As the sun moves behind the clouds, the image of this black monkey, who sits in the dark tree staring at us, starts to blend in to become at first dark colours, and then an absence of light.
This then transforms into the dim shade of the evening, sporadic shadows drunkenly attacking the fog of oversized insects around the two streetlights that are now illuminated. Bats are penetrating through the mist in search of their prey, before vanishing again into the blackness … we look up for stars, which should be the most incredible array of stars we’ve ever seen outside our dreams. The moon is absent, and the only light for miles around seems to be from these two lamps before us, yet we can see no stars.
We step away from the lights and into a darker and more immense cloud of insects that buzz about our heads. The bugs are repulsed as we saturate our clothes and skin with a spray repellent … the stars above remain unseen, masked by invisible clouds bringing warm rain to the already moist ground.… We have rented individual huts, to which we promptly return. The familiar sight of mosquito netting, the recognizable humming of insects, and reading several of Boccaccio’s stories from The Decameron lulls me into sleep. I fall into a restless sleep, one devoid of dreams.…
∞
The next nights are spent in the same huts, perched on stilts above the forest floor. I remember in these days and nights, as we await another bus that still has not come, what originally brought Yelena and me together. I remember our illogical conversations by having more of them, these ones with Karen. I revel with Karen in our absurdity, participating in native ceremonies by night, cleansing away any evil spirits by having a shaman breathe out healing properties through chicha, masticated and fermented corn juice spit at us from all angles, the shaman exhaling tobacco smoke over our aching joints and sucking and spitting out bad air, smoking unfiltered cigarettes ourselves while imagining the dark leaves to be the same tobacco as that prepared by the shaman, inventing this in our minds as we drink our own chicha, the natives dancing ritualistically around us in the warm rain and covered torch lights of the evening.
We marvel that we have no one to answer to here. Not each other, not even ourselves.
We are uninhibited, emancipated, free. And it is on that evening that I have the most vivid dream of my life, after I fall asleep reading The Decameron. It is a dream I transcribe for my therapist that, unlike Coleridge’s recording of his opium-induced "Kubla Khan" dream, is not interrupted and is therefore fully articulated, in its entirety, in narrative script as the Tenth Day, Eleventh Story, as told by myself, outside of Florence in the cloudy light of day. Yelena, Karen, the Señora, Inés, Yolanda and I have all come to a hillside to escape the bubonic, pneumonic and septicemic variations of the plague which have descended upon fourteenth century Florence and taken the lives of almost half the European population.
King Gianni, ruler of Cyprus, having secretly murdered his own daughter for taking many lovers and thereby bringing shame upon him, accuses his wife’s father, among others, of having played a key role in the murder. The King sentences him to death. After his execution the Queen, discovering her husband’s culpability in the death not only of her father but also of their daughter, becomes committed to ending the King’s life. A prognosticating witch, after declaring her allegiance to the Queen, appears to the King as an unusual black cat and prophesies that he will be destroyed. His daughter’s real murderer is uncovered publicly, a war with neighbouring Armenia is lost, and the witch ensures that the prophecy comes true.
19
I awaken that morning with the immediate sense that I alone am responsible for my daughter’s death, and no one else. She is not dead, I reply to myself, over and over again. I quickly write down every detail and aspect of my dream, in a frenzied state that must have approached that of Coleridge as he struggled to transcribe every element he could remember. In my transcription, I leave nothing out.
While I begin contemplating the meaning of my dream, we spend our days white water rafting alone. No other tourists are here, and there are still no buses coming through. The restaurant owner says the government protestors are blocking the main highway to the nearest city, the airport city of Quito, which is four hours northwest by bus through the jungle and farther up into the mountains.
Kayaking beneath a wide-spanning bridge I not only discover that there is much of my dream which I may never analyze due to its complexity, but suddenly understand that I, in fact, was the King in my dream who had killed his own daughter.
Sitting in a restaurant without walls, just wooden poles supporting a thatch roof, barely speaking, the conversation having dwindled to that of necessity, mundane details of what we will eat, again eating muddy-tasting fish with grit that crunches in the teeth at the same restaurant, the only restaurant in the town, I realize that the liberation I felt here by covered torch lights as I participated in the native ceremonies at night—smoking unfiltered tobacco like that prepared by shamans for their rituals while drinking chicha, the natives dancing around us in the warm rain—was the same feeling that the King in my dream must have experienced when he burned the Queen’s father beside covered torch light to conceal his own guilt.
We hike in close proximity to the hut, and then hire a jungle guide to take us to a local animal hospital, Amazoonica, situated on a nearby island. There we watch all but the most dangerous animals on the islands roaming free, held captive only by the water surrounding them, the spider monkeys, jungle cats and boa constrictors held in cages to prevent them from destroying the other animals.
We stand looking at an enlarged and colourful parrot with a mended wing, and I begin to comprehend that the King’s daughter was killed for the sake of appearances. She was destroyed in the interests of what other people would think and of the life he had lived, and would continue to have to live, because of their talk and their gossip. I am no better than the King, who was sentenced to death. All of my own reasons for unconsciously wanting to terminate Yelena’s pregnancy—the baby wasn’t developing properly, the doctor said, showing us the hands and feet that were only stubs when they should have been fully developed; her heart and mind would never be right; she’ll die anyway—were just meaningless justifications, the same as the public infuriation of the King where he had suspected and denounced so many when he knew himself that he was to blame. And in the end, the King was punished and died as a penalty for his crime—so, as my dream was telling me, shouldn’t I suffer the same fate?
But the King was unrepentant and malicious, and I am not. That is the difference, I conclude, holding a boa constrictor, the animal nurse instructing me not to squeeze the snake when I put pressure on the animal out of fear and thoughts of my own death, shunning the realization that the King is my own unconscious self, animalistic, brutish, instinctive, visceral, without integrity and morality, the boa constrictor beginning to encapsulate and squeeze the life out of my arm as I have done.
We travel away from the island hospital in a thin and disproportionately long motored canoe, our guide accidentally letting his hand slip from the motor steering controls before quickly recovering his grip, making the boat lurch to the left. I recall screeching black monkeys and spider monkeys with immense reaches, parrots and sleek black jungle cats resembling a muscular house cat slinking through the bushes beside immense rodents the size of large dogs. Karen, facing my back in the canoe, suddenly says: “I want you to go to Venezuela with me.”
“You do?” I reply. “Why? I told you I’m going back to Canada.”
“It’s complicated. But I really want you there with me.”
I turn my head out from beneath the hood of my yellow poncho so I can better hear her voice over the sound of the motor, the light raindrops cascading onto my head and quickly wetting my hair and face as I do, and she continues.
“You didn’t stay here in this country to learn more about your father, did you?”
“I suppose that, perhaps
subconsciously, I did come here to share some of his same experiences, and to relive a part of my youth,” I reply. “And a part of me would have wanted to come here to the rainforest, to see this place my father seemed to love so much. But it seems this was a further regression away from society for him, as it is for me. If you ask me, my father was a lot like myself, like a Gauguin without the artistic side. And even Manta wasn’t remote enough for him. I’d like to have a conversation with him now, to see the state of his mind. My mother thought he was schizophrenic, one side of him wanting a social life and interaction with people, the other side wanting complete isolation, perhaps to escape from his guilt. She said that’s why he came here in the first place. I’m beginning to see, from being here, that maybe she was right.”
“So, without the aim of discovering more about your father, your continued presence here was from something you won’t admit to, maybe not to me, or to anyone else, maybe not even to yourself.... It’s not for me to say, maybe, but I think you’ve chosen to stay here in Ecuador for longer than you needed to as an escape from contemplating your own actions and their consequences, just as your father probably did, like a repeating pattern, or—”
“Where is all this coming from?” I interrupt, annoyed.
“I have to tell you something.”
“What?”
She pauses before continuing.
“I was at the Señora’s, having lunch just the other day. The phone rang and she handed me the receiver. It was your wife Yelena.”
At the mention of her name, a name I have never heard Karen utter, my throat suddenly becomes dry.
“I gave her the number, in a letter, a while ago,” I say. “I thought she didn’t have it any more.”
“Well, she does.”
“And what did she say?”
“Well, she said she was somewhat relieved that you weren’t there at the Señora’s, actually, so she didn’t have to tell you—” she pauses.
“Tell me what?” I ask, growing more impatient.
“That her baby, your baby—”
“What?”
“That it died. In a procedure. How they normally terminate a pregnancy when the mother wants—I had the feeling that she has had this procedure done before. She didn’t seem as upset as perhaps she should have been, as I certainly would have been. The only explanation she offered was that she couldn’t wait any more. But then again, she might have still been in shock at the realization of what she had done—”
She pauses again. I could feel my face twitching as she spoke and now I feel dizzy looking down into the muddy waters beneath our boat, the raindrops falling onto the surface and splaying out in all directions, my chest tightening with the thought that one can never lose their memory or experience, that no matter how much one tries to forget, or to run, one can never be far enough away to escape their own mind. And having read Yelena’s letters over and over, which contained no talk of our child, I think now that I could have stopped her. I could have prevented this, and it would not have been difficult. Now, her actions, my actions, are irrevocable.
Karen waits for me to say something, but the wind and the unsteady hum of the motor provide the only response. We travel by large cliffs extending fifty feet out of the water and vertically upward at steep angles to end at forested rooftops with a flock of green parrots scattering overhead.
“Why did you let me come here?” I ask, turning back to face her, my tears blending in with, and washing away in, the intensifying rain. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“The Señora thought—actually, she voiced her opinion, as you know she has a strong opinion on everything, but really, it was me, I thought it would be better for you to come with me, not only here but to Venezuela ... so you wouldn’t be alone … and to help you to forget.”
As we continue on, I recall the King in my dream, and his sentence of death. The entire kingdom was after him, including a sleek black cat with menacing yellow eyes, unnatural and not of this world, like the small jungle cat we just saw on the island, and reminiscent of the black-faced monkey we saw in the overgrown town square in Archidona. It has been prophesied, in my dream, that I shall die—
“No,” I say loudly, after an indeterminate amount of time.
Karen asks if I am feeling well. I reply that I am as well as I can be, which is a blatant lie that she probably recognizes.
“My thoughts and my dreams here are too intense,” I say. “I’ll go back to Manta.”
“No,” she says, adding: “You can’t escape from this. Not now. You’ve done enough running away alone. Stay with me. Coming with me is best.”
There is a long period of silence before we arrive back on shore and then back at the huts, and I pack up all of my belongings and prepare to leave without her.
20
“The protests are not over,” the restaurant owner, jungle guide and hut owner tells me in Spanish, noticing the full backpack at my feet while he delivers a plate of fish with rice and beans. “Not yet. Still, there are no buses in or out of here, the main highway to Quito is blocked by protestors.” I tell him that I have already left my rented hut, without intending to return.
“Go back to your hut,” he instructs me. “There is no place else here to rent, and you have nowhere to go.” He says that, as of now, there are no longer any tours available by motorized boats either, because of a lack of gasoline. Ours was the last.
I am forced back to my hut and I spend the next dreamless days and nights in solitude, sitting inside drinking chicha and smoking unfiltered cigarettes, eating only a single bowl of ceviche every day, delivered, along with cigarettes and chicha, by agreement with the restaurant owner, who says, when I ask, that he knew my father very well, and that, in my seclusion, I spend my time, inexplicably so in his brazenly-stated opinion, in much the same way as my father. I finish The Decameron. Karen knocks on my door, day after day, and I send her away, telling her that I need more time. Days turn into a week, and then two. Hearing no buses coming through town, and with no English books available here, I descend into a constant bevy of my own thoughts. I begin to paint pictures of Annabelle with some supplies I brought from Manta, and I write in a notebook that I have brought with me. All of the thoughts I transcribe are morbid. In between drawing and painting various depictions of Annabelle on the pages of the notebook, I reread some of Yelena’s letters. Her voice coming through in the letters seems to have altered somehow; she seems to be speaking to me more forcibly, and with more vehemence, than ever before. All of her words now seem to be hateful accusations.
Yelena speaks about the confessions of the English Opium-Eater and how, before his addiction to drugs, he describes Ann, the first woman he had feelings for, with compassion; and how he mentions the dismal state of her life, saying how none of it is her fault, attributing her situation to the injustice of society. And when Ann disappears, an opera singer and the opium enter. The opera singer wants to introduce him to pleasures greater than the drug. The pleasures of Italian music. Rossini … Verdi.
Looking at the ultrasound picture of Annabelle, its roughly triangular shape, the baby’s outline similar to any other baby’s ultrasound except to the eyes of a trained professional to whom the signs are obvious and could be, and were, explained at great length and in great detail, enough to invoke my severe nausea and which I feel sick even thinking about now, I am as Rigoletto, misled, deceived, betrayed and bent over the sack which he thinks contains the dead body of the Duke, hearing the Duke singing “La Dona e mobile” in the distance and opening the sack to find his daughter who has been stabbed and who quickly dies as Yelena joins the Duke in song.… The opera singer disappears and the next woman of interest is a servant in the house where the writer stayed. Next to enter is wine. Wine is seen as an indulgence causing him to slip into a different state of ‘reality.’ He is made drunk by reality and sober by
the wine. The drug invigorates his self-possession whereas the wine robs him of it. Yelena elucidates the side-effects of quitting the drug and the associated nightmares, beautifully described.…
Yelena tells me of her nightmares. One is recurring and involves her parents, both of them Russian Jews who are always fighting, sometimes acting stubborn and prideful like little children, traits she says she inherited. They scream at her, and she awakens shaking, with sweat and tears all over her face, but still feeling as though a terrible burden has been lifted. They were not apt to change; both of them were in their sixties and her father was having psychological and memory problems, and was lying too much, even going so far as to say he has been dying for the past several months and acknowledging that neither Yelena, nor her mother, think that is true; instead dismissing his claims by saying that everyone in the world is slowly dying. How’s your father? I recall asking now, to which she’d reply, Apparently, he’s dying faster than the rest of us, but you would not know that if you saw him.
One recurring nightmare she had was related to the big scars on her left leg, which extended all the way from her ankle to her thigh, scars from having been burned in a house fire when she was two years old. The nightmare took place atop a building with a lit white top, but in the dream the white top had been replaced by a huge cage with fire in it. For Laing, renowned psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, fire represented a flickering soul, I told her, a flickering sense of self. But she didn’t want to hear about that, or to relive any of her nightmares through my analysis of them. She only wanted to recount them to me, to perhaps relieve herself of the encumbrance associated with keeping their memory to herself. In the dream, she went up from the ground floor in an elevator, and while she knew she was running away from someone, she didn’t know who. She recalled confronting him once, though she could not identify him apart from having recognized him from other dreams. After her act of defiance she compared the sense of awe and relief upon awakening to fresh snow in the forest right after someone had skied there, those two straight lines so seamless and precise. That was how her dream was recorded in her mind, perfectly.
The Abundance of the Infinite Page 7