Allerton said, "Maybe it would be better now. You know I like to sleep alone."
"Yes, I know. Too bad. If I had my way we'd sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes."
Lee was taking off his clothes. He lay down beside Allerton. "Wouldn't it be booful if we should juth run together into one gweat big blob," he said in baby talk. "Am I giving you the horrors?"
"Indeed you are."
Allerton surprised Lee by an unusual intensity of response. At the climax he squeezed Lee hard around the ribs. He sighed deeply and closed his eyes.
Lee smoothed his eyebrows with his thumbs. "Do you mind that?" he asked.
"Not terribly."
"But you do enjoy it sometimes? The whole deal, I mean."
"Oh, yes."
Lee lay on his back with one cheek against Allerton's shoulder, and went to sleep.
Lee decided to apply for a passport before leaving Guayaquil. He was changing clothes to visit the embassy, and talking to Allerton. "Wouldn't do to wear high shoes. The Consul is probably an elegant pansy. . . . 'My dear, can you believe it? High shoes. I mean real old button-hooky shoes.
I simply couldn't take my eyes off those shoes. I'm afraid I have no idea what he wanted.'
"I hear they are purging the State Department of queers. If they do, they will be operating with a skeleton staff , . . ah, here they are."Lee was putting on a pair of low shoes. "Imagine walking in on the Consul and asking him right out for money to eat on. ... He rears back and claps a scented handkerchief over his mouth, as if you had dropped a dead lobster on his desk: 'You're broke!
Really, I don't know why you come to me with this revolting disclosure. You might show a modicum of consideration. You must realize how distasteful this sort of thing is. Have you no pride?'"
Lee turned to Allerton. "How do I look? Don't want to look too good, or he will be trying to get in my pants. Maybe you'd better go. That way we'll get our passports by tomorrow."
Listen to this." Lee was reading from a
Guayaquil paper. "It seems that the Peruvian delegates at the anti-tuberculosis congress in Salinas appeared at the meeting carrying huge maps on which were shown the parts of Ecuador appropriated by Peru in the 1939 war. The Ecuadoran doctors might go to the meeting twirling shrunken heads of Peruvian soldiers on their watch chains."
Allerton had found an article about the heroic fight put up by Ecuador's wolves of the sea.
"Their what?"
"That's what it says: Lobos del Mar. It seems that one officer stuck by his gun, even though the mechanism was no longer operating."
"Sounds simpleminded to me."
They decided to look for a boat in Las Playas. Las Playas was cold and the water was rough and muddy, a dreary middle-class resort. The food was terrible, but the room without meals was almost the same as full pensión. They tried one lunch. A plate of rice without sauce, without anything. Allerton said, "I am hurt." A tasteless soup with some fibrous material floating in it that looked like soft, white wood. The main course was a nameless meat as impossible to identify as to eat.
Lee said, "The cook has barricaded himself in the kitchen. He is shoving this slop out through a slot." The food was, as a matter of fact, passed out through a slot in a door from a dark, smoky room where, presumably, it was being prepared.
They decided they would go on to Salinas the next day. That night Lee wanted to go to bed with Allerton, but he refused and the next morning Lee said he was sorry he asked so soon after the last time, which was a breach of contract.
Allerton said, "I don't like people who apologize at breakfast."
Lee said, "Really, Gene, aren't you taking an unfair advantage? Like someone was junk sick and I don't use junk. I say, 'Sick, really? I don't know why you tell me about your disgusting condition.
You might at least have the decency to keep it to yourself if you are sick. I hate sick people. You must realize how distasteful it is to see you sneezing and yawning and retching. Why don't you go someplace where I won't have to look at you? You've no idea how tiresome you are, or how disgusting. Have you no pride?'"
Allerton said, 'That isn't fair at all."
"It isn't supposed to be fair. Just a routine for your amusement, containing a modicum of truth.
Hurry and finish your breakfast. We'll miss the Salinas bus."
Salinas had the quiet, dignified air of an upper-class resort town. They had come in the off season. When they went to swim they found out why this was not the season: the Humboldt current makes the water cold during the summer months. Allerton put his foot in the water and said, "It's nothing but cold," and refused to go in. Lee plunged in and swam for a few minutes.
Time seemed to speed up in Salinas. Lee would eat lunch and lie on the beach. After a period that seemed like an hour, or at most two hours, he saw the sun low in the sky: six o'clock. Allerton reported the same experience.
Lee went to Quito to get information on the Yage. Allerton stayed in Salinas. Lee was back five days later.
"Yage is also known to the Indians as Ayahuasca. Scientific name is Bannisteria caapi," Lee spread a map out on the bed. "It grows in high jungle on the Amazon side of the Andes. We will go on to Puyo. That is the end of the road. We should be able to locate someone there who can deal with the Indians, and get the Yage."
They spent a night in Guayaquil. Lee got drunk before dinner and slept through a movie. They went back to the hotel to go to bed and get an early start in the morning. Lee poured himself some brandy and sat down on the edge of Allerton's bed. "You look sweet tonight," he said, taking off his glasses. How about a little kiss? Huh?"
"Oh, go away," said Allerton.
"Okay kid, if you say so. There's plenty of time," Lee poured some more brandy in his glass and lay down on his own bed.
"You know, Gene, not only have they got poor people in this jerkwater country. They also got like rich people. I saw some on the train going up to Quito. I expect they keep a plane revved up in the back yard. I can see them loading television sets and radios and golf clubs and tennis rackets and shotguns into the plane, and then trying to boot a prize Brahma bull in on top of the other junk, so the windup is the plane won't get off the ground.
"It's a small, unstable, undeveloped country. Economic setup exactly the way I figured it: all raw materials, lumber, food, labor, rent, very cheap. All manufactured goods very high, because of import duty. The duty is supposed to protect Ecuadoran industry. There is no Ecuadoran industry.
No production here. The people who can produce won't produce, because they don't want any money tied up here. They want to be ready to pull out right now, with a bundle of cold cash, preferably U.S. dollars. They are unduly alarmed. Rich people are generally frightened. I don't know why. Something to do with a guilt complex, I imagine. ¿Quién sabe? I have not come to psychoanalyze Caesar, but to protect his person. At a price, of course. What they need here is a security department, to keep the underdog under."
"Yes," said Allerton. "We must secure uniformity of opinion."
"Opinion! What are we running here, a debating society? Give me one year and the people won't have any opinions. 'Now just fall in line here folks, for your nice tasty stew of fish heads and rice and oleomargarine. And over here for your ration of free lush laced with opium.' So if they get out of line, we jerk the junk out of the lush and they're all lying around shitting in their pants, too weak to move. An eating habit is the worst habit you can have. Another angle is malaria. A debilitating affliction, tailor-made to water down the revolutionary spirit."