The Night of the Iguana

by Tennessee Williams

  Because of this troubled youth and wise counsellor air of their conversations it had at first struck Miss Jelkes, in the beginning of her preoccupation with them, that the younger man might be a war veteran suffering from shock and that the older one might be a doctor who had brought him down to the Pacific resort while conducting a psychiatric treatment. This was before she discovered the name of the older man, on mail addressed to him. She had instantly recognized the name as one that she had seen time and again on the covers of literary magazines and as the author of a novel that had caused a good deal of controversy a few years ago. It was a novel that dealt with some sensational subject. She had not read it and could not remember what the subject was but the name was associated in her mind with a strongly social kind of writing which had been more in vogue about five years past than it was since the beginning of the war. However the writer was still not more than thirty. He was not good-looking but his face had distinction. There was something a little monkey-like in his face as there frequently is in the faces of serious young writers, a look that reminded Miss Jelkes of a small chimpanzee she had once seen in the corner of his cage at a zoo, just sitting there staring between the bars, while all his fellows were hopping and spinning about on their noisy iron trapeze. She remembered how she had been touched by his solitary position and lackluster eyes. She had wanted to give him some peanuts but the elephants had devoured all she had. She had returned to the vendor to buy some more but when she brought them to the chimpanzee’s cage, he had evidently succumbed to the general impulse, for now every man Jack of them was hopping and spinning about on the clanking trapeze and not a one of them seemed a bit different from the others. Looking at this writer she felt almost an identical urge to share something with him, but the wish was thwarted again, in this instance by a studious will to ignore her. It was not accidental, the way that he kept his eyes off her. It was the same on the beach as it was on the hotel verandahs.

  On the beach he wore next to nothing, a sort of brilliant diaper of printed cotton, twisted about his loins in a fashion that sometimes failed to even approximate decency, but he had a slight and graceful physique and an unconscious ease of movement which made the immodesty less offensive to Miss Jelkes than it was in the case of his friend. The younger man had been an athlete at college and he was massively constructed. His torso was burned the color of an old penny and its emphatic gender still further exclaimed by luxuriant patterns of hair, sunbleached till it shone like masses of crisped and frizzed golden wire. Moreover his regard for propriety was so slight that he would get in and out of his colorful napkin as if he were standing in a private cabana. Miss Jelkes had to acknowledge that he owned a certain sculptural grandeur but the spinsterish side of her nature was still too strong to permit her to feel anything but a squeamish distaste. This reaction of Miss Jelkes was so strong on one occasion that when she had returned to the hotel she went directly to the Patrona to enquire if the younger gentleman could not be persuaded to change clothes in his room or, if this was too much to ask of him, that he might at least keep the dorsal side of his nudity toward the beach. The Patrona was very much interested in the complaint but not in a way that Miss Jelkes had hoped she would be. She laughed immoderately, translating phrases of Miss Jelkes’ complaint into idiomatic Spanish, shouted to the waiters and the cook. All of them joined in the laughter and the noise was still going on when Miss Jelkes standing confused and indignant saw the two young men climbing up the hill. She retired quickly to her room on the hammock-verandah but she knew by the reverberating merriment on the other side that the writers were being told, and that all of the Costa Verde was holding her up to undisguised ridicule. She started packing at once, this time not even bothering to fold things neatly into her steamer trunk, and she was badly frightened, so much disturbed that it affected her stomach and the following day she was not well enough to undertake a journey.

  It was this following day that the Iguana was caught.

  The Iguana is a lizard, two or three feet in length, which the Mexicans regard as suitable for the table. They are not always eaten right after they are caught but being creatures that can survive for quite a while without food or drink, they are often held in captivity for some time before execution. Miss Jelkes had been told that they tasted rather like chicken, which opinion she ascribed to a typically Mexican way of glossing over an unappetizing fact. What bothered her about the Iguana was the inhumanity of its treatment during its interval of captivity. She had seen them outside the huts of villagers, usually hitched to a short pole near the doorway and continually and hopelessly clawing at the dry earth within the orbit of the rope-length, while naked children squatted around it, poking it with sticks in the eyes and mouth.

  Now the Patrona’s adolescent son had captured one of these Iguanas and had fastened it to the base of a column under the hammock-verandah. Miss Jelkes was not aware of its presence until late the night of the capture. Then she had been disturbed by the scuffling sound it made and had slipped on her dressing gown and had gone out in the bright moonlight to discover what the sound was caused by. She looked over the rail of the verandah and she saw the Iguana hitched to the base of the column nearest her doorway and making the most pitiful effort to scramble into the bushes just beyond the taut length of its rope. She uttered a little cry of horror as she made this discovery.

  The two young writers were lying in hammocks at the other end of the verandah and as usual were carrying on a desultory conversation in tones not loud enough to carry to her bedroom.

  Without stopping to think, and with a curious thrill of exultation, Miss Jelkes rushed down to their end of the verandah. As she drew near them she discovered that the two writers were engaged in drinking rum-coco, which is a drink prepared in the shell of a coconut by knocking a cap off it with a machete and pouring into the nut a mixture of rum, lemon, sugar and cracked ice. The drinking had been going on since supper and the floor beneath their two hammocks was littered with bits of white pulp and hairy brown fibre and was so slippery that Miss Jelkes barely kept her footing. The liquid had spilt over their faces, bare throats and chests, giving them an oily lustre, and about their hammocks was hanging a cloud of moist and heavy sweetness. Each had a leg thrown over the edge of the hammock with which he pushed himself lazily back and forth. If Miss Jelkes had been seeing them for the first time, the gross details of the spectacle would have been more than association with a few dissolute members of the Jelkes family had prepared her to stomach, and she would have scrupulously avoided a second glance at them. But Miss Jelkes had been changing more than she was aware of during this period of preoccupation with the two writers, her scruples were more undermined than she suspected, so that if the word pigs flashed through her mind for a moment, it failed to distract her even momentarily from what she was bent on doing. It was a form of hysteria that had taken hold of her, her action and her speech were without volition.

  “Do you know what has happened!” she gasped as she came toward them. She came nearer than she would have consciously dared, so that she was standing directly over the young writer’s prone figure. “That horrible boy, the son of the Patrona, has tied up an Iguana beneath my bedroom. I heard him tying it up but I didn’t know what it was. I’ve been listening to it for hours, ever since supper, and didn’t know what it was. Just now I got up to investigate, I looked over the edge of the verandah and there it was, scuffling around at the end of its little rope!”

  Neither of the writers said anything for a moment, but the older one had propped himself up a little to stare at Miss Jelkes.

  “There what was?” he enquired.

  “She is talked about the Iguana,” said the younger.

  “Oh! Well, what about it?”

  “How can I sleep?” cried Miss Jelkes. “How could anyone sleep with that example of Indian savagery right underneath my door!”

  “You have an aversion to lizards?” suggested the older writer.

  “I have an aversion to brutal
ity!” corrected Miss Jelkes.

  “But the lizard is a very low grade of animal life. Isn’t it a very low grade of animal life?” he asked his companion.

  “Not as low as some,” said the younger writer. He was grinning maliciously at Miss Jelkes, but she did not notice him at all, her attention was fixed upon the older writer.

  “At any rate,” said the writer, “I don’t believe it is capable of feeling half as badly over its misfortune as you seem to be feeling for it.”

  “I don’t agree with you,” said Miss Jelkes. “I don’t agree with you at all! We like to think that we are the only ones that are capable of suffering but that is just human conceit. We are not the only ones that are capable of suffering. Why, even plants have sensory impressions. I have seen some that closed their leaves when you touched them!”

  She held out her hand and drew her slender fingers into a chalice that closed. As she did this she drew a deep, tortured breath with her lips pursed and nostrils flaring and her eyes rolled heavenwards so that she looked like a female Saint on the rack.

  The younger man chuckled but the older one continued to stare at her gravely.

  “I am sure,” she went on, “that the Iguana has very definite feelings, and you would be, too, if you had been listening to it, scuffling around out there in that awful dry dust, trying to reach the bushes with that rope twisted about its neck, making it almost impossible for it to breathe!”

  She clutched her throat as she spoke and with the other hand made a clawing gesture in the air. The younger writer broke into a laugh, the older one smiled at Miss Jelkes.

  “You have a real gift,” he said, “for vicarious experience.”

  “Well, I just can’t stand to witness suffering,” said Miss Jelkes. “I can endure it myself but I just can’t stand to witness it in others, no matter whether it’s human suffering or animal suffering. And there is so much suffering in the world, so much that is necessary suffering, such as illnesses and accidents which cannot be avoided. But there is so much unnecessary suffering, too, so much that is inflicted simply because some people have a callous disregard for the feelings of others. Sometimes it almost seems as if the universe was designed by the Marquis de Sade!”

  She threw back her head with an hysterical laugh.

  “And I do not believe in the principle of atonement,” she went on. “Isn’t it awful, isn’t it really preposterous that practically all our religions should be based on the principle of atonement when there is really and truly no such thing as guilt?”

  “I am sorry,” said the older writer. He rubbed his forehead. “I am not in any condition to talk about God.”

  “Oh, I’m not talking about God,” said Miss Jelkes. “I’m talking about the Iguana!”

  “She’s trying to say that the Iguana is one of God’s creatures,” said the younger writer.

  “But that one of God’s creatures,” said the older, “is now in the possession of the Patrona’s son!”

  “That one of God’s creatures,” Miss Jelkes exclaimed, “is now hitched to a post right underneath my door, and late as it is I have a very good notion to go and wake up the Patrona and tell her that they have got to turn it loose or at least to remove it some place where I can’t hear it!”

  The younger writer was now laughing with drunken vehemence. “What are you bellowing over?” the older one asked him.

  “If she goes and wakes up the Patrona, anything can happen!”

  “What?” asked Miss Jelkes. She glanced uncertainly at both of them.

  “That’s quite true,” said the older. “One thing these Mexicans will not tolerate is the interruption of sleep!”

  “But what can she do but apologize and remove it!” demanded Miss Jelkes. “Because after all, it’s a pretty outrageous thing to hitch a lizard beneath a woman’s door and expect her to sleep with that noise going on all night!”

  “It might not go on all night,” said the older writer.

  “What’s going to stop it?” asked Miss Jelkes.

  “The Iguana might go to sleep.”

  “Never!” said Miss Jelkes. “The creature is frantic and what it is going through must be a nightmare!”

  “You’re bothered a good deal by noises?” asked the older writer. This was, of course, a dig at Miss Jelkes for her complaint about the radio. She recognized it as such and welcomed the chance it gave to defend and explain. In fact this struck her as being the golden moment for breaking all barriers down.

  “That’s true, I am!” she admitted breathlessly. “You see, I had a nervous breakdown a few years ago, and while I’m ever so much better than I was, sleep is more necessary to me than it is to people who haven’t gone through a terrible thing like that. Why, for months and months I wasn’t able to sleep without a sedative tablet, sometimes two of them a night! Now I hate like anything to be a nuisance to people, to make unreasonable demands, because I am always so anxious to get along well with people, not only peaceably, but really cordially with them—even with strangers that I barely speak to—However it sometimes happens . . .”

  She paused for a moment. A wonderful thought had struck her.

  “I know what I’ll do!” she cried out. She gave the older writer a radiant smile.

  “What’s that?” asked the younger. His tone was full of suspicion but Miss Jelkes smiled at him, too.

  “Why, I’ll just move!” she said.

  “Out of Costa Verde?” suggested the younger.

  “Oh, no, no, no! No, indeed! It’s the nicest resort hotel I’ve ever stopped at! I mean that I’ll change my room.”

  “Where will you change it to?”

  “Down here,” said Miss Jelkes, “to this end of the verandah! I won’t even wait till morning. I’ll move right now. All these vacant rooms, there couldn’t be any objection, and if there is, why, I’ll just explain how totally impossible it was for me to sleep with that lizard’s commotion all night!”

  She turned quickly about on her heels, so quickly that she nearly toppled over on the slippery floor, caught her breath laughingly and rushed back to her bedroom. Blindly she swept up a few of her belongings in her arms and rushed back to the writers’ end of the verandah where they were holding a whispered consultation.

  “Which is your room?” she asked.

  “We have two rooms,” said the younger writer coldly.

  “Yes, one each,” said the older.

  “Oh, of course!” said Miss Jelkes. “But I don’t want to make the embarrassing error of confiscating one of you gentlemen’s beds!”

  She laughed gaily at this. It was the sort of remark she would make to show new acquaintances how far from being formal and prudish she was. But the writers were not inclined to laugh with her, so she cleared her throat and started blindly toward the nearest door, dropping a comb and a mirror as she did so.

  “Seven years bad luck!” said the younger man.

  “It isn’t broken!” she gasped.

  “Will you help me?” she asked the older writer.

  He got up unsteadily and put the dropped articles back on the disorderly pile in her arms.

  “I’m sorry to be so much trouble!” she gasped pathetically. Then she turned again to the nearest doorway.

  “Is this one vacant?”

  “No, that’s mine,” said the younger.

  “Then how about this one?”

  “That one is mine,” said the older.

  “Sounds like the Three Bears and Goldilocks!” laughed Miss Jelkes. “Well, oh, dear—I guess I’ll just have to take this one!”

  She rushed to the screen door on the other side of the younger writer’s room, excitingly aware as she did so that this would put her within close range of their nightly conversations, the mystery of which had tantalized her for weeks. Now she would be able to hear every word that passed between them unless they actually whispered in each other’s ear!

  She rushed into the bedroom and let the screen door slam.

  She switched on
the suspended light bulb and hastily plunged the articles borne with her about a room that was identical with the one that she had left and then plopped herself down upon an identical white iron bed.