by Paul Theroux
He could not bear the glibness of religious people. God spoke to them; they talked back. “God’s testing me.” God arranged everything. It was so easy for them to love life or have hope; they were taking directions from God. Yet how did a person like himself, with no faith, learn to love life? Perhaps by fearing its loss. Going away, as he was doing now—it was another message of Trespassing —was one way of seizing control of your life.
In a meaningless world he had devised ways to give his life meaning. Sensuality was meaningful; desire and the act of creation gave him purpose. The trip he had embarked on now in Ecuador was an expression of hope and, though he hated the word, his quest.
At the church entrances were Indian women, some with bags, others carrying babies—impossible to say whether they were selling something or just begging, but they were rooted there, looking immovable in their importuning. A blind woman whined at him, “No sea malito/” and superstitiously he pressed some money into her hand, making her smile. Black men hollered in Spanish, selling lottery tickets and newspapers. Stylish warmly dressed women slipped out of chauffeur-driven cars and hurried into shops. None of these people looked as though they were affected by the altitude. Steadman and Ava, exchanging an exhausted glance, were breathless and suffocated.
Pausing to rest, for even their plodding pace wore them out, they saw two people from the plane, Wood and Sabra. Wood nodded brusquely and seemed to mutter something to his wife, as if finding this chance meeting just as awkward as they did, for hadn’t Ava promised “We’ll never see them again”? Husband and wife were wearing new Panama hats.
“Janey’s been robbed—her bag ripped right off her arm,” Wood said. That was his greeting, as though he planned to deflect any pleasantries by introducing a note of drama—the theft. “All her credit cards. Her passport. Quite a lot of money. And she’s been in the country—what? Three hours?”
“Maybe that’s some kind of record,” Ava said.
“It was a beggar, a blind woman!”
“Robbed by a ciega. That’s a neat trick.”
“Where was her husband?” Steadman could not remember the husband’s name, and he did not want to say the wrong one because he recalled that the name was ridiculous.
“Hack was actually looking for her,” Sabra said.
As though reproaching Ava for her callousness, Wood said, “Anyway, all her medicine was in the bag, as well as her valuables.”
“I’ll write her una nueva prescripción,” Ava said.
Sabra said, “You speak Spanish.”
“Obstetrical Spanish. Abra sus piernas, por favor,” and she smiled at the woman’s confusion.
She knew she was being offensive—she intended it. She did not like bumping into these people. She had not come all this way to chitchat with tourists. She seemed to enjoy the fact that the big bossy interior decorator with the English accent and the cell phone had been mugged. Not harmed, just taught a useful lesson. Meeting these other travelers from the flight was a shock, though. They had never thought they would see them again, and here they were, two of them on their first excursion from their hotel room.
“You got a hat, too,” Wood said, tugging the brim of his own. “This is at least a grand back in the States. Maybe two grand.”
They parted as clumsily as they had met and, heading for a church shown on the small map in their guidebook, Steadman and Ava took a wrong turn and entered a plaza, which was set up as a market area. Three more passengers from the plane, nameless gringos in newly bought Ecuadorian garb, Indian-made sweaters, one wearing a crisp-brimmed Panama hat like the one he had just bought, were haggling over trinkets at a stall. The sight of these people drove them from the market, and yet they saw others from the plane in the museum and in the Indian market and in the narrow streets of Old Town.
What was the point in coming this distance if all you achieved was that disgusting flight and the company of these timid adventurers? Steadman felt he had so far accomplished nothing. They were stepping over beggars, entering the church of La Merced, their original destination—lots of Todos los Santos activity here, in the shape of reverential women carrying lighted candles or slender flaming tapers.
The large soot-darkened paintings in La Merced depicted soldiers in armor and settlers in flowerpot hats, the history of the country from the Spanish point of view, unintentionally showing plunder and bamboozling priests and grateful baffled Indians. In one painting a blind priest was being led by a young boy acolyte, Jesus smiling down from the heavens. The text under it read:
A los ciegos tit siempre iluminaste,
Testigo el sacerdote que curaste.
“‘You always illuminate the blind—witness the priest who’s cured,’” Ava said, translating. “But it rhymes in the original.”
The tall gold altar was as high as the church ceiling, with tiers of twisted columns, all thick pasty gilt and dazzling gems. A gigantic fatuity, this jewel box, looming among ragged people, some of them prostrate, others on their knees.
“But I had a strange encounter this morning at the hotel,” Ava said. She kept walking, did not look back, slipped into a pew at the side of the church.
Steadman followed her. He sat and listened to her describe how she had taken her clothes off and a man had come from behind and slipped a mask over her face; how he had made love to her; how it had happened in silence—she told Steadman in an even voice, as though confiding to a stranger.
“You liked it,” he said.
“I’ve never done anything like that before,” she said.
He wanted her again, and seeing a masked woman pass up the aisle and drop to her knees, a supplicant at a side chapel, only aroused him more.
The masked woman was praying, her words remorseful and audible: “Perdona nuestras ofensas como también perdonamos a los que nos ofenden—no nos dejes caer en la tentación...”
“Tell me,” he said, his tongue thick with desire.
“All this way.” She spoke in a whispering mystified voice that trailed off. They were near enough to the chapel to feel the heat from the rack of small candles, a hundred flames lighting the jewel-crusted crucifix on the gilded altarpiece. “And all that expense,” she said. “We’re in these mountains, among all this gold and these cross-eyed Indians, and at best we are blindfolded.”
“So what?”
“Did we have to come to Ecuador to find that out?”
“Obviously,” he said.
“That’s not why we came.”
“I forget why we came.”
They left the church and walked some more in the noisy clammy city. They came to a market and hoped to find handicrafts but saw only old-fashioned women’s underwear, piles of men’s shoes, stacks of brown trousers, folded blankets, and Chinese-made cooking pots. All this ordinariness in front of an ancient scribbled-on wall: ¡FUERA GRINGOS! Near the sign was a café, where they were greeted by a cheery woman who welcomed them, Ava saying “Huevos” Steadman felt sick before he had eaten much of his omelet. Ava said the beer she had drunk to quench her thirst made her feel dizzy. Was it the thin air? Steadman asked the waiter to take the beer away.
Throughout the morning walk in Quito he had felt they were getting on well, like an old married couple, but here—at rest, at the café table, dazed by the altitude and the indigestion it seemed to cause—Steadman realized that perhaps this apparent congeniality and easy company was the result of their decision to separate. Once they had said it was over, they had nothing to argue about—they had no future. They could be friends again.
Still, they sat at the café not speaking, not touching. The conversation in the church hung over them, the nagging echoey weight of unanswered phrases.
Rain came again, first like blown grit, then like pebbles tapping and softening in the gusting wind until the sound was more like a lash. Darkened by the weather, they were isolated and lost any desire to see more of the city. Steadman paid the bill and they caught a taxi that was parked near the bus terminal.
When they got in, the taxi driver was effusive, wearing a colorful scarf and a dangly earring. He spoke a sentence that Steadman could not comprehend.
“He says the rain is good luck,” Ava said. “He’s so pleased we are here. He has a friend in New York. Male friend, of course.”
Steadman thought how rainstorms made strange cities familiar, exaggerated and simplified their contours. Yet here the rain did not drain away but puddled and flooded and held up traffic. This sudden downpour enclosed them, blurred the city, gave it a look of homely exoticism, made them need each other again. Now it was just the two of them. The sun might have separated them, but the bad weather brought them close.
Steadman said, “I’m starting to worry about this trip. If I don’t hook up with this guy Nestor I’m screwed. I’m depending on him to get me into the jungle. He’s supposed to be an ethnobotanist. If he doesn’t show, there’s no story.”
Ava sat back in the taxi, drawing away from him, and said, “Oh, so you’re a writer.”
At first Steadman almost laughed and said, What are you saying? Of course I am! But he hesitated, because she was blank-faced, waiting for an answer while the taxi splashed through the flooded gutters, sending up gouts of water. That was the other thing about rain in such a country. It came down mud-colored.
Steadman said, “Yes, I am. And what do you do?”
“I’m a doctor.” She smiled as only a stranger smiles at another stranger, holding the expression in check and yet hopeful.
The taxi driver took an interest. He said, “Quisiera mostrarles cosas fantásticas.”
“He wants to show us some amazing things.”
Steadman whispered, “He’s a sodomite.”
Ava smiled again. She said, “Like me.”
“What’s your name?”
She said, “I’ll tell you upstairs.”
The taxi’s seats were covered in torn leather. Hanks of straw showed through, and the pungency of the straw and the leather stirred him as much as her teasing words.
In the hotel lobby, Ava said, “I’m in three-one-oh-two. Give me a few minutes.” She did not touch him. She turned and was gone.
Steadman liked this change of mood and the way she had given him this information, telling him what he already knew—so brisk and businesslike, as though she were an accomplished sneak, having rehearsed it many times. But he thought, That’s what fantasies are—fantasies are rehearsals.
Liking the taste of the delay, he gave her more time than she had asked for and then went upstairs. She answered the door wearing a hotel robe, but slipped it off when he entered. She was naked. Steadman locked and bolted the door, and when he turned to Ava again she was blindfolded—the sleep mask from the plane—and held another blindfold in her hand.
“Wait.” Steadman was kicking his shoes off, stripping off his shirt. She knew what he was doing. She said, “I don’t care what you wear, as long as you wear this,” and handed him the other blindfold.
In the stumbling game that followed, Ava slipped away from him and then called to him from across the room. Fearful of hurting himself, Steadman got down on all fours and crept toward the sound of her voice, though she went on teasing him. Over here, she said. No, over here. Until he cornered her and took hold of her and kissed her and pressed his face against her softness, sensing her vividly as an odor and a warmth in the darkness of his blindfold. As they kissed, this darkness lifted and became smoldering light. But the act itself came much later, for they struggled, choking in a hallucination of desire, teasing, delaying, relenting, beginning again, two strangers becoming acquaintances, uttering the desperate half-laugh of lust.
The act was not about possessing her but about letting go, each of them doing so in the most private way, as though practicing this release. And they took turns, each one both a suggestion and a dare, as if in using only their lips and their tongues they were saying with mute eloquence, This is what I want.
Later, Steadman was the first to wake, but taking off his blindfold made little difference, for night had fallen. He saw a slash of meager brightness, the dim lights of the city through the curtain. Ava lay asleep, still blindfolded, sprawled between two chairs, embracing herself for warmth. She looked tossed there, her lips parted, her tongue showing, like a cat that has been hit by a car.
He too was lying naked on the floor. There was also a crack of corridor light showing in the threshold, enough light so that Steadman saw that a folded paper, probably a note, had been thrust under the door.
4
BEING WOKEN before dawn was like an intimation of sickness, a set of symptoms: the tremulous fragility of early morning in the high distant city, sniffing the thin, sharpened air in the dim fluorescence of the uncertain light, the rank dust, the muffled voices and humming stillness, his clamped head and crusted eyes. He was reminded that he had said something like this in Trespassing about this very place.
Steadman hated early starts, and downstairs he was jarred by Nestor’s heartiness.
“Ready to rumble?”
When people like this knew American catch phrases, Steadman suspected them of trying to hustle him. Why else would a stranger take such trouble to ingratiate himself? Besides, their knowing such inanities proved that they had habitually associated with shallow boisterous Americans and knew no better.
Ava, used to a doctor’s emergencies, was already up and dressed and lucid.
Nestor was a big confident man, no more than forty, with a beaky face and a mustache and deep-set dark eyes. He wore a heavy leather jacket, which Steadman remarked on. Nestor instantly seemed to know what Steadman was intimating and said, “You won’t need it where we are going.”
Instead of being reassured by Nestor’s excellent English, Steadman was suspicious of his presumption. The man was clearly experienced, but he was impulsive in his movements, even in the way he walked—lunging—and so confident as to be carelessly clumsy.
Five other shadow-shrouded people sat in the back of the van, faceless in the darkness, hunched over in the chill of the early morning. A cassette of Andean flute and panpipe music was whistling in the van’s tape player. They said nothing when Steadman and Ava got into the forward seat. They remained silent—Steadman guessed that they resented having to pick up him and Ava last, giving them more time to sleep. Waiting for them in the porte-cochere of the luxury hotel perhaps annoyed them, too.
“Six hours to Papallacta,” Nestor said. “And then Lago Agrio. We stay in Lago tonight. We will be on the river in the morning. Tomorrow afternoon in the jungle. Anyone mind if I smoke a cigarette?”
“We mind,” came a voice from a back seat, a woman’s voice, like bolt cutters snapping through iron.
Nestor shrugged and unwrapped some chewing gum. He sat next to the driver, whom he announced as Hernán. Hernán was a capable driver, but Steadman disliked being driven except by Ava, who was efficient at the wheel, using her bossy doctor’s manner in traffic, but she drove with caution, never speeded. The other passengers in the van were seated in silence, their heads down. Steadman had assumed, based on the high price they had paid up front, that he and Ava would be alone. But this was like a group trip for budget travelers.
Steadman reminded himself that he would not have been able to accomplish this drug tour single-handedly. They needed Nestor, and Hernán too, probably, for though he had been in Ecuador before, this was different. Even if Steadman had managed to find the village in the jungle, he would not have been able to negotiate the drug ceremony with the Secoya. He needed Nestor as a guide and go-between, but he also resented needing him.
Outside the city, the road widened into what seemed a highway, and after a short distance—though it was impossible to be precise in this darkness—it dropped down to a narrower, winding road. The van swayed on the curves; Hernán drove with his forearms on the wheel. In the deeper valleys it seemed that dawn was receding and night falling all over again. All that was visible was a short stretch of road ahead, rising and fallin
g in the lights of the van, and at the margin of the road deep green sides of a forested valley.
“Like that road in Uganda,” came the bolt-cutter voice from the back, faintly English. “On the way to that gorilla place.”
“Bhutan,” a man said with more certainty. “Bhutan’s got roads like this. To the monastery. That burned down after we saw it.”
“This could be Yucatán,” a woman said.
“You been to Uganda?” Nestor called out. “Supposed to be awesome.”
There were murmurs from the back, though Steadman was thinking that “awesome” was just the sort of word such an Ecuadorian hustler would know. A woman, not the harsh-voiced one, said, “Africa’s finished. We’re never going back. Some people feel sorry for the Africans and their AIDS epidemic, but I despise them for it. I hate them for being so irresponsible.”
Beside him, Ava took a deep breath and released it as a sigh, a slow, barely audible whinny of exasperation.
“Billions of stars,” a man said.
And ghostly moon-glow patches on the dark earth where there were thick, squat huts, with stones weighting the corrugated squares of their rusted roofs. To the south, the eerie brightness of a snowcapped peak, like a bed sheet crumpled on a black rock, just a glimpse that came and went. Strands of clouds, like torn spider webs, fluttered up from the snowfield and then were crushed by the darkness that poured from the depth of the valley.
“Dark matter,” the softer-voiced woman said.
“I don’t get that,” the other woman said.
“Particles,” a man said. “It’s dark energy. What do you think is holding the universe together? Not the stars, that’s for sure. They are, like, this tiny proportion of what’s out there.”
“What else is out there?”
“Dark energy. Quintessence. Gravity mass. It’s a kind of invisible cosmic broth that keeps galaxies in place,” the woman said. She was eating trail mix, stirring it in a bag with her fingers and chewing loudly as she spoke. “Or maybe not particles but overfolded space-time, like a new dimension. A whole different plane of being.”