He had hoped that on the next morning they might be able to start moving again, but Teresa-Maria wanted to stay in bed. She was too tired to move. As Simone rustled up some vine leaves, larvae and berries for breakfast the boys played with their new sister as if she were the best toy they’d ever had. Rodney sat her in his lap and jiggled her about, while Simon sang her songs that he made up on the spot. She ignored them and cried and wriggled quietly all to herself.
Teresa-Maria spent the morning alternately sleeping, nursing, napping, nursing and sleeping. The boys carried the little girl about, picked her up, snuggled beside their mother and chewed on their berries. Only Simone felt less than an essential part of the family. He’d hardly had a chance to hold his daughter, the rest of them had been so greedy for her, and to his surprise he found himself grumbling that there were, in fact, more important things to be getting on with than dandling babies.
No one noticed when, halfway through the day, he wandered off into the jungle to see if today, just by chance, he might be able to find a clearing or a hilltop from which to spy the lay of the land and chart their course onwards to the sea and to home.
‘I’m failing them,’ he said as he brushed the brush to one side and ducked under a narrow corkscrewing horizontal branch. ‘I know what I’m doing, I know exactly what I’m doing, for once, and it’s failing, that’s what it is. Failing them.’
He tried to cast his mind back to that deep green valley in the mountains, that place where he’d once begun his spiritual growth, where he’d learnt to look at the world with eyes that were open to wonder and which weren’t concerned with success. What would his Little Master have done had he been in this same situation? What had he taught Simone that could be applied to this place? To this time?
‘When a man is lost,’ he remembered the Little Master once saying, ‘he has simply found somewhere else instead. To find there what he was looking to find is impossible, unless he is hoping for something else. To get where he wants to go he must turn around and forget about where he is going. Then he will arrive somewhere, and wherever somewhere is, somewhere else is always close to hand. The two are indivisible.’
After saying this he had hit each of his students with the long staff he kept beside his mat specially for the task. Since Simone always sat at the front, eagerly taking notes, hanging on each of the Little Master’s words and movements, he found the beatings with the staff to be an insistent but passing nuisance (they tended to jog his writing hand). If one was sat at the back of the room, however, the tip of the staff would be moving at a considerable speed and packed quite a wallop. But those who were furthest away often needed the biggest reminder, as the Little Master occasionally pointed out. With a thwack.
‘If I’m lost, as I seem to be,’ muttered Simone to the rainforest, ‘then I must look at where I am, because maybe it’s where I’m meant to be after all. Perhaps it’s not that I haven’t got to where I wanted to be, it’s just that I didn’t know where it was I was actually wanting to go … and if that’s the case, then how could I possibly know that I’ve arrived?’ He paused, one foot raised in walking, and leant a hand on a gnarled old trunk, before sighing and talking into his beard once more. ‘Goodness,’ he said, ‘the Little Master did talk some nonsense sometimes.’
He felt better admitting this to himself. He’d loved the old man, and had hung on his every phrase and utterance and had jotted as many of them down as he could, but he’d only followed half of them and of those he only thought he really understood half of them. The rest, he admitted, seemed like insoluble conundrums designed to make your brain ache.
He thought about heading back to the camp now and in a moment all the misery of his failure, of his lost path, of his lack of a plan forward slumped down onto his shoulders. How could he go back? How could he go back now? More of a failure than ever.
He let the foot that had been dangling in the air complete its step forward and lowered it to the ground.
His foot touched stone.
It didn’t feel, to his toes, like a pebble or a random bit of boulder. He could feel a distinct edge to it. He could trace a step, a level surface and six inches in, a riser of stone.
As he peered through the darkness he made out the shape, dark against the patchy sky, of an old stepped pyramid. It was covered with vines and moss and had clearly been abandoned and forgotten for centuries, but he could see from where he stood at its base that the platform at the summit of its steep side poked out above the canopy. He could see sunlight glint brightly on the grey stone.
In ten minutes he had climbed the hundred-odd steps and stood out in the fresh air, breathing hard and half afraid to look. He bent over with his hands on his hips drawing his breath until finally he straightened up and using a hand as a visor looked out across the sea of greenery. Feeling a little nauseous he quickly changed the metaphor and looked out across the rolling cloudscape of the forest canopy. Yes, it was like looking at green clouds from above, the way they undulated, the way here they were thicker and darker; how here they climbed, stacking massive and thick, as they covered some hidden hillside like dark cumulonimbus; how there they fell lower, like looking through a break in the clouds at the forested earth below.
Far to the east he could see a silver glittering. There, like a sliver just beyond the horizon, was the ocean. He’d seen it. He could see it. It was a long way, but now he knew which way. And there, oh joy! … There, not two or three miles distant, was the telltale gouge through the green canopy that could only be the great river, the Amazon itself, or one of its many tributaries. All he had to do was find that river ( just over there, two or three miles to the north) and then follow it as it flowed unhesitatingly to the sea, because that’s what rivers do, every time. Except, of course, he thought deflating a little, for the ones that just go to lakes and stop.
He made his way back to the family camp a much happier man. Hope had bloomed and he longed to see his beautiful little daughter.
*
By the time Simone Crepuscular made his way back to the camp evening was beginning to fall. In the early shadow, through obscuring trunks, he caught glimpses of Teresa-Maria up on her feet hunched over a fresh fire, the black bottom of their travel kettle swinging in the orange flames. Little Simon was curled up in the leafy nest with his little sister, quiet and bleary, and Rodney was stood beside his mother, a hand firmly on his hip as if he were commanding nations.
When he emerged from the undergrowth, nervous for having been away so long, he found he was greeted with a smile and no questions. Rodney skipped over and took his hand.
‘We’re making tea, daddy,’ he said.
‘Oh yes?’
‘Did you have a nice walk, darling?’
‘Oh yes, thank you dear. Did you get some rest today?’
‘Yes.’
Crepuscular let himself be led over to the fire where he kissed his wife on the forehead as she lifted the kettle off the fire with a stick and gently thumped it down on the mud. There was a hiss and sizzle and among the scent of steaming dirt Simone caught a pungent whiff of the vine tea. He remembered the glorious tea he’d drunk in India and instead of letting the comparison get him down, he held it up before him as simply another good reason to leave the jungle. He pictured again that slow loop of river he’d seen from the top of the temple and glanced through the shrubbery to the north, the way they needed to go, as if he might be able to see it from here.
He decided that he wouldn’t mention his good news straight away. He’d wait until they’d all had a nice cup of tea … well, until they’d had a cup of tea at any rate, and then he’d just slip it into the conversation as a casual aside. He knew he’d be risking life and limb by doing it this way, Teresa-Maria wasn’t really the sort who took surprises well – either because they spoilt her plans or because in her excitement she’d swing her arms around and, depending on which attachment was strapped to her right wrist, several different levels of injury suddenly became available. But all
the same, the look on her face would be worth a little risk, he thought. He wanted to feel loved and not just as her husband, but as someone who was actually proving himself to be capable, but at the same time, he didn’t like to boast, so just a casual mention as if it were nothing …
They sat down with their mugs of vine tea and everyone inhaled the coiling steam that twirled up from the surface. It certainly cleared the sinuses and if anyone had had a cold it wouldn’t have lasted long under such a medicinal assault. That’s what this is, he thought, it’s more like medicine than real tea. He tipped his mug to one side and then to the other and watched with unending fascination as the liquid gloopily followed the Earth’s pull, slowly settling down to the new equilibrium as if gravity and the trend for a liquid to keep its surface perpendicular to that of the Earth were merely guidelines, rather than rules. It was like treacle, perhaps, or particularly aromatic mud.
Teresa-Maria sat with the little baby girl tucked in her lap and the two boys sat by her side and everyone huddled over their mugs. No one drank. After a minute of this Simone could contain himself no longer and he burst out with the news about the pyramid he’d found and how the river swept round so close to where they were and how he could see it heading off to the ocean, which he’d glimpsed on the very far horizon.
He spoke excitedly, and at length even though there wasn’t that much to tell, but he described the way he’d stumbled onto the old stone steps and what he imagined the temple must’ve been used for in years gone by, but as he went off on archaeological speculations his family focussed on the most important bit of news – that, at last, they knew the way out.
Teresa-Maria jumped to her feet, filled with energy and delight. She danced around twirling their little daughter in her arms, animated in just the way that Simone had hoped she would be. All verve had been returned to her, all vim, all vigour. The merry eagerness, the cutthroat daring ruthless pleasure at life that she’d had when they’d first met, suddenly whooshed back up into her cheeks and she began to sing to their girl as she danced.
‘We’re all saved, we’re all free,
daddy’s saved us, you shall see!’
Crepuscular stood stopped in the middle of his ongoing oration and grinned from ear to ear as she swirled and twirled. He hadn’t seen her so happy since they’d first climbed down from the Andes, months and months earlier, and had walked their first few steps into the dense, patchy dark of the rainforest. The first thing they had seen, high in the nearest branches, had been parrots, a whole flock of parrots just sat there watching them with intelligent beady eyes. She loved parrots and these ones were beautiful, green like emeralds and red like rubies. He spontaneously gave them to her as a gift, and although she was a little disappointed when he explained that it was a symbolic gift and that if she actually wanted to keep one she’d have to climb the tree and capture it herself, she saw the generosity in it and laughed with loving eyes. She’d hugged him and kissed him as Rodney made gagging noises behind their backs. She’d looked up at those first parrots and with a slight glint of sadness in her eye had said that she didn’t do that sort of thing anymore anyway, but how lovely it was to see parrots happy and free in the wild.
‘We’re near the river, the river’s near the sea,
we’re going to the ocean, you shall see!’
She was beautiful as she danced, he thought. And he began to tap his foot and sway his hips too.
‘We’re going home, we’re going to be free,
over the ocean blue, you shall see!’
And then, all of sudden, she wasn’t there anymore.
There was silence in the jungle as three pairs of eyes stared at the space where she had been. It was empty now, as if she had simply vanished into the air. And then, after that suspended moment of peace, the scream reached them and Crepuscular jolted awake and into action.
He ran in two strides to where she’d been stood, and was lucky that his hand gripped a trunk instinctively when he got there, because there, just beyond the edge of their camp, of their terra cognita, was a cliff. It plunged down for maybe five hundred feet, vertiginous, huge, vertical, sheer and brown. He could see the canopy of the jungle dip and spread away below him, far below him: a deep valley, a rift valley perhaps, stretching away to the south. And there, in the air, far below him was his Teresa-Maria falling, spinning round and round. Her scream, a constant thread of sound, was diminishing now, in a moment he could hear nothing of it. And there … oh, there, just beyond her was a tiny speck, the baby … his girl, slipped from her arms, whipped away and flying free, falling free. Falling into the unknown depths of the distant, deep rainforest.
He watched until Teresa-Maria, his Maria, reached the forest canopy. She punched a tiny dark hole in it, breaking branches, tearing off leaves. A powdery flock of birds rose like dust from her point of entry, startled and scared into mindless flight, but they soon calmed, circled, descended and vanished back into the green blanket of trees again.
He had lost sight of the baby girl, she had been so tiny, and he had no idea where she had fallen. And the gloom was increasing. Soon the canopy was dark, soon the night had fallen entirely and then the rain began.
He stepped back from the edge of the muddy ledge as a great roll of thunder cracked the humid air. He turned his back on the view of that black valley and walked over to his boys. Fat drops of warm rain were splashing on the leaves above them, drumming like native telegrams, breaking up into smaller droplets at each level, until they reached the forest floor like a mist. Before Simone reached his boys his face broke down, his hands reached up and tore at his beard, yanking, tugging at it. Scraps of hair came loose, as tears rolled down his cheeks. From above them leaves began to fall; little twigs snapped off sturdier branches and a few fat drops, fat like a man’s thumb, found their way to earth. As his lips and eyes turned red and ran with raw tears he fell to his knees, trembling, misshapen.
His boys were as scared by this as by their mother (and step-mother)’s sudden disappearance. They didn’t know what to do, what was expected, what reaction was correct in this situation. As their father lay in the mud, getting wetter and shuddering they huddled together, sucking their thumbs and joining in with the crying. After a while they grew cold, so they dragged, step by step, urging by urging, their father over to the leafy nest he’d built for them. There he lay curled up and the boys lay beside him, sharing all their warmth against the oncoming chill of night.
They pulled a few giant leaves over themselves in a not wholly pointless effort to keep out the rain.
*
The storm finally blew itself out some hours before dawn, but the jungle echoed with the continual dripping of water long after the sun had risen. Exhausted by his impotent weeping, and with a pounding headache forming somewhere inside his shaven skull, Simone finally got up. He fed his boys a breakfast of fruit that he found in the bottom of Teresa-Maria’s shoulder bag. He’d found it snagged on a tree-root nearby, muddy, torn but still full of oddments. Everything else in the camp, his cooking pots, his rucksack, the notebooks he’d been keeping for years had all vanished. They’d been swept away by the water that had washed across the sodden sod of the thick muddy ground all night.
Once the boys had eaten he followed some of these diminishing streamlets and found how they all flowed to the same point, a narrow lip of rock that pointed out over the cliff edge. He watched the small waterfall fall and evaporate into mist a hundred feet below him. Looking around in the daylight he could see no way down the cliff: it seemed sheer and smooth and unclimbable. He couldn’t even make out which one of the dark spots in the canopy was the hole that Teresa-Maria had made when she fell. He cursed himself for not having paid closer, better attention at the time, for not having made a quick sketch map in his notebook. Was it that one there? Or that break in the green a little further on …? He couldn’t say. The more he looked, the more holes appeared to him, the more possible gravesites made themselves known.
He realised h
e didn’t know what he was doing, standing there, toes on the lip of rock, looking down into the valley. Or rather he knew what had happened, what had brought him here. He understood what he was looking at, but what eluded his brain right at this moment, what seemed hazy and hard to grasp, were the facts of how and when he had made his way to the cliff-edge, how he had fed the boys, how he had got up before that. It was as if his body were operating without him; he was in there, but so exhausted, he was still curled up, sucking his thumb, unable to embrace or face his loss. He peered over the ledge of his body, watching it move around, watching it manipulate the world, just as he peered over the ledge of the world itself. All he wanted to do, trapped inside, was go back to sleep (which presupposes that he had actually slept during the night, which was not entirely correct), or perhaps to topple forwards into the deep open air.
Suddenly his eyes jerked him awake. His head swung, he stood up straight, caught his balance, leaned back. He’d spotted something, whilst only half-aware … something that now looked like a way down the sheer face, further along the cliff to the west. Something inside urged him to get down there, into the sunken forest. It wasn’t the belief that his wife might still be alive, never for one moment did he delude himself with such a hopeful, wishful fantasy. He had seen the results of falls from much lower heights in the mountains and knew that gravity, velocity and the human body were not close friends. But still he needed to find her. He needed, perhaps, to touch her body, to hold it in some farewell gesture, to dispose of it in a dignified manner, not just to leave it unmarked and unnoticed for the rats and the panthers and the carrion birds. Perhaps he just longed for a farewell more ritual and more perfect than the frantic and unmeaning wave she’d given as she fell.
The Education Of Epitome Quirkstandard Page 13
