IN NORTH America, in Canada, there is a kind of “swapper” rat. An animal of this sort will take a small object from a human—a nail, a screwdriver, or a cartridge for example—and replace it with something else, a leaf perhaps, or a feather, or a pebble. But such behavior in animals is exceptional, if not unique.
For almost a week Ivy went about her everyday life without incident; her doings had become almost routine. Morning and night she cleaned her teeth using a fresh tube of toothpaste and a fresh toothbrush from her supplies.
On the seventh day her soap disappeared, replaced by a pretty fragment of mica schist. Ivy noticed this at noon, on returning to camp for lunch. Her lips tightened. She scanned the surroundings, then squatted on her heels and examined the ground for a good while. There were no telltale signs on the dry earth, even less on the grass. Ivy stood up, went into her living tent and placed the piece of mica schist alongside the shiny pine cone and the long red feather. She inspected the contents of the living tent, then those of the other tent which she used for storage and as a photo lab, where prints, attached by wooden pegs to a clothesline, had been hung up to dry. Ivy went out again and brought everything that usually lay around outside back into the tents. She checked the provisions stacked on racks under tarpaulins, pursed her lips and shrugged her shoulders. She went back once more into the storage tent and came out with ammunition and her odd shoulderable weapon with over-and-under barrels and foldable stock which could fire either .22 or .410. She made for the woods to the northeast. She was wearing blue jeans and a plaid cotton shirt in brown, green and gray with a touch of white. It was 25ºC (about 78ºF) and a few low clouds were drifting and breaking up against the summit of Pico Turquino; a storm was not out of the question.
Moving through the undergrowth, Ivy described a circle around her campsite, scrutinizing the surroundings, scrutinizing the ground. After completing this circle she described another, a far wider one.
From time to time she came across the tracks of a rodent or a pig, and duly noted them. In the trees were a great many birds. On the dry ground there was not a trace of human presence.
Into the evening, slowly and systematically, Ivy described ever-vaster circles, or rather ellipses, around her campsite. On the south side, however, she never got very far away from her tents, because it was in that direction that the very steep slope soon became a precipitous cliff overlooking the sea.
All Ivy’s searching was completely in vain. She returned to her camp to eat dinner. That night she slept inside the living tent with her pistol under her inflatable rubberized-canvas pillow. The next day, after carefully tying the laces that closed her tents, she went to visit the guajiro, Martín Guzmán Gallego, who worked his patch of land and kept five or six animals a few kilometers from her campsite. He was a man in his fifties with very curly, even kinky, gray-flecked dark hair and a handsome face with narrow lips and brown eyes and a fair but tanned complexion. He wore blue canvas pants that were too short and an olive-green nylon shirt. He had cut cane for thirty years at the foot of the Maestra and then, newly widowed, set himself up here so as to be his own boss. He was surviving with difficulty. He immediately offered to sell Ivy a bottle of rum, but she politely declined. They drank coffee with solemnity. Ivy asked Martín Guzmán Gallego whether he had seen any strangers on the mountain, any sign of the presence of strangers, or anything else out of the ordinary. She spoke clumsily and hesitatingly in Spanish. Other than French, Ivy had good English, passable Spanish and mediocre German. With some difficulty she could understand written or spoken Italian. She was obliged to ask the guajiro to repeat his answers to her questions, because the Cuban accent is troublesome for anyone with a purely academic knowledge of Castilian. Carefully, Martín Guzmán Gallego repeated that there were no strangers on the mountain and nothing else out of the ordinary.
“Tienes miedo, you are afraid,” he said, eyeing the Colt .45 automatic that Ivy was carrying on her left hip, butt forward, in a khaki canvas holster.
She said that she was not afraid, exchanged a few more remarks, then left after handing the guajiro five dollars in payment for his lost time. He went back right away to hoeing his plot. Ivy returned to her encampment. There was no sign of intrusion. She ate lunch and then set off once more with two cameras and her binoculars. After walking for a quarter of an hour northeastwards through the woods she made a right-angled turn and picked out a hiding-place on the flank of the Pico Turquino. From this vantage point she had a good view of her two tents and the clearing that surrounded them. She observed the campsite through her glasses. All afternoon she did nothing else, except that occasionally she put the binoculars down because holding them tired her arms. When evening came Ivy returned to her bivouac. She had lost a whole day. Her expression, though, was not glum; she appeared to be mulling over some fascinating problem. It was a strange expression, one she wore in unexpected circumstances: she had sometimes worn it in war.
Ivy spent the whole of the next day and the one after that watching her camp from the vantage point she had found on the mountainside. These were two empty days, marked only by a powerful but brief tropical storm. The young woman’s serious yet excited look gave way to one of distraction and weariness. On the fourth morning she went back off into the wild and resumed her usual photographic pursuits. Nevertheless, she left nothing lying around outside that could be taken into her tents, all of whose closure cords she then knotted firmly. Nor did she remove her Colt from her left hip, though it weighed well over a kilo.
More than another week went by, during which time Ivy took very many pictures, particularly of the Cuban trogon, not generally found at that altitude but rather in the humid tropical forests of lowland and coastal areas, in close proximity to alligators.
But then one day she returned just before the swift nightfall and noted that the cords fastening her living tent had been undone and were dangling loose. William Riley Burnett’s Vanity Row, a paperback she was very fond of, had been stolen. In its place, on a short shelf, between Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest and Donald Henderson Clarke’s Louis Beretti, the corolla of a very pale yellow orchid with gray spots had been laid flat. Ivy’s pretty teeth nibbled at her lower lip. The young woman set down her gear, though not her pistol, and went back out to examine the bare ground around the tents, but night was coming on. Ivy dined distractedly on military rations, seated on a log with a butane lantern placed by her on the table she had knocked together. After eating she went with the lamp to the storage tent and quickly checked some equipment she had there. She did not handle anything. She needed to economize on butane. The day would bring light. Ivy washed and went to bed inside the living tent. For a long time she lay still in the darkness without falling asleep. Eventually, however, sleep came.
In the morning, after making her toilet and taking nourishment, Ivy tinkered with various items in the storage tent. She then set these up in the living tent in such a way that any intruder approaching the entrance would break the beam of a photoelectric cell and activate the flash and shutter of a Leica with a wide-angle lens. The cell and its mechanical action on the camera were powered by two five-volt batteries. Ivy had brought this equipment in case it might help her photograph some furtive animal or other, but she had had no occasion to use it until now.
It was a Tuesday. Around five thirty that Friday, back from her mountainside beat, Ivy went to take a look inside the living tent, whose cords she never fastened now. She immediately saw that the flash bulb had burned out.
She cut the electrical supply to her set-up. Without making any further movement she carefully scanned the interior of the tent but noticed no sign of thievery. On the other hand, a stripped log of wood was lying on the camp bed, on top of the inflatable rubberized-canvas pillow, like a slumbering dwarf. Ivy frowned and shook her head, ruffling her sheared brown hair. Her skin was more and more deeply tanned.
She unloaded the Leica and went to the other tent with the roll of film. In the area that she used as a darkroom and that put one in mind of a catafalque draped in black, she shut herself in and lit a flashlight with a red filter. In the scarlet-tinted shadows she used scissors to cut off the beginning of the film and trimmed the remainder so that she could reload it later. She put the shortened roll into a breast pocket of her army shirt. So as to obtain a negative, she put the detached piece of film into the appropriate tank for treatment with chemicals and set a mechanical timer. Using an enlarger, photographic paper, and three trays, Ivy proceeded to printing, looking in perplexity at the image taking form in the red-tinged obscurity like a ghost silently materializing in an old movie.
Once her print was fixed, the photographer left her darkroom and hung the large damp photograph on a drying line with two wooden clothes pegs.
In the half-light of the tent she examined the image. The intruder was discernible, if a little hazy, and seen at a forty-five-degree angle from behind. He had either entered backwards, got into the tent by some other route, or crawled under the beam on arrival; in any case he appeared to have left in a hurry. He was short in stature, barely five feet high. His bare calves and feet were indistinct but certainly human. The head was a great nebula of tangled and disheveled hair. The curve of a whiskerless jaw could perhaps be glimpsed. The body was enveloped in a sort of giant T-shirt.
“Shit!” said Ivy. “My shirt!”
She hurried over to the living tent. In any case the semi-darkness precluded any close examination of the photograph as it was drying. Ivy lifted up her inflatable rubberized-canvas pillow. The nightdress she had worn overnight had disappeared. The young woman took the scraped log into the late-afternoon daylight outside. A clumsy or primitive hand, probably with the aid of a flint, had gouged and scratched marks on the wood that could be taken for eyes, a nose, and lower down a sexual organ, most likely female. Ivy turned the log around in her tanned hands. On the back of this probable fetish, poorly formed letters had been inscribed. They read: N E G R A.
The next morning, as she was getting washed, Ivy suddenly froze, staring at the thin trickle of water from the suspended water bag. Then she shook herself and quickly turned off the little spigot before starting to dry herself off. Water is precious, especially when you have to go and fetch it at quite a distance and return with fifty liters of it on your back. Animals do not transport water. Neither do primitive humans, if they have a stream near them for drinking and washing themselves. Ivy put the blue jeans and shirt she had worn the day before back on. She would wash her clothes every eight or ten days, wear the same shirt for two or three days in a row and the same blue jeans for two or three weeks. By the standards of cleanliness and bodily hygiene de rigueur in the United States in 1956 and fast making headway in Europe thanks to magazines and in the interest of soap manufacturers, perfumers, and pharmacists, Ivy, in the Sierra Maestra, was funky.
With her Colt .45 semiautomatic on her left hip, and equipped with her binoculars, several rolls of black-and-white ASA 800 film and a 6 × 6 Hasselblad camera with a 200 mm telephoto lens, Ivy left her camp at 8:10 a.m. in a south-easterly direction. She reached the stream at the point where it reaches the steep slope that drops vertiginously towards the Caribbean, so that the little watercourse tumbles for hundreds of meters among leaning pines. There Ivy turned left, or northeast, and followed the brook uphill. Jumbled boulders worn smooth by erosion cluttered the stream bed, which was edged by stretches of sand or mud. Animal tracks were visible, and Ivy carefully examined every one. She halted for a long spell, concealed among rocks. After an hour had passed four hairy black pigs appeared, watered, forded and disappeared into the pines. Their passage left a whitish muddy cloud for a few moments in the running water. Ivy stayed put for a little while longer, then set off uphill once more, paying close attention to tracks on the banks, paying close attention to the water, looking up ahead as far as she could see and occasionally turning to look back downstream.
She reached the place where she usually went to fetch water. She carried on. Her gear was getting heavy. There were plenty of birds, as always, and she also spotted some interesting large lizards and a big red-and-brown snake. It was worthy of a color shot. She sought to get a closer look, but it slid off very quickly.
At 11:50 Ivy was once again under cover and once again wild pigs appeared and drank water, and one of them was struck in the heart by an arrow sixty centimeters in length.