Villa Pacifica (3 page)

They could hear the crickets screeching on their tiny violins outside. A heavy, gritty fragrance, like incense, filled the cabin. There was no luxury here, but such tasteful simplicity that no five-star hotel could have pleased Jerry more. He was partial to creature comforts, though he wouldn't always admit it, because Ute was just so tough by comparison.

“I don't believe this place,” Jerry said. “From hell to paradise in twenty minutes.”

“Isn't it just?” Ute dumped the dead weight of her pack on the floor. She heard her torch crunch at the bottom, but who cared – they didn't need the torch any more.

“You know,” Ute said, “I thought
El Niño
hit the Pacific coast in 2006 or 2007, I can't remember exactly. Did the guy say ‘last year'?”

“Oh, who cares,” Jerry said. “What does your guidebook say anyway?” He laughed, and she didn't.

Without unpacking she undressed, washed her hands, swallowed her malaria pill, applied some medicated cream on her raw face and crawled inside the net. Jerry was splashing in the bathroom. She was asleep the second her head hit the pillow.

U
te woke up feeling drugged. Jerry wasn't there. It was semi-dark in the cabin, and Ute couldn't tell what time of day or night it was. She looked at her watch: eleven o'clock. She'd slept for almost twelve hours, a freak event for someone who normally didn't need more than six. And she'd had a bad dream – another freak event. She hardly ever had any dreams. Jerry said it wasn't normal to have so few. He said she must be repressing them.

This time, she had dreamt of her mother. Except her mother was a child in an oversized military coat. She was in a petrified forest where the trees were twisted, unfriendly shapes. Ute was observing her from above, but somehow, in that horrible way only possible in dreams, she also
was
the child. She crunched for ages among the dry branches, lost. There was no path. Ute knew this was a dangerous forest. She wanted to protect the little girl in the military coat from whatever was lurking in this dead forest. She could hear the child's breathing and the child's beating heart like a wounded bird inside her own chest. The dry branches scratched her face and reached for her eyes, her mouth, her nostrils. Somewhere far ahead, she could hear the sea.

Ute sprang out of bed angrily and put her aching head and stiff body under the dribbly shower. How absurd – to come all the way to a godforsaken coastal retreat in South America, and then dream of her mother in 1945.

The water was lukewarm and a sign said in English: “
Care about the water. There are not many left in the world's
.” She smiled and just then she caught a glance of her face in the shell-encrusted bathroom mirror. She instantly wished she hadn't. Her face was ablaze with a fresh flowering of eczema. It must have flared up on the long bus ride here. Sometimes it happened overnight.

She looked like a clown – a big, sad, female clown. The area around her mouth and her eyelids and eyebrows was flaming red. Nothing new of course, but it never failed to make her stomach sink. It had settled down in the mountain air of the Andes. The coast with its damp climate was good for the skin too. But buses and dust and heat were a killer. She applied some Eucerin – she didn't go anywhere without a tub of it – pushed her damp hair into a peaked hat and pulled it low over her face. The practical, unisex look of the travelling Nordic gringa.

The air outside hit her like a Pacific beach wave. It was warm, sweetly putrid and full of insect noises. The giant plants were an intense chlorophyll green, and flowers she'd never seen before peeked from foliage, their faces seductive and predatory. Birds fluttered in a bush nearby. Two locals in Panama hats were hose-watering each plant section by hand. They murmured a muffled hello into the ground in response to her greeting. She crunched along the pebble path. The low-hanging sky was overcast, mushroomy. It looked about to rain.

Ute climbed up the stairs to the veranda of the main house. There was nobody about. Then, suddenly, she saw water through the foliage and – across the water – a glimpse of wooded land. They were right on the seashore! More bizarre yet, across the water came the roar of a large animal, punctuated with the squawks of monkeys – or was it birds?

She walked from the veranda down a gentle slope to the sandy shore. It was a small beach. There was a crumpled towel near the water line. The water was a mossy colour. It looked still, stagnant even, like a lake. Ute took off her sandals and walked to the water's edge. It was warm like soup. To the right, the water continued all the way to the horizon, opening up and losing all land as it went. To the left, there was a sharp bend. The land across was a swimmable distance. It looked like a tropical island. The invisible animal startled her with another roar. She almost felt the land shake.

“She's just a cub,” rang a loud voice over her shoulder. Ute yelped and jerked around. She hated it when people crept up on her. A man stood right behind her with a loutish grin. “Imagine what she'll be like when she grows up, right? A man-eater.”

He had a loud American accent and a big, square head. He was a bit shorter than her and built like an ox, with a thickset neck, a naked beefy torso covered in curly black hair and thick limbs. His vigorous cheeks were flushed with health. Still, his face had a touch of Latino charisma.

He towelled his hair – his alert, dark eyes still on her. The dense flesh of his olive-skinned body shuddered.

“Didn't mean to give you a fright,” he said.

“What's on that island?” she nodded across the water.

“It's not an island, it's the other side of the inlet. It's the deepest inlet along the coast. Used to be a river, but it's been drying up and now it's more like an inlet. Runs for a coupla miles after this bend and stops. What you see up there,” he pointed to the horizon, “is the Pacific. Between here and the Galápagos, for five hundred miles, there's sweet fuck-all.”

“Really?” Ute said. She was the last person he should be teaching geography to. She'd been to this continent half a dozen times.

“So Puerto Seco is this way, along the shore,” Ute said.

“You got it.” He tossed the towel onto the sand and started stretching his upper body, not shy to show her the carpet of black hair that covered both front and back. “Where you from, Europe?”

She'd heard Europeans say “South America” and expect to be congratulated for having guessed a person's nationality. It was the same thing.

“Britain,” she said.

“Max,” he stretched out an arm, “from Miami. What's your name?”

“Ute. Spelt U-T-E,” she said, enunciating “ooh-tah” slowly, as she always did. She felt somehow naked even though he was the one in shorts and nothing else.

“Uddar – that's a funny name,” he said, crushing her hand into pulp. She squealed involuntarily and withdrew it.

“Sorry.” He released her hand. “I always forget.” She hoped he was leaving soon.

“So what sort of a name is Uddar?” he said.

“German,” Ute said. And to prevent further probes, she asked, “What's over there? Some kind of park or?…”

“
Refugio para animales
,” he said in perfect Spanish.

“What, there's an animal shelter there?”

“Right. Right. Villa Pacifica – the peaceful place, get it?” But he was more interested in her right now than the shelter. “Are you the better half of the tall skinny guy with the girl's name? Jenny, is it?”

“Jerry,” Ute corrected. He sniggered.

“My wife's over there too, with your Jerry, giving him the guided tour. I hope that's all she's givin' him.” He guffawed.

“How long have you been here then?” Ute asked. She was tempted just to wade into the water and swim across – anything to get away from him.

“Ah, let's see. It feels like I've put down roots here. Two days? Yeah, two days and three nights. And I'm bored, man. We've seen all the sights. Like, the dry forest, the beach. Yawn. The animals are kinda cool. For about five minutes, then they get boring. But Eve loves it. I guess I'm doing it for her, doin' it for my lady. Cos I believe in synchronicity, making things happen, you know, right place, right time. Place like this, no way it's not gonna work for us. I offered her a flash vacation somewhere, dunno, in the Bahamas. I said: ‘Look honey, you can have a six-star vacation, or I can take you somewhere simple, back to nature and all that. Eco-logical.' And anyway resorts are so boooring, man. But this is kinda boring too.”

Ute tried to imagine the sort of woman who would voluntarily couple herself with this man. She couldn't, and this made her curious.

“So how long are you staying?” she said, trying to sound casual.

“Ah, long as it takes. We're working on number four, and aaah, she's not young any more. They say after thirty-five a woman's fertility does a nosedive.” He winked at her conspiratorially. “How old are you?”

“Thirty-nine,” she said dryly. “And you?”

“Same. Thirty-nine. Getting on. Getting on and there's so much left to do before I turn forty. Nah, don't wanna think about turning forty.” Before Ute could ask what he had to do before forty, he shot at her again. “But for you ladies, it's worse. After forty, it's no good. Have you and Jerry, aah…”

“No,” she interrupted him, and kicked the water.

“Eve's a baby machine. A super-breeder. It's probably a done deed already. Usually takes only about a week. And how come you missed the train?” He cocked his head, studying her. She felt like a finger was poking inside her.

“I'm sorry. None of your business.” Ute strode up the sandy bank, picking up her sandals. This happened very rarely, but she was actually shaking.

“Hey, hey,” he said after her, mock-playful. “What did I say! I didn't mean to be rude.”

Back on the veranda, Mikel was smoking over a book and an espresso.

“Good morning,” he said brightly. “Or, rather, good afternoon.”

“Hi,” Ute smiled. Last night, after three days in Jerry's company, Mikel had seemed manic, but after Max he was positively sedate.

“Howdy,” Max said. He'd come up behind her. Their host crushed out a cigarette in the already full ashtray. Max kept going down the path to his cabin.

“Everything all right?” Mikel enquired, leaning back in his chair. He was like a sprung mechanism. Parts of his body were always moving. Right now, his cracked heel was measuring time in his flip-flop.

“I didn't know there was an animal… shelter across there.” Ute sat down in a wicker chair at the next table.

“Oh yeah. We're a sanctuary for endangered species. Animals, humans…” He coughed a warm emphysemic laughter. “Animal trafficking is a massive problem here. The Galápagos in particular. It's big business. Up in the Andes it's even worse, cos nobody gives a shit. Local government will pay thousands of dollars in prize money for cockfights, but they won't sponsor animal refuges like this. Not that we'd ever ask them. But people who are trying to do this elsewhere, they all run on volunteer labour and goodwill, and donations. We give them money too, we sponsor two animal shelters in the Sierra up north. It doesn't take much money. We get a lot of the animal food for free, and we've already got everything else in place. Of course we'd like it to be bigger, but there's only so much space. We can't cut down the forest. It's all protected dry forest around here, for ten kilometres that way.” He pointed inland with a nicotine-stained thumb. His fingernails were dirty and broken. “And you know the funny thing? We've got animal traffickers coming here, offering us money for the lion cub, the monkeys, the iguanas, the parrots. The bastards, they just don't get it.”

“I guess calling the police would be pointless.”

“The police! Did you say the police?” His laughter scratched the inside of his chest. Ute wondered how you get medical help out here. “I prefer to deal with the traffickers. At least with them you know where you stand. You know, once, we had this local family. Rich. They came with their kid for an educational holiday. First thing they say: why isn't there a swimming pool? We explain to them about water, about eco-sustainability…”

The collie ran up from the main gate, followed by the hostess, who was tall and stooped. She gave Ute a crumpled smile.

“Will you have some lunch?” The hostess stood by Mikel's chair.

“
Sí, amor
.” Then he turned to Ute. “Lunch?”

“Yes, thanks. I missed breakfast.”

The hostess strode away on her high, lean legs.

“So, anyway, next thing I know,” he lit another cigarette, “the kid takes a shine to Alfredito, the marmoset. It's the smallest monkey in the world, really cute. The father offers me good money for the monkey. He starts at a hundred dollars and goes up to five. Then he raises it to a thousand. He can't get it into his thick head that not everything is for sale. I threw them out there and then. The funny thing is, it's precisely to protect animals from people like them that we set up this operation. You know, rich people who buy a lion cub or a giant tortoise for their kids' birthdays, that sort of thing. And when the child is sick of it, the animal gets discarded. Our Jorge was found in a garbage dump twenty kilometres down the coast, almost dead from dehydration, his shell all shrivelled. He's eighty years old, our Jorge!”

“Jorge is our giant turtle.” The hostess had returned from the kitchen. Ute heard her American accent for the first time. She was leaning on the doorway of the veranda in a cloud of smoke. “They live up to two hundred years. The oldest specimen is on the Galápagos. So Jorge is not that old, in turtle years. He's younger than Mikel, relatively speaking.” She winked at Mikel with both eyes. The deep sun-wrinkles around her eyes were like exquisite tattoos.

“Ah, but I look younger than Jorge, don't I?” Mikel said. He grabbed her hand and kissed its palm sonorously. “Don't I?”

“
Sí, amor
.” She smiled at him.

Their lunch arrived: large plates of spaghetti Bolognese and a bottle of red wine. The young man who served it gave Ute the menu.

“I'll have the same,” Ute said. “It looks very good.”

“Our chef makes the best spaghetti bolognese on the coast,” Mikel announced. “And the best lemon cake, chocolate cake and passion-fruit cake. And the best
arroz marinero
. Have you tried it yet?”

“Yes, we had it up north, but Jerry got an upset stomach.”

“Ah, you must try Conchita's. No upset stomachs there.” Mikel tucked a large chequered napkin into his open shirt collar.

The three of them ate the spaghetti to the sound of plant sprinklers and birds. The afternoon was sluggish and contented, except for the threat of rain. Ute wondered where Jerry had gone for so long. She was itching to leave the compound and have a look at the dry forest and Puerto Seco itself. And the animals.