The Economy of Light

by Jack Dann

  It was a moot point. I would be long gone before the soil lost its nutrients and died.

  We stopped in the town of Paragominas for gas. A small, dusty town square, dirty pastel buildings, sand demons boiling into life with every gust of wind, a few bars with pickups parked in front, the sounds of loud carimbo music and laughter, a young man wearing cowboy boots and a Stetson hat leading a donkey loaded with leather bags down the main street. I had taken a pill for the pain in my stomach, and although I knew the ache was still there, I felt removed from it. The nausea remained, however. I could not yet believe it was real, that I was going to die. For as much death as I had seen during my life, now, when it was once again upon me, I refused it. I was more mature, more willing to accept life’s grim realities, when I was ten years old and part of Mengele’s zoo. I ground my teeth, a habit that my ex-wife had always complained about, and once again I began to tremble. It was already dark and rather than stay in what looked more like a ghost-town in the American northwest than a village in the jungle, I insisted that we drive on. Genaro would have probably liked to stay at least long enough to play some pool in the bars and drink a few fingers of cachaça—Brazilian white rum.

  Even in the darkness, I could feel when we were once again deep into jungle. The air was stifling, wet as a warm bath; my eyes stung and sweat rolled under my shirt, down my armpits, chilly in evaporation. A Culex mosquito flew into the cab of the pickup and its high-pitched whine almost drove me crazy until I finally managed to swat it.

  “We are almost home, Meester,” Genaro said at dawn, as the shadows that were hundred feet tall trees on either side of the road turned glaucous green and then finally came to life as a universe of viridescence, all the possibilities of green—celdadon, bice, emerald, beryl, aquamarine, olive green, evergreen, blue green, leek green, yew green, serpentine green, variscite green, turquoise green, mignonette, milori, chromium, terra verde, reseda—towering walls of trees and vines and air plants and ferns. I took another pill, which I had difficulty swallowing without water, and nodded. We had not talked for the entire trip; it was unusual that he would say anything at all without prompting.

  “Is everything okay at the fazenda?” I asked, feeling the need for company in the wet grayness of morning. I felt lost, swallowed.

  But Genaro didn’t answer, which meant that indeed everything was okay or he would have told me what was wrong. Finally, after what seemed like a long time of concentration for him, Genaro said in a slow, tight voice, as if it was very difficult for him to speak, “I know you are dying.”

  “What?” I asked, shocked.

  But Genaro didn’t answer.

  “You must speak now,” I said, sitting forward, leaning toward him, as if he were going to whisper to me how he had found out.

  His face tightened. “I knew you were dying before you left. Onca told me this. She also told me to tell you not to be afraid.”

  Onca, who took care of the house for me, was his wife. Once when I had asked her why someone who was so happy and talkative and full of life would choose someone as serious and quiet as Genaro for a husband, she laughed and said, “I’m a bruxa, you know what that is? Surely you have heard of macumba and espiritisme. Yes?” I had; they were indigenous religions that worshiped and, if one believed, used spirits. They used good spirits to protect themselves from bad spirits and were not above calling on foreign spirits for help, spirits such as Yara, which was supposed to be an American Indian, or white spirits such as Maria Lunga or Pai Jacobi, which could sometimes be used to harm people or accomplish evil ends. “Well,” she continued, “I can see things. And Genaro helps me to do that. Sometimes I think he’s a spirit.” She laughed, as if she thought I would believe that bruxas were just part of the natural weave of things. And in some way I suppose I did, for I still couldn’t separate the nightmare of my time in the camps from the reality. As I remembered Mengele, seeing him that first time, I could believe he was a spirit, a demon brought into the world; and even now, I remembered him as the man who was father, god, and tormentor. I remembered the feel of his clean-shaven face as he lifted me up once when he was in a good mood; and yet he had somehow merged with his death, and that fleshy monster had become skeletal in my mind; his face became that hollow-socketed skull the coroner had held high in Embu. And in my mind he was alive and dead, a grisly memory of the reality of sweet Onca’s spirit world.

  Genaro wouldn’t talk at all for the rest of the trip. He kept his eyes straight ahead, and we finally came to the open gate of the Fazenda, then down my road to the driveway. The red tile roof of the arcaded porches glowed wetly in the sun and I felt better just seeing the gardens and the white stucco walls stained with rust and dirt. I felt suddenly sleepy.

  The next thing I remembered was waking up in my room.

  * * * *

  The sun poured through my bedroom window and I could hear the familiar screams of the pia, a small gray bird that the Indians called dai-a-pior, which meant ‘worse to come.’ The bird would softly whistle and then would break out in staccato-like shrieks. I couldn’t stand the screeing, but like the terrible and unearthly screams of the howler monkeys, it was comforting if only because it was familiar.

  “Well, Meester finally wakes up,” Onca said, bringing me breakfast of milk, juice, a starchy gruel, and ice cream. Not her usual breakfast fare, nor mine. I discovered another lesion on my neck, which I would not allow myself to touch, lest it spread. I had to take my medication, I told myself, aware of the irony that here I was dying and yet I was concerned with a skin disease. But the taste of the sore in my mouth, and the constant awareness that there were others all over my body repulsed me, as if the pemphigus was an external sign of what was happening inside of me. But Onca only laughed and said, “You look like a young boy who hasn’t yet found a woman.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “You know, you’re getting pimples. They’ll go away once you start using your thing again like a man.” She giggled and her wide face that in repose could appear as sullen as Genaro’s seemed to partake completely of her smile. She tilted her head back as she looked at me, a habit of hers. Her mouth curled downward, which gave her an expression that was almost French. Her dark complexion was flawless, smooth as pond water, but her face seemed flattened. She wore a very faded dress that was cut much to short for her; it revealed her heavy legs and thighs and the outlines of her large breasts, which had nurtured seven children. Four of them died, she had said; the others grew up.

  “Do you talk to Genaro like that?” I asked.

  “Much worse, Meester. Much worse.” She put the tray on my lap and said, “Eat, you’ll feel better.”

  “What the hell is it?” I asked. The last thing I wanted was food; the very thought of eating made me queasy.

  “Do you want me to feed you?” she asked.

  “Don’t talk to me that way,” I snapped. “I can’t eat...but you can tell me what it is.”

  “It’s made from the manioc, which I mashed up and add some things.”

  “What other things?”

  “Some carapanauba bark, a little paxuri seeds, and cachaça, and maybe something else, I maybe forget. You know what they are?”

  “Cachaça I know, but the rest...I’m not eating—”

  Try it, you’ll see. I promise it won’t hurt you. Would I be stupid enough to kill the golden fleece?”

  I couldn’t help but smile. Over the years I had always read to her once or twice a week, for she didn’t know how to read, nor would she learn. But she loved fairy tales, and I tried to bring back new books to read her. Those stories would turn her into a child, an odd and wonderful thing to watch, for to me at least she seemed like the embodiment of the earth mother. She even looked like the prehistoric statues archaeologists had found all over the world; they were small, but had overdeveloped breasts and large stomachs. She was somehow natural, idiosyncratic, and universal.

  “It’s goose, not fleece,” I said, and, giving in, I took a spoonf
ul of the glassy-looking gruel; it had no taste at all, but then my mouth became numb, as if the mush had been spiked with Novocain. I could feel it numb my throat and more as the stuff worked its way down my esophagus to my stomach. There was a dish popular in Belém called pato no tucupi, which was famous for numbing the mouth. She must have used some of the same ingredients.

  “Try some more,” she insisted. “It will help your stomach. It will make the pain go away for a while.”

  But I couldn’t keep the food from trickling out of the side of my mouth. “What’s the ice cream for?” I asked.

  “It makes the herbs work better.”

  That was true. As the ice-cream went down, I felt as if my insides were being air-conditioned, as if there were great cold places where my throat and chest and stomach had been, and I felt muzzy and light-headed, as if everything was slowly floating around me. “Genaro told me you knew I was dying,” I said.

  “I told him that.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I had a dream about it when Genaro was making love to me. Sometimes I dream then. Often I do.”

  I felt myself blushing as she told me that, although I’ve never been a prude. Yet I felt embarrassed and chilled that she should see my death as she made love to her silent husband. I stared out the window at the neatly tended garden of jungle flowers and the evergreen trees that were in lavender bloom, but the white sash window-bars wavered and went out of focus. I did not feel pain in my stomach, only coolness. Now I imagined that dry breezes were passing though me. Onca must have used more than herbs in the gruel; I hoped it wasn’t anything hallucinogenic. Probably not, I could trust her.

  But she had put something in there....

  I didn’t want to ask her any more questions, yet I couldn’t help myself; and she was standing before me, waiting, knowing that I would ask, and prepared to answer, as if she had dreamed this, too. Perhaps she had.

  “What about your dream?” I asked. “Tell me about it.”

  “I dreamed about you and Genaro. Maybe because I was trying to make babies with Genaro. Sometimes dreams and truth get mixed up for me and I can’t pull out one part from another. Do you understand?”

  I didn’t, but I nodded.

  “And your dream?”

  She turned toward the window and looked out. She seemed to be looking past the trees and gardens and yard and miles of pastureland that was as level as Iowa grassland. Deep in the distance was the rainforest, the real ruler of this land. “It was a good dream, but it wasn’t good to dream it. You were with my Genaro in a boat. He was driving this boat. You sat in the front, but you were your own dream and it was a terrible dream. You were bones without flesh, yet you weren’t dead; and your bones were the color as the water. Brown as mud, just like the Amazonas. And Genaro was taking you to meet death so you could get yourself back.” She shivered and made a gesture in the air. “He told me he would do that for you.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, my words slurred from the Novocain-like herb she had put in the food. “Do what for me?”

  “I feel close to you, Meester, but I told him not to do this, but he believes it is a matter of honor.”

  “You’re not making sense,” I said, frustrated with all this mumbo-jumbo.

  “He will take you to meet your death so you may live. That is what your dream told me when I had my dream. Dreams come from people, but they can be alive on their own, to talk to each other, just like people.”

  “Onca, how you found out about my disease, I don’t know. I’ll give you that. But you—”

  “We know someone who can help you,” Onca said.

  “If I wouldn’t go to hospital to have them radiate me and do everything else, I certainly wouldn’t go to a witch doctor. But I thank you, I appreciate your concern.”

  “This person isn’t a witch doctor, Meester.”

  “Than what is he?”

  “He’s a white man. A doctor. You know him, I think.”

  “Who?”

  “That’s all I have from the dream,” she said. “Maybe later I will have more. Then maybe you will be ready.” With that she took the tray, leaving me only the milk on my bed stand, and left the room.

  “Onca,” I shouted, but she didn’t—and I knew she wouldn’t—come back. The image that had formed in my mind was, of course, that of Mengele. Death. But that was impossible, and yet I still felt the hackles raise on my back, cold as the scales of a fish.

  * * * *

  That night I was awakened by a sharp scream. My first thought was of howler monkeys, but the shriek was of too short a duration, and sounded too human.

  It was Onca.

  CHAPTER THREE

  DRY STORM

  In the days that followed, I would get out of bed early and wander around the ranch. I couldn’t stand to sleep. I would wake up screaming and sweaty, but I would be unable to remember my nightmares. I hated the onset of darkness, and when I finally retired to my room, I would read until I couldn’t stay awake any longer. I ate what Onca gave me and, although my mouth was continually numb, I had stopped taking the pills. I was living day to day, and the days seemed interminably long, as if I was a child and once again had time to be bored. But I wasn’t impatient. I didn’t think about dying hardly at all, and the lesions on my body had begun to clear up with the medicine. Onca also insisted I wash with a putrid smelling brown herb she placed in a glass by my washbasin every day. It looked like a turd and was as slippery and hard as a wet stone.

  But I felt safe for the time being, as if I could live in this eternal present until I was ready to face what was happening to me...until I could face dying. I became an ice-cream junkie, mildly high all day, buzzing with cool, inconsequential thoughts, slurring my words as if I had just left the dentist’s chair, and feeling as if my insides were cold as a refrigerator, even while I was sweating in the tropical humidity.

  Genaro introduced me to the new men, who weren’t happy to discover that their empreteiro was going to be here permanently. Genaro had unusual luck keeping fieldhands, for most macheteiros won’t work longer than thirty days before moving on. It was obvious that they respected him and considered him their boss; I was simply an intruder. I wondered if my presence would make them insecure enough to leave.

  He asked my advice on various things, such as what to do with the grass we’d been experimenting with: a type of grass that could be planted again and again without depleting the soil of nutrients. But the grass would often turn brown and die, even when there was sufficient rain. Some years ago I had also had the idea of trying to crossbreed the indigenous humpback zebu with American stock. The zebu is perfectly adapted to the Amazonian climate and is extraordinarily hardy, but its meat, unfortunately, tastes like old shoes. One afternoon I watched Genaro artificially inseminate several cows with large syringes of bull’s sperm. He wore a long green plastic glove and grimaced every time he did it. But so far we had had no luck in producing a viable crossbreed.

  Genaro was patient and dutifully showed me all work that was being done on the ranch. But more often than not my concentration would wander, and I would go off by myself. I suspect Genaro was happy to be on his own.

  I began to lose weight. Every day I shed a few pounds; every day Onca would insist I eat more. But I had no appetite, except for ice cream. I began staying in my room more often, as the pain in my stomach became harder to muffle.

  And then it stopped raining.

  Days on end without even a drizzle, an eerie phenomenon in a rain-forest. Genaro told me that he had known of this happening before; once, when he had been a macheteiro in the Araguaia Valley, it did not rain for two hundred days. If this occurred here, we would be out of business. Although I knew it was wrong thinking, for I had responsibilities to the others on the ranch, I could not help but think that it would be a fitting end to it all. It was as if nature was in league with my death to have my world fall with me. I remembered a quote from the Talmud, something to the effect that every
man is a whole universe to himself, which is irrevocably lost when he dies. This seemed like an omen, a physical extension of my death.

  But although there was no rain, dry storms occurred several times a day. The sky would turn black, clouds would boil, thunder would crash like cars on a freeway after explosions of lightning, yet no rain. It was disconcerting. I would pace the room during the storms, agitated, listening to the wind breathing around the house, until finally I would have to go outside, for I felt trapped, as if the thick stucco walls were imperceptibly getting closer, as if the electricity of the storm was depleting my room of oxygen and leaving only a hint of ozone to burn in my nose.

  It was an odd sensation walking through the fields in the stormy darkness, in the chill of imminent downpour; and yet during those times the air would be as dry as a fall day in upstate New York. The storms seemed to bring out the insects, clouds of them buzzing around my face, a constant annoyance. In a grove of huge Brazil nut trees a green parrot screamed, as if frightened. I could smell the moulds and sweet damp aroma of decay that I associated with forest floor as I passed the grove. But my mind was still blank, emptied, and I seemed to float above the jagged teeth of reflection and memory.

  And then I found one of Genaro’s macheteiros dead in the south pasture. Thirty head of steer had fallen around him, their tongues black and hanging out of their mouths, their eyes bulging. I stopped and stood there, realizing an instant later that I had been holding my breath. I could hear the roll of thunder and the buzzing of hundreds of flies.

  The ranch hand had fallen face down on the ground. I pulled him over, grasping his arm, and shuddered when I discovered that he was covered with maggots. They were crawling all over his face, in and out of his mouth, and over his eyes, which were wide open, as if he were surprised to find himself in such a state.