It was this following day that the Iguana was caught.
The Iguana is a lizard, two or three feet in length, which the Mexicans regard as suitable for the table. They are not always eaten right after they are caught but being creatures that can survive for quite a while without food or drink, they are often held in captivity for some time before execution. Miss Jelkes had been told that they tasted rather like chicken, which opinion she ascribed to a typically Mexican way of glossing over an unappetizing fact. What bothered her about the Iguana was the inhumanity of its treatment during its interval of captivity. She had seen them outside the huts of villagers, usually hitched to a short pole near the doorway and continually and hopelessly clawing at the dry earth within the orbit of the rope-length, while naked children squatted around it, poking it with sticks in the eyes and mouth.
Now the Patrona’s adolescent son had captured one of these Iguanas and had fastened it to the base of a column under the hammockverandah. Miss Jelkes was not aware of its presence until late the night of the capture. Then she had been disturbed by the scuffling sound it made and had slipped on her dressing gown and had gone out in the bright moonlight to discover what the sound was caused by. She looked over the rail of the verandah and she saw the Iguana hitched to the base of the column nearest her doorway and making the most pitiful effort to scramble into the bushes just beyond the taut length of its rope. She uttered a little cry of horror as she made this discovery.
The two young writers were lying in hammocks at the other end of the verandah and as usual were carrying on a desultory conversation in tones not loud enough to carry to her bedroom.
Without stopping to think, and with a curious thrill of exultation. Miss Jelkes rushed down to their end of the verandah. As she drew near them she discovered that the two writers were engaged in drinking rum-coco, which is a drink prepared in the shell of a cocoanut by knocking a cap off it with a machete and pouring into the nut a mixture of rum, lemon, sugar and cracked ice. The drinking had been going on since supper and the floor beneath their two hammocks was littered with bits of white pulp and hairy brown fibre and was so slippery that Miss Jelkes barely kept her footing. The liquid had spilt over their faces, bare throats and chests, giving them an oily lustre, and about their hammocks was hanging a cloud of moist and heavy sweetness. Each had a leg thrown over the edge of the hammock with which he pushed himself lazily back and forth. If Miss Jelkes had been seeing them for the first time, the gross details of the spectacle would have been more than association with a few dissolute members of the Jelkes family had prepared her to stomach, and she would have scrupulously avoided a second glance at them. But Miss Jelkes had been changing more than she was aware of during this period of preoccupation with the two writers, her scruples were more undermined than she suspected, so that if the word pigs flashed through her mind for a moment, it failed to distract her even momentarily from what she was bent on doing. It was a form of hysteria that had taken hold of her, her action and her speech were without volition.
“Do you know what has happened!” she gasped as she came toward them. She came nearer than she would have consciously dared, so that she was standing directly over the young writer’s prone figure. “That horrible boy, the son of the Patrona, has tied up an Iguana beneath my bedroom. I heard him tying it up but I didn’t know what it was. I’ve been listening to it for hours, ever since supper, and didn’t know what it was. Just now I got up to investigate, I looked over the edge of the verandah and there it was, scuffling around at the end of its little rope!”
Neither of the writers said anything for a moment, but the older one had propped himself up a little to stare at Miss Jelkes.
“There what was?” he enquired.
“She is talked about the Iguana,” said the younger.
“Oh! Well, what about it?”
“How can I sleep?” cried Miss Jelkes. “How could anyone sleep with that example of Indian savagery right underneath my door!”
“You have an aversion to lizards?” suggested the older writer.
“I have an aversion to brutality!” corrected Miss Jelkes.
“But the lizard is a very low grade of animal life. Isn’t it a very low grade of animal life?” he asked his companion.
“Not as low as some,” said the younger writer. He was grinning maliciously at Miss Jelkes, but she did not notice him at all, her attention was fixed upon the older writer.
“At any rate,” said the writer, “I don’t believe it is capable of feeling half as badly over its misfortune as you seem to be feeling for it.”
“I don’t agree with you,” said Miss Jelkes. “I don’t agree with you at all! We like to think that we are the only ones that are capable of suffering but that is just human conceit. We are not the only ones that are capable of suffering. Why, even plants have sensory impressions. I have seen some that closed their leaves when you touched them!”
She held out her hand and drew her slender fingers into a chalice that closed. As she did this she drew a deep, tortured breath with her lips pursed and nostrils flaring and her eyes rolled heavenwards so that she looked like a female Saint on the rack.
The younger man chuckled but the older one continued to stare at her gravely.
“I am sure,” she went on, “that the Iguana has very definite feelings, and you would be, too, if you had been listening to it, scuffling around out there in that awful dry dust, trying to reach the bushes with that rope twisted about its neck, making it almost impossible for it to breathe!”
She clutched her throat as she spoke and with the other hand made a clawing gesture in the air. The younger writer broke into a laugh, the older one smiled at Miss Jelkes.
“You have a real gift,” he said, “for vicarious experience.”
“Well, I just can’t stand to witness suffering,” said Miss Jelkes. “I can endure it myself but I just can’t stand to witness it in others, no matter whether it’s human suffering or animal suffering. And there is so much suffering in the world, so much that is necessary suffering, such as illnesses and accidents which cannot be avoided. But there is so much unnecessary suffering, too, so much that is inflicted simply because some people have a callous disregard for the feelings of others. Sometimes it almost seems as if the universe was designed by the Marquis de Sade!”
She threw back her head with an hysterical laugh.
“And I do not believe in the principle of atonement,” she went on. “Isn’t it awful, isn’t it really preposterous that practically all our religions should be based on the principle of atonement when there is really and truly no such thing as guilt?”
“I am sorry,” said the older writer. He rubbed his forehead. “I am not in any condition to talk about God.”
“Oh, I’m not talking about God,” said Miss Jelkes. “I’m talking about the Iguana!”
“She’s trying to say that the Iguana is one of God’s creatures,” said the younger writer.
“But that one of God’s creatures,” said the older, “is now in the possession of the Patrona’s son!”
“That one of God’s creatures,” Miss Jelkes exclaimed, “is now hitched to a post right underneath my door, and late as it is I have a very good notion to go and wake up the Patrona and tell her that they have got to turn it loose or at least to remove it some place where I can’t hear it!”
The younger writer was now laughing with drunken vehemence. “What are you bellowing over?” the older one asked him.
“If she goes and wakes up the Patrona, anything can happen!”
“What?” asked Miss Jelkes. She glanced uncertainly at both of them.
“That’s quite true,” said the older. “One thing these Mexicans will not tolerate is the interruption of sleep!”
“But what can she do but apologize and remove it!” demanded Miss Jelkes. “Because after all, it’s a pretty outrageous thing to hitch a lizard beneath a woman’s door and expect her to sleep with that noise going on all night!”
> “It might not go on all night,” said the older writer.
“What’s going to stop it?” asked Miss Jelkes.
“The Iguana might go to sleep.”
“Never!” said Miss Jelkes. “The creature is frantic and what it is going through must be a nightmare!”
“You’re bothered a good deal by noises?” asked the older writer. This was, of course, a dig at Miss Jelkes for her complaint about the radio. She recognized it as such and welcomed the chance it gave to defend and explain. In fact this struck her as being the golden moment for breaking all barriers down.
“That’s true, I am!” she admitted breathlessly. “You see, I had a nervous breakdown a few years ago, and while I’m ever so much better than I was, sleep is more necessary to me than it is to people who haven’t gone through a terrible thing like that. Why, for months and months I wasn’t able to sleep without a sedative tablet, sometimes two of them a night! Now I hate like anything to be a nuisance to people, to make unreasonable demands, because I am always so anxious to get along well with people, not only peaceably, but really cordially with them—even with strangers that I barely speak to—However it sometimes happens…”
She paused for a moment. A wonderful thought had struck her.
“I know what I’ll do!” she cried out. She gave the older writer a radiant smile.
“What’s that?” asked the younger. His tone was full of suspicion but Miss Jelkes smiled at him, too.
“Why, I’ll just move!” she said.
“Out of Costa Verde?” suggested the younger.
“Oh, no, no, no! No, indeed! It’s the nicest resort hotel I’ve ever stopped at! I mean that I’ll change my room.”
“Where will you change it to?”
“Down here,” said Miss Jelkes, “to this end of the verandah! I won’t even wait till morning. I’ll move right now. All these vacant rooms, there couldn’t be any objection, and if there is, why. I’ll just explain how totally impossible it was for me to sleep with that lizard’s commotion all night!”
She turned quickly about on her heels, so quickly that she nearly toppled over on the slippery floor, caught her breath laughingly and rushed back to her bedroom. Blindly she swept up a few of her belongings in her arms and rushed back to the writers’ end of the verandah where they were holding a whispered consultation.
“Which is your room?” she asked.
“We have two rooms,” said the younger writer coldly.
“Yes, one each,” said the older.
“Oh, of course!” said Miss Jelkes. “But I don’t want to make the embarrassing error of confiscating one of you gentlemen’s beds!”
She laughed gaily at this. It was the sort of remark she would make to show new acquaintances how far from being formal and prudish she was. But the writers were not inclined to laugh with her, so she cleared her throat and started blindly toward the nearest door, dropping a comb and a mirror as she did so.
“Seven years bad luck!” said the younger man.
“It isn’t broken!” she gasped.
“Will you help me?” she asked the older writer.
He got up unsteadily and put the dropped articles back on the disorderly pile in her arms.
“I’m sorry to be so much trouble!” she gasped pathetically. Then she turned again to the nearest doorway.
“Is this one vacant?”
“No, that’s mine,” said the younger.
“Then how about this one?”
“That one is mine,” said the older.
“Sounds like the Three Bears and Goldilocks!” laughed Miss Jelkes. “Well, oh, dear—1 guess I’ll just have to take this one!”
She rushed to the screen door on the other side of the younger writer’s room, excitingly aware as she did so that this would put her within close range of their nightly conversations, the mystery of which had tantalized her for weeks. Now she would be able to hear every word that passed between them unless they actually whispered in each other’s ear!
She rushed into the bedroom and let the screen door slam.
She switched on the suspended light bulb and hastily plunged the articles borne with her about a room that was identical with the one that she had left and then plopped herself down upon an identical white iron bed.
There was silence on the verandah.
Without rising she reached above her to pull the cord of the light bulb. Its watery yellow glow was replaced by the crisp white flood of moonlight through the gauze-netted window and through the screen of the door.
She lay flat on her back with her arms lying rigidly along her sides and every nerve tingling with excitement over the spontaneous execution of a piece of strategy carried out more expertly than it would have been after days of preparation.
For a while the silence outside her new room continued.
Then the voice of the younger writer pronounced the word “Goldilocks!”
Two shouts of laughter rose from the verandah. It continued without restraint till Miss jelkes could feel her ears burning in the dark as if rays of intense light were concentrated on them.
There was no more talk that evening, but she heard their feet scraping as they got off the hammocks and walked across the verandah to the further steps and down them.
Miss jelkes was badly hurt, worse than she had been hurt the previous afternoon, when she had complained about the young man’s immodesty on the beach. As she lay there upon the severe white bed that smelled of ammonia, she could feel coming toward her one of those annihilating spells of neurasthenia which had led to her breakdown six years ago. She was too weak to cope with it, it would have its way with her and bring her God knows how close to the verge of lunacy and even possibly over! What an intolerable burden, and why did she have to bear it, she who was so humane and gentle by nature that even the sufferings of a lizard could hurt her! She turned her face to the cold white pillow and wept. She wished that she were a writer. If she were a writer it would be possible to say things that only Picasso had ever put into paint. But if she said them, would anybody believe them? Was her sense of the enormous grotesquerie of the world communicable to any other person? And why should it be told if it could be? And why, most of all, did she make such a fool of herself in her frantic need to find some comfort in people!
She felt that the morning was going to be pitilessly hot and bright and she turned over in her mind the list of neuroses that might fasten upon her. Everything that is thoughtless and automatic in healthy organisms might take on for her an air of preposterous novelty. The act of breathing and the beat of her heart and the very process of thinking would be self-conscious if this worst-of-all neuroses should take hold of her—and take hold of her it would, because she was so afraid of it! The precarious balance of her nerves would be all overthrown. Her entire being would turn into a feverish little machine for the production of fears, fears that could not be put into words because of their all-encompassing immensity, and even supposing that they could be put into language and so be susceptible to the comfort of telling—who was there at the Costa Verde, this shadowless rock by the ocean, that she could turn to except the two young writers who seemed to despise her? How awful to be at the mercy of merciless people!
Now I’m indulging in self-pity, she thought.
She turned on her side and fished among articles on the bed table for the little cardboard box of sedative tablets. They would get her through the night, but tomorrow—oh, tomorrow! She lay there senselessly crying, hearing even at this distance the efforts of the captive Iguana to break from its rope and scramble into the bushes…
II
When Miss Jelkes awoke it was still a while before morning. The moon, however, had disappeared from the sky and she was lying in blackness that would have been total except for tiny cracks of light that came through the wall of the adjoining bedroom, the one that was occupied by the younger writer.
It did not take her long to discover that the younger writer was not alone in his room. There
was no speech but the quality of sounds that came at intervals though the partition made her certain the room had two people in it.
If she could have risen from bed and peered through one of the cracks without betraying herself she might have done so, but knowing that any move would be overheard, she remained on the bed and her mind was now alert with suspicions which had before been only a formless wonder.
At least she heard someone speak.
“You’d better turn out the light,” said the voice of the younger writer.
“Why?”
“There are cracks in the wall.”
“So much the better. I’m sure that’s why she moved down here.”
The younger one raised his voice.
“You don’t think she moved because of the Iguana?”
“Hell, no, that was just an excuse. Didn’t you notice how pleased she was with herself, as if she had pulled off something downright brilliant?”
“I bet she’s eavesdropping on us right this minute,” said the younger.
“Undoubtedly she is. But what can she do about it?”
“Go to the Patrona.”
Both of them laughed.
“The Patrona wants to get rid of her,” said the younger.
“Does she?”
“Yep. She’s crazy to have her move out. She’s even given the cook instructions to put too much salt in her food.”
They both laughed.
Miss Jelkes discovered that she had risen from the bed. She was standing uncertainly on the cold floor for a moment and then she was rushing out of the screen door and up to the door of the younger writer’s bedroom.
She knocked on the door, carefully keeping her eyes away from the lighted interior.
“Come in,” said a voice.
“I’d rather not,” said Miss Jelkes. “Will you come here for a minute?”