by Nancy Burke
If James had lived, perhaps he too would have been reminded, during that seemingly endless night on that tiny strip of praia, nestled in the crook of the river’s arm, that what remains unspoken floats in a certain well-appointed antechamber in the mind, living quietly amid the damask and the mildew, as in Sr. Catalpa’s house, until it is taken up for use as a prop in one or another instantly forgotten, never-forgotten drama. On that night, the main character was someone who looked like Larry only younger, with a shorter haircut and a brighter, more open expression, carrying a baby in his arms. The figure entered the dream, taking his place on the riverbank beside Dabimi and Amakar, holding Aran on his lap.
“You’re not holding her right,” said Dabimi, positioning her head more securely. His concern was warranted, for when Larry turned aside for a minute, the baby fell into the river and was carried off by the current, which grew stronger and more violent as his dream was pulled downstream. Again and again, Larry managed to rescue her, by ever more desperate means—by fishing her out with a stick, by building a dam downstream, by jumping in and carrying her aloft with one hand while trying with the other to keep his body from being battered against the rocks. He groaned and twisted in his hammock. His body was feverish with the effort, pulse racing as he tried to push her up onto the shore. He struggled to catch sight of his friends, but they had left him alone to thrash against a current far stronger than he. At last, her arm was pulled from his grasp, and he could only watch in horror as she was swept downstream towards the rapids. He ran along the bank beside her, shouting her name again and again, but his voice was lost in the crash of water against rock, and her small body plummeted down into the foam. “Aran! Aran!” he shouted, grasping at the sides of his hammock. Finally his screams awoke him to a morning dazzling with sunlight, and the placid, innocent river, and turtles sunning themselves on rocks, and a small voice speaking in clear, slow tones, “Pani, apa tanaa.” “Person, I am here.”
PART
TWO
LXI
THE WORLD APPEARS confusing and unreal when one’s vision is clouded, but often no less so when one’s vision is too sharp. When Larry raised his head and pulled himself up in the hammock, he saw everything around him in exaggerated detail; every leaf on every tree, the veins in every leaf, every knot in the fabric of his netting and, as he threw the netting off and turned to look behind him, every strand of dark hair on the heads of the women who stood side by side, watching him. He squinted as he returned their gaze, not to make the image of them clearer, but to blur it so that he might buffer himself from a reality too immediate to allow him the where-withal to see. Through the thin openings between his eyelids, he scanned the line of silent figures, and when he turned away, he caught a glimpse of some essence he recognized, as one sees the furthest stars in the night sky only out of the corner of an eye. What he saw, in the form on the far right, in the shape of her eyebrow, or her mouth, or her shoulders, or some other feature he couldn’t pinpoint, was Anok, only a different Anok from the one he thought he remembered, unbent and smooth-skinned, wearing a necklace of painted beads and feathers that nested on her chest against a woman’s breast on the right side and on the left side, a girl’s.
Larry opened his mouth and closed it and opened it again. “Anok, I’ve been looking for you,” he stammered at last, mixing English and Pahqua in a chaotic jumble. He stood up and reached instinctively to button his pants and zip his fly, as though frightened of offending with his undress. They stood in silence as he struggled with the zipper. “I got lost,” he said, feeling his pulse in his ears, so loud he could barely hear himself. “I think I’ve been sick.” One whispered to another, and Larry strained to catch the words. The figure standing next to Anok grabbed her arm to hold her still. The slightest breeze touched their hair and the feathers that adorned it.
“Did I make a mistake?” he said, looking from one to another, shaken as much now by their silence as by the shock of their appearance.
“Patiri!” called the tall woman at the head of the line, and they all turned at once and set off in single file towards the mouth of the forest, almost in a run.
“Anok!” Larry called desperately, reaching out for her arm as she passed at the end of the line.
She shook him off with a scream and ran to catch up with the others, but as soon as she stepped into the thicket, she turned back to face him, holding a branch in front of her. “Why did you call me?” she asked Larry, glancing back over her shoulder as she spoke.
“I’ve been looking for you,” Larry said again, helplessly, in Pahqua. “I needed to be with you,” he said.
“I don’t know you,” said Anok. She took a step backward and her face was lost to shadow.
“But you do! You do!” pleaded Larry, fighting tears. “I’m Liroko! Liroko! I took care of your baby! I mixed your paints. Jarara is dead, and I have no home, and I’m lost and I’m sick. Don’t go,” he said, unable to stop himself. “Don’t go. Don’t go. Don’t go. Don’t go.” He searched for her face among the dark branches, and a dozen pairs of eyes looked back. They were the eyes of the forest, of James, of the old Anok, of a tiny orange monkey throwing off the rind of a piquia and skittering away. They looked out at him from the semi-darkness and rendered their judgment and moved on, crushing mounds of dark green scrub as they went, leaving only Anok as a sentinel behind them. Larry paced his shimmering, desolate corner of sand, wiping his tears on his shirtsleeve, and the eyes of the sentinel followed him, and saw what had to be done. They watched as he untied his hammock and rolled it up, straining with the knot while his legs trembled with weakness and pain.
When he had finished gathering his clothes and cramming them into his pack, he pushed his books down on top. By the time he came to the last one, his thoughts had grown so shrill that he could hear them being shouted in his own voice, in English, punctuated by howls and gasps and the sound of a rasping cough.
“What do you want?” he yelled out, startling the forest. “What do you want? I’m done. I can’t do any more. Do you want to win? You won. Are you happy? I’m done!”
The forest swallowed the words as they appeared, dulling their impact and absorbing their echoes. When he finished packing his books, he took his pills with shaking hands, not bothering to count them, and pulled out a box of raisins, slipping it into his pocket. He filled his bottles and shouldered his pack. His knees buckled under the weight. When he fell, the pack came forward and hit him on the back of the head, and he collapsed onto the sand. The blow didn’t hurt him, or cause him to black out. Its only purpose was to mark the end of his efforts, to delimit the far boundary of hope. He slipped off the straps and curled up between the burning surfaces of sun and sand, ready to be crushed between them. Instead, he heard a rustling behind him and, despite himself, jolted up. Before him stood the vision of Anok with his pack on her back, leaning slightly forward to balance its weight.
“Pakara ano jajata?” she said, when she caught his eye. “Does it fly?” “Are we going?”
“Pakara,” Larry answered. “It flies.” He got clumsily to his feet and they walked to the place where his two smaller bags sat. She waited with her back to him while he pulled one strap over each shoulder and then she started off without looking back. As Larry stepped after her into the forest, he was suddenly tempted to turn back, at the very least to pay his respects to a place that, in leaving, suddenly felt more like home to him than any other he had had, or could imagine having. But he pushed himself forward after Anok and the door closed behind him with the crack of wood against stone.
The route was uneven and dense with branches, but less impenetrable than he had remembered it; there was no need to reach for his knife, or to keep his arms over his face as he went. Despite the ache in his joints and head, his body fell into the rhythm of walking, and he was able to keep the bright orange cover of his pack in view, though the body that carried it often vanished into the mottled brown walls that framed them on all sides. In fact, without the sigh
t of that saturated patch of fabric to guide him, he would have been helpless to follow, as his eyes had grown used to the light during his timeless stay on the praia, and he had lost the ability to discern the subtle variations of muted color that marked the forest’s contours. He saw only a blur of camouflage and darkness, pierced by a small orange beacon that blinked and danced at the far end of a sinuous tunnel.
Only after he began to feel accustomed to walking did it occur to him that he had finally been saved, or captured, or both. At first, he imagined the latter, and felt weak and ashamed, more naked than Anok. He pictured arriving at the village looking foolish and ineffectual and sick, not worthy even of pity, but as he walked on, his fear of being seen as diminished was gradually overtaken by the even deeper terror of his having been forgotten altogether. There was genuine confusion and defiance in Anok’s face at his insistence that he knew her, and he couldn’t help but picture himself surrounded by a crowd of people he thought he loved, each one bearing the same demeanor, threatening in its blankness, offering proof that the place that he had secretly called home had never really existed. He put his hands in his pockets, feeling, against his palm, the smooth round face of the compass, which there was no longer any reason to draw out.
They might have walked for an hour or a day. At times, Larry could barely stagger forward but at others, he felt his strength return in an agitated rush. As he walked, he ate raisins and nuts from his bag, and tried to drink from his water bottle without choking or tripping. When he saw her crouch down and stopped at a respectful distance to urinate against a tree, his arms and legs retained the feeling of motion, pendula that had forgotten how to be still. His limbs moved not to propel him forward, but because the entire world moves and breathes, expands and contracts, oscillates, paces the length of its confinement, even in surrender. He stared at the neon patch and his eyes reeled him forward while his arms and legs flailed in the air like a beetle’s. They rounded a bend in the path, and he made out a lone felled trunk which lay off to their right among some brambles, half-covered by moss and ivy, its trunk propped up on its stump.
Larry walked quickly by it and then stopped short. It was James’s hand that caught him by the shoulder and turned him, and pointed, and James’s voice that whispered, “Look!” It was James’s voice that tried, unsuccessfully, to quell the panic that rose in him at the sight of that hewn log. It tried to remind him of their first glimpse of one of those logs together, of his excitement and the thousand questions he had had, and his urge to run up to touch the marks the stone ax had left in the exposed cross-section of the trunk. It offered a gesture of reassurance and then disappeared, leaving Larry alone to gasp for breath in the thick, still air. Every aspect of the forest had grown heavy, sounds most of all, which refused to evaporate; the cries of birds and insects, the leaden pulse of his own footfalls, even the sharp snap of twigs under foot, were blunted and engorged and hung like overripe fruit from the ends of the vines. High cackles became low, booming voices: Sodeis, repeating in a distorted baritone, “there’s no room for anything personal,” and Sr. Catalpa inviting him, again and again, each time more slowly, to refill his glass tumbler with wine, and the nasal drone of the customs agent in Rio, asking James over and over, absurdly, how long they planned to stay. Music changed key; the slow movement from Beethoven’s seventh played in his head, ponderous and dirge-like, pitched so low that it threatened to dissolve into vibrations. Sound itself came, for a minute, to rest, and motion drew inward. As he trudged on toward the place where Anok had been standing, he knew that his only refuge from fear was in time’s capacity to thicken and set, causing an eternal postponement of his arrival. For a minute, he ceased to cover ground as he walked, while wasps hovered in the air as still as hummingbirds, and a spider’s web turned to spun glass. But even then, on the horizon, the spaces between the trees began to glow, rippling the air, reaching their thousand hands toward him, gesturing their infinite need.
“This way,” she called. They took a sharp turn to the right and then another to the left, and came out into a clearing that overflowed with light. Before Larry had a chance to shield his eyes, he felt a hand on his back, and another on his head, pushing it down, guiding him through a low doorway into a darkened, foul-smelling room. As he straightened up again, he heard voices coming from a corner behind him and turned quickly to see Anok pointing at him, gesturing as she leaned in towards a woman with long thick gray hair and uneven, sagging breasts. As the two came toward him, he felt his legs give way, and they ran forward and caught him by his arms. They slipped his bags from his shoulders and eased him onto a low platform of split logs lashed together, covered with a spongy sheet of what looked like moss but felt more like the dried inside of a gourd. Larry sat on the side of the platform and looked from one to the other in confusion and disbelief. Before him stood two versions of Anok, young and old; one wearing Anok’s characteristic stern expression and the other, her familiar guarded smile.
“He called to me, mother, by my name and yours,” said the younger of the two, glancing toward the other.
“Do you have a stick for your face?” said the older one, motioning with her hand against her chin.
Larry looked at her in disbelief, watching the movement through blank, confused eyes.
“For your face!” she repeated, sounding impatient. She motioned to his pack, which lay where Anok had set it, just inside the door.
Suddenly, Larry remembered. He reached a hand out towards the pack, and the young Anok brought it over and set it down against the platform. Larry dug through it and pulled out his razor and soap. “I need a bowl of water,” he said, and one was brought. As he began to shave, slowly, his hands shaking, without a mirror in the dim half-light, the older one sat down beside him and began to sing in a soft, low voice. The song was soothing and, as he allowed it to cover over the chaotic whirl of his thoughts, familiar.
“So I’m here,” Larry said at last, as though in a daze, to the older one, almost forgetting about the younger, who, after retrieving the bowl, had backed away and now stood in shadow watching them from the corner of the dark room.
“Liroko,” said the elder when he had finished, holding his head under the chin and turning his face toward her.
“Anok?” Larry said at last, searching her rutted face in disbelief. Suddenly, he was engulfed by a wave of relief that was narcotic in its power. “Can I rest?” he asked, and she gestured him down. He pulled his jacket from his pack with shaking arms and tried to throw it across his legs, but she took it from him and covered him instead with three soft animal pelts that had been lying in a pile at the end of the platform, after shaking each one with a firm, jarring snap. He balled up his jacket and pushed it under his head.
“Where is Jarara?” she said as she pushed the edges of the pelts under his legs.
“Napata. Dead,” said Larry, overcome with exhaustion and misery and relief. He closed his eyes and began to sink into the dark pool of his dreams, but caught himself and pushed with all his might to bring himself back to the surface.
“Who is that?” he said, gesturing weakly with his arm, already drifting downward again by the time the answer came.
“Shame, jitana!” said Anok from above him, at the surface of his thoughts. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten Aran!”
LXII
BY THE TIME Larry’s head came to rest in the matted arms of his jacket, word of his arrival had already spread. When Aran ventured out to empty the wooden bowl of shaving water, she had to push her way through the crowd that had gathered in front of the painted doorframe of her hut, blocking her way to the trough.
“Pin ano Jarara?” they whispered to her as she bent down to pour the water into the dirt beyond their kaawa. “Napata Jarara?”
She stood up haughtily, glaring at anyone who blocked her way.
“Pin ano Jarara?” Dabimi asked loudly, standing in front of her. “Pin ano jitana?”
“Jara ka,” said Aran in exasperation. “I
don’t know.” She tried to maneuver around him and the empty bowl fell into the dirt. “Move away” she said in a fierce whisper while she bent to pick it up, and he did, flashing a mocking expression to the man beside him as she disappeared through the hut’s doorway.
Once inside, she squatted beside her mother and they leaned in against each other, shoulder to shoulder, watching Larry sleep. In the silence, the murmur of the voices outside swelled like the rest of the forest, wrapping the tiny hut in a thick blanket of questions and assertions, of pleas and demands and laments.
“Pin ano jitana?” she herself asked at last in a hushed voice, averting her eyes from the direction of her mother, even in the darkness.
“Ibo jitana,” said Anok, nodding into the blackness. “That’s your jitana.” Her tone was firm but emotionless, as though she had made a wall of her voice. “I have to go now and talk to Asator,” she said. She stood and shook out her legs, turning her back to Aran.