by Edward Docx
Every so often, I looked up and breathed in the forest – the trees beyond, the layers of sound, the smell, the thrum of life all around, the great non-human flourishing of it all. I wasn’t anxious of being alone until I heard a crashing sound.
Something large was moving through the undergrowth. I stopped dead still, listening.
Nothing.
Peccary, soldiers, tapir, a jaguar, tribesmen; it was possible to be less than three metres from any of these and a First World man would never know. The sound came again – ahead, louder.
I called out: ‘Hello?’
I stood motionless, my field camera hanging from my wrist, the sweat pouring off my body, an entire continent of jungle in all directions.
‘Who’s there?’
My breathing stopped and my body tensed ready for I did not know what.
‘Guten Morgen, mein Freund.’ Hat, machete and grin – Lothar emerged from the thicket. He was holding up his palm in a childish gesture of greeting. ‘You know what I want to know? I want to know why the little bastards don’t take over the whole forest. It seems to work so well – this beautiful system? Why don’t they poison the entire planet? If I was them, I would not stop until the world was one big Devil’s Garden.’
I heard birdsong again.
Lothar made a rueful face; he was a little surprised by the nervousness of my reaction. ‘You look as though you’ve been bitten in both nuts by a naca-naca,’ he said.
‘You’re back.’ I raised my forearm to my brow and removed my hat. ‘Thank Christ it’s you.’
‘Who were you expecting?’
‘I thought you were one of those marauding pigs.’
‘You’d know all about it if I were three dozen peccary, my friend. They like to travel noisy and all together.’ There was amusement in his eyes. ‘But you’re right to worry: it is not such a great way to die – to be mounted by a herd of angry pigs.’ His face softened into his rare, soft, ugly smile. ‘You are not having so much of a party here today?’
‘I’ve been to better.’
He looked about as if weighing up our chosen field of operations for the first time. ‘Maybe if we had some disco lights.’
My brim was sodden and I did not want to return it to my head. ‘What are you doing here, Lothar?’
His expression became businesslike and with unusual deliberation, he took out a cigarette from the packet he kept in one of his breast pockets.
‘On the way back, I stayed at one of the villages. They told me the Judge and the Colonel arrived.’ He paused. ‘I heard about this Captain Lugo, too. There are rumours. I came straight to find you. I think it might be better to talk away from the Station. They took one of the Matsigenka prisoner – correct?’
‘Yes. And that’s only the start of it. I’ve been going insane wondering what the hell to do.’ More often than not I found Lothar’s boyish pride in knowing things ahead of time slightly irritating; but today I could hardly restrain my feelings of relief. ‘Can I have a cigarette?’ I asked.
‘Let’s sit,’ he said.
He was a rangy man with steady grey eyes that seemed a little sad and a face that forty-five years of experience had scored deep so that it creased and wrinkled as he cycled through his various expressions: cynicism, disparagement, black humour, lugubriousness. He smoked as other men breathed – fifty, sixty cigarettes a day. He had short, fair hair, almost no eyebrows, and a small wart on one ear. He wore a leather hat at all times and a wedding ring in which a tiny diamond was embedded.
He was one of those men whom nobody liked on the first few meetings – certainly not women – but whom, in time, all came to love and with such a surety and vehemence that they could not explain or understand their initial aversion. He had lived and worked in this region of the river for fifteen years or more: a translator, fixer, guide, the veteran of a dozen or so expeditions. Quinn persuaded him to join us and he had been living on the Station for the last three years. I would have thought the place too remote – even for a man of his daunting self-reliance; but we paid him well enough, his hut was free and he had the use of the computer – this last a near-priceless boon. I did not know whether his entomological knowledge had been collected as a result of working on other research or whether there was some part of his early life that had been passed in such study. Either way, he was a far more natural naturalist than I. He knew the names of tens of thousands of species of flora and fauna and his love of the forest and his curiosity for all that lived there were as affecting as those of a child. Of his wife, we knew nothing.
We walked together – back into the forest a short way from the glare in the glade. There was a fallen tree on whose branches I had sat before. Self-conscious of having summoned one up, we checked carefully for naca-naca. (Micrurus spixii, probably the most venomous of the snakes – neurotoxic, a grown man lasts no more than fifteen minutes, whether he is lucky or not.) Then we sat side by side and smoked and I told him everything. When it came to the fire, the white-hot pole, I found myself covertly watching his reaction. He was surprised; but he was not appalled and I realized with discomfort that my intentions had begun to dissolve. Neither the requirement to act nor the guilt of inaction felt quite so insistent any more. The thought rose up that I had not felt any outrage at all but was merely behaving in this way out of a conviction that I should.
‘How normal is this kind of thing, Lothar?’
‘Not.’ He looked across. ‘It is not normal. Not in the last few years. Not in this area.’ I had never seen him in this engaged mood before – more sober and without the mock gloom. ‘But whatever is happening is happening for another reason. Nothing about the registration. Probably, they are trying to flood the place with votes – yes. There will be bribes for one thing or another. You can be sure of that. They want the vote for something else – something specific.’
‘For what?’
‘I don’t know.’ He shrugged. ‘All the usual possibilities are with us . . . mining, logging, drugs, cattle, agriculture. You know the list.’
‘Aren’t we too far in for agriculture?’
‘You would think so now. But maybe there’s another road coming. There’s still a lot of very valuable hardwood here because it has been too difficult for them to get to.’ He crushed out his cigarette and placed it carefully in the empty packet that he always carried in his other breast pocket. ‘There will be a deal somewhere. It might be land rights. Or it might be some kind of concession. Who knows? But I have not seen it like this before. Not here. Everybody is tense. And one thing is for certain, my friend, this Colonel sends no more than two of his men out with the Judge. He goes out separately most of the time. The Yora have been watching them.’
‘Are they registering the Yora as well?’
‘They don’t know which tribe is which.’
‘I thought it was all about the Indians?’
‘Indians, mestizos, ribereños – they don’t seem to care. They register whoever they want. Who is going to check?’ Lothar shrugged. ‘Two weeks ago, when they were downriver, lots of Ashaninka turned up – but they are organized and their leaders were making the people go. Some of the Matsigenka who already live on the rivers are coming out for the bribes. The Ese Eja are staying out of the way and the Yora will wait for what they think they can get ahead of the other tribes. And as to Mashco Piro – well, what does any of this Scheiße mean to them?’ He exhaled. ‘They tell us that we must develop to relieve poverty. But the un-contacted do not consider themselves poor or undeveloped – they say, “We have the forest to live in. What are these things called rights? What is poverty?” ’
‘That’s more or less what the Judge said.’
He shrugged. ‘The facts are the same the world over. It’s what we do with them that is the difference between people.’
‘Now you sound more like the Colonel.’ I winced against my smoke. ‘By the way, he wants us to tell him where we are going every day. He says that we can’t go where his patrols are.
’
‘That’s not good.’
‘I don’t see what is so dangerous about rounding up people to register them to vote.’
‘Exactly.’
‘So where are we in all of this, Lothar?’
‘That depends on what you decide to do and what is really going on.’
‘We are doing science. It’s a research station.’
‘No, it is a government facility that your university rents off a poorer country that will do whatever it can do to make itself richer – just like your own. That’s what countries do. That’s what we want countries to do – no? And it’s only been used as a scientific station for the last five years – which is no time at all.’ He exhaled. ‘Welcome to the mess.’
I looked at the tree opposite. I remembered that the last time we had been at this site, Felipe had cut me some of the fruit.
‘We are only just beginning,’ I said. ‘We are booked in for four months. We have brought all our gear. I’m not abandoning everything and going home. I can’t do that.’ I coughed. ‘This work is all I have. We’re going to prove something about the way life works. Something that is nothing to do with human beings. Something real.’
‘Well . . .’ He folded his second cigarette and offered me the carton so that I could discard mine. ‘It looks like it will be a real pain in der Hintern to have these guys hanging around and telling us where we can and cannot go – but they may not stay so long.’
‘So you agree: we carry on as if nothing has happened?’
He looked at me with his grey eyes. ‘I am not telling you what to do, my friend. We must all decide that for ourselves.’
THREE
I
A week passed. And the truth is that we worked harder with the soldiers around – reporting in with our site destinations at dawn, leaving for the forest earlier, staying in the lab until later. But this was because the Station was no longer a place of gathering and conversation. We had lost our sense of companionship, the pleasure of society. We kept to our huts.
Every morning and every evening, Cordero was at the comedor, waiting. When he was alone, he studied maps and read yellow documents that he took ostentatious care to turn over as soon as we entered. When he was with one of his men, he would immediately and selfconsciously break off their discussion. He would nod his curt greetings but he seldom spoke save to ask questions – and when he did there was always that same mixture of indifference and contempt in his voice though nothing that could be specifically defined. I had been right about his concern for his appearance – his clothes were incongruously clean and he used various sweet-smelling lotions on his skin. He ate slowly and methodically and never fewer than three courses. And though our table was round, he seemed always to be sitting centrally so that we found ourselves divided on either side of him.
Jorge became Cordero’s personal chef and took an obvious delight in his new-found sponsor. He came and went from the kitchen with his little round jaw thrust forward above his chins, daring us to comment and refusing to work much before the Colonel’s sitting or much after his rising. We were served the dishes the Colonel liked at the times the Colonel liked them.
Felipe hovered and fussed, meanwhile, half envious of Jorge and half embarrassed by his disloyalty to Kim and me. Plainly, the Colonel had no use for him. And this realization only served to drive him to greater anxieties and the protracted performance of all manner of needless minor tasks. When he came out into the field with us, he was distracted. When he stayed at the Station, he was dejected.
Sole, conversely, did nothing. And though we carried on as before, it was not the same. She refused to talk about what had happened. And in the evenings, she preferred not to leave her hut at all. Instead, she performed her washing and cleaning tasks in the dead time of the mid-morning or mid-afternoon.
Estrela was the only one of us seemingly unaffected: surly, silent, she continued to sit in the tiny store room day and night in near darkness before her candlelit shrine devoted to La Virgen Madre de Dios, praying for God knows what.
Though there were half a dozen other uniformed men around, I saw nothing of either Captain Lugo or the Boy. And, after a couple of days, I began to convince myself that Cordero had acted on my insistence, that they had been disgraced and sent away to be disciplined, but that – for reasons of pride – he had decided not to tell me.
I said nothing to Kim of that first night. And she gave no indication of having heard anything. She had been thrown off balance by the Judge, I realized, but her unease and her upset had manifest themselves in a renewed application to our field studies and a more businesslike tone to our conversations in the lab.
The Judge himself seemed to work as he pleased, coming and going at hours that did not coincide with our own or the Colonel’s. I did not see him at breakfast but he arrived most evenings for dinner, always in his suits, always drinking from our bar, which he promised loudly to replenish. Like Kim and Lothar, I sought to avoid him and exchange only civilities, not least because I found something disturbing about his ability to force me back on my core – so that I felt I must always be defending myself against the acuity and implication of everything he said. One evening he surprised me, though, and I could not but talk with him.
Seeking some relief from the endless green, I had gone down to the river. The sun’s blast was fading and the perfumes of the plants were uncoiling so that the air was filled with subtle fragrances. I had sat down at the furthest reach of the jetty with my legs dangling over the water like a boy and I was listening to the burbling song of the oropendola birds and watching their bright tails flash across a sky streaked in peach and pale vermilion. My senses had become so subsumed in the forest itself that there was no longer a border between my body and the world. And so I heard his voice as one might hear a deep low splash – a large caiman entering the water.
‘Another beautiful sunset, Doctor. I can’t help but think they are wasted on humanity. I would like my wife to see this.’
Startled, I turned.
He was walking towards me: ‘I have never been able to process much above pleasure, of course, but my wife is remarkable – she really enjoys beauty where she finds it, breathes it in, lives it. There are too many people who wait for death to enlighten them about life, don’t you think? Please, don’t get up.’
He laid down the light rug that he was carrying rolled beneath his arm and sat down beside me. A pair of blue-headed macaws flew past.
‘They’re famous for their monogamy as well as their colour – is that true?’
‘I think so.’
‘Do you have a wife, Dr Forle?’
‘No.’
‘But there are strands of silver in that scruffy golden hair of yours and it is obvious you are a man who knows love.’ He looked across at me. ‘There have been women? Or is it one woman in particular?’
I said nothing.
‘Don’t persecute yourself, Doctor. It will be no more than half your fault. And women understand men more than it suits them to pretend.’
He took out his cigarette case and I had the sudden thought that his capacity for such quick intimacy must have been honed through the long years of questioning people under oath.
‘And you – have you been married a long time?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’ He smoked with a flourish that suggested a peculiar strain of happiness. ‘We’re lucky. When we are together we are very happy.’
‘And when you are not?’
‘I mope with my mistresses.’
‘It must be difficult for you.’
‘Touché.’ He smiled. ‘I like you, Doctor, you remind me of myself before I knew who I was. But there’s something else there . . . something visceral. Sorry, forgive me – would you like one?’
‘I’m giving up.’
‘So I’ve noticed.’ The smile became a laugh.
A green kingfisher dived into the water.
‘What are you really doing here?’ I asked.
; Another flourish. ‘Bringing democracy and enlightenment.’
‘You said yourself, though: most of the Indians don’t wish to vote.’
‘But we have told ourselves a great story about our world, Doctor,and the progress of mankind. And democracy is what happens next. Surely you must know that mankind is forever becoming?’
It was impossible not to respond to his odd mixture of charm and challenge. ‘You don’t need to be a scientist – or an amateur anthropologist – to know that life does not lead up to something else, something better. Life leads up to life.’
He exhaled. ‘And yet each man – in his own mind – tells himself a story, Doctor: about who he is, and what he is, and how he should be reckoned. And each man follows this story that he tells himself: what happened before,which is why he is where he is now; what happens next, which is why – pretty soon – he won’t be where he is now. So it goes. No wonder he cannot then resist the idea that there must be another story – that of mankind itself – of mankind’s progress. And no wonder he gets the feeling that his little story must be part of this . . . this much bigger story.’
‘Homo fabulans,’ I said, ‘man the storyteller.’
He looked at me candidly again, his pale eyes shining. ‘I have not heard that phrase before.’
‘I may have just made it up.’
‘Well, it is true, Doctor: we are the only animal that is compelled to fashion narrative.’
‘It’s still a fallacy,’ I said. ‘A scientific impossibility. The individual organism cannot participate unconsciously in some great narrative of the species toward a collective destiny.’
‘Well, then, it’s a fallacy that the evolutionary scientists share with their religious enemies – the notion of narrative, the notion of becoming.’
‘Again, no. You can have the first without the second.’
‘I’m not so sure.’ We could hear the unmistakeable sound of a powerful outboard. He began to get up. ‘And in any case the need for both springs from the same place inside the human psyche. Although it’s true: I myself much prefer being to becoming. This must be them.’