by Edward Docx
‘I don’t know – late.’
‘And you were awake?’
‘No, I woke up – because of the noise.’
‘There was a lot of noise?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did anyone else hear – or come out?’
He was interrogating me.
‘No. Yes. They must have done.’
‘Did you see anyone else?’
‘I don’t know. Felipe, the guide, might have heard something.’
‘Is this woman injured?’
‘Her name is Soledad. No, thankfully not. I intervened.’
‘You intervened?’ The suggestion of disparagement became tangible. Behind him Jorge shifted. The wood moaned.
‘Your men forced her to go with them to a fire they had lit – too close to the trees.’ I raised my arm in the direction of the forest. ‘They were holding a man there. They had him tied to a chair. He had shackles on his feet and a bag on his head.’
The Colonel was silent.
‘They wanted Sole to translate what the man was saying. They threatened her.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘She is in her hut – I told her to wait there.’
‘Can she speak for herself ?’
‘She is very upset.’
‘Of course. But if she has a formal complaint to make, then she must make it to me herself.’
Now he was using the policeman’s manner of exaggerated calm.
‘Fine – but your captain cannot stay here – on the Station. Not after this.’
‘If she wishes to come and see me, then I will talk with her.’ He pulled out a chair and spoke over his shoulder at Jorge. ‘Bring coffee and whatever else you have.’
‘I intend to write a report of everything that I witnessed last night.’ I said this to assert without subtlety my independence, but I had no idea to whom I might give such a thing or what, if any, its effect might be. I was beginning to sound ridiculous even to myself. The daylight made the night seem unreal. The parrot dipped its head repeatedly.
Cordero sat down with the affectation of weariness. ‘Try to bear in mind, Dr Forle, that this Station is owned by my government, and that decisions as to who can and who cannot stay here are government decisions. But please feel free to mention my name in your report. If nothing else, I am sure the mayor, the governor and even the president will be pleased to hear of our progress this far up the river.’
All the while, the Judge had been following the exchange with an exaggerated back and forth of his head. Now his pale eyes came to rest on me.
‘I’ll be back this evening,’ I said. ‘I will ask Sole to come and speak with you.’
‘Where are you going?’ He looked up from the table.
‘ To work.’
It was his turn to detain me.
‘I mean whereabouts is your work exactly?’
‘We have twenty-four different sites,’ I said. ‘They’re all around.’
‘Where are you going today, Doctor? Which one?’
‘It’s about half an hour away. Why?’
‘Because some of the river channels will have patrols on them by now.’ He thinned his nose. ‘And you will not be able to pass. But if you let me know where this site is, we can check that your way is clear before you go out.’
‘It changes every day. We rotate the sites.’
Again the weariness. ‘Then let us know every day where you are going – in the morning. And we will try to help you avoid wasting your time.’
‘If that’s necessary.’
‘It is.’
I hesitated. ‘What are your patrols doing, Colonel?’
‘Picking people up.’
‘For the registration?’
‘Yes. For that.’
‘I’m sorry but I don’t understand – surely we can just carry on – your men will know it’s us, won’t they? We won’t be interfering with your work.’
I looked towards the Judge, who smiled.
‘There are also security issues,’ Cordero said. ‘Which are my responsibility.’
Jorge had brought out the coffee.
Cordero turned back to the table.
‘Please let me know what you have done about Captain Lugo when I get back,’ I said.
I walked away full of intention and, in this, like so many whose lives pass busily and who in the end do nothing.
II
Our boat chugged the sullen backwater. We were travelling upstream but this no longer felt like a journey back to the earliest beginnings of the world, rather to its end. There was no visible sun and the matted tangle was strangely motionless – monochrome, petrified. Everywhere the roots were exposed and the brown flats suppurated. Where once there had been tributaries, now there were pools, cut off. A slow asphyxiation: more and more seeking less and less. The season of low water had gone on too late and too long.
I was thirsty. I needed to break the spell. Tord, the missionary who sometimes visited us (and who liked in our company to be considered a linguist), said that most of the Indian languages had a special word that described the power of the jungle to mesmerize. I could well believe him. I turned around. Felipe’s smile flew across his face to greet me.
‘Do we have anything to drink?’
‘Yes, of course, Dr Forle.’ He prised open the Styrofoam cool box with one hand and made to stand and lean toward me. I was afraid that we would swerve and that he would ground the boat. We had been snagging the propeller a lot recently. I am skilled with a knife – anatomy, dissection – but, still, it was blind, wet, dangerous work to cut free the heavy tendrils. And though they say the piranha only attack those with open wounds, the caiman and the anaconda are less particular.
‘Throw it,’ I said.
He did so with exaggerated care.
I sat back and cracked open the can. After the anger of the morning had come a burning urgency to work. I had left the comedor and gone straight to the lab to collect my pack and my equipment. I did not know what else to do. Perhaps I had already begun to feel that my work – as a naturalist, as a scientist – was somehow against them. I had then walked back up to Felipe’s hut, where I had found him already neatly dressed, sitting at his table, cutting pages from the lifestyle magazines he collected and drinking a glass of milk. He had been surprised to see me at the door of his hut. We needed to make faster progress, I had explained, even if that meant working alone in the field from now on. I wanted him to take me out immediately.
Now, I sipped my drink and watched the river. We were passing an unusually reedy stretch of bank. Heavy, raven-coloured birds sat high-shouldered on a fallen trunk as if at some last council. I swung both my legs over the bench and sat facing backwards so that I could talk with Felipe directly.
‘Did you hear anything last night?’
‘Yes.’ He rubbed at his cheeks; there was a line above which he did not shave but the bristles grew up further, towards his eyes.
‘Did you get up?’
‘I was very concerned, Dr Forle,’ he said uneasily. ‘I was very concerned.’
‘Did you come out? Did you go to the comedor?’
‘No.’
‘Did you see anything? Did you see Captain Lugo going into Sole’s room? Before?’
‘I saw him going back towards the comedor with her. Then I saw you following them and I thought to myself – oh, that’s good, the Doctor is awake – since I knew that you would come and knock if there was a serious problem.’ He tilted his head to one side. ‘And you know, Doctor, nobody bosses Sole about. Not even captains.’
Felipe was pretending to a certain delicacy – as though the night had been about something else and he was chary of intrusion. But his hut was next along to Sole’s and he must have been woken by her shouting, just as I was.
‘You didn’t hear Sole – when the captain went into her hut?’
‘No.’
‘You didn’t see the captain go in?’
‘No.’
&n
bsp; ‘You didn’t hear anything from the direction of the comedor?’
‘No – nothing.’
Now he was lying. I felt for him. In his own way, Felipe was ambitious. He liked to talk about the trip he had once made to the capital and though he was unsure as to what prospect the visitors might present, he was eager not to let any such opportunity pass. It occurred to me that he had not left his hut because he was employed by the government – like Jorge, Estrela . . . and like Sole. Inwardly, I cursed the Colonel and the Judge and the studious calm that their arrival had so quickly poisoned. More than ever, I wanted to work.
‘If I were going to report the captain – I mean report his actions – who would I contact, Felipe?’
‘The captain is not police. It would be impossible . . . even if he were police.’
‘What about an ambitious lawyer?’
The question dismayed him – his innocence was his armour not his nature.
‘This is politics now, Dr Forle. The mayor, the governor, even the president most likely – everybody is involved. These are matters for the government. Who knows how anything is decided? I would say that the best thing is to wait and see, Doctor, wait and see.’ He brightened. ‘This is all part of the bigger picture – the registration. It is better not to be involved. We stay focused on the bigger picture by staying focused on the little picture.’
It was one of the idiotic phrases that I brought with me.
‘After the registration process, they will be gone,’ he continued. ‘And then things will be back to normal. You will see. Mr Rebaque will be back and we can get on with the science.’
He was doing his best. He had worked on enough expeditions to understand scientific vanity, too; he knew that I feared a full-scale disruption of the work.
‘All the same,’ I said. ‘I’d like there to be a note on the Colonel’s file or something. And it might be important that you corroborate my story.’
I realized that I sounded naive, and that this offended his sense of my status, my international authority. But my thoughts would not leave the white-hot pole. And it was true: I would have liked to place a similar rod in the fire for the enemies of Cordero – something easy to hand if ever they wished to torture him.
‘What do you think Dr Quinn would do?’ I asked after a while.
‘I don’t know what Dr Quinn would do in this situation.’ Felipe crossed himself. ‘Nobody can know that.’
‘He would do something. You told me that Dr Quinn was involved in lots of things.’
‘Not like this . . . Nothing like this. He would visit the villages. That’s what I meant.’
‘Which villages?’ I was persecuting Felipe now, I knew, but I could not stop. ‘The ribereños or the Indians? The Matsigenka? The Yora?’
‘Dr Quinn was friends with Tupki and lots of the others. He would go and camp. Sometimes after his work. Or for a few days. With Lothar. He was interested in looking at their medicines and how they lived. But he was not . . . He was not involved with the government or the police . . . or soldiers. Not at all.’
Something swam just beneath the surface of the water.
‘Did they find the wreckage of the plane? I hear different stories.’
‘I don’t know. But, Dr Forle, there were more than a hundred people on the plane. Not just Dr Quinn.’
‘Not just Dr Quinn.’
‘Dr Quinn is with God and all the saints and the angels,’ he said and crossed himself again.
‘And we are finishing his work.’
‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘With your help, Felipe,’ I said.
He smiled but he did not speak. We had come to a bend in the channel where the shoals narrowed our passage and he looked past me, partly to verify his way, partly to pretend an absorption not permitting of conversation. He too was seeking refuge in his work.
III
The jungle has been compared to an ocean: the canopy is like the coral where the fruit grows and flowers bloom and the forest floor is like the seabed where all dead things must eventually fall and rot. Man is a monster of the deep, therefore, a creature of casual atrocity and low cunning lumbering through the perpetual gloom.
We progressed steadily. After a while, we found a rhythm to our going and in this rhythm a kind of ease. We carried our machetes; we swigged from our water; we clambered fallen trunks and bent beneath the hanging vine. The ground rose and fell. Amidst the green and brown of the trees, I began to see flashes of white and gold, red and blue – birds, flowers, epic butterflies in the quavering grace of their flight.
I had grown fond of following Felipe – specifically I had grown accustomed to watching his white gloves dancing ahead of me. I had thought them ridiculous when I arrived, but I quickly came to see their purpose. Only a fool would throw out a hand to steady himself in the primary forest: thorns and spines were on every side – great barbed trunk-teeth, lethal hooks, scimitars and spikes. And all five kingdoms have their formidable defenders – their bites and stings and scratches, their toxins and poisons and venoms, their bacteria and their viruses.
In order to ensure our study was thorough and robust, Quinn had chosen twenty-four separate field sites. Roughly half were less than fifteen minutes’ boat ride from the station. But it was difficult to try and remember the subsequent foot journey even to most of these. As for the more distant, it was impossible; and though I must have passed along the way that we were now walking a dozen times, I recognized little and the path we followed seemed barely that – appearing to fork and fork again, merging, circling, disappearing altogether, trickery and chimera, all directions identical, no direction at all.
It was our usual arrangement that Felipe and I went out together while Lothar worked alongside Kim. But with Lothar away, we three had been working all together at the closer sites. Up to now, I had been strict: neither Kim nor I had gone into the jungle alone – for obvious reasons to do with the risk of accidents, but most of all because we would both have been utterly lost within ten minutes. Anyone not thoroughly familiar with the forest is desperate within an hour of finding themselves alone. Most die after a surprisingly short amount of time; usually because they make themselves fatally ill as they start to believe – consumed by hunger and maddened by thirst – that every berry, nut, root and leaf is edible. Even a compass bearing is useless since it is impossible to walk in a straight line for more than two paces at a time. You cannot proceed except in the direction the forest allows. And though Kim and I both carried satellite navigation systems in our packs, they were little better for the same reason – and, in any case, the reception beneath the understorey was notoriously unreliable.
Felipe stopped and I looked up, startled afresh each time to see the canopy broken. We had arrived without warning and the sun was poking through and the light flaring from leaf to leaf, bright and shocking. Dead ahead, the customary riot and profusion of the forest had vanished and there were no plants in view save one species – a thin, bare and bleached-looking tree with crooked branches that reached towards the sky like claws: Duroia hirsuta.
IV
The Devil’s Garden
The Indian tribes call the glades in which we conducted our research Devil’s Gardens because they believe them to be gardens cultivated by an evil forest spirit, Chuyachaqui. For the most part, the local tribes are animist. But of course the anthropologists remind us that all forms of spiritual belief are about the same things underneath: through our magic and our cosmology we project ourselves onto the universe and the universe back onto ourselves. We place ourselves in the centre of our own drama. Our religions become the means by which we worship ourselves and our societies; a way to get the business of living done. And thus, like all human beings, the Indians conjure up their devils to make sense of that which is otherwise psychologically intolerable to them; to accommodate their anxieties, their disasters, the terrifying arbitrariness of the world. As once with our own witches, the worst of these malevolent spirits are
always located away from the villages – deeper in the forests – because established power seeks to maintain itself and devils threaten the status quo. All this the scientist knows well. And yet it was not difficult to understand why the Indians ascribed magic to the forest and malevolence to these anaemic glades. Besides which, most of our time in the Devil’s Gardens was spent on our knees measuring necrosis.
V
Stage One
There are three stages to our fieldwork – each important in its own right.
The first is the task we are engaged in every day: an experiment to demonstrate that the Devil’s Gardens are created not by the inhibition of one plant by another, but by our ants, Myrmelachista schumanni. In effect, we hope to prove that the Myrmelachista are engineering their own environment.
With this in mind, we plant some common forest saplings (Cedrela odorata) in the midst of the Devil’s Gardens. Then we either allow our ants onto these saplings or we exclude them with tape. We watch and record what happens.
As predicted, we are finding that the ants immediately attack the Cedrela odorata saplings from which they are not barred; but that the ant-excluded saplings grow as normal whether they are in the Devil’s Gardens or not. In other words, it is the ants that are doing the poisoning.
Of course, this is a classic mutualism: the D. hirsuta trees of the Devil’s Gardens flourish thanks to the ants; and the ants live with staggering success in the hollow stems of their beloved hosts. It is also one of the single most impressive evolutionary successes to be found in this, the most ferociously competitive environment on Earth. By our calculations, some of the Devil’s Gardens are over eight hundred years old.
VI
Felipe returned to the Station to pick up Kim and take her out to one of the other sites. I forced myself to be meticulous in my work. We were recording as much as we could; we had over thirty thousand photographs on the spare hard drive back at the lab – all coded for site and time. I wanted my foundations to be firm again and my dealings with the world authentic. Ninety per cent of the labour in our field was in organizing the appended material – the documenting and the display of the evidence to support our findings.