CHAPTER XLI

 

December 1933

 

At Colon they drove in a cab, at evening, along an esplanade.  Whitish, like a vast fish's eye, the sea lay as though dead.  Against a picture postcard of sunset the immoderately tall thin palms were the emblems of a resigned hopelessness, and in the nostrils the hot air was like a vapour of wool.  They swam for a little in the warm fish-eye, then returned through the deepening night to the town.

      For the rich there were, after dinner, cabaret shows with expensive drinks and genuinely white prostitutes at ten dollars.  For the poor, in the back streets, the mulatto women sat at doors that opened directly on to lighted bedrooms.

      'If one were really conscientious,' said Anthony, as they walked back late that night to the hotel, 'I suppose one would have to go and infect oneself with syphilis.'

      The smell of sweat, the smell of alcohol, the smells of sewage and decay and cheap perfumes; then, next morning, the Canal, the great locks, the ship climbing up from one ocean and down again to the other.  A more than human achievement that made it possible, Mark explained, smiling anatomically, to transport whores and whisky by water instead of overland from Colon to Panama.

      Their ship headed northwards.  Once every couple of days they would call at a little port to pick up cargo.  From among the bananas, at San José, a spider, large as a fist and woolly, made its way into their cabin.  Off Champerico, where the lighters came out loaded with bags of coffee, an Indian fell into the sea and was drowned.

      At night, it was not the ship that seemed to move, but the stars.  They mounted slowly, slantwise, hung at the top of their trajectory, then swooped downwards, travelled tentatively to the right and back to the left, then, beginning all over again, mounted once more towards the zenith.

      'Rather sickening,' was Anthony's verdict, 'but beautiful.'

      An improvement on the ordinary celestial mechanics.  One could lie there and look at them indefinitely.

      There was a note of grim satisfaction in Staithes's voice as he replied that in two days time they would be at Puerto San Felipe.

      Puerto San Felipe was a village of huts, with some wooden sheds, near the water, for storing coffee.  Don Jorge's agent at the port helped them through the customs.  A pure Spaniard, half-dead with tropical diseases, but still elaborately courteous.  'My house is yours,' he assured them, as they climbed the steep path towards his bungalow, 'my house is yours.'

      Orchids hung from the veranda, and, among them, cages full of incessantly screaming green parakeets.

      An emaciated woman, prematurely old and tired, hopelessly tired, beyond the limit of her strength, came shuffling out of the house to welcome them, to apologize in advance for her hospitality.  Puerto San Felipe was a small place, lacked commodities; and besides, she explained, the child was not well, not at all well.  Mark asked her what was the matter.  She looked at him with eyes expressionless with fatigue, and answered vaguely that it was fever; fever and a pain in the head.

      They went with her into the house, and were shown a little girl lying on a camp-bed, restlessly turning her head from side to side, as if seeking, but always vainly, some cool place on which to rest her cheek, some position in which she might find relief from pain.  The room was full of flies, and a smell of fried fish came from the kitchen.  Looking at the child, Anthony suddenly found himself remembering Helen, that day on the roof – turning and turning her head in the torture of pleasure.

      'I suppose it must be mastoid,' Mark was saying.  'Or meningitis, perhaps.'

      As he spoke, the child lifted thin arms from under the sheet and, clasping her head between her hands, began to roll still more violently from side to side, and at last broke out into a paroxysm of screaming.

      In immediate response, the noise of the parakeets on the veranda swelled up, shriek after shriek, to a deafening maximum of intensity.

      'Quiet, quiet,' the mother kept repeating, wheedlingly at first, then with a growing insistence, begging, exhorting, commanding the child to stop crying, to feel less pain.  The screaming continued, the head went on rolling from side to side.

      Tortured by pleasure, tortured by pain.  At the mercy of one's skin and mucus, at the mercy of those thin threads of nerve.

      'Quiet, quiet,' the woman repeated almost angrily.  She bent over the bed and, by main force, dragged down the child's lifted arms; then, holding the two thin wrists in one hand, laid the other on the head in an effort to hold it unmoving on the pillows.  Still screaming, the little girl struggled under the constraint.  The woman's bony hand tightened round the wrists, rested more heavily on the forehead.  If she could forcefully restrain the manifestations of pain, perhaps the pain itself would cease, perhaps the child would stop that screaming, would sit up perhaps, smiling, and be well again.

      'Quiet, quiet,' she commanded between clenched teeth.

      With a violent effort the child released her arms from the grasp of those claw-like fingers; the hands flew once more to the head.  Before the woman could snatch them away again, Mark touched her on the arm.  She looked round at him.

      'Better to leave her,' he was saying.

      Obediently she straightened herself up and walked away towards the door that gave on to the veranda.  They followed her.  There was nothing whatever that they could do.

      'Mi casa es suya.'

      Thank God, it wasn't.  The child's screams had subsided; but the frying fish, the parakeets among the orchids … Politely, Mark refused the invitation to an early luncheon.  They walked out again into the oppressive sunshine.  The mozos had loaded their baggage on to the pack-mules, and the riding animals stood in the shade of a tree, ready saddled.  They buckled on enormous spurs and mounted.

      The track round up and up from the coast, through a jungle silvery and brownish pink with drought.  Sitting bolt upright on his high-backed saddle, Mark read Timon of Athens from his pocket edition of the Tragedies.  Each time he turned a page, he gave his mule the spur; and for a few yards she would climb a little more quickly, then revert to the old, slow pace.

      In the hotel at Tapatlan, where they spent the night, Anthony was bitten for the first time in his life by bed bugs, and the next morning it was an attack of dysentery … On the fourth day he was well enough to go out and see the sights.  The last earthquake had almost wrecked the church.  A dense black fruitage of bats hung, like ripe plums, from the rafters; an Indian boy, ragged and bare-footed, was sweeping up the droppings; from the altars the baroque saints flapped and gesticulated in a frozen paroxysm of devotion.  They walked out again into the marketplace, where, secret and as though ambushed within their dark shawls, the brown Indian women squatted in the dust before little piles of fruit and withering vegetables.  The meat on the butcher's stall was covered with a crust of flies.  Rhythmically shaking their long ears the donkeys passed, on small quick hoofs, noiseless in the dust.  The women came and went in silence, carrying kerosene tins of water on their heads.  From under hat-brims, dark eyes regarded the strangers with an inscrutably reptilian glitter that seemed devoid of all curiosity, all interest, any awareness even of their presence.

      'I'm tired,' Anthony announced.  They had not walked very far; but at Tapatlan, it was an immense fatigue even to be living and conscious.  'When I die,' he went on after a silence, 'this is the part of hell I shall be sent to.  I recognize it instantly.'

      The bar of the hotel was in a dim crypt-like room with a vaulted ceiling supported at the centre by a pier of masonry, inordinately thick for its height, to resist the earthquake shocks.  'The Saxon ossuary,' Mark called it; and here, while he went to their room to fetch a handkerchief, he left Anthony installed in a cane chair.

      Propped against the bar, a smartly dressed young Mexican in riding-breeches and an enormous felt hat was boasting to the proprietress about the alligators he had shot in the swamps at the mouth of the Coppalita, of his firmness in dealing with the Indians who had come to pick the coffee on his estate, of the money he expected to make when he sold his crop.

      'A bit tight,' Anthony reflected, listening and looking on from his chair; and was enjoying the performance, when the young man turned, and, bowing with the grave formality of one who is so drunk that he must do everything with a conscious deliberation, asked if the foreign cavalier would take a glass of tequila with him.

      Fatigue had made Anthony's Spanish more halting than usual.  His efforts to explain that he had not been well, that it would not be good for him to drink alcohol, landed him very soon in incoherence.  The young man listened, fixing him all the time with dark eyes, bright like the Indians', but, unlike theirs, comprehensibly expressive – European eyes, in which it was possible to read and intense and passionate interest, a focused awareness.  Anthony mumbled on, and all at once those eyes took on a new and dangerous glitter; an expression of anger distorted the handsome face, the knuckles of the strong rapacious hands went white under a sudden pressure.  The young man stepped forward menacingly.

      'Usted me disprecia,' he shouted.

      His movement, the violence of his tone, startled Anthony into a kind of panic alarm.  He scrambled to his feet and, edging behind his chair, began to explain in a voice that he had meant to be calmly conciliatory, but which, in spite of all his efforts to keep it grave and steady, trembled into a breathless shrillness, that he hadn't dreamed of despising anyone, that it was merely a question of – he fumbled for the medical explanation and could find nothing better than a pain in the stomach – merely a question of un dolor en mi estómago.

      For some reason the word estómago seemed to the young man the final, most outrageous insult.  He bellowed something incomprehensible, but evidently abusive; his hand went back to his hip-pocket and, as the proprietress screamed for help, came forward again, holding a revolver.

      'Don't, don't!' Anthony cried out, without knowing what he was saying; then, with extraordinary agility, darted out of his corner to take shelter behind the massive pillar at the centre of the room.

      For a second the young man was out of sight.  But suppose he were to creep up on tiptoe.  Anthony imagined the revolver suddenly coming round the pillar into his face; or else from behind – he would feel the muzzle pressed against his back, would hear the ghastly explosion, and then … A fear so intense that it was like the most excruciating physical pain possessed him entirely; his heart beat more violently than ever, he felt as though he were going to be sick.  Overcoming terror by a greater terror, he stuck out his head to the left.  The young man was standing only two yards away, staring with a ferocious fixity at the pillar.  Anthony saw him jerk into movement, and with a despairing shout for help jumped back to the right, looked out again and jumped back to the left; then once more to the right.

      'It can't go on,' he was thinking.  'I can't do it much longer.'  The thought of that pistol coming unexpectedly round the pillar forced him to look out yet again.

      The young man moved, and he darted precipitately to the left.

      The noise of the revolver going off – that was what he dreaded most.  The horrible noise, sudden and annihilating like the noise of that other explosion years before.  His eyelids had stiffened and were irrepressibly trembling, ready to blink, in anticipation of the horrifying event.  The lashes flickered before his eyes, and it was through a kind of mist that, peeping out, he saw the door open and Mark moving swiftly across the room, Mark catching the young man by the wrist … The pistol went off; reverberated from walls and ceiling, the report was catastrophically loud.  Anthony uttered a great cry, as though he had been wounded, and, shutting his eyes, flattened himself against the pillar.  Conscious only of nausea and that pain in the genitals, those gripings of the bowels, he waited, reduced to a mere quivering embodiment  of fearful anticipation, for the next explosion.  Waited for what seemed hours.  Dim voices parleyed incomprehensibly.  Then a touch on his shoulder made him start.  He shouted, 'No, don't,' and lifting eyelids that still twitched with the desire to blink, saw Mark Staithes, demonstrating muscle by muscle a smile of friendly amusement.

      'All clear,' he said, 'you can come out.'

      Feeling profoundly ashamed and humiliated, Anthony followed him into the open.  The young Mexican was at the bar again and already drinking.  As they approached, he turned and with outstretched arms came to meet them.  'Hombre,' he said to Anthony, as he shook him affectionately by the hand, 'hombre!'

      Anthony felt more abjectly humiliated than ever.