Unknown (19 page)

Ironically, only the incorrect picture remained—the one of me in the cat-man’s arms. But their pleasure that this picture remained of myself and my ‘
jefe
’ was both touching and unfeigned.

Triumphantly, Petiso’s great-grandmother drew a circle round the sketch of the pair of us, James Fitzgerald and me. There were smiles and nods and clappings as Petiso and I made our farewells, and much calling after us.

‘What are they saying?' I asked Petiso in Spanish as a clump of gum trees hid the little village from our view.

‘Next time you come,
el jefe
will come too.'

‘Listen, Petiso,’ I said, tapping my ears, and flushing, ‘they say Mr. Fitzgerald is my
jefe?
'

‘Si.'
He beamed and skipped along the path ahead turning only to mime that the arrangement pleased him greatly.

‘But he isn’t.’ I shook my head. ‘Mr. Fitzgerald is not.'

‘Si.
' He turned and nodded vehemently.

‘No,
chiquillo.
'

Petiso looked at me pityingly. ‘Mr. Fitzgerald.’ He held up one hand.
‘Senorita
' He put his two palms together, then made a winding motion as if binding the two together.
‘Si.
'

I walked a few paces thoughtfully. How could one explain that unlike the Indian dialect of his village, neither in Spanish nor in English was a woman’s master also her husband? That a boss was a boss, a husband was a husband. Mentally I ran through my small vocabulary of Spanish. But what I didn’t ask myself was why it was so important to me to explain this to Petiso. Was I actually hoping that those primitive pictures drawn by an old woman who had never seen a city, let alone a school, held a grain of truth which had remained hidden from the supposedly more sophisticated me? And wasn’t I trying to kill that beguiling hope, because it tormented me?

‘Senor Fitzgerald,' I spoke my Spanish carefully, ‘is at work my . .
.jefe. Si.
'

Politely Petiso nodded. Then he asked by miming a kiss and raising his expressive brows if it were customary to kiss one’s
jefe.

I hesitated, then shook my head. I saw by the smile on Petiso’s face that he felt he had undoubtedly scored a point.

‘But, Petiso,' I continued, ‘that does not mean that at home he is my
esposo.
The two are separate, quite different. Do you understand? At work he is my master. At home he is not my husband.’

Petiso broke off a piece of some aromatic shrub and chewed it thoughtfully. For several minutes we walked in silence, while Petiso pondered this unwelcome information. Now quite near at hand I could hear the rushing of the river in the rocky valley.

‘No comprendo
,’ he said at last. And then in his mixture of mime and Spanish he asked, ‘In England ladies have two husbands, yes?’

‘No,’ I shook my head, laughing and almost giving up, and yet not giving up. Talking to myself really, I suppose, and not to this strange child. ‘We have one husband and one wife.’

‘Si.
' He waited.

‘But Mr. Fitzgerald is not my . . .’ I pointed to myself, ‘
esposo
, never will be my husband and does not even like me.

Petiso looked puzzled.

I raised my fist as in his grandmother’s drawing. ‘He is always angry with me. I do not please him.’ I shook my fist.

‘Si, si
,’ Petiso replied, and spread his eloquent hands. He looked smiling and relieved and old as Puck and wise. He waved towards his village, he clutched his heart, he pointed, he picked up a branch of wood and beat someone and then cradled them in his arms. I got the message. He was trying to tell me that in his village, in his country, a good man only beat the woman that he really loved.

I decided there was no answer to that. I grasped the shiny osier balustrade. In my determination to forget James Fitzgerald, I had forgotten to be afraid of the bridge.

The afternoon sun shone directly in our eyes, making the osier strands of the balustrade gleam like silver. It threw the shadow of the gigantic outcrop of rock on the foamy cauldron below. If I looked down, which I only did rarely, I could even see the tiny shadows of our heads, no bigger than beads, moving slowly along the necklace of the bridge, down into its slack in the -middle, soon up towards the opposite cliff face.

The sun had sunk too far to light and refract the spray above the falls. There was no miniature rainbows, only a damp chill coming up along with the roar of the pounding waters.

The noise was too great here for conversation, even if Petiso and I had felt like it. But we were both absorbed in our own thoughts.

For my part, I lectured myself every bit as forcefully as James Fitzgerald would have done. I was not the first girl, I told myself sharply, nor would I be the last, to fall in love with a man who didn’t love me. Despite James Fitzgerald’s gentleness to me at Belanga, he had gone out of his way to warn me that there was someone else. What could have been clearer?

I glanced down. The two small beads were slowly making their way now towards the shadow of the outcrop. Soon they would be engulfed in it. Soon we would be at the other side, climbing the slope up to the road, waiting for the bus, and life would go on uninterrupted as before. It looked symbolic somehow, as if it might have been symbolic to me. But it wasn’t. Love, to the poets, might be the tenuous bridge between two like minds, but I hadn’t crossed it.

I raised my eyes, looking along the line of the gently waving ropes, carefully placing one foot in front of the other. No one waited for me at the other side. In the fullness of time Mr. Fitzgerald would marry Eve, and successfully combine (perhaps to Petiso’s approval) the role of
jefo
and
esposo
. While Hester at the end of the Charaguayan engagement year would marry Don Ramón.

Four more steps. Petiso, walking just a hand’s reach in front of me, turned to grin. Lightly we rocked as on a swing above the racing waters far below. Gently the rope structure bellied a little closer to the torrent as we reached centre. For all its fearfulness we seemed to walk on air.

Yet Mr. Fitzgerald—and briefly myself, for that matter —had once imagined I was attracted to Don Ramón.

My thoughts skidded to a stop. Was that what James Fitzgerald was warning me of? He had assumed I was in love with Don Ramon. Indeed, I had allowed him to assume that. So, for their varying reasons, had Hester and Eve and Don Ramón. As the Mallenports’ trusted friend, had he known of Hester’s affair, and in his restrained aloof way been trying to warn me of coming disappointment? And what had I done? Female-like, I had told him I loved no one.

Ahead of me on the rope, Petiso pressed forward. We were gently climbing towards the far side. The two beads of our heads were big now, silhouetted against the cliff face. But though my feet moved, my mind didn’t.

Even if James had been warning me about Don Ramón and not himself, it didn’t make him love
me.
It left me perhaps with more dignity but no more love.

Five more steps. Only if I had listened to too much gossip, made other wrong assumptions too. Such as assuming he was in love with Eve. Just as I had assumed at the Hacienda that the kiss ... The kiss ... If the kiss...?

Suddenly from behind me there was the noise like the twanging of an arrow out of a giant bow, shrill, sharp and immediate above the roar of the waterfall.

The sky opened. I dropped as if a trapdoor had been sprung. I still held the rope balustrade, but it felt limp, my other upflung arm grasped Petiso.

Down, down, we plunged, falling as in nightmare into cold shadowy darkness. My ears sang, my stomach hurt, my breathing choked. A wind whipped at my hair and snatched at my clothes. The cliff face rushed past like a crazy film. The water rushed up to meet us. Like a fairground water-chute run amok, like a gigantic broken swing, down and down. I felt a fleck of foam on my face. I heard a scream high above the sound of the falls, echoing from the cliff face—mine or Petiso’s, I didn’t know which.

Then my arm was almost wrenched out of its socket as the rope balustrade tautened. We fell no further. We began swinging sideways and round like the pendulum of a crazy clock.

It all happened so quickly that I couldn’t think, let alone speak. At least, I still held hold of Petiso. I suppose instinctively when the bridge broke we had both thrown out our free hand to clutch the other. And there we clung like ants to the remains of the broken bridge, while like some Edgar Allan Poe story, a giant hand seemed to swing it over the rasping edge of the outcrop as if to time how long it would be before we let go, or the osier frayed and the rest of it broke, and we finally plunged to our doom.

I would like to feel, I thought clearly, that danger sharpened my mind. But it didn’t. My mind was as fragmented as a kaleidoscope. All that was sharpened were my senses. I can still remember the imminent roar of the water now only about fifty feet below our dangling legs, how damp and cold it was, how grim the rock face looked, how slender the osier rope I grasped in my chafed hand, how my armpit ached, how small and frightened and resigned Petiso looked.

The word
resigned
stuck in my head. I remembered with despair that often in danger the Indians simply
resign
themselves to death. The resignation and acceptance that adds to their longevity is no use when it comes to near-disaster.

I felt my face break out in a cold sweat. My throat thickened with horror and helplessness. Then I glimpsed a shaly ledge, about half way down between the outcrop and the waterfall.

I didn’t at first consciously try to swing towards it, but instinctively my legs began to work backwards and forwards, as I had done as a child on the garden swing, then consciously working hard at it, guiding our dizzy- making arc towards it. I couldn’t hear the creak of the rope above the roar of the water, but I was mindful that every movement would wear it that much more. Nearer and nearer we swung. The rope held. Then as we came within a leap of the ledge, I yelled in Spanish, ‘Jump!'

But Petiso stayed as still as a statue. His hands were frozen on the rope, his eyes glassy, his expression resigned. Life had taught him that the sunny day could so often end in death. This one he knew now was going to. In a little while he would drop into the foamy waters. Already he was composing his mind to accept it.

In the return arc, out we swung sickeningly towards the middle of the river. Despair crept like the cold misty spume round my heart too.

Desperately I talked to him. I didn’t know what I said, what words I said in what mixed languages, what mime I made. I cajoled, threatened, confessed, pleaded. The only thing that seemed to get through to him was when I mentioned
el jefe,
Mr. Fitzgerald. He had entrusted me to his care, so Petiso must exert himself. Otherwise
el jefe
would go to his village and demand harsh recompense.

Next time when I shouted, he must jump.

The threat, the reminder of his duty, his manly role, I didn’t know which, somehow pierced his consciousness. Petiso woke out of his stupor. He blinked his eyes and nodded. Then as the rope swung back towards the ledge again, I grasped his skinny waist, opened my hand, let go the rope . . . and together we jumped.

We landed on our feet, swaying, slithering, almost overbalancing, but steadying ourselves against the rock face, scraping our hands, gulping and gasping in near-hysteria.

For minutes I stood with my forehead pressed to the cold rough rock face, shuddering from head to foot with shock. My thin suit clung to me. My mouth felt as dry as the earth of Petiso’s village.

Then I turned round and explored our little haven. Below us was a sheer uninterrupted drop to the falls. Right under us, fast-moving glacial water poured in a great dark glassy curve, fragmenting into a white torrent which curled and swirled and rose on the first level like a vat of scalded cream, and then tumbled to yet another giant level and another and another till unknown darker depths hid it mercifully from my view.

Above us, like a giant stone toadstool, was the outcrop. Just as the race of waters below cut off any hope of a downward escape, so the roof-like rock high above our heads made an upward climb quite impossible. And when eventually anyone came to look for us, the outcrop hid us completely from view. Even the little bit of the bridge we had clung to had vanished—perhaps that last pull of our jump had finally shredded it. So there was nothing really to guide anyone. I took a quick look round before darkness fell, but there was no place we could make for. We could move neither up nor down. The ledge was narrow, shaly and uncomfortable. There were cracks across it, new ones, like the cracks on the boulder and the cliff face. The effects of the earth tremor had been small, but they had weakened the holdings of the bridge, cracked the cliff face. What if in a little while the ledge too began to crumble with our weight, and went tumbling down to join the other rocks and boulders in the wild water below?

Even if nothing so final as that happened, what about nightfall? What when the bitter cold mountain night took over from the warm equatorial day? It would be dark as the pit down here, and there would be only a late-rising moon. I had a small torch in my handbag, but I must hoard it, in case rescue came. But could we hope for rescue before dawn? Twelve long hours away from nightfall, and a thousand light years removed, it seemed, from Don Ramón's romantic
madruga.
I wondered how long it would be before we were missed; allowing for the unpunctuality of the buses, Morag would not worry till about midnight. And what would she do then? I wondered if like the cat dance there were any wild cats or jaguars prowling still around the villages, and my only consolation was that it might be too steep even for a jaguar to come.