Passion Play (16 page)

The riders pulled up and dismounted at a shabby wooden barracks, an old trading post, now disused, that seemed to be the center of the village, serving for infrequent and vaguely official government sanitary missions.

The guides hitched the horses, releasing the saddles, as Fabian and Elena settled Francisco on blankets outside the barracks. When the guides served the sandwiches and drinks they had brought, the huddle of villagers made a silent circle around the visitors, straining to see, intent on every flicker and move.

Some of the younger, bolder men gathered in a knot to one side, assessing Elena; she flushed at their open staring and moved closer to Francisco. Others, their interest riveted on weapons, surrounded the guides, posted warily against the wall of the barracks.
Still others hovered about the horses, marveling at their sleekness, height and the intricacy of their tack.

To distract the attention of the crowd and to manifest a sense of ease and command in this strangeness, Fabian strolled leisurely around the village, a straggling cluster of watchful children in his wake.

Passing a shamble of huts, he startled a woman with a baby on her arm; before she retreated within, alarm for her own safety and that of her child broke through her impassive face. From behind a shutter, an emaciated old man smiled toothlessly. In the distance a group of young women closed in on a scampering pig, their naked breasts still shapely and firm, patches of bright cotton shielding their hips.

Fabian had reached the edge of the village, the highest point of the plateau. He felt dizzy from the sun and the altitude; the sheer drop of foliage and bush, the distant river, a muddy trough of yellow stirring, dissolving into the mossy green of land stretching as far as he could see. He checked his watch: the helicopter had been scheduled to come for them shortly. He found himself straining for the sound of its engine, but the dome of sky was silent.

He felt a twinge of anxiety. He began to realize how far inland they were, how remote from any town or village with police or a military outpost that could arrange their transportation to La Hispaniola. He returned to the barracks, where he found the crowd undiminished, still vigilant, still mute; Elena was sleeping on a blanket, Francisco’s head in her lap.

The afternoon was receding. The natives began slowly to drift away to their shanties; only a few stray children and three or four young men still prowled around. The guides dozed in a stupor, guns cradled in their laps.

Fabian sat down on a blanket and watched Elena. Her blouse, undone at the throat, revealed the whiteness of her neck and breast, a contrast with the black of her hair.

The sun began to glide toward the crest of the palm trees; the helicopter still had not come. Fabian became alarmed. He roused the others, pointing out to them that there were dozens of small settlements like the one they were in scattered throughout thousands of square miles of jungle in the Cacata region and that
the pilot might have misunderstood the directions. The guides admitted that they had tracked their path to the village only by calculating the position of the sun in relation to the river.

Fabian underscored the urgency of their situation while trying not to alarm Elena and Francisco. He pointed out that, in the casual atmosphere of Casa Bonita, their absence could easily go unnoticed for a day or two. And they had neither the stamina nor the resources to ride all the way back to La Hispaniola, a venture which would take days. He proposed that the guide who knew best the perilous way down to the river should go there, taking the horses with him so that, alternating his mounts, he could reach in a day the military post that had dispatched the truck with their horses to the place of rendezvous. Then he would notify the authorities to summon a helicopter. Surly with reluctance but afraid to disobey Fabian, the man left the village for the descent to the river.

The remaining guide began to prepare for the night. He selected the largest hut in the village and, without explanation, ordered the natives to evacuate it.

They left, a procession of men, women and children, as well as a scrambling array of dogs, cats and pigs, driven to find other shelter for the night. While the guide started a fire outside to cook a meal, Fabian removed soiled mattresses and blankets from the bunks, leaving them in the yard for the night.

In the evening stillness outside the hut, Fabian joined Elena and Francisco, watching the guide roast a small pig. From the bushes around the hut, the sudden rustle of a branch, a sneeze, a cough, laughter betrayed the presence of natives huddling and squatting, alert in their scrutiny of the visitors.

During the meal, each time Francisco reached for a piece of meat, a spasm of pain from his fall contorted his face. The guide took a share of food but kept his distance, the submachine gun always at his shoulder. Occasionally he would glance with undisguised hostility at Francisco, but toward Fabian, whom he knew to be a friend of El Benefactor, he maintained his usual servile manner.

After the meal, the guide prepared a pungent fruit punch. He passed it around in pineapple husks. The punch was exhilarating,
and Francisco, Elena and Fabian returned to it three or four times.

It was not long before Fabian, exuberant with the punch and the intimacy of the night, told the guide to distribute what remained of the roast pig to the watching natives. The man called out, and soon a swarm of figures emerged from the darkness, stopping on the other side of the fire, hands burnished by the flame as they reached greedily for the food.

Some of the natives were already boisterous with liquor; others moved into the circle of firelight, chanting and starting to dance, first as if in exhibition for their visitors, then with mounting intensity for themselves. At first the guide kept them at a distance, but when a few of the men approached him with a jug and gestured toward the visitors, indicating they wanted to return the gift of the meat with a fruit drink of their own making, he brought them over and whispered to Fabian that it would be unwise to refuse. Reluctantly, but caught up in the sensual flush, Fabian took a swig of the searing juice, then passed it on to Elena and Francisco; they drank it under the watchful eye of the villagers.

The dancing was now a rite, the fire a beacon against the sky. There were moments when Fabian felt vehemently alert to color and shape; at other moments he lapsed into a stupor of sliding sensation. Once, he looked up into the mob and thought he saw Elena de Tormes swaying in front of him, her hands at her blouse, twisting it toward her hips, taunting him to tear it off; then he felt his body weightless, empty of feeling, cut loose, floating up from the ground toward her. Still later, he saw Francisco rushing at him with a machete, one that Fabian remembered the guide had used to split the roast pig. The machete gleamed as it split the table between them, Francisco’s voice a distant scream. Fabian’s head streamed with terror and exaltation. He reeled headlong toward de Tormes, but was snared suddenly by a figure he could not make out. He felt himself being carried inside the hut and placed there next to Elena.

He dreamed that although she seemed to be sprawled on the dirt floor next to him, her blouse open, boots discarded, her riding breeches pulled down, she was really behind a glass partition,
lying next to another man; Fabian, from his exile in this hut, was linked to her by thought only, his longing as translucent as the spill of a jungle cataract.

He felt himself being lifted, a tree uprooted, borne by an undertow, a spume of greedy mouth, a spindrift of venomous white froth, without respite. Elena was no longer far away, but moving beneath him, the stream that bore his vagrant tree, her mouth on his, their tongues folding, her hands prompting him to take her. He rose, leaning over her, taking her; then with her astride him, he took her again.

What he remembered at the last was a multitude of heads, nests and hives of faces he did not know, hovering over him, over Elena, intent on the two of them at love, as if witnessing the combat of insects locked in deadly embrace on the mud floor of the hut.

Fabian awoke slowly, pain splitting his temples, piercing his eyeballs, his joints stiff. In panic, he looked around.

He was lying on a bunk, daylight glinting through the thatched ceiling of grass above him, his naked body covered with a rough blanket, his clothes on the floor. Near him lay Elena, still asleep, covered with a blanket. In the farthest corner of the hut, masked by shadow, he saw Francisco slumped on the floor.

Fabian got up, stumbling as the bunk seemed to buckle under him and the roof skim low over his head. Shaking, he dressed himself and made his way out into the scalding sun.

A group of natives, gesturing with animation, stood around the guide. At the sight of Fabian, they fell silent and broke ranks; like a soldier on guard, the guide greeted him with a salute.

A patch of barren clay opened before Fabian. At its center, he saw a spider, black-bodied, as large as his two hands with fingers outthrust, its hairy legs motionless, the gray belly mashed. The spider was dead, but so real in its poised menace that Fabian stepped back involuntarily.

“This is the one which killed Señor de Tormes,” the guide said.

In his stupor and revulsion Fabian assumed it was Francisco who had killed the spider, but the expression on the guide’s face alarmed him.

“Who killed what?” he asked.

“A true tarantula,” the guide said, nudging the spider with the tip of his boot. “It bit Señor de Tormes when he went out and lay down on the ground. Señora Elena, when she found out he was dead, drank a whole bottle of this”—he gestured toward what was left of the natives’ punch—“so she wouldn’t feel the pain.”

Retching as the acid liquid volleyed out of his throat, Fabian staggered back from the spider and ran into the hut.

Francisco’s body was still huddled in the dark corner. Gliding with horror, Fabian knelt by the dead man and raised the blanket that shrouded him, trying to prop up the slipping shoulders, the head that bobbed to one side. He laid one hand along the dead man’s cheek. Francisco’s face was white, the sunburned glow of the day before already erased, the eyes open, fixed somewhere beyond Fabian, one eyebrow raised, the mouth slightly agape as if in an expression of wonder.

Fabian covered the body and crossed over to Elena. In her sleep she was serene. He stroked her hand; she did not respond.

Outside, he ordered the guide to store the dead tarantula for the police and to take down the names of the natives who, by the guide’s account, had witnessed the night’s events. Then, on an impulse, Fabian drew the guide to one side, away from the villagers.

“Where were you when the tarantula bit Señor de Tormes?” he asked.

The guide hesitated. “I was—I was guarding you in the hut,” he said. “I helped to undress you and keep you down, Señor Fabian. You were—you were sleepy from the drink,” he blurted out. “Then I stayed with you so Señor de Tormes would not come at you again.”

Fabian avoided his eyes. “I don’t remember anything,” he said brusquely. “Why would Señor de Tormes want to hurt me?”

The guide smiled knowingly. “He was drunk, Señor Fabian, and he was jealous when he saw you touch his wife. He grabbed my machete and wanted to kill you.”

Unable to challenge the man’s account, Fabian shifted his inquiry. “Who was the first to see Señor de Tormes dead?” he asked.

“I was,” the guard replied. “I also told Señora Elena what happened.” He lowered his voice. “Señora Elena started to scream. She said things she shouldn’t say, ugly things.”

“What did she say?” Fabian asked.

The guide moved closer, until he was almost at Fabian’s ear. “She said that someone might have put this tarantula under Señor de Tormes.”

“But who would want to do that?” Fabian persisted.

The guide nodded in confirmation. “That’s what I asked her. But she was drunk and kept saying that it might be”—he was whispering now—“El Benefactor himself who was responsible.” He looked toward the hut sullenly. “She also accused me of it—of putting this tarantula under Señor de Tormes.”

“Why you?”

“Because I work for El Benefactor. But you, Señor Fabian, you know that I couldn’t do it.” The guide was stressing each word, carving it as though with a machete. “You know best of all, because you must remember that I was with you, guarding you all the time. All the time,” he repeated.

The roar of an approaching helicopter rushed in on them. The craft came in low over the trees and quivered to a halt in a storm of dust. Natives started to spill out of huts and bushes, running toward it, shouting with fascination and fear. The pilot stepped out, saw Fabian and explained tersely that he had had mechanical trouble the day before and had been unable to come for them after dark. He then joined Fabian and the guide in rounding up enough of the natives to carry the body of de Tormes and the sleeping Elena into the cabin.

During the short flight to Casa Bonita, Elena did not wake up. Fabian got out, and the helicopter with Elena and the guide accompanying Francisco’s body continued on to the capital.

At Casa Bonita, Fabian went directly to Falsalfa’s quarters. He impressed the secretary with the urgency of his visit and was promptly ushered into the library, where he found Falsalfa in a hammock.

“I know about the accident. The pilot radioed us from Cacata,” Falsalfa announced calmly. “What a sad case,” he added, “de Tormes at the peak of his career, a young wife—all to end with
the bite of a tarantula.” He continued to sway in the hammock.

“De Tormes was murdered, Your Excellency,” Fabian said evenly. “A tarantula big enough to catch a chicken is not found in Cacata. It was the assassin’s best weapon.”

“If there was an assassin, my dear Fabian, then it had to be you,” Falsalfa said with emphasis.

“Why me?” Fabian asked boldly.

Falsalfa had stopped swaying, but the smile remained. “You were the only one with a motive to kill him—Elena.”

“That’s an ugly conjecture, Your Excellency,” Fabian replied.

“That’s an ugly crime.” Falsalfa spoke with patience. “There are witnesses: practically the whole village saw you and Elena thrashing around on the floor, right under their eyes—and under the eyes of her drunken husband.”