by William Bell
“Daniel!” His father’s voice.
“Coming,” Daniel called out. “Be right there!” He trotted back toward the cross-shaped pond and found his parents and their escorts.
“Where were you?” his mother asked, dabbing her damp forehead with a silk scarf.
“I got lost.”
“Well, it’s time we went back to the hotel. You look pale, dear. The heat must be getting to you.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Daniel said.
“I’m afraid your father and I have to spend the next three days or so here in Santiago,” his mother told him. “Another request to report on our research. We’ll be so busy it makes no sense to run back and forth between the city and the hotel.”
Daniel nodded absently, looking back over his shoulder.
The next morning, Daniel awoke with a fever scratching at his throat and a throbbing in his temples. By lunchtime his aching bones seemed to have filled with cement. After pulling the drapes across the patio door and turning up the air conditioner, he padded to the bathroom, swallowed some pills and took to his bed. He opened a book but couldn’t concentrate. He listened to his CD player, but, after a while, flung it aside. Then he drifted into a hot and sweaty sleep.
In a dream, he lay naked on a cold marble slab, surrounded by gravestones, silhouetted against a full moon. Although he was sick with fear, he had the sense that he belonged there. He heard insects stirring in the grass around the slab and the soft footfalls of larger creatures stalking between the monuments. A dark shape loomed high above him, wavering like a kite, intermittently blocking the moon’s cold silver light.
Slowly, implacably, the shape descended, growing larger and gradually acquiring shape. Something familiar came into focus. It was the leathery face of the woman in the graveyard, dark cavities where her eyes should have been. She grimaced, revealing stumpy yellow teeth. She reached out to gather him to her. Ching-ching. Cold, bony arms clutched him, tighter and tighter, until his chest was crushed. He gasped and struggled for breath. “No!” he begged. “No!”
Daniel awoke in the grip of a full-scale asthma attack. His lungs seemed collapsed within his aching chest. He crawled, wheezing, to the edge of his bed. Fell to the floor. Pulled himself to his feet. Fumbled in the dark for his puffer. Jammed it in his mouth. Plunged-and-sucked. Sat down, willing himself to fight the instinct to gasp for breath, staring at the crack between the drapes where welcome amber light from the lamps on the grounds seeped through.
After a while, his breathing restored to normal, he went into the bathroom and gulped down half a bottle of water. In the harsh glow of the fluorescent light over the mirror he noticed a tiny scab on his throat in the centre of a patch of angry red skin. It was itchy. Infected, he thought, reaching for his first aid kit.
Daniel kept to his bed for two days, snapping at the maid when she tried to enter, taking no food, only drinking bottled water, fighting off nightmares and the constricting vise of his disease, oscillating wildly between terror and relief.
On the third day, the day his parents were to return, he drifted into wakefulness and got out of bed. It was noon. Standing in the shower, he vigorously rinsed away the sweat and bad dreams. He towelled off, looked in the mirror. The mark on his neck was gone. He grinned at his reflection. “That’s better,” he said.
Stars sparked in the sky above a calm dark ocean. A powerful animal sprinted along a beach, breathing effortlessly, awash in night odours—the salt sea, fish, the dewy ground that skirted the beach, the blossoms in the hedges. Overhead, Daniel hovered like a kite. He saw the bones and sinews and muscles ripple beneath the creature’s skin, felt the heat rising from its back.
The beast was indistinct, a shape only, but Daniel felt its power, its joy as it ran. It swerved inland, crossed a dirt road, slipped into the trees as it headed into the mountains. Daniel soared higher, followed the shape as it disappeared, then reappeared under the trees. Then he veered off, banking like a glider.
Daniel awoke to birdcalls outside his patio door. He stretched languidly, hopped out of bed, drew the curtain aside. Workers with machetes, chatting amiably in Spanish, were cutting the grass between the palmettos and bougainvillea shrubs. The pleasant memory of his dream faded like smoke in a breeze. He showered, took his medications, sauntered out into the morning. At the end of the hall, the little mongrel darted from under the couch and clamped his jaws, snarling, on Daniel’s pant leg. He bent over and clouted the mangy animal on its head. The dog released its hold and ran off, yelping. Daniel headed for the dining room. He was hungry.
He spent the day by the pool, under an umbrella, reading and doing crossword puzzles. Occasionally he went to the pool bar and ordered fruit drinks, waiting patiently for his turn as revellers kidded and flirted with each other, trading quips with the bartenders.
For the next few nights, the dream returned. On the fourth night, as Daniel hovered above the loping animal and it veered toward the mountains, he stooped like a hawk, his own indistinct form blending with that of the beast. He was swept away with an exhilaration he had never felt before.
He sat with his parents on the patio, eating breakfast. His father pored over an article in a medical journal as he sipped his coffee. His mother, bored and fidgety when she was away from her work, glanced around the patio and wrinkled her nose as a man three tables away lit up a cigar. She fussed with her napkin.
A new flock of tourists had arrived and the buffet was busy. As Daniel was toying with his toast and jam, a waiter slipped a CD into the stereo beside the drinks cooler, and African rhythms and guitars filled the air. Same table, Daniel mused, same food, same boring tunes.
“Daniel, what on earth has happened to your hands?”
He looked down. Grime discoloured his skin. Dirt was caked under cracked fingernails.
His father looked up from his journal. “Not what you’d call pianist’s delicate digits.”
His hands, Daniel often thought, were the only part of his body with any strength. A lifetime of piano playing had hardened muscles and tendons. He kept his nails manicured, his skin—except his fingertips where they touched the keys—soft. A pianist, every music teacher he had ever had reminded him, must look after his hands.
But now he was as mystified as his mother.
“Well?” she said.
“Um,” he began, wishing that he was a better liar. He knew an I-don’t-know wouldn’t satisfy his parents. “I fell on the way to breakfast,” he said. “There’s this ratty little dog, I think it belongs to the maid, and it chases me every morning. And I fell.”
His mother pushed a few strands of hair from her damp forehead. The day was already heating up. “Well, be more careful,” she advised.
Daniel relaxed. A waitress bent across the table for his plate. Her shirt fell away from her body, revealing the tops of her breasts and a white bra. Daniel diverted his gaze, conscious of her warmth, the odours of her body. He breathed deeply. She straightened up and moved away from the table.
The powerful creature ran, climbing a steep, stony slope to a plateau. The night sky, obscured by clouds, gave no light, but the beast saw easily enough as it sprinted across the dry ground, skirting the small villages, sniffing wood smoke, burned lamp oil, humans, pigs, chickens, horses. In the fields around the tiny settlements, the sharp, heavy odour of goat, the thick scent of cow. Tongue lolling, the beast paced itself, running for the sheer joy of movement, rejoicing in its power and agility, ears tuned to the myriad sounds of the night, eyes afire. When thirsty, it lapped mountain spring water from rocky pools; when hunger pangs creased its stomach, it knew where to find succulent flesh and marrow, and rich, hot blood.
Daniel languished on a chaise longue in the shade of a tree on the beach, watching the waves break on the coral fifty metres from shore. A warm breeze from the water carried the scent of salt and fish. Piano practice had begun to bore him. He no longer read his books or worked on his puzzles; he preferred to soak up the heat and watch and listen.
He had begun to take some sun, and already a light golden tan tinged his skin. And he no longer felt ashamed to walk bare-chested along the beach. Though he was slender and undeveloped compared to the hard, muscular Cuban men, he glowed with the new power in his limbs. He felt as if he could run for miles, swim across the Caribbean.
The changes had frightened Daniel at first, but now he accepted—welcomed—them without question. The strange occurrences, like the lunchtime he found himself sitting down to a plate of blood-rare roast beef smothered in rich gravy, the breakfast when he tipped his plate to his lips and sucked bacon fat into his mouth, even the morning he rose from the toilet seat and noticed, to his amazement, shreds of fur in his stools—none of these things troubled him now.
Something was happening to him. And he wanted it more than he had ever desired anything.
“Cheers,” said his father.
Daniel and his parents clinked glasses. He was allowed wine with dinner that evening, to celebrate. His father had received an award at the conference, and one of his papers was to be published in a medical journal out of Havana.
“It’s not exactly Lancet,” his mother had said when she announced the news, “but it’s an honour nevertheless.”
They made small talk for a while. Daniel’s father commented on Daniel’s change in eating habits, apparently pleased. “From vegan to voracious,” he said. Daniel didn’t tell them he had no need for his puffers any more, or that his medications lay in the bottom of the waste-basket in his room. His mother would worry.
His parents soon fell into shop talk. Daniel made his way to the long buffet table, picking up a new plate. He selected a broiled fish, which had been cooked head and all, and a thick slice of ham. As he turned away, he noticed a young woman serving fresh fruit behind a table in the corner.
Her black skin contrasted sharply with her crisp white smock. As she moved, placing oozing slices of papaya on a platter with a spatula, the supple muscles in her forearms flexed; her long fingers seemed to caress the fruit. Daniel sucked in the rich scents—pineapple, mango, banana and the thick cream in the bowl at the end of the table; the woman’s hair, the perfume that floated like a cloud above the layer of perspiration. She had wide eyes, slightly slanted, and thick wiry hair drawn back from her face and held behind her head with a simple copper ring that glowed when she moved her head.
Daniel returned to his table. He cut his ham into chunks and pushed them into his mouth, gulping them down, his eyes directed across the room to the woman behind the fruit stand.
“What are you staring at?” his mother demanded.
His father pointed with his chin. “I think it’s that girl over there.”
As his parents looked toward the fruit stand, Daniel cut the head off his fish and popped it into his mouth, chomping noisily.
“Daniel, you really must stop this ogling,” his mother said, turning back to the table. “It’s rude and demeaning. You above all people should know women aren’t objects. You were raised better.”
Behind his mother’s head, Daniel saw the woman look his way. She fixed him with her eyes, her face expressionless.
She knows, he thought.
Later, lying in bed, Daniel easily directed his hearing to the next room, where his parents went through their preparations for bed.
“Did you notice your son at dinner? You need to talk to him about his staring. He’s stripping them naked with his eyes. It’s embarrassing.”
“Oh, leave him alone. He’s finally—at his age!—showing an interest in females and you’re upset about it. Well, I’m not. Frankly, I was beginning to wonder about him.”
“Oh for heaven’s sake! Just because he hasn’t fallen for the whole do-it-if-it-feels-good ethic these days. I don’t want him to become a boor.”
Daniel awakened early with the familiar comfortable ache and languor in his limbs. Standing at the sink, he scrubbed his hands with a brush, scouring the dirt from beneath his nails and the creases in the skin around his knuckles. He showered and brushed his teeth, barely noting that one of his upper canines was chipped, combed his hair, removing a burr, and put on a pair of shorts and a tight T-shirt.
He listened outside his parents’ room, heard his father’s snore and his mother’s deep breathing, and headed to breakfast without them. As he passed, the little terrier cowered under its couch, ears flat to its head, whining.
In the dining room, Daniel asked the man making the omelettes for three raw eggs. The man shrugged, cracked the eggs into a cup and put it on Daniel’s tray. Daniel selected half a dozen pork sausages, spooning grease onto his plate, and took a piece of toast. Alone at his table, he poured the eggs down his throat, washed them down with hot black coffee, then made a sandwich of sausages slathered with ketchup and melted fat.
Afterwards, he strolled into the lobby shop and bought a bathing suit. In his room, he donned the new trunks, oiled his body with sunblock, then headed for the beach. He took a swim, reapplied sunblock and walked the length of the beach, gathering snatches of conversation and eddies of smells, squeezing wet sand between his toes, revelling in the hot caress of sun on his skin. He retraced his steps to the beach bar. He ordered a beer and stood sipping it, watching the volleyball game.
She was there, among eight shouting and laughing players, a mix of tourists and hotel staff. One of the tourists, a heavy, well-built man in his twenties, crowed whenever his team scored a point.
At length, a Cuban dropped out, picking up a tank top from a chair nearby and heading toward the main building. The game ceased. Heads swivelled.
“What about him?” someone said. Eyes focused on Daniel.
“Why not?” the muscular guy jeered, addressing the shorthanded team. “It’s not like you’ll catch up to us anyway. Not with him on your side.”
Daniel stared at the man. “I’ll play,” he said.
Daniel knew the rules, knew how to play from lessons at school, classes he had attended only under duress. To his surprise, he held his own, fumbling a few balls at first, then improving rapidly. What he lacked in experience he made up for with speed and agility. Soon he was at the net, and his team had caught up.
He watched intently as the young woman from the dining-room fruit stand prepared to serve. She wore a banana yellow bikini. Daniel took in her smells, noted the muscles rippling beneath the skin of her thighs, the sheen of sweat across the tops of her breasts. She served overhand. Behind him, his teammates set up the ball. Daniel jumped, timing his spike perfectly. His hand was far above the net when he drove the ball downward. It slammed—Thwack!—into the chest of the man who had mocked him.
His arms windmilling, the man stumbled backwards and sat down heavily, grunting. Cheers from behind Daniel. The man shook his head, fixed Daniel with a murderous look as his face turned crimson. He leaped to his feet and rushed across the sand, ducking under the net.
“I’ll teach you to—”
Daniel sidestepped the rush and spun the man around, tripping him. As the man crashed to the sand, Daniel dropped one knee to the man’s chest and gripped his throat with one hand. He snarled, baring his teeth, squeezing his fingers tighter, his tendons contracting like piano wire, oblivious to the choking and splutters coming from the man’s open mouth.
“Let him go!” someone yelled. “He’s choking him,” came another voice. Arms pulled him backwards. He looked up. She was watching him, wide-eyed, her mouth open, a string of spittle joining her lips. She licked it away, closed her mouth, the intimation of a smile crossing her lips.
Daniel allowed himself to be pulled to his feet. He brushed sand from his knees, then walked away.
That afternoon, he sat at his keyboard, earphones clamped to his head so that only he c
ould hear. He played by ear, music he normally refused even to acknowledge. He surrendered to the passion of Liszt, alternately pounding and caressing the keys. After a while, he played impromptu, creating as he went, his torso rising and dipping, his head bobbing, sweat dripping from his brow. He played and played, insanely, with no control but that imposed by the music, until he fell from his chair, exhausted.
The beach party, to be held on Daniel’s last night in Cuba, had been the talk of the resort for a week. Daniel had joined his parents in their derision, pretending all the while. The hypnotic rhythm of drums could be heard as the three family members strolled through the grounds to their rooms after dinner. Daniel waited, fidgeting, drumming his fingers, until he heard the deep breathing of sleep through the wall. Then he dressed and left his room.
Tables and chairs had been set up in the sand. A bonfire crackled, and the bar was crowded and raucous. A large number of resort guests had turned up, along with a few workers. Daniel joined the crush at the bar, his eyes scanning the beach. He drank his first beer quickly and ordered another, carrying it to the edge of the water. He stood ankle deep in the lapping waves, facing the shore. Finally he caught sight of her. She was dancing with one of the young men who regularly played volleyball.
The tune ended and another began, with a faster beat that seemed to reach out and clutch him at the centre. The young woman left her partner and approached Daniel. She wore a white dress with full skirt and a scoop neck. She was barefoot, and copper bracelets adorned her wrists. She took Daniel’s hand and led him to the patch of sand where the dancing was taking place. They said nothing to one another. Daniel watched her feet, immediately picked up the simple steps, and gave himself up to the sounds.
