Undergrowth

by Nancy Burke

  “I don’t know about that,” Joaquim said. “I’ve been looking to hire a scientist myself.”

  “What for?” said Silvio, closing his book, moving to the edge of his chair, poised now, like his coffee cup, to either jump or fall.

  “Have you heard of the SPI?” said Joaquim nonchalantly. “We go tromping though the forest, trying to build ties with Indians.” He leaned back to allow the waiter to place before him a tiny espresso cup. “It hasn’t worked out for us, hiring just anybody who’s willing to go. My idea is that we’d do much better with people who really know their biology, and their chemistry, their sociology, their anthropology and the like. I’ve newly signed on a geneticist, a fellow from the States, guy by the name of James Ardmore. You’ve read Comte?”

  “Never heard of him,” said Silvio, sensing incipient disappointment.

  “Really? I’m going to have to talk to my dear friend Professor Oliveira, to find out what he’s been teaching his students these days.”

  “Professor Oliveira? I have him now for … !” Silvio started to interject, stopping in mid-sentence when his eyes met those of his dark-skinned companion.

  “Tell him I send my regards,” said Joaquim, setting his cup down and standing up. “Here’s my card,” he said.

  LIX

  THE NIGHT WAS interminable. Even the moon gave up and left, folding itself into the pockets of the river like a stowaway and flowing off. Each time Larry woke up, he remembered a different dream, but when he took out his flashlight and swept the shore, the landscape was always the same. He clicked off the flashlight and tried to reposition himself in the hammock. When he closed his eyes, he could see one of the houses in Pahquel. In his dream, someone had been shut up inside the house, which was fitted with a door and a padlock like the shack near the airport outside Itatuba. The prisoner was trying to get a message out by writing on bits of paper and sticking them through the cracks in the walls. No one noticed the white scraps fluttering down the sides of the house, and Larry tried not to draw attention to himself as he shifted his body slowly toward them. He tried to catch them without being seen by reaching his hand out behind him, but the papers crumbled when he tried to grasp them. “Tikima pattaa noa abaka,” he whispered to himself unwittingly as he slept, sensing even in sleep that what he said was determined as much by which words he could recall as by their meaning. “They’re falling into a hole.”

  And so his dreams fell, each bearing a message scrawled in transliterated Pahqua, which crumbled and blew away as he awoke. He dreamed about the sight of Banata’s rough hand resting on the blue checked fabric of James’s shirt. He dreamed about the smell of mopa soaking in a wooden vat. He dreamed about the day he had been missed, when he had gone off with Amakar and Dabimi to gather muruci without telling anyone where he was. They had wandered the whole day with their baskets on their backs, until the baskets overflowed and the juice dribbled out through the woven bottoms, running down their legs and staining them orange. Amakar had been protective of Larry; he knew he couldn’t climb, so he told Larry to sit at the base of the trunks and guard the baskets while they shimmied up, wearing their riris around their waists. Larry had felt so happy at his task, even though he suspected that Amakar was only pretending he was needed. As it turned out, he had done a better job than any of them had expected by spotting a scorpion in the weaving that held the shoulder strap to Dabimi’s basket. It had been almost dusk by the time they returned to the village. At the entrance, Amakar had made a commotion, singing out “Liroko do amik. Liroko do amik,” while James and Karad rushed to meet them, forgetting their anger in relief. Only, in Larry’s dream, he hadn’t made it back to the village because of the scorpions crawling all over his own pack. He turned in his hammock and brushed the back of his neck with his hand, and then jolted up and checked the woven ropes by the light of his flashlight while sleep stood patiently by, awaiting his return.

  It was as though each time he tried to set off for the morning, some other task called him back to his starting place, some other tentacle of night. He dreamed about small things, the texture of boar-skin blankets and the taste of grilled river shrimp, and then of the more important things, of Anok, who used to grind her dyes in rows of wooden bowls, telling him stories as she worked.

  Despite all his months of preparation, and his years of being tutored by James in Pahqua, Larry at first understood almost nothing she said to him. He would nod at her narrow, misshapen back and make lines in the dirt with a stick while she rocked back and forth on her heels, pushing the pigments with the maata. At first, she was the only woman he spoke to at all, because when she didn’t have her baby in her arms, she would sit with her back to him and keep her eyes on her work, freeing him from confronting the embarrassment of her nakedness. He rarely blushed in her presence, as he did when he tried to talk to the other women and girls. She would tell him the same story many times over so that he could learn the words, changing her voice to indicate the different characters. Occasionally, she would tip a few of the bowls toward him, and he would pretend to admire the colors, which looked to him like lumpy, dull versions of his tempera paints from grade school, and smelled distastefully pungent in the hot, still air. She covered the bowls with sapucaia leaves and lay flat stones across them, pushing them into the shade of a miniature lean-to that was built into the side of her house. After she rinsed her hands in a wooden trough, she would walk off without saying goodbye. As Larry got up to leave, he could usually hear her baby crying and her voice offering it the comfort of her stories.

  Once, when she was in the midst of grinding caba in a wooden bowl with the round, grey stone, the baby started to cry inside the house. She stood up and handed the stone to Larry, gesturing to him to continue. Larry sat by himself, turning the maata in his hand to the tune of “I’ve been working on the railroad,” the only song he could think of. The pigment smelled somewhat more tolerable than the others, like fruit mixed with mint and sour milk. It stained the stone a dark, blackish red. He leaned into his work with the full weight of his body, imagining that if he did a good job, she would ask him to help more often, an honor he longed for in a world in which many of his efforts, his triumph with Dabimi and Amakar notwithstanding, were regarded with subtle condescension. As the dark substance grew thicker, it clung to the sides of the bowl and took on a glossy sheen that made it look like tube paint. He tilted the bowl back and forth, and his face was pulled long and then pushed squat as his reflection ran over ripples in the surface. The trees stretched and thickened around his head like knotted locks of hair.

  When Anok came out again carrying the baby in her arms he showed her the bowl, looking for her approval. She smiled at him broadly, nodding at him to put it on the ground in front of the lean-to. She motioned for him to put the maata into a gourd beside the water trough she used for hand-washing, and then, without warning, thrust the baby towards him. At first he tried to refuse, insisting that he didn’t know how to hold it, afraid he’d make it cry. There was something shameful to him about babies. He felt uncomfortably girlish resting it on his lap, watching Anok as she shredded bark with the sharp edge of a stone. When he heard Dabimi and Amakar approaching from the far side of the house, a wave of panic hit him, and he felt the impulse to lay the baby down and run off before they could see him. As he stood up, they came around the corner and stopped directly in front of him, watching in disbelief as he lifted the baby and placed it over his shoulder. “I was helping Anok,” he tried to explain, his voice shaking as he held the thin leg against his chest. A smell like that of rotting fish passed in the air between them as Anok spooned a whitish, lumpy substance into the bowl that held the shredded bark. He felt a flush spread over his face and fumbled in his mind for words, until at last the silence was broken by the shouts of the two boys, “Anok, tika sapat ina marana!” “You never let me hold her! Why can’t I have a turn?”

  Anok answered without looking up from her work. “He does what I ask him to do,” she said. “He does
a good job, but you never listen.” She crouched over the bowl, holding it steady with her feet. The idea that two boys his own age would fight to hold a baby was unheard of to Larry. When Anok finally gave them her permission, he was unsettled by the eagerness with which each one cradled the small head in the crook of his arm, singing, drawing invisible designs across its chest. “They’re hidden in the corners of your house,” they each sang in turn, almost in a whisper, to a tune he had often heard Anok hum over her work. “They are the Ark Pol, who steal your children away.”

  Larry stood to one side and watched the child smile and reach for their faces. “It has no diaper,” he said in English.

  “Okay, you take her,” said Amakar. “Wan, wan,” said Larry, holding his hands between them as though in deference.

  “What’s her name?” he asked as a distraction.

  “Name? It’s obvious she’s not old enough,” said Dabimi, as though he couldn’t imagine a more stupid question. “You know she’s rajora?” he whispered to Larry.

  “Rajora?”

  “She has no jitana,” he said, leaning towards him, his voice still low.

  “Mmm,” said Larry, nodding. Despite his embarrassment, he looked down at her to see if there was anything missing, but since nothing obvious was out of place, he concluded that a jitana wasn’t a body part. He repeated the word several times to himself, hoping to remember it long enough to ask James about it. As he broke it into syllables in his mind, he absently held out a finger for the baby to hold. She brought it to her mouth, scraping at it with her two teeth. The three stood around her and she pulled their hair. Despite himself, Larry was reluctant this time to give her up, and allowed her to grab his nose and push her feet into his collarbone. He said “diapers” to her again and again, and she laughed with him at the absurdity.

  Such was the beginning of their love affair. Larry had come upon a sense of purpose that obscured the nagging shame that flooded him whenever he allowed himself to remember that he had become a nanny. He would sit in the shade, bouncing the baby on his legs to the rhythm of Anok’s story-songs and the boys would call his name from across the yard. When one day Anok had to meet with some other women in the far village, Larry kept the baby all evening long, and for once had as many after-dinner visitors as James did. He would follow Anok to the site of a new chajan and people would nod at him, both men and women, even those he had previously feared. Most of the other babies were carried by women or girls, though Amari often came out to play Kari after lunch, clutching his infant sister carelessly, Larry thought, like a football, under his arm, and Atwa, with whom James was so close, sometimes sat on the log in front of his house smoking a thick roll of kikara while he balanced his infant son on his knee. Nearly a month had gone by when one evening, as Larry sat with James on their stools of lashed cane stalks beside a dwindling fire, James turned to him and asked, out of the silence, “So you want to be the jitana?”

  Larry looked at him through the rippled film of heat and tried to remember where he had heard the word. “At first I was a skeptic,” James said, “for their sake and yours, but as I’ve thought about it, it does make sense. Especially since we’re coming back.”

  “Am I supposed to know that word?” Larry said defensively.

  James paused for a minute, and then laughed so loudly that Yamara came out of his hut across from them and ran over to see what the joke was. He had begun to laugh too, even before he reached them, but when he heard James spit out what he could, “Kokoru do Liroko nara alo jitana,” he too was doubled over, unable to choke out words. Horrified, knowing that the joke was on him, Larry stood up and stepped backwards through the doorway and started pacing back and forth across the hut with his hands jammed into his pockets. After a while, he started to feel dizzy, so he slumped in a corner without turning on his flashlight to check the walls for reduviids. The last of the light receded from the doorway, leaving the room in complete darkness. Outside, the voices grew even louder and more numerous, and then slowly faded and thinned, as a fire stretches itself out into embers between stones. At last, the embers flickered out and the forest’s voices flooded the empty space. James turned on his flashlight as he bowed to get through the doorway and fixed its beam on the ground by Larry’s right hand.

  “I think there’s been a miscommunication,” he said, sitting down beside Larry and switching off the flashlight.

  Larry turned his head away, allowing the cicadas to answer in his place.

  “I thought you knew what you were doing,” said James, unfurling his legs in front of him. “And like I said, it made sense.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Larry loudly, trying to pass off his humiliation as anger.

  “In retrospect, there’s no reason you should have known, but I assumed that one of your friends would have said something, Dabimi, maybe, because he’s older, or even Anok.”

  Larry thought back to the time when he had first spoken with Dabimi and Amakar at Anok’s. “You mean about the baby?” he said with the inflection of a retort.

  “About the baby’s needing a jitana,” said James.

  “Jitana,” said Larry, suddenly remembering.

  “You’ve heard the word?”

  “Maybe,” said Larry. He tried to imagine what his error might have been, but could only assume that his punishment would, as usual, involve a measure of shame far greater than the extent of his previous contentment.

  “Do you want to know?” James asked.

  “I was just trying to help Anok,” said Larry, getting up again to resume his pacing. “It likes me.” He took a few steps before he realized he couldn’t see to walk, and sat down where he was, across from James.

  “A jitana is a second father,” said James, speaking on faith into the dark. “When a man’s kaag has a baby, he can decide whether to allow a second father to be named, who will care for the child as best he can and protect it with his spirit if the real father ever dies or leaves. Anok’s kaag wasn’t so generous. He forbade all the men from going near his child. So the child pays the price for the father’s bullheadedness.”

  “I can’t take care of a baby,” Larry blurted out, “and we’re leaving in another month anyway.”

  “You’re already caring for her, just by carting her around. You’ve done more than enough, especially since Anok is Ak so she’s taken care of in that way. The most important part is in your agreeing to it. The child’ll have an easier time finding a kaag herself if she has a jitana, just an easier time in general getting around.”

  “I’d be the father?” asked Larry, unwilling to make sense of James’s words. “I can’t be a father! I’m only eleven!”

  “More a protective spirit, really,” said James, sensing Larry’s panic. “It makes sense, because it’s clear by now that none of the older men intends to do it. Most people are scared of Anok, I think, with or without the curse on her.”

  “So I’d be married?” said Larry, in the same panicked voice.

  “No, of course not—you’re an honorary father, not an honorary kaag. There’s a big difference. No one is going to let another man marry his wife, but almost all men want their child to be well cared for.”

  “But why should it be me? A lot of people could do a better job.” Larry thought about Dabimi’s easy manner, the way he swaggered with the baby on his hip.

  “I have a theory about that. First, it’s because Anok trusts you and thinks you’re hardworking. Also, she’d resent giving a boost in status to anyone else who stepped forward. And despite her stubbornness, she does feel the pressure. But …” James paused for a while before going on, “I think probably the biggest reason has to do with the fact that the jitana has the first claim to marry the child if it’s a girl. If you leave, she can block somebody else’s claim by using you as an excuse, or not.”

  James stopped talking. Larry watched as his uncle lit the camping light with a match and strung up their hammocks from the corner-poles. He pulled out their netting and
their flannel-lined sleeping pants and the cotton sacks of wadded-up clothes they used as pillows. Then he went out with his toothbrush, leaving Larry alone in the flickering light. Somewhere deep in the forest, an owl monkey called out to announce itself, and Larry imagined it scurrying over broken branches with its baby clinging to its chest. He could picture its face with its huge, nocturnal eyes, which gave it an eternally terrified look.

  “How would it affect me?” he said as James came and sat down again beside him. “Will anyone be mad at me?”

  “Only if they’re jealous,” said James. “Most people see it as your shouldering a burden on their behalf. It’s a way to be someone on your own here, rather than through me.”

  “I’m not old enough,” said Larry.

  But the next day, she spoke his name, “Ro” for “Liroko,” and the next, he won his first game of Kari in the clearing beside the center house after lunch, and they all went swimming in the river, Larry and Amakar and Dabimi and Amari and Karar, and spent the afternoon trying to catch fish with their hands, and threw sticks like javelins from bank to bank. On the following day, Larry and James sat in the shade and watched as Anok worked on a new section of Tarana’s chajan, listening to the stories she was painting as they passed the baby back and forth between them, and a week later, they sat together again, watching Anok paint the story of her baby’s jitana into her own chajan, so that when the child reached the age of six moon cycles and was given a name, they saw, in varnished images of yellow and orange and blackish red, how Liroko had come from out of the trees with his own jitana to become the jitana of the child, born of Anok and a dead man, whose name was now Aran.

  LX

  FOR SIX YEARS, Larry had worked to condense what was most meaningful about his first trip to Pahquel with James, into isolated phrases, into facts about which he had no personal interest; he would ask James about the range of the tapir, but never about his friendship with Asator; about the Pahqua word for kneecap, but not about the reason he was chosen as jitana; about which kind of palm leaves had been used in the roof of their hut, but never about why James wept as he said goodbye to Warari—a woman Larry had barely been aware of—and held onto her shoulder at the end of the path. James too had found his own private method for distilling a thousand stories—those he had told many times and those he had loved too deeply to tell—into a single plot whose ostensive subject was his fight to preserve the only words that might have captured otherwise untold thoughts. Whole dramas dried up before their eyes; that moment under the chajan, in which they stood together beneath the accrued histories of the living and the dead, sticky in their body paint, their smells blending, became “The Jitana Story” and then no story at all, never mentioned by either of them, even to each other, to the point that four years later, when their relatives fussed over an infant at a distant cousin’s wedding, no word was spoken between them as Larry awkwardly declined to hold the child, saying he didn’t like babies.