by Louis Bayard
“Not if…” Luz paused. “Not if she is like me—from out there. Oh, but it is not just the men who do this, Senhor. I have known girls to take lovers of their own or lie down with other girls’ men. They can do this so long as their husband does not become uma piada—something to laugh at.”
“But you are not permitted to do this yourself.”
“I have not wished it.”
A spinster’s logic, he thought. Yet here she was, the sap still rising in her. Had she been screening herself from the sun all these years, she might easily have slipped on a summer frock and walked into a Gracie Street cotillion, and no one would have been the wiser.
“Luz. What do you mean when you say Anhanga never chose you?”
“I was given to him.”
“Why?”
“Because he killed my father.”
Something tightened in Kermit’s throat.
“They handed you over to your father’s murderer?”
“Yes.”
“But that’s barbaric.”
“No, Senhor. For them, it was the right thing. It was justice, as you say, though they didn’t have the word for it. I never questioned. I suppose I was glad they let me live. And ashamed, too, to be alive. Probably I should have died with my father, or with my brother and sister. But I didn’t.” She began to scrape the dead skin from her toe. “When I gave birth to Thiago … I bled very much, but I lived, and Thiago lived. It made me barren, but I cannot complain, Senhor Kermit. It was God’s doing.”
“After all you have endured, Luz, why would God punish you?”
“Oh, no!” she exclaimed. “Not me. Them.”
And, without warning, she rose and walked toward him. He could feel her breath stirring in his beard.
“It is all part of God’s plan, Senhor, I believe that. I believe he sent the Beast. I believe he sent you.”
“For what possible reason?”
“Ah, well.” She shrugged. “If I knew this reason, I would be God.”
They were silent once more as the shadows deepened around them.
“You should know, Senhor. Thiago is not the name they gave him. It is the one I use.”
“Well, it’s a fine name. A saint’s name.”
She nodded. “The first apostle to be martyred for his faith. It is there in the Book of Acts. I like to read to Thiago from the Bible sometimes.”
“So they let you—”
“Not from my father’s Bible. They buried that long ago, as I said. I recite from memory.” She smiled. “This is what comes of being a missionary’s daughter. Bits and pieces—whole chapters, even—come back word for word.”
“No doubt.”
“Thiago knows much Portuguese. He can make his way in the world. The world out there.”
Kermit looked at her. “I am glad to know it,” he said.
He was conscious, even as he spoke, that this was not the right answer. She leaned toward him and hooped her hands around his wrists.
“Senhor Kermit.”
“Yes?”
“I wish to ask you something.”
“Of course.”
“When all this is done—when you leave here—I would like you to take Thiago.”
Slowly, gently, he peeled her fingers from his wrists. He looked into her eyes.
“That is a large request,” he said.
“I know.”
“I don’t even know how we could accomplish it for you.”
“You need not worry. I will make it happen.”
He slumped down on his hammock, kneaded his scalp. “The boy’s father…”
“You’re right. Anhanga would not approve. He would rather die, I think. But I will make certain he is not there when the time comes.” Once more she pressed her hands in his. “The rest,” she said, “is up to you.”
17
“A beauty, isn’t it?”
The Colonel nudged his elbow toward the sky, where a fat moon sat just above the parapet of the trees, pouring down bluish light on the palm fronds, on the crowns of the Cinta Larga huts, on the crooked old tree huddling over the stream. They were seated on the village’s western extremity, not too far from the ancestral burial grounds.
“These savages are awfully good at making fires,” said the Colonel. “Have you noticed? Even the wettest wood raises a flame.”
He gave the embers a light kick—and then, with a wince, pulled his leg back.
“A spasm,” he explained.
“Let me see it.”
With a grunt, the old man rolled up the cuff of his trouser leg. There, on the soft inner portion of the lower thigh, was the abscess, slowly colonizing, bulbous with pus. And something Kermit had never seen before: a ringlet of bumps around the base of the knee. Each bump about the size of a fish egg.
Maggots. Feeding and flourishing just beneath the skin.
“Is it bad?” the old man asked.
“Oh,” said Kermit, gently rolling the trouser leg back down. “I’ve seen worse. One of Fawcett’s companions, do you recall? Came down with espundia. All the flesh around his mouth and nose rotted away. He looked like a leper by the time he made it out.”
A grim smile played across the old man’s face. “It appears we are all engaged in a grand competition. Mere dysentery will no longer suffice. One must contract something truly exotic.” He touched the abscess through the cloth. “Perhaps Cajazeira can give it another lance when we get back.”
When we get back. Not a touch of uncertainty in the old man’s tone. If only the firelight hadn’t brought out all the fissures in his face.
“Kermit. You know what I’m going to say, don’t you?”
“You needn’t.”
“I am merely stipulating that if anything goes wrong tomorrow—not that anything will, but if for some reason I can’t make it back to camp—there are to be no extraordinary measures on my behalf.”
“Father.”
“You are to leave me, Kermit, do you understand?”
“Don’t—”
“It is my sincerest wish. You know the family credo. We are buried where we fall.”
Kermit scratched the underside of his boot. Smiled sadly. “Surely, Father, we might wait until you are fallen.”
“I don’t intend to wait. Not when it comes to that.”
Kermit nodded, said nothing. But from the corner of his eye, he scanned the old man from head to boots. Wondering where the morphine vial was.
“Father,” he said. “You do know what Mother would say.”
“I do.”
“And you know what I say.” He clapped the old man’s shoulder. “You’re to come home with us. Even if I must carry you all the way.”
“Ha!” Grinning, the Colonel squeezed his son’s hand. “That would be a mortal strain even for Hercules. I shouldn’t wish it even on President Wilson.”
They laughed softly.
“Suppose,” said the Colonel. “Suppose we were to follow that stream there. Follow it all the way to its natural end. Do you suppose it might take us back to the river?”
“To a river, surely.”
“Well, never mind,” he said. “We must take the Cinta Larga at their word. Tomorrow morning we will be back with our comrades. That is what Miss Luz has told us, and I choose to believe her.”
Kermit poked a stick into the fire, watched the shower of sparks billow up.
“Luz has asked something of us, Father.”
“Yes?”
“She would like us to take Thiago.”
The old man glanced up. “Tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
The Colonel absorbed the news. Then he, too, took a stick to the fire.
“I can’t see the boy’s father permitting that, can you?”
“Anhanga? No, he would not.”
“Nor would the Cinta Larga.”
“I wasn’t intending to ask their permission.”
“So you have already given your promise.”
“I’ve promised noth
ing.”
Tiny blue and yellow lights came blazing out of the forest. Fireflies, blinking in no clear pattern.
“Kermit, please understand. I should be the first to stand by your side in any battle, however quixotic.”
“Quixotic?”
“Which leads me to my next point. Even if we found a way to spirit the boy away without the Cinta Larga knowing, oughtn’t we…”
“Yes?”
“Consider what’s best for the lad?”
“You mean this, Father?” With a sweep of his arm, Kermit circumscribed the whole village. “Day after day, living hand to mouth? Cuffed and beaten and despised? His mother bartered back and forth like a mule?”
“Kermit—”
“These aren’t noble savages, Father. Yes, we had a fine time splashing around with their children, but those children will grow up to be abductors and murderers. Cannibals. Rapists. You can’t honestly believe his life is better for being lived here.”
He could actually see the heat rising through the old man’s skin. “If you please, Kermit, I have eyes. I can see what the boy is up against. But civilization is not an unmixed blessing. Think of the diseases he might contract. The social barriers…”
“And when have you ever honored those barriers, Father? When have you taught us to honor them?”
“I am speaking of the boy’s capacity to overcome them. He has never learned to read or write. This is the only life to which he has been trained. Isn’t it possible it’s the life to which he’s best suited?”
Kermit leaned back on his elbows. “Then we must be counted his greatest enemies, Father, for we are putting his world on a map for everyone to see. Do you think, once we’ve charted this river of ours, the rubber tappers will be far behind? The telegraph builders? The railway men? They will all come.” His heart was clanging inside him. “We may take him to civilization now, or we may wait for it come to him. If I’m not mistaken, the latter course rarely ends well.”
There was a long silence.
“I’m not sure either course ends well,” said the Colonel. Sliding his hand through his hair, he tweezed out a pair of lice—crushed them idly between his thumb and index finger. “But what a firebrand you are, Kermit! I should have engaged you to speak at the last convention.”
“You know I would have hated that.”
The old man nodded. “I’ll grant you this, though: One Thiago is worth a dozen Cinta Larga. Give me a few hours with him, he’d be a champion pugilist. Give me a few years, I’d get him elected to Congress.”
“You can’t make him president, I’m afraid. The Constitution.”
“Oh, I’m sure we could find some other country to suit. Panama, maybe.” The old man’s eyes gleamed in the firelight. “And there’s no harm in being vice president, you know. That can turn out quite well.”
“Point taken.”
Above their heads, indigo clouds as large as continents were squeezing out runnels of color. But the only color Kermit could see after a while was black, a swoop of black wings. Without ever abandoning his seat or shifting position, he fell fast asleep—like an old man nodding on a porch—and might have slept straight through till morning had the smell of pork not crawled into his nostrils. He woke with saliva dripping from his mouth. The Colonel, all gums and teeth, was standing over him.
“Our feast awaits.”
* * *
THE CAPTURE OF THE Beast was not the only exciting event to take place that day in the circumscribed world of the Cinta Larga. Only an hour or so later, one of their men had surprised and killed a peccary. Not just any peccary, either, but a caitetu munde. At four feet in length, it was nearly twice the size of any other boar Kermit had encountered.
To the village shamans, the appearance of such bounty so hard upon the Beast’s slaying was conclusive proof that the spirits of darkness were appeased. So, while the Beast’s carcass had incited paroxysms of relief, the arrival of the peccary—wrapped around poles, carried by a delegation of village braves—was a time of pure rejoicing. The entire village gathered in the plaza, squatting in jagged rows, all freshly painted in red uruku and arabesques of dark-blue genipap. The dead peccary, roasting in a column of fire, made a great crackle of fat and flesh.
As each section was cooked, one of the village women hacked it away; another threw it into a heap in the center of the plaza. The villagers rushed in, lunging and grabbing. Children fought alongside their elders, mothers snatched from mothers, yet the mood never veered from festive, and every diner, upon taking his fill, threw back his head and let out a cloud-shaking belch.
“That’s all right,” said the Colonel. “I wasn’t so very hungry.”
“Aqui,” said Luz, bearing two ceramic bowls.
In one sat the peccary’s foot, still hooved. In the other, the severed head, seared into a carbon mask.
“To express his thanks,” Luz announced, “the chief wishes you to have these.”
“O chefe!” answered the old man. “Be sure to send him our thanks for these delicacies. We are delighted to partake.”
He wasn’t being diplomatic. He grabbed the peccary’s foot and waved it at the chief, then tucked right in.
“Mmm … just like a slab of Virginia ham. Try some, Kermit.… You haven’t even touched the head.…”
But Kermit couldn’t get past the Cinta Larga themselves, with their greasy hands and smacking lips and their faces shining in the firelight. Now and again, Kermit would find the chief’s eye resting on him, and for the sake of politics he would raise the boar’s head to his mouth and make a show of eating. At last, one of the village boys crawled over and, with a grin of complicity, seized the head for his own.
As the bowls were cleared and the peccary’s carcass rendered, a shaman strode forth in a headdress of hawk’s feathers. Someone else began pounding on a hollowed-out log, and someone else cooed into a bamboo panpipe. A woman took up a deep wailing chant. From the darkness now came men in outsized animal masks, fashioned from tree bast: A squirming snake. A springing jaguar. A yellow-eyed owl fluttering from post to post.
“These are the demons,” said Luz, leaning in to Kermit’s left ear. “They are angry at our village, and they have sent the Beast to harm us.”
“Dear me,” said the Colonel. “This must be some sort of Amazonian mystery play. I see a lizard, a toad. And that’s the most fearsome by-God butterfly I’ve ever encountered!”
Now growling onto the stage came an actor in the largest mask of all, covering face and torso, incorporating elements of the howler, yes, as well as bits from all the other masks: owl talons, snake coils, jaguar teeth. Screeching and slavering, he rent the air with his claws, then ran straight for the audience, pausing at the very brink of hurling himself at them.
“A fine Beast!” declared the Colonel. “If a bit larger than the original.”
Two more masked actors swept onto the scene and arrayed themselves on either side of the creature, ready to do battle. The smaller of the hunters had a floury face, a pair of lion’s eyes ringed in ellipses, and a single row of teeth, as large as pickets.
“Well, who’s that supposed to be?” the Colonel asked.
“É seu pai,” whispered Luz.
“What did she say? Somebody’s papa?”
“Just some obscure local deity, Father.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what. Whoever it is, he’s giving that Beastie a good hard thumping. And that furry thing next to him, who’s that?”
Me, thought Kermit.
A mane of light brown hair. A long scraggly beard. An air of gloom to even the most violent acts. Yes, they had captured him quite well.
The two hunters began to pound the Beast on its snout. Then they grabbed it by its arms and spun it in a wide circle, the drum keeping time the whole way. Dizzy, outmatched, the Beast fainted. The hunters, seizing their advantage, pretended to stomp it into submission. As the Beast released its last cries, a round of cheers went up from the crowd, none louder than the Colonel
’s.
“Well done! Hooray!”
There were no curtain calls. The actors simply stripped off their masks and tossed them, one by one, into the great fire.
“They are sending the spirits home,” Luz explained. “If you keep them too long, they grow even angrier with you.”
Kermit felt a slight chill as he watched his own mask melting in a hot blue flame. The last part to disappear was his eyes. Eyes that had been, for as long as he could recall, an obscure torment. He could remember mornings at Groton, standing before the long walnut-framed glass on his dorm-room door and scrutinizing, with a feeling of mounting dread, his own demeanor: milky, stunted, unthreatening. It seemed to him now that his whole life had been an attempt to escape that face of his.
And so he had, he thought, watching his simulacrum vanish in the flames.
The last thing to be piled atop the fire was the genuine article: the dead howler itself, still hog-tied, carried out on a litter of sticks and waxy leaves. The onset of rigor mortis had stiffened it into a kind of sculpture—like a piece of wood beaten on by the sea, all twists and joints. The villagers gave it the greatest possible berth as it passed—made no sound, lobbed no spit in its direction. The whole ceremony had the solemnity and precision of a flag-folding, as the litter bearers positioned themselves alongside the pyre and swung the creature once … twice … then flung it clear. A second later, the flames had swaddled it whole. There was a curious stuttering, a low hiss, a puff or two of sepia smoke. From the depths of the fire, the aroma of roasting meat billowed forth, replaced in short order by a bitter, tarry scent that was the perfect translation for the compacting ball of bitterness in the fire’s heart.
And so the creature burned. Quickly, efficiently—comprehensively—as if it were in the greatest of hurries, as if the only thing still holding it on earth was the awestruck gaze of every last Cinta Larga. The fire popped and keened and coughed, but the silence on every side of it held fast, and when the last remnant of monkey, the last black blot of tissue, was consumed, the Colonel’s gravelly tenor could be heard clear to the other side of the village (though he barely spoke above a whisper).
“Well,” he said. “That’s all over with.”
* * *
BUT THE POSTMORTEM CELEBRATION was just getting under way. The chief rose from his throne and gave three soft claps. In perfect synchronicity, three village men glided into formation and began to stamp out a rhythm with bamboo pounders. Drum and pipe took up the chase, and the villagers caught the pulse and passed it through their feet. Three women entered the formation, and the steps grew more intricate, the chants deepened, the pipe shrilled higher, the drummer pounded harder.… Kermit didn’t even grasp the din that had risen up around him until he saw the Colonel flapping his mouth.
