The Night of the Iguana

  HANNAH: Thank you so much, Mr. Shannon. [She disappears behind the mosquito netting. Maxine advances to the verandah angle as Shannon starts toward his own cubicle.]

  MAXINE [mimicking Hannah’svoice]: “Thank you so much, Mr. Shannon.”

  SHANNON: Don’t be bitchy. Some people say thank you sincerely. [He goes past her and down the steps from the end of the verandah.] I’m going down for a swim now.

  MAXINE: The water’s blood temperature this time of day.

  SHANNON: Yeah, well, I have a fever so it’ll seem cooler to me. [He crosses rapidly to the jungle path leading to the beach.]

  MAXINE [following him]: Wait for me, I’ll. . . .

  [She means she will go down with him, but he ignores her call and disappears into the foliage. Maxine shrugs angrily and goes back onto the verandah. She faces out, gripping the railing tightly and glaring into the blaze of the sun as if it were a personal enemy. Then the ocean breathes a long cooling breath up the hill, as Nonno’s voice is heard from his cubicle]

  NONNO:

  How calmly does the orange branch

  Observe the sky begin to blanch,

  Without a cry, without a prayer,

  With no expression of despair. . . .

  [And from a beach cantina in the distance a marimba band is heard playing a popular song of that summer of 1940, “Palabras de Mujer”—which means “Words of Women.”]

  SLOW DIM OUT AND SLOW CURTAIN

  ACT TWO

  Several hours later: near sunset.

  The scene is bathed in a deep golden, almost coppery light; the heavy tropical foliage gleams with wetness from a recent rain.

  Maxine comes around the turn of the verandah. To the formalities of evening she has made the concession of changing from Levis to clean white cotton pants, and from a blue work shirt to a pink one. She is about to set up the folding cardtables for the evening meal which is served on the verandah. All the while she is talking, she is setting up tables, etc.

  * * *

  MAXINE: Miss Jelkes?

  [Hannah lifts the mosquito net over the door of cubicle number 3.]

  HANNAH: Yes, Mrs. Faulk?

  MAXINE: Can I speak to you while I set up these tables for supper?

  HANNAH: Of course, you may. I wanted to speak to you, too. [She comes out. She is now wearing her artist’s smock.]

  MAXINE: Good.

  HANNAH: I just wanted to ask you if there’s a tub-bath Grandfather could use. A shower is fine for me—I prefer a shower to a tub—but for my grandfather there is some danger of falling down in a shower and at his age, although he says he is made out of India rubber, a broken hipbone would be a very serious matter, so I. . . .

  MAXINE: What I wanted to say is I called up the Casa de Huéspedes about you and your Grampa, and I can get you in there.

  HANNAH: Oh, but we don’t want to move!

  MAXINE: The Costa Verde isn’t the right place for you. Y’see, we cater to folks that like to rough it a little, and—well, frankly, we cater to younger people.

  [Hannah has started unfolding a cardtable.]

  HANNAH: Oh yes . . . uh . . . well . . . the, uh, Casa de Huéspedes, that means a, uh, sort of a rooming house, Mrs. Faulk?

  MAXINE: Boardinghouse. They feed you, they’ll even feed you on credit.

  HANNAH: Where is it located?

  MAXINE: It has a central location. You could get a doctor there quick if the old man took sick on you. You got to think about that.

  HANNAH: Yes, I—[She nods gravely, more to herself than Maxine.]—I have thought about that, but. . . .

  MAXINE: What are you doing?

  HANNAH: Making myself useful.

  MAXINE: Don’t do that. I don’t accept help from guests here.

  [Hannah hesitates, but goes on setting the tables.]

  HANNAH: Oh, please, let me. Knife and fork on one side, spoon on the . . . ? [Her voice dies out.]

  MAXINE: Just put the plates on the napkins so they don’t blow away.

  HANNAH: Yes, it is getting breezy on the verandah. [She continues setting the table.]

  MAXINE: Hurricane winds are already hitting up coast.

  HANNAH: We’ve been through several typhoons in the Orient. Sometimes outside disturbances like that are an almost welcome distraction from inside disturbances, aren’t they? [This is said almost to herself. She finishes putting the plates on the paper napkins.] When do you want us to leave here, Mrs. Faulk?

  MAXINE: The boys’ll move you in my station wagon tomorrow—no charge for the service.

  HANNAH: That is very kind of you. [Maxine starts away.] Mrs. Faulk?

  MAXINE [turning back to her with obvious reluctance]: Huh?

  HANNAH: Do you know jade?

  MAXINE: Jade?

  HANNAH: Yes.

  MAXINE: Why?

  HANNAH: I have a small but interesting collection of jade pieces. I asked if you know jade because in jade it’s the craftsmanship, the carving of the jade, that’s most important about it. [She has removed a jade ornament from her blouse.] This one, for instance—a miracle of carving. Tiny as it is, it has two figures carved on it—the legendary Prince Ahk and Princess Angh, and a heron flying above them. The artist that carved it probably received for this miraculously delicate workmanship, well, I would say perhaps the price of a month’s supply of rice for his family, but the merchant who employed him sold it, I would guess, for at least three hundred pounds sterling to an English lady who got tired of it and gave it to me, perhaps because I painted her not as she was at that time but as I could see she must have looked in her youth. Can you see the carving?

  MAXINE: Yeah, honey, but I’m not operating a hock shop here, I’m trying to run a hotel.

  HANNAH: I know, but couldn’t you just accept it as security for a few days’ stay here?

  MAXINE: You’re completely broke, are you?

  HANNAH: Yes, we are—completely.

  MAXINE: You say that like you’re proud of it.

  HANNAH: I’m not proud of it or ashamed of it either. It just happens to be what’s happened to us, which has never happened before in all our travels.

  MAXINE [grudgingly]: You’re telling the truth, I reckon, but I told you the truth, too, when I told you, when you came here, that I had just lost my husband and he’d left me in such a financial hole that if living didn’t mean more to me than money, I’d might as well have been dropped in the ocean with him.

  HANNAH: Ocean?

  MAXINE [peacefully philosophical about it]: I carried out his burial instructions exactly. Yep, my husband, Fred Faulk, was the greatest game fisherman on the West Coast of Mexico—he’d racked up unbeatable records in sailfish, tarpon, kingfish, barracuda—and on his deathbed, last week, he requested to be dropped in the sea, yeah, right out there in that bay, not even sewed up in canvas, just in his fisherman outfit. So now old Freddie the Fisherman is feeding the fish—fishes’ revenge on old Freddie. How about that, I ask you?

  HANNAH [regarding Maxine sharply]: I doubt that he regrets it.

  MAXINE: I do. It gives me the shivers.

  [She is distracted by the German party singing a marching song on the path up from the beach. Shannon appears at the top of the path, a wet beachrobe clinging to him. Maxine’s whole concentration shifts abruptly to him. She freezes and blazes with it like an exposed power line. For a moment the “hot light” is concentrated on her tense, furious figure. Hannah provides a visual counterpoint. She clenches her eyes shut for a moment, and when they open, it is on a look of stoical despair of the refuge she has unsuccessfully fought for. Then Shannon approaches the verandah and the scene is his.]

  SHANNON: Here they come up, your conquerors of the world, Maxine honey, singing “Horst Wessel.” [He chuckles fiercely, and starts toward the verandah steps.]

  MAXINE: Shannon, wash that sand off you before you come on the verandah.

  [The Germans are heard singing the “Horst Wessel” marching song. Soon they appear, trooping up from the beach li
ke an animated canvas by Rubens. They are all nearly nude, pinked and bronzed by the sun. The women have decked themselves with garlands of pale green seaweed, glistening wet, and the Munich-opera bridegroom is blowing on a great conch shell. His father-in-law, the tank manufacturer, has his portable radio, which is still transmitting a short-wave broadcast about the Battle of Britain, now at its climax.]

  HILDA [capering, astride her rubber horse]: Horsey, horsey, horsey!

  HERR FAHRENKOPF [ecstatically]: London is burning, the heart of London’s on fire! [Wolfgang turns a handspring onto the verandah and walks on his hands a few paces, then tumbles over with a great whoop. Maxine laughs delightedly with the Germans.] Beer, beer, beer!

  FRAU FAHRENKOPF: Tonight champagne!

  [The euphoric horseplay and shouting continue as they gambol around the turn of the verandah. Shannon has come onto the porch. Maxine’s laughter dies out a little sadly, with envy.]

  SHANNON: You’re turning this place into the Mexican Berchtesgaden, Maxine honey?

  MAXINE: I told you to wash that sand off. [Shouts for beer from the Germans draw her around the verandah corner.]

  HANNAH: Mr. Shannon, do you happen to know the Casa de Huéspedes, or anything about it, I mean? [Shannon stares at her somewhat blankly.] We are, uh, thinking of . . . moving there tomorrow. Do you, uh, recommend it?

  SHANNON: I recommend it along with the Black Hole of Calcutta and the Siberian salt mines.

  HANNAH [nodding reflectively]: I suspected as much. Mr. Shannon, in your touring party, do you think there might be anyone interested in my water colors? Or in my character sketches?

  SHANNON: I doubt it. I doubt that they’re corny enough to please my ladies. Oh-oh! Great Caesar’s ghost. . . .

  [This exclamation is prompted by the shrill, approaching call of his name. Charlotte appears from the rear, coming from the hotel annex, and rushes like a teen-age Medea toward the verandah. Shannon ducks into his cubicle, slamming the door so quickly that a corner of the mosquito netting is caught and sticks out, flirtatiously. Charlotte rushes onto the verandah.]

  CHARLOTTE: Larry!

  HANNAH: Are you looking for someone, dear?

  CHARLOTTE: Yeah, the man conducting our tour, Larry Shannon.

  HANNAH: Oh, Mr. Shannon. I think he went down to the beach.

  CHARLOTTE: I just now saw him coming up from the beach. [She is tense and trembling, and her eyes keep darting up and down the verandah.]

  HANNAH: Oh. Well. . . . But. . . .

  CHARLOTTE: Larry? Larry! [Her shouts startle the rain-forest birds into a clamorous moment.]

  HANNAH: Would you like to leave a message for him, dear?

  CHARLOTTE: No. I’m staying right here till he comes out of wherever he’s hiding.

  HANNAH: Why don’t you just sit down, dear. I’m an artist, a painter. I was just sorting out my water colors and sketches in this portfolio, and look what I’ve come across. [She selects a sketch and holds it up.]

  SHANNON [from inside his cubicle]: Oh, God!

  CHARLOTTE [darting to the cubicle]: Larry, let me in there!

  [She beats on the door of the cubicle as Herr Fahrenkopf comes around the verandah with his portable radio. He is bug-eyed with excitement over the news broadcast in German.]

  HANNAH: Guten abend.

  [Herr Fahrenkopf jerks his head with a toothy grin, raising a hand for silence. Hannah nods agreeably and approaches him with her portfolio of drawings. He maintains the grin as she displays one picture after another. Hannah is uncertain whether the grin is for the pictures or the news broadcast. He stares at the pictures, jerking his head from time to time. It is rather like the pantomine of showing lantern slides.]

  CHARLOTTE [suddenly crying out again]: Larry, open this door and let me in! I know you’re in there, Larry!

  HERR FAHRENKOPF: Silence, please, for one moment! This is a recording of Der Führer addressing the Reichstag just . . . [He glances at his wrist watch.] . . . eight hours ago, today, transmitted by Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro to Mexico City. Please! Quiet, bitte!

  [A human voice like a mad dog’s bark emerges from the static momentarily. Charlotte goes on pounding on Shannon’s door. Hannah suggests in pantomime that they go to the back verandah, but Herr Fahrenkopf despairs of hearing the broadcast. As he rises to leave, the light catches his polished glasses so that he appears for a moment to have electric light bulbs in his forehead. Then he ducks his head in a genial little bow and goes out beyond the verandah, where he performs some muscle-flexing movements of a formalized nature, like the preliminary stances of Japanese Suma wrestlers.]

  HANNAH: May I show you my work on the other verandah?

  [Hannah had started to follow Herr Fahrenkopf with her portfolio, but the sketches fall out, and she stops to gather them from the floor with the sad, preoccupied air of a lonely child picking flowers.]

  [Shannon’s head slowly, furtively, appears through the window of his cubicle. He draws quickly back as Charlotte darts that way, stepping on Hannah’s spilt sketches. Hannah utters a soft cry of protest, which is drowned by Charlotte’s renewed clamor.]

  CHARLOTTE: Larry, Larry, Judy’s looking for me. Let me come in, Larry, before she finds me here!

  SHANNON: You can’t come in. Stop shouting and I’ll come out.

  CHARLOTTE: All right, come out.

  SHANNON: Stand back from the door so I can.

  [She moves a little aside and he emerges from his cubicle like a man entering a place of execution. He leans against the wall, mopping the sweat off his face with a handkerchief.]

  SHANNON: How does Miss Fellowes know what happened that night? Did you tell her?

  CHARLOTTE: I didn’t tell her, she guessed.

  SHANNON: Guessing isn’t knowing. If she is just guessing, that means she doesn’t know—I mean if you’re not lying, if you didn’t tell her.

  [Hannah has finished picking up her drawings and moves quietly over to the far side of the verandah.]

  CHARLOTTE: Don’t talk to me like that.

  SHANNON: Don’t complicate my life now, please, for God’s sake, don’t complicate my life now.

  CHARLOTTE: Why have you changed like this?

  SHANNON: I have a fever. Don’t complicate my . . . fever.

  CHARLOTTE: You act like you hated me now.

  SHANNON: You’re going to get me kicked out of Blake Tours, Charlotte.

  CHARLOTTE: Judy is, not me.

  SHANNON: Why did you sing “I Love You Truly” at me?

  CHARLOTTE: Because I do love you truly!

  SHANNON: Honey girl, don’t you know that nothing worse could happen to a girl in your, your . . . unstable condition . . . than to get emotionally mixed up with a man in my unstable condition, huh?

  CHARLOTTE: No, no, no, I—

  SHANNON [cutting through]: Two unstable conditions can set a whole world on fire, can blow it up, past repair, and that is just as true between two people as it’s true between. . . .

  CHARLOTTE: All I know is you’ve got to marry me, Larry, after what happened between us in Mexico City!

  SHANNON: A man in my condition can’t marry, it isn’t decent or legal. He’s lucky if he can even hold onto his job. [He keeps catching hold of her hands and plucking them off his shoulders.] I’m almost out of my mind, can’t you see that, honey?

  CHARLOTTE: I don’t believe you don’t love me.

  SHANNON: Honey, it’s almost impossible for anybody to believe they’re not loved by someone they believe they love, but, honey, I love nobody. I’m like that, it isn’t my fault. When I brought you home that night I told you good night in the hall, just kissed you on the cheek like the little girl that you are, but the instant I opened my door, you rushed into my room and I couldn’t get you out of it, not even when I, oh God, tried to scare you out of it by, oh God, don’t you remember?

  [Miss Fellowes’ voice is heard from back of the hotel calling, “Charlotte!”]

  CHARLOTTE: Yes, I remember that after making love t
o me, you hit me, Larry, you struck me in the face, and you twisted my arm to make me kneel on the floor and pray with you for forgiveness.

  SHANNON: I do that, I do that always when I, when . . . I don’t have a dime left in my nervous emotional bank account—I can’t write a check on it, now.

  CHARLOTTE: Larry, let me help you!

  MISS FELLOWES [approaching]: Charlotte, Charlotte, Charlie!

  CHARLOTTE: Help me and let me help you!

  SHANNON: The helpless can’t help the helpless!

  CHARLOTTE: Let me in, Judy’s coming!

  SHANNON: Let me go. Go away!

  [He thrusts her violently back and rushes into his cubicle, slamming and bolting the door—though the gauze netting is left sticking out. As Miss Fellowes charges onto the verandah, Charlotte runs into the next cubicle, and Hannah moves over from where she has been watching and meets her in the center.]

  MISS FELLOWES: Shannon, Shannon! Where are you?

  HANNAH: I think Mr. Shannon has gone down to the beach.

  MISS FELLOWES: Was Charlotte Goodall with him? A young blonde girl in our party—was she with him?

  HANNAH: No, nobody was with him, he was completely alone.

  MISS FELLOWES: I heard a door slam.

  HANNAH: That was mine.

  MISS FELLOWES [pointing to the door with the gauze sticking out]: Is this yours?

  HANNAH: Yes, mine. I rushed out to catch the sunset.

  [At this moment Miss Fellowes hears Charlotte sobbing in Hannah’s cubicle. She throws the door open.]

  MISS FELLOWES: Charlotte! Come out of there, Charlie! [She has seized Charlotte by the wrist.] What’s your word worth—nothing? You promised you’d stay away from him! [Charlotte frees her arm, sobbing bitterly. Miss Fellowes seizes her again, tighter, and starts dragging her away.] I have talked to your father about this man by long distance and he’s getting out a warrant for his arrest, if he dare try coming back to the States after this!