The Sting

One year ago or ten, twenty or thirty years ago, who cares… but it was a day in May when Chuck died, and every year in May I think of Chuck recalling the six months I spent as a guest in Casa Camicina, his beautiful house in Puerto Vallarta.

We were climbing in single file up over rocks and boulders towards the waterfall, we could not have been very far from it because we heard the splashing and gurgling sound of water and from time to time the strange call of exotic birds, otherwise the forest was silent. That was precisely what we were looking for, an afternoon of peace and quiet, a skinny-dip in the solitary waterfall, away from the playa, the crowded tourist beach, the beach-vendors with their colorful array of serapes and sombreros, the endless game of gin-rummy we played and the double Margarita Cocktails that filled the many Happy-Hours…

We kept pace though the trail we were following gradually narrowed and then disappeared, swallowed by the increasing density of foliage. I was following Darryle who walked five or six meters behind Tio Mateo and Celestina… Even when bush-walking Darryle was a gentleman, extending his hand, clearing the path, pushing branches out the way to make my passage easier. Hidden in the thick tangle of leaves and branches was a wasp hive whose inhabitants, clearly vexed by our noisy intrusion, buzzed out of the hive in frenzied fury. Five or six real and a hundred phantom wasps suddenly assaulted my hair and neck, the metallic clacking of their wings next to my ears pierced my brain and as quick as the strike of a match, uncontrollable panic possessed me. I did not want to run from the wasps, I desperately wanted the wasps to get away from me. I recall my arms lashing above my head in frantic attempts to get the insects to leave my physical territory, and they did. But only after inflicting revenge for our ill mannered invasion. In three different locations of my head and neck they left their sting, and as a party balloon deflates when punctured, I felt my energy flow out of my body, I became urgently aware of simultaneously being on the edge of an abyss and wanting to faint, with the fainting feeling a bliding light exploded in my head as if someone had turned on flood lights before my lid-less eyes. “Excuse me” I said to myself, “lie down here on these boulders because you are going to be sick”… Only I wasn’t sick, nor was I afraid, though I was floating on rocks as fluffy as clouds I was aware of goose-bumps on my skin, of wasps’ stings on my head and neck… and of an endless echo in my head, the song I heard that morning while walking past Playa Los Muertos: “…Y volver, volver, volver… a tus brazos otra vez… estare a tu donde estes… Quiero volver… volver… volver…”

“Adelita, Adelita, can you hear me?” Adelita hablame, Adelita dime algo… Adelita…”

The scent of lemons reached my nostrils. I focused my eyes, pink clouds were traveling across the sky, Celestina face... yes, she was looking down at me, cradling my head on her lap and rubbing lemon on the lumps that had grown where the wasps had left their sting. Chuck was there too, strange… he was not supposed to be there, he was not with us when we started out on the climb to the waterfall. Chuck was a doctor, had someone summoned him?

“…Y volver, volver, volver… a tul brazos otra vez… Quiero volver… volver…”

How bizarre, now I am still alive, often wishing to die, and Chuck is dead. Died in May, a few months later. I suspected it was not an accident. Well… it had been an accident, but a deliberate one. Chuck had a long standing death-wish, a big one. I knew it because Chuck knew mine. He told me once or twice: “All you ever need to concern yourself with is sex and death”. He never said love. I though he should have said love, and told him so, but he replied he meant to say sex, not love. And maybe he could have said suicide instead of death…