IVY WOULD wake up early. Usually the weather was fair, the nights cloudless, and the photographer liked to sleep under the stars, outside her tents, in a sleeping bag on a waterproof groundsheet. At dawn, in the shadow cast by Pico Turquino, she would open her eyes and contemplate the rapidly brightening sky. Countless birds would be singing to one another in the trees.
In cotton pajamas, Ivy would get up, her face shiny with the mosquito repellent she used to keep the macagüeras at bay, and wash outside without pointless modesty. Then she would go into her living tent and come out, dressed, to put her breakfast together. It would be quarter or half past seven by this time, and the subtropical day would have taken just half an hour to get underway.
To the east, stretching away from Pico Turquino, the Sierra Maestra was springing back to life with its verdant ridges covered with pines and hardwood trees in a sea of shrubs from which clumps of scarlet flowers dangled. To the right, towards the north and the island’s interior, at some two hours’ march, lowland villages could be seen surrounded by their sugarcane and tobacco plantations. To the left the view was blocked by trees. Beyond them was the edge of an almost sheer cliff that fell into the Antillean Sea, which Ivy preferred to call the Caribbean.
After a breakfast of strong, very sweet coffee, buttered biscuits and dried fruit, Ivy, wearing olive-green canvas coveralls, a small safari hat in the same color, and army boots, would reapply repellent and gather her gear. If only reconnoitering, she took very little: a pair of 8 × 30 binoculars and, to seize chance opportunities, a small 24 × 36 Voigtlander with a 135 mm telephoto lens fitted with a UV filter because she was loading Kodachrome. She would then set off, leaving behind her tents and the rest of her equipment and all her possessions. Two or three times, in Indochina and Africa, she had fallen victim to more or less casual robbers, but here there was not a soul for miles around, except, far to the west, a guajiro—a solitary peasant trying to survive on a patch of land wrested from the forest who occasionally sold Ivy the rum off which she was unable to wean herself.
When one of her reconnaissances put her on the track of some interesting creature, Ivy returned to her camp. The same day if it was not too late, or the following day, she would equip herself with the gear appropriate to her prey and go hunting. There was nothing epic about it. There are no wild Indians in the Maestra. No wild animals either, and no alligators up there but only lower down on the coast. There are merely plenty of insects and lizards, masses of birds, a few wild pigs, a few field mice, and the odd reptile. Ivy was used to danger and war, used even to running towards danger and war. At first, once she had set up her camp in the Sierra Maestra, she was bored; then she applied herself methodically to her tasks, and forgot to be bored.
Suppose, for instance, that she came upon a pellet disgorged by a small raptor, which is to say the tiny egg-shaped mass of bone and feathers or hair regurgitated by the bird after it has digested the edible portion of its prey. Ivy would then have to explore the surroundings meticulously, sometimes for two or three hours, staying stock still for long moments, scanning the tops of the pines through her binoculars. She might then spot a pygmy owl and delight in the confirmation that it was a Glaucidium siju. She would make sure she could find the location again. She would need to come back at dusk equipped with a 400 mm telephoto lens, a tripod, and superfast black-and-white film. She would slowly get to her feet and take a wide detour around the little bird of prey so as not to disturb it. And she would duly return at dusk to shoot for ten or twelve minutes, after the small owl had perceived the night’s onset but before the quick fall of darkness that would soon stop her from working.
On such occasions she would be obliged to make her way back to her camp in darkness, using a flashlight, over a chaos of rocks, through clumps of vegetation, jacarandas, tulip trees, royal poincianas, orchids, and beneath the branches of oaks and pines. Ivy would advance very cautiously. Once she had sprained an ankle while alone on the high plateaus of Cambodia. Luckily some nonhostile Hmong found her. She had since learnt how to be careful. A similar concern led her to put purification tablets in the water she drew from the brook even though it seemed quite clean.
In May she used a machete to hew pieces of wood for a table she put together by means of dowels.
Every three or four weeks Ivy took thirty-six hours out to go to Las Mercedes, the closest village, down on the plain. There she would stock up on such provisions as she felt able to carry, some fifty to sixty kilos of dried or canned food. The village shopkeeper was a skinny mestizo named Ignacio Chaumón whose store did double duty as a post office. Ivy had sent the address on a postcard to Samuel Farakhan in Seine-Inférieure, Francia, but had never received any mail there. She expected none.
By the time she got back to her camp she would be dead tired. After more than ten kilometers on foot and a climb of more than a thousand meters with a sixty-kilo load in her metal-framed backpack, once arrived and relieved of her pack she would fling herself down on the cot she kept in her living tent to sleep on when it rained; there she would groan with pain and relief, her back on fire, her legs beset by cramps, and her face buried in the khaki covers next to two or three hardboiled American novels and The Divine Comedy.
He is truly alive, and so, alone, I have to show him the dark valley. Necessity brings him here, and not desire.
At times Ivy was plagued by nightmares. They came from the past. The ones that featured snow and jungle and dead bodies in mud and ice were by no means the worst.
All the same, the young woman put on several kilos, all solid muscle. Her face and hands were weather-beaten, and beneath her light clothing the rest of her body was the shade of weak tea. As she washed herself at dawn, naked, she was superb.
As yet, no one was watching her.