Théo contemplated the scene with a kind of morbid relish.
‘They say that twenty thousand men died out here.’
The landscape offered him no solace, no evidence of mercy or redemption. He could see only disaster, and it was everywhere he looked. It was as if his failure had taken its rightful place in a whole hierarchy of failures.
And one failure, it seemed, could breed another. In the shipping office in Colón, they were told that there was no boat. Not for another week. When Théo tried to argue, the man just shrugged his shoulders, a slow, watery gesture that seemed to render them powerless, that was like being drowned. They had no choice but to book into the Hotel Washington, and wait.
On their first evening, Suzanne took a seat on the veranda. As the sun began to set over the Caribbean, Théo joined her. A march by Sousa blared and crackled from the graphophone in the dining-room. She wondered whether she ought not to be talking to Théo. Instead she listened to a French anthropologist tell a story about some trees that he had discovered in the province of Chiriqui. ‘They were extraordinary,’ he said. ‘Quite square.’ She presumed he meant the trunks. When he had finished his story about the trees, he launched into another. This time it was frogs. Golden frogs. He was a thin man, tubercular, with earnest lines between his eyebrows and the distinctly irritating habit of constantly swirling his drink around inside his glass. She found that his stories did not surprise her. In fact, she was not sure that she was capable of feeling anything as abrupt as surprise. Certainly it would take more than a few square trees.
When she retired to bed that night she glanced across at Théo. They had scarcely exchanged a word all day. She wondered if the anthropologist had noticed. Weren’t anthropologists in the business of noticing such things?
The lamp at her elbow began to smoke; she had to adjust the flame. Then she dipped her pen into the inkwell and continued.
From Panama we took the railroad (built by Americans, apparently!) to Colón on the Atlantic coast, which is where we are now. There is little to do here but rest; the good doctor would approve, no doubt. We leave tomorrow, on a steamship bound for New York — an eight-day voyage, if everything goes well –
The door opened and Théo entered. He hung up his hat, leaned his cane against a chair, then glanced across the room at her.
‘A letter?’
She nodded.
‘Who are you writing to?’
‘Monsieur Pharaoh.’
Standing in front of the mirror, Théo adjusted the lapels on his frock-coat. ‘Make sure you post it in the morning,’ he said. ‘There won’t be another chance for a while.’
She watched him settle in the armchair with a newspaper. The walls behind him were papered in green-and-gilt, mould blossoming above the picture-rail. Dictionaries filled the shelves. Works by Cervantes too. The size of the books wearied her; she had to look away.
‘How was your walk?’ she asked.
‘It was hardly a walk,’ Théo said, peering over his paper. ‘I sat on the quay most of the time. There were two Chinamen playing a game of dice. One of them was blind and the other one kept cheating.’ Théo forced a laugh.
He was attempting to amuse her, she thought, but he could not summon the enthusiasm necessary to make what he was describing come alive. Or perhaps the incident had depressed him.
He turned back to his paper with a frown. After scanning the front page, he folded it in two and laid it aside.
‘It’s seven o’clock,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we should go down.’
They ate in the hotel dining-room — a vast, deserted room with white walls and a tilting wooden floor. Huge gilt mirrors increased the sense of desolation. The orchid on their table sent a thin but sickly fragrance into the air. Outside, the usual evening rain began to crash against the trees.
‘You were lucky,’ she said.
‘Lucky?’
‘With your walk.’
He reached into his pocket and took out his watch. ‘It always seems to rain at the same time.’
Somewhere in the hotel a shutter banged.
Then two young men ran up the steps. They stood in the hotel lobby, laughing and shaking the water off their clothes.
Suzanne watched Théo tuck his watch back into his pocket. He seemed so delicate, though it was she who was supposed to be the convalescent.
Since leaving the shores of Mexico, Théo had been sleeping poorly. Night after night he woke up bathed in sweat, his bedclothes drenched; also he had developed eczema on the back of his hands. She did what she could, sitting beside him in the darkness, laying cool cloths against his brow, but she did not have the strength to nurse him properly. During the daylight hours a calmness stretched between them, a silence that felt bottomless, a kind of exhaustion. It was not uncomfortable; rather, it was as if they had been admitted to a place where words did not apply. She was not sure what had happened to her love for him. It had been withdrawn, concealed from her. Only charity remained. She moved about with hollow spaces inside her. Her limbs weighed almost nothing. It was like the feeling she used to have after communion when she was a child, a feeling of sublime emptiness that had somehow been received, been granted, that was greater, infinitely greater, than what had been there before.
The shutter banged again. She looked up. Théo was staring at the piece of beefsteak on his plate.
‘This meat,’ and he grimaced.
‘It’s terrible, isn’t it?’
He nodded.
‘I can’t even get my knife through it,’ she said.
‘Why did we order steak,’ he said, ‘when there is all this fish — ’ He gestured towards the windows and the dark arena of the ocean that lay beyond.
As his hand returned, it knocked against the table’s edge. A glass tottered, almost spilled. He did not notice.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘About everything.’
He was staring at his plate again.
She saw that he had not meant to speak. Those last few words of his had startled him.
‘Théo,’ she said, ‘you have nothing to be ashamed of.’
Still he would not look at her.
She leaned forwards. ‘Nobody could have done more.’
The rain was louder now, a constant roar against the roof. Their waiter was closing shutters on the north side of the room.
‘But Monsieur Eiffel,’ Théo said. ‘It was my responsibility — ’
She reached across the table for his hand. ‘You wrote him letters, didn’t you?’
He nodded.
‘Regularly?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then they will be your witness,’ she said. ‘Those letters. They will vouch for you.’
She sat back and looked at him. Just looked at him.
‘And me,’ she said at last. ‘I, too, will be your witness.’
His eyes lifted to her face. They seemed filled suddenly with a curious benevolence — as if he were old and she were very young, as if the fifteen years between them had grown to fifty. And yet, paradoxically, some gap appeared to have narrowed, some barrier had been removed. She had a sudden image of the tree that she had seen from the train, those birds which she had taken to be flowers, and the moment when their petals turned into wings, and they rose up out of the foliage, and flew.
After dinner, they retired to the veranda, where the anthropologist awaited them. The two men lit cigars. Suzanne excused herself, using words that Théo had given to her earlier. ‘I have a letter to write. It must be finished by the morning.’