Sound of Butterflies, The

by King, Rachael

  ‘Careful, you’ll become addicted! Especially if that’s the effect it has on you!’ He glanced at where Thomas’s hat was still clasped in front of him.

  Thomas felt himself redden. ‘Nonsense,’ he muttered.

  Ernie turned to Paulo, who had lost interest in George and his beetles. ‘Café,’ he said to him, and brought an imaginary cup to his lips, then pointed at Thomas. Then he set his hands vibrating and jittered his head around. Paulo laughed.

  ‘Ele bebeu café demais? Que engraçado!’

  ‘Quite right,’ said Ernie. ‘Look, chaps, I think we should turn back now. It’s going to be the hottest part of the day soon; I think you’ll find all the birds and insects will go into hiding, and so should we.’

  Thomas took a last longing look at the blues gliding in the treetops and turned with his companions towards home.

  Thomas knew that his time in the jungle would never be as sweet as those first few days. Every discomfort — his creaky hammock, the oppressive humidity, the strange food prepared by the black cook Antonio had hired for them, and the relentless attack of mosquitoes and gnats — was overpowered by the devastating beauty of the rainforest and all that he found within it.

  They quickly established a routine. They rose just after dawn, drank coffee, which seemed to be in abundance, then strolled around the forest collecting specimens until two or three in the afternoon.

  Thomas liked nothing better than the peacefulness of stalking a butterfly, when he could disappear into the jungle and into his thoughts for hours at a time. He never left the established paths, but he sometimes managed to go all morning without seeing another soul. Occasionally he would pass a native hut by a stream, and a tribe of children would line up to stare at him as he passed.

  Even having George near, digging into trees and squatting gingerly in the undergrowth so as not to dirty himself looking for beetles, was harmonious. Ernie would inevitably disturb their peace if he was close, ribbing them and blasting away with his gun, not caring how soiled his clothes got with blood and guts, but John also preferred to collect on his own and the men would often go all day without seeing him.

  The heat in the afternoon became oppressive, and while their neighbours slept away the worst of it, Thomas and his companions rested under the shade of the veranda’s awning and discussed their day’s finds, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, which Thomas had recently taken to. It was Ernie who had started him off, when George’s new team of boys — dark-eyed Indian children — began to carry things and to hunt for him. George paid them well, and there would be knocks on the door at any time of the day with shouts of ‘Olha que flor bonita!’ or ‘Uns lagartos pra vocês!’, which Thomas soon learned, through their daily Portuguese lessons from Antonio, was alerting them to a flower, or a handful of lizards that the boys had hunted out. One day they arrived with a boa constrictor in a cage, and Thomas reluctantly helped George lift it onto the porch.

  Ernie stood by, leaning against the doorframe, smoking.

  ‘What a magnificent taxidermy project for you, George,’ said Ernie. His pink lips quivered beneath his moustache. ‘I’ll help you.’ George made a point of ignoring him. While Ernie was expert at stuffing, it was something George was yet to master, and he didn’t like to be reminded of the fact.

  ‘Smoke?’ Ernie held the packet out to Thomas.

  ‘You know I don’t,’ said Thomas, annoyed that Ernie seemed to be teasing him for his discomfort. He had imagined the boa tightening itself around his chest and found himself short of breath. He could hear the creature’s lungs, like bellows, a deep wheezing whistle, and its great black head seemed to be looking straight at him.

  ‘Calms your nerves, old man,’ said Ernie. ‘Trust me, I’m a doctor.’ He took one out of the packet and held it out to him.

  Thomas took it and rolled it around between his fingers. He didn’t want Ernie to think his nerves needed calming, but the doctor was already striking a match and holding it out for him. He put the cigarette tentatively to his lips and let Ernie touch the end of it with his flame. He sucked at it, careful not to shock his lungs by inhaling straight away. Clouds of smoke billowed in front of his face and went up his nose. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and sneezed.

  They sat down while George negotiated a fee for the children, who gestured and shrieked in their excitement. Thomas inhaled carefully at first, but became bolder as a pleasant buzzing filled his head. There was something about Ernie — the way he sat with his legs crossed and the cigarette in his hand, his rakish hairstyle that was never quite tidy, and his easy charm — that for a moment Thomas coveted. He crossed his legs as well, and studied the way Ernie held his cigarette, not scissored between his first and second fingers, but pinched between his thumb and forefinger, using them like tweezers. He did the same and inhaled once more. The smoke drifted from the end of the cigarette into his eyes and they twitched and squinted.

  ‘Now all we need is …’ Ernie reached into his jacket pocket and drew out a silver hip flask. He toasted Thomas with it — ‘Here’s to us’ — and took a swig. He held it out to Thomas.

  The whiskey scorched his throat but seemed to make a natural companion to the smoke from the cigarette, which was burned down to a thin pinch of paper and a few curly strands of tobacco. He pulled a piece off his lips and another from the tip of his tongue.

  ‘I could grow accustomed to this,’ he said.

  ‘That’s my man,’ said Ernie, and gave him a hearty slap on the back.

  As the weeks wore on, talk turned to speculation about their benefactor. They hadn’t met him yet; nor had Antonio given them an indication of when they might. They began to imagine what sort of a man he might be. Ernie pictured him as a huge oaf who couldn’t speak English and had more money than intelligence. He puffed out his cheeks and lurched around the veranda, grunting, to make his point. George said he was sure Mr Santos was perfectly sophisticated; that he was a man who loved the rainforest and wanted to share its riches with the world. John concluded that perhaps he was a man up to no good; that he was only putting them up in order to placate the British directors of his company so they wouldn’t ask too many questions. Thomas laughed at John’s cynicism. It seemed ill fitting in his quiet personality; but then, it was delivered as dry as the bread they ate every morning for breakfast, and he was beginning to learn that he couldn’t imagine what John was thinking, no matter what his tongue was saying.

  For his own part, Thomas pictured Santos as a kind and gentle if somewhat parochial man, with a handlebar moustache, who had recently come into a large sum of money due to the explosion of the rubber market, and who was putting it to good use.

  They always dined at four o’clock, with the cook complaining in croaky Portuguese that he had to work through the hottest part of the day for their dinner. The meal invariably consisted of beef, which seemed to be the only type of meat available to them, despite the chickens and pigs Thomas saw roaming the streets among broken fenceposts. Every meal was always finished with bananas and oranges, which were in constant supply, and Thomas often went out walking with two or three pieces of fruit stuffed into his bag among his equipment. He found that a blackened banana, squashed and left on a log, so that its fermented aroma was released, was useful in attracting certain lofty butterflies that until then he had only gazed at from below.

  They spent the evenings preserving their collections and making notes, often while the last of the afternoon deluge — which struck most days — faded away, and they received regular invitations to dine with other British citizens in Belém — traders mostly, but the British Consulate also put on a formal dinner for them. They walked into town down a long avenue lined with silk cotton trees, heavy with balled red flowers like Christmas decorations. Many of the larger houses had fallen into disrepair; stucco crumbled from whitewashed walls, and red roof tiles lay shattered on the ground where they had fallen off. A kind of faded grandeur had settled over the city. Thomas drank too much wine at th
e Consul’s house and had to be put to bed by Ernie. He had a dim recollection of his half-walk back through the sandy streets of Belém, past low houses with no windows, and the jeers and laughter of the people who sat outside them. He woke up the next day with a heavy weight in his head. He was appalled to find that he had vomited on himself, made worse by the fact that Ernie lay in his hammock and complained about the smell.

  The little house was beginning to resemble a museum. Ernie’s stuffed birds crouched on top of the bookshelves; others lay neatly in rows in the boxes he had brought with him, their feet tucked under them and their bodies in a sleek diving pose. Although he preserved most of his smaller specimens in jars of formaldehyde, George had also stuffed some iguanas and other lizards, inexpertly. They had so much stuffing they appeared fatter than they should have been, and all their wrinkles were smoothed out, like old women with babies’ skin. Ernie offered to help him, but he refused, and concentrated on his beetles instead.

  Thomas awoke one morning to find that his first batch of butterflies was smothered with ants, and there was little left of the pristine insects he had caught. The others had already had trouble with rats and mice, so a complicated system of booby-traps was set up, with the aid of George, who said he had lost many a specimen in his early days.

  They hung drying cages from the rafters, and covered the ropes that held them with a bitter vegetable oil to deter the ants. This didn’t stop the mice from running down the ropes and attacking whatever was in the cage, so they hung inverted bowls halfway down the ropes. This prevented the rats and mice from having a decent running surface, and they had nowhere to go but back up the rope.

  Sometimes they pulled their tables outside and worked in companionable silence, pinning insects or painting intricate likenesses of their collections for their journals. The garden was alive with dripping flowers; hummingbirds flitted between them like fat bumblebees; dark-haired girls adorned with gold earrings collected blossoms on the side of the road and waved to them. George, still clad stiffly in his waistcoat and jacket, when the other men had long since stripped down to simple flannel shirts, turned his back to the women when they walked past, but Ernie was quick to smile and wink. Even John, on the few occasions he joined them, would call out one or two words of greeting in Portuguese. Thomas just watched, feeling the warmth of the coffee spread through his blood, and the tingling in his face from the cigarettes. On afternoons such as this he couldn’t imagine ever leaving Belém.

  One evening, they were caught in the daily downpour, and the rain came down in impenetrable sheets. They huddled under the branches of a low tree beside a great tract of cleared forest that had been burned away; what remained of the charred trunks of trees protruded like cancerous bones from the brown landscape. Great muddy pools lay like dark stains on the earth. Thomas could only stand and stare through the roar of the rain and hope that all of the life inside had escaped from the torching, but even as the rain began to ease, he saw a small, torn red butterfly floating a delicate circle inside a blackened puddle.

  Belém, November 15th, 1903

  I’ve not written in this journal for a few days. Between collecting, preserving and documenting, there seems to be little time for writing in here, even writing letters. Poor Sophie must be hungry for news of me, but other than a description of my catches, which I fear will bore her, there is little to tell. I have told her about the boa constrictor, but have left out my shameful experience with too much wine.

  It is imperative, I know, to keep this journal up, for didn’t the great explorers and collectors keep meticulous records not only of their bounty, but of their personal experiences on the Amazon? Perhaps one day my experiences will be published. Edited, of course. Perhaps I will be considered to be a pioneer of natural history, too. But no. I must not say perhaps. I will be a great explorer. I will make my name on this journey or be doomed to an insignificant life, my only excitement a little roast beef on Sunday. I am not stupid. I am aware of my shortcomings in the field of scientific knowledge. But I will rise above them as soon as I bring home a magnificent Papilio sophia.

  We have been here now nearly four weeks. I could easily stay here for a year — there are about 700 different species of butterfly around Belém, compared with only 66 in the whole of England! I estimate that I have caught and documented only half of these so far. I have had better luck with catching some of the high fliers — one of the boys that hangs around and helps us showed me how a bright blue rag is most useful in attracting the male Morpho rhetenor (but not the female, strangely). I leave it draped over a plant and it comes down to investigate, whereby I step out from my hiding place and voila! It is mine. My hands were shaking so much the first time that I missed it, so excited was I at seeing it up close.

  I have also fashioned a long-handled net, but this is terribly awkward to carry around with me. It is 20 feet long, and I can’t walk through the forest without banging into things and inevitably bruising myself. When I do use it, it is cumbersome to wave about, too, although I have managed to catch one or two slow-moving female rhetenors with it. How dull they are compared with their mates! No iridescent blue for them, but a turgid brown. On their own, they may be considered attractive enough, but with a mate so beautiful, they cannot help but feel like the dowdy wife of a handsome dandy, I’m sure.

  When I first arrived, I thought that I should never be able to catch one of these lofty species. Now that I have, I see that anything is within my grasp. Anything!

  John is anxious to move on. Last night he put into words what we all knew in our hearts — Belém is not the Amazon rainforest. We are too close to civilisation. My walks through the forest are often interrupted with the cloying presence of man, whether in the sounds of shouting from some neighbours’ dispute, or the devastating rape of the beautiful forest to make way for the progress of the city. While John has found more than 20 specimens of palms alone, all with distinct native names, he often stands very still and looks to the north-west, as if listening for the depths of the forest calling his name. While I am not sure that I will necessarily find such an abundance of lepidoptera upriver, I do know that the only sightings of my giant butterfly have been near Manaus, not down this far. Therefore, as much as I am stimulated here, I am impatient to move on also.

  Ernie, too, complains that the most exotic birds do not exist so close to a city, although he has learned where to find them. When we first arrived he seemed to catch only the smaller and more common birds. Now he brings back exotic parrots and toucans and macaws. He is establishing a fine collection.

  We have prepared our first consignment to send to Mr Ridewell — at last count we had 323 species of lepidoptera (butterflies mostly — I confess that moths hold little interest for me and George collected most of them), 400-odd beetles, 32 different species of bird, some lizards and snakes, and nine chests of plants, with countless dried seeds. Ernie plans to take live specimens back at the end of the trip. He wants to be able to accompany them, and he will dispose of them at various zoos with which he is in regular contact.

  Nobody has taken to collecting the numerous great spiders that are about the place. There is one — a ghastly hairy thing it is — called a mygale, of which there are many different species. One of them spins a thick web between two trees and catches small birds in it. I have never seen such a thing as a finch, quite dead, covered with some kind of venom, while another struggles to free itself. One wants to help, but we know that we can’t interfere with nature in this way; besides, who knows what state it would have been in had I freed it? I can’t help but feel ill when I see these spiders, and whenever I do it takes me longer than usual to get to sleep at night. I have taken to greasing my hammock strings with the same vegetable oil we use to deter the ants. I haven’t spoken of this (rather irrational, I know) fear, but I suspect the others feel the same, otherwise why have none of them caught any?

  When Antonio arrived to give us Portuguese lessons this afternoon, we talked to him about our des
ire to move on. He has agreed that it is time, and that we are ready to meet our benefactor. We are to leave for Santarém next week, where we will at last meet our Mr Santos, who lives in Manaus, and then we will progress into little-charted depths. We would have met Mr Santos earlier, said Antonio, but he has been delayed upriver by some troublesome native rubber workers.

  I sense that it is only a matter of time before my beautiful butterfly comes to me. I will hold it in my hands more gently than I would a lover. It will be my key to greatness; more importantly, it will belong to me.

  Three

  Richmond, May 1904

  By the slant of the sun, Agatha judges that it is nearly eleven. She clutches her elbow with a gloved hand as she inhales the last of her cigarette, then tosses it into the scrubby part of the flower bed where it will never be found. Her other glove is in her pocket; she takes it out and bangs it on her dress to rid it of any tobacco smells, then returns it to her right hand.

  She promised Sophie she would visit today, but the thought of running into Thomas again repels her. That first time she saw him, after his long absence, he seemed to slither along the walls. His newly rough features held a chilling vacancy. She wanted to steal Sophie away from the source of her pain.

  No — she is being cruel. Her grandmother would have said that Thomas had been taken by spirits. Agatha has heard of it happening before — people moving around as if they live on this earth, while their ears and hearts are focused on another realm. And he did have about him the air of one who is not fully occupying the world. He stared off into the corner of the room, as if watching something there. But when she forgot herself for a moment and made a light joke, his eyes found hers and quickly looked away; he heard her, all right, but something prevented him from reacting to the world around him. Poor Sophie looked at that point as if she might cry.