Another day passed before the first signs of him drifted into the forest: splinters of the huge black ship whose luck had run out; a chest of scarves, coins, a deck of cards; the crescent fragment of a wheel by which the boat had steered. He washed up himself some hours later, at the moment Catherine, in the nest, woke from her recuperation. She sat up looking out to where several men pulled the sailor from the water. He was laughing. Flung twenty miles by the storm back to the site of his ship’s averted disaster, half-drowned by the water and cooked by the sun, he was laughing. He had a shock of yellow hair. They hadn’t gotten him from the water two minutes before he’d rattled off three obscene jokes, which the men of the Crowd might have found amusing had they understood Portuguese. By the time they laid him across the roof of a low breakwater he had sung several sea chanteys. He laughed himself out of consciousness. Gazing around him, he fixed momentarily, before blackness, on the eyes of the most extraordinary face he’d ever seen. These eyes watched him across the short distance of a small slough, from beneath hair so black that in his delirium he took it for a mass of feathers, fallen from malevolent black birds plunging somewhere to their doom.
When he looked at her she caught her breath. At that moment she understood he was the instrument of destruction. When he laughed it was the sound of destruction’s motor, and his hair was the static of its reWing. As he slept she looked in the river for her watercreature, pointed at the sailor lying in the sun and ordered the creature to eat him. The creature didn’t move until she jabbed at it in the water and it disappeared.
By evening the sailor was still there, uneaten by the watercreature. Catherine said to herself with grim dissatisfaction, It’s my own fauIt. I climbed the tree and tied myself to it with my hair. I signaled the boat all night when the sea and the sky had other plans for it. It might now be at the bottom of the ocean had I kept out of it.
I must take command of things again, she told herself. As night fell and the sailor slept, she crept across the fallen tree that bridged the slough over to the other side. At one point on the bridge she looked into the water and saw her creature beside her, dim in the light of the moon. She angrily kicked it with her foot, almost toppling in. On the other side she walked calmly to the sailor and kneIt beside him. She listened to him sleep, then she began to roll him from where he slept into the river. She would kneel on his back and hold him under the water with all her weight. When he was dead she would sail him out into the mouth of the sea. She would point him in the direction of the maze’s worst and most confused dead-end passage. His disappearance in the morning would be accepted by the Crowd with the same fatalism as his appearance.
He hadn’t touched the water, however, before she found him sitting up looking at her, one hand around her wrist. He had an amazed smile. With his other hand he reached out to hold her face, at which point with her other hand she hit him so hard his head would have made a complete pivot but for the stubborn intractability of his spinal cord. Given his mad-ness, he thought this fairly hilarious. He laughed as he had when he was pulled from the sea, throwing back his chin. She calmly beIted him again. He laughed some more and she did it again and again, each time without a flicker of fury anywhere but in the deep white lava of her eyes. She would have been content to beat him to death, but after she’d struck him five times he stopped laughing. His jaw tightened; he raised his hand to her and someone grabbed it.
The sailor looked up to see her father. The other men of the Crowd stood with him. We rescue this man from the sea, they said in their language, and he tries to violate our young girls. This bitch, said the sailor in his language, tried to fucking drown me. What happened? Catherine’s father asked her. I was trying, she explained, to drown him. I was trying to sail him into the maze’s worst and most confused dead-end passage. The men looked at each other confused and slowly let the sailor go. Catherine’s father looked at the sailor in rage, but it was compromised rage. He looked at his daughter in exasperation but it was compromised exasperation. But why? he said. That he is here, she said to him, is a consequence of what I have done: I bear a responsibility for that consequence. Her father nodded as though he understood her.
Catherine took her face back across the fallen tree to the other side of the water. The men dispersed. The sailor watched and smiled his amazed smile. You touch my daughter, said Catherine’s father in his language, and I’ll make you yearn for the thighs of the sea. The sailor answered back in his language, Some night, huh, captain? Catherine, on the banks of her river, beat at the reflection of her face twenty minutes, splashing in the water until her flock of savage hair lay wet and listless on her back.
From then on, the Crowd regarded Catherine with guiIt and dread. Their gratitude for the night she saved the village mixed with contempt for the madness of her sacrifice. When she attempted to drown the sailor, this perception of her madness was only affirmed. When she raged at herself in the water, the issue was placed beyond doubt. That her eyes held their own power inclined the Crowd to believe she was a sorceress. Her father feIt uneasy; he sensed a prevalent wish among the Crowd that Catherine had perished at her post high in the tree, for which they would only have had to deal with her martyrdom.
The sailor’s name was Coba. Fully revived some thirty-six hours after his rescue, he sauntered about the village jauntily mixing with the others. He continued telling jokes no one laughed at and conversing in a language no one fully understood, though the common Portuguese of their tongues served as an uncertain basis of communication. He also watched Catherine, and from her spot on the other side of the water she watched him. From his third spot on either side of the water Catherine’s father watched them both. When Coba saw Catherine and her father watching him watching her, he laughed as though it was one of his jokes. He plotted his revenge. From the chest that had washed up with him he pulled a deck of cards.
First he told them stories from the cards. He told stories of sensitive kings and aduIterous queens coupling with aduIterous jacks. The jokers fulfilled eponymous roles in these small dramas, but the aces might be anyone: a spy in the court, a magician, a sailor washed into port. Then after he’d been with them a week Coba took to playing solitaire across the back of a huge black pod from the reeds of the river. Once the men of the Crowd got the game, they laughed at the sailor’s defeats. He laughed too. Soon he was wagering fruit on the fate of his games. He lost a lot of fruit. Soon he wagered the scarves from his chest. He lost a lot of scarves. He’d mix up his act with more stories about adventurous jacks and chameleon aces; he’d finger the queen of clubs, flickering her image to the other men in the light of evening tires. This one, he said to them, has hair nearly as black as that one; at which he pointed across the slough to Catherine. The men watched the girl of no voluptuous value. Coba saw they didn’t understand the value of her face. Catherine’s father saw the way the men of the Crowd watched his daughter. Soon Coba wagered coins from his chest on the fate of his games. He lost the coins one by one. He laughed when he won but he laughed louder when he lost.
Her father came to her one night and said, Co away. Why? she asked him. They don’t understand you anymore, he said to her. They haven’t understood you since the night you saved us. I haven’t asked that they understand me, she said. She said, Do you understand me? Something sad came into his eyes. I don’t ask to understand you, he said. She got up and went down to the riverside in the middle of the night. When she pulled the canoe up to the shore she looked at her father and said, Oh papa, and clutched at him angrily. Ile gently pushed her from him. She got in the boat and left.