by Louis Armand
We followed the Rio Ucayali, mind swimming in the vacuum left by the body in its absence. There were no more paths, every direction was the same, only the river distinguished one from another. I wandered in incomplete circles, each time ending face-down in water. The demon boy vanished inside my reflection.
Bit by bit my fever gave birth to horrors, bleeding out of me. The jungle heaved. Night caved in, telescoping through a hole in the world. On the other side, a room, a shanty on a river bank. The jungle seemed to fill it up. Howler monkeys, parrots, lizards, spiders gleaming on their webs. Fruit rotted on the floor among empty bottles. Mango, papaya, guanabana. I lay there, boa constrictor eyes staring down from dead branches. A voice spoke to me. “Once upon a time,” the voice said, without ever getting any further. Over and over and over again. Beginning but never continuing, as though waiting for me, like a child, to tell it the words that must come next.
*
Somewhere a man is doubled up, vomiting shit all over himself. Watery shit oozing from his mouth, dribbling down his chin. He looks so pathetic there. A crumpled sack of a man. Barely recognisable. Barely a man. But I still know him. He’s me.
We’re on a boat. A canoe. On a river. It could be anywhere. The whole continent stretches out around us in its uncreated chaos. And yet something about this place, this time, must’ve been preordained. The laughing god drawing a circle in the dust with a sharpened bone. We’re in the middle of the jungle. Air humid, thick with insects, piranhas stirring the water. Adrift, moving with the tide, onwards and onwards, for days, weeks, months, years.
He’s lying at stern, knotted up on himself, a spasm of human meat. A thick carpet of flies covers his face. A red hole of a mouth. Crust of dried retchings. He lies there and I watch him dying. When I’m not watching him, I sleep. When I don’t sleep, I wait. I no longer perform bodily functions, I’m merely a pair of eyes, a pair of hands.
The Swiss who sold us the canoe was almost blind. A Lutheran missionary on the Rio Ucayali – last outpost on the trail into the abyss. The canoe was old and needed calking. While the dying man sat and stared at the river, I calked. I bought wood to raise the sides. To fix a mast. Awning cloth to rig a makeshift sail. Bartered strips of cured monkey meat from the indios. Bartered the dying man’s shoes. His belt. A canvas bag with an old double-barrelled shotgun, a few charts, a compass, twenty-one dollars in Ecuadorian currency. There was an old camera, too. A Nikon F2 manual. Antique. I asked the half-blind missionary to take a picture of the two of us together, beside the canoe – me holding the dying man up. Out on the river, I dropped the camera overboard. Our images like two genies in a bottle sunk in the river bed. A temple for lost souls.
*
The dying man arrived one day out of the Ecuadorian jungle, just like I had, only from the opposite direction, coming south. He was alone. Face peeling, a stringy three-week’s growth. He looked the way I’d looked weeks earlier. Intestines melting down. Putrefying and fermenting. Fear eating the pancreas. Duodenum, jejunum, ileum. Malarial brain unravelling from pylorus to anus. Waves of backwards peristalsis. Bile and shit. Vomiting.
I stare at the photograph in the dying man’s passport until it becomes as familiar as a face in a mirror. United by accident. By chance. Providence. Destiny. I say his name to myself for hundreds of hours on end, learning it. Learning to become it. Divining its inner life. I wait for him to die. I wait deliberately. This, I whisper to myself, is salvation. A gift horse. A second life.
On and on we drift. Past the silhouettes of ocean-going ships, two thousand miles inland. On and on, through the long night of the soul. I hear him gasp. Last voice. Last breath. I stuff my own tattered passport inside his shirt. He’s me now. We drift against the riverbank. Cicadas, frogs, mosquitoes. A whole requiem. I drag the corpse onto land, prop it against a tree stump where maybe one day someone’ll find it. Stir an ant nest underfoot. Cast off into the river’s vastness.
I watch the shit-stained face dissolve into gloom, becoming him now. Being him. Raised up like Lazarus from the dead:
I am the resurrection and the life.
He who believes in me will live, even though he dies.
And whoever lives and believes in me will never die.
*
Writ on the evolutionary scale, each purpose cancels out the other. Like justice or liberty, set in stone, cast iron, blood and bone. The day comes and you slip out into the open, breathing the air. A sweet, fetid perfume. The world is this great big rotten fruit, spewing forth countless species in mortal contest. We vanquish, we decimate. Yet time remains closed. The enemy is always within. We remain that toy of paradox, to mythify smallest actions, a colossus in the jungle whose head is a room for a midget to grow old in.
I lie in the seepage at the bottom of the canoe, alone now, night bulging, remote cities spread across the sky. Pinpricks of light. Imagine future life, other worlds. Man-in-space: tin can floating down rivers of time into the big nothing. Black hole metaphysics. Strange constellations rear their monstrous heads. Monkey faces, piranha-mouthed. Night’s canopy spreads out across the eye’s infinity.
Hours stretch into days into weeks. Up the winding river, through floodplains, into the Amazon. Iquitos. Orosa. Chichita. Nameless villages invisible through the foliage. Outposts obscured across the river’s breadth. A plateau of brown and black water stretching away like Siberian steppes. Huge port cities rearing up out of the flatness. Dense tracts of submerged forest fringing the tide.
As I lie there with the river under me and the sky above me, I try to imagine seeing through the dead man’s eyes. I pronounce the heavy guttural speech of the dead man’s language. A language which I’ve somehow known since childhood. Der Fluss zum Himmel. Der Himmel über dem Fluss. Our histories merge within the slowly turning currents, the sweep of river debris pulled along inexorably to the sea.
*
Once again I’m lying in the old bathtub out in the vineyards. Up in the sky the clouds are shape-shifting against the blue. A red kite dangling a long tail winds in and out of view and appears infinitely far away. What would it be like up there flying alongside it, weightless, high above the world? The tide rocks under me and the world shifts. It’s Autumn. If I concentrate hard I can picture the men in the fields. Bundles of vine wood heaped up for the bonfire that’ll soon mark the end of the harvest season and the start of vinobraní – the Weinlesefest.
Long trestle tables are set out in the courtyard. Fat loaves of šumava. Wheels of stinking tvarůžky. Soon the first burčák begins to flow straight from the barrel. It fizzes in the mouth like baking soda and sours fast. Everyone who’s worked the harvest teeters around the barrel ritually gulping it down like fish gulping air. By divine edict, all and sundry duty-bound to get filthy drunk. Elbows work with an almost Presbyterian fury. And while the burčák’s being swilled, the local pig farmer drags in a prime sow and they slit its throat. Hang it from a hook over the barn door and gut it. Whoosh! The blood drained into a tub for black pudding. Three groans for piggy-wig.
By evening, when the pig’s well and bled, they light the bonfire. The drunks stand around leering at the flames, howling like monkeys. After the fire settles down the pig’s skewered on a spit and roasted slowly over the coals. Then the music begins. The bowsies sing and dance. From time to time someone prods the carcass with a stick and ladles fat over the crisped meat. All the local brats come to watch. They hide under the tables, scoffing burčák, sick as parrots. Nobody cares.
I’m lying in the old bathtub and Regen’s lying there beside me, watching the stars and listening to the shitfaced couples rutting in the dark among the vines. The bonfire glow turns the shadows into a wild moth-dance spiralling up through the night, flaring into starburst. I think how beautiful it would be to lie there with Regen forever. Free to invent the world. To own the sunrise. To sail ahead of the great deluge, bathed in warm orange light. But somewhere above the crazed music, the laughter and drunken voices, there’s a droning that gets louder
and more insistent until it hangs over us like the shadow of a great oppressive black bird, eclipsing everything.
12. RIOJA
The city falls away beneath us. Standing on the great pediment, swaying in the half-drunk gloom. Wind in our faces. The river glistens. White flash of gulls swooping and falling. And all of this but a moment’s reprieve? The girl from the Marquis de Sade is still beside me. Inessa. A name. Any name would do. We watch the city’s drama unfold. Sirens and streetlights, the razzle-dazzle cortège. Her hand touching mine. I feel her shiver, pull her close. Face lost in the dead metronome’s shadow.
Crossing the blacked-out terraces. Tree skeletons swaying. We meet people’s shadows in the streets, grown dark in mid-winter afternoon. It’s barely four o’clock. The motionless theatres of storefront windows. Stockinged mannequins. Furs. Objects staring out of painted eyes. A shop assistant kneeling, drawing a black lace in and out of the eyelets of a woman’s shoe. Advertisements for a life reduced to something anyone could understand. Love, pain, happiness.
Tram windows flash past like the frames of a film.
Inessa, sloe-eyed, presses against me in my oversized Gestapo coat. I, with my undertaker’s suit, grown thin under the weather. Nobody pays us any attention. Two characters in a wrong film. The film we all imagine ourselves in but are constantly vanishing from. A man and a woman with no past. Two figments. Two strangers. As anonymous to one another as they are to the world.
*
Traffic surges at the intersection. People on the sidewalk rushing somewhere, talking, doing nothing, waiting, huddled against the cold. We cross Letenské Square to a narrow street even darker than the ones before. Dead leaves mulched into pavement. A jutting neon sign above stairs leading down. We push through a heavy red door into a basement tapas bar. A blanket of warm air enfolds us. Cigarette smoke cut-through with char-grill and hashish. We find a corner table, ease down under the low lighting. The place is all moody sensuous, walls painted deep scarlet lake. Inessa ditches the coat, slides out of the black turtle neck, a black singlet over pale skin. I let my eyes wander all over her. Long neck, small breasts, collar bones standing out. She leans over and picks something off the floor.
Just then a waitress in a Spanish dress comes to the table. Black hair pulled back tight, hoop earrings. Wide hazel eyes. I try to make a smile, but the waitress doesn’t smile back. I order wine. Food. Inessa looks at me questioningly, says nothing.
“Don’t worry,” I tell her. “Everything’s good here.”
Outside it starts raining, heavier than before. The waitress returns with a bottle of red and sets it down between us. Rioja. Tempranillo. Returns again with bowls of green and black olives, grilled peppers, anchovies, bread. Flamenco music broods in the background, a guitar making unrequited love to the rain. A couple on the other side of the bar are dancing, slow.
I pour some wine, raise my glass. Inessa’s still looking at me. She lays something down on the table in front of her. A folded square of paper. I tip the glass back, pour more wine.
“What is it?”
She unfolds the paper. It’s the picture Blake gave to me. The picture of the dead girl. It must’ve slipped out of the coat pocket where I’d forgotten it. I stare at the dead girl’s face. It seems so long ago already, I barely recognise it. The rest of her’s not a pretty sight.
“She’s dead,” I say, as if it wasn’t obvious enough already. “I was at the morgue this morning. A friend took that. A photographer.” As though that explained anything. Why I’d kept it. Why she’d had to find it. Like there’s some sort of programme to these things.
“Who is she?”
“Nobody knows.”
Inessa looks thoughtfully at the creased photograph for a moment, tracing the autopsy stitches with her fingernails. The paper’s fold-marks neatly cut the body in four parts, centred at the groin.
“Somebody knows,” she says. Words like déjà vu.
“Sure,” I say. “Somebody always knows.”
I finish the glass of wine I’m holding and pour another. I finish that too and then empty the bottle. On cue the waitress comes over and asks if we want another one. I nod. She glances sidelong at the photograph and goes away. A little paler, it seems. Inessa looks across at me, her face a complex of unreadable emotions.
“How did she die?”
“They say she drowned.”
“They say?”
“What do I know, I never saw the girl before in my life.”
“And these?” she asks, pointing at the rope marks.
Something comes over me then. I put my face in my hands and try to rub out the picture. I tell myself again it’s not her. Wondering what I’m doing here. All the lies I’ve had to become. But she doesn’t know anything. Inessa. She’s just a kid from a bar.
I tell her what I know. What I think I know. It isn’t much. Just the story. The way it might’ve come out in the evening news. dead girl found in river. But even as I’m telling it I’m thinking about Blake. He knew her. He’d photographed her while she was alive. It’s the only way any of it made sense. The rope marks. Him bribing the stiff at the morgue. Me as his witness. His accomplice. His alibi.
The idea’s sick. I feel my guts turn over, a shiver runs the length of my spine. My neck’s all wet. I’m rigid. Staring hard at the black space in front of me. Inessa’s voice brings me out of it. My face does something ugly, I can see it in her expression. I know then that I’m just as ugly on the outside as I am on the inside. I expect her to get up and run while she’s got the chance, but she doesn’t. Instead she reaches across the table and touches my cheek. I feel confused.
“Look at me,” she says. I struggle not to, but her gaze holds onto me, a piercing azure. “Tell me what it is.”
I shake my head. I don’t want to go there. I’m saved by the waitress who brings another bottle and sets it down on the table. The picture’s still lying there but she avoids looking at it. When she’s gone I reach over and pick it up, turning it so that I can see everything. It doesn’t affect me this time. I tell myself it’s not anything real, it’s just an image.
“Did you know her?”
I fold the picture and slip it inside my suit jacket. I think for a moment, weighing my words. Then decide to say what I wasn’t going to say.
“I knew someone like her. It was a long time ago.”
*
We’re sitting at a corner table. The rain rat-tat-tats on casement windows. It’s later. Much later. Rain has a way of rearranging time. Like being in the past and looking towards the present the way you look across a room at someone coming towards you. Other rooms at other times. Faces or the absence of them – the ones you fear or the ones you expect. Saying there are things too precious to be allowed to be forgotten. A whole existence embroidered out of lies, so that I’ll never have to return there, to any of those places.
Inessa keeps her eyes averted as she listens. Words interwoven with the sound of the rain. Counterpoint. Darkness and light. I’m telling her the story of Regen. Like a wind-up drunk singing his only tune, out of tune. I don’t know why I’m doing it except that I know it’s not for her sake. Once upon a time I had people to blame for my life not making any sense. The hardest thing to walk away from is an alibi you don’t need anymore.
I tell Inessa the story of a child who had her childhood stolen from her, and then everything else stolen from her. If you make it general enough it could be anyone’s story. It occurs to me as I’m telling it, that it could be Inessa’s, too. Prague’s full of girls from Russia, Ukraine, Moldova who end up tied into the business. White slavery. Life-time bondage to the smugglers who got them here.
They start out in the brothels and strip joints off Wenceslas Square and slowly get used up. Bit by bit sliding down the scale into the rotation system, from one sleaze pit to another, winding up on the border, the E55, or working the streets around Můstek, Hlavní Nádraží, Libeň. A few get lucky as call girls. Maybe wind up making it on the porn ci
rcuit, too. But you can’t stop time and sooner or later the goods get well and tainted, and each new gig means more for less, harder, filthier, more vicious. Till they wind up like the dead girl maybe with a rope around their necks being tortured in front of a camera by snuff freaks.
13. LA FIN DU MONDE
There’s a bar off rue Mouffetard in Paris, called La Fin du Monde. The end of the world. It doesn’t seem so long ago, the train from Le Havre, Blake’s atelier, the night of the Spanish whore. Just like old times. La Paz. The infirmary on the hill. The mad room with the dead tree sticking up through the floor. Waking on the Place de la Contrescarpe, slumped beneath a lamppost clutching my duffel bag. I thought, I’d got so far but still hadn’t made it home and probably never would. Though for what it’s worth, still in one piece. More or less.
I mustn’t have been asleep there long, but it was dawn already, voices along the street. I hoiked up a gob of bloodied phlegm and spat. Raw behind the eyes. I’d been sick by degrees since I boarded that first ship out. The rest was just a kind of refinement. Like the stamp collection every kid keeps under his bed.
I was halfway down rue Mouffetard when I noticed La Fin du Monde with its shutters up. I staggered in and leaned against the bar. A drunk in the corner was humming a tune to himself that could’ve been anything at all or nothing. I dug in my pockets for loose change and spilled what I had on the counter. The barman glanced at it with his one good eye, unimpressed. The other eye was fogged glass with something swimming in it. I asked for a brandy. He poured a demi and left it in front of me. Then pointed at my face. There was dried blood on my cheek, probably from a fight with that lamppost.
“Cops beat up some Arab kids last night.”
“Sure,” I said. “The cops are always beating up on someone.”
