by Nancy Burke
“How do you know?” said Larry as he stirred the sap with a stick, imagining Kakap reaching up with his missing fingertip. “Isn’t your son taller than you are?”
Kakap waved him off and began to sing about the sap, which was the blood of the tree named Juru, after Anok’s ancestor, who had discovered it. The Juru’s sap was special, according to its song, because it hardened so quickly, forming a glossy shell over the chajans that kept their colors from fading. Thus, Kakap sometimes called it the guardian of the lines, as he sang and stirred, holding up the stick now and again to watch the thick amber resin run off the end, back into the mouth of the gourd. Also, in small quantities, it cured toothache. They pulled stray bits of bark and dried leaves and a few small beetles out of the viscous liquid and then sealed the gourds again with wax and leaves.
“Do you know the song of these?” said Kakap, holding up some tubers in his hands. To Larry’s surprise, he could say their name and sing a few lines of their song, sure that he was getting the words mixed up and telling the story wrong. Kakap unfurled his slow smile and patted Larry’s arm in time to his uneven chant. Larry didn’t recoil, but sang a little louder, pleased at himself for having learned more than he thought. The song stayed in his head all the way to Anok’s, and he began to sing it out loud as he approached her hut as a way of announcing his arrival. Anok came out and stood on the kaawa listening, leaning against the front of the house with her arms crossed and her head tilted to one side. Aran, too, stuck her head out of the door of the hut to listen, and smiled despite herself before withdrawing again into the darkness behind the chajan.
“I’ll walk with you to Dabimi’s,” said Anok, clearly pleased with him and yet also clearly wishing to hurry him away.
The sun was low in the sky as they made their way up the winding path between the scattered rows of houses. Parrots swiveled their heads to watch as they went by, and some of the men from the middle village hailed them when they passed on their way back from a hunt with two pacas and an armadillo slung between them. Kinata leaned across the jagged line of sticks that defined the front edge of her kaawa to offer Larry a papaya, and Tapata called out an offer of mucuri as they passed. Lita offered nuts and Kanani offered tapereba juice, and Anok, as far as Larry could tell, offered him Aran, by leaning towards him while they were standing alone in the clearing, away from the doorways of the huts, and whispering, “Jitana, press your claim.”
LXXIX
JOAQUIM ROCHA FUMBLED on his desk in Belem through the agglomeration of bark samples and talismans and papers and books which he referred to as his library, searching in vain for his reading glasses. Giving up, he bent again over the worn red notebook, squinting at the primitive script and scribbled marginalia and strange symbols and off-kilter diagrams of circles and squares. He was not an educated man in the traditional sense, but the past nearly fifty years spent among academics, bureaucrats, garimpeiros, politicians, tribal elders, sertanistas, cowboys, bootleggers, seringais; men wielding spears, clubs, machetes, shotguns and curses straight from the mouths of the most fearsome Gods, had left him with a belief in the power of patient, consistent effort to clear up the most difficult problems. And for the ones he couldn’t cut through on his own, he had an endless file of contacts to whom he could turn for help, and an absence of the sort of pride that would prohibit him from using it them. The obvious choice in this case was Bruno Oliveira, who even in retirement possessed the scientific currency he sought, but also, and more important, the loyalty and reticence he required of those to whom he turned.
“Daniel!” Joaquim called out to his youngest son, the last at home, who at that minute was passing his open door.
“Father!” said Daniel, coming in and standing by the desk.
“Get me Professor Oliveria’s number, would you?”
Daniel, shaking his head, began digging through the piles. He pulled out his father’s leather binder of addresses. The son was perpetually amused by his father’s disorder, and aware, at some level, that his father was returning his bemusement—the same look, but with sharper edges. The look signified Joaquim’s disappointment in his son for being raised in a house, by parents, signified his disappointment in children everywhere, all of them, for having been softened by lives of ease.
“And while you’re at it, can you find me my reading glasses?” said Joaquim, as the son reached over patiently and peeled them from atop his father’s head.
LXXX
WHEN LARRY RETURNED at evening with Kakap after a day of sap-gathering, he found the village in turmoil. A crowd of people in body paint was gathered around a peccary roasting on a spit in the clearing, and another crowd milled beside a large trough of fermented Murcuri juice, stirring it with painted-handled sticks. Kakap led him through a clutch of children trying to play kara amid the swarms of men, past the women braiding blue and green feathers into each others’ hair, and on to a hut at the far edge of the village where Aran and Anok were still at work. Kakap walked up to the kaawa and lowered his yoke of dangling gourds while the women caught them and propped them upright on the ground with sticks. He motioned for him to do the same, and Larry bent down slowly until he could feel his burden lighten as the gourds touched the ground. Anok untied the largest one from Larry’s yoke, patting him quickly on the arm. She handed it to Aran, who pulled back the piper leaves that had been used to seal it and examined the sap that ran clear off the end of her stick.
“Can I start?” she asked her mother.
“Is it good?” said Anok.
“Um,” said Aran, turning to the chajan behind them, which was painted all the way to the top. Feathers had been hung from the center of the lintel overhead, like mistletoe, he thought. Aran started to cover the chajan with the sap, using a stack of turpa leaves tied together as a brush. She worked from top to bottom and then began at the top again, stepping on a log to reach overhead.
“See how quickly it dries?” said Kakap, catching Larry’s hand in his broad net of fingers and holding it up to the wood. “That’s why we waited until the end to get it, and then ran back. You remember, like I told you—Juru was quick.” Aran looked down at them from on top of the log and said, “Your hand is going to stick.” Larry made a face and pretended he couldn’t pull his hand away.
“So what happens to this chajan?” he said.
“It goes back,” said Anok, waving her hands towards the wall of trees behind the hut. “Asator will sing it,” she said, reaching out to catch Aran’s arm, “when Aran goes to tell him we’re ready.”
“Why should I go?” said Aran in a defiant voice, standing close beside her mother as though determined not to leave her alone with Larry and Kakap.
“Patiri!” said her mother, giving her a push.
“I’ll go,” said Kakap, heading off before Anok could stop him. Anok scowled. They sat in uncomfortable silence, Larry on the log and the two women squatting beside him, listening to the sounds of talking and laughing, and the shouts of children at the game. The smell of the roasting meat reminded him that he hadn’t eaten since the morning.
“Kakap is good to me,” he said finally, in an effort to make the silence seem benign.
“His father too, and his father’s father,” said Aran defiantly, following Larry’s lead in avoiding her mother’s distress. “Two hands of fathers, all the way back.” She waved at the hut, or beyond it, into the woods, toward the river.
“It’s good when children follow their parents,” said Anok sharply. “Aran still has it in her head to gather, despite the change. Only Karun from her age group is doing that now.”
“Change?” Larry said vaguely, trying to pretend he didn’t know what she meant, in the hope of eliciting some more detailed explanation.
Instead, Anok came up and pulled Aran around, turning her shoulders so that she was facing him. Aran looked away, as did Larry, back up the path towards the clearing. Dabimi was coming down the path towards them, with his face frozen into a fierce smile, at the head of a larg
e group. Larry and Aran both caught his eye and quickly turned back again to face the more familiar danger. When Aran heard Asator’s voice, she jumped up and tried to roll the stump forward. A few of the men, including Dabimi, helped her turn it upright so Asator could sit down. The space was cramped, and the press of bodies made it hard to breathe. The odor of sweat filled every crevice. Anok pushed Larry into the hands of some women who came up from behind the hut to paint him. While they smeared ochre into the indentations on either side of his shins, whispering to each other about the hair on his legs, Asator began to sing about the chajan, which had walked hands and feet of rain in a single stride. Between each verse, he left time for Anok to sing a part of the story depicted on the chajan, while the members of the audience called out or clicked their tongues or clapped their hands against their stomachs, smearing their paint. Behind Asator stood Taran and his family, who were rocking nervously from foot to foot, anxious to hear what was going to be said to their ancestors about them. Beside them, at the far corner of the crowd, stood Dabimi and Aran, paying no attention to the story. It looked to Larry like Dabimi was trying to grab Aran’s arm, to whisper to her or pull her aside, but his view was obscured by the head of one of the old women, who had finished his ankles and now stood up in front of him and held him by the hair to paint his face.
“I have to go,” he whispered, trying to shake off her grasp.
“You’re not finished,” she hissed back while the other woman drew a thick line with her finger across his forehead. By the time they released him, Anok was already singing of the births of Taran’s children, who were still too young to hunt. Larry squeezed between the rows of sweating bodies, his skin making squeaking sounds as it caught skin. He got to Aran just as Asator was singing the last refrain. Dabimi was gone. The song ended in mass confusion, as everyone howled and clapped and streamed over Taran’s old hut, stripping it of its walls and roof. Asator was being led out on the arm of his daughter up the hill to where the food was, and a line followed behind him like ants, carrying huge pieces of the disassembled hut on their heads.
“Wait!” Larry hissed at Aran as she started off into the stream of bodies. She turned to look at him, her gaze intensified by the concentric circles of paint around her eyes.
“What did he say to you?” whispered Larry when the last of the others had gone.
“Who?” she said, looking away.
“You know,” he said.
She walked backward a few paces, stepping into the open space that used to be the inside of the hut, framed by the chajan that now stood naked, without its robes of lashed cane and thatch, its bare legs and feather genitals bright against the trees.
“He intends to press a claim,” she said, “which is more than you intend.”
Thus was Larry’s decision made. “My claim will be the first,” he said, walking towards her, reaching out for her arm.
“I don’t believe you.”
“I was going to speak to your mother tonight.”
“Then you will be too late,” she said, with sudden emotion in her voice.
“Why too late? Aren’t I jitana?”
“Another chajan gone, and Dabimi’s claim is ready now,” she said, walking through the place where the back wall would have been, heading off into the woods. “And besides, my mother thinks you’re too afraid to bring me to your father’s house.”
Larry stumbled as he followed after her, desperate and bedraggled, just as on the day she had first found him. His eyes smarted from sweat and paint, so that he had trouble keeping her in view. As she ran deeper and deeper into the forest, the brown of her skin faded into her surroundings, making it harder for him to see her at all.
“He can’t do that!” he called after her in English, his voice sounding whiny and small. Vines hit him in the face, and scrub scratched at the paint on his ankles.
At last she stopped and waited for him to catch up, standing with her back to him. As he reached her, she began to pull, violently, at the vines that covered what looked like a stand of old tree trunks.
“What are you doing?” he said, fearful that it was him she was ripping to shreds before his eyes.
“Aren’t you going to do anything?” she answered, without stopping. He reached forward and grabbed a vine, ripping it with a snap from its moorings. They panted and grunted and tore at the leaves side by side until their fingers touched wood and they both stopped at once, looking at each other, breathing hard.
“This is yours,” she said, pointing to a space between the vines where the wood seemed to glow red in the dim light. Larry yanked hard and the vines fell away to reveal a painted surface, still shiny and slick to the touch.
“It’s a chajan,” he said, stepping back.
“It’s yours, right?” she said, setting to work again. After what felt like an hour, the two of them stood back and looked at the chajan standing naked in a pool of black shadows, its dress of dull green leaves around its ankles. Where Aran pointed, Larry could see a triangle, James etched into its thigh at chest height.
“It’s Jarara’s, so it’s yours,” she said, walking forward until she stood within it, placing one hand on each of its legs. “See? You don’t need Dabimi’s—this is your father’s house too.”
Suddenly he understood her, and his heart began to race. He could barely look at her, let alone walk towards her, or touch her with his outstretched arm. She stood watching him, and in the silence, he felt his muscles go taut, as though his knees were going to crack. The paint on his skin was more oppressive and heavy in the heat than his shorts were, as though it were clogging his lungs. His stomach was knotted in hunger. His palms and his forehead were sticky.
“I need to lie down,” he said, squeezing past her through the doorway on instinct, rather than walking through what would have been a wall.
“On the ground?” she said.
“Sorry,” he said in English as his arm grazed hers, aware as though with heightened vision of the absurdity of their standing crammed together in the doorway of a house whose walls were nothing but open air. He pushed through and stumbled into the space defined by the imaginary walls, and lay face upward, gasping for breath. Aran stayed in the doorway and stared at him, a look of horror on her face.
“You still won’t?” she said, in a voice full of disbelief.
“No, no,” he said. “That isn’t it. Come here.”
She came and crouched beside him, and he pushed his hand out through the layers of undergrowth, of overgrowth and empty space, through confusion and shame, and took her hand and held it to his chest, where it tossed like a dinghy on the waves. He pulled her down next to him, and they lay together, still except for the rising and falling of her hand as he struggled for breath. At last, for no reason he could think of, his breathing grew more placid, as though a danger had passed, and he relaxed and stretched, feeling his spine against the dirt beneath his shirt. Even his hunger was gone. His mind, which had been racing, stopped at the point beyond which it couldn’t bear to go, just short of replaying a scene from his first semester in college, when an awkward, drunken encounter with a girl from his Western Civ. class while his roommate was at the movies culminated in a spreading red stain on his bottom bedsheet. The stain was revealed to the world the next morning when his roommate’s friends found him asleep and stripped his bed with him still in it, with a flourish that made concrete the indissoluble connection he had previously suspected between sex, humiliation, and betrayal. He even forgot, for a minute, that she was there, so that when he shifted on the dirt floor of what was once the home of his line and drew his hand up to his chest, he was startled to find her hand beneath it. After lying for a while in his grasp, she slowly lifted his hand and placed it on her own breast, where it could touch her heartbeat and snag in the tangle of her hair.
Had he not had certain memories to cling to, he might still have stopped at the kaawa of that small hut and paced back and forth in helplessness and fear, never entering through her body�
��s unpainted chajan. His heart began to race again as he sat up and slipped off his shorts, more out of fear than with desire, as he tried to push away the thought that his failure to act would cost him not only her trust, but Anok’s as well, and perhaps his survival in Pahquel. The memories on which he threw himself were not of his freshman year tryst, or stories from books, pin-ups at the barber shop, his eighth grade teacher, or the woman in Rio, beckoning to him from the doorway of a dingy house, pulling the hem of her skirt up to her breasts as he passed. They were, rather, the memories of holding her as a baby, when she reassured him, and he could make her laugh merely by shaking his head so that his hair fell over her stomach. It didn’t matter that they weren’t real memories; the one who lay beside him was surely older than he was, certainly not a girl of eight. He clung to them because he needed them, needed to remember the soothing whisper of skin on skin, the freedom of moving from place to place with her in his arms, the sense that he knew her, to whom he’d barely spoken a dozen words. He closed his eyes and remembered how she smelled, of must and sour milk. He remembered how she used to cling to him when Anok tried to take her back. “We’re safe now,” he whispered to her in English by way of love-talk as he stroked her hair and brushed her shoulder with his mouth, stretching out and entering, pressing his knees into the mud.
LXXXI
EDUARDO CATALPA UNDERSTOOD full well that he had no business in the forest, and that he depended for his very survival upon the illusion he had created in the midst of it of a world more suited to his temperament. Yet when he pulled himself to his feet at the end of the dock and began to make his way haltingly up the slope toward Gabriel, who was running towards him with his arms open, it occurred to the Prefect in a flash that his carefully crafted illusion had precipitously shattered, and that somehow despite this fact, he was still alive. The thought was not merely terrifying, but somehow intoxicating as well.