Five Wives

by Joan Thomas

  And then they were in the dining room, and—

  “Señora Saint,” Don Carlos said, gesturing to the seat to his left. He had written to her as Señorita, but now he’d seen her. In this light his moustache was stained yellow with tobacco. The room itself was narrow and painted the yellow of overripe corn, a colour eschewed by most of the world but dear to the Latin heart, and the guests lounged in their heavy chairs, chattering in quick, intimate tones, laughing and toasting each other with extravagant gestures. It was a terrible faux pas to have launched into her story like that, but every part of her life was so tightly stitched to the next that if you pulled at one live thread, the whole thing unspooled. Now she sat close-mouthed among them, big-haunched and blond, plain, chaste, solitary, her white hands empty of wineglass or cigarette, a ring of jungle feathers on her head, silent but sensing her voice still undulating freely through the smoky air, falling in who-knows-what form on mocking ears. She sat smarting at their indifference, thinking, I opened my heart to them and plucked out its particular treasures and freely handed them around to be ridiculed.

  “Coping all right with the altitude?” said a male voice on her left. In English, imagine! She turned eagerly towards him.

  He was an American, a fellow from the Midwest, but so dark-complexioned that he had not drawn her notice. “Don McGrath,” he said, sticking out his hand. One of those black Irish, she thought. A petroleum engineer for Shell Oil. An American working to bring modernity and prosperity to Ecuador! Rachel made an observation to this effect, and he said, “Well, no, not exactly.” After a huge investment and years of exploration, Shell was pulling out of Ecuador. The field tests hadn’t lived up to promises, and the Arabs were taking over the market. He’d been left behind to sell off company assets in Shell Mera, Coca, and Arajuno.

  Across from them sat an Ecuadorean man with the bulging eyes of a Boston terrier, listening with interest. “No ha terminado,” he said emphatically. It’s not over. He went on to say in Spanish, “Don’t dismantle too much. We’re going to get the oil companies back.” He had a distinct air of authority, as if he spoke on behalf of the government. In fact, as it came out, he was principal secretary to Velasco Ibarra, Ecuador’s previous president. He claimed Ibarra was certain to be re-elected next month, and nobody at the table seemed inclined to dispute this.

  A lovely Indian girl served them fried fish, chunks of beef, yellow rice with bits of grass in it, fried plantain, and hominy corn. Setting into his dinner, Don McGrath insisted in his crude Spanish that Shell was gone for good. It wasn’t just the poor field tests, it was the violent resistance of the Indians in the region. American shareholders could not stomach news bulletins that their engineers had been found in the jungle stuck full of lances like porcupines.

  The man with the bulging eyes just shrugged. “Chevron will invest if we promise military support. We’re already talking.”

  “Well, with all due respect, I wonder where you were through Ibarra’s last term. You left us at the mercy of savages. You could have gone in at the first sign of trouble and strafed their huts.”

  Don Carlos was listening to this conversation with keen enjoyment, as if it was the sort of entertainment he’d hoped to provide. But instead of jumping in, he turned suddenly to Rachel, peering at her through the sprigs of his eyebrows. “So your father was an artist. Do you paint, Señora Saint?”

  “No.”

  “A pity.” He lifted his wine goblet. “I could sit for you. I might even persuade you to do a dibujo natural—you’d be amazed to see my scars.”

  They held each other’s gaze for a minute, and then he smiled (I mean no harm) and began to enumerate his scars for the benefit of the whole party. Lance wounds to his thigh and his shoulder, from an Indian attack on a jungle trail when his carrier had been killed and he had trekked out of the forest alone. Eight days he walked before he reached help, maggots gnawing at his wounds. Then he told them about a canoe expedition into El Oriente, about trying to navigate a bend in the river and being driven close to shore by the current, and the lances suddenly raining down on them. In that attack he gave better than he got; he managed to shoot into the forest, where afterwards they found two bodies. On and on he talked, one adventure leading to the next. His interest in Rachel, his conversation about painting—it was all just a ploy to get to this.

  The beef was absurdly undercooked. With a sideways glance at Don McGrath, Rachel dropped hers deftly onto his plate and he snapped it up. It was hard to get a foothold in this conversation. When it came to Indians and their barbarism, she of course had the Shapras of Peru, who decapitated their enemies and by some devilish process shrank the heads down to tiny doll faces with witchy hair, which they flaunted as badges of their prowess, hanging them in their doorways. It was a story to dine out on, but the woollen tapestries seemed to have blotted up the oxygen, and the stifling air was fouled by smoke from huge brackets of candles and from the infernal cigarettes everybody smoked even as they ate. Don Carlos was talking now about going into a deserted Indian hut, gun loaded and cocked, and finding a life-sized human form carved from balsa. He understood it to be a dummy used for training purposes. The torso was scarred by lance thrusts. A heart had been painted on it in achiote, a red dye.

  “And a white moustache?” Rachel managed to say, and everyone laughed, and the sea of their regard lifted and swept her warmly up. Then she was restored enough to ask the question she’d been wanting to ask all along. “Are these savages the Lowland Quichua?”

  No, no, it’s the Auca, everyone said. You don’t know about our Auca? They live to kill. Don Carlos’s first plantation was in the heart of Auca territory. He worked it for four years, until the day he came home from a trip to Shell Mera and saw pillars of flies where the bodies of his workers lay face down on the fields. His entire workforce (twelve Quichua and two whites at the time) had been slaughtered. Thank God his family was safe in Quito. This was decades ago, but nothing had changed.

  Don Carlos put his fork and knife down and gazed at her with eyes that were at the same time warm and impersonal. “I have been looking at your feather headpiece all night,” he said. “Who gave you this crown, Señora Saint?”

  “A Shapra chief. On the Marañón River, just across the border in Peru.”

  He got up and went to the sideboard and pulled something out of a drawer and carried it to the table. A ring of jungle feathers. “May I?” he asked. He reached for her feathers and lifted them off and placed the two crowns side by side.

  They were almost identical. The same pattern of alternating colours, although the bands of green in Rachel’s were slightly wider.

  “Where did you get yours?” she asked him.

  “I picked it up by the Curaray, the time our canoe was attacked. Took it off one of the Auca men I shot. I’ve never seen another like it.”

  Rachel examined the basketry inside, the way the feathers were tacked onto it. The two crowns could have been made by the same hand.

  “You’ve been working with the Shapras,” said Don Carlos. “Do you speak their tongue?”

  “Passably.”

  “I’ve heard that the different Indian tribes don’t even understand each other. Can this be true?” The word he used for Indian was infieles.

  “The Shapra language is related to the Candoshi. But many of these tribes have no words at all in common with any other. Their languages are what we call isolates.”

  He seemed very struck by this. He took a drink of wine and daubed at the patch of mouth visible between the swags of his moustache. “Well,” he said eventually. “A strange business.”

  The servant they called Joaquina was passing out little dishes of crème caramel. She came to Don Carlos just then and he put a hand on her wrist. “This girl has stories to tell. She’s Quichua, but when she was a child, the Aucas stole her from her home on the Arajuno River. Those devils killed both her parents, but they took her alive. She lived with them in the jungle for a year, until she spied a party of
Quichua fishing on the river and was able to escape.”

  “Did the Auca not attack the Quichua fishers?”

  “No. They allow the Quichua to enter their territory to fish. But white men are always attacked. Always.”

  “What about white women?”

  He laughed. “That hasn’t been tried.”

  Every single thing that happens is from the Lord. The Sevillas were profane, irreverent people, and their hearts were closed up tight and padlocked with the seal of Rome. Yet God used them. They decided to throw a party and He planted a thought: Let’s find an American woman so Don McGrath is not all on his own. Or, Let’s invite that evangélica for dinner, they’re always good for a laugh. And she came, and wore her Shapra feathers, and there on the tablecloth in front of her lay another beautiful, almost identical crown from the forest.

  She had her voice back now and began to question Don Carlos. These people go about naked? They don’t trade in rubber? The priests have never tried to convert them? What about my brother Nate—has he been trying to reach them?

  “How do you convert an infidel if you don’t speak in his tongue?” Don Carlos asked.

  “Does this girl speak the Auca language?” Rachel gestured towards Joaquina, who stood with her hands clasped and her face turned shyly away from them.

  “No, señora, she’s forgotten. She was a tiny girl when she lived among them. But at Hacienda Ila we have an Auca woman who escaped the jungle in 1947. She is fluent in Quichua now, but she has not forgotten her mother tongue. The next time you visit Señor Nate in Shell Mera, you must come to the hacienda. If you know enough Quichua to converse with her, Dayuma will teach you all about the Auca.”

  10

  HER STORY WOULD HAVE MADE a splendid children’s book, as people often said at the fundraising events she held along the Eastern Seaboard one long winter before she went to the mission field. They compared it to The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, a book she herself had adored in childhood, and the similarities only grew with the telling. Poverty and piety are an irresistible combination.

  I was born in Pennsylvania, the third child in a family of eight. Sam. Phil. Dan. Dave. Steve. Nate. Ben. Seven boys and me the only girl. My mother was from a Quaker family named Proctor. This is a name that, as you know, means great wealth in America, and my mother was educated at Wellesley. She was a famous beauty whose many suitors included the poet Ezra Pound and the novelist Ralph Connor. But to her family’s dismay, she fell in love with an artist. He was pious, but he was penniless and her parents disowned her. That red-bearded artist was my father, Laurence Saint. He was awarded a scholarship to study art in Paris—a wonderful honour that he declined because the studio would have required him to paint and sculpt nude models. So it was his moral fibre that barred him from a conventional career as an artist.

  Instead, he was inspired to turn to stained glass, the art that most speaks of the glory of God. Early on, he vowed to use the classical methods in his glass work. This required a great deal of research, for many of the ancient formulae had been lost, and every penny my father earned was spent on study trips to Europe. My mother accompanied him, as she was needed to translate documents from the French and the Italian—and so we saw God’s purpose in educating her as he had.

  An immense sacrifice was required of the whole family. My two older brothers were taken out of school and sent to work, and I was the one who raised the five little boys. I was only a girl myself, and while my father and mother toured the grand cathedrals of Europe, I became mother and father both to that mischievous gang. We lived on peanuts, I always tell people, and they think I’m joking, but in fact many times our pantry was bare but for the sacks of nuts my brothers took in trade for performing odd jobs. The role I was asked to assume would have quelled many young ladies, but God gave me strength, and today all those boys are following the paths of righteousness. Two besides myself are missionaries in South America: Phillip, who serves God in Venezuela, and Nate, a missionary pilot who works out of Shell Mera, Ecuador.

  As for my father, his obedience to the will of God was one day rewarded. Back in America, his research completed, he was riding on a train when a stranger was drawn to him by the beauty of his face. “You resemble portraits of Jesus,” the stranger said. “In fact, the Lord Jesus Christ is my Master,” my father said, and went on to tell the man about his sacred vocation. As it happened, that stranger was a wealthy businessman in charge of the construction of the Washington Cathedral. From that providential encounter, my father was commissioned to create the cathedral windows, and I had the honour of posing as a model for one of them. One day a wealthy widow named Mrs. Parmalee happened to see my window, and was so affected by it that she sought me out and invited me to be her companion for a grand tour of Europe. Her husband had made a vast fortune in the horse-drawn carriage trade in Boston. This was 1932, and by the intervention of providence their money had not been lost, neither when the automobile took over the trade nor in the Great Crash.

  It is a trip I shall never forget. We had first-class passage on the RMS Aquitania. A suite in the Savoy Hotel in London. We visited all the greatest monuments and museums, often guided by distinguished scholars, because Mrs. Parmalee was known in society. We had hoped to tour the Continent, but Mrs. Parmalee fell ill and we were obliged to sail for home earlier than expected. On the last night out, Mrs. Parmalee called me to her stateroom and said, “Miss Saint, I make no secret of the fact that I like the cut of your jib. Will you consent to live with me in Boston?” She promised that if I would sign on as her companion, she would have legal papers drawn up the minute we landed in New York, naming me her only heir.

  As you can imagine, this invitation knocked me for a loop, and I spent a wakeful night seeking the will of the Lord. In the early hours I was moved to go up to the deck. I stood in the prow of the ship, wrapped in a warm cloak and with my hair loose on my shoulders, the opulence of wealth behind me and in front of me only moving darkness. There I watched for dawn—but it was in the west that I saw a pale light grow. Not the eastern flank of my own country, as you might imagine, not the Statue of Liberty. It was the light of the jungle. There, against the black sea, I saw a tangle of vines and palm trees, and under it a group of brown people, naked, with long black hair. And they turned imploring faces towards me, and raised their hands to signal me. “Come and help us,” they called.

  An hour later, I sat across from Mrs. Parmalee at the breakfast table and said, “Ma’am, I appreciate the great honour you have offered me, but I have had a higher calling.”

  SO, EVENTUALLY, PERU, and a Shapra settlement on the mucky bank of the Marañón River. Which perfectly fit the bill, as to vines and palm trees and needy brown-skinned people.

  She left Quito in early morning after the Sevilla party and made the onerous return to Peru. By the time she’d struggled up the riverbank to the Shapra settlement, her legs were cramping from three hours in a small plane and eight hours in a dugout canoe. The whole village streamed out to meet her, the children grabbing at her skirt, eager to see what she’d brought back from Ecuador. But her partners Loretta and Doris were nowhere to be seen. “They’re in the house with José María,” one of the children said. José María was their language informant, not the brightest candle in the box but the only youth they’d found willing to sit at their folding table for the equivalent of twenty-five cents a day and watch while they made marks on paper. He was their sole convert to date, unless you counted the chief, Tariri, the one who gave Rachel the feather crown, and by then she didn’t.

  She climbed up to the house, the porters trailing after her, and there sat José María with his head hanging down. Wearing his shoes (which, as they were strictly ornamental, signalled this as an occasion) and clutching a fistful of dirty bills. Loretta with her fiercest face and Doris all droopy and dispirited. “It’s a year since his mother died. He tried to buy a Mass, but the priest said he didn’t have enough money. So he came to us. He’s begging for a dis
count rate to get her out of purgatory.”

  José María—his name alone illustrated how bedevilled these people had been by the priests. Rachel walked the settlement as the sun dropped beneath the canopy. It was a single trail that wound between palm huts and the racks for drying tapir skins. She passed by Chief Tariri’s hut, as squalid as the rest, although larger. He would be inside, glowering from his hammock. Such an unpleasant little man. How long will he be your chief? she’d more than once asked the people. There was some nonsense about a boa that had put its lips to Tariri’s and passed him something on its forked tongue—a shiny pebble, which he swallowed, and still carried. The arotama, they called it. He would be their chief forever.

  The Shapras of Peru had lived with rubber traders and oilmen for three generations, but they clung to their superstitions. More to the point, they had lived with priests. She passed by the shrine, a plaster god in human form writhing on a wooden cross, blood oozing from the heart painted on its chest, its face lewd, its eyes rolled upwards. She passed by fires where people sat, finishing up the evening meal. Some ignored her, others greeted her elaborately, bowing and scraping—another form of begging, she had long ago decided. A few actually crossed themselves at the sight of her. And she thought of her vision on the deck of the Aquitania, the brown-skinned people calling, Come and help us. Once, when she told her story, someone said, “They spoke English?” “They spoke the language of the spirit,” Rachel had replied. “It’s a universal language.”

  She had got it wrong, she thought as she came to the end of the path and turned to go back. The Shapras of the Marañón River did not speak the language of the spirit, at least not to her. They weren’t even naked. They wore torn T-shirts and filthy jeans. Shapeless cotton skirts and sometimes Maidenform bras in lieu of blouses.