City of the Beasts Read online

  “Did you see him clearly, Nadia?”

  “No, because it was dark, but the only ones up during that shift were the two soldiers and him. I’m almost sure it wasn’t either of the soldiers,” she replied. “I think Karakawe is the person Mauro Carías mentioned. Maybe it’s part of the plan for us not to be able to call for help in case of an emergency.”

  “We should warn your father,” Alex determined.

  Cesar Santos was not interested in their report; he merely warned them that before they accused anyone, they should be very sure. There were many reasons why such antiquated radio equipment might fail. Besides, why would Karakawe put it out of commission? There was no reason he would want to be without communication.

  He calmed Alex and Nadia, saying that reinforcements would be there in only three or four days.

  “We aren’t lost, just isolated,” he concluded.

  “And the Beast, Papa?” Nadia asked, troubled.

  “We don’t know if it even exists, child. On the other hand, we can be sure about the Indians. Sooner or later they will appear, and we hope they will come in peace. In any case, we’re well armed.”

  “The soldier who died had a rifle, but it didn’t help him,” Alex rebutted.

  “He was distracted. From now on we have to be much more cautious. Unfortunately, there are only seven adults to stand guard.”

  “I count as an adult,” Alex assured him.

  “That’s fine, but not Nadia. The only time she can help is during my shift,” César Santos decided.

  That day, Nadia discovered an urucu pod tree near the camp. She picked some of its fruit, which looked like shelled almonds, opened them, and took out the red seeds. When she squeezed them and mixed them with a little saliva, she formed a red paste that had the consistency of soap. This, along with other vegetable dyes, was what the Indians used to decorate their bodies. Nadia and Alex painted lines, circles, and dots on their faces, then tied feathers and seeds onto their arms. When Timothy Bruce and Kate saw them, they insisted on taking photographs, and Omayra combed the girl’s curly hair and adorned it with tiny orchids. César Santos, in contrast, did not approve; the vision of his daughter painted like an Indian girl seemed to fill him with sadness.

  As the light began to fade, they knew that somewhere the sun was preparing to disappear below the horizon, yielding to night. Beneath the treetops the sun was rarely seen; its brilliance was hazy when filtered through the green lace of vegetation. Only occasionally, where a tree had fallen, could the blue eye of the sky be seen. At that hour, the shadows of the trees began to close around them like a fence. In less than an hour, the jungle would be black. Nadia asked Alex to play the flute to entertain them, and for a while the music, delicate and crystalline, filled the jungle. Borobá, the little monkey, followed the melody, moving its head in time to the notes. César Santos and Dr. Omayra Torres, kneeling at the bonfire, were roasting fish for dinner. Kate, Timothy Bruce, and one of the soldiers were securing the tents to protect their provisions from monkeys and ants. Karakawe and the other soldier, armed and alert, were standing watch. Professor Leblanc was dictating ideas that flashed through his mind into a pocket recorder he always carried for the times he was gifted with a transcendent thought that must be preserved for humanity. This happened so frequently that Alex and Nadia, bored, were just awaiting their chance to steal the batteries. About fifteen minutes into the flute concert, Borobá’s attention suddenly shifted: he began to jump up and down, fidgeting and tugging at Nadia’s clothing. At first Nadia tried to ignore her pet, but the animal kept bothering her until she got up. After she peered into the thick growth, she signaled Alex, who had just come to the end of a song, and led him outside the circle of firelight without attracting the others’ attention.

  “Shhhh,” she whispered, putting a finger to her lips.

  There was still a trace of twilight but the colors had faded; the world lay in tones of gray and black. Alex had felt he was being observed ever since he left Santa María de la Lluvia, but just that evening the impression of being spied upon had disappeared. He had been filled with a sensation of calm and safety he hadn’t felt for many days. Also, the penetrating odor at the place where the soldier had been killed the previous night had dispersed. Alex, Nadia, and Borobá walked a few yards into the thicket and waited there, more curious than uneasy. Without having stated it, they supposed that if there were Indians about, and if they had any intention of harming them, they would already have done so, because the members of the expedition, lighted by the campfire, were exposed to the aim of arrows and poisoned darts of the dwellers of the jungle.

  They stood very quietly, feeling they were sinking into a cottony mist, as if when night fell the normal dimensions of reality were lost to them. Then gradually Alex began to see, one by one, the beings that surrounded them. They were naked, painted with stripes and spots, with feathers and leather thongs tied around their arms—silent, airy, motionless. Even though they were right beside him, they were difficult to see; they blended perfectly into nature, which made them invisible, like stealthy ghosts. Once he could see them, Alex figured that there had to be at least twenty, all men, all with their primitive weapons in their hands.

  “Ah-ee-ah,” whispered Nadia.

  No one answered, but a barely perceptible movement of the leaves indicated that the Indians were moving closer. In the darkness, and without his eyeglasses, Alex wasn’t sure what he was seeing, but his heart was pounding wildly and he could feel the blood throbbing at his temples. He had the same hallucinatory sensation of being in a dream that he had felt in the presence of the black jaguar in Mauro Carías’s patio. There was a similar tension, as if things were happening in a glass bubble that might shatter at any instant. Danger was in the air, just as it had been with the jaguar, but he was not afraid. He did not feel threatened by those transparent beings floating among the trees. The idea of pulling out his knife or calling for help never occurred to him. Like lightning, a scene flashed through his mind that he had seen years before at the movies: a young boy’s encounter with an alien. He was living in a similar moment. Through his amazement, he realized that he would not trade this experience for anything in the world.

  “Ah-ee-ah,” Nadia repeated.

  “Ah-ee-ah,” Alex murmured, too.

  No response.

  They waited, hand in hand, still as statues. Even Borobá was quiet, expectant, as if he knew he was participating in a precious instant. Endless minutes passed and night fell rapidly, completely cloaking them in black. At some point, they realized they were alone; the Indians had evaporated with the same airiness with which they had emerged from nothing.

  “Who are they?” Alex asked as they returned to camp.

  “They must be the People of the Mist, the invisible ones, the most remote and mysterious Indians of the Amazon. It’s been known they exist, but no one has ever spoken with them.”

  “What do they want of us?” Alex asked.

  “To see what we’re like, maybe,” she suggested.

  “That’s what I want, too,” he said.

  “We mustn’t tell anyone what we’ve seen, Jaguar.”

  “It’s strange they didn’t attack us, and that they don’t seem to be interested in the gifts your father put out,” Alex commented.

  “Do you think they’re the ones who killed the soldier on the boat?” Nadia asked.

  “I don’t know, but if they are, why didn’t they attack us today?”

  That night Alex stood guard with his grandmother, totally unafraid, because he didn’t perceive any scent of the Beast, and he wasn’t worried about the Indians. After their strange encounter, he was convinced that pistols would be of little use in case the natives wanted to attack. How would you aim at nearly invisible beings? The Indians dissolved like shadows in the night; they were mute ghosts that could be on top of them and murder them in an instant, before their victims realized they were even there. Deep down, however, he was sure that killing them was not
what the People of the Mist intended to do.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Kidnapped

  THE FOLLOWING DAY was slow and boring. It rained so much that they could not dry their clothes before the next cloudburst came along. That same night, the two soldiers disappeared during their watch, and it didn’t take long to discover that the boat was gone, too. The two men, who had been terrified since the death of their companions, had fled downriver. They had been near mutiny when they’d not been allowed to go back to Santa María de la Lluvia with the first boat; no one was paying them to risk their lives, they said. César Santos had replied that it was precisely what they were being paid for, they were soldiers, weren’t they? The decision to desert could cost them dearly, but they preferred to face a court-martial rather than die at the hands of the Indians or the Beast. For the rest of the expedition group, that boat represented the only possibility of returning to civilization; without it or the radio, they were completely isolated.

  “The Indians know where we are. We can’t stay here!” exclaimed Professor Leblanc.

  “Where do you plan to go, Professor? If we leave this place, the helicopters won’t be able to find us when they come. From the air, all you can see is a mass of green; they’ll never find us,” César Santos explained.

  “Can’t we follow the river and try to get back to Santa María de la Lluvia on our own?” asked Kate.

  “Impossible on foot. There are too many obstacles and detours,” the guide replied.

  “This is your fault, Cold! We should all have gone back to Santa María de la Lluvia as I proposed,” accused the professor.

  “All right, it’s my fault. What are you going to do about it?” the writer asked.

  “I’m going to denounce you! I’m going to ruin your career!”

  “Maybe I’m going to ruin yours, Professor,” she replied, not giving an inch.

  Cesar Santos interrupted, saying that instead of arguing they should join forces and analyze the situation: the Indians were distrustful and had not shown any interest in the gifts; they were simply watching them—but at least they hadn’t attacked.

  “You don’t call what they did to that poor soldier an attack?” Leblanc asked sarcastically.

  “I don’t believe it was the Indians, that isn’t their way of fighting. If we’re lucky, this may be a peaceful tribe,” the guide replied.

  “But if we’re not lucky, they will eat us,” grumbled the anthropologist.

  “That would be perfect, Professor. That would prove your theory about how ferocious they are,” said Kate.

  “All right, enough foolishness,” cut in the photographer, Timothy Bruce. “We have to make a decision. Do we stay or do we go?”

  Cesar Santos took control. “It’s been nearly three days since the first boat left. Since they were traveling with the current and Matuwe knows the way, they must be in Santa María de la Lluvia by now. Tomorrow, or two days more at the most, Captain Ariosto’s helicopters will be here. They fly by day, and we will have to keep a bonfire going all the time so they can sight the smoke. The situation is difficult, as I said, but it isn’t desperate. Lots of people know where we are; they will come look for us.”

  Nadia was calm, hugging her little monkey as if she didn’t understand the magnitude of what was happening. Alex, on the other hand, concluded that he had never been in such danger, not even when he was hanging off the face of El Capitán, a sheer cliff that only the most expert dare to climb. If he hadn’t been roped to his father’s waist, he could have died.

  Cesar Santos had warned all of them about various insects and animals in the jungle, from tarantulas to serpents, but he had forgotten to mention ants. Alex had stopped wearing his boots; not only were they always damp and foul smelling, they were also too tight; he supposed they’d shrunk from being wet. Even though he rarely took off the sandals César Santos had given him, his feet were covered with scabs and abrasions.

  “This is no place for delicate feet,” was his grandmother’s only comment when he showed her the bleeding cuts.

  Her indifference turned to concern when Alex was bitten by a fire ant. He hadn’t been able to choke back a yell; he felt as if someone had burned his ankle with a cigarette. The ant had left a small white mark that within a few minutes had turned as hard and round as a cherry. Pain rose up his leg like flames, and he couldn’t take another step. Dr. Omayra Torres warned him that the poison would last for several hours and he would have to bear it with no relief but warm-water compresses.

  “I hope you’re not allergic, because if you are, the consequences will be more serious,” the doctor observed.

  He wasn’t, but the bite ruined a good part of the day nevertheless. By evening, as soon as he could put weight on his foot and take a few steps, Nadia told him that while the others had been doing their chores, she had seen Karakawe hanging around the boxes of vaccines. When the Indian realized that she had spied him, he took her by the arms so brutally that he left his finger marks on her skin, and he warned her that if she said one word about what she’d seen, she would pay for it. Nadia was sure that the man would do what he threatened, but Alex thought they couldn’t not tell, they needed to warn the doctor. The girl, who admired the doctor as much as she did her father and was beginning to cherish the fantasy of seeing her become her stepmother, also wanted to tell her about the conversation they’d heard in Santa María de la Lluvia between Mauro Carías and Captain Ariosto. She was still convinced that Karakawe was the person sent to carry out Carías’s sinister plans.

  “Let’s not say anything just yet,” Alex urged.

  They waited for the right moment, when Karakawe had gone off to fish at the river, and presented the situation to Dr. Omayra Torres. She listened very closely, showing signs of uneasiness for the first time since they had met her. Even at the most dramatic moments of their adventure, this delightful woman had not lost her calm; she had the steely nerves of a samurai. She was not shaken this time, either, but she did want to know every detail. When she found that Karakawe had opened the cases but not broken the seals on the vials, she sighed with relief.

  “These vaccines are the only hope for the Indians. We must guard them like a treasure,” she said.

  “Alex and I have been watching Karakawe; we think he’s the one who tampered with the radio, but my father says that we can’t accuse him without proof,” said Nadia.

  “Let’s not worry your father with these suspicions, Nadia, he already has enough problems. Among the three of us, we can neutralize Karakawe. I want you two to keep an eye on him every minute,” Dr. Torres said, and they promised that they would.

  That day went by without incident. César Santos continued his attempts to repair the radio transmitter, without results. Timothy Bruce had brought a radio they had used to listen to news from Manaus during the early part of the trip, but the signal was too weak to pick up now. They were bored, because once they had caught some birds and a couple of fish for the day’s meals, there was nothing more to do; it was pointless to hunt or fish anymore because the catch would be covered with ants or rotted in a matter of hours. Finally Alex could understand the mentality of the Indians, and why they never accumulated anything. The members of the expedition took turns keeping the campfire smoking as a signal in case their rescuers were looking for them, although according to César Santos, it was still too early for that. Timothy Bruce produced a worn pack of cards and they played poker, blackjack, and gin rummy until the light began to fade. There was no hint of the penetrating odor of the Beast.

  Nadia, Kate, and the doctor went to the river to relieve themselves and bathe; it had been agreed that no one would venture alone outside the camp. For their most private needs, the three women went together; for everything else they all took turns in pairs. César Santos arranged things so that he was always with Omayra Torres, which annoyed Timothy Bruce considerably since he, too, was captivated by the doctor. Even though Kate had warned the Englishman to save the film for the Beast and the
Indians, he had taken so many photographs of Dr. Torres that she refused to pose any more. The writer and Karakawe were the only ones who did not seem to be impressed by the young woman. Kate muttered that she was too old to notice a pretty face, a comment that to Alex sounded like a hint of jealousy unworthy of someone as cool as his grandmother. Professor Leblanc, who could not compete in looks with César Santos, or youth with Timothy Bruce, tried to impress the young beauty with the weight of his celebrity, and never lost an opportunity to read aloud paragraphs from his book, in which he outlined in detail the hair-raising dangers he had faced among the Indians. It was difficult for her to imagine the cowardly Leblanc dressed only in a loincloth, fighting hand to hand with Indians and wild beasts, hunting with arrows and surviving unaided in the midst of all kinds of natural catastrophes, as he described. In any case, the rivalry over Dr. Omayra Torres’s attention had created a certain tension among the men in the group, which increased as the hours went by anxiously waiting for the helicopter.

  Alex checked his ankle; it still hurt and was a little swollen, but the hard red cherry where the ant had bitten him was smaller. The compresses of warm water had helped a lot. To entertain himself, he took up his flute and began to play his mother’s favorite concerto, the sweet and romantic music of a European composer dead for more than a century but a melody that seemed suited to the jungle around them. His grandfather Joseph was right; music is a universal language. At the first notes, Borobá came bounding up and sat at Alex’s feet, as absorbed as a music critic, and after only a few minutes, Nadia returned with the doctor and Kate. The girl waited until the others were busy preparing the camp for the night, then signaled to Alex, who casually followed her.

  “They’re here again, Jaguar,” she whispered into his ear.