Pirates of the Caribbean — A Marketplace Tale, Part 7
Pirates of the Caribbean is fanfiction based on Laura Antoniou’s Marketplace series, a fictional world in which there is a large and secret market for consensual slaves who serve their owners under contract. Laura recently released “No Safewords,” a fan anthology of tales by different writers set in the Marketplace world.
In Part 6, Bette pays a visit to an archeological site — and learns something about her own past.
After a wonderful meal of crisp pork sandwiches — another product of Puerto Rico’s torrid love affair with all things pig — we press on.
“We’re going to a finca de cafe,” she says. “A coffee plantation.” We galumph over a big dip in the dirt road. “Though it’s not old, and not much of a plantation. It’s one of these small, high end places. An American came here and planted it in the 1980′s, to supply the world’s hipsters with Cafe de Taino,” she says.
We come over a rise and the vista opens up — rolling hills, terraced with coffee plants. Now, I love coffee, but it occurs to me that I’ve never seen a coffee bush in real life. Maybe the free-floating reverence that came over me at the petroglyphs was still hanging around, but I felt like I should pour out a libation to the coffee gods at the root of one of the bushes, in thanks for all the alertness the bean has provided me over my lifetime.
We drive up to a long, low farmhouse with a broad porch wrapping all the way around it.
An American, perhaps in his sixties, bounds down the steps, his arms flung wide.
Whoa, silver fox alert, I think.
“Margarita, dollface, how are you!” he says, embracing Rita in an encompassing hug. “It’s been too long!” he says, kissing Rita on the cheek.
Rita taps him on the nose with the tip of her finger. “The road runs both ways, handsome,” she says.
“Aww, you’re right. It’s just, we had this outbreak of …but really, before that, a problem with the distributor…well, you know. Mother Nature. She doesn’t take coffee breaks and never gives me a vacation.”
“You are her slave then,” Rita says, winking at him.
“Don’t you start, lady,” he says.
“Bill, you know Benny, of course,” Rita says. Benny waves, still leaning against the Land Rover a few yards behind us. “And this is Bette. She’s come to help us with…a problem.”
“I’ve heard about this problem,” Bill says.
“And Bette, this is Bill Buckman, proprietor of Finca de Taino, the largest producer of native Puerto Rican coffee in the world.”
“It’s not much,” Bill says, “But what there is is amazing.”
Bill leads us through the finca, through the rows of coffee bushes tumbling down the terraced hillsides; the vast shallow pans of red dirt where beans are laid out on wide canvas tarps; the cisterns where red coffee berries, the bean still within, are allowed to ferment a bit. Men are leaning over the cistern, pouring water from what looks like giant showerheads, agitating the slurry of water and bright red “cherries.”
Bill starts talking to the men, and I take the opportunity to lean over and ask Rita something quietly. “So…are these people Marketplace?”
“Dios mio, no. Bill is so egalitarian it would give Abraham Lincoln a woody. The men are part of an employee-owned fair trade coffee cooperative, not property. And Bill is no owner.”
“Do they know about the Marketplace?” I ask.
“No. Bill just thinks I’m an eccentric with unusual sexual tastes. He’s a very strange man — he won’t let me tie him up to anything, not even using little silk scarves! Very strange.”
It is so, so hard not to laugh as Bill approaches us.
“We’re experimenting with processing the coffee the way it’s done in Ethiopia — you let the cherries ferment a bit and then take the beans out. Gives it an interesting tang.” He rocks back and forth on his heels a little bit, his hands shoved in his pockets.
“Well,” Bill says. “come on. Are you sure you want to do this?” he says.
“I don’t see another way,” Rita says.
“Well, all right then.”
Bill hikes up and around the steep hill behind the cistern, and we follow. There’s a steep drop on the other side, and in a hollow next to a trickling creek is a stone hut with a tiled roof, surrounded by some wooden barrels, crates, and sawhorses. There are tools and what look to be the castoffs of a carpentry project.
“How is he lately?” Rita asks.
“Up and down,” Bill says. “Like always.”
“I’ll leave you here,” Bill says. “Bette, you might want to take off your hat and glasses.”
I take them off, and shove them in the pockets of my cargo pants.
Rita and I set off down the ridge. “Rita, this guy isn’t some Unabomber type, right? Is he likely to be armed?”
“Oh yes, he’s very well armed,” Rita says, picking her way around the roots of a massive tree.
Shit.
“Why did I have to take off my hat and glasses?” I ask.
“Mateo doesn’t like men. If a man gets within fifty yards of his hut he shoots them,” Rita says. “With the hat and glasses, and your short hair, he might mistake you for a man.”
Oh.
I peer down into the ravine and I can swear I see something moving. I start to get that surround-sound feeling. Things are sharp and clear. I see and hear everything, all around me. I hop off the little ledge I’d been following Rita down, getting in front of her.
“Que macho,” Rita says. “Want to go before a lady, huh?”
I look back up at her.
“Carino mio, he knows me. He’s not going to shoot me. You being in front just means it’s easier to shoot you.” Rita says. “But let’s just get on with it.”
Another few yards of climbing down, and we’re in the courtyard of the hut. Rita doesn’t approach the door. “Mateo? It’s me, Rita, and I have brought my friend, Bette. Do you feel well enough for a visit?”
For a minute, nothing happens. Then there’s a stirring inside the hut, and a man ducks out through the structure’s low front door and stands under the broad, deep sunshade around the house.
“Hello, Rita,” he says.
“Hello, Mateo. Thank you for seeing us.”
The man shrugs gruffly. Rita comes closer to him, and waves me on, to come with her.
“Mario, this is Bette. She has come here from Canada looking for friends of hers. Their boat was taken off of Punta Loma.”
The man nods.
“Mateo, do you know if they’re still alive?”
“Follow me,” he says. I notice he’s wearing a bandanna wrapped low and tight around his head. Thick black hair stands up from within it. He walks haltingly, listing to the left, and it looks like the process is painful for him.
He brings us around back to a small wood shelter with tools and a workbench, shaded by a slope-roofed structure with only one wall. We circle it, and on the wall is a tattered paper map that I recognize as a nautical chart.
He shuffles closer to it and raises his arm to point. “I can’t lift my arm that far, but if they’re alive they are here,” he says, picking up a stick and indicating a small clump of islands on the edge of the mangrove archipelago. “They’ll be on the northwest side of the big island, in the channel between it and the smaller ones.
“Do you think they are alive, Mateo?” Rita asks.
“Yes. They’re alive,” he says.
“How do you know?” I ask.
“He’s my twin,” he says. El Camariocano. I know everything about him. When he dies I will feel it; when he laughs I know it.”
Rita takes off her sunglasses, a wary expression on her face. Mateo ignores her and looks at me. “I managed to convince him to stop before he fed me to the sharks outside the reef,” Mateo says. “But not before he broke my legs and took my ears.”
*******************
Rita hands Mateo a thick envelope of money, and some pictures that she tells me are of extended family members of his in El Batalle.
“Why did his brother do that to him?” I ask, as we drive back.
“Some people say it was about a woman, or about money, or drugs, or power,” Rita says, as I back the Land Rover out onto the dirt road. “But I think evil men do evil things because they are evil.” Rita puts her sunglasses back on.
“And Mateo’s brother? Is evil.”
Lily Lloyd is the author of Discipline: Adding Rules and Discipline to Your Kinky Relationship, a book about making kinky relationships work.
