A beard of soft gray hair, two fingers wide, follows the concavity of his cheek, along his jaw, and thins around his mouth. His hair is white, but his manner and movement are youthful, quick. The muscles in his arms and legs are supple, but can harden into smooth stones. At his chest, breasts, flat and empty, lean sacs like those of an elderly woman, tipped with black nipples, matte as the powder dust of charcoal. A length of gauzy linen is wrapped around his waist and loins and tied at the side.
The tall girl reaches the man and the other girl, who has lain down beside him and placed her head in his lap. Far away below them, out toward a horizon so unobstructed that the tapered curve of the earth is discernible, banks of clouds, some lithe, some fickle as white yarn drawn off the whorl of a spindle, lie in the mountain valleys. Range after range of mountains rise like blue-brown waves beyond the banana grove. Peaceable kingdom.
The man stares down at the girl’s head where it rests against his thigh. He strokes her hair, thick as husk. It is moist at the base of her neck. The tall one sits, leans forward, and kisses his temple. Quiet, he concentrates his attention on the long train of hair that is fanned across his legs. He reaches around the seated one’s bare shoulder with his free arm and draws her tight in to his side. Her cheek pressed against the hollow above his collarbone, she joins him in caressing the wave of sparkling black hair in his lap.
Again his face solidifies in blankness, gives up no clue to what thoughts might be forming beneath its surface. However, he has closed his eyes and his heart has begun to pulse; his fingers gently tightening around the tall girl’s shoulder, he directs her down, his hand weighing and guiding, so that after a moment the girl’s face is adjacent to his breast. She does not speak. With two fingers he pushes past her lips and touches her wet teeth, running the tips back and forth across them several times before they loosen and her mouth comes open; he pinches the tip of his breast and lifts his nipple to her mouth so that she begins to suck.
Behind the lids of the old man’s eyes are forms and color like those which can be seen in the homemade kaleidoscope (a photograph of which has been included in the kit Lupi will be entrusted with), the one he fashioned (Krieger advises) for these girls when they were just children. Constructed of bits of quartz and mica dyed in vegetable juices collected at the end of a thick hollow reed and pressed between lenses of wafer-thin marble, its design by Sardavaal’s estimation is anthropologically unique. There is also the matter of the armillary sphere, a large device, a celestial globe fashioned of solid gold hoops that represent the equator, tropics, the circles arctic and antarctic, ecliptic, and colures—each a full meter in circumference—set on an axis within a silver horizon; Sardavaal’s stumper: to him the most puzzling item seen in the barricade, of Spanish manufacture dating possibly from as early as the fifteenth century and for no earthly reason having any right (Sardavaal’s term: “any right”) to be here. A rather poor snapshot of this armillary sphere, taken indoors with a flash, is also to be included with the documents in Lupi’s envelope.
Through the field glasses, Lupi can see the man whose left hand gathers hair, twists it over and over until it is tight like a tail at the back of a neck. Tacit, slowly, he continues to twist the heavy braid of hair so that the girl who had curled against his leg seemingly comes out of a dream and rolls onto her side facing him. He draws her head up along his thigh until her face is buried at the juncture of his hip. With her tongue she begins to trace the fold of skin. He releases the braid, reaches fluidly in under the coarse dry drapery of loin wrapping and lifts it away so that she can close her mouth around his penis, which he has offered her. His face is as stationary as sculpture. After the sun has climbed down lower into the leaves of the banana tree that canopies the three, he will have first pulled back the knee-length skirt covering one girl’s legs and buttocks and have entered her and, after a time, have also taken the other young woman. By dusk they will have followed ox and cart along the high ridge, down the zigzagging narrow road that descends to the river (which cuts through the bottom of the ravine) and back up the side of the far hill to the barricade not visible from here, an ancient village, formed not unlike a medieval town, in circles that radiate from the raised central house. Here—according to Sardavaal, the only “civilized man” ever to have entered its precincts (and by this he wryly’d discounted the season some poor missionary had spent among them, teaching Latin since they steadfastly refused to speak Spanish, trying to sort out whether these were Mosquito, Sumo, Paya, or Jicaque, and reaching no judgment)—the old man lives.
Bautista had fallen asleep, had ignored the entire pantomime which Krieger summed up as “a splendid performance, christ almighty, and to have seen them so close up out away from the barricade and in the very act of … well, we’ve certainly enjoyed a bit of good luck. It’s a propitious sign for the success of the entire project.”
Binoculars beside him on the lichen-rugged outcropping, Lupi looked at Krieger incredulous, thinking che cazzo credi che sia, what kind of a jerk do you think I am, saying, “But what is it you possess?”
“Possess? possess! why him, man, of course. The old one, the one you just saw. Indeed, we own them all.” That Krieger even now was whispering, and that his words were shrill and strained, only added to his overall histrionics.
“We do?” resistantly.
“All them, don’t you get it? Sardavaal says there are men in there some of them easily a hundred fifty, two hundred years old and, well, they’re ours.”
“… they are.”
“‘You that are old consider not the capacities of us that are young’—”
“But how is it you own them?”
“Postindustrialism, post-machine age, don’t you know diddley-squat? knowledge is property, man, and no one else so much as suspects this remnant-group, as I believe they might be classified, and no one suspects their existence and thus we—we, mind you—are the rightful owners and we have buyers, people willing to pay.”
“What for?”
“What for? for the good of man’s what for.”
“The buyers must be idiots.”
“Idiots? why not, romantics, moral maniacs, pathomaniacs, small beer, kind of a mix, a brew—the kid’s father, don’t you see?”
“What?”
“Moral insanity, not a current idea in psychology I guess, but one that ought to be brought back into currency. What I’m saying is progressives, Lupi, men willing to take a plunge, like Faustus, you got to keep thinking what I said before: science and industry … and presentation, Faustus don’t forget and from what I’ve seen, some of them are considerably more cunning than all that. We ask a couple hundred thousand ejemplares of what we need, little purchasing power is all, little power to bust us out of our own various bogs, and in exchange they get full ownership to perform whatever research they wish on them no questions asked, and nothing traceable, and you come through for them at least in most cases at any rate, you come through for them, and are paid, and immediately the crime quote unquote of it goes home to reside just where it belongs—squarely on their shoulders. They’re the ones that stand to grab all the fame and honor after all, even the real potential financially here. But the responsibility’s theirs as it should be and we perform our service, too, and everything’s hunky-dory. And there’s nothing to come back to roost with us. Here they have custody of an alien, no papers, no past, nameless, who cannot even begin to tell you where he came from, and if you are dissatisfied what are you going to do, go to the police? the Department of Immigration? What have you got.”
“Not much.”
“Nothing at all. At max a pseudonymous letter or two written out in a child’s hand. The thing to keep high in mind, you see, is that, despite some of the details, what we’re doing here is good, it’s a good thing. As it is now these people don’t stand a chance.”
“What child’s hand?”
Krieger breathed out hard. “You didn’t meet her, don’t worry about it, etcetera, a letter that ma
kes at best some relatively amicable and businesslike references to a transaction so vague it could involve almost anything from elephants to rivets. Once these people say yes they themselves are the ones who are at risk, not us. But they’re willing to gamble, they’re adults. They know the difference between yes and no, right and wrong, right?”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“Well, we do don’t we. Right and wrong’re only words but words are dangerous, words are symbols, and you know how they’re shaped? Here I was at college, know-it-all, and I come home for Easter to visit my aunt and she asks me, she said, Peter, how are they shaped? Like hooks, I told her, some people think words are things and that they refer only to themselves and nothing out in the other, I said. And she said, Other what? And I said, Just other. Other. So this is the fancy philosophy you’ve been in college learning? she said, that’s all well and good, these are important things for you to understand but remember when you come back home, you say ‘Nice day, huh?’ to a kid down from 140th Street and he turns around you’re dead. She was absolutely right. Structuralists, commentators on society, on all of us, I’ve read them, I’ve seen firsthand this decadence, they think this stuff is pioneering thought, innovation, revolutionary, but you know what it is?”
“I don’t, but listen—”
“It’s a pack of fags running around, cocks brown with their students’ shit, looking to keep themselves in print in order to keep their vermin university jobs. They think they’re vanguard whereas they’re really rearguard. They don’t understand anything but fucking in the ass.”
“Mr. Krieger.”
“Yeah?”
“You haven’t said how we, how it’s supposed to go that they’re transported, delivered to all these—”
“Not difficult and this is where your talents come in, your Latin, good old dead tongue that that is, leave it to a European to speak Latin, no offense but you people sit around on your thumbs watch everybody else go to the moon, while you sit there hail-Marying and conjugating verbs, read about the glory days, Caesar, Tacitus, Cicero bunch of windbags.”
“But getting back, you haven’t said how we’re, with all these border guards and soldiers, passport control—”
“Lempiras, Lupi. Money. Money into proper hands. We’ve got official help high up into the military, which is, let’s face it, the only branch of government that counts in these countries. You can pay a lot of people to say the word yes, you’d be surprised. Lempiras into the proper mitts. There’re echelons of military personnel in every army on earth that are open to bribe, if the plan is feasible, neat, safe. And ours fits all those criteria. After all, this is a sparsely populated region, undeveloped, poor, not much communication with the outside, precisely the region where the Bigger War will come and believe me it’s on its way. Of course, we’ll be out of here by then, but Montes de Colón, inland, just jungle and mountains. Were you to take a serious stand against the norteamericanos this would be a great place to do it. How is a high-speed jet coming in at two hundred feet supposed to locate targets by turns in rivers, tiny villages at nonexistent bends in nonexistent roads, all based on satellite photographs and old maps. You’re past your target before you so much as saw it and you’ve unloaded your rockets—caahboom—into emptiness. For all the money they spend there’s still no way to fight a limited air war over a jungle but as the adage goes some folks never learn, and the handful of politicians who can learn don’t want to—”
Lupi looked at his wrist; he had left his watch behind—ring, watch, this was a losing proposition.
“Why do you think they had to strafe with napalm in Vietnam, burn everything out clean? … why do you think they had to burn out the foliage in big rectangles, because they were all ace pilots? Hell no, napalm was a retrograde chapter in the history of warfare, like nuclear, since it’s not skill or accuracy or even strategy—just burn it all out! These mountains are gonna stink of napalm and a zillion other chemicals before the century is out. Napalm’s for queers, so’s atomic.”
Lupi rubbed his wrist. He wished he had remembered to bring his watch. “What’s my part in all this, what’s Latin got to do with anything?”
“Tomorrow morning you’re going in, it’s all arranged, you go in, get him, come back here and we’ll all go up to Teguz. Then you’re on your own.”
(Or had Bautista taken it?) “How am I supposed to do, I mean, I’m not going there.”
“Sure you are, Cicero, I’ll tell you just what to say, give you time to practice, eh?”
“Then what, afterwards.”
“Afterwards?”
“Us, us—there are people that are going to disappear, remember?”
“It’s nothing. Here’s the worst-case scenario: some men show up, some soldiers, they ask questions about the reports of murders, of harboring somebody. They accuse this one that one of being a leftist sympathizer, guerrilleros and goddamn trouble, they line the ladies and gentlemen in the village up against a wall, they say rural aid’s gonna get cut off, no more bullets no more beans for you folks if you keeping harboring these red guerrilleros, and they round up whoever they want and off they go.”
“An arrest, like.”
“Arrests become disappearances, disappearances become yesterday’s news faster than you can say minicam … three hundred eighty-something armed rebellions, a hundred-some-odd governments in the past century and a half? Forget it. Everything’s yesterday’s news. Nobody gives a hoot—so, no prob. Sardavaal’s colony managed to stay above it all. Pretty desirable piece of real estate I’d say. Nobody’s penetrated it yet, to our knowledge. There’re probably more villages like it, like the Tasaday tribe’s in the Philippines, Marcos’s tourist-trap tribe. The potential’s infinite. Think what the vacation industry could do with it. Anyway, northeast of here, up toward Burimac, it’s a no-man’s-land. For all anybody knows there are scads of pre-Columbian groups up in some of the higher mountain areas. No radios, no Beatles records, no framed photos of Kennedy. Nothing you’d find in any of the one-kilometer grids the good old Army Corps of Engineers made. Even old Sardavaal never got up in there.”
“When do I meet this Sardavaal?”
“You heard about the Corps? they’re a friendly pack. Here they came in mapped all these countries, helped build bridges, electrical substations, that sort of crap, all an act of neighborly foreign policy, right? and then the maps are given to, say, Nicaragua, and it’s all fine except that a second set is popped up to the Pentagon for research into how our own troops—if the need arose—could be moved across the terrain in the most cost-effective way. Nice.”
Lupi said again, “What about Sardavaal?”
“Sardavaal …” calming suddenly. “I’m afraid he vanished on us, Sardavaal did, at least he’s not to be found, just gone … not that it’s the first time. It’s habit with him. He loops in and loops out. It’s too bad, too. You’re right. I reason he’d have been useful in age verification, help stabilize any negotiation with Mr. Berkeley, that is, could he have been persuaded to come in with us, maybe we could have convinced him it is only a matter of time, that if we didn’t extract them, the community, they’d be massacred fairly soon anyway, accidentes personales, might have brought him around by pointing up the research value at the other end of the project, all the good that might come of it but on that score just conjecture, etcetera. Moot, etcetera.”
The descent down the mountainside was accomplished in silence. Lupi was careful of his footing. He stepped softly in the respite from Krieger’s words, the new quiet now, into which the birds did not break, and the soft-turfed path trod by animals, too narrow to be traveled comfortably by men.He restrained his breathing where it flowed across his tongue, the air itself of such a purity, like an endowment to his spirit. Krieger’s ribbons of language splintered up in particles and were left back at a turn in the path; Bautista, his smile was consigned to a bit of vine hung over the lower branches of a tree where it wound round on its natural chase sunward; the fat man sh
rank to a midnight-blue ant. Alone for the first time in days, and under the spell of … perhaps not freedom but independence, as Lupi knew the binoculars up there behind held him in view, by this time the size of a small figure on a beach maybe, and the beach itself reproduced on a postcard, like the one his mother had sent him from a strange island called Coney … and how he looked up coney in Hazon Garzanti and there were the words rabbit, coward, aint-heart (not faint, aint), chicken-heart. Soon enough he was turning Latin phrases over in his mind, brushing up his memory because of the encounter that Krieger said lay ahead, and before he knew it they came upon him, the people of the village came out to greet him (as he saw it), saint Lupi on the side of the long mountain.
A number of logs were laid bank to bank as a bridge over the white spring-fed stream. On the other side they waited for him to cross, men and a few women, colorfully clothed. The men displayed pendants, necklaces and other jewelry, even geometrically shaped earrings and ankle bracelets, as ornamental as those worn by the women. Lupi at once put his hands behind his head, as Krieger had coached him, planted one knee on the mossy ground and waited momentarily in this submissive pose before getting up to walk the log bridge, the while hoping he would not lose balance and fall into the shallow brook, and thereby forfeit any authority he had so far gained, first by this ridiculous act of obeisance which Kreiger taught him up in the rock blind the night before (laughing hysterically and coughing in the smoke of the campfire), and second by Carlos’s delivery to a village sentry of a letter purportedly from Sardavaal that told of Lupi’s immediate arrival. The letter was a mix of Spanish and Lenca—the dominant Indian tongue of the area—of which the fat man had some working knowledge. It would have been better, of course, if the letter had been written in Poton—according to Sardavaal this particular tribe’s tongue (about this Sardavaal had many theories, having referred to early missionary accounts and come to the conclusion that these people, this Poton-branch, were not some lost Maya group, but were refugees from Salvador, who fled the Spanish and ended up at the easternmost Maya boundary, where they resettled: a non-Maya group in the midst of Maya, an indigenous, displaced group in the midst of conquering foreigners—chontal (people time passed over). But Krieger—who had forged Sardavaal’s signature on the letter, displaying originality in the flourishes, having never seen Sardavaal’s actual signature, and so feeling very relaxed about free-forming the whole thing—said that some of the younger men in the tribe, whose occasional wanderings had put them in touch with the larger world and some of its language, were able to puzzle out the meaning of the communication, and pass it along to the elder.
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