Daughters of Babylon (11 page)

“Now, now, don’t be that way. We’ve talked about this before. Life, for humans, is not all about sex.”

We’ve talked about it, yes, but you will never be a great nagual until you learn better. In the old days, they knew it IS all about…

And with that, an electric thrill zapped Lupo’s loins with such ferocity that he doubled over, hit his head on the wall, and grunted. “Ow, that was unkind!”

Apologies. I was merely attempting to hook you up.

“Hook me up?”

Close your eyes, I promise to be gentler.

Lupo, whose lungs were beginning to numb from breathing in the hallucinogenic pollen, turned his back to the street and with a flower resting in his palm like a miniature Victrola, he closed his eyes.

Simple geometry came to him first. Disassociated lines and curves in two dimensions. There were vertical planes, right angles, oblongs and trapezoids floating, suspended in a grayish void, hanging out, nothing much going on, like day labourers waiting near a truck stop to be hired. By holding and simultaneously unfurling his attention like a spider’s anchor thread, his body-mind spun and laid out a grid with wide-open spaces that trapped the attention of the idling shapes. They drifted in closer and finding no resistance, fitted themselves into the grid like puzzle pieces. And the shapes absorbed depth, third dimension—
and the
greatest of these is depth
—and grew solid, took on matter. The grids walled, and lightwaves undulated to produce an image that flowed along the rivers of Lupo’s optic nerve of rolling countryside in ochers and a thousand shades of green. Finally, a manor house appeared with towers at both ends, sitting gray and remote—that is to say, it gave off remoteness with a feeble vibratory wash.

Toloache loosened her grip.
That’s enough for now.

“What do you mean? You haven’t shown me anything. It’s an oil painting above a rich gringo’s sofa. So what?”

I gave you the whole kit and kaboodle when you knocked.

“But that will take me years to sort. I want to know more now.”

Toloache sighed with a little plant crush.
Fine, but only for you.

Within moments, a woman in green velvet appeared at the window in the tower of the lonely manor house as if she’d heard her name. He saw her from the distance of willows and beeches and heard their silent singing. The woman couldn’t see him, of course, for no man was in her field of vision. He was only breezes and tricks of light—

Okay, you’ve seen her. That’s enough.

Toloache brooked no argument this time. She blurred his vision, and the foetid-sweet smell that hit him like a powder puff moments ago was now a stench that rolled over him in waves and set off a sequence of bodily revulsions—gagging, contractions of the stomach, loosening bowels, and while Lupo had developed enough stamina over the years not to puke and soil himself, the blindness was beyond his control. Flashing lights attacked: infra-reds and harsh electric yellows, miasmic greens, dripping, garish purples. Lupo staggered to the limestone ridge at the base of the terrace behind the
casita
where he rested his head and forearm against the stone until the symptoms eased. Pushing himself from the wall, he wondered what all that was about.

“No, don’t tell me. You’re right. I couldn’t have taken any more.”

He returned to the front door.

Clackety-clack. Clackety, clack, clack, clack…

“Cmmm ihmmh!”

Lupo entered, relieved to find William G. Carver, Ph.D., upright and sitting at his desk with a pencil clenched between his teeth. Well, not upright exactly. With his back rounded, elbows out, shoulders hitched to his ears, he looked like a sea tortoise furiously trying to unwedge himself from the keyboard of a Smith Corona.

Bill paused to nod hello, then nodded with a couple side sweeps to indicate,
have a seat beside the desk here, you’ll need to clear off the crap first, give me a minute.

The main room looked much the way it had a few weeks ago when Bill and Karin invited Lupo and the witches for a homecoming thank you repast of Spaghetti-O’s, Uncle Ben’s Minute Rice stirred into ground beef with chili peppers, and tinned palm heart salad. “I would have made you smörgåsbord,” Karin had apologized, “but Bill insists we use up these awful supplies first.”

There were heaps of books, recording and photography equipment, folded beach umbrellas and camp stools—a little more of everything, maybe, but not enough to raise concern.

The simple dwelling with packed earth floors and no indoor plumbing had been upgraded in the 1920s to accommodate a team of petroleum prospectors from Texas, including one who took a shine to a widow with four daughters. The terracotta tile floors patterned in an ancient Olmec design to perpetuate good fortune had been laid by Lupo’s grandfather, himself a
nagual
. The shutters on the side window were open to the toloache lattice, impossible to cut back, and Lupo guessed that the corresponding window in the bedroom was open too. He could feel, not a cross breeze—Las Cuevas had no breeze this time of day—but a slow, rhythmic contraction-expansion like the movement of a whale’s lungs.

The room smelled of datura musk mixed with male sweat, mildew from old books, and the spritzy citrus of L’Air de Temps, Karin’s favourite scent, according to Malvine. Five or six toloache flowers in various stages of bloom hung inside the house through the window. There was an electric hotplate in the corner with two lidded pots. He could detect no signs of cooking.

The professor removed the pencil from his mouth, drawing a long thread of saliva that rippled and bounced like translucent vermicelli. “Just give me a sec, nearly done here.”

“No hurry.” Lupo crossed an ankle over his knee and peered at the handwritten notes in a spiral notebook grown puffy from filled pages. Hand-drawn tables featured columns with titles like: Biol Fam with Rel, Biol Fam with Married Chil, Married Sibs with Fam, Unrelated Fams, Persons Living Alone, Misc. Comp.

Numbers had been entered in each of the lists. There was an overlay of sprinkles of pink eraser rubbings on the page, and tiny rubber mountain ranges were forming on the floor where Bill brushed them from the desk. But it wasn’t the unkempt floor or barren kitchen that had Lupo wondering whether he ought to suggest that Dely come in a few times a week; it was the look of Bill Carver himself.

He’d lost none of the paunch that Lupo had associated with middle-aged American men since he was a wetback kid in Jersey. And his cheeks still held an endearing apple roundness, only now, fine blue lines had risen like a map of rivulets, like fissures on porcelain. The veins on his hands too had become inky blue and prominent, as if too much was accumulating on the inside and straining to get out.

“There! Done!” Bill whacked at the carriage return, pulled out the page, and sat back, arms draped over the sides of his chair. “I think we could drill down further into Miscellaneous Composition, but for a first go-round, this isn’t bad. Maybe I’ll try talking to the priest again.”

He turned to Lupo and grinned. “Sorry. I’m talking like you should be on my wave length. So how are you, buddy? How was Veracruz? How’s the baby? What’s his name again?”

“Ívano. He’s good, loves his mama’s milk. Dely sold all her
serapes
at the carnival.”

“Hey, that’s great.” Bill stuck a pinky finger in his left ear and shook vigorously.

“So,” Lupo said, “are you and Karin still okay with the house? Tita says you were having some problems with the generator.”

“We were. The battery coils had been eaten by some kind of termite, but she replaced them, thank God. A cool house with lamps that work makes for a happy assistant. What time did she and Malvine leave for the caves this morning? Was it even daylight?”

“No, it was way before dawn. The caves they wanted to see, you can only enter when the dawn rays hit a certain series of stones.”

“No shit! So those old beliefs, they’re still being handed down.”

“Well, you could call them beliefs. That’s not what they are.”

Bill raised a conciliatory hand. “Hey, Nag-wall, I may be an anthropologist, but I’m with you here. I’ve seen stuff with the Hopi and Navajo that would knock your socks off. What I mean is, and I’m glad to hear it, is that your people have retained modalities that predate the Conquest and influence of the Church.” The capillaries on his face intensified while he spoke from a fountain pen aqua to luminescent cobalt blue. Excitement radiated from his pores like tiny electrical shorts. “Every new discovery, every hand reaching out from my border to yours, is a fork in the road to raise our awareness, know what I’m saying? I was trying to explain this to Karin the other day…”

Lupo stayed as neutral as he could. Agreeing with the professor in his current manic state, even a tiny nod, would only whip up a whole new line of chaos that the man would spin into questions to take out in the village and irritate even more
rurales
, for the sake of his lists that no one gave two shits about.
Sorry, Mamita. I’ll cross myself later.

Thing is, Lupo liked the professor. He wouldn’t hurt a flea, and his desire to know, to connect felt genuine. So he waited for Bill to talk himself out, and then said, “My people can’t tell you anything about the sun’s relation to the caves. They don’t know about it.”

“Really?” Bill was breathing like he’d run a marathon. “But they go to the caves all the time to gather guano.”

“Sure, and they get bitten all the time by spiders and bats, and the bites get infected, and
indios
die. It doesn’t matter whether they have access to the missionaries’ medicine or the
curanderos’
. They die.” Bill’s respiration was slowing, the veins in his face fading, so Lupo continued. “When I was a kid, we lived in a town called Longport—all white, mostly upper class. My mother cleaned houses, and one of her employers had some kind of surgery. Mom wanted to bring her her mail, but the hospital had strict visiting hours. It didn’t matter that the woman would have loved to open what were obviously get-well cards, or that my mother, who knew the room number, could have found the right corridor and delivered the mail, no harm done. She’d have been violating rules, and the hospital, in its way, would have bitten her. It’s like that with the caves. They have visiting hours; they have boundaries. It’s like that with anything, even people.”

“Hold on, don’t say another word.” Bill leaned toward the far end of the desk and rummaged under textbooks and notebooks and pulled out a portable tape recorder. “Would you mind?”

“Would I mind what?”

“My getting this down on tape.”

“But I’ve already said it.”

“Are you kidding me? I want to know everything about caves and hospitals that bite, it’s genius analogy. When Karin gets back, she’ll transcribe our conversation into notes. They’ll be verbatim. You can read them over for accuracy.”

The toloache blossoms inside the window were shivering. Not that Lupo would have agreed to being taped, but they were letting him know, just in case. “I think it would be best if you let Karin tell you her experiences in the caves and whatever she’s learned from Malvine. Some things are clearer coming from women…speaking of witches.” He held out the rubber balls. “Are these yours?”

Disappointment squashed Bill’s features like a wedding cake left in the rain. “Where’d you find them?”

“Outside your door. They look like they’d been there a few days.”

“Damn, that’s the fifth time this week. I’ve tried ball point pens, compact mirrors—nice ones, too, pink with little rhinestones, Karin picked them out in Tucson. I know soccer balls go over well with the Huicholes, but you carry a couple of those under your arm, people can’t keep their mind on the questions.”

“What do you want me to do with them?”

“There’s a box in the corner with all the—no, wait. Why don’t you hang onto them? They’re pretty good quality. You and your son could enjoy a few games of catch when he’s a little older.”

“You sure? Thanks.” Lupo went to drop the balls into the satchel he always carried, but it wasn’t there. He must have left it beside the house during the toloache episode.

Bill pushed a button on the recorder and the lid popped up. “While I have you here…”

He lifted out the reel and blew on it. He pulled out a foot or so of tape and held it to the light as if to inspect, or to make apparent that what he was about to ask would be, if Lupo insisted, off the record. “We were talking about the caves, it reminded me. In twenty-four years of research and field work, I’ve only come across this once or twice.
Curanderos
don’t seem to know anything about it—well, they know the garden variety, obviously. Our doctors in the States do it all the time—take two of these, you’ll feel better in the morning.”

“What are you talking about, Bill?”

“I hope you won’t think I’m out of line.”

“Not at all, ask away.”

Bill rubbed his nose with the back of his hand, which left a golden yellow smudge of what looked like pollen. He swiveled, leaned toward Lupo, planted elbows on his knees, and in a dramatic stage whisper said, “I want to know about the manny-opera.”

“Excuse me?”

“The man-ny-ob-ra.” It was a slight improvement.

Bill Carver’s Spanglish was easy enough to sort; that wasn’t why Lupo was stalling. “Are you saying
maniobra
?”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying.”

Now,
that
, he had not seen coming. Lupo flexed his fingers open and closed. “It means handiwork.
Mano
, hand,
obra
, work. Tapestry, pots, basket weaving…like what Dely sells on feast days. Unfortunately, in our subsistence economy, the quality of such work is declining. Even with tourism, it’s not the—”

“I’m not talking about arts and crafts. I mean the real stuff, what you nag-walls do. The maneuver.”

“Why would such a thing be of interest to you?”

“No reason, really. I mean, I have an academic interest, obviously.”

That was the second time Bill Carver had used the word obviously. Lupo waited.

“Okay, I have a reason. There’s this anthropologist turned bestselling author who’s touring campuses these days, making a fortune talking about his experiences with a Mexican sorcerer. His sources are a little sketchy, if you ask me, but I’ve talked to friends who know friends of his, and they say, what he’s doing, the whole thing, it’s a maneuver, a calculated strategy that looks haphazard—”