happy to stay with you. I’m free all afternoon.”
Marina looked at her guest but all she could really make out was the light of her hair which appeared to be receding down a tunnel. She said she did not want her to stay.
Barbara sat back on her heels looking disappointed. She took Marina’s cold fingers in her hand and bounced them. “Okay, I’ll come back then at five and we can talk about what dress you’re going to wear tomorrow. I brought a few that I think will be pretty on you. It’s good that you have a friend who’s as tall as you are.” She waited. “Are you going to be sick now? Try to wait as long as you can. The longer you can hold it down the better it works. Panting really helps.”
Lines of sweat began to run down Marina’s forehead, down from the crown of her head, down the back of her neck. A clear, thin mucus came from her nose at a rate that exceeded both the perspiration and the tears that were pouring from her eyes. She did not lift her hand to her face. She let the slick wall pour unabated. It was early still but she realized very clearly there was nothing she could do to stop this from happening. The trembling shook her hard enough to knock her teeth and she tried to keep her mouth open. Even if there were an antidote she would never get to it in time. This was the end of the end. She knew what it felt like now. If she lived to see it come again she would call it by name. In one of her last clear thoughts, Marina wondered if she had been murdered, or if by taking the cup herself, she had committed suicide.
Far outside the city the tree frogs were calling her, and the deep, rhythmic pulse of their voices set the blood flow to her heart.
Marina woke up on the cool tile of the bathroom floor, her head resting on a pile of towels. She opened her eyes and watched a bright red spider of medium size slip beneath the sink cabinet. The details of the time that had elapsed, she didn’t know how much time it was, were not clear, and for that she was grateful. She breathed in and breathed out, moved her fingers and toes, stretched open her mouth and closed it again. The shaman-induced illness had left her and in the violence of its departure had scraped out whatever illness she had had in the first place. She was alive, possibly well. Her hip was sore from the angle she had been lying at but that hardly seemed important. Carefully, slowly, she pulled herself upright and then moved the short distance over the ledge of the bathtub where she sat in the bottom just to be safe and let the hot shower beat against her head until the water slipped to lukewarm. After that she brushed her teeth and drank a bottle of water. She was sore and raw but she experienced that distinct mental clarity that marked a fever’s end. She rolled her head from side to side. She walked naked into the bedroom, a towel around her head, to find the room was clean and Barbara Bovender was sitting in a chair by the window reading the
“Look who’s up!” Barbara said.
“You were leaving,” Marina said, but very little sound came out. She coughed, trying to reset her vocal cords which had been stripped from vomiting. “You were leaving.” She found the bathrobe sheet folded on the foot of the bed and pulled it around her.
“I was going to, but you got sick so fast. It really went right to work on you. I thought I should stay just to make sure you didn’t fall and hit your head on the toilet, anything like that. But you’re better, right? I can tell just by looking at you.”
“I am,” Marina said. She couldn’t bring herself to thank the person who had so recently poisoned her, nor could she deny that the poison had improved her circumstances.
“I’ve never read this article,” Barbara said, holding up the journal. “It’s fascinating, even the science parts which I really don’t follow. I kept thinking about how lucky it was that things worked out so that I was sitting in your hotel room for a couple of hours. I have to tell you, I really didn’t understand Annick’s work at all before this. To think of being able to wait and have your children whenever you want them, forty, fifty — sixty even, that would be amazing.” Barbara stopped and looked at her hostess. “You know, I’ve never asked you, do you have children?”
“I do not,” Marina said. The air conditioning had been turned up to high and she was starting to shiver in the cold. “I’d like to get dressed now.” For the first time in days she was hungry.
“Oh sure, of course.” Barbara got up from her chair. “Do you mind if I borrow this? I know Jackie would want to read it.”
“Fine,” Marina said.
“Try the dresses on and let me know which one you like.” Barbara stopped at the door. “I really am so glad it all worked out and that you’re better. I’ll tell the shaman, he’ll be so pleased. We’ll pick you up tomorrow at seven, alright?”
But she didn’t mean it as a question. Before Marina had a chance to answer, Barbara Bovender and the
Five
The point of an evening at Teatro Amazonas was not so much to see an opera as it was to see an opera house. They had tickets for Gluck’s
“The natives swear that nobody built it,” Barbara said, taking the tickets out from her tiny black lacquered evening bag. “They say it just happened.”
Jackie nodded. It was the version of which he most approved. “They say it was brought down in a space ship for some prince because this was the only place he could have sex.”
Barbara Bovender was wearing a short ivory-colored dress that showed the full length of her leg, a shameless expanse of tanned calf and thigh that was exaggerated by a very high pair of evening sandals. It was a dress she had first offered to Marina and Marina had declined. Every dress Barbara had brought over in her tapestry bag was missing some essential piece of fabric: the front or the back or the skirt, leaving Marina to decide which part of herself she could best afford to leave uncovered. The ivory dress had a modest neckline and long sleeves but was short enough to embarrass a third-grader. In the end she settled on a long straight dress of dark gray silk that left bare her arms and back because Barbara consented to lend her a wrap, even though she said it ruined the lines. Once Marina’s fever had broken and the vomiting had stopped, she was in fact grateful, not only for her shaman cure (though she wished she had taken a vaccine for hepatitis A before leaving on her trip) but for the loan of an inappropriate dress and the chance to go to the opera. She appreciated having a reason to scrub beneath her fingernails, to leave her room in the evening, to listen to music. What’s more, Mrs. Bovender came back to her hotel before the performance to pin up Marina’s hair and apply her eyeliner as if she were a bride. Marina had had many friends in her life who could recite the periodic table from memory but not since high school had she had a friend with a particular talent for hair. When Barbara was through with her considerable work she led Marina to the mirror so that she could be overwhelmed by the results, and Marina, who didn’t remember looking as beautiful on her wedding day, obliged. “You have to make a point of looking nice every now and then,” Barbara said, clamping a significant gold cuff around Marina’s wrist. “Believe me, if you don’t do it down here then everything is lost.”
When the three of them moved through the lobby, the crowds of opera goers turned to watch them pass. Jackie, slightly stoned, with his lightly tinted glasses and glossy hair, looked like a man who was likely to arrive with two women. He wore a white linen shirt with white embroidery down the front, a surfer’s version of formal wear. Marina was only sorry to think that this beauty she was doubtlessly incapable of replicating was being spent on the Bovenders. After all, Mr. Fox enjoyed the opera. It wasn’t so unreasonable to think he could have visited her here. She imagined the weight of her hand resting inside his arm.
The usher unlocked the door to their box with a heavy brass skeleton key that he wore around his neck on a
