A long sigh and a brief silence ensued. “I suppose I’ve been half dead myself since she died. And then when you said that, it just took me over. I hope I didn’t frighten you with that display.”
“No, it’s totally cool. How did she die?”
He laughed, his usual short bark. “Asks the American girl. You all fly your sorrows like flags, don’t you? And expect everyone else to do the same. Perhaps you’re right. Keeping it all packed away hasn’t done me much good. Well, since you ask, she was bitten by a fer-de-lance.”
“What’s that?”
“A snake. Bothrops atrox. The deadliest reptile in the American tropics. We were in Colombia desperately collecting from a stand of forest scheduled to be clear-cut, a lovely little valley full of the usual richness, and of course since the edge of the cut was advancing, the place was full of refugee creatures, including snakes. We were working too hard at it, exhausted, becoming a trifle careless, which is something one must never do down there, but it was so vital, there might have been dozens, hundreds of species that lived nowhere else and the swine were going to extinguish them to make furniture and to let some peasants grow a few pathetic crops before the soil was exhausted. One evening, far too late, she ran off to check her traps one last time. She failed to return, and I took a torch and went to look for her, and found her lying on a trail a few hundred yards from our camp. It was perfectly clear what had happened. We’d both seen it before. The ants and beetles were already on her. I haven’t been back to the forest since.”
“Oh, that’s awful,” Jenny said.
“Yes. She had hair much like yours, that red-gold color, although she wore it short.” He curled a loop of her hair around his finger. She thought he was going to kiss her then and wondered what it would be like to be kissed by an old guy, but instead he closed his eyes for a moment and a shudder passed through his long frame. Then he cleared his throat and clambered to his feet and was regular Professor Cooksey again. As if nothing important had happened, he began to fuss with the insects, placing the tiny things carefully back into their vial. “We’ll have to publish, of course, and it’s up to the international nomenclature people to confirm it, but I don’t expect much of a problem. Now, as for the name—I propose P. jenniferi. How does that sound?”
“You mean me?”
“Of course you! They’re your fig wasps. You have achieved immortality, my dear. Your name will live forever, or at least until the last dying twitches of our scientific civilization, and graduate students yet unborn will bear your name on their lips. What do you think of that?”
“Holy shit,” said Jennifer.
“A grand sentiment and calls for champagne,” said Cooksey. “Let’s go see what Rupert has in his extensive cellars, shall we?”
Houses in Florida didn’t have cellars, Jenny knew that much, but she waited to see what would happen next on this strange and wonderful day. Cooksey returned shortly with two large bottles and a childlike grin on his face. He had brought a pair of Rupert’s fancy crystal glasses, too, that got brought out only for important dinners. Jenny had seen champagne served in movies but had never consumed any. Before she came to the property, her experience of wine had been limited to the cheap fortified swill homeless people used to keep away the cold. Since then, she’d had the opportunity to taste real wine, mainly that left over from Rupert’s rich-people parties, swiped from the kitchen by Kevin, but that experience had been flavored by Kevin’s pleasure in getting away with something. Kevin discussed wine mainly by mocking the pretensions associated with drinking the good stuff, reading the labels to her with his version of some rich guy’s elevated accent. Jenny went along with this, but she liked what the wine did in her mouth. It produced tastes she had not known were possible, sensations she did not have words for. It was one of the things that gave her the notion that regular people had a physical life that tramps like her were missing, and in this it was like listening to conversations among people who used words she didn’t understand.
She imagined it was like when the fish swam around her, how she must seem to them, something utterly alien living a life in a different medium, a higher kind of life. These thoughts swam around in her mind at times and made her vaguely discontented, but she did not have any substantial ideas upon which they could settle and become articulate. Kevin divided the world into “rich shitheads in the power structure” and “the people,” and she supposed she was in the latter class, but she also thought it couldn’t be as simple as that, when she thought about it at all, which was hardly ever. Still, she remained open to physical pleasure—fishpond, flowers, Château Margaux—and understood at some basic level that in this she was different from both Kevin and the dull or bitter Iowa farmwives who had raised her on behalf of the state.
The champagne tasted like a kind of flavored air, hardly a drink at all. Cooksey was pouring it down his throat like water in the desert, however, and keeping her glass full as well. He put a CD into the stereo in his bedroom, and the music drifted out. It wasn’t bad, she thought, not like what he usually played, which didn’t have any words at all, or else kind of screechy singing in Spanish or some language she couldn’t understand. This was a woman singing in English, with just a piano playing, and you could understand the words like you could in country songs, and there weren’t any curse words in it.
“Cleo Laine,” said Cooksey, although she hadn’t asked, and then he filled his glass again and began to talk. Delicious wine, and comparisons with other brands; champagne on other occasions; exploding champagne at his sister’s wedding; his home near Cambridge, the countryside, the flora and fauna thereof; his mother’s kindness and wit; his father taking him bird and bug watching in Norfolk as a boy; the fens, their similarity to the Everglades, the differences, his affection for low, flat, damp country, the oddness of his spending so much of his life in rain forest; tales of jungle adventure, narrow escapes, strange customs of the natives, stranger customs of fellow biologists; the awesome beauty of the great trees, laden with vines, decked with flowers, coated with scurrying, flying, crawling life. With Portia by his side; not a lot about her directly, but she was in nearly every jungle story, the touchstone of experience, nothing quite real until shared with her.
“Did you ever go to where Moie comes from?” she asked.
He paused before replying. “In a manner of speaking. I’ve been close to there, to the Puxto, and I knew someone who knew the region very well indeed. Why, we’re quite empty. Piggy us!”
Another bottle popped. Now he drew her out, her miserable life, but somehow not miserable told here drinking this wine: the missing father, the teenaged mother dead in a car wreck; no kin, so off to the mercies of the state; the discovery of the epilepsy, so no adopting families for her, the failure in school, the early stupid sex, the abortion, the flight into homeless drifting. She found herself talking easily about things she had not told anyone, even Kevin: the rape, or rapes, if you counted guys she knew already: the scary guys who got her to mule dope for them; arrest and jail.
It was back and forth: he said something, she said something, he took what she said and considered it and added something, an idea, a joke, an anecdote about a similar experience. She was conscious of wanting to say things that she didn’t have the language for, and self-conscious about her speech in a way she’d never been. Why did she say like every other word, or you know? Cooksey didn’t. He spoke more like a book, and with that voice of his it was like being on television, but in real life. She voiced this, and he laughed. “Yes, we’re having a civilized conversation, oiled by champagne. Why Madame makes the wine.” At her puzzled look he picked up the bottle and showed her the label.
“Veeve Clipot?”
He pronounced it correctly and added, “It means the Widow Clicquot. Interesting you read the q as a p. Do you always do that?”
Embarrassed, she admitted, “Yeah, I don’t read all that good.”
“And no wonder. You’re dyslexic.” He explained what that was
and added, “You’re in good company. Sir Richard Branson is, and any number of other billionaires. Plus Cher, I believe. And my mother, who was a quite well-known anthropologist. It’s a bit of a bother but by no means the end of the world. No one’s ever told you this before?”
“No. They just thought I was, like, retarded.”
“Retarded? Odd word. Well, you were, I suppose. But now you’re apparently advancing once more. I’ll help you if you like. More wine?”
She held out her glass, speechless, thinking of Cher.
He lifted his glass and held the golden contents up to the fading light from the window. “I always imagine brain cells winking out under the influence of this, like tiny bubbles. Charming. Now, intelligence is rather more complex than people imagine. With us, it’s the ability to manipulate abstract symbols. That’s what we prize above all else, nearly to the exclusion of all else, with the result that we often put in charge of our civilization people who have absolutely no concrete intelligence at all, who are in fact entirely cut off from real life—economists and such. The greatest virtue of real science, in contrast, is that it constantly throws nature into your face, messy, solid, and complex nature, which often makes a nonsense of all one’s airy-fairy abstractions. Obviously, real education would draw out the particular intelligence of every individual, but we don’t do that. We think we need abstract symbol manipulators, and so we try to produce them en masse, and fail, and toss the failures into the dustbin. Like you, for example. And of course there are modes of intelligence, broadly defined, of which our culture knows absolutely nothing. My mum was always going on about that, the truly remarkable range of what different peoples choose to do with their brains. I wonder what she would have made of Moie.”
“Oh, Moie!” she said. “God, I wonder what happened to him. Do you think he’s okay?”
“Perfectly fine, I should think. Aren’t you, Moie?” As he said this, he looked over his shoulder into the shadows in the corner of the room by the door. She followed his glance and saw the Indian squatting there. The sight startled her, and she spilled some of her champagne.
“Jesus! Where did he come from? I didn’t even hear the door open.”
“No. Moie is only seen when he wants to be. One example of his particular mode of intelligence, perhaps.” In Quechua, Cooksey said, “I’m happy to see you. How are you getting on in your tree?”
“Well. It’s a good tree, although no one has spoken to it in a long time. And are you well, and her?”
“We are both exceedingly fine. Would you care for some champagne?” He dangled the bottle, and Moie stood and came closer. “What is this?” he asked, sniffing it.
“It’s similar to pisco, but with water added to it, and also air.”
“Then thank you, but I must not. Jaguar is back in the sky tonight.”
“And can you not take pisco when the moon is full?”
“No. He doesn’t like it, and he may need me tonight or the next day or the next. After that I will be happy to drink your pisco with you.”
“What will he do with you? If he comes.”
“Anything he wishes to do, of course. You shouldn’t ask foolish questions, for you are not entirely a fool.” He turned his attention to Jenny, who smiled at him and said, “Hey, Moie, what’s up?”
He ignored this and said to Cooksey, “The Firehair Girl seems happier than she was before. I see she has drunk a lot of your pisco-with-air, but also there is something else. She’s found something she lost, I think.”
“Yes, that’s a way to say it.”
“Yes, and I can see the shadow of her death, almost as if she were a live person. She wishes to do puwis with you, Cooksey.”
“Surely not!”
“Yes, because I have seen it in her dreams. And also in your dreams. Will you take her into your hammock?”
“It’s not our custom, Moie.”
“I believe you, for I see the women come to take their children from under my tree, and they all have only one child, or sometimes two. Yet you have so much food. Each should have ten, and all fat ones, too. The wai’ichuranan have forgotten how to do it, I think.”
“No, it’s all they think about. A great deal of puwis is done among the wai’ichuranan, I can assure you.”
“No, I meant they have forgotten how to draw the spirits of children from the sun into the bodies of their women. Anyway, you will pull her into your hammock, or perhaps she will pull you into hers, as I have heard is also done among you. She has broad hips and heavy breasts and will bear many healthy sons for the clan of Cooksey. But I came to ask you if you have heard anything about the Puxto, if they have stopped the cutting and the road.”
“They have not stopped, Moie. They will not, I fear.”
Moie was silent for a while, then made a peculiar gesture that was like a shrug and also like a despairing slump. “That’s too bad,” he said in Quechua and then added something in his own language that Cooksey didn’t understand. Without another word he went out the door. Cooksey and Jennifer followed him into the garden. Moie had his head back, staring at the full moon, now tangled in the upper boughs of one of the tall casuarinas that edged the property.
“What will you do now, Moie?” Cooksey asked.
“I will go back to my tree and wait,” said the Indian, and he turned away to go. But then he paused and addressed Cooksey again. “There is one thing I have discovered. There are wai’ichuranan who can call tichiri. Did you know that?”
“I don’t know what tichiri is, Moie.”
“I will explain. There is the world below the moon and the world above the moon. Below the moon we men have our lives, and above the moon are the dead ones and the spirits and demons, and so on. We jampirinan can travel between these worlds, and also the aysiri, the sorcerers, and when you sleep the paths are open, too, and from that comes dreaming. Everyone knows this. But what only a few know is that a guardian can be called, and tied into a t’naicu”—here he touched the little bundle that hung from his neck—“so that the dreams of the one who wears it can’t be entered, or not entered easily. This guardian is called the tichiri.”
“And you found one of these guarding one of us?”
“I did. A little girl. We would think it was a waste to guard a little girl so strongly. Who cares what a girl dreams? But this is an unusual girl, I think. Jaguar has her in his mind for some reason. So, tell me, can you call a tichiri and make a t’naicu in this way?”
“I can’t,” said Cooksey. “But many parents pray that their children will have sweet dreams. Perhaps that’s what you found.”
“Pray? You mean to Jan’ichupitaolik? No, this was something else. I will have to think about this more.” With that he trotted silently into the shadows.
“What was all that about?” Jenny asked.
“Oh, you know, just a chat,” said Cooksey lightly.
“It didn’t sound like a chat,” said Jennifer. The champagne had made her bold. “It sounded serious. Where’s he been living since he ran off?”
“In a tree. He seems very content. And yes, it was serious. I think he’s going to kill someone tonight.”
“Oh, God! Who is he going to?”
“I imagine one of the men he thinks is responsible for cutting down his forest.”
“Can’t you stop him?”
“Not I. In any case, he doesn’t think he’s doing it himself. He thinks the man in the moon does it, or Jaguar, as he calls his god.” Cooksey looked up at the sky. “I suppose it does look rather like a jaguar, depending on what you bring to it. Some people say it’s an old woman with a sack on her back. In some parts of Europe it’s a loaded wagon, Charles’s Wain, the treasure of Charlemagne.”
“But that’s just, you know, imaginary. Isn’t it?”
“That would depend on what you meant by imaginary. Or imagination, for that matter. You and I were just speaking of intelligence, and there you have a good example. Our imagination works with our particular kind of intelligenc
e to produce televisions and nuclear bombs. His works to allow visits to other people’s dreams and the manipulation of mass and energy in entirely different ways to how we do it. You remember his footprint? My mother always swore she’d seen a shaman walk flat-footed up the side of a vertical tree as if he were walking on a street, and she was not, I can assure you, an easy person to fool. Moie imagines, so to speak, that he can turn himself into a jaguar, and perhaps in some strange way he can.”
Jennifer felt a sickish laugh bubble out of her throat. “That’s wack,” she said, and then recalled what had happened at the jaguar cage in the zoo and was silent.
He drained his glass and said, “I think there’s a bit more left in the bottle. Would you like some?”
“No, thanks. I’m pretty dizzy as it is.”
He nodded. “Well, then, I’ll say good night. I’m a bit unsteady myself, and I want to get some reading done before I pass out. I’ll leave the workroom light on for you.”
When he had gone, Jennifer went down the path to the pool and sat on the low stone bench placed at the foot of the pond. The moon had topped the tree, she saw. It wobbled brightly on the surface of the dark water and turned the little waterfall into a stream of silver. She stared at the moonlit ripples, feeling strange, and it wasn’t just the wine. She reached for an explanation and found that she hadn’t the words, but…it was just that she couldn’t simply let go and sink into the thoughtless depths as she had her whole life, there was stuff in her head now: that wasp and the business of naming it after her, and Cooksey’s whole story and his wife and the idea of a mode of life she had not imagined existed. No, that was wrong: she knew it existed, had seen it all on the TV, but now she had been invited into it in Real Life, and she found herself quaking in the doorway. Flowers and fish were not going to be enough after today, and she found herself racked with longing for what she had been and at the same time with yearning for another and still terrifying life. But I’m too dumb, she thought vainly: her hidey-hole now too small.
She wept then, silently as she had learned to do long ago in strange houses where they didn’t like whiny kids, her face distorted into a tragic mask, hugging herself, rocking back and forth on the smooth stone, while from her throat came the tiniest mewling sound, like a kitten lost. It was strange to her to be doing this in the open air, and not in a broom closet, shut up on account of messing herself during a fit, or hiding from taunting children in a girls’ room stall at school. She thought this, however, after it was over. A new kind of thought, a reflection on her life. Cooksey had just demonstrated to her how to do that, to look at a life from outside, like it was a movie. But while she wept, she thought nothing at all.
Night of the Jaguar Page 20
