Undergrowth

by Nancy Burke

  Larry felt his shame swell like mercury in a bulb. “But James trusted him.”

  “James had an unparalleled capacity for trust.”

  “You fired him because you couldn’t trust him?”

  “I fired him out of pity. He wasn’t cut out for it. He’s been much better off where he is, pushing papers and hobnobbing at meetings and hiring his English governesses for his children.”

  Larry didn’t respond, but turned his thoughts away from Joaquim’s talk to Jorge’s silence, in order to determine whether Jorge was still angry, or had fallen asleep. Against the background of the forest’s hum, he couldn’t even make out the sound of breathing.

  “Is Jorge asleep?” he finally asked Joaquim, rather than speak to Jorge directly.

  “No, I’m not,” said Jorge, sounding irritated but awake.

  Martina laughed. “You’ll know it, when he’s asleep,” she said.

  “What’s wrong?” said Larry at last.

  “I figured out why I can’t stand you sometimes,” said Jorge, under the cover of darkness.

  “Why is that?”

  “Because you remind me of me.”

  They were all quiet for a long time, and the forest’s skein of sound wrapped itself around them, around the porch and around the house and around the village. Under so many layers, Larry’s voice sounded muffled when he spoke. “Thanks,” he said. “That’s an honor.” He felt his hammock jerk to the side, and then Jorge’s hand on his arm on top of his mosquitero. He reached for it and held it through the mesh for a minute, and when he released it, their two hammocks swung back and forth to the same rhythm, both moving, by increments, toward rest.

  XXXII

  THE WORK OF painting a chajan is not a process of applying pigments to a background, of envisioning an image and imposing it upon the smooth, cool surface of a feet-and-legs. Rather, one must have the gift of seeing what is inevitable, already there beneath the surface, and of spiriting it outward through the application of certain substances so that it can be seen by all. That was Anok’s task. Nearly every day, someone would approach her saying, “Anok-Ak, my baby was named a hand of days ago, and still it is not on my chajan!” or, “Ak Anok, Pinini’s spirit will be lost if you don’t mark my chajan today!” So many of them thought she could just rush over with her maata and her pigments and her brushes of stacked leaves and sheathe their chajans as quickly as she could move the dyes. In their eyes, she was the obstacle between them and the ancestors as surely as she was the medium through which access could be achieved. Only she understood that when an image rose to the surface to merge with the one she painted, it was always stronger than she was, pulling life and death into it, severing their ties to time.

  XXXIII

  BY SIX O’CLOCK, Martina and Joaquim had already finished their breakfast of imported cakes and jams, had pushed aside their bone china teacups, which had been filled relentlessly by the Senor, and were stretching and yawning as they rose from the table. Jorge, who could not sit still long enough to eat with them, had already hauled his own bags down to the dock, and barely looked their way as he appeared at the top of the rise to reemphasize his obvious anxious readiness to set off.

  “Larry’s not up yet?” he said with quiet irritation, as though to suggest without saying so that his companions were to blame. He strode through the parlor and out through the front door with the three of them behind him to the place where Larry’s hammock still hung at the far end of the verandah. But he didn’t need to pull at the rolled-up bedding inside it to know in an instant the futility of the dramatic gesture he had suddenly longed to make, a satisfying flourish of the bedclothes the intensity of which might have offered him a split second of relief.

  “Jesus Christ!” he hissed, kicking the hammock from the bottom in a move that brought him none of the satisfaction the other might have offered. “This is your fault!” he yelled towards Joaquim. “You must think I’m stupid! You put him up to it! You planned this!” He turned on his heel and took off down toward the water.

  When the others caught up, they found him crouching sideways on the pier, his eyes fixed on the place where the clutch of battered rowboats encircled a small plot of disrupted sand.

  “Well, what do you know?” said Joaquim to himself as he approached, with a tone like admiration in his voice. “I’m really surprised he did it! I really didn’t think he would.”

  “You put him up to it!” yelled Jorge, “It was your idea! No wonder you dragged us all this way out here for half a day! No wonder you didn’t let me get him up with the rest of us!”

  “Actually, I wouldn’t have given him that much credit, when push came to shove. I’m really quite amazed.”

  “Why are you yelling at Joaquim?” Martina shot back, stepping forward and putting her hand on his arm as though sensing the need to restrain him. “He’s not the one who made up Larry’s mind!”

  “The whole thing was so obvious! The only reason I didn’t stop it was that I trusted you! I should have known better than to trust you!” Jorge shouted, breaking free of her grasp. “Aren’t you going to do anything about it?” he yelled as he headed for their boat.

  “You’re not going to find him,” said Joachim soberly. “You have no idea which way he went.”

  “He said he was going to leave his coordinates,” said Jorge, moving towards the house.

  “For emergencies only,” said Joachim, bowing his head in acknowledgement of Jorge’s ironic smirk. “And I doubt that any information he left would help you very much. Either he’s three hours downriver or he’s stowed the boat somewhere. You can go after him, or we can go to Lamurii. Your choice.”

  “So you’d leave him, just like that?” said Jorge, betrayed by the waver in his voice. Joachim turned and reached out for Martina’s arm, motioning to Sr. Catalpa to lead the way. “We’ll be in the house,” he said behind his shoulder.

  Martina waved them on. “Do you want me to go too?” she said, after regarding him in silence for a minute, watching his shoulders shake noiselessly.

  “Yes,” snapped Jorge.

  She turned and took a few steps up the path before she stopped again.

  “Be where I can find you,” he said.

  XXXIV

  “HE’S SO YOUNG!” said Sr. Catalpa, worrying his fingers and sucking on his teeth.

  “What would you suggest?” said Joachim. A soft breeze blew through the verandah, as though to demonstrate how benign nature could be. “I imagine he’ll be back within the week. You’ll take care of him?”

  “Of course,” said Sr. Catalpa, indignant at the question.

  “How often is the mail boat coming through these days? Still once a month?”

  “Yes, but in an emergency I can have Joao run something over to the mission; they’ll get it out within three days.”

  “Good then. Best for you to write to Sara Moretti—I’ll leave the address—and she can send Jorge to pick him up.” Joachim looked at him. “Don’t send him home alone.”

  “There’s something else,” said Sr. Catalpa, as Martina approached them from the head of the path.

  “He needs you,” she said to Joachim, nodding her head in the direction of the pier. “Are you sure this is the right thing?”

  Joachim stood up and walked toward the path. “I’ll be back,” he said.

  XXXV

  JORGE HAD MOVED to the edge of the pier, where he sat hunched up, looking down into the water.

  “Ahoy, cap’n!” said Joaquim quietly as he sat down beside him.

  Jorge shifted and turned his face away.

  “I didn’t know,” said Joaquim. “It wasn’t planned.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  Joaquim considered him in silence and then looked down. A seamless collage of shadow and reflection lay breathing at their feet.

  “Maybe I did and I didn’t, both,” said Joaquim. “Maybe I was testing him. But what I know for sure is that if he was determined to go, we couldn’t have stopp
ed him. The toughest part would have been between Itatuba and here. At least we got him this far.”

  “He’s too young,” said Jorge, crumpled over, his head suspended between his knees. “He’s alone!” Behind his reflection, fat grey fish were gliding slowly; sluggish, bloated thoughts, distorted by the ripples from his tears. When he caught sight of Joaquim’s reflection beside his, he sat up and wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his shirt. “You don’t have to say anything to Martina about this,” he said, gesturing towards his tear-streaked face.

  “You know what it’s like to be lost, to be stuck,” said Joaquim. “I know James didn’t want that for him.”

  “Easy for you to say!” said Jorge, retrieving his handkerchief from his pocket with difficulty, grateful for the distraction of the struggle.

  “And your father didn’t want it for you either,” Joaquim added as he stood up and straightened his trousers. “There was no one he loved more than you.”

  XXXVI

  TO LIVE IN the forest, one must learn to see. The kind of vision demanded there is unlike the sort one relies on when crossing the street, or watching a movie, or reading a magazine. Most important of all is the ability to sense minute contrasts of movement, as though through the eyes of a cat; the odd sway of a liana that exposes its true identity as an anaconda, the quick jerking leap of a monkey high in the treetops, or the strange stillness of the parakeet among the quivering leaves. Upon first entering the forest, one is invariably disappointed at what appears to be a monotonously uniform terrain, strangely empty, devoid of the exotica promised in the brochures of travel agencies and therefore felt, after all the effort of the trip, to be one’s due. Those who come to the forest to stay however, soon learn to appreciate the effort required to tease apart the separate strands of motion from the mass of endlessly interwoven skeins. The beginner can only undertake such a task while standing still, pausing in mid-step along the trail.

  There is the obscure, and the obvious. Walking beneath the crown of the pejibaye, one can be deluged by a thick white rain as all its blossoms fall at once in synchrony. One can watch the white liquid pour from a wound in the torso of a tree, or come face to face with a dozen white orchids, each the size of a human hand, arrayed in a cascade along a limb.

  There are extremes of temperament and sound. One can look high into the treetops where two monkeys are fighting over a single crying infant, each pulling on an arm, or low to the ground, where a fallen baby sloth cries out for its mother, who will never make the effort to retrieve it.

  There are things that are invisible and others too apparent to be seen.

  Amid this cacophony of intention and activity, Larry noticed very little, and more than he could fathom. Most of all, he understood he had arrived in a place in which the weave of motion was so thick and tight that he would never—and always—be alone.

  XXXVII

  THERE WERE TENSIONS between Anok and Asator, which preceded their connection. Most prominent among these was Asator’s refusal to act as gitana to Aran, as her protector in the community and in the world. When Asator said “she has all the gitana she needs,” he meant to reassure her, but instead, his certainty incensed her, as though he had refused to offer her, when they lay together, a skin with which to cover herself, when she knew that he had many. It was true that Aron had had a gitana, but what good is the protection of something without presence or force, in the face of the living and the dead? It was this, more than anything else, that led Anok to keep their vow a secret, as though the need, the refusal, had also never existed.

  XXXVIII

  MARTINA WASN’T THE sort of woman to shop, and the one store in Paruqu wasn’t the sort of venue in which shopping occurred. The few shelves that lined its cane-slat walls held mostly canned goods, and the clothing that hung from a ceiling beam was of a purely functional sort, T-shirts and shorts and a few wilted belts drooping from a long metal hook. She scanned the makeshift counter, lifting and replacing a bottle of aspirin, a rusty box of Band-Aids, a similarly rusty fingernail scissors, when a dark-skinned woman appeared with a coffee cup in one hand and a cash box in the other. The woman stood in the doorway regarding her.

  “How much for this?” Martina asked in Portuguese, holding up the nail scissors, not out of interest, but to engage her.

  “Nao.” said the woman, gesturing her lack of understanding.

  Martina replaced the scissors and approached her, pointing to her coffee cup and then to herself.

  “Café?” asked the woman.

  “Nao,” said Martina. “Chavena. Copo.”

  “Café!” said the woman.

  “Nao,” said Martina, suddenly furious at Jorge without knowing why. It was hard for her to remember that it was Larry rather than Jorge who had left them and was now wandering in the wilderness alone. She pointed to the woman’s cup, and rolled an imaginary ball of clay between her hands, pinching and shaping the air. Then she held one hand up to drink from its edge.

  “Sim!” said the woman, brightening. She pointed to a shelf on which a large assortment of rough cups and bowls were stacked. Underneath the shelf were wooden crates, filled with pots and cups of all sizes, all marked with the same pattern, which suggested to Martina that they were locally made.

  Martina regarded them for several minutes, weighing them, smelling them, turning them slowly in her fingers, setting them down again. At last, she turned back to the woman, returning her hands to the air, moving them over imaginary clay, and pointing in the direction of the clutch of huts whose thatched roofs she had seen from the rear window of the Prefect’s house.

  “Sim!” said the woman after a long pause, motioning for Martina to follow her. The woman led her along the path that climbed the incline behind the store and then sloped down to a clearing nested in a crook in the riverbank. Beneath the slanting roof of a straw lean-to, a clutch of women squatted in a circle working lumps of clay as they sang. Martina stepped forward and squatted beside them in the marshy dirt. She motioned to the mound of clay between them and the oldest of the women pulled off a handful and passed it to her. As Martina started to work it, the women stopped talking for a minute to watch and then turned back to their conversation. They rolled the clay, forming it into coils, and laid the coils to dry slightly, pausing to take bites of acai, which they dipped into a bag of what looked like sugar before they ate. Then they fashioned the clay into rough bowls, pinching and turning it in the palms of their hands.

  Everything about the clay was foreign to Martina—its smell, its texture, its consistency and color. The women grimaced when she held the lump to her lips and took a nibble from one corner, but when she started to roll, quickly and evenly, they nodded in approval and began to include her in their conversation, disregarding the fact that she didn’t understand. When Martina broke off a small ball and covered it in leaves, pushing it into her pocket, they smiled their assent, and when their faces dropped suddenly, Martina responded in an instant, standing and turning to face Jorge’s tense gaze.

  “Where the hell have you been?” he spat at her.

  “Waiting for you,” she retorted. Behind her, the women twittered and pointed.

  “I thought you were going to be at the house! It’s ten o’clock! I don’t even know if we have enough time now!”

  “Don’t you try that,” said Martina sharply, turning back to the women. The oldest held out her hand and Martina placed her coil of clay in it, but the woman grasped her instead by the forearm, placing the coil on the ground. Martina grasped the forearms of each of them and then turned to follow Jorge up the path. At her back, the women whispered, breaking into soft whooping sounds when, at the top of the ridge, Martina pulled him toward her, forcing her arm across his shoulders between his sweaty shirt and the weight of his pack.

  XXXIX

  SOME DAYS, ANOK had to wonder whether Aran would grow up at all, let alone grow up well. She was by far the strongest and tallest of the hand-and-one-rains children, and seemed to take naturally
to the spear, but when she wasn’t out on a hunt, she was at her mother’s side, trying to help, but too headstrong to take direction. While the other girls spent their time giggling together over Karata, Bata’s son, while hoeing their rows halfheartedly, Aran did a hand of rows to each of theirs, bringing an extra measure of kakana to Anok’s portion every day, but with it, an extra several measures of concern. And then there was the fact that Bata’s son seemed determined to repay her indifference with interest enough for them both, a fact of which her mother couldn’t help but be aware.

  “What do you say?” she asked Aran one evening while they sat together on their kaawa, watching the trees become shadows. “Karata’s got as much promise with the spear as you have.”

  “I’m not going to talk about it,” said Aran with irritation, turning her back on her mother.

  “But when will you?” said Anok sharply, twisting Aran’s long braid and then dropping it onto her back. “What are you waiting for?”

  “I’m doing things as they should be done,” said Aran sharply.

  The problem, Anok knew, was to be able to tell the difference between something that had been lost and something that had never existed.

  “ParaXa ki jitana,” said Anok in a resigned voice.

  “ParaXa ki jitana,” said Aran.

  It wasn’t that Anok was against the idea of doing things right, though she herself had never reaped the rewards of it; she knew the jitana should always have first chance as a suitor. But Karata seemed as fitting as any she could imagine. More fundamentally, she suspected, the ancestors shared her confusion as to whether, in truth, it would have been more right never to have had a child at all, or whether her life depended upon Aran, just as the lives of the ancestors depended with equal desperation and ambivalence upon her own.