The Doctor and the Diva (26 page)

When the ritual of the male toilette was over, Munga held up a wooden hand mirror for Ravell to inspect the results, and Erika put down her magazine and walked into the house’s dark interior, glaring hard at Ravell as she passed. He looked up, surprised.

Inside the house, Peter was napping. He’d dropped his shoes on the floor and lay fully clothed on the bed. Erika took some oil of citronella from inside a bag. Down by the lagoon, where she planned to go walking, mosquitoes were rampant. She tilted her chin upward and rubbed the lemon-scented oil across her nose and cheeks, and finally her arms. A red patch on the back of her hand itched, and she scratched it. Citronella did not deter the
bête rouge,
and a few had burrowed under her skin, but she hoped to seal her skin against as many mosquitoes as she could.

She thought of Ravell sitting on the porch while the servant painted his jaw white with cream. As she sat down on the bed, her weight shifted the mattress and Peter opened his eyes. Out of guilt she touched her husband’s face. With a finger she marked the horseshoe of his jaw and caressed the soft place where it ended, under his ear.

“I’m going for a walk down by the lagoon,” she murmured, and he nodded almost imperceptibly before closing his eyes.

She took a floppy hat and wandered. The lagoon’s surface flashed silver here and there with tarpon, and the mangroves grew thick along the water and showed their roots. Behind the lagoon the forest was alive with the chatter of parrots.

A horse and its rider came up behind her. It was Ravell, on his way to supervise coolies clearing more forest. He got down and tied his horse to a tree, his hair still glossy, wet from the pomade. The sight of him made her upper torso tighten.

“Erika?” he said. “Are you upset about something?”

“You know why I’m angry.” Her tone was low and curt and she walked onward, not looking at him.

Alongside her, he took two nervous steps to her every furious stride. “Why are you acting like this?” he asked. “How am I to know if you won’t tell me?”

She spun around. “I should think that you, of all men, would understand a woman’s loss.”

His arms hung at his sides. He was clearly confounded.

“You think that I’m wasting my talent,” she said. “You think that I should have forgotten about having a baby by now. Even you don’t believe that I’m likely to become pregnant again.”

Ravell let out a blast of a sigh, and turned his face toward the lagoon.

“You think that by now I should have rallied and taken myself to Milan or Florence. I should be singing my scales to the green river that washes under the Ponte Vecchio—” She took off her hat and flourished it with a wide arm.

Ravell stared at her as she went on.

“I know several other women who’ve had miscarriages or who have lost babies this past year,” Erika said. “We’ve formed a kind of club. We meet for tea. Every lady has her war story to share. Her personal horror. Sometimes as I’ve rushed toward our meetings through the sleet and the snow, I think: Nobody except us can ever truly know. . . .”

“Do you think I’m not haunted by such tragedies myself?” he asked.

She retrieved a long stick that had fallen on the ground and bent it like a whip. She hit some shrubbery with it.

“I’ve had eleven periods since the baby died,” she said in a cold whisper. “Do you know what it’s like when a period comes? I feel the crush of tears starting up.”

Ravell paced. He picked up a stone and sent it skittering across the lagoon’s surface.

She glared at him, her shoulders squared. “Every friend of mine who lost a baby . . . By now, every one of those ladies has gotten pregnant again. Except me.”

As he stared at her, a strand of hair fell onto his brow. “I am doing everything within my power,” he pleaded. He untied his horse and mounted it, glancing at her uncertainly before he rode off.

“We ought to do something adventuresome tonight,” Ravell said. Dinner had ended, and Munga had cleared away their plates, but the three of them lingered at the table, enjoying the green swizzles Ravell had poured.

“What sort of adventure do you have in mind?” Peter unfolded his legs and looked alert.

“We could go for a midnight buggy ride.”

A starry drive along the hard beach, with carriage wheels milling the water . . . that sounded diverting. Peter helped his wife into the turnout, Ravell took the reins, and Erika found herself seated between the two men. A breeze swept in off the Atlantic, and they felt it chill the back of their necks.

A drive in the tropical moonlight was not a thing Erika would soon forget. For miles and miles they drove along the beach, until its hard surface changed and softened.

Ravell’s excitement grew, and in the moonlight his teeth shone like ice.

“There are quicksands here,” he cried above the sound of the surf. “We’ve got to be careful. In certain spots, these quicksands could swallow a whole team of horses.” They approached certain stretches with trepidation, and Ravell urged the horses quickly forward.

“Well done, old friend!” Peter shouted as they eased past one dubious patch, and their wheels sped onward. “It would never do to tarry here.”

After they moved beyond the dangerous areas, they turned for the next part of the journey through the woods. Vampire bats swooped and hovered above the buggy, their flapping sounds crisp and distinct. From tip to tip their wings must have measured two or three feet.

Peter said, “I suppose these vampire bats are hoping that we’ll decide to take a nap by the roadside.”

Erika felt Ravell’s hip touch hers as they rode side by side on the black leather seat. When the buggy returned to the beach, they left the moonlit forest and the bats behind. Not far offshore Erika noticed a vivid light on the water. It was not a ship, nor a firefly, nor a spangle of moonlight. When she pointed it out to Ravell, he peered with interest and told them that he had witnessed this same phenomenon on two previous occasions.

“Watch it carefully,” he advised. “The light will remain keen and steady for some minutes, and then it will disappear.”

He halted the carriage. Just as he had predicted, the streak of light on the water extinguished itself, and the sea became dark again. “No one as yet can explain this,” Ravell said. “Another peculiar thing is that on any night when I walk the beach hoping to see that light, I never do.”

Mysterious happenings were often reported on the island of Trinidad, he said. Three times he had seen buggies disappear on the beach at the Cocal. “I can assure you,” he added, “there’s no greater skeptic in the world than I. Each time I’ve gone over very coolly to inspect the areas where the carriages have vanished, and I notice marks from the buggy wheels in the sand, but then the marks stop—there’s nothing beyond them. What do you think?” He nudged Erika, who shrugged and widened her eyes.

“Quicksands?” Peter suggested.

“Quicksands actually do their treachery slowly. Besides, we have no quicksands at the Cocal. The beach is extremely hard—you know this yourselves.”

“Then, who can explain it?” Peter thrust his hands into the air.

“Certainly not I.” Ravell shook the reins and the carriage started up again. As they neared the Cocal, he seemed to trust the horses to find the way back without his actively guiding them.

As Ravell extended his hand to help Erika from the buggy, Peter hopped down and wandered ahead, his back to them. As she descended, Ravell gave her a long look, and he released his fingers slowly from hers.

A groom appeared to take the horses and carriage away. As they walked back to the house, she stopped and removed her shoes. Under her feet the sand was gritty and cool. She lifted her skirt to her knees and swayed her hips, humming as Peter walked ahead and Ravell followed her.

Just as they reached the house, she broke away from them and ran. The sea shimmered. Closing her eyes while breezes played at her hem and sleeves, she drew in the salt air, tendrils of hair loosening at her temples. The sound of the breakers became her orchestra as she let the song out—a naughty little “Havanaise”:

Later Ravell told her that he thought she’d been singing something from
Carmen
. It had a similar head-tossing, hip-shifting rhythm. Barefoot, with her shoes dropped on the ground, she stood on the bluff and danced a small dance.

While she sang, she felt the old surging joy come back, and with it, familiar ambition. Moonlight widened across the water as the men listened, and the music rinsed through her bones. She wanted her song to tame the waves, to shush the wind in the palms, and to make the fish pause under the dark water.

She longed for a baby, and she still wanted to live in Italy. The clash of those two things terrified her. If she
did
have another child, the force of wanting a full career would return; she knew it would, and all her difficulties would only worsen. But she could cope with only one problem at a time, and for now, becoming pregnant was all she could worry about.

“What a voice!” Ravell called out when she finished. “As lovely as anything ever heard at Covent Garden.”

Peter gave a rousing shout of praise and clapped in the dark. The wind gusted under her skirt; she had to press her hands against her legs to keep the swirling fabric down. The men hurried toward her. Her husband took her by the wrist, and lifted her arm, holding it triumphantly high in the air. He caught Ravell by the sleeve and pulled him closer, too. The three of them joined hands, all dancing for a mad moment in a circle on the bluff while the ocean banged against the sand. All of them were laughing. Suddenly Erika halted and dropped her hands from theirs. She gave one last, frivolous twirl, and then she ran back toward the house.

I
n the woods, as the two men walked with butterfly nets, Peter broached his idea. To him, the coast of South America felt irresistibly near.

“Why don’t you join me for an expedition on the Orinoco River?” he said to Ravell.