by Nancy Burke
LXIII
JORGE GRABBED AT the receiver with annoyance, and fought back the temptation to return it to its cradle before finding out who had disturbed him.
“Moretti” he growled, already angry at Silvio for calling him three times in one day.
“Jorge,” said his mother on the line.
“That’s my name,” said Jorge, shaking his head.
“Martina’s been calling. Silvio’s been calling. It seems like you’re making things worse for yourself.”
“Is that so?”
“So you have a choice,” said Sara. “I can come over, or Joaquim can, or you can have both of us.”
“How about if I just call Martina and get you all off my back?” said Jorge, reuniting, violently, the receiver with the phone.
LXIV
WHEN ANOK APPEARED at the mouth of the doorway, the crowd, which had grown by now to a hands-and-feet and more, gathered around her as though speaking in unison an obvious question. They pushed forward onto the kaawa, but stopped at the threshold, chajan of the ancestors, and didn’t cross. Torches had been lit, and light flickered above their heads.
Anok stepped forward, and they backed away.
“Pin ano Jarara?” Napata Jarara?” people whispered, more to each other than to her as they followed her through the clearing. When Anok arrived at Asator’s house, she stood outside his kaawa and called to him. While she waited, the mass of bodies behind her untangled and scattered around the front of the house. Finally, Asator emerged.
“Pin ano Jarara?” said Asator, after lowering himself slowly onto the log by the door, taking his time to arrange his wooden cane across his thighs. Coming from his mouth, the question sounded as gentle as it had sounded harsh in the mouth of Dabimi.
“Napata Jarara,” said Anok, after a silence in which she considered whether or not to tell him. James is dead.
“Napata?” he said, lifting his stick again and pushing one end of it into the ground between his feet. “Who told you that?”
“Ibo Liroko. Ibo jitana.”
“Buka jitana?”
“In my house. Aran found him by the river, calling her. They were out beyond the world, which is something else I have to tell you. I’m sure it was Aran’s fault.” She paused for a minute. The penalty for venturing outside the perimeter of logs that demarked world’s end was significant, a moon cycle’s ration of smoked meat, but that was the least of her problems. “He’s sick,” she went on, looking over Asator’s shoulder to address his son, who had emerged behind him. “Go and get Panar.” Pahquel was made up of three separate centers that were positioned in a row, and Anok was asking him to walk to the farthest of the three to bring the curer back with him.
“Not now!” said the son, eager to hear the story that would emerge through the singing.
“He’s still sleeping, but I don’t know for how long. I want Panar Ak to be there when he wakes up.”
The son scowled and kicked at the dirt, but when Anok broke off in mid-sentence and nodded at him again, and Asator elbowed him lightly on the thigh, he exchanged a glance with the old woman and headed off, calling out as he went to alert the forest to his path. After he’d gone, Asator’s daughter stepped out of the hut into his place. She moved closer to her father and put a hand on his arm, patting it softly as he began to sing the names of those whose death-images had been added to the chajans since the rain. When he came to those who had not yet been given names, he referred to them by the names of their mothers, Katura baby and Jajata baby and Jun baby and Aparan baby.
Death songs are common songs, familiar to even the smallest children. Many who weren’t even Ak could have sung most of the parts themselves from beginning to end, given their symmetry: The story of the departure from the world of the ancestors and the birth into the world of persons resembles word-for-word, in reverse, the story of the return. But in James’s case, there could be no singing of his birth out of the body of a woman, but only of his ritaXa, his sojourn. There could be no first-hand account of the death, of the visitation of the ancestors, and their joyful reception of his spirit; no darker story either, of James’s suffering and removal as a result of their vengeance against him. As Asator sang, Anok strained to listen for clues as to how the death would be regarded, the outcome of which would determine Larry’s status in the group forever. Were he the holder of an ancestral curse, the results would be devastating for Aran.
“They are reaching down,” Asator sang at last, and Anok’s shoulders relaxed as she exhaled outwards. That was the reassurance she sought: That Jarara would be welcomed by the ancestors as one of their own. Anok was less concerned about the question of which line was rightfully his; given their long history together, Asator would no doubt claim him as one of his own, despite all the claims shouted out from every corner. But these were not questions to be answered by men; it was Asator’s privilege to sing not his own decrees, but those of the ones who came before, who could no more afford to be indulgent with the truth than their descendants could. “They’re waiting now to hold him,” sang Asator. When a person went to join them, the ancestors would welcome him by gathering him in their arms, rocking him like a baby. Like the others, she began to rock, closing her eyes, as they all did, to better feel the motion. She swayed forward and back, and yet opened one eye from time to time to keep track of Dabimi, who sat off to the right outside the circle defined by the arches of the torchlight, staring. In the silence that surrounded Asator’s voice like an aura, the torches cracked and spat, as though to remind them that they were all born of fire, whose claim transcended theirs, and would prevail. Asator’s singing contracted to a hiss, the sound of breath escaping, a wheel turning with some effort. Between phrases, as the crowd muttered their parts, he leaned over and whispered to Anok.
“What?”
“Nothing,” said Anok.
“Liroko has his claim,” whispered Asator, so that she could barely hear him. “And Dabimi’s too young for a second.” Others were singing now too, beating out the rhythm with the ends of their torches, calling out the names of those they’d lost.
“You know Dabimi hates Liroko for it. I heard him talking outside my house.”
Asator turned away. The song began to fade, moving more and more slowly, like a wheel grinding to a halt. When it stopped, he turned to his daughter and motioned to her to help him up. Low voices started to swell again, but stopped short when he raised his hand. “The chajans walk in their father’s paths.” He paused again and then went on, over the general murmur. “In four days, we’ll burn wood from the house of every man, and those pieces are his body. And we’ll do the dance and spread Jarara in the house of his line, over the roof and under the chajan of Dabimi.”
LXV
ARAN SAT CROUCHED in a corner of the hut, listening to the swooping of the bats outside the doorway, and to the sound of Larry’s slow breathing. Before, when so many people were gathered outside, whispering about her and calling to her, she had tried to stay calm by reassuring herself that they would soon be gone. Now, as she sat alone in the darkness, surrounded only by the cries of the night, she would have wished them back, if only she might not feel so utterly alone. Somewhere, far away, there was a circle of torchlight filled to bursting with the sound of human voices, but she was well outside it, beyond the touch of the longest fingers of the light. That she imagined herself to be the topic of their conversation was of less than little comfort; rather, the thought was like a sign that even her own fate had been stolen by the others, leaving her bereft. In a moment of weakness, she found herself wishing even for Dabimi, who, despite his bullying, might have reassured her by his mere presence that things were as they had been. But just then, Larry groaned in his sleep and shifted his position on the ledge. The sound of his breathing was raspy and sad, the muffled cry of someone dying, or of someone equally alone. Gradually, her fears about his claim on her subsided, pushed aside by the dank smell of pity, odor of sickness and solitude alike.
LXVI
FOR TWO DAYS and nights, Larry thrashed on the narrow wooden ledge, which was hard despite its covering of skins. People came and went, Panar Ak and Anok and Aran and two young nieces of Panar’s whom he brought to assist with the cure. They crouched beside the palette and caught the pieces of bark that fell from Larry’s mouth as he slept and held up hollowed-out gourds for him to urinate into while he clung to their shoulders with sweaty hands and called them both Aran. Panar Ak swayed and sang as he ground roots in wooden bowls that looked like the ones Anok used for paints, and produced liquids that, to Larry, smelled equally repulsive. Even in his sleep, he grimaced when Panar Ak began mixing, pushing himself into the wall and covering his nose and mouth with his arm. In a lucid moment, he had explained his pills and had handed them over, and Panar Ak ground some in with the rest of the strange mixture and held the bowl up for him to drink from. Every time, he would choke and sputter and gasp for breath, insisting that he needed only the pills, and would try to push the bowl away. From her corner, Aran watched him squirm and fight and then finally wipe his eyes on his sleeve and give in, taking down the mixture between deep, labored breaths, as though it were a pool he were drowning in. Sometimes, Aran would have to fight back the urge to save him, but at other times, she sat alone on her shore and watched impassively, feeling nothing as he struggled for air.
On the third morning, Larry woke up early, in time to see the first strips of light, thin as reeds, slip in through the spaces in the walls. They fell across the bodies of mother and daughter on their rattan mats, and wove themselves into the threads of softer light that laced the hut’s far wall. When Anok stirred and sat up, they shimmered over her like ripples in a shallow pool, and when she reached out to put her hand on Aran’s shoulder, they lapped at the edges of the floor.
“Are you awake?” Anok whispered, shaking Aran’s shoulder gently.
Aran mumbled in her sleep and turned over.
“You can sleep, but I have to get started.” Every morning, Anok offered her more rest, and every morning Aran understood that the offer was really a threat. She sat up and rubbed her eyes and then looked over her shoulder to see if Larry had moved. Larry lay still with his eyes shut.
“Asleep,” whispered Anok, quietly rolling her mat.
Aran got to her feet and picked up her own mat. “Will he live?” she asked, turning her back on the answer.
“What do you want?” asked the mother, unwrapping the protective covering of leaves from a wooden bowl. Larry could hear her scratch her head, crumble something in her hand, move towards the door with small, precise steps. She stood even with him on the outside of the wall, and he could hear her breathing. He felt the air stir as she moved. She lit the fire and soon it had consumed the more subtle of the sounds, as her peculiar smell dissolved into the heavier aroma of palm starch flour and cassava leaves frying in rendered boar fat. She sang as she moved a stick across the smooth, round stone, stirring the meal as he had watched her do so often in the past. In those days, her baby would cry and she would give the stick to Larry, motioning to him to continue. He half-expected to hear the same cry, but instead, Aran’s voice startled him back to the present.
“I don’t know,” said Aran, bending down and taking the stick. She pushed the stone off the fire and stood up again, looking down at her mother’s hands. “Jara ka.”
Larry heard footsteps as Panar Ak approached them at the hearth with his nieces scrambling after him. “Is he still sleeping?” Panar said in a low voice to Anok.
“Aran will wake him now,” said Anok in a tense, clipped tone. “She has his breakfast ready.”
“I bring the breakfast,” said one of the nieces, her feet pounding in the dirt.
“No,” said Anok. “From now on, Aran’s going to tend him, and you can help Panar with the mixing.” “Patir,” she said, pushing Aran forward toward the door.
Inside the hut, Aran stood by the palette and looked down at Larry. Even though his eyes were closed, he could feel her watching him, and fought back the urge to pull his jacket over his head. She looked at the mesh of greenish veins that laced his hands, and his hair the color of dead grass, and the stubble that had already begun to show itself on his chin and upper lip. She looked at the narrow outline of his chest beneath his clothes and his pale, translucent eyelids that betrayed the contours of his eyes. What she saw, she found distasteful, like everything that has been stripped of distance. If, from across the room, she had felt occasional bursts of sympathy, or curiosity, or concern, now when she stood beside him, she saw what the life she had even whispered to the ancestors to save consisted of: a blue pulse lodged between the sinews in his neck like a membranous newly hatched bird in a lizard’s jaws. She cleared her throat and tapped her nails on the side of the bowl, and Larry opened his eyes and looked up at her.
“Hungry?” she asked distractedly, as though she barely had the time to look in his direction.
“Maybe so,” said Larry, pulling himself up. She didn’t try to feed him, as the girls had done, but instead held the bowl out so he could take it in both hands. He ate as the others did, by gathering up bits of food between his thumb and two middle fingers, with the bowl held almost at his chin. Meanwhile, she stood back and directed her eyes to the beams in the ceiling of the hut, as if to search for reduviidae nests. He ate as fast as he could, to shorten their uncomfortable silence. When he finished, he called to her tentatively, afraid to interrupt her, and she took the bowl without speaking and went out. It was the same for each of the day’s meals, the sense of being watched as he slept and the silence and her determined examination of the ceiling beams. It was the same for breakfast the next morning, a ritual established with a haste in proportion to the awkwardness they would have felt without it. It was a private ritual between them, of the sort that binds an intimacy into an abstract and impersonal transaction, on which one comes too quickly to depend.
As he finished with the bowl and was about to let Aran know she could take it, Panar Ak appeared in the doorway.
“How is the troubled one?” he said to no one in particular.
“You’re late,” said Aran, taking the bowl from Larry and stepping backwards, away from both of them.
“Ibo Napata Ara,” said Panar Ak, squatting alongside the palette. Before he could hold his own bowl to Larry’s mouth, Larry reached for it himself and rested it on his crossed legs. Panar Ak was startled by the gesture, since medicines had to be given by another person in order to work. But he stuck to his purpose, and while Larry gulped the mixture down, Panar explained to him in a slow, deliberate voice about the Napata as though he were talking to a child, about wood being bone, and the dance, and the fire. “We’ll carry you out, so you can see him. We’ll leave you by Dabimi’s house, and when they come back with the ashes, you can help throw them under the chajan.”
“But I need to be there,” said Larry, terrified suddenly that they would leave him behind and take James as their own. The rivalries of mourning surpass in their depth and desperation the rivalries of love, and Larry could not afford to let himself be vanquished. He imagined planting himself in the midst of the dance, a tiny scrap of stillness against a whirling backdrop, who would capture their attention through the intensity of his silence, testifying by his presence in their midst to the privacy of loss.
“You can’t be at the dance,” said Panar Ak, shaking his head. “You’re not strong.”
“Of course I am,” he said, swinging his legs to the edge of the palette and sitting up. A wave of dizziness moved over him and passed. He pushed his feet squarely into the floor. “The dance will strengthen me.”
“We’ll see,” said Panar Ak, taking the empty medicine bowl and heading towards the door. “Persons are already starting to get ready, painting their patterns and cutting pieces of their house-beams for the fire. Anok has been gone all morning, working on the chajan.”
“I haven’t seen her working,” said Larry, motioning toward the doorway. He was aware of
Panar Ak’s irritation at his challenges, but couldn’t stop himself.
“That’s what I said,” said Panar Ak sharply. “She’s been working, at Dabimi’s.”
When Aran came in to carve a piece of wood from the thick beam at the far side of the room, Larry was too impatient to watch her in silence as he usually did.
“Why is Anok at Dabimi’s?” he called out, in a louder voice than he expected. “Shouldn’t she be painting?”
Aran cringed at the sound of the name, but Larry couldn’t see her well enough to notice. The beam she was carving was the one from which their household possessions were suspended—large baskets of pelts and small baskets of jewelry; an arrow-quill empty of arrows; and clay pots filled with lard and manioc flour and palm starch flour and fruit, sealed over with beeswax and leaves. She stood behind the basket that held their sleeping mats, so only her hands could be seen. They held the hammer and chisel stones up to the lower surface of the beam, but kept slipping when she tried to carve into the wood. The baskets jiggled back and forth on their leather straps and jute strings.
“Can I help you?” said Larry, unaware that he was on his feet. It wasn’t until he reached the far wall that he realized he was walking unassisted for the first time in days. The effort seemed a miracle, the moment when the cripple throws his crutches off, or the blind man finds his sight. They looked at each other for an instant, riveted by their shared terror at the prospect of his recovery, and then looked quickly away again, up to the place where Aran had made a mark in the beam. He held the sides of the sharper stone tightly with both hands while she slammed the thicker one against it, and a strip of wood pulled away from the beam and curled down towards the floor. Larry knew no miracle had taken place, that he had thrashed on the ledge not only out of sickness, but because he couldn’t bear to be well. Even now, as he pulled at the wood and cracked it back, he longed for his cocoon of immobility, for the few predictable gestures that sufficed for a sick person’s life. “Ibo Jarara,” she said as he turned the wood in his hands. He suddenly felt nauseated, not so much by his illness as by the thought of the bone in flames. He walked back to the palette and sat down, laying it beside him.