Villa Pacifica

by Kapka Kassabova

  “What are your dreams, Pedro?”

  Pedro glanced at Max sideways.

  “You know, what do you wanna be when you grow up? Mind you, in this climate, you’re already grown up at fourteen. Are you having sex yet?”

  The boy flushed.

  “OK, tell you what, do you wanna race me to the water? Let’s see if Luis wants to join in. Hey Luis,” he shouted. Luis was already returning.

  “We’re going to head off to the snorkelling club in a moment,” Luis said. “My mother’s coming after all and—”

  “Hey,” Max cut him off, “Pedro and I are gonna have a race. You gotta join us. Uddar, you’re on for a race?” He was bouncing on the spot already.

  “No, thanks,” Ute said. “I’m no good at running.”

  “How do you know, have you ever tried running?”

  “All right! I’ll run,” Ute said.

  “All right,” Luis shrugged. “Let’s run. Where?”

  “Just from here to the water,” Max said. “Whoever makes a splash first, wins. Get up buddy, don’t sit there like a lump, you’re in the race.”

  Pedro obeyed, and they lined up in front of the bench.

  “Clear off, kids,” Max shouted at the children playing football. “We’re racing.”

  The kids clustered in two small groups.

  “Dale Pedro!” shouted Evelyn, and the other kids giggled. It was a mocking version of the popular presidential campaign slogan: “Dale Gonzales!” – Go for it, Gonzales!

  “All right,” Max shouted. “Ready? Steady? Go!”

  Ute gave it her best and ran for the water as if there were someone drowning there. But her best wasn’t good enough. Luis splashed into the shallow beach water some time before Pedro, who was followed by Max and finally Ute.

  “Pedro and I win,” Luis said, and put a hand on Pedro’s shoulder.

  “You win, man,” Max said breathlessly, and punched Luis in the shoulder. “Where’d you learn to run like this? I mean, I’m fast, but you’re a torpedo!”

  Luis was already headed back to the malecón, and Ute followed him. It was a quarter to eleven on Max’s watch. The kids resumed their game, and now Pedro joined them, boosted by his near win.

  “Ciao,” Ute waved at Evelyn, who ran over to them.

  “Are you coming back?”

  “Yeah, we’re coming back,” Max said.

  “Not you, her,” said the plucky girl, then ran away.

  “Take care out there,” Consuelo said from the doorway of her café. Her face was full of shadows today. “There’s a storm on the way. I can smell it.”

  “Have you put your prices up like I suggested?” Max had caught up.

  “No,” Consuelo said. “Bueno, I have some work inside. Enjoy the snorkelling.”

  “Consuelo,” Ute stopped her. She made up her mind on the spot. “I want to buy The Three Lives of Mikel. Can I come and get it tomorrow and bring the money?”

  “Of course you can,” Consuelo smiled her generous smile. “I’ll be here. God willing.”

  “Thank you,” Ute said, and strode off with Max in tow.

  “No one’s ever heard of this Oswaldo Joven…” Max carried on.

  This reminded her that she’d made another decision that morning, and she turned back.

  In the semi-darkness of the back room, Consuelo was packaging Oswaldo’s canvases.

  “Are you moving these?” Ute asked.

  “Yes. I’m moving them tonight to my house, in case we get hit by a big storm. I couldn’t bear it if something happened to them. My house is almost as close to the water as here, but I can have them upstairs. What can you do. There’s nowhere else I can store them.”

  “What about Villa Pacifica, upstairs in the main house?”

  “Oh no, that wouldn’t do. I wouldn’t ask… Anyway, you must go, or you’ll be late, don’t worry about this. Héctor is coming to help me later, he’s taking time off work tonight.”

  “Consuelo, do you know how long it takes to climb to Agua Sagrada from the beach?”

  Consuelo straightened up and pushed a black curl from her eye. “Why?”

  “I want to see Agua Sagrada. Maybe meet Oswaldo.” She shrugged. “If he’s there.”

  “He’s there,” Consuelo said quietly. “But as I told you, he’s very sick. As to the path up to Agua Sagrada, I wouldn’t go. Nobody uses it except a few men when they go fishing in the bay.” Her mobile was ringing on the table, and she picked it up.

  “Yes? OK, well, never mind.” Her voice was dull with disappointment. “Yes, come early tomorrow. OK. Bye. It was Héctor,” she explained. “He can’t take time off tonight, he’s needed there. He said all the guests are staying, despite the storm warning. But it’s OK, he’ll come first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “Maybe I can help,” Ute offered feebly.

  “That’s very kind.” Consuelo smiled. “But don’t worry about it. You better go.”

  “Is there a path from Agua Sagrada back to Villa Pacifica?”

  “There is a path from the Manteño National Park to Villa Pacifica, but I don’t think it’s maintained by the park authorities. Nobody uses it. But I really don’t know, I haven’t been that way. I’ve only been up to the hills by tricycle from the main road.”

  Consuelo’s sad, toffee-coloured eyes seemed to say: “What’s eating you up, what are you looking for, my girl?” And Ute replied in the same silent language: “I don’t know, I’ve lost my way, can you help me?”

  “You’ll be late for the snorkelling trip,” Consuelo said.

  “Bueno, I’ll see you tomorrow.” Ute waved and went on her way.

  “God willing.”

  At the yellow kiosk with a freshly painted blue sign that said “PUERTO SECO PARADISE SNORKELLING” everybody was being fitted with lunatic-yellow lifejackets for the boat ride – everybody except Jerry.

  Liz handed Ute a sealed manilla envelope from reception. It was five times bigger than the note inside it, which said:

  Decided to stay behind and get some writing done. I’m in “the zone”. Afraid I’ll have to miss the snorkelling. Sorry! Have fun out there with the fishes, if not with the humans, and tell me all about it later. See you in a bit. J.

  The manilla envelope made the note look impersonal, like a memo from a sick workmate. Ute was surprised at how gutted she felt. A desertion, that’s what it felt like.

  “OK.” Their guide was a young man with an acne-scarred face. “Has everybody paid?” He looked at Ute. “Gracias.” He took her proffered twenty-dollar note. “So, please don’t bend down and touch the water, because we’re going fast. One American señor fell in the water last year, we had to fish him out before the sharks got to him.” He paused, then chuckled. “Don’t worry, no sharks here. Only dolphins and maybe whales. We spend one hour snorkelling, then lunch, and maybe two hours on the beach and walking. We are back here at four o’clock.”

  Without me, Ute thought. I’ll be up in the hills by then.

  “All right. Let’s rock this boat, baby,” Max said and jumped in. The boat shook.

  “The boat’s rocking all right,” said Eve, stepping in. “Won’t surprise me if it sinks, with you on it.”

  The guide helped Luis’s mother on board. Ute was glad Luis was here.

  When they were all seated, the driver started the engine. Now they were on the other side of the soporific morning, and heading into something less safe. Ute felt it in her guts, or maybe that was just seasickness. In a boat, the ocean is always choppier than it looks from the shore.

  They rode the rest of the journey in silence because of the engine noise. Max had positioned himself next to the skipper, where he observed closely with the evident intention of becoming an expert.

  The land was rocky and inhospitable along the shore, and further inland its green tops rose high into steam and cloud. The harsh sunlight fell at a ninety-degree angle today, like a stern finger from Heaven. You down there, it said, and you, and especially you, all o
f you will feel what’s coming to you, sooner or later. But in the meantime, enjoy the sparkling waters of El Niño, where fishes get fried, and gringos warm their cold bones, and dead bodies get washed up.

  Ute applied some sunscreen to her face, neck and bare arms and pulled her cap low over her face. “Good idea,” Eve shouted, and asked to borrow the lotion. After twenty minutes or so, the engine was turned off. They were close to the rocky face of the coast. Then, just round the corner, they came into a deep, dreamy bay.

  “OK.” Paco, the guide, got up and removed his yellow vest. “We are near the bay of Agua Sagrada. We stop here for snorkelling. Ladies, you can go downstairs for changing if you want.”

  “I already changed before we left,” Eve announced.

  “Over there” – he pointed at the rocky coast they’d just passed – “are some underwater caves. You can swim up to that point, but do not swim inside the caves. Not safe. OK? So, we have very warm weather this month, El Niño weather. This means that maybe you don’t see so much fish.”

  Paco took a bunch of diving masks and snorkels and distributed them around.

  “Señora?” he handed one to Luis’s mother. She shook her head.

  “She won’t be swimming,” Luis said, and dived into the water, soon followed by Max, Liz and Tim.

  “I’ve never done this before.” Eve was fussing with her mask. “How do you breathe with this thing?”

  “You breathe through the tube,” Ute said. “There’s nothing to it.”

  “Do I keep my eyes open?” Eve said nasally through the tube.

  “Yes,” Ute said. “That’s the whole point.”

  Eve sat at the edge of the boat, her legs testing the water. The guide and the skipper were busy preparing sandwiches from a couple of big chilly boxes. As soon as Eve plopped in, Paco collapsed into laughter. “‘Do I keep my eyes open,’ she says!” and the skipper joined in. Luis’s mother had something resembling enjoyment on her face, and her eyes momentarily met Ute’s behind the snorkelling mask.

  Ute jumped in. The water felt like warm champagne gone off, fermented and golden with light. Masked bodies hovered at the surface like roots. Their algae-like limbs stirred. It was a blissfully soundless universe. Up there, in the light, was the blue blur of Luis’s mother.

  Ute pulled herself deeper. How deep did she have to go to reach the underworld of the tsungki? She’d read somewhere, once, that the tsungki wear crabs for watches, fish for hats, and sit on giant turtles and caimans. There were some fishes darting about down here, and she could now see the sandy bottom, where nameless things scuttled about. She swam around, pretending to be one of them.

  She was surprised how far from the boat she popped up. She was in fact closer to the rocky shore than to the boat. There must be a current drifting northwards. She swam closer and looked under. No fish, lots of algae. It was deeper over here. She went a bit further along, feeling the sharp rock with her right foot. And here were the caves in question. The entrance was comfortable enough even for a boat their size to go through. Ute went through. This was only the first of several chambers. The underwater rock was deeply fissured.

  The water in here was different – darker and cooler. The reddish rock plunged underwater like an abyss. Time to get out.

  She turned around – and just then something gripped her ankle. And like in her nightmare, her choked scream was voiceless. Her reflex was to wrestle her ankle free, but she realized that what was clasped around it was not some tentacular creature of the depths, but a human hand. It was Max’s hand.

  She held her breath, which was difficult, because she already had very little left of it from the shock. The snorkel didn’t allow for long periods far from the surface. It was one of his “jokes”, no doubt. He now pressed against her belly as his legs pulled her in closer.

  She fought him off, and his legs disengaged as they went up. They burst through the water together and scrambled to remove their snorkels. For a while, there was just frantic breathing.

  “Gave you a fright?” Max gasped.

  “Fuck off,” Ute gasped back.

  “Yeah, you know how it is. I came to have a look and I see a hot babe. Synchronicity.” He chuckled.

  “Bullshit.” And she swam away from him, catching her snorkel in one hand, swallowing water.

  She scrambled up to the boat, where she found Eve and Tim sitting on towels and munching on sandwiches, bananas and mandarinas.

  Standing on unsteady legs, she dried herself with her weightless travel towel and sat down to eat. Soon they were joined by Luis, whom Ute caught with a corner of her eye glancing at her, and Liz.

  The skipper started the boat, and soon they could see the bay of Agua Sagrada. The horseshoe-shaped beach stretched for at least a couple of kilometres, and a dry tropical forest rose straight up from it, like a thorny crown sat atop a gigantic, faceless forehead.

  They passed Max and waved to him. He stopped swimming and waved back, squinting in the hazy light of early afternoon.

  The skipper stopped the engine to see if he wanted to get on. “I’ll catch up,” Max shouted.

  Tim and Liz hid behind huge, face-shielding sunglasses, and Luis’s mother squinted at the swimmer. Luis looked at Ute with his amused, crow-footed Indian eyes, identical to his mother’s. Ute shifted her gaze. For a moment, the boat was suspended in the bay, and the world was so perfectly still and noiseless that they could be inside one of Oswaldo’s triptychs of someone’s life.

  When they hit shallow waters, the skipper switched off the motor, and they all waded across to the beach carrying their shoes and daypacks. A warm, soundless spray floated in the air. A sweetly putrid smell of seaweed and gathering tropical storm had come to brood here.

  “Uh-oh, is that rain?” Eve said.

  “Just warm spritz,” Luis said.

  The skipper was still on the boat, tidying up and keeping a look out for the errant swimmer. The group dispersed. Liz went for a walk along the water’s edge. Tim lay belly-down on his towel with his book. Paco started texting someone on his mobile. Eve waded back into the water and splashed her rounded shoulders. Luis’s mother headed to the shrubs on the edge of the beach.

  “She needs the bathroom.” Luis sat down on the sand, and Ute joined him there. She should go and investigate the start of the path leading up to Agua Sagrada, but she needed a moment of stillness. She was still shaken by the cave encounter. They turned their faces to the fine mist in the air for a while. Ute closed her eyes.

  “Do you think there’ll be a storm today?” Ute asked.

  “Yes, I think there will be,” Luis said. “I can smell it.”

  “Me too.”

  “I’m thinking of going to Villa Pacifica tonight, away from the beach, but I don’t think my mother will agree.”

  “Why not?”

  “She thinks there are bad spirits there.”

  “Like Max?”

  “No.” Luis laughed his breezy laughter. “Not Max. We can see Max. But we can’t see those spirits. They’re like… Energy. Bad energy. She felt it last night.”

  “Did you feel it?” Ute asked.

  “I’m not so much in touch with the spirit world. Are you?” He looked at Ute.

  “No, not at all.”

  It’s possible that I’m not even wholly in touch with the human world, she thought. That I’m living somewhere in between.

  “Always competing, that one,” Luis said, looking out to sea. “Trying to prove something to someone. He must be an unhappy man.”

  “Oh, I think he’s happy,” Ute said.

  “Are you happy?”

  “Me?” Ute searched for an answer. “Sometimes.”

  “And now, are you happy now?”

  “Right now?”

  “Yes, today. This week.” His smile was playful.

  “I don’t know.” She could be honest with him, like with Consuelo. In fact, she could be nothing but honest with him. He would know it otherwise. “It’s been a strange week.
I guess I haven’t been all that happy.”

  “Your relationship is not very happy,” Luis said. That was wounding to hear, because it came from a stranger, and it wasn’t even a question.

  “Oh, we have a very good marriage actually. It’s just that at the moment, Jerry is writing something, and I have some work to do as well…”

  “I understand. You can’t always be together,” Luis said.

  “No. Yes.” After a short silence, she asked: “And you, are you happy? Are you and Helga happy?”

  “We have many differences, but also things that keep us together. Music is the most important.”

  Ute noticed Luis’s mother who was sitting right behind them on the sand, her skirt drawn modestly around her shins. Luis said something to her in Achuar, a joke perhaps, because her face cracked into a smile. Her teeth were oddly blunt, as if filed back. Then she looked at Ute and said something. Luis translated.

  “My mother says that illness is a sign of bad energy that must be cleansed. Your face, has it always been like that – if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Yes.” Strangely enough, she didn’t mind Luis or his mother asking. “And where does the bad energy come from then?”

  Luis looked at the sea. “Usually from the past. It can be an ancestral spirit.”

  “I don’t have any ancestors.”

  “You are disconnected from your past,” Luis said. “Like many Europeans.”

  “From my ancestors’ past, you mean.”

  “Same thing. You know, our past doesn’t begin neatly from the moment we are born. It’s not that straightforward. If you were in the Amazon, my mother would arrange for you to have a seance with a shaman. Take some herbs, vomit, see the past, and understand yourself better. Your skin would clear up along with your spirit.”

  “Too bad we’re not in the Amazon. Excuse me,” Ute said, and got up to talk to Paco, who was passing by.

  “I’m not coming with you on the walk,” she said.

  “How come?”

  “I want to visit the community of Agua Sagrada today,” she pointed to the invisible hilltop behind them. “I’m updating a travel guide, and would like to include the different points of interest in the national park.”