Undergrowth

by Nancy Burke

  Several times he caught the young man’s gaze, although he was unable to meet the eyes of his son, who stood directly beside him and loosely rested his hand on his father’s arm. Of his five children, only Daniel, their surprise, had remained as close to him in deed as in feeling; the others had reciprocated their father’s constant absences by likewise being always elsewhere, at the homes of their friends, or at the movies, or more recently, with their own families in distant cities, their awe of their father amplified by the breadth of the emptiness between them. Only Daniel sat at his father’s feet, engrossed in his stories, spent long hours examining his artifacts while his father worked, and cried for hours, days, Cora told him with an accusatory inflection, when he left again for the field. But even Daniel had always evaded his father’s invitations to go with him, to experience the life of the sertanista first-hand. The refusal was devastating, though Joaquim would have never admitted it. It had left a slight tarnish on their bond, which had largely been buffed away through years of contact.

  A woman’s voice came over the loudspeaker announcing flight 154 to Rio and a crowd formed at the door to the tarmac—men in suits and women in heels and white gloves and children in uncomfortable traveling clothes, shrieking with fear and excitement. Then the same group re-formed beside the plane, each one in that clump holding a hat in place against the fierce gale from the engines. Father and son stood together, hatless, both resting their hands on the oversized valise between them. Together they pushed it forward toward the baggage men who were throwing suitcases back and forth in a jagged trajectory into the hold of the plane.

  “I’m going to miss you, father,” Daniel shouted, his hair now completely disheveled. He knew full well his father’s investment in claiming never to miss anyone, and also that his father wouldn’t answer him for fear of betraying a hint of tremor in his voice. The one thing this family knew well was how each of its members said goodbye. Thus he could picture, without having to look up, his mother’s expression as she stood inside the terminal with her face nearly pressed to the window: equal parts pride and disapproval, equal parts profound grief and irritation at the failure of her husband to keep her son’s hair in place.

  “Harvard’s supposed to be an okay school,” said Daniel, with a forced laugh.

  “Is it?” said his father into the wind. This was a joke between them, between the son, with his preparatory school education, and the father who, despite all his reading, his erudition, his intense collaborations with professors from all over the world, had never managed to graduate from high school.

  “Don’t let mother get too lonely,” said Daniel, regretting the comment as soon as he made it.

  “She’ll tire of me soon enough,” shouted Joaquim above the engines. “In another month or two, she’ll think I’m around way too much. Remember, she’s not used to me!” Daniel had heard his father’s threats to give up “the work” forever, but lately they had come with a different inflection, a discouragement he hadn’t heard before. He found himself constantly brushing off the thought that his own growing up, his plans to leave for college and his actual leaving, were somehow to blame for his father’s corresponding loss of vitality and once-fanatical sense of mission.

  “I have about one more run left in me,” said the father. “A short one.” “But you’ve got a lot of running ahead of you. I hope you’re ready for it.”

  “I am ready, father,” shouted Daniel into the din, extending his hand as, behind him, people began jostling up the metal stairs that led to the door of the plane.

  The father embraced his son. “I will miss you,” he said into Daniel’s ear, his voice cracking. He turned away quickly and walked towards the gate, turning his back as Daniel mounted the stairs. Always having been the one to leave, it was the unfamiliarity of the moment, he wanted to believe, that was unbearable. Cora came towards him and they embraced while people milled around them. “Rio, New York, Boston by train, and then a taxi,” Joaquim thought for a minute, tracing Daniel’s itinerary. “Rio, New York, and Boston.” For a fleeting second, he entertained the fantasy that Larry had returned to Harvard after all, and that the two were destined to meet there. He remembered with a sudden sting that he had never told his own father even that he was leaving. He had only left a stack of bills wrapped in paper in his father’s bedroll. It’s true that he had sent him payments every month via Abarta, twice as much as he was used to, with just himself to feed, and that he trusted Abarta to see that the money made it to his father’s hand. But then there was Abarta’s note returning the last of the payments. Over Cora’s shoulder, Joaquim could see that the young man had stopped pacing, and was rifling in his pocket, searching the depths of his trousers in a muted panic for his lost cigarettes.

  CII

  WHEN WORD PASSED through Pahquel like a ripple on a river that Tirinat had been mauled by a boar while out hunting with his brothers, the news was met not so much with shock as with a sort of sad relief, as though it offered proof of the collective suspicion that preceded his reign that he was fragile, somehow too weak to sing or lead. Even in the first nights after his death, few of the moans from the huts outlasted the dawn, and his fire seemed to burn down quickly, to collapse into itself, snuffed out by its own ash. The liminal time of interregnum passed without the force of frenzy, while the intensity of the debate over who would succeed him, over which feathers should be granted a place atop Tirinat’s chajan, seemed to grow in inverse proportion to the intensity of mourning. By the time the decision was to be made, arguments had broken out, fissures that ran between houses and even villages like cracks that split the dirt in a dry time, and the number of feathers had grown to seven. They covered the top of the doorway and seemed to pin each other there, suspended in a tension as brittle as chajan lacquer.

  As the sun reached its high point, people started to show their restlessness openly; men paced back and forth in front of the kaawa, children cried, men and women squabbled over small things, bereft of guidance. Crowds gathered around the ones whose feathers were in contention, whispering advice, singing songs of their line, passing bowls of juice and crumbled fish between them. Larry stood off to the side alone, eyeing the clumps of people, walking back and forth with the other solitaries. As the afternoon wore on, the groups seemed to draw together as people clung even more tightly to their lines. He weighed what might be gained or lost by going to stand with Dabimi’s, among those with whom he still technically belonged. At last, he concluded he would gain little in exchange for an act that could be seen as adding weight to Dabimi’s claim. Instead, he stepped to the perimeter of Kakap’s circle and stood slightly behind him, until Kakap swiveled towards him as though he were a door and beckoned him to enter.

  “Kawano ti ni taparo parak,” the oldest of Kakap’s three sons whispered to him, “A bird-filled sky,” and they laughed together at the irony of the phrase.

  No one remembered such a circumstance, in which the ancestors expressed only hesitation, and the feathers only twitched, as though a finger had touched them and withdrawn. Kakap didn’t remember, and shook his head at all his children, and laced and unlaced his fingers, and closed his eyes as though to concentrate more closely on the ancient, inaudible songs. Larry knew those gestures well—they were all Kakap had ever shown of fear—and sensed the dread and the familiarity at once, the quiver in Kakap’s hands and the reference, offhanded and unselfconscious, that he made to all his sons. Larry pushed his shoulder against the shoulder of Pitar, Kakap’s middle son, and laughed despite himself, the anxious, collective laugh in which he was relieved to have a rightful stake.

  As the sun grasped the branches and pulled itself behind them, the clumps began to disperse again, and the circles of bodies grew porous. Kakap left the group to speak to Panar Ak, to ParanX, and to Kinara, Asator’s son, whose feather was once that morning lifted up and then set back down again on the top of the chajan with the others. He went to Piri, and to Taran, and to Dabimi, and while he stood in Dabimi’s circle
, Larry came over and joined him, grateful for the chance to fulfill his obligation under the safety of Kakap’s wing.

  “You’ve waited once before,” Kakap said to Dabimi, in a voice that was pure of motive, despite Larry’s presence behind him.

  “That time the wait wasn’t so long,” said Dabimi, with a reluctant smile that betrayed his anxiety. He nodded to Larry without looking at him.

  “There weren’t so many choices then,” said Kakap in a benevolent tone, shaking his head and holding Dabimi briefly by the arm.

  Larry and Kakap sampled the titini Dabimi’s kaag had made, and asked after her bad knee, which Panar was treating with a wrap of rajiru leaves. Kakap joked with Dabimi’s daughter and son, and teased his son’s two daughters about the interest they had aroused in certain recently initiated men from the far village, and then they moved on, stopping at several other circles before returning to their own.

  Kakap’s youngest daughter had joined her father’s group while they were gone, and as they came up, she was mocking the anxiety of the others to distract herself from her own. She reviewed out loud the nervous gestures of the owners of the feathers, and her brothers laughed in whispers at Xosa’s twitch and Dabimi’s bobbing head. No one spoke of their real concerns, questions about who had shirked the tending of the fires, whose daughter had recently begun to menstruate, who had given too much or too little when dividing up the hunt, who had not sung well as he carried water from the river. No one spoke of the boar that had killed Tirinat, whose bones now rested with his ash and bone, but whose essence might still be raging among those the fire had already claimed, disrupting their ability to choose.

  As if to give legitimacy to the need for such restraint, Kakap smiled his kindly, noncommittal smile as he surveyed the clearing, looking down on the swirls of activity and the glimpses of emptiness where the scrub showed through. He raised his hand to his eyes to blot out the one last, sharp ray that pierced the trees behind the clearing, and then let it drop to his side. As though in obeisance to his gesture, the light dropped too, and dusk swelled across the clearing. Torches were brought, and songs were sung, and the murky uncertainty was like a thick river that carried them out of the world.

  “Oh, Taraptar, where are you now? Oh, Asator, is your left arm strong from throwing the heaviest spear? Did you show yourself in the current? Did the last rain fill your troughs?”

  The number of things that Larry did not know about Pahquel was too great even to imagine; essential things, like the need to protect unnamed babies from the shadow of the kipta tree, like the significance of the lines that were painted on his legs before they danced, like the reason why a child of a mother whose name was comprised of two syllables would be given a name of two syllables as well; like the terrible ordeal that faced the ones who, long ago, after slaughtering their enemies, refused to eat them and thus forced the ancestors to strip them of their right to kill. He did not know that the world, contained within a perimeter of felled trees that could take a man four hands of days to walk, was taken from monkeys many chajans ago, after killing was forbidden, and given to persons to tend. He knew nothing of the Intrusion, and of its terrible aftermath, nor did he understand the group’s cultivation of the capacity to forget it. And he knew even fewer of the small things, with which any child would be familiar; how to bow his head before the fire, and how to tell when a person was preparing to receive a second kaag, and how to weave his own wristbands, or arm bands, or ankle bands, or those of his sons. In short, he was like an animal, a dog who sat at his master’s feet and drew in the world in quick, nervous whiffs, exquisitely alert to a few irrelevant scents. He knew as little as the dog of Pahquel, and yet he understood, with an intensity equal to that of anyone around him, what it was like to be untethered and forgotten and adrift. Kakap knew that he understood this, and thus kept him close by his side, forming an epaulet with the fingers of his left hand around his narrow shoulder, clutching his other arm with the bones of his right, submerging him whole in the scents of his body and breath. Just as water muffles sound, so Kakap washed them both in the humid grasp of his aura, and buffered them from the noises that moved toward them across the clearing, distorted and slowed them to a low hum, laughter and footsteps and whispers and finally, just before dawn, the shout that burst out like a parrot’s scream to announce Dabimi’s success.

  CIII

  THERE WERE THINGS about which Martina spent a great deal of time thinking and things about which, unknowingly, she refused to think. Curiosity was an inconstant friend, she knew, that could turn on someone faster than a snake in Eden, faster than a person could. When she bent over the wheel, the questions gathered around her head like insects, or auras, or angels, but she kept them at a distance mostly by singing. Usually she just hummed to herself, so quietly that the sound was lost to anyone other than her, covered over as it was by the rhythmic scraping of the wheel. But lately, she had come to rely on the more potent musical mosquitiero of the radio, which was turned up to full volume to be heard over the sound of steel against steel. For this reason, she didn’t look up when Joaquim stepped in and approached her, sliding himself onto the bench beside the wheel. He said a few things that were lost over the swell of the scraping and the horns. Finally, he reached over and turned off the radio. She startled, gashing the lip of the bowl with her thumbnail.

  “Damn it!” She pulled the vessel from the wheel and smashed it into a ball.

  “Sorry,” said Joaquim. “I was trying to be unobtrusive.”

  “If you’re looking for Jorge, he’s not here,” she said absurdly, knowing full well that Joaquim knew about their estrangement.

  “My point exactly!” said Joaquim, standing up and brushing the clay dust from his pant legs.

  “What’s your point?”

  “It’s that Jorge isn’t here, where he should be, begging on his knees for …”

  “He doesn’t have any reason to beg, and I don’t have any reason to forgive him,” said Martina, cutting him off. “It’s not an issue of forgiveness.”

  “That wasn’t what I was going to say,” said Joaquim, giving up on the pants. “I meant, begging you to come with him, because he’s going to be away for a while.”

  There was that curiosity, swelling in Martina like a bruise. She fought it down. “Make sure to wish him Bon Voyage for me.”

  “I don’t think he’ll be able to do it without you,” said Joaquim. “We need you to keep him going, because we need him. It’s as simple as that.”

  “So you’re using me to further some half-assed project of your own, with no regard for me or for him?”

  “Exactly,” said Joaquim, laughing. “No regard whatsoever.”

  Martina stared at him for a minute and then reached for a ball of clay, pushing hard with her foot to start the wheel. Joaquim stood beside her and watched the ball turn hollow as it grew. As she cut it off with a wire and transferred it to a slab, he stepped in closer as though to admire the finished product.

  “The fact is,” he started up, pointing to the open bowl as if to illustrate his words, “it’s all personal. We’re all in it for our own reasons, which you know more than anyone. Nothing has changed between you and Jorge, except for this wall of pride he’s put up temporarily while he tries to figure out if he’s worth anything, to you or anyone else. In the meanwhile, you can go on pretending it’s all about him and no one’s thinking of you at all, if that’s what you want, but you’re lying to yourself. You can’t stand to think that you need him as much as he needs you, because it’s the same issue of pride for you too, though you won’t admit it. It’s a great act, this pretending!”

  Joaquim looked up and noticed a reddish tone deepen around her eyes, then fade. That was enough for him.

  “So you’ve talked to Jorge about this?”

  “No, he doesn’t even know I’m here. This one is mine.”

  “So what’s personal in it for you?” said Martina, defensiveness in her tone.

  Joaquim was s
ilent for a minute. “I suppose,” he said, with the softest waver in his voice, “it’s the same for all of us. Something to do with regret.”

  CIV

  ONE MISTAKE MADE by almost everyone is to imagine time as something universal, known by all, and by each similarly. Few picture time as a man with a million masks, each of them threatening, yes, but each in a different way, and sometimes invisibly. If time seduces one with limitless promise, it shows another its fierceness; for one, it sweeps by in a seamless stream, and for another, it inches forward in an endless series of increasingly violent jerks. Silvio’s time combined aspects of each of these; it flowed by without notice, immersing him in its amusements, fine wines and thick cigars and full-bodied women, and then it intensified into flashes of desperate impulse. “Get me commercial, tomorrow, to Santarem,” he barked at Maria through the crack in his office door, just as she was adjusting her hat in the mirror, already in her coat and gloves.

  CV

  DABIMI WAS A strong ruler, who loved to lead nearly as much as he loved the sense of power leadership afforded. Only the ancestors might have thwarted him, but they remained strangely silent while he attributed to them mandates that did not, at least in the minds of the elders, bear their stamp. His decrees became increasingly specific, and over time, it appeared that they were more and more aimed at restricting the liberties of particular persons: There were penalties for families with five or more children, penalties for those who rebuffed the overtures of elders in line for jibimis, and penalties for the birth of additional children to those whose first or second had been held back or were otherwise of suspicious lineage. Also, he frequently disappeared, to prepare the way for successful hunts, he said, and no one doubted his expertise where such questions were concerned. Often, he was gone for days at a time, and in his absence, persons became increasingly bold, unafraid to mock him and disobey, in ways they wouldn’t have dreamed of during Asator’s reign, likewise without comment from the ancestors. Such was the limit of Dabimi’s strength. They gave Kakap not a lesser but a greater portion for his five children, and no one said a word when Aran chiseled the bright commemorations of additional kaags into the chajans of Kiri and Porpora. Only the mandate to regulate the number of children of persons giving birth to rajora was followed to the letter, at least in the household of Aran, whose bleed had faded to an intermittent trickle, a thinning stream in a dry time.