Blinding Light (12 page)

“I take from a pee-sant,” he said, sipping the coffee.

Nestor said, “Please eat some fruit for breakfast, then nothing more. No food all day. But stay busy. If you drink—just water. The ceremony will begin after sunset in the pavilion over there. Later I will tell you what things to bring. The main thing to bring is a clear mind and a pure heart. And an empty stomach.”

It was seven in the morning, sunset almost twelve hours away, and already the heat and the biting flies and the stink that rose from the sodden earth seemed unbearable.

“Why can't we have the ceremony right now?” Wood asked.

“Night is for ceremonies. We need darkness,” Nestor said. “So you can relax.”

“I didn't come all this way and pay serious money to relax!”

“You can maybe weed Joaquinas garden, then. She needs help.”

“Hard cheese on Joaquina,” Janey said. “She can weed her own garden. What a cheek. Imagine, faffing around on some scrubber's allotment.”

“Or the Secoya women will show you weaving if you like. Or you can make pictures. Or Don Pablo will teach you the names of the plants.”

Wood turned aside to Hack with an incredulous glance, mouthing the sentence “Do you fucking believe this?”

“We'll just hang out,” Hack said, as though to calm his friend.

“I'm unclean anyway,” Sabra said and, still sitting cross-legged, picked up her copy of
Trespassing.
“Look what this climate did to it!” The pages were thickened by the humidity, the binding curled, the whole book fattened and misshapen.

“At least you have something to read, to take the curse off this grottsville,” Janey said.

“Are you hot?”

“Not half,” Janey said.

“I wouldn't put that drug in my body anyway,” Sabra said. “It's like a pact with the devil, drinking the magic potion so you can get visions.
I'm glad I brought this.” She tapped the book. “None of that tricky stuff in here. I mean, the whole point of this book is that you can test your limits without putting crap like that in your system.”

Steadman stared, his lips pressed together, and felt Ava's eyes on him.

Nestor said, “Anyone who wants to go on a jungle walk, Hernán will take you.”

“That's us,” Ava said.

They left after breakfast, just Ava and Steadman. Seeing them approaching the path with Nestor and Hernán, Manfred smiled at Steadman and said, “I would like to come with you.” He sounded sincere, but more than that he sounded familiar, using a tone with Steadman that he never used with the others.

Ava said, “I'm sure you have something more interesting to do here.”

“Yah. I want to see the cooking, for my notes. How the ayahuasca is prepared. How it is stewed. You say ‘to stew'? The
yajé”

Nestor said, “We say
hervir.
We also say
reducir.
They mix in some other plants.”

“Of course, I know. I have read. They add other species of special plants. This I would like to see. You would like to see this?”

He was speaking to Steadman, but Steadman was so puzzled by the man's unexpected friendliness he just shrugged.

“They call the mixture
changru-panga
.”

“You don't need me,” Nestor said to Manfred. “You are a
perito.
Hexpert!”

Hernán nodded that he was ready to go, and he turned abruptly and set off, leading with a raised machete. A barefoot Secoya boy wearing a small canvas knapsack followed with a stick. They cut through Joaquina's maize patch and jumped a wide ditch. They were almost immediately slipping on a narrow muddy path under the tall trees, Hernán slashing at hanging head-high fronds and low thorny branches, the boy poking his stick at the dripping ferns at the track's side.

The land was level and the path fairly straight, but deeper in the forest the air was inert, hot, sodden, dense with humidity, whirring with insects. Some sunshine, in cones of light, penetrated from torn patches of the tree canopy, yet deep green shadow predominated. The shadow was wet, and the moss on the trees was like green foam.

After half an hour—they had not gone very far on the path—Steadman's shirt was soaked from sweat and his brushing the big, low-growing, dripping leaves. His shoes were heavy with mud. The bare skin of his forearms was scratched and dirty. Ava smiled at him but she was soaked, too.

“Where are we going?” Steadman called ahead to Hernán.

“
Paseo
,” he said. “Walking only.”

Perhaps feeling that he should be more informative, he pinched some leaves from a bush and showed them to Ava.

“The Secoya use this one for tea, if you have pain problem in you estomach.”

“
Tortuga
the Secoya boy called out sharply, and darted past Steadman and knelt in the mud. Steadman saw nothing, but within seconds the boy was holding up a small muddy turtle, its legs twitching and dripping.

“How did he see that?” Ava said.

“He is hungry, so he see everything,” Hernán said.

Farther on, Steadman paused and said, “I always wondered where those flowers came from.”

“We have many like this,” Hernán said.

“I think that's Heliconia,” Ava said.

The bunches of buds, red and yellow, hung on a long stalk like small brilliant bananas, little nips of color that were vivid among the gray ferns and shadowed leaves.

“You have this one?” Hernán said, and he indicated a tall bush with a profusion of white bell-like blossoms, thick and drooping from every slender branch.

Recognizing it as the mouthy blossom that Nestor had pointed out at Papallacta, Steadman said, “I saw one of those at the hot springs.”

“Is good for this,” Hernán said. He tapped his head and smiled at the Secoya boy, who was nodding eagerly, grinning and showing a broken front tooth. “See? Even he knows. He helps to gather this one.”

“Angel's trumpet,” Ava said, remembering what Nestor had told them. “What do you call it?”

“It is
toé. La venda de yana puma.
The tiger's blindfold.” He smiled and widened his eyes as he said it. “We scrape. We boil the pieces. We drink.”

They walked on for another hour, but slowly, because of the mud and the heat. Toward noon they came to an area where some trees had fallen and littered the earth around them with heaps of dead leaves and the withered trash of dead branches. Some of the trunks looked rotted and infested but one firm trunk remained, the right height for a seat. Ava approached it to sit down.

“Mira.
Espera un momentito
,” Hernán said, and slashed the trunk with his knife, and it came alive with large frantic ants and clumps of tumbling ant eggs like furious grains of rice.

“I think I'll stand,” Ava said.

Hernán took the knapsack off the Secoya boy and distributed bottles of water.

“Paseo
is better,” Hernán said, wiping his mouth. “If you sit in the village, you see food and you want to eat. Then, when you take the
yaje
tonight, you feel sick.”

But Steadman had forgotten the ceremony. He was looking around at the great vaporous hollow of the fly-specked and thick tainted air, everything greenish, soaked and slick under the rain forest roof.

Flourishing in this remote seclusion, unaided by any human hand, was an obscure and eternal thickness of garden beneath the patchy heights of the forest ceiling. In the lowest shadows of the muddy floor were soft dirt-humps marked by the grubbings of tree rats and turtles. Flowering plants grew at every level, banking to the highest tree trunks.

More angel's trumpet, sallow and succulent, like white downcast funnels, and torch ginger with crimson flower pods, and the Heliconia that Ava had identified, its smooth curved fruit red and yellow and striped black; the labial petals of a rosy blossoming vulva on a bluish stalk; the orange beaks of Strelitzia; and the scalloped and splayed fragility of purplish orchids. Fingers of boiled pinkness pointed from a pendant vine, and on another tiny yellow bells on wing-like leaves. All of it glowed in the feeble light, and from the heights of the boughs immensely long, narrow roots, some of them hairy, trailed past gnats and flies.

He saw struggling butterflies and dangling worms, the crooked symmetry of the blue veins on big leaves, the frail luminous tissue like wadded silk of droopier flowers, the stiffer stems of wet black plants, the pale noodles of wandering tendrils, and the fuzzier knobs, like monster paws of nameless growths—all of this in a place where there was the narrowest path and no other footprints and only the dimmest daylight reached to the bottom of the forest. Here it was possible to believe that, though humans had passed nearby, none had interfered with the place, nor had ever bent a stem, nor plucked a flower. The whole world was blind to its beauty.

“Mira
—
cuidado
,” the Secoya boy said sharply, and stepped in front of Steadman. Then the boy pointed with his stick, and Steadman saw the threads of a spider web glistening with dew. The whole thing was the size of a wagon wheel but suspended high, the center of it level with his eyes and trembling with the damp breath of the hot forest. If the boy had not spoken, he would have walked into it and wrapped the web across his face and all over his head. Just thinking of that made Steadman take a step back.

“Where's the spider?”

“Araña,”
the boy said, indicating the creature at the edge of the circle of milky filaments.

Steadman saw the spider, and even though he took another step back in fear, he could see it clearly: a big purple fruit with the dusty shine of a plum, highlights of pinky yellow, looking ripe and heavy. It was hunkered on skinny legs, each one ending with a tiny toothy foot. It stayed at the edge of the web, its jaws apart like a pair of pincers. What unnerved Steadman was not its large size or its lurid fruit-like color; he was alarmed by its gaze, its glowing eyes like drops of poison turned on him and fixed upon his own eyes.

“Escucha”
Hernán said, tilting his head to listen and look up.

Only then did Steadman awaken from the trance state induced by the spider's gaze. All that Steadman heard was the racket of insects. The boy and Hernán were straining to hear.

Then Ava said, “What's that?”

There came a far-off chugging, like a motorboat plowing invisibly through the sky, and when it drew closer it became a more distinct yak-yak-yak.

“Mira! Helicóptero
the boy said, his hair in his eyes, the complex word issuing from his smile and the space of his broken tooth.

Hernán said, “Is a chopper.”

A shadow like a big brown cloud passed overhead, a mammoth belching airship, the largest helicopter Steadman had ever seen.

He started down the path after it, but Hernán shouldered past him and then the boy skipped ahead, his skinny brown legs working as he leaped like a fawn. The sound of the helicopter was still loud, not far off, perhaps circling or going lower.

The enclosed interior of the forest with its dome of branches and leaves prevented them from seeing the progress of the helicopter, yet they still heard it and were able to follow its percussive sound, the drumbeat of its engine burps in the distance.

They were off the path now and chest-high in ferns and big leaves as they saw ahead a brightness, an opening in the forest, perhaps a clearing, and then the descending darkness of the helicopter settling to earth.

Hernán and the boy were hunched in stalking postures, signaling for Steadman and Ava to stay behind and keep low. The brightness led them on and dazzled them, too, for the whole morning they had been walking in the dappled shadow of the rain forest, and now sunshine poured through the trees.

They were stopped by a head-high chainlink fence that ran through the forest, razor wire coiled along the top edge and skull-and-bones signs lettered in red,
Prohibido el Paso,
every twenty feet or so. Sunlight scorched the clearing within the fence—sunlight and steel towers and boxy prefab structures and oil drums and the huge sputtering helicopter, its twin rotors slowing as men in yellow hard hats rushed back and forth from its open cargo bay, unloading and carrying cardboard cartons.

The encampment was entirely encircled by the fence and the forest. No road penetrated here. And there was no break in the fence—no opening, not even a gate. Thus, the helicopter. When the sound of it died down, they could hear the softer but regular pulsing of an engine and could see a steel cylinder moving up and down in the center of the clearing, pounding the earth, pumping with gasping and swallowing noises and the lurch of unmistakable grunts that sounded like squirts of satisfaction.

“Mira.
Gringo,” Hernán said, seeing a tall man in a checked shirt and boots waving the workmen along.

But to Steadman that American was not the oddest aspect of the clearing, for near the entrance to one of the new bright boxy buildings was an Ecuadorian all in white—white shirt, white apron, tall white chef's hat—and he was conferring with another swarthy man in a short black jacket and striped trousers and bow tie. This second man, obviously a waiter or a wine steward, held a tray on his fingertips, and on the tray were a pair of thin-stemmed wineglasses and a wine bottle in an ice bucket.

Another man was climbing out of the cockpit of the helicopter. Steadman could tell from the casual way he walked, almost sloppy as he staggered on the gravel, and from the flapping of his big hand, his easy wave of greeting to the other man, that he too was an American. He had the carelessness of confident ownership.

“Es él quien tiene la culpa,”
the boy said.

Hernán translated: “That one's fault.”

The two men shook hands and conferred, and the waiter approached with a flunky's obedient walk, upright and smiling and presenting his tray, and was rebuffed. The Americans walked toward a shelter—an awning propped up like a marquee—and the waiter followed them, the chef behind in his spotless whites.