by Nancy Burke
On his way through the village with the water jugs, Larry noticed that the older men nodded to him on the path again, and the women got up from their mats and poured out gourds of murcuri juice as they used to, and the knot that had tightened around his chest began to loosen slowly, allowing him to breathe. One day, while he was leaning the water gourds against the rear wall of Aran’s house, she surprised him from behind, walking awkwardly toward him, looking puffy and unbalanced.
They stood in silence and then both looked away. Larry kicked at the dirt, and rolled a stone back and forth with his shoe, and played with the frayed hem of his flak jacket. When he finally looked up again, he saw her doubled over and ran to catch her as she sank.
“Are you sick?” he whispered, holding her by the arms.
“Let’s go,” she hissed back through gritted teeth. “To the house.”
She limped off into the forest, gradually straightening as she went. Larry followed after her helplessly, his heart pounding, panting to catch up. His mind was a blur; could he have failed to count the moons right? Did he miss one? He tried to envision the pages of the notebook on which he had placed the checkmarks in a line, and nearly ran her down as she stopped again and squatted with her hands around her stomach. By the time they reached the old house and he had fashioned a dry bed on the muddy ground inside it with his jacket and shorts, the sun had withdrawn from the sky, replaced by a moon that gave nearly as much light. Aran lay on her side, breathing heavily, shivering and sweating, with her hair matted against her face. Larry paced back and forth in a panic, stopping every few minutes to stare into the semi-darkness behind him, searching the forest for intruders, sweeping the scene for a danger he knew to be close by.
“What should I do?” he whispered more to himself than to her, and received no answer from either. At times, she seemed to be asleep, and once, he panicked when he didn’t hear her breathing. He crouched beside her and put his ear to her mouth, and thought he heard the faintest hiss, but not the rhythmic in-and-out of breath. He shook her by the shoulders, and she jerked her head up, hitting his temple with her forehead. The blow sent him flying backwards. His first impulse was to run, but she groaned and he whirled around and slipped on the leaves into the mud as he tried to get up, jostling her as he landed. It was thus that his course was determined: to lie beside her as he had fallen, shivering in the chill of her sweat, holding one arm across her chest as a restraint while she writhed and thrashed like a snake shedding its skin. Finally, the thrashing subsided, and a minute passed, and another, in which only the smallest of movements occurred: his teeth chattering, and her breath in shallow gasps, and the fluttering of a tiny moth in the air above their legs. A pause in a universal frenzy, a glitch in the record, and then a sudden scream, an explosion that scattered fluid everywhere, as though her body were a gourd that had burst, and an unfamiliar cry, an accusation or a shriek or a sob.
“Get it,” she cried, moving his hands downward. “Bite,” she said, holding the cord up to his mouth in her slimy hands. Larry took a gasping breath and bit down hard, and felt his teeth tear through flesh. Again and again he bit, until the cord was severed, and then he turned aside and vomited into the mud. The mud received what came to it, sweat and saliva and vomit and ooze, and covered it in mosses. They fell back, pressed together on a skin of leaves and matted shorts, and the infant lay between them, wrapped in his muddy jacket, howling into the forest while they slept.
LXXXV
SILVIO’S ANGER WAS obvious. Unlike most people, who raise their voices or gesture aggressively, Silvio, when provoked, became still and quiet, in alarming contrast to his naturally belligerent presence. He sat at the edge of his battered desk without moving, glaring from beneath his owly brow at the map in front of him while through the receiver, Joaquim’s voice floated out and fell around his shoulders like a densely woven net. If there was one thing Silvio couldn’t tolerate, it was the threat of being ensnared.
“There’s nothing to be done at this point,” Joaquim said, taking advantage of Silvio’s rare silence. “As far as I’m concerned, you don’t know anything about it.”
“Except that I’ve lost my best pilot over it,” said Silvio through gritted teeth.
“We’ll get to that later,” said Joaquim. “I think he’ll be back.”
“You think? You think? Fuck your thinking! Your thinking is costing me plenty.” Silvio’s raised voice was a sign that, despite himself, he felt reassured by Joaquim’s confidence in Jorge’s return.
“There’s more to it than you know,” said Joaquim, equally unruffled by Silvio’s silence and his bluster. “But like I said, I’d suggest you forget anything you know about it.”
“All I know is that I made myself two promises: to do my job, which means to keep my men in line, and to look after the kid, and you’ve managed to ruin both of them. So just tell me what you’re going to be up to next. Are you going back for the kid, or not?”
“I’m not,” said Joaquim, “not for a while, and you’re not sending anybody else, either.”
“And a while is how long nowadays?”
“A while is until I get some inkling that Jorge is going to move on it.”
“A sign! You’re waiting for a sign? Maybe for some voodoo message or some mysterious wind. Maybe you’ll find it in the bottom of your caipirinha. I need to know now when you’re planning to get him.”
“You should have come out, Silvio,” said Joaquim, ignoring him. “I told you that. You should have come out when we were all together here. You should have given yourself a chance to say goodbye.”
“You want good-bye?” shouted Silvio, slamming the receiver onto the cradle and holding it down like a victorious boxer. Only when he could be sure that the match was truly over, that his opponent was truly out, did he remove his hand in order to open the door and wave in Maria, his long-suffering secretary. “Take a letter,” he barked to her, gesturing at her roughly to sit down. “Address it to Mr. Joaquim Rocha, 35 rua de Palestrina, Belem. Dear Mr. Rocha, colon. You’re fired as of today, comma, 4 August 1967, period.”
“You’re firing your boss?” said Maria.
“And you!” said Silvio, glaring at her. “You’re like one of those German inmates. First you write one for him, and then you write your own.”
“Sure, boss,” said Maria, turning back to her pad.
LXXXVI
BECAUSE OF ALL the time he spent before birth with his ancestors, the child of Aran and Liroko was expected to grow unusually quickly, but in fact when at six moons it came time for him to receive his name, he couldn’t yet walk, or even crawl. They danced for him, and Asator sang his song and gave him the name Iri, but throughout the feast, the child seemed barely aware that the fire was for him, and spent most of the day asleep in his father’s arms, sucking on his father’s little finger and clutching and unclutching his still tiny fists. Larry could tell that the ordeal was terrible for Aran, who shrank from attention in any case, and for whom the public acknowledgment of her situation could only have added an extra measure to her shame. She betrayed no trace of her distress as they turned to face each other in front of their chajan, which had been newly cleared of cobwebs and painted at the base with Iri’s birth, but he could sense a tremor in her hand as the song of their union was sung for the first time. He knew better than to try to comfort her in front of the others, but when they were alone, he approached her while she crouched with her back towards him and held her from behind, until she finally turned and lay across his legs, looking up at the hanging basket that held Iri asleep. She didn’t say anything, but toyed with the hair on his leg.
“So the ancestors have blessed us today,” he said.
There was a long pause. “Yes,” she said.
In the midst of her sadness, he tried to hide that he was happy. Where she saw signs that the child was stunted and strange, he saw only a beautiful, good-natured boy who had her large, intense eyes and full cheeks. Where the pity of those around them was a de
ep embarrassment to her, to him it was a reassurance against the return of their fear of him. Most of all, when he held the child in his arms and sang to him as he slept, he felt the same spreading joy he remembered from before, when he had carried on his hip a baby with an uncanny resemblance to Iri, whom he had called Aran. So deep was his devotion to the child and to its mother that its fervor shielded him from awareness of the outcome which some had demanded, that the perhaps cursed child be left in the forest as an offering for boar. He did sense that the child’s possession of a name gave him a more definite character, but what he didn’t know was that the name in itself meant that the child could no longer be killed.
In the tenth moon cycle following the birth, as he and Aran sat on their kaawa with the baby squirming on his legs, Aran broke off her gossip about an argument she had overheard between Piri and Atani to tell Larry she had missed her bleed. She hadn’t been expecting to, with the baby so long on her breast, but within two hands of days, her waist had already thickened, and she began to sleep again in the afternoons, and stopped going out to help Anok paint the chajans. On the days when Larry was out gathering, Anok started coming to the house in the morning to make the root-flour pancakes and to be sure her daughter had rolled up her mat and begun the household chores, chiding her with the same sly comments she had used when she was a child. Panar would sometimes visit them at night to give Aran a drink that was intended, she knew but Larry didn’t, to safeguard the child in her womb, lest that one be held back as well.
If the wait for the first birth had been inexorable, the second one moved like a rapid, glassy river. On the days when Larry stayed home, he waited on Aran with the tenderness of one stem that brushes another in a breeze. Encouraged by the growth of the child inside her, Aran began to show him little signs of affection, a heartfelt rather than impersonal gratitude. He would return from hauling the water and hold out the wooden ladle for her, and she would cup her hands over his as she took a drink. He would feed Iri the usual mash of tubers and fruit and she would rest her hand on his arm while he moved his hand back and forth between the child’s mouth and the bowl. He would sit on the kaawa with the sleeping baby curled in his crossed legs, resting the spine of his book lightly on his arm, and she would bring him juice while singing, under her breath, the song women sing to ask their husbands not to go out to the circle of logs with the other men in the evening. Most surprising, her affection for Iri seemed to grow in proportion to the growth of the new child; lately, she had taken to whispering to him and stroking his cheek, even within sight of the others. Indeed, there were days when he felt that he could barely recognize himself in his new life, as though it were a coat too large and fine for him. He sat together with Aran and Iri on the logs that circled the place where meat was divided and chatted with Piri and Amakar while they waited for their share. He helped Aran ladle juice into gourds when Jarma came to visit and laughed as their guest described, comically, his wife’s mother’s way of cooking laraj. He sat with Aran on Anok’s kaawa after he got back from hauling her water and watched the darkness seep in though the trees, and when they got home, he lay beside her and their sleeping child and felt the peace Van Gogh had promised him.
It was during one of those charmed moments, while Larry lay on his back with his head on Aran’s legs, his ear nearly pressed to her huge belly, that he realized that the birth was imminent. The third moon had waned and he had reveled in the thought of seven more just like it, but when the baby kicked against his cheek, he seemed to see it in his mind behind its rind of skin, a perfectly formed infant whose small hands pressed against their walls of membrane, stretching them to cellophane.
“When do you think?” he asked hesitantly, pushing his words one by one through the thickness of her stomach. “Soon?”
“Maybe a hand,” she said, and as if by way of illustration, her hand appeared at the top of her stomach and rested there.
“Of cycles?” he blurted out, more forcefully than he had intended, pressuring an old scar.
“Suns,” she said with equal force, removing her hand.
His first response had been a wave of nausea as he remembered the feel of his teeth in Iri’s cord, and then relief as he reminded himself that the second birth would be at home, where he could have his knife ready. He imagined sterilizing the blade in the fire and then holding it up for the night air to cool.
“Kam, kam,” he said with an attempted lightness, trying to pass off his earlier reaction as one of joy instead of horror.
Aran struggled to her feet and went inside. She unrolled her sleeping mat and dragged it toward the ledge. He picked it up and laid it on the wooden platform, and set his own mat beside it on the ground. Then he untied Iri’s basket and placed it next to her. She drew it to her side with the inside of her arm, and he imagined resting there in Iri’s place, burrowed in the crook of her elbow, washed in her scent and her heat and the shadows that slipped in through the walls from the fire that still smoldered on the kaawa. After he had curled up in his jacket and the blanket of bark and the one skin she wasn’t using, he reached up to her arm and held it, relieved when she allowed his hand to stay.
LXXXVII
AFTER SO LONG, if Jorge had called, Martina wouldn’t have talked to him. Her anger at him manifested itself as cheerfulness, and her cheerfulness, when she waited on her customers, mostly foreigners so eager for contact with the natives that they were pleased to mistake her for one, netted her a marked increase in sales. In the evenings, she embraced the wheel with a misplaced passion, and the clay did not disappoint in its capacity to neutralize all manner of tragic impulses and memories. It offered contact, a world outside herself, and the promise that everything in that world was in the process of transforming itself into something unexpected, and beautiful, and useful. It offered, in short, an alternative to asking questions, to the wish to know, which had proven so harmful in her dealings with Jorge. She had always been susceptible to the dangers of that inclination herself, but now the feeling in her hands was enough to distract her from the clay’s message, which she was not anyway ready to acknowledge: that the constant effort to restrict oneself to what is solid and noble and hearty tends to yield, in the end, only a container for something else, a receptacle, a thin-walled emptiness, a void.
LXXXVIII
AS THE FIRE dimmed on the kaawa, the light of the third moon appeared in the doorway to replace it, accompanied by fanfare from the swallows and the toads. Amid that noise and the clatter in his head, Larry slept poorly. Several times he lifted Iri from his basket and held him, as though to keep the new child from wedging itself between them. When he dozed off with Iri on his chest, he dreamed that his hands had become enormous spiders that hung balled up from the limp ends of his arms. A small boy poked at them with a stick and they thrashed their black tentacle-fingers, shaking him violently from his feet and dragging him off into the trees. He awoke panting and shivering, startling Iri so he cried. When he fell asleep again, he dreamed that his pack was full of spiders, so that he couldn’t find his knife to cut the cord. Then, he dreamed that the new child was itself a spider, with eyes that bobbed at the ends of fleshy black protrusions like a crab’s. He woke to find that the moon had gone. He sat up and leaned his back against the sleeping ledge, where Aran lay on her side holding Iri’s empty basket in the crescent of her arm.
It was not that a disturbance hadn’t formed in his mind out of the spider-laden blackness, but rather that two troubling thoughts had taken shape from the same dark matter, such that his mind darted back and forth between them all night long and never settled. By the time day broke, his whole body ached from running that distance again and again in his head, so that later when he tried to follow Kakap over a rocky outcropping, he felt his legs give way and he slid down over moss into the scrub, scraping his calf and his elbow and crushing one of the baskets that hung from the yoke across his shoulders. Kakap knelt beside him and held his leg still while he looked at the cut, stanching it with a few rit
i leaves from one of his baskets, which were absorbent and smelled like moldy eucalyptus. Larry tried to push the broken belly of the basket straight with one hand while he used the other to catch the ooze of berries from the puncture, but its woven sides kept collapsing inward, and the torn edges kept sliding from his fingers as he tried to hold them together.
“Forget the berries,” said Kakap, standing up and shaking out his legs. We can sing to Tur, and he will not be stern with us. There are more by the mogno logs. Forget the basket.”
Larry stood up and looked at the cut on his leg, but was distracted by a small movement near his foot. He leaned forward to watch as a brown spider struggled across the cragged scrub, rocking as though slicing a rough sea. For a minute, he felt nauseous as the after-image of the spider swam in the blood on his leg, but he shook off the vision. He took the leaf Kakap held out for him and pressed it to his leg, and felt his other foot sink into a bed of moss, planting him in the marshy ground.
“How old are you, Kakap?” he said suddenly as he pulled himself out. “How many rains?”
Kakap laughed at the question. “Pitarin a katir,” he said. Hands and feet.
The answer was meaningless, as he knew, because in Pahquel there were no numbers higher than twenty. He had expected that answer, and perhaps even the laugh, and yet his heart pounded as he asked it, because it was a prelude to his asking Aran, which he had always told himself he didn’t need to do. To distract himself from his unease, he asked Kakap the second question, which, now that he had formed it, was by far the easier to confront.