by Paul Theroux
“I want your story” was the sort of thing a dwarf with an evil insect’s face might say, bargaining with the harassed hero of a folktale.
Manfred was still holding the unusual plant with the strange torn-looking leaves and the even stranger blossoms. He dangled it, his eyes blazing, and said, “I have made the arrangement. Without me you cannot do it.” He breathed harshly through his mouth. “And this is something incredible.”
Whenever it became obvious that someone was brazenly trying to fob something off on him, Steadman felt his attention slacken and he lost interest. The more forceful and creative the sales pitch, the more Steadman resisted, seeing the salesman as an obvious buffoon. A persuasive sales pitch was no pitch at all, but rather something like a tremor that caused a distinct throb of aversion. The odd thing was that, knowing all this, seeing Manfred’s motive as transparent, and even sensing resistance rising in himself as Manfred grew shriller, he still wanted to know more. And he was fascinated by his own reaction—that he was allowing this grubby wheedling man to tempt him with the misshapen blossom on the twisted twig.
Ava seemed to understand that Steadman was listening. She walked from where Nestor was crouching and said, “If you give this German any money, you're nuts.
Manfred said, “Yah, I am just a German,” but his accent so overwhelmed him, his protest was a Teutonic yawp, which almost gagged him on the word Chermin. “When you see me, you see a German. Do you see a Jew when you see the woman Sabra? Oh, we are bad people. We persecuted the Jews. So we made our fate. We are the Jews now. You can say anything about a German and no one will schrei at you.”
Nestor was squatting on his haunches a little distance away, smoking a cigarette, listening to the rant and watching the negotiation. Several Secoya men with him were similarly squatting, hugging their knees, puffing pipes.
As though anticipating a probing question, Nestor called out, “It is not part of the tour package.” They looked at him and Nestor seemed to see another question in their faces, which he addressed. “So I am not responsible.”
This hint of risk attracted Steadman and, raising his eyes past Nestor, he saw the others, the ones who called themselves the Gang of Four, looking disconsolate on their log, like monkeys in the rain.
Steadman was indifferent to the bargain that Manfred was trying to strike. Instead, he saw a chance to rescue something from this trip—something to write about, something new, which would be part of his own story. And the fact that Ava was against it was another reason for him to go ahead with it. They were at an end. This decision to try the rarer drug was something final that would demonstrate this. It was more than a gesture; it was like a new aspect of separation, an act of defiance.
“Don’t listen to this cheeseball,” Ava said. “He comes down here with his big fat plant book and puts himself in charge, and you’re buying it?”
“Yup,” Steadman said, and gave Manfred two hundred and fifty dollars, counting the bills into his hand. Manfred objected with a movement of his mouth. Steadman added, “You get the rest when it’s over. But you can’t have my story.”
Ava said, “He’s the devil!”
But Steadman smiled. He was amused by Manfred’s meanness and manipulation, the transparency of it, especially when compared to the self-satisfied spending of the Americans and all their high-end gear—the contrast of Manfred’s beat-up Mephistos and rotting socks with the Americans’ expensive Trespassing Treads. Manfred’s shorts and all-purpose black sweater had tears and pills; Wood’s Trespassing jacket had seventeen pockets—so he kept saying—and Manfred had a greasy sack into which he stuffed everything, including the hard-boiled eggs he routinely sneaked.
Manfred’s sunglasses were misshapen; the Americans wore titanium TOGs and peaked caps with neck flaps, like Foreign Legionnaires. When there was a brief flutter of rain the Americans took out their Trespassing rain jackets and Trespassing ponchos and crouched in the drizzle and waited it out. Manfred was the picture of discomfort, with muddy legs, bruised fingers, dirty nails, clawed sweaty hair, and a mud-streaked cheek from his having rolled off his sleeping mat in a convulsion during his ayahuasca trance. And at his muddiest he was capable of insisting, “I have good connections in Washington and New York. I am working on a book. Many people know my name.”
“This watch is good for two hundred meters,” Hack had said.
“See this watch? I found it,” Manfred said.
Steadman liked Manfred’s recklessness and saw him as a natural ally, the improvisational traveler that he had once been. That, too, made Ava insecure.
“Do you know anything about this business?” she asked Nestor.
“Only that it is done outside the village,” Nestor said. “It is a shaman’s drink. Not like ayahuasca. This plant is new. It is rare. It is an accident. I saw a couple of people take it. Only one of them got a buzz.”
“What was the buzz?”
“That is the funny part. The guy just got quiet. He could not see. It was like we say, una ceguera, a blinding. Ugly to think about. But he knew everything that was going on—more than we knew.”
“What is it?”
“The one he showed you.”
“Angel’s trumpet?”
“The toé. Borrachero,” he said. “La venda de tigre.”
Manfred tapped his plant book and said, “Datura. Methysticodendron.”
“The tiger’s blindfold,” Nestor said. “He called it a crazy name. ‘A necessary poison.’”
“It is not very far,” the Secoya man said, pressing through the low bushes. His Spanish was as basic and approximate as Ava’s— “No muy lejo.”
“ ‘Not far’ always means it’s far,” Ava said.
She followed Steadman, knowing she wouldn’t take the drug—and certainly not on Manfred’s terms—but she felt protective toward Steadman. Her sympathy and patience were an unexpected reaction to their breakup, as strange as the sudden irruption of sex. But the desire to make sure he would be out of danger had nothing to do with their future; there was no question of compensation or reward. She had at last realized that they were each of them alone, and after the infatuation, the romance, the attachment had ended, and they were indifferent to each other’s power, underlying it all were frailty and friendship—mutual understanding.
But there was an awkwardness, too, the realization that they did not know each other completely. They had withheld something, they still had secrets. Those secrets exerted a subtle force, and their being blindfolded had made them unselfconscious enough to exploit the secrets, made them strangers again in the eyeless darkness of sensuality, less inhibited. For Ava eroticism was anonymous hunger—“I am stuffing myself,” she had told him with a greedy smile; never mind his pleasure.
She was free, no one’s wife, no one’s fiancee, no one’s girlfriend; just his friend—she could do as she wished. Being with Steadman was her choice. She wished for the time when she would be certain that he would be safe. Then she would be finished with him.
The Indian had been accurate; it wasn’t far. Beyond the bushes and split-bamboo stockade fence of the compound, another lashed-together pavilion stood a bit back from the riverbank and out of sight of the village.
“I guess we’re on our own now,” Steadman said.
Nestor had wanted to join them, but the Hacklers and the Wilmutts had demanded that he stay close to them, with Hernán, in case there was a problem. Nestor had mumbled “Niños" and stalked toward them, as though wishing them ill. Then he stood and ignored them and smoked, because they hated smokers and had not allowed it in the van.
Welcoming them to this different pavilion was the small smoothfaced shaman, Don Esteban, who had assisted Don Pablo in administering the ayahuasca. He had been the cook; he had stoked the fire, chopped and peeled the vine stems, stirred the pot; he had brewed the mixture.
Ava said, “He looks like he has a stocking over his face.”
Hearing her speak, Don Pablo clapped Don Esteban on the shoulder
and said, “Vegetalista. Toéro.”
And there were others: three Secoya men watching blank-eyed, or perhaps not expressionless but with faces so expressive, so peculiar, they could not be read—riddle-faced Indians squatting on their haunches and being obscurely busy, like scullions in a primitive kitchen. A frown might be a smile; their sniffing was like inquisitiveness; when they pressed their lips together it might have meant anything—pique, frustration, impatience.
Nor was language any good. In German-accented Spanish, Manfred said, “We start. I am first.”
They ignored him and went on stirring the pot, stewing the peelings of the dry slender stems, crushing them into it and reducing the liquid until it was darker and thicker. Steadman saw that it was the simplest boiling and simmering. He thought, I could do that. They were making tea, but strong stewed tea. Don Esteban, the shaman they called the toéro, was working over another fire, ladling liquid into another pot and reducing it, mixing it with more plant fragments, stirring it until it grew soupy.
Manfred announced himself again with a question, but the Secoya were so preoccupied in their cookery they did not notice his standing over them, nor did they acknowledge him until, in frustration, he squatted, rocking on his haunches, and then called out to Steadman.
“This one is Datura Candida’,’ he said. “It contains alkaloids, such as tropane and scopolamine. Not like maikua, but strong still.”
Using nannying gestures, the Secoya men directed him to sit. When he was seated, leaning forward, the shaman brought him a cup—a cracked porcelain cup—of the dark liquid. In drabness and consistency the liquid was no different from ayahuasca, a cup of muddy tea with a leaf of wrinkled scum on its surface. Manfred sipped, drank a little, then tilted the cup, emptied it, and blinked hard.
“Nossing,” he said, and beckoned with his fingers. “Más. Más!’
The toéro, Don Esteban, considered this, let some moments pass, and refilled the cup. Manfred drank the second cup more slowly while the Secoya watched him.
Don Pablo, the calmest of the squatting Secoya, simply gazed and growled tunelessly, chanting through his sinuses, as if he knew what was coming next. Seeing Don Esteban, Steadman was reminded of that moment when a dentist administers a jab of Novocain and then turns his back and squints again at the x-rays hanging from clips over his tools, knowing that in a moment or so the jaw will be numb enough for the tooth to be drilled or yanked. Don Esteban had that dentist’s confidence, which is also a look of indifference, part of the routine.
“Why it is not working?” Manfred said, his teeth against his lips. “Esta medizina no fale nada”
But he was looking away from them, interrogating the carved wooden protrusion on the worm-eaten finial of a corner post of the pavilion.
“Más, más” he said.
Don Esteban did not react. He was hunkered down, looking directly at Manfred, who was still preoccupied with the carvings on the corner post, grunting at them, perhaps finding a meaning.
Ava said, “He’s toasted.”
Manfred got up and stumbled a little, looked away, and then walked straight into the side of the pavilion, cracking his head on a beam. He staggered and sank to his knees, holding his ears, then slowly fell onto his side, his hands clutching his head, his elbows up. He was out cold.
Don Esteban shrugged and said, “El resultado no depende de mí”
Before Steadman had been able to help him, as he struggled to his feet and reached, the shaman waved him away in a negligent gesture that seemed to mean, Leave him—he will be all right.
“I think they’ve seen this sort of thing before,” Ava said. She gave Manfred’s head wound a swift appraisal, as she would any drunken stranger lying comatose in the gutter. The Secoya were fascinated by the way she lifted his eyelid and looked at his dilated pupil. They seemed to gather from this procedure that she was peering through this opening, through his body, into his soul.
“You’re next, darling.”
Now Steadman was glad she was there with him. He needed her experience, her skepticism, her strength. Only since their breakup had he realized how tough she was. Perhaps that was why their sex was better, even if so much else they did together was worse.
“Please, stay right here until I come down,” Steadman said.
He sat with his back flat against a corner post and accepted the cup from the toéro, then drank, sipping, and waited, and swallowed, then sipped again. He heard a mutter: “Está bebiéndolo”
He knew that he had drunk the entire cupful of dark liquid when he lowered the cup and looked in and saw a large spider, flexing its legs against spots of rust-stained enamel on the bottom. The thing was not just alive but visibly growing larger, hairier, its eye bulbs swelling with sympathy as Steadman’s own eyesight dimmed. From the spider’s posture and gaze Steadman saw a friend, in an attitude of patient welcome.
Turning the cup toward Ava so that she too could see the spider, he smiled, and she smiled back. But he did not see her. He was looking through her, and from far off came the small dull clatter of a metal cup striking the ground.
Too much was happening within him for Steadman to speak. He was plunged into an episode in progress, twilit, people busy in the foreground. The dusty liquid in his throat was like warm stale tea, but the taste had nothing to do with the effect, for it had the smack of ayahuasca, the mud-puddle tang of dust, rain, smashed stalks, pounded roots, dead leaves—any weed would taste like this. It was a swallow of the earth. So with this muddy ordinary taste of a dull drink he was unprepared for what followed.
What he took to be twilight, a summer dusk, the looming shadow of night falling, was in fact dawn, a slant of light rising like the first sword blade of sunrise and lifting upward, slashing open the darkness so the whole sky was pierced with day. The difference was that the moon was still sharply visible, and so were the stars, as he remembered them on some of the clearest mornings of his life. This morning was full of bright stars in a pale sky, with the same important patterns of constellations—readable to him now, the complex skein of stars making perfect sense.
He had no eyes, yet his whole bedazzled body was an organ of vision, receptive to all images. He seemed to understand and receive these sights with the surface of his vibrant skin. He felt a transparency of being, a prickling awareness—not observing in a simple goggling way, but knowing, being connected, a part of everything that was visible.
No visions played in front of him. Instead, they glowed inside him—his body was the engine of the vision, the light was within him. He was hyperalert as though feverish, and the crystal world was composed not of surfaces but of inner states, what lay beneath the look of things, sometimes hilariously, for he had a glimpse beneath a mass of expensive adventure gear of a big pale body he recognized as Hack’s—so odd to see this irrelevant American here and Sabra beneath him, making a cradle of her open legs. Not so hilarious was his understanding of his immediate surroundings, for there were snakes in the trees and spiders in the thatch and a clutch of nibbling rat-sized rodents in the undergrowth. Listening closely, he remembered and could understand everything that Manfred had said in his sleep.
No one knew him, no one saw his condition: the Secoya were indifferent to the state he was in. They were on the point of leaving the gringo to writhe, and he knew he was the gringo.
Turned inside out, he could think very clearly. He saw the blossom—he was inside the angel’s trumpet. This is what the ayahuasca told me. He was blind in a powerful way, in the thrall of a luminosity he had never known before, so that blindness was not the shadowy obstacle of something dark but rather a hot light of revelation, like a lava flow within him, a river of fire, and he was euphoric.
He could fly in a dazzling arc over the people who were near him. There were many of them, some from the distant past, women and girls he had known. But he was the only one who could see. They could not see him, or even themselves, in their flattened shadowy state.
“Slade.”
<
br /> Ava was calling to him, whispering, imploring. He knew she was worried—more than worried, she was terrified. And he understood: This is her own terror of herself and the world; it has nothing to do with me. She is lamenting something within her, crying out to herself.
Speaking with his whole body, Steadman said, “I am not that man.” He was outside time, outside his eyes, outside his body, in the opposite of a dream state. He was a hovering witness, seeing everything, all the guts and gizzards, the nakedness of familiar people, the sadness of their deceits. Of his own deceits, too, for he was like them—his keenest illumination was just that, a glimpse of his resemblance to these people.
Light was power, and in this experience of power he knew what he had to do with his life, his writing; he saw his story. He realized why he had come to this village on the riverbank, and he knew precisely why it was necessary for him to be here with all those other people who sat before him. He knew them entirely. The process was glorious, yet what he saw—the human shadows turned into plotters of flesh and blood—appalled him.
Slowly he surfaced, as though rising from the depths of the ocean, recovering as the dim light of day returned, real dusk, real shadows, clammy air, in which the world was once again its own human smell—frantic birds, ragged leaves, shabby village, smoky fire. He was back on earth, and even as his knowledge was slipping from him, he suspected that outside that trance state he would never have had a clue that anything coherent was discernible beneath the stagnant surface of the visible world. He had an instant memory that he had seen to its heart, where all was light and everything obvious. But now that he was awake he could not understand much of what seemed only a murky liquefaction of time. And the light was gone.
“I don’t think it worked.”
“You were out cold.”
“How long?”
Ava raised her wrist and showed him her watch, the stopped chronometer. “Almost four hours.”
“ Una ceguera Manfred said, and Nestor shaped his mouth in a halfsmile, as if to indicate “Who knows?”