Blinding Light

by Paul Theroux

  Manfred was staring, looking greedy again, and somehow Steadman knew the man was disappointed and envious. He had inspired and facilitated the whole thing, and all he had gotten, so he kept saying, were convulsions and cramps and bouts of projectile vomiting. He wanted to know what Steadman had seen. Steadman was so groggy, so confused by the experience, he realized that he would have to take the mixture again in order to remember.

  “You were blind. I shined a light into your eyes and got nothing,” Ava said. “Why are you smiling?”

  How could he explain? Blindness was the opposite of what he had experienced, but that was how he must have seemed to her.

  “I was seeing in the dark,” he said. Late that night he woke in his hammock. He said, “You know that line in Lévi-Strauss? ‘The scent that can be smelled at the heart of a lily and is more imbued with learning than all our books’? That.”

  10

  THE OTHERS did not sleep that night. They knew nothing about waiting, they hated to listen, they almost suffocated with impatience. All night they muttered, reassuring themselves, timidly plotting, too afraid to be truly angry. The village children—also awake, but frisky—played in the clearing by moonlight, while the Americans, hungry and uncomfortable, whispered like hostages, simply wishing to leave.

  Before dawn, before the sounds of the assertive birds and the mutters of the Secoya women starting their cooking fires, when the Americans heard Nestor’s call, which was just a murmured “Okay, we go,” they were fully awake, and then noisy and eager. Hack threatened to report Nestor in Quito; Janey was tearful, still hung over from the drug; Wood and Sabra were subdued, Wood also queasy from his dose of ayahuasca. Manfred, talking loudly in his sleep, even with his hat over his face, had to be shaken awake. Steadman and Ava woke from their fitful sleep. Steadman thought, Each of us is different now.

  In the hot dark morning of dripping trees and big-eared plants and powerful smells of foliage as rank as old clothes, there was no farewell. Blank-faced Secoya adults watched the visitors hurry down the plank to the big canoe while the children turned their backs on them. The Secoya women were the most curious, staring at the American women as though studying a troop of pale excitable apes unsuited to living on this riverbank.

  Nestor handed out the blindfolds again in the boat, and Hack said, “You’re actually afraid that we’re going to reveal the existence of this place?”

  “Do I look afraid?” Nestor asked, and waited for an answer.

  The visitors put on the blindfolds and became silent, sulking like scolded children.

  Steadman sat close to Ava, perspiring in the rising heat of morning, breathing the stink of the jungle, listening to the ambiguous birdcalls that sometimes sounded like teasing human squawks. He was sorry to be leaving and still felt the intensity of the village, which was for him a physical sensation, something he could taste, a tightness in his throat, a weariness, the subdued joy of having suffered through an initiation. He had no words for it and yet he felt changed. His sadness was the intimation that he would probably never see the place again, that he would have to keep going, no turning back.

  The chugging of the outboard, the gurgle of the bow wave, the low voices of Hernán and Nestor, seemed to relax the others and embolden them to complain.

  “I think my sponge bag was pinched,” Janey said. “Couldn’t find it anywhere.”

  “My daypack’s all jumbled up,” Wood said.

  “Anyone see my knife?” Hack asked.

  Sabra said, “Do your blindfolds smell as bad as mine?”

  “I don’t give a ruddy fuck anymore,” Janey said.

  But they complained in better spirits, dismissively, knowing they were leaving. The van was waiting at Chiritza, where Nestor gathered the blindfolds. They arrived before noon at Lago Agrio and had lunch. After the simplicity of the Secoya village, the town looked especially vicious to Steadman now, for he saw—somehow knew—that the town of drug dealers and gunrunners and whorehouses had once, before the oil boom, been a sleepy village on a riverbank. They boarded the van and took the long road to Baeza, ate there in twilight, passed by Papallacta, and made the long climb to Quito in darkness. The village was not very far after all, yet it now seemed inaccessible.

  Steadman wondered if he and the German had become allies in their sharing the datura.

  “What did you see?” Steadman whispered as the van labored on the turns up the steep road.

  Manfred shrugged and grunted and remained inert, frowning, saying nothing. Steadman smiled in a friendly way but was puzzled by the German’s lack of enthusiasm, and disappointed, too, because he wanted to talk about the drug, verify details and doubts.

  The others, united in their failure and humiliation, had taken a disliking to Manfred—“Herr Mephistos,” because Manfred called attention to his sturdy shoes. Now Steadman knew the German did not share the bond of blindness—seeing with tiger’s eyes. On the journey back, Steadman replayed the experience, and his episode of blindness unspooled, returning him to the dazzle that overwhelmed the ayahuasca nausea. The drug was the route to a cave, but a lighted cave with many echoey chambers, and not darkness at all but a vision, another self, another life, another world. He had been alone there. It was like love—a consuming happiness and a careless wishing for more.

  Steadman gathered that Manfred had seen nothing or very little, though Manfred was animated by the experience. Finding the drug and persuading Steadman to try it had given him status, set him apart, made him talkative. And Ava occupied a special place for Steadman, having cooperated and watched over him.

  Already the Hacklers and the Wilmutts, timid and exposed, were detached from this trip and mentally on the next leg of their journey, the Galápagos. They had come for the ayahuasca and they had a story to take home, even if it was not the story they had planned. The Galápagos would be another story.

  As they were climbing out of Tumbaco, ascending the pass that led them to a clouded ridgeline and the thin air of Quito, there was an incident.

  Nestor had said, “Baños. Anyone need?”

  “Pit stop!” Wood called out.

  Hernán slowed the van and parked it by the side of the road, near a café, but before he opened the door a commotion began at the back of the vehicle.

  “Do me a favor!” Hack shouted, for Manfred had reached up to the luggage rack, bumping the Hacklers’ backs. Janey said, “Do you mind!”

  Manfred paid no attention to the protests. He dragged down his bulging duffel bag and unzipped it, taking out a large basket, not smooth like most of the ones at the curio stalls, but a bulky one of slender woven twigs still encased in their bark. From the wide opening of the basket he produced a human skull.

  “My frent.”

  The skull was dark and smooth, with the grain and shine of polished wood. The eye holes gaped at Ava, who stared back.

  “Your friend has sustained serious trauma to the superciliary arch and the zygomatic bone. I think someone hit him in the eye with a blunt object,” Ava said. “I hope it wasn’t you.”

  “I buy him in the village.”

  Hack said, “And I got this,” and unsheathed a crudely made knife with a woven raffia handle. He pointed the blade at Manfred and set his jaw and said, “A shank. To replace the one they stole.”

  Manfred said a German word and stuffed the skull back into the basket. Ava glanced at Steadman.

  When they went outside to the café and the toilets, Steadman took Manfred aside and said, “That’s amazing.”

  “Is old, the head. They call it tsantsa.”

  “But what I want to know,” Steadman insisted, “is where you got the money for it.”

  “Was my last money,” Manfred said, losing his fluency in his evasiveness. “Was why I require some loan from you.”

  Manfred swallowed and something stuck in his gullet and made his eyes go out of focus, as they had glazed over when he had seen Hack’s knife blade pointing at him.

  Ava said, “A loan is some
thing you pay back.”

  Manfred had a bristly face and spiky hair. He had been sleeping in the van, his mouth gaping, his hands gripping his knees. Steadman admired him for the way he slept so easily, despised him for the way he took advantage, hogging a whole seat to sleep on. Steadman, who thought of himself as thin-skinned, easily offended by slights and criticism or even hearty encouragement—“When are you going to write another book?”—was fascinated by someone who did not care how much he was disliked. More than that, Manfred seemed to be energized at being singled out by other people’s contempt.

  Ava said, “He wants his money now.”

  Manfred did not turn to her, but he laughed, liking the aggression. “Ha! I don’t have!”

  This took place at a lookout point on the road, next to the café. A dog lay by the roadside in the dirt, probably sleeping but so skinny it was flat enough to be dead. The others who had used the baño —“It’s just a hole in the ground, like Bhutan”—were now adjusting their clothes and squinting and sidling back to the van. They looked defeated. This return trip was a form of retreat, and their rumpled expedition gear made them seem greater failures, because the clothing was a symbol of their ambition and their conceit.

  “You got Mister Bones,” Steadman said.

  “Is just a memory. A curio, so to say.”

  Steadman looked up to see Nestor smiling at their quarrel. He seemed impressed by Ava’s presence, her tenacity, for she was smaller than Manfred but more aggressive than Steadman. With her as a bystander, the encounter seemed a more serious dispute.

  Nestor said, “Who is winning, America or Germany?”

  “I am American,” Manfred said, so sharply the dog in the road jackknifed and raised its head to listen.

  Nestor glared at him and said, “ Usted es una persona aprovechada.”

  Steadman said to Nestor, “What would an Ecuadorian customs inspector say if he saw a human skull in someone’s luggage?”

  “They like it,” Nestor said. “They see them sometimes. They are very happy.”

  Manfred looked puzzled, and Steadman smiled, wondering what was to come.

  “Because then they ask you for a dádiva, a fat soborno, a bribe.” Nestor was big and confident and took his time, using his cigarette for drama and delay. “And you say yes. And you are happy, too, because they are so dishonest.”

  “You sink so.”

  “Yes. Because if they are honest, they do not ask for a bribe. They arrest you for breaking the law. If you ever see an Ecuador jail you know how lucky you are that they ask you for a bribe.”

  After that, they rode in silence up the escarpment to Quito. Steadman looked out the side window, seeing nothing, not even his reflected face, but only remembering his episode of blindness, the taste of the datura, and wishing he could remember more. He had his story, he had found peace, he was bringing something back. He knew he was selfish in wanting more, for his lingering feeling of the experience was like desire: the infatuation that had once made him obsessive with Ava, needing her constantly, his saying “I believe in pheromones—you have them,” and her replying “You’re cunt-struck. I like it.”

  Manfred, he could tell, kept wanting to start a conversation, so he turned away and held Ava’s hand and imagined her blindfolded again.

  In Quito, after the others had taken their bags and gone with Nestor into their hotel lobby, Manfred said, “I have no money.”

  “So I’ll take something else.”

  The German frowned and pulled on his nose. He said, “You think I don’t know you, but I read your book. When I read it I say to myself, ‘If I can write a book like that I will be so happy.’ That is why I want your story for my book. You are a great writer—better than me. You don’t need money.”

  “This guy is just so incredibly smooth,” Ava said, and Manfred scowled at her.

  “He heard what Nestor said. When he goes through customs he’s going to have a problem with his skull. I’ll make sure.”

  Manfred smiled grimly, seeming to expect this as part of the negotiation. He wasn’t flustered, he was nodding—calculating. He said, “Okay.

  I pay you. Tomorrow.”

  “You heard him, honey.”

  They were dropped at the Hotel Colon. They bathed, they drank beer from the minibar, and then, exhausted, they lay apart on the big bed.

  Ava said, “What was it like?”

  Steadman knew what she was asking, but he had no words for it. And he did not want to say that he was thinking how the trouble with the darkness here and everywhere was that it was not dark enough. The blindness he had known in the village just yesterday was so seamlessly black it was beyond eyesight, beyond vision, and really not the shadow he thought of as darkness, but a void of such profound blackness it was also its opposite, a brilliant light that endowed him with power.

  In the morning he looked for Manfred. He was determined that Manfred would not get away without paying him back. He saw Nestor in the lobby with Hernán, and even before Steadman spoke, Nestor pointed with a knowing smirk toward the coffee shop.

  Manfred was in a corner reading the Miami Herald. Steadman sat down opposite him at the same small table.

  “Five hundred bucks,” Steadman said.

  “Is not even much money,” Manfred said.

  “But it’s mine.”

  Manfred said, “The datura. You liked it?”

  Steadman did not want to be drawn into replying; the experience had been private. He was annoyed by Manfred’s bringing it up, especially since Manfred had not responded to the drug, and had only watched while Steadman came awake, his face glowing. He had not even wanted to talk about the experience.

  “I give you some datura. You can use it, make it like tea. Better than money.”

  Steadman tried to disguise his interest in the proposition, yet he saw Manfred smile, for Manfred knew he had succeeded in his pitch. More of the drug was exactly what Steadman wanted.

  “You brought some back?”

  Manfred tugged at the cloth bag at his feet. He opened it for Steadman, who saw the skull resting in the big basket, empty eye sockets, splintered nose bone, toothy jaw.

  “All I see is a skull.”

  “You don’t see the basket?”

  The basket, so big and so obvious as to be scarcely visible, lay on its side, like a badly made and fat-bellied clothes hamper.

  “The basket is datura—best kind. Five kilos of it. They make it from the flower stems. Just a small amount boiled into tea is what you took in the village. This basket is all Methysticodendron, pure drug, but not a drug that anyone knows—not described in any official book. Is what I tell you. Is a clone of Brugmansia.” He put his fingers to the lip of it and a small pinch of bark broke free. This crumbly fragment he showed Steadman. He said, “I know you want it. And maybe someday you will tell me what you see.”

  “Sure I will. How much for the basket?”

  Manfred lowered his head and said, “Two sousand.”

  “Fifteen hundred. You already owe me five. I’ll give you a grand.” Steadman began counting the fifty-dollar bills.

  They settled on seventeen hundred, and Steadman had to restrain himself. He would have paid much more. The agreement was that Nestor would hold the money. After Steadman had tested the datura tea and agreed, the money would be handed over. Nestor complained that he was being kept in the dark—“What’s all this money for?”—but Steadman suspected that he knew exactly the nature of the transaction.

  Then, narrowing his conspiratorial eyes, and with a movement of solemn intrigue—Steadman smiled at how truthful Manfred was in his tactlessness—Manfred eased him away from the others.

  “You will like the datura, and sometime”—Manfred raised his arms to take in everything—“we will come back to Quito, and back here, yah? Just the both of us. Down the river, to the village. We will drink again. We will have fissions.” Manfred fastened his gaze on Steadman’s eyes. “You will give me your story.”

  Bac
k to Quito? Down the river? To the village? Visions? He smiled at Manfred, and Manfred had never looked hairier or more spider-like.

  “Sure,” Steadman said.

  Upstairs, Ava looked at him with the same who-are-you? expression Steadman had seen on her face in the village. Noticing the big bag in his hand that contained the basket, she knew that the matter had been settled with Manfred. She could tell that Steadman was satisfied—more than satisfied: he was so happy he hardly acknowledged her.

  She said, “Nestor wants to give a farewell party for everyone tonight. His way of thanking us.”

  Steadman did not respond. He was examining the Indian basket, scraping at it with his fingernail. Loosely woven of thick, unpeeled, shaggy twigs, some of them splitting, it looked like a crude oversized version of many of the baskets he had seen in the curio markets in Quito.

  Ava came back to her old question. “What is it? What did you see?”

  If he told her that the drug had made him blind, she would have been misled, would never have understood, for “blind” was the wrong word. “I have seen among the flowers, tigers in the skins of men.”

  “You’re just being evasive,” she said, which was true. “You’ve hardly said anything this whole trip.”

  That was true, too. No one had noticed how silent Steadman had been. That was not unusual. Talkers never noticed; only listeners tended to be aware of the back-and-forth of discussion. Steadman had passively encouraged the others to talk by not appearing to listen.

  Ava turned away, went to the window, muttered something. He knew she was not looking at anything, just gazing at empty space, the way she had six days before when he had blindfolded her and made love to her. Maybe she felt that had been a charade and was now feeling futile, probably thinking: What a waste, all this time and trouble, what have we learned?

  Apart from Manfred, who in his clumsiness appeared to be the shrewdest one of all, Steadman knew the others were dispirited, impatient to go elsewhere, needing more travel. They were talking about the creatures they would see in the Galapagos. “Big goofy turtles.” They had not spoken about the ayahuasca. They were like children who had smoked their first cigar and gotten sick and said, “Never again.” They had learned nothing.