Undergrowth

by Nancy Burke

  CXXXVII

  SILVIO UNDERSTOOD FROM an early age that in the mandate to carry on his father’s work, to celebrate his triumphs and build on them and move them farther forward toward some imminent denouement, there had always been a second, unstated demand: to undo the other’s mistakes, to obscure the failures in the elder’s efforts, to render them pale and irrelevant in memory’s light. And perhaps it was Silvio’s curse to have no son to do that work for him, just as he had abandoned his own father to the full truth of his life, and especially its limits.

  How he had gone from who he was just ten years ago, he thought, surveying his old man’s face in the mirror, good-looking still, but with no trace of what James had called his lothario swagger, to a man whose every facial feature sagged subtly with the weight of his own failures, was a mystery he could not bear to solve. Instead he merely bent toward his image, rubbed the stubble on his cheek with an intensity that brought with it a blush he could no longer have created from inside himself, and then turned away slowly from that visage, a quiet and resigned goodbye.

  When he opened the bathroom door, he found Maria standing outside it, an immobile beefeater with a fresh cup of coffee in her hand. Silvio took the cup and kissed her on the forehead.

  “Good news! You have the rest of the day off,” he said, quickly waving her away.

  “That’s always a bad sign,” she said, following a step behind him as he headed towards his desk. “Whenever you give me a day off, that’s when I know I’d better call off my plans for the evening.”

  This time, Silvio raised her hand and kissed it. “I need to make some phone calls, and I don’t trust you not to listen in. And I’ll tell you something I want you never to forget: In this business, the less you know, the better.”

  “You know that’s not true,” she said, sitting in the chair by the side of the desk. “It’s what got us all in trouble in the first place.”

  “From now on, I tell you nothing but the truth, and that’s the truth,” said Silvio, raising her up and escorting her to the door.

  “What are you going to do if I go?”

  “My dear, I am going to make my calls, and then I am going to go home, and make myself a nice big drink, and read myself some nice long fairy tales, and put myself to sleep.”

  “I’ll go if you tell me who you’re calling.” She surveyed his face, and sensed without seeing it a flicker, fear, for a moment in his eyes. He looked at her for a long time, refusing to betray himself.

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” he said at last. “You’re in a bad spot already, given that you have not one but two sons still in the field.”

  Now the flicker was hers, but her eyes didn’t move from his.

  “First, I’m going to call Albuquerque Lima, see if I can meet with him, because I want to turn him into an ally, since we’re going to need all the allies we can get. Start to work it from a power base. Then, I’m going to call some people in the press, but not ours. International. The New York Times, London Times. Then I’m going to call Diego Melo, slimy rat that he is, and see what side of this he’s going to fall on, Mister “Apresentador de Marionetas” of the President’s men.

  He pushed her toward the door, bowing deeply as she pulled it behind her. Then he went to the phone. First, Melo, whose secretary said he wasn’t in. “Bullshit!” Silvio shouted into the receiver. “I have a story that’s about to break, and he’s going to look like a fool if he doesn’t know about it!” Before the secretary could even put down the phone to summon him, it was Melo on the line.

  “You’re going to owe me big time,” said Silvio, wagging his middle finger in front of the receiver.

  “We’re not talking at my office,” said Melo.

  “Name your place,” said Silvio.

  “The bar at the Novo Mundo. Eleven tonight.”

  “I already have plans,” said Silvio. “How about now?”

  “Eleven at the Novo Mundo.”

  Silvio didn’t bother to replace the receiver on the cradle, but only jabbed at the dial again. This time, he called Lima, whose secretary used the same old line. “First thing they teach you in secretary school?” he said. “I have an appointment to talk with him; can you remind him?” he said instead.

  The phone went silent for a full five minutes, during which time Silvio wore another quarter-inch rut into the linoleum. After the second of those minutes, he began to bang the desk with his fist whenever he passed it, a slow drum salute to his effort not to slam the receiver down. At last, Lima answered.

  “Amanza.”

  “Lima.”

  “What do you need from me?”

  “I need five minutes. Five minutes, and then I resign.” He sat down at the desk and positioned his stack of notes in front of him.

  “Five minutes it is,” said Lima. “Should I keep my secretary on the line?”

  “Might as well,” said Silvio, drawing in a deep breath before he spoke. When he unleashed himself, the words came like a spray of bullets, accompanied by a barely audible scratching sound on the other end of the phone as Lima’s secretary struggled with her shorthand to keep up. The scratching sound had another function too, to mask the sound of scratching from Maria’s pencil as she leaned in with her ear to the outside of the door.

  After seven of the five, Lima cut in. “So how much more you got?”

  “Maybe a hundred or so pages.”

  “Can you bring them over?”

  “I can do that,” said Silvio, holding the receiver between his shoulder and his ear as he patted the pages into a pile.

  “Then we’ll plan for your arrival in half an hour or so?”

  “Right. So do I resign, or am I fired?” Silvio shot in.

  “You don’t go anywhere. We need you right where you are.”

  “You need my boot up your ass,” said Silvio, as the click of the receiver masked the softer click of the lock on his office’s front door.

  CXXXVIII

  ALL HAD NOT gone as planned. A portage of two days had dragged on for nearly four, leaving Sodeis with the question growing constantly louder in his head of when to cut his losses and turn back, of how much good money to throw after bad. The undergrowth had been unusually thick, and the number of scratches requiring iodine had thus been disproportionately large. Had he brought a mirror, he would have struck himself as an odd mulatto indeed; his face especially, even though protected by the outsize helmet of his canoe, bore the blotched appearance of the map to which he had, for the past five days, refused himself reference. But the iodine was necessary, his secret talisman against the seething cities of microbes that had, several times, felled him for weeks on end, curtailing his freedom to move freely, to flee.

  When he came upon the riverbank at last, at midnight on the sixth day, the most rational thing would have been to spend the night there, to string up his hammock and wait at least for morning’s glow. After losing so much time, however, urgency trumped rationality, or else sleep-deprivation had allowed rationality to mutate into new, exotic forms. As Sodeis slid the canoe down the rocky riverbank and launched it, the moon barely blinked, as though refusing to acknowledge their shared understanding. He threw his pack off behind him and tested the oars. The sound of the canoe gently sluicing the water was the sound of a sigh, a smooth relief, humid and quiet. The current was so slow that there was almost no difference in the pull of upstream versus down, and the rhythm of the oars lulled him, so that several times he found himself and the craft alike drifting backwards, into the dark past. In all, the repetitive movement of his weight against the oars, the inaudible hiss of steam on the water, the tinkling sound of fish trailing drops as they broke the surface and fell back, created an aura that was better than sleeping, the world being rocked by a reassuring hand. The dramas that were playing out beyond the inert, dark bodies of the riverbanks seemed of little consequence, ephemeral as dreams. The frenetic grunt of boar, the soft grating of snakeskin on rock, the cries of frogs and the shrieks of swallows,
all were shed as effortlessly as memories. For it was not land that held his attention, but the river itself, that body he longed, through the reach of the oars, to embrace. Thus, he did not turn his head, let alone think to stop, when his canoe slid wordlessly by the sandy crescent on which the four were sleeping, four whose names he knew, and who were supposedly beings of his kind.

  CXXXIX

  THE NOVO MUNDO wasn’t Silvio’s sort of bar. He liked the dark ones, to be sure, but preferred the rat holes, the ones with the sticky floors and yellowed mirrors, where he could trust the bartender to keep confidences as much as he could trust the offerings of the establishment to loosen them. At five minutes after eleven on a Friday night, the Novo was packed. In a far back corner, someone was pounding a shiny black upright, and the neck of a bass craned above the crowd, moving from side to side, scanning for fish. It took Silvio a full five minutes to locate Diego Melo, who was leaning against the bar in his shirtsleeves, his necktie dangling at an angle, nearly untied. One of his interlocutors nudged him, and Melo pulled himself away from a group of men in dark suits and greeted Silvio with a choreographed embrace.

  “My man!” shouted Melo above the din. “How many years, huh?”

  Silvio nodded, feeling suddenly a bit woozy, hanging as he was over the abyss between what he had to say and the place he was saying it in.

  “What’re you having?”

  “A scotch, straight up,” said Silvio, looking around for a corner, or at least enough open wall to prop himself against.

  “Well!” said Melo, ordering himself the same. He handed one over to Silvio, and toasted the last decade, and the decade to come. “I’ve been keeping track of all your hard work, man. You should know that. I see that you haven’t had a raise in five years, and I’m putting you in for a big one.” He looked over at Silvio with satisfaction, his glance more period than comma, as though he had succeeded in foreclosing on their meeting in record time by simultaneously insulting his old acquaintance and making him beholden.

  Silvio waved away the offer of the money, his hand barely navigating the narrow channel between his face and Melo’s. He gestured toward a table by the wall, and Melo reluctantly followed him over.

  “I’m not going to waste your time on pettiness,” he said. “Even after all this time, you know me better than that!” It was true that although Melo had never been SPI, he had hovered on the edges of it long enough to have been caught, once or twice, in the strings the puppet master pulled.

  “So what can I do for you?” said Melo, resigned to a real conversation, throwing an impatient glance towards his friends.

  “I’m here to give you a warning, and an offer,” said Silvio. “It wasn’t my intention to take you down, and you don’t have to go down with this thing. You can get on board and help us out here and help yourself plenty because we need a mouthpiece, someone who’s willing to ride the coattails of change.

  “I’m not following you,” said Melo.

  “What I mean is that I’ve been waking up, sorting through all the deals we’ve made in the past 10 years, and I’m seeing some disturbing patterns, and I’ll be handing the whole thing over to Lima, but only after I’ve had some long, fruitful talks with the press.”

  “You nuts?” said Melo, no longer concerning himself with the pretense of friendship. “The only one you’re going to take down is yourself! I’m watching you light yourself on fire here!”

  “I don’t have profits at stake here. You do.”

  “You’ve got the wrong guy. What I’ve done for SPI has built this town, has fed a couple thousand of our own, and has made businessmen of a bunch of uneducated savages who wouldn’t have a claim to their names without my influence.” He looked at Silvio straight, pushing the hand with the drink aside so he could get in closer. “I’m beginning to take issue with your tone. So what are you offering me?”

  “Take the reins on turning this agency around. Make your name as a real reformer. Turn back an account or two to put yourself in good faith, and flush this thing out from the top. If it breaks in the international press, you’ll have all the publicity and a real popular mandate behind you, and SPI will back you, if you’re doing it right. It’s your way on up!”

  “Why me? You’ve never had the slightest appreciation for what I’ve done, and I’m the last person you’d turn to for something like this.”

  “Because you’ve been there at least, in the field, and on the other hand, we have a long and unflattering record on you we could circulate with no effort at all. But more to the point, because you have the power. Almost enough for a run, but not quite enough. We could be useful to each other.”

  “I need to give it some thought,” said Melo, looking sharply around.

  “How much thought?”

  “How about five minutes with my boys?” he said, nodding towards the bar.

  “Five minutes,” said Silvio, looking at his watch.

  Melo got up and was swallowed by the crowd and the noise and the heat. Despite himself, Silvio craned to catch glimpses of him amid the circle of grey suits, trying to read their expressions and their gestures without being seen. He watched them from the corner of his eye as they nodded to each other, their expressions impassive or sneering, and one gesture among many caught his attention, a thick hand that patted, repeatedly, an area of pressed gabardine beneath the left lapel of a well-fitting jacket. Silvio jumped up, pushing his way between the crowd and the wall, knocking down chairs and jostling the patronage. He slid between the upright piano and the bass, behind their black velvet backdrop, and out the back door into the alley. The air was cool and moist, thick enough almost to absorb the slap of a lone set of footsteps behind him. He dodged garbage cans and a wheel-less abandoned car, first panting and then gasping as he ran. He heard the footsteps slowing behind him, but pressed on even harder towards the place where the alley let out onto Altimaya Street. He embraced that aperture of streetlight and movement with his arms open, already hailing an oncoming taxi before he could even be seen. He waved frantically and then sprang forward with a mighty leap and fell, as the sound of a single gunshot echoed against the damp walls of the city’s dank intestines.

  CXL

  SODEIS RUBBED HIS eyes and looked around in a state of foggy confusion. No doubt because he never stayed in the same place for long, he tended to have trouble, first thing in the morning, remembering where he was. He sat up and lifted his netting over his head with both hands. The world was new, filled with promise and growth. That some of that growth took the form of stands of Janka and other hardwoods he didn’t even recognize, accounted in Sodeis’s mind for much of the promise of the day, but even he could sense, in the forest’s soft chill, the possibility of something else, something unforeseen, that might represent a turning point in his latest rather miserable trajectory. He slid out from the aperture he had made between his hammock and his mosquitero, splashed water on his face from one of his canteens, and took a swig from his hip flask, wiping his mouth on his shirtsleeve.

  He hadn’t bothered to articulate to himself a plan of action, but that didn’t stop him from following it to the letter: He would attempt to locate whoever was in power, and catch him alone, and broker a deal with him that would allow him to transport some of the beauty and awe he saw around him to the river, with the help of a crew who would soon arrive to assist him. If the chief was never alone, Sodeis saw barely a wrinkle in his plan; he would then woo the populace directly with the watches and pen knives and fish hooks he carried with him at all times for just such occasions, resulting in a delay of two days at the most. He shook out his shoes and put them on, rolled his hammock, grabbed his pack and headed out, chewing on a strip of jerky as he went.

  The only difficulty his march of conquest presented to him was to be found in the yawning lag between the formation of his goals and the time of their fulfillment. A hike of even three hours, as he estimated this one would be, was long enough to allow certain unwelcome visions to slip in, never mind the
12-hour marches he was used to, which simultaneously absorbed his attention and left him open to being blindsided by internal swellings of shame and rage and regret. Today, for example, the mere leaf of a Janka falling on his hammock had left him susceptible to thoughts of his old partner in crime, Diego Melo, with whom he had shared equitably the considerable profits of a deal for two thousand hectares of said hardwood twenty years ago. But still, it wasn’t the money. The contrast between the life of power and prestige he imagined for his friend and his own life spent urinating into rotting logs and prying the muck from his boots with a stick every night stung him with particular viciousness, and as he went on, it sank him further into that reservoir of self-pity that had long been filling within him. As his earlier sense of promise eroded with the fall of each drop into that deepening pool, he slowed and more often looked around him, noting, off to his right, what appeared to be an artificial glow emanating from the arcade of tree trunks in the musty dawn. The faucet of regret closed suddenly, freeing him to move at his old pace, in small, swift steps toward the light.

  When he was within a hundred meters of the luminescence’s source, he could see that the glow was being poured from a vast cavern, a world of swarming activity, from which flowed voices and motion and the smells of burning fires and smoked fish. All day, he watched and listened, moving from one vantage point to another, in order to discern any signs of a chief, any isolated wanderers, any well-worn paths which could indicate to him where to leave his offerings, SPI-style, any signs of contact already begun. He saw that when the natives left their village, they did so only in groups, a fact that was not unexpectable to someone thinking realistically, but deflating to Sodeis. As he placed his bright cloth on a fallen tree trunk and laid out his wares, he felt resigned, suddenly, to the likelihood that his offerings would be wasted on bands of young Indians whose discoveries, should they decide to hide them from their elders, could take weeks to come to the attention of anyone in power. Perhaps he would even have to enter the village itself, a risky business given that the notebooks he had encountered at Catalpa’s gave him no information at all about the tribe, and thus no reassurance whatever that these were Indios Mansos, tame ones. To make matters worse, he carried an unfamiliar firearm, newly purchased, with which he had not yet cultivated an intimacy. As he relocated his hammock and mosquitero at nightfall just out of sight of his display, he could barely hold back from reproaching himself aloud for having permitted himself to fall yet again under the sway of hope when he knew full well that what rose in him like dew in the morning was always burned off by mid-day. At last, he drifted to sleep, and the hum of his self-reproach was replaced by the whisper of light footfalls, by slow breathing, by the soft jangle of a silver watch-band as it was raised by a dark hand to the moon.