The Economy of Light (2 page)

“Some
carapanauba
bark, a little
paxuri
seeds, and
cachaça
, and maybe something else, I maybe forget. You know what they are?”

“
Cachaça
I know, but the rest...I’m not eating—”

Try it, you’ll see. I promise it won’t hurt you. Would I be stupid enough to kill the golden fleece?”

I couldn’t help but smile. Over the years I had always read to her once or twice a week, for she didn’t know how to read, nor would she learn. But she loved fairy tales, and I tried to bring back new books to read her. Those stories would turn her into a child, an odd and wonderful thing to watch, for to me at least she seemed like the embodiment of the earth mother. She even looked like the prehistoric statues archaeologists had found all over the world; they were small, but had overdeveloped breasts and large stomachs. She was somehow natural, idiosyncratic, and universal.

“It’s goose, not fleece,” I said, and, giving in, I took a spoonful of the glassy-looking gruel; it had no taste at all, but then my mouth became numb, as if the mush had been spiked with Novocain. I could feel it numb my throat and more as the stuff worked its way down my esophagus to my stomach. There was a dish popular in Belém called
pato no tucupi
, which was famous for numbing the mouth. She must have used some of the same ingredients.

“Try some more,” she insisted. “It will help your stomach. It will make the pain go away for a while.”

But I couldn’t keep the food from trickling out of the side of my mouth. “What’s the ice cream for?” I asked.

“It makes the herbs work better.”

That was true. As the ice-cream went down, I felt as if my insides were being air-conditioned, as if there were great cold places where my throat and chest and stomach had been, and I felt muzzy and light-headed, as if everything was slowly floating around me. “Genaro told me you knew I was dying,” I said.

“I told him that.”

“How did you know?”

“I had a dream about it when Genaro was making love to me. Sometimes I dream then. Often I do.”

I felt myself blushing as she told me that, although I’ve never been a prude. Yet I felt embarrassed and chilled that she should see my death as she made love to her silent husband. I stared out the window at the neatly tended garden of jungle flowers and the evergreen trees that were in lavender bloom, but the white sash window-bars wavered and went out of focus. I did not feel pain in my stomach, only coolness. Now I imagined that dry breezes were passing though me. Onca must have used more than herbs in the gruel; I hoped it wasn’t anything hallucinogenic. Probably not, I could trust her.

But she had put
something
in there....

I didn’t want to ask her any more questions, yet I couldn’t help myself; and she was standing before me, waiting, knowing that I would ask, and prepared to answer, as if she had dreamed this, too. Perhaps she had.

“What about your dream?” I asked. “Tell me about it.”

“I dreamed about you and Genaro. Maybe because I was trying to make babies with Genaro. Sometimes dreams and truth get mixed up for me and I can’t pull out one part from another. Do you understand?”

I didn’t, but I nodded.

“And your dream?”

She turned toward the window and looked out. She seemed to be looking past the trees and gardens and yard and miles of pastureland that was as level as Iowa grassland. Deep in the distance was the rainforest, the real ruler of this land. “It was a good dream, but it wasn’t good to dream it. You were with my Genaro in a boat. He was driving this boat. You sat in the front, but you were your own dream and it was a terrible dream. You were bones without flesh, yet you weren’t dead; and your bones were the color as the water. Brown as mud, just like the Amazonas. And Genaro was taking you to meet death so you could get yourself back.” She shivered and made a gesture in the air. “He told me he would do that for you.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, my words slurred from the Novocain-like herb she had put in the food. “Do
what
for me?”

“I feel close to you, Meester, but I told him not to do this, but he believes it is a matter of honor.”

“You’re not making sense,” I said, frustrated with all this mumbo-jumbo.

“He will take you to meet your death so you may live. That is what
your
dream told me when I had my dream. Dreams come from people, but they can be alive on their own, to talk to each other, just like people.”

“Onca, how you found out about my disease, I don’t know. I’ll give you that. But you—”

“We know someone who can help you,” Onca said.

“If I wouldn’t go to hospital to have them radiate me and do everything else, I certainly wouldn’t go to a witch doctor. But I thank you, I appreciate your concern.”

“This person isn’t a witch doctor, Meester.”

“Than what is he?”

“He’s a white man. A doctor. You know him, I think.”

“Who?”

“That’s all I have from the dream,” she said. “Maybe later I will have more. Then maybe you will be ready.” With that she took the tray, leaving me only the milk on my bed stand, and left the room.

“Onca,” I shouted, but she didn’t—and I knew she wouldn’t—come back. The image that had formed in my mind was, of course, that of Mengele. Death. But that was impossible, and yet I still felt the hackles raise on my back, cold as the scales of a fish.

* * * *

That night I was awakened by a sharp scream. My first thought was of howler monkeys, but the shriek was of too short a duration, and sounded too human.

It was Onca.

CHAPTER THREE

DRY STORM

In the days that followed, I would get out of bed early and wander around the ranch. I couldn’t stand to sleep. I would wake up screaming and sweaty, but I would be unable to remember my nightmares. I hated the onset of darkness, and when I finally retired to my room, I would read until I couldn’t stay awake any longer. I ate what Onca gave me and, although my mouth was continually numb, I had stopped taking the pills. I was living day to day, and the days seemed interminably long, as if I was a child and once again had time to be bored. But I wasn’t impatient. I didn’t think about dying hardly at all, and the lesions on my body had begun to clear up with the medicine. Onca also insisted I wash with a putrid smelling brown herb she placed in a glass by my washbasin every day. It looked like a turd and was as slippery and hard as a wet stone.

But I felt safe for the time being, as if I could live in this eternal present until I was ready to face what was happening to me...until I could face dying. I became an ice-cream junkie, mildly high all day, buzzing with cool, inconsequential thoughts, slurring my words as if I had just left the dentist’s chair, and feeling as if my insides were cold as a refrigerator, even while I was sweating in the tropical humidity.

Genaro introduced me to the new men, who weren’t happy to discover that their
empreteiro
was going to be here permanently. Genaro had unusual luck keeping fieldhands, for most
macheteiros
won’t work longer than thirty days before moving on. It was obvious that they respected him and considered him their boss; I was simply an intruder. I wondered if my presence would make them insecure enough to leave.

He asked my advice on various things, such as what to do with the grass we’d been experimenting with: a type of grass that could be planted again and again without depleting the soil of nutrients. But the grass would often turn brown and die, even when there was sufficient rain. Some years ago I had also had the idea of trying to crossbreed the indigenous humpback zebu with American stock. The zebu is perfectly adapted to the Amazonian climate and is extraordinarily hardy, but its meat, unfortunately, tastes like old shoes. One afternoon I watched Genaro artificially inseminate several cows with large syringes of bull’s sperm. He wore a long green plastic glove and grimaced every time he did it. But so far we had had no luck in producing a viable crossbreed.

Genaro was patient and dutifully showed me all work that was being done on the ranch. But more often than not my concentration would wander, and I would go off by myself. I suspect Genaro was happy to be on his own.

I began to lose weight. Every day I shed a few pounds; every day Onca would insist I eat more. But I had no appetite, except for ice cream. I began staying in my room more often, as the pain in my stomach became harder to muffle.

And then it stopped raining.

Days on end without even a drizzle, an eerie phenomenon in a rain-forest. Genaro told me that he had known of this happening before; once, when he had been a
macheteiro
in the Araguaia Valley, it did not rain for two hundred days. If this occurred here, we would be out of business. Although I knew it was wrong thinking, for I had responsibilities to the others on the ranch, I could not help but think that it would be a fitting end to it all. It was as if nature was in league with my death to have my world fall with me. I remembered a quote from the Talmud, something to the effect that every man is a whole universe to himself, which is irrevocably lost when he dies. This seemed like an omen, a physical extension of my death.

But although there was no rain, dry storms occurred several times a day. The sky would turn black, clouds would boil, thunder would crash like cars on a freeway after explosions of lightning, yet no rain. It was disconcerting. I would pace the room during the storms, agitated, listening to the wind breathing around the house, until finally I would have to go outside, for I felt trapped, as if the thick stucco walls were imperceptibly getting closer, as if the electricity of the storm was depleting my room of oxygen and leaving only a hint of ozone to burn in my nose.

It was an odd sensation walking through the fields in the stormy darkness, in the chill of imminent downpour; and yet during those times the air would be as dry as a fall day in upstate New York. The storms seemed to bring out the insects, clouds of them buzzing around my face, a constant annoyance. In a grove of huge Brazil nut trees a green parrot screamed, as if frightened. I could smell the moulds and sweet damp aroma of decay that I associated with forest floor as I passed the grove. But my mind was still blank, emptied, and I seemed to float above the jagged teeth of reflection and memory.

And then I found one of Genaro’s
macheteiros
dead in the south pasture. Thirty head of steer had fallen around him, their tongues black and hanging out of their mouths, their eyes bulging. I stopped and stood there, realizing an instant later that I had been holding my breath. I could hear the roll of thunder and the buzzing of hundreds of flies.

The ranch hand had fallen face down on the ground. I pulled him over, grasping his arm, and shuddered when I discovered that he was covered with maggots. They were crawling all over his face, in and out of his mouth, and over his eyes, which were wide open, as if he were surprised to find himself in such a state.

It looked as if someone had tossed a grenade into the area. The
macheteiro
and the cattle he was tending must have been hit by lightning.

CHAPTER FOUR

MACHETEIRO
DREAMS

That night I dreamed about the
macheteiro
. But in my dream the man was transformed into David, my brother.

I was back in Auschwitz, which was like a park filled with great trees in tended rows, and birds were screeing all around me as animals crashed through nearby bushes. Yet I wasn’t afraid, for this place was a concentration of life rather than death. I walked toward a building that looked like my house on the ranch, except this one was made of red brick and had a huge chimney. I opened the door and saw David strapped into an electrical apparatus of the kind Mengele used to use on us in Auschwitz. Then I saw Mengele. He was older and looked grandfatherly.

As soon as he saw me, he nodded and gave the order to send electrical shocks through David until he died.

I ran across the room to my brother and tried to unfasten the leather bands that held him against the machine, but as I touched him his skin turned black under my hands, his flesh became like parchment and broke off in pieces, and his eyes that were watching me, imploring, exploded, washing me with tears and membrane.

I screamed, and Mengele consoled me, shushing me like a baby, and I could smell the odor of cigarettes on his breath and the strong soap he used. Then he ordered the experiment to be reversed, and as if I had been watching a film being rewound, my brother came back to life, his skin healed, and his eyes, which were as intelligent and questioning as they had ever been, were welling with tears as he said my name. I turned to thank Uncle Pepi, Mengele. He accepted my thanks and then ordered one of his men to tie
me
to the machine. I begged him not to do this, and just as he was about to lower his hand—the signal to turn on the electricity—I begged him to take my brother instead of me.

He smiled, and brought his hand down smartly.

I could hear the thrum of the generator, and I knew I was going to die. But it wasn’t me who felt the heartstopping shock of electricity.

It was David.

It was the
macheteiro
.

His skin turned black and then to ash.

* * * *

I woke up in the darkness of my bedroom and called Onca, as if I were a child who had had a bad dream and needed his mother. The pain in my stomach was a throbbing; I imagined it as a bright light inside me; I imagined it as electrical wires touching, sending electrical jolts of pain through me, frying me from the inside out. But the pain, and the dream, had sensitized me. I had questions and wanted answers instead of herbs.

And I remembered the dreams I had been having for the past week.

I had had this dream of David and Mengele, over and over.

It was as if I had dreamed the reality of the
macheteiro
. As if
I
had murdered him. Just as I had murdered David. Just as I was murdering myself.

But I had also had another recurring dream...Onca’s dream of being on the river with Genaro.

* * * *

“Yes, Meester,” Onca said as she stood in the darkness of my room. She was like a shadow, a disembodied voice. I reached over to the bedstead and switched on the lamp. “Ouch,” she said, shielding her eyes. She wore a flower-patterned housedress that she held tightly around herself, as if I had somehow called her in here to catch a glimpse of her naked flesh.

“I’m sorry,” I said, embarrassed. “I had a bad dream,” but as I looked into her face I remembered something that I had blocked out of my memory for all these years. I saw her brown eyes, wide as a child’s, and remembered being sent on an errand when I was a child in the camp—the nature of the errand, I could not remember. I had gotten lost. I was frightened, for if I were found walking about by the wrong person, I might be turned to smoke in the crematorium the next day. (Hadn’t hundreds of children, most of them my own age, been sent to the crematoriums just because they weren’t tall enough? I remembered when that happened: It was Yom Kippur, and I had to put stones in my shoes in order to gain a centimeter.) I passed by a door and opened it, hoping it was the office where I had been sent. But the room was empty, nothing but two long tables and high-backed wooden chairs. A high window covered with mesh let in a wan gray light. None of the ceiling lamps were turned on. But the far wall was covered with a taut white canvass, and attached to it with pins were eyes of every color. It was as if they were all staring at me. Condemning me for having arms and legs and a head, while they were dead. Forever staring outward onto one of Mengele’s bare walls.

“Do you wish me to get you something?” Onca asked.

“No,” I said, “but I want to know about your dream.” She looked uncomfortable, for she turned her head away; it was a subtle movement, but I had come to know her enough to understand her body language. “I’ve been dreaming about being on a boat with Genaro, too. What do you know about this doctor?”

She shrugged and sat down in a chair near the bed, her back to the window. I had pulled the mosquito netting away, draping it behind the head post. “This you must ask Genaro.”

“But I’m asking you first. Then if I decide to pursue it further, I can talk to Genaro. But he can be difficult to talk to, and there are some things I need to know.”

“Okay, if I know something I will tell you.” She pulled her housedress around her, a nervous habit.

“In this dream you had about me, you said you knew about a doctor who could make me well. Was that your dream or is it true that you know about a doctor?”

“It is both. I had the dream, and I know about a doctor.”

“Who is he?” I asked. “Where is he from?”

She shook her head. “Genaro met this man a long time ago. He only told me so after my dream.”

“What did he tell you?”

“Genaro does not talk so easily, as you know that. But Genaro was very sick. The man helped him.”

“Any doctor might have been able to do that?” I said.

“He had
febre
. It had killed everyone where he was.”

“Where was that?”

She shrugged. “He says above Manaus in Aika territory.”

The Aika were an Indian tribe, part of the Yąnomamö, the largest primitive group in the Amazon. Onca was Yąnomamö. Perhaps Genaro was too.

“Were you with him then?” I asked.”

“I told you, no. It happened before I knew him. What I know is from him and from the dream, that’s all, Meester, I swear that.”

“How did Genaro get out to see this doctor when the others didn’t, when the others died.”

“You have to ask him these things,” she said impatiently. She looked tired. Her eyes were swollen, but I had noticed that they’ve been like that for the past few days. “Genaro says this man is powerful like a sorcerer.”

“And what makes you think I would know this man?” I asked.

“I had the dream, which told me that. That’s how I know. I had the dream before Genaro told me about what happened to him. That’s how I know. The dream said this man could save you. Some of that was told to me by your own dream, I think.” As she talked, she became more agitated and upset. “You don’t want to try it, that’s okay, too. Everybody dies anyway, and if you go you’ll pay for it anyway. So will Genaro.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that. I don’t know. The fuck if I know,” and she turned her head away again, this time not so subtly.

“The whole thing is crazy,” I said. “It’s crazy that I would even consider talking about it.”

“Yes,” she said. “Crazy. Now I think I should be sleeping.” She stood up and walked to the door.

“Onca?”

“Yes, Meester?” Her bulk filled up the doorway, part of her in deep shadow like some great ship about to break away from its moorings.

“A few nights ago I heard you scream.”

She stared at me.

“Why did you scream? Do you remember?”

“I remember.”

I didn’t say anything more, but waited for her to go on, if she would.

“The scream was for Genaro, but for you too,” Onca said. “I will tell you,” and she walked back in the room, but kept her distance from me. “I dreamed about what happened to Genaro when he was cured by this doctor. I saw in this dream what Genaro was like before he saw this man. He was not so quiet, he had more life. And then he became like you....”

I felt her words, as if I had been kicked and the wind had gone out of me, but I said nothing.

“In the dream I saw my husband as he really is, I felt his thoughts, and I felt a sadness that took the life out of Genaro, that took his words and laughter and juice. I can’t describe this sadness, but it was as if he felt he had done something terrible, even though he didn’t, as if he carried terrible things that weren’t his. Like you, Misteer. The same as you. And I feel afraid for both of you, because I know you are going back to meet this sorcerer, and I want to stop you. But I don’t want you to die. But I don’t want you to carry weight, and Genaro, he cannot carry any more. So I don’t know. But if you go, Meester, you must take care of Genaro, no matter what. You must promise me this.”

I nodded and saw that she was crying, although her voice never wavered, just increased in strength.

She left and I realized that she was right. I was going to go. I would only become bedridden if I stayed. If I was going to die, it might as well be in the open, on the Amazon, than here. And as I turned off the light, I thought about David and my mother—I had never known my father, for he had died in an automobile accident before I was born. I remembered snatches of childhood before the camp, and I felt the old anger and hatred for Mengele. I had spent the better part of my life tracking him, to balance the scales, and in those years I had lost the focus of anger; finding him had become my
raison d’être
, but it was a choir I had become resigned to. My passion was gone, walled deep inside, its only escape dreams and nightmares. But now, perhaps my fear of death rekindled it. If there was a doctor living in the jungle, I would find him. If, impossibly, he was Mengele, I would kill him.

I would kill him for David.

For my mother.

For me, for the life he had taken.

And if he were just a doctor, a missionary treating the Indians, perhaps he would help me to die well.

As I sank through layers of gray thought to sleep, I felt a strength leaching into my old bones. I dreamed that I held the knife to Mengele. I dreamed that Mengele never was, that I had a life, a family instead of a few ugly affairs. A family instead of an empty apartment. A family instead of a
fazenda
Indian woman who treated me as an child—perhaps out of love, perhaps because it was her character to mother.

But as I slept I found my anger and hatred once again. I seethed with it, I was overjoyed with it, and even in the deepest of dreams, I knew that if I were going to die, I would have a purpose. Even if Mengele was dead, even if he was the hollow-socketed skull held up by the coroner in Embu, I would find him, in life or in death. For in my dream, I could see into Onca’s dreams, into Genaro’s dreams; and in deep sleep I believed in sorcery, for now I too was a sorcerer, a demon, and if it took a dream-journey for me to reach and exorcise my past, then so be it.

* * * *

The next day I talked with Genaro. We were in my dining room and Onca had prepared the table with silver and crystal as if this was to be my last supper. It was dusk, and the room took on a smoky appearance; the oriental rug that covered the rough plank hardwood floor gave a cozy warmth to the room, as did the hearth, for there were nights here when a fire was in order. “I can’t just make plans to go into the jungle,” I said. “I must know exactly where we’re going.”

Genaro nodded; he stood beside me and fidgeted while Onca brought a bottle of wine to the table. I had asked him to stay to supper, but he had awkwardly and politely declined. Under normal circumstances, he would have made himself comfortable in one of the plush chairs by the fireplace, as if it was he who owned the ranch and not me. But tonight he was different, taut, as if he were a soldier out on a dangerous maneuver. “We must get to Manaus,” he said, “and then we’ll go up Rio Branco. We can rent a ‘motor.’ Then we go north, right up river, almost to Venezuela, I think. Maybe
in
Venezuela. I don’t know that. Wakatauteri country, not much on the maps. Dangerous.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Some tribes still eating people. The Inambu and the Casao. I saw Inambu once.” He shook his head slightly, which for Genaro connoted real disgust. And there is disease like black river
febre
, which kills you in a day. I know of this, too.”

I nodded; we would be well armed; and I, at least, had little to lose as far as diseases went.

“But more than that, something hard to put into words.”

“Try, Genaro.”

He looked even more uncomfortable and kept glancing at Onca, giving her nasty looks, as if it were her fault entirely that he was called in to talk to me. “It’s different up there from other jungle places,” he said after a time. “More dreams.”

“What?”

“Dreams, they are real, like us. You can see them. They are dangerous. They can look like animals, but they aren’t. You will see them if you go. You think not, but you will. Your dreams, too, will be real.”

I glanced at Onca, who would not make eye contact with me. She seemed to be hearing these things for the first time. This whole thing was crazy. I should lay down in my bed and die in my house, not be planning my last adventure, this field trip into superstition. But somehow I was committed, as if indeed the dreams were in some sense real.

“How long will it take us to get there?” I asked.

“From Manaus?”

I nodded.

“With a motor?”

I nodded again.

“Maybe three days, including the walking.”

I groaned just thinking about that, for I was in constant pain now. It was a dull ache, even with Onca’s herbs and the prescription drugs. But I continued on as if nothing was wrong, by sheer determination, for I knew that once I allowed myself to become bedridden, I would be finished. The pemphigus, which I had been treating with the methotrexate prescribed by my doctor, had responded somewhat to treatment; it did not clear up, but did not seem to get much worse. Onca, of course, firmly believed it was the soap she had given me; and when I stopped using the foul smelling stuff, I did, indeed, begin to break out. But I also broke out when I stopped using the prescription.