Villa Pacifica (19 page)

Without me, Ute thought. I'll be up in the hills by then.

“All right. Let's rock this boat, baby,” Max said and jumped in. The boat shook.

“The boat's rocking all right,” said Eve, stepping in. “Won't surprise me if it sinks, with you on it.”

The guide helped Luis's mother on board. Ute was glad Luis was here.

When they were all seated, the driver started the engine. Now they were on the other side of the soporific morning, and heading into something less safe. Ute felt it in her guts, or maybe that was just seasickness. In a boat, the ocean is always choppier than it looks from the shore.

They rode the rest of the journey in silence because of the engine noise. Max had positioned himself next to the skipper, where he observed closely with the evident intention of becoming an expert.

The land was rocky and inhospitable along the shore, and further inland its green tops rose high into steam and cloud. The harsh sunlight fell at a ninety-degree angle today, like a stern finger from Heaven. You down there, it said, and you, and especially you, all of you will feel what's coming to you, sooner or later. But in the meantime, enjoy the sparkling waters of
El Niño
, where fishes get fried, and gringos warm their cold bones, and dead bodies get washed up.

Ute applied some sunscreen to her face, neck and bare arms and pulled her cap low over her face. “Good idea,” Eve shouted, and asked to borrow the lotion. After twenty minutes or so, the engine was turned off. They were close to the rocky face of the coast. Then, just round the corner, they came into a deep, dreamy bay.

“OK.” Paco, the guide, got up and removed his yellow vest. “We are near the bay of Agua Sagrada. We stop here for snorkelling. Ladies, you can go downstairs for changing if you want.”

“I already changed before we left,” Eve announced.

“Over there” – he pointed at the rocky coast they'd just passed – “are some underwater caves. You can swim up to that point, but do
not
swim inside the caves. Not safe. OK? So, we have very warm weather this month,
El Niño
weather. This means that maybe you don't see so much fish.”

Paco took a bunch of diving masks and snorkels and distributed them around.

“
Señora
?” he handed one to Luis's mother. She shook her head.

“She won't be swimming,” Luis said, and dived into the water, soon followed by Max, Liz and Tim.

“I've never done this before.” Eve was fussing with her mask. “How do you breathe with this thing?”

“You breathe through the tube,” Ute said. “There's nothing to it.”

“Do I keep my eyes open?” Eve said nasally through the tube.

“Yes,” Ute said. “That's the whole point.”

Eve sat at the edge of the boat, her legs testing the water. The guide and the skipper were busy preparing sandwiches from a couple of big chilly boxes. As soon as Eve plopped in, Paco collapsed into laughter. “‘Do I keep my eyes open,' she says!” and the skipper joined in. Luis's mother had something resembling enjoyment on her face, and her eyes momentarily met Ute's behind the snorkelling mask.

Ute jumped in. The water felt like warm champagne gone off, fermented and golden with light. Masked bodies hovered at the surface like roots. Their algae-like limbs stirred. It was a blissfully soundless universe. Up there, in the light, was the blue blur of Luis's mother.

Ute pulled herself deeper. How deep did she have to go to reach the underworld of the
tsungki
? She'd read somewhere, once, that the
tsungki
wear crabs for watches, fish for hats, and sit on giant turtles and caimans. There were some fishes darting about down here, and she could now see the sandy bottom, where nameless things scuttled about. She swam around, pretending to be one of them.

She was surprised how far from the boat she popped up. She was in fact closer to the rocky shore than to the boat. There must be a current drifting northwards. She swam closer and looked under. No fish, lots of algae. It was deeper over here. She went a bit further along, feeling the sharp rock with her right foot. And here were the caves in question. The entrance was comfortable enough even for a boat their size to go through. Ute went through. This was only the first of several chambers. The underwater rock was deeply fissured.

The water in here was different – darker and cooler. The reddish rock plunged underwater like an abyss. Time to get out.

She turned around – and just then something gripped her ankle. And like in her nightmare, her choked scream was voiceless. Her reflex was to wrestle her ankle free, but she realized that what was clasped around it was not some tentacular creature of the depths, but a human hand. It was Max's hand.

She held her breath, which was difficult, because she already had very little left of it from the shock. The snorkel didn't allow for long periods far from the surface. It was one of his “jokes”, no doubt. He now pressed against her belly as his legs pulled her in closer.

She fought him off, and his legs disengaged as they went up. They burst through the water together and scrambled to remove their snorkels. For a while, there was just frantic breathing.

“Gave you a fright?” Max gasped.

“Fuck off,” Ute gasped back.

“Yeah, you know how it is. I came to have a look and I see a hot babe. Synchronicity.” He chuckled.

“Bullshit.” And she swam away from him, catching her snorkel in one hand, swallowing water.

She scrambled up to the boat, where she found Eve and Tim sitting on towels and munching on sandwiches, bananas and
mandarinas
.

Standing on unsteady legs, she dried herself with her weightless travel towel and sat down to eat. Soon they were joined by Luis, whom Ute caught with a corner of her eye glancing at her, and Liz.

The skipper started the boat, and soon they could see the bay of Agua Sagrada. The horseshoe-shaped beach stretched for at least a couple of kilometres, and a dry tropical forest rose straight up from it, like a thorny crown sat atop a gigantic, faceless forehead.

They passed Max and waved to him. He stopped swimming and waved back, squinting in the hazy light of early afternoon.

The skipper stopped the engine to see if he wanted to get on. “I'll catch up,” Max shouted.

Tim and Liz hid behind huge, face-shielding sunglasses, and Luis's mother squinted at the swimmer. Luis looked at Ute with his amused, crow-footed Indian eyes, identical to his mother's. Ute shifted her gaze. For a moment, the boat was suspended in the bay, and the world was so perfectly still and noiseless that they could be inside one of Oswaldo's triptychs of someone's life.

When they hit shallow waters, the skipper switched off the motor, and they all waded across to the beach carrying their shoes and daypacks. A warm, soundless spray floated in the air. A sweetly putrid smell of seaweed and gathering tropical storm had come to brood here.

“Uh-oh, is that rain?” Eve said.

“Just warm spritz,” Luis said.

The skipper was still on the boat, tidying up and keeping a look out for the errant swimmer. The group dispersed. Liz went for a walk along the water's edge. Tim lay belly-down on his towel with his book. Paco started texting someone on his mobile. Eve waded back into the water and splashed her rounded shoulders. Luis's mother headed to the shrubs on the edge of the beach.

“She needs the bathroom.” Luis sat down on the sand, and Ute joined him there. She should go and investigate the start of the path leading up to Agua Sagrada, but she needed a moment of stillness. She was still shaken by the cave encounter. They turned their faces to the fine mist in the air for a while. Ute closed her eyes.

“Do you think there'll be a storm today?” Ute asked.

“Yes, I think there will be,” Luis said. “I can smell it.”

“Me too.”

“I'm thinking of going to Villa Pacifica tonight, away from the beach, but I don't think my mother will agree.”

“Why not?”

“She thinks there are bad spirits there.”

“Like Max?”

“No.” Luis laughed his breezy laughter. “Not Max. We can see Max. But we can't see those spirits. They're like… Energy. Bad energy. She felt it last night.”

“Did
you
feel it?” Ute asked.

“I'm not so much in touch with the spirit world. Are you?” He looked at Ute.

“No, not at all.”

It's possible that I'm not even wholly in touch with the human world, she thought. That I'm living somewhere in between.

“Always competing, that one,” Luis said, looking out to sea. “Trying to prove something to someone. He must be an unhappy man.”

“Oh, I think he's happy,” Ute said.

“Are
you
happy?”

“Me?” Ute searched for an answer. “Sometimes.”

“And now, are you happy now?”

“Right now?”

“Yes, today. This week.” His smile was playful.

“I don't know.” She could be honest with him, like with Consuelo. In fact, she could be nothing but honest with him. He would know it otherwise. “It's been a strange week. I guess I haven't been all that happy.”

“Your relationship is not very happy,” Luis said. That was wounding to hear, because it came from a stranger, and it wasn't even a question.

“Oh, we have a very good marriage actually. It's just that at the moment, Jerry is writing something, and I have some work to do as well…”

“I understand. You can't always be together,” Luis said.

“No. Yes.” After a short silence, she asked: “And you, are you happy? Are you and Helga happy?”

“We have many differences, but also things that keep us together. Music is the most important.”

Ute noticed Luis's mother who was sitting right behind them on the sand, her skirt drawn modestly around her shins. Luis said something to her in Achuar, a joke perhaps, because her face cracked into a smile. Her teeth were oddly blunt, as if filed back. Then she looked at Ute and said something. Luis translated.

“My mother says that illness is a sign of bad energy that must be cleansed. Your face, has it always been like that – if you don't mind me asking?”

“Yes.” Strangely enough, she didn't mind Luis or his mother asking. “And where does the bad energy come from then?”

Luis looked at the sea. “Usually from the past. It can be an ancestral spirit.”

“I don't have any ancestors.”

“You are disconnected from your past,” Luis said. “Like many Europeans.”

“From my ancestors' past, you mean.”

“Same thing. You know, our past doesn't begin neatly from the moment we are born. It's not that straightforward. If you were in the Amazon, my mother would arrange for you to have a seance with a shaman. Take some herbs, vomit, see the past, and understand yourself better. Your skin would clear up along with your spirit.”

“Too bad we're not in the Amazon. Excuse me,” Ute said, and got up to talk to Paco, who was passing by.

“I'm not coming with you on the walk,” she said.

“How come?”

“I want to visit the community of Agua Sagrada today,” she pointed to the invisible hilltop behind them. “I'm updating a travel guide, and would like to include the different points of interest in the national park.”

“It's out of the question,” Paco frowned. “We can't let you walk there alone. You don't know the way. You need a guide. The walk there is three, four hours, perhaps more.”

“I have four hours. I don't need a guide.”

“We'll get you a guide for tomorrow, you can go there tomorrow,” Paco said. “I don't even know if we have time to get to the top of the hill. Look.” He pointed at the horizon, which was darkening by the minute. The fine spray had turned to a drizzle.

“Tomorrow might be too late.” She put resolve in her voice. “And we're leaving soon.”

“But I can't do anything about the weather. Those hill paths, when there's a storm, they're not safe. Trees snap. There are mudslides. Ah, thank God, there he is.”

Max emerged from the shallow water. Behind him came the skipper, carrying a pack with small plastic water bottles, which he handed to Paco. Liz was returning from her walk and Tim was deep in his book. Eve was swimming.

“Hey guys!” Max saluted with a wave. Nobody paid any attention except the relieved Paco.

“You're a good swimmer.” He shook his hand. “Very good.”

“I like to keep fit,” Max said.

“OK everyone, we're going to head up in a few minutes,” Paco shouted. “Go and get the
señora
,” he gestured to the skipper.

“I'm not comin' on the walk,” Max declared, and cleared his left ear of water. “I'm gonna hang down here while you guys are sweating up the hill.”

“OK,” Paco said. He looked like a man with a headache. “If you don't want to come walking, that's OK. But where are you going to go? Agua Sagrada is too far, you're not permitted to—”

“Who said anything about Agua Sagrada?” Max was towelling himself energetically.

“I don't know, the
señora
here was talking about going by herself.” Paco looked at Ute.

“No way, we won't let this
señora
go nowhere by herself,” Max said, and his eyes met Ute's.

“I'm not going.” She shook her head.

“Right,” Paco said. “Ah, there she is. We're ready to go.” He glanced at his watch nervously.

Eve was changing under a huge towel, her back to the group. Max went up to her and reached under the towel playfully. “Hey, honey.”

“Keep your hands off me.”

“Jesus Christ.” Max opened his arms to the heavens.

“OK everybody,” Paco shouted. “We have about two hours before the storm. Let's go.”