Blinding Light

by Paul Theroux

  Manfred fingered the leaves of the bush and said, “This is Datura Brugmansia. Is a separate genus now. A strong hallucinogen. Maybe containing the entheogen maikua. You call this borrachero?”

  “Some people do.”

  “Is a solanaceous genus,” Manfred said, hobbling his plant book, clawing at the tissuey pages with his sticky fingers.

  Steadman was listening closely, fascinated by Manfred’s dirty fingernails and his erudition; but Ava had turned away. “Why did we stop here?” she asked.

  “Lunch. Then baños. Use the hot springs, then we go,” Nestor said.

  The hot springs’ enclosure lay on a hillside, where there were terraces and stone steps, a shed that served as a changing room, and a shelter where an old leathery-faced woman in braids dispensed clean towels. The succession of pools set into the slope were linked by troughs and sluices down which steaming water ran. The pools at the top, near the source of the hot springs, were very hot—bubbling, perhaps boiling—and all of them were empty. Steadman put his hand into one and scalded his fingers. The larger, lukewarm pools were just below, surrounded by reeds, the water tumbling into them over a moss-covered spillway.

  By the time Steadman and Ava had changed, the Hacklers and the Wilmutts were already sitting in the largest pool, up to their chins in the water, their heads wreathed in vapor.

  “Plenty of room for you guys,” Wood said.

  “Ain’t half hot!” Janey called out.

  Steadman and Ava stepped into the steaming water and slipped down, seating themselves on the stone shelf, until only their heads were visible in the vapor. Four other heads watched them from the far side of the pool. A sulfurous odor hung in the mist over the bubbly gray water.

  “Where’s our German friend and his big book?” Hack said.

  Janey cursed her phone and tapped the keypad irritably.

  “I was promised roaming here.”

  Steadman noticed that a copy of Trespassing— it had to have been Sabra’s, she carried it everywhere—lay on the wall next to the pool.

  “How sweet it is,” Wood said, thrashing like a child.

  “The man of leisure,” Hack said.

  “I wish,” Wood said. “I want to do another book.”

  “You’re really a writer?” Ava said. She hadn’t meant to say anything, but she was so surprised by “I want to do another book,” it slipped out. She became self-conscious. “You mentioned your company?”

  “One of my companies.”

  “He buys companies,” Hack said.

  “Writer, book packager, pretty much the same thing.”

  Steadman just stared at the man who was stirring the tip of his stubbly chin in the steaming water.

  “The Heights of Fame— that’s mine,” Wood said. “One of mine.” “Full disclosure, the only one,” Hack said.

  “One of those is all you need,” Wood said.

  Ava smiled in surprise, for she had actually heard of the book—was it a book? Ava remembered it as a chart. She wondered if perhaps someone had given them a copy as a present—for a long time it was a gift item. It was regarded as a publishing phenomenon, widely publicized, reprinted many times, and unexpectedly and hugely profitable.

  Wood said, “It was a great idea, but the worst part for me was its simplicity. So everyone copied it.”

  The idea had occurred to him, he said, while he had been reading a biography of Joseph Conrad. Conrad’s height was given as just five feet.

  “I had thought of Conrad as a giant—bearded, broad-shouldered, a big Polack sea captain. He was tiny!”

  Wood read more biographies, he said, looking for the one fact. Diminutive writers seemed to be the rule. Alexander Pope had been four six; Lawrence Durrell gave his height as five four, but in fact he was just a little over five feet tall. Wood searched further. Keats had been five feet tall, Balzac five one, T. E. Lawrence five five—the same height as Marilyn Monroe. Dylan Thomas was five six, Thoreau five seven, and Robert Louis Stevenson five ten.

  Wood said, “Melville was a munchkin! Henry James was a dwarf! Faulkner was a peewee! Melville was just over five feet. You think of him as a powerful whaler, wielding a harpoon, but no, he was a borderline midget, like most other writers.”

  Ava said, “Thomas Wolfe wasn’t a midget.”

  “He’s on the chart. He was six four.”

  Now she remembered: a foldout chart was included in the book. It was in the form of an enhanced tape measure, giving the name and height of each writer mentioned. This was to be tacked to a wall, and there was room on the elongated chart for you to write your own names on it. So your mother might be as tall as Conrad, your child the size of Alexander Pope, your basketball-playing nephew the physical equal of Thomas Wolfe.

  “Graham Greene and George Orwell were both way over six feet,” Wood said.

  “Listen, want to hear something totally awesome?” Hack said to the others. Then he spoke to Wood in the tone of a quizmaster: “Edgar Allan Poe?”

  “Five eight,” Wood said.

  “Marquis de Sade?”

  “Five three.”

  Ava said, “William Burroughs.”

  “Five foot eleven and a half.”

  “Just your size,” Ava said to Steadman, and Steadman smiled, for she knew that it was Burroughs’s book that had started him thinking about this journey.

  “Ever read The Yage Letters?” Ava asked Wood.

  “Never heard of it. Who wrote it?”

  “A man who came here once,” Ava said.

  As she spoke, Nestor appeared. He said, “He didn’t come here. He was in Colombia, on the Putumayo. But it was still Amazonia and the quest was the same. Not a tour, though. Now we go.”

  Emerging from the steaming pool, they were chilled by the late-afternoon air and felt tired and stewed from sitting in the hot water. Drying themselves, they saw Manfred at the top of the slope. He always seemed to appear out of nowhere, as though dropping from an invisible line, like a pendulous insect. He was entirely naked and unembarrassed, thrashing himself with a loose towel, pink-fleshed from the scalding water, the hair on his head spiky and damp, his penis slack and swinging as he descended from stone to stone. He was wearing earphones and carrying a Walkman in one hand and had a small spray of flowers pinched in the fingers of his free hand, and he was smiling.

  “Is a bromeliad!”—shouting because of the earphones.

  Nestor said, “Next stop, Lago Agrio.”

  “How many kilometers until Lago Agrio?”

  “I will tell you later,” Nestor said.

  “How many kilometers until ‘later’?” Hack demanded.

  5

  THE FIRST INDICATION that they were nearing the town of Lago Agrio was a succession of signs, most of them lettered Prohibido el Paso, some of them showing a grinning stenciled skull, like a Halloween mask, and the single forbidding word Peligro.

  “What’s that supposed to be?” Wood asked in the darkness of the van.

  “Calavera,” Hernán said. “Eskell.”

  It was after midnight when they entered the empty streets, lurid in the glare of small orangy light bulbs, traveling first on a bumpy road and then the uneven pavement of the main street, flanked by the same ocherous shadows. All the shops were shuttered and dark. Only a handful of shadow-faced people lurked by pillars in the arcades, where some open fires were glowing, cut off oil drums serving as braziers. Ava and Steadman were first off the bus, and even in the semidarkness, smelling dampness, ant-chewed wood, moistened dirt, dog shit, rusty pipes, and the smutty smoke from the braziers, they sensed the town was ugly—not old but hastily built, a kind of blight in the jungle, a sudden wasteland of dead trees, a slum smelling of blackened pots and stale bread and frying and decay. Another stink in the air was subtly toxic, the sour-creamy tang of fuel oil.

  “It’s sensationally scruffy,” Janey said in a tone of gloating satisfaction. Then she yawned. “Promise you will tuck me in, darling? I am so knackered.”

 
Off the main road, down an alley, within a narrow courtyard that looked fortified by its high walls, the Hotel Colombiana lay in darkness. Hernán backed the van into the courtyard, stopping and starting.

  “Wouldn’t it be simpler just to park the van on the street?” Sabra said.

  “Then the van would not be here tomorrow,” Nestor said. “We are less than twenty miles from the Colombia border. You know the FARC? Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia? They will take the van. They will take you.”

  As he spoke, he worked, catching the bags that Hernán passed to him and stacking them beside the van.

  “You mean kidnap?” Sabra said.

  “They are too busy for that. They outsource the kidnapping,” Nestor said, and looked smug using the word “outsource” as he labored with the bags.

  “So who does it?”

  “Children kidnap you and then sell you to the FARC or anyone who will continue the ransom procedure.”

  “Charming,” Janey said.

  “What kind of kids would do that?” Hack asked.

  “Hungry kids, with guns,” Nestor said, and headed for the hotel office. “I will give you room keys.”

  The others complained about the hotel and were so aggrieved by Nestor’s warnings that Steadman and Ava made a point of praising the place. They drank gin-and-lime in their hotel room, hearing distant voices, screeching women, roaring men.

  While Ava sat facing the window and the wall of the hotel garden, which was fragrant with night-blooming jasmine, Steadman walked behind her and put a blindfold over her eyes.

  They went on drinking, Steadman carefully filling Ava’s glass, but she said, “It’s not working.”

  Steadman said nothing. Perhaps she was tired. Was the whole blindfold business a self-deceiving gimmick, or was it a step too far? He resisted giving it a name. Surely such intensity could not be blunted after one day. Steadman put tonight’s failure down to the fact that they had spent all that time together in the van. Being so close for so long, elbow to elbow, had tired him and killed his desire. Hers too, it seemed.

  They felt awkward climbing into the same bed, clinging briefly though not kissing. And then they were asleep.

  They were woken at seven—the jangling phone, Nestor summoning them to the café at the front of the hotel, where coffee, fruit, and bread were being set out on a table by Hernán. The others yawned and muttered, sounding irritated and weary. The morning was already hot enough to melt the butter in its sticky dish, and the humidity glowed on the faces of the travelers. The low hideous town was loud with traffic and scurrying people and hawkers, with new and sharper stinks and monotonous music.

  “Anyone get kidnapped last night?” Hack said, peeling a banana.

  “Hack, you are awful,” Janey said, smiling in encouragement.

  Nestor said, “Something stranger than that, my friends. Near here is the San Miguel Bridge to Colombia, at La Punta, the frontier. They call it Farafan. Early this morning, some people going across the bridge in their cars were stopped by the FARC soldiers at gunpoint. The soldiers gave them a choice. ‘Set your car on fire or we will shoot you.’ Twenty-two cars were burned on the bridge. Just here.”

  “That was this morning?” Sabra said, sounding terrified.

  “It’s okay, Beetle,” Wood said, and hugged his wife. With angry emphasis, he said to Nestor, “What is the point of that?”

  Nestor said, “Maybe they don’t want people using the bridge, or maybe it’s a protest against the hit squads here. Or maybe you should ask Tiro Fijo.”

  “Who’s that?”

  Hernán said, “‘Sure Shot,’ the big man of the FARC.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Sabra said. She was squeezing her copy of Trespassing in anxious fingers.

  “I think he’s just winding us up,” Janey said. “All I see in this grotty little town are nig-nogs in market stalls trying to sell us wickerwork.”

  Wood said, “Are we going to be leaving here in a timely fashion?” “After we go shopping. We need food for the jungle,” Nestor said. “There’s not much gringo food down the river. Ah, here is the estranjero.”

  Manfred appeared, walking into the café from the direction of the Hotel Colombiana passageway.

  The others, expecting someone new, looked up with disappointment. Manfred was in jungle gear, which made him seem darker and more predatory, his shirt tucked in and sweat-stained, his thick thighs tight in his trousers. He looked hot and uncomfortable, bug-eyed and blinking, his mouth open, breathing hard as he smiled and muttered at the rest of the people. He then seemed to take possession of the table, snatching at fruit, twisting bread in his fingers.

  “You hear about the kidnappings?” Wood asked.

  Manfred said, “Of course. Everybody knows. They enjoy kidnapping the oil people. This was all rain forest until the oil companies came. Texaco and Occidental cleared it. Now it’s drugs, putas, gun sellers, and oil pipelines. High toxicity. Criminals. You blame the people here for hating gringos?”

  “So what are you doing here then?”

  Manfred became serious and said, “I am on a quest, like you.”

  “We’re not on a fucking quest,” Hack said.

  “No need for effing and blinding,” Janey said.

  As a way of indicating that she was not interested in this abrasive back-and-forth, and loud enough for everyone to hear, in the manner of an announcement, Ava said to Steadman, “Let’s look around town, shall we?” She glanced at Janey and added, “I want to see those nig-nogs and the wickerwork.”

  “Meet back here at noon,” Nestor said. “Hernán will go with you. If you get lost, ask for the Colombiana.”

  “I’m staying right here,” Sabra said. She opened Trespassing and lifted it to her face, as though to keep the world away.

  Hernán led Ava and Steadman down a side street, explaining the stalls, some selling tapes and CDs—the music blaring—and others selling sneakers and sports jerseys and cheap clothes. Beyond the stalls were small shops, bars, and garages. The curio shops were stocked with blowguns of various lengths and darts, bows and iron-tipped arrows, crude knives, beaded belts, and woven baskets. Lining the walls were medicinal herbs in fat dusty burlap sacks.

  “You want something special?” Hernán asked Steadman, and winked at a man in a curio shop.

  The man took a long soot-blackened blowgun and inserted a dart into its tube and with bulging cheeks ostentatiously blew the dart into the ceiling of the shop. Then he led them past the sacks and more blowguns, behind a partition, saying “ Tigre, tigre” and showed them a jaguar pelt and a jaguar skull with sharp gleaming teeth. The man spoke eagerly to Hernán.

  “He will give you a good price.”

  Tigre!

  Steadman looked at the empty eye sockets of the jaguar skull. The thing had long fangs among its sharp teeth, but the hollows where its eyes had been made it the pathetic parched shell of a small blind monster. On the table were dishes of animal teeth, feathers, quills, and patches of fur. He picked up an even smaller skull, the size of a baseball.

  “Look, a little baby,” Steadman said.

  “Baby monkey,” Ava said.

  Seeing Steadman’s interest, the man pressed the small skull into Steadman’s hand and said, “Mono. Ees mankee. En peligro de extinción!” He flashed his fingers at him, saying “Cinco”

  “Who kills these animals?” Steadman asked.

  “Hungry people,” Hernán said. “Them too. En peligro de extinción también

  In a glossy box, propped on hatpins, was a large, hairy-legged, popeyed spider.

  “Tarántula!” the man said. He handed the box to Steadman.

  Holding it up, Steadman looked hard at it. The creature that had seemed a horror in its box was, up close, a figure of sorrow. He marveled at its symmetry, its long jointed legs, its shiny bristles. But for all its complexity it was just another empty shell, like the animal skulls, a black thing crucified on the pins.

  “Take. Cómpra
la/”

  “I want a live one,” Steadman said.

  “A live one will kill you,” Hernán said.

  Now the shop owner was holding a dead bat, and he shook it in Steadman’s face, calling out prices as Steadman backed away toward the door.

  Outside, at the sidewalk table of a café, a teenage girl in a tight skirt and frilly blouse sipped a drink. When Steadman glanced at her, she stared at him and smiled, following him with her eyes. Steadman smiled back and greeted her.

  “I think you’ve just made a friend,” Ava said. “Chingada”

  “So funny to hear a woman say this word,” Hernán said.

  “What word do you say?”

  “We say chingada. We say puta. We say”—he giggled— “tiradora. Culeadora. We say araña. We say many things.”

  “Lots of words for them.”

  “Because lots of them in Lago Agrio,” Hernán said. “Personas aprovechadas”

  “I heard some clicking up and down the street last night,” Ava said.

  “Day and night,” Hernán said. “The ones on the street are old and—how you say— muy fea? Agli. Most are at the burdeles"

  “What time do the burdeles open?” Steadman asked.

  “Los prostíbulos están siempre abiertos"

  Steadman glanced at his watch. “It’s nine in the morning. The whorehouses are open now?”

  Hernán shrugged, and casually reaching toward the busy street and making a gesture with his fingers, he stepped back as a taxi drew to the curb. He said nothing more to them. Taking charge, he opened the rear door, and after Ava and Steadman got inside, he slid into the front seat. He muttered a word to the driver, “Pantera,” and they were off.

  Within minutes they were going slowly on a bumpy back road, the tires thumping large loose rocks. It was more like a dry creekbed than a road, and as it narrowed it steepened. They climbed a low hill, where at its brow they were struck by the hard glare of the morning sun, and passed a neighborhood of shacks and dogs and snotty-faced children. Descending the hill, their taxi had to stop to let a large foul-smelling truck go by.

  “Cargo of meat,” Hernán said, and looking back they saw carcasses and sides of beef swinging from hooks in the ceiling of the blood-splashed interior, and clouds of flies following.