Authors: Unknown
‘It’s Madeleine’s first trip up. Let her sit at the window —right-hand side,’ he said to Morag. And turning to me, ‘The scenery’s spectacular. You might as well get your money’s worth.' Whether or not that was a subtle reference to a large deduction for the dress that was shortly coming my way, I didn’t know. But he gave me a funny little smile, teasing and oddly boyish and yet in no way diminishing his peculiar natural dignity.
‘Alex! It would be best if you sat in the front. Morag can sit beside you, she’s only half-pint size.’ He favoured her with a different smile, elderly brother and affectionate. 'I'll go in the back too, between Hester and Madeleine.’
I wondered wryly if he had promised Eve that should he go on this expedition he would see he was properly chaperoned.
Hester looked pleased enough with the arrangement, but I was acutely uncomfortable. I wondered if they would have perhaps liked to hold hands if it were not for my presence. I was also acutely aware of James Fitzgerald’s physical nearness. Once before I’d registered the fact to myself that I seemed conscious of his presence when he was in the Ambassador’s office just beyond the communicating door. Now we sat in the back of the taxi, uncomfortably close. He was a big man, and our arms and legs touched. I could even feel his breathing.
Luckily, the conversation was cheerful and continuous. Ashford and Morag turned round to join in.
Our journey took us up through the foothills of the Andes. At times the road wound round the flanks in a series of hairpin bends, then plunging into small green valleys, by vast still lakes.
James Fitzgerald pointed out places of interest. The fort, high on an escarpment where the sixteenth-century Spaniards had set up camp, the remains of an Inca village with its ashlar walls. From time to time he addressed some remark in a Charaguayan dialect to the driver. They exchanged jokes—the Charaguayans love to laugh. And even Mr. Fitzgerald had a most unaffected and infectious laugh.
But once he must have told the driver to pull into a rough lay-by on the road.
Morag looked round questioningly, ‘Does the wee wilk think we’re picnicking here, then?' she asked in the one appellative of her vocabulary.
James Fitzgerald shook his head and smiled, ‘I want Madeleine to see the earthquake fault. It’s here, remember, that you get the really awe-inspiring view.'
Morag opened her mouth as if to ask who was running this expedition anyway, and then shut it. Her eyes slid to my face and she winked.
‘Just here,' Mr. Fitzgerald leaned across to open the door for me, as the car stopped. ‘It's well worth getting out for,' he said, uncurling himself and following me. ‘The others have seen it before.’
Side by side, we stood on the edge of a precipice. Far, far down below, I saw the huge split in the mountain range which Don Ramón had pointed out from the aircraft. Now I saw it magnified a thousand times, and going down and down into the bottomless darkness in the bowels of the earth. I held my breath. I must have swayed on my feet, for Mr. Fitzgerald put his hand under my elbow to steady me. For a moment everything seemed utterly silent. Even the others waiting lazily in the car stopped talking. The air was very cold and rare and still. A great orange sun was just about to set. I heard the thin tinkle of a goat’s bell from far away, like some distant warning—a needed warning. That deep dark precipice seemed to draw me, had an analogy with some deep dark precipice I was beginning to discover within myself.
Then Morag must have made a remark to the others, for I heard Hester laugh. I shook myself free of my mood, and Mr. Fitzgerald's hand, and with a murmur of thanks, returned to the car.
‘You look pale,’ Mr. Ashford remarked kindly. ‘It’s quite breathtaking, isn’t it?'
I nodded.
‘I thought you were going to step in over the deep end at one point,’ Hester smiled.
‘And that wouldn’t have done at all,’ Morag shook her corkscrew curls emphatically. ‘My wee wilk, Petiso, would have gone spare, that is so. He’s taken a great shine to you, Madeleine.’
‘I can’t think why,’ I said, blushing.
It was left to Mr. Fitzgerald to make the remark which sounded so polite and diplomatic but which was really so caustic.
‘Really?’ He raised his brows in derisive disbelief. ‘Well, if you can’t, I can.’
I wondered if he might underline the quip by jingling the loose change in his trouser pocket, but happily we were too close packed for him to make the barb quite so pointed as that.
We reached the Hacienda del Ortega a few minutes before darkness. It was an impressive place dating back to the heyday of the Spanish conquistadors and built round its own rectangular courtyard. It stood at the head of the green Ortegan valley, surrounded by vineyards and orange groves. Now the old fortified dwelling had been adapted as an hotel for rich tourists, and barbecue expeditions such as ours. Bougainvillea and golden roses grew over the entrance arch.
Branches trailed the roof of the taxi as we entered, and the driver turned us in to a modern car park, already half full of taxis and cars and motor coaches. Morag’s ticket-holders had already got out and begun walking round the hacienda. On either side were formal gardens laid out in a beautiful intricate design of elaborate-shaped lily ponds, narrow streams spanned by osier bridges, like those that still crossed many of the mountain gorges. And, of course, everywhere the little statues and fountains so beloved by the Charaguayans.
For the few minutes before the sun set, the five of us strolled slowly through the gardens—Morag and Mr. Ashford, Hester, Mr. Fitzgerald and I. The flowers and the newly mown grass seemed almost unbearably sweet. We all seemed to have run out of small talk. Then as darkness fell, we followed the rest of the party in through the wide main door of the hacienda.
It gave immediately on to the enormous but already crowded courtyard. A triple fountain played from among statuary again. Soft coloured lights were concealed in the wrought iron tracery of the balcony, or amongst clumps of flowers. At the far side, Indians in the various costumes of different villages were baking food on flat circular stones. Waiters in Spanish costume, with high heels, tight black trousers, cummerbunds and theatrical beards, circled amongst the crowd carrying high their silver trays with dishes of the hot spicy food, and then offering them with deep Don Ramon-like bows. They looked very handsome and tall against the smaller Indians, all like close relations of Don Ramón, with their proud Spanish carriage, and in the catlike grace with which they weaved in and out of the groups of people.
Momentarily I was alone. Morag and Mr. Ashford had gone round to see the proprietor about the
danzas campestres
that were to follow the barbecue. Hester and Mr. Fitzgerald had returned, I think to the fragrant darkness of the garden. Apart from the military Attaché's wife, standing a few groups away, I saw no familiar face.
‘Senorita
,’ at first I thought it was a familiar voice. But the English was so uncertain and halting. ‘May I humbly suggest ... a little of this so succulent dish . . .'
I looked up at the waiter resplendent in his Spanish costume, at the dark eyes regarding me smilingly above the theatrical beard and mustachios. There was a hint of shared conspiracy in their melting depths.
‘It looks very good,’ I said, cautiously forking a little of the savoury concoction on to the plate he handed me.
‘It is good. It is made from fish caught in the blue waters of Lake Titicaca. And it is called . . .'
‘Yes?'
‘Ah, I do not its English name know,
senorita
.'
‘But I know yours, do I not, Don Ramón?’
‘Perhaps,
senorita
.’ The waiter smiled behind the big black cotton-wool beard.
I wanted to ask Don Ramón if this was his desire to go about unrecognised and accepted for himself alone. But something told me it wasn’t. In any case, I could see Mr. Ashford pushing his way dutifully towards me, so I simply said smilingly, ‘It seems a lot of effort just to get a barbecue.’
Don Ramon surprised me by bending suddenly towards me and the vehemence with which he whispered in my ear, ‘But so little effort when it means that I see the woman I love.’
The
danzas campestres
started at nine. I watched it standing beside Mr. Ashford. A few stars were visible in the arch of night sky above the courtyard, when the band on the balcony struck up. From under the archway a most unlikely pair of masked dancers ran forward —a girl in a long white cotton smock, wearing a curious flaxen plaited wig, was pursued by a man dressed like a striped cat. Each carried a huge basket, and the cat-man brandished a long whip.
The girl tripped daintily round the floor, the cat man following in long bounds. Having done one circuit, they stopped at opposite sides, set down their baskets with a flourish and lifted up the lids. From them they extracted armfuls of identical roughly made costumes. Then, the flaxen-haired girl to the women and the cat-man to the men, they proceeded to hand them out to each and every one of the audience and the waiters as well.
‘Now this is where we have to do the same as the dancers,’ Mr. Ashford said. ‘They’re great dressers-up, the Charaguayans. They love audience participation.’
I took the flaxen wig, the rough smock, the cotton mask which the girl dancer handed me.
‘Put it on. Let’s see you in it,’ said Mr. Ashford, stepping into his cat-striped boiler suit, and pulling the furry cat’s hood with the green glass eyepieces over his head. ‘At these do’s everyone has to metaphorically let their hair down.’
‘That I find hard to believe,’ I said drily, because Mr. Fitzgerald had left Hester’s side for a moment to come and stand with us. He had put on the cotton boiler suit, but he still held the cat hood in his hand. He still looked very much the Head of Chancery.
‘It can get pretty wild at times, this dance,’ Mr. Fitzgerald said, ignoring my remark. ‘I’d stay close if I were you.’
He went on to explain that the theme of the dance was the age-old one of fertility and good versus destruction and evil.
‘You girls,’ he smiled faintly, ‘with your clean smocks and your little white masks and your golden hair, are supposed to be the embodiment of good. Or thus the Charaguayans in their wisdom declared it.’ He eyed me teasingly. ‘We men are the cats.’
‘Evil?’ I asked.
‘So I fear.'
‘That sounds fair and reasonable,' I smiled back up at him.
‘Back in the mists of time,' Mr. Fitzgerald went on, giving my remark a little mocking lift of the brow, ‘pumas used to ravage the mountain flocks. So they’ve come to represent every sudden disaster—earthquake, famine, everything. Ah, here they come.'
The music, which till then, while the costumes were being donned, had been throbbing but soft, now reached a full, joyful and very sweet note. In ran six girls dressed in our flaxen-haired, white-smocked costume, and the time-honoured dance began. The girls mimed the sowing of seeds, harvesting, tending flocks, spinning, grinding, making clothes, throwing their arms wide to the fertile land, while the spotlights shone on them in green and gold.
Then the music abruptly changed to a shrill screech, then thunder, then a cacophony of rolling drums and dissonant wailing reeds and caterwauling pipes. The spotlights glowed blood red. Six cat-men whirling their whips bounded in. The girls fled in circles. The cats pursued, making their long whips whistle through the air.
As the first girl was caught and thrown over the leading cat’s shoulder, she stretched out her arms to the audience, beckoning for help. The music now changed to a loud abandoned tune. Everyone rushed on to the floor, and began to dance a wild Charaguayan jig. I found myself in first one cat-man’s arms and then another. Unidentifiable green eyes stared down at me. No one spoke. I was twirled, seized, spun. Once I was sure the hands were Don Ramon’s and that somewhere he waited to seize me again, that the head that bent over me was his, that the eyes behind the green glass of the mask smiled teasingly. I danced with a short, very fat cat, and one which smelled very faintly of Alex Ashford’s favourite tobacco.
Then inexorable hands suddenly swirled me past the fountain, out of the crowds, out of the courtyard and into the darkness of the garden. I was danced down paths, under the trailing blossoms of the trees. Rose petals and acacia pom-poms caught in my hair. I heard the tinkle of fountains and the croak of bullfrogs mingling with the sound of the music behind, smelled jasmine and night-scented stock and frangipani as my gay captor whirled me at last back to the courtyard again. I was in the mood, if not for love, at least for foolishness. This much I say in defence of myself.
For just before he let me finally go, my cat-man captor pulled me to him, whipped off his mask as if it were a helmet in the darkness of the courtyard archway, and bent and kissed me. The world seemed to spin. My bones melted. It was like that first weakening touch of altitude, only much worse. Much more entire. Thus, I thought dreamily, must the Inca princess have been kissed by her conquistador—not an ordinary kiss, but a slow, tender,,
meant
one. For this was to my astonishment and later when I remembered it, to my embarrassment and shame, why I responded to that kiss with warmth. It was as if the music had got into my cool English blood.
And yet it wasn’t only that either. I knew even then that I wasn’t kissing a stranger. I knew those lips were familiar, and I knew that I couldn’t kiss any man so ardently unless I loved him.
But I didn’t want to be in love with Don Ramón. I didn’t want history to repeat itself, with the added refinement that this time the Carradedas bride was to come to the Carradedas. I had the feeling he was going to speak, and I didn’t want him to.
‘Don Ramón,’ I breathed, pushing my hands against his chest.
Immediately, electrically almost, he released me, and realising perhaps he had violated some Charaguayan etiquette, put on his cat-mask, and almost at arm’s length danced me back to the courtyard again.