Undergrowth

by Nancy Burke

  Over time, they grew more skilled at managing the raft, and memorized the riverbed, even in its changes, so that each three-day trip took them further than the last. Soon, they were able to go beyond where they had gone on foot, to the edge of the world, where even Kakap had never been. They learned which slips of sand afforded them easy entry, and marked out the paths with betel dye, and returned to the raft with their gourds overflowing, to the point that they could barely be sealed with the wax. Kakap mentioned, from time to time, his failing eyesight, but he could still discern from a great distance the distinctive hunch of the Karapta Cacao, which, bent and laden, he resembled, and the Laratir, which he greeted with a cry of joy, and cradled in his arms like a baby. Back at the raft, he placed it into its basket with great tenderness, as though he were putting it to bed. In fact, more and more, Kakap seemed to regard the trips as reunions with his plants. He would speak more often to them than to his own son, and seemed to have forgotten that Larry still needed teaching. Gradually, he became so lost in his songs, so oblivious to Larry and to Pitar, that they moved their attention for the first time from him to each other, and spent their days talking, about the living now more often than the dead. On the river, their conversations flowed freely, protected by a tacit agreement that their words would be left on the water. Indeed, in the village, they barely spoke, and acknowledged each other with a nod or at most a sly smile. On the boat, they poured out gossip, and talked about their children, and even made fun of Dabimi, sharing the risk between them. They spoke of Kakap in front of him, and then, all at once, were overcome and couldn’t speak, and trailed their oars in the river, cutting parallel wakes.

  One day, Kakap spotted an odd brown fungus growing at the base of a tree, and let out an overjoyed yelp as his eyes welled over with tears. It was Saptir, he sang, the great easer of pain. He hadn’t seen it since he had gathered with his father, whose suffering it had soothed. He held it up with great excitement to show Larry and Pitar, but without looking at them, as though speaking only to his memories. Then he turned suddenly and set off toward the boat. They followed him in silence, feeling a chill spread up their arms. They emerged from the forest to find a thick wind blowing from the jacu direction, churning the water and jangling the gourds on their yokes. Then the rain came, rushing toward them, hurled on by the fury of the wind. They huddled behind a fallen log and clung to each other while the water pelted the shore and the gourds smashed against each other, their taut cords straining, and the raft shook, threatening to succumb. Then the thrashing grey curtain of the storm was yanked aside with a violent snap to reveal an unfamiliar landscape, quiet and still, strewn with branches and rocks. The water was as dark and as smooth as slate, in which a few dead fish were embedded like fossils. The forest was eerily silent. They ran to the raft and embraced it and, mindful of their bruises, soothed the gourds as they retied them. They pushed off and the raft groaned as it entered the river, still uncertain after its ordeal, nursing the stiffness in its joints.

  After even the one rain, the boat rode higher in the water, so that the silence was less often rasped by the sound of wood on stone. Larry and Pitar squatted back-to-back across the rear of the platform while Kakap lay face-up at the center, resting his head on the tether-post while the gourds knocked together gently above him. Now and again, he would begin the song of Saptir in a muted, trembling voice and then break off, as though he had forgotten all but the first two lines. Saptir squeezed the molars of animals and persons, he sang, and the pain dripped out from their gums. “The pain dripped out, the pain dripped out …” and then silence, the whisper of water at the boat. Soon there was no song at all, and the boat became a cradle bearing them toward and away from the only place on earth that was their home. It jostled Kakap slightly as it was carried by the current, and only slightly more as it was hefted on its runners by Larry and Pitar over rocks and broken branches and set down. Kakap seemed not to notice where they were, and barely moved with the motion of the boat. Only the faintest, irregular quiver of his chest hinted that he was still alive.

  Larry knew that the poet Virgil had spent his last years in exile, and had only been persuaded to return to the bosom of Augustus Caesar when he was so feeble that he could no longer walk the twenty paces from the top of the gang-plank to the sheltered cot that had been laid out for him like a velvet cradle in the hold. He lay in state, half-swallowed by the damask spreads and the pillows, beyond the reach of noise and quiet, oblivious to the attendants who tiptoed in and out not daring to look his way for fear the very light from their eyes would tax him beyond his strength. His body was inert, the one still point amidst a flotilla of great and small craft that rocked and bobbed in the gleaming harbor at Brundisium, and his head teemed with all that he had seen, the spires and the light-drenched blue of the sky and the relentless clustering of words into phrases, and phrases into songs without words. Larry knew this and couldn’t stop knowing it no matter how hard he tried. After so many years in Pahquel, he still could not help but turn, when he was overcome, to the stories and the images from the books that had befriended him when he had been in greatest need and now that fact served to draw Kakap even farther from him into the embrace of strangers. He longed to tell him that he knew the last, fire-hungry loneliness of Virgil, that he had been intimate with him through the death of James, but Kakap’s own last hours were anything but lonely, though he had slipped beyond the grasp of speech. When they arrived at the inlet downriver from the village where the boats were kept, Larry and Pitar lifted the runners and tied the vines around their shoulders. They carried Kakap down the narrow path as though on a litter to his hut, and set the boat down gently at the threshold of his kaawa. The setting sun glowed in the lacquer on the chajan, and the light from the fire drew out the colors that Anok had buried there, framing Kakap in what could have been, through Larry’s blurred eyes, a brocade of crimson and brown, rimmed on one side by a golden cord.

  CXXX

  LIKE THE KOYRARE upriver, the Indians in Paruqu still insisted on sending the bodies of their dead on their way toward Xipiti in the arms of the water. They rowed them to the juncture downstream where the Paruqu empties into the bolder Arraroyo, placing their stone necklaces on them tenderly, releasing them into the infinity of currents for the piranha to clean and transport. For this, the Padres at the mission begrudged them, but restrained themselves from retaliating, choosing instead to create a compromise involving the farce of erecting wooden crosses over empty graves. Thus, despite the presence, on a bluff that was visible from the attic of the prefect’s former house, of what looked like a tidy graveyard of recently whitewashed crosses, there was no hope of unearthing answers by exhuming the bodies of the dead.

  Other sorts of bodies however, other hatreds, other tensions and terrors and regrets were easily disturbed by any misstep, any overturning of dirt. As Martina and Jorge crouched in the dark stench of a dying woman’s hut, fumbling with the words that might allow them to defile her last hours with the assault of a needle stick, the added violation of a blade against hair, they were aware of the disaster a misstep could cause, of how quickly what they said could be turned around to mean the opposite of what they meant.

  “Her spirit has already been chosen,” her daughter whispered to them, “to inhabit my brother’s first boy. That’s not how it usually goes; the woman’s spirit must be very strong to go to a boy. The news has eased her last hours.”

  “I’m happy for her,” said Martina through Jorge, reaching for the daughter’s forearm. After a long pause, she added, “But then that makes helping her blood even more important. The falling sickness must not be passed to the boy.” If Martina’s voice betrayed her duplicitousness, she couldn’t detect it in Jorge’s translation.

  “Will it hurt her?”

  “No. We’ll do it very fast.”

  The daughter turned to talk to her brother and his wife in low, muffled voices.

  “You can,” she said when she turned back.

  Ma
rtina stuck her head outside the hut, motioning to Sam. She stepped out to make room for him to enter. Standing outside the door, she could hear the muffled voices of Sam and Jorge explaining how the needle worked, and showing them the bag for the hair. There was a sudden high-pitched gurgle, followed by silence. Martina suddenly panicked that the shock of the needle had killed the old woman. To take a life, especially a life at its end, was a spirit-murder, an unforgivable crime that promised retribution. She stuck her head in the hut, and saw the daughter leaning over the mother, ear to her mouth, assessing her breath. The mother coughed and the daughter stepped back, sighing in relief. It was not the drawing of blood that was to carry her off, but the moon, who came in broad daylight to retrieve her.

  CXXXI

  ALTHOUGH MANY PROSPECTORS hired Indians to do their advance work for them, Sodeis always did his own. In fact, that was the part he liked best, allowing himself to get lost and then find his way again, often into new and lucrative situations. He had come across the largest unincorporated stand of cumaru on record just by waking up one day, putting on his boots and setting out, guided only by the compass of his own intuition. As he cleared the left fork of the Juruena, past the border of Nambikwara territory, he had felt that familiar sense of elation that always signified internal True North, a tremor on the water, or in the heat-rippled air. For a man with no home, that was as close as he ever got to a sense of having arrived. At those moments, his euphoria was marred only by the futility of the urge to tell someone, to share his accomplishment with one of the specters who always sat in judgment in the back of his mind, his father, or Diego Melo, or lately, to his irritation, Joaquim Rocha.

  In the tiny tattered notebook he drew from a plastic case in his back pocket and held before him was a list of the leads he had gathered in his thirty-year career, thirty two pages in all, with twenty lines to a page. Of the more than six hundred entries, perhaps forty were still alive; a full two-thirds had been undermined by the procurement of negative certificates by others for a price or a return of favor, thirty or more had proven to be nothing more than fantasy or rumor, and fifty were unworkable due to the violence of nature or of indios bravos, who would take too much effort to pacify. Of those that were left, some were reports by seringais who were more concerned with protecting their stands of rubber from Indian incursion than they were with liquidating hardwoods, some were based on information from nut-trappers or miners or SPI, many of whom would sell what they knew, if they didn’t intend to use it themselves, for an avoidable cut of the profits. There were leads gathered from administrators like Catalpa (though it still irked him that he had acquired not a single line from the Senor), and from road workers, and from vaqueiros, and there was a whole sheaf of leads he had copied from the clipboard he had found among Jorge’s papers. And then there were the two penciled numbers on a scrap of paper in an envelope in the same pouch, whose very ephemerality had rendered them most intriguing, as though a message in invisible ink were being held to the candle of his need, slowly releasing some forbidden revelation from the delicate obscurity of a crumpled quarter-page of onion skin.

  CXXXII

  SILVIO PUT HIS head on his desk and kept it there. Maria knew better than to comfort him. Instead, she brought a cup of coffee and silently placed it on the desk off to the side. When the phone rang, he nearly knocked it to the floor jumping up. “Alo?” he shouted into the receiver, rubbing his face vigorously, as though he were buffing a chassis. “Lima? Lima?” he shouted. The line went dead. Silvio slammed the phone onto its cradle, and then dropped his head onto the desk again with almost as much force.

  “Better for us to do our homework first, anyway, before we talk to him,” he said at last, lifting his head halfway off the desk, looking up at her at an angle. “Go get me everything you have.” Maria disappeared and returned with a stack of files. She sat across from him and dealt them out into two stacks, a doomed hand for each of them.

  “What do you want to see first?” she said as she dealt.

  “I want to see twenty years ago,” said Silvio. “I want to see Paris.”

  “SPI or other?”

  “SPI. SPI. These are my men. But no more. From now on, I’m sending no one nowhere.” He picked up a file and opened it. “Don’t wait for me,” he said, gesturing to the piles. “Dive right in yourself! Pull out anything involving one of ours and put it over there.”

  Five years, it turned out, was longer in retrospect than it had been the first time around. One or two denunciations a month had accrued behind his back into more than a hundred, ninety-five of which he didn’t have enough men even to investigate, let alone resolve. Nearly all had been reported by Maria to the Federales of the relevant Divisional Areas, whose officers had no doubt filed them under O, for oblivion. That was how it went, he knew, having harbored, all this time, his own personal version of that unknowing limbo, a nether world that floated behind a curtain on which was emblazoned, on the one side, his father’s face, and on the other, lifted straight from a faded newspaper clipping, the face of Joaquim. Taken individually, the stories had been tiny splotches, drops of blood that should have been quickly wiped away so that the painstaking work of contact, of planning, of gathering information, could go on. Taken together, now for the first time, the drops formed a river, an alphabet of infamy that spilled, with increasing intensity, across his desk: for the sin of administering Alcohol; for the sin of Burying Indians alive; for the sin of Child abduction; for the sin of Dismemberment; for the sin of throwing Explosives into villages from planes; for the sin of Fingernail extraction; for the sin of contaminated Gifts; for the sin of public Hangings; for the sin of toxic Injections; for the sin of abuses by Jesuits; for the sin of chaining Lepers to posts; for the sin of leaching Mercury; for the sins of Near and Outright starvation; for the sin of Poisoning sugar; for the sin of necessitating Quilombas, fugitive slave settlements; for the sin of Relocation by force; for the sin of Slavery, for the sin of Throwing Indians from cliffs; for the sin of Usurious financial arrangements; for the sin of spreading Venereal diseases; for the sin of Xenophobia; for the sin of the Zeal of a whole generation for torture for torture’s sake. For all these sins, Silvio understood, there was no forgiveness and only a single possible response. He waved Maria away with one hand while, with the other, he stretched out his fist toward the phone.

  CXXXIII

  THE MAKESHIFT TAVERNS that sprang up around logging camps, upstream from mines, and sometimes even on the private property of the more benign or clever of the latifundios, who were clearing large tracts and thus had many hands to entertain, had always been places where Sodeis felt at home. It was that thing about being with people who were more drunk than he was that allowed him to relax. And he always found those establishments to be the most reliable sources of labor, if what you were looking for were men with expendable futures.

  Also, you didn’t enter them by doorways; rather, they were open structures, accessible from all sides, allowing him to slip in and out of them with ease, and to survey their inhabitants before making himself known. As Sodeis circumnavigated the bar at Yanarata to be sure he didn’t recognize the clientele, he resolved to himself to give up on the mining interests altogether, which had always only brought him grief, as complicated as they were to administer, and to focus his efforts only on rare hardwoods, a resource that was unique to Amazonia, he reasoned, and thus was sure to retain its value regardless of what the world markets were up to.

  At least that was the philosophy he espoused, loudly, to the three men whose table he came up to join, directly after overhearing that their contract with Findosino was almost up. The plan took shape as he described it to them: On the one hand, there was the possibility of brokering, which he could always pursue on the side. He had some leads, having heard about a few foremen who were experiencing problems with tribes and would find a smooth negotiator to be of use, especially one who was fluent in a dozen (a slight exaggeration) Indian tongues. Then, there were the situations
in which a high bid could be undercut by a team of experienced loggers, “like us,” he added, eyeing his companions, who generally needed to offer tribes merely a fraction of what their timber was worth, leaving a large margin for profit. And then there was the scouting, the prospecting for fine stands of hardwood in proximity to rivers to which they could stake an original claim.

  “I’m asking your advice, gentlemen—since I’m relatively new to the area, and don’t know how things are done here—as to whether you might know of some adventurous types who are out of work, men who own their own tools and gear. Don’t suppose you know anybody like that.”

  “If you’ve got the contracts, I’ve got the men,” said the tallest one, who was obviously also the smartest of the three. “There’s a whole gang of us who are just about to finish up here in a week or two.”

  “Now that’s fortunate,” said Sodeis. “Because I just brokered a contract that’s due to start around then.” He rehearsed the faintly etched coordinates in his head as he reached for his cigarette case, but then thought better of bringing it out. He prided himself on his ability to gauge just how superior in social status he needed to appear in order to impress without crossing the line and stirring up problematic levels of resentment. He looked from face to face and suppressed a shudder. They were all coarse specimens, reeking of month-old sweat, and missing a clear majority of teeth. “So what are you up for?’ he asked. “I know a man named Duarte Ochoa,” he started to say, but then realized the man in question was SPI. While fleeing from Paruqu, he’d resolved to stay away from SPI for a while, to let his trail dry out. Meanwhile, the whisper of those two numbers distracted him, and he realized in an instant that that was where his intuition beckoned. “If I were to go out on my own, ahead, until you’re ready, and set everything up, and wait for you, would you all be able to follow me in? Even if the trek is long and hard?”