by Nancy Burke
He had awoken from a dream about which all he could remember was the image of a small stone resting in his open palm. After lying awake in the darkness, trying to hold the image in his mind, his hand became Aran’s curled body, the stone in its center the child, which now lay embedded in its basket in the space beneath her arm, a small thing suspended in the center of an expanse: a pearl in an oyster, a drop of water on a leaf, a cruzero clutched in Jorge’s fist, a colony of huts barely visible, nesting in the faintly veined palm of the forest. He repeated to himself the word that had accompanied the image in the dream: “Mboa,” and knew with a sickening sense that the stone was Aran, and that he was the hand that held her. He worked out the numbers in his head: She had been newborn the summer he turned eleven, and now, eleven years later, she was afraid of being too old to bear more children. Asator and James had seemed, on the first visit, to be roughly the same age as his parents, but on the second, Asator was fragile like his grandfather, and even Anok was gray and stooped, with knotted fingers like his grandmother’s. Worst of all, the child was carried for only two and a half months to Iri’s nine; it too was a stone, which he could clench in his palm with all the strength he had, and yet, inevitably lose. He sank back onto the mat and her hand slipped from his arm. It hit the side of the sleeping ledge with a soft thud and she started awake, jerking the basket. The baby cried once and then settled again, rubbing its face in the moss lining. Aran pulled herself to her elbow and looked down at him. A diffuse light like a dry fog had filled the room, and she could see it reflected in his open eyes.
“Are you happy?” she said at last. “Is your house beautiful from the living?”
“Mboa,” said Larry, shutting his eyes. Beautiful from the dead.
XCIII
KAMAR SODEIS HAD nothing in particular in the forefront of his mind, and only a vague itch for revenge in the back of it, when he set out for the river with his pack on his back and bags crammed with papers dangling from his shoulders. He had stowed his boat well upstream from the camp, far enough upriver to render any concern about using the motor unnecessary, though that made the trek to it a mile longer than it would have been otherwise. The sun was high by the time he threw his bags into its hull and began to reach around for the shovel he kept under the seat, with which he used to bury his extra gas cans. The cans required holes nearly a meter deep, and in a shady spot so the heat in the ground didn’t ignite them. That tended to make the digging arduous, through dirt rather than sand, even when the holes had been excavated many times over. He waved his hand around, kneeling in the wet silt, and then swore loudly when he realized the shovel was gone. On the bank that jutted out at waist height behind him, he could see the handle of the shovel protruding from an empty hole. When he got to the hole, however, he realized it wasn’t in the place where his cans were buried. There was nothing in it, so he pulled out the shovel and excavated the three cans, which sloshed reassuringly as he carried them to the boat. Digging something up was always a lot easier than burying it in the first place.
The cardinal rule of the river was “Never mess with another man’s boat.” Although he hadn’t always obeyed this rule himself, and in fact had been quite liberal from time to time in his use of craft he had discovered in opportune places, no one had ever tampered with his own boat before. As he pushed out into the current, the sense of another man’s hands on his oars left him feeling strangely uneasy. He shook off the feeling by yanking the cord decisively to start the motor. Then he took off upstream, in the opposite direction from Xitipa.
XCIV
DURING THE FIRST hands of days after the rains, the forest was a flower, newly opened, moist, its perfume dripping from pistons as numerous as stars. The men returned from the hunt bearing yokes that were over-hung and bent, and the baskets of the women overflowed with fruits and tubers. The low ground that lay towards the West was always flooded then, swarming with mosquitoes and parasites, but in the jacu direction, to the right at the end of the path behind Anok’s house, the water stayed within its widest borders, and moved forward with a compressed intensity, carrying cities on its back. Tributaries that until two moons before were only furrows in the cragged hide of an expired beast were thriving with algae and fish and shards of sunlight. Larry sat with Aran and Iri and Karina and Piri on a thick log that ran parallel to one small inlet and watched as Oji and four other boys waded knee-deep in the brackish water, beating a vine they had laid on a rock just beneath the surface with stones the size of kipa. A few other children stood ankle-deep on the gray shoulder of the stream and shouted insults and advice to the older boys, bouncing their empty baskets on their backs and stirring up the water with their sticks. When the fish, stunned by the poison, began to bob up, sparkling like bits of green and blue foil on the surface of the water, Iri jumped to his feet with a howl and tried to slide past Larry along the log, but Larry restrained him and pulled him onto his lap.
“Soon,” he whispered in his ear, but the boy kept squirming, trying to run to Oji. “Next rain,” he said, and held him.
The boys at the shore were holding their baskets between their knees, grabbing the fish with both hands. When the baskets were full, the older boys and the men, Larry among them, shouldered them and they all walked back up the path together in a triumphant parade, stopping every now and then to retrieve a fish that had come to and thrashed its way out. Larry held Iri by the hand as they went, but Oji, who was already the height of Aran’s shoulder, took her arm, as he was too big to be led. They sang to the vine, and to the rain, and to Asator, who offered them the guidance of his line, but who now lay dying in his hut.
Back in the village, people were speaking in whispers, and a few were already painted. When Larry’s group burst into the clearing, they immediately smelled the last breath and stopped short so that the ones behind pushed up against the ones before, and the song was jarred to silence. Larry and Karina and Piri dropped their baskets and ran towards Asator’s hut, untying the bands from their arms as they went. In the distance, they could already hear the drum beating out the heartbeat of the deceased. As they approached, they were met by smoke from the fire on the kaawa, by the smells of sweat and rot and wet twigs struggling to burn. The son and the daughter were there, the daughter now wailing, now drifting like a stunned fish, unable to comprehend that she was suddenly rajora. Panar Ak was still inside, filling Asator’s mouth and nose and anus with sweet-smelling herbs that would announce him to the ancestors as he burned. People milled around, sweaty, pressed together, waiting for word as to when the dance would start, whether tomorrow or even today, as they whispered among themselves, although the fire for smoking the fish was already burning, and the fish were waiting to be smoked. Panar came out, his hands stained from rubbing the herbs, and told them to come to the clearing at dawn, and dispersed all but the family and the painted men who were to guard the body during the vulnerable time between death and immolation. Larry moved off slowly with the others toward the fishfire, but when he glanced behind him, he noticed Anok crouching with her back against the chajan, holding her head in her hands. He went to her and sat cross-legged beside her while the backs of twenty men faded into the mud on the path.
“Have you painted yet?” he finally said, seeing clearly that she hadn’t. “Can I grind the pigments, mother, or go for Aran?”
“Don’t,” she said, moving one hand from her face to his arm. Her breasts rested on the insides of her thighs, two abandoned oriole’s nests, heavy with water from the rains. Larry could see the movement of bodies out of the corner of his eye, but he didn’t look up until two legs stood before him, two familiar feet, with toes as long as fingers.
“I have the berries,” said Kakap, and helped Anok stand. The three walked together to his hut. Between verses, Kakap addressed her in a low voice, with the epithet used for the kin of the dead. When they arrived, he held up the berries in a reddish bowl, but pressed her to him for a minute with the bowl out of reach before he handed it to her.
When she left, Kakap took Larry’s arm and pulled him back into the house. “You know she was rajora,” he said, “and she was his.”
“She had no jitana?” said Larry, confused.
“Not that kind of rajora,” he said. “A woman with no husband or father. A woman who can go to men.”
The thought stabbed at Larry, who had convinced himself that Anok and Kakap and Asator and Panar Ak formed a secret society of elders who guided Pahquel with an abstract, benevolent interest that precluded their more personal involvements. In his mind, he had relegated her encounter with Pitiri, Dabimi’s father, to the status of a small irrelevancy, a means to the end of having conceived Aran, and her connection to Asator as a form of partnership, rather than as a passionate entanglement of any sort.
As though he had a sense of Larry’s distaste, Kakap spoke to defend Anok before he had a chance to reply. “It was a great comfort to Asator to have her when Kapora died. Because of your protection of Aran, she was able to endure Pitiri’s revenge and go to Asator without regret, or danger to her line. And she was tuara. You gave her that.”
At home that night, Larry struggled to shake off Kakap’s words in an effort to keep the loss impersonal, in an effort to rob it of its power to invoke the loss of James. But when Anok appeared on their kaawa with the dye still wet on her hands and allowed herself to be led to the fire, when she crouched with Aran and wailed, Larry knew that he wouldn’t be able to escape its power, or to protect James from it. By dusk, there was wailing from every kaawa, and from the dark pores between the trees, and from the sky, reef of stars, and he could no longer deny that it came from inside himself as well.
“You need to comfort Jarara now,” said Anok, taking his hands in hers. “You sing to him.”
Larry pulled his hands away and walked past her into the house. He stood beside his sons as they slept, shifting his weight back and forth from leg to leg, listening to their long breaths, which were thin enough to slip into the silences between the human cries. At last, as though he had found what he had come for, he turned and went out again. He sat down next to Aran, leaning the back of his head against the wall of the hut with his eyes closed. Aran and Anok stopped wailing.
In their silence, Larry numbered his miseries; the misery of knowing that no loss was impersonal, and the misery of knowing how quickly he would lose the ones he loved the most, and the misery of knowing that no one ever recovered from such loss. The dead were shell and bone, but the living, too, were porous. Looking at his own hand, he caught a glimpse of Asator’s hand resting on his painted stick, with its cracked thumbnail and its knuckles that were round and raised like coins. The image of the hand seemed suddenly solid, more substantive in memory than in life, and the cries he heard from distant kaawas were bubbles of air escaping from the bones of underwater reefs, the relentless exhales of time.
XCV
IT WAS NOT Jorge Moretti who hiked each day the cluttered urban trail that stretched from 72 R. Sen Augusto Meira to the austere main branch of the Banco do Brasil at R. Barbosa 794, through the imposing bronze doors to a back office just large enough to hold a desk, a chair, a few metal filing cabinets and a hat rack as bent as a man twice its age. It was not Jorge Moretti who, in his precise, tight script, filled lined index cards with the serial numbers of the stock certificates of some seventy-five Bovespa-traded companies, as brokered by Dannie and Roberto, “our men in Sao Paolo.” No matter how closely the figure who hunched over the stacks of cards might have resembled him, and no matter that he was always dressed in one or the other of Jorge’s two gabardine suits, with his father’s heavy watch sliding up and down his arm, the real Jorge would have been hard-pressed to recognize him as the same person who had greeted him in the shaving mirror every morning for the first two decades of his manhood. The other two fellows in the unit, who were both named Marco, a coincidence which attested, in Jorge’s mind, to their interchangeability, spent more of their time at luncheons, boasting of conquests and discussing boxing, than they did in actual work. They regarded Jorge as an oddity, an awkward old woman, a humorless, dusty sort who no doubt never scored with the ladies, and ironed his underwear.
“You coming?” they shouted into the open door of Jorge’s office as they slipped out an hour early, knowing full well he wouldn’t. Then Jorge would be left alone with the soft click-click of his ballpoint pen and his stacks of cards and the occasional echo of footsteps in the hall. Jorge knew that the footsteps would never belong to his boss, who was more likely to be out with the Marcos than patrolling their stuffy back suite. That he made more money at this job, which demanded nothing from him, and in fact reduced him nearly to some kind of automated transcribing machine, than he did with SPI had a certain irony to it, but was beside the point. Rather, the point was that in this job, he never had to think; his mind had endless open space in which to wander, but no need or inclination to go anywhere at all. Only twice thus far did any of the names he inscribed in his indexes, along with their addresses and identification numbers, belong to anyone he knew. Once, he jerked up in his chair when he noticed that he had just finished recording the purchase of 1,000 shares of Gerdau (siderurgy and metallurgy) by one Silvio Amanza onto one of his worn index cards, and, several months later, he again felt the tension in his stomach as he attributed the purchase of twice as many shares of Fibria (paper and pulp) to a Diego Melo, since 1960 of the BSB. Neither of those occasions prompted in him any urge to look further into the finances of either man, although he did pull the latter of the two cards, on impulse, and place it face down in the inbox on his desk. For the most part though, he understood that when one’s primary investment is in the passage of time, it was numbers, and not names, that moved the great wheel forward.
XCVI
ASATOR WASN’T WITHOUT Anok for long. After the fire had devoured him, and the dancing had consumed his survivors, after the two dreamlike hands of days in which chaos reigned and Larry hid in his hut for fear of coming upon people having sex in broad daylight in the clearing, or upon bands of men painted to look like animals wandering in and out of the forest, or upon people eating to the point of sickness, or drinking the katiro until they vomited into the stubble at the edges of the paths; after the feather had fallen, and it was not Dabimi’s, and the world had fallen into order again, Anok dozed on her kaawa one afternoon and fell as softly into death. Larry had been fetching her water and hadn’t noticed that she didn’t look up as he poured the gourds into the trough. The paints were already mixed, not just the pigments, but the pigments with the liquids, indicating her intention to work that afternoon. The paint gourds stood in a neat row against the side of the hut, and the sun swam in them and suffused them with intensity.
The day had been remarkable for its ordinariness, and for that reason beloved by Larry. He had loved the ease with which the gourds filled in the high water, and he had even loved, without fear, the spider’s patience as it waited in the corner of the kaawa for its prey. He loved the gentle, awkward greeting he had received from Jin, who, only a moon cycle before, had been wandering the clearing, shouting obscenities and beating back invisible intruders with a painted stick. He loved the way Aran had touched his arm to wake him, and the silence on the path, and the diffusion of the light in the treetops. There was order in the day’s unfolding, and reason in the veining of the leaves, and the stillness that seemed to have been revealed everywhere as the madness receded was pervasive enough to determine that death was ordinary too, and thus suddenly all the more worthy of fear.
In fact, he didn’t stay to be sure Anok was dead. He only noticed, for a fleeting moment, that she was changed, immobile in a sickening, familiar way, before he dropped the gourd-yoke and ran to Kakap’s fast enough to leave, for a time, the possibility behind him. On the way back to Anok’s he ran behind Kakap as though to use him as a shield, and turned away as Kakap wailed, as though to deny that the wailing was his own. When Kakap stopped, Larry turned around again to see him sprawled across her lap. S
he looked down at him like an empty, serene pieta, draping him in her granite robes. Both had forgotten he was there; the moment was intimate, unbearable, which made the intrusion of so many people, who heard Kakap’s wailing and pressed onto the kaawa, all the more violent and confusing. There were women to lead Kakap away, and men to run for Panar Ak. Atani set out the bowls for the herbs, and Kita and Tanar lifted Anok’s wooden body onto the sleeping ledge inside her hut. Kajar, toward whom Larry had felt nothing but an intermittent, mild dislike, took his arm and walked him up the path to his house, standing beside him on the kaawa as though expecting to be invited in to witness Aran’s first cry. Larry stood for a minute, confused, unsure of what he had to do to get Kajar to leave, and then finally dismissed him with a nod that shattered the lacquer that had seemed to spread over the skin on his face and neck and arms.
Larry watched himself turn and walk into the hut, as though from a great distance, or from another time. Aran and Oji were leaning side by side against the sleeping ledge, grinding tubers for the flour, while Iri was playing pick-up-sticks in the back corner. Larry pictured them all in a glass vitrine in the Natural History Museum, in an exhibit on Indigenous Man, marred only, made ridiculous by, the remnants of his tennis shoes.
“What’s wrong?” Aran asked, putting aside the nuts.
He came to her and held her.
“Mother,” someone said at last, using his voice. He feared that she would understand or need him to say more.
She did understand, but didn’t wail. She only fell back on the ledge, taking him down with her, sliding with him between the two transparent panes through which they could see, but not hear, Iri and Oji, and also Anok, and Pahquel, and the effigies of themselves clinging to each other on the ledge, moving their lips without producing sound. They slowly stood together, as though the pressure of the glass had fused them; they leaned against each other on the path to Anok’s with their faces contorted, stumbling forward like Masaccio’s innocents expelled, because the ground itself had suddenly become untrustworthy, and their legs were no longer their own. They jostled each other against the sides of Anok’s chajan, not knowing how to let go, and the crowd of people milling and talking on the kaawa split apart to make way for them as they fell towards the ledge inside the hut. When they came up to Anok, she looked surprised to see them; indeed, her expression was odder for the absence of its usual wry grimace than for the fact that she was dead. Larry wondered when she was going to start on the chajan, feeling a sudden urgency lest the paints dry in their gourds. Aran leaned down and adjusted her hair, frowning as though its lack of symmetry disturbed her. Panar came and scattered the persons on the kaawa, shaking his head while he worked as though annoyed by their idleness. Kakap returned with the herbs and set himself to crushing them with his strange, staccato gestures, frowning tensely at his hands as though irked by their unruliness. Larry felt Anok’s blank eyes on him, and knew how sensitive they had become to movement and light and feeling, and how quiet and small he needed to be to conform to the scale of her silence.