The Delicate Prey

The Delicate Prey

and other stories

Paul Bowles

Dedication

for my mother, who first read me the stories of Poe

Contents

At Paso Rojo

When old Señora Sanchez died, her two daughters Lucha and Chalía decided to visit their brother at his ranch. Out of devotion they had agreed never to marry while their mother lived, and now that she was gone and they were both slightly over forty there seemed just as little likelihood of a wedding in the family as there ever had. They would probably not admit this even to themselves, however. It was with complete understanding of his two sisters that Don Federico suggested they leave the city and go down to Paso Rojo for a few weeks.

Lucha arrived in black crêpe. To her, death was one of the things that happen in life with a certain regularity, and it therefore demanded outward observance. Otherwise her life was in no way changed, save that at the ranch she would have to get used to a whole new staff of servants.

“Indians, poor things, animals with speech,” she said to Don Federico the first night as they sat having coffee. A barefooted girl had just carried the dessert dishes out.

Don Federico smiled. “They are good people,” he said deliberately. Living at the ranch so long had lowered his standards, it was said, for even though he had always spent a month or so of each year in the capital, he had grown increasingly indifferent to the social life there.

“The ranch is eating his soul little by little,” Lucha used to say to Señora Sanchez.

Only once the old lady had replied. “If his soul is to be eaten, then let the ranch do it.”

She looked around the primitive dining room with its dry decorations of palm leaves and branches. “He loves it here because everything is his,” she thought, “and some of the things could never have been his if he had not purposely changed to fit them.” That was not a completely acceptable thought. She knew the ranch had made him happy and tolerant and wise; to her it seemed sad that he could not have been those things without losing his civilized luster. And that he certainly had lost. He had the skin of a peasant—brown and lined everywhere. He had the slowness of speech of men who have lived for long periods of time in the open. And the inflections of his voice suggested the patience that can come from talking to animals rather than to human beings. Lucha was a sensible woman; still, she could not help feeling a certain amount of regret that her little brother, who at an earlier point in his life had been the best dancer among the members of the country club, should have become the thin, sad-faced, quiet man who sat opposite her.

“You've changed a great deal,” she suddenly said, shaking her head from side to side slowly.

“Yes. You change here. But it's a good place.”

“Good, yes. But so sad,” she said.

He laughed. “Not sad at all. You get used to the quiet. And then you find it's not quiet at all. But you never change much, do you? Chalía's the one who's different. Have you noticed?”

“Oh, Chalía's always been crazy. She doesn't change either.”

“Yes. She is very much changed.” He looked past the smoking oil lamp, out into the dark. “Where is she? Why doesn't she take coffee?”

“She has insomnia. She never takes it.”

“Maybe our nights will put her to sleep,” said Don Federico.

Chalía sat on the upper veranda in the soft night breeze. The ranch stood in a great clearing that held the jungle at bay all about, but the monkeys were calling from one side to the other, as if neither clearing nor ranch house existed. She had decided to put off going to bed—that way there was less darkness to be borne in case she stayed awake. The lines of a poem she had read on the train two days before were still in her mind:
“Aveces la noche.
. . . Sometimes the night takes you with it, wraps you up and rolls you along, leaving you washed in sleep at the morning's edge.” Those lines were comforting. But there was the terrible line yet to come: “And sometimes the night goes on without you.” She tried to jump from the image of the fresh sunlit morning to a completely alien idea: the waiter at the beach club in Puntarenas, but she knew the other thought was waiting there for her in the dark.

She had worn riding breeches and a khaki shirt open at the neck, on the trip from the capital, and she had announced to Lucha her intention of going about in those clothes the whole time she was at Paso Rojo. She and Lucha had quarreled at the station.

“Everyone knows Mamá has died,” said Lucha, “and the ones who aren't scandalized are making fun of you.”

With intense scorn in her voice Chalía had replied, “You have asked them, I suppose.”

On the train as it wound through the mountains toward
tierra caliente
she had suddenly said, apropos of nothing: “Black doesn't become me.” Really upsetting to Lucha was the fact that in Puntarenas she had gone off and bought some crimson nail polish which she had painstakingly applied herself in the hotel room.

“You can't, Chalía!” cried her sister, wide-eyed. “You've never done it before. Why do you do it now?”

Chalía had laughed immoderately. “Just a whiml” she had said, spreading her decorated hands in front of her.

Loud footsteps came up the stairs and along the veranda, shaking it slightly. Her sister called: “Chalía!”

She hesitated an instant, then said, “Yes.”

“You're sitting in the dark! Wait. I'll bring out a lamp from your room. What an idea!”

“We'll be covered with insects,” objected Chalía, who, although her mood was not a pleasant one, did not want it disturbed.

“Federico says no!” shouted Lucha from inside. “He says there are no insects! None that bite, anyway!”

Presently she appeared with a small lamp which she set on a table against the wall. She sat down in a nearby hammock and swung herself softly back and forth, humming. Chalía frowned at her, but she seemed not to notice.

“What heat!” exclaimed Lucha finally.

“Don't exert yourself so much,” suggested Chalía.

They were quiet. Soon the breeze became a strong wind, coming from the direction of the distant mountains; but it too was hot, like the breath of a great animal. The lamp flickered, threatened to go out. Lucha got up and turned it down. As Chalía moved her head to watch her, her attention was caught by something else, and she quickly shifted her gaze to the wall. Something enormous, black and swift had been there an instant ago; now there was nothing. She watched the spot intently. The wall was faced with small stones which had been plastered over and whitewashed indifferently, so that the surface was very rough and full of large holes. She rose suddenly and approaching the wall, peered at it closely. All the holes, large and small, were lined with whitish funnels. She could see the long, agile legs of the spiders that lived inside, sticking Out beyond some of the funnels.

“Lucha, this wall is full of monsters!” she cried. A beetle flew near to the lamp, changed its mind and lighted on the wall. The nearest spider darted forth, seized it and disappeared into the wall with it.

“Don't look at them,” advised Lucha, but she glanced about the floor near her feet apprehensively.

Chalía pulled her bed into the middle of the room and moved a small table over to it. She blew out the lamp and lay back on the hard mattress. The sound of the nocturnal insects was unbearably loud—an endless, savage scream above the noise of the wind. All the vegetation out there was dry. It made a million scraping sounds in the air as the wind swept through it. From time to time the monkeys called to each other from different sides. A night bird scolded occasionally, but its voice was swallowed up in the insistent insect song and the rush of wind across the hot countryside. And it was absolutely dark.

Perhaps an hour later she lit the lamp by her bed, rose, and in her nightgown went to sit on the veranda. She put the lamp where it had been before, by the wall, and turned her chair to face it. She sat watching the wall until very late.

At dawn the air was cool, full of the sound of continuous lowing of cattle, nearby and far. Breakfast was served as soon as the sky was completely light. In the kitchen there was a hubbub of women's voices. The dining room smelled of kerosene and oranges. A great platter heaped with thick slices of pale pineapple was in the center of the table. Don Federico sat at the end, his back to the wall. Behind him was a small niche, bright with candles, and the Virgin stood there in a blue and silver gown.

“Did you sleep well?” said Don Federico to Lucha.

“Ah, wonderfully well!”

“And you?” to Chalía.

“I never sleep well,” she said.

A hen ran distractedly into the room from the veranda and was chased out by the serving girl. Outside the door a group of Indian children stood guard around a square of clothesline along which was draped a red assortment of meat: strips of flesh and loops of internal organs. When a vulture swooped low, the children jumped up and down, screaming in chorus, and drove it into the air again. Chalía frowned at their noise. Don Federico smiled.

“This is all in your honor,” he said. “We killed a cow yesterday. Tomorrow all that will be gone.”

“Not the vultures!” exclaimed Lucha.

“Certainly not. All the cowboys and servants take some home to their families. And they manage to get rid of quite a bit of it themselves.”

“You're too generous,” said Chalía. “It's bad for them. It makes them dissatisfied and unhappy. But I suppose if you didn't give it to them, they'd steal it anyway.”

Don Federico pushed back his chair.

“No one here has ever stolen anything from me.” He rose and went out.

After breakfast while it was still early, before the sun got too high in the sky, he regularly made a two-hour tour of the ranch. Since he preferred to pay unexpected visits to the vaqueros in charge of the various districts, he did not always cover the same regions. He was explaining this to Lucha as he untethered his horse outside the high barbed-wire fence that enclosed the house. “Not because I hope to find something wrong. But this is the best way always to find everything right.”

Like Chalía, Lucha was skeptical of the Indian's ability to do anything properly. “A very good idea,” she said. “I'm sure you are much too lenient with those boys. They need a strong hand and no pity.”

Above the high trees that grew behind the house the red and blue macaws screamed, endlessly repeating their elliptical path in the sky. Lucha looked up in their direction and saw Chalía on the upper porch, tucking a khaki shirt into her breeches.

“Rico, wait! I want to go with you,” she called, and rushed into her room.

Lucha turned back to her brother. “You won't take her? She couldn't! With Mamá . . .”

Don Federico cut her short, so as not to hear what would have been painful to him. “You both need fresh air and exercise. Come, both of you.”

Lucha was silent a moment, looking aghast into his face. Finally she said, “I couldn't,” and moved away to open the gate. Several cowboys were riding their horses slowly up from the paddock toward the front of the house. Chalía appeared on the lower porch and hurried to the gate, where Lucha stood looking at her.

“So you're going horseback riding,” said Lucha. Her voice had no expression.

“Yes. Are you coming? I suppose not. We should be back soon; no, Rico?”

Don Federico disregarded her, saying to Lucha: “It would be good if you came.”

When she did not reply, but went through the gate and shut it, he had one of the cowboys dismount and help Chalía onto his horse. She sat astride the animal beaming down at the youth.

“Now, you can't come. You have no horse!” she cried, pulling the reins taut violently so that the horse stood absolutely still.

'Yes, Señora. I shall go with the señores.” His speech was archaic and respectful, the speech of the rustic Indian. Their soft, polite words always annoyed her, because she believed, quite erroneously, that she could detect mockery underneath. “Like parrots who've been taught two lines of Gongoral” she would laugh, when the subject was being discussed. Now she was further nettled by hearing herself addressed as Señora. “The idiot!” she thought. “He should know that I'm not married.” But when she looked down at the cowboy again she noticed his white teeth and his very young face. She smiled, saying, “How hot it is already,” and undid the top button of her shirt.

The boy ran to the paddock and returned immediately, riding a larger and more nervous horse. This was a joke to the other cowboys, who started ahead, laughing. Don Federico and Chalía rode side by side, and the boy went along behind them, by turns whistling a tune and uttering soothing words to his skittish horse.

The party went across the mile or so of open space that lay between the house and the jungle. Then the high grass swept the riders' legs as the horses went downward to the river, which was dry save for a narrow stream of water in the middle. They followed the bed downstream, the vegetation increasing the height along the banks as they progressed. Chalía had enameled her fingernails afresh before starting out and was in a good humor. She was discussing the administration of the ranch with Don Federico. The expenses and earning capacity interested her particularly, although she had no clear idea of the price of anything. She had worn an enormous soft straw sombrero whose brim dropped to her shoulders as she rode. Every few minutes she turned around and waved to the cowboy who still remained behind, shouting to him: “Muchacho! You're not lost yet?”

Presently the river was divided into two separate beds by a large island which loomed ahead of them, its upper reaches a solid wall of branches and vines. At the foot of the giant trees among some gray boulders was a score or so of cows, looking very small indeed as they lay hunched up in the mud or ambled about seeking the thickest shade. Don Federico galloped ahead suddenly and conferred loudly with the other vaqueros. Almost simultaneously Chalía drew in her reins and brought her horse to a halt. The boy was quickly abreast of her. As he came up she called to him: “It's hot, isn't it?”