Undergrowth

by Nancy Burke

  “I’m worried too,” said Sara.

  “I’m not worried,” said Martina. A lie. “I’m disgusted.”

  “I know,” said Sara.

  Martina grimaced, not wanting to be known.

  “This has happened before,” said Sara. “When the news came about his father, he took it like a little man, ran the show, hosted all the SPI who flew in, took care of me to a fault, and then withdrew to his bed for months, and refused to go out, or talk to anyone.” Sara paused for a minute, regarding Martina. “And then again when he was in his late teens, and his first girl broke his heart. That’s when he started to fly.” Martina’s face contorted to a smirk. “He thought the world of his father. Always at his heels. Only wanted to be like him.”

  “Well, my father was incinerated,” said Martina. “What good does it do to dwell on it?”

  “I’m not so sure,” said Sara, looking at Martina intently now. Surrounded by broken vessels, Sara caught the tension in Martina’s voice, and understood that she was one. Martina had turned her back to her, and was studying the pots that lined the shelves on the back wall.

  “So how can I help?” Sara asked, restraining herself from approaching her.

  Martina pushed aside the sudden wish to throw herself at Sara, to cry in her lap. “Here,” she said, carefully drawing a few earthenware cups and hardened clay balls sheathed in dry, crumbling leaves from a worn canvas bag. “Do you have a way to analyze these?” She put most of the pieces on the table, but then turned to put the last one, an offering, in Sara’s hand. “For lead and mercury, other contaminants?”

  Sara put the cup and balls onto a tray. Then she approached Martina. “Let me introduce you to Sam and Bella, and show you the lab,” she said, lifting the tray with one hand while she grasped Martina’s arm with the other, drawing her ahead through the doorway.

  LIV

  ON THE MORNING of his fifth day by the water, Larry began to consider, in earnest, the fact that he might die. He could no longer insist to himself that his fever was imagined, and finally acknowledged that some action was required. He pulled out James’s medical guide and began to read through it, looking for a list of symptoms that matched his own. He rejected the possibility of Chagas, since he hadn’t been housed under thatch, and of dengue, as he had no rash. He doubted that he had filariasis or leishmaniasis, nor did he suspect schistosomiasis or typhoid or yellow fever. The obvious diagnosis, of malaria, he at first rejected outright, as he had taken his pills at least off and on for the past six weeks, but as he ruled out one illness after another, he was left with no other choice. He closed the book and began digging in his box of medicines. James had arranged them while they were still in the States, the label on each bottle covered over by another blank one on which James had written in his awkward print the names of various diseases and the dosages prescribed. “Diarrhea. Use as needed, not too much,” one said. “Misc. infections. Some VDs. 3x/ day. Use all.” A vial said, “Snakebite. Inject 1cc at site.” Finally, he found a large bottle labeled “Malaria. 4x/day.” and swallowed one of the pills with water. Then he crawled back into his hammock, which was still moist with sweat, and closed his eyes, trying to imagine a wall between himself and the throbbing behind his temples.

  Despite himself, what Larry wished for most at those times was some benign indulgence on the part of the world. He pictured in his mind what his room at home used to look like, his desk and dresser covered with the artifacts of childhood affliction—comic books and boxes of chewable aspirin and tubes of Vicks Vapo-Rub and half-eaten bowls of Jell-O. His mother would suddenly take notice, her face revealing a kind of diffuse panic overlaid by an outward air of competence that he remembered seeing only at those times. It disturbed him that he had never managed to eradicate fully enough his longing for that distinctive combination of frantic interest and neglect, although he used to avoid it as best he could by refusing to acknowledge ever being ill. As he lay in his hammock, looking up at the leathery undersides of leaves, he felt his old longing creep in opportunistically, having sensed that he was weak. Even more than the mosquito’s sting or the swipe of the jacu’s paw, Larry feared that in the grip of his own lonely death, he would hear his voice call out to his distant, childless mother, and that she would finally hear him, and respond.

  Larry shifted to one side in the hammock, as though to move away from the edge of that precipice in his mind. Like other sufferers from vertigo, he was less afraid of falling than he was of his impulse to jump, and pulled back instinctively, knowing that the danger was internal and therefore not to be tested. Out of fear, he forced his gaze outward, breathing hard with the effort, as though moving something physically heavy. “Look,” he hissed to himself, willing the word itself to carry him to safety. He surveyed the shore, and saw a kingfisher hold up in its beak a silver sliver of light, but no longer knew how to find the sight remarkable. He watched the way the river clung to the ends of the vines and tried to carry them off, the way the wind brushed the branches and rippled the sun on the water. But for each time he pulled himself outward, something stronger pulled him in; for every leaf he saw above him, there was a bit of pain inside himself overlapping endless others like a shingle in a roof as big as the forest itself. Finally, he relaxed his grasp and fell—into death, he was sure—and lay wretched in his own fear and sweat for several hours, until shadows brushed the trees on the far side of the river. Then, rousing himself and noting tentatively that he hadn’t died, he sat up and began his evening routine, leaning on his pack as he unzipped the front flap to reach his pills.

  As he held the tray up to fit the bottle back in its place, he accidentally fell forward onto his pack and pushed aside a rolled-up shirt to reveal a stack of books, the titles of which at first seemed unfamiliar. He read them aloud, squinting through his pain in the shadowy half-light, and was flooded with relief bordering on joy when he realized that the life they represented was his own. Each one contained a story, but it was a personal story, about when he had read it, and what it had meant to him, and how it had made him what he was. It was as if all his shattered parts had been collected and bound in a few orderly if somewhat worn and unmatched volumes he could read in sequence to reconstruct himself. As he lifted them one by one from his pack and laid them out in his hammock, he could feel a growing conviction that he wouldn’t die after all. He picked up the volume nearest his hand, a copy of Van Gogh’s letters, and walked slowly down to the water, carrying it under his arm. He sat down on a rock, pushing his feet into the cool, wet sand, and read: “Well, even in that deep misery I felt my energy revive, and I said to myself: in spite of everything I shall rise again, I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing ….” Larry closed his eyes, flooded for a minute with his own determination to go on, followed by a second wave of shame and confusion at the thought that he didn’t know what he needed to go on with. He sat looking out into the water, as though to discern beneath its surface, among the colorful, swirling schools, the dark presence of his own obscure vocation. At last, when the buzz of mosquitoes began to disrupt his thoughts and the light had thinned, he put on his heavy clothes and returned to his hammock to sleep, holding the faded blue volume to his chest. A wall of night sounds began to swell behind him at the forest’s edge, and behind it, another, softer voice whispering, “akama ua jata,” don’t leave me alone.

  LV

  THE DECISION TO forsake the most fundamental and communal aspects of life, the cultivation of the fields, and the smoking of fish, and the boiling of manioc, in order to pursue the more rarified or specialized ones, was not to be taken lightly. It was easily interpreted as an act of arrogance, especially on the part of someone younger than a hand-and-two of rains; most especially on the part of someone rajora. Yet one day, without telling her mother, Aran simply refused to accompany the other girls to the garden plot, choosing instead to slip off the path and spend the day among the looming, vine-covered chajans of the a
ncestors that spread deep into the forest behind the clearing to form interlocking ghost villages. The next morning, while the same girls were assembling for the hunt, she took her place among her peers without explanation, and kept an even greater distance around herself on the trail. All morning long, the others seemed undecided as to whether these actions on Aran’s part were to be ridiculed or admired. But when they reached the first circle of felled trees that marked the end of what exists, at least as far as girls were concerned, and Aran alone refused to turn around, they whispered among themselves for a while and then, cautiously, turned to follow her out into a world that they had never seen. Aran pretended to pay them no attention, but she knew that somehow, her life had changed at that moment, and more by their decision to follow her than by her outrageous act.

  LVI

  THE NEXT MORNING rose like a luminous curtain. The grating and buzzing of insects and frogs gave way to birdcalls and the sound of water, and the fierce chill of the night was suffused with a gentle, spreading warmth. Overhead, two parrots flew off side by side, their bright green plumage reflected in the smooth unworried river, leaving in a stream behind them the muffled echoes of their cries. The vines brushed the water’s edge with long, pliant fingers, without thinking, as a mother smoothes the hair on her child’s forehead as he passes. Nothing was troubled in the forest, nothing on the sand. The deaths that were taking place in every corner of the landscape were quiet deaths, private, serenely inevitable unfoldings, in which fate showed itself as a modest, unobtrusive presence. Larry stirred in his sleep and muttered, but his expression was calm and lucid, his brow as unfurrowed as the river’s. When the dark hand extended itself towards him, it was only to brush away a few unruly strands and then to lead him out to the threshold of the day.

  “Mboa,” he said to himself, at first silently and then out loud, as he climbed out of his netting and looked over at the deep green wall of forest on the far side of the river. At first, the sound of the word struck him as uncanny; he knew he had heard it only recently, but it took him a long time to remember that he himself had spoken it, for reasons he hadn’t been able to pin down. The word had had a history with him; he could recall the day that he learned it, with the indelible clarity that always marks an instance of shame. Not long after they had arrived, he had been trying to hold up his end of a conversation with Dabimi and Daja and Amakar while the four of them were running together around the shelter that served as a smoke house, around poles and piles of sticks, trying to chase a lizard with green and purple scales. Larry had wanted to make the simple comment that the lizard was beautiful, but he stumbled looking for the word, and then again when he tried to describe what he meant. Their play came to a standstill. The boys walked over and recited a string of words to him again and again in a sing-song pattern, none of which he recognized. At last, he asked them to come with him to find his uncle, but when he started off towards the clearing, the boys stayed behind, laughing at him and mimicking the way he kept his hands in his pockets as he walked. When he caught a glimpse of James coming towards him, he ran to him and burst into tears within view of the boys, which only added to his shame. Later on over dinner James explained to him that Pahqua didn’t contain a single word for beauty, but many, each of which made reference to its source. There was beauty from the animal world and beauty granted by the living. There was beauty given by the leader among men and beauty whose source was dreams and beauty from the dead. Kuruna, tuara, ima, awa, mboa, Larry had heard over and over in his head that night. After dinner, without telling James, he had forced himself to walk back to Dabimi’s house and call from outside the kaawa, “Pachi do kuruna! Pachi do kuruna!” as he paced back and forth in the dirt. At last, one of the brothers, Amari, stepped outside and stood beside him, looking at the ground as if he too were ashamed. “Makar nara an pachi,” he said softly. Tomorrow we’ll catch him.

  Larry shook his head and tried to shrug off the thought. He took his pills and washed his face and folded his jacket and shirt. He was unsettled by the vividness of the memory no less than by the vividness of the day, by water so clear he could see striations on the stones in the riverbed, and air so clear he could make out individual feathers on the herons who stood preening themselves at the water’s edge. It occurred to him that the clarity of his senses and his memory might be due not to the kind of day it was but to an improvement in his condition, so he paid attention to his shoulders and his elbows to see if they still ached. They did, and his knees still hurt when he walked, with their dull, more bearable morning pain. But something was lighter in his chest, he noticed, and his legs didn’t seem quite as heavy as before. He still had enough energy after his chores to put on his ointment and sit beside the river with his book in his lap, watching and reading and eating the leftovers of a camp meal out of its foil pack. The ripples on the water were delicate and even, like the scales on a snake. The snake knew its path, and moved at a deliberate, leisurely pace, carrying time on its back.

  Larry had read stories of men who had washed ashore and stayed, whether by choice or necessity or lack of will. He knew of the Lotus Eaters, and of Robinson Crusoe; he had heard about lost missionaries, crazy men, and half-men who tended isolated plots around their makeshift, palm-roofed huts, and kept monkeys on their shoulders as companions, and came to dread the rescue for which they had so desperately prayed. Larry pictured a pitched-roof house of cane-stalks, in which a few worn remnants of a former life—a few rusted pots, a pocket-knife, some frayed bits of paper and clothing—rested on stumps or hung from loops of juco. Unwittingly, he envisioned himself as its inhabitant, with a long, unkempt mane and madness in his eyes, crouching beside a low fire, his bony knees protruding from the faded tatters of his favorite blue pants as he scraped bits of meat from a desiccated bone. The image, he knew, was a warning, a caution against his urge to stay. He shuddered at the thought that whether he moved on or not, despite his barely having eaten for the last several days, he would run out of food in less than a week, leaving him, like the mangy, scraggly-bearded version of himself, to beg the forest for what it would provide.

  The future had become a maze, a labyrinth of false starts and blind turns, in which, each time, he met the Minotaur before he found his way. That there was a center, a treasure or even a refuge, he had never stopped assuming, and yet had never allowed himself to envision what it could be. He had rarely pictured deliberately the place he longed to arrive at, but instead had focused all his determination and imagination on the task of arriving itself. What was more, he knew when it was that he had lost the sense of a goal. It was before James had died, while they were sitting in the airport with Joaquim, watching his uncle’s outsized hands fumble with the tiny vials and needles. At that moment, Larry knew for certain the danger of hope, and resolved to do what he could to save himself from danger. The curtain fell and was not to rise again, but the metal point of a dagger appeared at a seam, threatening to rend it up the middle with the single word, mboa.

  LVII

  AS LARRY LAY miserable in his own sweat, there was no deluge through that tear in the curtain, no rush of evil into the world, no flood through a collapsing river bank, no angry mob streaming through a gate. Whatever rend there was, was thin and small, no bigger than a word, and memories slid through it slowly, as blood beads at the site of a small wound. The passage was so narrow that often the senses had to slip through one by one—a smell, or a color, or the gesture of a hand. A thought would well up slowly, like a tear in an eye, and hover quivering for minutes or hours before falling silently onto the sand. Yet behind the one word, there were others, pushing through at intervals, a halting and uncertain speech. If one were in a hurry, one would imagine there was little to be said, but Larry lay still for the entire afternoon, and barely moved from his hammock in the evening. By nightfall, the bucket had begun to fill; the level in the hourglass had risen, swelling with bits of memory, flashes of color and bursts of human sound “Mboa,” he whispered to himself as he felt the h
ammock cradle him, the first word of Pahqua he had spoken since James died. He sighed as he said it, blowing out the final “oa” sound as though it were a candle. “Mboa,” he said. “Beautiful from the dead.”

  LVIII

  THERE WAS NO doubt that Silvio had had his share of disappointments, a few but not all of which he had brought upon himself; he had likewise succeeded in disappointing others in equal measure. From boyhood, his parents had simply assumed that he would be a doctor like his father, not merely earning a good living and bringing pride to his family and to Jews everywhere, but able to assume the mantle of his father’s research, as soon as the elder Amanza was no longer able to carry it himself. This assumption on his parents’ part served to prepare Silvio for a lifetime devoted to the innovation of newer and better ways to shirk responsibility, to avoid routine, to call his own shots, to escape. Thus, when approached by a stranger as he sat gazing out over the top of his open biology text at Le Cigale, holding his half-drained coffee cup halfway off the table at a precarious angle, he was more eager than he should have been to engage in conversation with someone who already, even then, bore himself with an air of self-possessed exoticism.

  “You’re a scientist?” Joaquim had asked him, motioning first to the book and then to the empty chair across from him.

  “Nope. Just a student,” Silvio replied, moving the chair back to make room for Joaquim to sit down.

  “Well, science is a good thing to study,” said Joaquim, motioning to the waiter. “There are so many things you can do with it.”

  Silvio gave a little laugh. “What can you do with it? I guess there’s medicine, and research, and teaching,” he said. “No more possibilities, really, than in any other field.”