by Alex Barr
“Bananas.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
The Americans too are losing interest. They’ve come all the way from Quito to see a man with crimson hair, but there’s a limit to how long such a thing can entertain. Carlos looks under the space in front of the house, where the roof sails over to form a canopy. Ah, there’s a marimba, bamboo tubes hanging from split bamboo slats. He plays random notes, nods to the American to run his camcorder, plays to the lens. He motions the Englishman to use his camera too. The Englishman doesn’t move. Meanwhile the American woman is studying the bushes.
“What are they called?”
The taxi-driver, dozing at his wheel, stirs and calls out to Carlos, “Those are the seeds they dye their hair with.”
Carlos, inspired, tears off a branch and offers it to the woman. The Englishman looks at the Indian. Is he offended at having his garden pillaged? No, this is a different culture. Or maybe he accepts that from now on things can only get worse, slide into chaos. His life emptying out.
The American woman tears open the hairy seed, exposing something bright red and sticky. She thinks, Good, I’ve got to the bottom of this. She hands it round. She asks, “Do the women paint their hair?” The answer comes: “No. And not the young people either.”
The Englishman suddenly bursts out laughing. His companions all stare at him. He’s hardly shown any feelings the whole weekend. He says, “I’m sorry, it just seems funny. That at home young people do strange things to their hair to set them apart from adults. And here it’s the reverse.” He asks the Americans, “Don’t you think so?”
They move away from him. There’s something a little unbalanced about his laughter. Only the Indian is smiling, but he’s been smiling all the time, gazing modestly at the ground, looking like some kind of idol. The American examines the house: a frame of heavy bamboo, faced with smaller, split bamboos. Good, he thinks, solid, you need a solid house. Young people don’t always recognise that, but sooner or later they always learn. Get your priorities right and life won’t kick you in the butt.
The slatted door to the dark opens, the Indian’s wife comes out. Small, with a thin face and high cheekbones. She too wears a striped wraparound, longer than her husband’s. Above, just a few strings of beads and a see-through shawl. Her long hair is loose and black, unpainted. The camcorder whirrs.
Now there are two of them, posing together.
The Englishman feels a stab of pain. So she isn’t sick indoors, despite the only doctor being a hung-over brujo. She isn’t young, but her skin hasn’t lost its polish. The atmosphere in the clearing has changed. No longer a lone Indian but a couple, standing together, half-naked, smiling at nothing. Soon they’ll have the clearing to themselves, the visitors gone like rain. The Englishman takes a quick photograph and turns away.
Carlos is relieved. The Americans too seem to have had enough. They can all go back to the hotel. He can have a swim before lunch, and see if that Russian woman is still there. He can see what she looks like in daylight, in a bikini. Everyone’s looking round the clearing, pretending not to look at the taxi. There are no birds or animals.
He says, “You must pay them.” This is what the driver told him. “One thousand sucres each.” He wipes his brow. The day is heating up. The Englishman and American eye him coldly. He can’t think why. A thousand sucres is a straw to them.
The American says, “I thought this was included?”
The Englishman nods. “So did I. I thought everything was included. How much did the bus and taxi cost you, anyway?”
“And the hotel,” says the American. “I saw the tariff. How much are you making on this?”
The two foreigners look at each other appreciatively. Both travellers. They know the score. But the American woman mutters, “Please, no scenes, I can’t stand scenes.”
The Englishman says, “Let’s have it out with him later.”
“Right.”
They’re feeling grudgingly in their pockets when the door opens again and a second woman comes out. Much younger, dressed like the first, though her shawl (unfortunately, thinks Carlos) is less transparent and wrapped more tightly. She joins the others, just as assured, with a bigger smile, white-toothed. The odds are even better for the Indians now. Three against four (not counting the driver, fast asleep). The atmosphere has changed again.
The American woman asks, “So they have more than one wife?”
Carlos translates.
The Indian tells him, “In the old days. But now we are Catholics. We cannot stay in the past. Only death parts us.”
“And this young woman?”
“My daughter.”
He translates. The American woman says, “But they shouldn’t make her do this. Posing for tourists with them. So unnatural. She wants to be in Quito, wearing jeans, not stuck out here in the middle of nowhere. I guess it’s fashionable for us to think, Oh, Indians, great, but God, how she must loathe their lifestyle.”
There’s a silence. She thinks of LaVerne’s desert boots kicked off in their hallway in Indiana, sharp stones wedged in the soles. Stones damaging the parquet. LaVerne’s face, tanned and closed.
Carlos doesn’t know whether he’s meant to translate her words, and if so, whether he can. The American hands out notes grimly. The Indians take the money without embarrassment. The Englishman follows suit. Paying the wife he thinks of his own wife saying, “My travelling days are over.” But paying the daughter he suddenly remembers the letter from his son, about a new girl he’s met. He writes, This could be the one. He smiles at the daughter. There is a future, they will have reinforcements. There will be new Sunday mornings. The daughter smiles back, meeting his eyes.
The American notes this. He says, “For another thousand you can take her with you.”
Something in his tone stops Carlos, heading for the taxi. The girl’s black hair is soft, her cheeks very round and polished. He feels excited. He comes behind her and takes her hand, trying to place it in the American’s. He tells him, “Hold her while the others take photographs.” The Englishman looks disapproving, Carlos can’t tell why. He thinks, You never can with the English. When his girlfriend’s face would stiffen in just that way, she’d pretend it hadn’t. He keeps trying to join the girl to the American. Her hand is very small and firm. He calls to the others, “Have your cameras ready.” And from his list of Useful Colloquialisms: “To snap them.”
The Americans look at the brown earth, the Englishman at the treetops. No-one moves.
Whole
Monday. Why am I in Brazil? Because when my husband left me I sold my share of the furniture and came. I was numb, couldn’t feel myself. Had to prove I could move, wasn’t stuck forever in a half-empty flat in Southsea.
Manaus is like Southsea, ha ha. The kind of place where you think, Why am I here? Past its prime. Expensive—that’s why my money’s running out. Instead of the funfair, the opera house; equally vulgar, a giant pink and white cake with green, blue and yellow icing. Instead of ice-cream stalls, machines that squeeze juice from sugar-cane. Instead of the Solent with its sea-forts, the Rio Negro with its island petrol stations. Becoming, instead of the Channel, the Amazon. And all round, a horizon of what look like giant broccoli.
Down among them, unknown people I’ll never meet.
Tuesday. Correction. I’ve met one. On the usual drag from lift to room, thinking as usual, Make an effort, organise money, I passed a man on a chair. Pale, knobbly features, loose mouth, stubble. He took me in, head to foot then middle. I felt like something in the meat-market by the docks, where they throw offal behind the wall. He said something in Portuguese.
I said, “Não compreendo.”
He tried English. “I am Antônio. You have a drink with me.”
The dregs of male conversation. I walked away.
He called, “I show you something.”
“Thanks, I’ve seen one.”
He unlocked the door behind him and pointed. “You see nothing like that.”<
br />
That’s the trouble with going off alone. You lose heart and end up desperate for attention. I peered in. It was the bed he was pointing at, but there was someone in it, and Antônio was beckoning like some sideshow operator. So I’d be asked to pay. It was my wallet he fancied, not me.
I thought of all the coffee I drank in the bank while they phoned my credit card firm. No funds. Guess who diverted the payments. They gave me the name of a Lebanese moneychanger. That was too much, too threatening, as if the whole world’s got stirred up and mashed together. Besides, I’ve no stomach for haggling. So I moved to this hotel. Not cheap, but cheaper.
Antônio wanted the door shut, but I refused unless he lent me the key. I approached the bed. A face looked up, chubby, copper-brown, with blue-black hair streaked orange. There were violet zigzags painted on the cheeks. The lips were full, the eyes black, deep-set and liquid but somehow dead, expressionless.
Watching my face intently, Antônio drew back the sheet. My God, a basket case. Naked, the arms and legs brief stumps. The skin of his chest and belly was taut and supple, mahogany colour. He smelt of strange oils, plant essences, like some exotic salad. I turned away, trying not to cry. Antônio grinned.
When I asked what happened he gave me a sly look.
“All right, how did he get here?”
I could see he was torn between keeping quiet and showing off. He made a pouncing movement. “We take.” He waved at the flat horizon outside, eastward. “From far, many days.”
“You abducted him?”
He didn’t understand. I said hotly, “I’ll tell the police,” and he laughed in my face, his breath charged with stale tobacco and coffee. A pause.
He said, “Lady. Look.”
I turned to look, reluctantly. He bent over the Indian, who’d been gazing at me, and spoke an unfamiliar language. The Indian turned his head away. I asked Antônio whether the language was Guaraní. He shook his head and sneered, as if to say, You’re out of your depth. I asked what he’d said.
“I speak, foreign lady think him horrible. Bad. Kiss alligator before him.”
Disgusted, I headed for the door—then paused, thinking of my empty room.
Antônio said, “Lady, look now.”
He was almost pleading, like a child showing off a drawing. I went to look. The Indian’s eyes were shut as if in pain, and I suddenly thought he was dying. His lips had contracted like a corpse’s, exposing his teeth. Antonio’s ragbag face was creased with delight.
He said, “Soon, lips gone.”
“No! But how?”
He suddenly became cagey, nervous, eyeing the door. He said, “Patrão come soon. You go. Later, I come your room.”
So, not money. “Stay away from my bloody room.”
I went out. I’m scared to go back to the hotel. My brain’s gone, my head’s empty of ideas, except maybe to drink myself legless. I’m wandering by the great oily pontoon that floats up and down, watching the moored boats with their wide flat roofs and rows of hammocks. To escape to the mouth of the Amazon would cost more than I’ve got.
Wednesday. The Indian’s with me.
Last night I got back late. Sitting in the corridor was a different man; tall, black, who eyed me coldly. In the Indian’s room I heard men laughing, laughter with an edge of malice and hysteria. Trying to sleep, with the choice of a muck-sweat or the air-conditioner rattling, I thought again of the police, but pictured the laughing men sounding plausible while I wrestled with Portuguese. My memory of the Indian was confused. Full lips, or the shrunken mouth of a corpse? And why had they pounced on him, what use was he to them? The humid room went round and round. I dragged myself off the bed and staggered to the door.
In the corridor was Antônio, dozing. Beside him a bottle of cane brandy. The click of my door must have roused him; he stumbled to his feet and moved away. I tiptoed down and heard him in the bathroom peeing like a horse. He’d left his keys.
I took them, and in a trance moved chair and bottle one door along. I unlocked the Indian’s room. Blood pounded in my head as I heard Antônio’s feet. Ah! They stopped one door away. I heard him plonk down. I went to the bed.
The Indian’s eyes reflected the faint rectangle of window. Wide with terror? No, sad, unbelievably sad. Mouth like a drawstring, no lips at all. I made a decision. I rolled him in the sheet and picked him up, light as a child. Outside, one door away, Antônio dozed. I turned the key and carried the Indian to my room.
There I unwrapped him. His polished skin was perfect. But this was a woman, not a man. Wasn’t it? He saw where I was looking and his eyes filled with tears. I cried too, for him, whatever they’d done to him, his exile in this unreal place, and for myself, my exile, my money crisis, wasted career, useless husband, rotten life. For the bits of myself I left behind in half a dozen cities.
My tears fell on him and the bed like rain. He stopped crying and watched. I turned my head away. After a long time I went to the shower and wiped my face. When I came back I suddenly felt dizzy. My eyes were faulty. His lips were full and covered his teeth. He must have moved a little (the stumps of his arms were longer than I remembered) because I saw this was a man. His maleness was so small it must have been hidden.
I gave him a drink—he was desperately thirsty—and stroked his face. He smiled the most wonderful slow smile, bunching the zigzags on his cheeks. Something brushed my arm: the stump of his elbow. I didn’t pull back, but somehow accepted it. I felt the rich skin of his chest, painted with strange markings, and said, “Oh, if I spoke your language! If I could take you home!”
He replied in his language. I nodded as if I understood. And here we are. What the hell can I do? Other than stroke him? His legs must have been so strong; the muscles down to the knee stumps are corded and supple. And now I see I was mistaken, his maleness is normal, more than normal. I must be smiling, because he’s trying to raise himself on his elbows. With such hope and longing I’m just melting.
Thursday. At dawn, a thundering on my door. I phoned reception. No answer. The door splintered and in shot Antônio, then the tall black guy. They searched my room.
“Onde fica?”
I said, “Não compre—”
“Where is he? Martinho and me smell your cheap perfume in his room.”
I won’t dwell on Antônio and Martinho’s other insults. I’ve heard them before, but these men are experts, even in a language not their own. For cutting people down to size they leave my husband in the shade.
I shouted, “You can abduct an Indian unpunished, but not me.” I lied, “I’ve phoned Interpol with your descriptions.”
Antônio drew a knife and I suddenly felt sick, but Martinho took it off him.
He said, “Lady, the Indio big money.”
“How?”
“Sideshow in Rio. Maybe private circus. This people who lose parts when you make them feel bad, very rare.”
“And how much of him would be left, by the time you got to Rio? Nothing, the way you treated him.”
I wanted to ask who the Indian’s people were, but knew I’d get no answer. I’m left with imagining them. So careful and caring, so delicate with each other’s feelings. Watching their own feelings rise, to catch them before they turn into cruel words.
So how did my friend lay himself open to capture? Say, on shore making a dugout canoe. A chip of wood hits the eye of his brother, who gives him a tongue-lashing. My friend falls into the dugout, which slides into the water. Suddenly handless, he drifts downstream. More and more helpless till I restore him.
Today before dawn I made a decision. I’ll take him home, whatever it takes. Now I’ve shamed Antônio and Martinho into going to face their boss empty-handed, I’ll use the dregs of my money for a boat. I’ve drifted in this town; pathetic, waiting. Forgetting that after all the failures, reverses, insults, I’m still whole. All the bits work. And when I get back I’ll go and drink coffee with the Lebanese.
Doing It
Bet you can’t answer a si
mple question. How many moons has Mars got? Thought you wouldn’t know. Here’s a clue. How many eyes have you got?
That was good, wasn’t it? I like asking questions. But now I’m here I don’t see many people to ask. Ha ha. You’re meant to laugh. I don’t see anyone, do I?
Want another? What are the moons called? Dad couldn’t answer either.
“Dad, what are the moons of Mars called?”
“Dot and Carrie.”
Ha ha. I said, “I have told you.”
“And I’ve told you to make that phone call.”
“What phone call?”
He said, “Don’t think I’ll do it for you.”
I remember loads of things he said. “I won’t be here all your life.” I wrote that down. “What will you do when I’m not here?” I wrote that down too. Here it is. When I feel these dots I think of his hands. He had warts on his hands. Well, he had when I was eight. Maybe the warts went, I don’t know. He hasn’t any now. Ha ha. Joke. He hasn’t any hands.
I said, “The moons of Mars are Phobos and Deimos.”
“Who told you that?”
“Bruce Forsyth.”
“Very funny.”
He did the tea at the day centre, Bruce Forsyth. All right, that’s who he sounded like. His breath smelt of extra-strong mints. He read it out of a library book I’d asked for.
“Phobos is an ellipsoid seventeen miles long, fourteen wide, and twelve high. Can you remember that, Alan?”
Could I remember! I asked what an ellipsoid is but he didn’t know.
Dad didn’t know either. He said, “They won’t ask that at an interview.”
“Ha ha, what interview?”
“It’s not funny. There’s a policy for people like you. You can get a job with the Council instead of wasting time on rubbish.”
He didn’t ask why I was laughing. I was laughing at the mayor asking, ‘Now Alan, what are the measurements of Phobos?’
He said, “After all, you can answer a phone.”
“Except when you leave a chair in the way.”
“Put people through to the Council. Connect them.”