by Will Forest
Pedro ogled Lisbeth and fingered her necklace, lifting one of the nudes away from her chest. “And this precious necklace…” he said. “We know it has something to do with it, too. But what?”
The nude figures looked sturdy enough, but the chain seemed a bit flimsy for their weight. Had he commissioned it for her, after reading Amana’s story? Zé and I exchanged looks but said nothing.
“We’ll never know the exact motivations of the people who made this massive earth mother, or exactly how they did it,” Pedro continued, “but I think I have a good idea what it’s about—gold.”
“What? Why gold?” asked Zé.
After reading all of Amana’s story, I don’t think Zé was really surprised. The only detail we had not known about were the geoglyphs.
Pedro curled his lip. “You arranged for that special entertainment last night, didn’t you? That little nudie theater show? And now you’re going to act like you’ve never heard of El Dorado? The indios, they associated gold with life and abundance. That must be why they set up this landscape like a massive mulher, a woman. Her womb probably holds natural gold deposits, or a bunch of golden artifacts they threw in over the years, or maybe even both.”
“You know about Lake Guatavita, right?” Zé was pessimistic. “It’s near Bogotá. Some people think it was the real El Dorado lake. Well, it’s been dredged I don’t know how many times over the centuries, with no luck.”
“Ah, meu irmãozinho, my little brother so misinformed. They did indeed find golden artifacts in and around Lake Guatavita. But it’s a much bigger, much deeper lake—huge in comparison to this one. Look, those earth breasts over there on the Colombian side, they only showed up a couple weeks ago when the brush was cleared. I hadn’t given any thought to this little lake before, but suddenly here it is like a womb. And whatever that womb holds, I want to know, because this is our property.”
“Partially,” said Zé.
“It’s our property,” repeated Pedro. “Do you even know how much illegal panning and mining for gold is happening here in the Amazon as we speak? If we don’t get it, someone else will. I want the gold before we flood this whole area.”
Zé set his jaw. “I knew it! I knew there was something big, something important, that you weren’t sharing! You do this all the time! What the hell? Why are you talking about flooding the area?”
Pedro smiled wide and poked Zé in the chest. “Power plant, meu cara. Power plant.”
Zé smacked his brother’s hand off his chest. “Did you tell Sérgio and Clevina about this? They’re expecting a child!”
When Pedro only looked away without a reply, Zé shoved him. Pedro pushed back, and the gondola began to sway and pitch with their jabs. Lisbeth shrieked as they continued laying into each other.
It came out of me before I knew it was happening: “Stop it!” I yelled so loud even Lisbeth stopped screaming. “Stop it already! Let the pilot land this thing and then you idiots can poke each other’s eyes out, for all I care. Flood or no flood, I want to make it back to the lodge!”
“Falou,” said Lisbeth, nodding her agreement. She patted my arm.
Zé looked at me and knew I was right. He turned away from his brother. But Pedro laughed. “Besides, you think they’re the only ones? We build this plant—it’s a huge hydroelectric dam—and there’s a thousand-square-kilometer area covering both sides of the border that will have to be evacuated. That’s why Sérgio will keep his job—he’ll be managing some brand new low-rent apartments on higher ground. Probably, he can even find a job for his wife’s boto, too.”
“You bastard!” roared Zé, and his fist met Pedro’s cheek so fast and so hard that Pedro fell against the basket wall, and the entire gondola swung from the impact. Enraged, he lunged back at his brother. Zé tried to escape, but there was just no place to move inside the basket. Pedro punched him in the nose. The pilot was grabbing the ropes and yelling for them to stop. Lisbeth was screaming again, but in an odd way—kind of smiling at the same time.
Maybe Lisbeth was surprised, as I was, at how quickly it accelerated, each brother smacking and punching the other. The basket swayed and bounced, jerking the balloon around. The pilot lost control of the craft.
“The necklace,” I yelled, and I added “¡Cuidado!” hoping that “Be careful!” in Spanish was close enough to the Portuguese.
Pedro looked at me, registering what I meant, and jumped in front of Lisbeth to protect her, or the necklace, or both.
Zé took a moment to study the blood, fresh from his nose, on the back of his hand: the color of violence, the taste of metal, the flow of life outside itself… it all built up inside him and let itself out in a yell as he lunged for his brother’s shirt. But Pedro dodged to one side, and Zé’s swooping grasp connected with Lisbeth’s chest, pulling her forward as his fingers ripped through her décolletage, tearing away her blouse completely. From this sudden shock Lisbeth stopped screaming and turned away quickly to hide her exposed breasts. She probably wanted to cover her chest with her arms, but she needed both hands to grip the edge of the careening gondola.
“Seu besta!” growled Pedro. “Não bata na minha mulher!” He grabbed Zé’s shoulders and forced him to the floor of the gondola. The brothers, each as infuriated as the other, wrestled as if they had no idea they were swaying madly above the Amazon canopy. Lisbeth was shouting—cursing both of them, I think—without turning around.
At some point, when Pedro was on top, he knelt over his younger brother for a chance to knock him out. But Zé rose up quickly, surprising him, and pushed him off. Pedro fell away hard against the backs of his wife’s legs, and that moment lives forever in my memory, because from the force of the impact, Lisbeth arched her chest out, and the necklace clasp broke. For a split second I thought her artificially perpendicular breasts would keep the precious necklace from sliding… but then I saw it slip from her chest to plummet into the forest below…
The balloon’s wild rocking had brought us lower and back towards the west—I saw the necklace fall directly into the gourd-shaped lake, with the faintest splash.
“The necklace!” I yelled again over the din that everyone else on board was making. “The necklace fell in the lake!”
It was like a hex had lifted. The men stopped fighting. Pedro pulled off his polo shirt for Lisbeth to wear, but it was way too tight over her chest. Zé’s more loose-fitting button-down is what she ended up wearing, much to Pedro’s annoyance. The pilot was muttering under his breath, doing his best to turn the balloon back around toward the lodge.
Zé looked at me and apologized. He asked me to please take some photos of the fertility idol’s landscape, which I did. But since he and his brother stayed sulking in their corners, I decided to make small talk with Lisbeth, to calm things down a bit. Without my asking, she told me she had her breast augmentation surgery when she was getting ready to participate in the Miss Rio de Janeiro contest. Then she had advanced to win Miss Brazil and then fifth place in Miss Universe. That was when she had met Zé, and then Pedro, and a year after that, Pedrinho was born. She told me all this in Portuguese, which I was understanding better and with remarkable focus, thanks to our adrenaline rush. Lisbeth asked me a few questions about Mexico that led me to understand she had a very limited idea of my country. But I was no one to judge her, because my idea of Brazil had been similarly restricted until visiting there myself.
We landed back in front of the lodge. I wanted the brothers to shake hands, or pat each other on the back... something, but they didn’t. Pedro took Lisbeth’s hand and walked to an enormous white SUV that was just arriving. I recognized Nelson at the wheel, and getting out of the vehicle were some six people who started unloading bulky packs and boxes from the back. Zé walked straight into the lodge, probably to clean his face and hands but also to break the bad news to Sérgio and Clevina.
Filo saw him go by. “Y ése, ¿qué tiene? What’s wrong with him?”
“Got in a fight with his brother.”
She roll
ed her eyes, which brought a welcome laugh out of me. I don’t think I had ever seen her do that. “Over you?” she asked. “Oh, it must have been an exciting flight!”
“Something like that. Pedro showed us a lake from the balloon. He wants to test it for gold. These people unloading equipment? I bet they’re scientists.”
“A lake… gold… Ah, sí—Marisol, talk to Bill. He has some ideas for you about why ‘glowing water’ would be important.”
“Where is he?”
“Finishing breakfast. Clevina is so patient with him. He wants to know about every kind of local fruit.”
I found Bill with Clevina in the lodge’s little dining area. She was seated in a chair pushed back from the table, with her hand on her belly—just like the woman Dora and I had seen at the Parque Lage café in Rio. “Aqui, ô,” she was saying while she pointed to a round, orange fruit, which was just one of many fruits lined up on the table. “Tu-cu-mã. You ate it with cheese this morning in your breakfast sandwich.”
“It was so delicious!” Bill exclaimed, writing something down in a notebook.
“Oh! So that’s what it was,” I said. “I had one of those sandwiches, too.”
Clevina nodded. “O tucumã é muito comum aqui na Amazônia.”
“Sorry to interrupt, Clevina, Bill… I mean, Dr. Gutiérrez…”
“Oh, please! Call me Bill.”
Bill’s transformation from insufferable egotist to patient, kind, friendly and knowledgeable companion had been so remarkable that I smiled broadly in spite of myself.
“Long story short,” I started, and took a deep breath. “I need to know why ‘glowing water’ could have been important to an indigenous woman who might have lived in this area in the early sixteenth century.”
Bill set down his pen, pursed his lips, and looked off to the side, contemplating. “I can think of a few reasons. Maybe ‘glowing water’ meant, literally, clean water for drinking and washing. Water that’s clear, not stagnant water with algae. The second reason would be metaphorical—maybe ‘glowing water’ was a figurative way of describing something else, like a particular beverage, or a shamanic vision, or the symptom of a certain disease, or maybe even the amniotic fluid of childbirth.”
“That’s very helpful. Thanks,” I said.
“But the best bet,” Bill went on, “would be a combination of literal and figurative meanings. If water is glowing, usually it’s from the sun. Shiny things in general, all across the Americas, were held to be sacred representations of the sun. This was true for natural objects like obsidian or iridescent feathers, as well as fabricated ones, like burnished wood or beads made from shells. But the particular union of sunshine and water was widely believed to be the original act of creation. Masculine sunlight penetrated feminine water, stirring together the heat and the wet necessary for life to begin. And this was part of the reason that the shine of the gold alloy called tumbaga was so highly valued—it mixed masculine gold with the reddish hue and blood-like smell of copper, considered to be feminine.”
We were both staring at Clevina. She had started humming softly.
“Clevina?” It was Sérgio calling from the kitchen. He saw us through the service window and came to the table, greeting us and then conversing with Clevina in Portuguese. Bill was giving me more examples of shiny objects, but I have a terrible habit of eavesdropping, and so I understood from what Sérgio was saying that Pedro wanted him to go with him and some scientists out to the lake, but Sérgio wanted to stay with Clevina because of her condition. Tears leaked from Clevina’s eyes.
“...pyrite mirrors, gems, certain kinds of burnished ceramics…”
“Eu vou, Sérgio. Eu vou mesmo.”
“... snow-covered peaks, clouds, and silvery fish scales....”
“Mas por que você é tão obstinada? Fique. Fique aqui na pousada com a mexicana.”
“... rainbows, the sheen of pearls, oh and gold, of course gold….”
“Não fico. Eu vou porque vou e ponto.”
Clevina was slowly rising from her chair, so Sérgio helped her up. I turned to Bill.
“Thanks again for your help. Are you ready for a little hike? It looks like we’re going to the lake on the property, not far from here.”
Bill collected his notebook and pen. “Let’s go!”
I had a sudden thought. “Wait… You said, certain kinds of burnished ceramics, right?”
“Yes. There were techniques for including sparkly materials in the process, like on that Huastec necklace…”
I ran out the door and intercepted Filo coming out of her bungalow.
“Marisol, we’re all going to the lake, did you hear?”
“Sí. Qué bueno que te encontré. We need to bring the necklace replica.”
“But… why?”
“I think we just might need to use it.”
Chapter 24: The Lake of the Womb
We made it back to the front of the lodge only to find an entire squadron waiting for us. It was truly much more of a procession than I had anticipated. When Pedro gave the order, Sérgio led the way out of the small parking area and into the rainforest. He had his machete just in case, but the trail through the property to the lake was one of the areas that he and his employees regularly maintained. A burly Amazonas state policeman kept pace with Sérgio. Pedro and Zé followed close behind, still not speaking to each other, but staying close to each other out of mutual suspicion. Then came the six scientists carrying their equipment. Later I learned there was one each from Angola, Brazil, China, Norway, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. They were variously petroleum engineers, geologists and geophysicists, mostly men except the Chinese and Norwegian women. Jota was helping carry their instruments. Close behind them were three FUNAI officials: two women and a man. It turns out they had to be there legally as representatives of the Fundação Nacional do Índio, which is like a Brazilian governmental bureau of indigenous affairs. Then came Jônatas Bandeirante and the other nine actors from his company, followed by seven of the other eco-lodge guests, whose nationalities I eventually discovered—a French man and woman, two Italian women, a Canadian woman with a Lebanese man, and a man from India. Zé and Jônatas had whipped up enthusiasm for what they were calling a ‘nature excursion,’ because Zé wanted as many people as possible to witness his brother’s machinations. Dora walked along with Pedrinho and Lisbeth, and then came Filo and I, helping Clevina. Bill was talking with Nelson—the two of them were carrying the lunch materials. There was a pair of Amazonas state policemen bringing up the rear. We were a total of forty-one folks filing along through the foliage.
And when we arrived at the lake, we found a contingent of five of the eco-lodge employees, clearing the Brazilian part of the shore with machetes and weed whackers, bringing our total to forty-six. From the ground, the shape of the lake was not so obviously womb-like as we had seen it from the air, but I could tell it was definitely the same lake.
The scientists took lakewater samples. Then we all watched as they drilled near the lakebed and removed a core sediment sample. They gathered leaf and root samples from the plants along the shore, and trapped several insects and spiders. They surveyed the Brazilian side, and then guessed the coordinates for the smaller Colombian side as well as they could. There was a test they wanted to run that involved mercury, but the FUNAI people and the Amazonas state police would not let them do it. All of this activity took several hours of the afternoon, during which time we ate our lunches of rice cakes with beans wrapped in banana leaves, and dried fruit and nut snacks. And then, when the scientists had finished, Pedro wanted answers.
We need time, was the message from the scientists. They needed to take their data back to their labs.
“But can you at least make a prediction? Does it look promising?” Pedro wanted to know.
The geologists and engineers nodded as they packed up their equipment. The FUNAI representatives snorted with barely concealed hostility.
Zé studied his brother’s
expression, and asked him, “That’s it?”
Both brothers looked around the lake, watching as the group started to pick up their packs to leave.
“That’s it,” said Pedro. “For now.”
And that’s when it happened. There was a sudden shout near the lake, something like a mix of effort, surprise, and pain.
It was Clevina. I knew in an instant that her water had broken.
I rushed to help her lower herself to the ground.
Sérgio had already started back down the path to the lodge, but his voice quickly carried back to the lake. “Clevina? Clevina!”
He kept shouting for her until he was interrupted by a new voice.
“¡Esperen ahí! ¡Esperen! Clevina, ¿eres tú?”
It was a man yelling from the far shore, the Colombian side. He had emerged from the brush wearing camo and a balaclava, and he was pointing a rifle in our general direction. Everyone froze. I felt my gut quiver and my spine shake when I saw his weapon, but I also felt an immense disgust churning in my heart.
Clevina managed to shout out a name which turned into another howl of pain at the end: “Jaimeeeeee!”
“¡Sí, soy yo, querida! ¿A poco ya va a nacer nuestro hijito?”
“Sim! Já!”
By this time Sérgio had made his way back to the shore by Clevina’s side. Squatting down with her, he squeezed her hand and looked her in the eyes. “O Boto?”
Clevina, eyes streaming and mouth stretched wide, could only nod her head.
Sérgio stood up and looked around, scanning the group until he laid eyes on Pedro. “O colar, meu cara. Você prometeu.”
Pedro held out his arms. “Não o tenho mais, Sérgio! It was supposed to be some sort of magic necklace, with good luck amulets for childbirth… but now, we’ll never know. It’s all gone! Thanks to Zé here, Lisbeth’s incredibly expensive necklace fell into the lake.”
“Liar!” Zé shouted. “Mentiroso!”
Sérgio looked from one brother to the other with disgust and disappointment.