The Puma Years: A Memoir

by Laura Coleman

  Harry yells over the noise of the traffic, “I see you never got the speed bumps Mila was fighting for!”

  I wonder if Sammie has told him that the government is trying to expand the road. They have already clear-cut five metres on both sides for the electricity pylons now lining the banks. They want to increase this five to thirty, making this into a double-lane highway and the comedor into a roadside café. We’re fighting it, but . . .

  I choose not to say anything. Harry is staring at the rowdy group of volunteers, as if dazed. Sammie just shrugs, and silently we walk side by side back through camp, lighting the way with the last of my phone battery.

  “I see everyone’s got phones now,” he mutters.

  I look down at the incongruous piece of plastic and minerals in my hand, and nod.

  “When?”

  I shrug. “About five years ago, people started bringing laptops and watching films in their dorms rather than hanging out in the comedor. We got phone signal three years back, then data. Anyone who’s got a Bolivian SIM and a smartphone can get patchy internet now.”

  Sammie tries to smile, nudging Harry in the side. “I hated it at first too, but it’s world-changing. No one gets lost in the jungle anymore. No more cooees!”

  Harry just snorts. We’re passing the office.

  “And you’ve got a fucking office? And electricity?”

  “Not quite electricity,” I say quietly. “Not properly. They put in the power lines, and every month Oso goes into town to ask them to hook us up. Santa María has it but we’re still on a generator. It only powers the office, the clinic and the fridge. There’s no light switches in the dorms . . . not yet anyway.”

  “You’ve got a fridge?” he exclaims. “I’m going home.”

  “I know.” I laugh. “No more rotting meat. And vegetables. We eat so much salad now! And oh my goodness, the fruit! Here.” I push open the door to the comedor, stepping into the yellow candlelight and the low chatter of the few volunteers not in the fumador or already under their mosquito nets. Oso seems to have gone home, back to Santa María on his motorbike, Jhonny also. “Have you eaten?”

  “Yeah.” Harry’s looking distractedly up into the crumbling rafters, still covered in faded graffiti and termites. If you look hard, you can still see our names. “I can’t believe this place is still standing.”

  I grin, ladling a portion of dinner, thick and steaming pumpkin soup, into an old plastic container, closing the lid and sliding it into my backpack.

  “Come on.”

  Harry follows dumbly. Sammie trails after.

  “Did you get a bed?” I ask.

  “Yeah. Ally put me in one of the new dorms with that guy Charlie?”

  “Oh good. Charlie’s filthy, you’ll get on great.”

  “I wanted to go in Santa Cruz.”

  I keep on walking, not looking at him. But I see his jaw tighten, out of the corner of my eye.

  “There’s tiles on the floor in there now.” Sammie laughs, trying to make a joke. “So it’s not the same. I miss the old mud soup between my toes.”

  I laugh too, but what I don’t say is that I don’t go in Santa Cruz now. Not if I can avoid it. It is too painful. Too quiet. Too empty.

  We go past the showers, past the new dorms in their own little courtyard surrounded by mango trees. Past the new, shiny eco-baños.

  Harry suddenly grabs my arm. “What happened to Faustino?” His eyes are wide, the light of the moon just barely slipping through the canopy. I sigh and hold my phone awkwardly against my leg so as not to blind him.

  “A car.” I hesitate. “I wasn’t here. You were, though, right?” I look at Sammie.

  She nods. “It was a few years after Coco. Faustino . . . you remember. He was so sad. He just kept sitting on the road, like he was waiting for it. And then, eventually . . .” She doesn’t finish her sentence.

  We stopped letting animals live free in camp after that. People expected more . . . more health and safety. More normality, more control. Social media changed things. People uploading photos of monkeys in bed? Pretty soon that became unthinkable. Sammie starts walking quickly again, down the trail to quarantine. After Mila left, Sammie took over for a while. A few years. Before she started her law degree. Before she realised that she couldn’t live here forever but that she had to do something that would make her feel useful. Somewhat powerful. Or she would lose her mind for real. I shine my torch forwards, down the dark winding slip and slide. Its grey cloying mud is still above boot height. I look back to check that Harry is wearing boots. He isn’t. He’s trying to leap over the worst patches as best as he can.

  “There’s a dry trail,” I call back, “to the left up here.”

  “Where are we going?” he mutters.

  “To my house.”

  A screech owl calls, an eerie oo oo oo bouncing between the dark boughs of the canopy. I skirt over a little bridge made of wobbly, rotten planks, covering a little swamp, and then left again. From that fork, it’s only a few hundred metres until the house comes into view, its metal roof shining silver in the moonlight.

  “You have your own house?” Harry exclaims.

  “More a hut. Sammie’s staying with me while she’s here.” I grin, staring around the tiny dark clearing. “It was built for René, she was in charge, after Mila, after you.” I nudge Sammie, grinning. “An incentive to get directors to stay. It’s . . .” I shake my head, trying to find the words to explain what it means to have a house, an aging thirty-something with a bad back and arthritic hips, ancient in a camp of teenagers, even if it’s just one brick room with a tin roof. But there are tiles on the floor, which are always cold. There’s a double bed with a real mattress. There are shelves, a chair, hooks on the walls for my things. There’s a couch made of folded-over foam. There’s a family of rats in the roof and a porcupine that visits at three a.m. to eat the brick. There’s a tiny spot between bushes, just off the path, which I use as a toilet, with dung beetles that clear away any mess. “I love it,” I whisper.

  Sammie looks up at the hut wryly. “It’s no mud soup.”

  I roll my eyes, pushing open the door. Sammie goes in first, then Harry. I follow, lighting two candles balanced in glass bottles which throw out a flickering yellow glow.

  “You can sit on the couch, Harry.” I smile.

  Harry laughs ridiculously, shaking his head. “So much space.”

  They both plonk themselves down as I start peeling off my work clothes, layer by sodden layer.

  “Mind if I shower?”

  They shake their heads. Harry leans back, closing his eyes. Sammie takes out a cigarette and twirls it between her fingers.

  “Still smoking?” Harry murmurs.

  “Just when I’m here,” Sammie says. “I get two weeks off a year. I choose to come to this mosquito-infested hell-hole. Let me enjoy what I can.” But she doesn’t light her cigarette. I laugh at her pained expression. Knowing she’s joking but also, not. Her job is gruelling. The fact that still she comes down here, in whatever rare moment she can, just so she can see her elderly, ailing Vanesso. Just once more. Every year we think it’s the last time. Just to say thank you, and I love you, one last time.

  A decade. Neither of us has had any kind of functional romantic relationship with anyone—man, woman, or person—apart from me with Tom. This is our relationship, with Wayra, with Vanesso, with each other, and with the parque. And we wouldn’t give it up for the world.

  I wrap my towel around me, shaking it first, dislodging a black spider, who scuttles under the bed. Then I slide my swollen feet into flip-flops and beat my way around the back through vines, patuju and palms. Looking up, I see stars, pinpricks scattered across an indigo-black sky. It’s still hot, sweat trickling into the small of my back. I tread carefully, keeping my eyes peeled for bushmasters and coral snakes, the kind that will kill me, bleeding from my eyeballs, in twenty minutes. I can hear trucks lumbering by on the road, less than a hundred metres to my left. To my right there�
�s a rustling, a pig perhaps, or an armadillo. I feel a faint shiver, a thud of fear as I think about Cersei. Then, why she was here at all. The same reason we see the prints of wild jaguars on the patio some mornings. I close my eyes. There is so little wild anymore. I think of Wayra, still in her old cage. No longer walking her trails. Mila was right, in the end. The happiness that I left Wayra with in 2008 didn’t last. Every time I came back, it seemed she had found a new thing to be scared of. The trails would be overgrown, the lagoon unused. The Paradise Expressway just took her too far away, ultimately, from safety. I closed all her trails in 2014, three years ago. We cut her a series of runners instead that take her in a loop from her cage all the way to her lagoon. She likes them. She’s happier, I think. More stable than she was when she was walking her trails. Less free. But also . . . less stressed. She doesn’t have to be connected to anyone on a rope. And I think that’s a good thing now.

  Frogs sing in the grass and crickets chirp, mosquitoes whine and trees creak. When I reach my private outdoor shower, I hang my towel on a tree branch and, with an expectant sigh, reach up and spin the tap, which brings cold water down the pipes from camp. When the first drops hit my face, I let out a moan. It is ecstasy.

  I sit in my pyjamas on the tiles. Sammie and Harry are next to each other on the couch, close but not too close, still slightly awkward. I lather my poor rotten feet in baby powder to dry them out. Only when I’m done do I let myself open my dinner. With no more coca to keep me wired, I’m getting more tired and hungry by the second, and the smell of the now cold soup makes me groan. I hold it out to the others, but they just shake their heads and watch as I shovel food into my mouth.

  “Wow.” I shake my head finally, grinning. “You look so clean!”

  “People out there don’t talk to you if you’re not.” Harry smiles but it doesn’t reach his eyes.

  “True story!” Sammie mutters.

  I try to smile too, but it doesn’t quite work either. The initial joy of seeing Harry has twisted into confusion. I eat with even greater vigour, just for something to do.

  “So,” I mumble between mouthfuls, “how weirded out are you?”

  “I’m feeling very weird right now,” Sammie exclaims.

  Harry laughs and it sounds like a real laugh, but then he takes off his baseball cap and runs his hands through his hair. When he looks back at us, his eyes are stretched wide and red around the edges.

  “It’s all the same. But . . .”

  “It’s different?” I nod. “It’s like that every time.”

  “How’s Wayra?”

  “Perfect.”

  He raises his eyebrows.

  “She’s always perfect,” I say stubbornly.

  “You haven’t built her a bigger enclosure? I thought you might.”

  I shake my head. “It always seems there’s other animals who need it more,” I say quietly, not looking at him. “The birds are still in the same aviary.”

  Harry doesn’t say anything.

  “There was a time,” I continue, “when we went up to thirty cats. Did you know that? We had to stop taking them. People turned up with cats and we had to say no. Now we’ve got the space again, so many have died, but we don’t have the people. There’s four jaguars in the zoo they want us to take. But volunteer numbers . . . last year during high season we went down to five. Five volunteers!”

  Harry just looks at me, so I keep on talking.

  “Sama died at the beginning of this year. All the macaws are gone, Lorenzo as well, all apart from Big Red and Romeo. Juliet, she died last year, Romeo’s heart is broken. At first he stopped moving, staring at an empty spot on the floor. Then he started pulling out his feathers and hitting his head. It was when he started provoking fights with Big Red, they almost killed each other, that we moved him to quarantine, where he is now, alone. We hoped that this year we might raise money to finally rebuild the aviary. Then we might be able to take some new macaws, and Romeo might find another Juliet. But we just don’t have the money.” I take a gulping breath. “Inti, she died of cancer. They’re all riddled with tumours, leukaemia, bone disease. Babies fed on rotten pasta and crisps. No one deserves to go through what they go through! The cats die, the monkeys too, the vet opens them up, and they see their insides are broken. We just don’t know.” I sniff, holding tightly to my bowl. “Wayra’s fourteen, did you know that? Fourteen. They’re all old.”

  “Like us,” Harry mutters.

  There is a long silence.

  Finally, Sammie says very quietly, “Was it Ru? Why you didn’t come back?”

  I stand and go over to the window to put my unfinished dinner on the ledge. I don’t want it anymore. Harry looks at Sammie, his legs curled up beneath him, the grey patches in his hair and wrinkles around his eyes illuminated cruelly in the candlelight.

  “Yeah,” he finally whispers. “It was too hard. I couldn’t see him trapped like that.”

  I rub my eyes, leaning back against my bed.

  “He would have liked to see you.” Sammie stares down at her hands.

  He doesn’t reply. There is nothing to say.

  “How long are you staying?” I whisper.

  He gazes at the flickering candle. “Two weeks. That’s all the time I could get off work.”

  I nod.

  “Will I be able to see him?” His voice cracks painfully.

  It takes me a moment before I can speak. “Of course. Whenever you want.”

  We all listen to the noises for a while. The hoot of an owl. The rustle of the night-time porcupine. Finally, he says so quietly I almost don’t hear him, “I got a job I liked. Then I got a girlfriend, and a house, and a year turned into two, then five. I was broken. My body was so fucked, my head too, and . . . I was . . . happy.”

  Sammie snorts, grinning weakly. “Happy? You?”

  Harry flushes, and then suddenly the tension just seems to disappear. He laughs. “Yeah, shocker!” He hesitates. “Are you guys happy?”

  “Fuck no!” But she is smiling.

  We are quiet again. Then he says, “You ever hear from Tom?”

  “No,” I say. “Not since we broke up.”

  He nods.

  “But I think he’s happy. Working with sheep somewhere, I’d guess.”

  Harry chucks one of my old socks at me, and I catch it. “I suppose not even Tom could compete with Wayra.”

  “Nope. Not a chance.” I laugh. “I think about her every day. I wake up in cold sweats that she’s not OK.” I shake my head. “But when I get back here and I walk down her path and she remembers, with that meow! This place . . . it fills me up.” I look at Sammie because I know she feels the same. “We manage to convince ourselves that it’s worth it, right? That it’s OK to keep flying, to keep on coming, to live in this in-between just to make sure they’re OK, to be a body here, to remind whatever volunteers they have how to keep them safe. But the problems out there, the problems here. There’s no difference anymore. No here and there.” I sigh, chucking the sock back at him. It lands in his lap. “Why are you here now?”

  He stays very still. “I kept dreaming about Ru. And around him the Amazon was burning, the climate was going to shit, the world was falling apart . . .”

  Sammie takes his hand. He looks down dumbly. We are all silent. We listen to the rats in the roof, to the distant rumble of the road, to the soft breaking waves of the jungle. Finally Harry laughs.

  “My family think I’m nuts.”

  I stare across at the dark mosquito-netted window. I can see the bugs beating up against it, drawn by the dance of the candle-flame.

  “It’s hard to explain,” I say quietly. But then I smile. My mum came with me last year. She fell in love with all the broken creatures. She spent days with Big Red and Bitey. She made friends with Doña Lucia and Doña Clara, helping them chop vegetables in our rat-infested kitchen. And she loved Wayra. It was love at first sight. She knew I wasn’t nuts, right from the beginning. I didn’t need to explain it to her aft
er all.

  Harry runs his fingers across the edge of the couch’s dirty coverlet. Eventually he leans his head back and closes his eyes. I think he falls asleep, but then he murmurs, “Is Sama’s enclosure empty?”

  I stiffen. Sama died of old age, his many ailments finally getting the better of him. “Yes,” I say tightly.

  “Are you thinking about moving Wayra there?”

  I don’t reply for a long time. Of course I’ve thought about it, but I’ve also spent ten years getting my head around the fact Wayra’s life is as it is. There’s nothing more I can do to change it.

  “It’s Nena’s call,” I say finally. Nena, the president of the organisation. She’s based at another sanctuary, Parque Machía, in the cloud forest to the west of here. She’s in love with spider monkeys, some of whom she’s looked after for over twenty-five years. When she was about twenty, studying biology in La Paz, she rescued her first spider monkey, and that monkey changed her life, just like Wayra changed mine. She gave up her studies, and travelled to the jungle, where she set up Machía so that that spider monkey had somewhere safe to live, in the trees rather than in the city. Nena and I are friends now, I hope, although I had little to do with her in my first years at the parque. I’ve spent time with her, over in Machía, helping out where I was needed. And Nena comes here when she can. She deals with the worst of it, with the exhaustion, fires, deaths, floods, avalanches, government corruption, volunteers leaving year after year . . . But she doesn’t leave. I’m not sure if she can.

  The candle stutters, then falls down the neck of the bottle, fizzing into darkness.

  “Then call Nena.” Harry opens his eyes. “Don’t tell me it hasn’t crossed your mind. No more ropes.”

  I take a long, shaky breath. Wayra’s runner system works. I’ve come to believe that it truly is the best we can do for her. Over the years, I’ve watched her love her walks and I’ve watched her hate them. She changes according to the season, the weather, the individual volunteers, the number of mosquitoes, the level of diligent path-raking, the light, the dark, the sounds, the noise . . . our other walking cats thrive on the excitement. Not Wayra. She’s exponentially happier on these runners, where she doesn’t have to have someone walking behind her. But . . . she’s still Wayra. She still hisses and grumbles every day. She is still terrified. She still wants to sleep next to you, her head on your boots, then the next minute snarl savagely at what looks like nothing. But to her, it’s the opposite of nothing. She still can’t bear to be in her cage, yet can’t bear to be outside of it.