Labels and Other Stories Page 10

  Gerard was one of those remarkable men without whom poor countries could not operate at all. This was because he knew how to reclaim machinery that was utterly defunct. He knew which parts of one engine could be adapted to fit an engine of a completely different make, he knew how to add things to oil and gasoline so that engines ran more smoothly, and it was even said that he could bore a cylinder by hand with perfect precision. Anyway, my father first got to know him when his tractor cracked a piston and packed up, and Gerard replaced the piston with one that he got from an old Yanqui lorry that had been rusting in the river for years. It was a masterpiece of improvisation, and my father brought him home to eat and take a few copas. I think that he paid him with chickens, since pesos were worth nothing.

  Gerard was very handsome and cultivated, and he charmed the whole family right from the start. My mother was fascinated by him because of his Gallic manners and his ability to make her feel that her intellect was respected. It turned out that he too was crazy about the novels of Mario Vargas Llosa, and in addition he was able to talk about all sorts of intellectual movements in Europe in a very interesting manner. I do not mean to imply that here in our country we occupy a cultural backwater, because that is not true. Gerard himself used to say that we knew by heart more poetry than the inhabitants of any other nation. It was just that Gerard never took simple opinions as his own; he was always full of the complexities of apparently simple issues, and my mother found this a refreshing change from my own father’s straightforward opinions. My father too enjoyed his conversations, and we children adored him because he would bring us gifts of pieces of old engines, all polished up, to use as toys and ornaments. I still have a piston from a Russian motorcycle that I use as an ashtray, which he gave to me on my saint’s day.

  Gerard had black hair, a pencil moustache, and glittering brown eyes. He suffered terribly from the bites of our mosquitoes in the rainy season, and Mama used to fuss over the sores, worrying that they would ulcerate. He became a frequent guest at our table, and I believe that to some extent he enlightened my father as to my mother’s worth. He used to lean over and ask my mother’s opinion of things, treating her answers with perfect seriousness, and often admitting that she was in the right. My father began to do the same, and we all noticed that Mama seemed happier.

  It was Gerard who brought up in conversation the fact that all the children were named after countries, and he joked, ‘Are you intending to give birth to a complete continent?’

  This was the first time that anyone had had the temerity to hint at what was publicly considered to be the truth of my father’s mania for children. Everyone saw for themselves that he did not lavish much paternal love upon us, that he ignored us for the most part, and allowed my mother to do all the work. When Gerard asked this question, my father said, ‘Yes, a complete continent,’ and my mother said, ‘I will have no more children.’

  There was an embarrassed silence at the table, and then Gerard made light of it, and said to my mother, ‘There would be only three more countries to go.’

  My mother replied, ‘But Guyana was British, Guiana was French, and Surinam is Dutch. I think that the Latin countries of South America are quite enough. There will be no more children.’

  My father was a little drunk at the time, and he treated my mother’s remarks as a joke. He said, ‘What about Panama and Costa Rica and Nicaragua? What about El Salvador and Honduras and Guatemala? And Mexico? What about them? It would be fine to have them too. And what about the Malvinas?’

  My mother threw her eyes to the heavens, and Gerard said, ‘Take pity upon your poor wife, Pablo, and upon your children.’

  My father was annoyed. ‘What about our children?’ he said. ‘They are happy enough. Do not interfere in our family affairs. And what of my wife? She is fed, and she does no more than a wife expects to have to do.’

  He glared at Gerard, but Gerard did not back down. He stood up and put his hands on the table; he raised an eyebrow and replied, ‘Ten children in two beds is not civilised, Pablo, and neither is wrecking one’s wife’s health with childbearing and overwork.’ He left the table without finishing his meal, and my father did not speak to him again until the tractor broke a main bearing, and forced him to. But that did not stop Gerard from turning up when my father was away, and talking to Mama in the kitchen.

  Papa forced Mama to have Guyana and Guiana. I am sure of that because there was so much shrieking and crashing about during those two years. Mama was always bruised and tearful, and when she called in the doctor to try to talk to Papa and work out whether he was suffering from a mania, Papa went completely loco and broke all my mother’s possessions. He threw the doctor out for impertinence, and from that time the doctor refused to help us even when little Venezuela seemed to be dying of a fever.

  Mama was pregnant again when Papa was killed. No one knows exactly how it happened, but his body was found with a gash from a machete halfway through his neck. His assailant had taken his wedding ring and his money-belt, and so we all assumed that it was a robbery, although this did not stop the gossip when people noticed that Mama did not weep at the funeral. I remember seeing his glassy-eyed body laid out on the table, and not being able to feel anything at all. Colombia Carmelita told me in private that she was glad he was dead, and I did not know what to say.

  There was a peculiar gaiety about Mama’s period of mourning. She wore black and a solemn expression, but her mouth curled up at the corners with the hint of a smile, and she seemed happier with this pregnancy than she had been with the last ones. She would lie in her hammock in the evenings patting the hump protectively, laughing her tinkly laugh, and allowing Gerard to bring her tisanes and massage her feet. They smiled a lot, and stopped exchanging confidences whenever one of us children appeared. Bolivia Segunda started to call him ‘Papa’.

  When the baby appeared in the world everyone automatically referred to her as Surinam, even my mother, but things had changed. She was doing more of the farm work herself, and she left Surinam to Colombia Carmelita to look after for most of the time. But she loved the baby passionately, and she would dandle it on her knees and coo at it, calling it all sorts of pet names that seemed almost too sentimental. She also spent a lot of time seeming to be putting things in order, such as tidying the house, counting the sheets, selling off the surplus cattle, and so on.

  Then Gerard disappeared and was not seen for a month, and then Mama disappeared too, with Surinam. She left a letter which said:

  My dear children,

  I leave all that I have to you, and I trust in Colombia Carmelita to be a mother to the family, as I trust in Peru to be a father to it. Both of you are old enough to inherit your patrimony. I will send you an address to write to when I have finished travelling, and I beg you not to miss me. One day you will understand that it is not only babies who have a right to be born.

  I want you to know that I have remarried, even though the period of mourning is not over, and I have decided that the new baby’s name is not Surinam.

  With all my love, Mama

  PS The baby’s name is ‘Francia’, and it is my last.

  TWO DOLPHINS

  La Caboca Amadea was a connoisseur of earth; to each one of us the gods apportion talents according to caprice, and those of the gods with little intelligence (but impressively whimsical innovative genius) apportion talents of great interest but of even greater uselessness. When Exu decreed that Caboca Amadea should become a gourmandiser of soil, he did it with so little thought that he did not even remember to remind himself to keep an eye upon the consequences of his humorous gift, and so he was as surprised as everyone else when he discovered what had transpired.

  From the time when Amadea was a very little black-eyed girl with tawny skin and hair perpetually wet from diving for turtles in the inundated forest, she was developing not only an infallible sense of direction amongst the tangles of trees, but was also learning to tell by taste her exact location. Beneath the water she could take
a handful of the earth that was forest floor for only five months of the year, and surface with it. Shaking the water from her hair, she would first sniff the soil, appreciating its organic odours, its degree of fetidness, its proportion of sand, its perfume of submarine worms and the excrement of fishes. Then she would begin to devour it, slowly at first so that its warm tastes could mingle upon her palate, and then greedily so that she could feel it parading musically down her cormorantine gullet. This filled her with such delight that afterwards she would imitate the shriek of the hyacinth macaw, because nothing else could summarise her bliss.

  Amadea learned in this way the exact taste of every barra within the range of her people, and because of this she became desired by every man, for with her in the canoe it was impossible to become lost, and one could go fishing far and wide, since even when one was beyond the limits of the known world, Amadea could tell from the savour of alluvial silt and the direction of the current the precise location of home.

  At first people disapproved of her intemperate consumption of soil, because it was a sacrilege so to consume the body of a god. But Nenu declared after much thought that the Earthmother was not consumed, but transformed into a rich and valuable manure by passing through Amadea’s gut. When the cabocos accepted this opinion of such an old and indisputably wise woman, Amadea accepted it happily as well, and thought of herself as the handmaiden of the Earthmother as well as the High Navigatrix of the sodden forest.

  So it was that her pride grew mightily, and she heaped with contumely the humble offerings and inducements of her forlorn suitors, who prized her even more greatly the more she scorned and insulted them. She would send them away with the haughtiness of a young queen, and the judgement that she would never marry until one day a man appeared who would give to her a soil so exquisite that she could not resist him.

  This is why for so many months so many young men of that tribe were seen wandering so far from the known parameters of their territory. This is why three fishermen were lost to caimans, one disappeared in the rapids, and one other died of despondency amongst the orchids and lianas, to be consumed in sections by a tigre that stayed by the corpse for days in order to see off any rivals for the dusky meat. This is the reason that Amadea became a connoisseur of soils from places where she had never been, from places as far away as Rondonia and Nuestra Señora de la Selva; but none of these soils, however aromatic, however doctored with infallible aphrodisiacs and irresistible love-potions hard-bargained for with cascabeles and brujos and wise women ever satisfied her regal longing for the most exquisite earth of the world, which would win her heart and cause her to grant the lifelong benediction of her nakedness.

  Until one evening when she grew weary of the fiesta where Nenu was in the great hut drinking ayahuasca and vine-bark in order to determine the instructions of the gods, in order to become possessed by the spirits of ancestors from whom people were requiring advice as to the whereabouts of their lost knives and the biggest fish, and in order to travel the earth outside of her body and bring back news of the great events of the world that it was better to avoid.

  Amadea went to the sandbar and wept. So great was her loneliness amid all that chanting and dancing, all that divination and sortilege, all that music from the men’s hut, for so great was her longing for the man who would release her from her impossible vow. ‘I am,’ she cried, staring through her tears at the space between the stars called ‘the Tapir’, ‘fourteen years old, and already within me I am stirring for a child, for a man’s love, for a man’s loins, for the hot spurt of childseed, for a lover’s embrace in the forest and in the smoke of the hut. I am alone with my woman’s beauty and the taste of the Earthmother in my mouth; and no one knows who amongst these cabocos will take the longing from my tongue.’

  Amadea watched the bufeo break through the reflection of the moon upon the waters, and cried, ‘Ay, good dolphin, who takes half the fish ungrudged from our nets before our very eyes. Ay, bufeo, who saves the drowning fishermen and carries him ashore between two of you. Ay, bufeo, whom we never kill and never eat because you love each other so much and so publicly that our hearts are moved inside us. Ay, bufeo, when will I give up my solitudes of a perpetual virgin?’

  She rested her head in her arms, and her capuchin monkey clambered upon her shoulders and inspected her tangled hair. She reached up and stroked it, and then there was a soft footstep on the sandbar beside her. She looked up through her tears and the alcoholic haze of chicha, and saw that the bufeo had become a man. She saw that he was tall and golden-skinned, that his eyes were of different colours, and that he was completely naked. He was holding out his hand with something in it, and all at once she was glad that she had painted herself freshly with annatto, that she had scoured her parasites with fishes’ teeth, that she had withheld herself so long. She reached out for the earth knowing in advance that it was the quintessence of soil.

  The bufeo watched as her expressions changed with the delight of the rainbow of flavours. It tasted first of piraruca, then of spit-roast tapir, then of capybara, then of piranha except without the annoying little bones, then of granadillas, then of guava, then of sweet grapefruit, and then of two tastes unknown to her experience, because they were the tastes of apples and peaches. She ate the soil slowly because she was drawing out the pleasure of the savour of mangos, of three-toed sloth, of comelon, of venison in a sauce of juniper berries and Greek yoghurt.

  She smiled up in the moonlight at the bufeo, who said nothing as yet because in normal circumstances he spoke in squeaks and whistles, and did not want to alarm her with strange speech. His hand was still outheld, but now because it was an invitation to her to take it, which she did, pulling him down upon the sandbar and caressing his skin so finely muscled from so much swimming.

  Amadea made love with the dolphin every night upon the sandbar, and became accustomed to his silence and the feel of his slender embraces that stirred her so profoundly that during the day she grew tumescent beneath her uluri just in thinking about him and envisioning the events of the evening. When the rains ceased and the waters receded into the courses of the rivers she followed him and lived her caboco life on the shores of unknown parts, swimming with him by day and cavorting with him amongst so many other fish, until once more the rains came and the waters rose up and flooded the forest, carrying them back to her own stilted village.

  The bufeo’s child grew strong in the village, but Amadea was not there to care for her. The child Venu was raised amongst the cabocos whilst her mother lived carelessly, immersed in the waters and immersed in the bufeo’s silent love. Venu spent all her life astonished by what she saw, because she was half bufeo, and bufeos have very poor eyesight. With her human eyes Venu experienced the world as a perpetually astounding panorama of colours, because half her mind was bufeo, and, because half her mind was bufeo, she would sit by the sandbar of her conception, listening with wonderment to the world of the singing fish beneath the waters, feeling the same longing as Amadea her mother had done so many years before. She felt the same longing even after the missionary men with the black clothes, the stern faces and the pathological hatred of life and its joys, took her away and gave her to nuns who attempted fruitlessly to prevent her frequent escapes to the river, and eventually cast her out at the age of sixteen because of it, which was how she found herself working as a secretary to an oil company, where she had enough leisure to sit for some of the day in a tropical reverie, listening to all the high-frequency squeaks that no one else could hear, and mesmerised by the fact that everything had a colour.

  *

  In the same year that Aurelio saved the life of the sub-chief Dianari by hacking at the sucuri snake that was attempting to suffocate him by constriction, in the same year that Aurelio was therefore adopted by the paje and taught all the secrets of Navante sorcery, in the same year that Amadea conceived Venu upon the sandbar, Anane the paje conceived Rebu by a female dolphin.

  Anane was not a feared man because although
he was a paje he understood that compassion was the secret of peace. He knew that upon occasion it is better not to be compassionate, which was why he never disapproved of the killing of white explorers who brought lethal diseases, and which was why he was as proud as anyone else that his people were tolerant enough to learn as much as they could from explorers before they were killed.

  Anane was so compassionate that he had once lain absolutely still for a fortnight to allow a nest of mice to hatch in his hair, and he had once taken the unprecedented step of declining to rape the wife of a man who had raped his own wife. When he saw the suffering upon the woman’s face, he had chosen instead the right to strike the rapist who was not permitted to resist. And instead of striking the man across the head with his bordana, and killing him, he had struck him across the chest and only broken a few ribs.

  It was Anane who had taken yague and consulted with the tribal ancestor, Mavutsinin, to confirm that the village should be laid out in a crescent and that the moon was made of oropendola feathers. It was Anane who had agreed that from now on a knife should be called a ‘couteau’ to honour the memory of a French explorer who had arrived half-eaten by lechmaniosis leprosy, but who had touched their hearts by knowing how to pat their chests in greeting, which made him an honorary Navante so that he was allowed to die in peace whilst Anane blew smoke over his body and chanted so that his ancestors could come all the way from France to collect his spirit, thus preventing him from becoming a disorientated ghost lost for ever amongst the creepers and the heliconius butterflies.