Ten minutes later I catch Sammie vomiting behind the pig enclosure, the two babies, Panapana and Panini, watching with beady-eyed wonder from the caves they’ve made out of our old dinners. Agustino and Paddy pass out side by side over breakfast with their faces in the peanut butter, and Mila storms around them with an anger that seems electric in its ferocity. I only have to survive till lunchtime, I think giddily as I flinch away from her, trying to act very, very small. People whisper around me about town. A mythical place where there’s internet, ice cream, pizza and electricity—maybe even air conditioning—and it’s only an hour away by bus!
Surrounded on the way to the long drop by muffling thickets of bamboo, strangler figs out of nightmares and knotted clumps of vines, I dream of it, and other human things, so hard, I almost succumb to dizziness and have to sit down on the ground. Unfortunately Mila finds me and tells me, stony-faced, that we’ll be doing construction all morning.
“¡Todavía están todos borrachos!” she exclaims, eyes flaring. You’re all still drunk. “¡No puedes caminar con gatos! Puedes sudar el ron,” she snorts. You can sweat out the rum, she says, thrusting a machete in my direction and sending me off towards the aviary, with an instruction to cut down foliage for the birds. On the way, I pass Agustino, nursing his head miserably on the patio bench. He gives me a rueful grin.
I stare at the rusty blade in my hand. Once I reach the aviary, I set out into the surrounding jungle following the sweat-drenched clumps of volunteers and begin to swing my machete wildly. It’s the first time I’ve ever wielded a machete, and the excitement lasts a few quick minutes before it hits me what a bad idea this is. A worse idea than sending me out to walk a puma? It’s impossible to keep track of all the other hungover volunteers, also madly wielding blades—probably too blunt to mistakenly remove someone’s appendage, but I cannot be certain. Spines of bamboo darken my vision, trying to take out my eyes. Packs of mosquitoes steal my blood quicker than I can swipe them away. Innocuous, thin beige trees are infested to the core with ants. If you touch them, which I invariably do, it feels like you’re being burnt by a thousand cigarettes. When I accidently hit one with my machete, fire ants swarm over me in vicious anger and I scream, thinking someone has thrown boiling tar across my scalp. It is Harry—why it has to be Harry, I don’t know—who helps me get them off and tries at the same time not to laugh too hard.
This landscape spreads across the borders of countries. What is even more staggering is that if I put down my machete and walked in any direction, even though I’d be less than a mile from the road, I’d be disorientated. Lost. I might as well be halfway to Brazil for all I could do about it.
“Is that a . . .” Paddy, who is also on machete detail, points suddenly at my arm.
“Oh fuck!” I yell. “Get it off!”
Paddy is too busy shaking his own clothing and squealing.
“It’s just a tick.” Sammie passes by with a guy from Holland, known for telling such filthy stories that she’s nicknamed him Dirty Dutch.
I stare at the thing deeply buried in my upper arm. “What do I do?”
“Twist and pull.” Sammie puts down her side of the dead tree they’re carrying and wipes the back of her arm across her dripping forehead. “We’re coming into dry season. A million ticks. Horse-flies the size of wasps. Wasps the size of birds. We never catch a break here, whatever the time of year. You need to check yourself every night.”
I continue to stare at the place where the tick’s head is in my flesh.
“And when she says check.” Dirty Dutch grins, nudging Sammie. “She means really check.”
Paddy and I look between the two of them.
“What do you mean?” Paddy ventures nervously.
“Dirty Dutch and I have developed a tick X-rated system. Do you want to hear it?”
An itch blooms at the base of my spine. Paddy goes pale.
“There’s X, double X, and the worst is triple X. It’s—”
“No!” I put my hands over my ears.
“Single X is on the outers of your private parts. Double X is—”
“No!” Paddy shouts. “No, no!” Then he pauses, his eyes wide as if watching a car crash he cannot look away from. “Have either of you had a triple X?”
Sammie laughs. “You don’t want to know. Always check, that’s my advice.”
“And if you can’t get down there,” Dirty Dutch says gleefully, “or in there, or whatever, get someone else to check for you!”
I shower for a long time. I scour my body, and when I finally put clothes back on, I start to sweat again immediately. I don’t mind. I don’t have to go into the jungle. I’m mere moments away from the internet and anything that isn’t soup or rice on top of pasta on top of potatoes. Maybe I’ll eat something green! It’s gloriously hot. As Paddy and I lazily swing in one of the hammocks, we talk about ice cream. Dairy is one of my life’s great joys, unconscious as I am of the mind-numbing impacts of intensive cattle farming. On this day, ice cream still sounds like paradise.
Nearly everyone is out here, trying to conjure cars out of nothing so they can hitch rather than wait for a bus that may never come. I smile blissfully, not really caring. I’m light-headed, just so happy I don’t have to do any work, until I notice Harry watching me, a crooked smile on his lips. I glare at him.
“Hey, this is the first time I’ve seen you smile,” he says, taking a slow drag on his cigarette. “Like properly.”
I glare even harder, making Paddy laugh. “Apart from when she’s got a bottle of rum in her hands.” Paddy winks, grinning his Cheshire Cat grin. Harry, however, just rubs his beard thoughtfully, still looking at me, then gives an almost imperceptible shrug before turning away to talk to Bobby, who’s laughing wildly about something on the other side of the fumador. I look away too, swallowing what? Disappointment, embarrassment . . . Then Paddy elbows me gently in the ribs and whispers, “I hear there’s a lady in town who makes banana milkshakes. With ice!”
I’m smiling at him gratefully, shaking my head to shake Harry out of it, when someone yells: “Bus!”
Paddy almost tips me out of the hammock in his haste to get onto the tarmac. A small, local bus trundles towards us, and the road is so straight that I don’t know how long it takes, five minutes perhaps, before the bus actually catches up with the noise of its engine and is rolling to a stop in front of us.
It’s just at that moment that I turn. My foot is on the first step, Paddy jostling behind me.
“Jane?” I murmur.
Jane is walking up the track onto the road. She’s dressed as she dresses every day, in her too-big Wayra dungarees and straw hat. She’s carrying a book, Wayra’s water jug and an egg.
“Is she going to Wayra?” I say to Harry, who is next to me, although I don’t wait for him to answer. “Are you going to Wayra?” I back off the step and let Paddy and the others in the queue behind me go first.
“Yeah.”
“But it’s Saturday,” I say stupidly.
Jane just shrugs. “I prefer to spend it with Wayra.”
“Lau, what are you doing?” Paddy shouts out of the window.
I open my mouth to say I’m coming, but nothing comes out. Jane is already starting to walk in Wayra’s direction and I take a few steps after her. “Will you walk her?”
She turns around. “No. We’ll just stay in the clearing, on the runner. We’ll hang out.” She hesitates, breaking into a hopeful smile. “Want to come?”
“Laura!” Paddy yells. “Come on!”
The driver has started the engine. I’m frozen. Ice cream! I look back at Paddy desperately. I look at Jane, and then I look down the road towards where Wayra is. The bus is starting to move, everyone else is on now. I see Harry through the open door.
Jane starts to walk again, turning away. “You better hurry. The bus is leaving.”
“I . . .” I close my eyes. Bus. Town. Internet. Harry . . .
“Give me five minutes!” I shout, and I’m sp
rinting back down the path into camp.
Wayra is sunning herself on her throne. Jane and I sit cross-legged on either side of the doorway, the cloudless sky punishing and the compacted earth cruelly hard on my bones. I’ve been watching a particularly flamboyant beetle trying to bury itself for the last half hour while trying to identify why exactly I am here. When we arrived Wayra looked at us, eyes narrowed, then back up the trail as if to say: So, where the hell is Oscar? Since then she stubbornly hasn’t moved. She’s in a sunny patch in her cage and shows no interest in coming down.
“Maybe she knows it’s Saturday,” I say miserably, looking up at the sky, which is as blue as forget-me-nots. I cannot believe I’ve given up an afternoon of freedom for this.
Jane turns a page of her book. “It’s just good to be here.”
I stare at Wayra, who has her eyes firmly closed, so firmly closed it makes me think that it is for our benefit. “She doesn’t care.”
Jane just raises her eyebrows and says nothing.
I sigh, lean my head back against the cage, and return to the beetle. I can just hear the croak of a toucan somewhere to my left. Above that is the high-pitched whistle of some creature I don’t know, a truculent line of ca-caws, the throaty conversation of a pair of macaws. Lower down is the thud of a woodpecker’s beak. I think the tree is hollow, the way the noise sounds empty. Settling between this is the hiss of crickets, the whine of mosquitoes that grows higher as I grow still and they grow bolder, gyrating nearer to my ears. There is the motor of a hummingbird’s wings, the rustle of leaves, the muted squeal of toads, the crunch of sticks as something burrows in the undergrowth. I think with panic that these noises will be lodged in my brain forever and I’ll never be free of them, but the more I think this, the more I listen. And as I listen, with the heat cushioning my body against the cool mud and the cold metal of the cage, my mind drifts. I become dreamy, the sounds less fractious. The hummingbird’s whirl relaxes, the rustling deepens, the crickets lower, the toads sink, the woodpecker slows, the macaws start to speak somewhere else.
Time just passes.
Silence. Suddenly I look down at my wrist and realise I don’t have my watch. For a moment I feel panicky, but then I realise too that I don’t need it. It doesn’t matter. I close my eyes and let the river of jungle wash over me. I think, at some point, I fall asleep.
“Laura!”
“What?” I mumble, turning my neck with a painful groan and opening my eyes. “Oh fuck!” I hiss, jerking backwards. Wayra is inches away, staring at me with apparent interest. My head has somehow migrated, my cheek now sandwiched against the fencing. I move back quickly, rubbing the indentation in my face. “I’m sorry, princess,” I murmur, unconsciously using her nickname. “Lo siento.”
Wayra sniffs. Her posture is impeccable, a long line of darkness stretching from the top of her head down the graceful arch of her neck all the way to the curved end of her tail. Around the edge of her pupils is a line of amber, sharp as an old layer in a fossil. The sun falls across her fur. Jane is already threading the rope through the door, but as Wayra saunters over to lie down, Jane hesitates.
“Do you want to do it?”
“Me?” I squeak.
Jane nods, holding the rope out to me.
I stare at it in my hands, as if I don’t quite understand how it has got there. It’s about the width of two thumbs, the edges frayed. As I run my fingers across it, it feels soft. As if it’s been held by many different people before me. Wayra stares at me, waiting.
I nod.
“Put your arm in.”
I close my eyes, take a deep breath and try to recapture the sounds that lulled me to sleep. I let them wash over me again, the toads and their songs, the toucans with their chatter, the heavy thunk of the woodpecker’s beak. I let the shadows of the palms sit across my shoulder blades and the heaviness of the air lie over my hands. I grit my teeth over my fear. Then I crouch down and slide my arm through the bars. Wayra continues to lie very still, her eyes dramatically lined with black as if she’s on her way to a stage play. I am just able to keep my hands steady. Her ears are ever so slightly back.
The first time she licks me, I don’t know what to do.
“She’s licking me!” I hiss.
Jane laughs, crouched on the other side of the door, hugging her knees.
“Don’t get too excited. It’s mostly for the salt.”
But Wayra haughtily butts my arm with her forehead, turning it over so that she can lick the other side. It’s almost—almost—possible to forget that she’s in a cage and I am not. It feels as if it should be the other way around. The jungle out here with her, us in there. It cloaks her bottle-green. Her tongue is rough, ripping. It hurts more than I thought it would, but I don’t want her to stop. She’s making a low noise and it sounds to my desperate, exhausted ears like acceptance. She’s leaning over my arms, head down, one relaxed paw balanced up on the edge of the fence, licking, licking, licking. My skin is turning raw and the rest of me feels nothing, it’s only this small spot of skin that she’s touching. That’s the only part of me that exists. Everything else, the missed bus, the possibilities of town, my whole existence before this, fades. She’s spirited me away to a place where cages aren’t real. I can’t believe this is the same cat that hissed at me on my first day. She looks the same but she’s not. Everything is different. My head is full and I’m smiling so widely that I think for a ridiculous moment I might burst into tears again. What’s happening to me?
“Thank you, Wayra.”
She gives a little sniff as if to tell me not to make a big deal about it. My hands are shaking now and I fumble with the carabiner. She isn’t looking, but her ears are turned towards me and her eyes are starting to narrow. She can smell the sudden surge of alarm that makes my head hot then blisteringly cold.
“Always wait till she sits,” Jane breathes. “Any growls, grumbles, get your hands out of there. She hates being touched when you’re holding the rope.”
I fumble with the catch. But then I’m slipping it through her collar and it’s closed, locked. Wayra spins with the beginnings of a savage growl. I can hear the snap of her throat and the trapped snarl behind her teeth, but my hands are already out and I’m standing, breathing hard, pulling off the latch and swinging open the door.
There’s no acknowledgment, just a flick of her tail and then she’s ambling away as if this happens every day. For her I suppose it does, but not for me. Rather than going straight to the sentinel tree, Wayra plonks herself down in what seems to be her favourite spot in the middle of the runner. As if she knows she’s not walking today and she wouldn’t want to, even if she could. Her spot is a little dip of grass between a tall, nimble tree with bark that smells of baked pepper and a patch of knee-high young patuju. It is so well cared for, raked meticulously every day by Jane, that it looks like a garden. Wayra’s garden. She rolls onto her side, belly blindingly bright, and looks straight at Jane. Wilderness hangs off her. She might disappear. I’d believe it if I blinked and the rope was gone, she was gone. I make to move forwards but I can’t, the force around her pushing me backwards without my feet even moving. But Jane walks straight up to her. Wayra doesn’t hiss or grumble. The wild smell fades, dissipates, flows and then grows even stronger. Jane ducks her head, leans her face down. And the two of them sit cheek-to-cheek, forehead-to-forehead. I have stopped breathing. We’ve spent five days in the boiling heat and humidity being bitten to shit by mozzies just so we can watch this angry, stubborn cat sleep no more than ten minutes from her cage. I’d assumed that was it. That’s what this month would be.
Jane turns, flashing me a smile. “You can come over.”
Wayra pulls back, readjusts and sits again, almost in Jane’s lap.
“Wayra!” Jane laughs.
Wayra stares up into Jane’s face, her eyes wide. For the first time, I see that she is ever so slightly cross-eyed. She tries to lick Jane’s freckled button nose. There’s nothing but sweetness and a
ffection in the gesture. Jane grins and slides her legs away with a grunt, letting Wayra settle into the curve of her thigh. Jane shows absolutely no fear, despite having an entire puma in her lap. Wayra gives a happy sigh and rests her chin on Jane’s knee.
“This,” Jane whispers, stroking Wayra’s neck, “is where she really learns to trust you.”
I nod, not able to speak. I look up at the flat blue of the sky. I feel upside down, in a sea that should be down, not up, the clouds floating little white boats. I’m facing the wrong way entirely. A parrot calls out. It goes against every instinct to sit on the ground so close to Wayra that I can reach out and touch her. Her teeth are the length of half a finger, I know because I’ve seen her bare them at me. I wouldn’t do it, shouldn’t do it, if not for Jane. I know that Jane trusts Wayra, and I—in some strange way—am starting to trust Jane.
I sit down very carefully and hold out my hand. I know Wayra is watching me so my action doesn’t come as a surprise. Just with a heavy sigh as if to say, Finally, she angles herself towards me, and then she’s licking. In an attempt to get nearer, she gives a frustrated little grumble, puts one giant forepaw on my leg, immaculately sharpened claws caught in the material of my jeans, and pulls. I don’t look at Jane because I know she’ll be smiling, but maybe I am too. With my other hand, I reach across and place it on Wayra’s shoulder blade. I let it lie there, getting used to the warmth. The hardness of muscle, the softness of fur. Letting her get used to me.
There is a thin patch of fur on her spine that grows in the wrong direction. I never noticed it before. Her breathing is soft, relaxed. I think, by the angle of her ears, that she’s listening to me, and I work hard to keep my breathing steady. I run my hand downwards, across her back, over her hip. I think I can feel the steady thump-thump of her heart. I can’t hear anything else now, the jungle has gone and it’s just this. She twists her head, her eyelashes catching in a burst of sun. I move my hand upwards, stroking until my fingers reach her neck. She’s velvet. She leans towards me. She smells of the jungle floor, rain and damp mud. The light mottles, making patterns against the line of her spine, the shades of her fur, whenever I blink. I wonder what I smell like. Sweat and cigarette smoke perhaps. The mustiness of La Paz. Toothpaste. Soap. I let out my breath and then I lean towards her. There’s no one left to hide behind. No more Oscar, whose bulk had started to feel like a plate of armour. And Jane too, I sense, has edged away, giving us space.
The Puma Years: A Memoir Page 7