Undergrowth

by Nancy Burke

  In the three days he had been traveling, he had yet to find the heat oppressive, despite the thickness and stickiness of the forest air, but now the heat descended, as though it had been waiting to pounce when he emerged. He felt lightheaded, and began to hear the rhythm of his pulse in his temples. He made accommodations; he put on the zinc ointment he had until then refused to wear; he took gulps from a water bottle while he walked; he sat, for a quarter of an hour, beneath the uneven shade of a small stand of stunted trees and ate an extra piece of salted jerky with his dried fruit and crackers. He looked again and again at the maps he had sketched for himself, trying to judge by their scale and their contours whether he was already hopelessly adrift. The terror of what is in this world, he saw, was nothing compared to the terror of what is not, as he surveyed the emptiness around him and wondered if the grass would soon dry out completely and catch fire. And then the rain came, as though out of nowhere, announced by a crack of thunder and a band of swift-moving clouds that seemed to take the sun unawares.

  The downpour was as thick and relentless as the sun had been, stinging his skin as sharply, and the few small trees were as inadequate to protect him from the one as from the other. Larry pulled out tarps and wrapped his two bags in them, throwing his poncho over his pack and himself. As he stood, paralyzed, squinting out from under the visor of his poncho, all he could think to do was to fill up his water bottles, collecting the rain in his tin bowl and pouring it into the bottles using his hands to guide him, since he could barely see. It made him feel stronger to have taken any action at all, to have been able to replenish himself in the midst of seeming hopelessness. Holding his compass nearly to his eye, he leaned into the force of the downpour with his jaw clenched, clinging tight to his bags lest the rain rip them away. Only when he grew too tired to move forward did he allow his gaze to drift up, to the feet of an enormous rainbow that towered over him and his struggles and his storm and his sloshing bowl of prairie and pushed the clouds away off to the east, leaving him exhausted and bedraggled, lying where he had allowed himself to fall, across the belly of a smooth, round rock.

  XLIII

  WHAT HAPPENS TO a person who’s rajora, to a person with neither jitana nor brother nor kaag to rely on in this life? That person would end up no doubt either as beloved by the ancestors or, more likely, as a sort of necessary outcast, someone authorized to sing of the dark times precisely because of her status as pariah. In Aran’s village there were already three, one of whom, Tilata, caught the eye of ItaXa from the far village, a man who two rains prior had lost the only wife he had. Now they only had to wait for the arrival of a child, which everyone knew was impossible, given that ItaXa was already a hands-and-feet of rains. But even the status of awaiting the impossible conferred enormous benefits in the worlds of the living and the dead. Although the honor to Tilata simply for pressing a claim was obvious, and was rewarded by an extra measure of the forest’s bounty, the honor to ItaXa for accepting him was no less obvious, as it offered proof for all to see that her will had remained untainted by shadows, by curses, by doubt.

  XLIV

  THE SCALE OF the campo is defined by such minute events as these: the vibration of one grass blade against another, the flick of a lizard’s tail, the slight bow of the stem to the butterfly. The world to which Larry awoke, looking straight out at eye level, was a world in miniature, where bridges were made of reeds, and towers were of sand, and sound was nearly inaudible and yet endlessly complex. He struggled out from under his tarps, aware now that he was standing amid a cascade of tiny yellow flowers half the size of his fingernail, and fruit fit for the tables of a metropolis of ants. He pulled his clothes, now nearly dry, away from his skin, and in doing so, created a breeze that ruffled the leaves of trees no taller than his ankles. As he hoisted his pack and moved on, he caught sight of himself in his mind’s eye, towering over the cities of bugs and scrub just as he himself was towered over by the now-evaporated rainbow, by the clouds that had drifted like swirls of dust past the ankles of the sky. In his determination to move forward, he held onto the illusion of enormous height, stalking the bustling cities of leaf and stem the way Goya’s monster, in the painting on the wall in his fourth grade classroom, about which he had felt the child’s fascination with anomalies of scale, had stalked the cities of Spain, until he caught sight, at dusk, of the dark shore of the forest, and felt himself shrinking again as he approached it.

  Still shaken, he decided not to push on farther into the forest that evening, but to make camp between a trinity of chicles. The trunks of the trees defined a small, inviting room by the side of a chain of marshy indentations that had nearly swelled into a continuous river as a result of the rain. He still had plenty of camper’s meals jammed into the bottom of his pack, a whole smorgasbord of main dishes and side dishes and even desserts, all tasteless in the same way despite the pictures on the packages, but he didn’t have the energy to dig through to get to them. Instead, he finished the box of crackers with his fruit and jerky and a handful of nuts and went about setting up his hammock and netting as quickly as he could, thinking of nothing but sleep.

  XLV

  IT WENT WITH having attained a certain age, this involvement with the effects of the dead. Of James’s makeshift family in Brazil, no one knew better than Sara the capacity of a person’s surviving possessions to assume the force of their owner’s personality, and to continue the push forward, at least for a time, along their owner’s original path. Thus, the wing chair in the living room, imported at great expense from the parlor of Sara’s Genoan grandmother, conveyed for many decades through the dejected sag of its cushions its original owner’s disapproval of Sara’s choice of a husband, and the clock on the bookshelf, by running perpetually behind, continued to manifest her mother-in-law’s preoccupation with the tragic effects of time. No one knew this better than Joaquim, whose office in the back room of his house in Belem overflowed with odd seed pods, thick files, well-marked books, cross-sections of tree trunks, clay pots, photographs, and other artifacts once owned by fellow sertanistas who had been lost to the forest and its inhabitants. Thus, as Sara sat in the back bedroom of her house in Santarem watching Joaquim pull folder after folder from James’s traveling case, she shared with him an understanding that whatever information he found would necessarily follow the arc of James’s trajectory, rather than their own.

  “Here’s something,” said Joaquim, moving his reading glasses to his nose and leaning over the folder marked “Cancer.” “I guess this wasn’t his first bout with it. I wasn’t aware of that. Were you?”

  “I’m sure no one was,” said Sara, suddenly overcome by James’s loneliness, which, at that moment, was indistinguishable from Larry’s and from her own.

  “I know you probably hate me now,” Joaquim said. His voice was distracted, matter-of-fact. Joaquim was the only one other than Jorge who could generally ascertain the emotion contained in the diffuse, flat warmth she tended to convey.

  “I’ve caught myself calling you Wendy again,” he said gently. “All your lost boys.”

  “On second thought, maybe I do,” she said tightly.

  Joaquim put down a green folder of expense receipts and picked up a red three-ring binder, the thickest of the notebooks that were now spread out on the bed. He opened the cover and read out loud: “Pahqua: A Dictionary of Grammar and Definitions by James Lawrence Ardmore.”

  Sara came and sat beside him on the bed. “Is that his research? He never told me. Maybe I should put that one aside for Larry.”

  “How about if I just look through it quickly, to see if he left any information in here we can use in fishing Larry out?” He began to flip through the first section, which was labeled “Pahqua Glossary” in clumsy capital letters but was otherwise empty, its pages obviously having been removed. He turned quickly to the second section, titled “Grammato-genetics.” “Well, this is interesting!” he said, leaning in now over the notebook, and reading more slowly. “Look at this! ‘Ho
lophrastic and polysynthetic innovation markers: Tzotzil/Ge/Pahqua.’ Why didn’t he talk about this stuff? When I hired him, I thought he’d be doing this, but he didn’t want any part of it!”

  “Maybe Larry can tell us,” Sara said quietly.

  “So you do hate me,” said Joaquim, putting down the notebook and looking at her.

  “If anything happens to him I will. I think you misjudged, and I don’t know why I didn’t step in.”

  “Between me and Silvio,” said Joaquim, moving his reading glasses back to the top of his head, “we have two hundred and sixty-two men out there right now. If I stop listening to myself, we’re all in bad shape.”

  They sat in silence for a long time.

  “I suppose if I hate someone at this point, it’s his mother,” Sara said at last.

  “It’s always the mothers who get the blame,” said Joaquim. He turned back to the last section, which contained a title-page announcing ‘Genetic diffusion of novelty effects: A semiotic model,’ underneath which was written, in the same awkward scrawl, ‘Private: Keep out.’

  “If I had known the guy could actually read and write, I would have bought him a typewriter,” said Joaquim, bending his head over the page.

  XLVI

  ALTHOUGH LARRY CONTINUED to wear his watch, he relied on it less and less to help him estimate the things his body already knew. As the importance of clock time receded, it was replaced by the time of routine; the time of morning-coffee-making, and the time of taking pills, and the time of unrolling his hammock and securing each end to a tree. It yielded, little by little, to physical time, determined by the body’s need to eat and drink and move and defecate and sleep. There was the musical time of the forest, which began each day in the highest canopies of the trees and slowly lowered itself down their trunks, to hover near the ground by nightfall. There was the time of parrots and the time of toucans, the time of moths and of frogs. Most of all, Larry found, there was the time of walking, the slow rhythm of his pack rubbing back and forth against his shirt, leaving a deepening brown stain as a condensed record of the impact of his feet against the firm or marshy ground. At the end of the day, when the walking had ceased and Larry lay back in his hammock listening to the pulsing swell of the cicadas, he knew that his own pulse was stitched into their hum, and that somewhere inside himself, his heart was still taking step after inevitable step.

  XLVII

  THE FOREST HAS its own ways of inducing dreams and of disrupting them. In a town surrounded by streets and people and buildings, the night brings a gradual reduction of sound and activity, a communal settling-in, a sense of universal agreement that prevails despite the sigh of a lone car passing in the empty street, the howl of a cat in the alley, or the shouts of some drunken men leaving a bar. Everything is on the side of sleep, and the rest go about their business, or toss and turn in their beds, unable to forget that they have somehow transgressed, or been forsaken. In the forest, however, it is the traveler who, upon securing his hammock with the aid of a flashlight, finds himself moving against a rising current of activity as he arranges himself with his head against a pillow made of rolled-up clothing, his jacket resting on his shoulder, its arm across his chest. Larry was as tired as he had ever been, and his head was as heavy. He let himself sink into the hammock’s embrace as though he were a child, secure in its grasp, watched over by the trees that held it. He turned onto his right side and grabbed the jacket in his arms, holding it tight against him. He adjusted his makeshift pillow and felt it unroll all the way down to his leg. It was then, just on the verge of sleep, that the forest came for him, calling with grunts and whispers and cracking branches to announce the dawn of nocturnal day.

  At first he resisted, fearful of the exhaustion within him and the voices of unknown presences outside him, from which sleep had thus far offered him protection. But a scraping sound on the ground beneath his hammock made him jump for his flashlight, which he wielded like a machine gun, sweeping its beam wildly over the walls of his forest room and back and forth across the floor. As his spotlight passed the place where the scraping sound was coming from, he caught sight of an armadillo nosing its way along the ground, oblivious to the light, moving as clumsily and imperviously as a toy tank that a child could not quite operate correctly by remote. Larry watched it shuffle back and forth, pushing up dirt and leaves, until at last it turned and disappeared into the depths of the forest. Then he shut off his flashlight and lay in the dark, listening. There were croaking noises and whirs and raspy, belligerent cries. There were repetitive, insistent, careful tones, and sharp, indignant screeches. There were the calls of the howler monkeys, so loud that they echoed in the treetops and shook the sky, and worst of all, there was the constant, high-pitched buzz of mosquitoes, a number of which had infiltrated his netting, as though to guarantee the futility of his attempts to sleep.

  As he slapped ineffectually at his arms and his ankles, Larry thought to get up and search for his repellent, but held back for fear that by taking a step outside his flimsy shelter, he would leave himself vulnerable to an even more vicious attack. He remembered when as a child, he would awaken in the freezing house at night and look longingly into the darkness toward the place where he knew a spare blanket was kept, unable to convince himself to move for fear of dispersing the thin layer of heat that was all he had against the cold. He tried to tell himself that his situation was no different on this night than it had been on the others, that the forest was no more active or threatening, the insects no more fierce, and the mesh on his mosquitiero no less dense than it had been before, but still he felt exposed, for the first time, to the forest. In the place of stars in the night sky, he saw a hundred pairs of eyes like constellations in the firmament of leaves. He feared, with a shudder, the interest of the jararaca, which he imagined twining itself among the branches above his head like a serpent weaving in and out among the engraved figures in an antique map. He listened as hard as he could to what the forest was saying about him, dreading that he might discover therein a clue to his terrible fate.

  As Larry was beginning to discover, a given terror grows in proportion to its capacity to stir the memory of earlier terrors, to invoke a childhood fear of the dark, of the ghoulish faces hidden in the patterns in the wallpaper, or of the rustling among the shoes beneath the bed. Larry remembered clearly the forest nights he spent waiting for his uncle’s snoring to start up, confident and unrestrained and loud enough to chase away the jaguars that prowled the periphery of every darkness. Even at home, there were times when, terrified for no reason at all, he would call up the memory of that sound to carry him across the treacherous passageway to sleep. Such experience had taught him that the fears whose roots extend deepest into the past can only be dispelled by forces just as deep. He closed his eyes and tried to reach as far down as he could to find a trace of his uncle inside himself, whose presence in the hammock beside him he had every reason but one to expect. He fell through a succession of layers of sound, from the highest-pitched buzzing of insects through the nasal retorts of the tree frogs, down into a low hum that could only have come from the throat of the earth itself. By the time he found what he was looking for, it was well after midnight, and he clung to it so tightly that the mosquito’s buzz was no longer audible, nor did the brush of the spiny rat over the face of his backpack bring him any further unease.

  XLVIII

  IN THE EMPTY apartment, the ring of the telephone leapt from wall to wall, amplified by tension and neglect. Mrs. Tomoio, in the flat downstairs, sensing the loneliness of that echoing ring, added the comment of the end of her broomstick, while old Sr. Arterrio from next door, roused from his nap by the commotion, contributed to its rhythm a repetitive string of invectives. No doubt that complex pattern of sound traveled a thousand miles to Rio, where it gathered in Silvio Amanza’s handset. When Jorge crossed the threshold at seven minutes past midnight, he sensed that the walls had been saturated by vibrations, which explained the shaking of his legs as he set
his bags beside the table in the hallway without unpacking them and made his way towards the bedroom, unbuttoning his shirt as he went.

  XLIX

  AS LARRY LOOKED back, he had a hard time remembering the previous day, or how it differed from the one before. As he maneuvered around tree roots and tangled vines, he tried to remember what day it was, and suddenly realized he couldn’t. He had started off on a Sunday, and had crossed the clearing on a Tuesday, but after that, everything had blurred together until the cycle of day and night felt like a wheel, spinning without end. He had assumed that it was Saturday—leaving three more days in a trek of supposedly just under ten—but his conviction wavered as soon as he tried to justify it. He thought about counting his pills, or his packets of instant food, but he wasn’t sure how many pills he had started out with, or remembered to take, and he hadn’t been eating the same amount every day. Then he remembered his water purification tablets, which he had used without fail, since he hadn’t taken the time to boil the water. He took out the box and poured them into his lap, counting them once and then, more slowly, again.