Rubicon Beach (16 page)

They never saw her face. Not the Crowd, for a moment not the sailor, and not the jungle. They took her eyes to be the large fiery insects that buzzed among the reeds of the river. They took her mouth to be the red wound left by hunted animals or perhaps their own women each month. They took her chin to be the bend of a bough and her hair to be the night when there was no moon. She lived in a place where she did not know her own face; and where she did not know it, the jungle never saw it; identity was something known in a way utterly removed from the vessel that carried it. Here, far from the men who gave her face its beauty, she was impervious to the view of the jungle and everything in it.

Even the fever, he whispered. Even the fever doesn’t see you.

So she waited for him to die. The boat drifted along peacefully now. He bled and he bled. When he tired of lying in his blood he pulled himself out onto the deck; wrongly cold in the cargo hold, he thought he might snatch some warmth from a big soft ball of sunlight. But there was no big soft ball anymore. She did not slit his throat. She would let the cord wither on its own, so that the memory might wither too. It would leave less of a scar that way. As he shed his life on the deck of the boat she went through his things in a casual, practical way, sorting out odds and ends. She thought of casting his coins overboard, but that seemed spiteful and overwrought. She came upon his cards and his scarves. Layering the sturdiest and plainest scarf twice, she wrapped a seemly number of coins in it. Then she watched him some more.

The night passed. Before dawn of the fifth day something erupted from down inside him and filled his mouth and nostrils. He was astonished to notice that it was the smell he had first noticed four days before, the smell he had thought was of the jungle but which in fact was the smell of his own recesses.

His head shot up from the deck. He gasped for a huge gulp of air, his eyes wide. She walked up to him and, putting her foot under the biceps closest to his heart, rolled him off the edge of the boat. His eyes were still wide as he sank, staring up at her through the water. There was a bubble from him. In after him went the cards, queen of clubs and all. Deal, she said.

The westward river spat her out somewhere in northern Peru. Since she was deposited on the right bank rather than on the left, she went in the direction of Colombia rather than Chile; by such accidents whole lives are determined. Bogota was the first city she had ever seen, though all she saw were its lights in the night. She didn’t stay long, entering at sunset and crossing through the middle of town; by dawn she had already come out the other end, and it was behind her.

She continued in the same direction, to the coast west of Barranquilla, where she decided, at the edge of the sea, to turn in the direction of the sun. Since it was late afternoon and the sun was on her left, she followed the coast to Panama rather than to Brazil, where she would eventually have stumbled on where she had started. Continually walking along the edge of the sea, she approached, after two weeks and another three hundred miles, a river she easily identified as made by men. She was shrewd enough to understand the value of her gold. With it she bought food and passage on a barge, which exited the canal on the side of the Pacific Ocean and sailed to a small merchants’ port in the Gulf of Tehuantepec.

She lived on the beaches of the gulf for two months, sleeping in a hole she dug with her hands and covering herself with the sand that baked so hot in the day it kept her warm in the night. Each morning she got up as soon as the sun rose above the trees to get wood for a fire. She went down to the ships to buy food from the boatmen. She began to notice the way they looked at her; it was the way Coba had looked at her when he’d first come to the Crowd. One day she got up to get wood and kept on walking. She walked ten days until she finally came to the pyramids of southern Mexico. They gleamed a tarnished gold in the sun, and in the gaping holes pocked by the heat burned the fires of Indians. It may be that the pyramids of Mexico were the first thing to fire Catherine’s sense of wonder since the night she stood on the beach when she was three years old watching the husk of a dead ship. For a while she lived with an old Indian woman in one of the pyramids where she would pass the time strolling among the catacombs. There were ancient pictures on the walls that told stories, none of which she understood since she had never seen pictures before. Some of the pictures looked alarmingly like the treacherous watercreature. She refused to believe that there might be a whole species of watercreatures, rather she preferred to think the one she knew was an aberration of nature. Sometimes she recognized the pictures of suns and stars, of mountains and waters. One day she came to the strangest picture of all, which didn’t resemble anything she had ever seen. She couldn’t make head or tail of it; perhaps, she decided, it was the likeness of a peculiar kind of forest or maybe the huge city she had seen in Colombia. The picture looked like this: AMERICA.

Sometimes people with faces the color of Coba’s came to the pyramids. They came in automobiles. By now Catherine had seen an automobile, moving isolated across empty terrain. But what she had not seen were the cameras the tourists brought; to her they looked like mysterious little boxes raised in ritual. One day Catherine met a couple. The man was a university professor in his late twenties and the woman with him was a postgraduate student. They spoke to Catherine in a language she didn’t understand, unlike any she had heard. They were fairer than even Coba had been. By now Catherine was tired of living in the pyramids, and she pointed up the road from where the couple had come in their automobile and asked, in her own language, which they could never have comprehended, if she could go back up the road with them. She kept pointing up the road and pointing at herself, back and forth. The man was absolutely amenable to this proposal; the woman didn’t say anything. They got in the ear and drove the rest of the day, Catherine in the backseat with her scarf of gold coins. They came to a hacienda where the couple was staying. Catherine assumed she would find a patch of dirt somewhere out by the house and dig a hole where she would sleep; the young professor, however, would have none of this. He kept pointing at Catherine and pointing at the house where he intended to have her sleep. The other woman looked off in the distance during this “conversation.” Catherine and the couple were together two days, continually driving up the same road and always staying at another hacienda or, as was the ease on the third night, a small hotel. By the beginning of the third day Catherine understood that the woman hated her. She understood that the man looked at her the same way the other men had. In the hotel in the middle of the night, as Catherine lay in a blanket in the entryway of the couple’s suite, she heard them have a terrific argument. She got up, took her scarf of gold coins and left. She walked up the road during the night and in the morning was still walking when a familiar automobile screamed past as though she weren’t there.

She continued through Mexico, living for a while in the back room of an estate outside Guadalajara, working in the kitchens of a territorial governor. She was surrounded by Indian servants and didn’t go beyond the large wooden doors that divided the kitchens from the dining room. Once, when she heard the sounds of many people in the dining room, she peered through the crack of the door at a large table covered with food, surrounded by elegant women and men. Sometimes the governor came into the kitchen to speak to the chef; Catherine had been there three weeks when the governor saw her for the first time. He pulled aside the Mexican woman who was in charge of the servants and spoke to her as his eyes watched Catherine the whole time. When the conversation was over and the governor was gone, the Mexican woman kept looking at Catherine with concern. The next day the governor came back into the kitchen and smiled at Catherine; he spoke again to the Mexican woman. After that the Mexican woman avoided the governor whenever possible, and the governor began coming back into the kitchens more often. The governor’s wife, a tall thin but not unattractive woman with light hair and a long neck, noticed this pattern as well. She also kept looking at Catherine and had her own conferences with the Mexican woman in charge of the servants. Catherine found herself assigned to chores farther back in the house, until she was confined to the laundry area and then the grounds. The governor developed an intense interest in laundry. He toured his grounds with new enthusiasm. His wife regarded Catherine with frosty resolve. There were more conferences with the Mexican woman, and the other servants watched this spectacle with amusement. Finally the Mexican woman came to Catherine. Go away, she said kindly. It’s not your fauIt, but for your own sake you should leave. Catherine didn’t fully understand all the words but nevertheless grasped the point. The Mexican woman drew Catherine a map of where to go; Catherine had seen it before. The map looked like this: AMERICA. “America,” the Mexican woman said when she handed the map to Catherine. She repeated it until Catherine repeated it back.

She fell in with a caravan of wagons and mules led by a gypsy couple with four small children. The caravan made its way up through Durango and Chihuahua, across the flattest emptiest lands Catherine had ever seen, beneath skies that chattered with starlight, so bright as to pale the luminance of her own eyes. In the lives of the gypsy couple the magic of Catherine’s face was prosaic. The caravans moved five hours in the morning, stopped four hours in the afternoon so the couple and the children could sleep through the heat, and then moved another three hours in the early evening. In the second week rains came, stranding the caravan where it stood for four days. For two months Catherine lived with the gypsies and crossed fourteen hundred miles of Mexico to the northeastern part of Sonora, where they finally came to Mexican Nogales, which stared across the border at Yanqui Nogales. “America,” the gypsy man said to Catherine. “America?” she said. She parted as she had joined them, a stranger after two months. Outside the border crossing she walked up to a man leaning on his truck drinking a beer and said, “America?” pointing at the ground. The man smiled. “America,” he repeated and pointed across the border. “America,” he said again, and opened his empty hand. When she gave him half the gold coins she had left, he looked at them curiously, squinted at her suspiciously, smiled again and shrugged.

That night, in the back of the truck with two men, a boy and an old woman, Catherine rode across the border. She heard a discussion between the driver and the border guard, the talk was good-natured and friendly and there was laughter between them. There was a protracted moment of silence, during which Catherine understood the surreptitiousness of her journey. The old woman was watching her, and one of the two men raised his finger to his lips. They waited in the dark. One man made a signal to the other that reminded Catherine of Coba when he used to deal cards, except that in this case it was not cards being deaIt. When the driver and the guard had finished their business there was more laughter, discreet and conspiratorial, and the truck began to move again. After three hours the truck stopped, the driver got out and came around to open the back. The six of them were in the middle of Arizona in a desert not unlike the Mexican desert Catherine had crossed for two months. They looked around them in the dark. “America?” Catherine said to the driver, pointing at the ground. “America,” he said and pointed to the western black. “America,” he said again and rubbed his fingers together. Catherine gave him another coin, and when he continued to hold out his hand, gave him another. He looked at the coins still askance but smiled slightly and shrugged again, and after the others had paid him they all got back in the truck, driving west.

They drove all night. What woke Catherine the next day was not the glimmer of light through the edges of the back flap but the din, unlike any din she’d heard since the river sent her and the sailor roaring through the jungle. When she woke to this din it was ten and a half months since Catherine had left the Crowd, ten and a half months since the day she had watched Coba murder her father. It was nearly beyond memory aItogether. Some hours later, in the early afternoon, the truck came to a stop. Catherine and the other four passengers heard the door of the truck open and close and the footsteps of the driver coming around to the back. He threw the flap open.

The five got out. Catherine got out last.

They were on a hill. Trees were behind them, across the road; they stood on a dirt patch overlooking a basin.

The basin was filled with a city bigger and stranger and more ridiculous than the city she had seen on her one night walking through Bogota. She’d never imagined there could be such a big and strange and silly city. It appeared to her a monstrous seashell curling to its middle, the roof beveled gray and the ridges pink where the clouds edged the sky; and the din was the dull roar of all shells, she remembered the roar, somewhere beyond memory aItogether, from when she was a child, the sound of the sea her father had told her. Coursing through the city were a thousand rivers like the rivers of the jungle, except that these were gray rivers of rock, some of them hurtling into the sky, carrying thousands of the automobiles like the one she had ridden in with the professor and his companion, like the isolated ones she had seen struggling across South American countrysides. From one end of the panorama to the other ran this city, and in the distance was a black line she recognized as the sea. Carved in the side of a mountain was a huge map like the maps of ancient Indians she’d seen on pyramid walls. The huge white map looked like this: HOLLYWOOD. “America?” she said to the driver, unconvinced.

The driver took a beer from the truck and opened it on the door handle. “Not just yet, sister,” he said with a shake of his head; and pointed west. “America.”