakes that, with every few rolls of the dice, kept doubling. A stack of dollars on the table beside the board, staked against a set of keys for a Cherokee 4x4 and a kilo bag of e smelly grass buds.
It was a fine wake, but I didn’t feel a part of it, and so, my head swimming from booze and dope, I left the claustrophobic study and wearily climbed some stairs to the roof, where I finally landed in Mexico after my head exploded at seeing three spectral eminences, outlined in luminous colours over the City, shifting against a dark backdrop of heavy cloud.
Yes, that was my first sight of the Three Little Sisters in Mexico. The same as had haunted my dreams in one form or another, over the years. Yes, and there they were again, their icy summits illuminated by a single bolt of lightning as, with a clap of thunder, the little bus banded with the colours of Lineas Fronteras, emerged the dark tunnel.
Chapter 3. The Town With No Name…
Last off and last in, everyone else scattered to the four quarters, not even echoing footsteps to guide me, stumbling rutted cobbles that served for the street – a Mexican stand-off of slab-sided buildings, vaulted stone aspiring to crow steps and turrets. Did I say Mexico? More like a stage set for Don Giovanni. Fifteenth century Pamplona, minus the frills. A medieval slum town after the plague, following the footsteps of the Grim Reaper. All the population, with the exception of the town doctor and a black cat, in mass graves or long since rotted behind boarded doors. Wee Donald had been right. This ghost town was the best preserved, most authentic and least known ‘pueblo fantasmos fabulosa’ in all of the Americas, the Town With No Name. Surpassing strange, yet eerily familiar, as if I had been here before. An impossibility, but then so was this medieval Town and those three sisters, looming above. As if all were coexisting in a möbius present, that would have been doubly perfect, had not I recalled my secret purpose, born out of a past that was nothing if not imperfect – and questions, so many questions, about missing chapters in my palimpsest, scattered life.
Only one more thing to do, overcome foot-dragging reluctance –take courage in both hands, and that doorknocker under the rusting hanging sign. ‘La Castilla de la Dineroi, a bit over-the-top as a name for a hotel – Prop. H. Gomez, in tiny letters painted in the lower inside corner. Sheaves of corn and a scythe scrimshawed into blackened wood above a stone lintel carved with Masonic crossed T square and compass. The Roman numerals, ‘MCDXXVII’, below – if my prep-school Latin served me correctly – dating the building to sixty years after Columbus arrived in the Americas, just as I had been assured. And inside? Mother of God, would she be there after all this time? I’d only come half way round the world to find out.
Just audible, slow shuffling steps, then high on the door a small panel sliding back on a metal grill, and behind that, a suspicious eye, pale green as the ice on Scappa Flow, ringed with mascara.
‘Go away!’ Heavily accented. Resonating distant halls of memory I’d thought a locked chapter. Even shouting the same message as before, with the addendum, ‘We are closed for the season!’
‘But I’m a friend of... ah, Anon’s,’ I improvised woodenly, not wishing to mention wee Donald who had enough woes without a black curse from the Bruja de la Norte adding to his troubles.
‘Anon? Who is this Anon? I do not know any Anon!’
‘Let me in!’ I spat back, a familiar blood rage taking hold, ‘All the way with a dog on my knee from Chihuahua.’ I lied, ‘Three hundred crappy miles. My name’s Pilgrim, Peter to my friends, and bus-buggered is not the word!’
‘That is so much better Peter, I love lap-dogs too. ‘Specially Chihuahuas. Such long tongues,’ she chuckled, drawing a collection of long bolts…
I had only a photograph to remember her by –arm in arm with my father, as they entered a fancy dress ball –a pouting Amazon, looming over a Roman pro-consul in toga and circlet of laurel. Unchanged as far as I could gather, except she was now clad in a plaid dressing gown instead of burlesque Scythian chariot gear: still looking down, in her right hand a candle, in her left anodised metal. A pistol, small but deadly. Given her former position, could it be anything else? Palmed into a pocket as she pulled open the heavy door. Some things don’t change. Helga, straw haired troll of my childhood nightmares. The hand that rocked my cradle. There are mothers and there are mothers. Mine was a crocodile, crawled out of a primordial swamp, such was my fate. I’d actually searched her out. Now that I couldn’t believe. If I pretended strength perhaps I would be. But strong enough? One thing and one thing only in my favour, she could have no inkling who I was. Let it remain so. Mummy, alien womb that bore me.
Chapter 4. Mother?
Soon as I put a foot over the threshold, like I’d tripped a switch, the lobby light flashed on.
‘My gott Peter!’ Helga trilled, pinching the candle flame, ‘You bring luck to the house. The first time the electricity is on for a week. How I hates the borrachos down at the estacion, always drunk out their skulls.’
‘That bad is it?’ I said, glad of the small talk, and distraction from the assault of first impressions in which her cute looks seemed at odds with her height, giving me the feeling she was increasing or diminishing in size whenever she scowled or smiled – though admittedly she was tall. Now I knew why I like women that way. I was programmed from around the time she claimed to be twenty, and signed a birth certificate Helga Jonsdottr. The last name false. Hega was never anyone’s daughter. One source, confided that in the course of her official duties, while on secondment from a Swedish Government Department, she procured twenty one flaxen haired prostitutes, all perfect specimens, for the Shit Eater’s Club of Brussels, a shadowy group of cosignettii no one ever admits to knowing. All men, sharing a dirty secret, eating shit from gold plates, in a lodge as old as the hills. Anyone who’s any one at the pinnacle of power, is a member, and you’ve got to eat shit to get in.
That’s the rule, the nail Crapitalism is hung on, there wouldn’t be any point otherwise. So it’s got to be golden shit in the shite Eater’s Club, where apricots is all the call girls get to eat for thirty days in purdah, locked in a luxurious country house, supervised by a nursing sister on secondment from the Swedish Ministry of Defence, very nice work if you can get it, for a witch. Helga of course. So that’s it with the intro, Helga with a capital H. And that sorry son who had to have that Bitch for a mother, was me. A startling fact of my existence, that might have stayed wreathed in amnesiac mists, had not my Austrian analyst set me on the right path, with his tip about the Brussels connection.
‘You think that is bad?’ she said, bolting the door.
‘I don’t know,’ I shrugged, looking around
‘Let me tell you,’ she cast back over her shoulder, mincing past a suit of dusty armour I had taken to be a drunk old night watchman, slumped against the lobby wall, ‘Here in the mountains, you get used to shortages. One week the water is frozen tight. Then rock slides block the road. Sometimes the lightning strikes peoples down in the street.’ She said, leading the way along a dimly lit corridor.
‘Can you believe that?’ she went on, her voice resounding in distant rooms off the long, dim corridor, ‘Once, I even loose a burro from the hail stones, big as snooker balls they are, always firing out of the blue. Never you know when.’
Despite my hoarded resentments, I was warming to her. She was my mother after all. Genes of my genes communicating at a sub-cellular level. Maybe everything would be OK? Sucker thought.
Get it straight…
‘…Crocodile emotions with the bite of an asp.’
My father’s pronouncement on the subject, that one visit to my boarding school – Elias Ashmole’s, a Masonic institution for the wayward sons of Journeymen– in his chauffeur-driven Bentley of the long running boards, a car which I loved more than him, in the years since, wondering what had happened to the old shit-head. All through the interview, all that came across, cold indifference. Not one question. As if I didn’t exist. My mother was a mistake he regretted, ergo so was I. He had done his duty and hoped I would do the same by him. Not many boys had my educational opportunities, and he expected my best. Just half an hour out of his life and he did not even wave goodbye. Sitting very upright in the back seat, the black brim of his fedora shadowing his solemn brown eyes. All I knew he was somebody important in the world, but I never found out exactly who. What did I then know about a lodge as old as the hills, I was eleven, minding my P’s and Q’s, prepared by matron for the big day, in pressed shorts and blazer. A right pair my parents. All my life like the swamp fever. Penumbra, impossible to shake-off, except with strong medicine, like street drugs, or obsessive work …
The devil was high-tailing to las Hermanitas, taking my luck, and the electricity. Just as Helga pushed open the kitchen door, all the lights crashed. ‘Damn!’ she swore. In the darkness, the sound absorbed by stone walls like spilled ink on blotting paper, as we stopped in the doorway, half in and half out of the room, her heart beat beating time next to mine.
Boobty… Boom… O god, pneumatic boobs, pointed and hard.
One day I shoots them down at the station, mescal madmen.’
Boobty... Boom… hips and thighs, hers or mine?
‘They drink anything when it runs out, even the diesel for the generator.’
Boobty… Boom…. too much body heat, not enough fucking action…
‘Always it is this way. The light goes on. The light goes off. Maybe in an hour it comes on.’
Boobty… Boom… Not with my mother, fuck… sacrilege…
‘Maybe never!’
Suddenly her hand shot out. Boobty… Boom… Madre de Dios – those were crocodile claws.
Boobty… Boom. . getting louder…
‘Wait here, and stand where you are!’
Stand in the dark? Hard for dyslexics like me, always muddling their lefts from rights. In this case, my horizontal from the vertical, or maybe it was just the altitude getting on top of me? No heart beat, only the far away scratchy sound of a crocodile crossing bone shingle . Africa? No. Just mother in the next tomb, searching for candles, her gloss red claws scrabbling stone shelves. Mother? I had to stop thinking of her that way. Only one reptile in the family. Get it straight, she was a brood mare. Used and abused and put out to pasture. Between us the vast teeming stockyard of life. The mare who suckled me, seen through a clash of horns, a stranger now and always. Just treat her with consideration, that’s all I had to do. She was flesh and blood and bruised easily. A complicated kind of mother who needed tender loving care, just like me.
Yea sure, carry on warming the iceberg that sank the Titanic. She was sad, I knew that, a recluse more walled in this hotel than Rapunzel braiding golden locks, shut in her tower. But she made her choices. I was only three when she left. Why, I might never know. Perhaps she didn’t even know. Maybe she didn’t care. Well if she didn’t I didn’t. She could fuck herself, I certainly wouldn’t. No way would I put up with more shit from that harpy. Harpy Helga, I liked that. My mother a harpy in the Garden of the Hesperides. But there was no Garden any more and this wasn’t Mexico it was bloody Norway. My mind so far gone, I didn’t even know which fucking country. A bad place this town overlooked by the Three Sisters. For fuck’s sake, I should never have come for the fucking treasure…
Light sudden and awesome, banishing lurking spooks to the far corners. That candle flame a miracle – sustenance more vital than food.
‘Mere you take, and mind no spills. I have no need for seeing in the dark, not here anyways,’ she breathed, her cheeks shining like poisoned apples in candlelight. ‘I have to put on something... shall we say… more coming. So long since I have a real man for company. You are a real man I hope?’
A real man? How could I be when all my life I was swamped by circumstances, so isolated and so alone. All the women I had known no substitute for... Helga.
Stone me but it was cold in the kitchen. The only cooking facilities, a primitive griddle over a blackened hearth –numb bum on black basalt, chill invading my bones, my feet siphoning frost from stone slabs. When it reached my heart, I would be an ice statue in Nifleheim –watching a blue-bottle fly lazily buzzing the bunches of dried herbs amid the copper bottomed pots and pans, hanging hooks above the cooking range. Was that a memory from infancy, so opaque through the passage of time the fly was now petrified in Baltic amber, or just an old Nordic story about a little boy who ran away and returned a man, to find his mother a troll, and his father resting under stone slabs.
Father are you down there? Lying in your stone sarcophagus, your stone hands clasped to your stone chest?
Nothing else to do but to count distractions. Pestles and mortars, all sizes, pequeno to mas grande, reminding me of Rivera murals with big native women pounding yellow corn – the one exception to this stone rule, steel in serried ranks, blades from machetes to scalpels,
Pot noodle black now. The tallow exhausted and a flame guttered out... Mother where are you? Beyond my ken changing skins, that’s all I knew. Stone I was stone. Stone cold and unable to think.
Sounds from the netherworld: ragged breathing, reminding me I was still alive... from cavernous sinks, a continent away it seemed, an incontinent drip... and through the shutters of the window, a fiendish retching that might have been the braying of a donkey... some hope... But then a generator starting up, whining over a big basso beat, and a familiar voice .
‘The midnight hour is close at hand...’
No, not Daddy, just Vincent Price reciting the epilogue to Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller,’ his coffin-lid tone intensifying darkness palpable as a winding shroud. Midnight? Confirmed by a church bell, tolling the hour.
‘…nueve, diez, once, doce...’I spoke outloud, as much for company as anything else, my heart tripping a beat as I counted thirteen. How could that be? Clocks only struck twelve eelsewhere, even in Norway I supposed. But this was the Bruja of the North’s lair, right? Nothing normal around. These were the fucking Tropics, my nuts were frozen, and this nameless town was getting stranger by the minute. The way I felt, a little bus was still labouring bandit foothills towards a glittering eye on a shining capstone, putting me in mind of dollar bills and treasure, so much fucking treasure, it was piled up to Heaven…
A dream yes, and so much more vivid than mere nightmare. I was living it, lost in it, as a high kicking Bruja entered spinning a cocoon of light, from the lantern in her hand ‘Da-ra-rum-da-ra!’ Scheherazade of the Sierras, back to her bruja best, pirouetting in purple silks, her white powdered face spectral, pouting crimson. Geisha break. Yep, that mother just materialised. Scary, I’ll say. Jezebel could not have looked better. To a mouse.
Chapter 5. Heavy sexual hangups…
Woooooaaa… My head in a spin… Perhaps my drink was spiked. Locally brewed mescal with a bitter almond taste, Helga wouldn’t do that? With her record, I supposed. But so soon? I guessed not, settling into the soft cushions of a sofa, that could have come out a catalogue and was at odds with the stone surroundings, watching her heaping cactus onto a fire in the grate.
‘Another drink?’ she said over the snap and crackle of popping cactus heads, casting a carusel of prickly death on stone all around.
‘Yes, to the brim please!’ I said.
‘Oh my Gott! Peter look at that!’ She whooped, ‘Es muy grande!’
The Worm. Bobbing belly-up in my glass, pink on the underside, just the way I felt. Dragged my slime all the way up a mountain, only to haemorrhage from the effort.
‘You have to drink it up in one gulp.’ Helga breathed, her features blurring as she pressed close, her green eyes turning pyrotechnic in the firelight, ‘Is good for the manhood they say.’
‘That’s your game huh?’ I snapped, ‘upping’ it in one, ‘So, I’m to be the worm that catches the bird. Or maybe you have another pecking order in mind?’
‘How can a worm catch a bird?’ Helga frowned.
‘I’m sorry, it’s just I find you so attractive it’s damned painful.’ I sighed, crossing my legs, ‘I suppose I should explain.’
‘Explain then!’ Helga said, her cold eyes hard on mine.
‘It’s not what you think. No woman could know what I’ve gone through.’
‘You sure ‘bout that?’ Helga hissed, her prominent neck sinews, reminding me of a cat e a cat on a hot tin roof.
‘No way but to put it but straight.’ I grinned, giving her a meta fiction scripted by my analyst, explaining away the onset of a phobia, which he said was castration anxiety triggered by my recent divorce, ‘A woman I knew once. Married her even. A week after the nuptials she started on patchwork quilt. We were be together forever and a day. Boy she was obsessed. Always snipping away with her pinking scissors. I don’t know how many hexagonals, but it ran into thousands. Five years later, our first night under Amish covers – she came at me with those same scissors. That’s how the axe was wielded. She even shouted timber as she did it.’
I glanced down, anywhere but at Betty Davis eyes, noticing a small needlework box open on a small table to the side, and inside… damn-it, pinking scissors.
Resolute, I ploughed on, ‘I woke up and it was a bleeding stump! Funny huh?’ I laughed, wondering how was it that phobias have a tendency to become more real as time progresses. Clearly if I couldn’t be rid of it, I’d have to create another in its place and then what else would materialize, a demon?
‘Fuck,’ I groaned, holding my head.
‘No!’ Helga gasped, jerking upright, ‘That it is terrible!’ she said hand, on heart.She drew a deep breath, ‘Allow me to say I am so disappointing.’
‘Tell me about it.’ I snarled, ‘I mean look at you, a gorgeous woman, and I’m bare-arsed with embarrassment.’
‘My dear, don’t be!’ said Helga, transformed from arsenic to lace in a trice, ‘t do you never consider surgery..?’
‘What man wouldn’t,’ I shot back, ‘seven specialists in as many countries, all my money double-stitching bastards!’ I shrugged, but it was no use, my rebuilt soldier won’t stand and deliver, no matter what the attention.’ I grinned, ‘So, you’ve heard my story, now it’s your turn.’
‘Oh no!’ Helga inflated dangerously, under the thunder cloud that had eclipsed her brow, her Slavic face becoming bleak and harsh as tundra wastes, ‘You do not trick me like that. One tit-bit and you thinks that is worth a whole life.’ She eyed me intently, ‘If we are to become friends, you must understand one thing, personal information is just that. I do not ask to share your pain, and I do not expect you to share mine. In time perhaps I tell you a few things.’
‘Fair enough.’ I snorted. ‘But why don’t you let me guess?’
‘A game,’ she grinned, perceptibly diminishing, a trick of the firelight, I couldn’t tell – ‘I likes that, but no fishing. Either you hit the nail on the hat, or nothing.’
‘You were born on an island.’
‘You are fishing,’ Helga frowned, swelling ominously…
‘No,’ I shook my head. ‘Not a guess.’
‘How you know then?’
‘That would be telling?’ I smiled.
‘You are making me angry now.’ She glowered, and I hoped she wasn’t about to pop. But she wasn’t a balloon. Not with that face of rock.
‘If you really want to know, it’s all to do with semantics. The world over, island people tend to phrase their words in a different order than mainlanders.’
‘Why do you not tell me this in the first place?’
‘Because I didn’t want to bore you. My dissertation at university was on word order in colloquial dialects, but most people don’t find the general area interesting.’
She nodded, ‘Too much study makes Jack a dull brain, I always say.’
‘That is because you are an islander. I bet when you were young you were always out of the house exploring.’
‘How you know that?’
‘Because on a small island, kids are that much are easier to find. I take it the island was small.’
‘Not when I am young, it is a universe then.’
‘A very small universe,’ I laughed, at last at my ease with this big busty blonde who for the moment I had forgotten was my mother.
‘You know it was exactly on the Arctic Circle, just like this town is on the Tropic. Is that not strange. On the shortest day, from top of the Skafell mountain we can see the sun over the horizon. There are cows in the fields, and many, many trees.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes,’ she nodded, ‘we have mountain ash, hawthorn, spruce.’
‘So far North, I find that surprising?’
‘We have the Gulf Stream to thank. It is no colder than here. We even have apple trees with beautiful golden apples.’
‘Sounds like a mythical garden.’ I lofted an eyebrow, ‘Only in the wrong place.’
‘It is true, but in summer the sea is not so cold and sometimes on the beaches we find Malacca beans.’
‘From the Yucatan I suppose,’ I chuckled.
‘Why not,’ she frowned, ‘the Gulf Stream starts there.’
‘So it does,’ I smiled.
‘Everything on the island is so beautiful.’
‘I am sure,’ I nodded, smiling. ‘Whereabouts exactly?’
‘That is personal.’ She glowered.
‘Sorry,’ I said, already informed that the island was one of a chain of three, about three hundred nautical miles due south of Spitzbergen.
‘So many questions,’ she pouted.
‘Just one more.’ I implored. ‘Please!’
‘If you must, you must.’ She sighed, ‘I suppose.’
‘How’s about this then?’ I said, playing my ace in the hole, ‘Once, you worked in a circus.’I leaned closer.
‘Why you say that?’
‘Call it a hunch.’
‘Always you must guess so close?’ Helga’s eyes narrowed..
‘My, ah, therapist suggested it was sexual energy re-channelled after my injury. However I prefer to think intuition is a higher form of intellect. Logic is just too slow.’
‘But a circus?’ she slapped her knee, ‘Come on!’
‘Oh there are clues. Your height for one,’ I grinned, glad it wasn’t my knee. ‘Kind of restricts employment prospects. Your sureness in the dark, even if you do know this house back to back. Your strength, I guess, the crazy dance when you came back, those high kicks, definitely trained. So it was a toss-up between a dance company and something a little less disciplined but just as demanding.’
‘So you do use logic?’
‘Not when I’m employing my intuition.’ I paused, ‘Soon as you opened the front door, I had this image. You’re all in glittery white, clamped to a spinning target, and I’m the one throwing scissors,’ I laughed, ‘of course I mean knives.’
‘Tra la la!’ Helga clapped hands, gaily, ‘My Gott Peter, you are better than Professor McMental, he read minds too. What a team we make!’
Beddy-byes, back in the cradle tucked in by a giantess of uncertain size. I liked that so I rewarded her goodnight peck with a warm hug. Helga, what nightmares I had of you. The witch ever in my wardrobe. Counting my jackets, picking my pockets – always somewhere about as I drifted to sleep. Casting a long shadow after you left. Mummy, ever absent always omnipresent. We were friends I knew that now. Fair-weather friends for the moment. But how long would that hold? Until a change in weather. A tornado twisting from Texas, spinning a vortex over the high Sierras.