It was a fantasy, no doubt, brought about by the darkness and the wine. Still, I would remember.
“We are,” the captain said in a strangled voice, “the very center of everything.”
“Until now,” sighed Mrs. Gallimar with a softly amorous tone, “I had not looked forward at all to this journey.”
“Until now,” growled the captain in husky honesty, “neither had I.”
I left them there, my lips sweet with the wine, my mind full of wonder at the circled paths of light, resolving, as I returned to my cool cabin on the Stugos Queen, never to forget this night. The old woman was standing at the railing, just outside my door. “Good night, dear Beauty,” I thought she said, but the wine had made me too giddy to hear her aright.
“Good night, Senora Carabosse,” I replied. Though the monkeys were screaming in the flooded jungle once more, I knew that, on this night, I would sleep.
19
Captain Karon, by threats and shouts and hiring a few layabouts to help with the unloading, got the last of the publicly acknowledged cargo off the ship shortly after sunrise. Three inmates from the clownery showed up to see the boat offshore, which delayed matters a bit as they insisted upon helping the passengers with their baggage.
The stokers bent their backs before the boilers, the whistle began to bleat, and the passengers trickled toward the rail to watch the departure. The chaperone emerged onto the deck to motion with one languid hand. Colonel Esquivar, a tall person with sharp squinty eyes, an enormous moustache, and very brown skin—riven by long exposure to the elements—had come aboard during the night, and he staggered out of his cabin bleary eyed, bowed to Mrs. Gallimar, sneered at the chaperone, and said something mildly insulting to the captain before staggering back into his cabin and slamming the door behind him. With a final toot, the Stugos Queen moved out into the flood, breasting it with a great shuddering clatter of both monstrous wheels, while the clownery inmates hurtled along the shore in a series of giant cartwheels and balletic leaps, ceasing to follow the ship only when it came opposite the swamps at the mouth of the tributary Rio Apenado.
The stewards began laying the tables in the first-class dining room. The cooks were already ladling out stew for the second-class passengers, the crew, and that part of the cargo needing to be fed at midday. (Was I the only one who noticed food being carried twice each day into the holds? No, the old woman saw it, too. She gave me a significant look and a wink. Who is she? What does she mean?) First-class luncheon would be later, which gave the kitchen boys time to decorate the dessert table with a frilled lizard carved from ice and garlanded with poppies carved from halves of blood-red chinangarees.
I settled easily into the routine of the voyage. Each morning I arrived in the dining room before Roland Mirabeau, who—shaved, dressed, with his hair arranged and moustache trimmed by his servant—arrived shortly after me to drink a glass of cuscumbre juice before sitting down at my table with a steaming cup of coffee or maté or cou, all of which were available, each in several varieties.
Since I was not in the mood or market for a lover and had made this fact clear, Roland accepted me and talked freely in my company. I listened, seldom making any comment that required a reply. The old woman, Senora Carabosse, usually emerged from her room a little later to sit at a neighboring table with her tea, eavesdropping on our talk as she blinked and muttered to herself. Poor old thing. I felt ashamed of my animadversion. She was harmless enough.
[Really!]
After a time, Mrs. Gallimar would come down to breakfast, usually with either the captain or Colonel Esquivar in attendance. There would be a flutter of ribbons and a rustle of sweet, scented flounces, a titter of laughter and a softly modulated voice calling good morning. I would see Roland preparing himself for appropriate reactions, for smiles and courtly bows, for admiring nods and glances, all of which Mrs. Gallimar would expect. One morning he confessed to me that he felt there was something missing in his responses. He felt the lack, as one feels something missing in a flavor which does not fill the mouth but merely lies there upon the tongue as though in anticipation of some more complex savor. So Roland felt a certain lack of sincerity at the core of his acquaintance with Mrs. Gallimar. He did not, in fact, lust after her, although, on an intellectual level, he could appreciate all her lustworthy qualities. She left him chill and untouched, his flesh like tallow, stiff and unwarmed by her welcoming sensuality. So he said, supposing I would understand. This was an unflattering supposition, though I made no remark upon it but merely smiled, cocking my head to solicit further intimations. Behind me, Senora Carabosse chuckled quietly to herself.
Had this been a new sensation, Roland went on, he would have been disturbed by it, but in fact it was his usual feeling with regard to women. Flowers could move him. Sunsets could bring tears to his eyes. The sight of the wind bending the trees at dawn could make him cry out in luxurious sensitivity, but women moved him not at all. There was something about them, some inherent fleshiness, some excess of corporeality which turned him cold. And then there was their smell, whether masked in perfumes or alive upon the air as itself, that fecund stench, that earthy aroma, that mephitic scent, which seemed to come upon them with womanhood.
(I leaned toward him, wondering if he would catch my aroma. Evidently he did not. It was then, I think, that I began to understand the world in which I found myself. I was beginning
