Excertp:

A Descent into the Cane Fields

Every man must, at some point in his life, descend into the cane fields, and it is there he will become who he is meant to be. It all started the day I fell over the railing of the orphanage’s third floor, and as I rose, dazed by the blow… a car hit me. It was speeding, tossing me about fifteen feet, amidst the screams of the nuns who rushed me to the emergency room, where the doctors were stupefied to find not a single broken bone.

Back then, the term “Xenohuman” hadn’t been vulgarized as it is today by the news channels, which won’t stop chattering about supers individuals plagueing the nation. So, they simply described me as an abnormal mutant. Before the military and international police started addressing me as the extremely dangerous Mr. Mustard, I was just a child abandoned in an orphanage run by those shitty, cow-eyed nuns (or, mamaguevas). I don’t remember much of my childhood, officers; I barely recall passing through a white tunnel, like a celestial staircase descending into a banished Paradise… and a dying man who left me with the sisters, supposedly mortally wounded in a shootout.

Of course, I ran from that orphanage when I was eight. I couldn’t stand the nuns beating my hands with wooden rulers when I couldn’t read a text—or keeping me locked up like a prisoner, as in this bulletproof polymer jail. I fled with other kids who, like me, knew we’d never be adopted by those callous adults. No one could save us: not Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary, nor even Santa Muerte, who was just coming into fashion during that cruel era of child sodomy.

The Streets of Nueva Bolívar

Nueva Bolívar is the strangest city in the Banana Republic of Venezuela: a metropolis churned by class inequality, with haughty high-rises spilling oil onto lavish avenues, and dozens of neighborhoods made up of sheet-metal and cardboard favelas, where every kind of social vermin and degenerate lived. It was a failed capital. I don’t remember them clearly; I feel a sadness trying to extract their voices from the vault of memory. Something inside me snapped when they started killing us.

Adrián de Jesús was the oldest, twelve, I think, though he looked younger, a stunted little shit whose bones were deformed by malnutrition. I remember he robbed a bakery with a knife just to get us dinner when we ran out of everything on the street. The girl we called Teresa because she was such a whore: she sucked off truckers behind a criollo restaurant for a few bolívares to buy her bracelets. She disappeared. She was so young… and the predators didn’t spare her. Because on those streets, everyone was a lurking lynx, and one of them started making noise. Damn, I can’t recall the others’ names… just the horrifying ways they were killed. In the end, only Adrián and I remained, because no one could catch me. I ran like hell and didn’t heed the street adults. “He’s not like the other kids,” the high school boys used to say. “You gotta be on your guard with this one; this one truly is a creature of the Lord.”

It was then Adrián recruited me. He taught me to transport cocaine in paper tubes that were supposed to hold baking soda. We traversed the agitated barrios under the withering gazes of the thugs, because the territorial dispute was raging back then, and the distribution routes to the millionaires’ avenues. They paid a fortune for uncut garbage. I personally didn’t like being Adrián’s stooge (or, monigote), because when someone stole the merchandise from me at knifepoint, he’d give me such blows to the head it raised lumps. That’s why, when the police caught him and busted his ribs with wooden planks, I left him to die in a park, where the sun finished him off and social services took him to be buried.

The Witch’s Estate (Finca de la Bruja)

I lived in a favela in the Petare Barrio, behind an alley no one passed through. The high school boys built it for me: a shack of oxidized zinc, wired together and fixed to the ground with rotten poles. There, I had a yellow mattress and a Spider-Man blanket to ward off the mountain cold. That’s also where they’d cut the cocaine paste with wheat flour and sugar to stretch it out. And I always carried a knife in my pants to protect myself from the disgusting adults. They beat me to rob me after finding my hiding spot, but I’m no snitch (or, sapo). Not there in the barrio, not at the Witch’s Estate, not the damn sergeants with their insults, not in the jungle during the bombing. I refused to let them break me.

The high school boys, those who sold second-rate drugs at giveaway prices in the addicts’ favelas, got their numbers called and were hunted down. One afternoon, while they were playing soccer in the court, a truck drove by and let loose a burst of gunfire. They were killed because they were stealing clients from the ones who really produced the stuff in the neighborhood labs. As for me, several masked men cornered me and threw me in a trunk. My God, I imagined so many things! I thought they were going to hack me to pieces, like in those Chinese tortures of the Colombian guerrillas.

They dragged me out, weeping, to a warehouse, where some police officers took our photos and asked for our names. “Rómulo Marcano!” I screamed, and they slapped me silly for naming the president. They forced me into the metal compartment of a tanker truck with about twenty other desperate boys and girls. I knew immediately we were being trafficked, like the street children who disappear to become slaves in the mines, or the pretty girls kidnapped from the barrios and discotheques to be turned into whores.

That was hell. We couldn’t raise our voices, or those sicarios with machine guns would climb in and pistol-whip our heads. They kicked the non-compliant until their ribs cracked, and the little women who didn’t cooperate were taken to the side of the road to be raped. I was a fucking kid, to hell with everything! Excuse my language, officers, Minister… I was just so angry at myself, and I felt so powerless. It’s not good for a boy to see so many young women weeping and be unable to lift a finger. They beat me, not enough to kill me—perhaps my extremely hard bones withstood the brutality of those bastards—but my head was nearly unscrewed from my shoulders, and I spent the rest of the journey, two days I think, resting in an uncomfortable position, my face covered in scabs.

Later, when the military doctors on the Colombian border studied my X-rays, they discovered my bone structure was composed of chitin fibrils stacked at staggered angles, similar to a spiral. These fibrils could absorb impact tension, fractuuring the calcite in a controlled manner. But it hurt… It hurt like the Devil! I could barely drink the vinegar-tasting water, but I endured, unlike the other kids, who became dehydrated from the vomiting and were abandoned on the highways for the vultures. My life is based on endurance. I must endure if I want to keep going. Those devil nuns thought I’d die from a simple car accident, the damned Sergeant Rojas left me for dead during Operation Jungle in Flames, and that Barriga de Perra (Dog Belly) asshole underestimated me, selling me to the Party Secretary, until I took my revenge for everything he put me through.

I arrived at the Witch’s Estate at ten years old, a drug-trafficking sanctuary in a border town near Brazil, governed by “the Italian,” leader of the Llano Cartel, and the capo Monseñor Cobre, alias Barriga de Perra, known as the head of the Train of New Andalusia and one of the most dangerous criminals in South America. They wanted to train us as cartel assassins for the internal war being fought over the gold-mine territory and the traffic routes disputed with the guerrillas.

Damn all those sicarios! And that psychopathic witch, Manitas (Little Hands), who kept fondling our butts in his portal house! He was a real sorcerer, not like those charlatans from the Sorte Mountain and the Amazon jungle. This one had all the cartel assassins in his thrall with his rites. He took an interest in me because of my golden hair and because he practiced incisions on my back with his bone knives to write Viking runes, masturbating while stroking my ass. You goddamn pedophile! He taught me the names of all the Saints on his altar and would lock himself away to call down spirits until dawn, shouting in indigenous languages and whipping the fire in his cauldron with mystic powders. That was genuinely scary.

They beat us with sticks to force us to work on the farm’s coca plantations, collecting the raw material to be processed in the Guayana camps. They also made us eat under the table like dogs and fight bare-handed for the right to sleep in a bed, or for some disgusting food that tasted like a delicacy after hours of physical labor. Those who stole from the kitchen had their hands burned. The disobedient had planks busted over their butts until they shat blood. Those who hid were locked in a storeroom for days. They warned us that if we ran far, they would chase us with dogs and kill us if caught. But if they couldn’t find us, there were sixty miles of jungle to the nearest town, so running was worse.

We were in a hell from which few survived. The weakest died from fatigue and lack of food, or were killed by a sudden illness, or a bad blow that became complicated. We took their shoes and threw them into a refuse pit that was always covered with little children’s bones during the rainy season. The mountains of shoes in the depots told a terrible, infinitely sad story. How many children died over all those years? I could never count the number. I thought the young women sent to the camps had it worse, and they did, because the adults talked about how they couldn’t endure so many clients per night and would slit their own veins. Few times did I contemplate taking my life in that camp, but the time I finally decided to… it changed my life forever.

The Fire in the Cane Fields

I was tired of the blows to the back of my neck when I missed a shot, the cuts on my arms when they made us fight with daggers—there were accidents I’d rather not recount—and the exhausting, murderous labor in those goddamn plantations under the sun. Several years had passed, two or three perhaps, and faces had come and gone in an indescribable tide of dead children. I didn’t know who I was. Sometimes I was “Kid,” sometimes “Shit-Face.” Other times, they just pointed at me and ordered me around like an obedient dog.

Manitas, when he wasn’t attempting to overstep my boundaries with his morbidity, turned out to be a companion in that hell, dedicated to the Tarot and the sicarios’ rituals to bless the farm and “the Italian,” who rarely resided there. He told me about the Wizards of Sorte and the Spiritual Courts, and the Tumeremo Massacre, caused by a Black Magic coven led by Nicolás Fedor, called the Circle of the Necromancer, which sought to resurrect its Grand Master, but was annihilated by other occult circles in Guayana in a civil war. He also told me about his visions of the Pajarón (Big Bird), a malevolent being chained in a secret cavern, waiting for his curse to be broken to engulf the country in darkness, and the Immortal Sages in the Nueva Bolívar Metro, who possibly took little Teresa to drink her blood. And hundreds of terrifying stories about the ruminant creatures of the Amazon and the chilling Ánimas (Souls) of the Black Llanos, who turned vile men into ghosts.

I was something like his personal assistant; he called me “my golden boy,” and I had to watch over him when he went into a trance and those Viking spirits, thirsty for mutilation, descended upon his Materia (Vessel). We also watched scientific shows on Discovery Channel and National Geographic, and those Mexican soap operas that made us cry and laugh during our midday breaks. If there’s one thing I must thank Manitas for, it’s that he put me to work with him instead of sending me to the cities as a motorcycle assassin: those guys were just human trash behind the wheel.

But I couldn’t stand the Witch’s Estate, its horrific work shifts, the constant coming and going of children and adolescents turned into wrecks, and the bottomless death pit that seemed to grow deeper as it was fed the bodies of the kidnapped. Every day, I asked myself, what had I done wrong? Why had I ended up in this purgatory of dead children and merciless demons? When would I finally be a free boy? The shackles were consuming me. All my friends were killed, and Manitas would never let me go because I was “his.” My life wasn’t my own, and I cried every night, like all the children stolen from their homes. Only I never had a home; I was abandoned by those who should have loved me, and since that day, everything had been downhill. That thought still haunts me: I don’t know why I can’t be a happy person. From childhood, I wasn’t like the others. I didn’t see as others saw. And everything I loved, I loved alone. I thought that if I lived long enough, I could save my soul in a moment of redemption capable of erasing all my mistakes. But I was wrong. There was no escape in the vine controlling my strings.

The Genesis of Mr. Mustard

That’s why I decided to commit suicide that afternoon while feeding gasoline to the power generator that supplied electricity to the Witch’s Estate. I’d seen on TV that an electric current could quickly kill a person by touching unprotected copper. So, I turned on the mechanical device and found an instant to grab the connection to the high-revolution engine tightly. I was barefoot, grounding myself with my feet, and fifty amperes entered my arm in an apotheotic close encounter with Death. I closed my eyes, but the flow of electrons that entered my system did not cause a cardiorespiratory arrest in my heart. The smell of burning from the heat generated by the body’s resistance… that pyroelectric end never came. An inexplicable sensation, like floating in a sea of sparkling wine, intoxicated me.

The combustion engine exploded, destroying the generator’s tank. One of the farm workers came running to the demolished shack, unable to understand what was happening. His first reaction was to attack me, but then the thing that would turn me into the greatest villain in Venezuela happened: upon contact with me, sparks flew, and fifty amperes were suddenly transferred to his body with an indescribable cellular tingling. The man visibly tore apart with a howl of pain: his skin cracked into red fissures, his eyes melted like boiling oil, and his plastic boots emitted reddish vapor. Instant death, black void. Manitas found out what happened and told “the Italian” and Barriga de Perra.

That’s when my life changed completely. I stopped being a purposeless orphan, if I ever was one. They wanted to turn me into the toughest sicario in the country, more powerful than Mister Cartelúo and the one officially recognized today as Captain Venezuela after Operation Jungle in Flames.

Every man must, at some point in his life, descend into the cane fields, and it is there he will become who he is meant to be. They forced me to stick forks into outlets to demonstrate my ability to transfer electricity. Manitas believed I was the reincarnation of Shango, the Yoruba Thunder God, or the embodiment of an ancient spirit made man. A demigod in humanity. They immediately surmised that my unbreakable bones had something to do with the mutations produced by the trail of a red comet that crossed the sky during my conception, and they were willing to conduct clandestine experiments to discover my capabilities.

Manitas proceeded to teach me the thaumaturgical wonders of rudimentary Planetary Magic: the fiery Vulcan, Hestia, and Ares, capable of working the miracle of Hellenic combustion, the lightning of the Olympic gods, and other natural phenomena produced by the accumulation of small failures in the universe. He explained the mystic procedures of entropic wonders and how I could apply my mutation to multiply the kinetic effects.

How can I explain it to you, Minister Cabello? You and President Rómulo Marcano believe in spiritual influence over the universe. I suppose it’s the permutations of quantum mechanics affecting the fabric of reality. Well, how can I explain it so you’ll understand? To achieve a Planetary Magic spell, a series of instructions are required, like the commands of an operating system, capable of altering reality: to summon rain, chants, dance steps, and offerings are needed; for combustion, the influence of a Fire Elemental on a sympathetic material like sulfur is required. It’s a bit complex, a forbidden science that the sorcerers of the Black Llanos have refined thanks to the influence of English and French occult circles. Thanks to my mutation, I could absorb and control large amounts of energy to simplify spells, but this was nothing compared to the discoveries the military scientists made on the border.

The King of the Road

How did I get rich? Playing bingo with hookers. And when I turned twelve, Barriga de Perra took me out of the finca to work with him. What can I say about that bastard? He was huge, over six and a half feet tall, and fatter than anyone: almost 330 pounds, like a steroid-pumped bull. And he liked to drive large SUVs with me as his co-pilot, and he talked a lot. That was the good part; he’d spin these hilarious stories. He could go on for hours about whores, drug-trafficking routes, neighborhood anecdotes from when he was a boxer and when they locked him up in Tocorón and he crowned himself king of the prison, collecting protection money from the inmates. “He was like me,” he’d always say with his red pig face and his creepy, mongoloid child’s laugh. And he dressed like a bus driver with a black hat.

He was… the closest thing I’ve ever had to a father. We traveled almost the entire country to his meetings. I got to know the main highways and the hidden neighborhoods dedicated to planting and distilling cocaine, the boatmen who take the packages overseas, the mustachioed truck drivers who hide the drug packages in their containers, and the secret hideouts where they keep millionaire stashes. We went to the movies many times to see action flicks and bizarre comedies, and we ate in all kinds of restaurants. He took me to amusement parks after his meetings with the cartels and distributors.

Am I crying, right? Yes, I like to remember those good times with Barriga de Perra, because there were many chases on unpaved roads and gunshots that shattered the windshield. I remember his blood-covered fists when he came out furious from meetings, and I had to wait for him outside brothels in big cities when he needed to unload. And the screams of pain from the women he left shattered. And his bad temper that he tried to alleviate by singing llanera music at the top of his lungs on the avenue. I remember once he was negotiating with the chief of an indigenous camp in the Guayana mines, and amidst threats and bribes, he lifted the Indian by the throat while surrounded by machine guns and broke his neck with a flick of his fingers. He was feared, despite his childish conversations and his retarded laugh, because his strength was immeasurable. Once, we got stuck on a muddy dirt road, and he just got out of the seat and lifted the rear wheels with both arms. And the blows, no one could really hurt him. His prominent belly seemed bulletproof, and one of his legs weighed more than me. He was an obese red-faced ox with greasy eyes, and from what the sad prostitutes in the mines told me, they were all afraid of him because when he got it up, nothing stopped him, and he left them finished for several nights.

He called me “Mister Mustard” because I loved putting a lot of sauce on hot dogs, and I think the name stuck when he sold me to the government. I’m sure he made a deal with you, Minister of Defense, and that dragged me to the final consequence. It didn’t matter how many times they tried to kill him with shotguns, and I drove the car while he was shitting out sixteen hamburgers with garlic sauce. Or the times they chased us with machetes through hills, and we navigated in the dark until we reached civilization. Or when he drank four cases of beer and five bottles of anís cartujo and couldn’t get out of bed in the morning, and I had to go find the bundles of cash that the distributors in the cities left at specific points on the highway. I didn’t refuse to torture the strayers (or, descarrilados) with my powers and a car battery. Or when they stabbed him in the belly because they set a trap for us, and I had to seal the wound with shoe glue. And when we kidnapped the son of an indebted mobster in Nueva Bolívar, and he asked me to kill him with the gold-plated Pietro Beretta “the Italian” gave him. Or when I got sick with dengue, and he took care of me like a worried dad while we traveled the green roads of the Colombian border closing a deal for the Llano Cartel. And when I recovered, he gave me a top hat like a TV magician, which I never took off. He never forced me to do anything. I liked being with him in the SUV. I obeyed him because I wanted to be like him when I grew up.

The Weapon

But Barriga de Perra was never my friend. I turned sixteen when he sold me to the Bolivarian Army as a weapon of war. He left me at the New Andalusia Battalion, near the Military Institute in the mountains, and I was subjected to countless experiments that tried to break my bones and quantify the energy my body could tolerate. They extracted blood and tissue samples, took many photographs, tomographies, and X-rays. They charged me with thousands of volts, locked me up, induced starvation and thirst, drugged me with hundreds of substances, and enlisted me as a brigadier after arduous military preparation in long-range weapons, parachuting, defensive driving, and hand-to-hand combat. They discovered that I had organelles in my cells that could store chemical energy and that I could transform the kinetic energy of impacts, as well as other thermodynamic conversations. I could absorb bullets with my skin, and they used that as a weapon during the resurgence of the war.

The border was burning when they sent me with a commission of soldiers to the tropical climate of the humid jungle, and what I experienced during my descent into the darkness was a period of blood and death. The camps suffered daily attacks and sabotage from the guerrillas, and dismemberments were routine in that exile of gods. Everything was destruction, and they wanted me to go ahead because my body was “indestructible,” while the rest of the mortals suffered infections and the jungle horrors. War is a human meat grinder without remorse. And that desolate landscape, bombed out, with burned trees and broken mountains, appeared in my dreams under the roar of gunfire. Many times they tried to starve us or poison the streams, or trap us in a midnight fire. They were elusive demons who wanted to torment our days. My hands tremble remembering the recurrent feeling of terror that kept us from sleeping for many nights. Before Captain Venezuela, I was the only Xenohuman in that dead war. All for an offshore oil field? Thinking and watching the stars, I asked, was this repeating somewhere else? If in another world, perhaps, desire won? Or if we were just a mistake of the universe. Baby, kiss me; I want you back in my arms so we can feel eternal like the last time…

The Reckoning

One day, during a clash over a canal, a sniper’s shot hit me in the temple. I fell unconscious in the middle of the skirmish, and the very men I saved from Armageddon abandoned me. They thought I was dead. The tests suggested that only my soft tissues were vulnerable, but they didn’t anticipate that a blunt blow to my skull could knock me out.

Mr. Mustard is not invincible, after all. What do the Protestants say? Xenohumans should disappear, shouldn’t they? Was I really as bad as everyone said? Where had I failed? It’s true that I’m cynical and possessive. I woke up alone in the jungle. I had been fighting the Colombian armed forces for a year, but my existence was relegated to anonymity. I wanted to return to the border camp in Cúcuta, but Operation Jungle in Flames had begun, and returning was a Calvary. Incendiary bombs rained down…

…"

–Continue reading in its original Castilian language at https://fictograma.com/ , an open source Spanish community of writers–