Paul Bowles - The Delicate Prey - And Other Stories

When old Señora Sanchez died, her two daughters Lucha and Chalía decided to visit their brother at his ranch. Out of devotion they had agreed never to marry while their mother lived, and now that she was gone and they were both slightly over forty there seemed just as little likelihood of a wedding in the family as there ever had. They would probably not admit this even to themselves, however. It was with complete understanding of his two sisters that Don Federico suggested they leave the city and go down to Paso Rojo for a few weeks.

Lucha arrived in black crêpe. To her, death was one of the things that happen in life with a certain regularity, and it therefore demanded outward observance. Otherwise her life was in no way changed, save that at the ranch she would have to get used to a whole new staff of servants.

“Indians, poor things, animals with speech,” she said to Don Federico the first night as they sat having coffee. A barefooted girl had just carried the dessert dishes out.

Don Federico smiled. “They are good people,” he said deliberately. Living at the ranch so long had lowered his standards, it was said, for even though he had always spent a month or so of each year in the capital, he had grown increasingly indifferent to the social life there.

“The ranch is eating his soul little by little,” Lucha used to say to Señora Sanchez.

Only once the old lady had replied. “If his soul is to be eaten, then let the ranch do it.”

She looked around the primitive dining room with its dry decorations of palm leaves and branches. “He loves it here because everything is his,” she thought, “and some of the things could never have been his if he had not purposely changed to fit them.” That was not a completely acceptable thought. She knew the ranch had made him happy and tolerant and wise; to her it seemed sad that he could not have been those things without losing his civilized luster. And that he certainly had lost. He had the skin of a peasant—brown and lined everywhere. He had the slowness of speech of men who have lived for long periods of time in the open. And the inflections of his voice suggested the patience that can come from talking to animals rather than to human beings. Lucha was a sensible woman; still, she could not help feeling a certain amount of regret that her little brother, who at an earlier point in his life had been the best dancer among the members of the country club, should have become the thin, sad-faced, quiet man who sat opposite her.

“You’ve changed a great deal,” she suddenly said, shaking her head from side to side slowly.

“Yes. You change here. But it’s a good place.”

“Good, yes. But so sad,” she said.

He laughed. “Not sad at all. You get used to the quiet. And then you find it’s not quiet at all. But you never change much, do you? Chalía’s the one who’s different. Have you noticed?”

“Oh, Chalía’s always been crazy. She doesn’t change either.”

“Yes. She is very much changed.” He looked past the smoking oil lamp, out into the dark. “Where is she? Why doesn’t she take coffee?”

“She has insomnia. She never takes it.”

“Maybe our nights will put her to sleep,” said Don Federico.

Chalía sat on the upper veranda in the soft night breeze. The ranch stood in a great clearing that held the jungle at bay all about, but the monkeys were calling from one side to the other, as if neither clearing nor ranch house existed. She had decided to put off going to bed—that way there was less darkness to be borne in case she stayed awake. The lines of a poem she had read on the train two days before were still in her mind: “Aveces la noche. . . . Sometimes the night takes you with it, wraps you up and rolls you along, leaving you washed in sleep at the morning’s edge.” Those lines were comforting. But there was the terrible line yet to come: “And sometimes the night goes on without you.” She tried to jump from the image of the fresh sunlit morning to a completely alien idea: the waiter at the beach club in Puntarenas, but she knew the other thought was waiting there for her in the dark.

She had worn riding breeches and a khaki shirt open at the neck, on the trip from the capital, and she had announced to Lucha her intention of going about in those clothes the whole time she was at Paso Rojo. She and Lucha had quarreled at the station.

“Everyone knows Mamá has died,” said Lucha, “and the ones who aren’t scandalized are making fun of you.”

With intense scorn in her voice Chalía had replied, “You have asked them, I suppose.”

On the train as it wound through the mountains toward tierra caliente she had suddenly said, apropos of nothing: “Black doesn’t become me.” Really upsetting to Lucha was the fact that in Puntarenas she had gone off and bought some crimson nail polish which she had painstakingly applied herself in the hotel room.

“You can’t, Chalía!” cried her sister, wide-eyed. “You’ve never done it before. Why do you do it now?”

Chalía had laughed immoderately. “Just a whiml” she had said, spreading her decorated hands in front of her.

Loud footsteps came up the stairs and along the veranda, shaking it slightly. Her sister called: “Chalía!”

She hesitated an instant, then said, “Yes.”

“You’re sitting in the dark! Wait. I’ll bring out a lamp from your room. What an idea!”

“We’ll be covered with insects,” objected Chalía, who, although her mood was not a pleasant one, did not want it disturbed.

“Federico says no!” shouted Lucha from inside. “He says there are no insects! None that bite, anyway!”

Presently she appeared with a small lamp which she set on a table against the wall. She sat down in a nearby hammock and swung herself softly back and forth, humming. Chalía frowned at her, but she seemed not to notice.

“What heat!” exclaimed Lucha finally.

“Don’t exert yourself so much,” suggested Chalía.

They were quiet. Soon the breeze became a strong wind, coming from the direction of the distant mountains; but it too was hot, like the breath of a great animal. The lamp flickered, threatened to go out. Lucha got up and turned it down. As Chalía moved her head to watch her, her attention was caught by something else, and she quickly shifted her gaze to the wall. Something enormous, black and swift had been there an instant ago; now there was nothing. She watched the spot intently. The wall was faced with small stones which had been plastered over and whitewashed indifferently, so that the surface was very rough and full of large holes. She rose suddenly and approaching the wall, peered at it closely. All the holes, large and small, were lined with whitish funnels. She could see the long, agile legs of the spiders that lived inside, sticking Out beyond some of the funnels.

“Lucha, this wall is full of monsters!” she cried. A beetle flew near to the lamp, changed its mind and lighted on the wall. The nearest spider darted forth, seized it and disappeared into the wall with it.

“Don’t look at them,” advised Lucha, but she glanced about the floor near her feet apprehensively.

Chalía pulled her bed into the middle of the room and moved a small table over to it. She blew out the lamp and lay back on the hard mattress. The sound of the nocturnal insects was unbearably loud—an endless, savage scream above the noise of the wind. All the vegetation out there was dry. It made a million scraping sounds in the air as the wind swept through it. From time to time the monkeys called to each other from different sides. A night bird scolded occasionally, but its voice was swallowed up in the insistent insect song and the rush of wind across the hot countryside. And it was absolutely dark.