Once more lamenting the destiny of his people, he opened the volume at the beginning, and recited: “It vexes me to see how mean are these creatures of a day towards us Gods, when they charge against us the evils (far beyond our worst dooming) which their own exceeding wantonness has heaped upon themselves.” 1
That is Zeus talking, he added, and lay the book down, for the rubber-gatherers were bringing in, lashed to a branch, a strange hoofed animal they had just killed. For a moment I thought it was a huge wild pig.
“A tapir, a tapir,” shouted Fray Pedro, clasping his hands in amazement as he ran to meet the hunters with a rejoicing that revealed how tired he had become of the manioc gruel that was his regular diet in the jungle. First came the ceremony of lighting the fire; then the scalding and cutting-up of the beast. The sight of the hams, the inner organs, the loins aroused in us the inordinate appetite generally attributed to savages. Bared to the waist, his whole heart and soul in his work, the miner suddenly took on a completely archaic quality in my eyes. His gesture as he threw on the fire several bristles from the animal’s head had a propitiatory sense that he could probably explain by a verse from the Odyssey. The way of threading the meat on the spit after spreading it with fat, the way of serving it on a board after sprinkling it with brandy, were all part of an old Mediterranean tradition. And when I was served the best filet, for a moment Yannes was transfigured into the swineherd Eumaeus. . . .
We had just finished our banquet when the Adelantado rose to his feet and strode down to the river, followed by Gavilán, who was barking fiercely. Two completely primitive canoes—two hollowed-out treetrunks—were coming downstream, guided by several Indian oarsmen. The moment had come to leave, and each of us added his bundles to the luggage. I took Rosario to the cabin, where we had one last embrace on the dirt floor, which Montsalvatje, when he arranged his collections, had left strewn with dried plants that gave off the acrid, enervating perfume we had known the day before.
This time we corrected the errors and haste of our first meetings, mastering the syntax of our bodies. Our limbs were discovering a better adjustment; our arms sought out more adequate positions. From the mutual apprenticeship that this forging of a couple carries with it, a secret language was born. From our delight emerged those intimate words which others may not share, which would be the language of our nights. It was a two-part invention that included terms of possession, thanksgiving, sex declensions, words suggested by the skin, names unforeseen yesterday by which we would call each other when no one could hear us.
That day for the first time Rosario called me by my name, repeating it again and again, as though its syllables had to be molded anew, and in her mouth it took on a sonority so strange, so unexpected, that I was spellbound by the word I knew best when I heard it as though it had just been created. We lived the unmatched joy of thirst shared and quenched, and when we returned to the world around us, we seemed to recall a land of new savors.
I threw myself into the water to get rid of the dried grass that had stuck to my sweaty back, and I laughed as I thought to myself that we were running counter to tradition, for our mating season had fallen in midsummer. But my love was on her way to the dock. We took our leave of the rubber-gatherers, and we were off. The Adelantado, Rosario, and I occupied the first canoe, huddled between the sides. Fray Pedro, Yannes, and the luggage were in the other.
“May we go with God,” said the Adelantado as he sat down beside Gavilán, who, looking like a figurehead, sniffed the air. From now on we would be navigating without sails. The sun, the moon, the campfire—at times the lightning—would be the only lights our faces would reflect.
Chapter Four
Will there be only silence, repose at the foot of the trees, of the vines? Then it is well that there be guardians.—POPOL-VUH
(Monday afternoon)
XIX/ After sailing two hours between slabs of stone, islands of stone, promontories of stone, mountains of stone, their geometry combined in a diversity of patterns that no longer surprised, a dense, low-growing vegetation of interwoven grasses punctuated by the swaying, dancing presence of bamboo clumps replaced the stone with the endless monotony of impenetrable greenness. I entertained myself with a childish game suggested by the tales narrated beside the fire by Montsalvatje: we were conquistadors who had set out in search of the Kingdom of Manoa. Fray Pedro was our chaplain, who would hear our confessions if we were wounded in the attack. The Adelantado could well be Felipe de Urre; the Greek, Micer Codro, the astrologer. Gavilán became Leoncico, Balboa’s dog. My role was that of Juan de San Pedro, the trumpeter, who had taken himself a woman in the sack of a town. The Indians were Indians, and though it seemed odd, I had accepted the strange distinction established by the Adelantado, who, without intending the least disdain, said with complete naturalness when recounting his adventures: “We were three men and twelve Indians.” I imagined a question of baptism established this differentiation, and this gave an air of reality to the setting of the novel I was forging.
Now the bamboo thickets had yielded the left bank, which we were skirting, to a kind of low colorless jungle growth, with roots extending into the water, which threw up a solid fence, as straight as a palisade, an endless wall of trees standing trunk to trunk at the very edge of the stream, without sign of an opening, without a cleavage, without a crevice. In the light of the sun, which faded to mist over the damp leaves, this vegetable wall continued so long that it seemed the work of man’s hands, carried out with theodolite and plummet. The canoe drew closer to this sealed, forbidding bank, which the Adelantado scrutinized with the keenest attention. It seemed impossible to me that we could hope to find anything here, and yet the Indians poled along more and more slowly, and the dog, its back bristling, watched as alertly as its master. Drowsy with the waiting and the motion of the boat, I closed my eyes.
I was startled awake by a shout of the Adelantado: “There is the entrance!”
Two yards from where we were, stood a treetrunk, exactly like the others, neither thicker nor rougher. But there was a sign cut in its bark, three V’s, one fitting vertically into another in a design that might have been repeated ad infinitum, but which here was multiplied only in the reflection of the waters. Alongside this tree ran an overarched channel, so narrow, so low, that it seemed impossible to me that the canoe could enter it. And yet our boat managed to make its way through this tunnel, with so little room to spare that its sides grated against the gnarled roots. Oars and hands had to push aside obstacles and barriers to continue this incredible trip through the submerged undergrowth. A sharp stick fell on my shoulder with such force that it made my neck bleed. The branches rained a vegetable soot on us, almost impalpable at times, like plankton of the air. And there was the continuous moving through vines that irritated the skin, dead fruits, fuzz-covered seeds that made the eyes tear, decayed matter, dust that begrimed our faces. The shove of the prow loosed a nest of ants from a hole in the sand.
But what lay beneath us was even worse than the products of the shade. Under the water great riddled leaves waved like dominoes of ocher velvet, lures and traps. On the surface floated clusters of dirty bubbles, varnished over by reddish pollen, which a passing fin sent drifting off into the eddy of a pool with the wavering motion of a sea cucumber. A kind of thick, opalescent gauze hung over the opening of a rock teeming with hidden life. A silent war was going on in those depths bristling with hairy talons, where everything seemed a slimy tangle of snakes. Strange clicking noises, sudden ripples, the plash of waters told of the rush of invisible beings leaving behind them a wake of murky decay. One felt the presence of rampant fauna, of the primeval slime, of the green fermentation beneath the dark waters, which gave off a sour reek like a mud of vinegar and carrion, over whose oily surface moved insects made to walk on the water: chinch-bugs, white fleas, high-jointed flies, tiny mosquitoes that were hardly more than shimmering dots in the green light, for the green, shot through by an occasional ray of sun, was
so intense that the light as it filtered through the leaves had the color of moss dyed the hue of the swamp-bottoms as it sought the roots of the plants.
After sailing for a time through that secret channel, one began to feel the same thing that mountain-climbers feel, lost in the snow: the loss of the sense of verticality, a kind of disorientation, and a dizziness of the eyes. It was no longer possible to say which was tree and which reflection of tree. Was the light coming from above or below? Was the sky or the earth water? Were the openings in the foliage pools of light in the water? As the trees, the sticks, the lianas were refracted at strange angles, one finally began to see nonexistent channels, openings, banks. With this succession of minor mirages, my feeling of bewilderment, of being completely lost, grew until it became unbearable. It was as though I was being spun round and round upon myself to make me lose my bearings before bringing me to the threshold of some secret dwelling. I asked myself if the boatmen knew larboard from starboard any longer. I was beginning to be afraid. Nothing menaced me. All those around me seemed calm, but an indefinable fear out of the dim reaches of instinct was making me short of breath, as though I lacked air.
All this was aggravated by the dampness that clung to clothing, skin, hair; a warm, sticky dampness that permeated everything like a grease, making even more irritating the continuous stinging by flies, gnats, all the nameless insects, masters of the air until the malaria mosquito took over with the twilight. A toad that landed on my forehead gave me, after the first shock, an almost delightful sense of coolness. If I had not known that it was a toad, I would have kept it in the hollow of my hand to hold against my throbbing temples. Now little red spiders were dropping on the canoe. And thousands of spiderwebs hung in every direction, just above the water between the lowest branches. Each time the boat touched against them, the sides became covered with grayish combs, full of dried wasps, bits of wing, antennae, half-sucked shells. The men were dirty, greasy; their sweat-darkened shirts were befouled with the spittle of mud, resin, sap; from lack of sunshine, their faces had taken on that waxy tinge of the jungle-dwellers.
When we came into a small lagoon that died at the foot of a yellow rock, I felt myself trapped, hemmed in on all sides. The Adelantado called to me a short way off from where the canoes had tied up, to show me a horrible thing: a dead alligator, its flesh rotting, under whose hide swarms of green flies came and went. The buzzing that went on inside the carcass at moments took on the tone of a gentle lament, as though someone—a weeping woman, for instance—was moaning through the jaws of the reptile. I fled from the horror, seeking the protection of my lover. I was afraid. The shadows were closing about us in a premature twilight, and we had no sooner prepared a hasty camp than it was night.
Each of us sought refuge in the cradle-like compass of his hammock. And the croaking of enormous frogs invaded the jungle. The darkness trembled with fears and slithers. Somebody, somewhere, tried out the mouthpiece of an oboe. A grotesque brass set up a laugh in a hidden glade. A thousand flutes of two differently tuned notes answered each other through the leaves. And there were metal combs, saws whining through wood, harmonica reeds, the quavering stridulation of the crickets, which seemed to cover the whole earth. There were sounds like the peacock’s cry, belly growls, whistles that rose and died away, things that passed beneath us, flat to the ground, things that dived, hammered, creaked, howled like children, neighed in the treetops, rang bells in the hollow of a hole. I was dazed, frightened, feverish. The exhaustion of the trip, the nervous tension, had sapped my strength. When sleep finally overcame the fear of the threats I felt on every side, I was on the point of surrender—of screaming my fear—for the sake of hearing human voices.
(Tuesday, June 19)
XX / When the light came once more, I realized that I had passed the First Trial. The darkness had taken with it the terrors of the night. As I washed my chest and face in a pool of the channel, alongside Rosario, who was cleaning my breakfast utensils with sand, it seemed to me that I was sharing with the thousands of men who lived in the unexplored headwaters of the Great Rivers the primordial sense of beauty, of beauty physically perceived, equally shared by body and spirit, reborn with each rising of the sun. Beauty thus perceived, in such remoteness, brings man the pride of feeling himself the master of the world, the supreme heir of creation. Dawn in the jungle is far less beautiful, from the point of view of color, than sunset. Above a soil that exhales an age-old moisture, above water that divides the earth, above vegetation shrouded in mist, the dawn slips in with the grayness of rain, in a vague clarity that never seems to forecast a clear day. Hours must elapse before the sun, now high, freed by the treetops, can shed a clear ray through the myriad leaves. Nevertheless, dawn in the jungle always renews the intimate, the atavic rejoicing, carried in the blood stream, of ancestors who, for thousands of years, saw in each dawn the end of their nocturnal fears, the retreat of the roars, the scattering of the shadows, the confounding of the ghosts, the confining of evil within its bounds.
With the break of day, I felt called upon to apologize to Rosario for the few occasions to be together which this part of our journey afforded. She burst out laughing, and began to hum what must have been a ballad: “I am the new-wed wife—Whose tears fall like dew—For the bad match I have made—Which I can only rue.” Her malicious verses, full of allusions to our enforced continence, were still echoing when, poling once more, we came out into a broad channel leading to what the Adelantado informed me was the real jungle. As the water had overflowed its banks, flooding great stretches of earth, certain of the trees, enveloped in lianas rooted in the mud, had the air of boats at anchor, while others, of golden brown, prolonged themselves in a mirage of depth. Those of the ancient dead forest, whitened until they seemed more marble than wood, stood out like the towering obelisks of a drowned city. Behind those which could be identified, the mirity palms, the bamboos, the nameless vines along the banks, came the lush, exuberant vegetation, a tangle of lianas, bushes, creepers, briers, parasite growths, through which an occasional tapir crashed its way in search of a stream in which to refresh its snout.
Hundreds of herons, poised on their long legs, their necks sunk between their wings, surrounded the pools; an occasional vigilant humpbacked male dropped from the sky. A branch suddenly turned iridescent with the jubilant arrival of a flight of chattering parrots, who cast gaudy streaks upon the sour lower darkness where every species was engaged in the age-old struggle to climb over the other, rise, reach the light, the sun. The exaggerated elongation of certain weedy palms, the upward stretch of trees that showed a single leaf at the top of multiple trunks were different phases of an incessant vertical battle, above which towered the largest trees I had ever seen, trees that left far below, like creepers, the plants retarded by the shade, and opened out into an unclouded sky above the fray, their branches forming unreal aerial boscages that seemed suspended in space, from which hung transparent mosses, like torn lace.
Sometimes, after centuries of existence, the leaves dropped from one of these trees, its lichens dried up, its orchids were extinguished. Its wood aged, acquiring the texture of pink granite, and it stood erect, its monumental skeleton in silent nakedness revealing the laws of an almost mineral architecture, with symmetries, rhythms, balances of crystallized forms. Washed by the rain, unmoved by the tempests, there it stood several centuries longer until one day a ray of lightning finally cast it down into the shifting lower depths. Thereupon the colossus, unshaken since prehistoric times, crashed, groaning in all its splinters, hurling branches right and left, riven, all carbon and celestial fire, crushing and burning all that lay at its foot. A hundred trees died with it, crushed, uprooted, shivered, bringing down with them lianas that shot upward like bowstrings as they snapped. It came to its end in the age-piled humus of the jungle. From the earth emerged roots so vast, so interwoven that two separate streams suddenly found themselves made one by the work of those hidden plowshares, which emerged from their darkness
destroying nests of ants, opening craters that became the instant objective of the ant-eaters, with their threadlike, viscous tongues.
What amazed me most was the inexhaustible mimetism of virgin nature. Everything here seemed something else, thus creating a world of appearances that concealed reality, casting doubt on many truths. The alligators lurking in the depths of the swamps, motionless, jaws ready, seemed rotten, scale-covered logs. The vines seemed snakes, the snakes vines when their skins did not simulate the grains of precious woods, their eyes the markings of moth wings, their scales those of the pineapple or coral rings. The aquatic plants formed a thick carpet, hiding the water that flowed below, mimicking the vegetation of the solid earth. The fallen bark soon acquired the consistency of pickled laurel leaves, and the fungi were like congealed copper drippings sprinkled with sulphur. The chameleons were twigs, lapis lazuli, lead brightly striped in yellow, imitating the splashes of sunlight filtering through the leaves, which never allow it to come through fully. The jungle is the world of deceit, subterfuge, duplicity; everything there is disguise, stratagem, artifice, metamorphosis. The world of the lizard-cucumber, the chestnut-hedgehog, the cocoon-centipede, the carrot-larva, the electric fish that electrocutes from the dregs of the slime.
As we skirted the banks, the shade cast by several ceilings of vegetation brought a breath of coolness to the canoes. But a few seconds’ pause sufficed to turn this relief into an unbearable fervor of insects. There seemed to be flowers everywhere, but in nearly every case their colors were the lying effect of leaves at varying degrees of maturity or decay. There seemed to be fruit; but the roundness and ripeness of the fruits were feigned by oozing bulbs, fetid velvets, the vulvula of insect-eating plants like thoughts sprinkled with syrup, dotted cacti that bore tulips of saffron-colored sperm a handspan from the ground. And when an orchid could be discerned, high above the bamboo thickets, high above the yopos, it seemed as unreal, as inaccessible, as the most dizzying Alpine edelweiss. And there were the trees, too, which were not green, but dotted the banks with clumps of amaranth or glowed with the yellow of a burning bush. Even the sky lied at times when, reversing its altitude in the quicksilver of the ponds, it buried itself in heavenly abysmal depths.
The Lost Steps Page 16
