The good news, I was certain, wasn't really good news at all. It was a vision in the jungle, an ephemeral presence like an image projected on a wall of fog. With that unhappy thought, I began to drift into sleep.
A soft, pleasant dream was already starting. I was in the George Cinq Hotel dining room in Parts. Across from me was Diane Northrup, a woman I had loved in an earlier time. She was smiling, sipping from a glass of champagne. The orchestra was playing our favorite song. Diane leaned forward to kiss me and I heard a familiar voice, close by, sweet, bell-like and melodic:
Still half asleep, I couldn't believe that I would mix Diane Northrup and Elicia Cortez in the same dream. I couldn't imagine Elicia in the dining room of the very proper George Cinq Hotel in Paris, anymore than I could imagine Diane here in this hot hut in the middle of an Indian village in the Caribbean.
Something soft crept up along my chest. Something even softer, and smelling of orange blossoms, pressed against my shoulder. And then naked legs touched mine, slipped up over me and began to move gently back and forth.
I came fully awake, out of a pleasant dream into a far more pleasant reality.
Elicia was beside me on the pallet. She was naked and her hair was still damp from having bathed in the stream below the village. Once again, she had found orange blossoms and had crushed them against her skin, from head to toe.
I gazed into her loving eyes and still couldn't convince myself that I wasn't dreaming. She kissed my lips and I found my arm going around her back, caressing the soft, sweet-smelling skin. My hand went down to her gently-rising buttocks and I felt the erection building magnificently at my middle. This was no dream.
"Elicia, do you know what you're doing?"
She shushed me with a fragrant finger across my lips. "I know," she said. "No talk. Only love."
All right, I had tried. Time and again, I had turned away from the pleasures that this girl had offered me. Time and again, I had felt noble about my intentions, about my abstinence. Well, there is a time to put all that jazz behind you. That time was now.
Days of frustration and abstinence and temptation had built up a tremendous drive inside me. My erection was more than an erection. It was a budding, blossoming, flowering instrument of sex and love and lust and frustration. Elicia found the hardness and enclosed it with her hand.
There were no more thoughts about what would happen to Elicia when this caper was over. There were no more thoughts about whether she belonged to me or to Purano. There were no more concerns for whether she was still a virgin by the flesh or by the soul. The future had no place in my mind. Or my body. The needs of the flesh and of the soul were so intense, so ready, for each of us that we shut out past and future and plunged helter-skelter into the present.
I started gently, recalling the brutal rapings this girl had endured for three months from the Cuban Marines. She seemed to like it. I raised up and gazed at those erect, ripe breasts that had tantalized me so often in her loose blouse. I kissed the nipples, tenderly, then with more purpose. I sucked and she arched her back and raised her pubis to me. I lay my hardness along the mound and gently massaged until she let out a moan and bit my ear.
"Enough gentleness," she said, gasping, chewing on my ear. "Take me now and let me know the pleasure of losing my virginity to one I love. Oh, Nick, love me for now, for now only."
When I entered her, she was ready. She climaxed almost instantly and I thought it was over. She took a few seconds of respite and then the passion grew in her to a newer and higher level. She swallowed me up, rising and falling, plunging and withdrawing. She climaxed three more times before it finally happened to me. I had been holding back, savoring it, wanting it to go on forever — or, at least, for the next two hours. But nothing lasts forever. She responded by climaxing again, for the fifth time. I have always envied women that capacity, but I wouldn't have traded that one gigantic climax for all the little ones in the world.
Spent, sated, we lay sweating on the pallet. Elicia's arm lay across my now naked chest. She was silent for such a long time that I thought she was asleep. She wasn't.
"You will think me strange," she finally said, "but I did this as a gesture of farewell."
"Farewell?"
"Yes. In two weeks, I will marry Purano and join his tribe. I told him about you, about how I feel, about how I will always feel about you. He knows that I am with you now."
"He knows? And he agreed to this?"
"Yes, otherwise, he would know that I would always wonder what it would have been like. You see, Nick, I know nothing of love. I mean, this kind of love. What happened to me with those Marines was a world apart from what happened here today. I knew it would be so. Purano understands. Unless I could prove to myself that this beautiful act could be truly beautiful, I would not be a fit bride. Do you understand that?"
I have been all over this globe and have met and been exposed to the cultures of hundreds of peoples. I have understood much. I had to admit, though, that I didn't fully understand this weird triangle between me, Purano and Elicia, or why he would agree to have her come to me when they had just become betrothed. It was equally difficult to comprehend when I knew that Purano had remained single because there were so few suitable maidens in the tribe. There were so few maidens because thirty years ago the surviving females had been «spoiled» by Ancio and his gang. I understood a part of it, then. Spoiled had different meanings. Ancio had taken the maidens against their will, therefore spoiling them. Elicia and I had engaged in an activity of mutual agreement, as, I'm sure, Purano and Elicia would do before their marriage. But that was cutting the culture pretty thin and I didn't understand it at all.
"I understand," I lied.
"Good. It is important for me and Purano that you do."
We slept then, but only for fifteen or twenty minutes. I awoke first and was trying to understand more fully why this girl felt she had to give herself to me before her marriage to Purano, to make it a farewell gesture even though she confessed that she loved me every bit as much as she loved Purano. I couldn't understand. What happened next was even more difficult to understand.
Elicia awoke, came to me and we made love again. This second time, she said, would prepare her for a lifetime of joy in the man she had chosen to marry. I didn't try to understand that one either. I merely enjoyed, even though there was a growing sadness that this would be the last of Elicia for me.
There was shouting out in the square and we quickly dressed. Elicia walked boldly out the front door and I followed, a sheepish grin on my face. If the others in the square knew about our tryst, about Elicia's strange logic on how to say farewell to the man she was turning down, they gave no hint of it.
The shouting was because a sentry below had spotted Pico, Antonio, Purano and the warriors returning. I checked my watch. They'd been gone just over an hour. We were well within the schedule, if Pico had anything to offer concerning the map and the hidden cave.
He had.
The circles formed again in the square, with Pico and the map at the center. Behind Chief Botussin, I noticed, Elicia had moved up beside Purano and they were conversing in that strange ritual of staring at the ground near each other's feet. She was probably telling him about our love-making. With a slightly bitter thought, I figured she was telling him that I was a lousy lover, that he had nothing to worry about. But no, I thought again, she would be truthful. The truth was that we both were good lovers. Purano would have to go some to replace my performance in Elicia's eyes. I wondered, with another ping of jealousy, if she would sing the rose song to him. I knew she would.