“What is it you want?” I managed to say, in spite of my growing confusion.
“Your collaboration, Colombo-san. Be a team player. We only work in teams. Cooperate and everything will turn out fine. Wa! Wa! Wa! Conformity, Don Cristóbal,” he said, prancing a bit and then standing on tiptoe.
He smiled and sighed. “We meet at last. Well, better late than never.”
* * *
I signed more papers than I had during the Santa Fe capitulations with Ferdinand and Isabella. Nomura and his army of Japanese lawyers (the gulf filled up with yachts, ketches, and hydroplanes) forced me to cede the beaches of Antilia to the Meiji Company which in turn subcontracted their development to the Amaterasu Company which in turn ceded construction of hotels to the Minamoto Corporation which contracted to buy tablecloths from Murasaki Designs, all towel-related items from the Mishima Group, and soaps and perfumes from the Tanizaki Agency, while foodstuffs would be supplied by Akutagawa Associates in combination with the Endo Group insofar as imported products were concerned and with the Obe Group insofar as domestic products were concerned, all of which would be processed on the island by the Mizoguchi Corporation and transported to the hotels by Kurosawa Transport Corporation. All of it would be procured by local employees (what term do you think we should use for them: “aborigines,” “natives,” “indigenous peoples,” “Antilleans”? We wouldn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings) who will prosper with the influx of tourists, Columbus-san, and see their standard of living go through the roof. We need tourist guides, drivers, bus lines, car rental agencies, pink jeeps, and pleasure boats for the hotel guests. Which in turn will require highways and everything tourists need strung out along them: motels, pizzerias, gas stations, and recognizable trademarks to make them feel at home, because tourists — it’s the first thing you should know as Admiral of the Ocean Sea and president of the Paradise Administrative Council Inc. — travel to feel they haven’t left home.
He offered me some bitter tea: “Accordingly, we’ve given concessions to very familiar trademarks. You should sign — right here, if you don’t mind — private contracts with each one to avoid difficulties that might arise out of the antimonopoly law of the European Economic Community, which, I add to relieve your conscience, would never have accepted something as greedy as the 1503 Casa de Contratación in Seville.”
Dazed, I signed the various contracts, including clauses relating to fried chicken and soda water, gas stations, motels, pizzerias, ice cream parlors, picture magazines, cigarettes, tires, supermarkets, cameras, cars, yachts, musical instruments, and a list of etceteras longer than the list of titles belonging to the monarchs of Spain for whom I had embarked on my voyage of discovery.
I felt my new world had been covered over by a spiderweb and that I was the poor fly captured at the center, impotent, because, as I’ve already said, living in Paradise was living without consequences.
“Don’t worry. Work with the team. Work with the corporation. Don’t ask who is going to be the owner of all this. No one. Everyone. Trust us: your natives are going to live better than they ever did. And the world will thank you for the Last, the Supreme, the Most Exclusive Resort on the Planet, the New World, the Enchanted Beach Where You and Your Children Can Leave Behind Pollution, Crime, Urban Decay, and Enjoy a Pure Earth, PARADISE INC.”
* * *
I want to shorten this. The landscape is changing. Night and day, an acid smoke flows down my throat. My eyes tear, even when I smile at the hyperactive Mister Nomura, my protector, who has placed at my service a team of samurai who guard me against the people who have threatened me or organized unions and protests. Not long ago they were my friends.
“Remember, Don Cristóbal. We are a corporation for the twenty-first century. Speed and agility are our norms. We avoid offices and bureaucracies; we have no buildings or staff; we rent everything, and that’s it. And when reporters ask you questions about the real owner of Paradise Inc., just say: No one. Everyone. Team spirit, Cristóbalsan, company loyalty, yoga every morning, Valium every night…”
Nomura pointed out that, far from being a restricted place, Paradise Inc. was open to all nations. It’s true: I felt nostalgia looking at the old flags I’d left behind as they arrived on the airships with a horde of tourists eager to enjoy our immaculate waters and our pure air, the whiteness of our beaches and the virginity of our forests. TAP, Air France, Iberia, Lufthansa, Alitalia, BA … The colors of their insignia reminded me, with sweet bitterness, of the courts I’d wandered through, begging support for my enterprise. Now they were like the coats of arms decorating a herd of Pegasus in the field of the Pleiades.
Thousands and thousands of tourists came, and on October 12, dressed in my fifteenth-century clothes, I was paraded around on a float brought from the Carnival of Nice, surrounded by naked Indians (male and female). Now, it’s hardly worth saying, all my clothing comes from Banana Republic. No one bothers me. I’m an institution.
But my nose vainly tries to sniff the invisible highways of the night, when thousands of hidden organisms used to perfume the air to guide the tapir, the deer, the ocelot, and the ounce. But I don’t hear them anymore, don’t smell them either. Only my gray-brown fox with pointy ears stays close to me. The heat of the tropics escapes through those palpitating white ears. The two of us look toward the orange groves that surround us. I wish the fox would understand: the grove, the animal, and I are survivors …
They don’t let anyone near me. They’ve forced me to become fearful. From time to time, I exchange glances with a lanky, dark-skinned Indian girl who fixes my pink-sheeted bed and waters the orchids before leaving. Her eyes are not only wary but hostile and something worse: resentful.
One night, the young Indian maid doesn’t show up. Annoyed, I’m just about to protest. I realize a change has taken place. I become intolerant, comfortable, old … I open the netting that protects my hammock (I’ve retained that delightful custom from my original astonishment) and find stretched out in it a slim young woman the color of honey: stiff as a pencil, only the swaying of the hammock softens her. She introduces herself with verbal and gestural intensity as Ute Pinkernail, native of Darmstadt, Germany. She tells me she’s managed to sneak in by taking the maid’s place, that I’m very protected and don’t know the truth. She stretches out her arms, wraps them around me, and whispers breathlessly, nervously into my ear: “There are six billion people on the planet, the big cities in the East and the West are about to disappear. Asphyxiation, garbage, and plague are burying them. They’ve fooled you. Your paradise is the last sewer for our narrow, packed, beggarly cities without light, without roofs, through which wander thieves, madmen, crowds that talk to themselves, skulking rats, dogs in savage packs, migraines, fevers, vertigoes: a city in ruins, submerged in its own sewage, for the majority; for the smallest minority, there is another, inaccessible city on the heights. Your island is the last sewer, you’ve carried out your destiny, you’ve enslaved and exterminated your people…”
She was unable to go on. The samurai came in shouting, jumping, brandishing submachine guns, violently pulling me away. My veranda was shrouded in dust and noise; everything was bathed in white light, and in one vast, simultaneous instant, the flamethrowers burned up my orange grove, a bayonet pierced the heart of my trained wolf, and Ute Pinkernail’s breasts appeared before my astonished, desiring eyes. The girl’s blood dripped through the weaving in the hammock …