Indecision (17 page)

“No,” I said. “Let’s do it. Let’s go to the Oriente.” The name had a certain ring to it (as maybe the sound
Natasha
had at one point had); moreover a Knittelian notion of the profoundness of forests had rustled through my mind. “Can’t Cuncalbamba wait?”

“But Dwight,
I
have only just escaped from this jungle. I want to go someplace . . . for fun.”

“The jungle’s not fun?” Edwin seemed so fun—in fact, “Fun!” he was saying now, repeating this reassuring English word. Besides, I had made the important if paradoxical discovery that I was so eager for time alone with Brigid that I wanted to postpone it. For a decade or more I’d gone from girl to girl with hardly a week in between; like a chain-smoker, I’d lit one new romance off the stub of another and rarely had time to just breathe. So for now it was nice to be Vaneetha-less and single, waiting to bust a move on medium-sized, mercurial, almond-eyed, and currently somewhat reluctant-looking Brigid until convinced by longer experience of Abulinix that I should or shouldn’t do this thing.

With Edwin and me applying steady peer pressure—the look involved is exactly the same across cultures—finally she said, “Okay. You have a two-thirds majority. You want fun and he wants money.”

“And also,” I said, like the sensitive guy I might be, “I want to understand better where you’re coming from.”

“I don’t come from anywhere.”

THIRTEEN

But now let me do a kind of movie-style montage thing covering the first two days in the jungle and suggesting, the same way that movies do, when they do this, the excitement and emotional near-unanimity of the two main characters as they caper around and change locales, because once we were definitely going (and had made Edwin a split cash payment of two hundred dollars) she like me threw herself into our surprise excursion:

Dwight swallows serious fear of spiders and in a recklessly piloted van travels with Brigid down a washed-out road opposite which more waterfalls drop in white gashes from practically phosphorescent cliffs until past military checkpoints and the flyblown frontier town of Puyo the jungle begins, Brigid there translating Edwin for Dwight and displaying her own impressive command of flora and fauna, which categories include liana vines swung from Tarzan and Jane–style, caimans hiding in the water with loglike snouts, and leaf-cutter ants filing across logs while bearing on their backs pieces of leaves like sails. First night’s camp is made near water along the high jungle basin, with the silver of the sky getting polished and tarnished in the flat river going by, then a sudden rain as abruptly stops, this strong medicinal smell or muscular balsam afterwards pouring out from the jungle at the travelers who sit around the camp stove covered against mosquitoes with bandannas over their mouths, Brigid looking in the guttering candlelight like a trade-summit anarchist, something that along with the presence of Edwin and perhaps the overwhelming insect sound at night serves to muffle or delay possible sexual tension between the two principals, with their
mixed agonist-antagonist profiles,
who nevertheless seem to keep warming to each other as maybe generally people do in jungles, waking in the steamy morning to slip with Edwin in a dugout canoe down the river flanked by broken fans of pima bamboo and later emerging on a gray bank of gravelly sand only to plunge back in, deeper this time, wearing Wellington boots and DEET and hearing howler monkeys cry like
human babies
in the fresh warm jungle dark that gets relieved at points by bright red scooping slippers of heliconia flower and the similar red of some horse’s cock of an enormous root dripping colorless sap, and then, more dramatically, in a sudden clearing, by a waterfall shot yellow-gold with decaying afternoon light as it pours from this forest wall, an excellent site for stripping to underwear—all that Edwin wears anyway—and diving in under the surf and hard noise. Day two ends on a lookout ridge with the river in sight and the silhouette of distant ragged mountains etch-a-sketched a shade darker on the pigeon-gray darkening sky. A short walk is taken to camp, flashlights picking out curious eyes in the trees—spider monkeys, Edwin claims via Brigid before surprising Dwight and Brigid both by unstrapping a shaft of bamboo from his pack and, with a single deft blow, sending a poison-tipped dart flying off into the night.

“Whoa. Did he just try to kill a monkey?”

Luckily Edwin had missed. So that our tasty dinner in fact consisted of patacones (or potato pancakes filled with a strange mild cheese) and funky-smelling papaya for dessert. I’d never liked papaya much at Gray’s Papaya in New York, but was liking it a lot in the jungle, and attempted to smile at Edwin in such an eloquent way as to signify this tasty fact.

He nodded his head with judicious incomprehension, and he and Brigid resumed their conversation. Another monolingual person might have felt left out. But to me as I sat on the moss-covered log in the dark there was something exciting about the traded foreign voices and the constant chirr and throb of insect noise. Besides, it was a relief not to have to do any talking myself, since what I had to say wasn’t anything easily reportable: for two days now I’d been feeling like the thin end of some enormous wedge of promise was beginning to enter me, and be driven slowly home. I even permitted myself to imagine that upon my return to North America I might travel through the United States and Canada as a well-paid but unimpeachably honest lecturer on behalf of Bristol-Myers Squibb, testifying in venues large and small to the efficacy of Abulinix. “Recently I found myself in the jungles of the Amazon,” my inspirational talk would begin. Of course I didn’t know how it would end; but to the credit of the drug, I wasn’t worried in the least.

Eventually Edwin wished Brigid and me a buenas noches and walked off into the trees. The sound of his footsteps (he walked with a deliberate, soft, flat-footed tread) and the light from his headlamp were quickly submerged in the scissory hiss of the jungle and the moonless leaf-clogged dark.

A bit confused, I asked Bridge what was up.

Undecided between amusement and something else, she said, “He wants to sleep like a Haponi.”

“But he is a Haponi,” I observed as we repaired to the thatched hut.

Our headlamps revealed three hammocks hanging from rough-hewn ceiling beams, dangling a few feet apart above the floor of packed dirt. I dragged our packs inside.

Brigid sat down on her hammock, half under the mosquito netting.

“May I?” I asked, sidling in and sitting down next to her on the hammock so that our shoulders and arms were jostled together (I thought of a pair of dice shaken in the hand) and our heads briefly bumped.

She switched off her headlamp, like I did mine; and in the flawless jungle dark our voices seemed to acquire new intimacy or importance.

“I think that he wants to act the part of an Indian for me. It is not even allowed in the tourist zone to hunt monkeys.”

“What’s the blowgun for, then?”

“For show, for us. He was never good as a hunter.” It seemed that until the age of seventeen or so Edwin had grown up in an Evangelical mission where the proselytizing Christians had discouraged not only animism, polygamy, and the consumption of hallucinogenic potions, but also hunting.

“Down with the Christians!” I shook my head. “Wrong on all the issues . . .”

She went on to say that Edwin had quit the mission when his mother died and two uncles, more traditional-style livers and much deeper in the forest, had come to reclaim him. “So he was at least seventeen before he uses a dart gun.”

“And so is this why he left them, because he’s not such a good hunter?”

She seemed a bit weary of recounting the situation: “You see, after the oil spill—very near here, by the way—there was such anger at the government, at the oil company, really at the modern world of this moment, that when this group of Haponi moved down the river they didn’t want to traffic with this world anymore, not at all. So Edwin with his Spanish, whose role was to go to Puyo to trade—I suppose now he doesn’t feel very useful. Also he has met this woman on the bus. In fact this was the topic of my dissertation—”

“Bus-induced romance?” Does anyone really want to hear the topic of someone’s dissertation?

“If you want to know, my topic was the emergence among some of the Haponi of what you could call an
indigenous absolutism.
Where now they want to live absolutely in the former style. In fact it is not anymore the ones who are untouched by the market, the West, et cetera who live like an idea of the savage. Now it is those who
have
been touched, and some of course retreat, refuse, recoil—they become very deliberate about being indigenous. Even if they have forgotten.”

“And Edwin thinks you want him to be more of an old-school Haponi?”

From a slight displacement of her shoulder I could tell when she nodded. “Naturally we are taught not to romanticize about cultures that we can’t understand, not to speak for them—this is why your sister is studying America: that is the fashion now, to study oneself—but yes, of course I romanticize. And I think other anthropologists are also the same. They are all hoping for examples for a different life. And the Haponi
are
more spontaneous, their emotions are
not
so mixed as ours. It’s not romantic, it’s only true. Edwin is not a good example, but . . .”

“So in your thesis were you going to be pro–indigenous absolutism?”

“Officially neutral. Merely very ethnological. Secretly of course I was pro—but objectively I should be against this. Because ultimately they will need to accommodate. . . . To delay can only make it more difficult, no?”

“True,” I noted from personal experience. “Well it does sound like interesting material. . . .”

“This was my trouble, someone else thought so too. And yet for months I am asking all the clan questions which it seems they are very familiar with somehow, and still, no, I don’t see. Their answers seem all very packaged, or canned—and yet it took me several months finally to ask, ‘Has another anthropologist been visiting you?’ Of course yes, another anthropologist writing on precisely the same subject.”

“Ouch. Redundancy. That hurts.”

“And no one had divulged this at first because there was a man who wished for me to stay. For his part my admirer claimed not to understand why I should have to write something new. ‘Isn’t it true a second time, and as many times as anyone says it? Isn’t the truth confirmed by saying it more often?’ ”

“Good point, actually.”

“Really? Tell my advisor. Tell my committee.”

“But your admirer is right. I mean, why do we need a bunch of new truths? You’d think there’d be plenty of old ones lying around unused.”

“And which do you propose to use?”

I was considering kissing Brigid in lieu of a reply, when the beam of Edwin’s light lanced into the hut.

He’d forgotten how long it took to thatch a structure together out of palm leaves. And a few minutes later, after an exchange of goodnights, we were all three dangling silently from the ceiling in the swinging cocoons of our separate hammocks and listening—or I was anyway—to the jungle’s wet, dilated, rhythmic, chanting, serrated sound.

FOURTEEN

“So wait, again,
why
aren’t you seeing anyone?”

I’d been lying there in my hammock for a while, too excited to sleep, when these words came back to me out of nowhere; and maybe this entire memoir, unbeknownst to itself, began its gestation or germination that night as I lay on my back in the dark, and remembered these words that Alice had said to me back at the end of last summer as we sea-kayaked around the bristling lower tip of Manhattan.

It had been a late summer Saturday, and we’d rented these sea kayaks like we’d been saying we would all summer. “I like preserving our self-image as athletic people,” Alice had said as she fitted the nylon skirt around the sill and took her plastic paddle in hand. “How infrequently do you think we can do sports before we have to admit that we never do?”

We were paddling out around where the Hudson begins getting mixed up with the ocean when she asked me again why I wasn’t seeing anyone. There were zero clouds, and the air seemed tall with clarity—it was that variety of day.

Alice’s question surprised me because I thought I had just been
explaining
why. “Al, don’t dad me. I just explained why.”

Paddling along beside her, I had just been
explaining
that most of what I ever did with a girlfriend was to talk, and how when I talked to such a girlfriend there was something unsatisfying about being the one who wound up saying the things I invariably said. I never objected in the same way to what I said to friends: friendship seemed like an ideal forum for provisional conclusions and marginal comments, and I assumed that the high error quotient of most of these got forgiven by the fact that I hadn’t tied my friend’s life to mine in a sort of three-legged race, and wasn’t therefore obliging him to collude with my errors or to reject them, either of which would have been painful. But when in an actual romantico-sexual relationship I always wanted to be as faithful and unique to the truth as to the young lady in question, meaning that when talking to a girlfriend my loyalty was really to the reservoir of truth left behind uncontaminated by my words, instead of to anything I said. This is what I’d been telling Alice, adding that in order to actively boyfriend someone I wanted to add love to the truth (truth which I already loved, if unrequitedly) rather than start with love and hope for the eventual addition of truth.

It was the most elaborate speech I’d made since moving to New York, and Alice had seemed like she was paying attention at the time. “When did you graduate from college?” she’d said acidly when I was done.

“You
teach
college,” I’d reminded her.

“Well so come out with the fucking ‘truth’ already. Why not just say whatever you have to say to the poor girl?”

“What poor girl?” This was several days pre-Vaneetha and a day or two post-Nadine, utterly, totally forgotten Nadine. “And I would but—”