The Devil's Garden

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The Devil's Garden Page 9

by Edward Docx


  Jorge left Tord’s canoe for ours to make room, bringing his precious case of beer with him. Tord, meanwhile, stood upright by his tiller, doing nothing, and yet performing this ministry with such a sedulous and determined attitude of pastoral care that he would have us all believe that the afflicted of the world had ever been his personal charge and that their best chance on Earth, as in Heaven, lay solely with him. (Who can blame the Achuar for shrinking the missionaries’ heads?) There was no point in my offering yet more hands to get in the way – so I remained in our boat and watched Virima and Sole ease a near motionless Yolanda off the stretcher and into the bed that Sole had made. Somewhere, Sole had also found a great umbrella to protect Yolanda’s face.

  Mubb and José were waving. Tupki’s wife appeared beside them on the bank, looking on as we pulled away. I never knew her name.

  It was a beautiful day: a clear sky and – midstream at least – drier air and the breeze of motion. I was deeply cheered to be in our company. Sole and Tord were up ahead in the missionary’s boat with Yolanda and Virima; Felipe, Kim, Jorge and I were now in the second. We dropped the engines to their downriver chug. We rearranged whatever padding we had bought to make the plank seats more comfortable. We settled back – Tord and Felipe piloting, Jorge sipping his beer, Kim taking pictures, me with my notebook and the jungle sounding like a pair of maracas shaking out its rhythm on either bank.

  Time on the river is like time at sea. It is not measured in minutes but in the way the light changes the colour of the water. And I felt a deep and unusual contentment that day as I watched the current and the passing frieze of the banks. I had imagined something like this before – I had seen myself drifting along with mankind’s Latinate checklist of creation to hand, ticking the boxes as I went, all five kingdoms intimately described. One of the thoughts that I have always liked in Tord’s Bible is the idea of humanity as steward – caretakers of a paradise entrusted. Of course this leads on to questions as to who has done the entrusting . . . But is there not some secret back channel – muddy and shallow – that links even the most avid atheist’s urge to classify with the preacher’s teaching of stewardship?

  Children stopped their play to watch us go by. We waved and they waved back. Many of the riverside houses were little more than raised platforms, haphazardly roofed. The number of other canoes and skiffs increased as we went. Men were fishing here and there – with nets and spears and trailed hooks. I watched women laughing as they washed clothes at the water’s edge.

  On the near bank, we passed the oyster-backed heron birds whose name I still did not know, standing in the cracked mud of the holms. The way they swapped from one foot to the other was mystifying: the free leg gradually offered to the earth in one long slow-motion bend until – abruptly – the decision was made and both feet were firmly planted for a glorious second before – just as quickly – the other leg was snatched up an inch or two and then retracted the rest of the way with that same measured movement. What possible reason could there be for this? Must there always be reasons?

  I watched a pair of turquoise butterflies dance about a heliconia flower; Lasaia agesilas, the rarest of the rare. And as I fell asleep, the forward sky was full of swallows. Through half-closed eyes, I saw them wheel and swoop. Fast and keen. So many beating hearts in those chasing breasts; alive alive alive.

  II

  Speculations on the Nature of the Devil

  Sometimes, when I cast aside the tools of taxonomy and the great tapestries of language that we have spun about ourselves, I recognize afresh that there is no sense in evaluating creation merely by the measure of its most exotic creature – Homo sapiens. Instead, I see clearly that the ants that walk in tandem are teaching one another the way, however we may define teaching. I see that the ants that raid and forage have memories, regardless of what we might call memory. I see intelligence whatever our definitions of intelligence might be. I see super-organisms.

  I see, too, that my own ants and these hollow trees in which they nest need not even be two species but one. When the world was young there were one-celled organisms that did not have chlorophyll, that could not turn light into energy, and there were others that did. These combined to make single species of plants. Why not, then, another word for this amalgam creature in the Devil’s Garden – part ant, part plant?

  Indeed, my ants are very like trees already. The colony releases thousands of seed queens. These queens must scatter and fall to the ground. Almost all will die. Those too close to the parent colony, like saplings too close to the parent tree, cannot thrive. But the few colonies that make it are stable and unmoving; and they set about the exploitation of local resources, guarding them jealously.

  In this cast of mind, I come to consider Homo sapiens. And in the self-delight of two hundred thousand years – almost nothing – I see that he has lost all humility and blinded his own eyes to the true nature of his circumstances. That, despite his intelligence, he alone of all creation looks to the gods to save him. But I see, too, the ants who track him, settle where he settles, thrive where he fouls; I see them swarm across the world, destroying, colonizing, voracious – Solenopsis invicta, the red fire ant, that he can neither control nor repel.

  III

  We arrived in the late afternoon and even from a distance we could see that Laberinto was in chaos. Mindful of Yolanda, we cut the engines and hung back while we assessed our best course. Everything centred on the crowded pier, which teetered over the mud and vegetation, reaching out desperately for the water. Two big riverboats had drawn up perpendicular to the end but no care was being taken to load the outer vessel first and so commotion massed on both decks while more goods and boxes and carts and cages continued to arrive from the town. There were smaller boats all around. I called across to Sole: ‘Is there somewhere else we can tie up?’

  ‘No,’ she yelled back. ‘We’ll have to pull up on to the mud and walk.’ She indicated where the riverbed was dry beneath the pier. Filth and refuse choked even the weeds. A cadre of vultures kept desultory station on an upturned canoe.

  ‘Is there a path?’

  Tord raised his voice from behind his tiller as if he had not heard us. ‘We cannot climb up with Yolanda.’

  Sole ignored him. ‘Yes, there’s a way to the main track. They use it as a dump.’

  Two hundred yards downstream, we stepped into the mire. A fouler-smelling place could not have been imagined and yet there was no choice but to cross it. Jorge volunteered to stay behind with his beer until Tord and Felipe could get back and secure the boats somewhere. Sole went ahead to requisition a room at the town’s only hotel, the San Mateo. The rest of us set off after her, carrying the stretcher as best we could – Tord, Felipe, Kim and myself with Virima beside us – sometimes tiptoeing, sometimes slipping calf-deep, sweating through the slime, parting the tangle and weeds where they rose up, passing by the rusting fridges, the bed frames, the stain-soaked mattresses, the oil drums, the cans, the bottles and endless plastic bags. The worst was a rotting dog – the bristled yellow skin of its bloated stomach suppurating beneath a fume-brown cloud of flesh flies; this horror doubled by the vultures; and then tripled by the realization that, if ever it began properly to rain, this tip would soon be the river bed again and was deliberately sited in order that all of this detritus would be washed into the system. In every blessing – a curse.

  We were filthy, thirsty and slick-faced when we emerged onto the pot-holed track. I had never known such heat. Water left my body across the entire surface of my skin – even my knees were sweating, my wrists, my knuckles. We rested and swung our aching arms about. I had given Yolanda some more paracetamol. She was still conscious. We swapped sides to alleviate the strain and hoisted the stretcher and walked on, Virima beside us leaning in to her sister whenever we jolted or paused.

  Inland a little, the track joined a second – muddier and wide. Dead ahead and away to our right lay the Laberinto favelas. The trees had been cut back and the ground bared,
creating these terrible fields of mud. Great holes had been dug without pattern or obvious purpose – some filled with standing water, others with refuse. There were no cross-streets, but instead ill-defined footpaths wound and narrowed between the hundred corrugated-iron huts, the lean-tos, the plastic sheeting and the tents.

  A motorbike bounced past. Boys ran alongside. Matted heads emerged from beneath tarpaulin. A woman with a bucket of water was washing a child that would not stand still. Capuchin monkeys followed along behind us, too close.

  We struggled on in the direction of the centre. The stretcher drew eyes from all sides. Perhaps it saved us from the worst of the leers and drunken shouts that I knew from my last visit attended the arrival of the unfamiliar. I had not been down this far before but I had come through Laberinto on my way in – eager, clean – and was pleased to leave as fast as Felipe and Sole could find Vinton the following morning. Felipe had then explained to me that there were no serious prospectors left in the town – that the thousands encamped here were the mad and the desperate: men who slept guard at the entrance to their tunnels day and night; women who claimed to have discovered a new gold-yielding stream so secret that they walked three days in circles to throw imagined thieves off their trail. For everybody else, Laberinto had become merely another frontier town, a last stopping-off place before the various river tributaries went deeper into the interior. Apart from the supply stores and the depots, the only people who stayed here worked for the only people who could provide employment – those in charge of the trades that paid; drugs, guns, timber and sex.

  We had walked no more than three-quarters of a mile but it felt many times that distance. We stopped at a liquor shop guarded by a man with a gun on his lap and a military cap. Felipe went and found a truck and driver to take us through the centre – a narrow grid of dirt roads parallel to the river roughly three miles end to end. We climbed in and shook and thumped and juddered into town, Yolanda murmuring and Virima grimacing all the way.

  My time at the Station had altered my perception. I remembered thinking before how dangerous the bare wires seemed – strung up roof to roof between the shacks and sagging as if to garrotte the unwary. I remembered how the dim bulbs threw an incongruous fairground light on the mud and the dogs at dark. But now this felt like a high street and Laberinto all but a metropolis with its bars and ready supplies and motorbikes and the possibility of strangers and a life beyond nightfall.

  I remembered the San Mateo, too, the town’s only boarding house. I had stayed a single noisy night – full of an anticipation that was half fear and half elation. And it was the same stout manageress who now stood to greet us as we came in through the swinging doors, her biscuit-fed features as attentive as I had remembered them indifferent before. Sole must have worked her magic.

  ‘Hello, Doctor. Your room is number three.’

  ‘Thanks. Do you have the other keys as well?’

  ‘Yes, Doctor.’

  ‘Please bring them up with us? We all want to wash.’

  She hesitated by her desk.

  ‘I’ll come and settle all the bills straight away – as soon as we have this girl in a bed. Is there a doctor?’

  Confusion slackened her jowls still further.

  I asked again: ‘Is there another doctor?’

  ‘The señora has gone to look on the boats.’

  I turned as best I could with the stretcher. The short lift in from the truck had nearly killed us.

  ‘Everyone OK? Or do we need to put her down?’

  ‘I’m OK,’ Felipe replied.

  Across from me, Kim tried to blow her hair from her forehead but it was stuck with the heat. ‘Never felt better,’ she said.

  ‘Tord?’ I asked, over my shoulder.

  ‘Ready.’

  ‘OK. Let’s go straight,’ I said. ‘Can you bring us twelve big bottles of water?’

  The manageress nodded and forced herself to smile. ‘Please, this way.’

  We were lucky: the stretcher went through the door frame. But if the room was really the San Mateo’s largest, then it was by a matter of no more than two or three square inches. There was a bed, a clothes rail, a chest on which a television squatted and two tattered chairs – exactly the same as I remembered mine on the way through. Mercifully, Sole had found three separate fans from somewhere and at least the air was moving. We crowded in. I lifted Yolanda in my arms and the others pulled the stretcher out from beneath her.

  The door opened, pressing Felipe against the wall. It was the manager. I remembered him from before, too: porcupine hair and a face that always seemed to be calling in a favour. He eyed the fans: ‘How long will you be staying?’ he asked.

  ‘We’re not all staying.’ I turned so that he could not approach the bed. ‘We’ve just spoken with your wife. I’m going to check us in – and settle the bills in advance. Is there a problem?’

  ‘I’m the boss,’ he said.

  Felipe’s thumb knuckle went to his eye. Tord appeared to be praying over Yolanda’s feet. Kim was busy in the tiny bathroom wetting a towel.

  ‘This woman will be here with her sister until the boat leaves for the river city tomorrow,’ I continued. ‘My friend will also be staying. She’s the one who spoke with your wife. The other rooms you can have back this evening at six – that’s what has been agreed.’

  He leered. ‘We don’t do day rooms. You pay for the night. We’re busy.’

  ‘But you do rooms by the hour – right?’ I took a step towards him, widening my arms to sweep everyone out of the door before me. ‘Let’s go and sort this out. Tord – come on – Jesus hasn’t helped anyone here yet. I don’t think he’s going to start now.’

  The manager backed out but stood waiting in the corridor, picking his teeth. At the door I paused. Kim looked up and I acknowledged her expression of exasperation. Sitting on the other side of the bed, Virima was stroking her sister’s forehead. Quietly, she began to sing.

  IV

  The ceiling fan was broken. I lay down, clean if not cool, and I listened to the voices, the fizz of the electricity and the motorbikes in the street below. Two men were discussing the price of petrol and the price of women, the one rising as the other fell. They must have been sat on the porch directly beneath my window. Our other rooms were all upstairs – something of a novelty since this was one of only half a dozen buildings in Laberinto to have a second storey.

  Everybody passed through the San Mateo. Downstairs, at the bar, young working girls smoked and joked together, fussing with their counterfeit handbags in various simulations of sorority. Middle-ranking cocaine and logging bosses sat down at the tables for fried river fish with scientists and missionaries and the occasional anthropologist from Paris. The prospectors were the first joke in common – mad from the mercury, everyone said, crazed on hope. The environmentalists were the second. Lothar had told me of a zealous faction of undercover activists who blithely talked football and bought drinks all night for two gun-runners, who had convinced them that they were elders from a local village come in to campaign for clean water. I had some sympathy with the poor fools; I, too, had found it impossible to know the real provenance of any man or woman beyond their claims – the various Indian tribes, the mestizos, the ribereños, some moved down from the mountains, others left behind after previous booms, others again terrorized into stasis by the recent guerrillas; farmers, miners, adventurers, pioneers, narcotics, counter-narcotics, soldiers, rebels. Quinn’s words: ‘Whatever people say, in the end, the only sure measure of a man is what he does – everything else is commentary. You’ll understand when you get here.’

  There was a knock on the door. I rose and slid the buckled chain. She slipped inside. I trapped her against the wall and we kissed.

  ‘The doctor was like you,’ she said, looking up at me.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Not a doctor.’

  She had a way of only just touching me with her fingertips.

  ‘Does the water work?�
��

  ‘Yes.’

  She ducked beneath my arms.

  ‘It’s a rubber pipe but the floor is clean.’ I passed the towel that I had stolen for her from another room then lay back down on the bed watching her. ‘How is Yolanda?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She undid her shirt. ‘Alive. Drinking water. Some juice. No worse.’

  ‘I’ve arranged a truck and four men to carry her to your boat tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Good.’ She stepped from her jeans.

  ‘I will leave you the money to pay them.’

  ‘You have given me enough money. Just leave me the men.’

  She stood naked a moment at the end of the bed but before I could reach her she had stepped back and edged round into the washroom laughing. She turned on the tap and held the pipe away to test the temperature. Then she raised it to her head and let the water run down. I lay on my side so that I could see her through the door frame; there was something to do with the casualness of her beauty about other business that touched me deeply, something that summoned feeling again from my blistered heart. Sometimes, when she slept, I would press myself against her and she would murmur and seem hardly to wake, hardly to acknowledge me, save to shift by slow degrees until I was inside her and she was pushing her body against mine – and afterwards, without once speaking, she would sleep again and I would imagine that I had made love to some night creature now vanished, leaving sleeping Sole behind.

  I rose from the bed. She started to laugh and sprayed me. I cornered her, twisted the hose from her hands and carried her back. We twined together and soon we were alone in the world. When she was close, she opened her eyes and looked up at me, reaching for my hand and spreading it wide across her stomach.

  V

  We walked the late afternoon across the broken kerbs. At the Bar Gotica – painted in startlingly clean bands of yellow and blue – we stopped and chose two plastic chairs and sat down. We were protected a little from the worst of the fumes and the mud by a moped propped against a weathered wooden pillar and a row of sacks that might have contained nuts or beans or anything.

 

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