Villa Pacifica (22 page)

“Lizzie, is that true?” Tim said, his voice hurt, as if she'd personally betrayed him with Carlos.

Liz slowly got up, went up to Eve and slapped her on the face. Both women were in shock, then Eve jumped up, holding the side of her face.

“You bitch! What are you doing that for?” she cried, her face turning red. “What's wrong with you people? Can't you see I've had enough! I just wanna go home.”

She turned on her heels and stumbled down the terrace steps. But instead of storming off, she just sat at the bottom of the steps and sobbed loudly in the rain like a lost child. Ute knew she should feel sorry for her, but she couldn't feel anything right now.

“Jesus, girls, get a grip on yourselves! Liz, for Chrissakes!” Tim got up, went to Liz and took her by the wrist. She was crying now too, but silently, big tears streaming down her face. Again, Ute felt oddly unsympathetic.

“What's happening with you today?” Tim turned to Ute. “What was that about?”

Ute shook her head and closed her eyes. Something had possessed her. Since the night before, she had felt disconnected.

“I'm sorry,” she said – but she wasn't sorry. She wasn't anything. Liz was walking away, fighting the curtain of rain as she went, and Tim followed.

Helga, Luis and his mother were staring at Ute like a three-headed Sphinx.

She wished Jerry was there: he would find something clever to say at least. Then Luis's mother spoke, her eyes still on Ute, and Luis translated for Ute's sake into Spanish:

“Humans, animals and plants have a stable core. It's called
wakan
. It is expressed in their physical appearance, their emotions, their vitality. It doesn't change. But the
arutam
, the spirit or the soul, is in constant flux. It is impacted by energies and spirits. My mother believes that in this place there is spiritual interference, the
wakan
becomes confused with the
arutam
. This can have a destructive impact on all living beings.”

Ute couldn't follow. Luis repeated: “It's best to leave. If you stay, you must remain in a state of contemplation, because every action you undertake will be untrue.”

Ute giggled.

“Some people are more susceptible to interferences than others,” Luis added. “And the animals add to the disharmony of the spirit world because they are damaged.”

“Where are all the men?” Mikel wanted to know. “We need a hand or two. There's trees fallen over the road, we need to remove them.”

“OK” – Luis got up – “I'll give you a hand.” He spoke to Helga in German, and she nodded. “Ute” – Luis turned to her – “make sure my mother doesn't wander off. Can you keep an eye on her?”

Ute shrugged. “Sure.”

The three men disappeared and, as if on cue, Max appeared.

“Hey, hey, hey,” he said, “what's up today? Where's breakfast?”

“Self-service,” Ute said.

“The others go to the road,” Helga said to Max. “Now. You go too.”

“Yeah,” Ute joined in, “they went to remove some fallen trees from the road. I'm sure they could do with your help.”

“Right.” He considered it for a second. “Right. I better grab some breakfast first.”

Ute got up. The baby started crying. Max went into the kitchen to forage for food. She glimpsed him from the lounge – in the grey daylight he looked like a giant rat rummaging in a rubbish tip, his rump moving.

He was done quickly and then, to Ute's surprise, he went off to help the other men.

Then she thought of the Mexicans and their farewell note, and went straight to the guest book shelf. She looked at them again and counted them: 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009. She pulled out 2009 and opened it. It was blank, untouched. She tossed it on a chair and picked up the next one down – 2008. Blank, again. 2007 – blank. They were filled in from 2006 backwards.

There was some vast, inexplicable mistake here. An anomaly. She tried to fit it all together, but her mind was brittle and she couldn't do the maths. Instead, she just kept turning the blank pages, still looking for some sign of life. Time was out of joint. She looked up and around. Luis's mother was still sitting out on the veranda, motionless and totemic in her blue dress.

“Hey!” Max was back. His face was all red, and he was soaked in rain. There was a gash along his thigh.

“Wanna come feed the jaguar with me?” he said.

Ute clearly saw herself standing there, a woman at the end of her thirties and at the end of – what year was it really? – standing among these guest books, as if they contained an answer to all her sorrows.

“Max,” she said, and held the 2009 book open. “What do you see in here?”

She flicked the empty pages.

“It's empty, man,” Max said.

“OK.” Ute flicked through the empty pages of 2008. “What do you see in here?”

“Nothing,
nada
,” Max cried. “What are you showing me these empty books for?”

“And here?” Ute flicked through 2007.

“Oh man, everyone's losing the plot. Are you coming with me or not?”

“All right,” Ute said, and clapped the book shut.

“Cool, cool,” Max said, and stepped out onto the terrace, then turned around.

“Hey, by the way,” he said, “I'm real sorry about yesterday. I was an asshole. I don't know what came over me in those caves. Just wanted to say sorry, that's all. Long as we're still friends.”

Ute stared at him, blankly. “Yeah, whatever. What happened?” she pointed to his thigh.

“Ah, just a scratch. We moved all the trees though. The road's clear now.”

“What, in just five minutes?”

Max looked at his watch. “More like an hour, Uddar. Are you all right? You look a bit… wonky.”

Ute blinked. An hour. Time
was
a nonsense here.

“Let's go,” Max urged her, “before everyone gets back.”

Then she saw that the Achuar woman had got up and was gesturing to her. Ute followed her to her cabin. The woman gave her a bunch of leaves and mimed that she should chew them. She was trying to mime something else too, pointing at herself, but Ute couldn't make sense of it. She thanked the woman and put the leaves in her pocket. She'd give them a try later.

Ute didn't know how it happened, but when they waded into the swollen waters and got into Carlos's boat, there were three of them. Luis's mother was there too. Well, Ute had promised to keep an eye on her, and here she was.

And then Max was rowing to the other side. The water carried them fast, he hardly needed to row. The current was going inland. Ute was sure that the current had been going the opposite way when she swam that morning. But there was no point trying to make sense of things any more.

Max was talking about rabbits and the jaguar, and investment, and
El Niño
, but Ute couldn't concentrate – and, anyway, the combined noise of rain and rushing river muted everything. Max's thigh was still bleeding, the old blood caked and dark around the wound, but he didn't take any notice of it. Luis's mother sat motionless as always in her polyester dress, now plastered to her drooping breasts, her hands in her lap, looking at nothing visible to anyone else. What was it – the past, the future, someone present but not visible with the naked eye? For the first time, Ute wished she could talk to the old woman. Ask her what year it was. But this woman lived by some clock of her own anyway.

Then they were mooring the boat on the other side, and walking among screeching birds and agitated monkeys.

“
Enrique eat coca
,
Enrique eat coca
,” Enrique shrieked in his garbled voice when he saw them. The lioness stood up under her black plastic awning. She looked damp and bedraggled. The jaguar looked at them with a circumspect, mean face. He was huge, as if he'd grown in the last few days. Then Max said something and disappeared. Luis's mother started shuffling away, back towards the boat, battered by the rain, which hadn't let up. She didn't want to be here.

“Wait,” Ute shouted, and went after her. The woman broke into a hobbled trot. Ute caught up with her and grabbed her by the arm. The woman shook her head and pointed to the shore. Her eyes were slits in the rain. They were now at the open hut with the animal-skin display.

Just then Max reappeared, carrying an inert-looking rabbit.

“What are you doing?” Ute shouted. Then she wondered the same about herself. What was she doing there? The rain battered her, and all she wanted was for all this to stop.

For the spell to lift and this brutish joke to be over.

For things to be restored to their natural state.

For Mikel and Lucía to have their paradise back.

For
El Niño
and corrupt officials to stop plaguing them.

Ute and Jerry could love each other again, like they used to – purely, unquestioningly. They could be their better selves again.

And standing in the rain here, in Carlos's flooded beastly realm, Ute realized that she didn't hate Max any more. He was OK. He was just a fallible human dripping with rain, like all of them there.

And immediately she realized something else too, something much more important. All her earlier turmoil hadn't been about Carlos at all. It had been about Jerry.

She held the frail Amazon woman by the arm and stared at the empty armadillo shells, the pinned butterflies, the snake skins. And in a horrible lurch, what she already knew hit her with full force. It wasn't Carlos and Liz in that cabin last night, or Carlos and Eve. It was Jerry and Eve. She had recognized Jerry's moans of pleasure, but her brain had rejected the truth.

“No,” she cried, and tried to pull Luis's mother back. “You can't go back yet.”

But the woman wasn't budging. She fought back, and Ute gave up. She didn't have the strength for this. Max was now opening the jaguar's cage and stepping inside.

“What are you doing?” Ute shouted, and the rain entered her mouth. Max threw the rabbit at the jaguar's feet and watched it. The animal didn't seem interested in the meat, though. His ears were drawn back, and he kept his unblinking eyes on Max. Ute ran to the cage.

Just as she got there, the semi-open door of the cage swung shut by itself. It had an automatic lock. There was a key in the lock, which served to open the latch. But Ute didn't turn it.

“He's not eating it cos it's dead,” Max was saying. “Should've given him a live bunny.”

After a few moments of silent staring and heavy breathing, Max went for the door of the cage. The jaguar twitched, his eyes still on the intruder.

“All right, you can let me out now,” he said coolly, and shook the door, which rattled.

Ute just stared at him, transfixed. She couldn't move. Max told her to open the fucking gate, but his voice was quickly lost in the roar of the jaguar. Max stopped yelling and focused back on the animal, which had now risen. It was a very small space, now that two bulky animals occupied it, and Max didn't have anywhere to go.

“Open the door
now
,” he said to Ute quietly, his eyes on the jaguar. He had presence of mind. But Ute didn't. She found herself unable to move, as if she was paralysed.

Then things happened very fast. So fast she couldn't have possibly done anything about it even if she'd tried.

Max tried to stare the jaguar down.

“Easy now, boy,” he was saying. “We're gonna be friends.”

He stood with his feet planted wide apart, arms stretched out defensively, the same stance he took when he was being a nice guy, reasoning with a world full of idiots.

“You know me, I'm a friend. I brought you food yesterday. Friend.
Amigo
.”

But the jaguar wasn't interested in his friendship. He was approaching now, supremely sure of himself, supremely enraged – and with dreadful, effortless grace, he swiped at Max. Max yelled and pulled back.

“Open the gate!” he implored. This annoyed the jaguar even more: he growled and swiped harder, and tipped Max over. Max fell heavily on his back, and the animal was over him at once.

Max uttered a high-pitched, horrible scream – a scream of primal protest. The scream that comes out of us when we know the nightmare is real.

The scream jerked Ute out of her trance. Slowly, she reached to unlock the door. Just to stop the screaming. She turned the key in the latch with a numb hand. The gate was now unlocked. Max could push it open and come out if he wanted to. But it was too late. He now had the angry jaguar on top of him, and his screams went on in the thundering rain. Then they stopped. There was a snapping sound. Ute turned away.

She turned and saw the old woman standing in the display shelter. She was gesturing to her, but she couldn't tell if the woman was beckoning to her or sending her away – saying, “Go, go, gringa, go to the forest, because there is no way back for you now.”

Ute turned and headed for the back gate. The woman was shouting something, but Ute couldn't make sense of it – and, anyway, all this was already slipping into the past. She pushed the gate, and it opened soundlessly.

It was darker, and the rain felt colder. A chill began to enter her blood, and as she stumbled on in the mud, blind and deaf with rain and shock, the cursed forest embraced her.

T
he rain was invisible, inhuman, like time itself. It had obliterated everything, even the night and the day.

Ute scrambled in the swamped forest like an animal, whimpering and breathing hard, and her heart was a wounded bird inside her chest. The dripping branches scratched her face, reached for her eyes, her mouth, her nostrils. Somewhere far ahead, she could hear the sea, or maybe it was more rain.

Everything you do would be untrue
, the Achuar woman had said.

And now, the world was being washed away, and she had to keep moving.
I can't go on
,
I will go on
, Jerry would quote Beckett if he were there. But he wasn't there. He would never be there again. He didn't love her, and it was over for them. Everything was over now, suddenly and brutally. Max. Jerry. Villa Pacifica. Ute's future.

She stumbled on, willing her body to become an empty shell, until the atmosphere darkened and the rain eased off. Animal noises rose from the sodden forest. The path, or what had been the path, became steeper.

She walked for an immeasurable time, until she noticed that something had changed. She was climbing a green hill, the rain had stopped, there were trees, and she saw vapour rising ahead. She was entering the cloud forest. Then it was suddenly night, and in the bloodless moonlight all she could see was cloud. Her singlet was in shreds, and she didn't care to investigate how the rest of her was.

At the top of the hill was either Agua Sagrada or hell itself. Hell is what she deserved, because she was unlovable, iguana-ugly, barren, stupid, a murderer, and a destroyer of everything she loved. Oh how she loved her life now that it was destroyed. She even loved Max now.

Somewhere among the animal screeches and the invisible shrubs, she had to stop. She lay on the warm ground, feverish, weak, and waiting for some wild animal to come and eat her. Just as the jaguar… No, she couldn't think about that.

Ute wailed like a coyote under the ragged moon. Nobody heard, or at least nobody replied, not even the animals. The world of humans was far behind her, she no longer belonged to it. She shivered in the blackness, still alive in a graveyard of time.

Then it was dawn, and a couple of humans were standing over her. Birds and frogs chattered loudly, and white cloud was caught in the tops of the trees. The air smelt fresh as if nothing bad had ever happened.

The women were saying something. There was a horse too, which sniffed around her and spluttered. Ute was parched.

“
Agua
,” she whispered. Her throat was scratched raw and her mouth tasted like manure.

“
Sí
,” a woman said in a heavy coastal drawl, “Agua Sagrada. You need help, my girl. Where have you come from?”

“Villa Pacifica,” Ute sat up and felt like vomiting.

“What?” the other woman said. Now she saw that there was a local man with them. He was standing a few feet away, looking on with his mouth agape.

“I walked from Villa Pacifica,” Ute said in her clearest Spanish. Foreign languages came in handy even in the afterworld.

“Villa Pacifica.” One of the women turned to the other, perplexed.

“Poor thing,” the other one said.

“She's got fever. José!”

José came over, and together they hoisted her up onto the horse, which wasn't a horse but a donkey. The man's T-shirt said in faded English letters “JESUS IS A COCK”. She wanted to laugh, but instead dry-retched. Her guts were on fire.

One of the women undid the threadbare shawl that was wrapped around her shoulders and handed it to Ute. Ute's singlet, which was Carlos's singlet, was in tatters. Her sandals and feet were caked in mud – she hoped it was mud anyway, and not her own excrement. They trudged in silence higher and higher up the steamy green hill, the donkey sneezing from time to time, until they reached a wooden gate that said “Comunidad artesanal Agua Sagrada”.

The settlement consisted of a few huts. A few people came out to see the donkey's strange load. There was confusion about what to do with her now. Ute asked for water again, and someone brought out a grimy plastic bottle, which she drained in one go. Normally she wouldn't, but nothing was normal any more. Besides, she'd obviously contracted something from swimming in the estuary yesterday. Yesterday was another world that was now lost for ever. Carlos had warned her about the water with good reason. He did everything with good reason, and she had destroyed his only home.

Eventually, she was deposited in one of the huts. A woman was washing something in a tub outside the hut. Ute's rescuers explained to the woman that Ute was sick and needed somewhere to rest. The woman nodded, and the other three disappeared back down the dirt road with their donkey. Ute sat on a tree stump and thanked the woman, who looked at her with dull eyes and continued with her washing. It was semi-dark inside the hut, and three hammocks hung from the ceiling. In one of them something small – perhaps a child – was sleeping. Then she suddenly remembered.

“Oswaldo Joven,” she said feebly. “Does he live here?”

The woman stopped washing and gave her a veiled look. Her nails were bitten down and raw.

“Where have you come from?” she asked. Her face was broad, but her delicate features were all bunched in the middle. It was hard to tell her age – she could be anything between twenty and forty.

“From Villa Pacifica. I walked through the forest.”

The woman stared at Ute.

“Villa Pacifica,” she said with suspicion. “What were you doing there?”

“We were staying there… Holidaying.” She sounded to herself like an idiot. And her guts were churning again.

The woman had a slight squint, which was disconcerting, as if she was looking simultaneously at you and someone invisible next to you. She suddenly looked familiar to Ute.

“When?” the woman asked.

“Yesterday.”

How meaningless the notion of yesterday was. The woman seemed to think the same, because she scoffed as if Ute had just told her a mildly funny joke.

“Are you on your own?” she asked.

“Yes,” Ute said.

“So you want to see Oswaldo,” the woman went on. She now seemed less interested in her washing and more interested in the strange gringa. Ute nodded. She was feeling weak, and speaking was becoming an effort.

“How did you know about him?”

“From Consuelo. His wife.”

The woman jerked up as if stung by a scorpion, and went inside the hut. The sleeping mass was now awake, and it stepped out in the bright morning light like an apparition. It was a girl with coffee-coloured eyes, perhaps five years old. It was an inappropriate greeting, but Ute heaved, and the water she'd just drunk came out in a yellowish jet. The little girl watched with fascination. When she recovered, Ute smelt the familiar scent of
palo santo
. The woman had lit some of the stuff inside the hut. Perhaps she thought Ute was a bad spirit.

“
Señora
,” the woman enquired as she came out. “Did someone send you here?”

Then, seeing Ute's blank expression, she seemed to take pity on her and said in a sad voice, as if about to break bad news: “
Bueno
, if you like, I'll take you to Oswaldo now.”

Ute got up on shaky legs, and they walked through the settle-
ment.

The little girl held her mother's hand. They passed a few people who were going about their business – a pottery workshop, a few domestic animals – until they came to the outskirts of the settlement. They continued walking along the dirt road. Birds screeched in the lush forest. At one point, a fat toucan with a yellow beak waddled out onto the road and looked at them suspiciously, before waddling back into the bush.

Soon, they reached a rocky lookout point. From here, she saw the bay of Agua Sagrada and the open ocean, which was sparkling blue, like the sky. There was no trace of the storm.
El Niño
had vanished overnight.

Then Ute realized this was a small cemetery with simple gravestones. The girl ran up to a gravestone and stood beside it, looking pleased. Ute's head and stomach throbbed with confusion.

Clearly, Oswaldo had died in the last few days, and nobody at Villa Pacifica had heard the news. Not even Consuelo. Ute was the first beyond this little community to learn the sad news. Now she would never meet the intriguing Oswaldo.

“This is where Oswaldo is,” the woman said in her resigned voice. “He asked for this inscription. We did it his way.” Ute read the inscription:

On earth a prisoner

of fear and desire,

death will set me free

OSWALDO JOVEN 1949–2007

Ute read the whole thing several times.

“He died in 2007,” she said, and her voice sounded the way she felt – hollow.

“Yes,” the woman said. “April 2007.”

Ute could hear the buzzing of a fly somewhere near her head, or possibly inside her head.

“Are you an admirer of his work?” the woman asked. The girl was now picking wild flowers among the sparse graves.

Ute swallowed with difficulty. The white glare of the sun was blinding.

“How come… How is it possible that nobody in Puerto Seco knows about his death? Not even his wife.”

The woman looked at her with something resembling pity.

“His wife has been dead for three years,” she said.

“You mean his ex-wife, not his current wife. Consuelo lives in Puerto Seco.”

The woman opened her mouth, closed it again, and said slowly, as if explaining to a child:

“After
El Niño
destroyed her café and Oswaldo's paintings in December 2006, Consuelo hanged herself in the café. January 2007.” She shook her head. “Very sad.”

The woman looked at the gravestone for a while.

“Who are you?” Ute said in a small voice.

“María. I was Oswaldo's… Well, we weren't married, but we lived together after he moved up here.”

“Is the child his?”

“No, I had Luz with someone else. He left. Oswaldo was only here for a year.”

“You got together up here while he was dying,” Ute said.

“Oswaldo was a… special man. A great artist. Not everybody liked him, but…”

Ute had to throw up again, and only just managed to hobble away from Oswaldo's grave.

“Sorry,” she said afterwards.

“Don't worry.” María's smile was fleeting. “Let's go back.”

Back to the future? Ute wondered. She nodded.

“Was there a storm here yesterday?” she asked. “And the day before?”

“No,” María shook her head. “The last time we had storms was during the
El Niño
disaster in 2006. It devastated the coast…”

“Yes!” Ute cut her off, “and severely damaged Puerto Seco and Villa Pacifica, and… and…”

“That's right,” the woman said gently. “After the floods, Villa Pacifica closed down. They couldn't afford to repair the houses after one of their staff ran off with all their savings. They also had some personal problems, I heard at the time. Oswaldo had an affair with the
señora
before he moved here, and her husband, he went a bit crazy after that. Oh yes, and during the storms, traffickers broke in and stole some animals.”

Ute realized that they were walking on, beyond the graveyard. Luz ran ahead, clutching a sprig of flowers.

“Which of the staff ?” Ute asked. Her head was spinning in a sick vertigo.

“I don't know his name. But he was Consuelo's son.”

Of course!

“Where did he go?”

“No idea.”

They had reached a hut. It was overgrown and looked derelict.

“This is where Oswaldo lived. I walked here every day, to visit him. He wouldn't see anyone else. The
señora
from Villa Pacifica came a few times with supplies and medication. She wanted to see him, but he refused. You see, he didn't love her any more, or Consuelo. He loved me. Then he died on me. But such is life.”

Ute looked at María.
Such is life
, Consuelo had said. Oswaldo had fallen in love with the same woman over and over again: small-boned, curly-haired, gentle, but strangely tough. Consuelo, María, Lucía, they were essentially the same woman. Only their race was different – Consuelo was coastal black, María was an
indígena
, Lucía was white. And they had all loved him.

Ute squatted shakily on the ground outside the hut.

“Are you OK?” María was saying. “Do you want to go inside?” She pushed the door, and it opened with a creak. “Oswaldo's things are still in here. I don't know what to do with them. I don't lock it, because nobody comes here.”

“And Carlos?” Ute implored her.

“Carlos?”

“The guy in the animal shelter. The Paraguayan.”

“Ah yes. They say he went to work in another animal shelter, up north. Come in.”

Inside the dark hut, it smelt of
palo santo
– and oblivion. Luz was already clambering inside a low, sagging hammock hanging from a beam in the ceiling. There was a single bed with a worn blanket carefully folded at one end of the stained mattress. Ute sat on it, limp and dumb like a rag doll.

“How long are you staying?” María asked, as if Ute was checking into a hotel.

Ute looked around the cabin for clues, for anything to help her out. It was bare and unlovely, nothing like their
tortuga
hut, which now belonged to another life. The wooden floor was stained with oil paint.

“I don't know,” Ute said. “I killed someone.”

María was standing in the doorway, a dark outline framed by the dazzling light of morning. She didn't say anything. She wasn't easy to shock.

“At Villa Pacifica,” Ute added.

María laughed dryly. Luz stopped rocking in the hammock.