The night passed. Before dawn of the fifth day something erupted from down inside him and filled his mouth and nostrils. He was astonished to notice that it was the smell he had first noticed four days before, the smell he had thought was of the jungle but which in fact was the smell of his own recesses.
His head shot up from the deck. He gasped for a huge gulp of air, his eyes wide. She walked up to him and, putting her foot under the biceps closest to his heart, rolled him off the edge of the boat. His eyes were still wide as he sank, staring up at her through the water. There was a bubble from him.
In after him went the cards, queen of clubs and all. Deal, she said.
The westward river spat her out somewhere in northern Peru. Since she was deposited on the right bank rather than on the left, she went in the direction of Colombia rather than Chile; by such accidents whole lives are determined. Bogota was the first city she had ever seen, though all she saw were its lights in the night. She didn’t stay long, entering at sunset and crossing through the middle of town; by dawn she had already come out the other end, and it was behind her.
She continued in the same direction, to the coast west of Barranquilla, where she decided, at the edge of the sea, to turn in the direction of the sun. Since it was late afternoon and the sun was on her left, she followed the coast to Panama rather than to Brazil, where she would eventually have stumbled on where she had started. Continually walking along the edge of the sea, she approached, after two weeks and another three hundred miles, a river she easily identified as made by men. She was shrewd enough to understand the value of her gold. With it she bought food and passage on a barge, which exited the canal on the side of the Pacific Ocean and sailed to a small merchants’ port in the Gulf of Tehuantepec.
She lived on the beaches of the gulf for two months, sleeping in a hole she dug with her hands and covering herself with the sand that baked so hot in the day it kept her warm in the night. Each morning she got up as soon as the sun rose above the trees to get wood for a fire. She went down to the ships to buy food from the boatmen. She began to notice the way they looked at her; it was the way Coba had looked at her when he’d first come to the Crowd. One day she got up to get wood and kept on walking. She walked ten days until she finally came to the pyramids of southern Mexico. They gleamed a tarnished gold in the sun, and in the gaping holes pocked by the heat burned the fires of Indians. It may be that the pyramids of Mexico were the first thing to fire Catherine’s sense of wonder since the night she stood on the beach when she was three years old watching the husk of a dead ship. For a while she lived with an old Indian woman in one of the pyramids where she would pass the time strolling among the catacombs. There were ancient pictures on the walls that told stories, none of which she understood since she had never seen pictures before. Some of the pictures looked alarmingly like the treacherous watercreature. She refused to believe that there might be a whole species of watercreatures, rather she preferred to think the one she knew was an aberration of nature. Sometimes she recognized the pictures of suns and stars, of mountains and waters. One day she came to the strangest picture of all, which didn’t resemble anything she had ever seen. She couldn’t make head or tail of it; perhaps, she decided, it was the likeness of a peculiar kind of forest or maybe the huge city she had seen in Colombia. The picture looked like this: AMERICA.
Sometimes people with faces the color of Coba’s came to the pyramids. They came in automobiles. By now Catherine had seen an automobile, moving isolated across empty terrain. But what she had not seen were the cameras the tourists brought; to her they looked like mysterious little boxes raised in ritual. One day Catherine met a couple. The man was a university professor in his late twenties and the woman with him was a postgraduate student. They spoke to Catherine in a language she didn’t understand, unlike any she had heard. They were fairer than even Coba had been. By now Catherine was tired of living in the pyramids, and she pointed up the road from where the couple had come in their automobile and asked, in her own language, which they could never have comprehended, if she could go back up the road with them. She kept pointing up the road and pointing at herself, back and forth. The man was absolutely amenable to this proposal; the woman didn’t say anything. They got in the ear and drove the rest of the day, Catherine in the backseat with her scarf of gold coins. They came to a hacienda where the couple was staying. Catherine assumed she would find a patch of dirt somewhere out by the house and dig a hole where she would sleep; the young professor, however, would have none of this. He kept pointing at Catherine and pointing at the house where he intended to have her sleep. The other woman looked off in the distance during this “conversation.” Catherine and the couple were together two days, continually driving up the same road and always staying at another hacienda or, as was the ease on the third night, a small hotel. By the beginning of the third day Catherine understood that the woman hated her.
