Villa Pacifica

by Kapka Kassabova

  “Yes,” the woman said. “April 2007.”

  Ute could hear the buzzing of a fly somewhere near her head, or possibly inside her head.

  “Are you an admirer of his work?” the woman asked. The girl was now picking wild flowers among the sparse graves.

  Ute swallowed with difficulty. The white glare of the sun was blinding.

  “How come… How is it possible that nobody in Puerto Seco knows about his death? Not even his wife.”

  The woman looked at her with something resembling pity.

  “His wife has been dead for three years,” she said.

  “You mean his ex-wife, not his current wife. Consuelo lives in Puerto Seco.”

  The woman opened her mouth, closed it again, and said slowly, as if explaining to a child:

  “After El Niño destroyed her café and Oswaldo’s paintings in December 2006, Consuelo hanged herself in the café. January 2007.” She shook her head. “Very sad.”

  The woman looked at the gravestone for a while.

  “Who are you?” Ute said in a small voice.

  “María. I was Oswaldo’s… Well, we weren’t married, but we lived together after he moved up here.”

  “Is the child his?”

  “No, I had Luz with someone else. He left. Oswaldo was only here for a year.”

  “You got together up here while he was dying,” Ute said.

  “Oswaldo was a… special man. A great artist. Not everybody liked him, but…”

  Ute had to throw up again, and only just managed to hobble away from Oswaldo’s grave.

  “Sorry,” she said afterwards.

  “Don’t worry.” María’s smile was fleeting. “Let’s go back.”

  Back to the future? Ute wondered. She nodded.

  “Was there a storm here yesterday?” she asked. “And the day before?”

  “No,” María shook her head. “The last time we had storms was during the El Niño disaster in 2006. It devastated the coast…”

  “Yes!” Ute cut her off, “and severely damaged Puerto Seco and Villa Pacifica, and… and…”

  “That’s right,” the woman said gently. “After the floods, Villa Pacifica closed down. They couldn’t afford to repair the houses after one of their staff ran off with all their savings. They also had some personal problems, I heard at the time. Oswaldo had an affair with the señora before he moved here, and her husband, he went a bit crazy after that. Oh yes, and during the storms, traffickers broke in and stole some animals.”

  Ute realized that they were walking on, beyond the graveyard. Luz ran ahead, clutching a sprig of flowers.

  “Which of the staff ?” Ute asked. Her head was spinning in a sick vertigo.

  “I don’t know his name. But he was Consuelo’s son.”

  Of course!

  “Where did he go?”

  “No idea.”

  They had reached a hut. It was overgrown and looked derelict.

  “This is where Oswaldo lived. I walked here every day, to visit him. He wouldn’t see anyone else. The señora from Villa Pacifica came a few times with supplies and medication. She wanted to see him, but he refused. You see, he didn’t love her any more, or Consuelo. He loved me. Then he died on me. But such is life.”

  Ute looked at María. Such is life, Consuelo had said. Oswaldo had fallen in love with the same woman over and over again: small-boned, curly-haired, gentle, but strangely tough. Consuelo, María, Lucía, they were essentially the same woman. Only their race was different – Consuelo was coastal black, María was an indígena, Lucía was white. And they had all loved him.

  Ute squatted shakily on the ground outside the hut.

  “Are you OK?” María was saying. “Do you want to go inside?” She pushed the door, and it opened with a creak. “Oswaldo’s things are still in here. I don’t know what to do with them. I don’t lock it, because nobody comes here.”

  “And Carlos?” Ute implored her.

  “Carlos?”

  “The guy in the animal shelter. The Paraguayan.”

  “Ah yes. They say he went to work in another animal shelter, up north. Come in.”

  Inside the dark hut, it smelt of palo santo – and oblivion. Luz was already clambering inside a low, sagging hammock hanging from a beam in the ceiling. There was a single bed with a worn blanket carefully folded at one end of the stained mattress. Ute sat on it, limp and dumb like a rag doll.

  “How long are you staying?” María asked, as if Ute was checking into a hotel.

  Ute looked around the cabin for clues, for anything to help her out. It was bare and unlovely, nothing like their tortuga hut, which now belonged to another life. The wooden floor was stained with oil paint.

  “I don’t know,” Ute said. “I killed someone.”

  María was standing in the doorway, a dark outline framed by the dazzling light of morning. She didn’t say anything. She wasn’t easy to shock.

  “At Villa Pacifica,” Ute added.

  María laughed dryly. Luz stopped rocking in the hammock.

  “I don’t know you, and I don’t know where you’ve come from,” María said in a conciliatory voice. “But there is nobody at Villa Pacifica. It’s overgrown, nobody lives there. There are no animals. There was a jaguar before, but it got taken by the traffickers. Some animals were taken to other shelters. You have fever, and you need to rest. I’ll leave you here to rest for a momentito. And I’ll come back later.”

  Ute felt like shouting or laughing, but either was too much effort. She lay back on the musty mattress and pulled the grimy blanket over her legs with an effort. It was cold inside. She just needed to put her head down, close her eyes, and everything would fall back into place again. It had to.

  Then she sat up. “What will happen with Mikel and Lucía?” she asked.

  “Bueno,” María frowned, confused by the question. “I don’t know… Mikel went a bit mad. They say he was always a bit mad… But I don’t know where they went.”

  María retrieved Luz, and when she shut the door with “See you later”, Ute was plunged in a grubby darkness. She listened to the birds and tried to imagine staying here for good. Just move into Oswaldo’s hut, and look at the ocean from the graveyard every morning, and become someone without a past. Just as Villa Pacifica seemed to have nothing but a past.

  But she had just been there, she had just been inside its present. She had met those people. She had liked, desired, disliked, hated and killed some of them. She hadn’t imagined all that. Had she? Jerry had been there with her.

  She ached in strange places – in her throat, in her guts, in her loins. Perhaps those were the fragments left of her heart after it had broken. Because it had broken at some point. She couldn’t say at which point but, ever since, she had lived with the shards of it hurting her in unexpected places. She knew this now, and it was the only thing she knew.

  No, she knew something else too: Villa Pacifica was already a broken paradise when Ute and Jerry had arrived. But when had they arrived? Perhaps María was insane. She closed her eyes and drifted off.

  She shivered in her sleep, and when she woke up, the rough texture of the blanket shocked her skin. There was a skinny boy there, and the door was open. Sunshine was pouring in. She sat up in the bed. She felt as if lead had been poured into her head while she slept.

  “Hola,” the boy said shyly, and didn’t look at her. “María said to bring you this.”

  There was a plastic tub of boiled rice and a bottle of water on the table. The boy was dark-skinned and looked familiar.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Pedro.” He was already leaving.

  “Pedro,” Ute said. “Evelyn’s brother.”

  “Yes,” Pedro stopped in the doorway.

  “Don’t you remember me? We met at the beach, I talked to you and Evelyn and your brother Ricardo, and you raced with Luis and… the American gringo. On the beach. Just the other day, remember?” Ute sounded the way she felt – cracked.

/>   “No.” Pedro shook his head.

  “In Puerto Seco,” Ute insisted. But there was no point insisting. She changed tack. “Where do you live?”

  “Here,” Pedro said. He was keen to leave.

  “In Agua Sagrada?”

  “Yes.”

  “When did you come to live here?”

  The boy frowned and thought for a bit. “In 2006.”

  “And what about Evelyn and… the others, where are they?”

  “In Puerto Seco. I ran away.”

  “You ran away from home?”

  “Yes. I walked here from Puerto Seco. I didn’t tell anybody.” He scratched his thin neck.

  “And what do you do here? Is there a school?”

  “No. I work in the kiln.”

  “Did you know Oswaldo?”

  Pedro nodded, then shook his head.

  “When did Oswaldo die?” Ute pressed on.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Does María look after you?”

  He shook his head again. It was definitely Pedro, the same boy, the same timid body language, as if he didn’t want to be there, as if he hadn’t asked to be born at all.

  “Nobody looks after me. I look after myself,” he said defiantly.

  “Of course. You’re almost a man now.” But he wasn’t. He was a twelve-year-old boy who also existed in some parallel life down on the beach. In that life, he doesn’t run away from home and become a potter. In that life, he slowly rots away in Puerto Seco and eventually turns to crime.

  But it was impossible. There is only one life for all of us. Only one chance to get it right, to win some love for yourself. Or screw up beyond redemption.

  Ute got up and walked over to Pedro. She reached out and grabbed his arm, to check that he was real, that any of this was solid. He pulled away, scared by the mad gringa with tattered clothes and a crusty face, and ran off down the path.

  Ute sat on the steps of the hut and listened to the birds in the bright light. It felt like morning again. Perhaps it was always morning here.

  She felt inside her trouser pockets. There was a leaky chapstick, which she applied to her scabby lips with greed. The chapstick was the only item she had brought with her from her previous life, like a memento from a lost civilization. That, and the leaves from the old woman. She took them out and rubbed them in her fingers. They didn’t smell of anything. She put them back in her pocket.

  Later, she drank some water and ate some of the rice, and threw up all of it immediately in the tall grass outside. She then dragged herself to the graveyard, to look at Oswaldo’s grave again and check the dates. They hadn’t changed. He was still two-and-a-half years dead. The ocean was still a scintillating blue, with sweet nothing between here and the Galápagos.

  Max had definitely existed. You couldn’t make him up. And the jaguar had definitely pounced on him, she had seen it and heard it all. She could doubt her dreams, but not her waking life.

  It was this place that was unreal, some afterworld of punishment after the crime. Yes, she had killed Max, but her original crime was being unlovable, which is why Jerry had finally betrayed her. And the punishment was madness.

  Ute slowly walked down the path to the last huts of the community. She walked into what looked like a workshop. A few people were making pottery inside. They didn’t seem surprised to see her. She greeted them and asked the time. It was just before noon. She asked after María.

  “Ah, there you are,” María greeted her without enthusiasm outside her house. “You slept since yesterday morning. We checked up on you. Feeling better?”

  “Yes, thanks,” Ute lied. She felt like death warmed up – one of Jerry’s expressions.

  And suddenly Jerry’s absence pierced her with such force she almost doubled up with pain. She had always had Jerry to return to. She wondered where he was, what he was doing in that other reality of El Niño – betrayal, death by jaguar, and other things that didn’t bear thinking about.

  “You can get back to Puerto Seco whenever you like, we’ll get someone to take you down on horseback,” María said. She was smoking a cigarette a few metres away, and looked at Ute through a cloud of smoke. They too wanted to get rid of her. There was nothing for her there. Oswaldo was dead, and these people were complete strangers.

  She had to go, now. But where? She was running out of realities.

  “Didn’t Oswaldo leave any notebooks, anything… written?” Ute asked.

  María shook her head. “He left his paintings. But he asked to have them sent to a private collection, so we did. We needed the money too.” María went into the hut and came out with a T-shirt and a pair of cotton shorts. “Take these, you need a change of clothes.”

  She went into the dimly lit hut. Luz was inside, sitting at a table, drawing on a huge sheet of brown paper with crayons.

  “What are you drawing?” Ute asked while she changed into the shorts.

  “My mum,” Luz said.

  “Can I see?”

  Her drawing showed a stick figure in a dress with an outsized, long-haired head. Big teardrops fell from the eyes and formed a trail that went all the way to the far corner of the sheet, to a small house against a blue background, with smoke coming out of it.

  “Who lives in that house?”

  “Oswaldo,” Luz said. “His house is on top of the sea.”

  “But I can’t see him.”

  “That’s because he isn’t there. That’s why mum is crying.”

  “And where are you?”

  Luz looked perplexed.

  “Shall we put you in the picture too?” Ute suggested. Luz nodded.

  “Here, for example, next to your mum,” Ute pointed at a spot next to the crying woman. “You can be standing next to your mum, and that way, she won’t be crying any more because she has you.”

  “OK, I have to paint another picture then.” Luz pulled a fresh brown sheet over the old one.

  “Yes, you’ll have to paint another picture,” Ute said, and tears rose from her throat into her voice, and then out of her eyes.

  “Why are you crying?” Luz looked up at her.

  “Because sometimes,” Ute said, “I cry for no reason.”

  “Me too, sometimes I cry for no reason,” Luz said.

  María stood in the doorway. She looked familiar again, in a distant way.

  “Do the clothes fit?” she enquired.

  “Yes, thank you.” Ute quickly wiped her nose and her cheeks. The T-shirt was too short, and the shorts were too baggy.

  “Señora,” María said, “we can’t offer you much hospitality here, there’s no hotel, nowhere for you to stay. But we can organize transport in a momentito.”

  “Bueno,” Ute said. The message was crystal-clear.

  “I’m ready to go. But I need to go back to Villa Pacifica, the way I came.”

  María gave her a look that said “You really are as crazy as I thought”.

  “Well, you can discuss that with the personita who accompanies you.”

  “That boy, Pedro, when did he come to live with you?”

  “Three years ago. He ran away from home.”

  “I met him on the beach a few days ago,” Ute tried one last time. “I met Pedro in Puerto Seco. He was with his sister Evelyn, his brother Ricardo, and their baby sister. They were on the beach.”

  María busied herself putting some clean laundry on a clothesline stretched between two trees. Ute stood on the doorsteps of the hut and watched her dumbly. She was out of place and out of time here. Then María said:

  “Oswaldo used to take these potions. They were hallucinogenic. He had them sent by a friend in the Amazon who was a shaman. They induced vomiting and cleansed the system, and he believed that was slowing down the growth of his cancer. Maybe it was. I don’t know. But when he took those, he had visions. He saw things that nobody else could see.”

  “What things?” Ute said.

  “I don’t know. People. Dead people. Animals. He called it the spirit wor
ld. I don’t really understand those things.” She looked at Ute. “He believed there was some sort of special energy here in the Manteño cloud forest. You know, an ancient civilization lived in these forests. That’s why he moved up here. He called it a hot spot. He said there are only a few hot spots in the world.”

  Ute sat down on the half-rotten wooden steps of the hut.

  “Did he wander off into the park?” she asked.

  “He was too sick.” María sat down on the steps next to Ute and rolled up a joint with some mossy-looking substance from a cloth pouch. María offered her the rolled joint, and she gratefully accepted.

  “Yerba,” María said vaguely. Grass. Ute lit up. It tasted like sweet rot.

  “Oswaldo was looking for a home all his life,” María said. “He lived in Europe, he lived in the big cities, he came from a big city. But he said he didn’t like civilization. He said he felt ‘out of time’, and that he didn’t belong anywhere.”

  “I can understand that,” Ute said.

  They smoked in silence for a while.

  “Once he said he saw his dead mother. Another time, he saw the dead son of Señor Mikel, the one who drowned in the Galápagos. He said, ‘We can never get too far from those we have wronged.’”

  Ute’s head was beginning to feel pleasantly light.

  “But he himself was trying to get as far as possible from those he’d wronged,” she ventured. María looked at her with incomprehension.

  “Consuelo, for example.”

  María was quiet for a while, then she said: “Oswaldo never set out to hurt anyone.”

  Neither did I, Ute thought.

  “And you, where are you from?” Ute asked.

  “From Jipilini. My mother died in a bus crash when I was little, and my father remarried and gave me to my aunt. She lived in Puerto Seco, she had a shop there where I worked, but she passed away and I came up here with a cousin. I hated Puerto Seco. But to me, this is not a magic place. I always wanted to do something with my life. Go somewhere, even if it’s just to the big city. I don’t want to make pottery all my life. But now I have Luz to take care of.”

  “How old are you?” Close-up, María looked older and somehow even more familiar. And with a shock, Ute realized where she had met her. She looked at the bitten-down nails and it all came back to her.