IGMS - Issue 16

by IGMS

  "Last night I dreamed of a great bird, flying west, away from land. Only its right wing was twice as large as its left wing. It had great bleeding wounds along the edges of its wings, and the right wing was the sickest of all, rotting in the air, the feathers dropping off."

  "Very pretty dream," said Sam. Then he translated, to keep in practice. "Que sonho lindo."

  "Ah, but what does it mean?"

  "What happened next?"

  "I was riding on the bird. I was very small, and I held a small snake in my hands --"

  "The feathered snake."

  "Yes. And I turned it loose, and it went and ate up all the corruption, and the bird was clean. And that's all. You've got a bubble in that syringe. The idea is to inject medicine, not air. What does the dream mean?"

  "What, you think I'm a Joseph? A Daniel?"

  "How about a Sam?"

  "Actually, your dream is easy. Piece of cake."

  "What?"

  "Piece of cake. Easy as pie. That's how the cookie crumbles. Man shall not live by bread alone. All I can think of are bakery sayings. I must be hungry."

  "Tell me the dream or I'll poke this needle into your eye."

  "That's what I like about you Indians. Always you have torture on your mind."

  She planted her foot against him and knocked him off his stool onto the packed dirt floor. A beetle skittered away. Sam held up the syringe he had been working with -- it was undamaged. He got up, set it aside. "The bird," he said, "is North and South America. Like wings, flying west. Only the right wing is bigger." He sketched out a rough map with his toe on the floor.

  "That's the shape, maybe," she said. "It could be."

  "And the corruption -- show me where it was."

  With her toe, she smeared the map here, there.

  "It's obvious," said Sam.

  "Yes," she said. "Once you think of it as a map. The corruption is all the Europeanized land. And the only healthy places are where the Indians still live."

  "Indians or half-Indians," said Sam. "All your dreams are about the same thing, Anamari. Removing the Europeans from North and South America. Let's face it. You're an Indian chauvinist. You give birth to the resurrection god of the Aztecs, and then you send it out to destroy the Europeans."

  "But why do I dream this?"

  "Because you hate Europeans."

  "No," she said. "That isn't true."

  "Sure it is."

  "I don't hate you."

  "Because you know me. I'm not a European anymore, I'm a person. Obviously you've got to keep that from happening anymore, so you can keep your bigotry alive."

  "You're making fun of me, Sam."

  He shook his head. "No, I'm not. These are true dreams, Anamari. They tell you your destiny."

  She giggled. "If I give birth to a feathered snake, I'll know the dream was true."

  "To drive the Europeans out of America."

  "No," she said. "I don't care what the dream says. I won't do that. Besides, what about the dream of the flowering weed?"

  "Little weed in the garden, almost dead, and then you water it and it grows larger and larger and more beautiful --"

  "And something else," she said. "At the very end of the dream, all the other flowers in the garden have changed. To be just like the flowering weed." She reached out and rested her hand on his arm. "Tell me that dream."

  His arm became still, lifeless under her hand. "Black is beautiful," he said.

  "What does that mean?"

  "In America. The U.S., I mean. For the longest time, the blacks, the former slaves, they were ashamed to be black. The whiter you were, the more status you had -- the more honor. But when they had their revolution in the sixties --"

  "You don't remember the sixties, little boy."

  "Heck, I barely remember the seventies. But I read books. One of the big changes, and it made a huge difference, was that slogan. Black is beautiful. The blacker the better. They said it over and over. Be proud of blackness, not ashamed of it. And in just a few years, they turned the whole status system upside down."

  She nodded. "The weed came into flower."

  "So. All through Latin America, Indians are very low status. If you want a Bolivian to pull a knife on you, just call him an Indian. Everybody who possibly can, pretends to be of pure Spanish blood. Pure-blooded Indians are slaughtered wherever there's the slightest excuse. Only in Mexico is it a little bit different."

  "What you tell me from my dreams, Sam, this is no small job to do. I'm one middle-aged Indian woman, living in the jungle. I'm supposed to tell all the Indians of America to be proud? When they're the poorest of the poor and the lowest of the low?"

  "When you give them a name, you create them. Benjamin Franklin did it, when he coined the name American for the people of the English colonies. They weren't New Yorkers or Virginians, they were Americans. Same thing for you. It isn't Latin Americans against Norteamericanos. It's Indians and Europeans. Somos todos indios. We're all Indians. Think that would work as a slogan?"

  "Me. A revolutionary."

  "Nos somos os americanos. Vai fora, Europa! America p'ra americanos! All kinds of slogans."

  "I'd have to translate them into Spanish."

  "Indios moram na India. Americanos moram na America. America nossa! No, better still: Nossa America! Nuestra America! It translates. Our America."

  "You're a very fine slogan maker."

  He shivered as she traced her finger along his shoulder and down the sensitive skin of his chest. She made a circle on his nipple and it shriveled and hardened, as if he were cold.

  "Why are you silent now?" She laid her hand flat on his abdomen, just above his shorts, just below his navel. "You never tell me of your own dreams," she said. "But I know what they are."

  He blushed.

  "See? Your skin tells me, even when your mouth says nothing. I have dreamed these dreams all my life, and they troubled me, all the time, but now you tell me what they mean, a white-skinned dream-teller, you tell me that I must go among the Indians and make them proud, make them strong, so that everyone with a drop of Indian blood will call himself an Indian, and Europeans will lie and claim native ancestors, until America is all Indian. You tell me that I will give birth to the new Quetzalcoatl, and he will unify and heal the land of its sickness. But what you never tell me is this: Who will be the father of my feathered snake?"

  Abruptly he got up and walked stiffly away. To the door, keeping his back to her, so she couldn't see how alert his body was. But she knew.

  "I'm fifteen," said Sam, finally.

  "And I'm very old. The land is older. Twenty million years. What does it care of the quarter-century between us?"

  "I should never have come to this place."

  "You never had a choice," she said. "My people have always known the god of the land. Once there was a perfect balance in this place. All the people loved the land and tended it. Like the garden of Eden. And the land fed them. It gave them maize and bananas. They took only what they needed to eat, and they did not kill animals for sport or humans for hate. But then the Incas turned away from the land and worshiped gold and the bright golden sun. The Aztecs soaked the ground in the blood of their human sacrifices. The Pueblos cut down the forests of Utah and Arizona and turned them into red-rock deserts. The Iroquois tortured their enemies and filled the forests with their screams of agony. We found tobacco and coca and peyote and coffee and forgot the dreams the land gave us in our sleep. And so the land rejected us. The land called to Columbus and told him lies and seduced him and he never had a chance, did he? Never had a choice. The land brought the Europeans to punish us. Disease and slavery and warfare killed most of us, and the rest of us tried to pretend we were Europeans rather than endure any more of the punishment. The land was our jealous lover, and it hated us for a while."

  "Some Catholic you are," said Sam. "I don't believe in your Indian gods."

  "Say Deus or Cristo instead of the land and the story is the same," she said. "But n
ow the Europeans are worse than we Indians ever were. The land is suffering from a thousand different poisons, and you threaten to kill all of life with your weapons of war. We Indians have been punished enough, and now it's our turn to have the land again. The land chose Columbus exactly five centuries ago. Now you and I dream our dreams, the way he dreamed."

  "That's a good story," Sam said, still looking out the door. It sounded so close to what the old prophets in the Book of Mormon said would happen to America; close, but dangerously different. As if there was no hope for the Europeans anymore. As if their chance had already been lost, as if no repentance would be allowed. They would not be able to pass the land on to the next generation. Someone else would inherit. It made him sick at heart, to realize what the white man had lost, had thrown away, had torn up and destroyed.

  "But what should I do with my story?" she asked. He could hear her coming closer, walking up behind him. He could almost feel her breath on his shoulder. "How can I fulfill it?"

  By yourself. Or at least without me. "Tell it to the Indians. You can cross all these borders in a thousand different places, and you speak Portuguese and Spanish and Arawak and Carib, and you'll be able to tell your story in Quechua, too, no doubt, crossing back and forth between Brazil and Colombia and Bolivia and Peru and Venezuela, all close together here, until every Indian knows about you and calls you by the name you were given in my dream."

  "Tell me my name."

  "Virgem America. See? The land or God or whatever it is wants you to be a virgin."

  She giggled. "Nossa senhora," she said. "Don't you see? I'm the new Virgin Mother. It wants me to be a mother; all the old legends of the Holy Mother will transfer to me; they'll call me virgin no matter what the truth is. How the priests will hate me. How they'll try to kill my son. But he will live and become Quetzalcoatl, and he will restore America to the true Americans. That is the meaning of my dreams. My dreams and yours."

  "Not me," he said. "Not for any dream or any god." He turned to face her. His fist was pressed against his groin, as if to crush out all rebellion there. "My body doesn't rule me," he said. "Nobody controls me but myself."

  "That's very sick," she said cheerfully. "All because you hate your father. Forget that hate, and love me instead."

  His face became a mask of anguish, and then he turned and fled.

  He even thought of castrating himself, that's the kind of madness that drove him through the jungle. He could hear the bulldozers carving out the airstrip, the screams of falling timber, the calls of birds and cries of animals displaced. It was the terror of the tortured land, and it maddened him even more as he ran between thick walls of green. The rig was sucking oil like heartblood from the forest floor. The ground was wan and trembling under his feet. And when he got home he was grateful to lift his feet off the ground and lie on his mattress, clutching his pillow, panting or perhaps sobbing from the exertion of his run.

  He slept, soaking his pillow in afternoon sweat, and in his sleep the voice of the land came to him like whispered lullabies. I did not choose you, said the land. I cannot speak except to those who hear me, and because it is in your nature to hear and listen, I spoke to you and led you here to save me, save me, save me. Do you know the desert they will make of me? Encased in burning dust or layers of ice, either way I'll be dead. My whole purpose is to thrust life upward out of my soils, and feel the press of living feet, and hear the songs of birds and the low music of the animals, growling, lowing, chittering, whatever voice they choose. That's what I ask of you, the dance of life, just once to make the man whose mother will teach him to be Quetzalcoatl and save me, save me, save me.

  He heard that whisper and he dreamed a dream. In his dream he got up and walked back to Agualinda, not along the path, but through the deep jungle itself. A longer way, but the leaves touched his face, the spiders climbed on him, the tree lizards tangled in his hair, the monkeys dunged him and pinched him and jabbered in his ear, the snakes entwined around his feet; he waded streams and fish caressed his naked ankles, and all the way they sang to him, song that celebrants might sing at the wedding of a king. Somehow, in the way of dreams, he lost his clothing without removing it, so that he emerged from the jungle naked, and walked through Agualinda as the sun was setting, all the Baniwas peering at him from their doorways, making clicking noises with their teeth.

  He awoke in darkness. He heard his father breathing. He must have slept through the afternoon. What a dream, what a dream. He was exhausted.

  He moved, thinking of getting up to use the toilet. Only then did he realize that he was not alone on the bed, and it was not his bed. She stirred and nestled against him, and he cried out in fear and anger.

  It startled her awake. "What is it?" she asked.

  "It was a dream," he insisted. "All a dream."

  "Ah yes," she said, "it was. But last night, Sam, we dreamed the same dream." She giggled. "All night long."

  In his sleep. It happened in his sleep. And it did not fade like common dreams, the memory was clear, pouring himself into her again and again, her fingers gripping him, her breath against his cheek, whispering the same thing, over and over: "Aceito, aceito-te, aceito." Not love, no, not when he came with the land controlling him, she did not love him, she merely accepted the burden he placed within her. Before tonight she had been a virgin, and so had he. Now she was even purer than before, Virgem America, but his purity was hopelessly, irredeemably gone, wasted, poured out into this old woman who had haunted his dreams. "I hate you," he said. "What you stole from me."

  He got up, looking for his clothing, ashamed that she was watching him.

  "No one can blame you," she said. "The land married us, gave us to each other. There's no sin in that."

  "Yeah," he said.

  "One time. Now I am whole. Now I can begin."

  And now I'm finished.

  "I didn't mean to rob you," she said. "I didn't know you were dreaming."

  "I thought I was dreaming," he said, "but I loved the dream. I dreamed I was fornicating and it made me glad." He spoke the words with all the poison in his heart. "Where are my clothes?"

  "You arrived without them," she said. "It was my first hint that you wanted me."

  There was a moon outside. Not yet dawn. "I did what you wanted," he said. "Now can I go home?"

  "Do what you want," she said. "I didn't plan this."

  "I know. I wasn't talking to you." And when he spoke of home, he didn't mean the shack where his father would be snoring and the air would stink of beer.

  "When you woke me, I was dreaming," she said.

  "I don't want to hear it."

  "I have him now," she said, "a boy inside me. A lovely boy. But you will never see him in all your life, I think."

  "Will you tell him? Who I am?"

  She giggled. "Tell Quetzalcoatl that his father is a European? A man who blushes? A man who burns in the sun? No, I won't tell him. Unless someday he becomes cruel, and wants to punish the Europeans even after they are defeated. Then I will tell him that the first European he must punish is himself. Here, write your name. On this paper write your name, and give me your fingerprint, and write the date."

  "I don't know what day it is."

  "October twelfth," she said.

  "It's August."

  "Write October twelfth," she said. "I'm in the legend business now."

  "August twenty-fourth," he murmured, but he wrote the date she asked for.

  "The helicopter comes this morning," she said.

  "Good-bye," he said. He started for the door.

  Her hands caught at him, held his arm, pulled him back. She embraced him, this time not in a dream, cool bodies together in the doorway of the house. The geis was off him now, or else he was worn out; her body had no power over his anymore.

  "I did love you," she murmured. "It was not just the god that brought you."

  Suddenly he felt very young, even younger than fifteen, and he broke away from her and walked quickly away thr
ough the sleeping village. He did not try to retrace his wandering route through the jungle; he stayed on the moonlit path and soon was at his father's hut. The old bastard woke up as Sam came in.

  'I knew it'd happen," Father said.

  Sam rummaged for underwear and pulled it on.

  "There's no man born who can keep his zipper up when a woman wants it." Father laughed. A laugh of malice and triumph. "You're no better than I am, boy."

  Sam walked to where his father sat on the bed and imagined hitting him across the face. Once, twice, three times.

  "Go ahead, boy, hit me. It won't make you a virgin again."

  "I'm not like you," Sam whispered.

  "No?" asked Father. "For you it's a sacrament or something? As my daddy used to say, it don't matter who squeezes the toothpaste, boy, it all squirts out the same."

  "Then your daddy must have been as dumb a jackass as mine."

  Sam went back to the chest they shared, began packing his clothes and books into one big suitcase. "I'm going out with the chopper today. Mom will wire me the money to come home from Manaus."

  "She doesn't have to. I'll give you a check."

  "I don't want your money. I just want my passport."

  "It's in the top drawer." Father laughed again. "At least I always wore my clothes home."

  In a few minutes Sam had finished packing. He picked up the bag, started for the door.

  "Son," said Father, and because his voice was quiet, not derisive, Sam stopped and listened. "Son," he said, "once is once. It doesn't mean you're evil, it doesn't even mean you're weak. It just means you're human." He was breathing deeply. Sam hadn't heard him so emotional in a long time. "You aren't a thing like me, son," he said. "That should make you glad."

  Years later Sam would think of all kinds of things he should have said. Forgiveness. Apology. Affection. Something. But he said nothing, just left and went out to the clearing and waited for the helicopter. Father didn't come to try to say good-bye. The chopper pilot came, unloaded, left the chopper to talk to some people. He must have talked to Father because when he came back he handed Sam a check. Plenty to fly home, and stay in good places during the layovers, and buy some new clothes that didn't have jungle stains on them. The check was the last thing Sam had from his father. Before he came home from that rig, the Venezuelans bought a hardy and virulent strain of syphilis on the black market, one that could be passed by casual contact, and released it on Guyana. Sam's father was one of the first million to die, so fast that he didn't even write.