Madness is Better than Defeat

by Ned Beauman

  Leland Trimble prided himself on never being surprised by anything. And indeed, because he had already known about ‘the other Americans’, he was better prepared than his companions to see forty, maybe fifty whites standing around an encampment at the foot of the temple, as an uncountable number of skinny Pozkito men in loincloths labored around them like ants plundering a wedding cake, some rolling logs and some pulling ropes and some chiseling stones, to the accompaniment of a pianist, bassist, clarinetist and drummer improvising on a gypsy air. But there was one detail of this tableau which, by contrast, would not have meant much to any of his companions but which absolutely staggered Trimble. And this was that the guy supervising all this work was Frank Parker, the nightclub singer, who must have followed him all the way to Spanish Honduras to get revenge for that item in the gossip column. Trimble’s instinct was to turn and run before Parker noticed him. And yet when Whelt rushed up the slope, Trimble couldn’t stop himself from following. Because whatever happened here was going to be important later.

  Whelt was shouting and waving his arms. ‘Stop this!’ He raised the megaphone. ‘Stop this right now!’ So immediately Trimble knew that Whelt was going to lose. He sounded like a pacifist or a vegetarian. The ‘other Americans’, many of whom had been playing cards or sunbathing, were looking around in bemusement as more and more of the seventy-nine stumbled out of the jungle like a half-hearted ambush. And the Pozkitos weren’t paying any attention at all.

  Sometimes, back in the city, when two people out walking their dogs were about to pass in the street, you’d see the dogs start yowling the instant they caught sight of each other – no negotiations, just straight to war, running on the spot, claws practically sparking on the sidewalk, as if they didn’t know they were on leashes and all they had ever wanted in the world was to drag themselves a quarter of an inch closer to the other dog’s jugular vein – sometimes just a preposterous little meringue of a dog, a poodle or a Pekingese or a Pomeranian like Scofield, up against a Doberman, and yet neither bothered to acknowledge the imbalance – this hatred so total that you’d think one dog must have murdered the other dog’s father or raped his wife or forced his department store into bankruptcy, when in fact they’d probably never seen each other before in their lives, and the only explanation was that each had scented in the other a terrible incommensurability at the deepest levels of dog music, dog mathematics. That was what happened when Whelt and his counterpart looked each other in the eye for the first time. They didn’t quite start to growl. But Trimble could feel their hatred crackling across the air between them, a hatred that neither of them would have been able to explain, a hatred, like a love, that no one outside it would ever really comprehend, but that was instantaneous and undeniable and overwhelming.

  ‘Who are you and who are all these people?’ said Whelt.

  ‘My name is Elias Coehorn Jr. and these are my employees. You’d better have a good answer in return.’

  So it wasn’t Frank Parker after all. Trimble now had to concede that I’d had it right in the meeting at the Mirror: the guy he’d seen getting dragged away from the octopus-wrestling match was in fact the Coehorn boy. But as nutty as Parker’s presence here would have been, Coehorn’s didn’t make a lot of sense either.

  ‘My name is Jervis Whelt. I am the director of the Kingdom Pictures motion picture Hearts in Darkness. This is my cast and crew. We are here to shoot on location at this Mayan temple.’ Whelt sounded as if he thought he would be fine so long as he could keep on stating factual propositions.

  ‘I’m sorry but as you can see you’re a little late. We’re taking it home with us. You ought to have got here last week.’

  ‘We didn’t see any other boats.’

  ‘You obviously weren’t looking very hard. We moored downriver and took a shortcut overland.’

  By now Rusk had caught up. Whelt turned to him. ‘Get our interpreter.’

  That was when Coehorn saw Trimble. ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’

  The interpreter wasn’t far behind. Rusk brought over the nearest Pozkito laborer, a glum-looking guy with an underbite. ‘Ask if he knows anything about the five hundred natives that Poyais O’Donnell hired to work for us,’ said Whelt.

  After conferring with the laborer, the interpreter said, ‘He says he’s one of them.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘This is it. They’re all here.’

  ‘These are the same natives we hired?’ said Whelt.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That can’t be right.’

  ‘It certainly can’t,’ said Coehorn. ‘The Irish go-between hired these natives for us. These are our natives, not yours.’

  Overhead there flew a macau with prismatic feathers, like an advance scout for a rainbow. ‘Ask him who he thinks he’s working for,’ said Whelt.

  More conferral. ‘Both.’

  ‘Both?’

  ‘He says first they’re working for this man’ – Coehorn – ‘then they’re going to work for you’ – Whelt.

  ‘But we need the temple here so we can shoot our motion picture,’ said Whelt. ‘How does he think they’re going to work on our motion picture if we can’t shoot it because they’ve already taken the temple away?’

  More conferral. This time the translator shrugged. ‘I guess either he didn’t understand the question or I didn’t translate it right.’

  ‘Did you pay Mr O’Donnell his commission in advance?’ said Rusk.

  ‘I believe so,’ said Coehorn.

  ‘Did you ever actually meet him in person?’

  ‘He was away—’

  ‘Away on urgent business. Right. That son of a bitch.’

  ‘The natives will have to put the temple back together,’ said Whelt.

  ‘We only have two weeks of shooting scheduled here,’ added Rusk. ‘Once we’re through, you can do whatever the heck you like with it.’

  ‘Do you really expect us to sit around buffing our fingernails for two weeks?’ said Coehorn. ‘I’m not staying here one day longer than I have to.’

  By now Trimble was feeling almost disappointed that Frank Parker hadn’t come all the way to Spanish Honduras to take revenge on him. Not much in life was more important than getting even, and he always respected a guy who didn’t so much take a tooth for a tooth as he took a whole smile.

  Rusk said to Coehorn, ‘If you don’t want to wait for us to finish you could go away and come back again.’

  Coehorn smirked, and turned to the interpreter. ‘Tell our Pozkito friend he can go back to work.’

  ‘He’s our interpreter!’ said Whelt. ‘You can’t use our interpreter! No, tell him they won’t get any money from us if they carry on working for these other people.’

  ‘Tell him the same thing from me,’ said Coehorn.

  ‘Tell him we’ll double their wage.’

  ‘Emphatic ditto.’

  Whelt pulled Rusk a short distance away, and Trimble followed. For a moment Whelt just stared into space, as if the technicians inside him were performing some sort of emergency recalibration. Then he said quietly, ‘How much cash do we have?’

  ‘Not much. We weren’t expecting to need any. Just a little emergency fund in case anything went badly wrong in Panama or La Ceiba. And a little silver and gold for the same reason.’

  ‘Send someone back to the ship to fetch it all. Quickly.’

  ‘The natives may not know what to do with a hundred-dollar bill. I think O’Donnell was going to pay them in, you know, fish-hooks and beads.’

  ‘Just get it all. Jewelry too. Watches. Strip the cabins.’

  ‘Folks are not going to be very happy about that.’

  ‘We can buy it all back once we get word to Mr Spindler to send more money. And bring liquor, salt, mirrors, flashlights … Anything the natives might value. We won’t put it all on the negotiating table right away, but we need it in reserve.’

  ‘These other guys may have the same idea.’

  ‘Then we’ll
just have to outmatch them. There’s no other way.’ Whelt looked at Trimble. ‘Why do you keep following us around?’

  But at that moment Aldobrand arrived to reconstitute the troika. ‘What the deuce is going on? Why are they striking our set?’

  While Rusk explained the state of affairs, Trimble saw an anole running across the ground so he stamped on it – a Brooklyn cockroach instinct.

  ‘Well, whether or not we can persuade the Indians to put it back together again,’ said Aldobrand, ‘what’s important at this juncture is that at the very least they don’t take any more of it apart. Wouldn’t you agree?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Whelt. But the Pozkitos still hadn’t stopped toiling.

  ‘Then it’s time to chain ourselves to the gates.’

  ‘Pardon me?’ said Rusk.

  ‘Like the suffragettes.’ Once again, Aldobrand grabbed the megaphone. ‘Listen, everyone: last one up the steps is a saddle-goose!’

  The cast and crew of Hearts in Darkness just frowned back at Aldobrand, possibly struggling with his picturesque vocabulary. But then he made his dash, and they understood. There was a stampede. Soon, the entire party was spread up the stone steps of the surviving staircase like the audience at a Greek auditorium, with Aldobrand hiking all the way up to the upper terrace, the edge of which was now a precipice overlooking the absence of the staircase on the other side. Trimble himself, however, took the bottom step, as if he’d merely sat down for a cigarette on the stoop of a brownstone, feeling that it was better not to commit himself. Perched on the next step up was a dowdy girl he didn’t recognise.

  ‘Hey, I don’t think I’ve seen you before,’ he said.

  She swallowed. ‘No, well … haven’t you? I suppose I’m not … that is, I haven’t been around much. Um.’ Like Aldobrand she had a posh British accent, and for some reason her voice quavered as if he’d just accused her of drowning a baby.

  Trimble said flirtatiously, ‘You sound like you’re guilty about something.’ The girl blushed and avoided his gaze. But not in the alluring way girls did that sometimes. He took out a handkerchief to blot his forehead. Aldobrand was assuming that the army of Pozkito men weren’t so loyal to Coehorn’s enterprise that they’d just drag everybody back down by the hair. From what he’d seen in those wretched little settlements on the banks of the Patúca, the Pozkitos didn’t deserve their reputation as the local Peace Society. They were more than capable of violence. He could picture them running Tommy Gagliano off Broadway.

  But the next morning they were all gone.

  *

  The girl Trimble met at the foot of the temple was Joan Burlingame, virgin, Mayanist, and now defector. Last Easter a librarian friend at Cambridge had taken her to see the archive of Charles Darwin’s papers that was in the process of being recatalogued at the University Library, and among them Burlingame had found particularly memorable an 1831 letter in which Darwin had transcribed some of his father’s objections to the young man accepting a place on the Beagle as a supernumerary naturalist: for instance, ‘that they must have offered to many others before me the place of naturalist; and from its not being accepted there must be some serious objection to the vessel or expedition; and that my accommodations would be most uncomfortable; and that it would be a useless undertaking.’ She thought of this letter when she was trying to promote the Coehorn expedition to her mother and father, who made the same sort of reply that Robert Darwin once had: that Joan couldn’t possibly be anyone’s first choice for a scheme like this, and the fact that they’d offered it to her proved there must be something wrong with it, and that in any event she would be certain to hate every minute, since she didn’t even like going to the seaside.

  Despite agreeing with most of that, Burlingame did after a long battle manage to persuade her parents. The principal of Newnham College and the head of the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, meanwhile, needed only polite letters from the Eastern Aggregate Company soliciting the temporary release of their student for an endeavor of great scholarly importance and educational value. These were sent by the same efficient secretary who arranged for Burlingame a passage to New York and a trunk full of brand new field equipment. However, each time she worked up the courage to ask if she could speak to Mr Coehorn again, she was told he wasn’t available, and he didn’t come to see her during the two days she spent in a Manhattan hotel, which she was too nervous ever to leave since there was no one to tell her where to go. So it wasn’t until her first afternoon on the chartered steamship to La Ceiba that she found out the actual purpose of this expedition. To disassemble a Mayan temple.

  Burlingame kept reminding herself that if it were not permissible to bring relics home for safe keeping, the British Museum would be nothing but empty halls. Just like the nymphs of Notcote, the tribesmen here were demeaning their ancestral pile, and whatever Lord Byron might have said about ‘Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed by British hands … And snatch’d, thy shrinking gods, to northern climes’, etc., he had never met a Pozkito. So far, Burlingame’s observations did not at all match what she knew about the tribe from Dr Bridewall. She had seen no evidence of sensuality, jubilation, communism, but rather violence, rigidity, greed. But either way one’s conclusions about the responsibilities of the conscientious white man must be the same.

  When she was five years old her father had bought her a ticket for a church raffle and during the drawing of the numbers she had won a bottle of champagne. Everyone had looked at her and laughed, which had made her cry, and then the prize with its pretty gold foil had been taken away, which had made her cry even more. But just as it was now obvious to her that a child could not be permitted to keep a bottle of champagne, it should be obvious to the Pozkitos that they could not be permitted to administer the estate of their more advanced ancestors. Or at least that was what she forced herself to believe, until she was actually standing in the clearing, watching the first few blocks being hauled down from the ruin. She realised that this temple was the sublimest thing she had ever seen and she had set eyes on it for the first time at the very last moment of its inviolacy, the very last moment before a pillage in which she was herself complicit, so that the temple in all its mountainous weight now seemed to her paradoxically ephemeral, a dream that shattered in your mind as you tried to recall it, a deep-sea fish that prolapsed to death as soon as it was brought up into the light.

  Even then, Burlingame didn’t make a fuss. She just scribbled what notes she could and assisted with the project of diagramming the temple so it could be reinstalled on the North Shore of Long Island according to the serial numbers being painted on each stone. If it had to be taken apart, she thought, it might as well be put back together accurately. She still couldn’t shake off the feeling that this was not why she had come here; that this was not why she had worked so hard for the chance to study at Cambridge with Dr Bridewall; that this was not, all in all, why she was on this earth. But she was also aware that nothing could be more futile than making a protest with Coehorn, who had come here with no other objective but to take the temple away, and who still, as far as she could tell, had no idea who she was. Even when the rival party from Los Angeles made their baffling arrival at the temple, and it became clear that they wanted it to be put back together, which was what she longed for too, Burlingame didn’t feel that was any use to her, since her parents had brought her up to remember her loyalties.

  But then came the moment when the actor called for action, and she realised the newcomers were about to put the surviving ruins under guard. She looked up at the newly-exposed inner face of the half-temple, which wasn’t mossy and flat like the orthogonal sides but rather raw and irregular, umbrous, good for birds’ nests, resembling something between a basalt cliff and a tenement house whose side wall has been bared by the demolition of its neighbor. Mistaking her for a comrade, someone slapped her on the shoulder and said, ‘Come on!’ Once again she felt the weight of the bottle of champagne in her little arms, and this time sh
e hugged it tightly to herself and ran.

  *

  The Pozkitos were nowhere to be found.

  Five hundred men missing from the site, and yet from what Trimble overheard that day, not a single American from either faction could actually recall seeing any of them leave. For even the most observant, there had been no more than a half-conscious impression of dwindling, like the constellations fading in the hour before dawn.

  And the Pozkitos had taken their loot with them.

  For most of the previous evening, the leaders of both expeditions had bargained (through their interpreters) with representatives of the Pozkitos, offering more and more and more in exchange for either the disassembly or the reassembly of the temple. First it was all to be paid on completion, then half on completion and half in advance, then, desperately, all in advance, that same night. When the auction ended after several hours, both bidders were so mentally exhausted that they fell asleep in their mosquito-net bivouacs a little fuzzy on the latest developments but nonetheless almost a hundred per cent certain that they’d won. What neither of them could believe was that they’d been reduced to begging illiterate tribesmen for the privilege of enormously overpaying them for manual work. Maybe that was why it didn’t occur to them to hold anything back. They’d come from a country where people would hitchhike a thousand miles just to pick beets. Who could imagine these natives having the guile or the initiative to skip out on such a cushy job?