The Daughter of Doctor Moreau(81)
She nodded; the line of her lips told him nothing. He lit the lamp and placed it on the table. He stood across from her, glancing at the papers she had taken out of the glass case. She did not touch the food nor the coffee.
“Come now, sweetheart, talk to me,” he said.
She sighed deeply but provided no response at all. They seemed at an impasse. Then she began drawing invisible figures with her fingertip, brushing the page of an open notebook. He spied on it the drawing of a jaguar.
“I’ve been reading my father’s journals. There are a few of them. I went looking for information on my mother. She was twenty years of age when she had me. She died of sepsis. He weighed her, measured her, noted her coloration, kept notes on her pregnancy and my delivery. Yet he said almost nothing about who she was. And when he wrote about me it was the same. I know my reflexes were abnormally fast, but I do not know if he celebrated my first birthday. My life and that of everyone at Yaxaktun is recorded in these papers, yet he says nothing about us, not truly. And in his monstrous selfishness he wonders, constantly, how we are to be of use to him.”
She tucked her hands in her lap, looking down. “I have blindly loved my father, and in doing so I have ignored the atrocities he bequeathed us. I have followed him without question and for that God will punish me.”
“I’ve told you, there is no God.”
“Maybe not for you, sir,” she said angrily. “But I do believe in God. Maybe not the God whose face my father showed me, but a God. In doing what we’ve done here, in the needless cruelty of my father’s experiments and the creation of the hybrids, we have sinned. I thought Yaxaktun a paradise, but it is not so. He shaped pain into flesh.
“He made me and he wrote…do you know what he wrote? That I was ‘the most humanlike of his cursed lot.’ Hi non sunt homines; sunt animalia. We are animals. And being animals our only purpose was to serve him,” she said and held up a journal, reading from it. “?‘Similar research has been undertaken by breeders of horses and dogs, by all kinds of untrained clumsy-handed men working for their own immediate ends. The difference is that I operate with more finesse.’ That is what my father said. And you know how he ends this entry? He wonders out loud about the great reception he’ll have in Europe once he demonstrates his scientific accomplishments, he imagines the glory heaped upon his shoulders. And he says ‘when Carlota understands the full extent of my achievements and experiments, she might resent me. But then all children come to hold grudges against their progenitors, and her discomfort is no great consideration when weighed against my intellectual passions. Although I have made monsters, I have also performed miracles.’?”
She let the journal fall upon the table and stared at it.
“There is no perfect place on Earth. Everywhere I’ve gone, I’ve seen the cruelties and excesses of men. It is why I came to Yaxaktun and remained here, because at least it offered a semblance of happiness. I never saw monsters,” he said.
Her face had taken on a severe, sharp appearance, and she was breathing faster. “It doesn’t matter what you saw. It was wrong. And what shall become of the hybrids now? I should have gone with them, this is my responsibility. I am the doctor’s daughter, after all. I should have, but I could not.”
“Hush now,” he said and walked around the table, holding the girl, for she looked feverish, and he feared she’d collapse as she’d once done before him.
“You don’t care,” she muttered, and he felt her hands pressed against his chest.
“I do. I wonder if Cachito is afraid almost every hour of the day and whether trackers would be able to hunt them down.”
“Trackers! Hernando Lizalde wouldn’t be able to get trackers that quickly, would he?”
“I suspect not. But even if he does in a month, in two, the danger will still be there.”
He felt a pinprick of pain above his heart and let out a gruff complaint. The girl yelped in shock, pushing him away with a coiled strength that surprised him. He moved two paces back, softly stumbled against a cabinet, making specimens behind glass tremble.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize I was—”
Her fingers were tapered into long, sharp nails, like a cat that shows its claws, and like a cat she retracted the nails. The spot where she’d nicked him was blooming into a tiny red flower, staining his shirt.
“I’ve hurt you.” She raised a hand to cover her face. “I can’t control it. My father said to be good and calm. But I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to make it stop.”
Her free hand rested on an open book, and her fingers curled together, drawing a slash across the page. The jaguar was thus mangled, the perfect lines of its body broken.
“It’s fine. Sit, Carlota. Give me a minute to tend to myself,” he said, his voice shaky. He had no idea what to do, either.
He looked among the shelves and found a piece of gauze. Then he proceeded to unbutton his shirt and dab at the wound. It was shallow, like a paper cut. She’d applied little force, and he was reminded once again of a cat, this time kneading upon a human’s lap. What an odd thought! And she was strong, despite her slimness. He’d witnessed that already when she’d hoisted Moreau up.
When he buttoned up, she had her back turned toward him and had sat down again.
He thought Carlota might have herself a good cry, but instead the girl reached for the bowl and the spoon and began eating. She sipped her coffee but wrinkled her nose at it. When she was done he asked her if she wanted him to boil her a cup of tea in case she preferred something else to drink. She nodded her head and pushed the mug aside.