25
After lunch, during the hottest part of the day, Erika sat on a wicker settee reading a magazine, and as she leafed through the articles, she hardly knew why she felt so agitated, or why a revolt was building inside her. It was a leisurely afternoon, but she wanted to leap from her chair and fling the magazine at Ravell.
At the opposite end of the front porch, Ravell sat with a sheet draped over his chest and shoulders while Munga shaved him. They’d brought Ravell’s small oak shaving cabinet outdoors where breezes cooled the air. Munga used a soft badger brush to work up lather in a shaving mug, and he honed an ivory-handled razor on a leather strap. As the servant scraped his master’s jawbone clean, Ravell lifted his head higher. Munga then slapped Ravell’s face with a musk-scented lotion from a blue glass bottle. For his master’s hair and moustache, Munga used pomade.
When the ritual of the male toilette was over, Munga held up a wooden hand mirror for Ravell to inspect the results, and Erika put down her magazine and walked into the house’s dark interior, glaring hard at Ravell as she passed. He looked up, surprised.
Inside the house, Peter was napping. He’d dropped his shoes on the floor and lay fully clothed on the bed. Erika took some oil of citronella from inside a bag. Down by the lagoon, where she planned to go walking, mosquitoes were rampant. She tilted her chin upward and rubbed the lemon-scented oil across her nose and cheeks, and finally her arms. A red patch on the back of her hand itched, and she scratched it. Citronella did not deter the bête rouge, and a few had burrowed under her skin, but she hoped to seal her skin against as many mosquitoes as she could.
She thought of Ravell sitting on the porch while the servant painted his jaw white with cream. As she sat down on the bed, her weight shifted the mattress and Peter opened his eyes. Out of guilt she touched her husband’s face. With a finger she marked the horseshoe of his jaw and caressed the soft place where it ended, under his ear.
“I’m going for a walk down by the lagoon,” she murmured, and he nodded almost imperceptibly before closing his eyes.
She took a floppy hat and wandered. The lagoon’s surface flashed silver here and there with tarpon, and the mangroves grew thick along the water and showed their roots. Behind the lagoon the forest was alive with the chatter of parrots.
A horse and its rider came up behind her. It was Ravell, on his way to supervise coolies clearing more forest. He got down and tied his horse to a tree, his hair still glossy, wet from the pomade. The sight of him made her upper torso tighten.
“Erika?” he said. “Are you upset about something?”
“You know why I’m angry.” Her tone was low and curt and she walked onward, not looking at him.
Alongside her, he took two nervous steps to her every furious stride. “Why are you acting like this?” he asked. “How am I to know if you won’t tell me?”
She spun around. “I should think that you, of all men, would understand a woman’s loss.”
His arms hung at his sides. He was clearly confounded.
“You think that I’m wasting my talent,” she said. “You think that I should have forgotten about having a baby by now. Even you don’t believe that I’m likely to become pregnant again.”
Ravell let out a blast of a sigh, and turned his face toward the lagoon.
“You think that by now I should have rallied and taken myself to Milan or Florence. I should be singing my scales to the green river that washes under the Ponte Vecchio—” She took off her hat and flourished it with a wide arm.
Ravell stared at her as she went on.
“I know several other women who’ve had miscarriages or who have lost babies this past year,” Erika said. “We’ve formed a kind of club. We meet for tea. Every lady has her war story to share. Her personal horror. Sometimes as I’ve rushed toward our meetings through the sleet and the snow, I think: Nobody except us can ever truly know. . . .”
“Do you think I’m not haunted by such tragedies myself?” he asked.
She retrieved a long stick that had fallen on the ground and bent it like a whip. She hit some shrubbery with it.
“I’ve had eleven periods since the baby died,” she said in a cold whisper. “Do you know what it’s like when a period comes? I feel the crush of tears starting up.”
Ravell paced. He picked up a stone and sent it skittering across the lagoon’s surface.
She glared at him, her shoulders squared. “Every friend of mine who lost a baby . . . By now, every one of those ladies has gotten pregnant again. Except me.”
As he stared at her, a strand of hair fell onto his brow. “I am doing everything within my power,” he pleaded. He untied his horse and mounted it, glancing at her uncertainly before he rode off.
“We ought to do something adventuresome tonight,” Ravell said. Dinner had ended, and Munga had cleared away their plates, but the three of them lingered at the table, enjoying the green swizzles Ravell had poured.
“What sort of adventure do you have in mind?” Peter unfolded his legs and looked alert.
“We could go for a midnight buggy ride.”
A starry drive along the hard beach, with carriage wheels milling the water . . . that sounded diverting. Peter helped his wife into the turnout, Ravell took the reins, and Erika found herself seated between the two men. A breeze swept in off the Atlantic, and they felt it chill the back of their necks.
A drive in the tropical moonlight was not a thing Erika would soon forget. For miles and miles they drove along the beach, until its hard surface changed and softened.
Ravell’s excitement grew, and in the moonlight his teeth shone like ice.
“There are quicksands here,” he cried above the sound of the surf. “We’ve got to be careful. In certain spots, these quicksands could swallow a whole team of horses.” They approached certain stretches with trepidation, and Ravell urged the horses quickly forward.
“Well done, old friend!” Peter shouted as they eased past one dubious patch, and their wheels sped onward. “It would never do to tarry here.”
After they moved beyond the dangerous areas, they turned for the next part of the journey through the woods. Vampire bats swooped and hovered above the buggy, their flapping sounds crisp and distinct. From tip to tip their wings must have measured two or three feet.
Peter said, “I suppose these vampire bats are hoping that we’ll decide to take a nap by the roadside.”
Erika felt Ravell’s hip touch hers as they rode side by side on the black leather seat. When the buggy returned to the beach, they left the moonlit forest and the bats behind. Not far offshore Erika noticed a vivid light on the water. It was not a ship, nor a firefly, nor a spangle of moonlight. When she pointed it out to Ravell, he peered with interest and told them that he had witnessed this same phenomenon on two previous occasions.
“Watch it carefully,” he advised. “The light will remain keen and steady for some minutes, and then it will disappear.”
He halted the carriage. Just as he had predicted, the streak of light on the water extinguished itself, and the sea became dark again. “No one as yet can explain this,” Ravell said. “Another peculiar thing is that on any night when I walk the beach hoping to see that light, I never do.”
Mysterious happenings were often reported on the island of Trinidad, he said. Three times he had seen buggies disappear on the beach at the Cocal. “I can assure you,” he added, “there’s no greater skeptic in the world than I. Each time I’ve gone over very coolly to inspect the areas where the carriages have vanished, and I notice marks from the buggy wheels in the sand, but then the marks stop—there’s nothing beyond them. What do you think?” He nudged Erika, who shrugged and widened her eyes.
“Quicksands?” Peter suggested.
“Quicksands actually do their treachery slowly. Besides, we have no quicksands at the Cocal. The beach is extremely hard—you know this yourselves.”
“Then, who can explain it?” Peter thrust his hands into the air.
/> “Certainly not I.” Ravell shook the reins and the carriage started up again. As they neared the Cocal, he seemed to trust the horses to find the way back without his actively guiding them.
As Ravell extended his hand to help Erika from the buggy, Peter hopped down and wandered ahead, his back to them. As she descended, Ravell gave her a long look, and he released his fingers slowly from hers.
A groom appeared to take the horses and carriage away. As they walked back to the house, she stopped and removed her shoes. Under her feet the sand was gritty and cool. She lifted her skirt to her knees and swayed her hips, humming as Peter walked ahead and Ravell followed her.
Just as they reached the house, she broke away from them and ran. The sea shimmered. Closing her eyes while breezes played at her hem and sleeves, she drew in the salt air, tendrils of hair loosening at her temples. The sound of the breakers became her orchestra as she let the song out—a naughty little “Havanaise”:
Later Ravell told her that he thought she’d been singing something from Carmen. It had a similar head-tossing, hip-shifting rhythm. Barefoot, with her shoes dropped on the ground, she stood on the bluff and danced a small dance.
While she sang, she felt the old surging joy come back, and with it, familiar ambition. Moonlight widened across the water as the men listened, and the music rinsed through her bones. She wanted her song to tame the waves, to shush the wind in the palms, and to make the fish pause under the dark water.
She longed for a baby, and she still wanted to live in Italy. The clash of those two things terrified her. If she did have another child, the force of wanting a full career would return; she knew it would, and all her difficulties would only worsen. But she could cope with only one problem at a time, and for now, becoming pregnant was all she could worry about.
“What a voice!” Ravell called out when she finished. “As lovely as anything ever heard at Covent Garden.”
Peter gave a rousing shout of praise and clapped in the dark. The wind gusted under her skirt; she had to press her hands against her legs to keep the swirling fabric down. The men hurried toward her. Her husband took her by the wrist, and lifted her arm, holding it triumphantly high in the air. He caught Ravell by the sleeve and pulled him closer, too. The three of them joined hands, all dancing for a mad moment in a circle on the bluff while the ocean banged against the sand. All of them were laughing. Suddenly Erika halted and dropped her hands from theirs. She gave one last, frivolous twirl, and then she ran back toward the house.
26
In the woods, as the two men walked with butterfly nets, Peter broached his idea. To him, the coast of South America felt irresistibly near.
“Why don’t you join me for an expedition on the Orinoco River?” he said to Ravell.
“I’m afraid my freedom is limited,” Ravell replied. “We’ve got the clearing of the land for cultivation under way. I can’t simply leave the Cocal.” The preparation of land for planting new palms was difficult; the old hardwoods were often enormous, entangled in creepers, and sometimes impossible to remove. He felt he should be present to supervise the undertaking.
Good-naturedly, Peter nodded. He adjusted his white mushroom helmet as they forged onward. With his usual optimism, he intended to return to his proposal and keep talking about it to Ravell throughout the day. He knew when to let a conversation fade and when to resume it, how to nudge a subject along, how to persuade. He counted himself as a man who could bend fate in ways that suited him.
That morning they entered a valley where the air flickered with “big blues”—a species of butterfly with a striking dark border, the ones known as Morphos. It startled the eye to see these large blue butterflies on the wing, for they moved erratically, yet swiftly. Such specimens were plentiful but not easy to nab with a net. If pursued, Morphos fled to the depths of the woods.
After a hard chase, Peter finally caught one, and he and Ravell fell, breathless, to the ground. The two men sat up and drew out a flask of hot kola and drank from it to celebrate, licking the chocolate flavor from their lips. They opened a bag and ate a fruit called pawpaws, which had a creamy flesh that tasted like bananas. Ravell repeated that he was sorry about not being able to get away.
“We wouldn’t be gone long,” Peter said. “Just as far into Venezuela as the capital, Bolívar. Just there and back. We’d be gone no more than ten days at most.”
Ravell shook his head. “I’m afraid such a journey would require at least a couple of weeks.” During his first year as manager of the plantation, Ravell believed that he owed it to his friend Hartley to work especially hard to increase revenues. Again he insisted that he could not afford to be absent.
As a businessman, Peter took keen interest in the figures Ravell shared with him. A thousand coconuts brought in fifteen dollars, and the Cocal produced five million coconuts per year. Three thousand new trees were being planted. If each tree, on average, grew sixty or seventy coconuts annually . . . Mentally Peter calculated the potential for increased earnings, and the numbers flew like sparks in his head.
It turned out to be a good day for butterflies. In the late morning Peter spotted a Caligo, with its distinctive eye mark under the fluttering wing. The most interesting sighting of all was an unnamed butterfly that clicked as it flew. When the “clicker” flattened itself against a tree trunk, Peter tiptoed closer to inspect its gray and blue marbled wings.
Around noon Peter said, “If you can’t get away, perhaps I ought to make the Orinoco expedition alone.”
“What about Erika?”
“Unless you have an objection, I thought she might stay at the coconut plantation. I could leave samples of my sperm. You could treat her as before.”
Ravell looked aghast. “You can’t leave your wife at the Cocal.”
“Why not?”
Ravell stared at the tip of his boot. Then he glanced up through the treetops and winced at the sun. “Because it wouldn’t be proper.”
“Who’s to notice? Munga? The other servants? You live miles from any sort of habitation.”
“I’ll send word to Mrs. Hartley that your wife requires a place to stay while you’re off exploring,” Ravell said.
Peter halted. He removed his white helmet and rubbed sweat from his forehead. As he shook his head vigorously, droplets of water swung from his matted hair. “Not at the Eden estate. Erika can’t bear to be there—she’d refuse to go back to the Hartleys’ place.”
“Why?”
“Because they’ve got children. They’ve got a baby. Don’t you see?”
“Of course.” Ravell waved his words away in apology. “Most insensitive of me.”
Peter bent to observe an army of parasol ants. “Look at these,” he murmured. The ants had made a track that ran fifty yards through the grass. They’d formed two parallel lines. In one line, each ant carried a tiny leaf like a parasol on its head. A second line, moving in the reverse direction, headed from the nest toward the source of leaves. En route the ants had to cross a stream where a fallen tree branch bridged the water. One line of ants—the ones bearing the parasol leaves—followed the top of the fallen branch, while the returning ants traversed the log’s underside. Not a single ant experienced the least confusion. When Peter jabbed their nest with a stick, the warrior ants burst forth with their large nippers to counterattack. They bit his fingers—sharply.
“These warrior ants,” he remarked to Ravell, “have no job, except to attack.”
Ravell squatted to study them, his forearms braced against his thighs. He pointed. “Look how some of the ants dawdle. You see how the warriors act like policemen to push the slow ones along.”
When the two men came to a river, they settled near a cluster of calla lilies and ate their lunch.
“Maybe I’m superstitious,” Peter said, “but last time when I was away on a journey and we tried this—the artificial insemination—it worked very well.” A glow of hope came into his voice.
Ravell held a piece of mutton, but he
stopped eating it then and wrapped up the remainder and put it away. “Peter,” he said, holding himself quite still for a moment. He turned to Peter and looked directly into his face.
“Peter,” he said again, with so much gravity that Peter half-expected the other man to grip him by the shoulders. “I was run out of Boston by men who don’t trust me with their wives.”
“Well, I have an entirely different opinion of you—obviously, or I wouldn’t be here. And I’m entrusting my wife and our fate to you.”
Ravell stood up. He looked around at the forest and blinked as though he felt lost.
“I feel more respect for you and more confidence in you than I can say,” Peter went on. “I’ve never had a brother, but if I did, I imagine that I’d feel the same closeness to him that I feel toward you.”
Ravell resumed his seat on the ground. Along the riverbank the trees were festooned with creepers. Some were partly submerged, and blue herons and white egrets sat upon their exposed roots. The two men spoke of ice.
“Ice is horribly expensive in these parts,” Ravell said. “It’s like gold here, you know.”
Ice would be required, as Peter well understood, if a man intended to refrigerate his own seed and leave some behind for his wife while he went off to explore.
“I’m not a poor man,” Peter said. “And I won’t be daunted.”
He noticed a curious thing then—a line of ants moving up Ravell’s back, along the other man’s suspenders. The ants disappeared inside Ravell’s white collar, and emerged, half-drowning in the sweat on Ravell’s neck.
Suddenly Peter felt the jungle crawling in his own underwear. He jumped up and grabbed his groin. The hairs on his legs were teeming with ants.
Ravell let out a curse.
They realized that they’d sat down in the middle of a nest of ants, too engrossed in their talk to have noticed. Peter heard himself yelling, laughing. As he yanked his white shirt over his head, a swarm of ants fell into his hair and crossed his scalp like moving flakes. When he blinked, ants caught in his eyelashes. Ants crawled into the whorls of his ears.
The Doctor and the Diva Page 16