Harry nods angrily. The familiar blue vein on his forehead pops. “We think they’re building something over there. A new road maybe, I don’t know. We can hear the crash of trees being cut down.”
I feel a sick sensation in my belly. It’s like being squashed. Why shouldn’t people build a road? There are communities out there, villages. But I also remember that riverbank. The wild wash of the waves, the warmth of that sheltering cacao, those two night monkeys snuggled in each other’s arms . . . I have a sudden moment of panic. What’s happened to those night monkeys? Finally I manage to speak again, but I struggle with the words. “How’s Ru handling it?”
Harry shrugs, like it doesn’t bother him. But I see the vein on his forehead. The tightness around his neck. The rips in his clothes. The bruises he comes back with nightly on his arms. “He hates it,” he says quietly.
I nod, unsure how to reply. In the end, with nothing else to say, I start to talk about Wayra. “We’re going to walk her tomorrow, did Dolf tell you? For the first time!” I can’t help breaking into a ludicrous smile. Since we started going in the cage with her, she’s been so much better. Calm, affectionate, not so listless. “She’s started pacing a bit,” I continue. “Looking down the trail. She’s ready.” I look at Harry, and then Tom, expecting to see my joy reflected in their faces. Tom’s eyes are crinkling kindly, but when I see Harry’s expression, my smile drops. I realise what he’s thinking. I’m smiling when Ru has loggers yards from his riverbank and the jungle is being clear-cut for people like me who want to eat ice cream. I put my hands over my face. “Shit,” I mutter. “I’m sorry. Wayra, Wayra. How self-absorbed am I?”
He just stares at me and then looks down at his boots. They’re so old and familiar, it’s like looking at an old friend. They were once blue, made of soft, cheap rubber. Now they’re hard, a faded greyish black, stiff with use, and covered in so many slashes from Ru’s overzealous playing that I don’t think he’ll be able to wear them for much longer. He shakes his head. “Self-absorbed is wanting a jaguar skin on your wall.”
Tom nods, rubbing his curly red beard. “And it’s expecting the world to shape itself around you. You don’t do that, Lau. You couldn’t be here if you did.” His face seems particularly gentle. The muscles around his thick neck stand out in the pale moonlight. I am staring at him when Harry suddenly laughs. It makes me jump.
“Yeah, you’re not self-absorbed, Frodo. You just love Wayra way too much.”
I close my eyes briefly. How dare he say this thing out loud, in the presence of Tom, Flighty, the whole listening jungle? This thing I haven’t even said to myself, even in the darkest times of night when I’m lying in bed alone, not able to sleep. Dolf said it so easily. I wish I could do that, be easy like that. I glare at Harry because I’m annoyed, more at myself than him but I try to kick him through the fence anyway, just to do something, to make a joke out of it.
“Like you both don’t love Ru just as much!”
Neither of them argue with this. We listen as Flighty preens her feathers, somewhere high up in the cage. I’m glad she’s getting to enjoy the night orchestra. Then Tom says, so quietly I almost don’t hear him:
“You think she’s got used to being back?”
The question makes me swallow a number of times. There are only two answers I can give, and both stick in my throat. If I say no, it means she’s still miserable. And if I say yes . . . well, that’s even worse. I put her collar back on about a week ago. The memory is seared into my brain. I’d gone out by myself. She’d raced up and down by the fence, over the moon to see me. Her face silly, her eyes googly. She’s looking so much healthier. She’s got flesh on her bones. She’s eating almost two kilos of chicken a day, bones, organs, blood. Her coat looks thicker, her wounds have healed. She looks like . . . her again. But incredibly, a younger, more peaceful her.
I sat next to her, the cold still not quite set in yet, and we watched the sun move across the sky, shaded by the darkening canopy. A troop of howlers came to watch and they climbed playfully about the clearing, their fuzzy orange fur dark in the late afternoon. Wayra watched them too, pacing by the door, before slowly, almost reluctantly, coming back to me and letting her head fall into my lap. I slipped her new collar around her neck then, so easy. Like it was butter. Like it meant nothing. But it meant everything.
“Come on,” I say, a timely rumble emerging from my stomach. “I’m hungry.”
Harry grimaces. “Soup tonight?”
“It was soup last night!” Tom exclaims.
“Oh yeah, I forgot.” It’s soup every night. Harry laughs weakly. “You or me?”
“Oh, definitely you,” Tom says seriously. “Your beard is so much more impressive than mine.”
Harry sighs, stroking it for a moment. I roll my eyes. After a long pause, he finally pushes open the door.
“Hey, Flighty,” he mumbles. “It’s bedtime.” He does try to purr, but just as he begins, Flighty bursts out of the darkness with an ear-splitting croak, beelining for his head, and he ducks wildly. I hear Tom chuckle from the other side of the fence as she lands on Harry’s shoulder, sticking her beak into his beard, making a noise of perfect happiness. Beards are Flighty’s cocaine. She loves them. Lives for them. It’s her eternal misfortune that those who have beards don’t want to share them. I guide Harry—his eyes wide with fear—towards her bed, trying not to laugh too hard.
“It’s OK, Flighty,” I reassure her. “It’s not your fault. He’s just a deeply selfish person, that’s all.”
“I hate you, Frodo,” he mutters, whimpering slightly as Flighty gives his beard a last satisfied stroke before hopping cheerfully into her bed. Then he looks at me out of the corner of his eye and whispers, “Not a word to Ru about this, OK?”
I smile, patting him on the shoulder. “Not a word.”
It’s the next day, barely dawn, and the world is just turning from deep blue to a soft orange. I look around at the beach. I’ve cut back some of the largest prowlers, not too much, just enough so that there’s a little bit of light. Today is the day that Dolf and I are going to take Wayra out on her first walk since she’s been home. I stare at the winking lagoon. There are gold lines around the edges of the clouds sheeted across the sky, and the reflections in the water are fiery. It’s going to be a beautiful day. Patiently waiting less than two hundred metres away is Wayra. Her face, flecked with more silvers, greys, whites and browns than there are colours on this beach, is pressed up patiently against the fence.
The sky now, though, only a few hours later, is dark tan. I was wrong. It’s not a beautiful day. It’s wild, and a storm is coming. Wayra looks not silver, grey, and gold, but a murky, flat bronze. We’re as far away from the cage as we could possibly be. Wind whips the branches, whips my hair, whips the fur across her back. Wayra flattens herself against the ground. Her neck is angled unpleasantly, eyes storm-tossed, flashing fury. She spins, slaps her paw against a tree and growls. I stumble backwards. I remember my elation, only hours ago. I remember ten-foot flames crossing the firebreak. I remember the way she hissed at me the first day we met, and how it felt like she’d punched me. I remember the flash of grey as she attacked me in quarantine. And I try to breathe, to remind myself that I survived all that. That this is just Wayra and we’re fine, we’re going to be fine.
But her tail jolts and her claws rake jagged lines in the dirt. Dolf, a few yards in front, hesitates, worry crinkling his grey eyes.
“It’s OK, Wayra,” I try to say cheerfully. “We’re OK.” But I hear the break in my voice. I offered to take the rope, to walk behind, because I have much more experience than Dolf. But maybe this was a mistake. She knows me better. Maybe I should be in front. She flicks her head and snarls, saliva dribbling down her chin. She doesn’t believe me, she doesn’t think we’re OK. She’s on all four paws now, up and incensed, her long tail flapping violently, her fur dishevelled and confused, and the sound coming out of her belly is the angry prowl of a steam train. Suddenly she seizes the ropes
in her teeth. We have two ropes now, Mila has insisted, for safety. They’re both clipped to my belt, but if it gets bad, I can unattach one and give it to Dolf, so he can hold her off me. But this won’t happen. Of course it won’t! This is Wayra. We’ve walked together a thousand times . . .
A thousand times and I’ve never seen her as bad as this. She pulls back, lurching so fast into the murky forest of wild, head-high patuju that she almost takes me with her. I lurch back, grinding my boots into the scrabbly dirt, just managing to stabilise myself.
“Wayra,” I plead.
I push the fear down. I don’t let my hands shake. I don’t scream, I don’t run. I stay very still. But this is worse than when I hid from armed men in Colombia. This is worse than when I shat and vomited all over myself on a bus, a doctor swearing blind I had hepatitis B, when really it was just some river water parasite. It is so much worse than when I jumped from a roof in Ecuador to impress a boy, and dislodged my spine. I feel the pain of that accident now thunking into place, as it does when I’m nervous, and heat radiates outwards. Hot and scalding.
She knows I’m afraid. My hands tighten on the ropes, I can’t stop them. And although I drop the ropes a split second later, holding up my hands, I’m not touching the ropes, I swear, it doesn’t matter. She flinches as if I’ve slapped her. For a moment she fades, squeezes into a gap between the leaves, her bones contracting in terror. Then like a supernova, she attacks. She’s in the air, claws and teeth and snarls. Its quarantine all over again but worse. She wants to run, she wants to be that cat who for a moment was able to run, but it’s me who’s stopping her. It’s me who has these ropes, ropes that held her when she was a tiny, mewling puffed-up ball of fur, that tightened around her neck, that whipped her when she was sad, that took her mother and everything she knew away.
It’s only a second. There’s a rabid snarl, a tug, a horrifying ripping, a whir of grey and teeth, and then it’s over. I don’t really know what’s happened. I think I’ve blacked out from the adrenaline, and when my head clears, she’s back on the ground, her body small again, pulling away.
I don’t have time to check myself. To see if I’m hurt. She wants to run. She’s pulling hard, dragging me forwards, and so I run too. I have no choice. Dolf races ahead, looking back anxiously, but I’ve told him he has to stay in front. He has made a movement with his hand, as if to ask whether I want to give him the safety rope, but I shake my head. I don’t want her to feel any more trapped. Adrenaline keeps me on my feet. The fallen rubber tree goes by, the rise with the yellow bushes that smell like vanilla, the mouldering termite mound, the mahogany with the face of a shocked old man. Finally she slows, and I have time to look down. I’m imagining another session in Agustino’s clinic with that needle of horror, but there’s no blood. My arm is screaming, I think it’s going to bruise, but somehow even in her fit of panic, she knew how hard to bite, she didn’t break my skin. And she didn’t use her claws.
Emotions race through me, too quick to count. Gratitude, awe. She attacked me and she didn’t hurt me. Blinding terror. Will she do it again? We’ve got a long walk left to go before we’re back at the cage. Bamboo and branches and spikes entangle overhead until it could be dusk. There’s a crack of thunder. She grumbles, her paws stumbling over the veined trail to get home, just get home.
“Lau, are you OK?” Dolf asks.
I nod wordlessly. She’s staring at me from the bottom of a ditch. Patuju hangs, flopping soggily like old limbs. Dolf raises his hands, then drops them. They hang uselessly at his sides. He delivers pizzas in Copenhagen. During the winter, he toasts almonds on the streets. This is his first walk with Wayra.
She is lost. Her collar is skewed. She looks both ways, as if she doesn’t remember how to get home. Her ears are still flat back against her head—that look, an angry seal, a terrified child. My lungs and heart thunder. Utterly without the permission of my brain, I crouch in the dirt above the ditch. I remember what Jane used to do every time Wayra was sad, without logic, without any sort of training, just blind trust. I fall to my knees and loosen my hold on the ropes. Her cheekbones tilt, the silver around her eyes hardens. There’s a warning in her growl. The smudged line down her spine rises. I let go of the ropes entirely. She didn’t hurt me. The ropes hang slack, connected to me only by my waist belt. Then I hold up my hands. I trust you, Wayra. Our eyes are on a level. I trust you.
A bright-green butterfly dislodges from its camouflage. Wayra jumps, then follows it with her eyes as it flutters unaware of the tension, or who knows—perhaps it does know. Her eyes soften as she watches it. When it flies away, she looks disappointed. It is lost in the murky greens of the quivering, wind-pitched trees. When she turns back to me, she hardens and becomes a vivid scathing jade, pupils shrunk to absolutely nothing. Did she come here, I think, when she was free? Did she chase butterflies? A troop of capuchin monkeys, which have been calling anxiously somewhere behind us, suddenly seem to disappear. And then the macaws I’ve been hearing, the toucans, the ants seething across the mulch in anticipation of a flash winter rain—they disappear too. The ticks, the caterpillars, the fungus. The whole jungle. The clouds go, the sky, the tan dirt under my knees. The world’s broken, Wayra. But this forest is yours. I look around at it, at the veins of trails full of hope. I stand up slowly.
“Vamos, chica,” I murmur. “Let’s go home.”
I don’t even hear the snarl. But I feel the weight of her against my chest. She doesn’t knock me down, but I stagger with the shock of it. I put my arms forwards to protect myself, then she’s off. Again, it happens so fast. Dolf’s lips are moving but I don’t know what he’s saying. Then she turns again and walks, swinging her head, stormy wild and flinching, as thunder shatters the sky, stopping every third step to turn, baulk at this person with the rope, at me, recover herself, snarl, lunge. Sometimes she doesn’t come close enough to touch me, sometimes she does. But again, again and again, she doesn’t hurt me. She rips my shirt, bats my legs, looks as if she will kill me. And in this way, in this awful, dreadful dance, we walk back to her cage. I can’t hear anything but blood in my ears, the crack of the wind, and the lurching attacks of her hiss.
She runs for it when the cage finally looms before us like an apparition, or a nightmare, and I almost give myself a black eye on the corner of it in my rush to keep up. She just wants to be rid of me, and when I finally transfer her with shaking hands from my belt to the runner, she shoots away into the bushes without a backward glance, plonking down in a cave of patuju and beginning a fretful cleaning of herself. I sit shakily on a log by the door, Dolf by my side. We do not say anything. It feels like, as we watch her work her tongue desperately over every inch of her body, from paws to claws to tail to belly and back again, she would scrub herself clean of us too.
All the volunteers complain extensively about wet season, summer—November to March—but for me this winter feels like the longest of my life. It continues to be cold. What I wouldn’t give to be a sweaty mess again. May, June, July . . . the months pass and Wayra continues to get no better or worse. On some walks, she doesn’t attack once. On others, we barely get ten metres onto the trail before she loses it. Sometimes, she jumps twenty times. Others, only once. I never know when it will happen. I can’t find a pattern to it. She’ll be walking fine and then, suddenly, BAM. I never know if this time, my luck will run out and I’ll come back broken.
It’s as Harry said. It’s in our heads. She doesn’t hurt either me or Dolf, not enough to mean more encounters with Agustino and his sutures. But that somehow doesn’t matter. The fear is no less. Somehow, it’s worse. And the icy, unpredictable cold gets into my bones. Leaden grey clouds drown us in freezing rain, and there’s no drying room in camp, no bath, no sauna, no hot shower, no way to get warm.
I’m back in Santa Cruz after spending the afternoon with Wayra, glacial in her cage. She didn’t want to come out. I don’t blame her. I’ve crept into Sammie’s bed and we’re huddled together, but even her warmth a
nd the piles of blankets are unable to stop my shivering. Unfortunately, Faustino, a living hot water bottle, is already happily curled up with Tom on the bunk above. Tom is strumming notes on his guitar, Faustino in his lap, their identical red beards keeping their chins warm. I turn my face to Sammie.
“You still think the worst day here is better than the best day back home?”
She laughs. “I knew that would come back to bite me in the ass.”
Through the wall, I hear shouting coming from the kitchen. Paddy’s passionate encouragement, Harry’s desperate yelling. They’re making another cake, I think, snuggling down. Agustino bought an oven about a month ago. He was so proud of it, hauling it off the back of a truck. It’s fuelled by massive gas tanks that are more likely to explode in your face rather than cook anything, and burns or undercooks everything that comes out of it. Doña Lucia refuses to touch it. But Paddy’s taken it upon himself to raise wintry spirits. Harry is his unlikely assistant.
I’m almost drifting off, my eyes closing, when Sammie says, very quietly, “Yeah, I do.”
I open my eyes.
“I mean . . .” She makes a movement under the blankets, which I take to be a shrug. “I keep thinking about Bobby, you know? Back in the States. Building kitchens for people who only care about how expensive their fucking fridge looks. I saw him when I was back there, did I tell you? Fuck, it was awful. It was like his spirit had just gone.” She traces a cracked old termite trail that criss-crosses the wall. “I mean, I was just as bad.”
I nod, watching her. “Do you think he’ll be able to come back?”
There’s another movement. Another shrug. “Don’t know when. Once you dig in. Once you’ve got a job, a place to live, it gets harder. People look at you like you’re nuts when you tell them about this. And when you tell them you want to go back?” She lets out a long breath. Shadows dance across her face. “Get a real job,” she mimics. “Stop wasting your life! The environment? Pah! Go into marketing. That’s where the money is.” She looks at me sidelong. “I guess you’ve got that to look forward to. You haven’t been back yet, hey?”
The Puma Years: A Memoir Page 21
