Gerontius

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Eventually desserts arrived, among which the by-now-not-unexpected slabs of sticky brown guava preserve. Edward essayed a delicate inroad on one corner with his spoon. ‘You promised to chill my blood,’ he reminded.

  ‘I’m not sure I can guarantee that,’ Miles Moss said. ‘It depends if you want the usual traveller’s tales from the depths of Green Hell, that sort of thing. Giant anacondas. Piranhas stripping the flesh off infants in the time it takes their mothers to wash them in the river so that when they lift them out the child is a gleaming white skeleton from the thorax down.’

  ‘Good Lord,’ said Edward, glancing in alarm towards Lena. But she was evidently inured to such things. ‘The mothers in these parts must be remarkably unobservant. Deafish, too.’ Lena went on eating her goiabada with a slight smile.

  ‘Or,’ continued the Chaplain, ‘would you prefer a genuinely mysterious tale which none of us out here has ever quite fathomed? Ah, then I shall let you judge for yourself,’ he said with the happy decisiveness of one allowed to embark on a story. ‘It concerns power of one kind and another, principally that of the white man and that of the Indian. You have to remember the events took place at a time when the rubber barons here were still living lives of quite unbelievable extravagance and exemplifying an attitude which permeated down to the most ignominious European, even those who were penniless. Magdalena is of course better qualified than I to describe how things were twenty years ago – I only arrived in Pará in 1911 from three years in Lima – but even in those days one grew accustomed to tales of the freakish luxuries of Manaos.

  ‘We’d all heard how the Customs House was made in England and shipped out here in pieces for re-assembly, how every last cobblestone had likewise been imported. But the spectacle of tycoons trying to out-do one another in extravagance was of a different order. It was like Babylon, I assure you. Men literally did feed their dogs caviar and water their gardens with champagne. In fact it was the sight of gardeners at dusk walking to and fro with watering-cans of the stuff which once made an entire garden party break into spontaneous applause and induced one of the guests to order a yacht with solid gold deck-fittings.

  ‘You’re going to say that’s a vulgar and limited kind of power but reasonably harmless. Unfortunately, though, it all too often goes hand in hand with an arrogance which sets at naught human life itself. There are certain names which are still feared here, men who have long since departed with their profits. Paulo da Silva Leite, for example, was a trading baron who simply exterminated whole tribes of Indians practically on whim. He used to punish recalcitrant workers by firing them from cannons, you know. And Nicholas Suarez virtually wiped out the Karipunas after his brother was murdered. It was said he had ten million acres of rubber lands and once monopolised all traffic on the Madeira River. Exactly,’ Miles Moss said, watching Edward’s face. ‘Ten million acres. And you think certain estates in England are on the large size.

  ‘In any case such was – and I’m afraid still is in certain parts – the arrogance of the white man’s greed and power. That’s all by way of introduction to place events in some sort of perspective, you understand. Magdalena is familiar with the story so she knows whom it actually concerns, but for the fellow’s own sake I shall give him a pseudonym. For our purposes, then, we’ll call him Major Blackham, from which it is not pertinent to conclude his real name is Whiteham or anything of that sort.’ The moth-man smiled at him, the draught from the fan on its tall stand lifting his hair gently. ‘Major Blackham was a parishioner of mine not long ago.’

  ‘That disguises him pretty well, with your parish.’

  ‘Quite. Now then, the Major was out here at a venture in search of the usual kind of thing: a bit of excitement, maybe some big game, a lost temple or two, the bones of an expedition, a way of making money. Not, shall we say, an over-scrupulous sort of man but probably not much worse than hundreds of others here like him of all nationalities. Anyway, he fell in with a Brazilian Army officer who was stationed in one of those tiny river ports run by the Indian Service. The Indian Service, I should tell you, is an admirable idea of the Brazilians’ though its work is much hampered by lack of funds and the sheer size and inaccessibility of the terrain. Its duties are primarily to mediate between warring tribes of Indians and protect them from merciless exploitation and wholesale slaughter, to say nothing of the theft of their tribal lands by outsiders.

  ‘In any case Major Blackham and this Brazilian hit it off like billy-oh. The Brazilian was stuck upriver, utterly bored, his small squad of troops was becoming demoralised with inactivity and fever, when one day they came upon a truly vast forest of castanheiros-do-pará, which are Brazil nut trees or Bertholletia excelsa if one wishes to be botanically pedantic. I don’t know if you’re familiar with how the nuts grow, Sir Edward? No reason why you should be – no, well, each fruit contains between fifteen and thirty nuts and weighs up to four pounds, so they’re a tidy size. What makes them particularly convenient is that when they’re ripe they simply fall to the ground. Then it’s comparatively easy to collect them up by boat since the terrain the trees favour is usually crisscrossed by igarapés – creeks, you know.

  ‘The problem with this forest they’d found was that it lay across the dividing line which separated the territories of two tribes who were traditionally at each others’ throats, the Ga-Tuparú and the Coimbé. The Brazilian officer and Major Blackham between them hatched a plot which involved using the troops to annex the entire Brazil nut forest under the pretence of creating a no-man’s land between the warring factions, and then to share the proceeds of their newly created private estate. One day they went in force and to their surprise found much of the forest already settled by the Ga-Tuparú although small areas were under Coimbé control. They had thought it uninhabited, you see. There followed a series of nasty little engagements during which they took quite a large Ga-Tuparú village. They killed a great many villagers – some say as many as a hundred – and confiscated all the Indians’ plantations. That was quite bad enough but they took captives as well whom they forced to work as slave labour, gathering nuts indiscriminately in territory that had formerly belonged to the Coimbé. People didn’t like this at all when the story got out since the Brazilians quite rightly congratulate themselves on their so-called Golden Law which outlawed slavery. That’s not to say it doesn’t still go on, I’m afraid, but they find it harder to overlook when the slavers are foreign. I suppose one sees their point.

  ‘For a month or two everything proceeded according to plan. The nuts were sent downriver and sold and the two conspirators began to make some quite substantial sums. But then things began to go wrong. One day the Brazilian was shot with an arrow which was evidently poisoned with something especially horrible in place of the usual curare, which generally kills swiftly, since he suffered the most protracted convulsions, hallucinations and creeping paralysis. It took the wretched man a week to die and witnesses said his agonies were remarkable – and this in a country which tends to the phlegmatic about such things. Even though it’s unfortunately not uncommon in these parts that a white man is shot by an Indian arrow – many have never seen whites before and are mortally afraid – there were other odd aspects. Firstly, the arrow itself could not be identified as belonging to any known tribe in that region. It was quite unlike those made by either the Coimbé or the Ga-Tuparú. Secondly, it took the officer vertically down through the top of the shoulder right beside the neck –’ Miles Moss tapped his own shoulder where he might have worn an epaulette. ‘At the time he was standing a long way off the nearest cover and it would in any case have been a remarkable shot even from close range; imagine calculating such a steep arc of fire for so narrow a target. Of course I know perfectly well that certain tribes habitually use such a technique, but hardly from so far away. A witness was heard to say that it was more as though the arrow had literally dropped out of the blue.

  ‘Well, Major Blackham was disturbed by this but at the same time took consolation in
the fact that without the Brazilian his own portion of the profit from their nut scheme would now be so much the larger. A junior officer took charge of the troops and business went on as usual. They built two barracas on the site of the Indian village for storing the nuts and for accommodation while burning the rest of the huts to prevent the Indians filtering back. Generally the Major slept alone in one of these sheds with the nuts while in the other were the native troops who took it in turns to guard a sort of stockade where their captives lived. One morning Major Blackham awoke to find something terrible and at the same time completely incredible.’

  Here the Reverend Moss paused for a sip of wine and a mouthful of the goiabada which, like that of his listeners, had lain largely untouched ever since he had embarked on his story. So intent had Edward become, he found himself watching even as the narrator put the spoon in his mouth, chewed, swallowed.

  ‘What he found,’ the Chaplain resumed at the end of a pause judged to perfection, ‘was that the Brazilians’ barraca had been crushed during the night by a gigantic tree. Actually, it was not crushed so much as obliterated. The Major of course climbed among the branches to see if he could find any survivors but it was soon plain from the presence of flies and the urubus gathering overhead that the thirty or so men lay in the ruins beneath this enormous trunk. You’ll have seen some of the trees round here, Sir Edward, so you’ll realise I’m not describing anything on the lines of a big English elm or horse chestnut. I’m talking of something which had stood fully two hundred feet high and through the base of whose trunk one could have driven a motor car. It was then, of course, that the real horror dawned on him – which was that there had been no tree of that description standing at the edge of the clearing, certainly not within a couple of hundred yards. Neither had he heard a sound during the night and it was inconceivable that a thing that size could have fallen in silence. But not only that. He soon noticed that the tree hadn’t rotted, nor had it even been sawn. It had snapped.’

  ‘Snapped?’

  The priest nodded. ‘I doubt if there exists a piece of machinery anywhere in the world capable of snapping that monster as if it had been a pencil and assuredly not up a remote tributary in the Amazon rainforest. The same goes for a machine capable of lifting it, complete with its branches and everything. Once again someone observed later that it was as if the tree had simply fallen out of the sky.

  ‘This time the Major panicked. He was after all left alone in the clearing with an impossible event and the remains of thirty men, to say nothing of the ghosts of the villagers they had killed. The Indian slaves had disappeared, you see; their stockade was empty and the men on guard never found. Blackham got to his canoe and paddled for all he was worth back to the settlement where he told his story. But nothing would keep him there. He pressed on downstream to the next township, engaged boatmen, pushed on some more. He reached the main river, the Tapajós, and still kept on. He was heading for Santarém just as fast as he could for he now believed himself a marked man. He felt weighed down by an awful heaviness. What made his terror worse was that every now and then when he stopped at a settlement an Indian would catch sight of him and set up a great cry while pointing at something apparently a foot or two above his head. Whatever it was these people thought they saw was not clear, and by no means every Indian could see it – or if they did they gave no sign. But they all reacted when they saw the pointing and heard the word being shouted.’

  ‘What was the word?’ Edward asked, thinking he had detected the signs of another dramatic pause in the Chaplain’s narrative and wishing to forestall it. The Reverend Moss looked at the stem of his glass as he twirled it absently between forefinger and thumb. Then he said quietly but with intensity:

  ‘“The Squatter”. That was what they were shouting. “He carries the Squatter”.’

  And yes – Edward felt a coldness pass over his entire body which was not to do with the breeze from the fan. ‘The Squatter?’ It was unexpectedly sinister.

  ‘The Squatter. When Major Blackham finally arrived in Santarém he was in a terrible state, in a high fever and babbling. That was where I first came upon him. I happened to be visiting – on my way back to Pará – when I was told that an Englishman had reached town a few days before in a condition which suggested a priest as much as a doctor. Of course one had heard that before and it usually means by the time one has arrived the poor wretch is beyond the help of either. But I went and found him full of quinine and largely recovered from the fever: very weak, maybe, but perfectly lucid. He told me the whole sorry tale and ended up by saying he knew it sounded ridiculous but was I licensed to perform exorcisms? I said well, yes, I supposed I was – I believed there was a form of service and as an ordained priest I could conduct it but it was rarely used nowadays and was frankly not something I wished to undertake at all lightly.

  ‘“Lightly?” he said. “My God, Padré, believe me, there’s no lightness left in my life – however much remains of that. I’m haunted. I know it now. A curse has been put on me for what I did and I’m afraid there’s no power great enough to remove it. I’m a doomed man.”

  ‘“You mustn’t say that,” I told him seriously, “still less believe it since the Devil himself was vanquished by the love of Our Lord Jesus Christ and by His grace I can call down that power to your defence. There is no evil can withstand it, but it has to be asked for in all humility and with absolute and complete contrition for your deeds.” Whereupon he said yes, he would make a proper confession and added he was in such a state of mortal fear and anguish that saying he was sorry for his dreadful crimes would probably sound facetiously in God’s ears as a ludicrous understatement. Naturally I reassured him that God was not given to mirth at a sinner’s expense and then asked him what made him so certain he was haunted literally, rather than figuratively by his conscience.

  ‘“Don’t ask me to describe it, Padré,” he pleaded. “Just believe me – it’s there. Oh, oh, how lucky Agassiz and the others were! Things fell on them and they died, but what has settled on me is a far worse horror, a … a sitting on my shoulders. I can’t actually see it but I have – glimpsed – ah –” he was rolling his head from side to side on the pillow as he spoke, sweat pouring off him and with his eyes round open as if fearing to close them and see again what it was he’d caught sight of. “It’s an oppression. Here, pull me up, see for yourself.” I put my hands beneath his arms to help the poor man into a sitting position – his body was a furnace, I could feel my face glowing with the heat he radiated – and do you know, he weighed twice what I’d imagined he would. “You feel it too?” he said, watching my face and nodding. “Yes; you know. You know now I’m not making it up. Some of the Indians can see … can see what it is that squats on me.”

  ‘I told him to compose himself while I went and fetched certain necessities and that I would be back at once to carry out the exorcism. And when I turned and looked back at him from the doorway, propped up on a pillow and leaning against the whitewashed wall – just for a second, for an instant’s imagining, I thought I saw the thing which was roosting on him …’

  The Reverend Moss’s eyes darted quickly to one side as if he had seen something at the verandah windows open to the night. Involuntarily Edward looked as well and between the other tables and diners glimpsed a bat, no, a huge moth sailing along towards them with that flat, tropical glide. Maybe the Chaplain, long acclimatised to such things, could see what was bound to happen but Edward didn’t and was still watching as the moth floated into the mild vacuum behind the fan and was sucked into it with a soft ping!

  Immediately their table was swept by a small storm of fragments. Putting a hand to his cheek he felt what appeared to be ointment. Opposite him the lepidopterist’s shirt glistened with smears of seeming egg yolk. On the goiabada jelly in front of Lena a hairy insect leg flexed itself once or twice. Long afterwards Edward had the clear memory, accompanied by a definite measure of pride, that not one of them gave a single cry of disgust althou
gh such cries broke from the table behind them, for the moth had been a large and juicy one. The Reverend Moss was peering sadly at the smears and tatters.

  ‘Agrippina,’ he said. ‘What a shame. Funny: they’re not all that easy to catch. I say, I don’t know about you two but it’s rather put me off my food.’

  ‘It’s certainly put itself on mine,’ said Edward, wiping his cheek and shirt-front with a napkin. ‘A little moth goes a long way, a bigger even further.’

  Lena pushed her plate a decisive half inch towards the centre of the table as waiters converged on them. ‘We should go home,’ she said. ‘It has spoilt dinner and the story. As you remember, this was my affair, Mr Moss, so if you’d be good enough to pay I shall reimburse you as soon as we are outside.’

  ‘Oh dear, oh dear.’

  Once outside they engaged another caleça and set off for town. Beside him in the darkness Edward heard the sound of paper rustling. The punctilious whisper filled him at once with pity for her.

  ‘I must say, until that wretched insect came into our lives it was a most enjoyable dinner. I thank you both most sincerely for an occasion I’m not likely to forget.’ The night ambled by with its squares and rectangles of flickering orange glows. ‘But I say, Mr Moss, you can’t leave us in suspense like this. What happened to the Major?’