“Stay where you are, Lily!” Anna’s voice, like a balm over me. Moving slower now, quivering, every cell of its flesh listening for life, the eel still looped itself around the basket, its paddle-like tail nearly touching its pocked face. Two tiny fins like ears on either side of its flat head shuddered and waved in the murk as if listening closer, as if it knew something living was within striking distance. I forced myself to look up and toward the bank. Anna stood at the water’s edge, her beautiful face creased with fright.
“Lily, don’t move, okay? Just look at me. Come on, look at me, Lily.”
Tears leaked out of the sides of my eyes. Her face smeared until I blinked them away.
Several of the women reached into the pockets of their dresses and pulled out stones, which they hurled into the water, crying, “Come on! Come on, eel, come over here!”
Anna held out her arms as if she could lift me up and out of the nightmare soup I stood in. “You’re already on the shore with us, Lily, okay? You’re already here . . . just look at me, please, now don’t stop . . .”
Doña Antonia came thundering down the shore carrying a foot-long live sunfish. A liana cord was tied around its wide middle, the other end wrapped securely around her wrist. Panting, she whipped it out underhand. The fish flew high up, twisting against the hot blue sky before splashing down into the water several yards to one side of me. It jumped into the air a few times, eyes popping, as if it knew what was in store, before Doña Antonia dragged it back, looping the cord in efficient circles around her elbow and the heel of her hand.
A whoosh of cold water stroked the flesh of my calves. Something had changed. My eyelids fluttered closed, and I prayed to any gods who might have been listening. Anna kept calling out to me to look at her, but I couldn’t anymore. I had to know. Forcing the rest of my body to remain still, my neck almost too stiff to move, I lowered my chin in the smallest increments of movement I could summon—just enough to let myself look down—and opened my eyes.
The eel had completely lost interest in the basket and was swimming between my legs.
A few of the women splashed up to their ankles in the shallow section. Jumping and screaming, they smacked at the water with their hands, with pots, pans, gourds, anything they could find.
I dropped my eyes again.
The eel continued to figure-eight around and between my legs and the basket.
With a howl, Doña Antonia tossed out the still-live fish on the cord; this time it plunged into the water next to me, its saucer eye bulging with panic. In a surge of dark purple rage, the eel burst out of the water inches from my elbow and clamped down its prehistoric underbite on the doomed thing. Five feet of eel smashed down as the women grabbed the cord and pulled, screaming at me to run.
After forcing stillness into my legs for so long, it took a few horrid seconds to get them to move again. Abandoning the basket, I lunged toward shore. Dresses glued to their bodies with sweat, Doña Antonia and two other women screamed encouragement to one another as they wrestled with the beast, tug-of-warring it long enough for me to leap onto dry sand. As soon as I did, they let go, falling in an exhausted pile. The eel—released, enraged—leapt up, hanging in midair for several seconds, a demonic black muscle writhing, before it crashed back down into a deep, coffee-colored pool on the other side of the ruined fish gate. In seconds, the water smoothed again, leaving only a soft welt on the surface, perhaps from the last flick of its tail.
Anna hugged me. “Are you all right?”
“I think so,” I said in a daze, startled to find myself still alive. As if I were cold, I shook uncontrollably, even my teeth chattered as I took a few steps along the shore, holding my elbows to my gut, trying to coerce my soul back into my body. Facing away from all of us, Beya calmly waded back to shore. Weirdly, I listened for her to “say” something more to me, but only her silence echoed in my head.
Anna watched me with concern.
“Thanks, Anna, for helping me.”
“That was the biggest one I’ve ever seen. So strong!”
As we spoke, a few other women gathered around us, as if Anna had broken through some kind of standoff. I thanked them all profusely. There were some smiles and a few more expressions of concern, even another hug or two. One toothless grandma grinned as she peered at me and patted my arm and said, “You are having a lucky day, gringa.”
“We fix the gate all the time, but”—Anna shrugged—“you know, we can’t always be sure there isn’t a tear.”
Machete in hand, Doña Antonia brushed by us and splashed into the water. She looped my basket’s leather strap around one shoulder and dragged it back to the shore, setting it beside me with a huff. Balancing her own basket of wet clothes on her back, she charged past us, motoring up the hill with shocking energy.
The incident with the eel firmly in the past, the women resigned themselves to lugging the baskets filled with heavy, wet clothes up the hill to the longhouse. With a sinking feeling, I watched them repeat the carry-the-basket routine, this time with a full cargo of sodden clothes. I tried it their way, then mine. No luck. I tried dragging it, but gave up and sat down, Charlotte at my heels the whole time—walking where I walked, sitting where I sat, totally psycho-fixed on me.
Anna watched me and laughed. “Wait here. I’ll bring Perla. I use her when I’m too tired or too pregnant.”
In minutes, Anna appeared at the top of the hill leading the village donkey, Perla, who honked and brayed as she yanked at her liana leash. Sullenly she picked her way down the slope, her huge belly swaying back and forth under the knotty cord of her spine, big square teeth gnashing, a comical tuft of yellow hair curling over one fly-buzzed eye. Anna tossed my basket’s wide leather strap over the donkey’s back, trussed it up cleverly on the other side, then hoisted the heavy load off the ground, smacking the donkey’s flank as she directed it back up the hill.
The women were stoking a fire, heating irons that had been wedged between hot rocks. Woven mats wrapped around their hands, they picked up the heavy rusted irons and pressed down on the clothes, which were spread out flat on the rocks. Steam rose up carrying the smell of fish, stones, mold, and rotted cloth.
Doña Antonia gestured at an iron heating in the fire, my pile of sopping clothes next to it. At a totally separate fire several yards away, Beya ironed her own clothes.
“Why not just let them dry in the sun?”
Doña Antonia looked at me as if my stupidity would never end. “You think there are only big things that can eat you in the water? These clothes are clean but not safe. There are still bugs, you know. Very, very small ones. We need to kill them, otherwise they’ll make your skin white, even more white than you, hah!” She disappeared in a cloud of steam as she pressed down hard on the front panel of a dress. “Also, there’s a fungus that can grow if we don’t iron. Very, very bad.”
I wrapped my hand in the woven mat she gave me, took my own heavy iron and pressed it into the wet clothes, observing her technique as I went. It was tedious, hot, boring work, and she eyed my every move, making sure I’d steamed over every square inch of fabric. Nearby, Beya had finished her ironing and was already heading up the hill, back to the manioc fields. Doña Antonia caught me staring after her.
“You stay away from her, gringa. She’s no shaman. She’s a witch, and she wants you dead.”
SEVENTEEN
– JULY –
Though it had only been a couple of weeks, it felt like an eternity since Omar disappeared around the swooning curve of river in the longboat. Since then, the jungle had been seeping into me, changing me, mortifying me. The anti-malarial pills Omar got me in Cochabamba gave me vivid nightmares, each more bizarre, drawn out, and palpably real than the last.
My skin was changing, too, becoming not my own, never dry, always itching, bites infected. Since feeling crappy was familiar to me, I wasn’t alarmed. Me and the other fosters were always the ones who needed a bath, their hair combed, the ones with infected cuts or impetigo,
but we all survived. I never dreamed something was really wrong with me.
Of all the many things to be afraid of in the jungle, boredom began to creep higher on the list. After all the work was done: the hauling, washing, harvesting, chopping, cooking, and so on, it all became about waiting. Waiting for the men to come back. Waiting for the rain to stop. Waiting to hang out with Anna, who seemed less and less inclined to spend time with me, though I know now I had underestimated her need to be alone in the depth of her grief.
Then there was the waiting laced with fear. Waiting for the poachers to cycle back around, as everyone acknowledged they would, once they’d sold their goods in San Solidad. Waiting to hear Beya’s bizarre voice in my head. Waiting for the jaguar to come back and take another hapless child or chicken or pig. The platform was manned sporadically; days went by when no one went up there. One evening I walked under it and heard loud snoring—Panchito was taking a turn. But with the hunters and their helpers gone, we were it: the skeleton crew, those too old or disabled to hunt, pregnant women, children, and me.
* * *
With only one set of clothes to wear, I was beginning to feel unbearably foul. No matter how many times I scrubbed myself with the yellow soap, I could smell my own body; this rank pungency; as if all my fat—the little I had—was burning off through my pores, producing a reek I couldn’t seem to lose. I wondered what Omar would think of his pretty, sweet-smelling American girl when he came back to her. Even my sneakers were starting to rot.
One morning, I convinced Doña Antonia to lend me a man’s shirt. I wore it like a dress as I washed and ironed my remaining T-shirt and shorts and lay them out on a rock. When I returned later with a hot iron to dry them, they were gone. I was floored. Where could the thief wear my stuff, on a night on the town? I thought of all the things I had stolen in my life without a thought. Always this great gaping hole in myself I stuffed with other people’s crap, most of it I didn’t even want.
So I traipsed around the village repeating my monkey story over and over to anyone who would listen: a monkey stole my backpack with my extra clothes. When they stopped laughing, I finally scored a cushma, this one from a family whose patriarch had died. In the tradition of wasting nothing in the jungle, the garment was going to be handed over to the family of lepers, but they gave it to me. I washed and ironed that thing till you could almost see through it.
* * *
Those early days in Ayachero I felt a part and not a part of anything, tasting a flavor of loneliness quite new for me. In this place, it was clear that everyone needed everyone else. I so desperately wanted to be part of this unbroken circle, yet how could I? I had my foot in this new world, but could not possibly bring the whole of me because I was so very other. No matter how much Spanish or Portuguese, Quechua or even Tatinga I learned, I would be this odd one out, this matchstick-colored head walking around in a sea of black ones, thinking different, walking different, dreaming different, being different. Doomed in a way I was sure at the time was unique to me.
But I kept on trying. In late afternoons after siesta, a half dozen villagers would gather around the cooking fires at the longhouse or the Anaconda Bar and drink strong black coffee with lots of molasses-tasting sugar, smoke cigarettes, and tell stories. I’d sit with them and try to understand, even though they never slowed down for me. Paco stayed close by, translating when he was in the mood, but I made sure to laugh when they laughed, or grow serious when they did, to make them think I understood every word, all the slang, every idiom or splash of Tatinga. Mostly the stories were about hunts gone wrong, or soured love affairs, or sometimes about beasts even more fantastical than what already existed: fifty-foot anacondas with horns, five-hundred-pound pirarucu that crawled out of the river and sprouted legs and claws, pink river dolphins that turned into beautiful women and seduced men away into the Encante, the enchanted underworld in the murky depths of the river—especially during the rainy season when the river rose and flooded the forest.
It was during siesta, that blast furnace time of day when everyone but me—who had never been able to nap—went off to rest or sleep or make love, that I broke my promise to Omar that I would never go into the jungle alone. Beya obsessed me. She was the other odd duck in this place. She didn’t seem to fit in anywhere, this person who had bothered to save my life. Why? The more people who fielded my questions about her, like she was a source of embarrassment, shame, or fear—maybe all those things—the more fascinated I became. I’d catch myself pausing at odd times of day, grating manioc, ironing clothes, or getting ready for bed, cocking an ear and listening for the thrill of her words in my head, only to hear the snap of insects, or the crash of rain on the roof.
As the village dozed the hot afternoon away, I threaded among the huts to the perimeter of the chacra, the small field of plantain and yucca just east of the village. Subtle breaks in the jungle wall marked paths for gathering medicinal herbs or plants, or for a lone hunter to venture out for day hunts that sometimes resulted in the capture of a tapir or paca—a kind of rodent that could grow to thirty pounds—when the wait for the bigger hunts became too long and people were hungry. There was a time when the paths were all the village needed to find game, but the poachers and loggers had changed all that. Now they grew over quickly and had to be cleared by whoever had an interest in traveling on them. Each had a name: Jaguar, Anaconda, Fire Ant, and Caiman; each had several branches, unnamed, that those who traveled evidently knew.
I paused at the entrance to the Anaconda Path where, from the longhouse, I had seen Beya disappear like an apparition, only to appear hours later, a basket on her back overflowing with mysterious plants. As if standing at a great height, I felt equally pulled and repelled by the seething green.
I turned to see if anyone was watching. I was alone; with only the cor cor cor sound of the bamboo rats in the fields behind me. A whiff of wood smoke mixed with sage wafted toward me; her camp couldn’t be far. Above me, trees tangled riotously, inhaling and exhaling through giant leafy lungs. At that moment I stopped caring about being swallowed by whatever vicious thing wanted me. All the warnings, threats, stories, and myths shrunk to nothing compared to the pull of the forest’s wild green heart. I wanted to know this place, however monstrous.
I was going in.
EIGHTEEN
It wasn’t like walking into the woods of New England, or anywhere else that I knew. There was no gradual entrance into another world, no piney embrace or chittering of harmless chipmunks underfoot. Three steps in on the narrow trail, and the green curtains closed behind me. Countless plants hung unsupported in breath-warm darkness, leaves and boles and twirling vines, all in air so thick and wet you could cut it. The earth unorganized beneath me; black and green decay mingling with mosses, lichens, fungus. Actual solid ground could have been any distance beneath my feet.
I took a dozen steps toward the smell of the smoke and stopped, listening. A screeching sound; metal on metal. The braying of a donkey. I followed the sounds a hundred yards or so, considering every step. Soon, stabs of golden light filtered through, until I stumbled into an opening where full sun beat down on my head and shoulders.
In the center of a perfectly round clearing, Beya sat hugging her knees on a flat rock, facing in my direction like she’d been expecting me. She was hatless, her iron-gray hair wiry and loose around her shoulders. Her donkey, harness attached to a grindstone by a woven sisal rope, clopped along in a slow circle, lured by a plantain suspended over her nose, tied there by a stick poking out between her ears. Big belly swaying back and forth, she loped in a never-ending circle on the hard clay, turning the heavy stone. Ground up manioc fell from under the flat of the wheel into a metal bucket beneath. Beyond the donkey, sitting on thirty-foot stanchions, Beya’s ten-foot-square hut reached up into the mid-story. Half a dozen snake heads hung from the supports under the hut. If a snake was caught in the village, Ayacherans killed them and buried them head down to ward them away; I wondered if this was her ver
sion of the custom.
“What are you doing here?” she asked in strained Spanish.
“I smelled smoke and I—”
“No one comes here.”
The donkey stopped a moment, wagged her head as if annoyed by the bit in her mouth, and started to trot along again, the lure of the plantain too much to resist.
“I’ve been wanting to thank you for what you did. Warning me about the eel.”
She scowled and spit out a hot brown stream of tobacco. “Maybe I called the eel. Did you ever think of that? Maybe I dreamed his spirit to you.”
I looked around. Wicker baskets overflowed with leaves, seeds, dried fruit, flowers, and bark. Old plastic and glass Coke and Fanta bottles full of strange black and brown liquids stood in neat rows on a colorful blanket. “Did you?”
“I could have. I could have had you killed in front of everyone. He would have stung you, then you would be paralyzed and fall in the water and drown. They would have let you drown, too. They are afraid of the eel spirit.”
“But you warned me instead.”
In my head, I heard her growl the words, “I WAS TESTING YOU.”
Her mouth hadn’t moved. I shuddered, closing my eyes and shaking my head to clear it.
She pushed herself to her feet, dipped a calabash into a metal pail of water and handed it to me. Desperately thirsty, I drank it all down. As I thanked her, I stared down at her tattooed face, high cheekbones over sunken cheeks, mouth a stern line. I felt a helpless vertigo, as if I were gazing into an abyss of human strangeness I could do nothing to bridge.
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