No Enemy but Time (6 page)
“Just don't go walking in a forest of elephant legs,” Blair had cautioned me, “and you'll probably be all right.”
To make myself less conspicuous, I thought of following Babington's advice and strapping a bit of foliage about my middle, but dismissed the idea because none of the wildlife grazing or browsing within a hundred yards of me seemed especially agitated by my passage. For a moment or two I thought I might be invisible to the animals here, but a small herd of zebras (
Equus grevyi
, today a relatively rare species) blocking my way into a thicket of fig trees dispelled this idiot notion by pricking up their ears, flicking their tails, and stampeding away to the south. Because I was walking into the sun, they had seen me before I saw them, and my presence on the plain had moved them to exercise that immemorial escape clause, flight.
Cautiously I entered the fig-tree glade. No lions or cobras lay in wait, but I did find evidence that it had not always been uninhabited. A small midden of bones and lava-cobble flakes suggested that under one tree a group of tool-using hominids had butchered a small antelope of some kind and feasted on its carcass. Bits of fur snagged on the underbrush or ground into the sandy floor of the stream dissecting the thicket told me that the kill had taken place within the past year or so. I examined the stones scattered about. Obviously imported from elsewhere, they included lumpish core tools and the splinters fractured from them by the industrious bipeds. Hunger had prodded the creatures to this cunning labor, but so cheap and easily duplicable were its products that they had abandoned the implements upon abandoning the glade. I knelt beside the broken rib cage of the antelope and practiced knapping flakes from a polyhedral core tool.
This was something that Blair and Babington had taught me during my eight months in the Lolitabu National Park. The resulting tools—call them awls, or scrapers, or burins—were not so serviceable as the various scissors, toothpicks, tweezers, and corkscrews concealed in the bright red handle of my
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Swiss Army knife; however, they did not cost me thirty-five bucks, either. One of these tools was sufficiently acute to make an incision (accidental) across the toe of my left chukka boot.
Dutifully, I took out my transcordion: “
Firm evidence of hominids only a half hour
'
s walk from the
lake, Dr. Blair. Small midden with tool remnants and animal remains. Wish you were here.
” And, this time, I put the instrument away without waiting for a reply.
Although not yet noon, it was very hot, and I was sweating feverishly from my work with the lava cobbles. At the eastern edge of the fig-tree thicket I looked across the grasslands at the hills I had seen from the lake. From these hills wooded corridors stretched out into the savannah like the spokes of an enormous shell. Although Blair, the expert, had made many of his hominid-related discoveries in the fossil beds near the lake, I decided that this modest upland region was as likely a habitat for protohumans as any other. I based my decision on my past spirit-traveling and on years of intensive reading to explicate my dreams. If Mary Leakey, Alistair Patrick Blair, and Don Johanson had made no important finds in the uplands, the reason was not that hominids had never lived in them, but that erosion, predators, and volcanism had more successfully obliterated the signs of habitation there. It would take a couple of hours of walking to reach the hills, but I intended to go there. If I wanted to explore the haunts of habilines—that is, representatives of the near-human hominid family known as
Homo habilis
, a species first named and championed by Louis S. B. Leakey—I would have to seek them out and demonstrate for them the full range of my charms and accomplishments.
Ladies and gentlemen, Beau Brummell is on his way.
How would I be received into that unlikely Eden? With open arms or bared bicuspids?
Praying that a pair of furry archangels with incandescent swords and naked backsides would not turn me away, I set off across the savannah. I moved lightly in my chukkas, ignoring the heat. A warthog, its tail inscribing an exclamation mark above the period of its bung, swerved from my path and disappeared backward into its burrow. Wildebeest eyed me warily for a portion of my trek, but returned to cropping grass when they saw that my destination lay elsewhere.
Several times, seeking shade in shallow arroyos or small acacia groves, I paused to rest. At length, however, I entered a tongue of gallery forest extending out of the hills onto the plain, and my adventure among the denizens of Eolithic Zarakal truly began.
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Seville, Spain
Summer 1963
Two
days after Encarnación baptized her meddlesome neighbor with a shower of urine, the old woman's grizzled, potbellied son accosted her on the gallery outside her apartment. This man's name was Dionisio, and he was apparently a pharmacist's superannuated delivery boy. For a grown man with a job he spent a great deal of time around the tenement complex, and Encarnación had often heard the neighborhood children derisively calling his name when he sauntered like a bedraggled peacock through the courtyard.
A wastrel, this Dionisio, with a life going the same unpromising direction as her own.
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Today he grabbed her by the shoulders and spun her around to face him. His breath partook of a beery perfume, and chest hairs curled out of his shirt like so many popped packing threads. He was a man coming apart with rage; Encarnación half expected to see his shirt disintegrate and his fetid entrails come spilling out.
“Lay a curse on me!” he challenged her, tightening his grip on her shoulders. “I spit on your sorcery and your pride. How would you like to go over this rail, eh? How many would then gather to piss on your broken corpse?”
Dionisio began slapping Encarnación about. As he pummeled her, he treated her to an obscene catalogue of her faults. Finally, he delivered a stunning blow to her temple, caught her in his arms, and threw her to the gallery floor.
“But I'm not going to be imprisoned or killed for the pleasure of ending your sluttish life, you bitch. That would make you laugh from the grave, wouldn't it? That would give you a voice with which to mock us. I know how you think.”
Squinting past the hematoma blooming beside her eye, Encarnación saw Dionisio's chubby fingers unbuttoning his pants. Then her consciousness began filtering away. She heard a humiliating sibilance and felt an acrid warmth spreading through her skirts. Then she saw, heard, and felt nothing.
* * * *
Their new residence was a condemned building not far from the mouth of Leoncillos Street. A row of timbers braced against the curb propped the façade of this derelict upright, and warning placards, which Encarnación could not read, stood in the building's ground-floor fenestrae. She entered the foyer and, with an American-made bobby pin, sprang the lock on the ornate grate screening the stairs. Her son and her other burdens she then carried up three flights of steps to the empty sitting room of a desolate flat.
Here she deposited all her belongings but the child.
Before dawn she made three more trips through the labyrinthine alleys to their old apartment, never once abandoning her son in either place. Much of what she toted back to the condemned building was black-market merchandise, including nearly two dozen cartons of American cigarettes, a cache of wristwatches (Timex, Bulova, etc.), and several small electrical kitchen appliances. Once or twice, exhausted, she permitted the boy to pick his way over the cobblestones beside her, and he kept up remarkably well.
* * * *
leche de vaca
—she purchased from vendors who rode their battered motorized carts past her building several times a day. She also bought oranges from fruit stalls in the neighborhood and gave her child the juice. Because she was purposely denying him her nipples, she tried to compensate by introducing him to such effervescent soft drinks as Coca-Cola and Fanta, which might not be good for him but which he greedily enjoyed. This strategy worked very well.
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The boy soon ceased pestering her to present her breasts.
Another decision loomed for Encarnación. One day the city's blue-collar henchmen would come to the building with a wrecking ball. What would happen after that? Her removal from the tenement complex had ruined her livelihood as a black-marketeer and prostitute, and what money she made nowadays came chiefly from doing errands for the owner of a nearby bodega and selling to his out-at-the-elbow customers the remainders of her cigarette and wristwatch inventories. If she should die, no one would appear to rescue her baby. And if she lived, she would have to find more lucrative work before the wrecking ball turned them out into the streets.
Her son was her joy and her martyrdom. Ever since their run-in with Dionisio's mother, however, he had begun to change. First he had ceased vocalizing, almost as if aware that silence was the best means of preserving their squatters’ rights in the condemned building. Although he listened to the people jabbering on the sidewalk below their boarded balcony casements, he never tried to attract their attention with a hoot or a squeal. On trips into the streets on shopping errands, he habitually fixed his gaze on the lips of every speaking passerby or salesperson, but, Encarnación noticed, he did not attempt to emulate the sounds these people made. His fascination with the sequential sound patterns of human speech was entirely passive, and his mother began to fear that, having recognized her muteness, his infant mind had opted to achieve a similar state in himself.
The second change was in some ways even more worrisome. The child dreamed. These dreams, during which his eyelids flickered and his body thrashed, seemed to be especially vivid and captivating for one so young. Midnight horror shows. Morphean fantods. When his eyelids ceased jumping and his body lay perfectly still, the whites of his eyes showing like crescents of hard-boiled egg, Encarnación would panic and try to rouse him. Although he always came out of these swoons, they never failed to frighten her. She was afraid that her treatment of her son had mentally unbalanced him and that she had ruined his life forever. The final revenge of the
vieja
who had tormented her on the tenement rooftop was the accuracy of her analysis of the boy's chances as an adult. Encarnación felt that she had doomed her son.
* * * *
Carrying her son, she crossed the final bridge before the jungle of minor industries flanking the highway on the south. Traffic was light but daunting, most demoralizingly so when the gigantic automobiles of American military personnel came whooshing by. Off to Encarnación's right, the spooky amber of the Cruz del Campo sign gleamed above the dark superstructure of the brewery. No one stopped to offer her and her child a ride, and she did not attempt to solicit one. She was prepared to walk the entire distance.
To rest her arms, however, she soon set the boy down. Delighted, he trotted out ahead of her. Even barefoot, he looked quite handsome, for Encarnación had dressed him in a striped jersey and a pair of navy-blue shorts. She hurried to catch up with him, took his hand in hers, and counted his tiny steps in order not to have to think about the implications of what she was doing. Shortly—all too soon—the American enclave emerged from the oppressive dark.
Santa Clara reposed in the arid Andalusian countryside like an oasis of elms, neat stucco houses, and towering shepherd's-crook street lamps. At the housing area's unguarded entrance, these lamps cast overlapping circles of green-white radiance, blotting out the color of the lawns and imparting an oily sheen to the asphalt streets. Insects whirred in the grass, and music issued from an open doorway
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somewhere along the nearer of two parallel drives. In defiance of the panic building in her, Encarnación picked up her son and headed straight into this displaced American suburb. She had no clear idea what she was going to do, but she felt confident that her instincts were right. She knew a little about Americans.
Chance intervened.
A gaggle of teenage girls approached Encarnación along the drive, gossiping and gesticulating as they came. They had on toreador pants, or tight-fitting shorts, clothes that few Spanish girls would ever wear.
Despite the heat, the tallest of the five girls sported a crimson jacket with leather circlets around its shoulders and a huge felt hieroglyph on its left breast. Encarnación halted, weighing her options and hoping to calm the beating of her heart.
“Hey, look!” one of the girls exclaimed. “What're they doing here?”
“Somebody's maid, I'll bet, looking for a ride home.”
“What about the kid?”