Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates Page 10

  Smithe expelled a globe of smoke, and it bobbed just above them for a while like an air-feeding jellyfish or a rickety umbrella, slow to disperse in the cloying humidity. “Your accusation suffers, I daresay, not from lack of zeal but fact. Well spoken for an ‘errand boy’ but frightfully old-fashioned, I’m afraid, and from my point of view, more than a bit narrow in its own right. We ethnographers have a long history of direct participation in the everyday life of the cultures we study. We eat their food, speak their language, experience firsthand their habits and customs—”

  “Yeah, and then you go back to your nice university and publish a ten-thousand-word monograph on the size of their water jars or their various ceremonial names for grandmother (maestra not being among them, I guarantee) or the way they peel their yams. Hey, the way they peel yams—clockwise or counterclockwise?—could be significant if it reflected some deeper aspect of their existence. Like, for example, if they use the same cutting motion in peeling a sweet potato that they use in circumcising a pecker, and that pattern consciously, deliberately replicates the spiral of the Milky Way or—and stranger things have happened—the double helix of DNA. As it is, you won’t or can’t make those connections, so all you end up producing is a lot of academic twaddle.”

  “All right, let me have a go at that.”

  “Hold on. I’m not finished. Surely, your knowledge of natural history is not so puny that you’re unaware that extinction is a consequence of overspecialization. It’s a cardinal law of evolution, and many a species has paid the price. Human beings are by nature comprehensive. That’s been the secret of our success, at least in evolutionary terms. The more civilized we’ve become, however, the further we’ve moved away from comprehensiveness, and in direct ratio we’ve been losing our adaptability. Now, isn’t it just a wee bit ironic, Potney, that you guys in anthropology—the study of man—are contributing to the eventual extinction of man by your blind devotion to this suicidal binge of overspecialization? Who’re you gonna write papers on when we’re gone?”

  The girl returned to clear their dishes. Trotting out another of his seraphic smiles, Switters asked for papaya by its rightful name and was almost disappointed when she wasn’t embarrassed or insulted or coy but, instead, inquired matter-of-factly if he wanted mitad or totalidad: half or whole. (Even Switters’s nimble mind couldn’t picture half a vagina.)

  Potney Smithe, who had remained nonplussed throughout the Switters tirade, coughed a couple of times and said, “If you’re talking about the need for more interdisciplinary activity in the academic community, I quite agree. Yes. Um. However, if you’re advocating speculation, or a breach of scientific detachment . . .”

  “Detachment, my ass. Objectivity’s as big a hoax in science as it is in journalism. Well, not quite that big. But allow me to interrupt you again, please, for a minute.” He consulted his watch. “I’ve got to dash off and meet a guide.”

  “Your nature ramble.”

  “Exactly. But first I’d like to pass along a short, personal story, because it might explain my hostility toward your profession and why I may have seemed rude. Aside from the fact that I’m a Yank.”

  “Oh, I say . . .”

  “You’re the second anthropologist I’ve ever met. The first was an Australian—met him in the Safari Bar in Bangkok—and he’d done a fair amount of field work deep in the interior of New Guinea. Big juju in there, you know, loads of spooky ol’ magic. Well, this Ph.D. lived with one of those wild mud tribes for two years, and they sort of took a liking to him. So when he left, their shaman gave him a little pigskin pouch with some yellowish powder in it and told him that if he’d sprinkle the stuff on his head and shoulders, he’d become temporarily invisible to everyone but himself. He could go into the biggest department store in Sydney, the shaman promised, and help himself. Steal anything he wanted and nobody would see him. That’s what the powder was for. The anthropologist is telling me all this, see, but at that point he just chuckled and went back to his cocktail. So, I said ‘Well?’ And he said, ‘Well, what?’ And I said, ‘How did it work out?’ And he looked at me kind of haughtily and said, ‘Naturally, I never tried it.’ “

  “His response disappointed you, did it?”

  “Potney, I’m not a violent man. But it taxed my powers of restraint not to slap him silly. ‘Naturally, I never tried it,’ indeed. I wanted to grab his nose and twist his face around to the back of his head. The prig! The spineless twit!”

  Potney lit another cigarette. “I appreciate your candor in sharing this anecdote. It does cast your prejudice in a more favorable light. If rightly viewed, I suppose your peevishness over the bloke’s . . . the bloke’s decorum is somewhat understandable.” He paused, staring into a bloom of smoke with a botanist’s engrossment. “Sometimes, however . . . sometimes . . . sometimes it really doesn’t pay to get too chummy with these primitive magical practices. If they don’t actually do you physical or psychological harm, they can steer you well off-track. I myself am proof of that, sorry to say. Had I not allowed myself to become fascinated with one of those Kandakandero buggers and his bag of tricks, I wouldn’t be back in this bloody place, waiting around for God knows what, mucking up my career and my marriage.”

  He shoved his teacup aside and in a loud yet plaintive voice, cried out for gin.

  “I’d be interested in hearing more about that,” said Switters, and he sincerely meant it, “but duty calls.” He took the saucer of papaya slices and slid off the stool.

  “Perhaps I’ll see you later, then? I’d fancy an earful of errand-boy philosophy. An overview. The big picture, as you put it. Um.”

  “No chance in hell, pal. But I appreciate the chat. Tell the señorita I’ll dream about her for the rest of my life. And hang in there, Pot. Ain’t nothing to lose but our winnings, and only the winners are lost.”

  While Sailor pecked at papaya pulp, Switters, in his new rubber boots now, opened the shutters and parted the bougainvillea vines that nearly obscured the window. He was hoping for a view of town, but his room was at the rear of the hotel and looked down upon a clean-swept courtyard. There, white chickens scratched white chicken poetry into the sad bare earth, and a trio of pigs squealed and grunted, as if in endless protest against a world that tolerated the tragedy of bacon. Sudsy wash-water had been emptied in a corner of the yard, paving the area with soap-bubble cobblestones that glimmered in the morning sun. A couple of mango trees had been planted in the center, and though they were probably still too young to bear fruit, they produced enough foliage to shade the girl, who sat on an upturned crate, shelling beans into a blue enamel basin balanced on her lap. Her faded cotton dress was pushed up as far as the basin, affording a vista of custard thigh and, if he was not mistaken, a pink wink of panty. He sighed.

  Tennessee Williams once wrote, “We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.” In a certain sense, the playwright was correct. Yes, but oh! What a view from that upstairs window!

  What Tennessee failed to mention was that if we look out of that window with an itchy curiosity and a passionate eye; with a generous spirit and a capacity for delight; and, yes, the language with which to support and enrich the things we see, then it DOESN’T MATTER that the house is burning down around us. It doesn’t matter. Let the motherfucker blaze!

  Did those thoughts constitute an “errand-boy philosophy”? Possibly not. But for the moment they would have to do.

  Boquichicos proved to be as different from Pucallpa as the dory Virgin was different from a tanker ship. It was considerably smaller, quieter, cleaner, more benign. Switters recalled Juan Carlos de Fausto’s remark that Boquichicos was a planned community, founded by the government with “strict environmental considerations.” Basically, that was true. Whereas Pucallpa sprawled in anarchistic abandon, mindlessly fouling, pillaging, and devouring its natural surroundings, Boquichicos had been assigne
d firm parameters beyond which it was forbidden to slop or tentacle. As a result, the numinous emerald breath of the forest lay gently against the town’s whitewashed cheeks, while the river here serenaded the citizenry with an open-throated warble instead of a cancer-clogged rattle of death.

  Laid out in classic Spanish style around a central plaza, every dirt street, of which there were only six, had been rolled level and smooth, every building except the church uniformly roofed in palm-frond thatch, giving it an Indian flavor. The walls of the edifices had been constructed with mud bricks and/or with lumber milled after clearing the town site, then proudly brushed with a blanching lime solution that had once made them shine but was now wearing noticeably thin. None of the structures, including the municipal hall, the hotel, and the church, was anywhere near as tall as the jungle trees that cast shade on their rear entrances, nor did their doorways match in breadth some of the trunks of those trees. Far and away the town’s most significant structure, its crown jewel, its saving grace, was its modern waste treatment facility. (Were they wise, the inhabitants would float daily candles of thanksgiving upon the sassafras-colored waters of their nifty little sewage lagoon.) Certainly Pucallpa could boast of no such nicety, and quite likely Iquitos couldn’t either.

  There were perhaps a half-dozen trucks in Boquichicos—idle, scabious with rust, tires starting to sag: where was there to drive?—and not a single car. The town’s short streets, every one a dead end, were enlivened by pecking chickens, rooting pigs, yapping curs, and naked children, all of them skinny and soiled, though neither a glimpse nor a whiff of recently deceased canine intruded upon the Switters sensibility. Nevertheless, there were vultures circling—patient, confident of the more certain, and tasty, of life’s two inevitables—their necrophiliac radar sweeping the weeds.

  And weeds there were aplenty. Egged on by fierce equatorial sunshine and soaking tropic rains, an amazing variety of plants invaded gutters and yards, threatening to take over the plaza, even, their bitter nectars slaking the thirst of Day-Glo butterflies and a billion humming insects of plainer hue.

  Built to accommodate an oil boom that never materialized (geologists had vastly overestimated the potential yield of the area’s petroleum deposit), Boquichicos blossomed briefly, then shriveled. It had lost at least half of its peak population. Half stayed on, however, because housing was pleasant and affordable, and because they believed a more reliable boom—a timber boom—was right around the corner. It wouldn’t be long, the enterprising reasoned, before the Japanese had mowed down the great woods of Indonesia, Borneo, Malaysia, New Guinea, and possibly Alaska, and would be setting out in earnest to deforest west-central South America. In the Brazilian Amazon, they had already turned ancient majestic ecosystems into heaps of lifeless orange sawdust (one way to muffle vividity), and their buyers were becoming active around Peru’s Pucallpa. Soon, it was predicted, chainsaws would be snarling monstrous money mantras within earshot of the Boquichicos plaza (where that morning all manner of birdsong rang), and once again those forty-odd barstools at the hotel would be polished night and day by affluent or, at least, ambitious backsides.

  Incidentally, some might wonder what a relatively small nation such as Japan could find to do with so much timber. Switters knew. CIA reports confirmed that millions of imported logs had been submerged in bays all along Japan’s coastline, salted away, so to speak, for that time in the not-too-distant future when much of the world had run out of trees. Switters also knew—and he thought about it with a mirthless smile as he strolled across the plaza lugging Sailor Boy’s unusual cage—that a brother operative stationed in Tokyo was busily scheming to foil the Japanese gambit. Not under company orders but surreptitiously, on his own. This Goliath-hexing David was, of course, an angel.

  Also incidentally, Switters had once been under the impression that the term angel, as applied to certain evolved mavericks within the CIA, was an entirely ironic reference to a dopey book by the evangelist Billy Graham, entitled Angels: God’s Secret Agents. Not so, said Bad Bobby Case. Bobby claimed that the term referred to a little known scriptural passage recounting the existence of “neutral angels,” angels who refused to take sides in the Heaven-splitting quarrel between Yahweh and Lucifer, and who chided them both for their intransigence, arrogance, and addiction to power. How a hotshot from Hondo knew such things (Case was graduated second in his class at Texas Tech, but that was aeronautical engineering), Switters couldn’t guess, nor could he guess where the spy pilot might be that morning or what he was doing, but he would have given a vat of red-eye gravy to have Bobby with him there, sharing an early-bird beer in the somber little marketplace of far Boquichicos.

  The market was right next to the plaza. It consisted of a dozen or so irregularly spaced stalls with thatched awnings, as well as several rows of unshaded tables covered with ragged, faded, roach-eaten oilcloth. On display were a skimpy assortment of fruits and vegetables, dominated by plantains, chili peppers, and pale piles of yucca or cassava root; eggs, live poultry, smoked fish, animal and reptile hides; woven mats and baskets; dry goods and clothing (including shoddy cotton T-shirts adorned with unauthorized portraits of the most familiar face on the planet, more familiar, and perhaps better loved, than Jesus, Buddha, or Michael Jordan—the face of a bland, candy-assed cartoon rodent with a hypocoristic Irish moniker); and, at the stall where Switters currently stood, pisco, homemade rum, and warm beer.

  Switters sipped slowly—the wise do not gulp warm beer—and looked around for Inti. The Indian was late. Maybe he’d had difficulty hiring a guide to escort Switters to the colpa, the clay lick where the parrots and macaws were said to gather every day to coat their tiny tastebuds with a nutritious mineral slick. Maybe he’d gotten into trouble over the noisy nocturnal fellowship he enjoyed with his lads. It wasn’t feasible that Inti could have headed back to Pucallpa for the very practical reason that so far he’d only been paid a 40 percent deposit on his services. As unlikely as it was, however, the faintest fleck of suspicion that Inti might have abandoned him in this moldy, weedy, hell-for-lonesome outpost was enough to freeze the sweat on Switters’s brow. He began to drink faster and faster, until the beer erupted in froth and its spume filled his sinus passages. Foam was still trickling out of his nostrils when, a minute later, he thought he spotted Inti at the opposite end of the market.

  Some sort of commotion was in progress, and the captain of the Virgin seemed to be at the center of it. “Watch my beverage,” Switters said to the parrot. “I’ll be right back.”

  The argument proved to be between Inti and a sinewy, gold-toothed, young mestizo man in Nike basketball sneakers and a spooky anaconda-skin cape. Several of the mestizo’s friends were supporting him, mainly with their physical presence, although they became vocally exhortative from time to time. Inti looked quite relieved to see Switters. Impressed by the latter’s fine suit and hat, the mestizo jumped to the conclusion that he was an important señor, a lawyer(!), perhaps, and he, too, welcomed the intervention of a reasonable authority. Hope of an objective opinion in the mestizo’s favor quickly drained, however, when Inti pointed to the Yankee, made a symbolic pistol of his fist and forefinger, and, jabbering aggressively all the while, fired a volley of imaginary shots into his adversary’s sternum. Inti was urging Switters to obliterate the Boquichicosian exactly as he had the banana-hogging spider, and from the way the man stepped back, his face turning as gray as his wild snaky cloak, he obviously had some fear that Switters might comply.

  “No, no, no,” said Switters, shaking his head, forcing a big smile and trying to appear as genial as the toastmaster at a booster club prayer breakfast. He raised his arms in the universal peacemaker gesture and inquired conciliatorily, though in bad Spanish, what the trouble might be. This precipitated a dueling barrage of rapid-fire Campa-Spanish that sounded like stormy-night static on Radio Babel. It took a while, but eventually details of the dispute emerged, aided considerably by the fact that when cornered, the mestizo turned out to speak
a surprisingly excellent brand of English.

  Evidently, two weeks earlier, Inti had given Fer-de-lance (in order to enhance his reputation in one way or another, the mestizo had assumed the name of a deadly Amazon pit viper) a case of Lima’s finest pisco in exchange for a baby ocelot. The animal could be expected to fetch a high price in Pucallpa. Later upon the very evening that Switters had hired Inti, the Indian had been caught trying to peddle the ocelot on the fringe of Pucallpa’s semilegal parrot market. A game warden cited him for violating one of Peru’s new wildlife protection laws and confiscated the cub, but Inti informed him that he was heading again into the upstream bush the following dawn and promised to release the cat in the forest near where it had been captured, if he could have it back. After much discussion, the warden agreed. A bottle of pisco sealed the bargain.

  That would explain, Switters thought, the potbellied guy in the shabby brown uniform who stood on the dock with folded arms and saw us off that morning. I wondered about that gentleman.

  What Inti had done instead, however, was to return the little ocelot to Fer-de-lance (for the first time Switters now noticed a lidded, jiggling basket off to one side) and demand his pisco back. Fer-de-lance was having none of that, if for no other reason than that the bulk of the brandy had already met its brandy fate, which was to say, it had been sucked into that black hole that yawns at the gates of human yearning.