by Nancy Burke
“Will they at least send him home to be buried?” his mother said finally, her voice still not recovered.
“No, he left instructions in a notebook by his bed. He wants to be cremated here and”—and Larry’s voice began to waver also—“I’ll scatter his ashes in the forest. He wanted you to do something at St. Thomas.”
“I want to bury him myself. Here. I’ve owed it to him, since he buried Maggie,” she blurted out, as though she needed to tell him, or had forgotten he was there.
“Who’s Maggie?” asked Larry, the knot in his stomach growing tighter.
“Your sister,” she said.
The level had risen higher in the booth. Larry could feel it lapping at his neck, and longed for it to overtake him. It penetrated into whatever small opening was made inside him by his momentary sympathy, and washed out that crevice, and filled it with rage.
“When are you coming home?” she said.
“I’m not,” said Larry sharply, and then more softly, trying to keep an even tone. “There are things I need to do here, to wrap everything up. I’ll call you when I know more.”
“I think you should come home,” said his mother.
“Okay,” said Larry.
“Did he suffer?”
“Not so much, I think. Some.”
“Do you have enough money to get home?”
“My tickets are already paid for.”
“Then come home,” she said.
“I will,” said Larry. “Say hi to dad.”
On the street, the people seemed to be walking in slow motion, and in silence, as though the humid air were water. Larry looked into courtyards and windows as he walked; he wandered up and down the aisles of shops, looking for clues. He tried to keep his body moving, pushing hard into the thick, warm air. To Larry, moving felt like an answer in itself, the only possible answer to an endless stream of deprivations and uncertainties. He walked against the flow of traffic, leaving in his wake a string of cars and bicycles and cow carts. His sweaty shirt slapped back and forth across his back, following the rhythm of his arms.
Between the buildings in front of him, he could see the glare of the sun on the river. He turned off to the right, heading without thinking toward the Museu de Santarem. His eyes didn’t stop moving even when his body sat down on a stone bench in the courtyard, and his thoughts didn’t stop when, at last, he settled his gaze on the paving stones at his feet. A small, gray bird landed nearby and pecked at the dirt between the stones. He imagined himself through the bird’s eye, a hunched, despondent creature.
As he sat immersed, he felt someone sit down beside him, a body that mimicked his own pose, its shoulder at his shoulder, knee touching his knee. He slowly moved his gaze to the left and saw the tip of Jorge’s shoe, and the fringe of his leg hair hanging over the top of his sock.
“James told me yesterday to look for you here if I didn’t find you at the cafes,” he said.
They sat for a long time, watching first one beetle and then another struggle over the rocky ground. Drops fell on the paving stones leaving wet circles that quickly shrank and dried, and fleeting trails of water where the beetles waded through them onto shore.
“Do you want to be alone?” Jorge asked, shifting towards the end of the bench.
“You can stay,” said Larry.
Overhead, birds were reeling in the sky, their wings flashing in the spaces between the trees. Their calls grazed the walls of the courtyard and mingled with the sounds of the fountain.
“I’ve lost someone too,” said Jorge, brushing his hair from his forehead and looking back down at the ground.
“You still have someone,” said Larry, the bitterness in his voice reminding him, for a minute, of his mother’s.
“That’s true,” said Jorge.
Larry began to feel irritable again, angry at Jorge’s kindness and his own relentless subtle cruelty, angry at the hardness of the bench, and at his mother, and at James, and at all the useless beggars who wandered the streets of Santarem, one of whom he could easily become. He imagined crushing the beetles with his shoe. Over time, the anger passed.
“How old were you?” he said.
“Ten,” said Jorge. “The day after my tenth birthday.” He took off his glasses and cleaned them on his shirt, squinting up into the tops of the trees. “I can’t really say it goes away.”
A lizard darted across the pavement, scattering the tiny oceans at their feet. Jorge jumped up but forced himself to stay, clenching his fists at his sides.
Without looking at him, Larry straightened and took his place beside him. They walked together out onto the street, where a line of old men fed cornstalks to their cows while cars and motorbikes sped by. They tried to walk side by side down the Rua Bittencourt, but boys on bikes filled the sidewalk, forcing them into single file with Jorge in the lead. When the town center was behind them, Jorge slowed his pace until Larry caught up with him again.
“Did they come for him yet?” Larry asked when they neared Sara’s house.
“A while ago,” said Jorge. “Not long after you left.” He took the key out of his pocket and put it into the lock.
“You’ll stay with us?” he said, his hand on the key, without turning around.
“I don’t know,” said Larry as they went in.
The living room was as appealing as it had been before, generous in its appointments, and empty of people. Larry walked through it by himself to James’s room, and stood for a time just inside the doorway. The bed had been made, and the pillows were plumped up and neatly arranged along the headboard. His sleeping pad was rolled up and tied, and the rest of their bags had been brought over from Marco’s and piled up in a corner. His pack and James’s leaned against each other, as though both were very tired. Larry watched the two of them for a minute and then turned and headed down the hall to Jorge’s room, taking a seat at the end of the bed when Jorge looked up from his desk.
“What are you doing on Saturday?” he asked without looking at him.
“What are you doing?”
“I was thinking I’d go ahead on my own,” said Larry.
“Bad idea,” said Jorge. He shook his head, scattering his hair across his forehead and then herding it back with his hand. “I can’t do it.”
“You’re kidding!” said Larry, turning to look at him. “I thought that was the plan.” In light of Jorge’s obsequiousness towards James, and his air of sad fragility, and the indulgent kindness he had shown, it had never occurred to Larry that he could be anything other than compliant.
“You’re not prepared,” said Jorge, his voice almost angry. “What do you think, I’m going to drop you out in the middle of nowhere, where you don’t speak the language, and you won’t know how to find food, and you’ll end up as lunch meat, if you don’t die first of malaria?”
“I do speak the language, and I’ve done this trip before,” said Larry, desperate.
“With James. And do you know how long James had been at it by then? Twenty years, with a few narrow escapes and a lot of luck. And do you know how upset everybody was when he went off assignment? Silvio was livid when he found out James had brought you in with him. I only took you because, for some reason known only to him, Joaquim stepped in.”
Jorge was leaning forward in his seat, his head thrust out into the space between them. Larry could see the veins standing up on the sides of his neck. He found intolerable the idea that Jorge might know more than he did about the circumstances of what he thought of as his personal sojourn with James. When he thought back, all he could remember of that day was a seemingly endless wait in a small, hot, run-down airplane hangar in the middle of nowhere. James and a few other people he didn’t know were huddled together arguing in one corner while he sat in another, reading a book. He remembered the book clearly, though; it was The Hobbit.
“Besides,” said Jorge, “now there’s nobody with you who’s even remotely connected with IPS. Even if we found a way of getting around Silvio, I’d
never get authorization to take you.”
“James didn’t work for IPS this time either.”
“Officially, he was on leave, with at least the pretense of taking a real assignment.” Jorge said with an exasperated sigh. “Why do you even want this?”
“I don’t have a choice,” said Larry, despondent, understanding clearly now that life was going to defeat him.
“Let it sit,” said Jorge, wiping his glasses with his shirt as he stood and walked to the door.
XIV
MARTINA SAT AT the wheel and started to kick while she rolled the clay between her palms. If people asked her about the work, she would tell them, “It’s no different from breathing.” It was also like eating; every batch of clay had a different flavor, which she tasted through her pores, and through the cracks in her palms. Despite the wheel’s own rhythmic, raspy breath, it was, above all, silent work; when Jorge came, as he often did, to take her to dinner, they were sometimes halfway to the cafe before she felt ready to speak a word. Jorge was the only man she knew who didn’t mind her silences, unlike the others who seemed to need her to be chatty; he told her she was the only woman he knew who didn’t seem determined to disturb his thoughts with endless talk. That was their starting point, a small, superficial quirk of character that meant nothing and yet portended well for them.
The other important thing about working in clay was the fact that it depended on memory of body rather than memory of mind. Throwing demanded attunement, sensitivity to degrees of pressure and angle, but of an almost unconscious sort, so that her thoughts were free to wander. “I’m still dreaming,” she would say to Jorge as they sat together at the Boutu Vermelho waiting for their dinner. Then she would start slowly, telling him about whatever she had been reading the night before, Chaucer or Santayana or Jung. Sometimes she would read him passages in English or Italian or German or Portuguese, always sotto voce, in her heavy accent, so that he would have to listen hard to hear her.
When Jorge showed up at a quarter after two, she was in the midst of thought, bent over the wheel, but when she saw him, she rinsed her hands and followed him into the front room where the finished pieces were displayed. She watched him move from one shelf to the next, picking up vases and bowls and looking at their undersides, as if searching for some answer he had once known but had lost.
“What are you doing?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“You’re so early! Do you want to go out?”
Jorge kept on the search, as if he hadn’t heard her.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said. Then finally, “Larry’s in trouble.”
“What trouble?” she said, her voice tinged with impatience.
“James is dead,” said Jorge hollowly.
“Oh, you poor man!” she said, running to him and taking him in her arms. She pulled him back toward the dusty wooden church pew that sufficed for a sofa in the throwing room, wiping it off with a rag so they could sit down. Jorge stared down at his shoes, and then lifted his eyes to the far wall. He sat transfixed for half an hour, as though he had forgotten she was there. Then he stood up and smoothed out the wrinkles in his pants and shirt and brushed off the clay dust before walking slowly to the door.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
He pressed her hand for a minute and then let go abruptly, stepping out into the bustle of the street.
XV
THEY CALLED SILVIO “O Apresentador de Marionetas,” “The Puppeteer,” because of the web of threads and thumbtacks that covered the map on his office wall, and because he allowed no doubt as to who it was who placed and pulled the strings. Like the ones who orchestrated the endearing violence of Punches and Judys for coins in the Cathedral Plaza, his greatest contribution was found not in the stories he fabricated, nor in the nuances of his characters, so much as in his willingness to embody the universal fact that control over even one’s own body is approximate, mediated, tenuous, knotted, remote. As he paced the diagonal between his desk and the wall map, Silvio could feel his own threads stretch and contract, alternating between tension and slack. As a visible analog, the cord between the phone and the receiver coiled and extended as he moved from his desk to the wall along the worn path in the floor.
When he couldn’t get an answer at one number, he stopped beside the desk and dialed another with a finger grown stubby from constant, insistent service. Finally, hearing a voice, he stopped and covered his other ear with his palm.
“Alo? Alo?” he barked into the receiver at the operator. “Pois nao e urgento!”
“Silvio?” said Sara’s voice at the end of the line.
“I can’t find anyone!” Silvio shouted, though it wasn’t clear if he was still talking to the operator or to Sara. “Not Marco! Not James! Not Joaquim! Not yesterday! Not today! Where the hell is that good-for-nothing son of yours? If he’s out there with James and Larry, he’s out of a job, as far as I’m concerned. You can tell him that for me!”
“I need to talk to you,” Sara started, but Silvio cut her off.
“Tell him to call me! Now!” he shouted and hung up. Sara lifted the receiver and looked at it, a strange artifact from an even stranger culture. As she placed it on the cradle, Jorge passed her without a word, stopping to take a coin from the bowl on the windowsill on his way to the door.
XVI
WHEN JORGE TURNED the key, the Beaver’s engine jumped up to meet him, offering, without hesitation, its reliable droning solace. He checked to see that the radio was off and then eased the plane up and out, leaning forward, stroking the panel as though he were a jockey. He hadn’t planned on taking her up today, hadn’t told his mother he was going. But waking in his old bedroom with its child’s airplane-patterned window shade, and reaching for his glasses in their old place at the base of his blue wooden Cessna-shaped bedside light (a childhood gift from Joaquim), and hearing his mother move around in the kitchen, and listening to Larry run the water in the bathroom, and hearing the phone ring at five-minute intervals, and knowing from the bits he could piece together from his mother’s end of conversations that at least two of the calls were from Martina, he had been filled with the sort of desperation that could only be eased in the pit of a newly-washed DHC. Those were the extremes that his work offered him—entanglement on the one hand and a sense, on the other, of breaking free, as though a million strands were being stretched taut and severed in a chorus of soft pings.
The truth was that from the moment of his arrival at the hangar, while he was hosing down the plane and crawling around in the hold with his broom and flashlight, checking her over for lizards and leaks, he had all but forgotten that James was dead. He had hummed to himself while he threaded the hose in through the window of the cockpit to fill her up, and he had hummed even louder when the sound of the engine kicked in to offer him a cover. Looking down as he circled to the south, the town of Santarem was even smaller than he imagined it to be when he was in it, a tiny bauble resting against the soft throat of the earth, suspended from the juncture of two knotted river-strands.
At first, he allowed the familiarity of routine to lead him to believe that the day was like the others, a string of IPS dropoffs and deliveries, as dictated by the clipboard he had drawn from his canvas pack. Only when he looked down and saw the dusty airstrip of Itatuba recede behind him without his having landed there for a pickup, the first item on his job list, did he acknowledge to himself that he was headed elsewhere, beyond it by a hundred kilometers and almost twenty years. The magnet that had repelled him from Lamurii for so long had suddenly been turned on end, and he felt his spine push against his seatback, the engine accelerate his pulse. He knew its coordinates exactly, as one is at some level acutely aware of the location of the object of one’s fears, and he bent his path toward it, peeling off from the companionable escort of the Rio Tapajos. “Second star to the right!” he whispered to himself as he turned the wheel instinctively. The sensation wasn’t so muc
h of flying as of falling towards it at two hundred kilometers an hour, though to an observer, he might as well have been suspended there, between the urges to see and not to see. An hour later, it came into view, a jagged parting between the trees that harbored a tiny clump of circular thatched roofs resembling toadstools as much as human dwellings. He steered himself toward it as though to plant the nose of the plane into its heart and then suddenly jerked up again, climbing her as only a Beaver could.
XVII
WHEN THE HOLES for the tiXaja have been dug to the height of a boy, and the trunks have been inserted side by side like a man and a woman, and the lintels have been placed across them like a bridge, then it no longer matters whether the walls have been woven yet and tied into place. All one needs is a doorway in order to travel between worlds.
XVIII
WHEN JORGE WALKED in at a quarter after eight, his mother refused to acknowledge him. She had arranged the table with the plates and forks and glasses, and had put out guest towels in the bathroom, and had assembled, on trays in the refrigerator, an array of meats and cheeses. She had shaken out the rugs and dusted the bookshelves, at some level knowing she owed her sudden furious energy to her son, as much as to James. Larry had done his best simultaneously to serve and to avoid her, floating through the day as though it were already a memory. He watched her from the corner of his eye, envying what appeared to him to be a fierce efficiency that left him more ashamed than ever of his own foggy confusion. When Jorge came in, he stood beside the door and watched her too, but what he saw was not efficiency or self-control, but something he knew also in himself: a silent current of desperation that no channel, no matter how deep, could be trusted to contain.