Oliver Benjamin
him to resembled a strange grocery selling only dried goods. It was
an herb shop run by a smiling old lady who smoked cigars. Her hands
were stained black with the residue of old alchemies.
“I knew a woman who had the same look in her eyes,” Roy told
her. “You’re not going to put chicken blood on me, are you?” She
laughed openly, showing off her rotten teeth and a lively tongue.
As they sat around a table, she ground some wormwood into a
powder and brewed a green infusion. Roy sipped the tea while the
two women spoke of children. Lola had not seen hers in years; the
father had run off with them, leaving her desperate and indebted. But
she had faith that they would come back some day. “They will,” the
old lady assured her, “They always do.” Her own husband came back
one day only to die on her doorstep.
As they spoke, Roy picked his way through her bookshelf. There
were mostly faded occult titles replete with unfamiliar words. On the
bottom shelf he noticed an electric yellow hardcover book with an
English title. The hue drew his attention, but then, even more so, the
title. Feverishly, he grabbed it and scanned the pages. His sudden
frenzy halted the women’s conversation. “You may have it,” the lady
offered, “I can’t read English anyway. Is it about Iceland?”
Roy translated: “Island in the Sun,” he said, “By Alec Waugh.”
The last words of Winfield came rippling back: Eve. Evelyn. Evelyn
Waugh. Brother of Alec. Smart Aleck.Evelyn Waugh had written
famously about Ethiopia, attended Haile Selassie’s coronation. Alec
Waugh wrote about the Caribbean. But where? He scanned the pages
greedily.
Santa Marta. Where the hell was Santa Marta? He had never
heard of Santa Marta. He asked Lola and the bruja, but they too had
never heard of it. He had to find an atlas.
Minutes later he charged through the doorway of Libros de
Libertad, a small bookshop nearby. He had made friends with the
store’s owner after coming in for an English copy of Melville.
“Did you know that there really was a Moby Dick? ” Hernán had
asked him upon that first meeting. “His name was actually ‘Mocha
Dick,’ because he terrorized ships off near the Chilean island of
Mocha. Melville changed the name as a tribute to his friend Dick
Tobias Greene, the ‘Toby’ he wrote about in Typee, with whom he
was stranded on that south sea island.”
He pulled his copy off the shelf and showed him the appendix
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