The Night of the Iguana

by Tennessee Williams

  SHANNON: Show me the wire! Huh?

  LATTA: The bus driver says you took the ignition key to the bus.

  SHANNON: That’s right. I have the ignition key to the bus and I have this party and neither the bus or the party will pull out of here till I say so.

  LATTA: Larry, you’re a sick boy. Don’t give me trouble.

  SHANNON: What jail did they bail you out of, you fat zero?

  LATTA: Let’s have the bus key, Larry.

  SHANNON: Where did they dig you up? You’ve got no party in Cuernavaca, you haven’t been out with a party since ’thirty-seven.

  LATTA: Just give me the bus key, Larry.

  SHANNON: In a pig’s—snout!—like yours!

  LATTA: Where is the reverend’s bedroom, Mrs. Faulk?

  SHANNON: The bus key is in my pocket. [He slaps his pants pocket fiercely.] Here, right here, in my pocket! Want it? Try and get it, Fatso!

  LATTA: What language for a reverend to use, Mrs. Faulk. . . .

  SHANNON [holding up the key]: See it? [He thrusts it back into his pocket.] Now go back wherever you crawled from. My party of ladies is staying here three more days because several of them are in no condition to travel and neither—neither am I.

  LATTA: They’re getting in the bus now.

  SHANNON: How are you going to start it?

  LATTA: Larry, don’t make me call the bus driver up here to hold you down while I get that key away from you. You want to see the wire from Blake Tours? Here. [He produces the wire.] Read it.

  SHANNON: You sent that wire to yourself.

  LATTA: From Houston?

  SHANNON: You had it sent you from Houston. What’s that prove? Why, Blake Tours was nothing, nothing!—till they got me. You think they’d let me go?—Ho, ho! Latta, it’s caught up with you, Latta, all the whores and tequila have hit your brain now, Latta. [Latta shouts down the hill for the bus driver.] Don’t you realize what I mean to Blake Tours? Haven’t you seen the brochure in which they mention, they brag, that special parties are conducted by the Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon, D.D., noted world traveler, lecturer, son of a minister and grandson of a bishop, and the direct descendant of two colonial governors? [Miss Fellowes appears at the verandah steps.] Miss Fellowes has read the brochure, she’s memorized the brochure. She knows what it says about me.

  MISS FELLOWES [to Latta]: Have you got the bus key?

  LATTA: Bus driver’s going to get it away from him, lady. [He lights a cigar with dirty, shaky fingers.]

  SHANNON: Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! [His laughter shakes him back against the verandah wall.]

  LATTA: He’s gone. [He touches his forehead.]

  SHANNON: Why, those ladies . . . have had . . . some of them, most of them if not all of them . . . for the first time in their lives the advantage of contact, social contact, with a gentleman born and bred, whom under no other circumstances they could have possibly met . . . let alone be given the chance to insult and accuse and. . . .

  MISS FELLOWES: Shannon! The girls are in the bus and we want to go now, so give up that key. Now!

  [Hank, the bus driver, appears at the top of the path, whistling casually: he is not noticed at first.]

  SHANNON: If I didn’t have a decent sense of responsibility to these parties I take out, I would gladly turn over your party—because I don’t like your party—to this degenerate here, this Jake Latta of the gutter-rat Lattas. Yes, I would—I would surrender the bus key in my pocket, even to Latta, but I am not that irresponsible, no, I’m not, to the parties that I take out, regardless of the party’s treatment of me. I still feel responsible for them till I get them back wherever I picked them up. [Hank comes onto the verandah.] Hi, Hank. Are you friend or foe?

  HANK: Larry, I got to get that ignition key now so we can get moving down there.

  SHANNON: Oh! Then foe! I’m disappointed, Hank. I thought you were friend, not foe. [Hank puts a wrestler’s armlock on Shannon and Latta removes the bus key from his pocket. Hannah raises a hand to her eyes.] O.K., O.K., you’ve got the bus key. By force. I feel exonerated now of all responsibility. Take the bus and the ladies in it and go. Hey, Jake, did you know they had Lesbians in Texas—without the dikes the plains of Texas would be engulfed by the Gulf. [He nods his head violently toward Miss Fellowes, who springs forward and slaps him.] Thank you, Miss Fellowes. Latta, hold on a minute. I will not be stranded here. I’ve had unusual expenses on this trip. Right now I don’t have my fare back to Houston or even to Mexico City. Now if there’s any truth in your statement that Blake Tours have really authorized you to take over my party, then I am sure they have . . . [He draws a breath, almost gasping.] . . . I’m sure they must have given you something in the . . . the nature of . . . severance pay? Or at least enough to get me back to the States?

  LATTA: I got no money for you.

  SHANNON: I hate to question your word, but. . . .

  LATTA: We’ll drive you back to Mexico City. You can sit up front with the driver.

  SHANNON: You would do that, Latta. I’d find it humiliating. Now! Give me my severance pay!

  LATTA: Blake Tours is having to refund those ladies half the price of the tour. That’s your severance pay. And Miss Fellowes tells me you got plenty of money out of this young girl you seduced in. . . .

  SHANNON: Miss Fellowes, did you really make such a . . . ?

  MISS FELLOWES: When Charlotte returned that night, she’d cashed two traveler’s checks.

  SHANNON: After I had spent all my own cash.

  MISS FELLOWES: On what? Whores in the filthy places you took her through?

  SHANNON: Miss Charlotte cashed two ten-dollar traveler’s checks because I had spent all the cash I had on me. And I’ve never had to, I’ve certainly never desired to, have relations with whores.

  MISS FELLOWES: You took her through ghastly places, such as. . . .

  SHANNON: I showed her what she wanted me to show her. Ask her! I showed her San Juan de Letran, I showed her Tenampa and some other places not listed in the Blake Tours brochure. I showed her more than the floating gardens at Xochimilco, Maximilian’s Palace, and the mad Empress Carlotta’s little homesick chapel, Our Lady of Guadalupe, the monument to Juarez, the relics of the Aztec civilization, the sword of Cortez, the headdress of Montezuma. I showed her what she told me she wanted to see. Where is she? Where is Miss . . . oh, down there with the ladies. [He leans over the rail and shouts down.] Charlotte! Charlotte! [Miss Fellowes seizes his arm and thrusts him away from the verandah rail.]

  MISS FELLOWES: Don’t you dare!

  SHANNON: Dare what?

  MISS FELLOWES: Call her, speak to her, go near her, you, you . . . filthy!

  [Maxine reappears at the corner of the verandah, with the ceremonial rapidity of a cuckoo bursting from a clock to announce the hour. She just stands there with an incongruous grin, her big eyes unblinking, as if they were painted on her round beaming face. Hannah holds a gold-lacquered Japanese fan motionless but open in one hand; the other hand touches the netting at the cubicle door as if she were checking an impulse to rush to Shannon’s defense. Her attitude has the style of a Kabuki dancer’s pose. Shannon’s manner becomes courtly again.]

  SHANNON: Oh, all right, I won’t. I only wanted her to confirm my story that I took her out that night at her request, not at my . . . suggestion. All that I did was offer my services to her when she told me she’d like to see things not listed in the brochure, not usually witnessed by ordinary tourists such as. . . .

  MISS FELLOWES: Your hotel bedroom? Later? That too? She came back flea-bitten!

  SHANNON: Oh, now, don’t exaggerate, please. Nobody ever got any fleas off Shannon.

  MISS FELLOWES: Her clothes had to be fumigated!

  SHANNON: I understand your annoyance, but you are going too far when you try to make out that I gave Charlotte fleas. I don’t deny that. . . .

  MISS FELLOWES: Wait till they get my report!

  SHANNON: I don’t deny that it’s possible to get fleabites on a tour of inspection
of what lies under the public surface of cities, off the grand boulevards, away from the night clubs, even away from Diego Rivera’s murals, but. . . .

  MISS FELLOWES: Oh, preach that in a pulpit, Reverend Shannon de-frocked!

  SHANNON [ominously]: You’ve said that once too often. [He seizes her arm.] This time before witnesses. Miss Jelkes? Miss Jelkes!

  [Hannah opens the curtain of her cubicle.]

  HANNAH: Yes, Mr. Shannon, what is it?

  SHANNON: You heard what this. . . .

  MISS FELLOWES: Shannon! Take your hand off my arm!

  SHANNON: Miss Jelkes, just tell me, did you hear what she . . . [His voice stops oddly with a choked sobbing sound. He runs at the wall and pounds it with his fists.]

  MISS FELLOWES: I spent this entire afternoon and over twenty dollars checking up on this impostor, with long-distance phone calls.

  HANNAH: Not impostor—you mustn’t say things like that.

  MISS FELLOWES: You were locked out of your church!—for atheism and seducing of girls!

  SHANNON [turning about]: In front of God and witnesses, you are lying, lying!

  LATTA: Miss Fellowes, I want you to know that Blake Tours was deceived about this character’s background and Blake Tours will see that he is blacklisted from now on at every travel agency in the States.

  SHANNON: How about Africa, Asia, Australia? The whole world, Latta, God’s world, has been the range of my travels. I haven’t stuck to the schedules of the brochures and I’ve always allowed the ones that were willing to see, to see!—the underworlds of all places, and if they had hearts to be touched, feelings to feel with, I gave them a priceless chance to feel and be touched. And none will ever forget it, none of them, ever, never! [The passion of his speech imposes a little stillness.]

  LATTA: Go on, lie back in your hammock, that’s all you’re good for, Shannon. [He goes to the top of the path and shouts down the hill.] O.K., let’s get cracking. Get that luggage strapped on top of the bus, we’re moving! [He starts down the hill with Miss Fellowes.]

  NONNO [incongruously, from his cubicle]:

  How calmly does the orange branch

  Observe the sky begin to blanch. . . .

  [Shannon sucks in his breath with an abrupt, fierce sound. He rushes off the verandah and down the path toward the road. Hannah calls after him, with a restraining gesture. Maxine appears on the verandah. Then a great commotion commences below the hill, with shrieks of outrage and squeals of shocked laughter.]

  MAXINE [rushing to the path]: Shannon! Shannon! Get back up here, get back up here. Pedro, Pancho, traerme a Shannon. Que está haciendo allí? Oh, my God! Stop him, for God’s sake, somebody stop him!

  [Shannon returns, panting and spent. He is followed by Maxine.]

  MAXINE: Shannon, go in your room and stay there until that party’s gone.

  SHANNON: Don’t give me orders.

  MAXINE: You do what I tell you to do or I’ll have you removed—you know where.

  SHANNON: Don’t push me, don’t pull at me, Maxine.

  MAXINE: All right, do as I say.

  SHANNON: Shannon obeys only Shannon.

  MAXINE: You’ll sing a different tune if they put you where they put you in ’thirty-six. Remember ’thirty-six, Shannon?

  SHANNON: O.K., Maxine, just . . . let me breathe alone, please. I won’t go but I will lie in the . . . hammock.

  MAXINE: Go into Fred’s room where I can watch you.

  SHANNON: Later, Maxine, not yet.

  MAXINE: Why do you always come here to crack up, Shannon?

  SHANNON: It’s the hammock, Maxine, the hammock by the rain forest.

  MAXINE: Shannon, go in your room and stay there until I get back. Oh, my God, the money. They haven’t paid the mother-grabbin’ bill. I got to go back down there and collect their goddam bill before they. . . . Pancho, vijilalo, entiendes? [She rushes back down the hill, shouting “Hey! Just a minute down there!”]

  SHANNON: What did I do? [He shakes his head, stunned.] I don’t know what I did.

  [Hannah opens the screen of her cubicle but doesn’t come out. She is softly lighted so that she looks, again, like a medieval sculpture of a saint. Her pale gold hair catches the soft light. She has let it down and still holds the silver-backed brush with which she was brushing it.]

  SHANNON: God almighty, I . . . what did I do? I don’t know what I did. [He turns to the Mexican boys who have come back up the path.] Que hice? Que hice?

  [There is breathless, spasmodic laughter from the boys as Pancho informs him that he pissed on the ladies’ luggage.]

  PANCHO: Tú measte en las maletas de las señoras!

  [Shannon tries to laugh with the boys, while they bend double with amusement. Shannon’s laughter dies out in little choked spasms. Down the hill, Maxine’s voice is raised in angry altercation with Jake Latta. Miss Fellowes’ voice is lifted and then there is a general rhubarb to which is added the roar of the bus motor.]

  SHANNON: There go my ladies, ha, ha! There go my . . . [He turns about to meet Hannah’s grave, compassionate gaze. He tries to laugh again. She shakes her head with a slight restraining gesture and drops the curtain so that her softly luminous figure is seen as through a mist.] . . . ladies, the last of my—ha, ha!—ladies. [He bends far over the verandah rail, then straightens violently and with an animal outcry begins to pull at the chain suspending the gold cross about his neck. Pancho watches indifferently as the chain cuts the back of Shannon’s neck. Hannah rushes out to him.]

  HANNAH: Mr. Shannon, stop that! You’re cutting yourself doing that. That isn’t necessary, so stop it! [to Pancho:] Agarrale las manos! [Pancho makes a halfhearted effort to comply, but Shannon kicks at him and goes on with the furious self-laceration.] Shannon, let me do it, let me take it off you. Can I take it off you? [He drops his arms. She struggles with the clasp of the chain but her fingers are too shaky to work it.]

  SHANNON: No, no, it won’t come off, I’ll have to break it off me.

  HANNAH: No, no, wait—I’ve got it. [She has now removed it.]

  SHANNON: Thanks. Keep it. Goodbye! [He starts toward the path down to the beach.]

  HANNAH: Where are you going? What are you going to do?

  SHANNON: I’m going swimming. I’m going to swim out to China!

  HANNAH: No, no, not tonight, Shannon! Tomorrow . . . tomorrow, Shannon!

  [But he divides the trumpet-flowered bushes and passes through them. Hannah rushes after him, screaming for “Mrs. Faulk.” Maxine can be heard shouting for the Mexican boys.]

  MAXINE: Muchachos, cojerlo! Atarlo! Esté loco. Traerlo acqui. Catch him, he’s crazy. Bring him back and tie him up!

  [In a few moments Shannon is hauled back through the bushes and onto the verandah by Maxine and the boys. They rope him into the hammock. His struggle is probably not much of a real struggle—histrionics mostly. But Hannah stands wringing her hands by the steps as Shannon, gasping for breath, is tied up.]

  HANNAH: The ropes are too tight on his chest!

  MAXINE: No, they’re not. He’s acting, acting. He likes it! I know this black Irish bastard like nobody ever knowed him, so you keep out of it, honey. He cracks up like this so regular that you can set a calendar by it. Every eighteen months he does it, and twice he’s done it here and I’ve had to pay for his medical care. Now I’m going to call in town to get a doctor to come out here and give him a knockout injection, and if he’s not better tomorrow he’s going into the Casa de Locos again like he did the last time he cracked up on me!

  [There is a moment of silence.]

  SHANNON: Miss Jelkes?

  HANNAH: Yes.

  SHANNON: Where are you?

  HANNAH: I’m right here behind you. Can I do anything for you?

  SHANNON: Sit here where I can see you. Don’t stop talking. I have to fight this panic.

  [There is a pause. She moves a chair beside his hammock. The Germans troop up from the beach. They are delighted by the drama that Shannon has provided. In their sca
nty swimsuits they parade onto the verandah and gather about Shannon’s captive figure as if they were looking at a funny animal in a zoo. Their talk is in German except when they speak directly to Shannon or Hannah. Their heavily handsome figures gleam with oily wetness and they keep chuckling lubriciously.]

  HANNAH: Please! Will you be so kind as to leave him alone?

  [They pretend not to understand her. Frau Fahrenkopf bends over Shannon in his hammock and speaks to him loudly and slowly in English.]

  FRAU FAHRENKOPF: Is this true you make pee-pee all over the suitcases of the ladies from Texas? Hah? Hah? You run down there to the bus and right in front of the ladies you pees all over the luggage of the ladies from Texas?

  [Hannah’s indignant protest is drowned in the Rabelaisian laughter of the Germans.]

  HERR FAHRENKOPF: Thees is vunderbar, vunderbar! Hah? Thees is a epic gesture! Hah? Thees is the way to demonstrate to ladies that you are a American gentleman! Hah?

  [He turns to the others and makes a ribald comment. The two women shriek with amusement, Hilda falling back into the arms of Wolfgang, who catches her with his hands over her almost nude breasts.]

  HANNAH [calling out]: Mrs. Faulk! Mrs. Faulk! [She rushes to the verandah angle as Maxine appears there.] Will you please ask these people to leave him alone. They’re tormenting him like an animal in a trap.

  [The Germans are already trooping around the verandah, laughing and capering gaily.]

  SHANNON [suddenly, in a great shout]: Regression to infantilism, ha, ha, regression to infantilism . . . The infantile protest, ha, ha, ha, the infantile expression of rage at Mama and rage at God and rage at the goddam crib, and rage at the everything, rage at the . . . everything. . . . Regression to infantilism. . . .

  [Now all have left but Hannah and Shannon.]