Undergrowth

by Nancy Burke

  Over and over, without end, it turns out that the dead are bored by sentiment and repulsed by suffering, and are absorbed instead, with an intensity that can only be called fanatical, in the search for signs of how the loss of them has changed those who have survived them. They look for the odd curl of the lip, the slant of the shoulders, the settling of old scores, the bearing of children, the acts of cowardice or bravery, the unselfconscious gestures that they regarded once, foolishly, as their own. They study the chajans with an inexhaustible interest, and thus they identify the ones they must protect with their very names, with all their tools of memory and distance and fate. The funeral dance is always the same dance and the fire is always the same fire, yet no one who has died or who still lives can refrain from the impulse to comb the stream of faces or the simmering pool of ash for whatever they alone can recognize of themselves. Not even for an instant did Anok look away. That evening, when she had been fully prepared by Panar, and the others had gone home, while Larry sat beside Aran as she painted Anok’s chajan, Anok searched their faces and their hands, as, no doubt, in her loneliness she always had, anxious to see her reflection even before they understood that she was gone.

  The moon was as eager as Anok to see itself in them, and climbed up into the treetops even before the sun had finished climbing down. It hung behind their shoulders while Aran etched her mother’s image into the old muscle of the house and carved her mark, a smooth, brown crescent, into its bone. It lit the path so Oji and Iri could find them, the younger leaning over the older protectively, whispering comforts and stories and songs, leading him forward by the hand. It asserted itself and refused to leave, even when the fire sent smoke up to obscure it. The moon barely feigned interest in the rambling chant that was offered by Tirinat, Asator’s successor, whom it deemed unfit to lead, but it mourned Anok relentlessly, flinging its tears, out of season, onto the half-bare chajan of Anok’s empty house.

  XCVII

  WHAT IS TIME to clay? That was what Martina valued most, the fact that although the wheel made a scraping noise at regular intervals like a ticking clock, and the clay rose and fell back, and despite the fact that her hands on the clay had their own pulse, distinct from the pulse of her heart, repetition had the power to vanquish time entirely, each minute like the one before it, forever. There were interruptions, of course; she could list them: There were the coffees with friends, first just her and them and then, in the course of only a very few years, her and them and their babies in their arms, their toddlers, squirming to get down, yanking on the table cloths, dropping their dingy toys and teething them, always eager to leave. There were a few half-hearted dates with friends of her friends’ husbands, the most sensible of whom didn’t call again. There were the two unfortunate nights when her loneliness got the better of her, followed by disastrous mornings. There were the books bought and read and stacked in piles on the nightstand and the dresser and the floor. There were the movies and the trips to the grocery, nearly every day, in fact, since she now avoided the market, and once, unexpectedly, there was a visit from her Cousin Tighe, whom she had never met, but who was ten years older, passing through on an air tour of the tropics, bringing memories of her parents and her aunts—Aunt Jantje and her mother and their three other sisters—and their old house in Amsterdam, of which she had no recollection at all. The Cousin left behind a stack of photographs, images of a serious child in the arms of strangers who resembled more closely the couple in her one photograph than they resembled her as she knew herself to be. That was another truth about time: When it did come to rest, it was as vulnerable to sliding backwards as forwards. So that was what the clay was good for: it insisted, in the face of disruptions like the appearance of Cousin Tighe, that whatever was done could be undone, could be re-rolled and re-trimmed and mashed up with a few drops of water. It told her how pliable it was possible to be, and it told her you could always start again. Yet even as she worked the wheel and felt the clay breathe in her hands, she understood that a vessel, once fired, would relentlessly endure, and that she too, had emerged from the kiln hard and empty, immune to time.

  XCVIII

  IN THE FOREST, sounds and the creatures that make them can be categorized along a continuum, reflecting their places in the stratigraphy of time. At the base of the column are the hums, the buzzes, the low rumblings of choirs whose members press together, whose voices do not rasp with age, who are ignorant of rhythm, of measures and stanzas, and capable of singing as they breathe. They crowd the air at dusk, threading their strands through the roots of the trees, weaving the warp of trunks into seamless bolts of sound. In the strata of such density, voices are laid down tight as bricks, with no space for mortar, breath, between them. These hums and buzzes quickly become monotonous, and then tormenting, and then nearly inaudible, affording, as they do, no opportunity for mourning. They play the part that in the urban world is played by the vibrations of trucks in the streets, by machines, and by certain interminable sorts of speech. One might even say that the members of those choirs are not scathed by death, since when one voice ceases, it is replaced so quickly that not even a hiccup, the skip of a needle on a phonograph record, can be heard.

  At the crown of this column of sound are the cries of monkeys, and of parrots, and of persons, which come only intermittently, with stretches of longing between them. In Pahquel, persons were blessed three times over: by the chajans’ capacities to hold them, and the songs’ ability to sing of them, and by the breadth of the spans between them, yawning crucibles of silence, in which memories were created in an instant, so that people could be mourned no matter how briefly, or long, they had lived.

  XCIX

  IF PEOPLE FALL into two groups, the poets and the scientists, then Sara Moretti would, without hesitation, have counted herself among the latter, even as she was smart enough to know that the distinction was nonsensical. In her role as scientist, she brought order to the laboratories at Alta de Chao; standards were imposed, specimens were labeled and catalogued and stored under precise conditions of temperature and light, data was codified, procedures were spelled out clearly in manuals, and occasionally, employees were let go for their failures to follow protocol. No one expected such discipline from an Italian, let alone from a woman, and when she inherited the post from Loardo, who had previously chosen her to be his assistant from among a pool of men with titles and credentials, she was at first regarded with outright hostility, with protests, with resignations en masse, with projects deliberately ruined and once, with a dead rat left inside a file folder neatly labeled “Rato” and placed in the center of her desk. But if Sara felt distress at her reception, she didn’t betray her reaction to her adversaries, or even to her few allies in the lab, but only threw herself into the task of bringing order to the world outside herself. It was a further testament to her scientist’s nature that her two closest colleagues, a married couple named Sam and Bella Selman, were Jewish immigrants from Warsaw, a fact which her mother, in particular, would have found blasphemous, and to which that old lady would have responded with sputtered anti-Semitic ravings which were easily overheard by the neighbors, from whom Sara learned very early to distance herself. Fortunately, Marietto was passionate in his support of her, and a constant source of wise counsel. Even now she consulted him, asking him for guidance from beyond the grave. Even now, she allowed herself little rituals, sillinesses, she thought, and strained to see his influence in the myriad tiny clues that, unbeknownst to her, she gathered constantly and analyzed and re-analyzed and obeyed.

  There are premises that scientists consider fundamental: that things change in accordance with the law of cause and effect, that the answers to important questions emerge only slowly, and that these answers must be replicated many times over in order to merit even provisional acceptance. For instance, outside Sara’s awareness, she couldn’t help but think of the disturbing events of the past few years—James’s death and Larry’s disappearance, and Jorge’s resignation from SPI, and the los
s of Martina and, for all intents and purposes, of her only child himself—as the somehow expectable results of specific misdeeds of hers from the past, the most significant of which had been a long-time disorder in her feelings for her late husband’s closest friend. And indeed, the answer as to how to address such a painful state of affairs was long in coming, just as the specimens that were gathered by the lab—donated to the museum or acquired from other institutions, if no longer purchased from private collectors, who no doubt came upon them by questionable means—waited in queue in boxes sometimes for years before her few chemists, Sam and Bella and two other Fellows from the University of Sao Paolo, her two Indianists, her staff paleontologist and his interns from the university, and even her three lab assistants, were able, at last, to lift them from their cartons, to set them on their tables, and to enshrine them in temporary vitrines. There they would sit, like birds newly hatched and hungry, like interrogation subjects, like immigrants just arrived, trying to find their bearings in the brightly lit and bustling world of the lab. And so the question that had festered, packed away for years, took its turn on display under the twin spotlights of grief and inevitability: If only she had avoided James after Marietto’s death, if only she had attended more to her son’s suffering, if only she had married James in the first place and provided Jorge with a father who could actually have seen him into adulthood, at least, might her son then have proven himself equal to life, able to marry, able to pursue what was clearly his calling, able to forgive them all?

  C

  IT WAS OBVIOUS to everyone, and most of all Anok, that Aran had grown to fill, more and more completely, the outlines of her mother. Her tendency to hang back in conversation, to busy herself with some solitary task while the others sat drinking Mucuri juice and talking on their kaawas, which had always been viewed by Larry as a form of shyness with which he felt akin, turned out instead to be the first step towards that detached, ironic stance that had made Anok formidable, even to her line. During the years in which Aran had assisted her mother more invisibly, even, than the succession of Panar’s young nieces had assisted with the cures, she had committed to memory not merely the songs and the patterns on the chajans and the formulas for pigments, but an aspect of authority that was unmistakably Anok’s. Her own children were perhaps the last ones to notice the change, having always confused her hermetic restraint with its more elevated form, longing and admiring her with an intensity that persisted in proportion to the distance she maintained from them. Thus, when Oji returned, after the hand of days in which his initiation into manhood was accomplished, during the hot season after his fourth rain, he saw nothing new in his mother’s chiding Iri for the way he rolled the mats, or in the way that Iri pretended unconvincingly to resist her but then rolled them again with exaggerated care as soon as she turned away. Only on the night of his first chajan ceremony, when he sat with the other initiates and watched as even Tirinat deferred to his mother and called her Aran Ak, did he begin to suspect that she was held in unusual esteem by others than himself.

  For Larry, the realization hit with full force on the day he returned with Kakap from an overnight gathering trip, exhausted and nursing an elbow inflamed by a tocandira sting, and was startled to see Anok crouching at the kaawa of Ananda’s house across the clearing, carving a newly-named child into the barely painted chajan while Ananda and his wife, Tari, looked on.

  “Oh, mother,” said Larry, without blinking, coming up behind her. “That painting at the ankles is too hard on your back. Leave it for Aran.”

  Perhaps the moment was as terrifying for Aran as for Larry as she turned slowly to face him. Perhaps she looked into his eyes and knew that he could see that she was beyond the time of children, with her hair already half-white. Perhaps she, like Larry, shuddered inwardly at the vision of him holding her as she died, in the same arms that had held her as a child. Or perhaps she was proud of the mistake, understanding as she did that time was of no interest to the ancestors who move the sun and bring the rain and settle disputes between persons and teach the jacu to hunt. Tari giggled nervously, as though still unsure if Larry had made an error or a joke. Aran showed nothing in her face to suggest she thought the one over the other, though she frowned at the crimson liquid in the bowl in her hand, and pulled a large beetle from it with a stick.

  As Aran and Larry walked home, he would have apologized for his mistake if he thought he could have done so without causing an even greater offense. He might have told her that he needed to be gone again because Kakap had walked so slowly that they hadn’t found the Xira, or the Tapiri, or the Laar, but the words formed a dam in his throat, over which no stream could pass. To speak of Kakap’s diminishment was unavoidably to speak of hers; to comfort himself with the recognition of her intensifying power was to acknowledge that such power was dependent on the proximity of the ancestors, who never loosen their grip on things they lend. The only alternative to talk was silence—of the forest’s kind, built up of a thatch of voids, each filled to overflowing with movement and noise—and the friction of her shoulder against his, and her smell, mingled now as it often was with the smell of the paints that sloshed in the gourds at her sides. Slowly, as they neared their hut, the sounds of Pahquel at evening rose to meet them; the clattering of stones as Piri fixed the pancakes and the greens, the usual argument between Mabara and Katura, the indignant fussing of the parrot on Ciri’s kaawa as it burrowed its chin into its feathers. The house itself was empty, but held echoes of the shouting of the children in the clearing, and also of Oji’s singing as he approached the kaawa and said goodbye, with much laughter and teasing, to his friends.

  Larry left to retrieve Iri from the kari field. When he came in again, he sat down next to Aran on the sleeping ledge and together they watched their children getting ready for bed, unrolling their mats, hanging up their ankle straps, singing, in registers an octave apart, asking the ancestors for guidance. Although he was well into his sixth rain, Iri was still afraid to urinate alone after dark, and whined until Oji took him out, as he did every evening, to the edge of the trees beyond the seep of the firelight. Often at night, Iri would try to crawl between Larry and Aran when they slept together on the ledge, or he would push himself onto Larry’s mat on the floor, wedging himself between Larry and the side of the wooden platform, for which Oji would tease him the next day, and call him pitiX, a baby too small for a name. That night, there was the usual argument over where Iri’s mat would be; Oji pulled it to the center of the room as he always did, and Iri pulled it back to within a hand’s width of Larry’s, and sat on it quickly, before Oji could pull it out again. Oji always unrolled his own mat on the far side of the room, and made a show of lying down, as though to inspire his older brother by virtue of his mocking example, or as though to impress Aran.

  The effort was, as they all understood, doomed to failure on both counts; on the one hand, Oji’s show of independence succeeded only in intensifying Iri’s fears, while on the other, it only drew attention to the fact that he was still coming home alone at night, without a woman. Larry might easily have chastised Iri for his timidity, just as Aran might have teased Oji as the other mothers did, who called their sons pitiX, or sometimes weak-penised, and even turned them out of the house until the morning. But the tug-of-war in front of them, like the ones that took place on the clearing every feast day between the strongest men, was not to be dismissed with irritation, or resolved through any powers of the living, even Aran’s, for the combatants were pulling on the pure strength of their fear, and the rope that was stretched taut between them was the tautness of time itself. In the same way, Larry could feel the rope between himself and Aran growing longer and tighter and thinner with every quarter-moon, as each attempt to pull the other closer only drew out the span of years between them, and forced a wedge between their fates. They leaned into each other’s shoulders; they stretched out together on the ledge, and, like their breaths, which met in the gap between them, pushed themselves against each o
ther with all the force they had, until their pulses knotted, though the rope quivered and strained.

  CI

  JOAQUIM ROCHA WOULD have been outraged at anyone who dared to suggest that there was any relationship whatsoever between the act of sending off Daniel, his youngest, of putting him on a plane for Boston, os Estados Unidos, of all places, and the growing anxiety he felt about what he had come slowly, over years, to recognize as his abandonment of Larry. Yet the sense of vulnerability of the lone traveler haunted him as he watched, from his vantage point across the concourse, as an intense young stranger paced the length of gate 9, smoking and scowling at the ground. Cora was preoccupied, as she always was, with small things: whether the part in Daniel’s hair was straight, whether he had remembered to bring the letters from the Admissions Office, whether he had remembered to call his grandmother before he left. She fretted that he wouldn’t write, that he wouldn’t eat well, that he would fall for some crass, high-living American girl. She smoothed and ruffled and smoothed again the hair on Daniel’s forehead while Joaquim followed, with growing interest, the senseless, determined stride of the lonely young man across the corridor.