The Navidad Incident (30 page)

Yet somehow he can't get into the spirit of things at the fourth site, as if the festival magic had lost its effect. He's able to go fairly far forward and claim a place on the beach close enough to see the barge and Yuuka in the distance over the shoulders of other seated pilgrims. People are standing not far behind, but around him everyone stays low and sways on their haunches, all rapt expressions and ecstatic cries. Why can't he get into the mood? No longer one of the faithful flotsam, he's back to being the president just as surely as when he's at the Presidential Villa; a politician soberly observing this superstitious premodern spectacle, this waste of energy that brings everyday affairs to a halt.

Or maybe the festival spirit has given up on him. It's as if someone or something has now denied him entry here. Why this jaded, apathetic feeling? In a celebration of selfless belonging, why is he himself again? After all the secrecy involved in shedding his official identity, why has he suddenly reverted to keeping a watchful eye on civil disruption?

Clouds of suspicion boil up inside him, choking his mind with apprehension. It's as if the Yuuka had ritually laid the entire blame for people's misfortunes at his feet. He's an outsider, he doesn't belong here. Worse than that, what if people notice he doesn't belong? In their aroused state, they might turn on him and tear him to pieces. The fear becomes palpable. He's a crow among doves, he can't stay here.

At the high point of the ceremony, while the virgins are doing a dance of praise before the Yuuka, Matías turns away and wades out through the crowd without anyone stopping him. It must be around seven thirty in the morning. The outskirts of the village are deserted save for gangs of early-rising kids who clamor to get a view, unlikely though it is that they'll be able see past all the adults who fill the festival precincts.

He walks along, heading nowhere in particular. What's wrong with him? Is it just exhaustion catching up unannounced? Better take a breather, go lie down somewhere and take a nap, but he's not really sleepy. He keeps walking, then remembers that one of his own houses is somewhere in the vicinity. Not an old family home—he's lost track of his mother's relations for the most part—it's a property he bought before he became president, as an incidental investment when M. Guili Trading was beginning to show a profit. He's stayed there, what, three times all told, a decade ago. Always wanted to rent it out, but there's no market on Melchor, so he just kept it for when and if, employing an old pensioner from the Guili Supermarket in Zaran to look after the place from time to time. Now if he can only jog his memory, where does the man hide the key? Oh, he'll probably find it once he gets there. He'll be able to rest up, maybe catch a little shut-eye.

He finds the house and the key in no time. Inside, the air is still. Everything looks neat and tidy; the old caretaker has been doing his job. There's a bedroom in back, shuttered and secluded, but the sofa in the main room will do just fine. He's dead tired; he doesn't need nightmares, no shadowy anxieties coming back to seize him. No panic, no dread, just let him recuperate enough to go see the next ceremony. People will let him rejoin the festival, won't they? Thoughts spiral, but his body demands its due until his head gives in. But more than that, it's the otherness of this island, the aura of Améliana and the Yuuka that grant him sleep. He stretches out on the sofa and, very much like his nightly blackouts at the Presidential Villa, promptly slides down a steep incline into unconsciousness.

He wakes in the dark, then slowly recognizes his whereabouts: he's on the sofa in his house on Melchor. What time did he come here and fall asleep? It must have been morning. He can't have slept that long, but that's the full moon right outside the window. Last night the moon had almost completely waxed, and the Yuuka Yuumai begins on the eve of the full moon. Has he slept through one whole day on this wobbly sofa? How many years has it been since he slept so much? How is it possible?

The fifth ceremony will of course be over by now, probably also the sixth. Even if he hurries, he'll be so far back he won't see a thing at the seventh. No, it would make more sense to go on ahead to Sarisaran and just wait. Those earlier fears seem to have mysteriously vanished. Purified by sleep, he somehow knows he'll be accepted among the festival-going faithful. The fifth through seventh ceremonial sites are all the way over on the other side of the island, but the sacred barge circles back for the last observance at Sarisaran, an easy hike from here.

Matías starts walking and almost immediately feels hungry. He can make a short detour over to the supermarket for another cup noodle handout, but he'd rather eat something more substantial. The house up ahead has set out a washbasin full of deep-fried taro dumplings dusted with sugar—the absolute best treat around when he was a kid. There's also a large pitcher of water and cups. No one is about and no one seems to be home either, so he helps himself to a skewer of dumplings and a nice big cup of water. Can't beat simple fare—this is the real thing. So what the hell did he eat not twenty-four hours ago at his own store? What
was
that mass-produced crap he imported by the crate-load from factories half a world away to make his fortune? What does that make him? His wealth, even his presidential career are built on a bubble that a single stick of dumplings can burst.

He tries not to think about it and hurries off toward Sarisaran, passing several pilgrims dozing by the roadside on the way. Fifteen minutes later, he reaches the sanctum and finds a good hundred people there ahead of him, already positioned in silence on the sand waiting for the arrival of the Yuuka and the boat. Matías wanders in among them and locates a free patch of ground. Nothing is happening yet, but mysteriously—at least to him—he blends right in unnoticed.

Suddenly he's completely hemmed in by people. He must have dozed off again—altogether extraordinary after these past few years without normal sleep—but now a stir ripples through the crowd. Every eye is on the young oarsmen carrying the barge up to the final earthen dais, around which sit the eight priestesses and festival band.

The music begins. The Yuuka rise and slowly start their boat-landing dance, with special hand and foot movements, the orientation of the barge and dancers' bearing all subtly distinguishing Sarisaran as the holiest site in the cycle. Even the time spent on each movement here differs from the other seven places. Matías strains to follow every nuance and gesture, not feeling estranged in the least, but as if Sarisaran held him in a welcoming embrace. The feeling intensifies: a rapport he shares with every person here—newly initiated youth and toothless crone, man and woman, rich and poor, sick and well—each imagining himself the sole focus of the ritual. All the Yuuka seem to be Améliana, performing body and soul just for him. Through them the gods have been joyously welcomed from far across the waves, offered song and dance, entreated for eight more years of happiness, praised for things large and small, anger of mountain and wrath of sea assuaged, motions of the sun and all other heavenly bodies assured, in order that the reef teem with fish and fields with taro, that foreigners dripping with money be sucked toward the islands, that healthy children continue to be born and grow up to share in all this bounty. Each and every pilgrim believes it to be so—and for the moment, Matías counts himself among them.

By this final ceremony, how utterly exhausted they all must be. How can the Yuuka and attendants, musicians and rowers have stayed so focused in body and mind for so long with no food or sleep, when he dropped out midway? How can he presume to even ask? And yet there's something very odd about the way he dropped out—or seemed to be driven away by unseen forces that conspired to tell him, “You don't deserve to take part in more than half the ceremonies. You are denied the full eight-fold purification.”

Even so, Matías feels elated. To be here on this spot with the festival air filling one's body is to reconfirm the joy of being alive. To be born into this world and feel, looking up at the sky, smelling the sweet breeze, that for once one is truly in touch with the world,
that
is happiness. Even if it lasts no longer than three days, those days are bliss. Whether born a bird or a sea urchin or a ylang-ylang flower or a human being, all births seem equally precious; every bite of food, every footstep and blink of the eye, every ray of sunlight and molecule of oxygen is an increment of that happiness.

By the last dance to send off the barge, Matías realizes he is crying. His tears make the moon swim, the entire torchlit scene shimmer. His eyes blur with saltwater delivered from otherworldly seas to wash away the silt of day-to-day authority. His coming here was a homecoming. Blessed are the nameless for they alone shall know this state of grace.

No one here is a spectator. All are celebrants. They alone guarantee the rituals will be passed on and performed next time. Those who witnessed all eight ceremonies, those who skipped the middle part and those who caught only the finale expecting a few spiritual perks, all now stagger home under a weight of god-given gifts—or perhaps simply stiff from standing or sitting for hours—to get a good rest before returning to their lives.

Matías sits quietly watching the crowd disperse. He's tired, but there are things he still has to do. The rowers carry the sacred barge off to a boat shed five minutes from Sarisaran. There it will stay, save for an annual paddle around the lagoon to check for leaks, until the next Yuuka Yuumai cycle. The Yuuka and their attendants change out of their robes on the beach, two dozen of them forming a ring and, several at a time beginning with the youngest, slipping inside to put on street clothes. Matías sees the circle gradually transformed from pure white and vermilion to denim blue and floral-print pastels and brash T-shirt primaries—the casually chaotic colors of a marketplace. Nothing quite spells the end of the festivities as this does.

Ten minutes later, the women have shed all holy mystery and returned to their secular selves: housewives and schoolgirls who, taxed far beyond ordinary exhaustion, now go their separate ways without any parting words. Out of the corner of his eye, Matías sees them leave, but he's looking for Améliana. At no point in the ceremonies could he single her out with any certainty, but now back in regular clothes with no kava leaf crown to hide her face she's easy to spot. She's wearing the white cotton dress with large red buttons down the front she wore the day she left Baltasár City. He gets up and approaches, cutting in front of her as she starts to move off in a daze.

“A real effort you put in there. You must be exhausted,” he says in a voice recognizable as her employer's, back at the Presidential Villa.

She looks at him blankly, as though lacking the strength to even show surprise at finding him here in beachcomber clothes. “So you came.”

“Yes, I just got the urge. Dropped my work and came.” He hopes his expression shows sufficient admiration for her forty-hour spiritual ordeal.

“From when?”

“From the beginning. I rested out the middle, though. I've got a place here, if you need to sleep.” At that, he forges ahead like a guide, not even knowing whether she'll follow. She might have a place of her own, after all. Then, after a few steps, he turns to see her hobbling mechanically close behind like a wind-up doll, no spare energy to consider where she's going or why she's following this man. All her powers have been spent on the festival, for the sake of the island, for the inhabitants of Navidad, for everyone on earth. All to wrest some assurance of eight years of calm and quiet for others, however wrong their ways.

People are heading back to home and hotel as Matías leads Améliana to the house where he blacked out just hours before. She steps inside and, doing as Matías tells her, goes to the bedroom and collapses onto the bed in her clothes.

Matías takes a seat on the sofa in the front room. As he gazes at the morning light pouring in through the window, the tides of festival elation steadily ebb, leaving him grounded in his normal sober self. It feels strange to be out of the Presidential Villa for so long, though equally unsettling—probably because he's been doing something so unusual—to be on his own here. He doesn't really believe Katsumata or anyone else will attempt a coup in his absence, but the driving obsessions, thoughts that the country needs him, are reemerging. Still, he has a few hours before his pilot is supposed to pick him up. He can relax and bask in the sun a while, with a sleeping woman nearby.

Again he dozes off and reawakens with his head in a fog, some afterglow of the festival in his system. He vaguely recalls his official duties, but more than any immediate policy decision or dealings with legislators, the deployment of subordinates or negotiations with Japan, he feels an urge to just go on sitting here and consider his own options. Something's pushing him in a new direction. Something's about to give. Call it a premonition, but some major change is coming; it's
that
time. Time to think not about the days and weeks and months ahead, but much further off, though he can't picture himself as old and wizened like the Melchor Elders, he can't imagine Angelina with a head of white hair like María Guili.