The Daughter of Doctor Moreau(14)
Ramona eventually collected the child, and the men decided to smoke a cigar.
Montgomery excused himself, bid them good night, and went back to his room. Again he considered the situation, this place.
Animal hybrids, experiments. It was like a fever dream, and yet would it be worse than what he’d already experienced? He’d weathered the harshness of the logging camps and the peculiar cold of the jungle, when the sun couldn’t filter through the trees and you were chilled to the bone in the never-ending rain. The wind cracked the sky in this corner of the world, making the houses moan. Many people toiled in misery, serving the hacendados. The Maya rebels had not risen against the landowners solely out of spite, as much as the white Mexicans liked to tell the tale like that. But then, so what? Everywhere Montgomery had been he’d spied the same misery under a different guise. In England it was in the factories, in Latin America it was in the fields. There was always someone with a little more money, a little more power, and he owned you. The hacendados extended credit to the Indians, and the Indians were indebted forever. But if it wasn’t the hacendado, then it was the priest who came collecting, and the result was the same: weed cutting, sugarcane cutting, you had to work for them. Work like a dog, live like a dog, and die like one, too.
He’d heard fellow Englishmen say that the Maya were stupid for incurring such debts. But Montgomery, indebted as he was himself, understood that it was easy to lose control of one’s life, that the reins could be yanked away with a smooth brutality. If he’d been a braver man, Montgomery might have put a bullet to his own head. But as he’d explained to Moreau, he wasn’t brave. He was a perfect coward. He lay on the bed, placed his pistol under his pillow, and closed his eyes. The bedsheets were soft under his palms. He tried writing a letter to Fanny in his head, like he did sometimes at night.
I have come to stay at a small rancho which is the property of a wealthy hacendado. You’ll wonder what is the difference between a hacienda and a rancho. It’s merely a matter of scale. But the lodgings here are good and the place is clean. It is not always so in these distant parts of the world, wrecked by conflict. I’ve stayed in places where the floor was all dirt and my bed was a filthy hammock and chickens ran beneath me as I slept in a pitch-black darkness because there were no candles to be had. I know what you’ll say: that I ought to head back to England. But I feel as if I’ve lost England or I never really knew it. I am a creature aborted, torn from the womb and homeless.
He’d never jot these words down or mail the letter. But it soothed him to imagine himself writing and Fanny opening the letter, her elegant hands holding up the letter to the light, and her voice as she read it out loud. But he didn’t like picturing her face, he didn’t like remembering those blue eyes and the mass of golden curls, nor her languid body, pale as alabaster, stretched out next to him.
No, when he pictured her, he had to further the illusion. He had to bury his face in a woman’s hair, close his eyes, and breathe in slowly. Whisper her name while he held another and tried to bring a phantom back to life.
The words slipped away, his mind spent.
He dreamed of the jungle and flowers and a great jaguar sitting atop his chest, pressing him down as heavy as a stone. When he woke it was to the sound of a scream.
He sat up and reached for his pistol.
Chapter 5
Carlota
Ramona had gone to deliver the tea and then to check that all the visitors’ luggage was in their rooms. Lizalde’s servants had been allotted a room, told to wait there, and the children had been instructed to be good and quiet and stay out of sight. They’d decamped to Carlota’s room to play since they could not run free.
Cachito spun the zoetrope and made horses gallop. Lupe lined the toy soldiers up. There were soldiers on foot and cavalry soldiers with their sabers wielded high, and even a toy cannon. The soldiers’ coats were painted blue with white lapels, the cuffs red, and the trousers white, mimicking the uniform of Napoleon’s Grande Armée. They each wore a black shako with a diamond-shaped plate on the front. Her father was a great admirer of Napoleon and had thought to name his daughter Josefina, but had changed his mind at the last minute.
He called her Carlota because it meant “freedom,” and he thought it would suit her. Yet in the end she still shared a name with an empress: Carlota, who reigned in Mexico for a few scant years and who had visited Yucatán when Carlota Moreau was eight years of age. Yet, of those imperial times she recalled little of note and could not have said if the presence of the French army had altered the nation much having been cloistered away her entire life.
What she did know was that Carlota had gone mad after they’d executed her husband at the Cerro de las Campanas, and she thought it was an odd thing to have the same name as a madwoman locked away in Brussels. It struck her as unlucky. But her father assured her Carlota of Belgium was a great lady and he didn’t believe in luck.
“That Englishman has no color in his eyes,” Cachito said. “Ramona told me so.”
“Everyone has color in their eyes,” Carlota replied. She had taken off the fancy dress and was wearing a simpler frock and lay on her belly on the floor, watching the soldiers. She was getting too old for toys. But her father did not demand they cease their games, and she feared that when she was a grown woman he’d send her away, which sometimes made her want to cling ever so strongly to girlhood.