Keeper (2 page)

Because I no longer played the game, I found myself lying on my back looking up at the sky and watching how the clouds and then the stars disappeared into the forest, how the forest covered and swallowed everything. I understood that I was
surrounded.
And I wanted to get out. I think I began wandering into the forest to see if there was a way out of it. And because there was nothing else to do.

You need to understand that the forest, or the jungle, call it what you like, was always trying to remove our little town. It would send long green fingers across the cleared spaces to climb up walls and lift the roofs off our houses. On Sundays, after church, my father would walk around the walls of our house with a machete, chopping off the jungle’s fingers to keep it safe in its leafless space. At least once a month something would sneak out of the jungle and take one of our chickens. Before we went to sleep at night, Father would carry a flashlight and a heavy stick around the house, checking for snakes. And because people spent so much time beating back the jungle, there was a small belt of half-tamed land around the houses, a strip of struggling bushes with paths pushed through them, paths our neighbors walked. But only in the daylight.

One day, I decided to walk through the safe area around the houses and go into the dark, high forest. I was not particularly brave. I was bored, and I was lonely. That is why I went. I walked along the paths where the chickens and the pigs scratched around for food until I came to the gloomy wall of the forest.

There were paths that went in there. I was only a child, of course, so I didn’t understand that these paths had been made by animals, not people. I would follow them until they disappeared, until they vanished among the complicated roots of trees and the thick carpet of leaves and ferns. I met glittering insects, and glistening frogs, and sometimes brilliant-feathered parrots; I learned the difference between the harmless screaming of these animals and the dark silence that crept into the jungle when a jaguar was nearby. And when I lay down to sleep in the black heat of my room, my dreams were of this new and fascinating darkness.

As I said, I was not brave. I was just as scared of the forest as everyone else was. Things I could not see would scuttle away from my feet. Things would crash through the leaves above my head. Sometimes I would cry aloud in fright. And the forest has a smell, too — a sort of thick, sweet, rotten smell that makes the air difficult to breathe. The light is dim and green. Where the sun does break through, its light is broken up by the leaves into patches and freckles of brightness and shadow so that it’s often hard to make out the shape of things.”

Paul Faustino shuddered theatrically. “Not my kind of place,” he said.

“No,” Gato said, trying to imagine his elegant friend coping with the discomforts of the jungle. “And there were plenty of people who thought it was no place for me, either. Our town was small and talkative, and it was not long before my family heard of my little expeditions into the wilderness. My father was stern. He knew how dangerous the jungle was, he said, because it was his job to fight it. He told me of plants that scratch and fill the scratches with a poison that spreads through your body and kills you in an hour. He told me of how a man working with him had stepped into the forest to pee and never been seen again. He told me of secret tribes of wild, painted forest people who stole children away and ate them. My mother cried and prayed aloud while he told me these things.

But when it came to horror stories about the jungle, no one could compete with Nana. Ah, the things she told me! In the rivers and pools there were anacondas, giant snakes. If you looked into the water, Nana said, they would hypnotize you with the cold blue fire in their eyes, then rise up out of the water, crush you to death, and swallow you whole. She told me, shuddering, about the
ya-te-veo
tree, which had long, living, evil roots covered in thorns bigger than knife blades. If you walked anywhere near them, these roots would seize you and nail you to the tree trunk, and there you would die a long and terrible death while the tree drank the blood that flowed from your wounds. There were giant spiders, she said, that leaped onto your face and suffocated you with their thick, hairy bodies. There were worms, she said, that burrowed into your toes and worked up through your body until they reached your brains and ate them, so that you went crazy before you died. She had a great imagination, my grandmother. She should have been a writer for the American movies. But the
worst
thing, she said — and she crossed herself — was that the Waiting Dead lived in the darkness of the forest. I was puzzled. And also interested.

‘Do you mean ghosts, Nana?’

She shrugged. ‘Ghosts, zombies, they are called many things.’

‘Why do you say they are waiting, Nana? What are they waiting for?’

‘They are waiting for the thing that can make them truly dead, so that their hungry spirits can be peaceful. Until they get it, they have to go on waiting, searching. Maybe forever. A terrible thing.’ She shivered dramatically.

‘I still don’t understand,’ I said. ‘What is this thing that the Waiting Dead are waiting for?’

‘Something they wanted very much when they were alive, and never had. They cannot properly die because they still hunger for this thing.’

Crazy stuff, of course, but I was fascinated by it. ‘But what kind of thing might this be?’ I persisted.

‘It could be anything,’ Nana said. ‘Maybe there is one waiting out there who always wanted a son. A tall, handsome thirteen-year-old son.’

Then she crossed herself again and hugged me. ‘No,’ she said. ‘God forgive me for saying such a thing.’

But, despite everything, I went into the forest again and again. Why? Well, as I said, there was nothing else to do, and nowhere else to go. And I saw wonderful things. Shimmering green hummingbirds smaller than butterflies; a family of tiny emerald frogs living in less than a cupful of water; moths with wings as clear as colored glass, like little pieces of the church window; golden millipedes longer than my arm tracking through the leaf-rubbish of the forest floor. I saw beetles that looked like flowers and flowers that looked like beetles.”

El Gato caught the expression on Faustino’s face and laughed. “This nature stuff really appeals to your romantic imagination, doesn’t it, Paul?”

“Oh, absolutely,” Faustino said, flicking unsuccessfully at his cigarette lighter. “Can’t get enough of it. Us city boys just love creepy-crawlies and weird flowers. Do go on.”

“Okay, Paul, enough. But listen — when you write this up, you’re going to have to grit your teeth and somehow get across to the readers the magic of the forest. It’s important, really important. You’ll see why, I promise.”

“I’ll do my best,” Faustino said, and, seeing the skeptical look on Gato’s face, lifted his hands in a gesture of surrender and said it again.

“Okay, Paul, I trust you. Anyway, despite everything my family said, I started to go farther and farther in. Looking back now, I think I was looking for something
in
the forest, rather than a way
out
of it.”

“And you found it, this thing you were looking for?”

It was darker now, and the city below Faustino’s office was a jazzy dance of neon signs and traffic. The big man went to the window and looked down at it all, spreading his large hands on the glass. “No,” he said. “It found me.”

G
ATO TURNED AWAY
from the city and said, “It happened on the day I broke the one rule I had made for myself. Like I said, I used to follow tracks into the forest until they ran out, and then I would either turn around and follow them back or maybe explore a little way off the path. But never more than just a little way, so that I always knew where the track was. The one thing I was truly afraid of was getting lost, of being lost in there when the darkness came in. So that was the rule I set myself — never lose sight of the track. And then one day I broke this rule. I don’t know why. I think perhaps I saw a bigger patch of sunlight through the undergrowth ahead of me, and my curiosity was stronger than my common sense. Whatever. Anyway, I shoved through the foliage, clambering over a fallen trunk that was soft with rot and moss, and pushed aside a curtain of thick, fleshy leaves. And found myself in an open space.

You probably don’t think this remarkable. But if you knew the jungle, you would find it hard to believe me, because an open space in the jungle is not possible. Something,
anything,
will occupy any space where it can find light to live and grow. Yet here was this clearing, and it was covered in grass. Yes, grass. Short grass.
Turf.
Impossible. Absolutely impossible. I walked out onto this grass very slowly, far more alarmed by this clearing than by any plant or creature I had met in the jungle itself. And it was very, very
quiet.
The whirring and clicking and calling and screeching of the forest became blurred and then died away.

I was in a space that was about one hundred yards long and maybe half as wide, and I had walked out of the forest at a point about halfway down its length. I looked at first to my left and saw how the clearing ended in a dense, shadowy wall of trees. Then I looked to my right. And froze.

Standing there, with its back to the trees, was a goal. A soccer goal. Two uprights and a crossbar. With a net. A net fixed up like the old-fashioned ones, pulled back and tied to two poles behind the goal. My brain stood still in my head. I could hear the thumping of my blood. I must have looked like an idiot, my eyes mad and staring, my mouth hanging open. Eventually I found the nerve to take a few steps toward this goal, this quite impossible goal. The woodwork was a silvery gray, and the grain of the wood was open and rough. Weathered, like the timber of old boats left for years on a beach. It shone slightly. The net had the same color, like cobwebs, and thin green plant tendrils grew up the two poles that supported it.

It seemed to take an age, my whole life, to walk into that goalmouth. When I got there, I put out my hands and held the net. It was sound and strong, despite its great age. I was completely baffled, and stood there, my fingers in the mesh of the net and my back to the clearing, trying, and failing, to make sense of all this.

And then my fingers began to tremble, and then my legs, because I was suddenly certain that I was not alone. I do not know how I forced myself to turn around.

And here I find the words difficult, Paul. I could say that he stepped out of the trees, but that is not quite right. He moved into the clearing, that is true, but he did not seem to be solid until he stopped moving. You know how sometimes you get bad TV reception, and there is a kind of shadow that follows the picture, so that things seem to happen twice? It was a bit like that: I watched him move and saw him standing still at the same time.

He was a goalkeeper, but I had never seen a uniform like the one he was wearing. He wore a high-necked knitted sweater. Green, like the forest. And long shorts made of heavy-looking cotton. I was immediately interested in his cleats, which were high, clumsy looking, made of brown leather and laced in a complicated way — the laces went over and under his foot and were tied at the back of his ankles. He wore an old-fashioned cloth cap with a big peak, which cast a deep shadow over the upper part of his face so that I couldn’t see his eyes. Perhaps because of this, his face had no expression whatsoever. Under his left arm he had a soccer ball — not the kind we played with in the plaza, but a brown one, made of leather, with a pattern like bricks.

There we stood, facing each other. All I could hear was my heart pumping. What I wanted, most of all, was not to be there. It was like having a nightmare and knowing that you are having a nightmare and that all you have to do is wake up, but you can’t wake up. I was trembling like a leaf in the rain. I must have moved, made some sign of running back the way I had come, because he spoke then. The Keeper spoke, and that
really
scared me.

You know how American movies get dubbed in this country, Paul? The actor speaks, and someone else’s voice says the words in our language, and the actor’s lips don’t quite match the soundtrack. The way the Keeper spoke was like that. Out of sync. The words seemed to take a long time to reach me.

And what he said was:
‘There. Your place. You belong there.’

So of course I flipped. Maybe I screamed — I don’t know. But the next thing I knew I was plunging through that curtain of leaves and hurling myself over that rotting mossy tree trunk and running stumbling back to where I hoped, prayed, my house was.

That night, in my hot, dark room, I shook like I had the fever. I dreamed it all again and again: the clearing, just as I had found it, but bathed in light as if a million electric lamps burned down onto it. A light so brilliant that it drained color from everything, and the only shadow was the one that hid half the Keeper’s face below the peak of his cap. The clearing, the goalmouth, the trees, were all silver beneath a black sky. In the dream I looked up at the silver trees, and they were swirling wildly, as if in a great wind. And the wind had a voice, a huge whispering voice that said:
There. Your place. You belong there.

I pulled myself out of this dream I don’t know how many times during that night. But each time I fell back into sleep I was there again, in that windswept silver-lit clearing with the Keeper. I could not escape him. And those same words, over and over again:
There. Your place. You belong there.
Sometimes the wind spoke them; sometimes he did, his mouth moving before the words came. Toward dawn, exhausted, I dreamed the dream one last time and heard the voice again. Except that this time it was not the voice of the wind, and it was not the voice of the Keeper. It was my own voice, saying:
Here. My place. I belong here.

I was a wreck the next morning. Mother took one look at me and dismissed the idea of school. She made me strong tea and put me into Father’s hammock in the shade of the pepper tree.