by Edward Docx
THE
Devil’s Garden
EDWARD DOCX
PICADOR
For my father
The term kamatsiri, “dead spirit,” is virtually synonymous with the word kamagarine, “evil spirit.” Both are derived from the root -kama-, “to die.” The word kamatsiri is a noun made from the intransitive form, “the one who has died,” while kamagarine is derived from the transitive form, “the one who kills.” The two are used almost interchangeably, and both connote sinister and dangerous beings.
(Families of the Forest:
The Matsigenka Indians of the Amazon
by Allen W. Johnson)
Contents
Part One
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
Part Two
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
I came here as a scientist to conduct experiments on other living things. I believed that the most fundamental questions of our existence could be answered in the lab. I believed in rigorous method and the unemotional reporting of results. But I have come to see that life itself is the real experiment and that the answers to these questions are to be found only in what we do – as individuals, as a species. What results there are might better be called experience, and experience soon teaches us that they are not the results we would want. I will leave here under another name because of what I have done. All the same, I will leave here as a human being.
J. Forle
Part One
ONE
I
There is only one way in and there is only one way out: the river. And so they arrived on the supply boat in the late afternoon, just as the worst of the heat was over and the caiman began to stir. I heard their voices as they passed outside my hut. We had been expecting them – yesterday, today, tomorrow. Sooner or later.
I switched off my desk fan the better to listen. Sole was showing them the path down to the washhouse and explaining how our makeshift showers work. I could tell by her tone that she was trying her best to be soothing. The one cursed the cramp of the boat, the heat, the insects; the other the lack of airstrips.
Perhaps I should have greeted them there and then – welcoming, cordial and buoyed from my work. After all, it was not every day that we were visited by a Judge and a Colonel. But some part of me wanted to make an impression. And so I decided that I would let our visitors settle and wait until dinner to introduce myself. Instead, I would go down to the river and help with the unloading.
II
On the path, the heat of my own body hung heavily about me, suffocating, and the humidity was so thick that to breathe was almost to drink. The only place to see the sun was where the river broke the canopy and so it had become my habit to look up whenever I stood on the bank.
Red and yellow macaws were flying downstream. A graceful heron-like bird, whose name I could not recall, stood opposite me on one leg, studying the torpid flow, its long neck ivory in the softening light. The air was filled with a hundred different songs, chirps, squawks and screeches – back and forth, far and near, all around. But, beneath these calls, my ear was attuned to the real buzz and hum of the jungle: the great electric simmer of the insects.
Vinton, the boatman, was passing up our supplies to Jorge and Felipe. Felipe waved his greeting. I felt the wood shift a fraction as I walked out on to our jetty, the stilts beneath uneven, thin and crooked as crane fly legs on the mud. The water beyond was the colour of cinnamon and still so low that the boat could tie up only at the furthest reach.
‘What’s left?’ I asked.
‘All the important things, Dr Forle,’ Felipe replied. ‘All the important things.’
Felipe was our guide. His habitual demeanour was to please and his habitual expression was a wide and apprehensive smile.
‘They’ve brought quite a few boxes of their own,’ he said.
Jorge had turned away to urinate over the other side.
I looked at the stack of electrical goods beside the handcart.
‘Satellite dishes,’ Felipe said and shrugged.
‘Maybe they like to watch a lot of TV,’ I said. ‘People do. I’ll help pass up.’
The boat was still half full. I descended the rickety ladder to join Vinton, who was standing on his makeshift deck below.
‘Vinton.’
‘Chief.’
This was the boatman’s joke – a double insult aimed at both Felipe and at me. Rebaque, the true head of the Station, had been away for more than three weeks. Nobody knew where. No word. But if anyone was chief, then strictly it should have been Felipe. Though I moved carefully, the boat rocked.
‘If the water gets any lower, we’ll be cut off completely,’ I said.
‘It won’t.’ Vinton stood purposefully still. He was proud of his white cracked-leather seats; his was the only luxury craft between here and Laberinto.
‘The river is on the rise?’ I asked the question as if I had been waiting for such a day.
‘No.’ Vinton spat carefully over the side. ‘You would know if the rains had come.’
A few years previously, the entire basin had suffered the most severe drought in living memory – passenger boats stranded even on the larger rivers, half the forest burning, the whole vast system down to dribble and seep. If the rain did not quickly begin in earnest, I understood that even this record would soon be surpassed.
Jorge’s mud-smeared sports shoes came into view on the jetty’s edge. He stood heavily above the boat – a big, glabrous Buddha of a man with an odd coffee-coloured birthmark spilt across his smooth brown head.
‘Everything is crushed,’ he said as he zipped himself up. ‘The biscuits. The bananas. Crumbs and mush.’
‘They’ll be OK.’ Felipe appeared beside him. ‘You’ll find a way to use them.’
Jorge scowled. He was constantly suspicious of a slight and was the sort of person who must continually apply acid to all that was said and done around them as the only certain prevention. He was our cook. Sometimes, when we ate, I could not separate the taste of the food from the man.
Vinton threw paper towels up to Jorge.
I offered up the first big box of cigarettes to Felipe.
‘You’ll stay tonight, Vinton?’ Jorge smirked.
‘No . . . not tonight.’ Vinton shook his head as though the decision were narrowly made, though he had never eaten with us, nor spent a single night on the Station.
‘Another woman?’ Jorge grasped a big tin of cooking oil from the boatman.
‘Your sisters.’ Vinton grinned – broken teeth, a glint of gold. ‘A special show – free of charge.’
Jorge’s smirk fattened into a smile; he would take this off Vinton though nobody else.
We passed up bottles of water without speaking for a while. The heat seemed to shrink tighter about my skin. A beetle ran the gunwale, Brasilucanus acomus – dense, heavy-armoured, a brutal tank on tiny legs.
Then Felipe asked: ‘Which one is the Judge?’
He could not endure silence and must always force conversation; it was a trait I disliked in myself.
‘The smaller thin one with white hair,’ Vinton said. ‘The big one says he’s the Colonel. Wouldn’t wait for his own boats but he complained all the way here in this one.’
Jorge did his favourite mime of masturbation. ‘What are they doing here anyway?’ he asked. ‘Nobody comes to this place because they want to – nobody except you people.’
I inclined my head.
‘It’s the registration,’ Felipe said.
Jorge scoffed. ‘What did they say was really going on, Vinton? What did you overhear?’
‘
They didn’t speak. Or not to each other, they didn’t.’ Vinton spat a second time. ‘Not one word in seven hours.’
As far as we understood, our two visitors had been travelling up the river for a month, registering people to vote. For the last three days they had been on our branch. Our Station would be their final stop. Only day-long boat trips from here; it was too dangerous further into the interior, even for government officials – especially for government officials.
The boat was almost empty save for its heaviest freight lying ballast at the bottom, which included four crates of beer and the case of spirits that I had paid for. The others knew it was my intention to donate vodka and whiskey to our bar, such as it was. And I was unduly pleased that my order had arrived; indeed, it occurred to me that I had come down solely to check on its safety. We handed the bottles up, self-consciously careful. Then Felipe climbed down into the boat to help with the fuel drums for the generators. We counted three and heaved. There was a moment when I thought one of the damn things might fall back. But then we had it high enough and Jorge had rolled it over the edge to safety. We burnt oil.
The job was done. We were all slick with the work but only I felt the discomfort in my collared shirt. In six weeks, I still had not learned to sweat freely. Across the river, another bird I did not know chose this moment to display the fan of its plumage – bands of carmine, tips of jade. There was a splash in the water. The weeds strung out in the sluggish current around the legs of the jetty. I climbed the ladder. Jorge and Felipe would drag and push our cart. I would carry as much as I could. Vinton would wait with the remaining stacks.
There came the sound of another engine – full-throated and growing quickly louder.
I turned back to face the river. We knew straight away that it could not be any of our near neighbours; the Indians and the river-people, the ribereños, travelled with their motors at the lowest possible chug to save fuel. A moment later and we could make out six passengers – all men – sitting line astern in a rigid inflatable. They wore uniform.
It seemed undignified to continue staring as the boat veered from midstream to make its course for our jetty but this is what we did until they were almost upon us. Then, abruptly, I put down the box of cigarettes I had been holding and offered to receive their rope.
III
The dusk was rising from the forest floor. I stood at the porch window of my hut and watched the soldiers on their way to the washhouse. They bunched where the wall of the jungle reared and then disappeared down the dark narrow fissure of the path. I wondered would they meet Kim, my assistant, returning. There was an unspoken convention: that the women bathed around this time; the rest of us earlier or later. There would be more men arriving we had been told. I had been expecting only the Judge and the Colonel – but it now seemed obvious that that they would not be travelling alone. My whiskey made me wince. I had a six o’clock rule, to which I adhered rigidly.
Sole appeared on the balcony of her hut opposite. She was wearing her white dress. I had only seen it once before – and never for dinner. She hesitated and I did not understand what she was doing for a moment . . . Until, with surprise, I realized that she was locking the door. The key was stiff for her. She had to lift the handle so that the heavy bolt would find the unfamiliar barrel. She looked around and then hurried off. I was certain that she had been waiting for the men to pass. I was certain, too, that she had never locked her door before. We only ever laughed at our keys – huge, incongruous, medieval. Rebaque had liked to joke that one of his predecessors must have purchased them from the Franciscans in the 1500s; he said he had a skeleton key somewhere that opened all the locks and that it had an actual skeleton designed into the handle.
I returned to my desk. For the last five years, ever since my wife died, I had been trying to write a book that combined the best of my articles for the science journals with my research and findings – something that would open up my subject to the public and raise me from the confines of my discipline. I had been pleased to be making progress following my arrival on the Station. But now as I began to redraft my introduction, ‘The One Special Difficulty’, I found that I could not re-engage my concentration and that even my title seemed clumsy.
Two skull monkeys swung from my roof and raced along the wooden rail of my balcony, fawn-flashed tails held high and dancing, then perfectly still, then dancing again. They stopped a moment and began to copulate. I was still not used to the sound of their landing on my roof. When I awoke, they were always at the window waiting; two, three, four faces. Intelligent.
IV
Ever since my wife died . . . That is another lie – or rather, it is a story that I told people afterwards; a story I offered to give them a reason for the way I lived my life and to avoid conversations I did not wish to have. She was not my wife – though I came to believe that she was the better part of me and that this part had died with her. The last time I saw her she was angry with me. But as she turned away to cross the busy street, I did not call after her, I did not run to catch her up. I thought I would see her again. We always do.
I made a false floor to fireproof myself from what feelings burned below; and the greater the heat within me, the greater my effort to seal it off. Outwardly, I grew colder. Science, method – I turned into one of those men who seem to others reserved. But I held back only because I believed that to let go would have meant to detonate everything. My work became my reason for living. I escaped from life by intensifying my study of life’s secrets – biology. I wanted to make a contribution to human knowledge, a breakthrough. Of course, there were more immediate and practical reasons for my finally coming here – my colleague, Dr Cameron Quinn, not least among them – but most of all I wanted to make one last effort to save my soul. When a man is wounded in the river, he must swim as best he can upstream from his own blood if he is to have any chance.
Thus bound up in my leaving, I was shamefully ignorant about my surrounds when I arrived. I knew nothing of the endless land disputes, the trades (legal and illegal), nor the provenance of the different peoples. But an accurate history of our Station would be near impossible to uncover in any case. During the height of the rubber boom, it was probably used as some sort of a collection point – though we were situated a long way up the river. There had been slavery. Missionaries. An Indian settlement before that, perhaps. It was hard to know anything for sure. There is no stone with which to build. Tribes vanish. Iniquity is forgotten. Everything is subsumed back into the forest.
In physical terms, the Station occupied a rectangle of cleared ground, roughly the area of two sports fields placed end to end. The path from the river led directly to our main building, the comedor – a big open-sided construction, the size of a large cricket pavilion, though fashioned, as all, in rough-hewn dark wood and raised some three feet off the ground. The comedor was the Station’s dining room, lounge and bar. At one end, there were two separate rooms closed off: the kitchen and the store. And at the other, the same: a tiny infirmary and Rebaque’s office.
In addition, there were the accommodation huts in which we lived and those kept ready for visitors. They were unevenly spaced, unevenly built, of uneven sizes and at uneven distances to the walls of the forest. But all shared the same basic box-on-legs structure, and all had the same small balcony facing inwards. Mine was the last hut downstream and thereafter this same path ran on through the forest some fifty yards to a small secondary clearing for the washing stalls and laundry.
There was one other building – the lab. This stood alone adjacent to Sole’s hut and diagonally opposite my own. Roughly four times the area of our huts and a good deal taller, it had been built, customized and equipped by Quinn. I had taken it for granted in the background of the footage we played to students and associates. But when at last I saw it for myself, the fact of its existence struck me deeply – that it stood so square and so purposefully fitted to its creator’s ends. The sheer will: to have the thing constructed and supplied from
nothing.
With Rebaque away, we were now seven. Myself and my assistants, Lothar and Kim; along with Felipe, Jorge, Sole and her mother, Estrela, who were all on the payroll of the state – albeit to no great extent. We spoke for the most part in Spanish. Ostensibly, we were a scientific station, maintained for the purposes of research projects. But the real motivation for keeping the place manned and inhabitable (while indirectly paid for by First World universities) was that it was the last Government outpost before the impassable interior. For this reason, Quinn had told me that all kinds of officials and scientists dropped in. But in the last six weeks, aside from Tord, a missionary, and Tupki, our nearest neighbour, we had received no visitors at all. Until now.
V
By the time I set off for dinner myself, the croaking hour had begun and the frogs were already basking in the silvery glow of our little solar-charged lamps. I trod carefully.
On the far side of our mighty kapok tree, which stood with its vast vaulted trunk across the path, the comedor cast its welcoming light. But as I crossed the coarse grass in front of the steps, I was surprised to see Estrela hurrying toward the kitchen – Jorge’s domain. Relations between the two were more typically characterized by a steady and mutual detestation – seasoned only by an oblique regard that each held for the other’s obstinacy. They never worked together and Estrela never rushed anywhere except to judgement.
Felipe greeted me from the other side of the dining area where he stood behind our makeshift little bar. He was sporting a battered burgundy-coloured dinner jacket and he had been serving one of our visitors.
I crossed the wooden floor conscious that I was wearing shoes rather than boots for the first time since I had arrived.
‘Good evening, Dr Forle.’ Felipe’s smile was wide as a freshly strung hammock. ‘This is . . . Colonel Cordero.’ He poured so much deference into the introduction that I was afraid we would all drown.