by Joan Thomas
Sitting side by side on the couch, they studied the portraits of the wives.
“When I was little, I’d look at these pictures and think of you all as ancient. But look how young you were.”
“I was the youngest. I was twenty-four.”
The other wives are holding children in their portraits, but Olive stands alone, her big eyes on the photographer as if to say, Now what?
“Did you all believe in this mission? Did nobody have any doubts?” Abby’s voice was rough with fear, asking that.
Olive lifted those same eyes, made even bigger by reading glasses, and said, “You couldn’t afford to understand it any other way. Think how hideous that would be.”
Maybe that was what prompted Abby to start looking in the library, where she found the anthropology book that’s in her backpack. She knew without reading it that it would be dangerous. Standing in the stacks, she let her eyes skim over the preface. Elisabeth Elliot, Rachel Saint—they were named. She couldn’t bear to read on, and she couldn’t abandon it. She’s already renewed it once.
Will Rachel be in the film? She remembers her great-aunt Rachel mainly from when she brought the two Amazonian men to Seattle. “New Christians from a Stone Age tribe in the jungle, bearing witness to God’s victory over savagery,” was how Rachel described the men. They didn’t react to being called savages, but of course they didn’t understand English. For that whole hour in the church in Seattle, they sat alert, expressionless, their hands on their knees. If they were surprised at the fascination they inspired in a huge crowd of white Americans, they gave no sign. Sitting, they seemed bigger; Abby was struck by how broad their shoulders were, straining their cheap grey suits. There was a Q & A at the end, which went on a long time because Rachel had to translate the audience’s questions into Waorani for the men, and then translate the men’s answers into English for the audience. Mainly Enkidi, the old man, spoke. He had a deep and confident voice, and his language seemed to be full of consonants. No matter what was asked, his response (as Rachel translated it) was always a variation on, “When I was a child, we lived very, very badly and our souls were dark and black.” Rachel talked swiftly and casually to the men. It was clear that she wanted to impress everyone with how close she was to the Auca, that she was like family.
“Can you tell us about your culture?” someone asked. “What was your art like, and your music?”
Enkidi’s answer, delivered in Rachel’s blunt way after a little back-and-forth, was, “We were like wild animals before the missionaries brought Christ to us.”
“Let me just add,” Rachel said. She mentioned criticism she’d faced, mainly from journalists who accused her of destroying the Auca culture. She laughed at this. The Auca would not even exist as a people if she had not intervened! They were killing themselves off at a tremendous rate. And in fact (and this was hard for people to grasp) they didn’t have a culture. Take music: The Auca found the missionaries’ singing hilarious. They were incapable of melody themselves. All they knew was the drone that accompanied their demonic rituals. Many of their chants had no meaning whatsoever; others described and celebrated spearing. The missionaries had of course forbidden chanting—but how can you worship the Lord without singing? So hymns had to be written to the Auca scale, in faith that God would use these primitive songs to teach the beauty of true melody.
She asked whether the congregation would like to hear the Auca version of “Jesus Loves Me.”
“You might not recognize it—the Auca scale has only three notes, and this song takes on more of the flavour of the jungle every time they sing it—but it will give you some sense of what we’re up against.”
She spoke to the two men and Abby saw a silent signal pass between them. They lowered their eyes and sank into it, producing the song as one voice—a nasal sound, like the Jew’s harp Abby had once heard a busker play in Pettygrove Park. They chanted the same line over and over, but every few lines the pitch went up a tiny bit, and one word changed. It took her deeper, each repetition, stirred her in an unfamiliar way. It was something you’d have to have different ears to really hear.
“When you go, sweetheart . . .” her mother said. And now she will go.
IT’S RAINING AS she approaches Arbuckle. She spies a Roadway Inn the exact shape of a Monopoly hotel and decides to stop. She has nine hundred and fifteen dollars in her savings account. She’s never stayed in a motel on her own, and she feels like a kid walking into the office. She slaps the little bell on the counter, trying to project confidence. A hand splits a bead curtain and a man inserts himself between its strands. His big face gleams as if he’s just risen from a tanning bed. He looks full of self-pity and resentful at being interrupted.
She asks if he has a room available and he names a price. He wants a credit card, but he finally lets her pay with her bank card and gives her Unit 6. It’s on the ground floor with a door that opens onto the parking lot. There’s a faint smell of cigarette smoke. She pulls her jacket out of her bag and dashes across the street and buys a sandwich at a gas stop. Chicken and avocado, what a find. Back in her room, she brews tea in the coffee machine. Coffee-flavoured tea, always a treat. It’s getting dark. She stands at the window for a minute looking out across the parking lot and then she pulls the blind down and turns on a light. If she’s successful in this audition, she’ll soon experience the Amazon sunset, darkness that falls like a black curtain at the same time every night.
She sits back at the desk and finishes her sandwich, drinks down her tea. She tries the TV, but the remote seems to be dead. It’s early, but she barely slept last night. Once in bed, all she can hear is the faraway whine of the traffic. She commands herself to relax, alone in this impersonal room. She does relax, the bed is her friend. Her cheek against the pillow, she drifts towards sleep.
And then, on the edge of it, a drone starts up in her brain, a monotonous, hypnotic drone, and she pulls herself upright and sits in the dark listening.
It’s the Auca singing.
In the night a man, a hunter with two wives and six children, will stir awake and start chanting in a minor key, laying a bass line to the chorus of tree frogs and night birds. The chant will spread through the open-walled longhouse, from his hearth fire to the next, and then along the ridge to the next longhouse, until the whole dark forest is droning. Monkeys curled up in woolly sleep hear it the way they hear the rain.
Her mother knew it as a child. Abby only heard it that once, on a night so full of pain and surprise that she’s carried it for years without understanding it. A strange bit of theatre, that night in Seattle, in which Amazonian men in grey suits from Walmart played well-rehearsed roles and yet seemed the only authentic presence.
Rachel had warned everyone, “You will find they don’t look at you as they sing. They’re not being rude. It’s just their way.” But in fact, in casting his eyes down from the platform, Enkidi, the older man, was looking straight at Abby. All the time he was chanting, his eyes were fixed on her with an expression of utmost sweetness.
Who Is Rachel Saint?
9
THOUGHTS POP INTO YOUR HEAD every minute of every day, and it’s not easy to tell which are your own human (possibly silly or wicked) impulses and which are orders from the Almighty. In Rachel’s experience, God’s directives, however quietly they come down the pipe, tend to be harder and shinier than the average thought, as though they’ve been dipped in enamel. But even then, it can be hard to tell for sure.
Her third year in Peru, she avoided Lima and went to Quito, Ecuador, for her annual furlough. She was racked with toothache and people said that Ecuador’s dentists were a higher order of butcher than Peru’s—and besides, Quito was closer to her mission station. In Quito, she stayed at Hotel Andaluz, a decent hotel a block or so off Plaza Grande. She was well aware of her brother Nate just a hundred and fifty miles to the southeast, in an Ecuadorean town at the edge of the rainforest. He’d had an aviation accident some time ago. And wasn’t there a new
baby in the house? So at the start she thought, If my teeth are fixed in time, I will go to Shell Mera and try to help out.
She’d headed to a dentist near Alameda Park, expecting to spend precious weeks lying in agony in a chair with her mouth pried open. Dr. Sanchez-Smith met her with a wide smile, his own mouth a display case of what he could offer by way of gold inlays. Rachel said no to the gold but yes to novocaine, which cost less than a hamburger in America. And praise God, Dr. Sanchez-Smith had deft hands and an open schedule, and in a week she was toothache free! So then the next morning she sat on her balcony at Hotel Andaluz as the sun rose over Mount Pichincha, drinking hot chocolate and eating crusty bread with butter and marmalade, stretching her bare legs out to the sun and noting how nicely the jungle ringworm on her left calf was healing. And my brother Nate? she prayed. Below in the street, a donkey brayed into the cold, thin air, and she seemed to see God smile. Take this, Rachel. Take three more weeks at Hotel Andaluz. Well done, thou good and faithful servant.
It was at the end of those three weeks that a maid tapped on Rachel’s door with a note from someone named Carlos Sevilla.
She had never heard the name. The letter was in Spanish, and she whispered a translation as she read.
My dear Señorita Saint, I am the owner of a modest hacienda in El Oriente, and I count Señor Nathaniel Saint as a friend. He is a man of many surprises. Can it be that his sister is presently in Quito? If so, why have I not made her acquaintance? My wife and I are currently at our residence on Calle Ambato. Would you join us for dinner tonight so that we can remedy this sad state of affairs?
She knew from his quaint effort to charm that the man was a Spaniard. The thought of leaving Quito had begun to add a melancholy edge to every small pleasure, and she was grateful for the diversion, and felt suddenly buoyant. She ordered a bath for five o’clock and sent her dress to be pressed, an ivory dress with a lace collar. After the bath, she sat by the window in her wrapper and spread out the damp ends of her hair (still thick as a girl’s, still snatching sequins of pale gold out of the sun) and listened to the voices of the street merchants floating up from the square. Always the same nasal call, whether they were selling combs or avocados or little bunches of coca leaves. Her combs and hairpins were in a felt bag, and she began to arrange her hair, working by habit, without a mirror. She’d never socialized with white South Americans—El High, her partner in Peru liked to call them—and she had no idea what to expect. Maybe she should pin it looser, so waves formed around her face. Or should she be thinking of a hat? On the bureau sat her Christmas cake tin with its painted lid, three fat robins squatting on a pine branch. The feathers Chief Tariri had given her lay coiled inside, grey (owl), yellow (toucan), tan (eagle), green (parrot), neatly stitched onto a basketry circle, just the size of a lady’s ring hat in America. She went to the mirror and settled the ring on her hair. No, wear it lower, closer to the brow. Wear it the way the Shapras of Peru wear their feathers—like a crown.
The lobby was empty. No one at reception to witness her descent of the wide marble stairway, no one lifting his head in surprise from the back of the leather sofa. Only the derelict matador they called a portero, hurrying over to assist and cajole. That pencil moustache all catawampus, and front teeth missing. “Do not walk alone, señora,” he said. “You will not be so lucky another time.”
“It isn’t luck I count on,” Rachel said. She shook her shawl open and he reached out to help her with a mirthless laugh. There were more thieves than honest men in Quito, it was a fact. Rachel’s first night at Hotel Andaluz, she had set out for a stroll up Garcia Moreno and a man had scurried past her and grabbed her camera right out of her hands. She was still breathless from the altitude, but she chased him down and cornered him in the entrance of a hat shop and, trembling, he handed it back. The second day a gang of bootblacks swarmed her in Plaza Grande and snatched at her handbag. But the strap was solidly over her arm and she pinned the closest boy against a stone bench, breathing in the grease of his hair, till he cried for mercy. That was all in the first week. They knew her now.
“Buenas noches,” she said to the portero, stepping into the noise of the street. She set off up Calle Garcia Moreno, crossing the Plaza, oh, walking. At the station in Peru, the only place to walk was the trail to the yucca field, a hundred yards of snake-infested mud. The streets of the old town were still busy, well-dressed Quito families taking the air, the little girls with their shiny black plaits, the smell of brilliantine. Mountain Quichua draped in wool, the women with their bowler hats and babies tied to their backs—all stared at the tall, fair, robust American woman striding so confidently over the cobblestones. God had made her fair for reasons known only to Him, and He had made her big for wrestling her brothers into obedience. For serving at the Colony of Mercy in New Jersey, where the winos would get into potato-peel moonshine and stagger out into the yard and she’d have to drag them back to their cots. For walking through the jungle settlement where Shapra warriors sat in doorways polishing their rifles and watching her with spiteful eyes. God made her big because He could! A melody formed like a burr in the back of her throat, the words unspooling somewhere deeper. Immortal, invisible, God only wise, in light inaccessible hid from our eyes.
She crossed Plaza Grande, running her tongue over her molars, enjoying the silvery feel of her new fillings. All month she had played the tourist, which of course meant visiting the churches, though she was Quaker-born and Presbyterian-raised, and the incense turned her stomach, the penitents crawling on bleeding knees up the aisles and planting desperate kisses on their idols. But she was something of an expert in stained glass, and never tired of watching the way figures came alive in the light, even if she detested the Papist fetishism, the sallow, languid-eyed saints with iron halos like stovetop lids clamped to their heads, and the popes or whatever they were with the towering, pointed headdresses they wore to make themselves look like gods. Lima had its excesses, but nothing that compared to the obscenity of Quito’s Iglesia de la Compañía de Jesús, where seven tons of gold were smeared onto the walls of a chapel that looked like the inside of a jewel box. She went into it and into every other church within walking distance, and she took a bus up to the Monastery of San Diego with its huge Last Supper painting, in which Jesus is served a roast guinea pig lying on its back like a dog wanting its stomach scratched. Cuy—the artist used it as an obvious ploy to pander to the Indians. Cuy was on the menu at the hotel; the chef served it whole with a hot pepper in its little mouth. American tourists liked to order it and take one tiny bite and carry on noisily, coughing into their napkins, crying out the names of their childhood pets, while Rachel sat alone at a table in the beautiful courtyard and dined on trout and barbecued pork, thanks to the tithes of the faithful at the Presbyterian Church of the Covenant in Milford, Pennsylvania, and to the power of American dollars in a tinpot economy. At home she’d be living on Boston beans, here she was rich. Dreams are tawdry compared with what God offers His loved ones.
She came to Calle Ambato and turned up it and began to climb, breathing hard. A hill like a loaf of bread plunked into the middle of Quito. Casa Sevilla must be on it. She climbed farther and the streets dropped open to view like canyons. The glory of the scene—later she would understand it as her first intimation of the mighty plan God was putting in motion that night with a simple invitation to dinner—the sun sliding effortlessly behind the mountains, spilling its last light on the houses of El High, turning them pink, and Quito spread like a plain of broken pottery below, a window catching the light as if someone was signalling her with a mirror. She stopped to catch her breath and marvel. If they could see me now was in her mind, a habitual thought, although in the three years she’d spent in South America, they had rather paled as a cadre of watchers. She’d floated up, up and away; the bands between her and them had stretched thin and finally snapped. It was just this: her on the cobblestones with her white shawl over her white arms, and the swifts wheeling in their nightly roos
t, the glamour of the evening silvering everything.
WHEN THE MAID ushered her up the stairs, ten or fifteen guests were already out on the rooftop with glasses in their hands, sucking on cigarettes, not émigrés like the Sevillas (or so she judged) but the business class of Quito, older Ecuadorean stock, their features betraying a touch of Indigenous blood. Don Carlos Sevilla was exactly what he must be, a handsome, wiry, white-haired man with a huge moustache. He greeted her warmly, offered her the typical limp handshake, congratulated her on her choice of hotel, and told her that he was from Andalucia himself. “¿De dónde es usted, Señora Saint?” he asked. And where are you from? So, for the first time ever, she had the opportunity to offer up her testimony in Spanish. Her mother, the lovely young heiress. Her father, the impoverished artist. The party seemed entranced, feeding her the Spanish words that eluded her. How do you say life drawing? “La mujer desnuda,” she hazarded—and Don Carlos said, “El dibujo natural.” The torches guttered in the wind, and the stars hummed a few feet above them. But after a bit her listeners began to joke and interrupt, and two men drifted over to the rooftop wall and laughed about something in the street below. Rachel was trying to tell them about raising her brothers, a young girl shouldering an extraordinary burden, and her anger spiked. “Believe you me,” she cried, beginning to improvise, “a willow switch was never far from my hand. I did not spare the rod, and the truth of the proverb was born out, because all five of those boys are walking with the Lord today.”
“All dead?” A woman pressed a hand to her throat in consternation. It was Señora Sevilla, your typical fretful Spanish matron, her dyed black hair pulled into a bun.
“No, no.” Rachel dropped her voice, shocked as always by how little Catholics know of the Scriptures. “Spare the rod and spoil the child—it’s a Biblical proverb. Those boys were not spared, and they have grown up unspoiled.”