Villa Pacifica (8 page)

“I look after the animals,” the gaucho said, and smiled with crooked,
maté
-stained teeth. The etched lines and sun blotches on his face didn't dent his attractiveness one bit. Here was a well-lived-in face, which invited you to investigate.

“I'm Ute,” she said. He squinted and smiled at her, and she felt a savage longing for beautiful skin. She should have worn her hat, to cover up her face. She should have at least washed her hair this morning, or polished her toenails. With Héctor and Mikel, as with most men, she could easily forget she was a woman. With Jerry too, come to think of it – they'd been together that long. But not with the gaucho.

“Carlos is from Paraguay,” Héctor added.

“
Bueno
,” Carlos shrugged, “everybody has to come from
somewhere
.” Ute smiled unguardedly.

“Do you know that song, ‘The Flowers of Paraguay'?” she asked, just for something to say.

“No. I'm a bit behind with music.”

Her face was heating up under his casual gaze. And just then, with immaculate comical timing, they heard a rapid screech nearby. “
Las Malvinas son argentinas
,
las Malvinas son argentinas
.” It meant “the Falklands belong to Argentina”.

“What's that?” Ute gasped.

“That's our Enrique, a clever bird. And a patriotic bird. Even if Argentina isn't a
patria
for any of us.” They stepped away from the shade of the hut and walked on.

A small ponytail stuck out at the back of Carlos's hat. Not attractive on most men, but somehow on him it was fine. So was the quickly glimpsed near-monobrow – moronic on other men, but virile on him.

Carlos didn't have the demeanour of an employee or a mere animal-feeder. He looked like he was running the show. Who was he? He was a
mestizo
– a cross of white and Indian blood; most Paraguayans were. He was also a cross between a cowboy and a preservation activist, the kind of man you might catch in any number of mutually exclusive, freebooting activities. Planting olive trees in a kibbutz, running a marijuana plantation in Morocco, teaching orphans in Cambodia, counting the tiger population of Rajasthan, or swaggering in a cigarette commercial.

But before Ute had time to investigate Carlos's life or Enrique's politics any further, she yelped in alarm because she found herself only a few steps away from a large, sand-coloured feline behind a wire cage. It stood immobile, alert, one foot inside a tyre, and fixed them with a sorrowful eye that said “life is nasty and it drags on”.

“That's Melissa, our lion cub.” Carlos said. “She's everybody's favourite.”

“I didn't know there were lions in this country!” It was a stupid thing to say, and Carlos confirmed this with an amused look.

“There aren't,” he said. “They smuggled her in from Africa. Someone thought she'd make a cute pet. Then she started growing – not so cute any more. We found her in a backyard, chained, underfed, full of parasites, and very sad. She's still subdued, you know. But it'll cost a fortune to get her back to Africa. So we're building her a pit over there, somewhere she can run. It's almost done now.”

They went to take a look at it. The pit was a few metres from the lioness's cage, and the walls were all concrete. It was about three metres deep and as joyful as an empty swimming pool. Next to it, inside a separate, double-strength enclosure, lay a massive jaguar. His spotted feline face was impassive. Even in his humiliating circumstances, he exuded a supreme, ruthless confidence.

“He's only been with us a few weeks.” Carlos crouched beside the haunches heaving with power. The jaguar didn't take any notice of him, obviously used to his presence. “A young adult, quite restless. We're not sure how he's lived until now. Someone brought him to us and said he'd been bought as a cub for a rich kid. But we suspect, from his feeding habits and his behaviour, that he was poached later and lived in the wild until then. We need to organize a home for him soon. His natural home is the rainforest, above eight hundred metres. Do you know, this is one of only two countries in South America that doesn't legally protect its jaguars? In parts of the country the jaguar is extinct.”

“Will he use the pit too?” Ute asked. Wild animals were not her thing.

“Do you have any idea how powerful a jaguar is?” Carlos looked at her, amused. She didn't. “He'd just climb out, and you don't want that to happen, believe me. A jaguar can pull a cow up a tree. They feed on animals larger than themselves. Caimans, for example. They break their skull with a single blow. This here is the most powerful animal on the planet.”

It was unnerving to be standing so close to a beast that could break your skull with a single lazy blow and lunch on your still-warm brains, and Ute was keen to move on. Héctor was tagging along, sullenly. Next, they came to the parrots.

Like his two fellow inmates, the garrulous Enrique was in a sorry state. His once coloured head had been plucked, and only the bright-green feathers below his neck revealed his natural glory. A few blue feathers had begun to sprout around his head. He looked like a cancer patient in the last stages of chemotherapy. A sign hung on his cage:

Two things amaze me: the intelligence of beasts and the bestiality of humans.

“Enrique's a clever bird – too clever,” Carlos explained, and just then Enrique screeched something in Spanish that sounded like “Enrique eats
coca
. Enrique eats
coca
.”

“No,” Carlos shouted at him with surprising force, startling both Ute and the bird, who suddenly went quiet.

“Enrique eats
coca
,” the bird screeched once more, for good measure, and went quiet again.

“What was that?” Ute asked. Carlos waved his
maté
gourd vaguely.

“He picked that up from someone,” he said. “We had this French guy… He fed drugs to the animals. He killed a marmoset with cocaine.”

“Really?” Ute gasped. “When?”

“Around the time of
El Niño
last year.” A cloud passed over Carlos's face.

“He disappeared around Christmas,” Héctor said.

“For God's sake don't say ‘disappeared',” Carlos interrupted him. “For some people that word has political connotations. It's dissidents and innocents that disappear on this continent. Not that
hijo de puta
.”

“
Hijo de puta
,
hijo de puta
,
hijo de puta
,
hijo de puta
,” Enrique screeched gleefully and looked at them with a cunning round eye. Ute gave a delighted cry.

“He got that one from me,” Carlos grinned crookedly and sucked on his metallic
maté
straw. Then he led them away from Enrique. Ute walked next to Carlos.

“We get traffickers from time to time,” Carlos was saying. “Hanging about the enclave in jeeps.”

“How do they get here?”

“There's a bridge. I tell them to fuck off, because
hijos de puta
is what they are, and I tell them that in no uncertain terms.”

“And what about
las Malvinas son argentinas
?” Ute asked. He gave her a half-smile.

“Argentine visitors,” he said. “Thing is, when Enrique first arrived, we had him over on the other side: he had a corner in the lounge where he perched and slept. One night there were some guests from Britain and Argentina, and they got into an argument about the Falklands. Enrique picked it up. It's got a beat to it. Clever bird. And here we have the monkeys.”

They were standing by a large enclosure full of perches and hanging tyres to keep the five resident monkeys occupied.

“That's Alfredito the marmoset, the smallest monkey in the world.”

Alfredito swayed on top of a suspended tyre and looked at them expectantly. His tiny clawed hands gripped the indentation of the rubber. He was impossibly cute with his tufty head, round eyes and expression of eternal childhood.

“They use marmosets as house pets, and you can see why. They never grow, they're pygmies. A perfect present for a spoilt brat.”

“Can you not release him up in the hills? That's their natural environment, isn't it?” Ute ventured.

“Sure, but remember he's been kept in captivity since he was born.” Carlos sucked on his metal straw. “He doesn't know how to survive in the wild. He'd die in a couple of days. See the howler monkeys there, behind Alfredito? Same story. Some of those rich bastards out there are so stupid they don't realize that when you get a howler monkey for a pet it's gonna burst your eardrums, cos that's what they do: they howl. But only when there's enough of them to make a din. It takes a crowd to make a party, you know. These guys in here are a bit down in the dumps. But no one's as depressed as Carolina.”

Carolina next door was a scaly, soot-black iguana about a metre long. She crouched in a pit of sand and rocks, her spiked reptilian body stock-still, as if fossilized. It was hard to believe that a creature this prehistoric-looking could suffer, but its tail had been severed, and its rear end was just a stump. Ute stared at its hideous face.

“Why did they cut it off?”

“For the same reason they plucked the parrots,” Carlos answered. “There's no reason for human cruelty. Anyway, you know what Darwin called the iguanas of the Galápagos?” Ute glanced at Héctor. He was sulking beside the monkey cage and interacting with Alfredito. Clearly he wasn't enjoying Carlos's one-upmanship.

“‘Imps of darkness',” Carlos answered himself, and sucked on the straw contentedly, which emphasized the curious dimples in his chin and left cheek. Ute wondered how many times he'd done this spiel for the benefit of visitors. She wanted to believe that he was giving a little bit extra of himself for her – but she knew he wasn't.

“It's true,” he continued, “they're ugly as hell, but they're not without emotions. We've had Carolina for three years, our longest-standing resident, and we've had to force-feed her all along. She just won't eat. I think she's trying to tell us that she wants to die, poor thing, but we won't let her.”

“Who wants to die?”

His friendly paw thumped Héctor's back, almost knocking him against the mesh, face to face with the marmoset, which jumped back to safety and watched the intruder from another hanging tyre. The howler monkeys dispersed inside the cage too.

“Aha, got ya. You didn't hear me coming, did ya?” Max smiled at them. His face was a shiny red, his hair wet, and his Miami Beach Paradise T-shirt clung to his sweaty torso.

“I heard you,” Carlos replied, and moved across to the monkeys to pick up some twigs that they had got caught in the mesh and were trying to pry free.

“The guard at the gate, he's armed, man,” Max said to no one in particular. “Why is he armed? What's that about?” He took a gulp of water from a plastic bottle he was carrying.

“We've got to keep unwelcome guests at bay.” Carlos sucked on his straw, but there was no more liquid left in the gourd. “And unwelcome guests often come armed.” He whistled gently at the monkeys, and two of them bounded towards him.

“Ah, hell of a run up in the hills.” Max was shaking his legs to relax them. “Went off track at the bridge, then went for a swim downstream and had a laugh trying to get out of the river. Branches and shrubs everywhere, man, it was me and the elements. Just the way I like it.” He thumped his chest ape-like at the monkeys, who stared at him with their semi-human faces, unimpressed. It was true – his legs were scratched and bleeding in places.

“So, what's happening here, bit of a tour goin' on?” Max said and was ignored. Carlos beckoned to Ute with his head: “Want to see the tortoises?”

And they walked over to the giant tortoises.

In the near distance behind them, she spotted the jaguar. He had risen to his feet and was watching them quietly, unnervingly, as if storing away the information for future use.

“Jorge over here is the oldest,” Carlos was saying. Max stood beside them. “Not to be confused with the oldest living Galápagos resident – also called Jorge, Solitario Jorge. He's about two hundred, I think. Our Jorge is only about seventy.”

The three curved-shelled tortoises were enormous and fossilized. One of them was in the shade, underneath a high table. The sun had broken through the milky clouds. She felt the skin of her bare arms and neck heating up. Her face was flustered.

“They're boring,” Max said. “They don't
do
anything.”

“Jorge was found in an abandoned backyard in Guadeloupe,” Carlos was saying.

“So when's the breeding season?” Max interrupted him. Carlos gave him an unblinking look from underneath his hat.

“May,” he said, and turned back to Ute. “So when they found Jorge, his shell was all dried up. They can go a long time without food and water, but he was almost as good as dead.” Carlos spoke calmly, almost phlegmatically, as if relishing Max's twitchy impatience.

“Come on, let's feed the jaguar.” Max couldn't take the inactivity any longer. “I wanna see the jaguar eat his rabbit. You've gotta see it, Uddar. A live rabbit.”

“I've fed them already,” Carlos said.

“Do you actually get in the cage with them?” Ute asked.

“Yep. But with the jaguar I don't hang around, just throw in the meat and lock him up again.”

“I reckon I could do it,” Max declared. “It's not rocket science. Just observe the beast. I've been watching the lion cub for days. And the jaguar.”

“You don't know shit about animals,” Carlos said slowly in Spanish and gave Max one of his slanted looks. “You'd get yourself messed up.”

“Nah, I can do it.” Max winked at Ute. “All right guys,” Max glanced at his watch, “I've done the guided tour already, so I'm gonna go down to the boat and hang out there. Don't make me wait too long, all right? Or I'll set off by myself.” And he trotted off past the jaguar, who watched him motionlessly, and the lion cub, who lifted her head from her reclining position, then lay it down again.