The Doctor and the Diva (29 page)

When it was over, they lay sprawled on the beach, the sun drying them. Natives of Trinidad believed that it was supposed to bring quick death, to go from a tropical drenching to letting the sun bake the moisture from your clothes.

Instead, everything felt blessed here, even the grit of sand in her hair, and the looseness of her bare feet, her heels falling in opposite directions, the breakers pushing a breeze against her soles.

A
jaguar swam across the river.

Peter had risen at daybreak, keen to watch everything. By night the small stern-wheeler had carried him across the Gulf of Paria and Serpent’s Mouth, and by dawn they entered the delta of Venezuela.

The waterway through the tropical forest was narrow at first, and the air swirled with noises of animals he could not see, such as wild pigs. Troops of monkeys swung from creepers high in trees. He had never seen so many birds in one place. Cranes and herons poised on roots exposed in the water, along with kingfishers, and to his amazement, none of them stirred as the little steamer passed. As he gazed at them, they watched him. Occasionally a single, hungry bird dived into water and disappeared.

But the jaguar was the sight that most gripped him. The animal was large and muscular, with every tendon stretched as he swam toward what he was after.

If he had not persisted, Peter thought, if he had not gotten the ice and convinced Ravell and Erika that they should follow his plan, he would not be moving freely across this river, entering a continent where he had never been. He wanted to possess it all—every scarlet ibis he saw through his field glasses, every dolphin that splashed upriver, every experience.

The forest throbbed with song and the snap of a thousand wings. He had every reason to hope that all his wishes would be realized, that Erika might be pregnant by the time he returned.

It was a strange thing he had done, leaving her with Ravell—no question of that. He had considered the risks carefully, weighed them in his palm like stones.

Suddenly an Indian glided past in a dugout, spearing fish. The hairs on Peter’s arms stood up, seeing him. The Indian was nearly naked, his body sturdy and compact, and his red-brown flesh shone like a tree unsheathed from its bark. The Indian had no tension in his movements. All was easy and silent. He threw the spear and got his fish and pulled it up into his boat. He did it smoothly, just as he had taken a tree from the forest and carved it into a dugout canoe.

When the Indian passed close to the stern-wheeler, he glanced up at Peter, who waved. The Indian lifted his paddle in greeting. They did not smile at each other. If Peter had been able to tell him his situation, he suspected the Indian would have understood.

As the stern-wheeler left the delta, the Orinoco River widened, and they passed a place where Indians lived. Each dwelling consisted of four posts that supported a roof of palm leaves. Hammocks hung underneath, but the Indians seemed to own little else.

Next they passed an Indian burial site. The dead bodies had been raised several feet off the ground and rested in hammocks, the corpses covered by palm leaves.

All passengers on the steamer appeared to be armed, and quick and reckless about drawing their guns. Peter had brought his revolver, too. When they happened upon layers of blue-gray alligators sunbathing on a bank, with one alligator draped over the next, rifles lifted. Almost before the explosion of shots, the alligators slipped under the muddy waters. A mass of screaming green parrots fled from the high trees, joined by macaws that bolted with such a strong storm of wings that men snapped their heads upward and lowered their guns.

“Bolívar is a place of lawlessness,” the captain of the stern-wheeler told Peter. “The whole of Venezuela still is.”

The latest revolution had occurred just a few years earlier. In Bolívar, the captain said, lampposts and buildings were still pocked with bullet marks. Recently, eighteen men had risen up in some kind of protest. Those eighteen had been given no trial. They’d been taken to a sandy island in the Orinoco and shot. Nobody was allowed to touch the bodies as they floated downriver.

The map marked Bolívar with a great black dot, indicating that it must be a large and important place, but as the steamer drew close to its banks, Peter realized how dreary it was. No wharf existed. Passengers stepped across a plank to come ashore.

At the Hotel Decorie—the best in Bolívar—the landlady showed him to his room. Peter stared hard at the bed, the mattress bare with stains upon it.

“Are there no bedcovers?” he asked.

“You didn’t bring your hammock?” the landlady said to Peter, surprised. She pointed to hooks.

Everyone here traveled with a hammock, it seemed.

The hotel had only one story, its rooms divided by partitions that did not quite reach the high ceiling. Each room had a window with no glass, only shutters. The landlady led him to the bath—a cement structure in the rear yard. He stared at the water and wondered how many had bathed in it, and how long it had been since the water had been changed.

He decided to rely on the sponge in his valise.

Through a kitchen doorway he caught sight of the cook hunched over a kettle, the strands of her long black hair almost dragging in whatever she was cooking. The cook’s hair was so filthy that it looked as if she’d rubbed it with lard. When soup went around the table that evening, Peter noticed the grease and unidentifiable black specks that floated to the top. He left his bowl empty and passed the soup to the next man, who hungrily fished a potato from it.

Peter wanted to leave Bolívar but found he could not—at least, not for many days. No carriages existed here, no roads that led anywhere. The only ways to explore the country were by mule and by river.

He walked the steep streets of Bolívar, where gutters ran down the middle, and noticed that no women appeared on the street. Ladies stayed inside houses, where they sat at barred windows; their dark eyes glittered and observed him as he passed. Like him, they seemed imprisoned here. The ladies wore so much powder that he imagined reaching through the iron grill with his handkerchief to dust their cheeks and noses.

Erika could never tolerate their lives.

He knew he’d come very close to losing her. At home in Boston he had once opened a drawer and found a receipt for a passage she’d booked to Naples. She’d hidden it under a box of stationery, but he happened to stumble upon it. He’d noticed many gowns missing from her armoire. He suspected that she must have packed them. Yet not long after she had discovered herself pregnant, he’d opened the armoire one day and found that her favorite dresses had mysteriously returned.

A child was the thing that would bind her to him. Otherwise, how could he be certain that she would remain in the brick town house where he kept her like a butterfly in a jar? If he gave her no baby, what was to prevent her from signing on with a manager who would carry her off to the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, or the Sydney Opera House?

Unless she had a baby, he sensed that she was ready to step out of her shoes and soar away like a bird.

In the afternoon Peter returned to the Hotel Decorie and found that a bottle of rum he’d bought had been uncorked. Perhaps a maid or the houseboy had been drinking from it. Every time he left and came back, he found more of the rum gone, and yet he had drunk nothing from the bottle himself.

Since the walls between rooms were only partitions, one overheard every conversation and smelled every overboiled aroma from the kitchen. He did not sleep well at the Hotel Decorie. He shed his boots and lay down on the bedcovers that he’d finally persuaded the landlady to supply him with, and he tried to ignore the sweat of strangers that he smelled in the sheets. At home he rarely permitted himself naps, but here in the gloom of Bolívar, he closed his eyes and tried not to miss his wife.

As he sank into sleep, he saw Erika, the belt of her silk robe unfastened as she reclined against pillows. She bent her knees, her bare thighs parting as her legs fell open. A man held up a candle, looking down at her. The man was naked, aroused, his skin the same warm golden hue as hers, and as he came closer, Erika took his member in her hand. Peter chased the stranger. Outran him through the woods. Suddenly the fellow was fully clothed, wearing the suit of a gentleman. When they got to a remote place, Peter struck the stranger hard and repeatedly, until the man fell to his knees. Peter grabbed hold of the man’s lapels, pushing him between rocks until blood poured from the man’s ear. When the man turned his face, Peter realized it was Ravell.

Startled awake, Peter sat upright at the Hotel Decorie. He felt terror hidden in all four corners of the room.

Why have I dreamed such a thing?
he wondered. In his mind, Ravell felt as dear as a brother.

Peter lay with both arms crossed over his heart and waited until the wild beating calmed.
Ravell will do exactly what I expect him to do,
he assured himself.

He adjusted an old, stained pillow and made himself go back to sleep.