JANUARY 14, 2000
A party of eight checked in late yesterday—five men and three women. Jack was expecting the men: Ricardo Nuñez, with one of his surf groups from the mainland. Nuñez runs the only surf tours around the archipelago—or at least he’s trying to get started. He’s got a Web site, “Galápagosurf.com,” although updating it is sometimes a problem, what with his day job and all. And then there’s the small matter that most of the spots to which Nuñez takes his clients are National Park waters, closed to the public, illegal to surf. Only a few designated sites in the islands are open to surfers. But what the hell, the Park Service can’t patrol all this water, and the way Nuñez sees it, or his argument, at least, is that he and his customers are doing no harm.
When Surfer magazine brought those pros down to do its big story, it was Nuñez who served as their guide. He’s been riding waves all his life, starting out on the Ecuadorian coast where he was born and grew up thirty-some years ago. The surf isn’t bad there, Nuñez says, but the first time he saw the Galápagos, at the turn of the 1980s, he thought he’d found heaven. He’d never seen tubes like these, and in a setting like this. He worked on a traditional tour boat around the islands for a couple of years, then went back home to Guayaquil to join his family’s beer distributorship because he simply had to make money. The beer still pays Nuñez’s bills today, but two or three times a year he charters a boat and brings out a group of a half dozen or so surfers, who pay and pay well for him to show them some waves like the ones they have seen on those magazine pages.
That’s what the four young men in their twenties with him this Friday morning have come for. Except this group has clearly got more money than most surfers Jack sees, with their hand-tooled leather travel bags, Perry Ellis slacks, Ralph Lauren shirts, and Docksiders shoes—not to mention that chartered pearl-white, seventy-five-foot catamaran anchored out in the harbor on which the group will be living for the next week or so as they circle the islands looking for waves.
The group’s apparent leader, the short stocky one with the salon-styled hair, the tight T-shirt, the abs, the biceps—and the shapely redhead in jeans and a bikini top parked on his lap—Jack’s never seen him before, but he knows who he is: the son of one of the most influential members of the Ecuadorian Congress. The kid’s father is at the moment in Quito, looking out his office window at mobs of Indians facing off in the streets with some of the several thousand soldiers and police deployed just this morning by President Mahuad to keep the protesters from fulfilling their vow to seize Congress when Mahuad delivers his State of the Union address one week from today.
The kid seems less than concerned about the coup his father is facing back home. Right now he and his buddies are hungry for breakfast, which Betty and Albertina and the rest of Jack’s kitchen staff have just about gotten ready. The lights were still on in this kid’s bungalow when Jack went to bed late last night, and when he passed the room early this morning on his way to the office, female laughter was drifting out its window.
The congressman’s son and his friends had made reservations with Jack’s office manager, Carlos, but the three girls were a wild card, showing up in their platform pumps, hip-hugging skirts, and tight, lace-up tops. Nuñez said something about them being Hawaiian Tropic models, come for some vague kind of photo shoot, and Jack listened and smiled. He’d seen these women before. “Part of the scene,” he calls them, high-priced escorts from Guayaquil, as rentable as that catamaran in the harbor. But Jack said nothing to Nuñez about this. And when he got a phone call early last evening from yet another member of the group, the nephew of a former Ecuadorian president, it all fell into place. The nephew called to say he would not be arriving till today. “Oh, by the way,” he told Jack, “some models will be arriving with the group. Please put them in their own room. I’ll be paying the bill.”
Jack has his doubts about whether he’ll ever actually see that money. The nephew’s been here before, and he’s “forgotten” to settle his tab when he’s left. Sometimes he makes good later on; sometimes he doesn’t.
But what the hell. That’s how it is in a place like this, a country like this. The people who have passed through Jack’s hotel over the years—the nice, normal folks, and the con men, thieves, freaks, perverts, refugees, rock stars, groupies, scoundrels, scumbags—who is Jack to judge any of them? Whoever they are, when they get here it doesn’t much matter to Jack where they’ve come from or where they are going. He treats them all the same way, just like the elderly birdwatchers sitting at the table by the back window or the tour group from Tokyo gathered down at the bar. Jack hopes they have a great time, that they come and go in peace, and that, in the end, they each pay their bill. Jack’s not the kind to make quick character judgments. Live and let live; that’s pretty much what he believes. But please, if you’ve got any class at all, pay your bill.
Now sit down with the congressman’s son, and the kid will tell you what class is. Not five minutes into the conversation, he’s already giving the rundown on that catamaran. “It has everything,” he says, in English tinged with a sweet Spanish trill. “The cook, the captain, the people who clean the rooms and make them up.”
He makes a circle with his thumb and forefinger, squints his eyes, and puckers his lips.
“It is as good as it gets,” he says. “Believe me.”
The others are eating their breakfast, but the congressman’s son is finished with his. His wife just called from the mainland to see how he’s doing. He had to shush the girls at that point by cupping his hand over the receiver and putting his finger to his lips. God knows he didn’t need his wife asking what those female titters were in the background. His wife told him their ten-month-old son misses him, and he told her he misses the boy, too. He’s got a photo of the baby in his wallet, which he pulls out and shows off with fatherly pride. Someday the family fortune will belong to this boy, he says, or at least a large part of it.
“Bananas,” he says, putting his wallet away. “We have some plantations.”
His father, he says, was the family firm’s CEO before becoming a congressman.
“Now that he is a politician,” he says, “he is out of the business. It is kind of an ethics rule.”
Kind of confusing, apparently, because in the next breath he explains his own position as the company’s general manager by saying, “There is nobody higher than me, only Daddy.”
His English is excellent, thanks to four years of college in the States at the University of South Carolina, where he got a B.A. in business. He spent a bit of time in San Francisco, he says, but now at age twenty-eight he’s back home, running the sixth-largest banana-exporting operation in Ecuador.
“Dole, Chiquita, Del Monte,” he says, “they are our customers. We primarily sell in Germany and Eastern Europe and Russia. All developing, emerging markets.”
He’s been all over the world, closing deals for his fruit, says the kid. “Poland, China, Portugal, Belgium, Germany, Japan, Singapore, you name it,” he says. But last year was the first time he visited the Galápagos.
“Sometimes,” he says, “it’s incredible how you can go all over the places, but not in your backyard.”
The redhead strolls past with a cell phone. The kid winks, grins. The office phone rings. It’s one of the other men’s wives, calling the hotel to see if he’s okay. Again the girls—the redhead and the tall one with the tumbling, black hair and the young one, who can’t be older than eighteen—cover their mouths to suppress their giggles. The ex-president’s nephew will be checking in some time later today. The group will spend one more night at the hotel then take off tomorrow for six days of surfing, if things go as planned.
It’s not yet nine A.M. on this Friday morning, and already the temperature has climbed into the nineties. With so much of the islands covered with lava—or, recently, paved with asphalt and concrete—the sun’s heat, through both radiation and reflection off the rocks and water, is magnified well into the hundreds. Because of cold ocean currents and the soothing sea breezes, the Galápagos heat often feels less intense than it is, a deception that can prove deadly for unknowing visitors. Locals liken the heat on these islands to that of a fan-assisted oven: The airflow can feel cooling, even as it’s sucking the moisture from your body, gently cooking your skin to a crisp.
Max Parédes has seen more than a few cases of severe sunburn in the twenty-five years he’s worked at the hospital here in Puerto Ayora, although the vast majority of the thirty or so people a day who come through the clinic’s front doors are either stricken with parasites or expecting a child. Pregnancy and parasitic infection are, far and away, the two most common conditions treated by Parédes and the three other doctors on his hospital’s staff.
They’ve got fifteen beds here, although on this particular morning, not one is occupied. At the moment, a half dozen or so men and women and a couple of children are sitting in the waiting area, gazing at a television bolted to the ceiling and watching a program called Laura en America via cable from Peru. At this time every weekday, almost every TV set in town—and across these islands, and indeed, throughout all South America—is tuned to this program. It is a Latin version of the Jerry Springer Show, starring a professionally dressed blonde who looks not unlike Dr. Joyce Brothers, acting as ringleader to a parade of betrayed wives and cuckolded husbands. When Laura is on TV here in Puerto Ayora, the streets and sidewalks are noticeably empty.
Parédes is in his office, squeezed into a chair that can hardly contain his broad, beefy body. He’s forty-eight and “healthy,” he says, thumping a fist on his chest. He wears slacks and a sportshirt, not the blue or white scrubs of a doctor on duty—although he is, at the moment, on the clock. Above him, mounted like art on the walls, are an array of stringed instruments—guitars and mandolins. “I give lessons,” he says, “when I have time.”
It’s a slow day. But then almost every day is like this, says Parédes. There’s not much illness to deal with here in the Galápagos, he says. He mentions AIDS, saying there have been only five victims here. He brags that the cholera epidemic that swept through South America five years ago took no lives on these islands, although they did treat fifty or so cases in this clinic. Parédes says he wishes his hospital had its own ambulance—the only one on the island is owned by the Red Cross, which lets Parédes and his staff use it whenever it’s needed. But then again, he says, it’s a relief not owning the vehicle. “If we did have one,” he says, “people would abuse it to get free rides to Baltra.”
They don’t see death often inside these walls, says Parédes. When they do—two, maybe three times a year—the bodies are accident victims from the traffic that has increased so much in the past decade, and from the illegal diving done by the pepiñeros. With the nation’s only decompression chamber six hundred miles away in Guayaquil, there’s not much that can be done for those unfortunate divers. And there’s little hope that such a luxury will be available here in the Galápagos anytime soon. The very idea makes Parédes laugh. His salary, he says, is six million sucres a month, about $240. His colleagues make less, including a young female staff member who’s fresh out of medical school in Guayaquil. This is her first job, with a monthly paycheck just a bit more than half of Parédes’.
Parédes’ doctors and nurses would all love to have more pay and equipment, but the hospital is doing well enough with what it’s got, says Parédes. He emphasizes that he has no complaints about the funding he gets, both from the nation’s social security system and from the municipal government. All of his friends on the Provincial Council, says Parédes, are doing a wonderful job.
The mayor himself will tell you the same if you stop by his office down by the waterfront, just across from the police station. The room is upstairs, with its own air conditioner and flags flanking the desk. A bright Galápagos mural is painted on the wall behind the chair in which the mayor sits on this shimmering day, marking some documents with a pink highlighter pen.
His name is Franklin Sevilla. He’s forty-one, with a wife and two children and almost four years as mayor under his belt. Before he took office, he was an electronics salesman with a small shop in town. His family still owns a hotel here, the Hotel Palmeras. He made much more selling radios, he says, than the $500 a month he’s now paid as mayor. “My family wants me to stop,” he says of his public service, “but I have goals, and I haven’t finished them.”
Those goals, he explains, are much the same as most mayors’ in most small towns anywhere in the world: improving the water system, working on trash removal, addressing the sewage problem, upgrading the electricity, and yes, paving the streets.
“I don’t like personal propaganda. I don’t want people to see my face.” He points his pen at the papers. “I want them to see my work.”
Or perhaps both. That road to Tortuga, for example. When the paving was finally finished, a ceremony was held featuring the unveiling of a large, wooden sign at the road’s entrance, announcing to visitors that this project was the work of Franklin Sevilla’s administration. The mayor’s name was painted right on the sign in large letters. There were other signs as well, posted every quarter-mile or so along the length of the road, all the way to the beach. The Park Service didn’t care much for the placards, Eliecer Cruz in particular. Within days the things were taken down by wardens with chain saws.
Sevilla shrugs off such unpleasantness. “In politics,” he says, “there are always two groups: those who like you and those who don’t like you.”
He says this—he says almost everything—with an unceasing smile. He’s peppy, upbeat, a cheerleader for the Galápagos. He knows that his vision of these islands and their future may differ from others’, particularly from the people at the Park and Research Station. But hey, he’ll tell you, he’s lived here all his life, and that counts for something.
He was born in Bellavista, one year before the National Park was created. He saw his first car at age thirteen. “We rode on donkeys and horses. We got our milk from the cows, our food from the ground.” And, he adds, “We ate a lot of tortoises. It was free meat, just roaming around.”
It was illegal, he acknowledges, to kill tortoises. But everyone did it back then, he says. The Park Service didn’t start caring, he says, until the 1980s or so. Back in those days, Sevilla’s family, neighbors, friends, and even he himself didn’t quite understand why such laws existed in the first place.
“We didn’t understand why people would want to protect the animals when God gave us the animals to eat. Even to this day, I feel this way. We respect the importance and rights of the animals, but we also have lives, like all human beings. We also have needs.”
To be frank, says the mayor, it’s those foreign meddlers up at the Research Station who are behind most of the problems the islands are having. If those gringo locos, as he calls them, would just get out of the way, this town and these islands could prosper in the way they should.
“When we got the desalinization system,” he says, “the scientists were against that. They were against the electricity going twenty-four hours a day. Telephones, the bank, the sewage system—they are against all these things because it will attract more people to come here.”
There is a gap, says the mayor, between the people up at the Park and Station and the townspeople he represents. “I want to close this gap between the Galápagos and the Park,” he says. “We must remember that we live by tourism here.”
And by fishing, he adds. He won’t say he supports the pepiñeros, but he won’t condemn them, either. Like any good politician, he knows where the votes are, and there are too many votes in the camps of the fishermen to risk losing them by taking a stand on this issue. Indeed, when a stand must be taken, such as when one of those small, local, illegal pangas is seized, the mayor will side with the locals. Since the town’s judge was thrown off the island and has not been replaced, the mayor has acted in his stead, prosecuting or releasing local lawbreakers as he sees fit.
“When I’m convinced someone is guilty, I send them to Guayaquil,” he says. Most of the cases he faces are minor misdemeanors—“delinquents, drugs, thievery.” And, of course, poaching. “If the fisherman is Galápagueño, and it is the first time for them, they are pardoned. I have that authority.”
If it’s the second or third time, well, the mayor won’t say. This whole subject of laws and lawbreakers makes him a little uneasy. He’s happy to talk about the good works being done, but if you want to discuss crime, he says, it would be best to go talk to the chief of police.
Which is not hard to do. The gate to the Puerto Ayora police station is always wide open. It takes a minute or two for the men in the guard shack to go see if the chief is done with his midday siesta and is prepared to see visitors. The chief, it turns out, is as laid-back as his headquarters, with the bay waters lapping outside his office window, kids playing tag under the palms at the edge of the small parking lot, and a woman—the wife of one of his lieutenants—sitting on a curb in the shade just outside his office door, nursing an infant.
Beyond the woman, behind a pair of clotheslines and a junked motorcycle, sits the cárcel—the town jail, a small concrete bunker with one steel-barred door and two steel-barred windows. The bars on the right look in on the men’s cell; the ones on the left look in on the women’s. Right now there is one person inside, leaning on the door, a muscular man in his thirties or so, wearing a tight white T-shirt, with swept-back Elvis-style hair and a glum look on his face.
“Apesta!” he says, pressing his nostrils with his finger and thumb.
It does stink—of urine and feces. There is no toilet inside and no lighting either. A wet, rotted mattress leans up against a graffiti-scrawled wall. LA VIDA ES DURA PERO NOSOTROS TENEMOS QUE SER MAS DUROS, reads one message: “Life Is Tough, but We Must Be Tougher.”
The man says he was arrested less than an hour ago. His name is Milton Medina. He drives a taxi. He’s here because he ran over a bicycle and does not have the money to buy the owner a new one.
The chief won’t say what he plans to do with Medina, but he acknowledges the jail is a disgrace. It was built to hold four. “If there’s more,” says the chief, “they just have to fit in there. If there are twenty criminals, you can’t tell them to come back tomorrow.”
The chief is a pleasant man, surprisingly young—thirty-nine—to be wearing a captain’s bars on the shoulders of his tan khaki uniform. He’s in charge of a staff of twenty-nine men. “Not one,” he says, “from the Galápagos.”
Neither is he. His name is Rodrigo Proáno. He came to Puerto Ayora from Quito exactly one year ago. In fact, he had been here just three days when the march on Judge Avellan’s office took place last January. Proáno was inside the judge’s chambers that morning when the protesters broke the front gate with the battering ram. “I was the one who suggested he flee the island,” he says. “He wanted to stay, but I said that was not possible.”
When the judge was led out and was put in the truck waiting to take him to the airport, Proáno was one of the policemen beside him. “Yes,” says the chief, his eyes widening in mock terror as he dodges his head this way and that. “Welcome to the Galápagos, with the flying eggs.”
The ceiling fan above Proáno’s desk turns slowly, stirring the sweltering air. A half-empty bottle of Amaretto sits on a shelf by his filing cabinet. Outside, his staff’s only vehicle—a ’96 Chevy pickup, the same truck that carried the judge away—is parked in the lot. There is one motorcycle as well, and two boats, but that’s it. For the most part, the cops in this village travel just like the townspeople and tourists: on foot.
It’s a sleepy job, says Proáno, and he likes it that way. This posting, for him, is a reward of sorts, a respite after doing years of hard time in the streets of Quito and Guayaquil and Cuenca—inner cities where Proáno worked for almost two decades before coming here.
“I have never been in a place so tranquilo as the Galápagos,” he says. “In all those other places, I always carry a gun on my belt. But here,” he says, pulling a handkerchief from his back pocket, “I carry this.”
The mainland cities, he says, have become like war zones. In his last year on the beat in Guayaquil he was up at five every morning and often would not get back home until midnight. “Here,” he says, “I ask people to give me work.”
The things he saw in those cities, he says, will stay with him forever. “The way people can treat each other. Murders. Rape. Fathers sexually abusing their daughters. Many things are stuck in my mind, things that I can’t forget, things that hurt my heart.”
His most nightmarish memory, however, took place not in Quito or Guayaquil but in an Amazonian jungle village called Lago Agrio in the northeast corner of Ecuador near the Colombian border. Across that border, in Colombia’s southernmost Putumayo province, more than 150,000 acres of coca plantations, controlled by the 16,000-member Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), produce nearly half the world’s supply of cocaine. The guerrillas have been battling their government for over thirty years now, with more than 35,000 Colombian people killed in the fighting. Nowhere has the violence been more vicious than in the Putumayo zone, where the FARC’s most feared unit, the Southern Bloc, holds sway.
Proáno was sent to Lago Agrio in 1993 to lead the community’s twenty-man police force on border drug patrols engineered and largely supplied by the United States’ Drug Enforcement Agency.
Actually, to call Lago Agrio a village is not accurate. Thirty years ago it was indeed nothing more than a jungle hamlet, called “Nuevo Loja” by the indigenous Cofan tribesmen who lived there. But the Texaco Oil Company arrived in the late 1960s, turning the place into a beachhead for its Oriente operations. Before long, ninety percent of the crude oil flowing out of Ecuador’s Amazon basin ran through this village, and thousands of petroleum industry workers—foreign and Ecuadorian—began moving in.
Today, 25,000 people live in what has come to be called Lago Agrio—“Bitter Lake”—possibly the filthiest, most violent, disease-ridden hellhole in all South America. Battered dust-coated oil company trucks rumble night and day down trash-strewn streets, past shacks and shanties crammed with Colombian refugees who have fled the killings across the nearby border. Destitute Ecuadorians—indigenous Cofans driven out of the surrounding jungle and impoverished “settlers” from the west, from the cities—hustle everything from wristwatches to pet monkeys to bowls of boa ceviche on the dusty roadsides. The hot, humid air stinks of petroleum. At night, as the flames from the refinery plants at the edge of the town throw their light on the surrounding jungle, the thump of disco music throbs from crude strobe-lit brothels where drunken oil workers fistfight and curse and make illegal transactions in dozens of languages. Bloody gunfights erupt in the streets. Execution-style murders by ski-masked Colombians have become common, as have kidnappings and killings of oil workers—some of them Americans—by FARC guerrillas demanding multimillion-dollar ransoms.
The root of this nightmarish violence is America’s “drug war,” which escalated at the turn of the 1990s with Colombia—and FARC—becoming that war’s primary foreign target. Ecuador, dependent on America’s oil dollars for its very existence, reluctantly became part of this war, agreeing to host and join U.S. antidrug operations launched from various bases in Ecuadorian territory. Lago Agrio became one of those bases, and this is how, a little over six years ago, Rodrigo Proáno became a soldier in that war.
In the autumn of 1993, using speedboats supplied by the DEA and supported by Ecuadorian soldiers dispatched from Quito, Proáno and his men began patrolling the winding San Miguel River and its tributaries, which form part of Ecuador’s 370-mile border with Colombia. Not a month after the patrols began, on a December morning, a letter arrived from the FARC guerrillas.
“It said if we did not stop, then they would—” Proáno makes a slashing motion with his finger across his neck. “We didn’t take it seriously.”
A week after the warning arrived, Proáno traveled to Quito to visit his family. While he was away, on a Thursday afternoon, just a week before Christmas, a squadron of seven speedboats carrying thirty-six men was ambushed by cross fire from more than 200 guerrillas at a bend in the river.
Proáno pulls a small booklet from a shelf near his desk. With drops of blood drawn on its cover, the booklet is titled PUTUMAYO: Sacrificio Y Valor. Typed in Spanish, it is an hour-by-hour account of the events of that day. A rendition in English reads as follows:
06:30h: In an atmosphere of comradeship, officials and police troop personnel were having breakfast at the B-5 Putumayo installations. Many of them were emanating professional perspectives while others were missing their families.
07:00h:…departing to the area of Pena Colorado on the river Putumayo: 1 chief, 8 officials and 20 policemen in 6 motorboats and, in addition, 1 COE motorboat with crew of 7 army men, all Ecuadorian.
12:00h: The motorized caravan made up of the 7 motorboats had crossed Pena Colorado and were going toward Pinuna Negra.
14:00h: Once the professional activities in the site were concluded, the patrol initiated its return which was not accomplished with the expected agility due to damages in motorboat Pirana…. At the communications base, a feeling of preoccupation started to invade.
14:45h: Nature presented an impressive spectacle. Entering a turn shaped by the river, at the height of Pena Colorado, the patrol is attacked from both riversides with fire originated from automatic guns and with hand grenades propelled from the vegetation…. The motorboats had no covering so they tried to get away from the area. The river flow was low and the boats started to get stranded. Confrontation continued for approximately one hour and a half.
16:30h: Once the first attack stopped, a white speedboat was seen displacing guided by guerrilla men, to inspect the Ecuadorian boats. They proceeded to take armament and the engine from one of them and to destroy the others.
16:45h: An Ecuadorian helicopter arrived to the area for help…. Minutes later, two motorboats arrived, one from the army and the other from the police, to provide support to the attacked men.
17:00h: The motorboats were not able to provide the requested help because their navigation was impeded by machinegun fire.
19:00h:…survivors from the attack were under arrest at a FARC guerrilla camp.
21:00h: At the dock, activities were undertaken to receive the wounded and the bodies which came down the river and also to stop drifting vessels.
Twelve men were killed that afternoon, says Proáno, including eight of his police officers. Nine more were wounded. Two have never been found. “This was the hardest experience of my life,” he says. “To have my friends die—twenty years old, thirty-five years old. They left children, wives, fathers, and mothers.”
If he never sees another dead man, says Proáno, slipping the book back on the shelf, it will be too soon. He doubts he will see many here in the Galápagos, certainly none from such violence. There has never been a murder on this island, he says. Well, he corrects himself, maybe one, up in Bellavista a few years ago.
“It was a problem with two homosexuals on a farm,” says the chief. “There was one that was jealous of another and he knifed him.” But that, says the chief, doesn’t really count. It was a lover’s quarrel. Besides, he says, they were homosexuals.
Violent crime has not reached the Galápagos, at least not yet, says Proáno. There are break-ins and petty theft, but nothing like back on the mainland. “There,” he says of the cities, “if you put your camera down for an instant, you will never see it again.” Here, he says, the camera will be there even if you leave and come back.
Drugs have become somewhat of an issue, says the chief, but again it’s nothing like what is seen in the cities or even on other island resorts, such as in the Caribbean. “When foreigners come,” says the chief, “lots of drugs come also. It’s not that the tourists bring the drugs, but when they’re here, they ask for the drugs.”
Truth be told, says the chief, he’s not much concerned with such things as long as they are kept discreet and no one makes trouble. The Galápagos is, after all, a vacation place, a place to relax. “I still have my pistol,” he says, “but it’s not necessary here.”
As the afternoon ends, the chief orders the taxi driver, Medina, released with instructions that he buy a new bike for the owner as soon as he can.
It’s getting dark now. It’s Friday night. Darwin Avenue is alive with the pulse of the music spilling out of the waterfront clubs. Nowhere is the music louder than outside the Galápason. The place is packed—bodies jammed chest-to-chest on the dance floor, latinos and gringos alike, locals and tourists, men and women sharing sweat and saliva as they grind and rub bodies to the beat of the music.
The crowd is three deep at the bar, where a twentysomething kid named Jorgé is mixing cuba libres as fast as he can. When he’s not tending bar, Jorgé works as a guide on the Galápagos Explorer. When he is tending bar, he’s never too busy, he says, to take “special care” of the “ladies.” On this particular evening, he grabs a stool by a woman named Mona, who’s nursing a whiskey and Coke and smoking a Belmont.
Mona is twentysomething herself, Swiss, a nurse, with a dark pageboy haircut, no makeup, and a loose-fitting T-shirt draped over her slim, boyish body. This is her second trip to the islands, she says. The first was three years ago, when she bought a one-week discount package, including a brief, four-day tour on a small six-passenger boat. “Two German girls,” she says, “two Swiss guys, me, and my brother.” The crew included the captain, a guide, and a cook with whom Mona had sex late one night out on the deck as the boat sat anchored off Seymour Island.
“The sex itself was okay,” she says, “but what made it great, what made it fantastic, was it was here, in this place, out in these islands, under the stars. It was so real, so romantic.”
Now Mona is back, nuzzling Jorgé as they smile and whisper to each other at the end of the bar. Not far away, among a crowd of men watching surf videos on a TV mounted above the dance floor, stands Bico. He’s nursing a beer, killing time before going home. Petra’s out guiding, he says. She’ll be home next week.
And there’s Jason, out on the dance floor with Monica, the two of them moving as if they’re possessed, the couples around them giving way as Jason and Monica show the crowd how to salsa.
The song ends, and Jason moves to the bar to buy a cold drink for himself and his girl. Bico is there and they chat as a group of four men and three women come through the front door. The group grabs stools near a table covered with flickering candles. It’s the surfers from Jack’s place, Ricardo Nuñez and the guys—and the three girls as well.
The girl with the dark, tumbling hair is wearing a tank top, revealing a tarantula tattooed on her right shoulder. No sooner is the group seated than she’s mounted one of the men, straddling his thighs as she settles onto his lap and locks her lips onto his.
“Hm,” says Bico, “his wife would be interested to see this.”
Jason heads back to Monica. Bico finishes his beer and leaves to go home. Mona and Jorgé are nowhere to be seen. Nuñez’s group begins to split up, each of the women paired with one of the men.
It’s a little past midnight. The surfers’ catamaran waits in the harbor, shining like a snowdrift in the light of the moon. Ten or so hours from now it will lift anchor. But for the time being it bobs in the stillness, a single light glowing in one of its berths as the sounds of the discos drift out over the water with no sign of ceasing.
The night is still young.