The light was the color of dry pine. A faded hair-ribbon was snagged, I noticed, on the thorns of a dry and naked bush. Everywhere stretched the shadowy landscape of the cages — empty, untended. A marble water fountain yielded not one cool drop, despite my patience. Its bowl was impacted with dead leaves. On I went in my white linen suit which, only a few hours before, had been fresh and pleasing to the touch when I had removed it from my stateroom closet. The light made me think of the green and yellow suffusion associated with the ashen aftermath of a volcanic eruption. The cages I had passed with the wireless operator appeared to be empty.
When I reached the carriage, which was now a piece of dreamlike statuary in the vast gloom, the old horse was unresponsive to my thick and well-intended caresses. I patted his nose, I stroked his withers, I spoke to him quietly in Dutch. But to no avail. As for the driver, the old man did not awake, though I put my full weight on the little iron step of the carriage, though the black carriage squeaked and tilted dangerously, though I resumed my former place on the cushioned seat with unintended clumsiness and noise. Clearly the old man and ancient animal were sleeping the same sleep in the depths of their age.
Thus I sat waiting for the return of the lovers. I relaxed as best I could, I noted the straw bag on the floor beside my foot, I crossed my knees, I smoked a cigar — but too quickly, a little too quickly — and alone in the sleeping carriage and vast silent zoo I thought with mild bitterness that here was the reality of the “Paradise Isles” promised in the pages of the brochure describing the special delights of our endless cruise. Here, I thought, was the truth of our destined exoticism, the taste of our dreams.
I nodded, I took a last puff on the cigar, I coughed, I saw Ariane approaching up the shadowed path. She was alone, she was bareheaded, she was walking briskly, she was still tucking in her purple blouse and adjusting her tight pants. It was a trivial but significant operation — the sum of those gestures — and without speaking, without changing my position in the carriage, without smiling, I read in the movement of her hands and fingers the message of what had obviously occurred on the dusty wooden floor of the reptile house. She was angry, she had dressed in haste, she did not wave to me or speak. It was only too apparent that she was indifferent to my perception of the whole long song so evident in the way she walked and the way she twisted and tugged at her clothing.
She climbed into the carriage and sat beside the Dutch corpse, as I thought of myself at that moment, and leaned forward and roughly shook the old driver’s arm.
“We shall go back to the ship alone,” she said aloud. “We shall go without him.”
The startled old man took up his reins. We rode in silence. From the crest of the hills, with the umbrella pines behind us and the little silvery city stretched out below, I noted that the sun was setting like a fiery cargo on the deck of the ship. And later, after Ariane had softened, after we had dismissed the carriage, after she had followed me wordlessly to my dark cabin — it was then that she faced me and seized my arms and ran her hands up and down my arms, touching and squeezing them as if to reassure herself of what she felt for me and that I was there and real. She was small, she was standing as straight as possible and searching my eyes, her features were sponged with dark shadows.
“Allert,” she said at long last and in a whisper, “please….”
I heard the tenderness of her appeal, I smelled the depths of the evening sea, I deliberated, I thought of the reptile house in total darkness. And then I relented.
That night the drunken wireless operator returned to the ship supported by the two women members of the ship’s band. The next day he and Ariane spent half the afternoon in the warm wind on the volleyball court.
“Allert,” she said, turning to me abruptly in the act of dressing, “I want to ask you a simple question.” She rested her hand on the back of the leather chair and then, watching me, moving across the room, she stepped into a pair of underpants which once in place looked less like a silken garment than like a faint hue that might have been spread long ago by a bearded painter. Again she paused, again she stared in my direction. I knocked the ash from my cigar. “Allert,” she said then, “why are you here? Why exactly are you here? Do you know?”
But if Ursula was capable of asking me such a question, how could I possibly have been capable of finding the answer?
On a morning as clear and dense with the cold as any I had ever seen, and while Ursula and I were driving down the snow-covered road in Peter’s car on our way to the village, she remarked that during the trial she had had sex every night with my attorney. It was her way of rewarding herself, as she expressed it, for her loyalty. At that moment I was tempted to tell her that they had greeted me in my cabin with black handcuffs the night we docked. But I controlled the temptation then and thereafter.
I awoke. I was wet. The sheets were double thick and stretched beneath me like some enormous scab peeled from the wound of the night. I could see nothing, I could feel nothing except my weight and the sensation of my own sweat laving and filming the sheets. But where had I been? What had I dreamt? Why was I so wet and stricken in clear paralysis? From what depths had I fought my way to this dead surface? Flat on my back, lips parted, waiting, body slack on the sheets and wet with sweat — thus I lay alone, though next to Ursula, and thus I gave consciousness to the agony of true thirst, though my mouth itself felt thick and warm. But what had I dreamt?
Later, after I had returned to the moonlit bedroom from the blackened lavatory, to which I had carried myself like some wounded animal to the midnight water hole, and where in the tiled darkness I had turned on the tap and listened to the flow of cold water and drunk my fill, it was then that I stood in the doorway and saw that Ursula was sprawled in the moonlight with her nightdress high and her right hand undulating in the considerable erogenous zone between her spread and partially lifted legs. The heat from her body reached me in waves across the moonlit room. Even in sleep Ursula’s active erotic life was not to be stilled.
But where had I been? What had I dreamt?
“Well,” I said, “why rock the ship? Why must you rock the ship?”
“The word is boat. I wish you would speak like anyone else. I do not find your verbal affectations amusing.”
“But really it would be better if you did not rock the ship. After all, Peter had the consolation of dying in the presence of both of us. Surely one of us deserves to die in the presence of the other. Perhaps you would like to change your mind and stay. Why not?”
“You are already dead, Allert. You do not need me. I have mourned at your funeral far too long already.”
Throughout this brief exchange, which was one of several, Peter’s dusty pipe lay in my ash tray and Peter’s automobile stood empty, locked, covered with a glaze of frost and cobwebs in our old garage. Ursula was smoking a fragrant cigarette.