by Edward Docx
‘We have an hour,’ Sole said. ‘Time for three or four drinks – if we go at your speed.’
‘I wish you were coming.’
She raised a single shoulder in her favourite shrug. ‘When I was a girl, we went every year. My father took me.’
The barefooted waiter must have been no more than seven. The simplest thing for everyone was beer.
‘Two bottles of Cusqueña,’ I said.
He nodded – oddly formal – and set off for the ramshackle stack of crates at the back.
‘Did your father take you everywhere?’
The shoulder again. ‘He had no sons.’
‘It must have been fun.’
‘Not always. He had no money either. And most of the time we were fighting for something or other with crooked lawyers and bent politicians and then there was our own people and, well, you know the mess of everything . . .’
I nodded.
‘And there are some things a daughter shouldn’t see,’ she added.
The boy came back and flipped the lids with his prize opener. I lit a cigarette and watched Sole watching the street. Her eyes were so dark that it was impossible to distinguish her pupils. The boy hovered, still holding the necks of the bottles. I dug out some money and paid him; clearly, lines of credit in Laberinto did not extend even as far as two beers. He nodded and then pushed the bills into the front of his underwear.
‘How long will you be away?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. As long as we need to be. Will you survive without me?’
I smiled but beneath I was startled. Not once had Sole acknowledged our relationship in such a way, let alone joke about it. Neither had I.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But that’s different from . . .’
‘From what?’
‘From being alive.’
I was sure that a reciprocal smile quivered at the corner of her mouth but just then the boy arrived with the change.
‘And you?’ I asked.
‘And me what?’
‘Will you survive?’
‘I don’t need you. I can take care of myself.’ She sipped her beer but looked at me over the top of the bottle. ‘But if you are serious, then I am serious. I like your company. You make me laugh. Not so many men do that.’
I felt something I could not articulate so I said, simply: ‘I am serious.’
Immediately she danced backwards into mockery. ‘How do you know I am not just after your money?’
‘I don’t think you are. But just in case: you should know that I don’t have all that much.’
‘And you should know that we don’t trust anyone from outside.’
‘I can understand that.’
‘Why are you really here?’
‘I’m a scientist.’
She curled her lip. ‘Oh, please – don’t – you say the same thing to everybody. You’re worse than Tord.’
‘I’m here because . . . I was trying to get away from myself. The man I was before – I didn’t like him.’
She shook her head slowly – half in ridicule, half in earnest. ‘The Judge is right. Everyone thinks that the lost tribes have been looking after their souls for them here – while they have been busy filling their lives with poison and crap.’
The dogs rose. Above the noise of music from the other bars came the sound of a larger engine labouring in first gear. Opposite, a group of women sitting outside the grilled-chicken shack stopped shelling nuts and looked up. An American off-road vehicle with tinted windows lurched into view, leaning precariously into a pot hole while the wheels spun axle-deep in mud.
‘Who’s that?’ I asked.
‘Cocaine,’ she said.
‘Did he have to boat that car all the way in here just so he could drive it up and down this street?’
The shoulder again. ‘Yes.’
This time I shook my head.
‘I know him,’ she said. ‘Everybody does. He is a nice man. He doesn’t shoot anybody if he doesn’t have to.’
I put out my cigarette.
‘And everybody knows?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’ The car drew level and Sole must not have liked my expression because now she narrowed her eyes. ‘Why shouldn’t he have his men drive him around in whatever car he likes? The people in your country who buy and sell his cocaine – they do.’
‘Cocaine is illegal in my country. They still—’
‘Listen,’ she scoffed, ‘sometimes the Americans come and they give us money so that they can take it away and stuff it up their noses. Sometimes they give us money so that they can burn it. But then what happens? All the farmers who are not already growing coca start to do so – as fast as they can – because the money they make if they give over their crops for this burning – guaranteed – is way more than they could make from anything else. They – you – you’re the same – you have no idea what you want. Cocaine is not our problem. It’s your problem. Your presidents and your leaders – most of them take it – or they have done – before. Their sons and their daughters – for sure. But what do they say? What do you say? That it’s illegal.’ She laughed. ‘So why should we care about your hypocrisy? Why not buy a stupid car and boat it here all the way? At least this guy is a good criminal – he keeps the peace.’ She sneered. ‘I told you. Nobody cares. Not when it comes down to it.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘It is true.’ She put down her empty bottle and leaned in. ‘On the TV, when I was working in the capital, just for that one year, there were maybe fifty things on the news or on the documentary channels about cocaine or the trees or beef or soya or something. Maybe a new thing every week. And I bet there is ten times that in your country. Do you think that there can be anybody left – really – who does not know all the bad stuff about what happens? No. Everybody knows everything. Or they know enough. Lothar says that in Europe it’s even taught in the schools – everything – about the drugs and the guns and how many acres we lose a day. And, Jesus Christ, everybody has computers. So who doesn’t know? Which people? Where are they?’ She looked around as if to find them. ‘So what is the answer? The only answer is that they don’t care. How many times do I have to tell you? People are killed here – casually – all the time. It’s the same with diamonds and heroin and weapons and oil and everything like that. Everybody knows. Nobody cares. Simple. This is the world we live in.’
‘Sole, I want to go back to the hotel.’
‘Good. I hate talking. We still have half an hour. We can be quick. Let’s go.’
VI
Two hours later, I stood alone at the prow, bound for Machaguar. This was no minor tributary but the mighty river itself, greater in volume than the next eight of its rivals combined. The far bank was little more than a painter’s smudge of indigo and violet and the early stars were spread across a sky so wide it seemed to vault a sea. As the current began to whisper around the bow, I breathed in air that was truly fresh and forgot the long weeks so tightly hedged about, inching up those foetid back channels, sweating through the nether gloom of the forest floor. I stretched out my arms and let the wind ripple through my sleeves.
There had only been a few cabins left, so we had split up. Felipe was with me. Kim, Jorge and Tord were on the second boat, which now began to draw up alongside, a twin to our own: two decks tall and top-heavy with the crowds so that every conceivable space on the railing above and below was taken by people leaning out and struggling past, by dangled legs and waving arms. In between, cluttering, strapped and loose, were innumerable bags and crates and boxes. A llama. Two vast black speakers. A moped. Pigs. More boxes – cardboard, plastic, wooden, mesh. Packs and sacks. Drums of oil. Smokers. Gamblers. An old woman crouched on a stool, seemingly cooking on a tiny gas stove – a ghostly blue flame – elbowing off her crowding patrons. And above it all, nearer the back, a crown of children sat in a line so high on a mound of bags that they must surely have slid clean over the guardrails and into the water with the slightest swell. In
the trees of the near bank, the twilight skull-monkeys screamed and raced – maddened outriders to these tottering human arks.
There were shouts from the deck above. A spotlight was switched on; it rolled and wandered across the water like a cataractous eye. People above and behind me were moving and the extra weight was making the boat lurch. For a moment I thought that someone must have fallen in, but the chug of the engine had not changed. I stared out into the water, following the spotlight. Pink dolphins.
The night darkened and the moon came and went behind clouds. I found a seat and drank awhile and watched my fellow passengers settle themselves to sleep: children on the floor, mothers propped up, fathers sprawled out. The other boat had dropped behind us and all that lay ahead now was the blackness of the water, the blackness of the nearside bank, mile after mile, and beyond even that, the pristine jungle, rising above the waterfalls and on into the upland mists. The last place on Earth where people lived who did not know what the world had become.
VII
We heard it long before we saw it. Low and deep; a deadened thudding. Sleepers twisted in their hammocks. Children fell silent. The jungle absorbed the sound, so that it throbbed in from all sides, spread and seeped between the trees and, strangest of all, drifted up from behind us where the river disappeared into the darkness. The boat began to turn and the bend ahead to open up, the music swelling with each degree until, at last, we rounded the corner and there it was: the great beach, curving away as far as we could see, glimmering dark in the light of a thousand torches. Machaguar.
The scale surpassed all that I had imagined. At the near end there were twin towers of burning lights that cast gold and platinum streaks across the water, black and shiny as oil. Fireworks arced the river and flared across the thousands of dancing arms raised as if in worship. More lights were draped through the trees of the opposite bank; necklaces, pearls; the branches super-illuminated and ghost-white where these bulbs were set. The entrance was a banner between two giant poles and under-lit by crimson spotlights so that it reached out into the water ahead of us like a red tongue lapping us in to some fantastical city born only of the night.
There was no pier. Somehow, our pilot manoeuvred us so that we were able to tie up alongside our twin, several boats out from the shore. Below, we could see hundreds of smaller craft but the congestion was such that it was impossible to tell which were floating on the river and which had been hauled up onto the mud.
Felipe, who was wearing what appeared to be a luminescent pink waistcoat, had gone to find the others. Now he was waving to me as though there was a chance I might not be able to see him. I found the break in the rail, crossed to the other boat and made my way towards where they were standing to one side of the main crush. He was not alone in wearing his party clothes: Kim was dressed in her shorts and some kind of silver-sparkling vest top that I did not know she possessed; and Tord was wearing a T-shirt with a big white arrow pointing heavenwards on which the words ‘I’m with Him’ were inscribed in a Gothic typeface.
‘Where’s Jorge?’ I asked.
‘He says he is meeting some friends,’ Felipe replied.
‘He has friends?’ Kim widened her eyes in mock reconsideration.
‘Let’s go,’ I said.
We crossed one deck after another with the throng, the music insistent and the excitement impossible to resist. Beyond, the wide beach rose gradually up towards the tree line of the forest in which were hung more lamps, Halloween orange and ladybird red. We reached the long wooden ramp and walked down, one at a time, the drop twenty feet either side. There were several thousand here already. They pressed in on all sides and we stayed close as we moved towards the entrance. The music heaved and pulsed so that, when we stopped, we had to speak directly into one another’s ears or not at all. We passed beneath the banner and paid for our stamps and our ultraviolet marks. Then we linked hands and snaked our way up the beach through the dark mass of dancers.
Crocodiles of boys pushed through in haphazard directions, brash and careless, jumping to the rhythm. I fought a rising wave of claustrophobia and felt Kim’s fingers tighten behind me. Underfoot, there was glass and plastic and cans and I was glad of my boots.
We stopped at a blue tent that despatched only spirits and mixers – the former served in little paper thimbles that everybody tipped carefully into their cans. Over to our left below was the giant stage. A woman with a beautiful voice had started singing.
‘Worth coming all this way for,’ Kim said. ‘We should have been here last night as well.’ She poured her rum into her can. ‘I’m blaming you for not organizing things better.’
I smiled. ‘I’m blaming me, too.’
She looked up from behind her straw. Few people were wearing much more than she, but her lighter skin and the sparkle of her vest attracted attention. Most thought that she was with me. Passing men glanced up for that male-to-male fraction of a second – acknowledgement, envy, challenge, then blank.
She held out her free arm and offered the cool of the can to her wrist. ‘Where did you disappear to in Laberinto?’
‘I went for a drink – with Sole.’
‘Did you?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s probably a good thing.’ She looked away and waved at Tord and Felipe, who were buying chicken. Then she handed me her can.
‘Will you look after this?’ she asked. ‘I’ve just got to go dance.’
I watched her as she walked down the incline to the top edge of the beach. There had been no animosity but there was a constriction in her voice that she could not hide – either her feelings of sisterhood with Sole or something at odds with those feelings.
Tord came over. Without speaking, he ate his food and stood watching Kim dance. Then he drew a deep breath and eyeballed me before turning about and setting off for the sand, moving to the music with one arm in front and the other behind in the manner of an Egyptian hieroglyphic. I felt for him and his strange and patient pursuit of Kim. Almost uniquely on the continent, he could be trusted to face down temptation; and I admired him for that, too.
I caught Felipe’s attention. He turned, eager, and began to move his shoulders up and down alternately. I nodded to him to join the others but he kept on with his jigging and it occurred to me that I had never seen him drink spirits before. He came and stood by me and I leant over and cupped my hand to his ear: ‘Stay with them,’ I said. ‘And rescue her if she looks like she wants to be rescued.’
Then, before he could protest or start his shoulder dipping again, I walked away, conscious of the flask in my trouser pocket.
From the top of the beach, I looked to the shoreline where flickering fires burned between the hundred hauled-up boats. I could see the river again, just beyond, black as a scarab’s thorax save for the liquid shard and glitter of reflected lights. Smoke was drifting between the larger riverboats and out across the water. Spotlights crisscrossed the crowd, revealing countless black heads rising, falling, nodding, dense and tight together.
I walked on, sipping as I went. Beneath the roar of the music, I could hear the heavy drone of the generators away to my left. I stepped across the snaking cables, moving closer to the trees. Already the mixer was thinning down and the whiskey’s edge was a strengthening wall against which I would soon be able to lean. There were fewer bulbs but I could smell paraffin and kerosene from the lamps. I stood awhile and smoked. Groups of people were passing me on their way back down to the beach. Eyes shone and every face – beautiful, ugly, young and old – was caught a moment in the glow of the torchlight. For the first time since I had arrived I saw tribesmen painted in earnest: red semicircles on their cheekbones, darker streaks beneath, white lines, beaded skin, gleaming white-bone jewellery bolted through noses and tiered in hoops around ears, the flash of gold.
Further on and further in, the ground flattened out and the way narrowed. The trees began to muffle and distort the music from the river and I could hear the sound of the jungle night ri
sing once more. I found I was walking on a raised wooden walkway and ahead there was a clearing – the village of Machaguar itself. The path split right and left and then split again, each branch haphazardly lit. Between and besides and beyond were scattered huts. They were tall with steeply raked liana roofs and larger than any I had yet seen; some were illuminated from within, others were dark. The crowds had gone but everywhere there were groups gathered and people going in and out of doorways. I was walking in the trees and I could not tell any longer how far below me the forest floor was. A man came towards me carrying a burning torch, his skin shining, black paint rising in a v from his nose, white discs hanging from his ears, a thin peccary tusk curved through his nose. I stood aside in the entrance to a hut. The music was distant now, the air stultifying. I could not see within but I could hear breathing. One, two, three . . . I did not know how many people. I realized with a shock that I was outlined in the lighted doorway and that they were waiting. As I turned away, a woman let out the unmistakeable moan of pleasure. I hesitated, sipping from my can and looking back at the river of torches along the walkway. And only then did my breathing deepen and my limbs ease; I had passed beyond the jurisdiction of my better self.
‘What do you want?’
The voice came from behind me and was followed by a low murmur of laughter. Startled, I spun about. A man was standing – too close. I stepped back. But he continued to look at me with the quick and searching frankness of a far greater intimacy – as though my entire being and history would be instantly plain to his perception. My mind had not yet left the hut’s darkness, the woman’s sigh, and before I could speak came the low laughter again.
‘What do you want?’ he repeated.
‘I was just—’
‘Tell me what you are looking for.’ He inclined his head slowly and then held it still. ‘I might be able to help you.’
‘I was just wandering.’ I was not sure how apologetic to be. ‘I came up from the river.’