I awaken that morning with the immediate sense that I alone am responsible for my daughter’s death, and no one else. She is not dead, I reply to myself, over and over again. I quickly write down every detail and aspect of my dream, in a frenzied state that must have approached that of Coleridge as he struggled to transcribe every element he could remember. In my transcription, I leave nothing out.
While I begin contemplating the meaning of my dream, we spend our days white water rafting alone. No other tourists are here, and there are still no buses coming through. The restaurant owner says the government protestors are blocking the main highway to the nearest city, the airport city of Quito, which is four hours northwest by bus through the jungle and farther up into the mountains.
Kayaking beneath a wide-spanning bridge I not only discover that there is much of my dream which I may never analyze due to its complexity, but suddenly understand that I, in fact, was the King in my dream who had killed his own daughter.
Sitting in a restaurant without walls, just wooden poles supporting a thatch roof, barely speaking, the conversation having dwindled to that of necessity, mundane details of what we will eat, again eating muddy-tasting fish with grit that crunches in the teeth at the same restaurant, the only restaurant in the town, I realize that the liberation I felt here by covered torch lights as I participated in the native ceremonies at night—smoking unfiltered tobacco like that prepared by shamans for their rituals while drinking chicha, the natives dancing around us in the warm rain—was the same feeling that the King in my dream must have experienced when he burned the Queen’s father beside covered torch light to conceal his own guilt.
We hike in close proximity to the hut, and then hire a jungle guide to take us to a local animal hospital, Amazoonica, situated on a nearby island. There we watch all but the most dangerous animals on the islands roaming free, held captive only by the water surrounding them, the spider monkeys, jungle cats and boa constrictors held in cages to prevent them from destroying the other animals.
We stand looking at an enlarged and colourful parrot with a mended wing, and I begin to comprehend that the King’s daughter was killed for the sake of appearances. She was destroyed in the interests of what other people would think and of the life he had lived, and would continue to have to live, because of their talk and their gossip. I am no better than the King, who was sentenced to death. All of my own reasons for unconsciously wanting to terminate Yelena’s pregnancy—the baby wasn’t developing properly, the doctor said, showing us the hands and feet that were only stubs when they should have been fully developed; her heart and mind would never be right; she’ll die anyway—were just meaningless justifications, the same as the public infuriation of the King where he had suspected and denounced so many when he knew himself that he was to blame. And in the end, the King was punished and died as a penalty for his crime—so, as my dream was telling me, shouldn’t I suffer the same fate?
But the King was unrepentant and malicious, and I am not. That is the difference, I conclude, holding a boa constrictor, the animal nurse instructing me not to squeeze the snake when I put pressure on the animal out of fear and thoughts of my own death, shunning the realization that the King is my own unconscious self, animalistic, brutish, instinctive, visceral, without integrity and morality, the boa constrictor beginning to encapsulate and squeeze the life out of my arm as I have done.
We travel away from the island hospital in a thin and disproportionately long motored canoe, our guide accidentally letting his hand slip from the motor steering controls before quickly recovering his grip, making the boat lurch to the left. I recall screeching black monkeys and spider monkeys with immense reaches, parrots and sleek black jungle cats resembling a muscular house cat slinking through the bushes beside immense rodents the size of large dogs. Karen, facing my back in the canoe, suddenly says: “I want you to go to Venezuela with me.”
“You do?” I reply. “Why? I told you I’m going back to Canada.”
“It’s complicated. But I really want you there with me.”
I turn my head out from beneath the hood of my yellow poncho so I can better hear her voice over the sound of the motor, the light raindrops cascading onto my head and quickly wetting my hair and face as I do, and she continues.
“You didn’t stay here in this country to learn more about your father, did you?”
“I suppose that, perhaps subconsciously, I did come here to share some of his same experiences, and to relive a part of my youth,” I reply. “And a part of me would have wanted to come here to the rainforest, to see this place my father seemed to love so much. But it seems this was a further regression away from society for him, as it is for me. If you ask me, my father was a lot like myself, like a Gauguin without the artistic side. And even Manta wasn’t remote enough for him. I’d like to have a conversation with him now, to see the state of his mind. My mother thought he was schizophrenic, one side of him wanting a social life and interaction with people, the other side wanting complete isolation, perhaps to escape from his guilt. She said that’s why he came here in the first place. I’m beginning to see, from being here, that maybe she was right.”
“So, without the aim of discovering more about your father, your continued presence here was from something you won’t admit to, maybe not to me, or to anyone else, maybe not even to yourself.... It’s not for me to say, maybe, but I think you’ve chosen to stay here in Ecuador for longer than you needed to as an escape from contemplating your own actions and their consequences, just as your father probably did, like a repeating pattern, or—”
“Where is all this coming from?” I interrupt, annoyed.
“I have to tell you something.”
“What?”
She pauses before continuing.
“I was at the Señora’s, having lunch just the other day. The phone rang and she handed me the receiver. It was your wife Yelena.”
At the mention of her name, a name I have never heard Karen utter, my throat suddenly becomes dry.
“I gave her the number, in a letter, a while ago,” I say. “I thought she didn’t have it any more.”
“Well, she does.”
“And what did she say?”
“Well, she said she was somewhat relieved that you weren’t there at the Señora’s, actually, so she didn’t have to tell you—” she pauses.
“Tell me what?” I ask, growing more impatient.
“That her baby, your baby—”
“What?”
“That it died. In a procedure. How they normally terminate a pregnancy when the mother wants—I had the feeling that she has had this procedure done before. She didn’t seem as upset as perhaps she should have been, as I certainly would have been. The only explanation she offered was that she couldn’t wait any more. But then again, she might have still been in shock at the realization of what she had done—”
She pauses again. I could feel my face twitching as she spoke and now I feel dizzy looking down into the muddy waters beneath our boat, the raindrops falling onto the surface and splaying out in all directions, my chest tightening with the thought that one can never lose their memory or experience, that no matter how much one tries to forget, or to run, one can never be far enough away to escape their own mind. And having read Yelena’s letters over and over, which contained no talk of our child, I think now that I could have stopped her. I could have prevented this, and it would not have been difficult. Now, her actions, my actions, are irrevocable.
Karen waits for me to say something, but the wind and the unsteady hum of the motor provide the only response. We travel by large cliffs extending fifty feet out of the water and vertically upward at steep angles to end at forested rooftops with a flock of green parrots scattering overhead.
“Why did you let me come here?” I ask, turning back to face her, my tears blending in with, and washing away in, the intensifying rain. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“The Señora thought—actually, she voiced her opinion, as you know she has a strong opinion on everything, but really, it was me, I thought it would be better for you to come with me, not only here but to Venezuela ... so you wouldn’t be alone … and to help you to forget.”
As we continue on, I recall the King in my dream, and his sentence of death. The entire kingdom was after him, including a sleek black cat with menacing yellow eyes, unnatural and not of this world, like the small jungle cat we just saw on the island, and reminiscent of the black-faced monkey we saw in the overgrown town square in Archidona. It has been prophesied, in my dream, that I shall die—
“No,” I say loudly, after an indeterminate amount of time.
Karen asks if I am feeling well. I reply that I am as well as I can be, which is a blatant lie that she probably recognizes.
“My thoughts and my dreams here are too intense,” I say. “I’ll go back to Manta.”
“No,” she says, adding: “You can’t escape from this. Not now. You’ve done enough running away alone. Stay with me. Coming with me is best.”
There is a long period of silence before we arrive back on shore and then back at the huts, and I pack up all of my belongings and prepare to leave without her.