by Nancy Burke
“Let me help you,” said Gabriel, reaching him just as the Senor attained the crest of the hill.
“Thank you, Gabriel. I’m all right,” said Senor Catalpa, allowing himself to be supported nonetheless.
They limped into the parlor, where the Senor collapsed on the divan. He opened his mouth to request a chardonnay and then closed it again, feeling a sudden revulsion at the thought of drink. Instead, he looked around as though to make sure Sodeis wasn’t lurking, perhaps behind the bust of Apollo on its marble pedestal, or within the folds of the drapes.
“I’ll send Joao to the mission right away, sir, and they can summon the police.”
“Not yet,” said Catalpa, testing his arm, finding it not broken or dislocated, but swollen and red from his hard landing. “First, get me a compress,” he said, dismissing him with a wave of his good hand.
By the time Gabriel returned with the damp towel, Sr. Catalpa had reached a resolution the sheer audacity of which held him sufficiently in thrall that he had forgotten all about the pain in his arm. His reasoning had proceeded thus: Within three weeks, he was to be gone from Paruqu forever, closing a chapter that he could only regard as the centerpiece of his life. This chapter had unfolded thus far without his having accomplished anything whatsoever, other than the creation of a sort of vitrine of refined stasis that had afforded his children a relatively carefree childhood, despite the intrusions of the tutors, and his wife, two decades of marital disillusionment and boredom. But perhaps James had been right after all, that he had been an honorable man, capable of more, not merely of compliance, but indeed of something heroic, which might even allow his children, on his return, to see him in a new light. Of course he wouldn’t have dreamed of pursuing Sodeis himself, or even of alerting the police, who, in his experience, caused more disturbance than they prevented. Rather, he sought a small act of defiance, which could allow him to defend himself in a way that he never had before, and would even have significance beyond himself, without putting himself in undue danger. He had to tell, in defiance of Sodeis, but tell what? And to whom?
When he looked up, he suddenly noticed Gabriel standing beside him with the towel. He unbuttoned his shirt and allowed him to place the compress, realizing gratefully at that moment that the arm that had been affected was his left one, leaving him able to write.
“Get my lap desk and some paper,” he instructed Gabriel, remembering with pleasure that he had discovered, lodged between the cushions of the divan after Sodeis had been removed to the bedroom, an excellent blue pen, a ballpoint, the design of which was pleasing enough somehow to offer confirmation of the wisdom of his plan. He bent over the desk, writing quickly, and then sealed the letter with a flourish, addressing it and handing it off to Gabriel. “Have Joao send it now!” he said, suddenly overcome by deferred pain.
LXXXII
THE MOON HAD passed through four full cycles, and although she hadn’t bled during that time, Aran’s belly had barely swollen. All across the village, people had been whispering, and then talking openly, suspicious of her story and her mother’s quick decision to embrace it. The new hut had been constructed on a rise behind the home of Piri and Karon and their baby, but it stood blank and empty, tempting the forest to re-claim it. Spiders cast their nets across the chajan, as though to confirm that the threshold was not, as things stood, to be transgressed. Disintegrating moths hung in the doorway, twitching in the forest’s exhale.
Their life together began dramatically enough, with their return to the village just in time to interrupt Dabimi’s efforts to press his claim to Anok by presenting her with a quiver of perfectly hewn arrows and a basket of folded boar-hide laces.
“That is not his father’s house!” Dabimi bellowed, his voice steaming like ice in the heat. “They would have had to come to my house, where I would never have allowed it.”
“Which wouldn’t have done anyway,” said Anok, just as coldly. “There’s no consummation in the woman’s father’s home.”
Dabimi stopped in mid-protest, his mouth and eyes wide open. Finally, he collected himself. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said firmly.
“I know my child’s father,” said Anok, “who left me nothing but the curse of his ancestors. And I almost cursed myself for you.” She spat in the dirt. “I’m old now, and soon I’ll have my own line to face.”
When Larry arrived home that night, he found his belongings in a pile just outside the boundary of the kaawa. He stood and stared at the pile. He didn’t hear Kakap come up behind him, and moved only when Kakap nearly fell as he tried to shoulder his pack. He took the pack and gave Kakap the shoulder bags.
Larry had hoped that by establishing his status as Aran’s fiancée, he would be shown renewed deference, as when he first began to gather. What he found, however, was that there would be no recognition of their union until the birth of their child; no wedding, no painting on their chajan, no dancing, no greetings but giggles and whispers at his back. Without any public recognition of their status, he again found himself fearful that she would slip through his grasp. He was plagued by longing and foreboding when he was away from the village for more than a day at a time. After moving his belongings to Kakop’s, he filled the days when he wasn’t out gathering by helping Aran with the household tasks, especially the ones involving lifting. He soon began to haul the water on his own, and dig and mash the tubers, but still the baby didn’t grow, and the talk around them became more apparent, and more dire. Aran began to turn away as they bent together over the cooking stones, and Anok hesitated before taking his arm as he left at nightfall.
“It takes nine moon cycles to make a baby,” Larry would remind them, growing more and more unsure of himself each time he said it.
“Three,” Aran would say firmly, turning away.
“Maybe even ten, two hands of cycles,” he added one day when Aran seemed particularly upset, as he pushed the breakfast from the cooking stone into a bowl with his stick.
“You tricked me,” she said, leaving with the bowl in her hands. She didn’t come out again. He went up to the chajan and called to her.
“Do you want me to stay?”
“No,” she said.
When Kakap returned from his visit to the far village, he found Larry weeping into the crook of his arm, leaning on his pack with his knees hunched up to his chin.
“Is something wrong with her?” he asked, his eyes searching Kakap’s. “Isn’t it ten cycles? Do you think I cursed her?”
“It’s not Ark Pol,” Kakap said cautiously, wiping a tear from Larry’s face. Not a monkey ancestor’s curse. But despite himself, he had wondered to Asator whether it was safe to allow Larry to sleep on a mat beside his children, given Tapata baby’s illness, which he had dismissed until now as the result of an insult to its grandfather.
“We’ll know in ten cycles, won’t we?” said Asator, reaching his hand out and holding it still while Kakap brought his arm up to meet it. “Not so long now.” The grasp was surprisingly strong; the pressure of the fingers lingered on Kakap’s arm as he walked home. He greeted Larry with a special warmth, both out of his guilt at having doubted him and out of his sense of Larry’s distress. “Let’s do the kina,” he said, pulling out the grinding stones and the furrowed wooden slabs. He began to sing the story, but then fell silent, and they sat together watching the juice run through the veins in the wood to collect, purple-red, in the bowls at the bottom of the slabs.
That night, as Kakap walked to Anok’s house, the moon seemed to glow before his eyes, lighting the path. “So we’ll wait ten moons,” he whispered to her as they sat together on her kaawa. “That’s not so long now.”
“What else did Asator say?” said Anok, feigning disinterest but listening for something in particular.
“He only said to wait.”
“Maybe he disagreed with my decision.”
“He didn’t say so.” Kakap stood up and brushed the dust off his legs.
“Maybe
you would have made another choice.”
Kakap looked down at her still squatting in a corner of the kaawa. Even hunched over, she was formidable, even in doubt.
“We’re two old tiXaja,” said Kakap, starting to leave. Two old trees, the indestructible ones, the kind used for chajans. “You had no other choice.” Anok nodded a grudging agreement as she watched him walk away, into the light of the burgeoning fifth moon.
LXXXIII
IT WAS CLOSE to midnight, his neighbors were outraged to notice, by the time Jorge picked up the phone. The call didn’t catch him shaving, as calls used to do, but rather on his back on his sofa, with a damp towel pressed to his eyes. He rose and reached for the receiver not from a wish to hear from anyone, but from a desperate need to make the ringing stop.
“Alo, desconhecido!” said Joaquim’s voice on the line. “Where you been?”
The obvious thing would have been to hang up, impulsively, and then to lift the receiver again and bury it under pillows forever. But Jorge remained frozen in place, pressing the earpiece to his temple.
“I’m calling to apologize. Will you hear me out?” said Joaquim, his voice muffled by skin and bone.
Jorge held the receiver more tightly against his throbbing forehead.
“I shouldn’t have let it happen,” said Joaquim, “and I’d like a chance to make amends and more. But now we have some real leads to follow. It would be your chance to right two wrongs at once.” He paused. “No. More like seven or eight wrongs. Who could turn that down? We could be ready to go in two days.”
“I’m not available,” said Jorge finally, into the silence that held the place of a question. “I have a real job now.”
“You had a real job before, and no one’s been able to find you, short of camping outside your door, and you are obviously too slime-headed to care that the people who care for you are suffering while you’ve taken up residence under a rock with the rest of the reptiles.”
The obvious thing grew more obvious and more impossible at once. “Maybe I can figure out how to right my own wrongs. Maybe I’m doing that now.”
“Righting wrongs and creating others that are far worse. You don’t answer the phone. You don’t respond to anyone’s concerns but your own. I guess you’re not answering your mail much these days.”
That was true; there was a stack of unopened letters by the door.
“It’s all I could do to keep Silvio from coming over and killing you, which was maybe a good idea anyway, especially since you seem to be giving him a pretty good headstart yourself.”
“He wouldn’t be able to find me, even if he tried,” said Jorge, getting up to warm the compress under running water. He lay the compress on the sink and took his glasses from his shirt pocket. He put them on slowly and walked to the window, squinting as though searching the night for his own approach.
“Do you really think we don’t know where you are? Do you really think Mrs. Tomoio wouldn’t have seen you walking back and forth in front of her window day and night for six months? Do you really think she wouldn’t have taken pity on your mother?” Joaquim was deliberately not confronting him with the question of why it would be that someone who was supposedly so desperate to get away would move just two blocks from where he lived before, and keep his old telephone number, a feat that usually required a substantial bribe to arrange. He was right. Jorge was a failure even in his efforts to disappear.
“I need some time,” said Jorge, squeezing out the compress in the sink and placing it again over his eyes. “I’m trying something different. Tell them all I just need time.”
“I’ll tell them all you’re a stinking, reeking rat,” said Joaquim, in a softer, resigned voice. “So how’s the new life?”
“Stinking and reeking,” said Jorge, pressing the compress to his eyes.
LXXXIV
WHEN KAKAP APPEARED in the doorway, the moonlight intensified around him, as the rays that escape from an eclipse contract and burn. If he noticed Larry looking at him, he didn’t acknowledge him, but went about his nightly rituals: unrolling his mat, passing his web of fingers back and forth over his head as he sat on the corner of his sleeping ledge; singing to himself under his breath, a blessing on his family. One night not long after he had moved in, Larry noticed that Kakap had added his name to the roster of the living blessed, and James to the longer list of the dead. Since then, the sound of his name in the center of Kakap’s song had always given him comfort, but that night, he half expected not to hear it. When he did, his eyes stung with gratitude, and he struggled to stifle the sounds he would have made by crying. After the song came to an end, he did his best to weave it again in his head from the noises the forest provided.
In his mind, things were encroaching and receding; the sun forced its way through the slats in the walls at dawn in rays as sharp as darts, and the rains, when they came, pierced his face like ice shards, and every whisper stung him, and every thought of Aran and Anok was like a splinter in his stomach. What fell away were the familiar things, the comforts; Jorge and Joaquim, long gone from Sr. Catalpa’s house, stepping into their boat again and again and pushing off, heading farther and farther upstream. His uncle stood on the far side of the world and reeled in the string to which were tied the memories of his habits and the way he smelled and the sound of his snoring. Each night, his parents were dislodged from their house and flew off in a storm, and the house itself went spinning into the air, like the one in The Wizard of Oz. He thought of the chajan of Anok’s house, in which he appeared as an odd, one-eyed icon, and the chajan of their old house in the forest, and Dabimi’s chajan, and Kakap’s, on which his children and his parents were joined at shoulder height by his two hands, depicted as two elongated brown finger-shaped objects reaching up and down along the right side of the wooden doorframe. He thought of his own chajan, picturing it only as a blur, its raw wood limbs forming a stark foyer to his and Aran’s abandoned home.
Each morning, he dreaded word from Kakap as to whether they were gathering or grinding or meeting with Panar Ak in the far village or doing nothing at all. There was no comfort in going, and even less in staying, though worst of all was having to walk through the three villages one after another, greeted by fewer and fewer people, avoiding Panar’s eyes while trying to remember which roots and leaves were to be gathered, in what quantities and from what distances and heights. Finally, he asked Kakap if he could stay behind on meeting days, and Kakap agreed, with apparent relief. After that, he used the time to do slowly what he otherwise, when he wasn’t out gathering, had rushed each afternoon to finish. During the height of the day, while most people were away from the village or asleep or sitting together under the shade trees around the circle of logs talking in low voices, he would retrieve the empty gourds from behind Aran and Anok’s house and walk down the thin, worn path to the river and sit for a while in the shadows, watching the water glide silently over the rocks. He would scramble down the steep wall of the channel, using tree roots as treads, and fill the jugs, tying their laces together across his shoulders before climbing up again. After leaning the jugs against the side of the house and returning to Kakap’s, he would pull a book from his pack and sit down in the corner of the kaawa, hanging his head down over it so he wouldn’t catch the eyes of those who passed.
He had come halfway around the world, he thought in misery to himself, only to take desperate refuge in the same books he had inhabited at home. There was The Lord of the Rings, and Henry Walter Bates, and a worn copy of the Aeneid, which a stranger had left on the train to Boston. There was the old leather-bound atlas, which he couldn’t bear to open, and the thin volume of Van Gogh’s letters, given to him by James so that “you’ll always have someone with you—other than me—any time you want, who understands you.” He opened the book to search for his companion, but today his friend seemed to taunt him by talking on and on about the miracle of birth and the inspiration provided to him by children. “There is something deeper, more infinite, m
ore eternal than the ocean in the expression of the eyes of a little baby when it wakes in the morning,” he read and turned the page. “Young wheat has something inexpressibly pure and tender about it, which awakens the same emotion as the expression of a sleeping baby,” he read, and tried to turn away. “I think that there is no better place for meditation than by a rustic hearth and an old cradle with a baby in it,” he traced unwittingly with his eyes. As he moved to close the book, with disgust and stifled rage, a single phrase jumped out at him, which he read again and again in a sort of joyful disbelief, with the uncanny sense that a prayer had been answered. “The nine months to childbirth …” said his friend, and Larry repeated him under his breath, first in a whisper and then out loud. “The nine months to childbirth …” When Kakap arrived home from the far village, Larry told him eagerly about the vindication of a claim he couldn’t imagine how he had come to doubt, but Kakap looked with confusion at the passage he pointed to, and drew out the bowls and berries and gestured for him to start. Larry finished quickly, singing as he worked, nodding when Kakap sat down beside him to tell him about the next day’s trip.
‘He’s happy now, and sings the songs again,” Kakap reported to Anok after they had returned from the forest. “He is certain that the child is going to appear in two hands of moons, and showed me a thing that he said told him so.”
Anok might have shaken her head out of bitterness and waved him away with her hand, but Aran’s belly had grown, and that day she had said she felt a kick in her stomach after the morning meal.
What they both knew, Anok and Kakap, was that nothing could happen that hadn’t happened before. Persons had been held back for a hand of days or more—had failed to return from the forest as planned, having been tricked by a devious dead relative, or singled out for instruction by a loving one. It was common to be held back, Kakap reminded Anok, and not always for the worst. This child has been held back in order to be taught to gather, Kakap told Mabara the next day, and Mabara told Jer, and Jer told his brother and his brother’s wife while they were hanging the fish for drying. “That child is going to know more than we do; it’ll teach us.”