The Night of the Iguana

  MAXINE: Calm down, honey.

  HANNAH: I’m perfectly calm, Mrs. Faulk.

  MAXINE: I’m not. That’s the trouble.

  HANNAH: I understand that, Mrs. Faulk. You lost your husband just lately. I think you probably miss him more than you know.

  MAXINE: No, the trouble is Shannon.

  HANNAH: You mean his nervous state and his . . . ?

  MAXINE: No, I just mean Shannon. I want you to lay off him, honey. You’re not for Shannon and Shannon isn’t for you.

  HANNAH: Mrs. Faulk, I’m a New England spinster who is pushing forty.

  MAXINE: I got the vibrations between you—I’m very good at catching vibrations between people—and there sure was a vibration between you and Shannon the moment you got here. That, just that, believe me, nothing but that has made this . . . misunderstanding between us. So if you just don’t mess with Shannon, you and your Grampa can stay on here as long as you want to, honey.

  HANNAH: Oh, Mrs. Faulk, do I look like a vamp?

  MAXINE: They come in all types. I’ve had all types of them here.

  [Shannon comes over to the table.]

  SHANNON: Maxine, I told you don’t make nervous people more nervous, but you wouldn’t listen.

  MAXINE: What you need is a drink.

  SHANNON: Let me decide about that.

  HANNAH: Won’t you sit down with us, Mr. Shannon, and eat something? Please. You’ll feel better.

  SHANNON: I’m not hungry right now.

  HANNAH: Well, just sit down with us, won’t you?

  [Shannon sits down with Hannah.]

  MAXINE [warningly to Hannah]: O.K. O.K. . . .

  NONNO [rousing a bit and mumbling]: Wonderful . . . wonderful place here.

  [Maxine retires from the table and wheels the liquor cart over to the German party.]

  SHANNON: Would you have gone through with it?

  HANNAH: Haven’t you ever played poker, Mr. Shannon?

  SHANNON: You mean you were bluffing?

  HANNAH: Let’s say I was drawing to an inside straight. [The wind rises and sweeps up the hill like a great waking sigh from the ocean.] It is going to storm. I hope your ladies aren’t still out in that, that . . . glass-bottomed boat, observing the, uh, submarine . . . marvels.

  SHANNON: That’s because you don’t know these ladies. However, they’re back from the boat trip. They’re down at the cantina, dancing together to the jukebox and hatching new plots to get me kicked out of Blake Tours.

  HANNAH: What would you do if you. . . .

  SHANNON: Got the sack? Go back to the Church or take the long swim to China. [Hannah removes a crumpled pack of cigarettes from her pocket. She discovers only two left in the pack and decides to save them for later. She returns the pack to her pocket.] May I have one of your cigarettes, Miss Jelkes? [She offers him the pack. He takes it from her and crumples it and throws it off the verandah.] Never smoke those, they’re made out of tobacco from cigarette stubs that beggars pick up off sidewalks and out of gutters in Mexico City. [He produces a tin of English cigarettes.] Have these—Benson and Hedges, imported, in an airtight tin, my luxury in my life.

  HANNAH: Why—thank you, I will, since you have thrown mine away.

  SHANNON: I’m going to tell you something about yourself. You are a lady, a real one and a great one.

  HANNAH: What have I done to merit that compliment from you?

  SHANNON: It isn’t a compliment, it’s just a report on what I’ve noticed about you at a time when it’s hard for me to notice anything outside myself. You took out those Mexican cigarettes, you found you just had two left, you can’t afford to buy a new pack of even that cheap brand, so you put them away for later. Right?

  HANNAH: Mercilessly accurate, Mr. Shannon.

  SHANNON: But when I asked you for one, you offered it to me without a sign of reluctance.

  HANNAH: Aren’t you making a big point out of a small matter?

  SHANNON: Just the opposite, honey, I’m making a small point out of a very large matter. [Shannon has put a cigarette in his lips but has no matches. Hannah has some and she lights his cigarette for him.] How’d you learn how to light a match in the wind?

  HANNAH: Oh, I’ve learned lots of useful little things like that. I wish I’d learned some big ones.

  SHANNON: Such as what?

  HANNAH: How to help you, Mr. Shannon. . . .

  SHANNON: Now I know why I came here!

  HANNAH: To meet someone who can light a match in the wind?

  SHANNON [looking down at the table, his voice choking]: To meet someone who wants to help me, Miss Jelkes. . . . [He makes a quick, embarrassed turn in the chair, as if to avoid her seeing that he has tears in his eyes. She regards him steadily and tenderly, as she would her grandfather.]

  HANNAH: Has it been so long since anyone has wanted to help you, or have you just. . . .

  SHANNON: Have I—what?

  HANNAH: Just been so much involved with a struggle in yourself that you haven’t noticed when people have wanted to help you, the little they can? I know people torture each other many times like devils, but sometimes they do see and know each other, you know, and then, if they’re decent, they do want to help each other all that they can. Now will you please help me? Take care of Nonno while I remove my water colors from the annex verandah because the storm is coming up by leaps and bounds now.

  [He gives a quick, jerky nod, dropping his face briefly into the cup of his hands. She murmurs “Thank you” and springs up, starting along the verandah. Halfway across, as the storm closes in upon the hilltop with a thunderclap and a sound of rain coming, Hannah turns to look back at the table. Shannon has risen and gone around the table to Nonno.]

  SHANNON: Grampa? Nonno? Let’s get up before the rain hits us, Grampa.

  NONNO: What? What?

  [Shannon gets the old man out of his chair and shepherds him to the back of the verandah as Hannah rushes toward the annex. The Mexican boys hastily clear the table, fold it up and lean it against the wall. Shannon and Nonno turn and face toward the storm, like brave men facing a firing squad. Maxine is excitedly giving orders to the boys.]

  MAXINE: Pronto, pronto, muchachos! Pronto, pronto! Llevaros todas las cosas! Pronto, pronto! Recoje los platos! Apurate con el mantel!*

  PEDRO: Nos estamos dando prisa!

  PANCHO: Que el chubasco lave los platos!

  [The German party look on the storm as a Wagnerian climax. They rise from their table as the boys come to clear it, and start singing exultantly. The storm, with its white convulsions of light, is like a giant white bird attacking the hilltop of the Costa Verde. Hannah reappears with her water colors clutched against her chest.]

  SHANNON: Got them?

  HANNAH: Yes, just in time. Here is your God, Mr. Shannon.

  SHANNON [quietly]: Yes, I see him, I hear him, I know him. And if he doesn’t know that I know him, let him strike me dead with a bolt of his lightning.

  [He moves away from the wall to the edge of the verandah as a fine silver sheet of rain descends off the sloping roof, catching the light and dimming the figures behind it. Now everything is silver, delicately lustrous. Shannon extends his hands under the rainfall, turning them in it as if to cool them. Then he cups them to catch the water in his palms and bathes his forehead with it. The rainfall increases. The sound of the marimba band at the beach cantina is brought up the hill by the wind. Shannon lowers his hands from his burning forehead and stretches them out through the rain’s silver sheet as if he were reaching for something outside and beyond himself. Then nothing is visible but these reaching-out hands. A pure white flash of lightning reveals Hannah and Nonno against the wall, behind Shannon, and the electric globe suspended from the roof goes out, the power extinguished by the storm. A clear shaft of light stays on Shannon’s reaching-out hands till the stage curtain has fallen, slowly.]*

  INTERMISSION

  *We’re going to have a feast! / We’ll eat good. / Give it to me! I’ll tie it up. / I caught
it—I’ll tie it up! / You’ll only let it get away. / Tie it up tight! Ole, ole! Don’t let it get away. Give it enough room!

  * The iguana’s escaped. / Get it, get it! Have you got it? If you don’t, it’ll bite your behind. Have you got it? / He’s got it.

  *Hurry, hurry, boys! Pick everything up! Get the plates! Hurry with the table cloth! / We are hurrying! / Let the storm wash the plates!

  *Note: In staging, the plastic elements should be restrained so that they don’t take precedence over the more important human values. It should not seem like an “effect curtain.” The faint, windy music of the marimba band from the cantina should continue as the houselights are brought up for the intermission.

  ACT THREE

  The verandah, several hours later. Cubicles number 3, 4, and 5 are dimly lighted within. We see Hannah in number 3, and Nonno in number 4. Shannon, who has taken off his shirt, is seated at a table on the verandah, writing a letter to his bishop. All but this table have been folded and stacked against the wall and Maxine is putting the hammock back up which had been taken down for dinner. The electric power is still off and the cubicles are lighted by oil lamps. The sky has cleared completely, the moon is making for full and it bathes the scene in an almost garish silver which is intensified by the wetness from the recent rainstorm. Everything is drenched—there are pools of silver here and there on the floor of the verandah. At one side a smudge-pot is burning to repel the mosquitoes, which are particularly vicious after a tropical downpour when the wind is exhausted.

  Shannon is working feverishly on the letter to the bishop, now and then slapping at a mosquito on his bare torso. He is shiny with perspiration, still breathing like a spent runner, muttering to himself as he writes and sometimes suddenly drawing a loud deep breath and simultaneously throwing back his head to stare up wildly at the night sky. Hannah is seated on a straight-back chair behind the mosquito netting in her cubicle—very straight herself, holding a small book in her hands but looking steadily over it at Shannon, like a guardian angel. Her hair has been let down. Nonno can be seen in his cubicle rocking back and forth on the edge of the narrow bed as he goes over and over the lines of his first new poem in “twenty-some years”—which he knows is his last one.

  Now and then the sound of distant music drifts up from the beach cantina.

  * * *

  MAXINE: Workin’ on your sermon for next Sunday, Rev’rend?

  SHANNON: I’m writing a very important letter, Maxine. [He means don’t disturb me.]

  MAXINE: Who to, Shannon?

  SHANNON: The Dean of the Divinity School at Sewanee. [Maxine repeats “Sewanee” to herself, tolerantly.] Yes, and I’d appreciate it very much, Maxine honey, if you’d get Pedro or Pancho to drive into town with it tonight so it will go out first thing in the morning.

  MAXINE: The kids took off in the station wagon already—for some cold beers and hot whores at the cantina.

  SHANNON: “Fred’s dead”—he’s lucky. . . .

  MAXINE: Don’t misunderstand me about Fred, baby. I miss him, but we’d not only stopped sleeping together, we’d stopped talking together except in grunts—no quarrels, no misunderstandings, but if we exchanged two grunts in the course of a day, it was a long conversation we’d had that day between us.

  SHANNON: Fred knew when I was spooked—wouldn’t have to tell him. He’d just look at me and say, “Well, Shannon, you’re spooked.”

  MAXINE: Yeah, well, Fred and me’d reached the point of just grunting.

  SHANNON: Maybe he thought you’d turned into a pig, Maxine.

  MAXINE: Hah! You know damn well that Fred respected me, Shannon, like I did Fred. We just, well, you know . . . age difference. . . .

  SHANNON: Well, you’ve got Pedro and Pancho.

  MAXINE: Employees. They don’t respect me enough. When you let employees get too free with you, personally, they stop respecting you, Shannon. And it’s, well, it’s . . . humiliating—not to be . . . respected.

  SHANNON: Then take more bus trips to town for the Mexican pokes and the pinches, or get Herr Fahrenkopf to “respect” you, honey.

  MAXINE: Hah! You kill me. I been thinking lately of selling out here and going back to the States, to Texas, and operating a tourist camp outside some live town like Houston or Dallas, on a highway, and renting out cabins to business executives wanting a comfortable little intimate little place to give a little after-hours dictation to their cute little secretaries that can’t type or write shorthand. Complimentary rum-cocos—bathrooms with bidets. I’ll introduce the bidet to the States.

  SHANNON: Does everything have to wind up on that level with you, Maxine?

  MAXINE: Yes and no, baby. I know the difference between loving someone and just sleeping with someone—even I know about that. [He starts to rise.] We’ve both reached a point where we’ve got to settle for something that works for us in our lives—even if it isn’t on the highest kind of level.

  SHANNON: I don’t want to rot.

  MAXINE: You wouldn’t. I wouldn’t let you! I know your psychological history. I remember one of your conversations on this verandah with Fred. You was explaining to him how your problems first started. You told him that Mama, your Mama, used to send you to bed before you was ready to sleep—so you practiced the little boy’s vice, you amused yourself with yourself. And once she caught you at it and whaled your backside with the back side of a hairbrush because she said she had to punish you for it because it made God mad as much as it did Mama, and she had to punish you for it so God wouldn’t punish you for it harder than she would.

  SHANNON: I was talking to Fred.

  MAXINE: Yeah, but I heard it, all of it. You said you loved God and Mama and so you quit it to please them, but it was your secret pleasure and you harbored a secret resentment against Mama and God for making you give it up. And so you got back at God by preaching atheistical sermons and you got back at Mama by starting to lay young girls.

  SHANNON: I have never delivered an atheistical sermon, and never would or could when I go back to the Church.

  MAXINE: You’re not going back to no Church. Did you mention the charge of statutory rape to the divinity dean?

  SHANNON [thrusting his chair back so vehemently that it topples over]: Why don’t you let up on me? You haven’t let up on me since I got here this morning! Let up on me! Will you please let up on me?

  MAXINE [smiling serenely into his rage.]: Aw baby. . . .

  SHANNON: What do you mean by “aw baby”? What do you want out of me, Maxine honey?

  MAXINE: Just to do this. [She runs her fingers through his hair. He thrusts her hand away.]

  SHANNON: Ah, God. [Words fail him. He shakes his head with a slight, helpless laugh and goes down the steps from the verandah.]

  MAXINE: The Chinaman in the kitchen says, “No sweat.” . . . “No sweat.” He says that’s all his philosophy. All the Chinese philosophy in three words, “Mei yoo guanchi”—which is Chinese for “No sweat.” . . . With your record and a charge of statutory rape hanging over you in Texas, how could you go to a church except to the Holy Rollers with some lively young female rollers and a bushel of hay on the church floor?

  SHANNON: I’ll drive into town in the bus to post this letter tonight. [He has started toward the path. There are sounds below. He divides the masking foliage with his hands and looks down the hill.]

  MAXINE [descending the steps from the verandah]: Watch out for the spook, he’s out there.

  SHANNON: My ladies are up to something. They’re all down there on the road, around the bus.

  MAXINE: They’re running out on you, Shannon.

  [She comes up beside him. He draws back and she looks down the hill. The light in number 3 cubicle comes on and Hannah rises from the little table that she had cleared for letter-writing. She removes her Kabuki robe from a hook and puts it on as an actor puts on a costume in his dressing room. Nonno’s cubicle is also lighted dimly. He sits on the edge of his cot, rocking slightly back and forth, uttering an indi
stinguishable mumble of lines from his poem.]

  MAXINE: Yeah. There’s a little fat man down there that looks like Jake Latta to me. Yep, that’s Jake, that’s Latta. I reckon Blake Tours has sent him here to take over your party, Shannon. [Shannon looks out over the jungle and lights a cigarette with jerky fingers.] Well, let him do it. No sweat! He’s coming up here now. Want me to handle it for you?

  SHANNON: I’ll handle it for myself. You keep out of it, please.

  [He speaks with a desperate composure. Hannah stands just behind the curtain of her cubicle, motionless as a painted figure, during the scene that follows. Jake Latta comes puffing up the verandah steps, beaming genially.]

  LATTA: Hi there, Larry.

  SHANNON: Hello, Jake. [He folds his letter into an envelope.] Mrs. Faulk honey, this goes air special.

  MAXINE: First you’d better address it.

  SHANNON: Oh!

  [Shannon laughs and snatches the letter back, fumbling in his pocket for an address book, his fingers shaking uncontrollably. Latta winks at Maxine. She smiles tolerantly.]

  LATTA: How’s our boy doin’, Maxine?

  MAXINE: He’d feel better if I could get him to take a drink.

  LATTA: Can’t you get a drink down him?

  MAXINE: Nope, not even a rum-coco.

  LATTA: Let’s have a rum-coco, Larry.

  SHANNON: You have a rum-coco, Jake. I have a party of ladies to take care of. And I’ve discovered that situations come up in this business that call for cold, sober judgment. How about you? Haven’t you ever made that discovery, Jake? What’re you doing here? Are you here with a party?

  LATTA: I’m here to pick up your party, Larry boy.

  SHANNON: That’s interesting! On whose authority, Jake?

  LATTA: Blake Tours wired me in Cuernavaca to pick up your party here and put them together with mine cause you’d had this little nervous upset of yours and. . . .