The Savage Garden

by Camille Renaud

There was a town on the west coast of a tiny banana republic called Concepción. In the town lived a young man named Téolindo. His mother, who had recently moved several miles inland to be with her new husband, had always called him Téo, and so everyone else called him Téo, too. For twelve thousand colones an hour he taught tourists with pinky-red skin how to stand up on a surfboard in the water. He lived in an apartamiento above Dos Pájaros, a restaurant-bar in the middle of town. But he wanted to buy a place by the ocean, where he could build a life with his woman and where loud merengue music wouldn’t drift up through the floorboards and disturb him at night.

Téo’s mamá was called María Paula. She had had high hopes for her son when he was born, when María Paula was just sixteen years old. She would look down at him as he suckled her breast and sigh with relief at the thought that it was he, not she, who was destined for las grandes cosas.

The thought of great things had troubled María Paula ever since she had learned about them, reading sticky plastic-covered libros from the local library as a child. How could she ascend the mountain? How could she find her pot of gold? She prayed not for God to grant her what she desired, but for Him to relieve her of the terrible pain of desiring it. And when Téo arrived—the product of a tryst with a slick ciudadano who disappeared as soon as he came—María didn’t despair at the thunderclap of doors being shut to her one by one. She cried tears of joy at the knowledge that there was nothing, really, she could do—that God had agreed to scoop her up and carry her towards the horizon of her fate.

María Paula’s love for Téo was sweet and fresh and pure. She walked in languid bliss to the market each day, baby slung across her chest, all but deaf to the stinging insults of her neighbors, thrown at her like sun-hot coins as she passed. She turned the other cheek because she knew that they shamed her not out of hate, but out of duty. A yearning, book-obsessed girl induced fear; an unwed mother they could love.

The final act of grace was Téo himself. In the eyes of the towns-people, the wrongs of the mother had no transference onto the child, who proved to be a charming and humble boy. With midnight-black curls and skin that shone like bronze, Téo earned the nickname el Príncipe after his classic good looks, cherubic in youth and growing ever more handsome in adolescence. Like his mother, he was sparing of word but wise of speech, leaping into full sentences when he first began to talk and earning full marks at school. But despite his enviable strengths, Téo was determined to be seen as one of la puebla. He spent his teenage years out dancing with his peers instead of studying and refused to apply to university. This caused great pain to María Paula, who never truly forgave him.

María Paula married Téo’s stepfather when Téo was sixteen years old, the same age she had been when Téo was born. They moved further inland once they were married, because the town of Concepción had swollen with tourism in recent years and prices were going up. Téo took a job at the local surf shop with a friend he’d known at school and leased an apartment in town, hanging a picture of María Paula by his dresser. He also kept an old metal cigar-box underneath one of the floorboards by his bed, filled with flattened-out bills to fund the purchase of his house by the sea. On weekends he went out with Josefina, his woman—his nóvia since forever—a girl of his age from a neighboring town.

A house with the ocean at its feet, a wife to care for him, children he could call his own: this was what Téo had decided to want from early on. Unlike his mother, Téo knew that you could choose your dreams, that you could tend to them and prune them like a shrub. So when the blooms of his desire grew fast and heavy, he cut them before they could overwhelm the bush. Breathing in his mother’s sadness, the tender gloom behind her smile, Téo sensed that she had let her life’s force run rampant, its wanton plantlife creeping wide. He had resolved, then, to never inherit his mother’s heart, savage garden that it was, flush with birthings and decay.

He saved his money little by little and told Josefina, who grew more impatient with each passing day, “just a little longer, mi amor.” She kissed him wildly before returning to her parents at night, grinding her body against his as if to fuse them together.

“Pero cuándo?” Josefina whined, the warm heat of her body making Téo feel weak. She was hopelessly beautiful, and Téo ached to have her. But he breathed through it every time, knowing that pain was only a bitter kind of joy.

After he dropped Josefina off at her house on his motocicleta one night, Téo headed to the beach and walked into the ocean, stripping off his clothes and diving under the waves. The water cooled his senses and the moonlight shone in his upturned eyes. He was a man in the fully charged and desperate throttle of his life.

It was then that he saw a figure on the shore. Walking along the beach was a girl alone. She was the only person on that section of beach, which led Téo to the strange and passing thought that he and the girl were perhaps, for that moment, the only people on the Earth. The girl moved gracefully, as if she were gliding. Téo had ducked down at the sight of her, and now only his head and shoulders stuck out above the water. He did not know why he did this. Perhaps because he was naked, and had felt suddenly ashamed.

Then the girl turned, and Téo wished himself a shadow on the sea. The moonlight was shining on the girl’s skin like mother-of-pearl.

That night, Téo turned so often in his bed that in the morning he woke up and found himself entangled in the sheets.

The girl from the beach appeared at the surf shop the next day. Téo was waxing one of the renter boards when she appeared in the open doorway, the hem of her dress fluttering as the fan rotated her way.

Her name was something that sounded lyrical and elegant in her language but horribly off-key en español. She was slender; perhaps the same age as Josefina but in no way rivaling the latter’s formidable curves. Téo put down his waxing rag as she talked, her voice lilting like music. He found himself mesmerized, unable to understand a word.

They began the lesson on the sand, Téo miming the paddling and the jump one had to accomplish in order to stand up in the water. The girl managed the task with strange gracefulness, her slender muscles gripping and relaxing underneath the translucent skin.

“Like this?” she asked, breathless. “Yes,” Téo said. “Like that.”

They went into the water. It was noon, which made it too hot for a surf lesson, but the girl had insisted. When she slid the plane of her body on top of the board, Téo felt sweat trickle into his eyes, stinging. He wiped his face on his arm, and when she turned her head to look back at him—like this?—he met her gaze and smiled. Like that. She wasn’t able to stand up on her first try—or her second, or third. The girl was self-deprecating about this, and laughed as Téo

gripped her arms to pull her off the ocean floor. “I’m awful,” she said.

“You can do it, cariña,” Téo said. He could see the outline of her breasts underneath the thin fabric of her suit.

When she finally was able to stand—a triumphant five seconds— there was a whooping and shouting from the shore. The girls’ parents, two outlines against the blinding-hot sand, were cheering the girl on. Pulling the board along the water with her, the girl approached

Téo, rolling her eyes as if the two of them shared a secret.

“Family vacation,” she said, and Téo smiled weakly in response. At the arrival of the girl’s parents he had felt something like a pull in his stomach, as if he had eaten something rotten sometime before. He averted his eyes as the girl cocked a hip and looked at him, raising a hand to shade her eyes.

“I’m dying for a night out,” she said.

Téo felt the sun beating down on his face as she spoke. The heat had become unbearable, and suddenly he felt very light, as if the past lay infinitely behind him, at the point where the sky touches the sea.

They met at ten o’clock that night at Dos Pájaros. The girl wore a dress whose skirt fell from her waist like the petals of a rose. When she greeted Téo it was with an embrace, and as she pulled away he smelled something dark and musky on her skin.

Téo ordered drinks; the girl laughed at his suggestion of margaritas and insisted on wine.

“Although they probably don’t have anything good,” she said. As the girl drank she became louder. She had gotten a day’s sun;

the tops of her shoulders, the bridge of her nose and her smooth, wide forehead all seemed to grow redder as the night went on.

Towards midnight Téo couldn’t stand it—the thudding of his pulse in his ears. A feeling like fire was creeping up his chest, and whether it was anger or desire, he didn’t know. When she asked to see his apartment, he consented. He felt the eyes of the other patrons follow him as he led the girl to the door, and the sensation was as sharp and sweet as knives.

Téo took the girl’s hand before they ascended the creaking wooden steps. When he opened the door to his apartment, the girl entered, then looked back at him.

“Come on,” she said, shaking her head, amused by something that Téo couldn’t guess.

At first the girl seemed bored. Téo stood a little ways away from her in the room, watching her touch the books he had on his dresser, and then his statue of the Virgin. Then she paused.

“Who’s this?” the girl asked. She was looking at the picture of María Paula hung above the dresser.

“Mi mamá,” Téo responded.

The girl stood studying the photograph. It was of María Paula at sixteen years old, her dark hair around her shoulders, standing against the trunk of a moss-covered tree. Téo had found it in the bottom of a box in a crowded closet in his childhood home. He had kept it not because of who was pictured—there were many other photos of his mother—but because of who had taken it. He had never asked María Paula about it, but he didn’t have to. He knew.

Téo walked towards the girl, who was still looking at the photograph. Reaching out his hand, the first place he touched was her shoulder, still red from its burn. She flinched at his touch, and then, with a slowness that seemed eternal, she turned herself to face him.

In the morning, Téo woke up alone. The girl had mentioned that her flight was the next day, so she had left in the early morning. He pulled on his clothes from the previous night, which were strewn by the bedside, and walked out of his apartment and towards the beach.

After giving lessons all day, Téo returned to his apartment to shower and change his clothes. He was supposed to pick up Josefina that night to go dancing. Upon entering the apartment, he froze. There was a pale rectangle on the wall where his mother’s picture had been. Téo cursed. He began to search the apartment, even though he knew he wouldn’t find the picture there. Panicking, he pried open the floorboard under the bed. His cashbox was still there. Kneeling before the bed, he pulled the box out from its place under the floor and held

it in his hands.

Téo opened the box. The bills were all there, decompressed and rising, bursting from their stronghold like an all-consuming weed.

Suddenly, Téo slammed the lid of the metal box and threw it across the room with a shout. The box made a loud, dull noise as it hit the wall and clattered to the floor.

Téo felt something like nausea rise within him. He sprang to his feet and fled the room.

That night, sitting alone in a dark corner of Dos Pájaros, he got drunk on cheap wine. It was dark, blood-red and bitter. It helped to dull the ache inside him, which was beating like a drum. He picked up his phone near midnight, after hours of calls from Josefina.

As soon as he answered, he was met with a slew of curses.

“Why didn’t you call?” Josefina yelled. “You worthless . . . I know, don’t you know? I know what you did with that puta gringa.”

“What are you talking about?” Téo slurred.

“I know, Téo. Todo el mundo sabe. And everyone says, leave him, the hijo de puta, and I say no. Because I love you. Because I thought you loved me, too.” There was a noise like a hiccup. “But you don’t care! You don’t care about anything, Téolindo. You think you’re better than all of us.”

The call ended.

Téo exploded, letting out an angry shout. He shoved his phone in the pocket of his jeans and stalked across the bar to the outside, over to his motocicleta on the curb. He got on, slammed the helmet on his head and revved the engine. He sped up the street and turned onto the road that curved around the mountains.

Todo el mundo sabe. Everyone knows.

He thought of his mother’s picture on the wall of an American bedroom.

The bike’s engine roared. Téo thought his heart would burst from his chest.

There was a flash of blinding headlights, and a truck’s sounding horn. Téo swerved and just missed the collision, turning sharply towards the edge. The sleeping jungle bristled at the touch, and unhinged her putrid jaw.

The songs of night birds were ringing as Téo fell to her embrace.