At last a gig!! Tropical!!

If you remember our last entry, we are in this tropical island, living in a cabin near our host Melissa’s house. We often have long chats with Melissa, listening  to stories about her life and family and about the comings and goings on the island (according to her, coke smuggling is a glam career choice around here and makes for great narratives of desire, greed, lust and haplessness, ‘get rich or die tryin’ style). We also enjoy playing with the 3 young kids, they have a good sense of humour and we sometimes spend hours together. Well, so much so that the other day Melissa came to the cabin and, sheepishly, confessed that the children would very much like us to watch them sing – their religious hymns!!! Would we take part in the ‘Sabado’ religious festivity the Adventists perform every Friday evening? Confusion ensued... the scene was not really ours (see the ‘S&M and other Christian perversions’ entry for details) – but a gig is a gig! We said yes and keenly joined the family in their house, where we were seated in circle, us enthroned on two mass-produced belle époque bourgeois dining chairs.

A book of psalms and songs was produced and the gig started. The first song went a bit so-so: we didn’t understand we were supposed to sing along, so we just nodded approvingly, smiling encouragingly and tapping our feet while the family was belting it out. But things smoothed out afterwards – the pater familiae informed us we are supposed to ‘help’; I asked them if they knew that we think god is dead (OK, I didn’t quite phrase it this way, I just said I don’t believe); they were a bit stunned but assured me god doesn’t mind that I think he’s dead (he’s either unconscious or doesn’t yet know he’s dead, the poor fellow, as the great stand-up comedian Jacques Lacan might’ve said). From now on, the crowd was ours!! The melodies had the complexity of nursery songs, so we had no trouble mastering the compositional intricacies. They were all written by Anglos, as limp and soggy as a wholemeal biscuit long lost at the bottom of a cup of soup, but the spirits were high, so it didn’t matter!  The lyrics were the usual Goth stuff: damnation, sulphur, doom for the sinner; eternal love and happiness for the devotees.

If I may digress for a second, I often feel that the conduct demanded from the Christian, especially in the newer sects and subcultures, resembles that demanded from a good dog: Semper Fi. Eternal, blank devotion: adore, obey and serve your master, no matter what he demands, no matter his character, no matter you have no idea why you’re asked to do these things or what they mean and that you don’t understand a iota of his desires.  Just obey, love, wait for the reward. But disobey, and the punishment will be fearsome: whipping, canning, your nose will be dragged in your own piss and feces, castration, the kennel, the shot. These Adventist songs were all of the type:

“My master gives me love and food, and bathes me now and then/

And I get treats and flea repellents and, hey, even a toy/

I get a name, a rug, a bone, a neutering and a den/

And if I sit and fetch and roll, he’ll shower me with joy/

Chorus: Oh my master there is nothing, nothing more than serving thee/

To lick your hands, sleep at your feet and be put on leash to pee”.

So we went crazy, belting them out too, nodding knowingly when psalms were read, screaming ‘’amen!’’ like Black Sabbath saying their goodbyes to a loving stadium crowd. It was a blast, the crowd was amazing and we basked in the afterglow for a while. The post-gig party was also an intimate affair, the two of us getting tanked in the cabin. We Have Cracked The Tropics!!! We Are Golden Gods!!! Rock and Fucking Roll! Thank You and God Bless, AMEN!

The terrifying tale of the telepathic peacock

 Melissa, our host in Providencia – a tiny island off Nicaragua’s coast that, somehow oddly, belongs to Colombia and where we are just lazing off, since there is no point whatsoever subjecting the locals to our brand of electro - tells us the horrifying and 100% accurate story of the evil genius island peacock. This peacock, whose cries resembling a melancholy fog siren I can hear as I write, has been abandoned on the island, along with a bunch of other animals, some of its own kind, by an Italian fleeing his Caribbean home. The menagerie owner was by trade an alternative healer and could discover one’s ailments simply by looking at them.  After being abandoned, the peacocks have a terrifying faith: the two females die shortly, unable to survive in the bush. The two males succumb to bestial conducts: they split the territory in two, each owning one side of the road. Each patrols his territory, emitting piercing calls that die, frightened and alone, where the sharp rocks plunge into the sea. Increasingly terrorized by the utter uselessness of their masculinity, they engage in a fight to the death; the peacock owning the side of the road where Marissa’s house is kills the other peacock gruesomely.

Since then, for the past 8 years, the peacock lives alone on his land, flying around, perching on the tall trees, scouring the bush without ever crossing into his dead rival’s territory, no matter how big the threat to his life. He promptly and mercilessly stifles all of Melissa’s agricultural endeavours, devouring her young melons, flowers, cucumbers and peppers with the precision of a vegan piranha.  This converts Melissa, a committed Adventist otherwise, into his arch-enemy: she promises to do away with the evil patriarch and ritually cook him in a spicy Caribbean casserole. “This is for my young cucumbers!” she would cry, before biting into a sauce-dripping leg.  

 But the peacock has amazing abilities, avoiding all her traps: the cane sugar dipped in rum fails to inebriate him. When a noose made of thin fishing rod is laid in the grass, the peacock saunters around it, eating the bait, without even once stepping inside the circle of death whose other end Melissa, hidden in her kitchen, feverishly holds through a crack in the door. When, exasperated, Melissa asks her husband to borrow a friend’s gun, the peacock disappears for three days without trace, confounding their assiduous searches of his territory. Since then he seems to provoke her, eating from the tourists’ hands but flying away as she gets near, permanently spying on her from nearby trees, ravaging her garden in a protracted guerrilla war. Melissa is convinced that the Mesmeric Italian healer endowed his peacock with telepathic powers that allow him to triumph over his enemies, each victory deepening his isolation.

 The Pill, predictably aroused by the romanticism of this classical story, starts thinking of ways to kill the feathered white whale. Discussions about the tastiness of peacocks start (because in Spanish a peacock is a “pavo real”, a ‘’royal turkey’’, Melissa launches one of her main offensives around Christmas); plans of female peacock decoys and fishing nets are proposed. A week later though, das Pill is endeared by the fellow and starts feeding him bread every day which, of course, he takes from her palm.

As we speak, the last peacock of Providencia, aware of all these conspiracies to murder him, flaps his heavy wings from tree to tree, does intricate mating dances to no one in particular and, at dusk, launches shrill calls towards the darkened seas, his powerful telepathic brain squeezed in the castrating vice of solitude.