by Nancy Burke
“Which sides in particular?”
Joaquim took a breath and then began to talk in a pressured burst. “Something tells me our old vision is fading, and then I catch myself. I push away the thought. I tell myself there’s still important work to be done. I think of Xingu, even with its problems. I think we could give SPI a whole new direction if we really started to think in terms of non-contact, of demarcation only. There’s been too much focus on intervention, and that’s what’s placed our men in situations of temptation. We need to re-think ourselves completely at this point, or we’ll lose our way forever. And maybe Silvio’s right. Maybe that can’t be done from the field. Maybe we’re doing more harm than good right now. And maybe he’s the right one for the job, but it’s just as likely that he’ll be too wedded to the romance of taking action. He’s not someone who has an easy time sitting still, or letting his men sit still in the field either. It can take a year to make a solid contact, and it can take five to demarcate an area without it.”
Sara studied Joaquim in silence, the muscles and sinews in his thin arms, and the dark skin draping at the collarbone. They were two old people, each, perhaps, still fighting for something.
“Morrer, se preciso for, matar nunca!” Joaquim said softly, and then fell silent again. Sara nodded. Rondon’s motto: “Die if necessary, but never kill.”
“And then there’s Larry,” said Joaquim suddenly, interrupting her thoughts. “I don’t know what sort of contaminant it is out there, but it’s there. And it seems that our little team has no interest in that part of the puzzle. James got too caught up in the details, in his strange preoccupation with words and dying languages and genetic theories, and Silvio can’t sit still long enough to pay attention to any details at all. But whoever’s responsible clearly sees the tribes as their own perfect laboratories, and is as dangerous as any of the worst fazendieros we’ve run into. Whether or not our mission needs re-thinking, we’ve still got a lot of work to do out there!”
“Of course we have work to do,” said Silvio from the doorway, buttoning his shirt. “Got another one of those?”
Sara poured him a cup and set it on the table. Then she started in. “I know this isn’t my job, and I’m an outsider in all of this, but it’s clear to me,” she said, “that this fighting on one front at a time, everybody on their own turf, isn’t working anymore. Things have gotten just too complicated. If you’re going in, you should do the whole thing, and do it the right way. I’ve gone ahead and asked Sam from the lab to go along, and I’ve approached Martina about acting as his assistant. She has good instincts, and she knows her soils. I was thinking of just assaying, but now we’re going to need to get our hands on a whole suitcase full of phlebotomy kits. My guess is that one thing will lead to another, and that you’ll run into that Sodeis fellow no matter whether you decide to follow him or not.”
“Martina’s in?” said Joaquim. “How did you pull that off?”
“I’m not certain, but I have a feeling she is.”
Silvio stood up and pushed in his chair. “I need to get myself home,” he said, “but I’m going to leave you with a present and then a question.”
“I’ll take the present!” said Joaquim, suppressing a smile. “You can give her the question. I’ll tell you what I want for my present. Call Lino back to Rio.”
Silvio shot Joaquim a look. Then he went to his room and retrieved his suitcase out of the front pocket of which he pulled a cloth pouch. He set the pouch in front of Joaquim and stepped back a few paces. Joaquim unzipped the pouch and pulled out three sets of handcuffs.
“Are the keys in here?” he said searching in the bottom of the pouch.
“Of course the keys are in there,” said Silvio, straining to look over Joaquim’s head into the pouch and then remembering he had put the keys on his own keychain. As he was unfastening them from their clasps and laying them in front of Joaquim, Sara asked, “So what’s the question?”
“The question is,” said Silvio, coming up behind Joaquim and putting his hand on his shoulder, “Why do I hate to listen to this guy? Like, why the hell didn’t I take his advice and marry you when he told me I should go for you back in ‘54?”
“Joa!” said Sara, looking at Joaquim in mock shock, her neck reddening.
“Well, here’s your chance to make up for lost time and listen to me,” said Joaquim, pulling Silvio towards the door. “No Lino. Recall him as soon as he gets here. Give him the same gift you gave me, and make sure it’s his size,” he said, gesturing with each hand toward his opposing wrist.
“No Lino,” said Silvio tipping an imaginary hat to both of them as he headed out through the living room, hailing a cab at the door.
CXVI
ONE OF THE realizations that grew on Larry only very slowly, over the course of years, is that homesickness is a far more complex malady, far more difficult to diagnose, let alone to treat, when one has never felt at home. Also, despite its reputation as an acute condition, he found that it became bothersome only after the time when it should have faded forever, as if what one was mourning was the possibility of homesickness itself. But when Iri read his first sentence, when Oji, at the age of two and a half months, took his first halting steps across the kaawa in full view of a hand of persons whose relief at his not having been held back only added to the intensity of their praise of him, Larry was aware, in the back of his mind, of a wish to share his excitement not only with James, but with Joaquim, with Jorge, and even, he was ashamed to admit, with his parents, who no doubt did not celebrate his own milestones with the same enthusiasm that was now being lavished on his children. His longing not only for people, but for places and things swelled up at odd times, and always surprised him. Still, after all this time, he could not manage to remember that he didn’t have a camera, and fought the urge to rifle yet again through his pack to find it. And the worst of it was that there was no one he could speak to about his old life; from the point of view of those in Pahquel, the time prior to his appearance was thought of simply as the time in which he was held back, and the things he learned, talked about, experienced then were regarded as confidences between himself and the ancestors, and not for other ears. Thus he had no choice but to envy others their intimacy with the ancestors, and to look among these lineages for any signs of his own. There was some comfort in Kakap’s insistence that he had as much claim as anyone, more, in fact, for his having been held back, to the ancestors both of Dabimi’s line and, due to his having sired children, of Anok’s, but the comfort was often short-lived, erased by a sense of shame at his hidden past, as though he were betraying the ancestors both of his own obscure lineage and of his new ones.
“Why does no one want to hear about my ancestors?” he asked Kakap one night while they lay in their hammocks with their gourds hanging beside them.
“Of course we do,” said Kakap, “Your ancestors are ours, and we love them!”
“No,” said Larry. “I mean, the people I knew before I came here. The ones who gave birth to my parents and to me.”
“I said, we do.” Kakap laughed. “We love them.”
“No,” said Larry, suddenly determined to be as insistent as Kakap.
Kakap was silent for a long time. At last, he said, “I can only say that the things that come to us from out of the world are bad, and they must not be in the world.”
“How do you know that?” said Larry.
“The ancestors told us.”
“Then why did you allow me and Jarara to live here?”
Another long silence, in which Larry suddenly became afraid that he had asked too much, that Kakap would suddenly see him as a foreign particle, an intrusion to expel.
“The ancestors told us,” he said at last.
The night sounds swelled up, as though to concur with Kakap’s summation. He listened, but remained unsatisfied. “What did the ancestors tell you?” he said.
The night itself answered, but in riddles, in noisy, coy, preoccupied exclamations: “The
world is more than you thought.”
“Should I not be asking?” Larry said at last into the cacophonous silence.
“No,” said Kakap. “Our ancestors are our teachers.” Then, at last, a long breath, and Kakap’s story-telling voice: “Jarara was ours because he kept the bad ones out of the world. When they came in, he followed them. That was when we were hand-and-four of villages, not the three we are now. They made us get sick and die. They were going to take the chajans and all the girls and women, so that we would wither. But Jarara had a thing like the ones you look at. He made it himself, and he showed it to them, and it told them their children would die if they used our women. It told them they would die. And the chajans did not yield. The bad ones left, and he left with them. We did not throw one spear. He came back without them.”
“Really?” said Larry, feeling a sudden stab as he remembered he had left James’s notebook at Sara’s. It occurred to him then that the longing for things was always a longing for someone. He felt ashamed not to have realized that before. “So what about that story of him and Asator being held back together?”
“Yes, that story is also true,” said Kakap.
CXVII
JOAQUIM WALKED SLOWLY to the Telepar, not merely because he dreaded the call, but because he was as weighed down as the burros that plied the Travessa dos Martires with the spoils of the harbor on their backs. He had been feeling his age acutely lately as a burden among burdens, an exhaustion like a father’s who discovers that his children still need him long after they should have been capable of living on their own. With his literal offspring, he was oblivious to a fault to their need for him, having learned a lesson or two from his father, who, especially after his mother’s death, had all he could just to keep a roof on their tin shack. But with regard to the offspring of his dreams, Jorge and James and Marietto and Flavio and Heitor and a hundred other agents and, yes, Silvio too, not to mention all the forest people he regarded as his kin, he could draw for example and inspiration upon the memory of the great Rondon, who loved him like the son he never was otherwise; he could draw upon Orlando, on Claudio, on half a dozen of the native elders at whose feet he had been privileged to sit. Perhaps what pained him most was the sense that all around him, he could see evidence of the waning of Rondon’s influence in the face of the modern obsessions with adventurism and greed, as though he were watching the disintegration before his eyes of a painting of staggering beauty in the torpid, mildew-saturated air, the last extant portrait of his next-of-kin. When the dial tone sounded suddenly, he shook off his thoughts with a start and recited the number quickly.
Cora’s voice came on the line. “Alo? Alo? Quim? A ligacao esta muito ruim!” A poor connection.
Joaquim motioned with his free hand to compensate for the crackling on the line as though he were speaking to someone in front of him. “Cora, I’m going to be away again, but I think this’ll be the last time.”
“You told me that last time was the last time! How many last times are there these days? How do I know when it will be the last of the last times?” Cora tended to have one of two reactions to Joaquim’s calls—either this explosive mock-rage or else withdrawal and resignation. Of the two, this was by far the best.
“I’ve done something I’m coming to regret. I have to make it right, and then I’ll be home.”
“What? You killed somebody?”
“It’s James’s kid. You know all those notebooks? I finally figured out what’s in them, and I think I let him get into something he can’t get out of. We need to go and retrieve him.”
“Now? Now? After one, two, three years? He’s probably dead by now!” Then, perhaps out of regret for that last comment, “So how long you going to take? Just because your kids are gone doesn’t mean you don’t live here any more.”
“I know where I live, and I know who I live with,” Joaquim said, “But this one’s going to have to be open-ended. Not long, I hope.”
“But the last?”
“The last.”
“So give me the date.” A ritual—Cora always asked him for a date on which to hold the wake if he hadn’t arrived home by then. She knew it was all necessary, that he couldn’t really live in their world, and that that was why she had married him.
“A date … a date … November first.”
“Of which year?” They easily had as many rituals around absence as they did around proximity. Their rituals were everything, but not nearly enough. He had had plenty of time to figure out the difference between the things he could make right and the things he couldn’t, between things that were true and those that weren’t.
“Te amo,” he said.
CXVIII
“LET’S CHECK THE weight on these,” said Jorge, pushing boxes one by one to the platform scale under the metal awning outside the hangar. Joaquim and Sam stepped forward to help him lift, and the three grunted in unison as they hoisted the cargo, marked it, and slid it off the scale.
Jorge was taking his time readying his plane, and the others were taking their time checking and rechecking their bags. In fact, the whole process of readying themselves had been extraordinarily laborious, due to the presence of as many forms of resistance as there were participants, and more. There were the packs to assemble, each of which contained a condensed version of its owner’s life, including a few photographs to remind each of them of who he thought he was, the memory of which tended to fade quickly in the field. There were the three weeks it took the phlebotomy kits to arrive from Belem, and the multiple trips to the Mercado, and the prep work in the lab, and the paperwork, and most of all, there were the arguments, in person and over the phone, and the ones that took place privately in the thoughts of each, often just before sunrise. There had been the confusing search for Valerio, of whom Silvio had apparently lost track, and then the waiting for Lino, who didn’t show up for a week and finally arrived, inexplicably, and clearly with rancor, on a flight from Belo Horizonte, and the long, dangerous hour in which Joaquim told him that Silvio had recalled him at the last minute, a fact that Lino would have known had he been where he said he would be.
Lino stood off to the side, still arguing with Joaquim in a low but intense voice while Sara milled aimlessly, fingering the cruzeros in her pocket, unsure as to how close to get to Jorge while he was working, as at any other time.
The passengers, Joaquim and Sam, jostled each other and made hooting noises as Jorge moved them together onto the scale, and Joaquim grabbed Jorge’s pen and threatened to write their weights on their stomachs. They were off the scale and starting to lift the boxes into the hold when Martina walked up, carrying a pack on her back and a book under her arm.
“So what time is liftoff?” she asked them while they were still facing away.
Jorge turned on his heel and stared at her in silence.
Sam came up and shook her hand. “Glad you’re in,” he said. “I can use you.”
Jorge moved his stare from Martina to his mother, and then to Joaquim. Then he turned to Joaquim. He reached into his pocket and handed him the key to the plane. “Have a good trip,” he said, heading towards his car. Martina followed him and pulled herself up onto the hood of Jorge’s Aero, dangling her legs. Jorge weighed the advantages and disadvantages of blowing the horn, of getting out and pulling her off, perhaps by the hair, of driving away with her still on the hood, of swerving or not as he drove. As none of those options seemed plausible, he sat immobile for nearly an hour, sweating in the hot car despite the hangar’s shade. Martina took off her pack and leaned against it with her knees up, reading her book. Finally, Jorge heard the groan of a metal hinge as Joaquim opened the passenger door and got in. They both sat with their eyes straight ahead, as though they were driving together on a particularly demanding stretch of road.
“Ready, captain?” said Joachim, keeping his eyes on the road.
“Ready for what?”
Joaquim took a minute to answer. “Ready for you to grow up and take control of your l
ife.”
“How the hell am I supposed to do that,” Jorge exploded at Joaquim, rising up in his seat, “when every time I turn around, other people see fit to manipulate me, and pander to me, and think they can make decisions about how I’m supposed to live?” He pulled his eyes from the road and turned them on Joaquim recklessly. “You don’t want me to live my life—you want me to live yours. You want to keep me a child so everything works out according to your plans!” He took off his glasses with a snap and began to rub them frantically on a corner of his shirt. Then he put them on again decisively and turned back to the road, as though intending to drive fast enough to forget that the others would inevitably be speeding along with him.
“You know when I quit SPI?” said Joaquim slowly, as though they were touring on a pleasure ride with time to reminisce. His mouth betrayed a flash of a wry smile; they both knew that he had quit and also that he likely would never quit. “It wasn’t directly after I lost your father. Those things take a while to hit home. It was when I realized why I had lost him, and what it said about me.” He turned to see if Jorge was listening. Jorge was still staring straight ahead, into the distance well beyond Martina. “Ever since I left home at fourteen, I was always trying to prove that I could make it on my own, and then suddenly it occurred to me who I was trying to prove it to, and that was a punch in the gut. It occurred to me that all I was doing was trying to win over the people I was closest to by showing that I could live without them. It was a point of pride, and I sacrificed your father to it, and now I’m worried that I may have sacrificed Larry to it also. I think I’ve sent too many men out there to fend for themselves, without the background, or the backup.” He turned his eyes back to the road. “In short, I should have listened to you. I’m trying to do it right this time, trying to learn something in my old age. And,” he said, the twinge at the corners of his mouth hovering now, “you see how hard it is to change things.”