Christina Ch 07 11

Chapter seven

By the time the morning sunlight hit the top of the cathedral, my mind had returned to business. Somehow that long, dreamy night with Tolerante had made me more determined than ever to find out what had happened to drive Paul into that mysterious and seemingly hopeless captivity, to turn that powerful love of ours so suddenly and irredeemably cold.

"Tolerante," I said as we sipped coffee and munched on fresh bolillos in the courtyard, "take me to see el cubano."

He shook his head immediately. " No, senorita," he said. " This I cannot do, not even for you."

"And why not?"

"Because, senorita, one doses not seek out elcubano. If he wants you, he comes to you."

"How unsatisfying," I said. I reached into my purse, took out another hundred-dollar bill, and stuffed it in his shirt pocket. Then I reached across the table and gave him a long passionate kiss, sliding my tongue between his teeth and rolling it enticingly around the moist cavern of his mouth. He remained stiff for a moment, and then began to respond, sucking at my tongue like a hungry kitten at his mother's tit.

"All right, senorita," he sighed as I finally broke the kiss. " I will take you. But I cannot guarantee that we will find him. Even if we do, I don't think he'll talk to you."

"I'll take the chance," I said

"I don't think you understand, senorita. It could be very dangerous for you to go into the mountains."

"I'll take the chance." I repeated

He gave me a long look, than seeing that I was absolutely resolute, he sighed and nodded. " All right," he said in a resigned tone. " Vamoose."

We got into my rented car -- one of those horribly noisy German jeeps that everyone finds so cute these days -- drove through town, and headed south on the highway toward the Guatemalan border. After a half an hour's drive along the excellent pan American highway, Tolerante suddenly directed me to stop at an unmarked spot by the side of the road. There was a small foot trail that led off into the forest, for the life of me I still can't figure out how to tell one of these tiny footpaths from the other, and without a word Tolerante started off down it, leaving me no choice but to follow in silence.

We walked for what seemed like hours through the still forest, seeing no signs of life whatsoever. Thankfully I had worn a pair of baggy jeans and an army shirt, for everywhere it seemed that thorns and brambles reached out to grab at me. Finally, when the noonday sun had burned the mist off the clinging trees, the trail began to broaden and I thought I heard voices in the distance.

In another few minutes we emerged into a large clearing, where a dozen or so stone huts with thatched roofs were pouring smoke through the unadorned holes that served as chimneys. Immediately a tiny Indian woman appeared at the door of one of the huts, and then walked quickly towards us. Tolerante met her halfway, and the two talked urgently in a language the words of which thundered with antiquity, while I stood off to the side trying to hide my nervousness.

Finally I saw Tolerante nod solemnly, and then he turned and walked back to me.

"Esta bien," he said, " the old woman will take you to see el cubano."

"And you?"

"I go back to san Cristobal."

I frowned at this news, for a moment not knowing whether I should feel relieved that I was finally going to see the Cuban or apprehensive about being abandoned here by Tolerante. But I could see that I had absolutely no choice in the matter.

"All right, " I said. " I'll see you in the hotel."

"Si, senorita," he mumbled, giving me a look of such intolerable sadness that my heart nearly broke. I reached to touch his cheek, but before I could he spun on his heel and walked off down the forest trail. Within moments the trees had swallowed him.

It was the last time I ever laid eyes on that marvelous boy, who had touched me so deeply in such a short time.

Now the tiny Indian woman -- she could not have been more than four feet tall -- motioned that I should follow her. We crossed the village, the woman beating off the wretched, furiously barking dogs as we passed, and soon plunged back into the forest, following a trail that, unbelievably, was even narrower than the comparative superhighway on which we had come. The old woman immediately broke into a surprisingly rapid trot, so that I had some difficulty just keeping her in sight, let alone keeping up with her.

After an hour or so of this, we suddenly broke out of the woods into another clearing. In this one there were no houses, only a blackened, ash-strewn field that had once obviously bourne some crop. The woman stopped at the edge of the clearing and let out a howl so astoundingly similar to the ones I had heard last night from the Gatos del Monte that an inadvertent sexual thrill passed through me.

In a moment the call was answered, and soon a couple stepped out of the woods on the other side of the clearing. Their appearance was so strikingly different from anything I had seen since coming to Mexico that I almost gasped in surprise: - the man was at least six and a half feet tall and black as a panther, while the woman, who resembled him somewhat, was a statuesque Negro Latin mix with a round face, startling eyes, and skin the color of milk chocolate.

They walked quickly across the clearing toward me as the old Indian faded away into the woods. They were holding hands, and their quiet confidence with one another led me to assume that they were lovers, or perhaps husband and wife. Finally they reached me and I looked from one to the other, barely able to hide my admiration for these two nearly perfect physical specimens.

So this is el cubano, I thought. Maybe I'm finally going to get some answers.

"Miss van bell," the gorgeous giant said in flawless English, with just a hint of a Cambridge accent. " We've been expecting you."

"You have? " I said. " How? Why?"

He ignored my question completely. " I am nacimiento Santos, " he said, " and this is my wife, Julia. Please come with us."

With out allowing me a word he took his wife's hand and led me up a small hill on the other side of the clearing. When we reached the top he pointed down the hill to a large field in a bowl at the bottom. Even from that distance I could see that I was looking at what amounted to a marijuana plantation, the plants -- all of them from ten to fifteen feet tall -- waving in a gentle breeze, foot long flowers crowning the tips and reaching for the benevolent sun.

"Very impressive," I said, and I ment it.

"It's actually quite sad, " he said. " come with me and I'll explain."

They led me down the hill to a tiny shack at the edge of the marijuana field. From there I could see corps of Indians tending the plants, some trimming and picking yellow leaves from the bottom stalks, others carrying bucketfuls of water with that now familiar forehead strap. Evidently what the Cuban had here amounted to an industrial installation -- lack of machinery not withstanding -- and I found myself wondering how much he paid his peons for their obviously considerable labor.

We stood outside the shack, watching silently as the workers went about their business. Finally the Cuban spoke:

"This is our last field, " he said, and I could hear the sadness through his steely voice. " I came here ten years ago from Cuba, with orders from Fidel to organize these Indians, to make them see how the puercos in Mexico City were conspiring to keep them poor and miserable. And I did a good job. I cut their corn production in half and applied that labor to planting mota, which we then traded for guns and money. We had a real revolution going. We were wining. The army didn't dare follow us here, where the forest is one of our most powerful weapons, and we controlled everything outside San Cristobal. We even elected one of our people governor of Chiapas. Oh yes, we were strong." his eyes shone as he remembered his triumph.

"What happened?" I said.

"The D.E.A." he spat out the words as if they were some kind of deadly poison.

"Are you talking about parquet?" I asked, remembering the hubbub that the spraying of Mexican marijuana had caused. " You mean they killed all the plants?"

"Pah! " he said bitterly. " They never touched a plant. But they killed the trade as effectively as if they had really sprayed the entire country."

"You mean it was a hoax?"

"The hoax of the century. You see how this field is protected? You feel how the winds blow everything up the hill, how no plane could possibly fly lower than the field to seed the wind with that poison of theirs? All our fields were that way. We were never touched by parquet. The only thing that killed us was the scare."

Now I understood. I myself had never smoked much Mexican marijuana, as I preferred the fragrant Thai and the potent afghan sinsemilla grown on the kona coast. But I had heard the talk. I had heard the news of lung damage, of parquet testing and chromosome breakage and what - have you. I had not paid it much attention at the time, but now that it was laid out in front of me I could understand that no American pot smoker would have bought Mexican marijuana during those days of fear. I could see how clever, how diabolical the government had been in playing on the paranoia of the health food generation, knowing the yogurt- eaters would never touch anything that had been tainted with chemicals, even if the tainting were nothing more than sheer invention, sheer propaganda.

We sat in silence for a moment, looking down at the field that represented the last gasp of hope for Santos' personal revolution -- or so I thought at the moment. As we sat I occasionally glanced over at him, seeing the almost holy determination in his eyes shine through the unutterable weariness. I saw now that Julia was looking at him in the same way, and abruptly I suspected that this lovely young woman, a teenager probably, had known no other existence than this for over half her life. Nacimiento Santos had become her entire world -- her hero, her raison d'etre, her friend, her lover, and this last thought stirred in me a pang of the one emotion that I hardly ever fell: --- jealousy.

Then another thought occurred to me. " Senor Santos," I said, " you said awhile ago that you'd been expecting me. And yet you let me find you without your knowing why I came. Why? If I were you, I would let no one find me."

"A dangerous policy, I agree," he said in that curious accent. " And you're right, I don't know why you came. But I do know that anything important enough to bring you to me must be important enough to deal for."

"You're offering me a deal? But what could I possibly do for you?"

"I know you well enough to know that you have influence."

"I know many influential people," I said. " That doesn't mean I have influence."

"No?" he said, turning to look at me with a cool, challenging stare.

"It depends on what you want me to do with these influential people."

"Just tell them what I have told you. Tell them what your government has done to a country of poor, ignorant Indians who will starve if they have nothing to live on but corn. The mota is the only chance they have to improve their lives."

"You want me to tell my friends to support a communist revolution?"

"Communism has nothing to do with it. I stopped being a communist six months after I got here. ' Isms ' mean nothing to these people. They need food, and they need self-reliance. And what they need, I need."

He was looking directly into my eyes, and the dedication, the sincerity in his expression was undeniable. It was evident that he had somehow been absorbed by these secretive and implacable Indians, and that in that process he had given up his political orientation to become something of a missionary.

"All right," I said after a long moment. " I'll do what I can."

For the first time I saw him smile, a flashing smile, blazing smile that lit up his face like a diamond. He reached over to touch my hand, and it was as if he had put his strong fingers directly on the entrance to my vagina, so strong was the sexually thrill that coursed through me.

"Thank you," he said softly, still smiling that magnificent smile. "And now what can I do for you?"

"Among other things," I said coyly, throwing him a teasing glance, "you can tell me who your buyers are. Or were."

"Why would you want to know that?" he said frowning slightly.

I told him about Paul, about the mysterious contract, and obliquely about the lead that had brought me to Chiapas in the first place. He listened intently, and when I was through he sighed deeply.

"I'm afraid, "he said, "that you've got the wrong drug. The man you're looking for, the man who apparently owns this lover of yours, does not deal in mota."

"But you know who he is," I asked hopefully.

"No. I just know his reputation. And I'm not trying to frighten you, but I think you would be much better off if you simple found a new lover."

He turned again to look at me, and I caught his eyes and held them. I am quit good at reading truth or fiction in people's eyes, and if Santos was lying, then he was by far the best lair I had ever met. Realizing that, I was stuck with a feeling of hopelessness and utter disappointment - it seemed as if Paul was further away from me then ever, as if I would never solve the wretched mystery, and as if the entire incident was lodging in my brain like a fish bone in the throat.

My thoughts must have registered on my face, for in a moment I felt Santos' hand in mine again. I looked up at him to see his face softly lit up by a gentle, compassionate smile.

"Come," he said softly. He helped me up, then released my hand and started walking down the hill, indicating with a gesture that Julie and I should follow. When we reached the of the marijuana field, he stood up on tip toe, grabbed one of the fifteen foot plants by its neck, then pulled the foot long flower down toward him. A look of calm and peacefully ecstasy passed over his face as he closed his eyes and rubbed the fragrant blossom all over himself, smearing his face with the heavy golden pollen and sticky resin.

When he was finished he offered the flower to me, and I followed suit, immersing my face in it, inhaling its delightful perfume, feeling the pollen cling to my lips and eyelashes. When I finally turned the flower over to Julia-- who immediately began to repeat the ritual in which Santos and I had just indulged---Santos bent over and kissed me lightly on the eyelids, the tip of my nose, and finally my lips, licking the resins from them, then feeding them back to me with his tongue as it entered my mouth.

What a wonderful sensation! It was as if my head were immersed in a fragrant cloud of perfume marijuana, my eyebrows and lashes dusted with the sweet pollen, my taste buds inundated with the thick flavor that was being planted in my mouth by his gentle tongue. I sucked now on that warm flesh, feeling my head go light as the insistent weed penetrated my brain, my body, my pores, down to the very cells them selves, the center of life. At the same time the tip of his tongue was rubbing gently at the back of my throat, thrilling me with little sparks of desire that were growing more urgent by the moment.

I knew I would have this marvelous man, and soon!

In a moment I felt him gently with draw his tongue from my mouth, and I opened my eyes to see what he would do next. My question was answered when he dipped his in the rich flower again, then walked over to his wife, who turned her ecstatic face up to his. In a moment they were kissing passionately, a kiss that spoke of an intimacy so powerful, so total, that I was almost ashamed to watch; and even wondered momentarily if I should somehow make a graceful exit and try to find my way back to San Cristobal.

But I needn't have wondered. Santos soon broke the kiss with Julia---I noticed that he stayed with her no longer than with me----took her hand, and led her over to where I was standing.

"Now," he said in that soft, strong voice, "my two ladies if you please."

I looked at Julia, carefully examining her face for any sign of jealousy, or of mindless submission to her husband. I saw neither. What I did see was a bright, eager, innocent face, a face that radiated beauty and devotion to this man, whom she obviously loved with all her heart. I was touched deeply by that face, that smile, and I soon found when she licked the pollen from her lips, parting them just slightly to allow the very tip of her tongue to pass over them, that I wanted her every bit as much as I wanted him.

"Come to me Julia," I whispered.

She obeyed instantly, stepping over to me and opening her arms wide to except my embrace. As her body melted into mine, I could feel the pliant softness of her breasts as they met my own; and as we kissed, our tongues mingling in delightful play that was laced with the heady flavor of marijuana, I found my hand beginning to rove of its own volition over the smooth roundness of her buttocks. This touch she answered by beginning a slow undulation of her hips, so that I could feel the shy softness of her mound of Venus as it made contact with my own love-flesh.

By this time the beast was stirring within me, and it was all I could do to keep from taking over the program, as it were, and attacking the two of them simultaneously. But I realized that I was on soMeone else's ground, that Santos was to be the conductor here, and that I would probably enjoy myself all the more if I simply surrendered to him, accepted his pleasure as my own, and availed myself of the lush fruits that were being offered to me in the form of their two glistening bodies.

I stepped away from Julia and waited for Santos to introduce the next movement in this sexual concerto of his. While Julia and I watched raptly, he took a dried corn leaf and rolled the most enormous joint I have ever seen from the blossom he had picked. He lit it and inhaled deeply, closing his eyes and grinning that marvelous grin of his, and then passed the joint to Julia, who took a hearty tote.

Then it was my turn. I inhaled the grass and instantly felt it fill my veins with its secret joy. I felt as if the weed were making love to me itself, massaging me just under the skin with a thousand subtle fingers, a thousand tongues.

"Excellent!" I murmured, closing my eyes to savor the juice of it. "My compliments."

"Open your eyes," Santos urged.

I did as he asked, seeing that in the meantime Julia had stripped her self and was standing naked, like some magnificent bronze statue in the afternoon sun. She stood there with her arms outstretched and her legs spread wide while I gaped unashamedly, almost sobbing in my desire for her lush body.

"Santos..." I groaned. "My god, she's so beautiful... I want her so..."

"Patience, my darling' " he said, and for the first time I could hear the rolling accent of the Caribbean in his voice. "Everything will happen, darling. Just be patient."

I moaned to myself and unconsciously cupped a hand under one of my breasts, beginning to massage it idly as I kept my eyes glued on the rich chocolate brown of Julia's body. As I watched, Santos picked another blossom and walked slowly over to her, as she spread her gleaming legs that much further at his approach. When he reached her he put his hand down so that the blossom he was holding came to rest squarely between her legs, and Julia immediately began to ride back and forth on it slow, tantalizing motion, her pussy lips just grazing the soft, furry flower, her eyes closing and a lazy, seductive grin beginning to spread across her face.

"Si, " I heard her whisper as she rocked gracefully back and forth. "Si, deme la flor...la Linda flor........."

I was hypnotized by the lushness of this sexual scene being played out in front of me, fascinated and stimulated almost beyond control by the lovely Julia as she swayed so elegantly over the golden bloom. Only half conscious of what I was doing, I raised my other hand to my breast and now began to poke and tease at both nipples through the material of my fatigue shirt. Santos glanced over at me and smiled approvingly as he continued to hold the flower for Julia, whose lips were beginning to pull back to bare her teeth in a lusty smile.