Dante studied her intently, whether for intimidation or simply out of curiosity I was unsure. “Your lady needs a drink,” he told her. “And if it pleases you, I could use another myself.”
Without answering Matilde spun on her heel and went to do as he asked. I felt abandoned.
“She doesn’t like me,” he said. “Do you know why?”
It was the air he carried around him, a miasma of treachery and deceit. “She recognizes an adversary,” I said.
He scratched at his chin, rasped at a day or two’s growth of beard. “In a moment I will take a shower and get to bed. I know that you are tired.”
“You’re staying here?”
“Unless you tell me to go.”
“I can do that?”
His smile was thin, his wink a lecherous threat. “You could try.”
Matilde surfaced with two bottles of beer. She opened them in front of us and wisps of cool smoke drifted out.
Dante took a drink and moved to the window, relighting his cigar. Down below the car he had come in started up and crunched away down the shell gravel drive.
“Make up the guest bed with clean sheets,” I told Matilde wearily. “Mr. Dante is staying tonight.”
She hung at my elbow staring at me, her eyes as young and round as her children’s. “Nahuales,” she hissed.
“Go on,” I told her between my teeth, pushing her out of the room by force of will.
“She thinks you are an animal,” I translated loosely.
“She thinks that I am a shaman,” he said. “I know these people well.” He nodded to himself. “She is wiser than you.”
He stayed by the window, puffing absently and warming the beer in his large paw. He studied the blank blackness beyond the light of the house.
“When the Spanish first came to the Mayan land they burned their own ships so that they would not be able to leave. It gave them incentive to take over the native people.” He smiled at the darkness. “They befriended the ruler and he took good care of them…shared his secrets, fed the Spanish men-”.
“And then they betrayed the ruler, and killed him, and stole his silver and his kingdom. I know the story. What is your point?”
Dante dropped his unfinished cigar into the open mouth of his beer bottle with the thick plop of a fat worm. He set it on the table in front of me and leaned down. “There is a bit of the blood of the ruler in you, and in me, there is the blood of the conqueror.” He left a breath of fog nestled in my ear.
“Goodnight Señorita Cordova,” he said with an incongruous little bow. “We will talk more tomorrow.”
Matilde crept into my bedroom a short while later. “Do you want me to stay the night?” she whispered.
“No …go home to your children. I’m fine.”
“He is dangerous.”
“He is unlikable, but he has a reason for being here. He has important business with the plantation. If I do what he wants I can get the harvest shipped and we can keep going.”
“I should get Father Julián.”
I shook my head. “No. Don’t say anything to him yet. I can handle this.”
Matilde stood straight, no longer bothering to lower her voice. “I don’t think so Isabel. Not this time.” She stopped in the open doorway, and for once I wished I had doors so that I could lock myself in. “Goodnight,” she called. “I will see you in the morning.”
I did not sleep much that night, playing a vast array of scenarios through my head, listening for Dante moving around the house. From the drooping jungle darkness rose a black and wet snarl.
Matilde arrived at dawn and started coffee, a dense black brew that stung my nose and throat and sharpened my mind. I could taste the bitter alkali of cocoa in its depths-Maya fortitude. I was determined to see this matter with the fruit company settled to my satisfaction today.
Dante emerged freshly shaven in pure white. The sun whittled down his bulk to something manageable. He was not at all a fat man, just a large one, with the fat man’s sausage fingers and heavy breath, and a pugilists grace and stance.
I read the newspaper while I sipped my coffee, pretending his presence didn’t capture my attention or bother me in the least.
He chuckled and sat beside me instead of across from me, accepted a scalding cup from Matilde that he held long enough to singe before setting it down.
“Your hair looks much better brown,” he said.
The printed words smeared in front of me. I was already outmatched with his first statement of the day. “You’ve been spying on me.”
“I have many eyes,” he said. “Do you have sugar? This coffee is as bitter as liar’s heart.”
Matilde set a bowl of sugar cubes in front of him, tossed her apron in the sink and poured herself a cup. She sat down with us, her eyes on his cup of coffee as he lifted and replaced it.
I laid my paper aside, watched him watch me, used the moment to study him more than I had the night before. He was saved from ugliness by his clear green eyes and an odd roman nose that ran straight to the end and turned down suddenly. These two features caught one’s attention first and led them to believe they were looking at a different sort of face than the one he actually possessed. They stood out in relief from the weakness of chin and high forehead, sharpened and honed him.
He smacked his lips and added another two lumps to his cup, stirring the steaming broth with his finger and sucking the drips off with a look of pleasure. “I have a surprise for you today.” As if his arrival hadn’t started a long string of surprises already. “Dress in something loose and comfortable…I am taking you out to sea.”
I told myself that he may own my house and land, but he did not own me. But I was intrigued, and determined to wrangle my banana business back into my own hands. In the driveway the car was back, driven by one of the men from the previous night.
“That is Nacho,” Dante told me sliding into the front seat beside him as I settled into the back. The car was a Cadillac, new and comfortable and filled with canned cold air.
“Nacho, huh? How does that happen?”
“He doesn’t talk about it and I never ask. It would be impolite.” Some of the hairs on the back of his neck were too long. I thought an inattentive barber must have missed a spot or two in his haste to finish the job.
Nacho did not turn right to Monkey River, but instead headed down the Southern Highway. The radio dribbled erratic static and jangled marimba music. Three miles or so later he took a sudden right onto a narrow road that barely accepted the car as it trundled between the mangroves and cashews. The road opened up to a crescent of white sandy beach and a small dock. A dinghy was bobbing beside the dock, farther out at anchor the sleek white thrust of a powerboat sat on a glass flat sea.
Stepping out of the car I saw that Nacho had a clunky gun tucked haphazardly into the waistband of his cutoffs. He was barefoot and walked with a lopsided gait compensating for the weapon.
“Who are you planning to shoot?” I asked walking behind them.
“Ha!” Dante coughed. “No one I hope. I have more enemies than friends. Money is not really the root of all evil but it certainly attracts it.”
Out in the dinghy the wind blew my hair into errant drifts and whirls. The salt air stickied my skin and filled my nose. The rubber raft bounced in little jumps over the incoming tide giving the impression that we were not getting anywhere.
I had not been on the ocean before. I had stood on its banks and let it suck my toes. I had watched the fishermen in town cast their nets and drag in their flopping briny catch, but I had never thought to step out into the element myself, to throw myself into the frosted layer over the deep.
Approaching the boat I saw other men on the deck. It was a larger craft than it had appeared to be from shore. On its side the call letters were painted in a sedate black and the name of the boat, Sea King, was only slightly larger.
An aluminum ladder clung to the side and Nacho passed me up to the waiting arms of the men already aboa
rd. I stood swaying on the deck trying to get my footing.
Dante tossed himself over the rail to land next to me, an overweight tom cat. “You don’t get sea sick do you?”
“I’ve never been on a boat, but I feel fine so far.”
“Good.”
“Bonga se a trabajar!” he shouted to the five or so deckhands, all armed as Nacho was. “Yo tango mi negoseos.” They scattered to their various positions.
The ship was utilitarian, large enough to be imposing, to suggest might. “This is a Minesweeper,” Dante said with obvious pride in his voice. “YMS- 135 subclass. One stack and two gunwales. She was decommissioned in ’46, and I had her converted to suit my needs.”
I wondered if his needs included the use of the guns.
“Come down below,” Dante said. “We’ll have something refreshing, and perhaps some lunch. And then we will talk business.”
All the flash had been saved for the interior. Polished wood snaked through the cabin; mirrors reflected my own image back at me. I looked like a different woman, changed by my location. With my tousled hair, my lean bones, and my clean chambray shirt, I might even have belonged, the co-pilot of this boat, and this uncouth ugly-beautiful man.
A run of windows on either side opened out to the dingy green shore to our left, where scraggly palm trees shook their hair in the frantic wind. To our right the blue diamond of the bay rolled out to the husky voiced Caribbean, the open sea of pirates and pleasure seekers.
“At night the stars look pasted on the windows, lots of little starfish.” The poetic words were offensive in his mouth, as offensive as the thought of being on this boat at night pressed between stars and Dante, no matter how beautiful it was. Needing a moment alone I asked for the restroom.
“I’ll show you.” He led me down a hallway, tiptoed his fingertips along the brass rail, leaving perfect small animal tracks. He pressed himself against the wall forcing me to squeeze past him to get into the closet sized bathroom.
His breath slipped down my neck. “I’ll be out here waiting for you.”
I may not have been wise to come out here. I was now completely at his mercy.
The pump sucked and drew in the distance. I rinsed my face and mouth with musty water. Stepping out of the bathroom I turned in the wrong direction and found myself in a bedroom, a room literally consisting of a bed that dominated all but the outermost circle. It was rumpled, and unmade, and covered with a red velvet spread.
“You’ve made a wrong turn,” Dante said immediately behind me, making me jump. “Or at least I think you have.”
I was stuck in the doorway between his hot voice and that rumpled whore’s bed, and suddenly I thought I knew his motive for taking me out here. Was it really worth my bananas, my new life, my sense of belonging, to allow myself to be pinned under his damp and heavy body in that round lascivious bed? In my deeper thoughts I realized that the idea interested me, that same revolting attractiveness lured me. I actually wanted to know how it would feel.
“I have no intention of inviting you into my embraces,” Dante said amused. He took my elbow and led me back down the hall toward the main cabin. “You’re easy enough on the eyes, and no doubt full of all sorts of unfulfilled desires. Consequences of loving a priest I suspect.”
I sat down, dazed by my own traitorous mind, and accepted a glass from him.
“But no…you are not to my taste…too much trouble really. I can have a woman whenever I want one, without having to woo or threaten her. No. From you I want something different.”
“What?” I did not trust my own voice; it wobbled, trying to find its sea legs.
“A business partnership.”
“You don’t need my agreement, you said yourself you own everything I have.”
“This is too much talk on an empty stomach swishing with that native witches brew. Let’s eat.” He rang a bell and a steward appeared with a tray of fresh bread and steaming chunks of crabmeat. A greasy silver bowl of butter sloshed around leaving legs.
“This is a real breakfast. It is succulent.” He poured me more champagne. “Isn’t that a fine word?…Succulent.” He drew it out, all bayou sibilance, making it a dirty word. “Where I come from we appreciate succulence; anything plain, or clean, or holy just doesn’t cut it.”
I was all three of those things apparently. I was not tawdry enough for him then. I was not his mango.
There it was again, that gnawing desire for him to find me succulent so that I could-what-give in to him, or spurn him triumphantly? I did not know which I would do. This impulse was an insect bite, a sting, an annoyance leaving the craving to scratch.
“You are not eating.” He lifted a tattered chunk of crabmeat, butter swizzled down his fingers, greased his palm. He touched my lips with the morsel. “Try it.”
Searching for presence of mind, I reached up and took the meat with my own fingers. It tasted of apricot tobacco, and butter, and the deep, deep blue. He smeared the juice on a napkin, and pulled off a chunk of bread, stuffing it between his lips and chewing noisily.
I ate in silence while he talked of his home; of magnolias, and wrought iron, the wet slippery docks, and the gamblers and thieves that hid among all the foppery and food. He wiped the last of the butter from the bowl with a piece of my uneaten bread.
When I looked up I could no longer see the shore, only acres of wet blue fields.
The steward brought strawberries and thick black hunks of chocolate. Dante sucked the strawberries until they popped whole off their stems into his mouth. Then he dropped another in his champagne glass and swirled it around, an organ in a glass jar.
I finished the rest of my champagne and put the glass on the table, carefully, right back in the ring I had left before.
“Thank you for lunch, but I really want to know what all this is about. I don’t appreciate you stringing me along, even with champagne.”
He finished his own drink and extracted the berry from his glass with a thick pink tongue that was longer than the usual. “But you do enjoy it I think. Or you would not have come along today. You would not have lingered that extra thirty seconds looking at my bed. You want to dislike me, to be hostile, but you can’t. You don’t know what to make of me. While I, on the other hand, know exactly what I need to about you. I understand women señorita, and you are just like so many.” He flicked his fingers in the air, tossing away worthless predictable women. “However; what is different about you is that you are not attracted to me because of my obvious wealth or position of power over you. You are attracted to me because I am everything you think you do not want, respect, or agree with. I am the opposite of you.”
He leaned forward, ran one finger down my arm to my loose and unresisting wrist, pressed it into my pulse point. “I know exactly what you are thinking at all times. But for you I will always remain an enigma. I am much bigger than you or your paltry beliefs, whatever they are.”
“I think I’m afraid of you,” I said, not meaning it to come aloud.
“Well you have no reason to be as long as you don’t break your promises.”
“I haven’t made you any.”
“Now it is time to talk.” He stood and reached for my hand, pulled me to my feet. Behind the sofa, under the starboard windows, was a metal stairway, its treads raised and bumped to keep wet feet from slipping. At the bottom through a doorway was a bar, a salon of sorts. It was lit warmly with ambient light that hung unseen behind curtains or drifted up through spaces between furniture. There were no windows. It was a pleasure cave, with a pool table and a mirrored bar lined with fine spirits all strapped and lashed to prevent shifting on the open sea. Down here I could feel the roll of the ocean, the crushing fist of the walls of water holding us aloft.
Behind the bar Dante lifted the rug, exposing a metal ring that he pulled up to open a hidden hatch. It was dark down below and a smell of old wet dishcloths drifted up, of mildewed rubber and dank airless holds.
I pulled back instinctively, afr
aid that he would shove me in and slam the lid. Instead, he went down first and pulled a light on the stairs, casting long wet shadows down into the gloom.
I was prepared to follow, but he stepped back up the stairs and sat on the edge of the opening his legs hanging down. “You have a decision to make,” he told me. “Right now you can go back to your own world, and your disillusioned mother, back to the bland safe existence you had before. You can leave everything you have to me and you will never hear from me again. You will forsake this place completely and in return you will have your freedom again.”
He said, “You were free before you know. It is only since you came here that you have become a captive, a captive who does not even see her own prison.” He reached his fingers up, pointed out the window above our heads. “You can be headed home in that clear blue air by this evening, courtesy of the United Fruit Company. My men will even pack your bags. And you will owe me nothing. We will be even. I will have given you time to discover yourself a little bit, to learn about desire and refusal, while you rested in that soft bed with the shutters open and the jungle around you. You will have spent the money your father should have given to me, on a vacation, on a memory that will sustain you back home, while you marry a pale man, and give birth in a clean white nightgown in a sterile hospital to children whose blood is just a little more diluted than yours, children whose palms will not tingle with the lure of distant places.”
While he talked I thought of Julián, pulled his face into focus, the storm puddle eyes, the small mole just above his right ear, the timbre of his voice when he spoke of God. He would never have been tempted by the red velvet bed, by the juice of crabs.
Dante said, “You can go home and leave poor Father Julián in peace, stop tempting and tormenting him. Really it is a gamble for you either way, if you stay for him, or work with me. The only way to guarantee your safety…your sanity…is to go back from where you came.”
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