Undergrowth

by Nancy Burke

  XIX

  THE NEXT MORNING, Jorge and Sara set off early, and separately, but Larry feigned sleep so as to be left behind. Now he found himself alone in the living room, a bowl of mango slices in one hand, flipping through a pile of photographs without interest or recognition. As he was about to put the pile back on the shelf, he looked more closely at the one on top and saw, suddenly, that the tall young man in the khaki trousers, framed by a wall of trees, dangling a large fish from the end of a line, was James. The one beneath it showed James again, standing arm-in-arm with a man who looked like Silvio and another man Larry didn’t recognize until later on, when he came upon him again in a family portrait holding a child who was unmistakably Jorge on his lap, underneath which was written, Giorgio, 8 m. There was James at the edge of a river, preparing to dive, and James surrounded by a group of dark-skinned, nearly naked young men who barely reached his shoulders. There was James in a canoe and James in a cafe, as strange and unreachable in youth as in death. In the last picture on the pile, which was in color, James was standing in a doorway, his hands on the shoulders of a boy. Larry felt a stab of jealousy, and held the picture up in front of him to try to see what the boy looked like. He could tell right away that his hair was too light to be Jorge’s, but it took several more minutes for Larry to realize that the boy was him. He had no recollection of the picture having been taken.

  Back in his room, Larry reached for the strap of James’s travel case and hoisted it onto the bed. Then he began to pull out folders, working his way through them with the narrowness of vision characteristic of someone looking for something in particular, but because he did not know which particular thing he sought, he barely saw anything at all. There were medical bills and check stubs, lists and ticket stubs from movie theaters and instructions for fixing a bicycle. Larry rifled through a blue folder labeled “Documents,” and a brown envelope stuffed with cash register receipts. He felt as though he were running through scenery that grew more streaked and blurry the faster he went. At some point the thought crossed his mind that he might not find what he needed among the folders marked “Supplies,” and “Evidence” and “Cancer.” Even the “SPI” folder seemed to hold nothing of promise in its pages of contracts and instructions, all in Portuguese, some underlined sloppily in red. By the time Larry came to the bottom of the pile, he felt exhausted, like a runner at the end of a race, and fell back into the pillows, holding the last folder, labeled “Joaquim,” in the air in front of him. He opened it slowly, expecting more old scraps of paper to fall on him, but he found instead drafts of James’s letters, some of which looked like they’d been crumpled up and then smoothed out again.

  Larry flipped through the pages impatiently. At best, writing had always been a struggle for James. Larry had felt pity, and sometimes disdain, at the discovery that someone so verbally imposing could write so poorly. He had sensed that James’s clumsiness on the page had something to do with his incongruous reverence for the written word in general, and for Larry’s fluency with it in particular. Only such a person, Larry had thought, would devote so much of himself to the task of transforming a spoken language into a written one, a task Larry cared about only because James did. But no matter how deep James’s faith might have been that the Pahqua notebook could be a sufficient legacy, Larry understood at that moment how little it had to offer in proportion to what he needed. He went to his own pack and found it, and threw it onto the pile of folders with a rage that surprised him. Then he turned back to the letters, fighting off the urge to crumple them again.

  At intervals, his mind continued to register a few of the fragments he read, “stay awhile,” and “not much contact,” and to move them around to arbitrary rhythms. “He’s like a foundling,” he repeated to himself, until he suddenly began to listen to himself and turned back to the page. “He’s like a foundling,” he said under his breath while his eyes sought out the words. “He’s like a foundling,” he read, “because despite all Judy’s efforts, she’s in no shape to care for him. It’s all a mess. David’s useless. So I’m off assignment for now—tell S. I’ll call when I get back. Just say something came up.” Larry stared hard at the page. He felt strange, as though something were wrong with his eyes, as though everything was closer than it should have been. He waited for a minute to see if the sensation would pass, the feeling that someone was there, in the chair, or at the door, trying to tell him that people had made efforts on his behalf, that James had been a real person after all, a man in a cafe, in a doorway, his hands on the shoulders of a boy.

  Larry retrieved the picture from the living room and propped it up on the bedside table, referring to it, looking up from the folder at intervals as though he were reading its description. “You wanted me to put down roots, and so in my own way I have, though as you know I can never stand it here for long.” As he turned the pages, Larry looked up at James’s hands, which covered his shoulders like epaulets. “It’s better when we get away. I’ll bring him to meet you. I know you’ll love him, not just for my sake.” Larry saw that James’s mouth was open, as though he were talking to whoever was taking the picture. “We’ll come in June and see you, and then go about our business. That’s enough for now.” Larry was looking off to the right, frowning slightly, as though to avoid the camera’s interest. He had never been comfortable with cameras or mirrors, and because he lacked a sense of his own image, he assumed that others did as well. The idea that James would think of him, or write about him, was as foreign as the idea that he was not automatically a part of everything James did. Larry imagined his uncle bent late at night over the desk in his parents’ guest room, which had always looked to him like a girl’s room, for reasons he now understood, writing the letters he had in his hands. He could see him turn slowly to look up and then back to the page, scratching his head with the end of his pen.

  As Larry put the folders back in the bag and lowered it to the floor, he imagined that one side of his house had been cut away, like a doll-house. He could see James at his desk in that room, with its pink wallpaper and bedding, and his mother in the room next door, folding back the old maroon bedspread and turning on the light by the head of the bed. His father was asleep on the sofa downstairs, washed by the flicker of the gray light from the TV, and he was upstairs, alone in a crib, or older, sitting on the floor of his room reading a book. Eventually, he knew, James would come in and sit with him until he fell asleep. James never read to him; sometimes he read to James, but most often, James would tell him stories about nature, about animal dung, and water lilies as big as their dining room table, and spiders whose webs were like bridges between the trees. He would teach him phrases of Pahqua, and occasionally, painfully, sing him Pahqua songs. Then there were the months and years when James was gone, and the people in the house froze in their places, and the only movements were the flickering of the TV light and the back-and-forth of Larry’s eyes over the pages of his book. Larry had always had the impression that during those times, they had all simply ceased to exist, but now he saw it differently. He found he could imagine that James had not just disappeared, but had gone to a place somewhere, to a place where, even if he couldn’t write, he could look for stories about nature to bring back to him. The thought crossed his mind that even now, James might be keeping his eyes open for something new to bring back and tell him, but as soon as it occurred to him, he knew he didn’t need it; it was enough, somehow, that James had intended, during each of his absences, to return. When Larry walked out to the living room to put the picture away, the world seemed oddly populated, not by his own ghosts but by people driving cars and listening to music and talking to one another as they walked, side by side, down the hill to the Mercado Modelo. When he heard the key turn in the lock, he fought his instinct to run back to his room, and stood at the door, waiting until Sara tumbled in with her packages to help Joaquim with his bags.

  XX

  LARRY SAT AMONG a group of men, all old and most drunk, each with a story about James, who
m Larry doubted that any of them knew. He looked around, desperate, for Jorge and when he didn’t find him, for Joaquim, who, unsettlingly, appeared deep in conversation with an unfamiliar, much younger woman. Panicked now, he sought a path of escape, sliding out between the backs of chairs and down the hallway to his door.

  His room was as crowded with sounds and shadows as Sara’s living room had been with people. The walls were thick with silhouettes, and the air with night noises—the buzz of insects interrupted now and then by the hum of a car driving off, the crowing, in the distance, of an errant rooster, the nasal cries of swallows, and the ebb and flow of voices from the other room. As he lay on his back in the bed that had been James’s, feeling alone and lost and exposed, he found a moment of comfort in the fleeting thought that if he could only push himself deeper into the mattress and pillows, he might yet feel the heat of James’s body, and rest his thoughts in the contours of his head.

  The night was full of ghosts, but James was not among them. If a ghost, by definition were someone with no resting place, then his uncle, who seemed to carry his home inside himself, would certainly never have qualified. He had made himself comfortable in the houses of strangers, pulling bottles of beer from their refrigerators before he had been invited to do so. He had spread his legs out into the aisles of movie theaters, pushed his seat back in airplanes, stretched out in chairs in waiting rooms, and slept. Larry trusted him to make his home, with equal unselfconsciousness, in death, to be easy among the ashes, to spread out in all directions along the forest floor. He couldn’t bear, at that moment, to think otherwise, nor, given the depth of his own loneliness, could he rid himself of the sense that James had abandoned him in this other, restless world. He heard the gathering in the other room breaking up. He saw the lights go out, leaving the world outside the window in an even deeper darkness. He saw how the dead make ghosts of the living. He wove in and out among all the other strangers in the shadows, and looked down at himself in the bed. He stood, for a moment, and watched himself, a thin, terrified figure looking up from under quivering eyelids, and then he too wandered off, leaving himself behind to let sleep find him when, or if, it would.

  XXI

  ANOK WAS SMALL and hunched, but because she spent so much time struggling with the chajans, she was stronger than most of the men. She never became angry at the wood, at the fierce resistance it showed her, because she was like that too—unwilling to be moved or changed by anything but the most fundamental of the events around her, or at least that’s what she wanted to think. But that didn’t mean there was no anger in the work itself. Anyone who watched her wield the maata might have guessed that despite its sharpness, it took the force of all the accrued small rages and passions of a lifetime to give it power sufficient to make its mark. It was also true that once a mark was made, it could never be erased, blotted out, sanded down, dug out, painted over. “That’s what it is to remember,” she told Aran.

  XXII

  MARTINA’S AUNT JANTJE used to read to her every night before she tucked her in, from a heavy old book of nursery rhymes and stories she had managed to carry out with her in her small suitcase. That was the only request her mother had made of her spinster older sister—that she continue to read to Martina every night, to preserve her daughter’s Dutch in the face of the threat of yet another strange tongue. That was the only way to assure their future contact: to preserve their ability to understand each other. Inside the front cover of the old volume was the only surviving photograph of the two parents, the handsome young strangers who themselves, in the seven years she had had with them in Munich, according to Aunt Jantje, never spoke a word of German to her, but always, only Dutch. When Auntje would close the book each night at the end of the story, a faint odor would be forced from the pages, which Martina always assumed was the odor of her mother. But during the rest of the day, Auntje never spoke to her in anything but Portuguese, even from the very first, when all she knew to say was “ta bom” and “adeus.” Only later, when Martina was old enough to read by herself, far too old to be read to, and continued to allow it only with irritation, for her aunt’s sake, did the question about her parents’ true motives emerge. She and Auntje had come home from a late evening service at the church, eaten a quick dinner of fried fish and plantains, and retired straight away, after washing their faces in the cold water from the pitcher her aunt had filled from the spigot by the door. After the ritual closing of the book, Auntje had leaned over her, so close that her breath eclipsed the odor, by now stale and oppressive, that slipped from the pages as they fell.

  “I have something to tell you,” said Auntje, surprisingly, in Dutch.

  “What, Aunt?” Martina had answered, also in Dutch, more alarmed by her aunt’s choice of language than her tone.

  “Your parents won’t be joining us ever, Marti,” her aunt said slowly, “nor Mina either.”

  “I know those were your letters, not theirs. When did they die?”

  “Years ago, Marti, with the rest of the Jews.”

  XXIII

  WHEN THEY HAD finished dinner and stood to move into the living room, Jorge slipped ahead of Larry and sat down in the wing chair, leaving Larry no other choice but to take the empty seat beside Joaquim on the couch. Larry was sure without raising his eyes that Joaquim was looking at him, but Joaquim addressed Jorge instead.

  “Perdao?” said Joaquim into the silence, clearing his throat.

  “So, what about Lamurii?” Jorge blurted out.

  Until then, it hadn’t occurred to Larry that some of the awkwardness over dinner might have come from sources other than himself.

  “I promised I’d take you,” said Joaquim, nodding his head. “You should trust me more.”

  “You’re the only one I do trust,” said Jorge. “That’s why I’d feel better if we could pick a date, before you disappear again.”

  “Well, you’re about to get your wish,” said Joaquim, glancing up at Sara, who had come in from the kitchen and was standing with her hands on the back of Jorge’s chair. “I can go with you this week, if you can make time in your schedule.”

  “Really?” asked Jorge.

  “There’s a catch, though,” said Joaquim, smiling slightly.

  “What’s that?” said Jorge, returning a tenser version of Joaquim’s smile for a minute and then letting his face drop. “No!” he said suddenly, shaking his head.

  “Do you know what I have in mind?” asked Joaquim.

  “I do. Forget it.”

  Larry leaned forward.

  “I’ve been thinking about it all week. It makes no sense. There’s nothing to discuss,” said Jorge. He started to rise out of his chair, but Sara, who was still standing behind him, put her hands on his shoulders to keep him in his seat.

  “I’m glad you’ve been considering it,” said Joaquim.

  “Larry just doesn’t know what he’s doing,” said Jorge, not bothering to gesture toward Larry.

  “Neither did any of us, at the start.”

  Larry listened from the sidelines, unsure as to whether he was really there, or had a right to comment on the fate of this person who bore his name but seemed otherwise unfamiliar. Only a twinge of desperation forced him to speak.

  “I found all of James’s maps in his travel bag. I’m going to take the boat to Itatuba on Monday, and then buy a rowboat to take to Paruqu, and hike in from there. I have the money. James has a friend there who can help me. That’s where we started from last time,” he said. “I’m sure I can find the way in from there.”

  “See? It’s completely impractical. He hasn’t thought about the realities at all.” Jorge turned to Larry and addressed him directly. “I’m trying to look out for you. I’m afraid for you.” They regarded each other for a moment in silence. “You’re still a kid,” Jorge said, changing his tack. “You still have lots of time. When I was your age, my mother didn’t let me go around the block by myself, let alone fly my own missions.” Sara opened her mouth to protest, but Larry cut
her off.

  “My parents always let me do whatever I want,” Larry retorted, feeling suddenly strong and defiant and superior, capable of conquering darkness and fear. “They said I was born taking care of myself!” He leaned farther forward as though convinced that by setting off impulsively on his own, he had escaped their opinions, their reservations and their claims on him. He was relieved to have forgotten that the sense of triumph was, for him, invariably the prelude to an even greater fear.

  “Larry,” said Joaquim in his quiet, measured voice, “Why do you want to do this?”

  “I asked him that!” said Jorge, but Joaquim raised his hand to stop him.

  Larry felt paralyzed, pinned by Joaquim’s gaze. His resolve had come and gone in an instant. The sounds of the night creatures, which he had for a minute, kept at bay, came crawling in under the door and through the open windows, their eyes glowing. He tried unsuccessfully to turn away from Joaquim, who was waiting for him with no sign of impatience.

  “I don’t know.” His voice sounded weak and pleading. “I have to. I don’t have a choice,” he said.

  Jorge opened his mouth to speak, but Sara tightened her grip on his shoulders.

  “I know you don’t,” said Joaquim, putting his hand on Larry’s arm for a minute, before turning back and gesturing to Jorge. “And he doesn’t either.”