The Delicate Prey (6 page)

“No, Nicolás. No. No.”

Nicolás pushed his daughter forward and stepped back several paces, leaving her there by the table. “It is done,” he said sternly. “She is your wife. I have given her to you.”

Pastor Dowe looked out over the assembly and saw the unspoken approval in all the faces. “Crazy Rhythm” ceased to play. There was silence. Under the mango tree he saw a woman toying with a small, shiny object. Suddenly he recognized his glasses case; the woman was stripping the leatheroid fabric from it. The bare aluminum with its dents flashed in the sun. For some reason even in the middle of this situation he found himself thinking: “So I was wrong. It is not dead. She will keep it, the way Nicolás has kept the quinine tablets.”

He looked down at Marta. The child was staring at him quite without expression. Like a cat, he reflected.

Again he began to protest. “Nicolás,” he cried, his voice very high, “this is impossible!” He felt a hand grip his arm, and turned to receive a warning glance from Mateo.

Nicolás had already advanced toward the pavilion, his face like a thundercloud. As he seemed about to speak, the pastor interrupted him quickly. He had decided to temporize. “She may stay at the mission today,” he said weakly.

“She is your wife,” said Nicolás with great feeling. “You cannot send her away. You must keep her.”

“Diga que sí,”
Mateo was whispering. “Say yes, señor.”

“Yes,” the pastor heard himself saying. “Yes. Good.” He got up and walked slowly into the house, holding the alligator with one hand and pushing Marta in front of him with the other. Mateo followed and closed the door after them.

“Take her into the kitchen, Mateo,” said the pastor dully, handing the little reptile to Marta. As Mateo went across the patio leading the child by the hand, he called after him. “Leave her with Quintina and come to my room.”

He sat down on the edge of his bed, staring ahead of him with unseeing eyes. At each moment his predicament seemed to him more terrible. Wit h relief he heard Mateo knock. The people outdoors were slowly leaving. It cost him an effort to call out,
“Adelante.”
When Mateo had come in, the pastor said, “Close the door.”

“Mateo, did you know they were going to do this? That they were going to bring that child here?”

“Sí, señor.”

“You knew it! But why didn't you say anything? Why didn't you tell me?”

Mateo shrugged his shoulders, looking at the floor. “I didn't know it would matter to you,” he said. “Anyway, it would have been useless.”

“Useless? Why? You could have stopped Nicolás,” said the pastor, although he did not believe it himself.

Mateo laughed shortly. “You think so?”

“Mateo, you must help me. We must oblige Nicolas to take her back.”

Mateo shook his head. “It can't be done. These people are very severe. They never change their laws.”

“Perhaps a letter to the administrator at Ocosingo . . .”

“No, señor. That would make still more trouble. You are not a Catholic.” Mateo shifted on his feet and suddenly smiled thinly. “Why not let her stay? She doesn't eat much. She can work in the kitchen. In two years she will be very pretty.”

The pastor jumped, and made such a wide and vehement gesture with his hands that the mosquito netting, looped above his head, fell down about his face. Mateo helped him disentangle himself. The air smelled of dust from the netting.

“You don't understand anything!” shouted Pastor Dowe, beside himself. “I can't talk to you! I don't want to talk to you! Go out and leave me alone.” Mateo obediently left the room.

Pounding his left palm with his right fist, over and over again, the pastor stood in his window before the landscape that shone in the strong sun. A few women were still eating under the mango tree; the rest had gone back down the hill.

He lay on his bed throughout the long afternoon. When twilight came he had made his decision. Locking his door, he proceeded to pack what personal effects he could into his smallest suitcase. His Bible and notebooks went on top with his toothbrush and atabrine tablets. When Quintina came to announce supper he asked to have it brought to his bed, taking care to slip the packed valise into the closet before he unlocked the door for her to enter. He waited until the talking had ceased all over the house, until he knew everyone was asleep. Wit h the small bag not too heavy in one hand he tiptoed into the patio, out through the door into the fragrant night, across the open space in front of the pavilion, under the mango tree and down the path leading to Tacaté. Then he began to walk fast, because he wanted to get through the village before the moon rose.

There was a chorus of dogs barking as he entered the village street. He began to run, straight through to the other end. And he kept running even then, until he had reached the point where the path, wider here, dipped beneath the hill and curved into the forest. His heart was beating rapidly from the exertion. To rest, and to try to be fairly certain he was not being followed, he sat down on his little valise in the center of the path. There he remained a long time, thinking of nothing, while the night went on and the moon came up. He heard only the light wind among the leaves and vines. Overhead a few bats reeled soundlessly back and forth. At last he took a deep breath, got up, and went on.

Call at Corazón

“But why would you want a little horror like that to go along with us? It doesn't make sense. You know what they're like.”

“I know what they're like,” said her husband. “It's comforting to watch them. Whatever happens, if I had that to look at, I'd be reminded of how stupid I was ever to get upset.”

He leaned further over the railing and looked intently down at the dock. There were baskets for sale, crude painted toys of hard natural rubber, reptile-hide wallets and belts, and a few whole snakeskins unrolled. And placed apart from these wares, out of the hot sunlight, in the shadow of a crate, sat a tiny, furry monkey. The hands were folded, and the forehead was wrinkled in sad apprehensiveness.

“Isn't he wonderful?”

“I think you're impossible—and a little insulting,” she replied.

He turned to look at her. “Are you serious?” He saw that she was.

She went on, studying her sandaled feet and the narrow deck-boards beneath them: “You know I don't really mind all this nonsense, or your craziness. Just let me finish.” He nodded his head in agreement, looking back at the hot dock and the wretched tin-roofed village beyond. “It goes without saying I don't mind all that, or we wouldn't be here together. You might be here alone . .

“You don't take a honeymoon alone,” he interrupted.

“You
might.” She laughed shortly.

He reached along the rail for her hand, but she pulled it away, saying, “I'm still talking to you. I expect you to be crazy, and I expect to give in to you all along. I'm crazy too, I know. But I wish there were some way I could just once feel that my giving in meant anything to you. I wish you knew how to be gracious about it.”

“You think you humor me so much? I haven't noticed it.” His voice was sullen.

“I don't
humor
you at all. I'm just trying to live with you on an extended trip in a lot of cramped little cabins on an endless series of stinking boats.”

“What do you mean?” he cried excitedly. “You've always said you loved the boats. Have you changed your mind, or just lost it completely?”

She turned and walked toward the prow. “Don't talk to me,” she said. “Go and buy your monkey.”

An expression of solicitousness on his face, he was following her. “You know I won't buy it if it's going to make you miserable.”

“I'll be more miserable if you don't, so please go and buy it.” She stopped and turned. “I'd love to have it. I really would. I think it's sweet.”

“I don't get you at all.”

She smiled. “I know. Does it bother you very much?”

After he had bought the monkey and tied it to the metal post of the bunk in the cabin, he took a walk to explore the port. It was a town made of corrugated tin and barbed wire. The sun's heat was painful, even with the sky's low-lying cover of fog. It was the middle of the day and few people were in the streets. He came to the edge of the town almost immediately. Here between him and the forest lay a narrow, slow-moving stream, its water the color of black coffee. A few women were washing clothes; small children splashed. Gigantic gray crabs scuttled between the holes they had made in the mud along the bank. He sat down on some elaborately twisted roots at the foot of a tree and took out the notebook he always carried with him. The day before, in a bar at Pedernales, he had written: “Recipe for dissolving the impression of hideousness made by a thing: Fix the attention upon the given object or situation so that the various elements, all familiar, will regroup themselves. Frightfulness is never more than an unfamiliar pattern.”

He lit a cigarette and watched the women's hopeless attempts to launder the ragged garments. Then he threw the burning stub at the nearest crab, and carefully wrote: “More than anything else, woman requires strict ritualistic observance of the traditions of sexual behavior. That is her definition of love.” He thought of the derision that would be called forth should he make such a statement to the girl back on the ship. After looking at his watch, he wrote hurriedly: “Modem, that is, intellectual education, having been devised by males for males, inhibits and confuses her. She avenges . . .”

Two naked children, coming up from their play in the river, ran screaming past him, scattering drops of water over the paper. He called out to them, but they continued their chase without noticing him. He put his pencil and notebook into his pocket, smiling, and watched them patter after one another through the dust.

When he arrived back at the ship, the thunder was rolling down from the mountains around the harbor. The storm reached the height of its hysteria just as they got under way.

She was sitting on her bunk, looking through the open port-hole. The shrill crashes of thunder echoed from one side of the bay to the other as they steamed toward the open sea. He lay doubled up on his bunk opposite, reading.

“Don't lean your head against that metal wall,” he advised. “It's a perfect conductor.”

She jumped down to the floor and went to the washstand,

“Where are those two quarts of Whit e Horse we got yesterday?”

He gestured. “In the rack on your side. Ate you going to drink?”

“I'm going to
have
a drink, yes.”

“In this heat? Why don't you wait until it clears, and have it on deck?”

“I want it now. When it clears I won't need it.”

She poured the whisky and added water from the carafe in the wall bracket over the washbowl.

“You realize what you're doing, of course.”

She glared at him. “What am I doing?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Nothing, except just giving in to a passing emotional state. You could read, or lie down and doze.”

Holding her glass in one hand, she pulled
open the
door into the passageway with the other, and went out. The noise of the slamming door startled the monkey, perched on a suitcase. It hesitated a second, and hurried under its master's bunk. He made a few kissing sounds to entice it out, and returned to his book. Soon he began to imagine her alone and unhappy on the deck, and the thought cut into the pleasure of his reading. He forced himself to lie still a few minutes, the open book face down across his chest. The boat was moving at full speed now, and the sound of the motors was louder than the storm in the sky.

Soon he rose and went on deck. The land behind was already hidden by the falling rain, and the air smelled of deep water. She was standing alone by the rail, looking down at the waves, with the empty glass in her hand. Pity seized him as he watched, but he could not walk across to her and put into consoling words the emotion he felt.

Back in the cabin he found the monkey on his bunk, slowly tearing the pages from the book he had been reading.

The next day was spent in leisurely preparation for disembarking and changing of boats: in Villalta they were to take a smaller vessel to the opposite side of the delta.

When she came in to pack after dinner, she stood a moment studying the cabin. “He's messed it up, all right,” said her husband, “but I found your necklace behind my big valise, and we'd read all the magazines anyway.”

“I suppose this represents Man's innate urge to destroy,” she said, kicking a ball of crumpled paper across the floor. “And the next time he tries to bite you, it'll be Man's basic insecurity.”

“You don't know what a bore you are when you try to be caustic. If you want me to get rid of him, I will. It's easy enough.”

She bent to touch the animal, but it backed uneasily under the bunk. She stood up. “I don't mind him. What I mind is you.
He
can't help being a little horror, but he keeps reminding me that you could if you wanted.”

Her husband's face assumed the impassivity that was characteristic of him when he was determined not to lose his temper. She knew he would wait to be angry until she was unprepared for his attack. He said nothing, tapping an insistent rhythm on the lid of a suitcase with his fingernails.

“Naturally I don't really mean you're a horror,” she continued.

“Why not mean it?” he said, smiling pleasantly. “What's wrong with criticism? Probably I am, to you. I like monkeys because I see them as little model men. You think men are something else, something spiritual or God knows what. Whatever it is, I notice you're the one who's always being disillusioned and going around wondering how mankind can be so bestial. I think mankind is fine.”

“Please don't go on,” she said. “I know your theories. You'll never convince yourself of them.”

When they had finished packing, they went to bed. As he snapped off the light behind his pillow, he said, “Tell me honestly. Do you want me to give him to the steward?”

She kicked off her sheet in the dark. Through the porthole, near the horizon, she could see stars, and the calm sea slipped by just below her. Without thinking she said, “Why don't you drop him overboard?”

In the silence that followed she realized she had spoken carelessly, but the tepid breeze moving with languor over her body was making it increasingly difficult for her to think or speak. As she fell asleep it seemed to her she heard her husband saying slowly, “I believe you would. I believe you would.”

The next morning she slept late, and when she went up for breakfast her husband had already finished his and was leaning back, smoking.

“How are you?” he asked brightly. “The cabin steward's delighted with the monkey.”

She felt a flush of pleasure. “Oh,” she said, sitting down, “did you give it to him? You didn't have to do that.” She glanced at the menu; it was the same as every other day. “But I suppose really it's better. A monkey doesn't go with a honeymoon.”

“I think you're right,” he agreed.

Villalta was stifling and dusty. On the other boat they had grown accustomed to having very few passengers around, and it was an unpleasant surprise to find the new one swarming with people. Their new boat was a two-decked ferry painted white, with an enormous paddle wheel at the stern. On the lower deck, which rested not more than two feet above the surface of the river, passengers and freight stood ready to travel, packed together indiscriminately. The upper deck had a salon and a dozen or so narrow staterooms. In the salon the first-class passengers undid their bundles of pillows and opened their paper bags of food. The orange light of the setting sun flooded the room.

They looked into several of the staterooms.

“They all seem to be empty,” she said.

“I can see why. Still, the privacy would be a help.”

“This one's double. And it has a screen in the window. This is the best one.”

“I'll look for a steward or somebody. Go on in and take over.” He pushed the bags out of the passageway where the
cargador
had left them, and went off in search of an employee. In every corner of the boat the people seemed to be multiplying. There were twice as many as there had been a few moments before. The salon was completely full, its floor space occupied by groups of travelers with small children and elderly women, who were already stretched out on blankets and newspapers.

“It looks like Salvation Army headquarters the night after a major disaster,” he said as he came back into the stateroom. “I can't find anybody. Anyway, we'd better stay in here. The other cubicles are beginning to fill up.”

“I'm not so sure I wouldn't rather be on deck,” she announced. “There are hundreds of cockroaches.”

“And probably worse,” he added, looking at the bunks.

“The thing to do is take those filthy sheets off and just lie on the mattresses.” She peered out into the corridor. Sweat was trickling down her neck. “Do you think it's safe?”

“What do you mean?”

“All those people. This old tub.”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“It's just one night. Tomorrow we'll be at Cienaga. And it's almost night now.”

She shut the door and leaned against it, smiling faintly.

“I think it's going to be fun,” she said.

“The boat's moving!” he cried. “Let's go on deck. If we can get out there.”

Slowly the old boat pushed across the bay toward the dark east shore. People were singing and playing guitars. On the bottom deck a cow lowed continuously. And louder than all the sounds was the rush of water made by the huge paddles.

They sat on the deck in the middle of a vociferous crowd, leaning against the bars of the railing, and watched the moon rise above the mangrove swamps ahead. As they approached the opposite side of the bay, it looked as if the boat might plow straight into the shore, but a narrow waterway presently appeared, and the boat slipped cautiously in. The people immediately moved back from the railing, crowding against the opposite wall. Branches from the trees on the bank began to rub against the boat, scraping along the side walls of the cabins, and then whipping violently across the deck.

They pushed their way through the throng and walked across the salon to the deck on the other side of the boat; the same thing was happening there.

“It's crazy,” she declared. “It's like a nightmare. Whoever heard of going through a channel no wider than the boat! It makes me nervous. I'm going in and read.”

Her husband let go of her arm. “You can never enter into the spirit of a thing, can you?”

“You tell me what the spirit is, and I'll see about entering into it,” she said, turning away.

He followed her. “Don't you want to go down onto the lower deck? They seem to be going strong down there. Listen.” He held up his hand. Repeated screams of laughter came up from below.

“I certainly don't!” she called, without looking around.

He went below. Groups of men were seated on bulging burlap sacks and wooden crates, matching coins. The women stood behind them, puffing on black cigarettes and shrieking with excitement. He watched them closely, reflecting that with fewer teeth missing they would be a handsome people. “Mineral deficiency in the soil,” he commented to himself.