Merrick - Anne Rice [94]
I saw her shadowy form there waiting for me. And for the first time I realized that the lanterns had been put out. A little light came from the nearest house, barely penetrating the fabric of the tent, and of course it was quite sufficient for me to see that she had taken off her clothes.
“Damn it, I can’t do this,” I said. But in truth I was afraid that I couldn’t finish it. I was afraid that I was too old.
She rose with that same suddenness which had startled me when she began to summon Honey in her little séance, and she wrapped her naked arms around me and began to kiss me in earnest, her skilled hand going directly to the root of my desire.
I do believe I hesitated, but that I don’t recall. What is vivid still is that we lay together and that, though I failed myself morally, I did not fail her at all. I did not fail the two of us as a man and a woman, and there was afterwards both a drowsiness and a sense of exultation that left no room for shame.
It seemed, as I drifted off to sleep with my arms around her, that this had been building all of the years during which I’d known her. I belonged to her now, quite completely. I was drenched with the scent of her perfume and her rum, of her skin and her hair. I wanted nothing but to be with her and to sleep beside her, and that the warmth of her would penetrate my inevitable dreams.
When I awoke in the morning, right at dawn, I was too shocked by everything that had taken place to know quite what to do. She was sleeping soundly, in a marvelously disheveled state, and I, humiliated that I had so dreadfully betrayed my position as Superior General, ripped my eyes off her, bathed, dressed, reached for my journal, and went out and into the little Spanish church so that I could write about my sins.
Once again I spied the shaman, who was standing to one side of the church building and watching me as though he knew everything that had taken place. His presence made me extremely uncomfortable. I no longer thought him to be innocent or quaint. And of course I despised myself utterly, but I had to admit I was invigorated, as is always the case with this kind of encounter, and, naturally, oh yes, naturally, I felt very young.
In the quiet and cool of the little church with its sloped roof and its uncritical saints, I wrote for perhaps an hour.
Then Merrick came in, said her prayers, and came to sit beside me, as if nothing at all had happened, and then whispered to me excitedly that we should go.
“I’ve betrayed your trust, young woman,” I whispered immediately.
“Don’t be so foolish,” she fired back. “You did exactly what I wanted you to do. Do you think I wanted to be humiliated? Of course not!”
“You’re putting the wrong meaning on everything,” I argued.
She reached for the back of my neck, held my head as firmly as she could, and kissed me.
“Let’s go,” she said, as if speaking to a child. “We’re wasting time. Come on.”
14
IN THE JEEP, we managed an hour before the road gave out. Then, hefting our machetes, we proceeded to follow the trail on foot.
There was very little conversation between us, all of our energy being given over to the difficult and steady assent. But again that sense of bliss descended upon me, and the sight of Merrick’s forceful slim body up ahead of me was a constant guilty delight.
The jungle now seemed impenetrable, regardless of the altitude, and again there came the clouds with their wondrous sweetness and damp.
I had my eye out all the time for ruins of any sort, and indeed we saw them, on both sides of us, but whether they were temples or pyramids or whatever, I was not meant to know. Merrick dismissed them out of hand, and insisted that we press doggedly on.
The heat ate through my clothing. My right arm ached from the weight of the machete. The insects became an unendurable nuisance, but I would not have been in any other place just then for anything in the world.
Quite suddenly Merrick stopped, and motioned for me to come to her side.
We had come upon a clearing of sorts, or the remains of one, I should say, and I saw decayed