Undergrowth
Page 16
“Where do I go to prepare?” he asked as she tested the straps on the baskets. She pretended to be absorbed in the task, and didn’t answer. “Why is Anok at Dabimi’s house?” he asked again as she re-rolled the sleeping mats. “Don’t you need this?” He held out the sliver of James, and she came at last and lifted it from his hands.
“Ibo Jarara napata kawar Dabimi,” she said, holding the piece of wood like a rifle against her shoulder and turning on her heel to leave.
Larry started after her, but stopped himself. He knew that he couldn’t let himself be seen without shaving, so he went to get some water in a bowl. The sunlight was painful on his eyes, and burned away the detail from the day. As he relieved himself at the edge of the forest, he squinted into the clearing next to the house, unable to detect any movement. There was silence everywhere, an uncanny emptiness that reminded him of something. He filled the bowl and went inside, stumbling in the darkness. His hands shook as he shaved, though he somehow avoided drawing blood. After he put away his razor, he took out a bar of soap and washcloth and bathed as best he could, using the rest of the water from the bowl. On his way out, he poured the soapy water onto the dirt just outside the kaawa, and the ground hissed and whispered at his back.
LXVII
MOVING BETWEEN THE houses that were scattered around the clearing like leaves, past doorways bright as turning leaves, whose color the sun didn’t fade, but rather intensified, Larry felt pale and ghostlike, or like a pale survivor among ghosts. Each of the houses was empty, save a macaw or a parrot nesting on a perch, its head turned backward on its wing; save a dog whose eyes glowed red from the inside of a doorway, or who scratched in the dirt beside a hut. Larry stopped to rest on a stump at the end of a long kaawa and slowly surveyed the deserted grounds. The space was still warm from human use, and the silence bore the echo of high-pitched voices. Birds scattered; a tiny garden snake slid by, provoking the excitement of the dogs. Far off in the distance, he made out a lone stooped figure crouching in a doorway and knew it was Anok. With a sigh, he stood and plunged himself forward, toward one of the larger huts at the far edge of the clearing.
When he came upon her, he startled her.
“Where is everyone?” he said, dreading the answer he knew.
“Why are you here?” she said, regarding him. “We were going to come for you when the dancing was done.” She turned back to the chajan and began to pound out an outline with a sharpened rock. “You might as well sit down and wait for them to come and get you.”
He remained standing, watching her. After a minute, she turned around again and glared at him.
“If you’re not going to answer, at least you can mix,” she said, and handed him one of the bowls that sat at her feet. His first reflex was to drink from it, but he stopped himself and began to crush the leaves in it with the maata. His right arm shook when he turned the stone, and his left arm shook as he tried to hold the bowl from beneath, so he crouched on the floor of the kaawa, behind Anok’s back, and set the bowl in front of him on the ground.
“Is this Dabimi’s house?” he asked, already certain of the answer.
“It’s Dabimi’s” said Anok, “and now yours.” Behind her voice, Larry could make out a clatter of sticks, overlaid upon an ascending wail of voices. He jumped to his feet and started off in the direction of the noise, but stopped in mid-step and turned back to face her.
“What do you mean, it’s mine?” he said. The wailing grew higher and more rhythmic, as though coming for them through the trees.
“From today, this is the house of your line. It’s Jarara’s, so it’s yours.”
For the first time, Larry looked up at the painting on the chajan, and made out a large, pale oblong shape containing a greenish eye, with a smaller one beside it.
“No!” he blurted out. “I want to live with you!”
“You have a brother now,” said Anok without looking at him. “It’s good. You have a line.”
“No!” Larry shouted again, taking off in a run towards the source of the pulsing rhythm. But he wasn’t used to running. By the time he had reached the last house in the row, he was sweating and gasping for breath. He helped himself to a drink from the water-trough built into the hut’s far wall, using the wooden ladle beside it as a cup. They had got it wrong, his thoughts shouted at him as he started off again. James hadn’t shown Dabimi any special interest; they had never stayed in Dabimi’s father’s house. Nothing in the arrangement made any sense, nor could any explanation justify the fervor of his rage. It pushed him beyond his strength, along the path that wound through a thick patch of forest towards a separate, smaller clearing. It pushed him on until, suddenly, he came up short on the brink of a blazing column filled with swirling, brownish smears which, as he drew closer, became knots of moving bodies. He stiffened, transfixed, and stepped off the path into the thicket, where he became another of the forest’s pairs of eyes. Leaves clung to the sweat on his arms like hands trying to steady him, and brushed his forehead lightly, eager to smooth away his rage and fever with their palms.
Not twenty feet in front of him, a small group of older men stood with their backs to him, beating sticks against a long, hollow log. He could make out the colors on the handles of the sticks, and the painted trim on the edges of the log. He could see the sweat on their backs as they played, and could hear them calling to each other over the din. The wailing women stood beside them, or walked around the pile of wood at the center of the clearing, considering it, adjusting it, adding to it from the pieces at their feet. One by one, as they finished being painted, others came to join them, so that their collective wail grew louder and more piercing by increments. Some were painted from head to foot, while others had only their legs and faces covered, and still others, especially the younger ones, only their faces. At the left edge of the clearing, some of the stronger men worked together to raise three enormous woven masks that were at least their height. Larry could tell by their gestures that they were shouting to each other, though he couldn’t hear their voices. In another corner, men were squatting in a circle, drinking from a wooden bowl that was being held for them by Panar. In every corner of the scene, there was activity, someone marking the ground with a painted staff, someone tying feathers to a woman’s ankles. He saw before him a painting by Bruegel, a canvas painted to its very edges with dark and random purpose. He wanted to watch the scene with the same detachment with which he might have viewed the painting, with an abstract sort of horror from which he might have turned away. Instead, despite himself, he leaned forward in his hiding place and strained his eyes, desperate to identify Dabimi.
A few of the men had begun to walk the periphery, singing together loudly, as though to drown out the women’s wailing. Each time they passed, their line was longer, first ten and then forty and then a hundred, walking in single file. The young ones hung back at the end of the line until the snake swallowed its tail and the stooped man at the head of the line put his hands on the shoulders of the last boy. The two circles moved against each other, the women’s nested within the men’s, with the prone body of sticks as a hub. Face after face passed him, so close that he could see eyes gleaming against the saturated colors of the paint. He searched the strange masks without recognition, seeing no one as familiar; seeing none of them as men. Their anonymity emboldened him, made him feel invisible, and he stepped to the edge of the forest, straining to make out the words of their song. They passed in a trance, their eyes as fierce and empty as the eyes of the huge woven masks. They reached up with their left hands and gestured toward the sky, and stretched their right hands out toward the trees, but a single hand kept reaching, farther and farther through the thicket, until it had grabbed him by the sleeve of his T-shirt and pulled him out. For a minute the song stopped, and the wheel of bodies slowed. There were whispers up and down the line, from which Larry tried to turn away. Then a voice cried out and the wheel began to move again, and the song drowned out his panicked explanations.
“Tarima pota taranop tur, tarima kaawa pataj toti,” they sang, over and over, while the sun plodded forward on its own path, to the drone of its own relentless chant. Larry feared fainting; he feared dying of the heat; he feared the glare of those stark, bright faces that judged him so harshly, and betrayed no human concern. His first thought was to run, and his heart pounded as he approached the mouth of the path. He tensed his legs, poised to jump when he came up to the gap between the trees, but the music sensed his intention and tightened its grip, and the hand that held his shoulder clenched it. He turned to look behind him and saw the opening recede, and knew he wouldn’t try again. Without being aware of it, he began to chant, tentatively, and was carried forward on the stream of sound. Soon the words themselves blended together; they too formed a chain that tightened and reeled in the sun, which, as it filled, tipped and spilled itself with a whoosh, igniting the body of Jarara. At the roar of the flames, at the sudden gasp that arose from James as he sucked their air into his blazing lungs, they all jumped back. The line of women pressed itself into the line of men, and the mass of bodies shook with a collective tremor. Then they were no longer standing in a double line; they were whirling around; they were shaking themselves with their arms outstretched; they were embracing wildly, as though the fire’s eruption had flung them into chaos. A few of the men were holding each other by the shoulders like a line of Russian dancers and vomiting into the thicket. The women held each other and wailed. Whatever absurd message he had been so desperate to give them, about the irreducible privacy of mourning, was submerged, before he remembered even to speak it, by waves of heat and sweat and sound. He stood back at the edge of the forest and clung with both arms to a knotted branch that jutted out at chest height, and wondered whether he too would vomit. The body of James groaned and twitched on its bed of flames, throwing off sparks from its pores.
Yet little by little, as the fire burned, it began to contract and grow quiet, as though its shouts of rage had grown internal; it began to speak intimacies of resignation in soft, measured tones. As, in dying, heat leaves the extremities first, the whirling and writhing bodies that had been the fire’s extension grew still and shriveled, crouching down, rocking and muttering in the fading light. A stump was rolled in and Asator was led to it and seated. The song he sang was low and monotonous; Larry could as little make out the words as he could the words of the fire, though he strained for the meaning of each. When one voice started up, the other would interrupt; the fire would assert itself with a crack, and the old man would counter by pounding his stick into the dirt. Larry moved forward and peered into the embers, but he jerked his head up when he heard, at last, among the sung names, the one he sought: Dabimi.
The group of bodies crouching closest to the fire parted to make a path for the ones who had been called. They came forward as they were named, Dabimi, and his kaag, and his son, and his daughter who bore, like Aran, one breast each of a woman and a girl. They were joined by two jitanas and the sister of the kaag, all rocking back and forth together as the old man mingled the name Jarara with each of theirs. Larry watched the scene in horror, as he knew James was watching, with the hatred smoldering in his ribs. For a minute, the song stopped, but then Larry’s name went off like a trigger and he hurled himself at Dabimi, arms outstretched, trying to knock him to the ground. He rammed himself against Dabimi’s chest with all his might, but at the moment of contact, his legs gave way, and he fell instead into Dabimi’s arms. Like a series of steel doors slamming, the others began to throw themselves at them from all sides, embracing both Larry and Dabimi together, and then the backs of the ones who embraced them. A mass of bodies pressed them to each other, all swaying as one, a ship as wide as a barge, bobbing on the widest of rivers. Larry wept into the shoulder of the body that held him, made intimate by his hatred, and wept again when they carried him up to the chajan to scatter his handful of ash. He was weeping as sleep overtook him on his mat on the floor of Dabimi’s house, and as, in his dream, the body of sticks rose to its feet, uncharred, and knelt beside him in the night. When morning broke, he was surprised, for a moment, not to see it next to him as he drew himself up to a sitting position and rubbed his eyes in confusion, scattering the ash from his cheek.
LXVIII
JORGE WAS STANDING at the sink shaving when the phone rang. He pulled his mouth to one side to get at his cheek, and then attacked the nascent mustache, the fruit of his isolation, an experiment gone wrong. He had always wanted to try it, but not in public. He had hoped that it would make him look older, but surprisingly, it seemed to have the opposite effect, making him look more like a boy than ever, a serious little boy walking around in his father’s facial hair, to comic effect. The phone stopped ringing. He rinsed and dried off with a towel.
“What’s gotten into you?” His mother’s words, echoing in his mind, didn’t help him in his effort to distance himself from the borrowed-mustache boy. Nor did the fact that he didn’t know. The obvious answer was that he had harbored, for all those years, the belief that his father was alive in Lamurii, waiting until his only son had grown brave enough to free him, and that that fantasy had finally been shattered by the truth. Or the obvious answer was that he hated himself and Joachim in equal measure for abandoning yet another innocent to the forest’s brutality. Or the obvious answer was that he couldn’t live with the feeling that he had humiliated himself in front of Martina, had proven himself to be less than he needed to be in her eyes; if nothing else, she was a woman, and she had seen him cry. Or the obvious answer was that he had realized that the mission to which he had devoted himself, to which he and his father before him had devoted themselves, was doomed, ill-advised, counter-productive, destructive, wasteful, ultimately inhumane. But as Jorge was in no position to notice the obvious, he dressed slowly while nursing the sense that Martina had somehow betrayed him, through some subtle condescension that demanded action on behalf of his honor. He stepped out the door and closed it behind him, turning the key in the lock just in time to hear the phone start up again, echoing down the hall.
LXIX
BECAUSE THERE WAS a man already in the house, Larry wasn’t given the sleeping ledge. Instead, he had a floor mat and some of the largest of the skins, and a coarse blanket, made from the bark of a milk tree. He was treated with an uneasy deference; Dabimi’s kaag and daughter called him “paar aXata,” “brother of honor,” when they handed him his food, and turned their heads quickly if they came upon him shaving. He rarely made eye contact with them, or with anyone, but sat for long hours on a stump on the kaawa, cradling an open book in his crossed legs. Two weeks earlier, Anok and Aran had appeared in the doorway carrying his bags and had placed them in a pile in one corner of the hut. He had been so relieved to see them that he reached his arms out to them. “I need you …” he called out in desperation, but Anok merely nodded to him and hurried Aran out the door in front of her, pushing at her daughter’s back when she lingered. He waited until they were gone, to cry, and then put his hands over his eyes and leaned his head forward. The tears swelled in the cracks between his fingers and fell through, translucent messages falling through walls. Each afternoon, sitting cross-legged in the shade of the kaawa, his book open in his lap, he saw in his mind an image of Anok’s hand pushing firmly against Aran’s back, and felt the same emptiness again, and stained the pages of his book with his tears. Only on occasion did he let himself imagine that Aran had hoped to speak with him; that Anok had pushed
her as hard as she had for a reason.
When his mind wandered from his Henry Walter Bates one day, it occurred to him that he might have lost his status as Aran’s jitana when he joined the new line. When Dabimi came back to the hut at midday looking for a meal, Larry cleared his throat and called to him for the first time.
“Am I not to talk to you?” he said, his voice shaking from fear or lack of use.
“You are my brother of honor,” replied Dabimi, sounding impatient.
“Am I still Liroko?” he asked.
“Um,” said Dabimi, jerking his head.
“Am I still Aran’s jitana?”
“Um.”
“Then why didn’t she talk to me?” said Larry, closing the book and stretching his feet to the ground.
“How could you speak to her in your own house, when you don’t give her a thing?” Dabimi asked in a harsh tone. “Some people want the honor without the work, but there’s no honor to their line in doing that.” He turned on his heel and headed toward the cooking area. When he left, Larry sat for a while, looking out over the tops of the trees, and then got up and dragged his pack onto the kaawa by the straps, leaving two thin ruts in the smooth dirt floor. As he began to dig through the outside compartments, Dabimi’s daughter came and handed him a bowl. Then she returned with a dried-grass broom and swept away the tracks his pack had made. He rummaged through the small pocket on the front of the pack and came up with the black leather change purse in which he kept his American money. He felt for the coins on the bottom—the ones with buildings on them wouldn’t do, nor could he give them an image of a bearded man. He looked at the cruzero from Sara, but knew he couldn’t give it in any case. Instead, he picked out two quarters and slipped them into the pocket of his shorts. Then he tried to lift the pack to put it back in the hut, but it was so heavy that he put it back down, and ended up making ruts in the floor again. As he lowered it to the ground, he nearly dropped it, but caught it at the last second by the two small pockets that stuck out on either side. The right one held only a few wadded up dirty socks, but the left was stretched taut over what felt like a smooth-sided box. Only when he had unzipped the pocket and peered at the top of the box did he remember what it was: the reticule containing James’s ashes. For a minute he thought about sprinkling them on the floor with the others, but he caught himself and shuddered and pushed the box back into the pocket, zipping it shut. He kept his eye on the pocket as he ate, as though to be sure no ashes would escape from it. As he walked to Anok’s hut, turning over the quarters in his hand, he felt a renewed sense of strength in the thought that he alone possessed the real James.