Praying that a pair of furry archangels with incandescent swords and naked backsides would not turn me away, I set off across the savannah. I moved lightly in my chukkas, ignoring the heat. A warthog, its tail inscribing an exclamation mark above the period of its bung, swerved from my path and disappeared backward into its burrow. Wildebeest eyed me warily for a portion of my trek, but returned to cropping grass when they saw that my destination lay elsewhere.
Several times, seeking shade in shallow arroyos or small acacia groves, I paused to rest. At length, however, I entered a tongue of gallery forest extending out of the hills onto the plain, and my adventure among the denizens of Eolithic Zarakal truly began.
Chapter Five
Seville, Spain
Summer 1963
TWO DAYS AFTER ENCARNACIÓN BAPTIZED her meddlesome neighbor with a shower of urine, the old woman’s grizzled, potbellied son accosted her on the gallery outside her apartment. This man’s name was Dionisio, and he was apparently a pharmacist’s superannuated delivery boy. For a grown man with a job he spent a great deal of time around the tenement complex, and Encarnación had often heard the neighborhood children derisively calling his name when he sauntered like a bedraggled peacock through the courtyard. A wastrel, this Dionisio, with a life going the same unpromising direction as her own.
Today he grabbed her by the shoulders and spun her around to face him. His breath partook of a beery perfume, and chest hairs curled out of his shirt like so many popped packing threads. He was a man coming apart with rage; Encarnación half expected to see his shirt disintegrate and his fetid entrails come spilling out.
“Lay a curse on me!” he challenged her, tightening his grip on her shoulders. “I spit on your sorcery and your pride. How would you like to go over this rail, eh? How many would then gather to piss on your broken corpse?”
Dionisio began slapping Encarnación about. As he pummeled her, he treated her to an obscene catalogue of her faults. Finally, he delivered a stunning blow to her temple, caught her in his arms, and threw her to the gallery floor.
“But I’m not going to be imprisoned or killed for the pleasure of ending your sluttish life, you bitch. That would make you laugh from the grave, wouldn’t it? That would give you a voice with which to mock us. I know how you think.”
Squinting past the hematoma blooming beside her eye, Encarnación saw Dionisio’s chubby fingers unbuttoning his pants. Then her consciousness began filtering away. She heard a humiliating sibilance and felt an acrid warmth spreading through her skirts. Then she saw, heard, and felt nothing.
* * *
That night Encarnación Consuela Ocampo determined to do two things: to take up other lodgings and to wean her son. Long after the radios had been turned off and the run-amok children scolded into bed, she left the tenement carrying a bag of clothes and household items. The child had his usual place on her hip, and he rode wide-eyed through narrow alleys, past padlocked storefronts and bodegas. A milky sprawl of stars was visible overhead.
Their new residence was a condemned building not far from the mouth of Leoncillos Street. A row of timbers braced against the curb propped the façade of this derelict upright, and warning placards, which Encarnación could not read, stood in the building’s ground-floor fenestrae. She entered the foyer and, with an American-made bobby pin, sprang the lock on the ornate grate screening the stairs. Her son and her other burdens she then carried up three flights of steps to the empty sitting room of a desolate flat. Here she deposited all her belongings but the child.
Before dawn she made three more trips through the labyrinthine alleys to their old apartment, never once abandoning her son in either place. Much of what she toted back to the condemned building was black-market merchandise, including nearly two dozen cartons of American cigarettes, a cache of wristwatches (Timex, Bulova, etc.), and several small electrical kitchen appliances. Once or twice, exhausted, she permitted the boy to pick his way over the cobblestones beside her, and he kept up remarkably well.
* * *
A month went by. The boy began drinking from a plastic cup that Encarnación bought for him in a department store called Gallerías Preciados, not far from the Calle de las Sierpes, Seville’s famous pedestrian thoroughfare. The milk—genuine leche de vaca—she purchased from vendors who rode their battered motorized carts past her building several times a day. She also bought oranges from fruit stalls in the neighborhood and gave her child the juice. Because she was purposely denying him her nipples, she tried to compensate by introducing him to such effervescent soft drinks as Coca-Cola and Fanta, which might not be good for him but which he greedily enjoyed. This strategy worked very well. The boy soon ceased pestering her to present her breasts.
Another decision loomed for Encarnación. One day the city’s blue-collar henchmen would come to the building with a wrecking ball. What would happen after that? Her removal from the tenement complex had ruined her livelihood as a black-marketeer and prostitute, and what money she made nowadays came chiefly from doing errands for the owner of a nearby bodega and selling to his out-at-the-elbow customers the remainders of her cigarette and wristwatch inventories. If she should die, no one would appear to rescue her baby. And if she lived, she would have to find more lucrative work before the wrecking ball turned them out into the streets.
Her son was her joy and her martyrdom. Ever since their run-in with Dionisio’s mother, however, he had begun to change. First he had ceased vocalizing, almost as if aware that silence was the best means of preserving their squatters’ rights in the condemned building. Although he listened to the people jabbering on the sidewalk below their boarded balcony casements, he never tried to attract their attention with a hoot or a squeal. On trips into the streets on shopping errands, he habitually fixed his gaze on the lips of every speaking passerby or salesperson, but, Encarnación noticed, he did not attempt to emulate the sounds these people made. His fascination with the sequential sound patterns of human speech was entirely passive, and his mother began to fear that, having recognized her muteness, his infant mind had opted to achieve a similar state in himself.
The second change was in some ways even more worrisome. The child dreamed. These dreams, during which his eyelids flickered and his body thrashed, seemed to be especially vivid and captivating for one so young. Midnight horror shows. Morphean fantods. When his eyelids ceased jumping and his body lay perfectly still, the whites of his eyes showing like crescents of hard-boiled egg, Encarnación would panic and try to rouse him. Although he always came out of these swoons, they never failed to frighten her. She was afraid that her treatment of her son had mentally unbalanced him and that she had ruined his life forever. The final revenge of the vieja who had tormented her on the tenement rooftop was the accuracy of her analysis of the boy’s chances as an adult. Encarnación felt that she had doomed her son.
* * *
The highway to Santa Clara, the American housing area on the outskirts of Seville, was wide and desolate, the surrounding landscape forbidding under the summer moon. Encarnación, not without suffering and doubt, had made up her mind to brave the edge of this highway on foot.
Carrying her son, she crossed the final bridge before the jungle of minor industries flanking the highway on the south. Traffic was light but daunting, most demoralizingly so when the gigantic automobiles of American military personnel came whooshing by. Off to Encarnación’s right, the spooky amber of the CRUZ DEL CAMPO sign gleamed above the dark superstructure of the brewery. No one stopped to offer her and her child a ride, and she did not attempt to solicit one. She was prepared to walk the entire distance.
To rest her arms, however, she soon set the boy down. Delighted, he trotted out ahead of her. Even barefoot, he looked quite handsome, for Encarnación had dressed him in a striped jersey and a pair of navy-blue shorts. She hurried to catch up with him, took his hand in hers, and counted his tiny steps in order not to have to think about the implications of what she was doing. Shortly—all too soon—the American enclav
e emerged from the oppressive dark.
Santa Clara reposed in the arid Andalusian countryside like an oasis of elms, neat stucco houses, and towering shepherd’s-crook street lamps. At the housing area’s unguarded entrance, these lamps cast overlapping circles of green-white radiance, blotting out the color of the lawns and imparting an oily sheen to the asphalt streets. Insects whirred in the grass, and music issued from an open doorway somewhere along the nearer of two parallel drives. In defiance of the panic building in her, Encarnación picked up her son and headed straight into this displaced American suburb. She had no clear idea what she was going to do, but she felt confident that her instincts were right. She knew a little about Americans.
Chance intervened.
A gaggle of teenage girls approached Encarnación along the drive, gossiping and gesticulating as they came. They had on toreador pants, or tight-fitting shorts, clothes that few Spanish girls would ever wear. Despite the heat, the tallest of the five girls sported a crimson jacket with leather circlets around its shoulders and a huge felt hieroglyph on its left breast. Encarnación halted, weighing her options and hoping to calm the beating of her heart.
“Hey, look!” one of the girls exclaimed. “What’re they doing here?”
“Somebody’s maid, I’ll bet, looking for a ride home.”
“What about the kid?”
In a moment Encarnación was surrounded by these teenagers, even the shortest of whom dwarfed her. They had apparently taken her child for either her little brother or a babysitting charge, and he charmed them by reaching out toward them with grimy fingers. Their banter was jolly, Encarnación decided, and she was especially reassured by the manner of the freckle-faced Amazon in the garish letter jacket. The letter jacket itself reassured her, ugly as it was.
“Hey, he’s cute. Really cute. He looks a lot like Lucky James Bledsoe.”
“Yeah, he really does.”
Then all the girls laughed, and the one in the letter jacket asked Encarnación, in tremulous Spanish, if she could hold the little boy. “Con su permiso, por favor.” Encarnación yielded her son to this request, and he immediately clutched his new protectress’s red-gold hair and twisted it experimentally in his fingers.
“Ouch,” the Amazon cried, pulling her head back and laughing.
Whereupon another girl attempted to snatch the boy away from her. A mock battle for the right to hold him ensued, and he was swung from side to side as the girl in the letter jacket sought to retain custody.
Encarnación, deadening her instincts, began to back away. When she reached the edge of the circle of light cast by the street lamp, she turned around and ran, darting between a pair of single-story duplexes and disappearing into the shadows. Only then did the girls realize what she had done, and only then did her son break his self-imposed silence and screech in outraged bafflement. “Hey, you can’t do that!” shouted the Amazon after his fleeing mother. “Vuélvase—come back! Come back here!”
The intruder was gone, vanished into blackness.
“Looks like you’ve inherited a little brother, Pam.”
The girls huddled together in the tree-lined drive. Raucous in the heavy stillness of the evening, the lyrics of a popular song reverberated from a nearby house:
“I’m with the crowd,
I’m with the party crowd—
Cool and cocky and keen.
Music’s growlin’ hot and loud.
Yeah, we’re proud
It’s a crazy scene . . .”
“Gee, what am I supposed to do now?” Shifting the screeching child to her other arm, the girl searched her friends’ shocked faces for an answer.
* * *
On the roof of the condemned building across from Leoncillos Street, Encarnación knelt beside the iron railing and brought great gouts of air up from her lungs. These she expelled painfully through her mouth and nostrils, her head hanging forward. The sound thus made was a resonant, unsteady keening, and she kept this up until her strength was gone and dawn began to glimmer in the east.
Chapter Six
Helen
I SAW MY FIRST HOMINIDS—IF NOT HABILINES—only a few minutes after I entered a strip of forest wedging into the savannah from the eastern hills. These creatures were the kind that in a dream diary of my youth I had always indicated by the symbol of a human hand with a set of blunt teeth in the palm. Australopithecus robustus in the argot of taxonomists, although I had not learned the impressive ten-dollar Latin words until I was eleven or twelve and had given up my diary in favor of tape cassettes.
“Johnny,” Jeannette had told me, handing me the portable recording unit my father had bought for me in Guam, “keep your diary with this. Use it to record your dreams. Recording them will be easier than writing them down. When you’re older, Johnny, you’ll have your ‘spirit-traveling episodes’ on tape.”
I had taken my mother’s advice.
Now—fifteen years later, or two million years earlier—I found myself watching several representatives of A. robustus (black-hands-with-teeth) in an East African thicket, and the invaluable lessons of my boyhood whirred through my head like the garbled output of a tape on high-speed reverse.
Heavily built creatures with wide faces and massive jaws, the australopithecines had been grubbing for insects and foraging desiccated fruit. There were five altogether, four of whom, apparently hearing me approach, beat a swift retreat into denser foliage. The remaining hominid was a male, his penis a mere nub in the Brillo pad of his pubic hair, his scrotum as round and intricately puckered as a rotten grapefruit. A pronounced crest ran fore and aft over his skull, like the wedge of a Mohawk haircut.
Fascinated, I decided to reveal my presence.
Despite my six-inch height advantage—he was probably about four feet, nine inches tall—for nearly a minute the male stood his ground, aggrievedly eying me and making rumbling noises in his throat and chest. He was covering the escape of the others, who had already completely disappeared. Then, having accomplished his purpose and satisfied the demands of honor, he too turned and gimped away into the undergrowth.
My heart was hiccupping in my chest. On my first day in the Pleistocene I had encountered specimens of an extinct hominid family—not extinct, however, but alive. Alive! Indeed, I was the first human being ever to lay eyes on an upright-walking primate that was not itself a human being, for the australopithecines have been extinct throughout the entire history of Homo sapiens. The significance of our brief encounter was staggering, and for a moment after the male’s departure I was at a loss to comprehend the full meaning—the unbelievable wonderfulness—of what had already befallen me. Indeed, Blair would have agreed to stand before a firing squad for a face-to-face confrontation with a burly member of A. robustus. I stared into the undergrowth after my unsociable hominid acquaintance.
I was still not alone. From the branches of the surrounding trees a throng of bandit-faced monkeys, probably vervets, had watched my run-in with the australopithecines. Ill-tempered elves in black-face, they leapt about excitedly, scolding and anathematizing me. I had chased off their big bipedal cousins. Moreover, I was like nothing they had ever seen before.
“Quiet down, fellas,” I told them. “You’d better get used to this turn of events. A. robustus is going the way of five-cent cigars, 33-rpm records, and Cadillac convertibles.”
Startled by my voice, the vervets quieted: I got no more response from them than I had from Woody Kaprow over the transcordion. If A. robustus had not survived, I asked myself, what were my chances?
Kaprow had not permitted me to drink or eat for twelve hours before my dropback, and although I had been running all morning on willpower and adrenaline, I had just about depleted my reservoirs of both. Besides, the sun told me that it was lunchtime. Not wishing to shoot a vervet—though their manners did not really warrant clemency—I gathered leaves from several different kinds of acacias and made myself a dry, unappetizing salad. I found water trickling through the mulch cover in the g
lade and drank long and hard to dislodge the pulpy residue of leaves sticking to my teeth. The meal was not very satisfactory, but I was not yet ready either to kill an antelope or to exploit the limited resources of my survival kit.
Not far away, through the clustering foliage of my temporary hideout, I saw a baobab. The Tree Where Man Was Born. In fact, I had seen three or four baobabs while crossing the savannah, but this one was close enough to study, admire, and approach. The baobab is an exclusively African tree, with a bole like the leg of an elephant trousered in baggy sailcloth and branches like enormous, naked nerve endings. Leopards often use them for their headquarters. A Sambusai legend has it that an evil spirit pulled the first baobab out of the ground and replanted it upside-down, thus transposing its roots and its branches. Even so, an edible fruit grows high in the baobab, and if I could find a few, I would augment my lunch with some of these hard-shelled, woody delicacies, known to many Africans as “monkey bread.”
After determining that no leopard was present, I climbed the tree, using the numerous nodules and indentations about the trunk. I ate in its branches, confident that my .45 could fend off any intruder. Had the vervets in the acacia grove possessed automatic pistols, I reflected, they might have already stripped the tree of its burden of monkey bread.
When I came down from the baobab and hiked deeper into the forest strip, sweat began to pour off me. My Right Guard had long since failed, and I was beginning to tire. After shedding my backpack and slinging my epaulet of nylon rope down beside it, I slumped to the ground for a breather. A tree trunk was at my back, and although the savannah was visible through the foliage to the southwest, I had no real apprehension of the carnivores out there. I was certainly at risk, but I was also so rare a creature that, simply by being a rarity, I felt I generated a kind of armor about myself. I rested my hands on my stomach, closed my eyes, and felt myself drifting . . . drifting . . . drifting into dreamland. . . .
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