by Edward Docx
She stirred again. I soothed. She settled. I lay still. Whenever we slept together, these wordless duets of ours played on through the night; though we were barely conscious, it was as if our bodies were about some quiet communion that they wished to protect from the searchlight of the mind.
Now, without warning, she turned herself onto her front, raised herself on her elbows and hung her head. I reached for the kerosene lamp behind me. The room flared into view; the shadows stretched and shrank back. The animal moved again beneath the hut. Her cheekbones were fiercely broad and high, so that she seemed both defiant and shy whenever she looked up.
‘I hate this,’ she murmured. ‘What’s happening?’
‘They got back about half an hour ago. They’re having some kind of a party. Here – have some water.’
She remained on her front and swigged awkwardly from the bottle. The white sheet fell from her shoulders.
‘My husband came here,’ she said.
I made myself hold her eyes.
‘I saw him,’ she said.
‘It was a dream, Sole. You woke in the middle of a dream.’
‘Why does he come back?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘He wants to speak to me.’
She passed the water and lay down on her side, facing me. As a younger man, I would have recoiled. Now I was drawn further in – I wanted to show solidarity with her experience. I wanted to tell her that I knew some of what the human heart is required to endure.
Her body tensed: people were coming up the path. It was too late to extinguish the lamp.
‘I’m going to buy a gun,’ she whispered.
Her husband had been a miner but he was poisoned by the mercury and then shot for his gold.
‘No,’ I said softly.
‘If you were me, you would have already got one.’
There were two voices. And an eerie rhythmic squeaking sound that I both did and did not recognize. They stopped directly outside. We breathed the wet air. Our door was locked but I was afraid that they were about to demand Sole out again. They were arguing. I could not make out what they were saying. Where had they been? I did not believe that they would bother with the bathing hut to urinate. They had not done so thus far. The squeaking began again.
Sole rose and soundlessly crossed to the window. She motioned me to douse the light.
‘Who was it?’ I asked. ‘Lugo?’
‘No. The youngest one with the metal mouth and his rat friend.’
‘What are they doing?’
‘I can’t see. They’re using our cart.’
The cart, of course: the wheels squeaked.
‘What for? What are they moving?’
‘I can’t see. It looks empty.’
‘I’m going to go out.’
She turned from the window. ‘Stay there.’
‘They won’t do anything to me, Sole.’ I threw back the sheet. ‘It would cause them too much trouble.’
But I hesitated. The cart was moving away. I twisted again to light the lamp at its lowest burn. She stood looking towards me in the flickering light, fingering the hem of her T-shirt. My heart was filled with feeling for her.
‘They’re going,’ I said. ‘Come back to bed.’
‘Everything is changed.’ She shook her head. ‘They are changing everything.’
‘What, Sole, what are they changing?’
‘Ministry of Agriculture to Ministry of Interior.’ She said these formal, masculine words with a terrible finality.
‘How do you know?’
‘Everybody knows.’
‘Do they?’
‘Yes. That’s why Rebaque went away. That’s why he won’t be back. Right now, I bet he’s in the capital getting a new job somewhere else. Maybe he already has one. This place isn’t about research any more. It never was. It’s about money. Like everything.’
The noise from the comedor was dying down. I spoke softly: ‘You don’t know that. It’s just rumours. Nobody official has said anything.’
‘There is no official.’ She raised a single shoulder in her habitual shrug and scoffed. ‘Maybe they will send one letter in a few months and maybe – if it makes it as far as Laberinto – someone will open it before they wipe their ass. But even then they won’t be able to tell us the good news because they won’t be able to read.’ She leant back against the wall and raised her eyes to the ceiling. Quiet again, she said: ‘Our jobs will go.’
‘If that happens . . . if that happens, I can increase the money I pay you. We need more help, we’re going too slowly.’
‘I do not want you to give me your money.’
Inwardly, I cursed my clumsiness.
From somewhere in the night came the sound of a small plane.
‘Cocaine,’ she said.
‘Sole, come.’ I reached out. ‘I will massage your head.’
She moved from the wall but only as far as the end of the bed, where she sat down sideways with her legs curled beneath her.
‘Perhaps you are the reason for my dream,’ she said. ‘My husband wants to talk to me about you.’
I wished only to crawl across to her.
‘Tell me about your dream,’ I said.
‘You tell me about yours.’
‘I don’t dream.’
‘But sometimes . . . sometimes when you are here you are not with me.’
‘Everything before – it’s gone, Sole. With you, there is quiet. That’s the truth.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘I am not dishonest.’
‘But you keep yourself hidden to me – to everyone.’
‘Ask me anything.’
‘Even when you answer, you do not answer.’ She looked at me, her eyes unmoving and so dark they seemed completely black. ‘You’re like the men who come out of the forest – you sign your name to the register with a cross. Except that I know that you can write.’
FOUR
I
I found Felipe bustling about at the comedor as if but half an hour from opening the family restaurant.
‘The Colonel has gone,’ he said, stepping towards me and unable to contain his delight.
‘What – with the soldiers?’
‘Yes – all of them – the Colonel, the Judge and the soldiers – and this time they really have gone.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Their huts are completely empty. No equipment. Nothing. All that they’ve left us is some beer.’ He smiled his widest smile. ‘Twenty-four bottles. We are saving them for when we go to Machaguar – for the party.’
‘Twelve bottles,’ Jorge murmured – he was standing by our dining table wearing his black and white oven gloves, holding a hot metal tray on which he was keeping half a dozen fried eggs warm.
With finger and eager thumb, Felipe began tugging first one shirt cuff then the other. ‘Two of the men were carrying the Judge’s red boxes,’ he said. ‘The registration documents are in those boxes . . . I think they have finished here, Doctor, I really do.’
I could not hide my excitement any more than Felipe. ‘All right, we should do something about the mess – especially where they had their fire.’
Jorge slid the eggs ever so slightly one way then the other on his tray. ‘Where is Sole?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. She’ll be here in a minute.’ I tempered my tone. ‘We’ll clean up together – it won’t take long. We’ll have a meeting here in half an hour – everyone. Then we’ll get to work.’
I had forgotten about Machaguar until Felipe and Jorge reminded me. Every party on the river believed itself the best but Machaguar, a remote and little-visited village, had a particular reputation as ‘the enchanted carnival’. In the main, so Lothar had explained, its fame was to do with an accident of nature: there was a giant beach there – a rare, relatively flat expanse of mud and sand on the inside of a great slow bend that allowed them to erect a stage and a huge sound-and-light system. This beach then became the biggest
dance floor in the jungle. They dressed up the surrounding trees and the village behind with thousands and thousands of torches – and it was these lights that were supposed to cast ‘enchantment’ over the two nights. People travelled hundreds of miles to come – down from the mountains, up the river, in from the jungle, out from the cities.
We would need two full days to get there. We would first have to go down our tributary and back up the main river as far as Laberinto; from there, we would take one of the passenger boats. Clearly, Jorge still intended to go with his stolen beer; Felipe, too, judging by his tone. The others would take their cue from me. I would have to decide.
Eggs were one of the few things Jorge cooked well. I was considering a second when I was startled by a high-pitched squeal . . . A tiny boy was running full tilt down the path from the river towards the comedor: it was Mubb, Tupki’s youngest son. He seemed to be in the grip of a maddened exuberance at his own mobility. His excitement doubled as he realized that I had seen him and he appeared to lose all control of his toddler self, holding both his hands out in front of him and waving as though to stop a taxiing air force. I stepped down from the comedor and gathered him in before he could stumble.
‘Hello, Mubb. Hello hello hello.’
‘Dig dig dig,’ he shrieked. Digging had obsessed him ever since we had passed twenty minutes together digging a hole for a D. hirsuta I had planted near the lab.
‘Dig dig dig.’ His shiny black hair had been trimmed again so that there could be no better example on Earth of a bowl cut; and his cheeks bulged so far up his face with his grinning and his squealing that they squeezed his eyes half closed, giving him the appearance of a deranged boy-emperor – life, death and all the kingdoms of the sun at his whim.
José, his older brother, sloped up. He was a sombre four to Mubb’s two and yet already he had the bearing of one resigned to an existence of fraternal glossing and oblique compensations. He stopped short, placed both his hands behind his head and looked up at me with an expression that said: I know he’s mad; I have talked to him about it; but there’s nothing further we can do; we just have to persevere.
‘Hello, José.’
‘You come eat tambaqui?’ he asked.
How could I refuse such an invitation?
‘Yes,’ I replied.
Mubb shrieked.
José nodded and winced and nodded.
‘Dig, dig, dig,’ Mubb began again.
Tupki himself emerged from the trees, holding up his hand in salutation.
Rebaque used to make a point of maintaining good relations with our neighbours – the river folk, the missionaries, the farmers, the various workers and the Indians alike. And now that the Colonel and the Judge had left, I wanted very much to continue in that spirit. I placed Mubb back on his feet and offered him and his brother some of the juice on the table, which they drank at terrifying speed.
Tupki climbed the stairs and murmured his thanks and then said something to José that I did not understand. The two brothers set off down the path towards my hut and Tupki and I sat down together at the low table.
‘Brothers who are friends need fear nothing in the world,’ I said.
Tupki had no true smile but his pained eyes softened momentarily and the furrow of his brow shallowed a fraction.
‘All my children are different,’ he said. ‘Same mother, same father, same food. I don’t know how it happens.’
He was a short man with a thick black-and-grey moustache and though brawny-armed he had a tight little belly as if he had just swallowed his sons’ football. His face told of hard work and harder liquor and he had the odd double manner – solicitous and yet scornful – of a ticket tout. He always wore the same things: a nondescript T-shirt, football shorts, sandals and a tattered straw hat in the last possible stage of disintegration. He was a fisherman. And he was a father – nine times over.
He had come, he said, to see if I and ‘my ant people’ (here he did manage a grin of sorts) would like to eat with him and his family. He would have asked us earlier but he had not been finding the fish.
‘Thanks,’ I replied. ‘Of course, we would love to . . . José tells me that it is tambaqui. I’ve never eaten it. They say it’s the best.’
He nodded and began to explain that certain fish had vanished, returned, disappeared, required libation, become plentiful. I neither understood nor quite believed him.
‘I will bring something to drink,’ I said.
He made no effort to hide his satisfaction at that.
‘Come tomorrow,’ he began. There was the faintest note of distraction in his voice and I had the sense that there was something he wished further to say.
‘The day after is better for us,’ I said. I wanted us to have some free time together again – to eat in the evening as before and play cards. ‘I’ll bring my assistant, Kim.’
There were squeals from beyond; Mubb had escaped his brother’s attempts at distraction. They were coming back at maximum speed across the clearing.
‘They can help with our work today,’ I said, ‘if you want to stay for lunch. We’re cleaning the whole place.’
Tupki could not prevent his eyes going to the bar.
‘Thank you. I will wait.’
I understood his need. And I wanted only to indulge it. A flood of good intentions was rising inside me. I knew that the spring was guilt over my inaction regarding the prisoner and that the source lay deeper still in my previous life. But I wanted now to encourage this flood in the hope that it would drown the weeds that had flourished since the arrivals and bear me back to the hope I had previously begun to feel in the steady business of our work. And in the company of Sole.
II
Stage Two
The second phase of our research will be a concerted effort to address the constraint question: what limits the Devil’s Gardens?
During the course of our work, we have become ever more astonished at how effectively the Myrmelachista go about the destruction of the environment to suit their purpose – how they poison it, then populate it, then police it. We are growing certain, too, of what can only be described as a ‘language’ employed in these feats. For the most part, our ants use chemical secretions to communicate, but these in combination with a vast array of touches and even sound; they tap, they stroke and they squeak. Indeed, we have come to believe that they are very close to what we might call ‘syntax’; each chemical ‘word’ is used in a sequence to convey a ‘phrase’ and this communication is modified and further directed by contact and auditory signals. Demonstrably, they teach and they learn; running in tandem, meeting, ‘embracing’, ‘pointing’, passing instructions back and forth.
The question has arisen, therefore, and will not go away: if the Myrmelachista build, and then maintain, their great monocultures, their cities, their empires, then what constrains them? Why do they not take over the whole forest? Given the right conditions, might they do so? Is there some advantage to the species as a whole in limiting the expansion of one group and, if so, what kind of intelligence is this? Such a thing would be an anathema to evolutionary biology, of course; for how could the individual (or the colony for that matter) ‘know’ what was good for the future of the species and act upon this – at its own genetic expense – on a day-to-day basis?
Our working hypothesis provides a simpler and less heretical explanation: because a larger number of plant eaters are attracted to the altered environment in Devil’s Gardens, there must come a point where the Myrmelachista cannot keep them all at bay. In other words, through the very act of engineering the world around them for what appears to be their own benefit, the ants eventually bring about their own demise.
The difficulty, as ever, is how to prove this.
III
I passed the morning of the departure in two tasks.
First, I took José and Mubb and I cleaned the wash-houses. José was helpful; but Mubb wanted only to climb into our wooden buckets and put José’s sponge on his head
. Every five minutes he got soap in his eyes and started to wail as if he had been shot. He was, however, a dedicated sweeper of the floor; though in this, too, less than helpful since he could not control the big broom and yet insisted on monopolizing it while José attempted miracles with the dustpan.
Second, I entered Rebaque’s office, which doubled as our infirmary store. I had been intending to form a mental inventory of our medical supplies since Rebaque left; but I had always anticipated his imminent return and such an undertaking had felt as though it were an invasion of his domain.
I went through the shelves. As a student, I had studied anatomy but not medicine. I often wished I had been a doctor – a purpose so clear, so daily, so undeniable. We were short in most things though long in aspirin and, unaccountably, laxatives. We had splints and bandages and surgical tubes for sprains. There was nothing for venom. I put everything on the desk. I wiped down cupboards and then replaced the various pills and packets to a new and more ordered system of my own.
An unwholesome curiosity made me open the drawers. The three down the right were empty. Those down the left the same. Only the central one had any weight. Inside was the grotesque master key with its death’s head at the bow end. I sat back and looked around the office with fresh eyes. The place was bare of personality. The pictures on the walls were generic – an aerial shot of the river, a child in feathered headdress, a chart of poisonous frogs. Perhaps Sole was right: perhaps Rebaque was not intending to return.