Who Made Stevie Crye? (23 page)

One evening the lord of Cancer Keep came to Cathinka’s bedchamber, where she lay in rough clothes beneath a veil of mosquito netting, and dumped the contents of her teakwood box on the laterite floor. They had been monkey and wife for nearly a year. Although she had never warmed to him or spoken kindly to him except by accident, this ostentatious petty vandalism was his first display of temper. Chalk-white in the cloistered gloom, his face contorted fiendishly, a Gothic image so paradigmatic it was almost risible. Cathinka could not accept Don Ignacio, but neither could she fear him. She responded to his anger by chuckling derisively, for she, too, was angry: He had violated the small wooden stronghold of her secret life.

“I despair of ever winning you,” her husband said. “You insist on regarding your marriage to me as a prison term, which you must stoically endure until your release. There
is
no release, Cathinka.”

She glared at him, pitilessly.

“However, I love you for your willfulness. In a last effort to conquer your repugnance to me, and to a union that must persist even should my effort fail, I grant you three wishes, milady.”

“As in a fairy tale?” Cathinka scoffed.

Don Ignacio ignored this riposte. “You must swear that you will use them all, one wish a year beginning on the first anniversary of our wedding day, which is not far off. Do you swear?”

“Do you swear that my wishes will come true?” She did not care for the stipulated waiting period between wishes, for she must remain at Cancer Keep at least another two full years, presumably even if Don Ignacio were to die during this time. Of course, one of her wishes might repeal or satisfactorily amend this strange proviso, and she would be a fool to refuse her husband’s offer solely on its account.

“Cathinka, I do not intend to toy with your expectations. The wishes I grant you will indeed come true, but they are subject to several other conditions. Perhaps you should hear them before agreeing to accept my offer. I have no wish to deceive you.”

“Granted,” said Cathinka sardonically. “State your niggling conditions. They must certainly outnumber the wishes, for if you are anything like my father, your litigiousness surpasses your charity.”

A big hairy spider tottered among the scattered sheets of paper on the floor, and Don Ignacio paced near it reciting his litany of stipulations.

“Let me backtrack, Cathinka. First, you may not set aside our wedding vows. Second, you may not wish physical harm upon either yourself or me. Third, you may not presume to transform either of us into any other human or, indeed, into any other sort of matter, animate or inanimate—even if I would be more attractive to you as an exquisite butterfly or a perfect double of Waldemar. Fourth, you may not try to remove yourself or me to any other place in the entire universe. And, fifth, as I have told you, a year must pass between wishes.”

“Very good, my husband. Two more provisos than wishes. Your magnanimity reminds me of the late French king’s.”

“Although you clearly do not realize it, Cathinka, these are modern times. Whoever bestows wishes without qualification must reap the dreadful rewards of such folly. To our credit, lady, neither of us is a fool. Think on what remains to you, not on what I have wisely proscribed.”

Cathinka yielded, sullenly, to Don Ignacio’s logic. She then bade him retire so that she could consider among the bewildering alternatives. She had several days, and she fretted the question for three of them before hitting upon a wish that promised to deliver her from the former Capuchin’s tyranny, even as it paved the way for an end to her loneliness. What her third wish might be, however, she still did not know; but, in the fatalistic words of the old Count, time would tell, time would most assuredly tell.

Came the first anniversary of the couple’s wedding day, and Don Ignacio summoned Cathinka to his small, oppressive study to state her wish. He had been working at an electromanuscriber, but, as soon as he heard her tread on the hard-packed laterite, he turned to face her, extending his crippled-looking hands. He asked her to take them as she had done at the end of their wedding ceremony in her father’s library, but she shuddered and placed her hands behind her.

“You must obey me if you desire your wish to come true.”

“A sixth stipulation,” Cathinka remarked pointedly.

“By no means. You swore a willing oath to observe the five stipulations I outlined. You may break that oath if falseness is any part of your makeup. However, unless you grasp my hands, lady, you forfeit your wish even before you utter it—for our touching effects its fulfillment, and only our touching, and so our touching is a prerequisite rather than a mere proviso. Understand?”

“I do,” she said, stepping forward and taking Don Ignacio’s hands.

“Then wish.”

“Aloud?”

“I am not a psychic, child.”

But she had not bargained on staring into Don Ignacio’s wizened face while making her wish.

“I w-wish . . . f-for D-Don Ignacio t-t-to—”

“Stop stammering, Cathinka. Out with your contrived treachery.”

“—fall-into-a-ten-year-slumber-during-which-he-continues-healthy-and-all-his-dreams-are-pleasant,” Cathinka chanted ritually. A feeling of relief, even serenity, began to descend upon her, but this feeling shattered when Don Ignacio’s hands jumped a foot into the air without yet releasing their grip on her own. A galvanic force seemed to flow through Cathinka’s body, altering the microscopic alignment of her constituent atoms. Meanwhile, the monkey-man’s eyes flashed like tiny mirrors.

A moment later his fingers slid away from hers, and she crossed her arms in front of her belly, concealing her hands. Don Ignacio was still awake, still alert, and he rotated back to his electromanuscriber to record her first wish on the treated foolscap in his machine. It seemed that he had set up this huge formlike page for just that purpose.

“You are a clever young woman. By modifying an important noun and subordinating a compound clause to your main one, you have compacted all three wishes into your first. Did you
mean
to exhaust your allotment?”

“I did not.”

Don Ignacio operated the machine. “Then I must note here that your first wish is for me to fall into a ten-year slumber, period. The adjective is permissible because it specifies the duration of my slumber, a matter undoubtedly crucial to your wish-making strategy. I am also noting, lady, that you have come perilously close to abrogating the stipulation forbidding any harm to befall either of us. . . . However, I admire the way you attempt to skirt the problem with a pair of sweet but inadmissible subordinate clauses. You leaven your deviousness with the yeast of old-fashioned conscience.”

“Will you fall into a trance, then?”

“Tomorrow, Cathinka. Give each wish a day to begin taking effect. I go to prepare a place for my slumber.” Reproachfully dignified, Don Ignacio strode from the room, leaving his wife to contemplate the degree to which she had cheated the letter of one of his stipulations. Certainly she had not meant to.

Outside Cancer Keep, jaguars prowled and capuchins chittered stridently.

The next morning Cathinka found, at the heart of the cloister’s overgrown garden, the pirogue in which she and her husband had floated through the jungle to the monastery. Don Ignacio was lying inside the pirogue with his hands crossed on his chest and the fur at his throat like a cluster of white lilies. He lay beneath a transparent canopy that his little cousins must have worried into place; while a cockatoo the color of new snow kept vigil on a perch at the head of the coffinlike dugout. Even in slumber Don Ignacio was master of Cancer Keep, but unless he arose before a decade had passed, her first wish seemed to be fulfilling itself. Free of the monkey-faced tyrant, she spent that whole day singing.

The succeeding year was not so joyful. She could not leave Cancer Keep, for she had promised not to, nor could she converse with her retainers, as Don Ignacio had done. They fed her and guarded the monastery as watchfully as ever, for their lord lay slumbering at its heart, but Cathinka had no real rapport with them and sometimes felt that they regarded her as their inferior.

Cathinka passed some time with the picture- and music-making machines in the various rooms, but the music intensified her loneliness and the activities of the people in the illuminated windows of the wooden boxes seemed silly or cruel. Moreover, she refused to touch these machines and so had to depend on the sullen cooperation of the capuchins to make them work. Presently, without regret, she ceased to rely on these tiresome wonders at all. As for the apparatus through which Don Ignacio had communicated with demons, Cathinka continued to leave it strictly alone.

If not for the electromanuscriber, the year would have been unbearable. Even with its assistance, its marvelous ability to make palpable the most subtle nuances of her mental life, Cathinka often felt like a traveler on the edge of an endless desert. She would die before she reached the other side. She did not die, however. She made two more teakwood boxes to hold her manuscript pages, and she survived that interminable twelvemonth by concocting philosophies, fantasies, strategies, and lies. The inside of her head was more capacious than either Cancer Keep or the vast encroaching jungle.

The second anniversary of Don Ignacio and Cathinka’s exchange of vows dawned bright and cloudless, as had every preceding day for a month. The time for her second wish had come.

Cathinka signaled a crew of monkeys to lift the canopy from her husband’s unorthodox bedstead. When they had departed, she knelt beside the pirogue to make her wish, but hesitated to clasp Don Ignacio’s hands because his body looked so shrunken and frail. He slept, but he had not continued especially robust, and the pained expression on his face suggested that the dreams he endured were far from pleasant. The sight surprised Cathinka because for a year she had purposely walked on the periphery of the garden. It also served to remind her that she must not try to squeeze too many qualifiers into the wording of her next two wishes. Magic was a conservative science.

Soon, though, she overcame her reluctance and took her husband’s hands. “I wish that Waldemar were here,” she said. What could be more elegant or simple? She had observed all of Don Ignacio’s conditions—for surely the arrival of a male visitor did not constitute, in itself, a breach of fidelity—and she had conscientiously pruned her wish of ambiguity and excess.

Don Ignacio’s hands leapt, nearly throwing Cathinka off balance, and for a split instant she believed he intended to pull her into the pirogue atop him. She caught herself, however, electrified by the force that had flowed from his small body into her big-boned one. Trembling with expectation and power, she fitted the clumsy canopy back into place with no help from the estancia’s retainers.

That night she began to fear that her wish would rebound upon her in an ugly or a mocking way. The gods had invented wishes to ensnare and frustrate people, as in the case of the Phrygian king Midas. If Don Ignacio was a vassal of Satan, this tradition would undo her, too. Suppose that Waldemar had died. Tomorrow a corpse would arrive at Cancer Keep. Or suppose that when he set foot within the cloister, she was invisible to him because they no longer existed within the same time frame or because Don Ignacio had evilly stolen her own corporality. Perhaps she had become a ghost unable to live in the world beyond Alcázar de Cáncer. Pinching her flank seemed to disprove this last hypothesis (the pinch produced a painful twinge), but Cathinka could not stop worrying.

Late the following afternoon Waldemar dropped from the sky into Cancer Keep. Cathinka saw him fall. He dangled from a dozen or more lines beneath a billowing parti-colored tent, like a puppet trying to escape being smothered by a floating pillow case. What a weird and beautiful advent!

Waldemar landed not far from Don Ignacio’s bier, in a tree from which it took him thirty minutes to disentangle himself. Although clearly astonished to see Cathinka in the garden, while cutting himself free he responded perfunctorily to both her cries of welcome and her many excited questions. At one point he grudgingly vouchsafed the news that some “varlets” in a flying machine, jealous of his moiety of their cargo of “magic plants,” had thrust him into the air with only this colorful silken bag as a sop to their consciences. Waldemar cursed these varlets. Bag or no bag, they had not expected him to survive the drop.

“Then your arrival is not the result of a loving search?” Cathinka asked.

“I never knew where you were,” Waldemar replied, at last addressing her as if she were a human being rather than a ghost. “The Count would not say, and several months ago I left our homeland to make my fortune. The world has changed spectacularly in that brief time, Cathinka. Assassinations plague every capital, societies subordinate ancient wisdom to youthful bravado, and one upstart nation even claims that it has sent visitors to the Moon.” All his lines cut, Waldemar fell to the garden floor. Sitting there in a heap, he said, “Peril, pomp, and enterprise abound. At last, Cathinka, I am truly alive.”

“No thanks to your ungrateful, greedy cohorts.”

“No thanks, indeed.”

Thus began the year subsequent to Cathinka’s second wish. It had come true, this wish. Her lover was with her again, and in a series of chaste interviews at various places around the estancia she recounted for Waldemar the events preceding their unlikely reunion. As they stood gazing on the crippled figure in the pirogue, she told him of the conditions under which she had pledged to make her three wishes, of which the important final wish still remained.

Waldemar’s pale eyes flamed up like coals under the breath of a bellows. Must a year go by, he wondered aloud, before she could wish again? Cathinka assured him that it must. He squinted at the scrunched form of Don Ignacio as if her husband were an unappetizing entrée on a glass-covered platter. His distaste for the monkey-man seemed as thoroughgoing as her own, an observation that spurred in Cathinka a surprising pang of resentment. This passed.

Like the world, Waldemar had changed. He was still taciturn—indeed, he spoke more sentences cutting loose his bag of silk than he did in the entire week after—but his diffidence in regard to their courtship had utterly disappeared. He took every opportunity to kiss her hand. He brought her jungle flowers in the mornings. He paced the corridor outside her apartment at night. Once having learned how to use Don Ignacio’s electromanuscriber, he prepared faultless copies of lovely
carpe diem
poems, which he then slid under her door or folded under the silver fruit bowl of her breakfast tray. Two of these later poems were his own compositions; they had neither meter nor rhyme to recommend them, but they burst within Cathinka’s heart like Roman candles, owing to the incandescent violence of their predominant sentiment. Had Waldemar’s translation from an arctic to a tropic clime so enflamed him? The man had begun to behave like a Tupian buccaneer.