The Codex (31 page)

“Then men came upriver with soldiers, and they had guns and papers, and we all signed the papers, and then they said we had agreed to have a new chief, much bigger than the village chief, and that we had agreed to give him all the land and animals and trees and all the minerals and oil underground, if there was any, which we thought was very funny. They gave us a picture of our new chief. He was very ugly with a face as pockmarked as a pineapple. When our real chief protested, they took him into the forest and shot him.

“Then soldiers and men with briefcases came and said that there had been a revolution and that we had a new chief, that the old one had been shot. They told us to make marks on more papers, and then more missionaries came and made schools and brought medicines, and they tried to catch the boys and take them away to school, but they never could.

“In those days we had a very wise chief, my grandfather, Don Cali. One day he called everyone together. He said that we needed to understand these new people who acted like madmen but were as crafty as demons. We had to learn who these people really were. He asked for volunteers among the boys. I volunteered. The next time the missionaries came I let myself be captured and sent to boarding school in La Ceiba. They cut my hair and put me in itchy clothes and hot shoes and beat me for speaking Tawahka. I stayed there ten years, and I learned how to speak Spanish and English, and I saw with my own eyes who the white men were. That was my job: to understand them.

“I came back and told my people what I had learned. They said, ‘This is terrible, what can we do?’ And I said, ‘Leave it to me. We will resist them by agreeing with them.’

“After that, I knew what to say to the men who came to our village with briefcases and soldiers. I knew how to read the papers. I knew when to sign the papers and when to lose them and act the fool. I knew what to say to the Jesus men to get medicine, food, and clothes. Every time they brought a picture of the new chief and told me to throw away the picture of the old chief, I thanked them and hung the new picture up in my hut with flowers.

“And that is how I came to be chief of Pito Solo. And so you see, Curandera, I understand how things are. There is nothing we can do to help the mountain Indians. We will be throwing away our lives for nothing.”

Sally said, “I, personally, can’t just walk away.”

Don Alfonso laid a hand on hers. “Curandera, for a woman you are the bravest I have ever met.”

“Don’t start on that again, Don Alfonso.”

“You are even braver than most men I have known. Do not underestimate the mountain Indians. I would not want to be one of these soldiers in the hands of the mountain Indians, with my last sight on earth that of seeing my manhood spit-roasting on an open fire.”

No one spoke for a few minutes. Tom felt tired, very, very tired. “It’s our fault, Don Alfonso, that this is happening. Or rather, our father’s fault. We’re responsible.”

“Tomás, none of this means anything, this business of your fault, his fault, my fault. We can do nothing. We are powerless.”

Philip nodded in agreement. “I’ve had it with this crazy journey. We can’t save the world.”

“I agree,” said Vernon.

Tom found them all looking at him. A vote of sorts was being taken, and he had to decide. He found Sally looking at him with a certain curiosity. He just couldn’t see himself giving up. He had come too far. “I’ll never be able to live with myself if we just go back. I’m with Sally.”

But it was still three against two. Even before the sun rose, Don Alfonso was up and breaking camp. The usually inscrutable Indian was frightened out of his wits.

“There was a mountain Indian not half a mile from our camp last night. I saw his tracks. I am not afraid of death myself. But I have already caused Pingo’s and Chori’s deaths, and I do not want any more blood on my hands.”

Tom watched Don Alfonso flinging together their meager belongings. He felt sick. It was over. Hauser had won.

Sally said, “Wherever Hauser goes with that codex, whatever he does, I’m going to be on his trail. He’ll never escape me. We may be returning to civilization, but I’m coming back. This isn’t over by any means.”

Philip’s feet were still infected, leaving him unable to walk. Don Alfonso wove a carrying hammock, something like a stretcher with two short poles that went across the shoulders. It didn’t take long to pack. When the time came to leave, Tom and Vernon hoisted him up. They set off single file through the narrow corridor of vegetation, Sally in front wielding the machete, Don Alfonso taking up the rear.

“Sorry to be such a nuisance,” said Philip, taking out his pipe.

“You are a damn nuisance,” Vernon said.

“Allow me to beat my breast with remorse.”

Tom listened to his two brothers. It had always been like this, a kind of half-joking banter. Sometimes it stayed friendly, sometimes not. Tom was glad, in a way, to see Philip well enough to start chaffing Vernon.

“Gee, I hope I don’t slip and drop you in a mudhole,” said Vernon.

Don Alfonso made one last pass among them, checking their packs. “We must be as silent as possible,” he said. “And no smoking, Philip. They will smell it.”

Philip swore and put the pipe away. It began to rain. Carrying Philip proved to be far more difficult than Tom anticipated. It was almost impossible to haul him up the slippery trails. Carrying him across wobbly logs laid across roaring rivers was an exercise in terror. Don Alfonso kept a vigilant eye out and enforced a strict regime of silence; even the use of the machete was forbidden. Utterly exhausted, they camped that afternoon on the only level piece of ground they could find, a wallow of mud. The rain poured buckets, the water streaming into the feeble hut Vernon built, and the mud covered everything. Tom and Sally went off to hunt and wandered through the forest for two hours, seeing nothing. Don Alfonso forbid the lighting of a fire, for fear of the smell. Their dinner that night was a raw root that tasted like cardboard and a couple of rotten fruits riddled with little white worms.

The rain continued to pour down, turning the streams into boiling torrents. Ten hours of grueling effort carried them only about three miles. The next day and the next were more of the same. The hunting was impossible, and Don Alfonso could not catch any fish. They subsisted on roots and berries and the odd rotten fruit that Don Alfonso was able to scrounge up. By the fourth day they had managed to travel less than ten miles. Philip, in his already half-starved condition, was weakening rapidly. The hollow look returned to his face. Unable to smoke, he spent most of his day staring up into the jungle canopy, hardly responding when spoken to. They weakened from the physical effort of carrying the hammock and had to rest ever more frequently. Don Alfonso seemed to shrink, his bones sticking out horribly, his skin loose and wrinkled. Tom forgot what it was like to have dry clothes.

On the fifth day, around noon, Don Alfonso called a halt. He reached down to pluck something off the trail. It was a feather with a tiny piece of plaited twine attached to it.

“Mountain Indians,” he whispered, his voice quavering. “This is fresh.”

There was a silence.

“We must get off the trail now.”

Following the trail had been bad enough. Now walking became almost impossible. They pushed into a wall of ferns and lianas so thick that it seemed to push back at them. They crawled under and climbed over fallen trees, waded through boggy pools with the mud sometimes to their waists. The vegetation was riddled with ants and stinging insects, which when disturbed dropped down on them with a fury, crawling about their hair, falling inside their collars, stinging and biting. Philip suffered the most of all as his hammock was dragged and wrestled through the dense undergrowth. Don Alfonso insisted they travel off the trail.

It was pure hell. The rain never let up. They took turns hacking a path a few hundred yards long through the dense undergrowth; then two of them would carry Philip in his hammock along the path. There they would stop and take turns cutting another hundred yards through the forest. They proceeded this way at the speed of two hundred yards an hour for two more days, without a single letup in the downpour, wading through knee-deep mud, sliding and sometimes crawling uphill and falling and sliding back down again. Most of the buttons had come off Tom’s shirt, and his shoes had fallen apart so badly that he had cut his feet on several occasions on sharp sticks. The rest were in a similar state of raggedness. The forest was empty of game. The days merged into one long struggle through twilight thickets and rain-loud swamps, where they were stung and bitten so continuously that their skin took on the raw texture of burlap. It now took all four of them to lift Philip, and sometimes they had to rest for an hour just to carry him a dozen yards.

Tom began to lose all track of time. The end was soon coming, he realized: the moment when they could go no farther. He felt strange, light-headed. The nights and days blended into one another. He fell in the mud and lay there until Sally pulled him up, and then, half an hour later, he would have to do the same for her.

They arrived at an open area where a giant tree had fallen, opening a hole in the forest canopy. The ground around it was, for once, relatively level. The giant tree had fallen in such a way that it was possible to shelter under its enormous trunk.

Tom could barely walk. By silent mutual consent, they all stopped to camp. He felt so weak that he wondered if, once having lain down, he’d be able to get up again. With the last of their strength the group cut poles and laid them against the trunk, thatching them with ferns. It seemed to be around noon. They crawled underneath and huddled together, lying directly on the wet ground in two inches of mud. Later, Sally and Tom made another attempt at hunting, but they returned well before dark empty-handed. They huddled under the log as the long darkness descended.

By the dying light Tom examined his brother Philip. He was in a desperate condition. He had been running a fever and had become semicoherent. There were great hollows where his cheeks used to be and heavy rings under his eyes; his arms were like sticks with swollen elbows. Some of the infections they had so carefully treated had reopened, and fresh maggots were there. Tom felt his heart breaking. Philip was dying.

Tom knew, in his gut, that none of them was going to be leaving that miserable little clearing.

The listless apathy of incipient starvation overtook them all. Tom lay awake most of that night, unable to sleep. The rain lifted during the night, and when dawn came the sunlight broke over the treetops. For the first time in weeks he could see blue sky—spotless blue sky. Sunlight streamed down through the opening in the treetops. Banners of light caught columns of insects, turning them into whirling tornadoes of light. Steam rose from the giant log.

It was so ironic: The break in the trees framed a picture-perfect view of the Sierra Azul. Here they had been struggling for a week in the opposite direction, and the mountains looked even closer than ever: the peaks rising through tatters of cloud, as blue as cut sapphires. Tom no longer felt hungry. This is what starvation does to you, he thought.

He felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Sally.

“Come over here.” She spoke in a grave voice.

Tom was suddenly afraid. “It’s not Philip?”

“No. It’s Don Alfonso.”

Tom got up and followed Sally down the length of trunk to where Don Alfonso had laid his hammock directly on the wet ground. He was lying on his side, staring at the Sierra Azul. Tom knelt and took his withered old hand. It was hot.

“I am sorry, Tomasito, but I am a useless old man. I am so useless that I am dying.”

“Don’t talk like that, Don Alfonso.” He put his hand on Don Alfonso’s forehead and was shocked by the heat.

“Death has come calling, and one cannot say to Death, ‘Come back next week, I’m busy.’ ”

Did you dream of St. Peter again last night or something?” Sally asked.

“One does not need to dream of St. Peter to know when the end has come.”

Sally glanced at Tom. “Do you have any idea what he’s got?”

“Without diagnostic tests, Woodwork, a microscope ...” He swore and stood up, fighting a wave of faintness. We’ve had it, he thought. It made him angry in some vague way. It wasn’t fair.

He brushed those useless thoughts out of his head and checked on Philip. He was sleeping. Like Don Alfonso he had a high fever, and Tom wasn’t even sure he would ever awaken. Vernon got a fire going despite Don Alfonso’s muttered entreaties not to light one, and Sally brewed a medicinal tea. His whole face had sagged, collapsing inward, the skin losing its color and taking on a waxy hue. His breathing was labored, but he was still conscious. “I will drink your tea, Curandera,” he said, “but not even your medicine will save me.”

She knelt. “Don Alfonso, you’ve talked yourself into dying. You can talk yourself out of it.”

He took her hand. “No, Curandera, my time has come.”

“You can’t know that.”

“My death was foretold.”

“I don’t want to hear any more absurdities. You can’t see into the future.”

“When I was a little boy, I had a bad fever, and my mother took me to a bruja, a witch. The bruja told me that my time of dying was not then, but that I would die far from home, among strangers, within sight of blue mountains.” His eyes glanced up at the Sierra Azul, framed in the gap in the treetops.