by Nancy Burke
“Do you want to hear about my ancestors?” he said suddenly to Aran, surprising himself as much as her.
“You want to sing of them?” she said, confused as to why he felt the need to ask.
“No, I just want to say them,” he said, putting down the maata and disappearing into the hut. When he came back, he had a stack of books in his hands, which he placed gently in a pile on a stump.
“You’re going to lay them out already?” said Aran. “The ground is still wet from the fog.”
“No, I just want to say them to you,” Larry repeated, lifting the first one from the top of the pile and opening its cover. The sudden sense he felt of impending danger made him pause for a minute, and then impelled him on. “All these people were hunters,” he said, grasping for words in Pahquel that could capture the slightest essence of what he meant. “They were hunters, but not of animals. Of worlds. Of worlds they’d never been to.” He started to falter, and turned to his pile. “You see, this one, it tells the story of a man who travels across the world to find a new home. He ends up in a place called Italy, which his line will someday come to rule.” She looked at him, confused, frowning pointedly when he spoke of the outsider who becomes a chief. He put the book down and turned to another. “This one, it’s about this boy who teams up with a runaway captured person and they jump on a raft like our gathering boat and find out about the world.” He looked at her for recognition, but finding only confusion, put the book down. “This one,” he continued on, now with a tremor of uncertainty in his voice, “is about these persons, called Hobbits, who must capture this ring”—he used the English word, wrapping a finger of one hand around the ring finger of the other—“and take away its strength, and this one,” he said, laying Tolkein atop the pile, “is about a person named Henry Walter Bates who walks through the forest and tells stories about all the animals and plants.” She nodded at that one, a gesture of approval that seemed to diminish, for a moment, the growing expression of concern he had begun to sense in her.
“Only living things tell stories,” she said at last. “Only persons, or animals, or ancestors, or plants.”
“Yes,” said Larry, suddenly desperate for her comprehension. Then he had an idea. “These are my chajans,” he said, drawing symbols on the ground with his finger.
“They’re too weak to be chajans,” she said, reaching up to touch one, pulling on a page. “They’re leaves, not trunks.”
“Where I was born, they last forever,” said Larry, increasingly frightened. “Hands and feet of hands and feet.” He turned, his posture one of supplication now, and picked up the dearest of his companions, his friend Van Gogh. “Listen,” he said, and began to read, stumbling over the effort to squeeze the English words into Pahqua. This is my favorite: “Well, even in that deep misery I felt my energy revive, and I said to myself: in spite of everything I shall rise again, I will take up my pencil (my brushes), which I have forsaken in great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing, and from that moment everything has seemed transformed for me.” He looked at her, a question, and then flipped through the pages and went on: “This person was a painter too. Listen: When the grass is fresh, it is a rich green, the like of which we seldom see in the North (the jacu, he said), quiet. When it gets scorched and dusty, it does not lose its beauty (tuara), but then the landscape gets tones of gold of various tints …. And this combined with the blue—from the deepest royal blue of the water to the blue of … the bluest flowers ….”
She looked at him in silence for several minutes, studying his face, unmoving. Only the wind toyed with wisps of her hair, fingering them gently, and then leaving them as they were.
“Um?” said Larry quietly at last, over the din of his heart in his ears.
“Mboa,” she said, coming to crouch beside him, understanding at least that she was grass.
CXXVI
WITHOUT ITS OVERSTUFFED sofas and its imposing buffets with their settings for twenty-four and its pedestals set at odd angles, exhibiting replicas in marble of the highlights of the high Renaissance, the Senor’s house began to breathe again, its lungs expanding and stretching, its exhalations pushing the walls outward. As they walked through the echoing rooms taking stock of what was left after the permanent residents of Paruqu had no doubt stripped it, the broken furniture and piles of paper, the rusted old desk and the shadows of pictures on the walls, Jorge and Martina acted as if each was so preoccupied by the act of looking that neither noticed the presence of the other. Jorge picked up a sack of rags carefully and shook it, and Martina pulled at the drawers of a wooden dresser, rifling through reams of used carbon paper. They came across stacks of empty file folders, and cheaply bound books that smelled strongly of mildew and old clothes and cartons of government documents, blank forms and completed ones, some of which had already sheltered a few generations of mice. They moved from one end to the other through the wing of offices and guest rooms, whose hallway murals were even more triumphant than before, no doubt at their perseverance. And then at the landing beside the back stairwell, Jorge gave a shout and they all ran to surround him, Martina from down the hall and Joaquim from downstairs, followed by Sam.
Jorge picked up the familiar travel bag and held it out at arm’s length, afraid to see what was in it, and what was no longer there. He pulled out its contents gently, as though their preciousness at that moment had made them suddenly fragile. Martina took the folders as Jorge handed them over and laid them out along the wall, together with his clipboards, and a razor in a pouch, and a compass, and a bottle of half-disintegrated antacid tablets. At last, with trembling hands, he pulled out the envelope Larry had given him and turned it over. It had been unsealed, but the paper in Larry’s hand was still inside it on which two numbers were written faintly in pencil. He handed the paper to Joaquim. “That’s yours,” he said, turning back to survey his possessions. “I think there’s a folder missing, with the locations and dates of runs.
“Does it look like this?” said Joaquim, holding it up.
“That’s it!” said Jorge, reaching for it.
“It’s double-or-nothing day, I guess,” said Joaquim, holding up a scrap of paper. “Found in Sodeis’s bedroll.” They all leaned in at once to see what was on it and in the process, Jorge could feel Martina’s shoulder pushing against his and didn’t step away. Joaquim pulled the bit of paper from Larry’s envelope and they stood, comparing the numbers, which looked strangely foreign in Sodeis’s flowery hand.
CXXVII
WHEN DABIMI’S KAAG breathed her last, slumping suddenly over her grinding stone one morning as she sat gossiping and singing with her two sisters from the far village, it was two days before Dabimi heard the news. It was common knowledge that he often stayed away at night, and no one was surprised that it was left to his children to decide on their own with which of the dried plants from Kakap Ak’s stores she should be filled for burning, and when the burning would be. When Dabimi was intercepted by Kakap and Panar on his way to his hut on the second evening, Aran was already finishing, having painted the kaag’s transformation into the torso of their chajan, stooping slightly to put her work at eye-level. At the news, Dabimi hung his head, allowing it to droop just as the kaag’s had, like the falling of an overfilled gourd. But despite his distress, he stopped to stand beside Aran while she laquered the colors, leaning over to speak to her quietly before he turned and began to wail. Kakap and Panar came to squat beside him, and suddenly the entire village burst out, as though it had been waiting. Between swells, Kakap and Panar each spoke to Dabimi in turn about the particular plants that had been chosen, some from his line and some from hers, some to take away pain and others to teach her what she would need to know to take her place among the ancestors. The choices were of the utmost importance, for they would determine the course of her life outside of time and the world, but Dabimi seemed somehow impatient with the discussion, waving them off and moving instead to sit among his children and his kaag’s sisters, whose wail
ing was more heartfelt and filled in the voids in his own.
“He told me it’s his right to claim a first kaag,” Aran whispered to Larry after the boys were asleep. She was trembling in his arms, and her tears fell on his chest. “But that’s not true. She was his first kaag, even though she died. I will never go to him. He has no claim on me. He has no claim,” she cried again and again, in a hushed voice despite that she would never have been heard above the wailing that echoed from one end of the village to the other.
When she had quieted, he said, “Do you want me to go to Kakap and ask him? I can do it now or in the morning. He may still be at Dabimi’s. I can go now and look for him.” He lit a torch from the fire on their kaawa and began to head up the path toward Dabimi’s house, but met both of the old Aks coming toward him before he had taken even a hands and feet of steps. In a hushed voice, he called them over and drew them into the hut, feeling already unsettled as he observed Kakap’s unsteady gait and Panar’s pronounced hunch as they came forward.
“He has no claim,” hissed Aran, repeating herself so insistently that they had to quiet her before they could respond.
“Of course he has no claim,” Kakap said first. “He has already had a first kaag. And besides that, aren’t you akarara?” No longer able to bear children, which would render her unsuitable as a first kaag in any case.
She hung her head as she nodded, turning her face from Larry. He put his arm around her and drew her to him.
“He spoke so strangely,” said Aran finally, turning to look at him.
“Many voices come out of a forsaken person,” said Panar, standing up as best he could inside their small hut. At the door, he held both their arms for a minute. Kakap gave Larry a playful pinch on the shoulder as he squeezed past them onto their kaawa.
“And the other thing,” said Aran as they turned to go, “is that he smelled bad. Not like a person,” she added.
CXXVIII
JORGE WOULD NEVER have admitted it, but his anxiety tended to rise in direct proportion to the distance from his plane. As he went down the sloping path to retrieve Martina from the gathering of women working the clay, he remembered his previous encounter with her there and felt a sudden wave of shame, which was amplified by his distance from the Beaver’s controls. At the moment, he wasn’t so much embarrassed because of his prior outburst, however, but because the outburst at least implied a familiarity to which he could no longer lay claim. He was relieved to find her with a smaller group this time, which lessened slightly his sense of being observed.
“I think we’re ready,” he said, standing over Martina and the Indian women as they rolled.
“Can you talk to them?” said Martina.
“What do you want me to say?” said Jorge, his anxiety flaring at the prospect of a delay.
“Ask them where the other women are,” said Martina.
Jorge asked in Ge, and drew his mouth and nose into a tight knot as he listened to the answer.
“She said two died, and the rest are sick,” he said. “I’ll give them our sympathy,” he said, and did.
“What’s their sickness?”
Jorge asked, and then translated for Martina, addressing her knees.
“They said it’s falling sickness, that it’s come to their village before. They seem to think it’s not a white man’s disease. Only Indians get it.”
Martina held their forearms for what felt like minutes as she took leave of them, and followed slowly behind Jorge as he headed up the hill. When she reached the verandah, she motioned to Sam and to Joaquim. Jorge stood behind them pretending not to listen, playing with his pack.
“I think we should do bloods,” said Martina to Sam. “I don’t remember how many of them were there last time, but I’d guess ten or more. Now there are four. They say they have falling sickness. I don’t know what that is, but we should track it.”
“I have some guesses,” said Sam, unlacing one of the boxes to look for his kits.
“They’re not going to tolerate your just walking up and sticking them with needles,” said Joaquim to Sam, putting a hand on his shoulder to slow him down. “I know you haven’t been in the field before, but one thing you’re going to learn is that taking blood is a threatening prospect.”
“Let’s you and I go and talk to them first,” said Martina, walking over and pulling Jorge along with her by the arm. “Maybe we can explain it to them. Tell them we have a doctor with us who figures out illnesses.”
“They have their own doctors,” said Jorge.
“Don’t forget the mission,” said Joaquim. “That’s where these Indians show up when they’re ill. Catalpa liked to think that it was his diplomacy that was responsible for his good name with them, but the mission was here at least ten years before he was, and it’s been relatively good to them. Also, the missionaries vaccinated, and they know how many of their trading partners got smallpox, while they stayed healthy. These Indians trust us at least to a point, and they trust the mission even more.”
“Let’s try this first,” said Martina, pulling Jorge along.
Jorge glanced at Joaquim who shrugged. He hesitated for a minute and then turned to follow behind Martina with his head hanging, a chastened, obedient child. As he walked, he whispered under his breath: “Falling sickness,” feeling the resonance of the phrase.
CXXIX
SINCE KAKAP COULD no longer shoulder the yoke or walk for long without resting, he gave Larry the choice of either going without him to gather, or of their going out together on one of the narrow, painted rafts that were used to bring in the chajan logs and the pirarucu from upstream. Long stretches of the river were nearly impassable even after the rains, and as neither of them was skilled at oars, Pitar, Kakap’s middle son, was recruited as an oarsman, although the arrangement delayed his bid to undertake a ritaXa, the type of solitary retreat that prepared men for higher status. Larry hadn’t expected Dabimi to approve their plan, which took Pitar from his hunting group and placed a greater pressure on his line, but when Kakap returned from Dabimi’s hut, he could tell by the slant of his head that the meeting had gone well. Despite the likelihood that Dabimi had been pleased most of all by the postponement of Pitar’s claim to a ritaXa, Pitar was eager to row, and spent his mornings on the river, learning from Sari and Xitot. On the day he returned from his first trip as a full-fledged oarsman, he strutted around the hut with an unselfconscious delight that reminded Larry of Oji, even though Oji was younger by five rains, and that Pitar was a grown man with a child. In his exuberance, he persuaded them to start within a hand of days, and threw himself into preparing and nagged his father to compile the song that listed the plants to be gathered.
They set off at dawn, when the chill was still sharp in the air, and the water could do nothing to warm them. The riverbed overflowed with rocks and grit, so that the raft had to be hauled for long stretches on its runners with their yokes and their hammocks tied to it. The hauling vines wore symmetrical red medallions into their collarbones, and fish bit at their ankles as they pulled the raft from the water. The mosquitoes were as dense as the air, and the mud was thick with half-buried sting-rays, and caimans trolled for fish with their huge mouths gaping, so that conversation was often interrupted by the sickening snap of jaws. The sliver of sun was as sharp as its reflection, and the rocks were as sharp as the sun, and the waters were so thick with piranha that they had to haul Kakap onto the raft despite his protests and requests for a turn to pull. At those times, Larry tried to grasp the memory of James’s voice preaching the blessings of Pahquel’s nearly unnavigable river, which fed and protected them at once. He leaned into the vines and his legs shook with the strain, and sometimes after he and Pitar had maneuvered the raft onto level ground, they collapsed, panting, on top of it, pressing themselves into Kakap from either side. It would seem hopeless, and Kakap would declare, without accusation or self-pity, his intention to be left behind, and the weight of the impending loss of him would combine with the weight of the
raft to leave them nearly paralyzed in the web of pulling vines.
Then, as they threw themselves forward, the rocks would suddenly give way and the raft would slide without effort through fine sand and clear water, leaving barely a ripple behind. They would enter a world without friction in which they floated weightless, untethered in time. Larry called himself Huckleberry Finn, and waved to the inhabitants of the shore—caimans that sunned themselves with their chins half-buried in the sand, and kingfishers, tentative and careful, and monkeys with serious white faces who turned their heads slowly to watch them as they passed. They would glide through clouds of iridescent butterflies whose reflections swam among tetras of the same shimmering purple-blue, and at evening, they were brushed by the slipstreams of egrets flying upriver toward the moon. They lay on their backs in the raft in slow-moving water and looked up through the thin, jagged deep blue seam that formed a part between the trees, across which toucans darted, and bats swarmed and wheeled. They beached the raft on slivers of sand barely wide enough to hold it, and ate their rolls of pancake and dried fish by the fire, and chewed on nuts and fruit from the baskets while Kakap sang to the plants, a familiar, soothing song that called on them to appear.