Love Among the Cannibals

by Wright Morris

  We could leave the bags on the trail, I said, since we were now on the property, and after we’d had a shower, and a rest, Mac and I could come down for them. Nobody seemed to care. Even the Greek didn’t answer me. Back in the road, where he had stopped to watch us, I could see the glow of the cigarette and the phosphorescent glow of one of the fish. In the street I hadn’t noticed the smell. Now I did.

  “Let’s get goin’,” wheezed Mac, and I led off again. Near the top of the grade there were steps in the slope, and a rail to lean on. The house was new; that is, under construction, since there were still mounds of dirt in the yard, bags of cement and sand, and several lengths of pipe. The house looked modern. That is, it called for glass. Glass was one of the things it called for that hadn’t arrived. Chinese screens hung over the large openings in the walls. We stood in the yard, sour-smelling and shiny, and our breathing alone may have aroused Señor Eroza. In the opening where the door would be I saw him closing the front of his pants. He appeared to be a tall man for a Mexican. Tall and thin.

  “Señor Eroza?” I inquired.

  “At your service.”

  “We are friends of Señor Lockwood,” I said.

  He sucked the air between his teeth, threw up his hands, then turned to the door and called his wife. Then he stepped into the yard, grasped my hand, and said in a Spanish I found hard to follow that what was his was ours, although, alas, it was not very much. I thanked him, and he bowed to the girls. He repeated his greeting, this time to the effect that what was his was not much, not at the moment, but any day now—he let the wave of his hand take in the house and yard. The girls thanked him, and he turned to lead them into the house. A woman almost black, as tall as the Greek and twice as wide, stood there with a lamp and showed us the whites of her eyes. His wife. He asked her to show us the room. With the lamp she walked to the center of it, then placed the lamp, like a basket, on the top of her head. There she stood. The room flickering with shadows, in darkness herself. It contained a bed, one small child’s chair, a fruit crate, and the front seat of a car. The walls were whitewashed. The floor was brick. A Virgin of Guadalupe was on the wall at the back. The flame of the lamp seemed to bum from the oil in the woman’s head.

  “There is no electric light?” I said.

  Of course. That is, there would be. The wires and the poles were down there in the street. Perhaps we had seen them. Any day now they would be up. Any day now there would be lights in the rooms as well as on the porch.

  “Ask him where’s the shower?” said Mac.

  “There is a shower?” I said.

  Of course. An American shower. The finest apparatus to be had. It could be seen in the crate that was just to the left of the door. There would not be a finer shower in Mexico, once it was attached.

  “There is water?” I was breathing less heavily. Almost calm.

  “There is water,” he replied, and raised a long thin arm to point at the ceiling, at the spot where he seemed to see it. Then he waved the finger, as one waves the traveler over a rise. The water was not there on the roof, nor on the slope of the hill, nor the hill beyond, but in a tank on top of the mountain. The biggest tank in the world. Any day now everybody in Acapulco would have more water than they knew what to do with, water to bathe in, to play in, wash their clothes and brush their teeth with, sprinkle the lawns and cool the streets with, even water to waste. There was water, and any day now it would flow right into the house. The pipes for bringing it down from the mountain were there in the street. The ditches for protecting the pipes from the thieves were there in the road. Had we not seen them?

  I nodded.

  “Well—” he said, smiled, spread his hands, and shrugged his shoulders. There was water. We would have it any day now.

  “What’s he say?” asked Mac.

  “There’ll be water any day now,” I replied. My voice was not ironic. I was getting the feel of the place. Complaints are a matter for the authorities, and I sensed the absence of authorities. Any day now the water would appear. One waited for it. My eyes, growing accustomed to the light, could see the massive body of Señora Eroza, like a dark continent, beneath the dress she wore. He spoke to her, and with the lamp still on her head she left the room. She passed through the opening where the door would be, through the room where the shower would be, the light and water flowing, bountifully, once they were attached. We heard her speak with the accent of castanets, then the scuffling, hurried sound of frightened animals leaving a stable. No words. Just an exodus into the yard. Señor Eroza then beckoned to me and I followed him to the door of the room. His wife, a dark pillar with a flame, stood at the center of it. The room appeared to be about the same size, and with the same bed. But in one dark corner was an oil-burning stove, and on the wall above it a few pots and pans. In a fruit crate on the floor there were pottery plates, a bowl or two, knives and forks. Through an opening in the wall, where there would soon be a door, I could see the row of phantoms in the yard. All of them as God had made them. Two of them were boys. The boys still held on to the corner of the mattress they had dragged from the room.

  “But Señor Eroza—” I began, and he closed his eyes, smiled. What was his was mine. Little as it was, that was how it was. In Acapulco one needed a roof—he waved a tired hand toward the lean-to in the yard—but not a house. And besides, any day now—

  I thanked him. From the head of his wife he took the lamp, turned the wick up a notch, gave it to me. I turned to Mac, his sweat-soaked shirt and coat as transparent as an oilskin, his body like a large briny dill pickle in a plastic bag.

  “Man—” he said, “how much dough we got?”

  “Dough?” I inquired. But sometimes he will surprise you. He understood I was being ironic. “It’s a lovely little villa,” I said. “Which half of it you like?”

  I did not smile. A simple statement of fact. Mac turned from me to look at his girl, and she looked cool.

  I mean she looked cold. Her hands were clasped in such a way that the fingers were curled up in the palms, the way they are in a game I used to play as a boy. The game went like this: Here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the doors and there’s the people. The fingers were the people. She was holding on to them. She suddenly crossed the room to the bed and put her hand on the mattress, as you would a radiator, then she came back to the door of the other room and said:

  “In here.”

  I liked that. I had the feeling we were finally getting down to the facts.

  “You can have the lamp,” I said, passing it to her. “We like it dark.”

  She went off with the lamp, and that was how we had it. Dark. Through the hole in the wall it looked almost light in the yard. The Erozas were bedding down for the night. Was it something in the air? The pollen-scented night that fathered the thought? The Greek stepped out of the room, she walked back to the door, where she turned and kicked one shoe off, then the other, and I saw the second one arch through the opening into the yard. A new shoe. Hecho en Mexico, as the label said. Then she slipped out of her clothes, tossing them on the bed the way she did that night in Malibu, and when she had finished she helped me take off mine. I got the coat off, all right, but the sweat-soaked shirt had stuck to my back. She took a grip on the tail and ripped it up the center, like a sheet. That sound, like a sail tearing, seemed to drown all the sounds of the night. For a moment the pounding surf did not pound, the drums ceased to beat. She had kept a grip on one half of the shirt, and she used it to pull me over to the bed, and before I could get my arm out of it I was tangled up with her. Under the film of sweat on her body, the flesh was cool. The bed had no springs, nothing to creak or twang, but it also lacked one leg on the wall end, and the frame had been propped on the wall for support. The knocking sounded like someone trapped in the wall, wanting out. It went on knocking, in fits and starts, since the Greek has that sort of laugh, but there was no sound from the family Eroza. Nor from Mac and his chick. When my eyes were used to the dark I saw that the fli
cker on the ceiling was lizards, almost flesh-colored, darting on the beams like pinpoints of light. There were also bugs, but no mosquitoes, a breeze soft as a bird’s flight near the floor, and a night bird with the voice of a wailing infant in the yard. The pounding of the surf caused a tremor I could feel in the bed frame, where my hand touched it, and the Greek slept like a baby with my fingers in the curls at the scruff of her neck.

  II

  The two boys and a girl, the boys like sun-cured tobacco, the girl the shiny blue-black of a stovepipe elbow, stood at the foot of the bed staring at the white band left by my shorts. The body of a woman, one color all over, did not interest them. The body of a man, bleached white across the buttocks, did.

  The Greek lay on her face, cupped in the hollow left in the bed by Señora Eroza, a large pear-shaped basin shaped by her hips. I lay on the plain, sloped like a beach, where Señor Eroza had left a few ridges. Knobs that he could cling to during a rough or wakeful night. Ridges that he could clutch when she heaved a sigh, or gently brushed him off. The sun, smoking like a blowtorch, rose from the sea where I thought it should set, and I sat up suddenly thinking we had slept both day and night. But it was morning. In the yard Señora Eroza sat braiding hair. Not her own, that had been done, but that of her oldest child, a tall, flowering savage with Rita Hayworth’s mouth and eyes. The smell of urine and decay blended with that of the banana she soberly ate.

  Out on the glassy bay, which I could see through the screen, there were pleasure craft, a large two-masted schooner, and the white streak where a surfboard, skidding like a coin, swung wide on a curve. On the slope below the porch there were flowering trees. On a branch near the door there were overripe papayas. The massive Señora Eroza sat like an idol before her own house.

  As I would tell Mac, if he had the brains, or my Greek, if she cared to listen, Paradise, the one with long white shadows, was always the vision we turned away from, since there was nothing else, nothing human, that is, we could do with it. Nothing except hang it on the wall, like a painting, the way I would hang this scene in my mind. The Greek, a deep brown nude, and her white-buttocked lover sprawled on the bed. That picture I could grasp, but when I sat up in bed it broke like the mirror in which I saw it reflected. The little savages ran off, howling, as if the dead had come to life. They screamed the news at their mother, who ignored them, then they ran around the yard till they found their father and brought him back to the door to look at us. At me, that is. The dead man with the bleached buttocks who had come back to life.

  Señor Eroza looked older to me in the daylight than he had at night. Older and thinner, his chin almost pointed, a sort of South Sea version of Don Quixote, his head spinning with the windmills that would pump water, any day now. He picked up his smallest child, the one hugging his legs, and while the boy chattered to him he ran a finger into his mouth, around the gums, and fished out something. Holding the child in his arms cost him an effort; he had to lean back and stand straddlelegged, but I was seldom to see him without one in his arms or two or more in his lap. Through a gap in his front teeth the tip of his tongue slipped in and out.

  He greeted me, taking in at a glance my zebra stripe, the brown body on the bed, then matter-of-factly he predicted that a fine day lay ahead. With his five children he watched me rise, draw a pair of pants over my white spot, and with that matter settled they lost, as a unit, their curiosity. They turned from the room and looked for something to do in the yard. I slipped on a shirt, but left off my shoes because I liked the cool feel of the floor, the bricks moist as a shower room, almost soapy around the bed. In the white light I could see the dirt, the filth in the corners, the bugs in the mattress, and the bites I had scratched red and sore during the night. But I liked it better by day than by night. I liked the shimmering view of that dreamy bay through the bamboo screens. I let the Greek sleep, covering her legs with her skirt to keep off the flies, then walked to the door to see how Mac and Billie were getting on. I had to step across the room where the shower would be, once it was attached, and stand in the opening where the door would be, when the hinges arrived.

  Billie Harcum was dressed, seated on the bed which she had partially covered with a beach towel, and I could see the spot where she had curved up like a kitten to sleep on it. She sat with her back to me reading about the fourteen frustrating “disturbers” that made the 44 Practical Ways to Happiness hard to come by. Mac—I had to look around for him—lay curled up on the car seat, his back to the wall, his head on a piece of her air-weight luggage softened by his pants. He had taken off his coat, but slept in his shirt, pants, and shoes. During the night he must have rolled off the seat, since about half of his shirt was covered with floor dirt. More dirt had stuck to one side of his face and one sweaty arm.

  There’s a moment before rain becomes a snowflake, and a chick like Billie Harcum becomes Mrs. Macgregor, when you reasonably feel that it just might become something else. Or perhaps nothing in particular, just evaporate. But overnight, or in less than a night, you look up and see that the die is cast. The crystal has formed. You can’t imagine it being anything else. Little Billie Harcum, of Ole Memphis, a piece of unfired Suthun pottery, had somehow passed through the flame and was now a piece of transparent porcelain. You wouldn’t have to turn the saucer to see the potter’s name on the back. Or where, like a tax-paid stamp, it would turn up next. Her taut little body—I suppose she tried to sit on the lip of the bed, without touching—was stiff inside the dress that had the price tag dangling from the belt. I don’t like pity. But what else is there to feel? The way a bride, after a brutal honeymoon, will go through an album of wedding snapshots in order to recover the clichés she had just lost. On the bed at her side was a pamphlet entitled Acapulco, Lovers’ Paradise, a souvenir album of post-card views she had picked up. Shots of the night clubs, the Copacabana, where the revelers danced barefoot in the sand to the cha-cha-cha and the American jazz from the Club Canibel. Views of Pie de la Cuesta, where, lounging in hammocks, you watched the dark-skinned boys dive from the cliffs into the sea, then swim like dolphins into the sunset, their mouths full of coins. All of it in color. The way it would look, the way it would feel. The dazzling strand, the glassy sea, the glamourous nights of mambo, conga, and rumba, while her nonlover sprawled on the rumble seat, phenobarbitaled.

  “Mornin’, honeychile,” I said, and it might have killed her. She drained white as her eyes. It took her some time to fight her way back from Norman Vincent Peale, and Healthier Living, to Irwin K. Macgregor and life among us cannibals.

  “Yoh-all just get up?”

  “Us-all didn’t,” I replied. “Just me.”

  She smiled in such a way that I knew she had managed to brush her teeth.

  “Let me see what I can catch for the pot,” I said, and stepped out on the porch, a sort of veranda, where Señor Eroza was coming toward me with a pail.

  “Water!” he said, as if he had made it himself.

  “To drink?” I asked. He made a face. It was the face of a man who had drunk and survived it. But he didn’t recommend it. Not just yet.

  “Any day now—” he said, pointing toward the mountain. Any day now the finest water in Acapulco. But not just yet. No, this water was to wash.

  I thanked him. I took a cup of it and splashed it on my face. While I combed my hair he watched me, and I said:

  “There are eggs? We would like to buy bread and eggs?”

  Of course there were eggs. But later. Perhaps by noon. He, Señor Eroza, would see that there were eggs. But right now, no. Right now there was fruit.

  I replied that we did not want to trouble him, but right at this moment we had no car. It might be a day or two. We had a car, a good one, but right at this point it did not work.

  “A car?” he asked. I nodded. “Would it be red?”

  I smiled agreement. Yes, this car was red. A bright one. I pointed down the slope to where we had left it. Near the traffic circle. His eyes lit up. Señor Eroza had seen it? I asked
.

  Did I think he was blind? Indeed, he had seen it. A fine car. He liked the color of red. It made him wonder, that color, what color the wheels would be?

  “The wheels?” I replied. They had no color. They were wire wheels and nickel plated. Hadn’t he seen them?

  That he hadn’t, he said, since the wheels were not there. The body was there, and bright red, but not the wheels.

  I stopped combing my hair and looked at him. He returned my gaze. I suddenly understood what he meant and said, “Ah, the hubcaps. So the hubcaps are gone?”

  “Of course,” he replied. Who would take the wheels and leave the hubcaps?

  “They have taken the wheels?” I said.

  In Acapulco wheels were hard to find. Good wheels with wire spokes were perhaps in demand.

  I cupped a handful of water from the pail, splashed it on my face. Desperation makes me calm. Indeed, they were in demand, I said. Where would I go to buy them?

  Nothing he had seen had astonished him. What I said did. He picked up the child that stood hugging his legs, then stepped back a pace to see me better. He smiled, shrugged, kissed the child, then said, “Who knows?”

  I became even calmer. “There is a reward,” I said, “to the man who will sell me the wheels.”

  That did not surprise him. I could see that he considered it sensible. “When I go for the eggs,” he said, “I will mention there is a reward.”