by Lucia Ashta
Once again, when the man stopped to wipe the sweat from his brow with the back of his slick hand, he noticed his three work companions—even the weathered man that could outdo them all—gone, vanished. That was what had happened last time, the time he saw the woman.
The man sat down on a fresh tree stump, and for once, he hoped his coworkers would take a long break. He plunked his chainsaw down with too little care, as if it weren’t the device that dealt death to the jungle all day long.
His shoulder muscles ached. It felt as if his arms were still vibrating with the saw as it sliced. He would probably still be able to feel the shaking in his arms when he was dead. Sometimes, he would wake up from sleep to the muscles in his arms twitching, after the long hours of holding that blasted saw.
With calloused fingers, he tipped his ceramic vessel to his mouth. It was one the aboriginal tribes in the area made, brown like the dirt, a remnant from an old trade route that the natives were no longer interested in keeping. The villagers of Guayucuma had little to offer the indigenous tribes, who knew the jungle so well that they could find anything they needed within it.
The water felt cool on his tongue, though he couldn’t be certain it was actually cool. Maybe it was just because he was so damned hot. He was always hot. Somewhere around six months had passed since he’d seen the woman, yet the seasons had not changed. Seasons never changed in the Amazon. He had only experienced one season his whole life, and that season was hot and humid.
He sat in the shade of the tree he would cut down next and wondered whether he should pour water over his head. He never had before, not while he was still out in the jungle. If he ran out of water, he might feel desperate with thirst (though it had never happened), and he didn’t dare drink from any of the water that ran unconcernedly around him.
That got him thinking about the woman and how she had slipped into the Amazon River. She, or the imaginings of his mind, was incredibly daring.
Yet, what if the river wasn’t as dangerous as he believed? What if his attitude toward the river made a difference? The woman had said that she trusted nature, and that he didn’t.
It was then that he saw her again. He let go of these thoughts, so foreign to him, along with the worry of what might come, and lost them to the river.
He let go of anything but her. He clunked his earthenware vessel to the ground without care to reach toward her with desperation.
Yet he didn’t move a muscle.
He waited. Only his gaze followed her unlikely rapid approach, every part of his body tense in anticipation. He was frightened to move in case he might scare her away. He spent much of his time being frightened, he realized then, while he followed her flickering steps that brought her closer to him. She wove amongst the trees, making his daily struggle through the growth look like a joyful game.
Even his chest rose and fell slowly, carefully. He didn’t blink, not even when a bead of sweat broke through his eyebrow. The sweat stung his eyeball. He blinked, only once.
She was running as if all her days were different and there was reason to hurry through life to experience more and better, or just as good. She leapt as she stepped, and she gave him visions of her bouncing body through the screens of trees. The ends of her springing hair. A thigh. A full breast. A hand that whipped past incredibly fast.
When finally she reached him atop his tree stump, all words and thoughts eluded him, all but one. This must be love, he imagined, although he had never been in love before. His breath came shallow; he was sweating more than usual; and he felt as if he might faint. Either it was love, or he was having a heart attack.
She came to a stop right in front of him; there could be no doubt that she was there to see him. She had been running fast, yet her breath came normal and steady. He was certain of it because, with him seated, her chest lined up with his eyes.
He didn’t want to move his eyes from her round breasts and their rhythmic, slow movement up and down, though he knew he would have to. He would have to find those rich brown eyes again. He had to. It was her eyes that he most remembered, half a year since he last saw her.
She waited for him as he had waited for her. She didn’t shift with discomfort. She didn’t know how to be uncomfortable. Things either were or they weren’t; that was it.
She was fully naked. Nothing distracted from her beauty. She was born into this world naked, and had no reason to conceal her nakedness.
She appreciated her body, just as she appreciated the panther’s sleek body, made for every one of its movements, and just as she loved the blooms of the orchids, pregnant with color, and the stiff form of the stick insect that blended in so precisely with the leaves and branches it lived among. Her body, like all the life within nature, was made to fulfill a purpose, and there were no mistakes in the designs of nature.
It didn’t bother her when the man, forgetting himself entirely, trailed his eyes along every part of her body. He traced her curves, memorizing every one as much as he could, commanding himself to remember every piece of her.
Finally, the man found her eyes. His breathing calmed. His pulse grew steady.
He stayed within those eyes as long as she allowed him. And she did, for a long time, until the intensity of the moment became too much for the man.
Insanity, if she were not real, had become a distant consideration. He knew, nevertheless, that he could lose himself in the world that she encompassed. He didn’t know how he knew it, but he did. Whoever she was, she gave off a raw power that he had never faced before, and that only the strong could survive.
He didn’t touch her.
When he stared into the brown of her eyes for so long that he couldn’t have told her his name if she’d asked, she took one step back, said nothing, and walked away.
From where he sat, he followed every sway of her hair, every bounce of her buttocks, and every flash of the soles of her feet, until she vanished. This time, he didn’t think the jungle swallowed her.
The jungle embraced her as if welcoming one of its own.
4
A Good Way to Die
When his fellow workers came back and found him sitting on the stump, he didn’t care to make it look as if he had been working the entire time they were gone. He would have told them that the woman appeared again had they asked, but they didn’t. They just picked up their saws and got back to work, in their usual silent camaraderie.
He would have told the other villagers too. But no one asked. The woman’s initial appearance had receded into legend, and few discussed her anymore. It had become one of those things that faded into the background of food harvesting and preparation, of living and dying.
Not even his parents, aunt, uncles, or grandmother asked him whether he had seen the woman of the jungle again. They had routines according to gender and age, and nothing varied them much.
With this secret he hadn’t meant to keep secret, he began to feel like an outsider. And the more no one asked him about the woman, the more intent he became on keeping her to himself.
Although he didn’t mention her again, she was never absent from his thoughts. Her brown eyes hovered behind the reality his eyes took in, always there, calling her to him.
He took to drifting away from the others. Now that he confirmed she was out there, that someone like her existed, certain things changed. His fear was less acute, his worries further removed from his mind. He longed for her, wishing that everything other than her would disappear. Nothing else was necessary.
She was like a narcotic. He walked around sedate. The chain saw felt detached from his calloused hands, as if it moved all by itself. Everything around him seemed to go on without his interaction with it. Time ticked on. Plants died and were reborn through their seedlings. Animals killed and gave birth.
She answered his call much sooner next time, the third time, which allowed him to hope that there might be even more to come.
She appeared as if in response to his wish. As always, as if it were the on
ly way she could reach him, she approached through the dense jungle. He saw bits of her until she eventually coalesced into one whole in front of him, reawakening the desperate yearning for her within him.
She smiled at him, and instantly he realized that she had never smiled at him before. This was a smile meant for him, perhaps even caused by him, though he didn’t know what he could have done to earn it. He smiled back. Two of his teeth on the bottom were crooked, but he forgot about that because he knew she wouldn’t notice. Or if she noticed, she wouldn’t care. Already, he could tell things like that about her.
He stood now, chain saw halfway through the trunk of an ancient tree; it was thick, and he was tired from trying to cut through it. He knew that moment so well, when the laboring teeth of the saw tore through the last of what needed to be cut, and broke free. Suddenly without challenge, the chain saw felt too light.
Without moving his eyes from her, he reached to power off the saw. Even though the blade vibrated with alarming danger, he felt for the off lever by memory and touch. He was already a changed man, after only three encounters.
He left the saw in the trunk, sticking out from it, hanging, like an error in the always-perfect design of nature. It was an aberration, though he didn’t notice it then as he would later.
Despite the chain saw and the sweat and grime that covered him, she beamed a smile that was enough to wipe it all away.
He dared to breathe, more comfortable in her presence, less anxious that she might disappear as quickly and unpredictably as she had arrived. He took one small step toward her; it was barely anything at all, yet he held his breath to see what she would do, so close to him.
She didn’t step back. She reached a hand out to him instead.
“I missed you,” she said in her rhythmic Portuguese.
He couldn’t believe his good fortune. Nothing truly fortunate had happened to him in his life. It had all been so ordinary. Yet there was nothing ordinary about his life now. It was impossible to look into those brown eyes and have a single ordinary thought.
“I missed you too. I wondered if you would come back.”
She smiled again, but this time the smile held something he couldn’t yet understand. “Of course I returned. I have been waiting for you for a long time. I have been searching for you. I always recognize you.”
He took her hand and barely heard the meaning of her words for the distraction of her touch. Her skin was warmer than his and, somehow, felt more alive. Yet she did not sweat. A constant rivulet of sweat ran down the curve of his back, sometimes pooling in the small of it, sometimes not, beginning in the morning and only stopping at nighttime, and sometimes not even then. She, however, looked crisp and composed, as if she were walking in a different world, even though she looked like she belonged in the jungle more than he did.
She began to move, leading him by the hand. She could have led him anywhere, and he would have followed. Her touch was just enough to let him know that she was real and not a fiction of his deluded imagination.
He walked behind her. His eyes traveled over each ridge of her body, confirming that he remembered it correctly, that nothing had changed the perfection he’d relived many times since their last encounter. He didn’t even hesitate when he realized where she was taking him. There came a point in life when one just had to let go of everything, and it seemed that this was that time.
She didn’t slow, and it looked as if she were heading straight into the Amazon River with him tagging along behind her. But then, with her toes already wet, she turned. He ran into her—not much, but enough for the curves of her breasts to caress the cotton of his shirt, for the arc of her hip to brush against the leather of his belt. With difficulty, he dragged his eyes upward to meet hers.
She was about to speak, but in the end, did not.
He was about to speak, but thought better of it. If he should die now in that water, then it would be a good way to die. With her, any way of living or dying was better than what he could accomplish alone.
With her still facing him, he let go of her hand. Immediately, he missed it, as if a part of himself were gone. But it would only be for a moment.
He removed his work boots. They were too thick and stifling for the tropical weather, but the added protection was worth it. He left his socks in his boots with more elegance than their grime might have deserved. He unbuckled his belt, looped it carefully, and tucked it into his shoe.
He met her eyes again, this woman he didn’t know. What a woman she was.
He pulled his shirt over his head and folded it atop his boots. Then, his long pants. Despite her nakedness, he stopped there. He stood in tattered underwear and retook her hand.
Then she pulled on his hand and walked into the water. She led the man who had been fearful of the Amazon all his life into the deep waters of that most dreaded river.
And he never came back. All that was left of him for the townspeople of Guayucuma were his boots, piled with his old, hard-worn clothing—that, and a legend that joined him inextricably with the woman.
5
Death of a Way of Life
Before long, the villagers declared the man dead, another victim of the jungle’s greed and insatiability. The clearing around Guayucuma grew larger with each cycle of the moon. The light of each full, silver moon shone on less entangled tree canopies. The reaching sprawl that alighted magically from treetop to treetop had died somewhere, slain by the sputter of a saw.
A few people mourned the man. His parents, aunt, uncles, and grandmother shed tears for a handful of days. Then, they moved on. They were seasoned to accept losses. It was how life had always been for them—hard—and they saw no way around it. It was the way of their people. It always had been, even when their people still lived in the big city.
The man’s aunt gave birth to a new generation, and she moved into his portion of the hut. She and her husband and the baby needed the extra space until they could build a hut of their own.
Life went on. A boy had matured into adulthood, and he took the man’s boots and his place in the logging crew. He picked up the chain saw, still halfway through the ancient tree, and cut the tree all the way down.
With all the open space now, the villagers turned to gardening. They were surrounded by plenty, by lushness, but they sowed seeds of plants they trusted, of those which humans had domesticated generations before. They dug their fingers into the rich loam that released the scent of fertility every time they moved it, and they found their version of contentment in the Amazon rainforest.
Perhaps the man’s death had placated the voracious spirit of the forest, and they would all be safe for some time. The man had been young and strong, virile and full of life. Surely that meant more to the jungle than the life of a crazy old woman, or any of the other strays that the jungle had taken. None had been such a hard worker. Even the man’s parents thought it a worthy sacrifice, now that it had been done and there was nothing they could do to change it.
After a few weeks, no one spoke the man’s name anymore. He had served his purpose, and the townspeople would continue to serve what they could understand of theirs, until death claimed them all.
6
The Silence of a Full Heart
Do you not want to know my name?” the man asked the woman.
They had spent months in togetherness. They built a hut in a remote part of the jungle, where no one from Guayucuma dared go. Here, the rainforest was denser than in most other places. The animal life was more concentrated. The Amazon River diverted and plunged into a thrashing waterfall that those from Guayucuma didn’t even know about.
“Names are not important. They can deceive. What you are made of cannot.” She placed a warm palm against his bare chest.
He had abandoned thoughts of clothing soon after they arrived in this isolated area. No one but she would ever see him here.
“And what of your name? Do you have one?”
She drew a spiral across his chest with her finger,
distractedly, he thought. “I have many names. But none that matters.”
“Will you tell me your names if I want you to?”
“Yes. I will do most things if you want me to do them.”
She sat and took her hand from his chest. She looked out from under their open-air casita into the jungle around them. They were nestled in the density of the forest, as if they were a part of it—She was, but was he?
He tilted his head back against the jute mat they had woven together, once she taught him how. She didn’t do things like the women from his village did. She didn’t do things like anyone else he knew, or had once known.
She culled jute that was dying and broke it into long strands. Once, he reached for a plant that was thriving, and she grabbed his wrist until he let go; then she softened her touch.
She hadn’t let him cut down a single tree either. Their casita was squeezed into a small natural clearing of the forest, butting against trees and plants on all sides, like a tree house that couldn’t take flight. Only once, he suggested he return for his chain saw to clear ample room for them, but the suggestion died with a look from those brown eyes.
He sat and scooted up against her, his chest pressing against her back. He put his forehead and cheek on that warm flesh, and he forgot all about names and the many she might have. Throughout all the time they shared, he would never ask again. There were days when he nearly forgot his own.
It was easy to forget things that were unimportant, even though they had been important to him once, not so long ago. All the fears that had consumed him before he met the woman went away so easily that he couldn’t even find evidence of the deep roots he was sure they cast into him. He borrowed her courage.
He had made it across that beastly river, the Amazon, unscathed, and had survived every other day just as remarkably, accompanied by her. His life was divided into two distinct parts: life without her and life with her. He hoped there would never be a third.