Our Dark Prince (The Scottish Play)

XLVII. The Fish Mongerʼs Daughter

INTERLUDE
The Fish Mongerʼs Daughter
[Halcyonʼs Journal #2]
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1
THE PRESIDENTIAL PALACE
Oro
Algarrobo, Chile
Territory: Pinochetʼs
The Needleʼs Eye
June 27th, 2004
Time: 9:00 PM
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    "Magical realism."

    Gold. In the haunting yellowish glow of El Coliseo, with the sun fiercely skimming over the surface of the Colosseum with a wrathful vengeance, there was gold. Engraved in the arena, tiered in the Colosseumʼs benches. The heat was a monsoon – raining acid down on them with the fury of the Chilean wind – and it clung to their dress uniforms, burning the skin. Above them loomed an earthen plaza that was the Igneous Palace of Itxtab, carved from Illyrian steel and quetzal arrowheads. As Oro marched, Itxtabʼs Palace was a shadow of obsidian and gold, and El Coliseo was swallowed by its shining, gaping teeth. Four hundred feet of golden genius.

    "It holds a – how do you say? – hypnotic attraction in this country. In Latin America. Magical realism are books about Colombian dreams sleeping with Chilean realities....a need to cut out the monsters. To create an industrial body. To cheat death."

    There was gold. Screaming inside the corpses. Oozing from the flesh and bone. Mounted towards the sky, the men and women bandaged in military uniforms were staked through the abdomen, the stakes cleanly cutting through their stomachs. Blood, it painted every corpse. Exploding arcs of blood, streams of blood, rivers of blood, mountains of blood painting the town red. Silent corpses marked El Coliseo, desperately flailing before they met their timely ends, and their mouths cried tears of gold that flayed the skin, bubbled against their tongues. Pinochet, he was an ostentatious man who loved to display his wealth – and in the golden hour of his violent reign – he showed the world just how rich he was.

    Just how powerful he was.

    "They invest in their future, the Latin people do. They sell their souls to the devil. They kill themselves in the streets. They trade in blood and make profits in skin. Magical realism is a form of evolution, señora. An abiding devotion to whatever God that sits in the blue eyed orbit of the Giants up above."

    His hands were laced in gold chains. Laced around his head. Laced in the blood that created oceans at the floor of El Coliseo. They were effigies – all the white-smocked workers and mice-like men and all the drug dealers lined up for the slaughter – effigies drowned in the Chilean blood and Pinochetʼs gold. Oro was stacked next to his brothers and sisters in the drug trade, broken by the back of his business – soaked in the sheen of Portuguese sweat – and as the Chilean soldiers loaded their assault rifles, he felt the blood ooze from the crevices of his body. A flash attack, ringing in his ears, honey-smoked in its golden sweetness, in its bloodthirsty lust. The bullets his the men in front of him, the women behind him, breeding a perpetual hunger he had been trying to starve.

    A hunger for survival, a hunger seasoned with fear. One sensation that emerged in frantic movement that fought its way out from under the golden wave of gored corpses, another flavor that molded its way from the grave in glorious gore. And in that moment, Oro showed how to claw his way to freedom.

    "Escobar and his men were the North American fire. Torching the West; destroying the hungry need for magical realism. To hide in the truth of the world and in the fiction of the supernatural world. As violent as he was, he gave the Latin people the chance to show the true colors of the Westʼs dark chapter in Latin America. Creating a throne of mangled bodies and corrupt bones that rivaled the Orderʼs. In a tragedy written by ruthless conquistadors and European monarchs, the poor were on top for the first time. And Escobar was king."

    How powerful he was with his freedom.

    "But the king is dead. Long live the kings."