A one-story building, the windows boarded up. Joanes stopped the car in front of the door, which was closed but rattling inside its frame in the wind.
“Give me the flashlight,” he told the woman.
He jumped out of the car and ran toward the cabin, which was raised above the ground on a platform about a foot and a half high. A couple of steps led up to the entrance. At some point a lock had protected the door, but it had been wrenched off a long time ago. Somebody had passed a piece of rope through the remaining hole and attached it to a hook on the front of the building. Joanes removed the rope, and the wind shot the door open. He gave the place a quick once over and went back to the car.
“We’ll carry your wife in together,” he told the professor. “The chair stays in the trunk.”
They carried the woman to the cabin, splashing through the soaking mush of leaves. They left her on a metal bed base whose one missing leg had been replaced by a few bricks and on top of which lay a grayish mattress smattered with stains. It was the only piece of furniture in the cabin.
Joanes went back one last time to the car for the blankets and the rest of the things that the hotel owner had given them. The next priority was to close the cabin’s door in such a way that it would stay closed. On the inside of the wall there was another hook, and Joanes wound the rope around it. The door banged fiercely against the frame, and it looked like the rope wouldn’t hold out for long. On the floor there were several more boards like those covering the windows. He chose the one that seemed most resistant and used it to buttress the door. All the while, the professor shone the flashlight on Joanes. The door stopped rattling, and the noise of the wind dimmed.
Having done all this, Joanes could finally take a proper look at the place where they were going to spend the night.
It smelled of damp, of stagnant air, of rot, and of something else, which the three of them could only associate with excrement. The biggest room took up almost the entire surface area of the cabin and, given its size, they guessed it was where whomever the construction had been built for had slept, if indeed it had ever been occupied. Another room, tucked away in a corner at one end of the building, was closed off to them by a metal door. Joanes pushed the door, and it gave a little groan as it swung open. There before him was an empty, windowless space, just a few feet long on each side. He guessed that at some point it had been intended as an office or storeroom.
The bathrooms were on the other side of the cabin. There were three showers, another three more stalls for the toilets, and a couple of sinks. The stalls didn’t have doors, and if at some point they’d had toilets, someone had long since done away with them. Only the plumbing pipes were left, jutting out of the wall, along with some holes in the grounds, holes which someone had used not too long ago. Of course, there was no water. In the corner lay the remains — the skin and a muddle of bones — of what might have been a possum. The whole cabin had a polished cement floor.
That was it.
Some rusty cans of food, bottles, and other trash were littered across the floor, signs that other guests sometimes stopped by the cabin. This worried Joanes, who then double-checked that the door and windows were firmly shut. Whoever had blocked the windows had done so with great care. At least they’d be protected from the rain.
The scene was so dismal that Joanes preferred to keep his mouth shut. He didn’t want to overstress the place’s obvious deficiencies, and he guessed from the others’ silence that they felt the same. The darkness and the storm only intensified the poor impression the cabin made on them. Joanes forced himself to see it another way, with new eyes — with a little sweep of the floor and some sunshine, the place wouldn’t be so bad. The walls were painted a pistachio color, and on the upper part, skirting the ceiling, some well-intentioned if poorly skilled person had begun to draw a decorative border of vines and tropical birds.
The professor held up his wife, while Joanes turned the mattress, hoping — in vain — to find fewer stains on the other side, and then spread one of the blankets over it.
“You can lie down now,” he told the woman.
The professor put her down on the bed. Afterward, he lit the oil lamp and, carrying the lamp and his luggage, took himself off to the bathroom to put on a dry change of clothes.
“The hotel room was a positive suite compared to this,” said the woman once she and Joanes were alone.
He kicked away the garbage around the foot of the bed. A blanket of dead cochineals — their shells parched and curled into little balls — crunched under the soles of his feet. On the floor, the flashlight lit up a V shape of dust and grime, over which a rust-colored millipede was crawling. Joanes remembered the chronicles he’d read of the conquistadors, which told of flies that bit people inside their noses and ears, bites that would later become infected and swell up terribly, and of worms that crawled onto sleeping people at night and burrowed through their eyelids and eyes.
He shook these thoughts from his head.
“It’s not so bad,” he replied. “I’d imagined some shed that the wind would rip apart piece by piece. This seems solid, at least.”
He took off his rain jacket and patted himself dry with one of the blankets.
“We should have stayed at the hotel,” said the professor’s wife. “Whatever the cost.”
Joanes said nothing.
“You don’t think a tree could fall on us?” she asked.
“Not windy enough.”
When the professor came back from the bathroom, he was carrying a metal bucket, which was swinging by its handle from one of his fingers.
“I found this. Whoever was here before used it to make a fire. We could do the same.”
He had a point. The hurricane had made the temperature drop. The woman, who was wrapped up in one of the blankets, was shivering.
“Here, indoors?” she asked. “Won’t the smoke asphyxiate us?”
“There are too many air currents for that,” answered her husband.
Someone had pierced holes in the bucket to help the fire catch. It was black with soot, and the base was covered in a dark, gritty residue. Joanes and the professor surveyed the trash around the cabin, searching for something that would burn. They decided on the boards that were strewn across the floor. They propped them up diagonally, resting one end on the floor and the other against the wall, and then stamped on them so they snapped in the middle. They kept going until they had a decent amount of firewood.
Joanes placed the bucket near the bed and added the smallest pieces of wood to it.
“It’s too damp,” said the professor. “It’ll need something else if it’s going to catch.”
There was nothing suitable in the cabin. Joanes opened his backpack and pulled out the notebook where he’d made his notes about the reduction to the hotel offer the night before. He tore off a few blank pages, scrunched them into balls, and put them inside the bucket, under the sticks of wood. He held a lighter to them. The wood resisted. Joanes was forced to go on tearing out pages until he reached those where his notes were written. He tore them out, too. At last, the wood caught fire. It let off a load of smoke, and the residue at the bottom of the bucket gave off an acrid stench as it melted. But the fire gave them light and heat. The professor turned off the flashlight.
The three of them watched the flames in silence.
In spite of the cabin, the hurricane, and the exhaustion, Joanes was pretty pleased with himself. He’d shown conviction. He was sure that nobody expected that when the hotel owner told him get out, his response would be a cool “fine by me.” He felt a certain degree of pride at spending the night in that place, in the middle of the wilderness and a Category 2 or even Category 3 hurricane.