Villa Pacifica

by Kapka Kassabova

  “Just poisonous snakes,” Jerry said.

  How were they going to endure all the walking ahead of them? Well, by just enduring – that was always Ute’s way. Endure the fourteen-hour bus ride, and it’ll be over. Endure traveller’s diarrhoea, and you’ll come through it a bit thinner, a bit less dignified, but fine. Endure the cold room and the thin blanket, and you’ll be snuffly but alive in the morning. Endure a lonely childhood like a prison sentence in the Finnish countryside, and it will end one day. You will walk free. Very few things actually kill us, she thought.

  “Fear of the dark is more a state of mind, you know,” she offered.

  “Every fear is a state of mind. You could argue that everything we experience is a state of mind. That doesn’t make it any less real. Shit.”

  He was only a metre behind her, but she couldn’t see him.

  “Something got caught on my…” He wrestled with something that sounded like a large branch or shrub.

  “Shit, shit, shit.” A tearing sound and he was free again. “Some thorny shrub-thing caught my shirt. And I dropped my glasses. God I hate this. We don’t even know where we’re going, for fuck’s sake.”

  “Sorry,” Ute said, and crouched down beside him to feel around the thorny embankment for his glasses. It was somehow her responsibility, and therefore her fault.

  “We’ll get there,” she said. “We’ll be at the animal shelter before we know it.”

  “What if it’s a dead end? That old git in the kiosk said there was no other way out.”

  Ute could hear him panting in the blackness, feeling around for his glasses. She was looking for them too.

  “If it’s a dead end, we’ll die, I guess,” she said through gritted teeth.

  “For fuck’s sake,” Jerry said. “Whose idea was it to come here?”

  “Mine, it was all my stupid idea, and you are just suffering the consequences, you poor thing.”

  “Your sarcasm is inappropriate right now,” Jerry said. “Oh, found them. Thank God for that.”

  He exhaled, and they didn’t move for a moment. Then they got back to their feet and stumbled on in bitter silence for a while.

  “Why do they charge people twenty dollars to get scratched by bramble?” Jerry said in the end. “I don’t get it. There are no signs, fuck all to see, and these God-awful tracks leading nowhere.”

  “Yeah, it’s a bit strange. But then we haven’t seen the whole park. There’s twenty-thousand square metres of it. Or something like that.”

  “Oh good. That cheers me up no end. I can’t wait to explore more of it.”

  Ute was clammy with old and new sweat. She was walking with her hands feeling in front of her, because it really was like moving through tar. Anything could be in front of you – a sheer drop into the ocean or a dead body – and you would just walk into it blindly. Except she knew – logically – that there was no such thing. It was a dull path through a dull forest.

  “Do you want me to walk ahead of you?” Jerry said, pitiably.

  “No, it’s fine,” Ute said. How different it would be walking through here with someone like Carlos. Well, not someone like him, but him.

  The secret of a happy marriage is to know how to adjust your expectations. One of their friends had said this once at a small dinner party at their place. Everyone had been drunk on some expensive red wine Jerry’s parents had brought from France, and they were talking about relationships. All three couples took turns, smug in their established coupledom, listing their three rules of thumb for a successful relationship. Rule number one, Jerry had said: stay in love if at all possible. Rule number two: no matter what, don’t fuck other people. Everyone had laughed – Ute too. This was his strength. This was his brilliance. Not malarial jungles at night-time. She had fallen for his mind. Not for his courage and love of adventure. Rule number three, Jerry had said: do not become the couple, remain yourself. You never know what might happen to the couple, but you’re stuck with yourself.

  Slap. “Something just bit me,” Jerry said. “Is there malaria here?”

  “I don’t think so,” Ute said. “It’s too dry. There are no marshes. But it’s the wet season now, so I don’t know. Are you taking your malaria pills?”

  “Yes I am.” Contracting malaria was beyond any doubt now, in his mind.

  They walked a lifetime’s worth of silent breathing and blackness. Ute blamed herself for this – her shitty watch, her blithe decision to go a different way, her being so cocksure about directions. It was even possible that she was showing off a bit in front of Jerry. The old South American hand. The travel professional. This way, follow me, I know where I’m going. Idiot.

  “Two shitty roads diverged in a shitty yellow wood…” Jerry muttered at one point.

  Then something – someone! – screeched ahead of them.

  “Enrique!” Ute whispered.

  “What’s that?” Jerry croaked behind her.

  “Enrique, the parrot. I think it’s him.”

  “Hallelujah!”

  “Hold on, I’m not sure yet. Might not be.”

  But it was. A faint light fell on the path and, a few minutes later, they were walking across a clearing towards the back gate of the animal shelter.

  “My God, we’re here,” Jerry said. The gates were shut.

  “Hola!” Ute shouted. Her mouth was dry and scratchy, like the rest of her. “Hola!”

  A few moments later, the gates creaked open, and the curious face of a night-guard – Pablo, or was it Jesus – looked at them, followed by a second one.

  “Where have you come from?” The guards let them in. They were carrying a gas lamp.

  “From the national park,” Ute said.

  “Did you get lost?” the first guard said. The second one heavily sat down at the plastic table where they were playing cards and drinking.

  “What do you think?” Ute said.

  She wanted to lie down somewhere – anywhere would do, except next to the jaguar – and sleep. Now that they were safe again, she was ready to collapse.

  “Come with me,” said the first guard. “I’ll see if Carlos is here, and he can take you across in the boat.”

  Carlos. She hadn’t thought about him in the last few hundred years. No doubt she looked bedraggled and stank of sweat. They walked among various animal enclosures, and the gas-lamp was just strong enough to see shapes breathing, quietly growling, scratching and swinging gently on tyres and perches.

  Carlos emerged from the guard’s cabin. There was a bare light bulb swaying outside. He was barefoot, and had nothing on from the waist up. No hat this time, and strands of ash-coloured hair fell on each side of his face. His chest was surprisingly hairless. He was drinking maté again.

  “What happened to you two?” His face was lit up by a gentle semi-smile. He leant in the doorway, crossing his arms. Inside his cabin it was bright, and again that strong smell of burning incense.

  “We… we got a bit lost,” Ute said, trying not to look at his bare torso. “My watch stopped, and we got caught out in the dark.”

  “Yeah, it happens easily here.”

  He looked at her, at them, for a quiet moment, still leaning in the doorway. It was as if he was trying to work out whether they were a good match, and she wondered what he thought.

  “Do you have water?” she said with a croaking voice.

  Carlos went inside and brought out a large plastic bottle.

  “Is it mineral?” Jerry asked.

  “Not mineral,” Carlos said, in a slightly mocking way. “Filtered.”

  Ute filled herself with its coolness. Amazing, every time, how delicious water tasted to the parched mouth. She passed it to Jerry.

  “I take you across. OK?” Carlos said.

  “Thanks very much, that would be great,” Jerry said cheerfully, relieved at this happy ending, “and sorry to be a nuisance.”

  “No problem.” Carlos disappeared for a moment and then reappeared, this time with a dark T-shirt and flip
-flops on, and a torch in his hand.

  “Let’s go,” he said and walked ahead of them down to the riverbank.

  Inside the boat, he gave the torch to Ute to hold while he rowed. “Shine this way,” Carlos instructed her, and pointed towards the other side. Their side. His side was with the animals.

  The only sound now was the gentle plopping of the oars. She was aware of his body moving, his arms, his shoulders turning in their sockets. Undemanding, uncomplaining, he was at ease with himself and his surroundings. Her foot touched his. It sent a shiver up her whole body. She withdrew it quickly.

  “Do you always stay on that side?” Ute said. She swung the torch needlessly to indicate which side, and it shone into Carlos’s face, blinding him for a moment. He turned his face away.

  “Yes, almost always,” Carlos said. “I prefer. Sometime, when I feel too lonely, I go across and talk. Before, I lived on the other side when there weren’t so many visitors. But then I have to move out every time in high season, and I decide it is just better to live in the cabin on the other side. I must feed the animals two times a day. And I don’t like too much visitors.” He chuckled. “Sometime they are very nice, but sometime…” he drifted off.

  “Sometimes they are Max,” Jerry offered.

  “Max is OK,” Carlos said. “Too much energy and too much ego, but OK. Not dangerous.”

  “He’s a danger to himself more than anything,” Jerry said, and stretched his legs on the other side of Carlos.

  “Maybe tomorrow he will make you so angry that you hit

  him,” Carlos said to Jerry, and Ute wondered if he was mocking

  him.

  “Maybe,” Jerry said, almost amused. How quickly they had passed from a world of blackness, animal noises, and – so it had seemed – bare survival, to the civilized world of conversations and humour! Ute realized she’d been more worried about how Jerry felt than about herself.

  “How long have you lived out here then?” Jerry asked. “You seem to know quite a bit about animals.”

  “Three years and a half.”

  “And what did you do before that, in Paraguay?”

  “Different things.”

  “And how do you know… our hosts?” Jerry pressed on, a vein of irritation snaking into his voice.

  “My father and his father were friends. A long time ago, at university in Spain.”

  Carlos moored the boat and walked with them up the sandy bank to the main house. It was dinner time, and they could hear Max’s rowdy voice and Alejandro’s high-pitched laughter.

  “Uh-oh,” Jerry warned. “He’s holding court, and the court jester’s there too.”

  “Bueno, good night,” Carlos waved at them casually and turned down the pebbled path towards the master bungalow.

  “Good night and thank you,” Ute called, then added, “Carlos,” and wondered if Jerry could hear the regret in her voice – or was it longing, or alarm? Something that shouldn’t be there anyway.

  “Hey guys,” Max called out from his chair planted in the middle of the terrace. “Where you’ve been? We missed ya. Tom and Jerry,” he chuckled.

  “Hiya,” Jerry said cheerily. “You’ll have to excuse us, but we’re bone-tired. We’ve walked all afternoon.”

  Ute waved at the four diners with a smile. A figure stirred in the periphery of her vision. It was Carlos, walking back to the shore some hundred metres away.

  “Hey gaucho, how’s it goin’?” Max yelled. But Carlos didn’t pause or even look back. He crunched on and sank out of view.

  “Shifty dude, that one,” Max went on. “A dark horse. I bet you he’s shagging the lioness. I wonder what that’s like.” Alejandro sniggered.

  “You’re not having dinner tonight?” Héctor was taking a tray outside.

  “Maybe later,” Ute said.

  “Bueno.” Héctor had his butler face on.

  “Hey guys.” It was Alejandro, out of breath from the effort, coming after them. “You don’ wanna have dinner with us?” He had a beseeching look on his face. “Later, if you like? We’ll be here for sure.”

  “Yeah, we’ll come out later, we’re a bit knocked out at the moment,” Jerry said.

  “All right, I understand. See you later, maybe.” Alejandro waved and returned to the table.

  Ute stripped and dived into the shower, which was pleasantly lukewarm. She soaped up her sticky neck and armpits and closed her eyes while the shower jets hit her head.

  She and Jerry had honeymooned in the south of France, a pleasant honeymoon of late breakfasts and swimming in the Mediterranean. They had got married two years ago. It was almost on a whim, after eight good, seamless years together. Ute had invited her parents to the wedding and hoped at least her father would come, but in the end he didn’t – her mother was having “an episode”, and he couldn’t be away even for two days. At the wedding, Jerry’s family had seemed more numerous than ever. The men were well appointed and smug like country manors, the women dull and chirpy like a flock of geese in hats.

  The main thing Ute retained from her wedding was a sense of complete and utter loneliness in the world. It had never struck her before with such devastating force. Christmases were usually spent with Jerry’s family – his parents, two sisters and their bulging families. Occasionally, she went to Finland to spend a few days with her parents, but Jerry always found excuses not to go along, and she didn’t blame him. Her mother wasn’t easy to like, and her father was a man effaced by a lifetime of failure. A quiet, unremarkable tragedy, but since she had left home and country aged nineteen, Ute had convinced herself that it wasn’t her tragedy any more. And it wasn’t her country any more either. Seeing her off at Helsinki Airport all those years ago, her father had squeezed her hard against his big body and simply said, “Try and make your life over there, dearest girl.” And she had.

  She’d made a good life – she had friends, she had Jerry, she had an exciting job. But at her wedding she realized that all this couldn’t fix the fact that she was alone in the world. She felt the absence of brothers and sisters more acutely than ever. The two potential siblings hadn’t made it past the embryo stage – her mother had told her about the abortions. Her mother also told her that she hadn’t wanted any kids, that Ute herself had been an accident. At least she was honest, if nothing else.

  And at the wedding there was no hiding it: Ute had no next of kin who cared enough to turn up. Decent and benign as they were, Jerry’s people were not her people. Even after years of knowing her, they didn’t quite understand where she came from. Finland to them was a land of snow and vodka, and the odd deer. Not of people with quiet tragedies. They couldn’t comprehend the emptiness, the soundless damage of dark winters that chipped away at your soul until there was nothing left. They knew only the bare facts about her parents – German mother, mentally unstable, war orphan from the 1945 bombing in Hamburg, father a carpenter, looking after mother. And beyond these facts they sensed some gaping pit of Nordic melancholy, and knew not to go probing any further. They had welcomed her into their fold, no questions asked, and she was both grateful and resentful for their indifference.

  After the ectopic pregnancy, they had stopped making enquiries into Ute and Jerry’s reproductive plans. The incident had shut them up. Jerry’s entire family were among those people who somehow knew how to protect themselves from unpleasantness, and they passed on this survival skill to their children.

  “It’s all yours,” Ute called to Jerry. She stepped out and towelled herself.

  Jerry bounced out of the hammock, laptop in hand. A moment later, he called out from the bathroom, “Did you remember to care about the water? There are not many left in the world’s!” He had perked up.

  Still in her towel, she lay down in the hammock and closed her eyes.

  Today felt like several days rolled up into one. Something still bugged her about the morning, that distant morning on the other side of the forest crossing. The abused animals. The disturbance of Carlos’s musky p
hysicality. The strange, informal Héctor, full of insinuations. Now it came to her. In any case, Héctor had said. In any case, that’s what the police concluded. And left it at that.

  A mosquito was feeding on her arm. She slapped it and stirred her legs with an effort. Inside the hammock, her body felt like a bag of wet concrete. Jerry was still splashing in the shower. She dressed lethargically. She didn’t know why she was doing it, instead of crawling into the mosquito net. She scribbled a lazy note for Jerry letting him know that she’d be in the lounge. She closed the thin wooden door behind her quietly, like turning a page.

  ‌9

  Insects and other invisible creatures screeched in the tropical plants. On a whim, Ute took a different path through the compound, the one that led to the master bungalow. The windows upstairs were lit up. Standing in the middle of the path, she felt furtive and ashamed for spying like this.

  She quickly walked back to the main lounge, careful to stay out of view of the diners on the veranda, which was strangely quiet.

  That’s because nobody was there. In the kitchen, Conchita the cook was lazily stirring a pot. Ute poked her head in.

  “Is Héctor here?”

  “He’s down at the shore, he went after them,” Conchita said grumpily, and returned her attention to the pot.

  Ute went after them too. She could already hear Max’s booming voice down by the water. Max had untied the spare moored boat and was pushing it into the water, helped by a hesitant Alejandro. The two women stood by. Héctor shone a torch onto the scene.

  “Please,” Héctor was saying in Spanish, “I already explained. You can’t go across at night. Señor Mikel doesn’t allow it.” His voice was matter-of-fact. “The animals are sleeping.”

  “Well” – Max was seating himself inside the boat now – “Señor Mikel isn’t around tonight, and you ain’t gonna do much about it, are ya? Come on, are you coming?”

  “I don’t think this is a good idea,” Alejandro protested.

  “We’re…”

  “Come on, stop being a pussy and jump in,” said Max, switching to English. He was already getting hold of the oars.