Come Sunday

by Bradford Morrow

  “What does this have to do with me?”

  “Hey Lupi?”

  “What.”

  “Hold your horses—Sardavaal I’m trying to say, he showed up with a gentleman named Miguel Sardavaal. I was supposed to meet Sardavaal, but the Nicaraguan came along too—and everything sort of came together in my head. Sardavaal was an anthropologist, he’d been working for years in this region, here in Honduras, all over from the Sierras de Nombre de Dios to the Montes de Colón.”

  “These, in other words?”

  “Correct, right,” like sharp bites: Krieger did not like to be interrupted. “I gather he mostly was focusing on links, evidences of links, between the very earliest colonists, the conquerors, and the indigenous populace, the natives. He was always needing more money to go on with this work and that’s where I came in, in the sense that I worked for a petroleum company was into fruit, hardwood export, etcetera, the standard sort of industries you do down here, that is apart from the drug thing which was big from day one, anyway I worked mostly as a consultant, investment adviser that sort of trip more money than they knew what to do with. Those were the days of gas lines, shortages … though of course the shortages were as much manufactured by slowdowns as by supply problems, everybody’s clear on that and the bastards’re going to pay for their prescience. So, well, we were constantly on the lookout for proper places to put funds, that was my job, funding placement, disposition of excess. Consulting, the second-greatest racket on earth—” Lupi wanted to ask the obvious question, but let it go. “Whenever possible the criteria involved were two. A: promote public respect. You know, counter the hostility. Even promote gratitude of a sort by giving the appearance that the money was going into the arts or the social sciences, in any event something that had the aura of social good about it. Second: to make inroads, establish favors owed in areas of the world that might become important to the corporation at some moment in the future, in other words buy friendships in every potentially strategic place right down the line. All pretty obvious stuff. But Sardavaal, his work was the perfect fit.”

  “Perfect how?”

  “He met both criteria as if they were tailored exclusively for him. Or if not, at least vice versa. Honduras was one of the very poorest countries on earth, sixth-poorest I think, in this hemisphere second only to Haiti mortality rate not to be believed, life expectancy straight out of the thirteenth century, seven of ten children dead before they’re six, survivors mostly all illiterate of all the Latin American countries Honduras lagged farthest behind in every category you can think of. Constitution after constitution drafted, promulgated and ignored. Oligarchies, inept bastards one after the other, straight through the nineteenth century on into the twentieth. And look at how well United Fruit had done, Standard Fruit, Chase Manhattan, you telling me? whole bunch of them eighty percent of the whole fucking economy was three U.S. corps—three—the military like their own sort of personal gendarmes, whole government bought off for nickels and dimes, and they’re still in here to the tune of sixty percent control of the economy. Other twenty percent slack’s been picked up by the nips—”

  “What’s nips?”

  “Nips nips. Japs, slants. You know, the squirts, yellow bastards with their eyes like theees? Mitsubishi, on and on, low wages and no division of profits worth spitting at. No, no, we wanted Sardavaal, his reputation so clean you could eat off it. Here was a humanitarian, introduced hygiene to some of these more remote villages, scientific farming ideas, that sort of thing. I remember one thing he wanted was used tires—”

  “Tires.”

  “Tires, yeah, he tried to get these people to make sandals with tire soles, keep them from walking around barefoot in their own shit, and the shit crawling with tapeworm, ringworm, hookworms. No, god, this guy we had to have, an absolute fount of benevolence and carrying the corporation’s flag down here. We knew even then, two decades tops before the popular revolt. I mean, you can only feed people a steady diet of malaria pills and jet fighters so long before their digestive systems start to go and the mood turns sour. So this was backup, and the corporations were into the really intelligent strategizing down in here long before the government types even gave it three thoughts. Sardavaal. It was prophetic, really. Let him play till his heart’s content with linking images painted on old clay pots and fabrics, whatever, artículos de piedra y cerámica, bunch of junk carved in lava etcetera. A small investment and of course the corporation had every logical right to fly somebody in from time to time, visit, see how the old money’s being spent, glad-hand around at the Palacio de los Ministerios, the Casa Presidencial, in Teguz. Every strategist worth his salt, every damn one of them knew thirty-forty years ago this was as fine an exhibit of a piece of real estate vulnerable to … you know what, as there was on earth. Rich and completely untapped, gold, silver, copper, coffee, cotton, sugar, tobacco, not to mention as I say primo bit of military-industrial strategic acreage, I mean that this would be one of the scenes of the major confrontation in the latter quarter of the century, it was something you could bank on, in fact it’s already begun.”

  “How do you get away with? that is,” seemed somewhat sheepish, for Krieger was on a roll, his voice tinged with the kind of hysteria that comes of many years of concentrated thought on a single topic. “How is it, speaking of the fighting and how it’s started, I can attest to that, we heard gunfire back there. How is it you people are able to move about so freely?”

  “Sardavaal, I’m trying to explain. These investments do pay off. Etcetera, in any case, to continue, the Spaniards had it right in the first place, came here looking for gold, fame, the fountain of youth, honor, the great passage to the Orient, and more or less they found what they were after. All perfectly but perfectly reasonable goals to an expansionist civilization.”

  “The fountain of youth they never found, of course.” Lupi rubbed the back of his neck; his shoulders ached. He glanced up ahead and saw they were nearing the top. The trees thinned out and gave way to green scrub and rough stone.

  “The fountain of youth, no. Ponce de León, Cabeza de Vaca?” And with this Krieger gave a clipped laugh. “That, no, and to think of the lives lost, the fortunes squandered trying to find it. But this all pertains, you see.”

  “How pertains? you mean the Berkeley man—or the—”

  “Pertains to the project, fountain of youth, longevity etcetera. You know that Walt Disney—you know Disney, no? Pluto, Minnie Mouse, Mickey, all that crap?—you know that Disney had himself frozen?”

  Lupi closed his eyes.

  “Cryogenics, sure, sink them in units three hundred and X degrees below zero suspended in canisters until the cure for whatever they’ve got, cancer, whatever, is found, then you thaw them—but of course the invoice is tendered and check cleared in advance, otherwise? brick ovens or cold ground, take your choice. Clever concept from the marketing angle since they don’t slap you on ice until just after you croak, so what value does the money have at that point? High profit yield, theoretically, think of the interest accruals waiting for you when they pop you in the toaster in two thousand eighty-four, however cryogenics’ scientific merit about the equal of like treating measles with nannyplum tea, you ever heard of nannyplum tea?”

  “No.”

  “Sure, my grandma loved to steep you up a nice pot of nannyplum for measles, goatshit tea. It had kind of a nice taste to it, mellow, a tad salty’s all.”

  “It worked?” Lupi asked, feeling there wasn’t room for the question, but finding that he’d already asked, composed a kind of stern look on his face, one of interest, as if the answer mattered.

  “Worked, hell no, obviously not, that’s my point. No, Jesus, probably vented a little of her aggressiveness, maybe relieved some perverse psychological need way down deep in the works, but it cleared your sinuses right the hell out, that I can tell you. No, what I’m talking about is money spent on any project you want to name whose point is to keep blessed youth going. We worship youth, have si
nce the sixteenth century, since long before, you sip some secret potion your wrinkles disappear, the glaucoma dries up, the hair on your balls falls off, you’re a mewling adolescent again and it’s what everybody seems to want. Some more than others. Every culture has its holy grail, or Achilles’ heel if you want to look at it from another angle, mix a metaphor, but anyway this grail for the Romans, like it was empire for them, to hold complete dominion. The Greeks were softies for perfection, in art, government, philosophy, boys’ rumps, whatever you like. Take us Americans, for us it’s the overwhelming desire to be loved, and if you can’t see your way clear to loving us, why we’ll have to bludgeon a modicum of respect out of you, you got a nation made up of runaways, malcontents, religious nerds, troublemakers who left behind their own cultures to join this single strange hybrid. So here your holy grail is a mix of the others, eternal youth, power, total wealth, but a nation too young to concern itself with perfection anyway, were it even in search of such a thing which, of course, it’s not. And that’s where Sardavaal and in his own way the noisy Jonathan Berkeley put me onto an idea. I guess some of my annoyance with the guy comes from, well look, I don’t know what kind of background you have but you strike me as blue-collarish, and I sat there looking at this kid, really smart, talking telepathy and clairvoyance, growing his hair out so he could go down and live with a tribe of Lacandones, drive around in dugout canoes, blow weed in the milpas or something, and here I was working my ass off, mailed half my pay back to my aunt who lived over the kennel, dogs barking day and night begging to be papped and played with—”

  “Mr. Krieger?”

  “Huh?”—Krieger seemed distracted for a moment, with the memory.

  “You were about to say, what were you going to say about this Sardavaal.”

  “Come again?”

  “Sardavaal, you were saying—”

  “Very pleasant individual, honest in the extreme.”

  “What would a diplomat from Nicaragua want with Sardavaal,” asked Lupi, unsuccessfully—in part because of fatigue—trying to conjure an image of the fat man, years younger, dressed conservatively perhaps in the unoffending pinstriped suit of a cultural attaché, one son of a wealthy Third World family.

  “Simple, officially, publicly he wanted Sardavaal to extend his research from El Paraiso and Olancho over into the northern provinces of Nicaragua. Of course that was back when you could drive your VW camper down the Pan American highway right down to the tip of South America, ferryboat ride Panama to Colombia, smoking reefer and whoring all the way, and nobody was going to bother shooting your face off just because they felt like appropriating a new set of tires for their jeep, or needed to suck some gasoline off your tank. But anyway, what I was saying about Sardavaal. Prestige, influx of foreign grant money, jobs, the same as what was happening through him in Honduras they wanted to bring over the border into Nica. Granted, on a cultural level quote unquote—not a high priority per se. But as I told you, these things develop. Picture your ordinary provincial deputy, your general, your local governor muckymuck being invited with the wife in tow over to toy at nine holes of peewee golf at the private residence of some U. Fruit exec. Sardavaal was just one of any number of foreigners perceived to be a potential link to one of the bigger concerns coming down, setting up. Corporations don’t like revolutions knocking their foreign plants down. Lobby Congress for military aid, stabilize the area, and so forth, all of it elementary. You have to make friends with the potentially powerful, not just those already established. That was what his courting of Sardavaal was about, or so I gathered. Privately, by extension of what I just said, my colleague comes from a landed family, good wealthy old family, and naturally Sardavaal’d be of use to them. Family owned mountain after mountain and the valleys between, all coffee plantations and when you own in Nicaragua mountains of coffee plantations you own, at least in part, in turn, the government, and they did. Very chummy with the American ambassador in Managua before what’s his name Pezzullo but I mean back in Somoza’s day. Pezzullo, Negroponte, come to think of it you wops have been involved in here in your own way haven’t you but where was I, so anyway it was the ambassador who was the real head of state there. So these people were doing fine.”

  “What does all this have to do with—”

  “You?”

  “Me—the project—”

  Krieger brushed his hand at the space between them. “I’m getting there, I’m getting there. So as I’m saying, the whole scene’s changed since Somoza was put to pasture. Changed and stayed the same. There’s always been the fighting, that’s a constant. There’ve been murders, land reclamations, seizures of property, liberations, all untidy business especially if you happened to be on the wrong side of the fence. But, as I was saying, most of the family, his family, fled the country I believe, up into Honduras, Guatemala, down to Costa Rica, or else went underground. But it’s beside the point, you’re right. What Sardavaal talked about that day in New York, and I think you have a clear idea about what a trustworthy, even simple almost incredibly simple man we were sitting there with, drinking our iced teas, what Sardavaal talked about was this rumor, apparently persistent rumor that circulated among the Indians up here where he was conducting his studies, excavations, etcetera, that they kept telling him once they had grasped the nature of his project, telling him he must try to visit this man, a Spaniard, one they referred to as El Viejo, as the christ, El Christo, and as Baal or some such. Miracles were attributed to him. He was the object of adulation, worship, and considerable terror. Sardavaal told us how surprised he had been at the consistency of these rumors, also at the—let’s face it—undeniably fantastic nature of some of their claims about him. How is a man like Sardavaal supposed to react when he is told, over and over, that this Viejo guy has, that he is generations old, generations surely the oldest living—well one can speculate, clearly one can’t afford not to be doubtful, and a scholar like Sardavaal naturally—”

  “Allá está,” Bautista broke in on Krieger.

  Lupi was seized by two strong hands laid on his shoulders and shoved to the ground. Bautista was already in a crouch just above them. Krieger’s face was inches from Lupi’s and their knees jostled. They had been following Bautista for a hundred yards along the gently snaking mountain ridge just below its jagged summit, paying no attention to anything around them. Now they found themselves in a deep granite blind, a natural formation of boulders whose carbon-blackened walls, protected from the wind and rain and difficult of access, had for centuries been used as a refuge if not a dwelling.

  What Bautista’d heard, Krieger and Lupi heard now, too—girls’ voices raised in song. The melody carried from some distance, but was distinct. No more than three notes, like a religious litany, rather monotonous in its harmony. Then it ceased, as if on cue, and the echo of the last note held before drifting away.

  Viewed in the lenses of binoculars the world is narrowed, sharpened. It is owned by the eye. There is a proprietary quality over what is seen. This arises because in essence it is a solitary act of victimization. The object of study is usually unaware and without recourse. Outside the field of vision lay mere inconsequentials, black walls, a barrenness. Depth is not canceled altogether, but it is metamorphosed and must be imagined through the help of memory. The ocean, for example, the ocean that once splashed over these mountains—the ocean when seen through binoculars seems to stand up, a wall across which the waves melt. The sky seen by them is converted into sleep. The planet, its plants and flowers, is even more abundantly detailed through the glass than when seen by the naked eye. It is all made lavish, particularized, and suspect in its misshapen high-resolve. As a result it can become cinematic, even Active.

  Here is a man whose eyes, cerulean blue faded to the whiteness of coconut, propose something unfeasible, propose to have been witness to more than the experiences of a single lifetime, thousands of nights sunk in sleepless passions, unredeemable ceremony of sunset and moonrise and of seasons turning so often th
ey have become as blurred as two colors—say, blue and red—painted on either half of a top spinning so fast that red and blue relinquish their redness and blueness in order to form a third color, a color like a violet bruise: a color that does not in fact exist.

  He is harvesting bananas, this man. Two girls, possibly his daughters, possibly wives—Krieger is unsure—assist him. Their flat adolescent breasts are exposed; each wears a wraparound bark-cloth skirt, but is naked from the waist up. Their strong, wide backs, their torsos the shade of oiled mahogany—a tree which grows in wild abundance around the plantation—shimmer under the high morning light as do the woven bands of glass beads which encircle their necks and wrists. The taller of the girls fetches the bunches of bananas and carries them uphill to a flatbed cart with large wooden wheels; the other keeps a lookout for tarantulas, which enjoy roosting in the bunches hanging in the shady banana grove. She brandishes a bamboo pole which can be used to flick the animal out of its hiding place to the ground, where it is easily crushed under a rock.

  The cart is nearly filled with fat green bananas. The ox tethered to the trunk of a tree beside the cart switches its tail and gives its massive head a shake from side to side. It ignores the girl as she swings two weighty loads into the bed. She makes her way barefoot back down the stone-stubbled slope.

  The old man has sheathed his machete, and reclines against the bole of the harvested tree. The fruit sways in clusters above, but he has left it to mature and swell more before he will cut it down. His skin is dark, although not quite as dark as the girls’; his eyes are unblinking, seem at once advertent, melancholy. There is a quality—almost voluptuary—about them that is sweeping, unreadable as the quick eye of a bird or a tardy tortoise. At night, when he retires, the girls, who sleep beside him on a bark mattress (Krieger postulates, “Though it would not be typical Caribbean lowland tribe behavior except the shamans, who get to have their polygyny and eat it too, right?”) in the quiet cabana above the rambling houses of the barricade, watch him under the moon that pours through the open window. They are able to discern the moment he has fallen asleep solely by the metamorphosis of his slowing breathing, since he sleeps with eyes unclosed.