Five Wives

by Joan Thomas

  The three Waorani informants they worked with in Limoncocha had been educated in the mission school, and they all spoke Spanish. The only one he can picture clearly is a woman named Omi. She was the least friendly; there was something about the work that bugged her. One day they were walking back to the guesthouse and she surprised him by asking him whether he’d ever heard the Waorani origin story. About the squirrel that chewed through a cord holding a big tree to the sky. “No,” he said eagerly. “There’s a tree in your origin story?” “Sí,” she said, with one of her rare smiles. And she stood still and told him the story. A dramatic performance, her voice was passionate. But she was speaking Wao-Tededo. When she finished, he gently pointed out that he didn’t understand her language. “Sí,” she said, starting to walk again. “I realize that.”

  He steps uncertainly into the hall. The radio room and the kitchen have been restored to 1956, but it looks as though the rest of the house has been modernized. A chain across the stairs has a PRIVATE sign on it. Surely that doesn’t apply to him? Before he can make a move, the outside door opens and a girl comes in. She’s dressed in spandex and her short black hair is damp and imprinted with the shape of a helmet. It’s the cyclist they passed on the highway.

  “Hey,” she says. She closes the door, but immediately there’s pounding on the steps and excited American voices, and the Georgia gang troops in, Kelly at the rear, making apologetic gestures in his direction.

  A man in a red baseball cap takes in David and the cyclist. “So you folks made it to the sacred shrine on your own. Where you-all from?”

  The girl pointedly ignores him, but David offers, “I’m from Portland, Oregon.”

  And then a woman with a knowing smile says, “You wouldn’t be David Saint, would you?” and everyone wants to shake his hand and get him talking. They bring artifacts over to ask about them. A piece of wood from the old kitchen, honeycombed with tunnels.

  “My dad thought he could outfox the termites by setting the foundation piles in enamel dishpans of kerosene,” David explains. “Nobody ever told him there was such a thing as a flying termite!”

  They marvel over the lances, hard as iron and their points sharpened to a knife-edge without the use of modern tools. The blowguns so beautifully crafted and balanced, they’re a work of art. Did the Auca have a god? someone asks. This question has always perplexed David, and he gives them the best answer he can: the jungle was their god. “They were pagan,” a woman offers.

  Through the glass, David spies a massive book open on the kitchen counter. It has to be the Wao-Tededo Bible. It was only recently published, the fulfillment of a dream cherished by three generations of Operation Auca families, and a very valuable archive.

  It takes forever to work his way through the crowd to the kitchen, and by the time he gets there, the cyclist has beat him to it. She’s leaning on the counter studying the large print with great interest, Kelly at her elbow.

  “There are only eighteen phonemes in the Waorani language. So words have to have a lot of syllables, to differentiate one from the other. And the Waorani didn’t have vocabulary for so many things in the Scriptures—cross, sacrifice, redemption, sin.”

  The girl raises her head. “Donkeys, sheep, purses, lanterns, robes. Buy, sell, coin, wine.”

  “Right!” Kelly says. “So instead of using a simple noun, you basically have to write an explanation. I mean, this is just the New Testament, and it’s five inches thick. It was very creative and demanding work for the translators.”

  “So, the Waorani still speak their language?”

  “Well, not so much,” Kelly says. “The elders do.”

  “And the elders can read?”

  “Well, no, not too many of them.”

  The girl has a smug little smile. She is clearly trolling Kelly. She waits a beat, and then she says, “The Bible is currently being translated into Klingon. Also into Na’vi. At least, that’s what I read online.”

  “What is Na’vi?”

  “The language from Avatar.” Kelly’s expression is blank and the girl adds with a shrug, “It’s a movie.”

  It’s a playful sort of disrespect, the worst kind.

  He steps out to the veranda. Lord, he prays. First Fidel and then this girl—couldn’t you have ministered to me in some small way? Couldn’t you have met me here, after I came all this way with a thirsting heart? No answer. God’s out helping some Christian kid in Florida find a parking spot at the mall, Abby says. She smiles at him, pert. God finds all the prayers of mankind in his Spam folder. That was a cartoon. She thought it was hilarious.

  Everything, every blessed, sacred thing, has to be challenged. Everything. Pain heaves in his chest, a solid block of it breaking into pieces. He misses her so desperately. That a child so longed for, finally conceived when they had almost given up hope, so cherished, so gifted, that such a child could willfully turn against truth—a sense of his own failure rises, so sharp his eyes burn.

  He stumbles down the stairs and out into the yard. He was always too open; he thought freedom of thought was a safe exercise, given the compelling power of the gospel message. He thought they were special, their family, he saw himself as above the fears that built caution into other Christian parents. He raised a curious and articulate and spirited young woman. Like God, who for whatever reason planted the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden, and then had to watch as Eve reached for the fruit that damned all humanity.

  Because you take others down with you, don’t you. You recklessly knock a crack into the vessel of faith, and the murky gas of doubt seeps in. Abby said she’d stopped talking to God to see if He would keep talking to her. So David has to ask—Lord, why didn’t you? Why didn’t you try at least as hard as her earthly father, who messages her over and over whether she responds or not?

  He walks slowly across the lawn. Some of the Georgians beat him outside. They’re videotaping each other enthusing about the house. Mount Sangay is behind the clouds piled on the river. They probably don’t realize it’s there, but he could let them know. You have to take it on faith. The gravel parking lot is empty except for the tour bus. Fidel’s red Hyundai drives up from the Puyo direction and pulls in. Sean gets out of the front passenger seat, wearing sunglasses, carrying his laptop, and raises a victory fist to David. Then he staggers back against the car, his head lolling. This also means no words: it’s the ultimate iteration of Youderian wonder. I should get my suitcase out of Fidel’s car, Dave thinks. But he’s distracted by the American cyclist. She comes down the steps and crosses the grass and unlocks her bike, which was chained to a tree. She wheels it down to the road and soon she’s out of sight, heading back towards Baños. Abby is not here and she’s not coming. He’s known that all along, of course, and he discovers that he’s glad.

  He hears his name. Kelly, the missionary docent of Nate Saint House, is calling from the veranda. So David Saint, less than the least of all saints, heads back to the house to talk to the crowd waiting for him there.

  29

  LA VIRGEN DE QUITO IS a patchwork statue, made of thousands of pieces of aluminum welded together. She’s relatively new, in David’s personal history. He came back to Ecuador after six years of college and seminary, and there she was overlooking the old city, a robed woman embellished with wings, standing on a dragon, which is crouched on a globe. Now it’s hard to imagine the city without her.

  The driver stops at the top of El Panecillo. Dave pays him and gets out. His plane leaves at midnight and he’s dragging his suitcase. He walks once around the monument, studying the statue. She’s supposed to be the Woman of the Apocalypse from the book of Revelation. Her face is pretty but vacant. Those wings—oh, why not? And the dragon under her feet has a snout horn, like a rhino. The dragon is not dead, of course, it’s just enchained, and the Virgin holds the chain loosely in one hand, waving with the other.

  When he was a boy, Marj would sneak them off-campus for a family outing, just Benjy and Debbie and him
, and they’d hike up here. You climb and climb and climb, and you get to the top only to discover how low you are, what a little pimple of a hill this is in the sprawling city-plain slung between the mountain ranges. The smell of eucalyptus, the trails for running, the cries of the food vendors—it was his favourite place. While they played, Marj would sit on a bench looking out over the city. If a woman came by with a cart of espumillas—the cones that look like ice cream but never melt—they would race back to their mother and she’d smile indulgently and reach into the neck of her blouse (where, to foil thieves, she had tied her change purse to a long loop of shoelace) and pull out a coin warmed by her breasts.

  It’s quiet tonight, just a few courting couples. Sometimes you can see Cotopaxi, but tonight a scarf of cloud is draped along the horizon. David walks the path a second time, admiring the city spread out in every direction. Then he spies the path he’s looking for, and steps through a hedge and down some steps. His favourite restaurant—still here, perched on the slope.

  The room is almost empty. A waiter takes the suitcase and lets him pick his table by the long, high window. It’s just five thirty, he’s organized his day perfectly. “¿Cómo te llamas?” he asks the waiter, and the man says, “Marco.” David orders a drink and in the time it takes him to down it, the blue sky turns opalescent and then its silvery light drains from it and starts to come on yellow in the buildings. A beautiful and moving transformation. It’s always a relief to survey Quito from this height, its individual human dramas lost in haze, just the pleasing adobe shapes, and the sky and the distant peaks. You feel (he realizes) less guilty.

  Even as a kid, he carried this weight around. The shoeshine boys jostling him in the square, hungry, ragged—they were his personal responsibility. God had brought him to South America for them. But in those days, he didn’t speak Spanish. He had no money for a shoeshine. And he wore canvas runners! He could never enter their mystery, never picture where boys like them laid their heads at night, what they would be as men. They would join the unreached, anguished millions who thronged the streets, but to what end? And so, even then, it was a relief to be up here, where Ecuador became what it was, essentially unknowable.

  He signals for another CC. It was the first alcohol he ever tasted—the night they visited the old photographer in that beautiful, warm apartment in Manhattan. Edith poured squat, heavy glasses of the amber drink, and to David’s astonishment, Betty accepted one. So David said yes, okay, thank you. Sharon asked for tea and Edith went to put the kettle on, and the light sconces in the hall brushed her hair with amber as she passed. Cornell had the beginnings of Parkinson’s and when he raised his trembling hand to drink, the amber liquid heaved in his glass. Already the liquor was moving warmly and swiftly through David’s chest, and then more gingerly up the back of his neck to his brain. Sharon, in her orange mohair sweater, he remembers her smiling and asking, “Cornell, is your faith still important to you?”

  “I would call myself a secular Jew,” Cornell said. He went on to say that this was the sweet spot in American culture, as far as he was concerned. “You’re somebody, something more than your money and your ego. Your race was seasoned by great suffering. You have a turn of phrase that makes you sound profound. You can light candles and tell stories, you’ve got the ancient melodies, you lift your arms and dance—right, Edith? But you’re not hostage to all the hocus-pocus.”

  A trumpet was playing, filaments of music silver in the amber air. Miles Davis, they said. A big orange cat leapt to Sharon’s lap and she sat stroking it. Edith refilled their glasses and the secret glow infused the whole apartment. David was—his heart was open that night. The five of them loved each other. His mother-in-law, so much worldlier than he’d known. The old photographer, so homely and so beautiful. His precious wife.

  So now, on the rare occasions he treats himself to a drink, it’s Canadian Club. Neat.

  Marco brings his second drink and hands him a menu in a black leather folder. Then he goes back to the bar where his colleagues linger, talking to each other but alert to their customers. Dark-haired men in black jackets, dutiful members of a modest fraternity. The restaurant is half-full now, couples with heads together talking. David’s chronic loneliness rises in his chest. He will never not be alone. You need to get married again, everyone says. But how can you be close to someone, how can you share a heart as troubled as his?

  Well, the trip is over. He spent much of the week in a rental Nissan with the locations manager, who, beyond looking like Sean Youderian’s identical twin, is named Sean. They called him Segundo at first and then Gundo. David still hadn’t read the script, but Gundo had a list of locations. He and David drove to Shandia, a beautiful Quichua settlement in the foothills, and found a house that could stand in for Jim and Betty’s, their actual house having fallen to ruins in the forest. At Puyo they borrowed a canoe and paddled down the river and chose a long and stable playa that could serve as the beachhead on the Curaray. A single-engine plane was going to have to land there. As David recalled it, Nate needed five hundred feet. He paced the length of the sand and it was good. The topography was wrong, of course, not the high rainforest where the men died, but Gundo valued airport, road, and hotel access above all else. “If Walter’s desperate for a canopy,” he said, “there’s always CGI.” They needed traditional Quichua longhouses to stage the scene where Betty meets the two Auca women, and they needed Waorani longhouses in the settlement Betty and Rachel trek into. Gundo couldn’t see why the same structures couldn’t serve for both if you shot from different angles. David tried to explain the differences as he understood them, and Gundo crossed his eyes. It was all about buy-in. Once you had buy-in, you were good.

  Una fantasía, Fidel called the film. David himself could see that it had nothing to do with the Waorani they saw from time to time on the streets of Puyo and Shell, destitute individuals or families who had been flown out to the clinic on an emergency basis and didn’t have the money to get home. That’s what Fidel said. Fidel spent the week driving Sean Youderian around, and David seldom got to talk to him. He felt a surprising bond with the guy, and started to hope they might drive up the Vía Auca as Fidel had suggested. But any time Fidel had a few spare hours, he barrelled across Puyo to a cement building that was the Waorani Association headquarters, ignoring David’s hints to be invited along. Not just a taxista, he was (in his niece Carmela’s words) an activista.

  Sean was still obsessing about Tiwaeno, about going in for background, but the Ecuadoreans on the team suggested Quehueire Ono. This was a traditional settlement on the Rio Shiripuno that had been started by people who broke with the missionaries and moved back into the forest. Turned out Fidel had been involved in establishing an eco-lodge near there, where (as one guy from the Ecuadorean service crew put it) rich foreigners could fly in to watch the Waorani practise their lifestyle. That eco-lodge had recently had to close because of oil drilling in Yasuní Park, but Quehueire Ono was still a community, and the idea grew that they might allow the crew to come in and film. They called Fidel into a meeting to ask him about it. “No,” he said.

  So then Sean was back to talking about Tiwaeno. The plane he booked was a four-seater and one of the seats had David’s name on it. By that point David had started to loathe the sound of Sean’s voice and the very way he put his words together. “No,” he said.

  So of course Sean was going to come back from Tiwaeno with a sensational story—you could bank on it. Sure enough, that afternoon when David arrived at Nate Saint House, Sean had just walked over from the Shell airstrip and he was perched on a counter, flushed and excited, waiting for them all to assemble so he could astonish them.

  The flight over the rainforest had been stunning. They bounced three times landing, but the Lord had them in the palm of His hand. They were warmly welcomed and taken by canoe to see Rachel Saint’s house at nearby Toñampare, although they couldn’t go inside as it was shuttered and barred. But they saw her grave. They met numerous individual
s who remembered the killings, including three old men who had taken part. All morning they sat chatting over bowls of tepae, the yucca beverage. With Carmela translating, first into Spanish and then Wao-Tededo, Sean told the people about the film. He had his laptop with him, and some impulse made him take it out and play the Leo Duric song they intended to use on the soundtrack.

  Sean’s laptop was on the kitchen counter and at this point in the story he opened it and touched a finger to a key. “I just want to take you to that moment,” he said. “That gorgeous melody the Lord gave Leo, and Carmela and I sitting deep in the jungle with these old men God rescued from their savage past, and Leo’s amazing voice comes on. The music floats up over the trees—and all the elders fall silent. They listen, and this look comes over their faces, a look of pure wonder, and then (and Carmela here is translating) they say, We know that music. We’ve heard that song before. Right after the killings, while the missionaries’ bodies were still bleeding, we saw a tribe of people in the sky, up over the trees. They were wearing white robes. There was bright light all around. That’s the song they were singing.”

  The synthesizer, and that rapturous voice, and in the blue kitchen they turned stunned faces towards each other. Sean’s eyes were rimmed with tears. David sat motionless on a wooden chair. Everybody in that little circle of film people looked terribly young to him. They were young. God chooses his servants. You don’t get to choose who you serve with.

  First chance he saw, he slipped out. The mountain was painted white on the darkening sky to the south. Always a gift, Sangay showing itself to you at the end of the day. And then another gift, Fidel on his own, leaning against his car in the parking lot. David walked across the gravel towards him.

  “It’s my last night,” he said.