The Puma Years: A Memoir

by Laura Coleman

  We’ve just come back from Porn Bar in Santa María and we’re desperate for cake. The moon shines down on the comedor, illuminating patches of bone-almost-blue brick across the floor. The rafters hang darkly above our heads, full of rats and cockroaches and Teanji, most likely. Cascades of giggles erupt out of the kitchen. Tom and I look at each other, the single candle flickering on the wobbly back table between us, casting shadows across his beard, which seems to have somehow grown even redder in the last months, perhaps by proximity to Faustino. My mouth tastes of rum and too many cigarettes, my feet are aching from the long walk home, but I am blissfully, drunkenly happy.

  Harry races too fast out of the kitchen and trips over one of the benches, catapulting to the floor, taking Sammie with him. The two of them lie on top of each other, laughing hysterically. I roll my eyes, and Tom chuckles. He’s wearing Bobby’s “SMILE” T-shirt, not ironically, and his freckles stand out across his strong forearms, his skin still so glaringly pale. But as I stare at him, I see that his eyes are glistening. Without thinking I reach over, putting my hand on his. His skin is warm.

  “You OK?” I whisper, slurring only slightly.

  He nods, wiping his eyes. With effort, he manages to focus his face. He gives me a brave attempt at a smile. I manage to smile back, although now I’m feeling slightly sick inside. I remember I’m still touching his hand, and I pull back quickly, but not before I register with a kind of dawning sadness how nice his hand feels.

  “Did you get it?” he murmurs, and for a moment I’m not sure who he’s talking to.

  Sammie giggles breathlessly, climbing to her feet and pulling Harry with her. As they collapse onto the benches next to us, she slams something down on the table.

  “Ta-dah!”

  “Cake,” I murmur.

  Harry leaps back up, raising his arms, and shouts with triumph, “Cake!”

  “Shhh!” Tom and I hiss, pulling him back down. I look around anxiously, but the rest of camp stays dark. The only light is ours, our single fluttering candle.

  “Do you think he’ll notice?” I stare in wonderment at the slab of fluffy peach, papaya and peanut butter sponge they’ve liberated from Paddy’s lockbox, which is a bucket with bricks on top of it. Teanji safe. Rat safe. Not Harry and Sammie safe.

  “No way.” Sammie hands out a spoon each, reverently. “We only took, like, half of it.” She explodes into giggles again, holding up her spoon. “It’s for Tommy anyways, right? In honour of his last night.”

  Tom winces. “Salud, amigos,” he says very quietly.

  We raise our spoons. They clink above the cake.

  “Salud,” I whisper.

  “Salud,” Sammie echoes.

  Harry bursts into tears.

  A while later, cake crumbs are spread across the table. Harry and Sammie are fast asleep, their heads cradled in each other’s arms. Tom stares at the last piece of cake. Then he looks sadly at Harry.

  “You think he’ll be OK?” he whispers.

  I shake my head. “You’re his best friend.”

  “He’s still got you and Sammie. And Ru.”

  I’m afraid that I can feel my own tears starting, and so I look down hard at the lonely cake crumbs and try to swallow.

  “How will you cope? Back in England,” I finally whisper, when I’ve got myself under control. “There won’t be any cats there!” I try to laugh, but it comes out mangled.

  He doesn’t look at me. He stares at his hands. “There’ll be cats.”

  “Not big ones!”

  “No. Not big ones.” He gazes up into the rafters, where the names of the cats have been inscribed. Earlier tonight, Harry took out his penknife and carved our names up there too. “I’ll be a vet though,” Tom murmurs, trying to be jovial. Then he laughs, putting his big head in his hands. “In five years or so.”

  I gaze very hard at one of the constellations of freckles on his left arm. It’s the shape of a puppy, I think. Or an old tree.

  “You’ll be a good vet,” I say quietly.

  He is silent for a long time. “You know,” he finally whispers, a faint flush on his cheeks, not quite looking at me. “I’ll be not too far from you. When you get home, that is.”

  I look up. He looks at me. And for a while, we just stare at each other. I think it’s the longest I’ve ever looked at him before. His eyes are the most curious shade of blue. Almost grey, but not quite. I gulp, feeling heat rising in my stomach, a strange tingling in the backs of my ears, a sort of dizziness. I feel myself leaning forwards, tilting almost, and for a moment, we are so close to each other, I can feel the heat off his skin, the smell of him, heady, slightly monkeyish, like Faustino’s fur when he’s too hot. I feel hot all over. I lean forwards a little more.

  “I’m never leaving!”

  Both of us pull back sharply. I laugh to cover the flush that’s staining my cheeks and put my hands over my face. When I sneak a look back at Tom, I see that his cheeks are bright too. Harry grabs my arm, oblivious, barely able to lift his head off the table, and repeats what he’s said, slurring badly. “I’m never leaving, you know that, right?”

  I grin, patting his hand.

  “We know, buddy,” Tom whispers.

  “You have to leave at some point.” Sammie snorts, rubbing her bloodshot eyes. “That’s just life.”

  “Nope.” Harry looks dreamily off into the middle distance, towards where I know he is imagining Ru to be, even though he’s got the direction completely wrong and he’s actually looking towards the baños. “Never. Never again. Nu-uh. Can’t. Not doing it.”

  “You’d really stay here forever?” I gaze at him. “Truly?”

  Harry lays his cheek affectionately on Tom’s shoulder, their dirty beards touching. “This is my home,” he murmurs. His lips tighten, just for a moment, and in that moment I think about the Harry he is outside of here, who has a family in Australia he doesn’t talk about, a place he grew up in that none of us know about. I cannot think about leaving. The idea is too huge, too awful. But it is also inevitable.

  “But what about . . .” I wave my hand vaguely.

  “What?” he snaps. “Out there? Fuck out there.”

  “I don’t know if I could stay forever,” Sammie says quietly. “I don’t know if I’m strong enough. Mentally.”

  Harry shrugs. “I don’t think I’m mentally strong enough to leave.”

  Sammie stares around at all of us. Tom just places his head on Harry’s, and Sammie takes Tom’s hand, and I take his other one. There are tears now on his cheeks, proper tears. I watch them fall silently into his beard. His tough calloused fingers entwine with mine. Eventually the candle splutters, then goes out. We continue to sit there, none of us wanting it to end, as the moonlight darkens, and then also goes out.

  The sky is duck-egg blue, the clouds all blown to nothing. I let myself float, as if I’m weightless. A wide orb framed by a ragged crown of green. My ears are under the water and I can hear nothing but the muffled thumps of my heart. The milky lagoon settles. I take a deep breath. I smell the scent of lavender and the sun beats down on my face. Wayra is swimming. I can feel the strong surge of her legs, her paws making waves underwater. We’ve strung an eighty-metre runner across the lagoon so that she can swim on her own. She likes it, I think. Another touch of freedom. If I turn my head, I’ll see her. Not far, ten metres or more. Her eyes bright, clear, green, concentrating on nothing but the rhythmic pulse of her swim. She’ll be bobbing, snorting as she tries to keep her nose above water, one dark line running from the top of her head all the way down to the tip of her tail. She is smooth and graceful as a sea snake. Doggedly angling her face to the opposite bank. I have no idea what it is she hopes to reach. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps she just likes the hypnotic drag of an unknown, unchanging shore.

  I don’t turn my head though. It’s enough to know that she’s there. Just for now, I let the water hold me and the bright blue of the sky fill my eyes. Absently, I scratch an itch on my leg that Agustino says mi
ght be scabies. And I think back to the beginning, when my onion layers cleaved to my bones. I remember those layers falling away like old skin, as the seasons turned and the months passed, as the jungle rose and fell, expanded and contracted, lived and died. I turn on my side. She’s a swollen, distorted shape puffing in a coffee-brown sea. The surrounding forest is a fairy crown. I feel naked. The sky is pulling me under. When I lie in bed at night, I think about this look that Wayra gives me now. When I stand in front of her, she gazes up at me. It’s not like when she’s curled in a ball. She doesn’t look small. She has filled out her body. She looks around at her jungle, and then she looks back at me. And she sees me.

  Wayra and I are swimming in a wild lagoon that has been in this place for thousands of years. Millions perhaps. And maybe it will continue to be here, millions of years after we’re gone. Maybe it won’t, I don’t know. All I know is that I wish I could travel back in time. I’d give anything to be able to go through the acres of jungle, through the seasons, through the wind, the rain and the sun. I’d go to the moment that changed everything. The moment the hunter shot his gun. I’d stop him, of course. The hunter who came for Wayra’s mother. If it meant I’d never have met Wayra, even if it meant none of this would have ever happened, I’d change it all in a second if it meant it didn’t have to be like this for her.

  But I can’t. I can’t change anything. And I feel that she knows this, when she looks at me now. Maybe she always knew it. It just took me a while to catch up.

  It’s a month after Tom leaves that the fires start. The air is too dry and crisp for them not to come ripping through fields that are slashed and burnt and broken. Everything else goes out of our heads. It’s worse than last year. There are more fields, more farmers—Mennonites, Colombians, settlers moving in from elsewhere. The government looks away, a socialist government with a hatred of American consumerism but a heady desire for progress. Slashing and burning is illegal, but not controlled. So the new farmers set new fires, even when the old ones are put out. And we’ve got more animals. Our firebreak is there, so that’s good, we don’t have to cut it anew, but where last year it was Wayra, Katie and Sama at risk . . . now we have Iskra, her new enclosure built merely two hundred metres from the break. Amira the jaguar, somewhere between Wayra and Iskra. Leoncio, the male puma, not too far from Sama. Perhaps it was stupid to build on that side of the road, but even though we’ve got almost a thousand hectares of land, most of the land behind camp floods more than waist high in wet season. So what do you do? Where do you put the cages? The feeling of being squeezed, the panic of it, the horrible feeling of not being able to breathe . . .

  We push through, keep going, buy a few more machetes and wheelbarrows. Nobody we know dies, none of our animals have to be moved. But other people’s homes are destroyed. Hectares of forests are devastated. The fires rage on, across the Amazon, but they leave us behind.

  Not unscathed though. Never unscathed. Agustino has a blank look on his face for a long time afterwards, not even grief. I think he’s past grief. He walks aimlessly through the charred remains, searching for injured animals to treat. He doesn’t find many. Only corpses. So many corpses.

  When I try to speak to him about it, he just looks at me with eyes purple with shadows.

  “Estoy cansado, Laurita,” he says, shaking his head, a tiny dead lizard in his hands. Its skin is cracked, its body empty. I am so tired, Laurita.

  Mila. She’s just angry. All the time.

  And soon, we don’t talk about the corpses. Nobody has asked for Lorenzo to be caged for many weeks. VAPTOL is long gone. We don’t talk about Dontdothat, or the rest. We get back to our animals, to our work. We don’t talk about the fires, but I see them on people’s faces. I see the question no one wants to ask, the one that I hear now at night, with the scratching of branches on the roof. With the knowledge that wet season is coming on the back of the fires, fast and unstoppable like a high-speed train. With heavy bruised clouds, the smell of rain in the air. As the dry heat melts, no less hot but different, a wet heat that seems to drip from every atom. As half our volunteers leave. As we drop down to sixteen, then twelve the following week. As I imagine the jungle filling with water, oozing into every brown, ravaged pore, green with moss and water lilies, with an urgency that makes me tingle. As tarantulas emerge from their holes and coat the road in a seething, downy black.

  The question I cannot get rid of is this: Will it be like this every year? Will the fires get worse every year? And if they do, how will we survive?

  The light, a high swinging bulb, seems particularly harsh tonight, sputtering every few seconds. Doña Lucia’s eighties music plays on repeat, right now it’s Kate Bush, “Hounds of Love.” Scores of insects are flying, brought in by the rain, some scattered dead around my feet. Their fragile tissue-paper wings crumple. The hum of the generator gives a low rhythm to the patter, to the rise and fall of laughter, and to the song of the frogs in the grass outside. My jaw cracks as I dislodge a wad of coca and spit it into my hand. It’s starting to disintegrate and I can feel green saliva running unattractively down my chin. With a sigh, I take a fresh handful of leaves from a bag on the table. I’m chewing them peacefully when suddenly, Sammie and Ally come up behind me and slam their beers down on the table, tipping half of them into my lap.

  I’ve been in the parque, since I came back, for almost eight months.

  “You’re ready, sugar?” Sammie demands, her southern drawl thick when she drinks.

  I sigh. “Where’s Mila?”

  Ally, her shaggy hair swaying down her back, is already waving to Mila. Mila is talking to Paddy, her arm tight around him as if reluctant to let go. But when Ally signals, they both saunter over. I place my leg on the table and we all peer down at it. Just above my right knee is a red lump the size of a walnut, a tiny black hole at its centre. Stu, a new volunteer, cranes over my shoulder.

  “What’s that?”

  Ally rubs her hands together gleefully. “Boro boro.”

  “Es grande.” Mila nods. Then she looks at Stu and enunciates seriously. “Very large.”

  Stu pales. “What is boro boro?”

  “It’s a worm,” I say. “From a botfly.”

  His cheeks go white.

  “See that hole?” Paddy points, grinning. “That’s how he breathes.”

  “And Frodo here is going to birth him.” Sammie looks to Mila. “Sí?”

  I’ve named my worm Harold. He’s been growing inside me for about a month. I’ve conflicted feelings about him. Mostly he sleeps. Only when I disturb him does he start burrowing, finding somewhere deeper, a softer, fleshier cocoon. Harold is a stabbing, urgent pain that keeps me awake at night, but he’s also become part of me.

  Mila nods her assent.

  “Can I do it?” Ally’s smoking a cigarette and has a wad of coca in her cheek so big it looks like a growth. “Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze!”

  I anxiously pull my own wad away from my raw cheek with one dirty finger. “But . . .” I look plaintively at Mila. Mila’s excellent at squeezing stuff. But Mila is shrugging, and she and Paddy are retreating back to their corner laughing. I sigh, glaring at Ally. “Fine! But be respectful. Harold’s my friend.”

  She’s already leaping up, a manic expression on her face, returning mere seconds later with Sammie’s backpack, from which she pulls out a roll of industrial duct tape. When I raise my eyebrows at Sammie, she just shrugs. “Always be prepared.”

  “Come on.” Ally taps my knee and I straighten it reluctantly. “Ready to say your last words?”

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper towards my knee as she unrolls one of her cigarettes and makes a little pile of tobacco on top of Harold’s breathing hole. Then she slaps three lines of tape over it and presses down.

  “Don’t move.”

  “What’s happening now?” Stu asks.

  “Harold’s being asphyxiated.”

  The room spins a little. I would have let poor Harold pop out by himself if he hadn’t
started chomping on my flesh. I don’t know how much time passes, but when Sammie plops onto the bench next to me, I open my eyes. She straightens her filthy flannel shirt and passes me a lukewarm beer. I see Stu’s eyes moving around, taking in the bugs. The filth on our clothes, on me. The unforgiving concrete. The locals gossiping around the pool table. The massive pile of corn that has been laid out in one corner to dry. The overwhelming, unstoppable darkness outside. My leg. Harold. The look of horror on his face makes me think of England. Stu is from England. And I think of the bars there. With no pigs outside. Where it isn’t appropriate to wear gumboots and a T-shirt that hasn’t been washed in months and could technically be classed as a nightie. Where it’s frowned upon to eat peanut butter for dinner from the jar, and fall asleep on the floor. Where there are so many people and it’s so loud, I would drown. Where there are only humans and human noise and no parasites to keep you up at night, only men who stalk you around the dance floor and try to touch your breasts.

  I shake my head, suddenly laughing. Sammie looks at me like I’ve gone nuts.

  “Samwise,” I say to her, leaning back against the wall. “Do you ever think that it’s not this place that’s mad. It’s the rest of the world?” I came to Bolivia wanting to transform. I wanted to be a butterfly. Maybe I should have been hoping for something else. A botfly, perhaps, like little Harold. That’s more what I feel like now anyway. Last month, around mid-November, when the rains truly started in earnest, I shaved my head. I sold my hair at an auction to raise money for a new enclosure for Amira. I also had head lice the size of raisins. I’ve lost so much weight that for the first time in my life, my bras are too big. My collarbones stand out across my chest, and my neck is thin like a giraffe. I’ve spent my life praying to be thin and now I am, and yet I realise that wasn’t what I was praying for at all. I was just praying to feel comfortable in my own skin.