Madness is Better than Defeat
Page 44
Our skipper made enquiries with the farmer we found tending plots of maize and cassava nearby. As advertised, a mule was available; and, without much interest, as if it was a busy afternoon at the rental counter and he was quoting me the standard terms, the farmer pointed at my watch, which he wanted not as a deposit but as a day rate. I was ready to haggle but Vansaska was simply too impatient. ‘We’ll walk,’ she said.
‘I don’t know if that’s a good idea.’
‘I’ll carry you myself if I have to.’
We left our skipper drinking cacao with the farmer and set off east into the forest. Apparently the track ran directly to the temple site, unlike the circuitous routes of the past, and it proved to be generous enough in width that no machete was necessary to rip open a corridor (although, because it had been cleared with axes and saws, not bulldozers, you had to watch your footing if you didn’t want to trip on a tree stump or a snake burrow). Back towards the dam, the undergrowth had been a crisper and more radiant green, but here it seemed wet and bruised and aromatic as if it had been ground into the earth by an enormous pestle.
‘After all this is over I want to go live in a place where I’ll never see another tree again in my life,’ I said. ‘Some sort of tundra. Not a desert – you might think you’re safe at first, but you never know when you’re going to run into an oasis.’
But Vansaska had another subject to bring up. ‘You still don’t know if Elias Coehorn Sr. was in the other half of that railroad car.’
‘No.’
‘What if it was empty all along?’
‘They wouldn’t have taken the trouble to install it just to leave it empty.’
‘You were going to bring back the armor,’ she said. ‘What if Phibbs was going to bring something back too? Back to New York. Apart from Coehorn Jr.’
‘Like what?’
‘United Fruit got a lot of use out of the Mayan god they parleyed with in New York. There were more of those gods inside the temple. What if Eastern Aggregate thought they could—?’
‘No more theories,’ I said.
‘What if they thought they could go to the temple and bring back another one of the—?’
‘I said no more theories! It’s too late for more theories.’
After that we didn’t speak for a while. But then, over the sifting and popping and nagging and burping of the forest, we heard the sound of a jazz band.
Vansaska looked at me. We picked up our pace until we were practically running along the track, and I forgot I was weak. I almost believed we would emerge into the clearing and find the two expeditions just arriving for the first time, the temple and its claimants reborn like the world after Ragnarök, because the eternity they spent there could never come to a definite end …
What we saw instead was even stranger.
There were thirteen of them in the clearing. Eight from the Hollywood camp, five from the New York camp. Meeting somebody in real life who you already know from your hallucinations – sure, that’s nice enough, but it is nowhere near as exciting as meeting somebody in real life who you already know from the movies. During the six months I spent mold gardening in Trujillo, I generally avoided the town’s only movie house because of the lice in the seats, but one night I got so bored I decided to brave it. When I bought my ticket I learned that rather than the scheduled Showdown at Abilene, which hadn’t arrived from the distributor, they were showing a 22-year-old print of a Kingdom Pictures comedy called Fat Chance. One entire reel was missing, and the rest looked like something a pack of dogs had chewed on, but it was nonetheless a pretty good picture, especially the supporting performances from George Aldobrand and Adela Thoisy, both still on the cusp of stardom in 1935. I’d always liked them both. And now here they were in front of me.
They each wore an animal skin of a different kind. Aldobrand’s was a loincloth of banded fur, whereas Thoisy’s was the same Revillon Frères mink she’d kept with her ever since she left Hollywood, draped across the shoulders of a tattery sisal dress that was older than the loincloth but not as old as the stole. Even now, it was startling to see Aldobrand’s ruined face, the mask of gnarled, waxy scar tissue, collapsed cheeks and no upper lip and not much of a nose. But it was not as startling as the look in the eyes of these survivors, Aldobrand and Thoisy and the four-piece band (with gourd drums and a deer-femur flute and an old dented trumpet and a singer clicking her fingers) and all the others here. The look was bright and cheerful and camera-ready.
‘Greetings!’ said Aldobrand in the Americanised accent he used on screen. ‘Who might you two be?’
Another actor stepped forward, who I recognised but couldn’t quite name, which made me wonder if the memories I’d assimilated from the fungus were finally beginning to blur like any other memories. Perhaps writing it all down here, sending it off to the archives, has hastened that. ‘My name’s Coutts!’ the actor said. ‘This is my sister Marla, she’s come with this fellow to fetch me home, but I can tell you I’m not going anywhere! New York’s a real yawner compared to the tropics!’
‘What is he talking about?’ Vansaska whispered to me.
‘Don’t you remember Hearts in Darkness?’ I whispered back. ‘The movie Whelt was supposed to make?’
‘I’ve got to get my silly old brother back to New York so he can give me away at my wedding!’ said Thoisy. ‘There’s a tradition in our family that it has to be the brother who gives away the bride, otherwise the marriage won’t last six months!’
‘Where were you when they cleared a path to the river and took the temple apart?’ I said.
‘Yes, we played a few games of hide and seek with those locals!’ said the actor playing Coutts. ‘There were some pretty close calls, believe me! Not easy running a nightspot in the jungle, you know! But when they left, we all just came back and carried on! The good times never stop around here!’
The rest of us had fled outward through the layers of adaptation and aboutness, telling a story about a story about a story, thinking it would keep us safe from the pull of the river. But these people had gone in the opposite direction. They had barricaded themselves inside the original story, bricking up the Fourth Wall along with all the doors and all the windows.
‘The next round of cocktails is on its way!’ said Thoisy. ‘In the meantime, won’t you join us for a trot?’
Vansaska and I exchanged a glance. In the circumstances it would have felt perverse, even spiteful, to turn the invitation down. ‘What’s the fashionable dance here?’ she said.
‘The Half Doodle, of course!’
‘I haven’t danced the Half Doodle in twenty years,’ Vansaska told me. ‘But I think I remember it.’
So we put down our hats and I took her in my arms and we danced, cheek to clammy cheek, where the temple had once stood. Our shoes dragged a little in the grass, but the ground beneath was perfectly flat, as if all along the real purpose of the temple had been to level out an eventual dance floor. ‘I’m glad we came here,’ Vansaska said.
‘So am I.’
‘We had to. So it could be over. Really over. So we could be free. We’re free now. Can you feel it? I really think we’re finally free.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I feel it. We’re finally free of the temple.’
The band played on, discordant but in fine rhythm. My feet still remembered the Half Doodle, the steps I must have learned in some Broadway nightclub from some girl I’d just met, so long ago.
Up and across and up and across and up and across – and all the way back down …
Up and across and up and across and up and across – and all the way back down …
Acknowledgements
For their comments on the first draft, thank you to Allison Devereux, Ben Eastham, Courtney Maum, Edmund Gordon, Jonathan McAloon, JW McCormack, Kiloran Campbell, Onur Teymur and Spencer Matheson. For hospitality and inspiration, thank you to Beatrice Monti della Corte and everyone at Santa Maddalena; Alex Gerson, Matteo Zevi and everyone on the Land Art Road
Trip; and the Literature team at the British Council. For all their hard work on my behalf, thank you, as always, to Jane Finigan, Juliet Mahoney, Felicity Rubinstein and everyone at Lutyens & Rubinstein; David Forrer and everyone at Inkwell; Drummond Moir and everyone at Sceptre; and Gary Fisketjon and everyone at Knopf.