Blinding Light

by Paul Theroux

  More shacks, more children, and a short distance beyond this little slum the car stopped before a yellow-walled building. It was solid, made of cement, one story, with a big black cat crudely drawn on the wall and a painted sign: La Pantera.

  Hernán led them through the door, toward the music, which was loud and Latin with a pulsing beat of drums. The sound of syncopation filled the large room but competed with other sounds, low animal wails of complaint, an agonizing mooing. The strange, seemingly empty room was the size and shape of a dance hall, with a high ceiling, which was the tin roof of the building. The wide floor was like that in a dance hall, but no one was dancing. Only the music and that horrible mooing filled it. The middle, which could have been the dance floor, was littered with tipped-over chairs and some empty tables and made of cement—a boy was slapping at it with a dirty mop and dragging a bucket.

  At first glance the place made no sense—a big hollow noisy space, the music, the animal howl, the clutter, the boy with the mop. Looking harder, Steadman saw activity at the margins, groups of men seated in chairs drinking beer from bottles, scraps of bright color that were the costumes of women, some standing, some seated, at the doorways—a door every six feet or so, around the entire perimeter of the dance floor. Of the fifty or so doors, there were women at most of the thresholds. The women wore bathing suits, most of them were smoking cigarettes, and they seemed demure, patient, passive, and vaguely attentive, as though waiting for a bus that was overdue.

  Most of the women sat alone, but near two or three of them were clusters of men. The men sat talking together, their elbows on the tables. Steadman saw that the men were old and tough-looking, and in each case the woman nearby was hardly a woman but rather a girl, sixteen at most, looking watchful.

  “Hola” Ava said to one of the young girls, walking past the men. The men pretended not to be interested in or shocked by the tall lighthaired woman and the man in the Panama hat behind her approaching the slender prostitute, who stood up like a schoolgirl, showing politeness.

  “Cuál es su nombre?”

  “Soy Carmen. Mi apodo es Mosca’’

  She seemed shy and was so soft-voiced Ava could not understand her.

  “ Vive usted aquí?”

  “No. Vivo en Lago Agrio”

  “De dónde es usted?” Ava asked.

  “Guayaquil,” the girl whispered, and entered the cubicle.

  Ava followed her inside, and Steadman joined them, and there was so little room in the cubicle that the girl sat on the edge of the bed, which was just a mattress covered with a stained sheet, the two visitors towering over her, their elbows against the walls.

  “Cuánto vale esto?” Steadman said.

  The girl clasped her hands. She looked so awkward in her bathing suit and thick-soled shoes. She said softly, “Dos personas juntas?”

  “You’re scaring her,” Ava said, and as she spoke she heard the men outside hoarsely conjecturing.

  “I’m just wondering,” he said.

  The girl said, “Por mí, normal—solamente normal aquí. Cinco dólares. Pero, número trece, número catorce” —and she gestured to the wall, meaning the cubicles that way— “por allí” —and she became vague, and hesitated. She shrugged. “Otras cosas”

  But Ava had been right: Steadman saw a look of fear on the girl’s face, something in the way her mouth was drawn sideways, a brightness in her eyes that was terror. He wanted to leave and he wanted to calm her. He gave her a twenty-dollar bill and motioned to Ava to leave.

  The men gaped as Ava and Steadman left, and one of them—the oldest, the drunkest, grizzled and wearing a baseball hat—swaggered to the door, and before the young girl could step out he squeezed her face in his dirty hand and pushed her inside. She sat down on the bed and wrung her hands as the man kicked the door shut.

  Hernán had hung back as Ava and Steadman went forward, passing the other groups of men, the single seated women, and toward the far end of the row of cubicles, all of which were numbered—a cot and a mirror and a small cluttered table were visible through each door. The women here were older, potbellied, with slack breasts, pathetic, even ridiculous in bathing suits. They did not look depraved, they looked sullen and badly fed. The music rang against the tin roof and this end of the brothel had a bad smell.

  The old black woman in the last cubicle wore a tutu and high-heeled shoes and a pink turban and sunglasses. As they approached, her phlegmatic expression became alert and attentive. She frowned when Steadman met her gaze, but realizing that her head did not follow him, he motioned silently, an onward gesture with his hand. Just then, the racket of harsh wailing beyond the window became shrill, like an animal fighting confinement.

  “Number fourteen,” Ava said. “Other things.”

  The staring woman in the pink turban heard her and said, “Soy Araña!’

  They kept walking past her, past the partition to the window, where that agonized wailing was louder. Steadman looked down and saw a gutter running crimson, bubbling where it was slowed, frothing over the sides, into the dust—a stream of blood outside thickening the soil, losing its redness, making the mud blacker.

  Through one of the grimy and blood-smeared windows of the large building just behind the brothel, Steadman saw a blindfolded cow being electrocuted, howling and collapsing on twisted legs as the electrodes of a black clamp were fixed to its head, the cow shitting in fear, expelling great dark muffins of dung. Another window showed a scene of butchery, two men hacking at a bloody animal carcass on a stone slab, and other windows gave onto sides of meat on hooks, men skinning cows, tearing carpets of hairy hide from fatty flesh, knives and cleavers flashing.

  “Is the abattoir,” Hernán said, laughing at the absurdity of a slaughterhouse next to the whorehouse, the smells and noises mingled. “You want to see Las Flores. Is another burdel, but not so nice.”

  Some people began to dance on the floor that was still wet from the boy’s mopping. But Ava and Steadman could not hear the music anymore, only the sounds of cows being slaughtered and the hacking of cleavers on slabs, the chucking sound of steel blades against thick bone and raw meat. Ava and Steadman backed away.

  In the distance they saw Manfred in a stained T-shirt and sweat-plastered hair, watching them. He was carrying his beat-up bag, the weight of the big book showing in it. He turned and walked quickly past one of the girls, into her cubicle. She placed her cigarette in an ashtray beside her chair and followed him.

  The black woman who called herself Araña was still sitting outside her cubicle. She cocked her head; her sullen look left her. She stood up and mocked them and, doing a little dance, spun slowly, wagging her bum at them, plucking at her buttocks.

  “Buenos días. Que desean?” she said. And then, spittle forming on her lips, she said, “Sodomita” making the word like the name of a delicacy. She leaned toward them, but they had taken a few steps, so her head was canted wrong: her sunglasses faced in the direction of the slaughterhouse, where they had lingered and talked.

  Ava said softly, “She’s blind.”

  Araña beckoned. She opened her toothless mouth and stuck out her tongue and wagged the long pink thing at them. Then she laughed hard, louder than the dying animals. And she clutched herself and repeated the word: “Sodomita”

  “Lo siento” Steadman said to her, and Ava murmured to Hernán, “No comprendo lo que dice.”

  Araña laughed and Hernán translated her shout: “‘But why? Because you’re not interested in this culeadora?'”

  She went on shouting, and when Steadman nodded, Hernán continued to translate, but slowly, softly, with reluctance, as Steadman stared at the woman. She removed her dark glasses. Her eyes were pitted and scarred, with welts like burn tissue, a pair of wounds.

  “What is reflejo?” Ava asked.

  But Hernán was trying to catch up with the woman’s shouts. “‘You are not looking at me, you’re looking at yourself,”’ he said. “‘Don’t be so proud. I am you! Your reflection!
”’ She plucked at her flesh, her breasts, did a little dance, and she laughed again, sticking out her pink tongue. “‘Take a good look. I am your mirror. You are me—the same. You are Araña.’”

  Sensing that Steadman and Ava had turned, that Hernán was following them, still talking as they walked away, the woman pursed her lips and spat at them.

  “Fak yo!”

  “I got that,” Ava said.

  On the way out they heard metal chairs clatter to the cement floor and saw some men fighting, two big men hauling the arms of the grizzled man who had swaggered into the young girl’s cubicle earlier. The old man shouted and kicked at the bouncers as they dragged him outside. When that noise died down they heard another shouting match: Manfred arguing with a man and one of the prostitutes, as though haggling over the price.

  Hernán went over to Manfred and spoke to him. The German shrugged and, seeing Ava and Steadman, spoke to them.

  “They try to cheat me. I want to leave. I want to go into the chungle.”

  Hernán tapped his watch. “ Vámonos.”

  Over lunch at the café, Nestor said, “We eat, then we go.”

  “Any pork in this?” Sabra asked, using her fork to indicate the sausage in her soup bowl, but not touching the meat with the tines.

  Wood said, “Porco?”

  “Puerco. Cerdo. Sí, all pork,” Nestor said. With a wink he added, “And a little bit perro”

  Sabra peeled a hard-boiled egg, prying pieces of the shell with her long nails.

  The rest of them ate impatiently, hardly speaking, but self-conscious in the silence, Janey said, “Oh, super. Elevenses.”

  Manfred reached for the dish of hard-boiled eggs and slipped three into his jacket pocket.

  “I wonder if we get afters,” Janey said. “Any pud? What about biscuits?”

  Reaching again, Manfred began to tug at a covered dish, and when he got it nearer he lifted the lid with one dirty finger and exposed a bright crust.

  “Crikey. There is pudding!”

  “Llapingachos’’ Nestor said. “Pancakes.”

  “And a cuppa char would go down an absolute treat.”

  “Special Ecuador coffee,” Nestor said.

  “Look, Hack,” Janey said as the coffee was served. “Just a manky little packet of instant.”

  Then they were all in the van again, with the boxes of food and stacks of luggage blocking the view out the back window. They were driven very fast down a narrow road fringed by tall grass and yellowish trees. At a settlement of shacks and shops—“Chiritza,” Nestor said—they were shepherded to a riverbank and down a wooden walkway to a waiting canoe. Steadman sketched it quickly in his notebook, for it was less a canoe than an enormous tree trunk that had been hollowed out, its ends blunted, an outboard motor clamped to the stern. The travelers sat on the benches that had been lashed to it, and they watched as mud-splashed boys labored back and forth on the walkway with the luggage and food boxes.

  While the lines were being unclipped from the mooring posts and coiled, Nestor knelt and reached into a bag. He took out some hanks of cloth and said, “Where we are going must remain secret. Please put these over your eyes.”

  6

  THESE NEW BLINDFOLDS on the river made them fearful and garrulous, seeking reassurance, their yakking a frantic signal, like bat-squeal. In places, the river made odd swallowing sounds. Birds jeered at them from high branches, insects strummed and chattered, the heat and moist air left a film of damp scum on their skin and thickened their hair. Ill at ease, trying to imagine the scenes they were passing on the jungle stream, they went on talking, interrupting the birds and insects, interrupting one another. After a while they ceased to sound like bats, but instead squawked like anxious children, praising what they could not see, as though infantilized by the blindfolds, attempting to propitiate the river’s menace.

  “This is awesome,” Wood said.

  “Sweet,” Hack said.

  In a timid voice tinged with nausea Sabra said, “Like I’m traveling into some enchanted cave.”

  “As the bishop said to the actress,” Janey said.

  “Hernán is so shredding this river,” Hack said.

  Keeping his head down, Steadman lifted his mask with one thumb and was briefly blinded. He saw a rusted sign on the muddy riverbank, Prohibido el Paso, and let the mask drop over his eyes once more.

  Hack said uncertainly, “This isn’t that bad. Remember that smelly cave system in Mexico where we went diving? Santo something?”

  “And the most awesome thing about it is the, like, smell of the darkness. Like you’re in a tunnel.”

  “That is a veever bird,” Manfred said.

  As though Manfred’s utterance were a cue, Janey said, “Jolly super.”

  The air on this part of the upper river was clammy, intimidating, and felt full of looming shapes. Some of these shapes seemed soaked in the fetid stink of fear, the musty forest-hum of an old corpse softening to the sludge of vegetable mulch. The bad smell silenced them like an overwhelming noise. And then Sabra spoke in an earnest voice.

  “I think you’re wrong—we are on a quest,” she said. When no one replied, she added, “I want a healing.”

  Her seriousness seemed to silence the others. There was only the gurgly drone of the outboard motor, farting when it idled, and the mingled sounds of birds and insects, seeming to compete, their calls skimming across the river’s surface.

  “For me, yah, is a kvest.”

  “The longest distance on earth is from the heart to the head,” Sabra said, as if she were remembering and quoting. She started to say more when there was a snort of derision from the bow of the boat, which in a bizarre echo was repeated by a birdcall, just as derisive.

  “How long we must to wear this thing?” Manfred pleaded, in a different mood.

  “What do you care?”

  “I want to see things. Long ago, in 1817, came here von Spix and von Martius. They found the unique species on the River Caqueta, on one place, name of Cerro de la Pedrera. I will go there for my book. And Nachtigall as well. For the Schamatiismus. You know the Schamanismus?”

  The motor chugged and coughed, sounding unreliable, and the water slapped the bow of the boat.

  “Also, in 1905 up to 1922, Koch-Grünberg was here.”

  “That’s funny. My mother’s name was Greenberg.”

  “And Otto Zerries,” Manfred said, remembering. “Also Schultes, of course.”

  “Oh, do put a sock in it,” Janey said.

  But no one else was listening. As the river widened and warmed in the sunshine, the air was less dense and the afternoon gave softer colors to the forest they imagined—greener trees and clearer water, a blue sky showing through the canopy of high boughs, and the louder birds they assumed were larger than others, with great beaks and spiky crests, toucans and hornbills with colorful drooping tails.

  The light quieted them. They listened to the slurp of their wake against the bank.

  “Confluencia,” Nestor said as the boat tipped and seemed to slip sideways along a swifter current. “Río Arana. You say ‘confluence’?”

  After a while the brightness reminded them that they were exposed, and they became talkative again. One swirl of river sloshing in an eddy beside the bow Steadman took to be a fleeing snake, uncoiling in the stream. The air was humid against his face. In the shadows of trees at the level of the knobby roots were jaguars and ocelots. Sunlight glinted on the water like slivers of scrap metal, Hernán at the stern, Nestor at the bow, impassive, saying nothing except for their murmured directions: “To the bank” and “Stump ahead” and “Shallow here” and the repeated “Siga, no más

  Janey Hackler seemed on the verge of speaking, asking a sudden question beginning “Europe!” But it was not a word. She was retching strenuously, her whole bulgy gut audibly convulsed, and a moment later she vomited over the side. She sobbed disgustedly, and when she got her breath she said in a pleading voice, “I’ve got bits of sick all over
my fingers.”

  “I guess this is what you’d call dark matter,” Hack said.

  “Marshall, do be serious. I’m all sticky,” Janey said, her gorge rising again. “Yoo-roop! Oh, crikey!”

  “Wait,” someone said. “Listen.”

  A canoe was passing. It had to have been a canoe: there was no engine, only the slurp and suck and drip of working paddle blades. People in the canoe called out a greeting, not Spanish but a chain of seesawing monosyllables, and Nestor replied in the same language, but flatter, seeming to repeat something he had once heard.

  “What’s that you’re saying?” Hack demanded, but unsurely, in a nagging way.

  “Secoya language.”

  They hate to be blindfolded, thought Steadman, who not only liked it, but unexpectedly took pleasure in being in the presence of blindfolded people, for all their revelations in the darkness.

  “Lots of bird life,” Wood said.

  “This sucks,” Hack said.

  “But at least you’re not covered with vomit, are you,” Janey said, sobbing. “What are you grumbling about?”

  “I can’t see shit!” Hack screamed.

  “I left my Leicas in Quito,” Wood said. “They said travel light.”

  “The little Leicas, they weigh nothing.”

  And everyone sighed, because Za little Leicas, zey veigh nossing was so much more irritating spoken in the darkness. Yet the darkness was a soup of colors, and the colors were smells, not images, a swirl of odors, marbled like endpapers in an old book, the heat of the day making the color green almost black, and the crimson black, and the tree bark black. The green had the sharpness of cut leaf, the air was like sour dust, and the bark had the moldering odor of tobacco moistened by rain. The odors came in irregular layers, like the layers of a whole plant—leaves and roots and shimmering blotches of flowers they could actually taste.

  Sabra said, “Rivers are borders. If you haven’t crossed a border without permission, you haven’t traveled.”

  Steadman held his breath, waiting for someone to comment on this oversimplified quotation from Trespassing. He heard the glugging of the outboard, some seconds passed, and then Manfred spoke.