The forest throbbed with song and the snap of a thousand wings. He had every reason to hope that all his wishes would be realized, that Erika might be pregnant by the time he returned.
It was a strange thing he had done, leaving her with Ravell—no question of that. He had considered the risks carefully, weighed them in his palm like stones.
Suddenly an Indian glided past in a dugout, spearing fish. The hairs on Peter’s arms stood up, seeing him. The Indian was nearly naked, his body sturdy and compact, and his red-brown flesh shone like a tree unsheathed from its bark. The Indian had no tension in his movements. All was easy and silent. He threw the spear and got his fish and pulled it up into his boat. He did it smoothly, just as he had taken a tree from the forest and carved it into a dugout canoe.
When the Indian passed close to the stern-wheeler, he glanced up at Peter, who waved. The Indian lifted his paddle in greeting. They did not smile at each other. If Peter had been able to tell him his situation, he suspected the Indian would have understood.
A man heads in the direction he needs to go. A man captures what he most wants, and lets the rest drift away.
As the stern-wheeler left the delta, the Orinoco River widened, and they passed a place where Indians lived. Each dwelling consisted of four posts that supported a roof of palm leaves. Hammocks hung underneath, but the Indians seemed to own little else.
Next they passed an Indian burial site. The dead bodies had been raised several feet off the ground and rested in hammocks, the corpses covered by palm leaves.
All passengers on the steamer appeared to be armed, and quick and reckless about drawing their guns. Peter had brought his revolver, too. When they happened upon layers of blue-gray alligators sunbathing on a bank, with one alligator draped over the next, rifles lifted. Almost before the explosion of shots, the alligators slipped under the muddy waters. A mass of screaming green parrots fled from the high trees, joined by macaws that bolted with such a strong storm of wings that men snapped their heads upward and lowered their guns.
“Bolívar is a place of lawlessness,” the captain of the stern-wheeler told Peter. “The whole of Venezuela still is.”
The latest revolution had occurred just a few years earlier. In Bolívar, the captain said, lampposts and buildings were still pocked with bullet marks. Recently, eighteen men had risen up in some kind of protest. Those eighteen had been given no trial. They’d been taken to a sandy island in the Orinoco and shot. Nobody was allowed to touch the bodies as they floated downriver.
The map marked Bolívar with a great black dot, indicating that it must be a large and important place, but as the steamer drew close to its banks, Peter realized how dreary it was. No wharf existed. Passengers stepped across a plank to come ashore.
At the Hotel Decorie—the best in Bolívar—the landlady showed him to his room. Peter stared hard at the bed, the mattress bare with stains upon it.
“Are there no bedcovers?” he asked.
“You didn’t bring your hammock?” the landlady said to Peter, surprised. She pointed to hooks.
Everyone here traveled with a hammock, it seemed.
The hotel had only one story, its rooms divided by partitions that did not quite reach the high ceiling. Each room had a window with no glass, only shutters. The landlady led him to the bath—a cement structure in the rear yard. He stared at the water and wondered how many had bathed in it, and how long it had been since the water had been changed.
He decided to rely on the sponge in his valise.
Through a kitchen doorway he caught sight of the cook hunched over a kettle, the strands of her long black hair almost dragging in whatever she was cooking. The cook’s hair was so filthy that it looked as if she’d rubbed it with lard. When soup went around the table that evening, Peter noticed the grease and unidentifiable black specks that floated to the top. He left his bowl empty and passed the soup to the next man, who hungrily fished a potato from it.
Peter wanted to leave Bolívar but found he could not—at least, not for many days. No carriages existed here, no roads that led anywhere. The only ways to explore the country were by mule and by river.
He walked the steep streets of Bolívar, where gutters ran down the middle, and noticed that no women appeared on the street. Ladies stayed inside houses, where they sat at barred windows; their dark eyes glittered and observed him as he passed. Like him, they seemed imprisoned here. The ladies wore so much powder that he imagined reaching through the iron grill with his handkerchief to dust their cheeks and noses.
Erika could never tolerate their lives.
He knew he’d come very close to losing her. At home in Boston he had once opened a drawer and found a receipt for a passage she’d booked to Naples. She’d hidden it under a box of stationery, but he happened to stumble upon it. He’d noticed many gowns missing from her armoire. He suspected that she must have packed them. Yet not long after she had discovered herself pregnant, he’d opened the armoire one day and found that her favorite dresses had mysteriously returned.
A child was the thing that would bind her to him. Otherwise, how could he be certain that she would remain in the brick town house where he kept her like a butterfly in a jar? If he gave her no baby, what was to prevent her from signing on with a manager who would carry her off to the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, or the Sydney Opera House?
Unless she had a baby, he sensed that she was ready to step out of her shoes and soar away like a bird.
In the afternoon Peter returned to the Hotel Decorie and found that a bottle of rum he’d bought had been uncorked. Perhaps a maid or the houseboy had been drinking from it. Every time he left and came back, he found more of the rum gone, and yet he had drunk nothing from the bottle himself.
Since the walls between rooms were only partitions, one overheard every conversation and smelled every overboiled aroma from the kitchen. He did not sleep well at the Hotel Decorie. He shed his boots and lay down on the bedcovers that he’d finally persuaded the landlady to supply him with, and he tried to ignore the sweat of strangers that he smelled in the sheets. At home he rarely permitted himself naps, but here in the gloom of Bolívar, he closed his eyes and tried not to miss his wife.
As he sank into sleep, he saw Erika, the belt of her silk robe unfastened as she reclined against pillows. She bent her knees, her bare thighs parting as her legs fell open. A man held up a candle, looking down at her. The man was naked, aroused, his skin the same warm golden hue as hers, and as he came closer, Erika took his member in her hand. Peter chased the stranger. Outran him through the woods. Suddenly the fellow was fully clothed, wearing the suit of a gentleman. When they got to a remote place, Peter struck the stranger hard and repeatedly, until the man fell to his knees. Peter grabbed hold of the man’s lapels, pushing him between rocks until blood poured from the man’s ear. When the man turned his face, Peter realized it was Ravell.
Startled awake, Peter sat upright at the Hotel Decorie. He felt terror hidden in all four corners of the room.
Why have I dreamed such a thing? he wondered. In his mind, Ravell felt as dear as a brother.
Peter lay with both arms crossed over his heart and waited until the wild beating calmed. Ravell will do exactly what I expect him to do, he assured himself.
He adjusted an old, stained pillow and made himself go back to sleep.
29
“How many estates does Mr. Hartley own?” Erika asked.
“Four,” Ravell said. “Three cocoa plantations, as well as the Cocal.”
As they rode through the moonlight toward Esmeralda, an estate Mr. Hartley had only recently acquired, their buggy passed huts that reverberated with the sounds of coolies chanting and beating their tomtoms. They passed one Hindu man seated in a doorway, his knees hugging his drum, his head ready to shake from his neck as his palms slapped his tom-tom’s leathery skin.
Look how much pleasure he derives from it, Erika thought. Lost in his rhythms, his trance. She knew that feeling, as close
as her own drumming heart.
They had to drive far to Esmeralda, fifteen miles toward the center of the island. Moonlight marked their route and poured with the whiteness of milk through the dense trees.
Finally they reached it. In a small clearing in the woods, a rough house stood. After coming through the dark trees, they might have been shifting from the darkness of midnight to the brightness of noon, for in Trinidad’s pure atmosphere, the moonlight was incandescent.
At Esmeralda the house was lifted high off the ground by poles made of balata, the wood that never rotted. A tall flight of steps led to the door.
Out of the woods, a coolie boy appeared. He bowed low and set a plate of pawpaws on a table for them. While the boy swept the floor and made up the beds, Ravell went to work clearing bats from the house. Erika waited outside, as still as a tree, a thin shawl around her.
Then the boy was gone. He ran through the undergrowth and evaporated into the forest, and they had the house to themselves.
It was a curious structure, built like a hexagon. The house had no glass windows, only hinged shutters that Ravell propped open by means of a stick, so that the sides lifted like wings. The entire room became a sort of veranda, open to the air. After eating the dinner they’d brought along, they sat there encircled by the forest and listened to the songs of the night—the strange agitation of wind, the cries of lonely animals. They stared into the dark and watched the blink of fireflies.
“How long will you live on this island?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you suppose you will ever marry and have a family?”
“I expect not,” he said.
She did not ask why he thought this. Instead, she asked him about his youth in Africa. At the age of fifteen, he had made love for the first time with a black woman from the town who liked whiskey and dancing on tables, and one night he saw her break a chair. “I have this to say about her,” Ravell confessed. “She was more alive than any person I’ve ever known.”
In the moonlight Ravell’s collar was crisp white. He wore no jacket, only a dark vest and white shirtsleeves rolled up to show his hard forearms, marked by well-developed veins. Erika studied his face, wanting to take her finger and trace the fine curve of his nose. She got up and stood behind him, and put her hands on his shoulders.
“What are you thinking?” He glanced up at her.
“How bright your shirt is.” Gently she tugged at his collar and smoothed the pointed flaps. “It’s the color of the moon.”
Ravell pushed away from his chair and stood. His arms hung rigidly at his sides and he stepped back; she sensed he meant to keep his distance from her.
“I don’t understand,” she declared in amusement. “You’ve brought me all the way here. Don’t you want me?”
He laughed and took hold of her by the waist. They fell against a bed, and tossed their garments, one by one, until each thing landed on the floor: vest, suspenders, camisole, corset, parachute of skirts. The smells of the forest were strong, and as they grew dizzy with lovemaking, the house on stilts seemed to turn like an open-air carousel.
Lying underneath him, she imagined that he must have touched many women, and she felt herself becoming all of them—an East African woman who danced on tables and broke chairs, coolie girls with rings on their toes. (“There are women enough here to suit Ravell’s purposes,” Peter had said to her, smiling.) His accusers from Boston blended into Erika’s senses, too—blonde Caroline, and gray-haired, leggy Amanda.
With her nose against his face, she smelled musk and remembered that day when Munga painted Ravell’s jaw white with shaving cream. She winced from pleasure, and heard the sound of her own sharp little screams.
“Shush,” he said with a jest in his tone.
“Why should I ‘shush’?”
“The animals of the forest,” he laughed. “You might scare them.”
“Taste,” Ravell said. He’d sliced a piece of fruit open, and she bent her head and filled her mouth with the sweet pulp from one of the pawpaws the servant boy had left. The fruit made a good breakfast, along with hot kola, which had the flavor of steamed chocolate.
Ravell loved to rise early—at four in the morning—so they got up then, and walked through the woods before the moon was gone, just as the sun was emerging for a new day. Their movements roused parakeets and other birds.
“If your husband were here,” Ravell remarked, “here’s a sight he would be very interested in.” He pointed to a carpenter bird boring holes into ripening cocoa pods. “Those holes will breed worms,” Ravell explained, “and the bird will come back to eat them.”
Why mention Peter? Why revive thoughts of him now? Something tightened under her ribs in annoyance. As they walked, her legs ached. Not since the earliest weeks of her marriage had she been so sore.
“Are you all right?” he asked, noticing her reluctant pace.
She nodded. At last they reached the road where they’d parked the buggy.
Driving home toward the Cocal, they met women in saris and coolie men en route to their daily labors, each politely calling “Salaam sahib” and “Salaam memsahib” in greeting.
It was not yet ten in the morning when they noticed a familiar silhouette heading on horseback in their direction. It was Munga racing toward them. Just from the lopsided way he rode—with one arm held high, flailing—they recognized that he carried a terrible message.
Munga led them to a coolie settlement miles from the Cocal, where Ravell jumped down from the carriage and ran along a dirt path to a hut. Erika tried to follow, wondering if she might assist in some way, but as they came to the little house, ducking under baskets of hibiscus at the entrance, they saw a bloody handprint on the door, and more blood trailed over the threshold. Inside the house, a woman wailed.
Ravell made a fast pivot and gripped Erika by the shoulders. “Go back,” he said. “Go to the carriage.”
Munga took up the buggy reins. Neither the servant nor Erika spoke as he drove her back to the Cocal.
It was evening before Ravell returned.
“Tell me,” she said.
“I’m not telling you anything,” he said. “There’s no reason for you to know.”
To calm himself, he walked to the beach that night. She left him to his thoughts for a time, and then she went to find him.
He sat on the sand, his knees drawn against his chest. From his pocket he removed a flask and took a swig of whiskey.
“It was not a pretty scene,” he said. “Not a thing you should have witnessed.”
The wind lifted strands of her hair, blinding her until she brushed the tangles from her eyes. She sat down and shifted her hips, the sand forming a saddle underneath her.
“When I left Boston, I vowed to do no more doctoring,” he said, “but that’s proved impossible. Am I to stand by and let a woman die at the hands of a country midwife?”
He drank more whiskey, capped the flask, and put it away. He hung his head.
“Did the mother—?”
He cut her off. “In Boston I had colleagues with whom I could discuss a traumatic case. Here, I’m alone. I practice in isolation.”
She slid her hips closer to his, inching nearer in the sand. She sensed that he did not want anyone to touch him, not at that moment. “You can tell me,” she said.
“In a village not far from here,” he said, “there’s now a newborn baby who has no mother.”
“She bled to death, didn’t she? That’s what you’re afraid to have me know.”
“If I’d arrived sooner, she might not have had any problem at all.” His lips formed a grim line. He stared at the breakers, crashing like glass. “In these rural parts, you’ve got midwives who plunge ahead and show terrible ignorance.”
“What did the midwife do?”
“Certain untrained persons believe that as soon as an infant is born, the placenta ought to follow immediately. They’re impatient. They don’t wait the extra minutes for Nat
ure to expel the afterbirth slowly.”
He brought his fist against his mouth and kept it there, silencing himself, shutting his eyes. He would not say anything else.
Erika heard the rest of the story the next day. One of the kitchen servants had been present in the hut during the delivery—she was the one who had summoned Munga. While this older woman was describing the scene in a shrill, wild voice to the other servants, Erika entered the kitchen. The servant was reenacting how the midwife had pulled the cord and tugged with such violence that—
The servant stopped talking when Erika appeared. Two young coolie women were seated on stools, and they’d been preparing cassava, which were like yams, for supper. The Negress had been rubbing dough across a wooden board, exercising her strong, flour-covered black fingers. They had the air of sisters talking, but suddenly they hushed themselves.
“What happened?” Erika stepped closer.
The older servant hesitated, and then went on to demonstrate how the midwife had yanked the cord with such violence that she had pulled out the mother’s womb.
Erika turned and ran from the house, down to the beach. She bent in half, her arms crossed over her midsection, then dropped down onto the sand. She sat there and writhed, her hair hanging over her face, sorry she had heard it, sorry she had asked.
30
“I’m worried about Peter,” she said. “Three and a half weeks have come and gone. Don’t you think he should have returned by now?”
Ravell brought out a calendar and counted the days. He, too, felt alarmed. Venezuela was not always safe territory for a traveler, he admitted. It was strange that they’d received no word to explain the delay.
“It’s so unlike him,” Erika said.
The Doctor and the Diva Page 18