Children of Paradise: A Novel

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Children of Paradise: A Novel Page 28

by Fred D'Aguiar


  On the walk back to the buildings, Joyce and Trina hold hands and want to skip along but keep their walk to a trudge to match the other farmworkers’. Joyce offers to give Trina a piggyback, since they are leaving the piggy farm. Trina holds her canvas shoes and points at her sore foot and even hops a couple of steps to indicate pain or blister, in case a guard or prefect is looking. Then she climbs aboard. The piggyback is as close as she comes to hugging her mother to celebrate the fact that the captain showed up. Joyce walks slowly with her daughter on her back. She tells herself she will get them both away from this place and the captain will be there to help them. And if she fails, then this act of carrying her daughter will be the last thing they do. If she has to join a commune line to drink along with her daughter, she promises herself to find a way to carry her just like this, and if the preacher is right about paradise, then this walk will never end.

  —That was her, wasn’t it?

  The first mate puts this to the captain as they steer the boat back into deeper water.

  —To whom do you refer, señor?

  —The Princess and the Pea.

  The captain straightens his hat and stares ahead with a smile and replies in his best faux Australian:

  —No idea what you’re talking about, mate.

  The first mate slaps his captain on the arm and takes his hand and keeps hold of it.

  —Captain, that was Joyce and Trina up on that hill, chasing those pigs for the world to see, well, a world with just you in it. That was the two of them!

  —Yes, oh yes, that was my Joyce and Trina.

  And right there the two men grab each other and perform a little jig, sticking out their legs and circling by linking arms, before they check themselves and run back to their stations in case the boat drifts into a sandbank. They talk about how many guards were on the scene and how far away Joyce and Trina were from the wharf and how long it would take to reach them or for them to make it down to the boat. The captain asks his first mate to forget that they are relatives for a moment and forget that he is the captain and tell him honestly, man to man, if the idea of devising a plan to rescue Joyce and Trina from the commune strikes him as a madcap notion.

  —Man to man?

  —Yes. Plain, no varnish.

  The first mate says if the captain forgets about Joyce and Trina and does nothing but pretend the river is his life and life is the river and everything else a distraction, he will be one first mate short and one cousin fewer and will have one less friend in the world to watch his back. Aubrey cannot leave his captain’s post, as he dearly wants to right then, so he waves a raised fist in the direction of Anthony, his first mate, his cousin, his friend. Both men scratch their itchy new beards.

  The first mate asks the captain, if he could be one thing in this life, what would that be. Aubrey takes no time to reply:

  —Water, of course. How about you?

  The first mate says wood.

  —Wood?

  —Yep. I start as a tree, and I turn into practical things like this.

  He slaps the boat.

  —What made you ask that?

  The first mate says partly because he loves the boat and river and working with the captain, he would not want to be too far away from that trio. The captain bows and waves his fist in a gesture of solidarity with the first mate. They steer Many Waters down the middle of a bend enclosed by trees that funnel the boat through a green-lit bottleneck. The river opens into a straight; on both banks a panorama of rolling savannah tilts into the distance all the way up to greet the horizon, and the two banks blend with the surroundings and with the sky to become a river somehow lifted into space.

  Today the water appears smooth, its usual wrinkles ironed out by the sun. Almost as if thinking aloud, the captain says that the way the river flows with a quiet power tells him a thing or two, that for power to do real good, it need only be deployed quietly.

  Captain says there are places, ports, jetties, whatever, all along the river for people to board and disembark as they choose.

  —And sometimes those arrivals and departures are chosen for us.

  Aubrey pauses and Anthony rolls his hand in small circles for Aubrey to elaborate.

  —The river grinds a stone to dust and washes bones clean. It runs but it can fly to great heights and fall to great depths. If that isn’t a library for a lifetime’s study I don’t know what is.

  The first mate nods, but says nothing, can say nothing, looks at the expanse of water in front of him and wipes his eyes.

  Ryan thinks as he is conveyed from cave to bush to clearing.

  Wind to the left and to the right blows away things stuck in the eye of the sun. Sun eye open but moon eye shut and the two share the same face. And birds fall, one for each teardrop from the bright eye of the sun and the darker eye of the moon, from the bearded face of sky, from cotton wool squeezed dry and swiped to the left and to the right until those two eyes become clear. Clean sun eye shine and dull moon eye, too. Sky face shines bright and blue.

  Ryan keeps looking up as he is carried, and his head that is too heavy for his neck hangs and lolls and lollops to another’s bounds and strides.

  Joyce volunteers to work at the bakery to get some extra baked goods squirreled away at short notice in case she and Trina need them. She wants to see how things work during the night. Since most of the sermons occur at night and run very late on many occasions, it is entirely probable that the final communal drink could fall during an evening, in which case Joyce wants to know that she can secure some rations in a hurry for a fast exit. As she mixes flour and water and begins kneading dough and greasing pans, she wonders if Trina can sleep with so much to store in her young head. She asks herself what kind of a mother gets herself and her daughter into a situation like this.

  Her tears fall into the dough that she mixes even as she dabs her eyes on her sleeves and tells herself that she is stupid to cry over a situation that needs her resolve, not her tears. She leans in to the bread mixture with all her strength and rolls and twists it. The table creaks and shakes under her weight and she turns over the dough with the same, slamming it down again with a loud thump that causes loose flour to flare upward like smoke from a blast, and she keeps doing this over and over. Then she tears the dough to pieces and forces those portions into baking pans. And from flour, water, baking powder, and a pinch of salt mixed and forced around in this way, she makes bread. Just like the preacher made a disciple of her and everyone around her.

  Trina looks around her dormitory and wonders what will become of all the children. Not like Ryan. She realizes that her family extends to everyone in the room and on the compound, and for them to die would mean the end of her family. What will become of Adam? Is Ryan alive or dead? She faces the wall and keeps very still and tries to sleep. She counts the times she talked with Ryan and thought their time together would never end. His legs to help her run in the game he played so well. His bread in her mouth. She hears Ryan call her name. She wants to turn around and whisper to him for a while about whatever he chooses to talk about, but she knows he is not really there. He calls her name again. Without changing her position, she whispers that he should shut his mouth and his eyes.

  Another voice, Rose’s this time:

  —Yes, go to sleep.

  And another and another and Trina adds her yes to the chain and they begin to giggle and become noisy and Ryan begs them to stop and sleep or they will get him into trouble and he will get another beating. And all the children jump up with Trina and Rose and leap on Ryan. He falls to the floor and they cover him with hugs, and under the pile, Trina’s face ends up near his.

  —Why didn’t you answer me the first time?

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The captain and his first mate spend the night at an indigenous Indian village carved out of the forest a short walk from the river. Hammocks slung between trees hold dozing adults or children in pairs or a parent rocking a sleeping infant. Huts fenced in by logs form a semici
rcle, and a central clearing supports a large fire with a roast turning on a spit attended by a couple of men and a woman. The first mate pulls off his cap and puts it on the head of a child, and the other children chase the child to take a turn. The next child to get the hat runs off with it on his head, pursued by the group of children.

  The captain talks with the elders, Sid among them, about ways to persuade the commune to stop polluting the river. The commune, it emerges, is the principal culprit but not the sole one. The international logging companies’ alarming rates of deforestation add their share of bad practices. Sid shares the joke with the captain about his unarmed indigenous council taking on a truckload of armed commune guards and how the guards retreated from the scene, shouting the names of clothes, blouses, skirts, trousers, and panties. Sid asks the captain if he knows the significance of the items. The captain shakes his head and says that the commune works in mysterious ways. Sid and the elders laugh. The talk returns to logging. They knock around ideas about how to control the numbers of loggers, since their machinery clears so many trees so fast that they create massive dead zones in the forest. Those responsible happen to be foreign companies, blessed by the government. They talk about saving the country from itself before the entire rain forest ends up parceled off and sold to the highest bidder from overseas.

  The cooks add pieces of the roast to a large pot of vegetable stew and ladle the stew into wood bowls and pass around cassava bread that everyone tears and dips into the stew. Wooden cups of warm rice wine never seem to get more than half empty before being refilled. Neither the captain nor the first mate smoke, but as the pipe comes around the circle and it reaches the captain, he takes a symbolic puff and coughs, which draws laughter, and his first mate puffs and does not cough even once, which earns him cheers. They join in a dance around the fire to drums and chants, and their dances make the shapes of birds and animals of the forest. Perhaps it is the wine and the smoke, but the moment of circling the fire slows, overtaken by a faster spin of the dark and the shadows of flames licking the leaves and rubbing against the trunks of trees. The captain and the first mate feel indistinguishable from their surroundings. The captain thinks he moves because the person in front of him and his first mate behind him move, that he can stop only if they stop and the forest and the darkness in a faster spin stop at the same time. The chanting and the drums match the flames. The people and the forest shape the dark. All of them move in concert. None of them wants to be the first to stop the dance.

  They sleep in a guest hut on beds made of grass and leaves, and the room smells of baked clay. They remove their shoes and their hats, and the moment their heads touch the bedding, they drift off. The forest can be a noisy place at night if a person listens to it, but the ears get tired just like the body, and though ears remain open, they stop being consciously receptive. The captain and his first mate hear monkeys and frogs, but in their end-of-a-long-day state, they cease putting names to sounds and therefore stop hearing the names. Their bodies join the shadows of a dying fire. They hear but do not listen to the drum of their hearts and they feel a stranger’s heart as it synchronizes with their own. They dance but with wings for arms, which makes their gyrations weightless, freeing them from the limits of their bodies and casting them into the air above the trees. And instead of falling they simply drift with no up and no down and with stars all around them that they can reach out and touch if they have the energy or inclination.

  In the morning it is almost sorrow to resume their former selves, but it is sweet to feel renewed, in a new body, and therefore in a new set of circumstances even if they face the same things. They eat cornmeal porridge and drink green tea and thank their hosts and offer a few dollars. The first mate asks the captain’s permission to give away his cap and the captain says yes and the first mate drops it on the head of a child who immediately attracts many small hands that try to pull it off and the child runs away pursued. The two men promise Sid that they will return soon. They dip in the river and brush their teeth with the chewed end of a twig from a special bush with oil in it that polishes the teeth and leaves the mouth feeling fresh. The captain asks his first mate if he is ready. The first mate says never more so.

  —Let’s do this.

  The first mate nods slowly and spins the wheel. In the morning light, as the boat leans into the current, it looks like a perfectly formed flock of parakeets swooping low over the water. The Many Rivers cuts across the river current, set on a course for the commune.

  Trina brings Ryan a bowl of cornmeal porridge. He crawls out of his hiding place under the bunk bed but refuses to eat. She tells him the trouble she went through to walk from the kitchen with a bowl of porridge that every hungry child wants to take from her and every prefect and guard she meets questions her about. Still Ryan shakes his head and looks at the bowl as if it might be poison. She tells him she might get into big trouble for telling everyone that the preacher asked for the bowl of porridge so that he can sample the quality of the breakfast being fed to his flock, but Ryan remains unmoved. Trina dips the spoon in the porridge and eats a little and tries to feed the rest to him. He pulls his head away and keeps his lips sealed. She brings the spoon to his mouth and presses it to his bottom lip and he takes the spoon’s contents and swallows. She feeds him again and again until the bowl empties.

  —Next time you feed yourself, you big baby.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The president of the land of many waters dictates a letter that he wants flown and delivered forthwith to the commune leader with the date—two weeks hence, is how he puts it—of the U.S. delegation’s arrival and its composition. Next to the list of names, he writes “press” or “VIP” or “concerned relative” and the kind of access each wants at the commune. His letter advises the reverend to take this one on the chin and he will be rid of foreign interference, since half the things said about the commune concern outside access and this visit would settle that question and quiet the negative publicity. The president argues that this could be a positive public relations exercise if the commune handles the visit with professionalism. Much can be accomplished in the few days before the delegation arrives. He recommends that the commune spruce up the place, mow grass, a lick of paint here and there, put out flags, bunting, that sort of thing. Plenty of schoolchildren in neatly pressed uniforms always do the trick with the media.

  Finally, he offers the assistance of the highest office of the land to the commune leader to facilitate the urban aspects of the visit.

  We have a zoo with the largest collection of anteaters on the continent. Our botanical gardens abound with Rafflesia, the largest single flower on earth, some opening only once every twenty years, with a twenty years’ smell to match; to witness one of these rare specimens opening is to remember that time and day for the rest of your days. The largest wooden building in the southern hemisphere that is a miracle of engineering is here, and cloth, we are a land of weavers, and the best indigenous Indian wood carvings at bargain prices, the best curried goat, the most prized blood pudding, the most precious gold and diamonds at a steal given the exchange rates, the most mouthwatering cow foot, pig foot, and offal stew, and the world’s longest single-drop waterfall in the free world, not to forget calypso, everyone needs to dance every once in a while, and we have cricket.

  The preacher’s assistants divide themselves between checking the radio to see if the connection to the president’s office is still open and making sure the reverend is okay. The preacher looks around for something else to throw, and seeing nothing within reach, he stamps his feet, jumps up and down on the spot, and rushes at the radio again, but his assistants and the guards restrain him. They release him and he warns them all never to lay a finger on him when he has a mind to do something. He turns to the nearest guard and punches him hard in the stomach. The guard doubles over and vomits into his hands and darts out of the room, still leaning forward and leaving a trail of bile and a sour smell in his wake.

  The people roam a
round the commune, guided by chores. All appear to wait for something, an order to switch tasks, another summons to meet, or a message on the broadcast system. They do what they think the preacher wants them to do, but he asks something different of them. They move as if the preacher were standing in their midst, directing them this way and that. They move against each other at the slightest provocation or report of dissent or any accusation of impudence or a lack of effort. Adam watches them as if he stands in their place and they in his and he acts for them.

  Adam spots the woman in an apron covered in flour, coming toward his cage, and he sways from side to side and grips the bars. He holds his open hand through the bars and Joyce places an aromatic chunk of warmth in his palm. Bread, she says, and she spells it for him, b-r-e-a-d. He looks at her, retracts his arm with the spoils, and scoots to the back of his cage. He sits on his bed and nibbles the bread to make it last. Soon enough, though, the bread disappears. He sniffs his hand for the bread smell. Soon that goes, too. He considers asking her for some more, with a sound for bread and an open palm pushed through the bars of his cage and perhaps a gesture of that hand to his mouth. If not Joyce, someone else will come along soon with a banana. The preacher or Trina. Or both.

 

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