by Nancy Burke
Larry waited, staring into the darkness into which Dabimi had vanished, and then gave up and turned back towards the fire, which was dying softly into embers. Leaning back, he grabbed some branches from a pile by the end of the kaawa and tossed them on it, fanning the flame with his datebook. The fire was a more responsive companion than Dabimi had been, and flared obligingly. He sat back and listened to it crack and hiss, trying to sort out all the pictures in his head. There were the ones of him leaving, announcing his plans to Anok, trying desperately to explain himself to Aran’s turned back. He saw Dabimi gloat as he forced himself to give a tribute to his generosity. He imagined, with a shudder, setting off into the forest, and arriving at Sr. Catalpa’s half alive, having been lost again, or chased by those he had betrayed, or attacked by boar, or swarmed by bees. He saw himself writhing with fever on the same perfect crescent of sand and never arriving at all. Then, he was on the plane looking down on Florida, on D.C., on Boston. He imagined going back to school, sitting in the Dean’s office trying to explain his failure to inform him that he wouldn’t be returning for the fall quarter, or locking himself in his bedroom at home, playing the same sequence of chords again and again on his guitar until his parents threw up their hands in despair and turned him out. He thought about moving in with Sara and finding a job at the wharf in Santarem, or teaching English for money, or begging for a job at the museum, answering the telephones or making change at the front desk, listening with an empty interest for the familiar cadence of English. He couldn’t picture with any vividness the possibility of Joaquim’s taking him in, as he wasn’t sure what his house looked like, or who lived there, or even where it was. His mind scanned the images he could call up one by one, in search of a setting in which he felt capable of living, and found only awkward situations, risks, disappointments, and dead ends. There were no real friends to miss him, no commitments unfulfilled; not even a dog the burden of whose care would be resented by his parents. In a way, he found it odd even to wonder about going back, given his assumption, which he had often stated without laying out his reasons, that he had wound up in Pahquel because he had nowhere else to go.
Larry would have said that Pahquel was his fate, except he was used to thinking of fate as something terrible and easy, as the place one slid into without longing or even effort after intending some other, more desirable outcome. In this case, the fact that he saw no other option lent his situation no air of inevitability, no sense of solidity, no opportunity for surrender. Part of him suspected that he had never intended to stay in Pahquel beyond the four months he had planned for, but rather had assumed that he would somehow figure out what to do next just by being there. As he consciously considered, for the first time, the thought of living in Pahquel forever, he felt a sudden rush of terror at the realization that if he stayed, he would have to fight even harder to protect himself. There would be no escaping Dabimi’s hostile gaze, or its consequences; no means of forgetting Aran if she rejected him. He would have no choice but to face the wrath of anyone he wronged, to dance in all their dances, and to drink from the draught that gave them visions and caused them to vomit into the bushes, swaying in each others’ sweaty arms. He would have no choice but to live as one of them, all his differences having become, over time, unremarkable, insufficient to exempt him from the cruelties of inclusion. Perhaps he had hoped to be absorbed by Pahquel, but only as himself, as a perpetual outsider whose every approximation of their gestures had a perpetually incongruous aspect to it and thus a notable charm, like a child’s when he is playing grownup. To lose his identity as the strange one, he sensed, was to lose his right to a handicap, without which he despaired of getting by.
The fire had died down; he noticed not the darkness, but the chill. He stood up and shook out his legs, walking over to the edge of the forest to relieve himself before he headed into the hut, while images swarmed after him and buzzed around his head like gnats. As he unfurled his mat into his netting and shook out his skins in the dark, he heard the kaag moan in her sleep and shift to her side beside her children. From behind them, on the sleeping ledge, Dabimi’s snores were soft but harsh, nothing like James’s or Kakap’s. “A connoisseur of snoring,” he thought to himself with a kind of black amusement as he ran his dry toothbrush over his teeth, too tired to get up and walk over to the water trough. He pulled his jacket over his shirt and tried to get comfortable on the hard ground, against which the mat and skins gave little padding. Outside the hut, the forest was an engine revving up, proof that the night was not for sleeping.
To the insomniac, only two types of creatures exist, the ones who are already sound asleep and the ones who are awakening to action. There is the scurrying of the spiny rat, and the rooting of the possum, and the bat darting after its quick prey, just as at home there were the newspapermen, typing in a frenzy while the presses rolled behind them, and the revelers dancing in fast-motion like they do on newsreel tapes, and the policemen giving chase down dark, deserted streets. Meanwhile, the sleepers all but disappear into their own stillness, like rabbits curled in their holes, and shut-up flowers, and closed-up shops. The children and the kaag, for all their slow breathing, were as inert as the walls of the hut, and the village was scattered with others who were equally immobile. He knew Kakap was breathing slowly in a hut not far away, and that Anok and Aran were unresponsive, like two unsinged rocks in the midst of a furious fire.
Larry had long ago taken the insomniac’s oath, which bound him to believe he was alone in his misery of muscle cramps and terrible thoughts and hypersensitivity to sound. In this, he was like all other failed sleepers, like Jorge, who knew that any return trip to Sr. Catalpa’s would be fruitless, that there was no undoing the past, and tossed in his bed, certain he was to blame for yet another loss; like Joaquim, propped up on his pillows reading like all the other old men; like his mother, whose children were dead or gone, and husband gone overnight of a heart attack, and the house cluttered up with boxes to be sent ahead with the movers to her sister’s in California. “Isn’t it too soon to leave?” she wondered, her leg knotted up in the covers, when Larry could be returning any day to find the house locked up and empty, a For Sale sign in the yard. There was nothing protective in that oath; yet those who couldn’t sleep would never had been comforted anyway by knowing that others suffered in the night as they did. Last year, while reading late for his European Lit class, he had had to put down the book by Proust that had been their first week’s assignment, unable to go on after reading of the sleepless patient whose only hope of comfort was snuffed out with the light under the door. To know that other lamps were burning, that others struggled under the weight of too many thoughts, would have made his task of finding relief all the more hopeless. As it was, he turned on his mat for another hour and a half, crumpling up the skins and twice catching his zipper in his netting, before being sought out by the image of Aran, who turned slowly to face him, revealing the deep brown of her eyes and her newly symmetrical breasts.
LXXVI
EVEN THE WAN dawn light that crept in between the heavy curtains constituted an assault on the senses of Kamar Sodeis as he lifted his head and then lowered it; even his head’s soft landing on the sweaty feather pillow exposed it to a sort of searing violence. In the chair at the foot of the bed, the Prefect’s soft but burly bodyguard sat slumped over, predictably asleep on his watch. Sodeis had no memory of having entered that room, no memory of whatever useful information he had managed to glean from the Prefect, and no memory of where he had left the case containing his papers and maps, his favorite pistol and his tool kit and his brand-new blue Parker Jotter. He did have the memory of feeling the way he felt now on many other occasions, the raging, sick intuition of somehow having betrayed himself, though how badly in this case he couldn’t venture to guess. He sat up again and tried to slide quietly to the floor, but the bed was higher than he thought, and he landed with a soft, jarring thud, waking the faithful Gabriel.
“Rough night, sir?” said Gabriel, sitting u
p and stretching.
“Something like that,” said Sodeis, reminding himself that it was likely no harm had been done. The things you had to fear were the ones you did sober, since any witnesses to the other kind were no doubt equally drunk. “You too?” he said, smelling the front of his shirt.
“Let me take you to the Prefect.”
“No need. I’m just going to take my things and go. Convey my regrets.” He stood on wobbly legs and hobbled out into the hallway, relieved to find his case on the divan. He picked it up and began to make his way down the path to the river, halting and sliding on his way down. Gabriel stood on the verandah watching him pause on the path to relieve himself and then take off again toward the river, wondering if he should disturb the Prefect anyway but deciding to let well enough alone.
When Sodeis got to the water, he was surprised to see the Senor standing by himself at the end of the dock, in seeming contemplation of the steam that swirled over the water. He started to turn away, but his foot skidded on the rough sandy gravel, and the scraping sound, accompanied by the string of whispered curses that shot from him despite himself, caught the Prefect’s attention. As he approached, he patted the canvas of his case in an effort to discern the shape of the pistol inside it, but couldn’t tell whether the lump his hand found was his gun or just the top of his clipboard.
“Thanks for the bed. I’ll be on my way,” he said coldly, bypassing the dock on his way to his boat.
“I regret to say that you’re no longer welcome here,” said the Prefect, still obviously distraught, “and won’t be until you can moderate your taste for drink.”
“You seem to be a fan of the hard stuff yourself,” said Sodeis, climbing into his boat, laying his case on the thwart and adjusting the oars.
“That sort of slight will not be tolerated either,” said Sr. Catalpa, sensing that things could heat up unnecessarily. He glanced up the hill for Gabriel, and on not finding him began to pull on his fingers with even greater vehemence.
Sodeis stepped out of the boat onto the sand. When he leaned over to launch it, his head began an unbearable pounding, the effect of which was amplified tenfold by the strengthening sun. While he was hunched over, trying to subdue that pain, it occurred to him that his host’s sobriety presented him with yet another unwelcome set of details to contend with. He stood up and approached Catalpa on the dock, scanning the top of the hill to make sure the old man’s attendant hadn’t followed him down. Suddenly, he lunged at him, grabbing one arm and twisting it behind his back. “You breathe a word of anything I said to you last night and you’re a dead man,” he hissed, throwing the Senor down on the dock. He walked to his boat and pushed off. “Remember that! I have ways of finding these things out, and I’m a man of my word,” he said as the boat lurched out, seeking the current.
LXXVII
SARA FOUND MARTINA in the back of her shop, drinking coffee and reading the Gazeta, still in her robe.
“Am I disturbing you?” She stood in the doorway, framed by the low, harsh rays of the morning sun that streamed in through the display window in the front room.
Martina’s first inclination was to turn away, to express her resentment at Sara’s capacity to be kind, a capacity she had lately found lacking in herself. But her loneliness got the better of her and she looked up, folding the paper and laying it on the table beside her.
“Coffee?” she said.
“A vontade.”
Martina wiped out a coffee cup with the edge of her robe but then thought better of it and went to the sink to wash it. She poured the coffee and set it across from her, motioning Sara to sit.
“How are you?” said Sara.
“Tired.” It was true.
“I have some information for you, from the lab, and then two questions.”
“Information first,” said Martina, refilling her own cup.
“Here are the numbers,” said Sara, drawing a piece of paper from her bag and unfolding it on the table.
“Testing for lead is fairly easy, but getting an accurate read on mercury is harder—see here? Organic mercury?—so take that one with a grain of salt. But here’s the surprise. Arsenic. Not a mining runoff. Smelting, but not mining. The only thing I know about arsenic in the tribes is from Marietto, from his stories about latifundios giving out sugar laced with arsenic when they were clearing their lands. So that’s something to take note of, there.
“And the questions?”
“Easy one first, or hard one?”
“Easy one.”
“Or maybe they’re both hard. But the first one: Can I have a lock of your hair? I want to send it along for testing, just in case.”
Martina went to a drawer and pulled out a pair of scissors. She grabbed a handful of hair and started to cut it at the root.
“Not so much!” Sara took the scissors and snipped off a small piece at the back by her neck. While she was holding Martina by the hair, she decided to bring up the second one: “If I could somehow convince Jorge to get back in his plane, if I could talk Joachim into going back for Larry, would you agree to go with them? Give it one more chance?” She put down the scissors and walked around to face her. Sara studied her face for a reaction, not expecting one. She understood that with Martina, even more than with her son, it was a matter of learning to read her expression-lessness for tiny signs of changes in pressure.
“I’m not on speaking terms with certain likely members of that party.”
“You don’t have to talk then,” said Sara, pulling a garlic bulb from her purse. “Question three: Sam told me to ask you if you’d be willing to eat three cloves a day. Stop the arsenic from binding. So no one will get close enough to talk to you anyway,” she said, placing the bulb in Martina’s palm.
LXXVIII
ONCE LARRY HAD what he thought of as a job, he noticed a change in how the others treated him. He would go with Kakap to Panar Ak’s hut in the farthest of the three interlocking villages and strangers would tease him and try to peer inside his basket. Panar’s nieces began to call him by name, and the youngest one always clamored to sit on his lap when they all met under the magno tree to plan their next nataja. Panar Ak smiled broadly, without a trace of his earlier annoyance, as he offered Larry a drink of fermented acai. Whenever Larry was at home, Dabimi’s kaag made him a drink of bacaba juice at the hottest time of day. Tapata, whose baby was still sickly and was sleeping on her arm, waved to him from her kaawa and held out a gourd of mucuri juice, and on his free days, when he followed Anok to whatever chajan she was painting, the owner of the hut, who might once have ignored him, spoke to him directly, and offered nuts and tucuma to them both.
The sense that he had only to work in order to be liked made Larry feel he had suddenly cracked a code that, in the end, had proven far simpler than he had ever imagined, and made him suspect that he had wasted the years of his life from childhood on in searching for a key that was unnecessarily personal and obscure. If, on his first visit to Pahquel, he felt accepted, sometimes even coddled, it was, in his mind, by virtue of his relationship to James, an illusion he nurtured all the more on his return, due to an utter inability to conceive of how he might be of value otherwise. Thus, what he feared most during his illness was the waning not of their memory of him, but of James, which would have left him stranded and exposed. Yet, sitting next to Kakap on his kaawa, sorting out the branches from the roots, he felt as happy as he had ever been, and hummed along when Kakap sang the song about how Nataji taught them to go on the nataja, how to cut the stems and tie them and present them to Panar. The idea that he had earned such contentment on his own, without James’s intervention, was simultaneously exhilarating and, he suddenly noticed as he wound a bundle with reeds and handed it to Kakap, deeply sad as well. He tried to turn from whatever thought had brought on the sadness by listening to Kakap as he sang to the stalks and leaves.
Each plant was treated differently, tied with a different sort of tie and knotted in a distinctive way, according to its
nature and its purpose and its place in the lineage of ancestors. Kakap would sing the specific story of each one as they worked, nodding for him to join in on the repeated lines. As he bound the stems of panatan with strings he had pulled from the rough coat of a tatara tuber, he sang of Pantor, his own ancestor, who had created the herb from a paca bone he had rolled in dirt and then dipped into the river. He leaned forward to show how the stem was so long because Pantor had been tall, and how the scent of the tiny yellow flowers, which were sheltered under the leaves, had been Pantor’s scent. “It’s a gift to us small ones,” he said. The leaves glistened even in the shade, brighter than the crumpled bits of parchment that were its flowers, and when Larry turned the plant in his hands, it gave off a faint, musky smell. The story was told of how it had wandered until it found its home in the place where the soil around a decomposing log mixed with silt from the river; of how it became a plant; of how it had to be blended with the herb that was its kaag in order to soothe pain, of how only one cluster of flowers was to be cut from each stem. As he sang, Kakap referred to the plant as “he,” and Pantor as both the discoverer of it and the plant itself. He lay the bundles on top of one another in a low basket, pushing the basket away with his foot when it was filled.
“Why did you say we’re his smaller and smaller children?” asked Larry as they moved on to the next substance, the sap they had collected in painted gourds. There were four types in all, corresponding to the four aspects of the body: leaves and stems, trunks and bark, roots and tubers, and sap.
“We grow smaller with every birth,” he said. “When our grandfathers lived, they were tall.” He shook his head as he peeled back the leaves that were layered over the mouth of one of the gourds. “After two hands of sons, we have shrunken and bent, and after two hands more we will no longer be able to reach the tops of our chajans.”