Villa Pacifica

by Kapka Kassabova

  Jerry was now snoring gently. The door was locked, she was safe again. Except she knew she wasn’t. She found Jerry’s warm, reassuring forearm and gripped it. She slept fitfully. She was woken up by the sound of heavy rain hitting the thatched roof. She was alone again.

  ‌19

  Breakfast wasn’t served. There was still no power, no Conchita and no Héctor. And no one else either except Mikel, who was making coffee in the kitchen on a gas camping stove. Ute crouched by the dog, which was lying on the veranda, and stroked it.

  “Morning,” Mikel said.

  “Has everyone left? It’s very quiet.”

  Héctor had borrowed his car and gone to the village, Mikel said absent-mindedly. That’s what bugged Ute about Mikel and Lucía: their obliviousness. Here they were, living in their self-made paradise, and yet they seemed permanently absent from it. It was as if they weren’t here, only their shadows.

  Ute sat down with a glass of mandarin juice that Mikel offered her. Mikel hovered around, looking like a dark cloud about to burst its lining. Lucía wasn’t up. Jerry had gone for a walk earlier. Where, Mikel didn’t know. On the table was a basket of stale buns and some jam. Ute smelt the air. The faint whiff of pot still hung in the air, but it was mixed with the sweet rot of humid plants.

  “The baby iguanas, they’re gone.” Ute pointed at the empty residential leaf. But Mikel wasn’t listening. He was counting money in the reception till. She went up to him. He was snuffling, as if he had a cold.

  “Did Max really write out a cheque for two thousand dollars?” she asked.

  Mikel looked up at her. “Yes, he did, it’s in here,” he tapped on a drawer Ute couldn’t see, and continued counting the money.

  “Use it,” Ute said. But something else was on her mind right now. “Mikel,” she said, “was the French guy really short?”

  Mikel frowned in confusion.

  “What French guy?”

  “The French guy who drowned here last year.”

  Mikel thought for a moment. “Was he short?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t remember his height. He was skinny, like all junkies.” He looked at her with amused curiosity, his eye twitching in that unnerving way he had. “What a funny question. All your questions are funny.”

  “Mikel, can I ask you a personal question?”

  He looked at her again in surprise and lit a cigarette. “Go on. Ask another funny question.”

  “Why aren’t you friends with Oswaldo and Consuelo any more?”

  “Who told you that we aren’t friends any more?” He frowned. “Consuelo? You’ve been to her café of course.”

  “Yes,” Ute said. “She seems a very kind woman.”

  “She is. And we are still friendly, but we don’t spend time together any more. Oswaldo is dying of cancer in Agua Sagrada and doesn’t want to see anyone. He’s a fine artist, you know, some of the paintings here are by him.” Mikel swept a vague hand towards the lounge. But he was still preoccupied elsewhere.

  “And you don’t visit him?” Ute felt bad about insisting like this, but she had to.

  “Even Consuelo doesn’t visit him.”

  There was something utterly shipwrecked about this man. Ute couldn’t help but like him. She said:

  “You know, I am buying that painting of Oswaldo’s, The Three Lives of Mikel.”

  Mikel stared at her and chased another fly. Smoke came out of his nostrils.

  “I really like it. And you don’t seem to want it…” Ute added. Mikel stared at her again and inhaled from his cigarette butt. Rainwater was dripping from the roof and onto Ute’s head where she was sitting. She didn’t feel like moving. The collie was sitting up now, looking imploringly at Ute, as if waiting for her to remember something.

  “Can I have a cigarette?” she asked. He handed her the packet and gave her a light.

  “I thought your husband was the writer,” Mikel said.

  “He is,” Ute smiled. “I’m just a travel-guide writer: facts and attractions.”

  “Ah, but people’s lives are an attraction to you, right?” Mikel said.

  “Not at all,” Ute said, “I’m just… I was bored. And I liked talking to Consuelo.”

  “Consuelo is a good woman. We miss her.”

  “And Oswaldo, you must miss him too?”

  Mikel looked at her under a frown, stubbed out his cigarette on the sole of his flip-flop and shrugged his shoulders. “Oswaldo was a good friend for many years. But what good are friends who betray your trust? Who can you trust in this fucked-up world where nothing beautiful lasts and you lose the people you love one by one, and everything has a price? Who can you trust, if not your friends? Tell me.”

  “The person closest to you. The one you love,” she tried. She trusted Jerry more than she trusted herself. He wasn’t like other men – he had chosen her.

  “Sure, the one you love,” Mikel said, and she wasn’t sure if he said it in earnest or mockingly. “You have to trust the one you love even against your better judgement. You better trust them, or you may as well shoot yourself in the head.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Though that too might be a solution.” Mikel broke into a cracked laugh. Ute wanted to console him, say it’ll be all right, you don’t have to shoot yourself in the head, but she sensed that whatever had caused Mikel to be like this could never be put right.

  “So,” Mikel said with sudden brightness. “What are your plans for today? Are you staying on?”

  “Is Max leaving?”

  “I hope so. Haven’t seen them yet, but I’ll make sure he leaves. I’ve got enough on my hands without him.”

  “Morning, guys!” Liz said. “Forecasts of doom and gloom were wrong after all. We’re all still here, no storms in the night…”

  She sat down in a chair, then realized something wasn’t quite right: no Héctor, no breakfast, no lights inside. But Ute wasn’t going to explain the situation. She finished nibbling on a dry bun and scraped her chair as she got up. Mikel had vanished. Even with all the doors open, the place looked shut, almost abandoned. Ute and Liz were like the last laggards in an expired paradise.

  “Where’s everyone else?” Liz asked.

  “Gone. It’s just us and the resident malevolent spirits,” Ute

  said.

  “You make it sound creepy,” Liz chuckled. “Are you and Jerry gonna leave today, do you think?”

  “Don’t know. Don’t think so. You?” Ute went down the veranda steps.

  “Well, Tim and I don’t mind. We’re kind of tired of travelling. There’s not much to do here, but we don’t mind the place really. But we’ll go in a couple of days, for sure.”

  Ute was already walking towards the riverbank. The estuary had risen more overnight, and was now lapping up almost all the way up the bank. The monkeys called despondently from the other side. There was something odd and muted about the day: it didn’t feel like day at all. It felt more like dusk. Instead of light, there was rain.

  A boat had just turned the sharp bend in the river, and was gliding towards her. It was Carlos. As he approached, his bare arms and neck glistened with rain. She stood motionless for a while, in surprise. He should have been on this side, in the cabin at the back of the main house. It was logical. Why was he on the other side? It was hard to follow logic in this place, increasingly hard.

  She waded into the swollen water, which quickly came up to her waist. She shook her hair and had a sharp, dizzying sense of unreality. As if anything was possible now. Anything at all could happen now, and it wouldn’t matter very much.

  “I wouldn’t go for a swim right now,” Carlos shouted. He was pulling up near the mooring place.

  “Why not?” Ute said breezily, and felt like laughing. Perhaps she did laugh. Then she peeled off her T-shirt and left it to float or sink in the water. She was naked underneath.

  “What are you doing?” Carlos shouted. The water was deep, and she was swimming – not towards th
e steep shore across, but out towards the open ocean.

  “Come and get me,” Ute gurgled, choking on some water. It was quite funny. Why did she have to take things so seriously? She’d taken all of life too seriously up until now. In fact, it was all a laugh. It was all a gamble. Nothing was terribly important, she saw that now. The water was lifeless as the rain hit it, as if the rain itself was gurgling: “After me, the deluge.” Ute wondered if she could swim all the way to the malecón in Puerto Seco. She wasn’t a great swimmer, but there were no waves and no currents there.

  “There’s an undertow, come back!” Carlos was shouting. There was no undertow, the water was dead. It even smelt of decay.

  Carlos had caught up with her in the boat. He was leaning over into the water and saying:

  “Are you mad? Where are you going?”

  “I’m swimming.”

  “Get in the boat.” He didn’t seem in a mood for jokes. “The water is contaminated, you’ll get sick.”

  “I won’t drown, don’t worry,” Ute said, and swallowed some water again.

  The rain started hitting the water harder, like thousands of pebbles to her head and face. Carlos was now reaching down from the boat to get her. She gripped his arm, and he started lifting her out of the water. He was phenomenally strong. It was hurting her arm, but she didn’t mind. She stepped over the boat’s rim and sat next to him, shaking the water from her hair and smiling. Carlos let the oars dangle for a moment and looked at her. She stared at him hard. He took in her bare breasts, but didn’t linger on them before he started rowing without a word. Curtains of rain fell over them. Ute kept quiet.

  “El Niño drives people a bit mad,” Carlos said while he moored the boat.

  “Like last time?” Ute said. She had to shout to be heard over the clamour of rain.

  “Yes, people went mad.”

  “Which people?”

  “Everyone, the whole village.”

  “And here as well?”

  He gave her that slightly condescending look which she found so intriguing and so exasperating at the same time. Actually, she found everything about him both intriguing and exasperating. Intriguing because she couldn’t get close to him, and exasperating because he seemed to have an answer for her – if only she could get close enough to him.

  “Where’s your T-shirt?” Carlos shouted, scanning the water. His hair was plastered to his head and his face looked blurry in the violent rain. Everything looked blurry. The T-shirt was nowhere in sight.

  “Don’t worry,” Ute shouted back, and stepped over the boat rim and waded waist-deep into the water.

  “Another day of rain and the water will cover up the shore,” Carlos said.

  “How long before it reaches the cabins?”

  “Not long. And you don’t want to be here for it.”

  “You don’t want to be here for it either,” she said flippantly.

  “You can go home any time you want. We have nowhere else to go.”

  “And Paraguay?”

  “Paraguay’s Paraguay. Screwed up for all eternity.”

  They reached dry land. He took off his black singlet, wrung it out and handed it to her. She put it on. This took a moment, and standing like this, blurred and muffled by rain, with nothing but water on their naked skin, was delicious. She wanted to prolong it.

  “If something happened to this place,” she shouted, “where would Lucía and Mikel go?”

  “Nowhere,” Mikel said. She walked behind him. It was like the day before all over again: moving slowly in the heavy, slippery soil, your body crushed by rain. His singlet clung to her. She would follow him anywhere now, anywhere. To any dingy cabin, any ends of the earth. Except they already were at the ends of the earth. On the porch of the main house, a clump of people huddled together, nibbling dry buns and sipping yesterday’s juices. Neither Jerry nor Max were there. But Luis and his family were. Ute could swear the baby was shrinking from day to day inside its bundle, as if time was going backwards for it.

  Nobody was in the mood for greetings – not even Luis. They all just sat there with dull complexions and listened to the waterfall thundering around them. Except Liz, who openly ogled Carlos as soon as he turned up. But he quickly disappeared from view as usual. Then Ute heard unhappy male voices inside the main house – something about phone lines being down and about getting help. Ute sat down at Luis and Helga’s table. Luis looked at her. His usual friendliness was gone, and he looked preoccupied.

  “How were your dreams?” Ute tried. Luis smiled faintly.

  “I didn’t have any. A good thing too. My mother said if you have dreams here, they will be bad ones, and you will be doomed to fulfil them. She refused to sleep in her cabin. She spent the night upstairs in the music room. She’s convinced there are bad spirits here and wants us to leave immediately.”

  Ute felt herself blush, but no one seemed to take notice, except Luis’s mother, who was looking at her with kind, mustard-yellow eyes. She’d seen her upstairs – seen her bolt like a lunatic, running for her life in the black night, running from a kind old woman who was quietly smoking a joint, minding her own business.

  Suddenly, she felt the same as in the water just moments ago, and she saw that this whole thing was unreal. The place, the people gathered here, even the stupid weather was a joke. And life itself, all their lives were a joke, a divine practical joke. Ute laughed a nervous little laugh and drew a few surprised eyes, but she didn’t care.

  “So what are we gonna do today, guys?” Liz asked.

  “Drown, by the looks of it,” Tim said.

  “Leave,” Eve said. “I wanna leave. I can’t take it any longer. I wanna see my kids.”

  “Yes, we must leave.” Helga said, and looked at Luis.

  But somehow leaving didn’t seem possible any more. Leaving was a topic of conversation, nothing else.

  “Liz, I know what you can do today,” Ute heard herself say.

  Liz looked at her, surprised, friendly.

  “You can continue your little shag parties with Carlos, no one will hear you in this rain. Don’t let us stop you.”

  There was a stunned silence. Liz blinked at Ute a few times, then she suddenly looked at Eve. Eve’s eyes widened.

  “Lizzie, is that true?” Tim said, his voice hurt, as if she’d personally betrayed him with Carlos.

  Liz slowly got up, went up to Eve and slapped her on the face. Both women were in shock, then Eve jumped up, holding the side of her face.

  “You bitch! What are you doing that for?” she cried, her face turning red. “What’s wrong with you people? Can’t you see I’ve had enough! I just wanna go home.”

  She turned on her heels and stumbled down the terrace steps. But instead of storming off, she just sat at the bottom of the steps and sobbed loudly in the rain like a lost child. Ute knew she should feel sorry for her, but she couldn’t feel anything right now.

  “Jesus, girls, get a grip on yourselves! Liz, for Chrissakes!” Tim got up, went to Liz and took her by the wrist. She was crying now too, but silently, big tears streaming down her face. Again, Ute felt oddly unsympathetic.

  “What’s happening with you today?” Tim turned to Ute. “What was that about?”

  Ute shook her head and closed her eyes. Something had possessed her. Since the night before, she had felt disconnected.

  “I’m sorry,” she said – but she wasn’t sorry. She wasn’t anything. Liz was walking away, fighting the curtain of rain as she went, and Tim followed.

  Helga, Luis and his mother were staring at Ute like a three-headed Sphinx.

  She wished Jerry was there: he would find something clever to say at least. Then Luis’s mother spoke, her eyes still on Ute, and Luis translated for Ute’s sake into Spanish:

  “Humans, animals and plants have a stable core. It’s called wakan. It is expressed in their physical appearance, their emotions, their vitality. It doesn’t change. But the arutam, the spirit or the soul, is in constant flux. It is impacte
d by energies and spirits. My mother believes that in this place there is spiritual interference, the wakan becomes confused with the arutam. This can have a destructive impact on all living beings.”

  Ute couldn’t follow. Luis repeated: “It’s best to leave. If you stay, you must remain in a state of contemplation, because every action you undertake will be untrue.”

  Ute giggled.

  “Some people are more susceptible to interferences than others,” Luis added. “And the animals add to the disharmony of the spirit world because they are damaged.”

  “Where are all the men?” Mikel wanted to know. “We need a hand or two. There’s trees fallen over the road, we need to remove them.”

  “OK” – Luis got up – “I’ll give you a hand.” He spoke to Helga in German, and she nodded. “Ute” – Luis turned to her – “make sure my mother doesn’t wander off. Can you keep an eye on her?”

  Ute shrugged. “Sure.”

  The three men disappeared and, as if on cue, Max appeared.

  “Hey, hey, hey,” he said, “what’s up today? Where’s breakfast?”

  “Self-service,” Ute said.

  “The others go to the road,” Helga said to Max. “Now. You go too.”

  “Yeah,” Ute joined in, “they went to remove some fallen trees from the road. I’m sure they could do with your help.”

  “Right.” He considered it for a second. “Right. I better grab some breakfast first.”

  Ute got up. The baby started crying. Max went into the kitchen to forage for food. She glimpsed him from the lounge – in the grey daylight he looked like a giant rat rummaging in a rubbish tip, his rump moving.

  He was done quickly and then, to Ute’s surprise, he went off to help the other men.

  Then she thought of the Mexicans and their farewell note, and went straight to the guest book shelf. She looked at them again and counted them: 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009. She pulled out 2009 and opened it. It was blank, untouched. She tossed it on a chair and picked up the next one down – 2008. Blank, again. 2007 – blank. They were filled in from 2006 backwards.