The Economy of Light

by Jack Dann

  Genaro talked to a short, stocky man of about forty, who had no upper front teeth and was quite drunk. His missing teeth made his lower jaw appear to jut out. He looked like a brancinho, for his frizzy gray-flecked hair was red, his skin was ruddy and freckled, but his features were Negroid. He stood on the flat deck of a thirty foot motor, which had a cabin consisting of kitchen and toilet in the back and a wheelhouse in the front; the deck was covered with a torn canvass roof that ballooned in the wind and made cracking and whipping sounds. Genaro’s friend had left months ago for Santarem and had never returned, the man told us. “He found a girl,” he said, making a quick obscene gesture with both of his oddly delicate yet calloused hands, “and he left his wife and children alone.” Then he spat and shook his head.

  “Do you know of a boat we can rent?” I asked, and Genaro gave me a quick but angry glance, for my impatience might queer the deal and certainly cost us more money. But I was impatient. There was something about being here at the edge of the city, watching the water, which made me slightly dizzy, as if the land were undulating, and I felt trapped and claustrophobic. I wanted to get away from the smell of chemicals and fish and people; I wanted to ply the dark water of the Amazon. I wanted this last journey...this last chase, if, indeed, that was what it was. And if these strange dreams of Onca’s, Genaro’s, and my own were true, I wanted to be justice for Mengele.

  Then I could rest in peace.

  The man looked at Genaro and shook his head. “Onde vai?” he asked.

  “Wakatauteri,” Genaro said, and he nodded toward the river.

  The man shook his head again. “Perigoso.” Then after a pause, he said, “Quanto custa?”

  Genaro looked at me and said, “1500 cruzeiros.”

  The sailor laughed and lit a flattened cigarette; I had seen Turkish cigarettes rolled that way. “7,500,” he said. They argued. Genaro told him that we wanted to rent the boat, but didn’t want him as captain. The sailor threw down his cigarette and started walking toward the cabin. “What do you want to do?” Genaro asked me.

  “5,000,” I said. “Estou com pressa.”

  “Americano,” he said. He looked at Genaro scornfully; Genaro did not meet his eyes. “6,000,” the sailor said. I nodded, and the deal was done, although for what I was paying he could buy a new boat.

  An hour later we were on the river, chugging out of the harbor. The engine skipped and choked, and Genaro had to adjust the carburetor while I took the wheel. We were in Amazon waters, which were brown and muddy, the color of light chocolate; but the Rio Negro flowed beside us, and its surface was like a black mirror. And like oil and water poured into the same trough, the rivers remained separate because of their different temperatures and speeds. We passed warehouses, factories, oil refineries, sawmills, and as we put distance between ourselves and the city, we passed farms and the occasional white stucco house with red tiled roof, which reminded me of home. There were plenty of fishing boats and barges on the river; some families had tied two, three, and in some cases, four boats together, and they floated down the river like the ragtag retinue of an ancient king. We waved at the passers-by, who were lying in colored cotton hammocks; or drinking caipirinhas, concoctions made with rum, sugar, and lemon; or playing dominoes, which wouldn’t blow away in a stiff wind, like cards. I felt the distance from everything familiar as we went into deeper country. We passed isolated cottages with penned cattle and neatly planted trees and then crossed over to the Rio Negro side, for we were going to take a branch of the Negro, the Rio Branco, north. The shore consisted of a green swatch of vegetation and trees of different hues of green and different heights. We motored toward the Branco and as we went farther into the rain-forest, it became warmer with every mile, and the humidity was so high that my shirt clung to my skin like a transparent wrap. There was nothing to do but stay in one place and try not to move around too much. We kept as close as we dared to the clay river bank, slowly passing by and sometimes under cool, shady canopies of tree branches, roots, and vines. The trees beyond were so closely packed as to cut out the light, a wall of leaf and bole that seemed to rise into the cloudless eggshell blue heavens.

  We passed a few Indians paddling dugouts; the canoes were made out of hollowed-out itauba wood, which was black and hard as stone. By dusk we met a river merchant, a cabloclo with his wife and three daughters, who sold us some gasoline; and then we were alone on the river, which became dark, the color of dried blood, for as the sun set, the sky turned from blue to orange to deep crimson. The color seemed to be visible as a fine mist in the air; it was as if we were passing into a different atmosphere, and ahead of us and far to the left, almost in the center of the river, we saw river dolphins playing, breaking the surface. They came closer to us, as if looking for company, and swam and jumped and splashed and made snorting noises. Then, almost impossibly fast, they left, disappearing into the glassy water.

  Genaro smiled and said, “Botos. Black ones. You can tell by the way they stick their heads above the water; the pink boto they come to the surface differently. You see their back first. The pink ones, they are almost gone, but where we’re going, they may still live because it’s so far away from the fishermen. After a pause he said, “The black ones are almost gone, too.” He stuffed a loose wad of chewing tobacco into the side of his mouth, chewed for a bit, making sucking noises, and then spat into the dark water. The river seemed to change Genaro, animate him somehow, as if being close to its teeming life gave him life also. The deadness that sometimes clung to him had disappeared; his movements were less cautious and studied, and he was talking, almost to himself, as if for the joy of hearing his voice once again. If I had not known him at the facenda, I would take him to be gregarious, a man who enjoys company, but one who is not altogether giving, one who has been hurt and defeated...one whose defenses are like jaws that snap shut at the merest intimation of violation.

  Night came almost at once, and I imagined I could see after-images of the red sunset on the surface of the river. A full moon bathed river and jungle in a wan, pearly light. We were near the Rio Alatau, which was a tributary of the Branco, and there we anchored. We could hear the jungle all around us, the constant sawing and chirruping of insects and frogs and every so often the heart-stopping cries of howler monkeys. I felt as if we were a thousand miles from any civilization, as if the world I had just left was an ancient dream, a fogged memory. We tucked down the canvass as best we could to keep out mosquitoes—they did not seem to be out in force here, which was also one of our reasons for staying here the night. I had doused myself several times during the day with insect repellant, and I did so again, just to be safe. Genaro made dinner, a delicious catfish called jandia, which he had caught earlier. He fried it and surrounded our plates with slices of fruit, but he warned me not to bite into the husk of the cashwe fruit, for “it would burn like fire.” But I couldn’t finish my meal, as good as it was, for my stomach began aching; and I spent an hour aft. The pain was followed by waves of nausea, and when I finally felt strong enough to return, I was chilled and sweating. I was going to take a pill for pain, but Genaro had made a bowl of Onca’s manioc gruel and said, “Eat a little if you can. “Onca mixed up this for you; better than the pills.” I forced down a little, although it gagged me, yet within a few minutes I felt relief. “I’m sorry, but no ice cream here,” Genaro said. I smiled and lay down in my hammock; I could still feel pain, but it seemed isolated, controlled.

  “Onca’s a fine woman,” I said rather lamely, but I wanted to talk about her with Genaro, pull him a bit about her.

  Genaro nodded and said, “She likes you, or she wouldn’t have stayed with you for so long. She had an offer to go to Belém to work for a factory owner. You see, she worked for very rich people before. She never told you that, no? But she thinks of you as if...as if you need to be preocupar-se com, how do you say, ah, mothered. That’s what. Like you’re the child, even though you’re a man and have killed other men.”

  I looked shar
ply up at him.

  “Onca told me this from her dream, but I would know anyway.”

  “And how’s that,” I asked, edgy.

  “The way you are. I can see it sometimes, just as you can see me. What do you see from me?”

  He had caught me off-guard. But, yes, I did see something. There was a connection between us. I had felt it when we had talked in my dining room. I sensed his psychic heaviness then, his burden, which was somehow like my own. And I felt that connection now once again, although the burden seemed lighter; perhaps because we felt free. An illusion, most likely, but I sensed it nevertheless.

  “Well?” he asked in earnest. It certainly seemed that the river had dissolved some of his sullenness. “I see us both carrying something terrible with us,” I said, suddenly embarrassed. “As if we share this...thing in common. A darkness, perhaps.”

  Genaro nodded, seemingly satisfied. “You see,” he said. “You can see. But where we’re going, that is where I found the darkness, the burden.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer that; he just leaned back against the bulkhead and looked up at the stars, which were as bright and cold-looking as bits of ice reflecting some strong, focused light. He was silent.

  “Why are you going back then?” I asked, persisting.

  After a long pause he said, “To take back the burden.” Then he moved away from me and drank his rum from the bottle by himself. Suddenly I had a sense of déja vu, and I realized that right now, I was living the dream I had had of being on the river. The smells and sounds of the river and jungle were exactly right. They disoriented me, for in that instant of realization I couldn’t discern whether I was dreaming or awake. And as I lay in my damp hammock, I remembered my other recurring dreams, I remembered my brother David being electrocuted by Mengele in a house that was by appearances my own, and I broke into cold sweat. I could feel Mengele’s presence here, suffocating me, and I shivered, once again a child in the camp. Yet I could not hate him then, for I was too frightened, anxious, as if he were my father, as everything here—the insects, the lapping water, the splashing fish and screeing monkeys—were all simply manifestation of Mengele. As if I were but a manifestation of Uncle Pepe, of Mengele, the jungle itself.

  Suddenly a great crashing noise startled me. At first I thought some animal was smashing through brush. That noise was followed by an almost human wail that was so unearthly that I found myself standing on the deck, the sweat sending chills down my spine. I had never heard a sound like it, and I wanted to leave this place immediately.

  Genaro was up and walking forward to the wheelhouse. He started the motor, and we glided out to the center of the river, which reflected the stars; it seemed we were drifting in space among them.

  “What was that noise?” I asked.

  “Curupira,” he said matter-of-factly. “Bogey-man. That’s his noise. Not usual to hear his noise, and we’re so early on the river. But now we leave everything behind here. From now on this is a place for bugs and monsters. You will see the monsters, or see some of them already. You think this is crazy?” Genaro asked.

  I shrugged, trying to get that wailing noise out of my mind. I thought back to when I had first heard the howler monkeys, how their shrieks had jolted me, but this sound was different. I couldn’t imagine it coming from anything known to science. It did have a beauty, though, as did the inhuman lowing of white whales. Yet, somehow, this sound was...sinister.

  “The curupira is dreams, that’s all,” Genaro continued. When you hear it you dream of dying. It helps you die, but it cannot kill you. Not like the cobra grande, which I myself once saw. Now that is a real thing in the world. It is like a dragon and over a hundred feet long. Its eyes are azulado, like fireflies blinking. And it kills those on the river. I’ve seen it turn over boats and make food for the piranha. And I’ve also seen the Mapinguari, the monster with one eye that lives in the jungle. I saw him gore a man. When I breathed the doctor’s red dust, I saw these things, too. I saw snakes crawling through the air and disappear like smoke. I saw a man see these things and die and come to life again.”

  “What about the doctor’s red dust?” I asked, wondering if Genaro was a little crazy, or perhaps it was just the normal run of superstition one acquires in this part of the world. Certainly Genaro had no education; like Onca, he couldn’t read or write, except to make a squiggle that signified his name.

  Most likely he had seen some of his monsters on hallucinogens.

  But this was the first time he had mentioned the doctor on his own, and so I tried to get him to continue.

  “If we get to where we’re going, maybe you’ll see,” Genaro said. “Me, I think the doctor made these monsters to keep Indians away. Maybe he changed his mind later and couldn’t kill them. Who knows but Deus and the doctor?”

  “Tell me what you remember about the doctor?” I asked.

  Genaro had his back turned to me.

  “Genaro?”

  “I remember what I tell you. The rest I cannot remember.”

  Or will not, I thought.

  Genaro took a sip from his bottle of cachaça as he piloted the boat up the dead-quiet river. The water was like black glass, and the silence was as palpable as the darkness.

  * * * *

  I slept most of the night to the constant throbbing of the engine and the breaking of water against the hull. I came awake sharply a few times, twice screaming, but I couldn’t remember what, if anything I had dreamed, and feeling uneasy and anxious, I fell back to sleep, to finally wake up well after dawn. Although we had put up the canvass to keep out the bugs, they had easily gotten inside. I brushed six or seven transparent pium flies from my face and arms. Looking closely, I could see the abdomen’s of the creatures filled with blood, my blood. The bites itched, and I was covered with tiny welts. I got up and pulled down the canvass.

  “I think sometimes the canvass makes them worse,” Genaro said, looking back at me from the wheel. It’s like we built a house for them to live in. You should put alcohol on yourself, Meester.”

  “I have some insect repellent,” I said.

  “Alcohol works much better. Stop the itch then drink some. Then you can use the other stuff.”

  I noticed that the cloud of insects wasn’t swirling around him. Perhaps it was something about his metabolism or sweat that kept them away. But they were devouring me.

  “We’ll be out of it soon, Genaro said. “These bugs, they don’t like to travel too far.”

  He was right, and I did as he said. Indeed, the alcohol eased the itching and burning, but the sores from my pemphigus which had been stung were especially painful. The day passed uneventfully. Genaro kept to the east side of the Branco for shade and the west shore later in the afternoon. I kept to the hammock, for I was trying to conserve my strength, what I had left. I ate Onca’s gruel and while I perspired in the choking heat and humidity, my insides felt cool and anesthetized. I wasn’t anxious, or frightened. Perhaps it was the river; perhaps I had absorbed its calm, its rhythm. Genaro seemed in his element here, and to watch him, one could believe he was happy, for the time being at least. He would turn to me every few minutes and nod or curl his upper lip, which for him was the equivalent of a smile. We didn’t talk much after last night, except some small talk, which petered out, for it sounded so inane against the backdrop of river and perfectly clear sky and mud banks and dense forest, a wall I could not imagine penetrating. We passed a few black caymans, ugly alligators baking in the sun, and turtles, whose eggs were an illegal native staple, for they were becoming an endangered species. But here in the wilds, life was in profusion. Pink macaws shouted, flycatchers crashed through shrubs as we passed, and all manner of bird cawed and screed and made creaking unbirdlike sounds: jaos and hoatzins and Orinoco geese. Kingfishers flew close to the surface of the water, and I caught a glimpse of a huge black snake slithering between two rocks. The snake had to be fifteen feet long. It was easy to imagine how one could exa
ggerate size here...to imagine a great black snake that was a hundred feet long, that swam just below the surface of the river until it sensed a barco to capsize in its waters. And I even glimpsed a jaguar, or thought I did, and I remembered its caged cousin near the entrance to my hotel.

  As the day wore on, my thoughts seemed to move back to memory, and I thought of my ex-wife Adriana. The river seemed to open me up, for I felt a sense of loss over her, as if it were only days rather than years since she left me. She had loved me more that I could love her, for I was obsessed with my work, with Mossad, as if by finding Mengele, I could rework my life again from the beginning. And indeed that’s what I had promised her. I would change. I would be ready for a family and a permanent home. Now, twenty years too late, I ached for her, for the pretty little kitchen she had made, for the way she stared at me when she thought I wasn’t looking, for the security and love she had tried to give me. And I remember how I had felt when she left. Lonely, a bit, but relieved. I had become like iron after I survived. I had survived Mengele and died. And the river reminded me. It seemed to sing with voices I only now remembered, and on this sun-scorching day, as we motored through primeval land, I wanted to close my eyes and be done with myself. It was no longer guilt, but a profound sense of loss, a loss of everyone I had loved, a loss, finally, of self.