Villa Pacifica

by Kapka Kassabova

  “It’s out of the question,” Paco frowned. “We can’t let you walk there alone. You don’t know the way. You need a guide. The walk there is three, four hours, perhaps more.”

  “I have four hours. I don’t need a guide.”

  “We’ll get you a guide for tomorrow, you can go there tomorrow,” Paco said. “I don’t even know if we have time to get to the top of the hill. Look.” He pointed at the horizon, which was darkening by the minute. The fine spray had turned to a drizzle.

  “Tomorrow might be too late.” She put resolve in her voice. “And we’re leaving soon.”

  “But I can’t do anything about the weather. Those hill paths, when there’s a storm, they’re not safe. Trees snap. There are mudslides. Ah, thank God, there he is.”

  Max emerged from the shallow water. Behind him came the skipper, carrying a pack with small plastic water bottles, which he handed to Paco. Liz was returning from her walk and Tim was deep in his book. Eve was swimming.

  “Hey guys!” Max saluted with a wave. Nobody paid any attention except the relieved Paco.

  “You’re a good swimmer.” He shook his hand. “Very good.”

  “I like to keep fit,” Max said.

  “OK everyone, we’re going to head up in a few minutes,” Paco shouted. “Go and get the señora,” he gestured to the skipper.

  “I’m not comin’ on the walk,” Max declared, and cleared his left ear of water. “I’m gonna hang down here while you guys are sweating up the hill.”

  “OK,” Paco said. He looked like a man with a headache. “If you don’t want to come walking, that’s OK. But where are you going to go? Agua Sagrada is too far, you’re not permitted to—”

  “Who said anything about Agua Sagrada?” Max was towelling himself energetically.

  “I don’t know, the señora here was talking about going by herself.” Paco looked at Ute.

  “No way, we won’t let this señora go nowhere by herself,” Max said, and his eyes met Ute’s.

  “I’m not going.” She shook her head.

  “Right,” Paco said. “Ah, there she is. We’re ready to go.” He glanced at his watch nervously.

  Eve was changing under a huge towel, her back to the group. Max went up to her and reached under the towel playfully. “Hey, honey.”

  “Keep your hands off me.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Max opened his arms to the heavens.

  “OK everybody,” Paco shouted. “We have about two hours before the storm. Let’s go.”

  The skipper waved at the group and waded back to the boat.

  They headed for the northern tip of the bay. Max was lying spread-eagled on the sand like a hefty starfish.

  Soon, they were climbing a sandy path. Luis and his mother wore identical Jesus sandals with Velcro straps. Everybody wore shorts, except Luis’s mother and Ute, who had long cotton trousers on for the scratchy forest she wasn’t going to traverse after all. She felt cheated and robbed of her afternoon and of her dream. She’d had an auspicious dream, and now the toad had butted in and poisoned it with his secretions.

  The dry forest was heated like an oven. All moisture was gone.

  Ute trudged up the hill and pictured a bored Max swimming out to the caves to take another look, going deeper and deeper into the fissured rock underneath the cliff path they were treading now, and vanishing for ever in the chambers of the sea, as in that T.S. Eliot poem. No, she must stop quoting Jerry’s stuff to herself, as if he were there. It was pathetic. She didn’t really want him there. She didn’t want to be there herself. She wanted to be on that path at the other end of the bay, striding to the top of the misty hill, to the realm of cloud forest and Oswaldo Joven’s lucid, Cyclopean eye of a dying giant. There everything would become clear, one way or another.

  Down by the ocean, in the sulphur-pongy air pregnant with storm, nothing could ever be clear. She crunched along the scorched white path, last in line behind Luis.

  Thorns, branches and giant cacti all around. The cacti, gnarled and bulbous, were twice a human’s size.

  “…Blue-footed boobies are not afraid of humans,” Paco was saying to the group. They’d stopped to look at a nonplussed booby, which sat hatching eggs in the middle of an explosion of excrement from above.

  “This tree here is algarrobo blanco, Latin name is Prosopis alba.” Paco moved up the path to a pale-barked tree with a large crown of tiny leaves.

  “In Europe it is called carob. This tree doesn’t have problems with heat and dryness. This is why it is green now.”

  “But it’s not dry, it was raining just before – sort of,” Eve pointed out from underneath her safari hat.

  “Raining now, raining last night, but not for many months,” Paco said in a patient voice. “This is our dry season – usually finishes in January.” And they walked on.

  The ocean was a thin strip of blue glanced here and there through the gaps in the pale trees. The further they climbed, the wider the blue strip grew. Ute took big gulps from her two-litre water bottle. She had cleverly prepared for a major trek, but had she been really clever, she would have made her escape from the beach in time, instead of chatting to Luis. Now she’d have to hire a tricycle the following day and bribe the sleepy old man at the entrance kiosk to let her through all the way to Agua Sagrada. She really had no time to see everything on foot. And how else could she justify a week of her travel schedule spent here?

  “Check this out,” Liz was saying. It was a thick tree with a green trunk covered in spikes.

  “Wow, it looks unreal,” Tim said.

  “Young Ceiba trichastandra. The ceiba tree is green because it does photosynthesis with its bark.” Paco glanced at his watch.

  “What are the spikes for?” Eve touched one.

  “Spikes protect the tree from animals when it’s young and still growing. When it’s older, it grows very large roots.” And on they went on their hurried expedition. Luis’s mother was saying something to him in her muted voice.

  “You know” – Luis turned to Ute and evened his step with hers – “the ceiba tree was the tree of life for the Mayans. They believed that the long roots hanging from its branches connect the living with the souls of the dead above.” Ute stopped and scribbled this in her notebook.

  After a couple more stops, they reached the top. Here, the dry-forest fuzz receded to reveal the plucked, rocky nape of the hill. The ocean rushed into the picture from all sides. Part of it was under the sky’s dirty carpet, which kept rolling out their way. The bay was out of view behind them, but on the other side of the hill Puerto Seco’s huts squatted behind the estuary of the river, which lay fat and sluggish like a replete boa. Segments of it could stir any moment. Ute recognized the inlet where the entrance to the animal shelter was. Beyond, it became lost from view in the dry forest.

  “How long does the river go inland?” she asked Paco.

  “About five kilometres after the bend. Then the mangroves begin, and the river Mapuyo.” Paco led them briskly to a rocky outcrop right on the edge of the cliff. It was covered in birds and guano.

  “Please don’t go close to the edge, OK?” Paco warned. “If you fall from here, I am not coming after you.” They all laughed feebly with what remaining breath they had from the steep climb. All except Luis’s mother, who hadn’t understood. She shuffled to the very edge of the jutting rock and stood there, squat and penguin-like.

  “For Chrissake, tell your mom not to stand there – she’s freaking me out,” Eve said.

  Luis pulled his mother back from the edge. She said something and pointed down at the tiny beach. Luis quickly stepped into the space she’d just left and looked down at the bay.

  “The boat.” He turned to Paco. “It’s not there.”

  “What do you mean, not there?” Paco said, and stepped over to have a better look. “Why the hell’s he moved it?” he muttered, dialling his mobile phone, his ashen face glistening with sweat. “Jesus?”

  Jesus answered. The boat had in fac
t been moved, but not by him. He’d been woken up from his nap by the roar of the motor. Max was at the helm. They were now two bays further to the south. Max took over the phone. The familiar loud voice was enough to pull the others around Paco.

  “We don’t have time for silly games,” Paco was shouting into his mobile, the sweat pouring from his face and onto his T-shirt, which said, in faded letters, “I LOVE NY”. “The storm is about to hit us. You are putting everyone at risk…”

  Max shouted something in reply.

  Paco handed the phone to Ute. “He wants to talk to you.”

  “To me?” Ute said.

  And just then, a massive bolt of lightning ripped sky and ocean, blinding everyone for a second.

  “Max,” Ute shouted. “What’s up?”

  His reply was deafened by a loud thunder crash.

  “What?” Ute shouted.

  “I’ll talk to him,” Eve said, extending her arm. “Pass him over.”

  “What does he want?” Liz asked.

  “I’ll talk to him,” Luis said. “Max!” He listened for a few seconds. “What?” he shouted in Spanish. “Are you mad? That’s suicide.” He translated for everyone. “He want us to jump in the water from here, and they come and collect us in the boat. He’s out of his mind.”

  There was a collective gasp of disbelief.

  “We can walk back through the park,” Ute said. “There’s a path that leads to Villa Pacifica.”

  “Yes,” Paco said. “But it is far away.” He wrenched the phone from Luis’s hand and shouted, “Jesus, put Jesus on.”

  But Jesus and Max were gone. The connection was cut off. Paco redialled angrily. Sweat poured down his pitted face. The ocean went very dark. It looked as if it was rising.

  “There’s no signal,” Paco shouted in Spanish through the noisy rain, shaking his mobile. “I’m not getting any signal. It’s the storm. Anyone got a mobile phone?” Nobody did.

  “One of his pranks,” Liz said. “But this one’s gone too far.”

  “Let’s go!” Luis said.

  “But how’re we gonna get back?” Eve said, panic in her voice.

  “We’re not walking all the way back to Villa Pacifica. You’ve got to be kidding!” Tim wiped the water pouring down his face. “Are we?”

  “Walking back is better than swimming back,” Liz said, and set off behind Luis.

  “Hey,” Eve shouted, running behind them, frantic. “Let’s get back to the beach. He’ll be there, it must be just one of his stupid jokes.”

  Paco shook his head. “But maybe he isn’t there. We can’t take a risk.”

  “Why is he doing this to me?” Eve moaned – but they were all walking fast now, and she had no choice but to keep up. The dry forest wasn’t a great shelter from the downpour, but they felt less exposed. Luis quickly summed up the situation to his mother, and she nodded in her matter-of-fact way. They were all adapting to survival with surprising speed.

  “OK,” Paco shouted, and moved to the front of the column. “Soon we take another path. Don’t separate from the group. Follow me.”

  “I swear it must be one of Max’s jokes,” Eve was saying to Ute, and Liz and Luis, her safari hat drooping with water. “If we go down to the beach, I’m sure—”

  “Move on, Eve,” Liz cut her off. “Jesus, this is like Judgement Day.”

  Lizards darted about in the roots and twigs, and birds fluttered in the trees. The cracked earth of the path quickly turned to mud. Water poured down everyone’s head and body: it got into their eyes and noses, and when they opened their mouths to speak, water filled it.

  “Great.” Tim’s face was screwed up with distaste. “Can we do it again tomorrow, please?”

  The rain pushed them downhill, as if on a waterslide. Every few minutes, someone slid into the mud and cursed. Their backs dripped with sludge.

  “OK,” Paco yelled eventually. After trying his phone several times on the way, he’d given up. There was a narrow path turning inland. “Here we start the walk to Villa Pacifica.”

  He stopped to count them and rounded off the column. They continued to glide downhill. It was hard to say how long they spent squelching and sliding in silence. The rain interfered with human time. Huge thunderbolts ripped the forest from time to time, and made everyone duck instinctively. Ute turned and saw that Eve was crying. Luis and his mother were keeping a lively pace at the front, their Jesus sandals invisible under the mud.

  The forest had come to life. Ute could hear the moisture-starved trees breathing, swelling with hope, growing leaves and moss, humming with new, verdant thoughts. The path evened out as they hit the grounds of the park, and it was now possible to walk without falling. No one dared ask how long it was going to take. Ute’s estimate was at least four hours.

  It seemed impossible that the rain could get any worse, but it did. It wasn’t rain any more. It was a solid wall of water. They were now walking through the Niagara Falls in slow, incredulous motion, blinded and gagging in the deafening thunder of water.

  “Jesus Christ!” someone gagged, and those were the last words anybody managed for a long time. In the tangled curtains of water, it was hard to see who was who. They all looked like watery holograms that could vanish in the space of a blink. Ute feared for Luis’s tiny mother. She could be swallowed whole by the water beast.

  It was hard to breathe. The air had darkened, and the steaming forest looked evil and endless in every direction. Pushing against the rain wall, Ute felt she’d be covered in bruises later. The water kept slowing down and accelerating, slowing down and accelerating, like a pulse. They kept moving in a dumb daze of survival through this chthonic water world.

  After an eternity, they finally reached Villa Pacifica. In the grey mist it was hard to tell whether it was night or day. The back gate was open: they were expected. Carlos, wearing a plastic hooded raincoat, greeted them with no comment. Paco seemed on the point of grateful tears, like a man whose death sentence had just been waived. Birds twittered from all sides, excited by the rain.

  “Las Malvinas son argentinas, las Malvinas son argentinas,” Enrique rattled off by way of a greeting, but nobody laughed. The rain kept falling at a steady, thoughtful pace. It didn’t bother Ute any more. She felt at one with it. In fact, it was now hard to imagine a world without rain.

  The animal and bird enclosures were covered with large plastic sheets. The lion cub was back in her cage, lying dejectedly. The jaguar lay in a corner of his enclosure, breathing heavily, as if the humidity was inside his lungs.

  Carlos and Pedro ferried the bedraggled crew across the river in the two boats. The river was swollen. In his black plastic hood, Carlos looked like Charon transporting shadows across the Styx back to the world of the living.

  ‌18

  “I must go get Helga and the baby,” Luis said to Carlos as they all scrambled up the already flooded bank of the estuary towards the main house. “It’s not safe along the malecón any more.”

  “It isn’t safe here either,” Carlos said. “See how the water has already risen? If it doesn’t stop raining, it’ll keep rising. Last time we were completely flooded, half of the cabins came under water.”

  The tropical plants were half hidden in a mist of rain. On the veranda, also half hidden in vapours and cigarette smoke, were Jerry, Mikel, Lucía and Héctor, plus the two dogs.

  “You poor devils!” Mikel said in Spanish, and patted Luis on the back with good cheer. “You made it after all. We’ve been going off our heads here.”

  “Are you OK?” Jerry reached out to Ute and gave her a hug – a slightly guarded hug as if protecting himself from something so saturated.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Fine.”

  “I’d normally say ‘have a shower’, but I’m not sure that’s what you need this time.” Jerry was trying to be light-hearted.

  She did need a shower. She looked down at her feet and legs, which were aching with fatigue. She was covered in mud and bits of plants to the waist, like
some mythical beast – half human, half vegetable.

  “Señora?” Héctor held a tray laden with steaming mugs of hot chocolate. Ute took one.

  Most of the expedition group were already plonked in chairs – shapeless, speechless and stunned to be back in the familiar world of furniture and hot drinks. Liz sat on the veranda steps, the rain falling on her legs. Tim and Eve had gone straight for the lavatories, first removing their mud-covered shoes. Even so, they left muddy traces across the polished boards of the lounge. Luis, Mikel and Paco were already setting off in the rain.

  “Going to fetch his wife,” Mikel called to them, and said to Lucía: “Amor, show the señora to the Monkey, it’s got a single bed.” Lucía nodded and exchanged some words with Carlos, who flipped back his black rain-hood, removed his gumboots and went through to the kitchen with her. Luis’s mother sat in a chair, her dress fetched to her knees and exposing her scratched and bleeding legs. Behind her, the two baby iguanas faithfully guarded their leaf, though their pattern was now disturbed and no longer formed a yin yang. They were now like two quotation marks without a sentence. Sitting on top of a table, Ute sipped her hot chocolate. It was heavenly. Jerry stood beside her, his arm around her.

  “So what happened?” he asked.

  “I don’t feel like talking,” Ute said.

  Nobody else did either. Mikel’s engine started up. Ute felt on the verge of tears. She glimpsed Héctor inside the lounge. He stood propped behind the reception bar, looking at them.

  Carlos was drinking black coffee from a mug.

  “Coffee at this hour?” Liz turned to face him. She had removed her soaked T-shirt and was down to a white sports bra again.

  “Yes,” he said, and looked at her breasts. “I’m drinking coffee now because I may be staying up tonight.”

  “Oh, really! Why?”

  “Because there may be a storm during the night.”

  “See you later.” Tim was back from the bathroom and off to his cabin. “I need to decrust, I feel gross.”

  “God, I can’t believe we made it.” Eve was back from the bathroom too, her mouth stuffed full of cake that she’d grabbed along the way.