Screenwriting tim.desanta

"Tim De Santa
9/21/09
Story Treatment: “Call at Corazón”
 
A newly married husband and wife are on their honeymoon in South America. They are standing on the deck of a docked ship, in the midst of an argument.  The husband wants to buy a monkey he sees in the pier marketplace next to the ship, but his wife thinks this is a terrible idea.
We learn over the course of their quarrel that they have been sailing around South America for some time now, inhabiting a series of cramped boat cabins.  From the way they converse, their relationship seems strained, at best, dysfunctional, at worst.
The woman finally tells her husband, to his surprise, to go onto the dock and buy the monkey. The man purchases the animal, ties him to the post of a bunk bed in their cabin, and goes for a walk around the port town. He sees corrugated tin and barbed wire everywhere, and finds a stream with black water and women washing clothes along its bank.
He sits against a tree next to the river, and removes a small, well-worn notebook from his pocket.  He opens it to an entry from the previous day, in which he had written an abstract and perhaps pretentious philosophical musing about dealing with the ‘hideousness’ in things. He lights a cigarette and watches the women struggling to clean their laundry in the river, then flicks the burning stub at a sand crab scuttling along nearby. He writes a new, chauvinistic entry in his notebook about how women confuse sexual rituals with real love.
As the man arrives back at the ship, thunderhead clouds are drifting in from the nearby mountains; it begins to storm just as they set sail. The man’s wife is sitting on a bunk bed, staring vacantly out of the cabin’s open porthole, listening to the rumbling thunder. The man lies down on the opposite bunk across the room, and begins to read a book. She gets up, walks to the washstand and asks him where the two quarts of whiskey they purchased yesterday are. He tells her somewhat reprovingly that she should read or nap to deal with her emotional funk, rather than drink, but she pours herself a whiskey and water anyway and slams the door on her way out of the cabin.
The man lies pensively on the bunk with the book open across his chest, then decides to look for his wife on the deck. He finds her standing alone against the railing, looking despondently at the waves below, with the empty glass in her hand. He begins to walk haltingly towards her but stops midway and then retreats to the cabin where he finds his newly purchased monkey tearing pages from the book he had left open on the bunk.
When the woman returns to the now jumbled and untidy cabin, she quips that the monkey’s deeds must represent Man’s innate urge to destroy. When the husband peevishly offers to get rid of the animal, she says that he (and not the monkey) is the real problem. She says the monkey reminds her, by contrast, of the husband’s free will and ability to behave differently if he really cared to. The husband characteristically puts on a blank impassive face, and says nothing until the wife tries to take back what she has said. He counters that while he looks at monkeys as little model men, she idealizes men as special creatures distinguished from other animals, and she consequently tends to become disillusioned by man’s bestial behavior.
He asks her again if she wants him to get rid of the monkey, and she says he might as well just drop the creature overboard. As she falls asleep, she hazily hears her husband saying, “I believe you would. I believe you would.”
She awakes in the cabin to find her husband’s cot empty. She goes up to the dining hall and sees him leaning back in his chair, smoking. He says cheerfully that the cabin steward is delighted with the monkey. She is pleasantly surprised by the news that he has gotten rid of the animal, and says that a monkey doesn’t go with a honeymoon.
It is the next day—they have switched to a new, extremely overcrowded double-decker boat in Villalta. They head to the first-class state rooms on the upper deck and let themselves into the biggest stateroom they can find. The man works his way through the densely populated passageways of the boat, in order to find an employee and pay for their room, but he does not see anyone. Back in their room, they hear guitar music and singing and go out onto the deck to watch the festivities.
As the boat heads toward the dark east shore, it pass through a particularly narrow channel, scarcely wider than the boat itself, and branches from trees on the bank actually scrape along the cabins and whip onto the deck. The man asks his wife if she wants to go down to the main deck where they hear roaring laughter, but she declines. He criticizes her for never being able to get into the spirit of a thing. He goes down below by himself and finds men sitting on burlap sacks and crates and women standing behind the men, smoking. He finally finds an employee and arranges for him to come to his room so he can pay him. He notes the man’s strong, animalistic body and especially handsome face before leaving. The worker also offers at this time to spray the room for his ‘senorita’ to keep the mosquitoes at bay.
As the worker moves back away into the throngs, the boat suddenly jolts violently. The man pushes through the crowd to the prow, and sees that the pilot has run the boat into the bank. As the sharpness of the bank’s curves increase, the pilot continually runs into the bank, to the whooping delight of the masses on the main deck. One of the gamblers on the main deck remarks that this isn’t the regular channel of passage, because the ship is picking up cargo at Corazon.
The man retreats further into the interior of the boat, away from the boughs spilling onto the deck, and into a square storage area. He pulls out his notebook and writes a poetic entry about ‘moving through the blood stream of a giant.’ He lies down on the deck and slips into broken bits of sleep, awaking later at half past one to find the boat stationary and the people mostly asleep, save for a faint buzz of conversation from small groups of men discussing life in the republic.
The man works his way back to his stateroom, knocks and enters to find it dark inside. He hears a cough and thinks it is his wife, but when she does not answer his calls he lights a match and discovers that the room is empty. A tin insecticide sprayer is laying on one of the mattresses, leaking oil onto the ticking. He hears the cough again and realizes it is from the adjacent cabin.
He suddenly is struck by a horrible thought, and rushes to inspect her valises. He rifles through her clothing, groping for the two bottles of whiskey, only to confirm his suspicion that she has gone out drinking by herself again. He angrily undresses and lies down on a bunk. His hand bumps into a half-full beer bottle by the head of the cot. He drinks the warm, bitter liquid and rolls the empty bottle across the room.
As he lies there listening to the thud of heavy cargo hitting the loading deck, he reflects on his disease at his wife’s absence. He always has trouble sleeping when she is not in the room, and his accustomed feeling of infinite futility and sadness comes back to him. The boat’s motor starts up, and he finally drifts off into a light sleep.
He comes to in a sort of daze, to an intense, high-pitched drone. He jumps of his cot and realizes he is hearing the thin wail of mosquito wings everywhere. He checks the cabin window and finds that the screen does not quite reach the top. He lights a match and checks his wife’s cot again, but she is still not there, and the can of mosquito spray has continued to leak onto the bed.
He goes back to the window and tugs forcefully on the screen, trying to raise it up to close the crack, until it pops out of the frame and falls into the water, letting in a torrent of mosquitoes. He runs into the corridor in his undershirt and trousers to find almost everyone asleep. He finds two women on the floor sleeping with their backs against the wall, and wedges in between them until he dozes off again. He awakes to the light of dawn and a crick in his neck.  
He walks onto the main deck, which is already filled with people, and watches as the boat moves through a wide, shallow estuary. The islands they are passing through are dotted with brilliantly white herons. He looks at his watch—it is half past five. People on the deck begin to peal mangoes for breakfast.
Now the man is anxious about his wife, and begins searching methodically through every compartment and open space on the boat. He checks the salon and upper decks before heading downstairs to the gambling area. He passes by a cow, roped to two iron posts, and then sees an improvised lean-to where the crew sleeps. He peers through the transom as he walks by, and sees his wife and another man lying, half-naked, asleep on the floor. He notices the stale smell of drunk and spilled whiskey.
He goes upstairs with his heart beating wildly and the sweat pouring down his face. Back in the cabin, he closes her two valises, packs his own, dresses, and goes out onto the deck. He sees the mountains of Cienaga growing large as the boat approaches the dock. He fights his way quickly off the boat and onto land as soon as the boat is tethered, and hurries across a dusty street to a crowded, waiting train.
Now on the train, he continually casts anxious glances back at the street.  A whistle blows by the dock, and he sees a figure in white running frantically, and battling her way through the dogs and children in the street towards the train. But the train begins to pull away and a row of trees sliding past obscures his view. He takes out his notebook and sits with it on his lap, smiling at the green landscape whirling by outside the train window."