“Twenty-four,” María said, her squint magnified in close-up. “And you?”
“Thirty-nine.”
“Oh,” María said. It was her turn to be shocked now.
“Your aunt…” Ute said with a shaky voice, “her shop… where was it?”
“In Puerto Seco.”
“Where?” Ute almost shouted. “Where in Puerto Seco? Which street?”
“At the corner of Moreno and Bolívar, one block behind the malecón. Why?”
“I was there,” Ute said quietly. “I bought a bottle of water there. And you sold it to me. And you were breastfeeding a boy.”
María looked bewildered.
“Oh my God,” Ute said.
“I don’t understand.” María shook her head.
There was no point trying to explain to María what Ute herself couldn’t grasp.
“You know, it’s funny.” Ute suddenly felt talkative and full of energy and light. “I met the brother of the shaman too, and his mother. They were in Villa Pacifica. I know you don’t believe me, but I did. He told me about this thing called the ‘vision quest’. Young Achuar men do it, to find themselves. That’s what we call it, ‘finding yourself’. But for us gringos, the vision quest is travelling. The Achuar lives in ignorance of the world outside. This is his blessing. This enables him to embrace tradition and harness the power of his ancestral spirits. Then he returns home stronger. What do gringos do? We embrace sunstroke and diarrhoea, and mistake it for self-knowledge. Then we return home more confused than ever.”
María stubbed out her joint on the steps.
“Yes, but I have neither,” she said. “I am not living in the Amazon, and I can’t travel. I am stuck here.”
Luz appeared behind them in the doorway, holding a sheet of paper.
“I painted another picture,” she said, and held out the sheet to Ute. In the new drawing, the woman was smiling, there was a small stick figure next to her holding her stick hand, and inside the little house in the corner there was a little stick Oswaldo.
“That’s very nice,” Ute said. “It’s much better now, and nobody has to cry any more.”
“Yes,” Luz looked pleased. María hugged her, and the child went back inside the hut.
“You don’t have children?” María asked.
Ute shook her head and put out the joint. She got up to use the latrine behind the hut. Outside it hung a shard of mirror. Ute glimpsed a face in it. It was her face, but there was something wrong with it. She took a closer look. The eczema was gone, only faint blotches of past inflammation remained on her eyelids and cheeks and around her mouth. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen her face like this. She touched her face to make sure it was real, and she smiled. She was an ordinary woman now, an ordinary good-looking woman.
María and Ute sat in the harsh midday sun, among the birdsong and the noise coming from the kilns. They rolled another joint and smoked in silence for a while.
“So where are you going next?” María asked at one point.
“I don’t know.” Ute shook her head. It felt very light.
“Bueno,” María said in a gentle way that reminded her of Consuelo.
Later, they ate roasted plantain. Sitting in the dim light outside the hut with Luz and María, with the screeching insects, heavy palo santo smell and another spiff of the potent mossy stuff, Ute felt closer to peace of mind than she had been for a long time.
She slept in María’s hut, in the spare hammock. Or rather she didn’t sleep in the spare hammock. She remembered the leaves the Achuar woman had given her, and chewed some of them outside with a bit of filtered water. They were bitter, and soon she began to shiver and retch.
She started walking, past some other darkened huts. Then, suddenly and violently, she puked her guts out. She had never vomited like this before. It was good to empty herself so comprehensively. She slumped down next to a tree and leant on its trunk.
It was as if she was acquiring a new pair of eyes. She began to distinguish shapes in the pitch-black community, and in the outlaying forest. There was a boy there among the trees. She kept losing him from sight, and then he would appear again. At first she thought it was Pedro – he was about his size – then she saw his face, even though there was no moon. It was the face of a white boy. He seemed to want to tell her something, and she was strangely unafraid. But she was also unable to speak or move, and eventually the boy disappeared.
Then she saw a small old woman. At first she thought it was the Achuar woman, but then realized it was her own mother. It was clearly her mother. Her mother was looking at Ute and smiling. Her mother was noticing her, watching over her, telling her that everything was going to be OK. Ute felt the warm trails of tears on her face, but they were happy tears. Things were falling into place, finally. Time was not out of joint any more.
And at some point in the night, Ute knew exactly what she needed to do next. It was blindingly obvious. She felt light and free. She could take off any minute now, up to the blue sky of the new day, where birds and clouds lived and from where everything looked small and connected, and made sense, in a distant sort of way.
She was floating in a light-filled sky, looking down on Puerto Seco, Villa Pacifica and Agua Sagrada. In her bird’s-eye view, the topography of the whole area was mapped out with luminous clarity. She could see the paths criss-crossing the dry forest at the foot of the Agua Sagrada cloud reserve. They were like blazing trails, they were many, and they all led somewhere. This was the map of her life, and she would take control of it, finally. She would be smiling if her face wasn’t paralysed.
In the insect-thick night, she lay and listened to the whispering in her mind – or was it in the forest?
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…
At one point, she may have heard a roar somewhere far off in the forest. It was the jaguar, but she was not afraid. Everything was clear now. Everyone was safe.
21
In the jaguar’s cage they found half a rabbit, Max’s limp body, and no jaguar. Ute had disappeared too. The only witness to the accident was the old woman. Jerry was convinced she was a witch as soon as she confessed to giving Ute some leaves. Her son translated as she explained how Ute had gone off “for a walk in the woods” as soon as they crossed in the boat, leaving the old woman with Max and his jaguar-feeding obsession, which had brought about his grisly end. But the old woman was distressed about something, and it wasn’t just Max’s death. The leaves had to be ingested in a special way, with supervision, she explained. If you took them alone, you could fall prey to the spirit world and die a psychic death. Whatever that meant.
“Then why did you give them to her and then let her go off by herself?” Jerry wanted to know.
The old woman rocked disconsolately. She didn’t know. She was having a bad time herself. She had a strange way of crying: her face suddenly became wet, but Jerry didn’t see any tears in her eyes. Then she left with her son, Helga and the baby.
Jerry spent two weeks discovering the meaning of hell. Hell was waiting. Jerry had never had to wait for anything in his life.
First, he waited for Ute to come back after a walk in the storm – after all, it wasn’t completely unlike her to go off walking in extreme conditions: she was moody, she braved the elements in that slightly loony Scandinavian way, and she was a weathered traveller who could find her way in and out of most places.
Then, he waited for her to come back after forgiving him. People told him how strangely she’d behaved that morning. She must have figured out his betrayal, and this had tipped her over the edge and into the flooded woods. Already she had not been quite herself since their arrival. Or perhaps – not a nice thought, but he had it anyway – she had been too much herself since they arrived: cold, distant, unhappy.
Finally, he waited for the search party to bring her back. But the search party returned prematurely, because the only car access to the interior of the national park was via a bridge that was floo
ded, and nobody was going to walk – they were slobs down to the last man. Admittedly, the paths had been washed away. Jerry asked about a helicopter, and got sniggers from the local police. They had more urgent things to worry about than a missing gringa. An American mangled by a missing jaguar, for example. Then came the tidal wave, and they forgot about the American too.
After the tidal wave, and drinking himself to sleep night after night in the only open watering hole in Puerto Seco, Jerry waited for Ute’s body to be washed out on the wrecked malecón. It seemed to be the way in this cursed place: people went missing, and the sea spat them out later. This was what had happened with Consuelo.
A few days after Ute disappeared, a small tidal wave wrecked half of Puerto Seco – the half closer to the ocean. Consuelo’s café was among the first to go, along with her house and all of Oswaldo Joven’s paintings. Miraculously, nobody died in the calamity, except a few mangy dogs, but Consuelo went missing. It was several days before kids found her on the beach, like a mermaid tangled in big clumps of leathery, flesh-coloured seaweed nobody here had seen before. Someone said it came all the way from New Zealand. It was the kind of thing El Niño brings, the locals said. There were also sightings of flying fish.
The entire village went to Consuelo’s funeral, which was modest and hasty among the wreckage. Héctor was ashen and stony-faced. Lucía was even more absent-minded than usual, as if she had always been preparing to live in an afterworld. Jerry hated her now. Mikel cried like a child, clutching his big fists, his big tears falling into the open grave. This sight shook the already unsettled Jerry to the core. It was amazing how quickly one’s life could unravel to its barest threads, leaving you a sudden pauper.
With the tidal wave, the estuary rose monstrously, and Villa Pacifica was flooded down to the last hut. Jerry and Ute’s tortuga hut was at the back, so their luggage – packed by Jerry and ready to go as soon as Ute appeared – only got sodden. But the foundations of the huts were under water, and most of them would rot and eventually collapse. This is when Mikel stopped noticing Jerry. His livelihood was suddenly destroyed along with his dream. Lucía never talked to Jerry, before or after the wave.
Héctor was nowhere to be found, and neither was the safe that contained all their takings for the past three months, and all the guests’ passports. The animal refuge was spared because of its raised shore, but the animal sanctuary couldn’t be sustained without the human sanctuary – even Carlos grimly agreed. He took Enrique out of his cage, and the bird now followed him everywhere, perched on his shoulder and screeching in garbled distress, “Las Malvinas son argentinas, las Malvinas son argentinas, las Malvinas son argentinas” – the only sentence he seemed to remember from his repertoire.
Carlos stuck with Jerry until the end, sat with him almost every night, although he didn’t drink, and offered moral support. But he couldn’t offer much hope about finding Ute. He came to check up on Jerry every day, first in his tortuga cabin, and then in the village. He was the one who said to Jerry, “Hell is waiting.” His brother had been among the “disappeared” under Paraguay’s fascist dictator. His family had waited for twenty years to know for sure that he was dead. “And the bastards who murdered him are living in air-conditioned houses in Rio and Buenos Aires. That’s why I came here,” Carlos told Jerry, who could find no response to this except to get drunk on aguardiente yet again.
In the wake of the disaster, Jerry moved to a bare room with a single hammock in one of the undamaged houses in Puerto Seco, where a family offered him a very cheap rate and the benefit of their complete indifference. By then, the guests of Villa Pacifica had long gone – Tim and Liz had left soon after Luis and his family. They had all testified at the local police station, and been driven in a special police vehicle to Guadeloupe, to get replacement passports. No buses were going anyway.
And of course there was the suddenly widowed Eve. She went into a hysterical fit when Max was found, and never recovered from it. She screamed and thrashed about until her face looked the colour of a cooked lobster, and then she screamed some more. In the end, they had to call a doctor, who administered an injection. Eve’s grief made him wonder what is a better measure of our love for another: the way we are when they are alive, or the way we are when they are dead.
Eve left in a police vehicle two days later, clutching only her handbag and looking like a mental patient. She left behind a cabin full of scattered clothes and shoes. Her last words to Mikel and Lucía, delivered as she was getting into the clapped-out police car, were “I’m gonna sue you!” Fair enough, Jerry thought. Perhaps he should sue them too. But that wouldn’t give him anything he needed, because all he needed was for Ute to be found alive.
During the day there was nothing to do but hang out at the wrecked beach. He sat in the sand, the dull thud of the ocean like blood in his ears. He thought about Ute and their life together. Often, Jerry had felt that she was like that boy Kai in the Andersen story The Snow Queen. A shard of the evil troll’s mirror had lodged itself in her eye and in her heart, some time in her childhood – perhaps at birth – and she saw the ugliness in everything and everyone. Especially in herself. It took the tears of childhood sweetheart Gerda – that was Jerry – to melt the icy kingdom and dislodge the shards from Ute’s eyes and heart.
Because that’s where she’d gone now, to the ultimate destination that you couldn’t find in any of her guides: the evil kingdom of the Snow Queen, where there are no other humans, just bad dreams. In the story, Gerda goes all the way to this kind of underworld. But desperate as he felt, Jerry couldn’t bring himself to go into the woods looking for Ute. Carlos said the jaguar, Max’s killer, was out there in the hills. The paths had been washed away, they said. Ute could be anywhere by now, the police said in their lethargic coastal drawl. Even Carlos advised against going, and Carlos was fearless. So Jerry waited in his safe hell, and with each passing day, more of his self-respect drained away.
One afternoon, in a bout of despair, he waded into the murky sea waist-deep and flung his laptop as far as he could. It made a heavy plopping noise. This way the stupid, mediocre novella he’d been writing in his week-long delusion was flushed out by the retreating tidal wave along with his ambitions, his marriage and his self-respect.
Then, one morning, Mikel and Lucía left. They came to say goodbye. They were in their jeep, piled up with luggage. They were going scouting for a new place to live, Mikel said. They were also broke. Mikel shook Jerry’s hand distractedly, and Lucía waved from inside the car with her impenetrable smile, which had seemed enigmatic before but was chilling now. She gazed at Jerry sideways, as if she barely knew him, as if they hadn’t spent several sweaty nights making love in the noisy rain.
He had felt a fatal attraction to this woman from the moment he saw her dreamy face behind a cloud of smoke. He had risked his marriage for a few nights of sex with her – it had been heaven, and now she meant nothing to him. Clearly, the indifference was mutual. Jerry wanted to forget all this on the spot, along with the image of the gored, limp-bodied Max in the jaguar cage.
With these two gone and only Carlos left to look after the animals, Jerry felt as if the last hope of finding Ute was fading away. He was considering contacting the British Embassy when Ute suddenly appeared.
She was picked up by some locals in a truck. She was walking along the main road. He was in his darkened room, lying in his hammock in a vacant state.
She looked distracted, as if she was on her way somewhere else and was only stopping by to say hello. She had wasted away so much, she looked like an apparition. Her face, feet and what was left of her clothes were blackened as if she’d been climbing through chimneys. Her clothes were hanging off her bony frame like a scarecrow’s rags. Her hair was matted, her nails were filled with dirt, and her eyes had a messianic glow that dislodged Jerry’s jubilation and replaced it with dread. He put his arms around her. She was limp and smelt foul. He squeezed her tight. Involuntary sobs came out of his throat.
She finally put her arms around him and patted him on the back reassuringly. He gave her a drink from a large bottle of Coke he’d just bought. She drained it all in big gulps and handed him back the empty bottle.
“Where have you been?” Jerry said. “I’ve been going out of my mind.”
“I’ve been looking for something. It’s hard in the forest, because the paths are flooded. But I figured it out.”
“You figured out what? I thought you were dead, Ute!” Jerry realized he was shouting, and stopped. The family he was staying with had come out of their hammocks to see what was happening and were gathered at the doorway to his room.
“I need to go back to Villa Pacifica,” Ute was saying. “Then exit again through the back gate of the animal shelter, and there’s a path there which…”
“Ute, for God’s sake, we need to get out of here immediately. Max is dead. Consuelo’s dead. Everyone’s gone. The Villa’s closed down. Mikel and Lucía…”
Ute flinched, then said “Don’t shout at me” in her new, flat voice, her eyes fixing him in a dreadful, unfamiliar gaze.
“I know. I killed Max. Consuelo hanged herself. I know what’s going to happen here, because it’s already happened, you see. I’ve figured it out. We’re in a time loop.” She sat inside the hammock. “A time-trap where things happen over and over, but in different versions of themselves,” she continued. “We all have different versions of our lives. At first I thought it was the past. Then I thought it was the future. Then I realized it’s neither. It’s a turn in the road, a time warp. We can set it straight. We can undo it. You don’t have to be sorry. I don’t have to kill Max. Even El Niño… Villa Pacifica goes on…”
A new kind of despair gripped Jerry. She had lost her mind. Just like her mother. It was in their genes. It was what he’d always feared. Her hardness was just a front, he’d always known it. Underneath it, she’d always been fragile. It was his fault for not being more caring, more careful, a better husband, a better writer, a better man.
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