El Traficante
Excerpt from "The Servants Of Gods", Ecks Ridgehead's as yet unpublished first novel
Don Apolinar Moscote was a very round man. A lifetime of privilege had bloated him and left him rotund in every way, from his pudgy sausage fingers to his great stretched belly. The roundness of his head was accentuated by the large central bald spot in his curly black hair, which made the top of his head look like a smooth pink bird’s egg poking out of a tangled nest of black twigs. His greasy lips were fat and dark, topped by a lank, drooping moustache parenthesised by puffy red cheeks, the mark of his lack of physical exercise. He wore loose, billowing shirts that he left untucked at the waist, and they hung down from his stomach inches out in front of his creased baggy trousers. An improbably delicate and feminine gold chain hung down from between one of the rolls of fat around his neck, a tiny crucifix tangling itself in the tufts of hair that sprouted up from his dry, sagging chest.
He lived in a beautiful, sprawling estate some way outside of the town. It was a glittering white diamond set into the luxuriant emerald of the cloud forest, framed by shady palms and speckled with rashes of fat, multicoloured flowers. The central villa, the residence of the Moscote family for centuries, was surrounded by smaller white satellites, each housing a different aspect of the Moscote family business. A trail of smoke snaked up from a long, narrow building that served as a canteen that fed the small army of workers and guards. Don Moscote’s men flitted constantly in and out of these buildings like bees around a hive.
Over on one side of the compound were a number of empty cages, the bones of the old menagerie hidden under moss and grime. During the middle years of the 19th Century, the Moscote family had constructed a menagerie and stocked it with animals from around the globe. The patriarch, Julio Octavio Moscote, had had a great passion for animals, and had wished to recreate on the island a kind of living natural museum to celebrate the diversity of natural life on the planet. This undertaking was at no small cost to himself, but money was of no import to him, as centuries of prosperous trading had left the Moscote family very wealthy. He imported birds of paradise from Papua New Guinea, monkeys from the Ivory Coast and great black pigs from Indochina. He imported koalas from Australia, giant tortoises from the Galápagos Islands and cantankerous llamas from the Andes. After painstaking experimentation he built a collection of songbirds from around the globe that each sang on the hour at different times of day, and then spent two weeks learning the particular song sung by each individual species so that this aviary could act as his own personal clock. His offspring, however, were less than enthusiastic towards animals, and allowed the private zoo to fall into disrepair until only old Gabito the llama remained, and when he finally died in 1880, his eyes dim and his mouth too cracked and dry to spit, the menagerie closed forever.
Don Apolinar Moscote was a very round man. A lifetime of privilege had bloated him and left him rotund in every way, from his pudgy sausage fingers to his great stretched belly. The roundness of his head was accentuated by the large central bald spot in his curly black hair, which made the top of his head look like a smooth pink bird’s egg poking out of a tangled nest of black twigs. His greasy lips were fat and dark, topped by a lank, drooping moustache parenthesised by puffy red cheeks, the mark of his lack of physical exercise. He wore loose, billowing shirts that he left untucked at the waist, and they hung down from his stomach inches out in front of his creased baggy trousers. An improbably delicate and feminine gold chain hung down from between one of the rolls of fat around his neck, a tiny crucifix tangling itself in the tufts of hair that sprouted up from his dry, sagging chest.
He lived in a beautiful, sprawling estate some way outside of the town. It was a glittering white diamond set into the luxuriant emerald of the cloud forest, framed by shady palms and speckled with rashes of fat, multicoloured flowers. The central villa, the residence of the Moscote family for centuries, was surrounded by smaller white satellites, each housing a different aspect of the Moscote family business. A trail of smoke snaked up from a long, narrow building that served as a canteen that fed the small army of workers and guards. Don Moscote’s men flitted constantly in and out of these buildings like bees around a hive.
Over on one side of the compound were a number of empty cages, the bones of the old menagerie hidden under moss and grime. During the middle years of the 19th Century, the Moscote family had constructed a menagerie and stocked it with animals from around the globe. The patriarch, Julio Octavio Moscote, had had a great passion for animals, and had wished to recreate on the island a kind of living natural museum to celebrate the diversity of natural life on the planet. This undertaking was at no small cost to himself, but money was of no import to him, as centuries of prosperous trading had left the Moscote family very wealthy. He imported birds of paradise from Papua New Guinea, monkeys from the Ivory Coast and great black pigs from Indochina. He imported koalas from Australia, giant tortoises from the Galápagos Islands and cantankerous llamas from the Andes. After painstaking experimentation he built a collection of songbirds from around the globe that each sang on the hour at different times of day, and then spent two weeks learning the particular song sung by each individual species so that this aviary could act as his own personal clock. His offspring, however, were less than enthusiastic towards animals, and allowed the private zoo to fall into disrepair until only old Gabito the llama remained, and when he finally died in 1880, his eyes dim and his mouth too cracked and dry to spit, the menagerie closed forever.
posted by Ecks Ridgehead at
2/02/2005 01:16:00 pm
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