‘You seem so unhappy,’ she said.
‘Unhappy?’
‘Oh, I saw you joking with Andrew Hunt, and I know you like to tease people. But when I look at you, I think you look sad. I watched you when you were talking to Mrs West. Your face was very …’ She pulled her mouth down into a glum expression so that he could see what she meant.
Collis stood up and unbuttoned his pants. He was quite glad he had put on fresh cotton combinations that morning, especially since Maria-Mamuska had taken the trouble to wash. He went over to the basin on the bureau, poured out a little water, and brushed his teeth with a gritty pink powdered dentifrice which he had bought at Jacksonville. He rinsed his mouth out, then came back to the bed.
‘Is it a woman who makes you sad?’ Maria-Mamuska asked. ‘Some other woman? I don’t mean Mrs West.’
He shook his head. ‘No. It’s more than that.’
‘You don’t want to talk about it?’
‘There doesn’t seem to be any point in talking about it. It’s all behind me now, whether I want it that way or not. Talking about it isn’t going to solve anything.’
He was silent for a long time, staring with unfocused eyes at the lamp. ‘Do you want me to go?’ she said.
‘Why should I?’
‘I don’t want to stay here if you don’t want me.’
Collis began to unbutton his combinations. ‘You’re very welcome to stay. I’d like you to. I’m just sorry I’m not rich. I’d buy you flowers, and diamonds, and whatever else this dump of a city had to offer.’
She sat up on the bed with a creak of springs. ‘I’m sorry, too.’ She smiled. ‘But why don’t we just say that we’re doing this so that we’ll have something to remember each other by? An old time that we can talk about when we meet on Montgomery Street three years from now.’
‘Do you think I’d forget you?’ he asked.
She shrugged. ‘You might. If you get rich, and meet lots of beautiful girls.’
He looked at her. There was an unkempt, practical beauty about her which made him feel unexpectedly good-humoured. She was quite unlike Delphine, who played her erotic games as a teasing exploration. There were no ploys and counterploys and coquettish sidesteps. Maria-Mamuska saw love-making as a healthy recreation, like riding; and even if she fell a few times when she was out doing it, she accepted those falls as a legitimate (or, more strictly, an illegitimate) risk. She could be wildly theatrical, and impossibly illogical, but she was grown up enough to know what her body desired.
Collis, as he stood beside her in his stuffy tropical hotel room, decided he liked her.
She knelt on the bed and reached behind her to unbutton her dress. Outside, the rain had ceased falling, and there was no sound now but the insects and the endless clanking of the locomotive. She crossed her arms and pulled her dress over her head, and on the ceiling her shadow looked like a bird unfolding its wings and then settling again. She tossed her head once to throw back her long black hair.
Underneath her dress, she was wearing a ribboned bodice and bloomers. They were off-white from washing in the Virginia’s laundry room, and from the sweat of a night in Panama, but she had scented them with lavender powder, and hung a little muslin bag of pot-pourri around her waist. She let the ribbons of her bodice go, and her big brown breasts were bared again, wobbling heavily as she unlaced the bodice altogether, and as she rose on the iron bed to take down her bloomers.
Nude in the lamplight, she exuded muskiness and warmth; and although she was short when she stood up beside him, the fresh-washed crown of her hair barely reaching his chest, her body was full and well-proportioned. Her pregnant tummy was rounded and high, and Collis guessed she must have been carrying her baby for at least three months. But she was still sensual and provocative. He let his hand stray down her, appreciatively moulding itself around her every curve.
‘I think the whole of America should be full of women like you,’ he said.
She unfastened the last buttons of his combinations and pulled them off his shoulders, baring his chest. She kissed his chest with selective kisses, as if certain spots on it were sweeter than others.
‘You’d go crazy if it was,’ she said. ‘Even more crazy than you are now.’
She knelt down on the bare floor in front of him and took down his underwear. She stroked his hairy thighs as if she could hardly believe how white and lean he was: during the journey from New York he had lost ten pounds.
‘The whole of America should be full of men like you,’ she said, with a sly smile. ‘But then, I’d be too jealous.’
She kissed him slowly, enough to make him shudder; then she lifted herself and turned around and fell back on to the bed, sinking into the cream coverlet. Collis dived after her, one swimmer after another, and they seemed to fall and fall through layer after layer of time and feeling, as if the bed could carry them down through years and months and mysterious hours, through memories of long-forgotten winters and summers, softly showered with ambrotypes of unremembered friends and faces, entranced by half-heard snatches of songs, tantalised by fleeting visions of lost loves. Collis even thought of Delphine, as he sank, and he might even have called her name out loud. He thought of Hannah, too, and glimpsed her for a moment in profile, with her blonde hair unfurled by the wind, a Renaissance heroine. But it was Maria-Mamuska with whom he fell. He saw a dark tangle of hair, a chestnut-brown eye that stared at nothing, a dark flushed cheek. He felt as if his sinking were almost over, as if the whole of Panama were pressing in on him, as if locomotives were rushing slowly towards his head from all sides. He felt the intense sensitivity of his own naked skin against hers. ‘Maria-Mamuska …’ he whispered, and then he was discharging everything he felt for her and for Hannah and for Delphine, and in one intense awesome flash it was over.
They lay side by side on the coverlet for a long time, until their panting had subsided, and until most of the night had passed them by. Collis guessed it would be dawn soon, but he felt too idle to get out of bed and go look at his pocket watch, which he had left on top of the bureau.
After a while, Maria-Mamuska kissed his shoulder. He turned and smiled at her, and she smiled back.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I guess it’s the only way to tell.’
‘The only way to tell what?’
She brushed back her hair. There were clear beads of sweat on her upper lip. ‘How much you could love someone. It’s the only way to find out for sure.’
He didn’t say anything for a minute or so. He wasn’t entirely certain what she meant. He looked up at the cracked, stained plaster on the ceiling, and at the twining column of black smoke that rose from the oil lamp. He could have done with a drink.
Maria-Mamuska propped herself up on one elbow. ‘So many people must marry without knowing what their wife or their husband is like underneath. Look at you and me. I could have been the tattooed lady for all you knew, and you could have been the tattooed man.’
Collis frowned. ‘Sure. But we’re not thinking of getting married.’ He paused. ‘Are we?’
Maria-Mamuska shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t marry you even if we were.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
She sat up and cradled her knees in her arms.
‘What do you mean, you wouldn’t marry me anyway?’ he wanted to know.
‘Just what I said. Why should I marry a man who couldn’t make me happy?’
‘You don’t think I could make you happy? Why not?’
She gave him a smile. ‘Now I’ve made you angry. You think I’m being bad to you.’
‘I simply don’t understand you, that’s all,’ he told her. But he admitted to himself inwardly that her words had made him feel more than usually sore. What kind of a gibe was that – that he couldn’t make her happy? Damn it, he could make any woman happy. Hadn’t he just this minute made her happy? What more did she want? Surely she didn’t want more?
Maria-Mamuska kissed his hair. ‘You mustn’t look so sad. You’re
looking sad again. But you could never be right for me.’
‘I don’t know what makes you say that.’
‘I say it because I don’t like to be raped.’
He looked at her petulantly. ‘You call that rape? How the hell do you work that out?’
‘It was rape,’ she affirmed, with a nod. ‘If a man takes a woman to his bed, and yet his mind is someplace else, then that’s rape. You weren’t with me, Collis, you were far away, and all I could do was lie there and wait for you to come back to me.’
He sat up. He could hardly credit what he was hearing. ‘What in heaven’s name are you trying to say?’ he said. ‘What do you mean, you were waiting for me to come back to you? Where the hell do you think I was?’
‘I don’t know, Collis. Maybe with other women.’
He put his hand over his mouth. His eyes, framed by his thumb and his index finger, were both irritated and thoughtful.
‘You mustn’t blame yourself,’ said Maria-Mamuska. ‘Plenty of women would think you were wonderful. But wherever you went in your mind, and with your body, I would have liked to have come with you. I wanted us to get there together.’
There was a silence, and then Maria-Mamuska suddenly started to laugh. It was a hoarse, hilarious laugh, and Collis couldn’t help smiling in response. But he said, as he watched her, ‘I don’t know what’s so funny.’
She brushed tears away from her eyes. ‘Nothing is funny, Collis. Nothing is funny except what men don’t understand about women, and women don’t understand about men. You’re not funny. I’m not laughing at you. I think you’re very good-looking, and very strong, but you’re not the one for me. There is something else you have to do in your life before you think about staying with a woman. You must use some women first, as you used me tonight. That was all I should have expected.’
Collis reached out with his hand and gently touched her forehead with the tips of his fingers, almost as if he were giving her a blessing.
‘I think you’re quite amazing,’ he said.
She took hold of his hand and kissed it. ‘No, I’m not amazing. I’m one of those people who have to do everything the difficult way, and that’s why I think like this. I’m not amazing. But you will be amazing. And this thing you have to do will also be amazing.’
‘What thing?’
She bent forward and picked up her bodice from the floor. ‘If you don’t know, then I don’t. But you will do something that will change the world, and people will say, there goes Mr Collis, he changed the world.’
Collis stood naked and silent. The flame in the oil lamp dipped and flickered, and all around, the Hotel Colón creaked like an old ship. His watch on the bureau said four-thirty, and he knew it would soon be light. Here, only about nine degrees north of the equator, the dawn came up as suddenly as a thrown-back curtain.
All through the long minutes of quiet, the locomotive on Front Street went pssssshhh-clank, pssssshhh-clank, patiently waiting, as a carnival waits, for the people to come and bring laughter and life to it.
The train pulled out of Aspinwall at eleven the next morning, chased by dogs and ragged children. The day was clear and brassily hot, and the mud of Front Street was already crusted like pastry. The Virginia’s passengers were pale and withdrawn on the whole, because none of them had slept very well, and although they had been served with cups and cups of fragrant Colombian coffee, their breakfast had consisted of not much more than dried-beef hash, beans, and potatoes fried in rancid oil.
Collis, however, was in a good mood. He felt that today’s train journey was at last going to bring him face to face with the broad expanse of his future. Travelling through the jungle from the Caribbean to the Pacific was like disappearing down a rabbit hole, leaving behind his failures and his creditors, only to reappear in another world where his past errors were all forgotten. He was still irritated by Hannah’s oblique approaches, and confused by Maria-Mamuska’s self-reliance, but in this world of exotic trees and bright-blue skies, with parakeets shrilling and the locomotive broad-chestedly chuffing along ahead of them, it was hard for him to feel depressed.
Front Street, once they were past the hotel, deteriorated into ramshackle buildings and abandoned sheds. But then they were crossing the narrow Folks River, which separated the island of Aspinwall from the mainland, and after they had been treated to a vivid, clear view of the glittering bay of Limón, they were plunged almost immediately into the jungle. Here, the sunlight was filtered into a thousand different shades of green, emeralds and turquoises and glass greens, all sparkling with raindrops from the previous day’s downpour. The air was musty with the scent of vegetation, and close with the damp decaying smell of the tropics. Collis watched in fascination as the train emerged from the undergrowth which grew around the tracks and the sleepers, and crossed a wide watery mangrove swamp, its wheels rolling only inches above the surface. All around, like the patterns in a kaleidoscope, the piercingly blue sky was reflected in the muddy brown water. Andrew took out a flask of bourbon, wiped the neck, and passed it over to Collis. ‘That’s Monkey Hill,’ he said, pointing to a low mound to the east. ‘That’s where the railroad used to bury their dead before they got around to selling ’em.’
The train clattered and swayed on the uneven rails. The puffs of smoke from its bell-shaped stack sailed past Collis’s window, then broke up and faded amongst the giant grey-trunked cedro trees. Collis lit a cigar and sat back to enjoy five or six hours of travelling through the most exotic landscape he had ever seen in his life. Andrew, on the other hand, bent over a chess problem with a stub of pencil from the Astor House Hotel in New York, took regular sips from his flask, and ignored the scenery.
Once across the mangrove swamp, the train made its way through crowded tangles of trees and plants, so dense that they sometimes formed a green, creeper-hung tunnel. Collis felt that if the train travelled slowly enough, the jungle would entwine itself around the wheels, and eventually overtake it completely. One day, an exploratory safari might find them, a party of cheerfully grinning skeletons, in a train from which scarlet hibiscus and pale orchids grew and trembled, with passionflowers and trailing vines twisted around the locomotive’s smokestack and interlaced between the spokes of the motionless wheels.
Andrew evidently sensed what he was thinking, because he looked up and remarked, ‘They have to cut back the jungle every year. Jungles don’t like railroads. Not much more than brides like their husbands on their wedding night.’
Then he returned to his chess.
It wasn’t long before the train reached the village of Gatun. Gatun station was a small white-frame building with green shutters, neatly fenced and meticulously kept. The village itself lay across a wide, muddy river, a sparse collection of grass huts; and from there the train was watched with disinterest by a ragged crowd of men in straw hats, women in sun-bleached cotton dresses, and naked children. Occasionally one of the more exuberant passengers would wave, or call out ‘Halloo’, but the heat, and the noisy lushness of the jungle, seemed to swallow their greetings up. More than that, the river kept up an oily sliding noise as it poured its way out to the Caribbean, a noise that put Collis in mind of flood and fever.
‘That’s the Chagres,’ said Andrew. ‘The first time I saw it, it was almost dry. But the way it rains around here, it gets real swollen at times. They reckon they average more than sixteen inches of rain in August, and that’s if they’re lucky.’
The train stopped for a short while at Gatun, hissing and steaming under the glaring sky. Some of the passengers alighted, and walked up and down the train, admiring the river and the distant hills, but Collis remained where he was. Andrew Hunt took some more snuff, and blew his nose, and then decided that his chess problem was impossible.
After twenty minutes, the train whistled, everybody clambered aboard again, and they slowly pulled out of Gatun and started to cross the swamps of Panama’s Caribbean lowlands. The heat was building up, and several passengers drew down the window s
hades and sat fanning themselves with magazines and newspapers. The Hotel Colón had offered a limited number of New Orleans Times-Picayunes, two months old.
By noon, the day was so hot and steamy that it was like a dream. They rolled slowly over the Black Swamp, which was supposed to be bottomless, and where the railroad pilings sank year after year, and continually had to be built up. They passed the stations at Tiger Hill, Lion Hill, and Ahorca Lagarto – ‘Hanging Lizard’ – all as neat and white as the station at Gatun. As they crossed the swampy bottomlands, the Chagres twisted and wriggled beside them, on their right, disgorging last night’s rain through the hectic jungle undergrowth. They passed Frijoles (literally, ‘Beans’), and punctilious Jamaican stewards offered them quinine water with ice; however, several of the passengers had already drunk so much warm white wine and bourbon that they were sleeping, their heads vibrating against the panelled sides of the coaches. They crossed the Chagres River over the huge iron bridge at Barbacoas, the train wheels echoing over the metal supports, and the river foaming violently underneath. Then they were out in broad, green fields, under an intense blue sky, in which clouds floated like tethered balloons.
Collis, drowsy with heat and whisky, watched the meadows go by through half-closed eyelids. The train clattered on its rails, and yellow butterflies blew in and out of the windows. He thought about Maria-Mamuska, and what had happened last night at the Hotel Colón. He didn’t know whether he was going to sleep with her again or not. That seemed to be up to her – a position that Collis found both novel and alarming. He didn’t know, either, what Hannah would think of it if she ever found out. It would probably mean the end of what she had called their ‘affinity of spirit’. But would it?
All that he could decide about his feelings at the moment was that his travels on the paddle steamer Virginia, and his first night in a tropical climate, had opened his eyes to his lack of experience with women. The morning after Maria-Mamuska’s frank words of disappointment, he missed Delphine more than ever, and he would have gladly had her here on this train, as it rocked and swayed across the drowned meadows of Panama, across bridge after bridge, crossing all the twisting tributaries of the Chagres before it eventually began to slow, and apply its brakes, and steam slowly into the village of Matachí n. It was at Matachí n that the train would finally leave the course of the Chagres and begin to scale the valley of the Rio Obispo, the Chagres’s largest tributary. It was at Matachí n that the Chinese labourers who had worked on the Panama Railroad had given in to the terrible depression that follows bouts of malaria, and had committed mass suicide, by hanging or wrist-slashing or sticking themselves, like pigs, on pointed bamboo sticks.
Railroad Page 20
