Passion Play (15 page)

At Fabian’s proposal, de Tormes made a gesture of dissent. “In my work, I don’t have much chance to practice riding, and as a student, neither does Elena,” he said deferentially. “We might only be a burden, Mr. Fabian.”

Fabian, sensing his apprehension, was about to propose another diversion, when Falsalfa curbed him with a smile.

“Come, now. It’s a splendid idea,” Falsalfa said. “What a pity that I can’t join you.” He turned his eyes on de Tormes, a veiled displeasure behind his joviality. “But is our famous de Tormes still interested in the primitive villages of his own country, which he is about to abandon for the big-town comforts of the United States?” Falsalfa’s bitterness toward political fugitives from Los Lemures who opposed him from the safety of the United States was notorious, and de Tormes flushed at the public chiding.

Elena de Tormes broke in apprehensively, her fan slicing the air. “Please remember, Excellency, we will only be visiting the United States for a year. It is my first journey abroad, the honeymoon trip Francisco promised me.”

“I won’t forget, my dear, I won’t forget,” Falsalfa assured her, his manner softening. When his glance returned to de Tormes, he was again the essence of suavity and charm. “It’s settled, then,” he announced decisively, “but surely, de Tormes, you and your delightful wife must see Cacata before you go.” He turned to Fabian. “Order the best horses dispatched, at once. My helicopter will be at your disposal early tomorrow.” Falsalfa closed the incident with a lordly gesture, dismissing de Tormes and his wife, reaching out again to clasp Fabian’s shoulder. “Meanwhile, we have our polo to plan for,” he announced so expansively he could not fail to be heard. “Let us retreat to the library,” he concluded, guiding Fabian firmly through the dividing crowd.

Trailed by bodyguards, Falsalfa pulled Fabian toward him with an air of mischievous conspiracy.

“Aren’t you even going to thank me for what I have done for you?” he whispered in his thick English.

“For what you have done, Excellency?” Fabian stammered. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

Falsalfa stopped and pinched him gently on the cheek. “I am
old enough to be your father, Fabian. You have no secrets from me.” He quivered with laughter. “I saw you exchanging glances with the pretty wife of that sly fox de Tormes.” Falsalfa chuckled with amorous speculation.

“I met Señora de Tormes for the first time at dinner tonight,” Fabian protested. “I can assure you, Excellency, there hasn’t been anything between us.”

“Don’t say anything yet, Fabian,” Falsalfa interrupted, suddenly sober. “I have no right to pry into your feelings.” The amiability returned. “In any case,” he continued, “I’m glad you’ll be on this trip with a woman you want. Let’s hope you’ll find a moment to be alone with her in Cacata.”

Fabian attempted to disengage himself from Falsalfa’s romantic illusion. “But Señor de Tormes is going with us, Excellency,” he began. “And I don’t hope, I wasn’t really planning—” Falsalfa’s eruption of laughter made him break off in embarrassment. They had arrived at the door of the library.

“Have a good trip, Fabian,” Falsalfa said indulgently. “And when you make love to Elena in the jungle, watch out for our famous tarantulas—otherwise de Tormes might find one for you.” The gusty insinuation of his laughter dissolved into the library, followed by the mute parade of Falsalfa’s bodyguards gliding past Fabian. He was left before a closed door.

Fabian made the preparations for the trip as Falsalfa had ordered. He was told that horses had been dispatched by an army horse van to the place he had selected for the departure point, along with two guides whose services he had often made use of on other trips to the interior. His plan was to accompany the de Tormeses on the helicopter from Casa Bonita and to rendezvous with the guides and the horses at the site agreed upon. Two to three hours of steady horseback travel would be required to reach one of the oldest and most isolated settlements perching high above the river’s rocky bank. They would have a picnic lunch there, and a helicopter would come for them in time to return to Casa Bonita for late afternoon tea.

On the following day, Fabian was up at dawn, the sun still a hazy dazzle on the glassy surface of the sea.

He and the couple met for breakfast on one of the villa’s small
terraces, the motionless air and limpid sky heralding a day of tropical heat. Elena de Tormes, in the sturdy twill and khaki the trip called for, was radiant with anticipation. Her husband, dressed, like Fabian, in heavy boots, double-padded cotton breeches worn under chaps, and the thick, soft shirt he would need for protection against jungle insects, might have been a prosperous Latin landowner setting out to inspect his cattle.

At breakfast, Fabian showed Francisco de Tormes a map of the terrain they would be covering, pointing out the route the helicopter would take to the outpost at which the horses awaited them, then the small Indian settlement deep in the jungle that was Fabian’s goal for their excursion.

A powerful clatter of sound from a military helicopter descending on an adjacent stretch of grass broke the morning calm. The standard it bore identified it as the helicopter reserved for Falsalfa’s private use. The pilot, an air force captain Fabian had not previously met, wore the special insignia of the palace brigade, the crack troops Falsalfa maintained solely to guard his person.

Fabian and the couple boarded quickly, and the helicopter rose in a sweeping arc, the guards at the gates waving it on cheerfully, the deep brick colors of Casa Bonita, its terraces and roofs, dropping away beneath them.

Soon the brilliant patchwork of villas and hotels of La Hispaniola yielded to endless stretches of thickly massed fields of sugar cane, slashed symmetrically by access routes and the single-line railroad that connected the fields with the sugar mill. On rude dirt paths leading to the railroad, they saw huge carts of sugar cane moving slowly behind six or eight oxen, but even these glimpses of life gradually ceased.

The helicopter tracked the jungle, dense with greenery, studded with explosions of rock erupting from the bristling green mat. It hovered low over a river, where alligators idled on a sandy bar, then it skimmed a clearing in the brush, tawny with sun, where a herd of wild goats scampered at the roar of the machine, and a startled boar staggered from its haunt in the bush, angry with menace, then vanished into the thicket. Soon the machine prepared to descend on a pad of red clay that jutted out from the end of a strip of dirt path slicing through the
wilderness. Fabian saw horses and the shapes of the guides waiting below. The helicopter quivered to a halt. The pilot verified the exact location and the precise time at which the helicopter was to arrive at the Indian settlement to collect passengers for the trip back, then, touching his cap in salute, shook hands with Fabian. As Fabian led Elena and Francisco onto the patch of brick earth, the helicopter took off, a shower of clay and dust veiling it from their sight.

Fabian expected to find the two guides he had requested. Now he was startled to be faced by two men new to him, each squat, with thick, wiry hair, a sheathed machete at his waist, and a submachine gun over his shoulder.

One of the guides explained that they needed their guns for protection when, at the close of the excursion, after the helicopter collected Fabian and his guests from the Indian settlement to return them to Casa Bonita, the two of them would have to ride back through the jungle, with valuable horses in their keeping.

The guides moved about briskly, adjusting stirrup leathers and tightening girth straps, as Fabian inspected the horses and the tack, as well as the provisions in each saddlebag—the food that had been prepared for their picnic lunch and medical packs for an emergency.

Mounted on the waiting horses, the group started into the jungle, one guide at the head of the column, Elena behind, Fabian trailing Francisco, and the second guide bringing up the rear.

After two hours at a fast, steady pace, they veered onto a narrow path high along the banks of the Yuma. The trail had ended. The river here was at its widest, in full flood, swarms of wild birds nesting in the marshes, indifferent to the passing cavalcade.

With only the sinewy back of Francisco shielding him from a glimpse of Elena, Fabian was brought back to Falsalfa’s jovially insistent insinuations about the columnist’s wife. He was aware that, even though he did not intend to pursue her in any way, he was drawn to her nonetheless, and the source of that attraction was the visible force of the devotion she exhibited toward her husband.

Peering around Francisco, Fabian continued to watch Elena,
in splinters and shafts of movement, now swaying lightly in the saddle, her hair caught briefly by the occasional sun, one hand slack on the reins, the contour of a hip.

The heat lulling about them, in fantasy he saw Elena de Tormes as one of the models in the adult sex entertainment centers commonly found in any large city. There would be booths, a girl to each booth, a booth to a customer, a man and a woman isolated on either side of a transparent glass partition that was immovable, and over the glass, a curtain that automatically rose for a brief interval each time the customer dropped a coin into a slot on the wall of the booth. The coin also set in motion a system, a grille of sound, through which the customer could ask the girl, in the safety of their separation from each other, to perform a suggestive act, or he might ask that she initiate one. To keep the customer aroused, and the curtain up, and to sustain the current of coins, the girl would resort to various forms of provocative undress, posing, prompting him with language aimed at arousing him even more.

In the booth containing the man and the woman, separated by the impregnable glass—the sight of each other and the exchange of their voices, the sole language of their contract—the woman, perhaps naked, might press her breasts against the cold surface, her nipples flattening, her flesh leaving a steamy blot, her tongue trailing a thread of moisture. The man, inflamed by her, by her voice and words, at the mercy of his own need, would continue to drop the coins, his passion congealing, locked away from the flame that had ignited it and from the source of release that summoned it.

On this trackless path, the jungle their booth, Elena’s marriage and her husband the partition, the reverie flowed over Fabian. He imagined how it might have been had he met her in the city, in the anonymity of a booth, Elena on one side of the glass, he on the other, two strangers trapped in their silent contemplation of each other. What would he tell her to do or ask of her, what might he want her to say to him, ask him to do? What would he tell her about himself, about her? Would he be coarse and carnal with her to the brink of abasement, and would he enjoy the spectacle of a charming, sensitive woman incited, driven to language
and action so lewd that they seemed to violate the mouth and body that offered them? Would the presence of that glass partition urge him to excess or restraint?

The trees, motionless about them, were no longer a shelter from the jungle heat. The narrow path rose, twisting through hills of rock and clay; the horses, hesitant and unsure, pawed the stones, shying at the tangle of weeds and vines, slipping, threatening to fall.

Fabian realized that the horses, though Casa Bonita’s choicest, unsurpassed on the flat and open planes of the polo field or the predictable vistas of the stable grounds, were baffled at the unusually precipitous terrain on which they found themselves. Yet he was anxious to reach the settlement at Cacata before the blaze of noon, and he had said as much to the forward guide, who was prodding his own horse to a swifter ascent. It soon became apparent that Elena, though uncomfortable on a horse and apprehensive at the hazards of the climb, was still in command of her mount, while Francisco was tiring rapidly, his legs dangling, his horse not properly mastered, bucking, fighting the bit in defiance. By now, the excursion had become an ordeal, the jungle closing about them like a tunnel, the staircase of rock they were ascending jagged and lacerating, shelves of stone notched and gouged by time like petrified lava.

Looking for a shelter where they could dismount and rest, Fabian was scanning the foliage when a loud tumult erupted at the head of the column. The guide’s horse had lost its footing, its hind legs foundering, veering to one side, as the man, reins still in hand, jumped clear, at an angle, stumbling into the bush, his curses invading the heat.

The other horses panicked and dodged on the narrow precipice, rearing in desperation at the treacherous ground they could no longer trust. Fabian and Elena managed to remain in the saddle, hauling their mounts to steadiness, but Francisco, weakened by the punishing trail and the jungle heat, toppled out of his saddle, onto the sheer face of rock at their right, rolling onto the sharp knuckles of stone clawing at his shirt, gashing his arm. In fright, his horse heaved back into the brush, then, stung by the bristling foliage, charged forward, splaying out on the rocks. Fabian managed
to catch its reins, noticing as he struggled to restrain the frantic animal that the fall had ripped a patch of skin from its hip.

The mishap forced them to stop directly in the path, the horses sidling and bucking about them. Elena and Fabian bandaged Francisco’s wound, then, even though the journalist was shaken and tired, his clothes drenched with sweat, they were compelled to continue the climb. Without a place for them to bivouac, the laborious ascent continued for another two hours—an hour more than Fabian had thought it would take—before they broke out into the spaciousness of the plateau; they took the last stretch toward Cacata in a loping canter.

The region of Cacata was a wedge, a peninsula of level land carved out of the jungle, a wooded, dry shoal jutting thousands of feet above the river that snaked through the valley at its base. As the party approached one of the first settlements, the stir of the horses echoing in the silent lassitude of midday, hutches and shanties of clapboard opened on both sides of the road, and a pack of mangy dogs shot out to herald their arrival. The rutted, dusty strip widened before them as they made their way through the village, a swarm of children, naked and barefoot, abandoning the shelter of palm trees, joining the dogs in a squalling welcome. The village was routed from its siesta, as men and women of every age appeared in the shadow of the hutches, some naked or with only a knot of cloth around their bodies, a few crawling, a stray pig or goat nosing about the fringes of the commotion.