Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (14 page)

“Electricity make from six to nine,”
he called out, as if that were information to which even a visiting
loco
was entitled. Presumably, he meant in the evening.

The stairs were adjacent to what must
surely have been one of the world’s longest bars. To walk its length in under
nineteen seconds would no doubt qualify one for a place in some special
Olympics. Had there not been a lamp flickering at its far end, it might have
been perceived as extending into infinity. There were, Switters guessed, a minimum
of forty barstools. Only one of these was occupied, it by a middle-aged
foreigner. The man had sandy hair and a pink complexion, and wore pressed khaki
shorts and a khaki shirt with military epaulets. Flip-flops dangled at an angle
from his large pink feet, and a bottle of English gin kept him company. No
bartender was in view. It took Switters two trips to lug his belongings up to
his third-floor room (the third floor was the top floor: the second floor,
Switters was to learn, was wholly unoccupied), and each time that he passed the
solitary drinker, the fellow nodded and smiled encouragingly, hoping, it
seemed, that Switters might join him.

Switters yawned ostentatiously, a
signal that he was too tired for barroom conviviality. Indeed, he could barely
wait for a hot shower and clean sheets.

The shower water, predictably, was
tepid at best, and the sheets, while clean enough, were damp and smelled
pungently of elf breath. Since the ceiling fan only rotated between the hours
of six and nine (the river was presently so low that Boquichicos’s tiny
hydroelectric plant could operate no more than that), the air in the room was
thick and still. The air was like a flexed muscle, the bicep, perhaps, of some
macho swamp thing showing off for a female swamp thing, green in both cases. So
heavily did it weigh down on Switters that he felt he couldn’t have gotten out
of bed had he wanted to. Despite the bed’s slimy texture and toadstool aroma,
he didn’t want to. He reached out from under its mosquito netting and snuffed
the bedside candle.

“Sweet dreams, Sailor Boy. This time
tomorrow, if all goes well, you’ll be a free Sailor Boy. In fact, you won’t be
Sailor Boy at all, you’ll be a wild thing without a name.”

Unable to decide whether or not he
envied the parrot, Switters turned his thoughts, as he often did at bedtime, to
the ways in which word and grammar had interfaced with action and activity
during the day; had collided with, piqued, mirrored, contrasted, explained, enlarged,
or directed his life. It so happened that something most unexpected, maybe even
important, had occurred in the linguistic interface that very evening. To wit:

Athapaskan is the name given to a
family of very similar languages spoken by North American Indians in the
Canadian Yukon, as well as by tribes in
Arizona
and
New Mexico
, although the groups are separated by more than two
thousand miles and have evolved various markedly different cultures. Now,
astonishingly, it appeared that a dialect of Athapaskan might have migrated as
far south as the Peruvian Amazon. As they parted company at the hotel entrance,
Switters had first glanced hard at the pisco bottle in Inti’s hand and then at
the boys huddled shyly behind him. Showing his coca-ruined teeth, Inti had
smacked the nearest boy on the buttocks and, turning away, muttered,
“Udrú.”
It was intended as a private joke. Inti, in his wildest jungle dreams, could
not have imagined that Switters would have recognized
udrú
as the
Athapaskan word for “vagina.”

Ah, but Switters knew the word for
vagina in seventy-one separate languages. It was kind of a hobby of his.

He grinned in the dark at the scope
of his own expertise.

In the morning he managed a
cold-water toilet, donned a clean white linen suit over a solid green T-shirt
(its hue matched the air in the room), and went downstairs. The sandy-haired,
baby-faced gent from the evening before still sat at the bar. Although he was
perched on the very same stool, he presumably had not been there all night, for
he, too, looked freshly shaved, and the gin bottle had been replaced by a pot
of tea.

“I say,” he called to Switters in a
decidedly British accent. “Searching for a spot of breakfast?”

“You, pal, have read my mind.” He
hadn’t eaten since the previous dawn. “All those damned roosters crowing me
awake before sunup, there’s got to be an egg or two on the premises. And if
not, fruit will do. Or a bowl of mush.”

“Euryphagous, are we?” asked the man,
instantly winning Switters’s friendship on the strength of his vocabulary. “And
a Yank, into the bargain! Last night I took you for Italian. Your suit was a
frightful mess, but it
was
a suit. Then, just now, I thought you might
be a fellow subject of the Queen. Never expected to run across a
Yank
in
a
suit
in bloody
Boquichicos
.”

“Yeah, well, as for Yanks, the old
colony’s a variety pack, I’m afraid. You never know which or what is gonna show
up when or where.” Switters settled onto the next barstool. “Tell me something:
Is it cool—is it acceptable—to ask for papaya around here?”

The man raised a pair of sandy
eyebrows. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Well, uh, in the dialect of Spanish
spoken in
Cuba
, they refer to that particular fruit as a
bombita
.
‘Little bomb.’ Which makes sense, considering its shape and everything. But in
Cuban Spanish, the word
papaya
means ‘vagina.’ Which has a certain
logic, as well, I guess. However . . .”

“Oh, yes, I see,” said the
Englishman. “If one asks for a
jugo de papaya
in
Havana
, one gets a rather funny look.”

“Or a glass of juice that’ll put hair
on your chest. So to speak.” When the Englishman slightly grimaced, Switters
added, “Gives a whole new meaning to ‘bottoms up.’ “

“Rather. And afterward, I suppose, a
chap would want a cigarette.” The man spoke dryly and without overt levity.

“Personally, I only got the funny
look.”

“I see. Well. Have no fear. Unless
I’m much mistaken,
papaya
in these parts will give offense to none.”

At that moment a disturbingly pretty
mestizo girl, not much older than Suzy, emerged from the gloom with a tray of
cornbread and tropical jams, which she set before the Brit. When she looked
questioningly at Switters, he became flustered and blurted, “Bombita,” simply
lacking the nerve to ask for papaya in the unlikely event that here, too, it
might possibly mean . . .

“You’re wanting bombita, you better
go see Sendero Luminoso,” she said, giving him the kind of wary, patronizing
smile one might give a known lunatic. He blushed and quickly ordered eggs.
Sailor would have to wait for his breakfast fruit.

Apparently too well-mannered to
commence eating before the other was served, the Englishman retrieved from
somewhere on his person a fine leather case. Embossed in gold upon its lid was
a coat of arms and the legend, Royal Anthropological Society. “Oh, bugger!” he
swore, after opening the case. “I seem not to have a one of my bloody cards. A
chap gets lax in a place like this.” He wiped his large pink hand on his shirt
and then extended it. “R. Potney Smithe,” he said. “Ethnographer.”

“Switters. Errand boy.”

They shook hands. The hand of Smithe
(it rhymed with
knife
) was neither as damp nor as soft as Switters had
feared.

“I see. I see. And are you running an
errand in Boquichicos, Mr. Switters?”

“Most assuredly.”

“Contemplating a lengthy, um . . .
errand run?”

“Au contraire.”
Switters
checked his watch. It was
6:13
.
“In about an hour, I’m scheduled to take a little nature walk. Then, provided
I’m not overwhelmed by some aspect of the local fauna . . .”

“As well you might be. From this
outpost to the Bolivian border, there exist twelve hundred species of birds,
two hundred species of mammals, ninety or more frog species, thirty-two
different venomous snakes—”

“. . . or flora . . .”

“A most immoderate vegetative
display, you may be sure.”

“. . . I expect to depart here in
midafternoon. Tomorrow morning at the very latest.”

“Pity,” said R. Potney Smithe, though
he didn’t say why.

The girl reappeared with a plastic
plate of fried eggs and beans. Switters worked his smile on her. If there was
any reason to tarry in Boquichicos . . .

After they had eaten, Smithe lit a
cork-tipped cigarette, inhaled deeply, and said, “No offense, mind you, and I
hope you won’t think me cheeky, but isn’t it, um,
difficult
finding
yourself an ‘errand boy’? I mean, a chap of your age and with your taste in
attire.”

“Ain’t no shame in honest labor, pal.
You must have had the occasion to observe honest labor, even if you’ve never
actively participated.”

“And why wouldn’t I have done?”

“Well, no offense to you, either, Mr.
Smithe . . .”

“Oh, do call me
Potney
.”

“. . . but, first, your accent
reveals that you probably spent your formative years knocking croquet balls
about the manicured lawns of Conway-on-the-Twitty or some such pretty acreage,
where the servants did all the heavy lifting; and, second, you’re a
professional in a branch of science that ought to be the most enlightening and
intriguing and flexible and instructive of any branch of science—outside of,
maybe, particle physics—and would be if the anthropologists had a shred of
imagination or the dimmest sense of wonder, or the
cojones
, the
bollocks, to look at the big picture, to help focus and enlarge the big
picture; but instead, it’s a timid, dull, overspecialized exercise in
nit-picking, shit-sifting, and knothole-peeking. There’s work to be done in
anthropology, Potney ol’ man, if anthropologists will get off their
campstools—or barstools—and widen their vision enough to do it.”

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.”