Villa Pacifica

by Kapka Kassabova

  “I need to retrace my steps.” Her words were getting garbled with fatigue now. “I need to go back to the Villa and the forest, and find an alternative path. I have to…”

  “Please, darling, just lie down for a while, you’re exhausted.” Jerry squatted by the hammock and put his hands around her shins and his head on her emaciated thighs. He lifted her sandalled feet and placed them in the hammock. She didn’t protest. He put a blanket over her. She shivered, closed her eyes and muttered something.

  Jerry sat on the floor by the hammock and signalled to the family at the doorway to leave. They shuffled away. He looked inside the small canvas shoulder bag she’d been carrying. He hadn’t seen it before. It had three empty plastic bottles in it. Who had given her this?

  She slept the fathomless sleep of lost souls. He sat there for a while, relishing her new-found aliveness. She was here, they were together again, and all would be fine, eventually. He just had to get them out of here fast. There was no time to call a doctor. He would do that once they were back in Britain. He would make it up to her. He would set everything straight.

  Some local buses had resumed services as the roads were being cleared up. He carefully removed the rags from her upper body and put a new T-shirt over her head, one of his. He carried her from the hammock to a taxi, and then from the taxi to the bus. There was no time to say goodbye to Carlos, and he didn’t want Ute to get agitated any further. By the time they were on the bus, with their bedraggled luggage and the weird painting Consuelo had sent for Ute via Héctor before the flood, Jerry felt exhausted. Sleeping was out of the question though, with the music blaring out of speakers a few seats away. Ute woke up just as darkness fell.

  “Where are we?” she asked, her eyes unfocused from sleep.

  “We’re on our way to Guadeloupe to get emergency passports, and then we’re going home. How are you feeling?”

  Ute grabbed him by the front of his T-shirt and shook him with surprising force. “We have to go back! Jerry, we have to go back!” she shouted. Heads turned to look at the sorry gringos.

  “Darling, we can’t go back, there’s nothing there.” He tried to contain her, but she was suddenly very awake and struggling violently.

  “You don’t get it, do you?” she was saying. “We can’t just leave, we have to go back. It’s all wrong, it all happened the wrong way around, we have to fix it.”

  She wrenched herself away from him and stumbled out of her seat. He held her back.

  “Let me go,” she cried, and pulled away from him. She was heading for the front of the bus. He caught her before she reached the driver.

  “Ute, for God’s sake!” He put his arms around her, like a psychiatric nurse containing a patient.

  She screamed, “Let me go! I have to go back! I have to go back,” then broke down sobbing. She was saying something Jerry couldn’t make out, and it didn’t really matter what it was. The main thing was to contain her now, to stop her from harming herself or disrupting the bus journey. The bus was full. She collapsed on the floor. People offered help, but there was nothing they could do except help take her back to her seat and mutter sympathetic words – not that Jerry could understand what they were saying.

  She cried in his arms. Saliva came out of her mouth, and her hot tears burnt his face and hands like acid. Jerry knew that everything until now had been a mere rehearsal for this moment of naked truth. Nothing would be the same again.

  At one point, a travelling salesman got on. Jerry could swear it was the guy from last time. He was wearing the same pink shirt. Jerry couldn’t understand what he was saying, but the man was handing out tiny ginseng bottles.

  “Hey, amigo!” Jerry called out to him. “Do you remember us? From a few weeks back?”

  The guy looked at them warily, but made no sign of recognizing them or understanding what Jerry was saying.

  “It’s the guy with the ginseng bottles,” Jerry nudged Ute. “Talk to him, ask him…”

  “I know,” she said placidly, looking at the seller. She had calmed down. “I told you, we’re in a time loop. But you don’t believe me. You don’t believe me.”

  Later, in their hotel in Guadeloupe, he called an English-speaking doctor, who gave Ute some mild sedatives and advised a few days of “physical and emotional rest”, while they waited for their emergency passports to be issued by the British Embassy.

  The sedatives worked. They worked too well. Ute went quiet, and only spoke on the second day. She tried, once again, to tell Jerry about Agua Sagrada, about diverging realities, about the time loop.

  “I don’t know what to think,” Jerry said after listening to her. They were sitting up in bed. “It’s completely mad. I mean, you were quite sick when you got to Agua Sagrada, you can’t be sure of your judgement of events and dates.”

  “I saw his grave. And I spent two days with María. She told me…”

  “Yeah, you told me all this. But Ute, thinking that you can rearrange your own life is crazy enough already. Thinking you can do that with other people’s lives is delusional mania. I mean, do you think people and places just appear out of thin air, just so that you and I can play out our neuroses?”

  “OK, let’s go back to the facts. How do you explain, for instance, that you thought I was gone for two weeks, when in fact I was gone for only a few days? Three days in Agua Sagrada, and maximum two days wandering in the forest. I wouldn’t have survived any longer. I didn’t have food or water for more than—”

  “Ute, I didn’t think it was two weeks, it was two weeks. A lot happened in those two weeks while you were gone. People died. People left.”

  “Exactly. This proves that there’s a time discrepancy, a divergence of realities where—”

  “Ute, this is the stuff of fiction.” Jerry knew he should indulge her more, but if he agreed with her version of events, she would then insist on going back, and that was impossible.

  “No,” Ute said bitterly. “It’s the stuff of hope. Because if we don’t go back, there is no hope for anyone. Consuelo is dead. It didn’t have to be that way.”

  “Ute.” Jerry sighed deeply and took her hand. His chest felt as if a ton of cement was sitting inside it. “To fix everything, we’d have to go back all the way to the womb. We can’t do that. It’s not possible. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry that I, that I…”

  “No, I don’t want to know,” Ute said, and got up. She stood at the window in her undies, her long legs ethereal in the late afternoon light that streamed in from the port dotted with ships’ masts. Soon, they would be leaving too.

  They were silent for a long time, Ute turned towards the port, Jerry sitting miserably in bed.

  “I promise we’ll come back one day,” Jerry said in the end.

  Ute didn’t say a word for the next few days, and not much more over the following months. The fevered look in her eyes was extinguished, and a flat, unmoving gaze replaced it.

  Ute and Jerry did return six years later. They pretended to each other that it was a “family holiday”, but the only one who believed it was their five-year-old daughter Amber. Amber had been miraculously conceived at Villa Pacifica, born eight weeks prematurely. She had the intent, intelligent grey eyes of her mother.

  After the events in Puerto Seco, Ute had carried out her pregnancy quietly and stoically, and soon tumbled into post-natal depression. On their return she had also given up her job for good. She would never write another semi-true line about a place again, she said. Travel is meaningless, she said, unless you arrive in some place that changes you radically and therefore makes all further travel futile. In the end, she didn’t include Puerto Seco or even the Manteño National Park in the updated guide. She didn’t want anyone else to go there, and left it at that.

  It had taken her two years to recover, two years that were a blur of sleepless nights and survival for Jerry. He nursed her back to relative wellness, while also nursing the baby. He felt he was atoning for his crime that way, but part of him wondered. He wanted
to talk to Ute about Max, and what exactly had happened by the jaguar’s cage, but she had imposed an embargo of silence on all Villa Pacifica matters.

  Now they would visit Puerto Seco. They didn’t even have to say it: they knew it was the only way to lay those ghosts to rest.

  They walked along the littered beach to the familiar gates. It was so overgrown, the carved wooden sign “VILLA PACIFICA” was hardly visible. They walked among the collapsed remains of the huts, and even found what looked like their tortuga cabin. A baby iguana was sunning itself on the collapsed steps. Amber crouched beside it and poked it with a stick. “Dad,” she cried. “It’s dead.” She picked it up gingerly with two fingers and placed it on her palm. It was dried out.

  “Leave it where you found it,” Jerry said. But Amber was like her mother – fearless, and rarely listening to anyone, especially not her father. “It doesn’t weigh anything,” she said, and carried it with her hand held out ceremonially. “I will take it home and bury it in the garden.”

  The main house was full of weeds that had broken through the collapsed wooden floor and were growing inside the shell of the building like in a surrealist painting.

  “Careful,” Jerry called out, “there will be snakes in there.”

  Ute walked across to the visitors’ ledgers, which were amazingly still there on the shelves. She picked up the one which said “2006”. It fell apart in her hands, and then into the undergrowth, dispersing the invisible reptiles, which hissed and darted this way and that.

  The shore of the estuary was much wider than they remembered it – either memory was playing tricks on them, which was likely, or the water had retreated, which was also possible. Anything was likely here, as they already knew, so they tried to take in the place without undue excitement. They found nothing to say to each other, except “watch out” and “look at this”. This was a place where words lost all meaning.

  Back in Puerto Seco, they asked around. Nobody knew where Carlos, Mikel and Lucía had gone, though some said Carlos had gone to work in another animal shelter. Nobody remembered Ute and Jerry from five years ago. The locals couldn’t agree which year Villa Pacifica had fallen into abeyance.

  “And Agua Sagrada?” Ute asked.

  Someone had stumbled across stunning artefacts from an ancient civilization, and the community had been flooded by archaeological teams. The authorities were keen to turn it into a national tourist attraction and were financing the excavations. This had put the pottery community out of work, and many people had left. Neither Jerry nor Ute mentioned going to Agua Sagrada.

  Jerry was relieved to get on the day’s last bus out of town. On the way back to Guadeloupe, Amber dozed between them, her mouth open, still clutching the dead baby iguana in her hand.

  Jerry reached over Amber and squeezed Ute’s cold fingers. They were always cold these days. Her face looked serene and distant in the grubby dusk. Her eczema had cleared with the pregnancy and never returned. But she took little pleasure in her new-found beauty. It was as if some essential part of her had departed with the eczema.

  “Remember when I promised you we’d come back?” Jerry said.

  Ute was looking out of the window at the shrimp farms along the road.

  “These were once virgin mangroves,” she said. “Mikel and Lucía’s land must have long been turned into shrimp farms too.”

  Jerry squeezed her hand again.

  “I remember,” Ute said, her eyes on the road.

  And at this point Jerry understood what he had always feared: we can never really know other people. Especially those we are close to, especially those we treat as if they are part of us. They are not. We are alone. Even with the longed-for child firmly wedged between us, we are always alone.

  “I remember everything,” Ute said again, so quietly that he almost didn’t hear her.

  ‌Postscript

  The awful thing is not that what we love will eventually be taken from us. No, the awful thing is that nobody warns us. We are unprepared. We assume that what we love will always be there. I remain unprepared, six years later, and yet I’ve somehow managed to live with it since the day we found Max’s body in the jaguar’s cage. Max’s neck was broken and one side of his head was pulped. The jaguar was crouching in a corner looking a bit sheepish, if you can imagine that. The cage door was unlocked. Either of them could have simply pushed it open and walked out, but it seemed that neither of them had wanted to.

  It quickly became clear to me that if I didn’t go looking for Ute, nobody was going to do it. So I walked through the cursed forest all the way up to Agua Sagrada, with Carlos, who was willing to abandon his animals to save a human being, proving that vile little Héctor wrong. We walked for hell knows how long in liquid mud. It was as if the forest was sweating blood and bile. I’d given up on keeping track of time there, and Carlos never wore a watch.

  At Agua Sagrada, we met the squinting María and her precocious child. She told us about Ute’s visit, about her confusion, about her distraught talk of murder, of not having a place to return to, about how she’d asked to go back down to the forest and gone off with a local man and a local woman, and two horses. She had been very sick with vomiting on the morning she left, but she’d seemed happy, and no one could stop her from going.

  They had dropped her off, at her insistence, at the foot of the cloud forest. She had been hell-bent on continuing alone. María seemed to imply that Ute had asked for it all. I wanted to slap her for it. Or slap someone, do something. Being so helpless was agony. On the way back down with Carlos, I felt myself going mad. Every giant cactus looked like something behind which Ute might be hiding.

  And this is where we lose Ute’s tracks.

  Later, much later, I wrote Villa Pacifica. Everything I’ve written is true, although one thing I learnt in Villa Pacifica is that true and real are not the same thing. As you might guess, I got the idea from Oswaldo’s The Three Lives of Mikel, which accompanied me home. I flew back to Britain after several weeks of futile search involving the British Embassy and, yes, even a helicopter that flew over the entire park, the mangroves in the south, and all the bays along the shore, looking for Ute, dead or alive. At the time I prayed they wouldn’t find her dead. But that’s because I didn’t yet know the hell of not knowing. A dead body would have been better.

  I put the painting in the living room at home, and after many months of staring at it in a stupor, I realized that it wasn’t about the lives we have in chronological order. No, it was about the lives we don’t have, the turns in the road we don’t take. And it was Ute who would have realized this before me. She had humanity and imagination. I had vanity and fancies. She had hunger. I had appetites. She was twice the man I was, and twice the writer I wasn’t.

  I wrote Villa Pacifica so that I could be close to Ute again, and re-live everything through her. But I also did it because it was the only way to make sense of what happened in December 2009. You see, the facts by themselves are not reassuring.

  Oswaldo Joven did die in 2007. I didn’t see his grave up in Agua Sagrada – I didn’t think of it at the time – but I looked up his biography.

  There is no information on Villa Pacifica on the net or in any guides that came out since then. I travelled back a year later, and couldn’t find either Puerto Seco or the Villa. I got on one of those dismal buses, and a bus seller gave me some porn and El Che Part I and II to hold while he did his spiel, and I went exactly the same way, but nobody knew of Puerto Seco. I couldn’t find that bend in the road.

  Here are some more facts. There was an El Niño storm on that coast in December 2006, and not again until last year – 2015. It’s true: they only happen every ten or fifteen years. There was no tidal wave or any other climate disaster on that coast in 2009, while we were there.

  And here is the strangest thing of all. When I finally left Puerto Seco, without Ute, it was the same day as the day we had arrived: Tuesday, the 15th of December.

  All this messed me up in the fo
llowing few years. I fancied that if time could play tricks on us, we could play tricks on it too. Thus anything was possible. It was possible that Ute was alive, and that she might return to me after a long spell in the mangroves. That she had fallen into a time-trap and was still trying to find her way out back to me. But eventually, such hope destroys the soul.

  Everyone was concerned for me and convinced I was deranged with grief. I discussed with an astrophysicist the concept of the wormhole. I told him what had happened, and I told him my theory: that Puerto Seco and Villa Pacifica are in a wormhole, and we got caught up in it. It is always the year after the disaster there. Versions of the same events repeat themselves each year. A weather anomaly. A flood. A gringo dies a violent death. Consuelo kills herself. Mikel and Lucía leave. Over and over again. But then, somehow, it all repeats itself – because the place doesn’t exist in real time. And it’s typical for wormholes that while time passes inside them, on the outside, in the real world of space-time, no time has passed at all. Do you see? I said. He did, but he also saw a problem. Wormholes may exist, he explained, but they are unsustainable. They can’t exist in perpetuity. They are momentary lapses of space-time. They do not contain alternative worlds. Do me a favour, he said, see a psychiatrist.

  I told the psychiatrist my story. He said I was suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, and I was having a manic-depressive episode, and I was possibly psychotic. He prescribed some drugs.

  I wrote Villa Pacifica. By doing that, I became the man I should have been for Ute. A man who can reach outside of his own little world. A man who could have saved her and himself. The awful thing is that conditions become ideal a heartbeat too late.

  Even now, I feel as if she might be just around the corner. I can’t help it. It’s not a hope any more, it’s a feeling. I haven’t thrown out or given away any of her things. Once a month, I dust her shelves of travel guides, all of them out of date. But not Ute.