Don DeLillo: The Angel Esmeralda

I was beginning to learn when a certain set of houses would appear, where the worst turns were, when and on which side the terrain would fall away to a stretch of deep jungle. She sat next to me absently rubbing an insect bite on her left forearm.

We went to the same hotel and I asked for a pool suite. We followed a maid along the beach and then up the path to one of the garden gates. The way Christa reacted to the garden and pool, I realized she’d spent the previous night in one of the beach units, which were ordinary.

When we were alone, I followed her into the bathroom. She took some lotion out of her makeup kit and poured a small amount on a piece of cotton. Slowly she moved the cotton over her face.

“You were number seven,” I said.

“They took four, only.”

“You would have come back alone? Or stayed at the airport?”

“I have very little money. I didn’t expect.”

“They have no computer.”

“I have gone out. I have called them from the hotel where I was. They have different lists. Two times they could not find my name anywhere. And there is no way to know when a flight is canceled.”

“The plane doesn’t come.”

“This is true,” she said. “The plane doesn’t come and you know you have gone out for nothing.”

I held her face in my hands.

“Is this nothing?”

“I don’t know.”

“You feel.”

“Yes, I feel.”

She walked inside and sat on the bed. Then she looked toward the doorway, taking me in — a delayed evaluation. After a period of what seemed dead silence, I was aware of the sound of waves rolling softly in, and realized I’d been hearing it all along, the ocean, the break and run of moving water. Christa kept her eyes on me as she reached back toward her handbag, which was sitting in the middle of the bed, and then as she felt inside for cigarettes.

“How much money do you have?” I said.

“One hundred dollars, E.C.”

“Less than two trips out and back.”

“It’s amusing, yes. This is how we must count our money.”

“Did you sleep last night?”

“No,” she said.

“The wind was incredible. The wind kept blowing. It blew hard until dawn. I love the sound and feel of that kind of wind. It was warm, it was almost hot. It bent those trees out there. You could hear the rush it makes through the trees. That heavy rushing scatter-sound it makes.”

“When you heard how loud it was and felt how hard it was blowing, you could not believe it would be warm.”

When everything is new, the pleasures are skin-deep. I found it mysteriously satisfying to say her name aloud, to recite the colors of her body. Hair and eyes and hands. The new snow of her breasts. Absolutely nothing seemed trite. I wanted to make lists and classifications. Simple, basic, true. Her voice was soft and knowing. Her eyes were sad. Her left hand trembled at times. She was a woman who’d had troubles in her life, a hauntingly bad marriage, perhaps, or the death of a dear friend. Her mouth was sensual. She let her head ease back when she listened. The brown of her hair was ordinary, with traces of gray, short strokes or flashes that seemed to come and go in varying light.

All this I said to her, and more, describing in some detail exactly how she appeared to me, and Christa seemed pleased by these attentions.

We used the morning in bed. After lunch I floated in the pool. Christa lay naked in the shade, moving farther into it whenever the sun line reached her elbow or the edge of her pink heel.

“We must start thinking,” she said. “There is the plane at five.”

“We’re not even wait-listed anymore. We left without telling them to move up our names. It’s useless.”

“I must get out.”

“I’ll call later. I’ll give them our names. We’ll see what the numbers are. We can leave tomorrow. Three flights tomorrow.”

She draped herself in a large towel and sat on the steps that led to the patio. It was clear there was something she wanted to say. I stood at chest level in the water.

This was the fourth day she’d been trying to get off the island. She had begun to be deeply afraid these past twenty-four hours. The ordeals at the airport, she said, had made her feel helpless and pathetic and lost. The strange way they spoke. Her diminishing supply of money. The cab rides through the mountains. The rain and heat. And the edge, the dark edge, the inwrought mood or tone, the ominous logic of the place. It was all dreamlike, a nightmare of isolation and constraint. She had to get off the island. We would have these hours together. This episode, she called it. But then I must help her get out.

She looked solemn in her white towel. I bobbed several times in the water. Then I climbed out and went inside to call the airline. A man said he had no record of our names. I told him we had valid tickets and explained some of our difficulties. He said to come out at six in the morning. We would all know more.

We had dinner in the suite. With a pencil I sketched her face in profile on the back of a linen napkin. We took our dessert out to the garden. I sketched her again, full figure this time, on a piece of hotel stationery. The ocean. The coastal sweep.

“You paint, then?”

“I write.”

“Yes, a writer?”

“What is it that smells so fantastic? Is that jasmine? I wish I knew the names.”

“It’s very pleasant, a garden.”

“Aside from getting out, just getting off the island, do you have to be somewhere at a particular time?”

“I have to fly Barbados — London. There are people who are meeting me.”

“People waiting.”

“Yes.”

“In an English garden.”

“In two small rooms, with babies crying.”

“You smile. She smiles.”

“This is a tremendous thing.”

“A secret smile, this smile of hers. Deep and private. But engaging all the same.”

“No one has seen this in years. It hurts my face to do.”

“Christa Landauer.”

A man came with brandy. Christa sat in an old robe. The night was clear.

“You have a desire to go unnoticed,” I said.

“How do you see this?”

“You want to be indistinct. I see this in different ways. Clothes, walk, posture. Your face, most of all. You had a different face not so long ago. I’m sure of that.”

“What else do we know about each other?”

“What we can see.”

“Touch. What we touch.”

“Speak German,” I said.

“Why?”

“I like hearing it.”

“Do you know the language?”

“I want to hear the sound. I like the sound of it. It’s full of heavy metal. I know how to say hello and goodbye.”

“This is all?”

“Speak naturally. Say anything at all. Be conversational.”

“We will be German in bed.”

She sat with one leg up on a chair, out of the robe, and held her brandy glass and cigarette in the same hand.

“Are you listening?”

“To what?”

“Listen carefully.”

“The waves,” she said.

In a while we went inside. I watched her walk to the bed. She moved a pillow out of the way and lay back on the bed, looking straight up, one arm hanging over the side. With her index finger she tapped cigarette ash onto the floor. Smoke climbed along her arm. Women in random positions, women lazing, have always aroused in me a powerful delight, women carelessly at rest, and I knew this image of Christa would become in time a recurring memory, her eyes open and very remote, the depths of stillness in her face, the shabby robe, the bed in disarray, the sense she conveyed of pensive reflection, of aloneness and somber distances, the smoke that rose along her arm, seeming to cling to it.

I called the desk. The man said he would have someone come with breakfast at four-thirty and would have Rupert sitting outside in his taxi at five.