The Puma Years: A Memoir

by Laura Coleman

  My breathing is slowing to match hers. She’s stopped licking, her strong back paws curled up in the mud, her one front paw still on the edge of my trousers, claws contracted, toes relaxed. Her other paw is tucked under her chin. She’s starting to shut her eyes, her breathing deepening. Her chest rises and falls, her eyelashes flutter. She suddenly looks incredibly vulnerable. It floors me. I wonder what she does in that cage every night when we’re not here. I wonder if she looks forward to seeing us, or dreads it. I feel dizzy again, as if I’m tilting. Maybe it’s the adrenaline. But maybe it’s also because I’ve been spinning for so long. I’ve felt lost in the lights and sounds and pressures of moving forwards, moving upwards, moving somewhere. The aimlessness of it making my hands shake and limbs desperately tired. I’m tired now but it’s different. Now, for the first time in a really long time, with the sound of Wayra’s steady breathing and the settling of the jungle heartbeats around me, I feel like I’m weightless. As if I might be coming to a stop. Here in a place I least expected to. With this puma, who I’m starting to realise might not be as brave, or as bold, as she wants me to believe.

  Three days later, I’m assigned a macaw to work with in the mornings. His name is Lorenzo. He is blue with yellow belly feathers. There are more than twenty macaws in the aviary, a series of interconnected roofed cages that back into the trees. They’re close enough to the comedor that I can clearly hear them calling out as I try to eat my breakfast. Osito, mi amor! Hola Mila! Fuck Harry! A few of the macaws are housed in their own cages—Big Red, who laughs constantly and is blind and a little senile, and Romeo and Juliet, a couple interested in nothing but each other, spending their days grooming and gossiping. The rest are deemed sociably acceptable enough to live in one big enclosure, but entering is like going inside a mafia enclave. The massive birds, scarlet and blue, are clumped about in groups, their beaks sharp as flick knives, and when they sense weakness they swoop, cawing and plucking at your head. Paddy and I both scream and run out the door. Sammie—who’s training us, me on Lorenzo and Paddy on the rest of the macaws—rolls her eyes.

  “¡Cállate!” she yells. The macaws squawk, circling, but retreat to their perches, giving her the evil eye. She turns her sharp expression on us cowering. Two macaws wobble along the ground. They’re identical, with delicate masked faces limned with blacks and whites. One of them, the one approaching fastest, has eyes that roll dramatically back in his head. The other waggles his turquoise wings, trying to catch up. Sammie’s expression softens.

  “Frodo,” Sammie says as she bends down, letting them both climb onto her arms. “This”—she holds up the slower one, the one able to hold eye contact—“is Lolo.” Lorenzo leans over so far—as if trying to get as close to her as possible—that he falls and is left hanging upside down, his claws desperately gripping her shirt. The other takes the opportunity to climb rapidly up Sammie’s back and onto her head, where he gazes around as if he’s reached the peak of Mount Everest. Paddy and I look at each other. We’ve already discussed the fact that neither of us wants anything on our heads.

  “Alright, Crazy Eyes,” Sammie murmurs, leaning against one of the platforms for him to disembark. “Lorenzo’s the only one who goes outside.”

  Paddy watches the rest of the birds, who are still eyeballing us as they sharpen their beaks on the fence. “Why?”

  “Agustino gave him wing extensions after he came with his feathers cut, and now we’re trying to see if we can teach him to fly again. It’s a trial. But the others get jealous.” As if he’s heard, the one called Crazy Eyes launches at Lorenzo, who, not yet stable, drops in panic. Sammie catches him, and when she presses him protectively to her chest, a faint pink blush colours his cheeks. I’ve heard that macaws can blush, but never believed it.

  “Eyes tries to fool volunteers. Make sure when you take Lolo out that you’ve got the right bird.”

  All kinds of horrific scenarios run through my mind—bird escapes, death by Crazy Eyes—as Sammie and I take the one she tells me is Lorenzo out to the road. She patiently holds him on a stick, slowly waving him up and down in the air to give him a bit of a lift. The road is the perfect training ground, straight and empty as a forgotten airplane runway. Pale puffy clouds lazily drift past the trees sleeping on either side of us. When it becomes clear that Lorenzo isn’t going anywhere though, she lifts up his wings to show me the plastic spines Agustino has added to the bottoms. Lorenzo squawks indignantly but continues to grip the stick, his claws wrapped tightly around it as if he can’t let go. Why him and not others, I wonder? I guess time, money . . . people. Luck. Lorenzo is going to have me, for the whole hour before breakfast. But the rest of the macaws, they just get Paddy, and that’s for just half an hour because of all the other tasks that have to be done. There aren’t enough volunteers to go around.

  The sky is so big, so blue. The three of us watch flocks of wild macaws fly past in formation, their feathers bright scarlet, cobalt blue, tropical-beach turquoise. How is that fair? I look down at Lorenzo as he gazes after the wild birds that look so much like him, and feel a painful lump in my throat.

  When Sammie leaves, disappearing back into camp, the canopy curling around her as if she was never there in the first place, he ruffles his head feathers in panic. We both gaze after her longingly, then back at each other with trepidation. I give the stick a little shake and he turns his head almost three hundred and sixty degrees, shrieking so loudly in my face that I drop him.

  Ten minutes later he’s on top of the fumador. He hasn’t flown, he’s crawled, using his stubborn beak to pull himself up on the thatch. The useless stick hangs at my side. He is a bright flash of blue, almost the same colour as the sky as he stretches his wings out. Screw you and your stupid stick. He casts one proud sideways look down at me before seeming to forget that I exist, getting down to the business of preening his feathers.

  Mila is in one of the hammocks, drinking a cup of coffee. She’s been there the whole time and is trying not to smile, but I can see the edges of her eyes crinkling. Every now and then she gives me gentle encouragement, which only makes me more frustrated as Lorenzo moves further away from me. In the end she trots off, returning minutes later with a pocket full of peanuts. I’m so grateful, I hug her.

  “Todo es como una cebolla,” Mila says, pensively rubbing a mosquito off her nose as Lorenzo happily picks peanuts out of her calloused palm. “It’s like . . .” She snaps her fingers, looking for the English word. “Onion.”

  Before she came here, Mila was a waitress. Then she found three puma kittens in a cardboard box. The pumas are now three years old. They are called Inti, Wara and Yassi, and Mila can walk them without a lead. Sometimes she sleeps with them in their enclosure at night. So I listen avidly to her words.

  “Para mí, los animales rescatados son como las cebollas.” She watches me to see if I have understood, but when I bite my lip nervously, she sighs and switches to a slowed-down mixture of English and Spanish. She is used to having to make herself be understood, I think, and when I concentrate, I find that I am able to follow more of the Spanish than I expect. She tells me her theory that, for her, rescued animals are like onions. You work so hard to peel off one layer of anxiety, only to expose another, and then another that you had absolutely no idea was hiding underneath. And because all of us really are no different from any of the animals here, because we’re all messed up and broken in our own individual ways, we’re like onions too.

  “Y eso es lo que hace el parque,” she says with a smile. “And that is what the parque does, no? Peels off our layers”—she taps me sharply on the chest—“you and me. One after another after another, and we learn new things about ourselves, and about the animals that we’re with, cada día. Every day. Juntos. Together. We do it together. Por eso me enamoré de este lugar. That is why I fell in love, no? With this place. You never know what is going to happen.”

  Lorenzo has crawled up onto her shoulder, wiping the peanut shells off his beak with her ear. She goes
back to her coffee, leaving me with the uneasy—and oddly thrilling—sense that my skin is being peeled off when I’m not looking. Lorenzo, having finally assented to come back onto my stick, flaps his wings churlishly. He goes too far and it takes a while for him to stabilise himself, but when he does, we both look up. A single harpy-eagle is flying from left to right across the sky. It’s hard to tell the scale, but I know she’s huge, her leaden wings spread wide. She soon disappears, back into the shelter of the canopy, but it feels as if Lorenzo and I watch her for a very long time. I think we feel as if just by watching her, we’ll get closer to that feeling of being free.

  As the days pass, Mila’s words stay with me. When I notice that suddenly it isn’t a struggle to pull my jeans on, this small thing makes me indescribably happy. The next day I notice that my feet have moulded to the shape of my boots, and then I discover a dip in my mattress that fits my spine. I fall over and instead of cringing, I laugh. I wake up and the first thought I have is of Wayra. Is she going to be in a good mood today? Is she going to lick me again? Will she be pissed? Lazy? Excited? Everything at once? After another week, I can tell the difference between Lorenzo and Crazy Eyes. I can’t remember ever not being able to. Lorenzo rolls onto his back when he sees me, his legs waving in the air. I give him belly rubs. He spreads his wings to show them off and his feathers feel both fragile and strong. He sidles backwards, pushing his neck into my hand so that I rub the feathers around his ears. The first time he flies, wobbling a few metres along the road before falling to the ground with a painful crash, we do a little dance together, lifting one leg and then the other, rolling our necks to the ocean blue of the sky, the green banks of leaves fluttering around our heads. I let myself imagine that the harpy-eagle is watching us as we do this.

  At the beginning of my fourth week, I find myself on the road, where my sore feet usually take me. It’s the only place where I can see the stars because everywhere else, it still feels like I’m in a drawstring bag made out of leaves and smothering darkness. I think my eyes dimmed when I was living in London. I felt exhausted all the time. I needed thirteen hours of sleep and still it wasn’t enough. Now though—I almost don’t ever want to shut my eyes again. I walk along the road staring upwards, not caring when I fall into potholes. I’m in a cavern made of crystals, I’m looking into an ocean exploding with phosphorescence.

  How did I spend so many years missing this? In a city or a bar. On the Tube. Watching TV. On the computer. Pulling the duvet over my head.

  I take off my gumboots and wriggle my toes. The heat of the road is almost too much but even so, I press my hardened heels downwards. I thought I would miss TV. I can’t even fathom how I thought that. Every night the constellations look different. But I love being under my mosquito net too, with nothing to do but watch the candles dance, moonlight shining across the patio bricks. I’ve even come to love the comedor. We play cards by candlelight. Me and Katarina, Jane, Paddy and Bryan, Bobby, Osito, Germáncito and López, Mariela and Juana, sometimes Tom too, sometimes Agustino and Mila. Bobby strums his guitar and sings. And we play silly games. Who can eat the most peanut butter? Who can balance the biggest melon on their head? Who can find the carrot that looks most like a penis? The comedor explodes with laughter. And I join in. But when I’m tired, I can just come out here to be by myself too. And that’s OK. Or I can go to bed. There’s no shame in going to bed. I love that. We’re all exhausted. But it is bone deep and physical and welcome. So different to the mental exhaustion of anything else I’ve experienced.

  My roommates snore and fart, and I listen to the monkeys play-fighting next door. Being in a small room with so many people should horrify me, the sound of rowdy laughter make me flinch, god forbid rats in the rafters and the low tick of spiders crawling the walls. But I just feel safe. It’s taken three weeks but I’ve learnt that Coco and Faustino aren’t going to bite me. If they try to touch my breasts, there’ll be no hard feelings if I push them away. I can cradle them in my arms with their tails wrapped around my neck. I groom their fur and they pick imaginary bugs out of my short hair.

  Today Osito taught me how to swear in Spanish, and I taught him how to say, “My name is Osito. Will you be my girlfriend?” in English. Mariela and Juana showed me how to eat the ends of patuju stalks. “Muy rico, no?” Mariela giggled. The stalks are stringy and taste like cucumber, sliding out of their shoots with a whoosh. She was right. They are delicious. Panchita rubbed her snout along my inner thighs, smearing my jeans with the stench of her stink glands, and I didn’t have to concentrate on not being afraid. I held the rope with Wayra, perhaps my sixth time walking behind her, and I never had time to think, I’m walking a puma. Because I wasn’t. She was walking me. And it was OK. Walking was what she wanted to do. It was her right. She had a fundamental right to walk in this jungle, way more than I did.

  I see the light of a candle flickering now and I hesitate. There’s the silhouette of a wave. It’s Mila, her silky dark hair spread wide.

  “Laurita,” Mila calls out, her voice soft.

  Sammie and Harry are with her. They lie on their backs, boots discarded. There’s the faintest hint of a breeze, and not a single piece of traffic for miles. Mila sleeps out here sometimes, she’s told me, when she cannot bear the heat in the dorms. She props herself up now on her elbows and watches me approach, moving over to make room.

  “Gracias,” I say, dropping down.

  Harry lights two cigarettes and passes one to Sammie. Since that one night, weeks ago now, we’ve had little to do with each other. He avoids me and I avoid him. I sense that he thinks I’m inconsequential, and I try not to watch when his blue eyes assess some other pretty new volunteer as she walks across the patio.

  I light a cigarette of my own and take a long drag. I’d intended to quit, when I came travelling. I started at school as a way to make friends. Flicking ash with gothic black fingernails off my fishnet tights behind the gym. Eight years later, I still think I can fool people into believing I’m braver than I am by smoking a cigarette. Here, though, it’s different. Here, when there’s always some kind of work to be done, when you’re busy all the time, smoking is just a moment of exquisite peace.

  I think Mila has fallen asleep but suddenly she turns her head.

  “Cómo está mi amor Wayra?” Her voice is quiet as a star shoots across the Milky Way. There is no moon. It makes the stars burst. “La cebolla.”

  I turn on my side and we face each other.

  “Increíble,” I say, whispering too, unable to stop myself from smiling like a loon. “Caminamos y es . . .” I shake my head. I have no words for what it’s like out there. We walk together and the wild smell that inhabits her touches me too. I’ve been wearing a numb rubber suit for so long I’d forgotten that I was wearing it, and now it’s come off, I can move. Actually move my limbs. I can feel things I couldn’t before. I can breathe. It’s like being on a tightrope that could at any moment snap. It’s a gift. Mila has given me this gift, and Wayra. Wayra most of all.

  “Ah, sí.” She laughs, turns onto her back and stretches, the same way that Wayra does after a long nap. Last night, Mila threw a mango at Agustino’s head because he let one of the pigs loose. And I saw her cry uncontrollably for two hours when a volunteer packed up and left. Sometimes I think Mila is as brave and wise as any person I have ever met. Then I think she’s also just a little bit broken. Jane told me Mila had a family once, kids, and left them for this place, for her pumas.

  Mila turns to Sammie. “¿Y Vanesso?”

  “Oh, Mila,” Sammie keens. “¡Él es perfecto!” Vanesso is the cat Sammie works with. I know this because she carries a picture of him around in her pocket and spends hours staring at it. She calls him V. He’s an ocelot, his fur golden yellow, marked with black rippling shapes. A flawless pink nose and gorgeous striped tail. He was rescued from a Chinese restaurant. Katarina told me that Sammie arrived here last year with a boyfriend. She was assigned to Vanesso, who was just a baby then. Sick from
all the Chinese food, vulnerable, needing a mum. She stayed for a few months, left because her boyfriend wanted to, dumped her boyfriend immediately and came back to look after V. She’ll stay now until her money runs out. She walks Vanesso alone. Along the edge of a long lagoon. Through his forest trails. I do not doubt that all that time, one-on-one with the jungle, with him, has done something to her brain. Whenever anyone mentions Vanesso, it is as if just the sound of his name makes her heart crack. I am starting to wonder what the recovery period for an experience like this is.

  “Todos los animales son perfectos, no?” Mila laughs. “Jaguaru también.”

  Harry nods serenely. “Él es el más perfecto.”

  Jaguaru and Jaguarupi are the only male jaguars in the world that volunteers can walk with, into the jungle. Ru’s younger than Rupi. He’s more playful, boisterous. He’s the reason that Harry has stayed so long. He’s the reason Harry has come back, two years in a row. He is the reason, I’m told, that Harry left a well-paid job in engineering. Every night, I see him return, often after dark. His clothes are ripped, he is exhausted, drained, and I have never seen a look like that on someone’s face before. It’s a look of absolute and utter certainty.