They married, and had two sons, and Melissa moved from job to job, serially underappreciated. In time she arrived at the conviction that the chief reason for the becalming of her career was that she had lost momentum in the years that had followed the birth of the boys. Oszkár was somehow implicated in this loss of momentum; he had been in some way insufficiently supportive. Sometimes Melissa would talk as though motherhood had been foisted on her, though in fact it had been virtually a condition of the marriage that Oszkár would impregnate her at the time of her choosing, and sooner rather than later. Oszkár had little understanding of the ‘real world’, Melissa regretfully told Bernát. It was not to Oszkár’s advantage that he had Bernát for a brother: Bernát understood the real world and was a success in it; he had a car that seemed to impress her as much as a Nobel prize would have done. Once, Bernát told Naomi, his sister-in-law had asked him why he never talked about his girlfriends. ‘You must have girlfriends,’ she murmured to him; they were alone in the house. Bernát might have misunderstood the intention, but certainly Oszkár came to believe that Melissa admired his brother excessively. At times, it seemed possible that he suspected an affair.
Melissa eventually left Oszkár for an aerial photographer, a widower whose daughter was in the same class as Oszkár and Melissa’s younger boy. It turned out that Melissa had been involved with him for more than a year. He was a qualified pilot and owned his own plane; when the boys met him, they thought he was cool; that’s what Melissa told her husband, anyway. She had become bored, she told Oszkár. Or rather: Oszkár was at fault for becoming boring. But, said Bernát, Oszkár had not become boring. Oszkár had always been Oszkár: a moderate man; a man of decency and integrity; a fastidious scientist, devoted to the objects of his study. In the aftermath of Melissa’s desertion, Oszkár’s absorption in his studies seemed to have intensified. Never a voluble character, Oszkár now was clenched within himself; the adulterous Melissa could not be discussed. Oszkár would talk about his fish, and little else, but Oszkár’s fish were of limited fascination for his brother. Another factor had to be taken into account, said Bernát, which was that Oszkár took much the same view of his brother’s career as did their mother: Bernát had squandered his intelligence, for the sake of having enough money to fly to Paris or Milan for a night at the opera whenever the whim took him. An ethical investor was still a money man at heart, thought Oszkár.
The reunion in Brazil was not a great success. After two weeks in each other’s company, they were no closer than they had been a fortnight earlier. But Bernát had gone to Brazil, he said, not solely in order to ameliorate his relationship with his brother. He had also travelled in the hope of amazement, he confessed to Naomi. London was suffocating him. He had taken to withdrawing to the countryside for days at a time, staying in remote guest houses, walking all day, whatever the weather. These retreats had a palliative effect, but the relief was transitory. Stronger medicine was required.
During those weeks in Brazil, he had seen some remarkable things, Bernát reported. He described some of the things he had seen. He had seen army ants flowing though the undergrowth like a stream of oil, and bats gushing from the trunk of a Kapok tree. He had peered into the maw of a pirarucu when it came up to the surface to breathe: it was like looking into a satchel of greasy white leather, said Bernát. He saw lilies that changed colour overnight and exuded a thick perfume of pineapple, and a trio of pink dolphins, near the seam in the river where the dark and tannin-rich waters of the Rio Negro flow alongside the pale and silty waters of the Solimões without mingling.
When Bernát spoke of what he had seen, says Naomi, it was like listening to a naturalist-explorer from a time before cameras. She cannot adequately describe the eloquence of Bernát in full flight, she tells her sister. He never fumbles for a word: it’s as if his whole vast vocabulary is instantly at his disposal, and he simply has to reach in to extract the right words. But it isn’t just a matter of fluency: it’s the quality of his gaze when he seizes on a subject, and the way his hands, in constant motion, seemed to be giving form to objects that were elaborate and invisible. But the gestures were never actorly, Naomi insists; there was no element of performance. Rather, it was an act of transmission. Inspiration, she says, would not be an inappropriate word. Yet inspiration was not what Bernát had experienced. Even the spectacle of the skies had not been sufficient to dislodge the torpor that had settled in his mind. And the skies were wondrous. Daylight expired quickly on the river, he explained to her, and as the sun fell into the forest the sky was transfigured into galaxies of colour. All colours were in those sunsets, in a multitude of forms: quick-moving wisps of tangerine-tinted white; slow floes and slicks of crimson, magenta, saffron, cobalt; massifs of pale grey and graphite; diffuse expanses of cool gold and silver; purple and marigold mixed in huge moraines of cloud; iodine and buttermilk and tar; viscid messes of blood and egg yolk, which congealed into the colours of liver and old fat. Some sunsets were of an apocalyptic grandeur, said Bernát, and yet they did not stir him as he knew they should. He needed the sublime, and it eluded him. Instead, he merely registered that these arrays of coloured air were spectacular; he appreciated them; he watched the sunsets and found himself thinking of words.
Bernát was of course aware, says Naomi, that he should have been grateful for his good fortune. But being conscious of one’s good fortune, she says, does not change the quality of the experience; one cannot force oneself into enjoying a meal by thinking of the starving millions. He was bored, still. The terrain was monotonous, offering nothing but foreground for hours at a time: reeds and bushes rising from the mud, in front of a wall of trees and vines and lianas, and only the sky beyond. Inside the forest, the sun is erased: you’re in a dark green radiance that has no point of origin. ‘North, south – you don’t know which is which,’ says Naomi, as if she had been there. It was not an environment to delight the senses. The smell of the forest is not the perfume of Eden: its scent, said Bernát, is the stink of formic acid. The climate was oppressive: he had overestimated his capacity for this type of discomfort. There was a bird that had a call like a wolf whistle, and it made its noise incessantly; others were like yapping puppies, or the squeal of rusty hinges; every day he heard them, for hours on end. At dawn and sunset the monkeys screamed.
When Europeans first saw the Amazon, said Bernát, they thought they had regained paradise: the forest was thronged with fabulous animals; the birds were as bright as stained glass; fruit dangled from every branch, inviting the hand. Soon they realised that this paradise was a false one, that the profusion was deceptive. The trees drew every drop of sustenance out of the earth, leaving soil that was no better than sand. No crops could be made to grow here. The waters seethed with fish that could kill a man; underfoot and in the air lived creatures that inflicted a pain as severe as the pain of an arrow. In a letter to King Philip II, the conquistador Lope de Aguirre wrote: ‘There is nothing on that river but despair.’ And despair did sometimes overcome Bernát on the river; in Manaus, watching the boats swarming on the water like a lethal virus in the bloodstream of the land, it was impossible to hold off feelings of doom, he said. But most of the time he was suffering trivially, from mere lassitude and dejection. He was dejected and bored – by himself, more than anything, he told Naomi, she says.
On the penultimate evening of his trip, in Manaus, Bernát went to a bar on Ponta Negra beach. The air was cool and clean, after rain. Lights from the tower blocks, quivering on the river, were conducive to contentment. Bernát sipped a beer and turned the pages of the book in which Lope de Aguirre’s letter was quoted. It was impossible to read, however, because of the noise from a group that had taken over a nearby corner of the terrace. They were American and white and middle-aged, except for the loudest member of the party – a hefty and darker-skinned man, in a half-unbuttoned floral shirt. Evidently he was the host. He seemed to be employing a strategy of affable provocation to keep the evening lively. A small uproar arose, in w
hich the big man’s laughter was dominant. He declaimed: ‘We’ve had enough of foreigners ruining our country. We can ruin it for ourselves, thank you.’ Like a lord in a costume drama, he called for another pitcher of beer; glancing at Bernát, he raised his glass to him, before making a remark that provoked a screech of incredulity from one of the women. ‘OK, OK, OK,’ said the big man, raising his arms to quell the hubbub. ‘Tell me this: why were the Jesuits expelled? Anyone know?’ When a waitress brought another pitcher to the table, he put an arm around her hips and was not resisted. He saw Bernát looking his way, and smiled as if in recognition of a fellow aficionado of the female form. ‘Come on over, lonely guy,’ he shouted.
His name was Jack Taffarel; he ran river cruises on his boat, and these people had been his customers that day. Welcoming Bernát to the table, one of the group – a bristle-haired man in a sweaty pink polo shirt – warned him that the cruises were just a front: ‘Turns out this guy’s an agent of the Vatican,’ he joked, with too much aggression. ‘The Jesuits and the Vatican are not the same thing, not at all the same thing,’ answered Jack, and he proceeded, with some wit, to summarise the issues on which the papacy and the Society of Jesus had not seen eye to eye. Bernát was intrigued, he told Naomi. Jack Taffarel looked as you might expect someone who worked on the water to look: the face was weathered, the arms powerful, the hands scarred. But he talked like a professional spokesman, and appeared to be peculiarly well informed on the subject of the Jesuits, particularly the Jesuits in South America. It would have been better, Jack Taffarel agreed with Mr Pink Shirt, if white people had never come across this country. But of all the white people, the Jesuits were often the best, he maintained. ‘They provided protection against the worst,’ he said. Though far from sober, he produced a succession of salient facts, or plausible pieces of information, to support this contention. Bernát was inclined to take his side, perhaps in a spirit of perversity, as he told Naomi. Regurgitating something he had recently read, Bernát told the group that the Jesuits in Paraguay had ensured that school lessons were taught in Guarani, the natives’ language, rather than in Spanish. Jack confirmed that this had indeed been the case. In response to a woman who had ‘a problem with the whole missionary thing’, Jack had much to say on the topic of liberation theology. ‘Sounds like communism to me,’ commented Pink Shirt; the conviviality of the gathering was becoming fragile. Jack talked about the Fields of Man and the Fields of God. ‘Forced labour,’ someone remarked. ‘There was no flogging and branding,’ Jack countered. ‘It wasn’t like your cotton plantations.’ Several took exception to this. Before long, Jack and Bernát were bidding the tourists goodnight.
The waitress joined them at the door; her name was Luciana. They strolled onto the beach, and Jack Taffarel told his story. His father, educated at a Jesuit school, had become a botanist, and at university had taught Jack’s mother, who was American and had come to Brazil as a postgraduate. Now the parents were living in Florida, because in the end his mother couldn’t live in Manaus any longer. Having given years of her life to the place, she thought it was only fair that her husband in turn should live in her country for a while. So his father had got a job in the States and the family – there were three children, including Jack – was transplanted to America, which is where they still were, except for Jack, who had been a teenager when they left Manaus and had found that he could not be happy anywhere else, though he had every sympathy with his mother, because Manaus was not an easy place. It was an ugly city, he knew. It was, however, the only place that Jack could live. He needed to have the river and the jungle.
At the water’s edge they sat down. The water was as dark as engine oil, and made no sound as it trickled onto the sand. For a while nobody spoke, then Jack took an envelope from his pocket, and what appeared to be a pen. ‘Anyone for fairy dust?’ he asked. It was a herbal mixture, he explained – bark scrapings, with a bit of liana thrown in. ‘Perfectly safe, in the right quantity,’ he assured Bernát, ‘and I know the right quantity. My education wasn’t totally wasted.’ He told Bernát that he would feel bad for a minute, but incredible things would soon happen. These things could not be described, he said. It would be like trying to explain sight to a blind man. Luciana dangled the envelope between her lovely eyes and Bernát’s. At his nod, she knelt in front of him, her knees touching his. Into a palm she tipped a cone of powder; she sucked it up into the small pipe that he had mistaken for a pen. With a fingertip she pressed shut one of his nostrils, and to the other she raised the pipe. As it touched his skin she gave him a solemn look that compelled trust; she put her lips to the pipe and blew sharply. A violent bitterness rose into his mouth, and moments later it was if a hosepipe had been rammed into his gullet. He vomited. Pressure began to accumulate behind his eyes; in pain he closed them, and when his eyes were shut he saw an area that was like the beach except that it was indigo and there were movements in this indigo sand, as if in response to the pulsations of a vast object that was buried beneath it. When he opened his eyes the sky was also indigo and waves were travelling across it, mirroring the motion of the river. Then the river, a lighter shade of blue, began to change, and the wavelets became things like turtle shells, and there were bright green eyes, thousands of eyes, in the dips between them. He put out a hand towards the moon, and the hand seemed to be a hundred yards away, but every pore and hair was distinct, because his eyes had become telescopes. Removing his hand from the moon, he smeared white light across the sky, like car lights in a long-exposure photo.
It was a profound experience, an incidence of absolute vision, superior to any dream, he told Naomi. In dreams, he said, you see the same faces over and over again: your parents, your lovers, your boss, a miscellany of figures from your past. It’s a nocturnal repertory company, performing dreary fantasias in settings that are nearly always nothing more than versions of places you’ve already seen. It’s your life, but messed up, and messed up in a way that is rarely of interest. Visions like the vision at Ponta Negra, though, do not arise from the compost of daily life. They do not represent one’s fears or desires or memories, suppressed or otherwise; the self plays no part in their creation; the self is overwhelmed, transfigured.
‘Like being drunk,’ Kate comments. The moisture of the grass can be felt through her clothes now; she stands up. Clouds are thickening over the horizon of the sea.
‘The opposite,’ says Naomi. ‘When you’re drunk you get smaller. Your brain slows down, you talk nonsense and then you fall asleep. What I’m talking about is an enlargement,’ she pronounces. ‘I’m talking about seeing beyond appearances.’
‘Or, to put it another way, seeing things that weren’t there,’ says Kate, brushing pieces of grass from her jeans. ‘I think we should be getting back,’ she says. ‘It’ll be raining in half an hour.’
Naomi obediently stands up. ‘But they were there,’ she says.
‘The river was not full of green eyes,’ Kate points out.
‘He saw them, so they were there,’ says Naomi.
‘No,’ says Kate. ‘There were no eyeballs in the river.’
‘There were images of eyes, and the images were as real as anything,’ says Naomi, as if her sister’s objections were of a naivety that must be corrected with gentleness.
Walking side by side, the sisters retrace their steps, and Naomi endeavours to help Kate to understand. It is not disputed that the green-eyed things were not ‘really there’, in the sense that Kate is using the words. It was a vision, and Bernát knew that it was a vision, while it was happening. He knew that the things he was seeing could not be seen by anyone else. They could not be touched. They were made in his brain – he understood that, of course. This did not mean, however, that the experience was not ‘real’. The world we inhabit is fabricated in our brains, says Naomi. Our senses are not the passive recipients of what is ‘really there’: when excited, our ears and our eyes and our skin send signals to different parts of the brain and the brain somehow puts them all t
ogether to make something that feels solid and predictable, something in which we can live. ‘Colours are in here,’ she informs her sister, knocking her brow with a knuckle, ‘not out there,’ she declares, offering the hillside.
‘Yes. I know,’ says Kate.
But Naomi cannot be brought to a pause. Soon she is going on about parallel universes. Physicists know that parallel worlds are a reality, she asserts. Experiments have proved it. There’s a thing called the double-slit experiment, a very elegant and simple experiment which proves that light is both a wave and a particle and that there is more than one universe. Bernát, of course, explained it to her, and Naomi can explain it to Kate, but not now. For now it’s enough to know that these are the facts. What we take to be reality is but an environment that we construct for ourselves. True reality is of too great a complexity for our brains to manage. ‘We can cope only with what we make of the world,’ Naomi states. The monologue continues, and Kate attends closely, with an appearance of thoughtfulness, though there is little sense in what Naomi is saying. Kate smiles whenever a smile might not be inappropriate, but she is unsettled by what she is hearing – not so much by the incoherence of it, as by its vehemence. In the past, such urgency has been an indicator of imminent crisis.
The river is the river Page 10
