by Devon Code
He understood his brother’s decision to help him become a as a way of atoning for his complicity in the torture, even if his brother-in-law had never expressed it in those terms. For two years, before he became the Maestro, he lived with a shaman in the rainforest near Iquitos, while he became acquainted with the medicinal properties of various plants and underwent all manner of purges and learned the that had been passed down for generations. The way the interrogators used the music supplied by his brother-in-law was precisely the opposite of the way he employed as a , he said, for the were intended to reassure and to soothe and to guide the listener toward healing. Unlike a recording, he said, the were never repeated in exactly the same way as before, but were always subtly changing.
He was greatly indebted to the shaman he’d apprenticed under, and also was indebted to his brother-in-law for his sponsorship. The two men could not be more different from one another, much like ayahuasca and Inca Kola, but he was equally indebted to both. When his apprenticeship ended, the insurgency was at its height. Countless atrocities were committed, he said, and there was much suffering to appease. Insurgents executed peasants for selling their produce at market. The military were relentless in their pursuit of dissidents, which led them to execute a professor at the Teacher’s University along with his students, leaving them together in a mass grave. But when he thought about the years of the insurgency, it was always the hanging dogs and the interrogator’s music that came back to him. These thoughts had returned to him during ayahuasca purges, and he had explored them at length. He would never look at a stray dog nosing through trash in the same way again, he said. This sight, which was common enough in Lima, was forever connected for him now with propaganda that was incomprehensible and cruelty that was absurd. Also, his reflection on his brother-in-law’s story about the interrogator had increased his appreciation for his freedom to listen to music of his own choosing and at a sensible volume. In the years since the revolutionary leaders had been incarcerated, things had grown quieter and more peaceful, said the Maestro, but the suffering remained. The Shining Path was still there, he said, weaving its way through the Andes, the jungle, and the farmer’s field and into the capital. But there were many other paths as well, he said. Peru was covered in them.
When the interpreter had finished interpreting all the Maestro had said, James asked the Maestro if he’d ever read the Peruvian novella—published under the pseudonym Señor Mosca—which had briefly become popular during the period following the coup. No, said the Maestro, though he’d heard of it. He knew that it was supposed to be very dirty and also that it didn’t make any sense. He’ had no desire to read such a book, he said. He didn’t enjoy reading and preferred to listen to music, which brought him contentment. He then asked James if he knew what the word “ meant. When James said he did not, the Maestro told him that in colloquial Peruvian it meant to be awake, to anticipate the unexpected.
The Maestro fell silent, as if recalling a memory from the distant past. When he spoke again, he said that the only novel he’d ever read was the Great Russian novel. He hadn’t actually read it, he said, but had listened to it in translation on cassette tape when he was a boy. He said that he remembered the ending to this day because it reminded him of the fate of the Incan people and also of the political turmoil in the time of the insurgency. James asked the Maestro what Russian novel he meant, and the Maestro couldn’t remember its name. The one he was thinking of, said the Maestro, was not the one people mentioned all the time, but another one that was also well known. It was very long, he said, going on and on for many tapes. There was a very strange passage near the end, and in his opinion everything that comes before was just a setup for this one passage. The main character recovers from a fever and remembers the dreams he had while he was sick. In these dreams there is a plague that destroys almost everyone by making them insane. Part of the madness is that everyone takes his own beliefs more seriously than ever before, and everyone disagrees with everyone else. They try to make war against one another, but the soldiers can’t stop quarrelling long enough to launch attacks on the opposing armies. Everyone loses their power of judgment and stops being productive. Alarm bells go off constantly, but no one knows why or who sets them off. The plague spreads a great distance, and only a few survive. The survivors are the hope of humanity, the ones who will go on after all the others have died. But the problem is that no one has seen or heard from these people; no one knows who they are, including the main character of this Russian novel. The main character of the novel has to go through a lot before he has those dreams. He must lose everything he has, his freedom, his health and almost his mind like the people in his dreams. Then, finally, when he is suffering from fever, he has these dreams that are the point of the whole novel. But he doesn’t understand them, so they are meaningless.
When the interpreter had finished translating the Maestro’s remarks, the Maestro remained silent, as if to provide James the time to make sense of all he’d heard. Then, eventually he asked if James had decided upon his intention for when he was to drink ayahuasca that evening. The Maestro advised him to think of a specific question he wanted answered. He could, for example, ask about the end of the world, or ask for the chance to see his friend who had died, or ask for his auditory hallucinations to end.
James said that he’d not yet decided, and the Maestro said he’d have to make up his mind by nightfall. Then the Maestro requested the payment. James took the money from his pocket, the folded bills damp from his sweat, and handed it to the Maestro, who accepted it without comment. He pressed a button on his Walkman and lay down once again on the floor, prompting the interpreter to get up to leave the hut and James to pick up Warren’s mandola and follow. After they’d stepped outside, the interpreter turned to him and confided that she did not like Diet Inca Kola. She hated the taste of the artificial sweetener, but felt compelled to drink it whenever it was offered so as not to offend the Maestro. James asked her if ayahuasca tasted as bitter as the Maestro claimed and she said that she’d never tried it because it was against her beliefs.
“Then why do you interpret for the Maestro?” James had asked her, and I was not to hear her answer to his question, for I was compelled to interrupt James’s account at that instant, his emergence from the Maestro’s hut coinciding with what I surmised to be sounds coming from the bottom of the half-constructed mid-rise condominium in which we sat.
“Did you hear that?” I asked.
“Hear what?” asked James.
“Sounds coming from below,” I replied, the two of us then sitting in silence, listening with utmost intensity just as James had done several months before, as he endeavoured to discern the particulars of that tryst on the side of the mountain some distance from where we now sat with our backs against the concrete pillars. There was nothing to hear, however, the noises never having existed, or else, ceasing to exist at the precise moment at which my hearing of them was no longer incidental.
“False alarm,” said James, and I had little reason to doubt that he was right, no reason but the fading certainty that I had in fact heard sounds coming from below while James had still been speaking, sounds that had since given way to the ambient noise of the waning night, the pulse of the nightclub’s bass having stopped some time ago.
“Maybe we should leave just the same,” I suggested, but James made no sign of moving. Sitting silently, he seemed pensive, as if he was not really there beside me but somewhere else entirely. I too felt transported in that instant, our precarious position in the uppermost heights of the mid-rise fading into the background while I speculated as to the content of James’s troubled thoughts. I asked him what had come to pass on his last evening in the Maestro’s camp. Before he replied, I heard him fumbling in the dark and then a match flared, its flickering light illuminating James’s expression, which was drawn with fatigue, or perhaps resignation, as he brought the match to the tip of the marijuana cigarette held in his lips
and inhaled deeply just as he’d done that afternoon. The match extinguished, James offered me the cigarette and I declined, the pungent odour filling the incomplete concrete enclosure, lingering, it seemed to me, in a way it had not in the open air on the side of the mountain. James said that his ayahuasca purge had been far more unsettling than anything the Maestro had described. At the appointed hour on their third night in the camp, said James, all of the initiates had gathered in the hut where they took their meals. There they found the Maestro already seated, smoking a cigar. His Walkman was conspicuously absent and the interpreter sat at his side. The room’s furnishings had been removed and mats had been placed on the floor in a circle, a small plastic cup and a larger bucket placed next to each mat. The initiates arranged themselves in a circle just as they had done on the first day. Then the Maestro said that he would remain for the duration of the proceedings, until the last of the initiates had retired. If at any time, he said, they felt panicked or lost, they needed only focus on the sound of his . No harm would come to them, he said, and whatever sensations they experienced, be they painful or pleasurable, would inevitably pass away.
Then he poured a dark brown liquid from a large Inca Kola bottle into each initiate’s cup, James noticing that he appeared to receive a greater amount than those seated on either side of him. He downed the bitter decoction in one draught as he had been instructed and found it as acrid and unpalatable as the Maestro had claimed. Once everyone had drunk, the Maestro drank as well. James looked for the interpreter, but she was no longer by the Maestro’s side. The Maestro commenced his , which he accompanied with the shaking of a rattle composed of dried leaves. James found nothing soothing about the chanting or the insistent rhythm, his attentiveness to it heightened in the absence of all other stimuli. He struggled to keep down the bile rising in his throat. After some time, there was a reprieve from the chanting as the Maestro again circulated the bottle and all the participants drank a second draught. The Maestro resumed his . This time the chanting was punctuated by the intermittent sounds of retching and the splatter of vomit against the bottom of empty buckets. The became unbearable to James, as if it was the source of his sickness, and he also vomited and afterwards, felt relief. The chanting no longer bothered him and he waited for the ayahuasca to have its affect. The Maestro spent time with each initiate in turn, his shifting in their rhythm and in their words. When he came to James, he tapped him lightly upon the head with his rattle of leaves. James closed his eyes and the tapping ushered him away from his surroundings, so that the contents of his mind supplanted his awareness of the inside of the hut. By the time the Maestro had left him and moved on, the darkness gave way to patterns of emerald light, coalescing into the form of a serpent that rose up before him, like a cobra rising from a snake charmer’s basket. The serpent banged its head against his open eye, as if his eye were the wall of a terrarium in which the serpent was contained, or else, as if it was the window of a building that the serpent wished to enter. When James opened his mouth to cry out in astonishment, the serpent slid down his throat and occupied the length of his digestive tract. This terrified James and he bit down on the serpent with the full force of his jaw, severing its tail, while the rest of the serpent remained lodged within him, writhing in protest. The writhing tickled and James felt himself erupt into involuntary convulsions of laughter, the sound of which was stifled by the reptilian mass. The serpent regenerated itself while still inside of him, a new tail emerging to replace the old, protruding from James’s mouth like a second tongue.
When the serpent reached its former length, its growth continued, its girth burgeoning as it slithered deeper inside him. James felt his bowels heave and the head of the serpent erupted from his anus and twisted around and rose up to look him in the eye. The serpent spoke softly and clearly in Warren’s voice, but in Quechua, which James perfectly understood. It said that James was alone in a room. It said that this room was invisible. It said that the room had no walls. It said that everyone that James had ever cared for and those he would care for in the future were gathered outside of this room. It said that they were in the midst of celebration. It said that in the act of celebration, they grew closer to one another. It said that James could hear the sounds of their laughter, their voices, but that he could not make out the words. It said that James was the reason they were gathered together. It said that no one missed James at the celebration, because they did not know he was absent. It said they did not know he was absent, because they did not know he existed. It said he existed nevertheless. It said that the celebration was proof of this beyond all doubt. It said that the echoes of pain and pleasure and yearning would remain constant in his ear until he finally heard them. Then the serpent’s growth continued and James experienced the entire course of his existence in reverse, beginning with the time he’d spent in the Maestro’s camp, his visit to Machu Picchu, innumerable drops of rain forming one by one and exploding upwards from the ruins as they were sucked into the clouds. He listened to the applause and then walked backwards, away from the ruins, gaining in energy with every step, the slaughtered calf rising from the damp earth as the machete cleansed itself of blood. He experienced the silent retreat, his illicit nocturnal bursts of scribbling giving way to vengeful gusts and waves of feeling and thought. He delivered Warren’s eulogy, experienced his grief condensed, accelerated, culminating in Warren’s resurrection from the dead, giving way to frustration at being unable to complete his paper on the Peruvian novella with its confounding notion of involuntary bliss, a series of recurring inverted dreams, the missionaries backing up from his doorstep while facing toward the door, as if they could see him standing there behind it, as if they wished for him to know that they knew he was behind the door even as they walked away. Again for the first time, he read the Peruvian novella, which he found even more compelling in reverse. Once again he witnessed the seizures of the epileptic infant, each fit followed by her blissful absorption in the sound of Warren’s mandola, the sound of his voice as he sang to her the wordless tune. He witnessed the depth of his friendship with Warren give way to its early stages, when he and Warren seemed familiar although he had not yet come to know him well. The joys and tribulations of his young adulthood gave way to trials of his youth, the discoveries and disappointments of his boyhood, vivid recollections sweeping over him in rapid succession as he realized that it was not the serpent who was growing, but he who was shrinking, as maturity gave way to childhood and then to infancy, his body growing younger and smaller just as his knowledge of the world declined, the reversal slowing to a stop at what he estimated to be one month after his exodus from the womb—a time when he was as yet incapable of articulating his thoughts, of recognizing the sound of his own name, when he knew the world only through a pall of half-formed sensations, when all was shadow and strain and fleeting satisfaction—the writhing serpent unbearably cramped within him, unsettling him like a sublime colic, so that he clenched his tiny fists and flailed about until the pressure exerted from within caused him to burst, his remains scattering a great distance through the cosmos, propelled by the force of their release, each remnant of his exploded infant body experiencing its own unbearable velocity before its momentum dwindled, each component and appendage coming to a solitary state of rest, where it provided sustenance for all manner of celestial vermin. He shared in the sensations of all that ate of his remains. These included maggots born in the flesh of his left hand. The tiny fist had been propelled a great distance until it came to rest on the island of Montreal. There a fly had laid its eggs on the fleshy pillow of his thumb, the eggs hatching to release maggots of exceptional vigour, the maggots maturing into flies of great ambition. James took pride in each fly as if it was his own progeny. He knew that each was destined to become caught up in the cosmic web, and this filled him with sorrow. The web stretched an unfathomable distance and each of its strands was indistinguishable from the serpent that had entered him. The more each fly struggled to free itself, the mo
re it would become entangled, for such was the web’s design. Each fly became immobilized, powerless to do anything but await the return of the web’s creator.
Tobacco smoke entered his nostrils then, anchoring him once more in his own physicality, the Maestro’s having ceased some time before. His insides ached and his eyes opened of their own accord. He saw that he was alone with the Maestro. The Maestro sat before him, his eyes open as he puffed on a cigar, gently blowing its smoke upon James’s face. He remained there unmoving as James rose unsteadily, hastily left the hut and made his way toward the river. At the river’s bank was a makeshift latrine, a platform of poles bound together with twine. He crawled out onto it and squatted over a hole that opened onto the flowing water. His bowels released a violent torrent until he was convinced there was nothing left for them to expel, the sensation of release at once painful and delicious. He felt his innards heave again, and he feared that his colon would rupture. Still more left him and was swallowed by the river. It was in this final act of purgation that he felt something had been left behind, something nameless and irretrievable. He looked down at the river and it appeared impenetrable, the moon reflected on its surface.
He crawled back to the bank, where he collapsed. That morning, he awoke when the interpreter gently shook his shoulder, offered her hand and pulled him to his feet. Without speaking, she led him back to the centre of the camp, her hand in his. All the initiates were gathered there around the Maestro, just as they had been on the day they arrived. The Maestro sat with each initiate in turn, and the through the interpreter, listened to their account of the visions experienced during the purge and advised them as to their significance. When James gave his account, the Maestro said it was obvious that his friend who had recently died had assumed the form of the serpent. As to what the serpent communicated, only James himself could know. Then through the interpreter, the Maestro congratulated all of them on following through with their intentions. He counselled them to ease their way back into their normal routines and advised that it may take some time before they understood fully what they’d experienced the night before. It was on the return flight from Lima, said James, that he’d completed the opening canto of “The Maundering Harlequins,” the roar of the jet engine spilling through the airplane’s insulated cabin and into his ears.