But this Berkeley jerk, thought Krieger, having to show us that he knows
Yucatec, kindergarten-level. Hard to cut slack to such negative space.
Toe in wok, no (Krieger was thinking fast—he had to say something that would bring the conversation back to Sardavaal’s tribe. Krieger sensed there was something there, something possible, with that tribe. He hadn’t yet figured out what. But something), well, tried-but-true he offered, “Straight up your Az-tec.”
No one laughed.
“Käläx t’an,” Sardavaal smiled. Obscenities.
“Anyway so tell me more about your father’s work, Jonathan,” Krieger’d gone on. That was choice—hated his father. No memory this guy, either. Hadn’t there been that time on MacDougal? Ranted about the establishment, pissed on money, very garden-variety Utopian and, plainly, how much easier to piss from the comfortable height of financial security than from down, say, in the gutter?
“He doesn’t interest me.”
Turning to the woman in a flannel suit, which seemed so out of place in the setting, “He interests the rest of us, though, a gerontologist, admirable discipline, I think.”
Sardavaal was back to talking earthquake relief by then.
Time flies, and the ground flies, too. Krieger almost said it aloud.
“What we’ve done is suggest that by putting barbed-wire armature inside the adobe walls the thing holds together better when it starts rocking.”
“That’s interesting, barbed wire.”
A tedious bunch, Krieger thought, turning to the cross-eyed woman whose irises were deep brown flecked with marigold. What color was she between her legs? he wondered. What taste? what smell? what feel? There was, apropos the itch in his fingertips to test out the resistance of the cotton of her skirt—so gaily patterned—another Lacandon saying that came to mind. When the party began to break up and the dinner guests said their goodnights, Krieger managed to get her off to one side. “Ki’ wenen tech. Ki’l(le) bä(al) a wilik,” he whispered. Sleep well, you. Take care what you dream.
She got the message.
2.
BERKELEY HOUSE SAT on a knoll where it surveyed the long lawn, the rolling irregular grounds that extended to its northwestern border, and the sea of trees which sparkled and waved, a sinuous and torrid expanse out beyond the combination of hedgerows and post-and-rail, long since collapsed in desuetude, that marked the property line at one border. Locusts, birches, lindens, maples, merged to make a carpet whose nap would change in the gentlest wind. In the autumn, when the leaves were at peak, it seemed at times as if the entire forest were constituted of embers. In winter, under the slow snow during the short days, it had seemed to Owen—who gazed out over it from the relative security of his second-floor rooms—to be the gloomiest conceivable stretch of earth, like a desert, a wasteland of interest only to the complaining crows that lit at the tops of branches. Many birds made these forests their sanctuary and others passed through on their way from Canada south toward the West Indies, the Caribbean, to quarters in Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela and beyond each fall. But of all the seasons summer seemed kindest here when the leaves were green and meaty, and the trees were caught up in ceaseless song.
The house itself where Madeleine, Alma, and Jonathan had grown up was a sprawling immensity, too grand for the family ever to have occupied more than a small number of its rooms. It had the appearance and the magnitude of a mansion but these, the last generations of Berkeleys to live in it, never thought of it as a mansion since the family could never afford to maintain the grounds or the structure itself. An accretion of Palladio, Williamsburg, Victorian, the house was fitted out with clerestories, three turrets, two widow’s walks, many balconies. Dormer windows jutted from all angles of the slate roof. At the peak of every gable stood a finial or weather vane, painted ships and tin cocks long stuck in place, pointing beak north/tail south, or bow east/stern west, no matter which way the wind blew. Tall chimneys were each finished with decorative brickwork. Fashioned in part of river stone, clapboard painted white, and later of brown brick, the house had been added on to by succeeding generations of the family since its cornerstone was laid in place in 1775 by the chandler and fur trader Theophilus Berkeley.
Diversities of architecture reflected the changing tastes of the house’s owners through the centuries of its history, and the varying qualities of workmanship and materials represented a chronology of their fates. Theophilus Berkeley’s son and grandsons lived comfortably in Berkeley house through the first decades of the nineteenth century. Thousands of acres were kept in seasonal rotation and what land the family was unable to utilize was profitably leased. But already by the end of the century the great-great-grandchildren had begun selling off acreage in large parcels along the borders of the farm. This was a process that proved difficult to halt. What remained in the hands of these last descendants of the patriarch was their small private cemetery, walled in and lost under the darkness cast by great willows whose roots pillaged its caskets and crypts, and Berkeley house itself, situated on a fraction of original land that remained—about a hundred acres along the river, many of them overgrown with trees, berry bushes, and wild vines.
The arrangement of rooms and passageways within the house was no less quirky than that of its exterior. Corridors wandered off to terminate at doors locked half a century ago. One balustrade led up a stairway which ended at molded ceiling where architects and carpenters had run out of ideas or encountered an unresolvable problem and been forced to nose the topmost riser of a staircase in where a chandelier were better hung. False windows and false doors abounded. A ballroom described the shape of one wing, and it had a grand staircase which led down to a lower foyer and a series of glass doors that gave onto a terrace. The parquet was now covered in a fine film of dust; the floorboards on the small raised bandstand were wildly warped owing to a leak in the roof; glass in the bank of doors was cracked.
The Berkeleys’ nature had always been industrious, bright, eccentric, nepotic, isolationist, and until their latest manifestations, practical and unspeculative. It was a proud family as well, and that pride was a quality passed from generation to generation so unerringly it seemed almost a genetic process. Their isolationism contributed, over the years, to the very undermining of industriousness and led to the dispersal of the property. When Owen was married and became the head of the house, the lands that protected Berkeley hermeticism were so broken off and scattered that this trait became more a function of the imagination and will. In so many words, the house itself had become the land.
Late fall. Gables sunk in coral, shadows making mischief over the lime-moon lawn. The leaves crackled crisp underfoot. The berries in holly bushes the only objects a brighter red than the flash of the cardinal through their prickly spines. Summer had been dry, nearly drought; a freak frost had tricked the leaves into turning early, but the birds had still delayed migration. They flitted everywhere and, far above, a red-tailed hawk beat its broad wings three times then glided into its circle, eye trained on the open country below for the movement of a rabbit, or a mouse.
This abundance of bird life Jonathan first gladly remembered after being away so long. If it was true that his father was entangled, after a lifetime squandered in the pursuit of ridiculous impossibilities—alchemical conversion of dry ice to diamonds, vacuum-carriage urban sewer system, biologic codes of immortality—and all at the expense of his family, year after endless sinking year, now in something that would finish him, finish the “Berkeley line” (for Jonathan himself had no intention of continuing it), then Alma’s telegram in its typical Alma-panic and Alma-mother tones would not be as farfetched as it seemed when Jonathan first read it.
If not—though this time it sounded as if things had gone too far, Owen always having gone “in and out of it” but was now more “out” than ever—he had explained to himself that some days could be spent on his project, an old project, one which even he had given up much hope of ever completing
: to find his sister Maddie who was still in exile—find her with or without Henry, and this would make the trip worthwhile. If not, he would pay homage to dear sweet mother Sophie and poor brother Red and maybe fill his pocket notebook (bought especially for the purpose) with lists of some new sightings, and return to his fieldwork before the culture shock, to which he was susceptible, settled in to wreak havoc on his conscience.
Barefooted and toothlessly whistling, perched awkwardly on an old bicycle jerryrigged with a steering wheel for handlebars, a man had brought him Alma’s cable on Tuesday, gracias doctored him with teeth like Indian corn cutting straight across the lips. In his small house in Lejamani he locked his notebooks, tapes, and all his medical supplies in a file cabinet, packed up and left in the truck, feeling slightly guilty at leaving Manuel de Jesus Díaz behind with the generator only half rebuilt.
Lejamani had served as Jonathan’s base for a year. He’d come to Central America first as a graduate student, working on human ecology and agricultural biology in developing nations, but in fact had never yet reduced the masses of notes and figures into a doctoral dissertation. He had worked for the OAS in Salvador and Costa Rica for six months here, seven months there. He dropped everything when natural disasters took place, and flew with other volunteers into sites to help the dying, those burned by volcanic ash, or crushed by falling beams in an earthquake, the homeless after a flood. His most important published paper was about the Carib Indians along the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua who—unlike the Chorotecs, descended from the Aztecs who settled across the inland plains and had been subjugated by Cortés in the sixteenth century—had lived in not quite unobserved primitivity and autonomy until the end of the nineteenth. Primitivity carried with it a fundamental honesty, he believed, and the thrust of his argument was that socioeconomic conditions among individual tribes unerringly and in every respect had deteriorated ever since. In the early part of the eighteenth century the British turned Moskitia into a de facto protectorate. Both the Christian barbarians, led by the “butcher-bishop” (his term) Bartolomé de Las Casas, and imperialist Britain—seeing the need to establish a command post for military discourse with the French and Spanish—had played key roles in destroying the “simple” (meant to be ironic, that is: complex) societies they had found there in Latin America. And what the Spanish and British neglected to do, the United States, the good old homeland, undertook to finish:
“Land of the crow-juanist’s pride,
Land where the Tacho-shafted died,
From every big-booted kick to its neighbors’ underside,
Of thee I sing.”
His father, sent a copy of Jonathan’s typed notes back when he was writing them in southern Mexico, responded responsibly, with a letter that called him on several points. First, this was not the language of academic dissertation nor was it one which seemed to him very special, or new, however clever. Second, contrary to what Jonathan may have thought—even hoped, as children can often hope in their quest to see well over the shoulders of their elders—he, Owen, was not fundamentally in disagreement with his son’s findings, his opinions, his moral outrage. Third, this was especially nothing new, this outrage, and even Maddie in her running away with the stableboy (Owen refused to call Henry Work by his name) showed more basic pluck than anything he was doing with his Maya studies and simple readings in post-Columbian literature and art (or whatever you geniuses locked away in your ivory towers, or mud towers, down in the middle of the jungle call it).
Jonathan was so surprised by the letter that he spent several days drafting his response. He didn’t want to seem like a child. He didn’t like what his father had said, but saw there was something to it, a care Owen usually reserved for Alma, or Red. But the letter came out—gushy, full of love and again, all wrong, too far the other way. He sent it anyway. There was never an answer.
It was with an obscure anthropologist named Miguel Sardavaal that Jonathan had spent his most rewarding month to date in Central America. Sardavaal enjoyed the reputation of both pioneer and outsider (a combination Jonathan cultivated like bamboo and reeds). His work was concentrated in the remotest areas of the most backward districts of southern Honduras and northern Nicaragua. His materials (Sardavaal’s colleagues knew of piles of undigested notes, and remembered when he attended meetings to give eccentric, impromptu papers which were recognized to be the richest stuff to have come out of the area) remained for the most part unpublished. He hadn’t the time and was always giving his typewriters away. His research was therefore enveloped in a kind of mystique. Jonathan came into his temporary employ under false but not dishonorable pretenses. They met, through a mutual acquaintance, at a soccer match in the loud dusty stadium in Comayagua. The day was white in its heat but the players were fast, out on the shabby yellowed grass, and the crowd was enthusiastic and loud.
The man who worked his way across the bleachers to make the introduction was someone Jonathan knew he had encountered before. A corporate type of the kind Jonathan had run up against in the OAS and even in his tour with the Peace Corps—Jonathan, indeed, continued to think of all Americans down here as either rapists or saints—but clearly this man, approaching jauntily, all smiles, was some fresh brand of renegade. Jonathan remembered his name even before he reached out to shake his hand because, during the last discussion the two of them had had, the origin of the name Krieger and its having to do with the German term Blitzkrieg came up. A party for the medical volunteers Amigos de las Americas, at the campo de golf at the shantytown edges of Tegucigalpa, proceeded with its bartenders in white, stained waistcoats and pennyloafers?—was it? maybe not. There might have been an earlier meeting back in New York? that was plausible. There was also something about a very bad joke: up your something or other.
“Here’s your man,” Krieger announced to Sardavaal, whose own smile was one of forbearance. “I was just telling Dr. Sardavaal about you.”
“Telling him what?”
“Telling him what we talked about, don’t you remember?” and he began to whisper, close, softly in the crowd. “There was something about that drought where was it now down in Alabama? chickens shrivlin’ away, the fish all justha drying up in they ponds, corn poppin’ right in they stawks, blessed catfeesh djaw member that one just come boxing long the road just popped up into the pan to cool off in the bacon grease?”
“What?”
“Ya still like Prez?”
“You know what, you must be remembering somebody else.”
“No, no, I never forget anything. Hey, wait: you cut your hair, man.”
“Of course I know Dr.—” but when did Charlie Parker ever come up between himself and Krieger? or was Krieger guessing? yet it was true the Parker albums had caused trouble at home so many years ago, as did the trips down to New York to the jazz clubs, all frowned on by Alma in the ever-present pro-Henry, anti-Henry climate of the days after Maddie left home.
“Looks great, the hair I mean, that mop must’ve got pretty hot out in the canoes, no?” Krieger gestured to the other man, “I believe you two have met before, Dr. Sardavaal? This is Jonathan Berkeley. That’s right isn’t it?”
“Of course I—”
“Inside joke,” Krieger offered as an aside to Sardavaal, “bacon grease.”
Sardavaal’s attention was called away to the field as the crowd rose to its feet. Legs pumping, the Honduran worked the ball down toward the goalpost, shot wide. Krieger groaned, then continued. “Well that’s fine that’s clever, Mr. Berkeley, Jonathan, I remember trabajo garantizado, all work guaranteed, right?”
“Trabajo garantizado—what kind of work?”
“What kind of work? This is Dr. Sardavaal I’m sure you must know who he is for godsake, you’ve been down here for a while haven’t you?—no, I remember now, I think we all had dinner once, remember, after the earthquake? and maybe back in the Village?”
“Which?” Sardavaal asked.
“Uhm, Managua, maybe? can’t remember, faces and names e
ven some ideas yes, but earthquakes no.” He cleared his throat.
“Yes I—” Jonathan extended his hand, which was taken, a cool bony hand, then turned, “Your name is Krieger, isn’t it?”
“Why not,” he winked, “but in any case it’s all arranged, and if I can be so bold without embarrassing Dr. Sardavaal, you owe me one. ‘A man should not mean but be,’ so okay?”
Jonathan’s gratitude—which ended, after Sardavaal left, in a tour with Krieger through chambers of an Iglesian brothel, “raven-haired” women with “volcanic” eyes (the descriptions seemed appropriate at the time), waist-long tits, tattoos, caterwauling babies left in dark corners (“etcetera”)—was at first grudgingly offered. But the gratitude was premature, also, and, as it turned out, some of the skills which Krieger claimed for Jonathan were extravagant fabrications. The tequila had blown the evening out of proportion, though. They ended hugging in the street.
Jonathan had no expertise in epidemiology and yet so many miles outside the already far-removed village of Huanquivila, Sardavaal—who had need of an epidemiologist—could hardly send his young intern home.
“Dr. Krieger,” Sardavaal reasoned, “is an enthusiast.”
A liar, thought Jonathan, doctor? doctor Krieger? Trying to remember what it was Krieger had said declining the mulatta in the whorehouse, joking in his perfect Spanish; a Spanish so adroitly rendered that he sometimes sounded “international Spic”—upbeat, oily, spiced with so much ingratiation the words themselves seemed commerce. He had, however, talked Jonathan into taking her. He wasn’t in the mood, after all. It was something Jonathan’d never done but the room had gone into a hole by the time it came around to deciding so that before he knew it he was naked, in a feather bed which smelled of aspic, warming to all of it—how did people live? how did they go forward from day to day? life was okay, it wasn’t all that bad, no matter what the circumstances, right—while Krieger (as it turned out) sat at the table in the room, writing letters. One of the letters (in the morning, it seemed as if he had produced enough to fill a postman’s satchel) was that which made an ultimate link—that is, in Jonathan’s life, though perhaps in Krieger’s too.
Come Sunday Page 30