A good distance up the hill, Paco meandered between the huts, listlessly kicking around an empty corn-oil keg. He saw me jumping around and began to roll the can toward me. I ran to the tree that shook with monkeys, awed by their churning animal grace even as I screamed, “Give me back my bag!”
More nuts came raining down, followed by more branches. Grapefruit-sized yellow fruit covered with sharp thorns slapped the moist earth. Paco stopped halfway down the bank, turned the keg on its bottom and sat on it, watching the show. “Be careful,” he called out. “They’ll poop on you!”
The monkey who’d stolen my pack catapulted through the branches, threading through explosions of flowering bromeliads and epiphytes. He swung upside down from his tail, figure-eighting a landing on a thick branch, where he sat on his haunches. I grabbed one of the fruits from the ground—thorns stabbing my palm—and chucked it, missing him. He hooted at me, blowing out his cheeks with mirth. With perfect dexterity, he clutched the pack between the palms of his feet and used his arms and tail to climb higher to another favorite perch. Settling there, he grabbed the cord for the main compartment of the bag with one finger and unzipped it. Smirking down at me, he flipped the bag over and shook it out.
Tumbling down through the branches came . . . everything I owned. Charlotte’s Web seemed to toss and roll in slow motion into the waiting hands of another monkey, who fanned out the pages and, finding this hilarious, let out a series of raucous barks before ripping them out. They drifted down, most of them catching on the tangled vines and thick vegetation. My mom’s and foster mom’s photos fell next; glittering like precious leaves. One of the monkeys snatched up the bigger one—my real mom’s photo, my only photo of her—and I swear he looked at that thing like he was looking at something, like that was my mom looking back at him and he knew it. Eyeing me the whole time, he gave it a few cautious licks before stuffing it in his mouth and swallowing it.
Other stuff rained down: my only other pair of underwear; my jeans and T-shirt; my comb; toothbrush; a plastic bag with an old doughnut another monkey ate whole, including the ziplock bag. Along with everything else, a couple of Kotex I’d stolen from the Versailles in Cochabamba caught and hung in the branches like bizarre Christmas ornaments. Looping the pack over a branch by its remaining unbroken strap, the howler swung from it, braying, his magnificent ruff shaking, until he launched himself a full flip in the air, landing perfectly among his friends, who howled their approval of the show before leaping en masse and vanishing into the riotous mid-story. Torn open, empty, one strap totally gone, my backpack swayed a hundred feet up in the hot breeze, forever a part of the random insanity of the jungle.
I spun around, searching for help, for someone to give a shit. My hands bled from the thorny fruit; the bellowing of the monkeys rang in my ears, their calls still clear, though they were probably already a few kilometers away. I felt slightly deaf, heatstroked, a little bit out of my mind.
Beyond Paco, up the hill, stood the old woman I’d seen with the lepers that morning that felt so long ago. Beya. She leaned on her cane, contemplating me. At her feet sat a small cloth bag that moved slightly, as if whatever was inside was trying to get out, or was fighting with another occupant. Mouth grim and straight, ears bright with feathers, she stared at me with a mix of curiosity and sadness. How long had she been standing there, watching this circus? A chill bloomed in the base of my spine, even in all the mind-bending heat.
Suddenly dizzy, I braced my hands on my knees and closed my eyes for a few seconds, before slowly opening them. Her gaze intensified. I took a step back. The electric buzz of insects whined louder. She seemed to shimmer under the diamond sun, come into focus, then vanish into the pattern of branches and leaves behind her. A palpable, pulsating energy flowed between her and the forest, a buzzing, unbroken loop. I blinked again, trying to shake off the white noise that crashed inside my ears.
I heard her voice—it had to be her—whisper in Spanish, as clearly as if she were standing next to me, “WHY ARE YOU HERE? THIS IS NOT YOUR FOREST.”
Her lips had not moved.
The voice trailed away in my head, like the rasping of leaves on a fall night. She had spoken without making a sound; that or I was losing my mind. She dropped her eyes, picked up her bag, turned, and made her way up the hill.
Paco pushed himself off his seat on the keg and walked down to the bank where I stood, dumbstruck from the theft and from the woman’s voice in my head. He wrapped his sticky little hand around my finger. I yanked him around to face me. “Did you hear that?” I hissed.
He looked at me as if trying to figure out what I wanted to hear, what would make me happy. “I just hear monkeys.”
I wiped the sweat off my forehead with the back of my hand. “She spoke to me.”
“Was it out loud, or in your head?”
“In my head.”
“Was it something nice?”
“Not really.”
Paco watched me thoughtfully as I gazed up at everything I owned besides the clothes on my back, hanging among the leaves and branches above us.
“Come with me. I’ll make you a comb,” Paco said very seriously.
Gesturing at me to follow him, he walked toward a low-lying palm plant, its slender fronds picking up the morning light with a greasy sheen. With a stubby-handled knife, he sliced off a thick, waxy branch, and with quick, practiced movements snapped out every other frond, creating a bright green comb.
He patted the ground and said, “Sit.”
“I don’t want to sit, Paco, okay? There’s spiders in there and—”
“Sit!” he commanded.
So I sat down, very slowly and carefully. No spiders this time. Paco stepped behind me. Laying one hand on my shoulder as if to steady me, he reached up with the other to gather a section of my snarled, filthy hair. I closed my eyes and listened to the receding roars of the monkeys.
I didn’t have a clue then, but it wasn’t the pain of him wrestling out the knots in my rat’s-nest hair with the palm-frond comb that made me cry my fucking eyes out, it was the fact that someone was actually bothering to take care of me.
SIXTEEN
From where I hung like a fleshy chrysalis in my hammock, I woke to a little piglet screaming in my face. Her snout quivered and glistened; morning sun set her pink ears aglow. Suddenly she stopped and sat back on her ass, stumpy hind legs splayed out, front hooves planted into the soft wood, and stared at me agape, like I had been the one braying at her.
I reached out and scratched the top of her head. The hair was softer than I thought it would be, still tufty baby hair. She grunted and snuffled, her eyes squeezing shut in ridiculous pleasure. I took one of her front hooves with my other hand and held it for a second, shaking it like you would a dog’s; she seemed to like this, too, but soon she pulled away and moved her head under my hand, as if she preferred the scratching to anything else. I took one of her velvety ears between thumb and forefinger and leaned into it, whispering, “I’m going to call you Charlotte.” The pig’s name in the story was Wilbur, but this pig seemed much more like a Charlotte to me.
Around me drifted the soft sounds of people waking up, speaking in hushed tones, the dull scraping of utensils as breakfast was prepared. The pig and I held each other’s gaze. I missed my backpack like a phantom limb. After years of rambling with it on my back, I felt deeply unmoored without it, as if I might float up and away. At last I placed my unease: I had finally unpacked, and it took a howler monkey to do it.
“Hey, Meessis Gringa, let’s go, time to get up,” Doña Antonia muttered with a little swat of her straw broom at my hammock. “You’re going to wash clothes with the other women, okay? Enough of this sleeping all day like a queen.”
Like that was possible with the jungle already ricocheting with the calls of monkeys, parrots, frogs, all going at it molto vivace, shrieking and squawking as if the world were waking up in pain, the jungle giving birth to itself each morning. I untangled myself from the hammock
and netting and got to my feet. Charlotte blinked up at me. I finally recognized her as the same piglet the woman had held to her breast. A dark line of fur encircled one eye; another seemed drawn on one pink flank, like a bull’s-eye.
“What happened to that woman who was nursing her?” I asked Doña Antonia, who stood waiting for me, hands on hips.
She waved me away like it wasn’t worth her breath to discuss it. “Angelina? She’s away. She’s gone.”
“Where did she go?”
“Why? She’s a friend of yours?”
“No, I just—”
“Now you want to give milk to the pig?” She grabbed her saggy tit and squeezed, cackling.
“I just want to know—”
“Forget it, okay? Everything’s okay.”
“Is she dead?”
She turned to me, took stock of me. “You really want to know, American girl? Okay, so listen. Two days ago, she took off her clothes and ran into the jungle naked. So she’s dead. The jungle ate her. Okay?”
“No one tried to find her?”
“Some of the men went looking, but—she was nowhere. After two days, we stop. We call it off. That’s the rule.”
“But that’s—”
“Come on, come with me.” She handed me some hot cooked yucca wrapped in a banana leaf—my to-go breakfast. I followed her down the stairs, out of the longhouse, and—despite my horror as I imagined what might have happened to Angelina—took tentative bites of the food, fingers burning, craving a bit of salt, some flavor, something I could recognize.
Squealing and making an insane racket considering no one was interfering with her in any way, Charlotte followed at my heels, scruffling across the floor and falling down the stairs, one by one, each step a little calamity and cause for more complaining.
We followed Doña Antonia through the village to a chicken coop where a few dozen scrawny chickens in a wire cage pecked at dried corn. “Every morning and every night you feed them, got it? You take their eggs and you bring them to me. You keep this rooster over here, by himself, away from his women, or he’ll eat them, okay? He’s crazy.” She shook her head. “We need a new mister. This one has run out of brains.” She laughed at her joke as she looped the gate shut behind her with a length of wire. “And this is always closed, okay? Always, always. Or no more chickens, understand?”
I nodded, encouraged in a small way by being given some responsibility, and followed her back to the longhouse. A few of the women, tall woven baskets on their backs held in place by leather straps across their foreheads, were already making their way to the river. Two baskets sat waiting for us, both nearly as tall as Doña Antonia, whose gray head came only to my shoulder. She stood in front of hers, turned, knelt a bit, positioned the strap across her forehead, and stood up, lifting the basket off the ground with ease. She gestured at me and the one that remained.
It looked so easy. I did what she did: faced it, turned, knelt, adjusted the strap across my forehead, and tried to stand. It was like lifting a building. I tried again, straining with everything I had: impossible. I sat on my ass, the strap loose around my knees. A half-dozen spider monkeys watched from their perch in the canopy before screeching some sort of signal to one another; they dropped to the earth and coursed around me in a wave of chattering gray fur like I was a stone in a river. Charlotte was unfazed.
Doña Antonia, halfway down the hill, turned and squinted up at me. I got to my feet, mugging my inability to lift the basket with a lame smile and shrug. With a look of disgust, she turned back toward the river, machete swinging from one hand, her wide-hipped, pigeon-toed walk flinging out her loose skirt from side to side. A couple of bright-eyed little girls sat down next to me with a bunch of green bananas, chattering too fast for me to understand a word. I got that they were asking me questions, but when I couldn’t answer, they grew sullen and silent. They opened the tough peels of the bananas with their teeth, making their way steadily through the fruit.
I turned again and faced the basket—my new enemy—bent down, wrapped my arms around it and did a dead lift, pitching backward so hard I almost lost my footing, but turned toward the river, determined. Staring into the thatch, I blindly made my way down to the shore. Charlotte followed me so closely I kicked her now and then; she squealed with indignation but never left my side.
Already most of the women had waded into the river up to their thighs. They rubbed pieces of clothing, mostly cushma—the sack-like dresses several women and many men wore—over slabs of rock, dousing them in the water to rinse them. A few sat near the shore, one arm around their tiny babies as they worked the clothes with the other. Everyone spoke nonstop and too fast for me to grasp what they said, but at least they seemed to be looking at me with something like curiosity—as in: How’s the gringa going to handle this? Will she be able to hack it?
Several yards away, Beya stood hip-deep in the water with her own armful of washing, skirt hiked up high and tucked under her belt, her painfully thin brown thighs parting the thick warm water in slow, thoughtful steps. She seemed in her own world, gazing down into the murky depths as if we didn’t exist.
I stole glances at the brilliant red, turquoise, and yellow macaw feathers that sprung back from her earlobes; the tattooed lines, swirls, and dots on her face; her narrow, sun-bronzed chest, breasts flattened to nothing by the years under the ragged man’s cotton shirt she wore. A beat-up derby hat perched high on her forehead, her long braid glowed silver down her back in the sunlight. She stood near the fish gate, a semicircular stretch of fine mesh wire sheeting that reached from the silty bottom of the river—weighted by stones—to about a foot above, circumscribing a twenty-five-foot stretch of beach where we did all our washing of clothes, bathing, and gathering water for cooking and to boil for drinking.
I stood ankle-deep in the amber-colored water, my arms piled high with clothes, wishing I could wash my own, but they were all I had. Charlotte sat at the shore, her front hooves just touching the water. Warily, I watched the fish gate.
Rubbing the slab of hard yellow soap Doña Antonia had given me into the almost colorless cloth, it hit me that no one was punishing me. The women were just doing what needed to be done: the clothes were dirty and needed washing, and all the women were pitching in. Heartened to be included, I worked as hard as I could, as long as I could, until I had washed all the clothes assigned to me and dropped them back in my basket, which sat in knee-deep water next to me.
Just as I turned back to shore, a wave of pain lashed across my forehead, the light of day suddenly so unbearably bright I closed my eyes and covered them with one hand, the other resting on the rim of the basket.
Moaning, I heard the words “DO NOT MOVE” whispered inside my head.
Nausea flooded me, then passed. I opened my eyes, shielding them from the glare off the water, my headache fading with the echo of the words in my brain.
I knew who had spoken to me.
Void of expression, Beya held my gaze. She stood knee-deep in the river just a couple of yards from me, the basket of soaked clothes balanced against her hip dripping steadily into the still water.
I heard her murmur, “DO NOT MOVE. DO NOT LOOK DOWN. LOOK AT ME.”
I obeyed. The words hummed in my head, repeating over and over and over, “DO NOT MOVE DO NOT LOOK DOWN LOOK AT ME, DO NOT MOVE DO NOT LOOK DOWN LOOK AT ME,” a one-note song sung in basso profundo. Thirty seconds passed like this, a minute; then a pause—it was as if I was waiting for her to “say” something else. Had I invented this whole thing? The longer we looked at each other, the more convinced I became that I was losing my mind, yet I was riveted, enthralled. A buzzing circle of energy coursed between us, binding us; her eyes burning black.
A child shrieked up on the hill, only in play, but we both looked away from each other, severing our communication, if it had happened at all. I gathered my thoughts, brought myself back to where I was and what I was doing, what was expected of me. The sounds of talking and laughter between
the women, the whine of insects, began to leak back into my awareness.
That’s when I noticed the top section of the fish gate, maybe two yards from me, jerking side to side, before it began to sink—bit by bit—as if something were pulling it, until it sank completely, dragged under the silty brown water.
Her voice in my head whispered, “DON’T MOVE. DON’T SCREAM.”
My head whipped back to focus on her face as if she had physically forced me to do so.
“STAY CALM. LISTEN TO MY VOICE.”
All the women shouted at once. They abandoned their baskets and splashed toward the bank, snatching their children from the shallows as they ran barefoot across the dark sand, the thumping of their footsteps loud in my ears as I searched Beya’s face.
“Electric eel! Everybody out! Go! Go! The fish gate is torn!”
My heart pounded at the cage of my body, the terror in their voices and Beya’s words planting me where I was. Only she and I remained in the water.
I looked down.
A dark purple eel, man-length, thick as a car tire, quivered as it circled my laundry basket, its warty flesh rubbery and cold looking. Part snake, part catfish, its wall-eyed stare seemed to see nothing as it banged its head over and over against the weave. I stood an arm’s length from it, the water lapping just above my kneecaps. I forced myself to be still, to remember what Omar had told me about these creatures; their vision was bad, but their touch could stun and kill a horse; they were attracted to a heartbeat, to movement of any kind. In a distant part of my awareness, the women called to one another, pointing at me as they ran up and down the shore. I pictured my legs as two stone pillars, the blood in my veins thick and unmoving, a cold sludge. I slowed my breathing, made my heart a dull, muffled clock. Still the thing circled the basket, as if it felt something were alive inside of it, and was trying to figure a way in. My bare feet sank deeper into the silt.
Into the Jungle Page 12