The Economy of Light (5 page)

“What was that noise?” I asked.

“
Curupira
,” he said matter-of-factly. “Bogey-man. That’s his noise. Not usual to hear his noise, and we’re so early on the river. But now we leave everything behind here. From now on this is a place for bugs and monsters. You will see the monsters, or see some of them already. You think this is crazy?” Genaro asked.

I shrugged, trying to get that wailing noise out of my mind. I thought back to when I had first heard the howler monkeys, how their shrieks had jolted me, but this sound was different. I couldn’t imagine it coming from anything known to science. It did have a beauty, though, as did the inhuman lowing of white whales. Yet, somehow, this sound was...sinister.

“The
curupira
is dreams, that’s all,” Genaro continued. When you hear it you dream of dying. It helps you die, but it cannot kill you. Not like the
cobra grande
, which I myself once saw. Now that is a real thing in the world. It is like a dragon and over a hundred feet long. Its eyes are
azulado
, like fireflies blinking. And it kills those on the river. I’ve seen it turn over boats and make food for the piranha. And I’ve also seen the
Mapinguari
, the monster with one eye that lives in the jungle. I saw him gore a man. When I breathed the doctor’s red dust, I saw these things, too. I saw snakes crawling through the air and disappear like smoke. I saw a man see these things and die and come to life again.”

“What about the doctor’s red dust?” I asked, wondering if Genaro was a little crazy, or perhaps it was just the normal run of superstition one acquires in this part of the world. Certainly Genaro had no education; like Onca, he couldn’t read or write, except to make a squiggle that signified his name.

Most likely he had seen some of his monsters on hallucinogens.

But this was the first time he had mentioned the doctor on his own, and so I tried to get him to continue.

“If we get to where we’re going, maybe you’ll see,” Genaro said. “Me, I think the doctor made these monsters to keep Indians away. Maybe he changed his mind later and couldn’t kill them. Who knows but
Deus
and the doctor?”

“Tell me what you remember about the doctor?” I asked.

Genaro had his back turned to me.

“Genaro?”

“I remember what I tell you. The rest I cannot remember.”

Or will not, I thought.

Genaro took a sip from his bottle of
cachaça
as he piloted the boat up the dead-quiet river. The water was like black glass, and the silence was as palpable as the darkness.

* * * *

I slept most of the night to the constant throbbing of the engine and the breaking of water against the hull. I came awake sharply a few times, twice screaming, but I couldn’t remember what, if anything I had dreamed, and feeling uneasy and anxious, I fell back to sleep, to finally wake up well after dawn. Although we had put up the canvass to keep out the bugs, they had easily gotten inside. I brushed six or seven transparent pium flies from my face and arms. Looking closely, I could see the abdomen’s of the creatures filled with blood, my blood. The bites itched, and I was covered with tiny welts. I got up and pulled down the canvass.

“I think sometimes the canvass makes them worse,” Genaro said, looking back at me from the wheel. It’s like we built a house for them to live in. You should put alcohol on yourself, Meester.”

“I have some insect repellent,” I said.

“Alcohol works much better. Stop the itch then drink some. Then you can use the other stuff.”

I noticed that the cloud of insects wasn’t swirling around him. Perhaps it was something about his metabolism or sweat that kept them away. But they were devouring me.

“We’ll be out of it soon, Genaro said. “These bugs, they don’t like to travel too far.”

He was right, and I did as he said. Indeed, the alcohol eased the itching and burning, but the sores from my pemphigus which had been stung were especially painful. The day passed uneventfully. Genaro kept to the east side of the Branco for shade and the west shore later in the afternoon. I kept to the hammock, for I was trying to conserve my strength, what I had left. I ate Onca’s gruel and while I perspired in the choking heat and humidity, my insides felt cool and anesthetized. I wasn’t anxious, or frightened. Perhaps it was the river; perhaps I had absorbed its calm, its rhythm. Genaro seemed in his element here, and to watch him, one could believe he was happy, for the time being at least. He would turn to me every few minutes and nod or curl his upper lip, which for him was the equivalent of a smile. We didn’t talk much after last night, except some small talk, which petered out, for it sounded so inane against the backdrop of river and perfectly clear sky and mud banks and dense forest, a wall I could not imagine penetrating. We passed a few black caymans, ugly alligators baking in the sun, and turtles, whose eggs were an illegal native staple, for they were becoming an endangered species. But here in the wilds, life was in profusion. Pink macaws shouted, flycatchers crashed through shrubs as we passed, and all manner of bird cawed and screed and made creaking unbirdlike sounds: jaos and hoatzins and Orinoco geese. Kingfishers flew close to the surface of the water, and I caught a glimpse of a huge black snake slithering between two rocks. The snake had to be fifteen feet long. It was easy to imagine how one could exaggerate size here...to imagine a great black snake that was a hundred feet long, that swam just below the surface of the river until it sensed a barco to capsize in its waters. And I even glimpsed a jaguar, or thought I did, and I remembered its caged cousin near the entrance to my hotel.

As the day wore on, my thoughts seemed to move back to memory, and I thought of my ex-wife Adriana. The river seemed to open me up, for I felt a sense of loss over her, as if it were only days rather than years since she left me. She had loved me more that I could love her, for I was obsessed with my work, with Mossad, as if by finding Mengele, I could rework my life again from the beginning. And indeed that’s what I had promised her. I would change. I would be ready for a family and a permanent home. Now, twenty years too late, I ached for her, for the pretty little kitchen she had made, for the way she stared at me when she thought I wasn’t looking, for the security and love she had tried to give me. And I remember how I had felt when she left. Lonely, a bit, but relieved. I had become like iron
after
I survived. I had survived Mengele and died. And the river reminded me. It seemed to sing with voices I only now remembered, and on this sun-scorching day, as we motored through primeval land, I wanted to close my eyes and be done with myself. It was no longer guilt, but a profound sense of loss, a loss of everyone I had loved, a loss, finally, of self.

We passed a hut in the center of a clearing beyond the mud flats of the river. It’s sides were mud and wattle, and it looked like a beehive that was secured to the ground by a huge wishbone, which was in actuality a tree cut down from the forest beyond. Green parrots and pink and turquoise macaws perched on the limbs straddling the hut and screamed at each other. The roof was covered with palm leaves. Food and waste littered the ground around the hut. A primitive pier reached over the water like an unfinished bridge; a canoe bobbed up and down in the water beside it, and a man stood at the pier’s edge. He watched us and waved. Although he wore only torn, baggy trousers belted with twine, and seemed to be in good physical shape, I could not even begin to guess his age. His face was so disfigured that he looked like a creature that had escaped from one of Goya’s etching plates into the bright sunlight. His nose and the upper part of his mouth had been eaten away, turning him into a monster that looked like he was always screaming silently, or perhaps luridly laughing. The horrifying effect was heightened by the few misshapen teeth that remained in his lower jaw. He must have contracted leishmaniasis, a parasitic disease that was not uncommon in this part of the world. But I had never seen the disease progress this far. I couldn’t help but think, as I watched him standing beside his small boat, that this was the River Lethe rather than a tributary of the Amazon, and this twilight creature waving to us was Charon, hailing us down.

I found myself waving back.

“It’s bad luck to look at him,” Genaro said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“He’s like the bogey-man. He’s a dream thing. I know him. I’ve seen him before.”

Then we rounded a curve in the river and the grotesque and his hut and pier and boat were gone, as if they had been heat ghosts on a highway, and for an instant I believed that if we turned around and went back, we would not find anything but mud-flats and river and forest. But it was not the place that was magical or irreal—not Brazil, not the river, not the jungle; it was my impending death, my closeness to it, that was turning me into a
bruxa
, a sorcerer, a lucid dreamer. I drew a raw and complicated strength from it; and it connected me like an umbilicus to my boyhood, to the camps, to Mengele. For there I had survived as a dreamer, swimming between dream and reality as if they were flowing side by side like the Negro and Amazon. I was a child demon, a denizen of my waking nightmares, just as was Mengele, who created them. He had been pulled into his own dark and evil magicks, and it gave him the blind, monomaniacal strength to tower above rules and morality, to become as cruel as Heinrich Hoffman’s
Struwwelpeter
storybook characters, which we had both grown up with. Good and evil were simply opposed manifestations of power: the interjection of dreams into the world.

I watched a group of large yellow butterflies flitter across the water before us and then swoop up into the air like dust devils being carried by the wind. And Genaro was right, for I suddenly and with a shock remembered last night’s dreams that had been working themselves out of me like a psychic peristalsis all morning. It was one dream, recurring, Onca’s dream. I was in this boat, just as I am. In fact everything was exactly as it is: the suffocating humidity, the smell of Carter Insect Repellant and alcohol, the reflections of light on the water, the mudbanks and grotesquely shaped roots and vines that hung into the water like the limbs of some infinitely long slithering creature.

But I had the same face as the man on the shore.

I had waved to myself.

Death was turning me into the man on the shore, baking my bones brown; it would soon dissolve my flesh, a cosmic leishmaniasis.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE DREAM FOREST

We traveled up the Branco to the Catrimani River, which went north and then west until we were in Wakatauteri country, which was near the eastern border of Venezuela. We stayed the night on the river and put to shore at dawn. Genaro scattered amulets over the deck: stones and herbs and a worn skull, undeniably human; I was surprised he would have been carrying such a thing, but I made no mention of it.

“We have to leave the boat in the open here, nothing else to do,” Genaro said. “We could try to cover it, but no use. People, they know we’re coming. I see them in the bush before.”

“You never mentioned it to me,” I said.

“Not necessary to say anything. But Aitaí people, they’re around.”

“Will we see them?” I asked, as we divided up our packs. Genaro took the heaviest, but I wanted to carry my weight too.

“There’s a mission here, and many Yanomano there,” Genaro said. Yanomano are Aitaí, too. But nobody’s supposed to go there unless you have government papers. To make sure you don’t mess up the Indian culture.” He raised his lip after he said that, obviously pleased with himself. “They’re teaching Indians how to get along with white people, teaching them how to use money, but there it’s the white people who live in cages to keep out the Indians. It’s stupid, but they’re afraid, the government’s afraid, that those pure Indians will get corrupted and get like me. Although I’m not pure, anyway. But I was at that place once, and unless we’re in some big trouble I wouldn’t go back. Who knows, they may all be dead by now anyway. Maybe killed. Or disease. Or maybe all the Indians leave their
maloccas
and go back to the trees, make their own villages again. That probably wouldn’t happen.”

I followed him through the bush and then we were making our way through the forest. It was dim and cooler here than on the river; the weather suddenly changed. It was raining, pouring, but very little reached us under the hundred foot high canopy of trees. The smell of decaying leaves and logs and dampness pervaded everything. The smell of the soil was dampness itself, and then in minutes the temperature cooled down some twenty degrees. It was tough going for the first few hours; I had to stop every half-hour or so, but the pills numbed my pain and Genaro had given me a root to chew on, which made me feel stronger and eased my queasiness. Perhaps it had an effect similar to cocaine. But then we found a trail, which was cleared, although I wouldn’t have recognized it if I had been alone. “This goes to the mission,” he said, and we traveled that for a ways and then detoured back into ‘uninhabited’ country. There was a sameness to the forest: the great boles of trees, the roots and leaves on the forest floor, a few blades of heliconia, a few flowers, but this was lowland forest, all green and brown, uniform, for the bursting of colors, the flowers and wildly hued birds were all above us, in the canopy, out of our reach. It was also quiet, only the crush of leaves and branches and pine-cones underfoot, the occasional unnerving scream of the pia, the hissing of insects, the thrumming of
jacamins
, those were the only sounds. The silence of the place made it difficult to talk; it was like a weight that had to be pressed against with words, and I was concentrating on putting one foot before the other, on getting through for the next few minutes. But I had to call to Genaro every few minutes or so because he naturally tended to walk fast, especially when we reached savannah, which seemed like an ocean of fifteen-foot high grass. My first sensation was of agoraphobia, after being in the forest, which was somehow like walking through thousands upon thousands of rooms. My mind had used the trees as imaginary demarcations and filled in the cognitive spaces.

It rained, sheets of water, for over an hour; the wind was strong and its gusts felt somehow jagged rather than sweeping. The savannah bowed to the storm, making the windpaths visible, boiling the stalks like a storm on the river. Thunderheads loomed above, gray with a misting of pink from the sun, and they moved quickly, leaving me with the impression that they could have been parted by God’s hands. Then the sky became completely clear, and the humidity returned like air blown through an exhaust pipe. The sky, suffused with pink, gave way to a pellucid clear blue; and the savannah glistened as if covered with dew. It was like walking through a painting of the clarity and intensity of a Vermeer. The hugeness of sky, the rolling grass and jungle climbing into hills seemed to stop time, made me feel as if I were suspended in perfection, that this was the form from which the rest of the world had been, imperfectly, made.

We followed a winding path made by ants, which looked like a white chalk-line that had been dropped by some impossible craftsman, and Genaro navigated it as easily as if he were steering the
barco
we had rented. He would put one foot exactly in front of the other, which gave him extraordinary speed and balance; the same reason why American Indians do so well walking on high girders. It was an entirely different way of walking. As I couldn’t keep up with him, he had to slow his pace until I could see it was plainly agonizing for him. He had found a few moments of freedom here, and, once again, I was restricting him. But even walking slowly, I had a tendency to drift off the ant-path and trip and smash into hidden vines, roots, and branches.

“You must be careful of snakes here, Meester,” Genaro said. “Not so many here that can hurt you, but you walk like a drunk man off the path and step on one of them and they’ll bite you good.” I had once stepped on a fer de lance at my fazenda; luckily I had been wearing high leather boots, or I would have been dead. It had drooled a scummy yellow venom all over my boot. In the savannah, I might encounter
cascavel
, or rattler, and maybe
cobras-corais
, which can be pulled away from the skin before it expands its mouth, if the potential victim is fast enough. I had medicine for snakebite, including antihistamine for shock; but even under the best of circumstances, the chances of surviving were only about fifty percent.

But as we neared the forest, he slowed his pace, at times stopping entirely and cocking his head, as if listening for something. I asked him what was wrong, but he only said, “Dreams. Can’t you feel them?”

“What do you mean?” I asked as I looked at the forest looming beyond the savannah; it seemed endless. Above the forest, layers of cloud had gathered like smoke. Although I had always felt good being near primal land such as this, I now felt something ominous; it was as if with every step we took toward the jungle ahead, we were getting nearer to darkness and heaviness.

I had felt that before.

In the camps.

“You feel them or you don’t,” Genaro said. It was as if these dreams he was feeling were closing him up once again, for his manner, his posture, even his face took on the sullenness I had known at the fazenda. Whatever he was feeling, or fighting, had clouded him; and I felt the old, traditional barriers between us, the silence of companionship suddenly and irrevocably replaced by the silence of isolation.

Genaro was in a shell, and I knew as we entered the darkness of the forest that we were near our destination. This forest was identical to every other I had been in over the years, with one exception: this one didn’t seem quite real. It smelled like earth and leaf and compost; macaws crashed through brush above and screeched like metal penetrating metal; but somehow it all felt wrong. Dreamlike, that was it. Everything was in place; everything was perfect, except for one minor and yet impossible thing. What that was I didn’t know...yet.

So yes I felt the dreams, I supposed. But I couldn’t tell Genaro I understood; he was too locked into himself. He was the old hollow-eyed, tight-faced Genaro, and worse. We were getting closer to the source of his burden. I could feel that, and I wanted to comfort him. But it was no use. And I knew that although Genaro wouldn’t have come this far on his own, that he was here for me out of a sense of
direito
, of duty and honor, he was here now for himself. Perhaps Onca’s scream that night was for Genaro, for the death he was carrying. We both carried it, only mine was manifest on my skin and in my organs.

We walked through the forest until dark, with frequent stops, and then made camp near a stream that gurgled and fell over black rocks, a small white waterfall of foam and spray. White noise. We set up our tent, built a fire, and Genaro and I ate some of our canned rations. The darkness seemed absolute, bringing with it the constant chittering of insects and the skreeing of bats overhead. I couldn’t see the sky, as the canopy of trees effectively blocked it out, and the shadows cast by the fire before me gave the nearby trees a quality of constant motion. I imagined that the monsters Genaro had talked about were lurking all around us, and I would jump when I heard a branch or leaves being crunched underfoot. And I could see the red reflections of fire in the eyes of forest creatures watching us. I took a pill for pain and chewed on the bark Genaro had given me to quell the nausea.

“Genaro, do you have any idea where we really are?”

Genaro didn’t look up at me, but stirred the fire with a charred stick.

“Well?” I asked.

“Aitaí country here,” Genaro said, after a time. “Aitaí people want to see you, give you dreams, see what you do with them. Best to be asleep when they do that or makes you crazy like drugs. So best we go to sleep,” and with that he crawled inside the tent. End of conversation.

But I wasn’t ready to sleep yet. I looked around and listened to the stream. The fire was low, so I broke a few branches and tossed them into the weak flames. Maybe someone was out there, for I felt as if I was being stared at. I went to the edge of the firelight, looking about. Then, exhausted, I crawled into the tent. I lay on the damp ground in my sleeping bag and listened to the mosquitoes buzzing and vibrating against the tent canvass. I could smell my sweat and Genaro’s, sweet and fetid; mine was mixed with the almost gasoline odor of insect repellant. I chewed on the medicine Genaro gave me and waited for sleep and dreams.

I stared wide-eyed into darkness.

I slept fitfully and was awakened once by Genaro sobbing and moaning and talking and thrashing beside me. Perhaps the Aitaí were giving him dreams, as he said they would.

We both woke up just before dawn.

“I heard you moaning and talking in your sleep,” I told Genaro.

He just grunted, obviously not willing to discuss his dreams, nor curious about what he might have said; although I couldn’t have told him anything, anyway, as I could only make out slurred words and moans. After we crawled out of the tent he asked, “Did you have dreams, Meester?”

I had not dreamed at all, at least not that I could remember, and that’s what I told him.

“If you dreamed, you would remember Aitaí.”

“What do you remember?” I asked.

“Aitaí are here, you’ll see,” Genaro said. “But you must have had dreams.”

“Not that I can remember.”

“Then maybe
this
is your dream,” Genaro said.

I looked up at him, expecting his raised lip grin. But his face was as vacant as a somnambulist.

* * * *

We broke camp after dawn, as a dusky light filtered through the trees, turning everything sallow, as if a cinematographer were using yellow lenses for strange effect. I hoisted my pack—which was much lighter than Genaro’s—to my shoulders, and seven Indian men stepped out of the forest into our clearing. They appeared out of the bush without a sound, as if they were spirits. Their faces were heavily painted and tattooed, their oiled black hair was cut straight across the forehead; some of the men wore shirts or pants, others wore penis sheaths, balsa earplugs, long fans of palm splinters stuck into lips, and one wore a lip disk, which gave him a terrifying appearance, reminding me of the man with the rotted face I had seen on the river. They all carried shotguns, which they held in a sort of port arms position. Suddenly they started shouting at us and making menacing faces. I reached for my pistol reactively, but Genaro grabbed my hand and said, “They’re making greeting. White people are backwards from Aitaí. Aitaí shake their heads when they mean yes. This is showing a bad face now so it won’t be for real.”

The Aitaí cracked their rifles, and, with the stock swiveled down, they made resounding noises by blaring through the barrels. Birds screeched above, as if in response.

And then another Indian stepped into the clearing. The others moved out of his way, showing him deference...either out of fear or respect. He wore no face or body paint to frighten his enemies; he didn’t need to, for half of his face and body was like that of a young man’s while the other side was withered, blotched, and wrinkled. Even his hair, which was black on one side, was a yellowish white on the other; perhaps he had dyed it, but he could not have faked the rest. The wrinkles and flaccid flesh of old age contrasted with the muscle tone and energy of youth; it was as if the younger side was bearing the weight of the older. Indeed, he favored the ‘young’ side of his body. I could not imagine what disease could have such an effect, and I felt as if I were looking at some kind of mythical demiurge.

But the demiurge was staring back at me so intently that I had to look away.

“What the hell happened to
him
?” I whispered to Genaro, unnerved.

The other Indians were watching us silently, as if waiting for us to make the first move.

“He’s a
claro
sonhador
,” Genaro said.

“What?”

“Like a dreamer. Only he lives his dream to its end.”

Then Genaro turned to him, spoke a few words, and then exchanged greetings with the other Indians, one by one. He presented me to all of them, except the
sonhador
; and the tension seemed to ease a bit, although the Indians stood in place as if they were in formation.

We exchanged gifts, as was customary.

We gave them each a cigarette lighter, a plastic watch, a few nails and needles, and a colored comb. We would save the shorts and dresses, hammock, flashlights, and tape recorder for the chief, should we meet him.