The Devil's Garden (16 page)

‘Where have you been?’ I asked. ‘What time did you come in last night?’

‘I came in this morning. I have been in the gardens.’

‘What? All weekend?’

‘Yes.’ He glanced at the screen and clicked with the mouse. ‘Friday and Saturday – they were good days. And then yesterday – after the rain – I worked with
torches until late. I have been sleeping in the storage hut to save time coming backwards and forwards.’

He meant no reproof but I felt guilt leaking into my bloodstream like quicklime into the river.

‘The good news is that I have been round half of the sites.’ He pulled at both ear lobes simultaneously. ‘I think so – we should keep going, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Everything is entered on the computer. And I have labelled the pictures, of course.
Ruhig fließt der Rhein.
’ He clicked again then wheeled the chair all the way around
childishly with his heels so that he could face me properly. ‘So. What happened here? It looks like the circus came? Or was it the famous swine?’

‘The Judge is back. He is using the Station as a registration post.’

He drew heavy breath. ‘Why must it be that whenever I think the worst I think the truth?’

‘You should have been here yesterday: anarchy.’

‘I saw the jetty, my friend.’

‘He is mad,’ I said.

‘No, he’s not mad. You do not survive in the way he survives if you are mad. He survives in the capital. He survives here. He works by himself. He considers himself separate from
everything that happens in the world. And yet people of every kind do his bidding. Not mad – much worse than that.’ Lothar scooted himself forward and backwards a little.
‘What’s the plan?’

‘I am going to talk to him now. He has to get a grip of it. Even if he is treating the whole registration as a joke – he can’t let it be dangerous.’ I stood upright.
‘Have you heard anything more?’

He coughed again. ‘No. Nothing since you left. I have been in the forest.’

I hesitated. ‘Thanks, Lothar.’

‘For what?’

‘Thanks for your work.’

I had never seen him blushing. And I took it then as embarrassment – embarrassment at me thanking him.

‘I love this place,’ he said.

IV

Only twenty yards beyond the
comedor
and the Station felt different. The walls of the jungle were closer on the upriver side – a slight tapering of the
clearing. I realized with a start that I had not come this way since the Judge and Cordero had arrived. Somehow, this side had become . . . theirs. Before, when Rebaque was here, I would walk up
blithely and often and sip bourbon on his porch.

The heat was growing heavier. Soon, the rain would seem like a dream. Leaf-cutters were streaming across the path,
Atta cephalotes
. A foraging raid, six deep, but separating into several
thinner lines that fanned out in radial arms away to my left, like a great river flowing backwards, unnatural, in urgent search of its every source.

‘The fungus-growing ants are wise,’ Quinn would say in his lectures, ‘not because the Bible says so – “
Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be
wise
” – but because they are the only creatures on Earth properly to heed that great atheist Voltaire.’ And then he would describe the manner in which they cultivated their
mighty fungus gardens.

The Judge had the best of the guest huts, the last on the right. Ahead, the path to the generator went on into the jungle – improbable, ill-kempt. I turned aside.

She was motionless in the hammock and so I only noticed her belatedly – the same woman who had arrived that afternoon on the jetty. I nodded. She was wrapped in a sheet, which was drawn up
beneath her arms and tight across her chest like a strapless evening gown – stark white against her skin and the black tangle of her hair. She must have been watching me all the while. She
was a
mestizo
and the capital’s jealousies and calculations animated her appraisal.

‘Is the Judge here?’ I asked.

Her hazel eyes did not leave mine. ‘Raúl?’ She said his name without raising her voice much above a murmur and still without taking her eyes off me. I had never seen
provocation and indifference blended so exactly.

‘Raúl,’ she called again, ‘there is a man here.’

I heard a clattering and then a second sound that I did not recognize – a steady low-pitched roar. The door was pulled open awkwardly and the Judge appeared. He was stripped to his slim
waist, grizzled hair on his chest and his face half-concealed by an Old Testament beard of shaving foam. In one hand he was carrying a blue-flamed gas burner and in the other an overfilled pan of
water.

He stopped and regarded me as though astounded at his own patience with the world.

‘Were it not for Rafaela’s morning ministrations, then today I would be minded to cut my own throat,’ he said. ‘I do not sleep any more, Doctor. I do not sleep well and
fully. All night, my mind teems. Imagined voices, imagined conversations.’ He set down the little camp stove on the table. ‘It is an unendurable agony. Sleep comes only briefly and as
frugal as the rain. Do you suffer? The harrowed mind?’ Foam slid slowly off his jaw like snowmelt – against the continued roar of the flame, it created the impression that his entire
face was liquefying. ‘How are the ants this morning? Do we have long to go before we can finally hand over? Or are they dragging the damn thing out like sadists?’

‘I want to talk to you.’

He fixed his pale eyes on me as if reading something in my face that I did not concede. ‘This is a great habit of yours, Dr Forle, if I may say so – saying that you
want
to
talk to a person when in actuality you already
are
talking to a person. You are here. You are talking to me. Let us not dispute it further.’

‘How long do you plan to use the Station as a registration post?’

He balanced the pan on the burner. The water slopped and brimmed its weight in chasing circles. The tiny stove would topple, I thought. The hut would surely burn, the trees, the forest.

‘Do you have a difficulty with this policy?’

‘No, I think it is a clever idea – thoroughly thought through and very well organized.’

He looked up sharply. ‘You are not without a sense of humour, Doctor. This is good. Those without a sense of humour cannot be trusted with anything.’ A precarious equilibrium had now
been achieved and he straightened up to face me. ‘Well, what shall we do, then – you and I? What do you propose? What next? Every morning, it’s the same question –
no?’

‘The jetty has collapsed,’ I said. ‘It’s unsafe. You can’t do anything else here until it is repaired. You can use our computer if you wish to send a
message.’

‘To whom?’ His thumb had found the woman’s foot and begun a slow massage. She shifted her legs apart a fraction the better to accommodate his attention though her eyes remained
on me. ‘To whom shall I send this message?’

‘I don’t know – whoever you want – but I’m telling you that we are here for four months and that I will not let you use the Station as a registration post until you
have mended the jetty.’

‘I am enjoying this assertiveness, Dr Forle. Is it the woman or the drugs – or is something else inside you uncurling again?’

‘When that is done,’ I continued, ‘if you want to carry on here, then we will need to organize a system so that there are not too many people registering at once. We will also
have to cordon off our side of the clearing.’ Our side. ‘I don’t want people wandering anywhere near the lab. The equipment in there is irreplaceable. We can’t afford to
have anything damaged or stolen. Not just for our sake, but because – presumably – your government is going to want to rent the place out to scientists in the future.’

‘The savages are thieves and hooligans – is that it?’

‘In the meantime, you will have to set up somewhere else.’

Foam fell from his face. ‘I agree – I agree absolutely,’ he said.

‘Good.’ I was taken aback but I spoke without showing it. ‘Then that is decided: no registration here until the jetty is fixed.’

‘As you wish.’ He raised her foot to his lips.

‘Thank you.’

‘I will peddle my democracy elsewhere.’ He kissed further up her calf and she smiled. ‘Where it does not affect you.’

The water had started to boil. He let go of the foot and stepped smartly back to the table. I saw for the first time that he was carrying a cut-throat razor in the waistband of his pyjamas.

‘That look in your eyes makes me feel better, Doctor. It reminds me of home. Of the men I have sentenced.’

I hesitated. ‘Where is the Colonel?’

He took out the blade and sat as if to eat soup.

‘I have no idea. But he will be doing as he sees necessary. He goes on despite, Doctor,
despite
. Much like your friend, the German, I notice. It is you and I who are to blame with
our observational natures. The absurd sham of non-engagement.’ He raised his jaw to scrape the blade up his throat and looked down his nose at me. ‘Who knows where the Colonel is? The
Colonel is out there.’

He flicked foam from the blade. The woman had still not taken her eyes off me.

‘Ah, you may feign your disagreement and your disgust – especially in front of the women, Doctor – but you don’t really believe in all the mud and the huts. Not in your
heart. Nobody does. When they ethnically cleansed America for those angry and disaffected Europeans, they also brought industry and endeavour and fortitude and civilization and law and medicine and
welfare and technology and, yes, science. And in your heart you believe – despite the genocide – in your heart, you believe that
it is better this way
. We all do. It began
– as it always begins – in blood and slaughter; it became conquest and slavery; and by way of shame and in need of disguise, it pulled on the robes of religion and then the suit and tie
of the market; until eventually it came to’ – he laughed – ‘con-servationism.’

‘I will see you both this evening, I hope,’ I said.

Close beside the veranda, there was a maddened tree: the walking palm,
Socratea exorrhiza
. They lurch slowly through the forest on stilted roots in search of more light.

V

We gathered in the sanctuary of the lab. Lothar had made a flask of his treacle-thick morning coffee, which he poured into whiskey tumblers. We sat together at the bench
amidst the welcome orderliness and calm.

I relayed the Judge’s assurances.

Kim wondered who would tell the Indians and the
ribereños
.

I said that my guess was that the Judge had either already decided to leave or that he would set up somewhere else and that, hopefully, everybody would come to know of the change by
mid-afternoon in the same way that everybody in the jungle always did: quickly and mysteriously.

Felipe, meanwhile, felt that it was his pressing duty to spend the day attempting to return the Station to a measure of normality and cleanliness. He was worried about Jorge, who had not been
seen since the trip to Machaguar. But most of all, he wanted to know what we thought he, Felipe, should do about the jetty.

Jorge would most likely come back on the same boat as Sole, we reckoned, and he might as well forget about the jetty.

After that we got on to the work and Lothar argued that it would be quicker for him to carry on cataloguing the results his marathon had generated rather than for Kim to take over and decode his
jottings.

Kim agreed and expressed a great deal of appreciation for the hours he had put in.

I suggested that without Lothar or Felipe to act as guides, the best course was for Kim and me to go together to the cluster of easily accessed sites directly upriver that we both knew well. And
that we should not waste any more time but start straight away.

VI

Kin-selection works because of the strange way ants inherit their sex: fertilized eggs become female and unfertilized become male. The consequences of this method of gender determination are
profound: it means that each new female ant is born three-quarters related to her sisters. Why? Because each sister has inherited an identical half of her genes from her father (since the male
father was in effect a clone) to go alongside the standard shared quarter set of genes inherited from her non-clone mother. In other words, ants are more closely related to their sisters than they
are to their parents or would be to their offspring.

Thus, it makes more sense, in terms of the genes, for a worker ant not to produce young but to devote herself instead to caring for her close-kinned sisters. And, once it becomes more
beneficial to favour sisters over children, a colony is formed. As long as the queen is able to have more offspring as a result of each of her daughters’ communal attention to their sisters,
then the shared genes will still be favoured and so disperse more quickly through the population.

In this way, for a while, biologists were able to preserve the gene’s eye view of natural selection and explain the cooperation of the colony.

But the ants defy us at every turn. For now we know that they – our
Myrmelachista
more so than most – mock even this explanation. How so? Because in the Devil’s
Gardens there are many queens. And the daughters of one queen behave cooperatively towards the daughters of another – behave cooperatively, that is, towards other ants to which they are
not
related. (In truth, we have long suspected that the lemon ants are cooperating between colonies. And this was the really significant work that Dr Quinn and I had in mind when we first
began.)