Sound of Butterflies, The (28 page)

Towards evening, when the rain had abated, the pilot steered the boat towards a dock. An acrid smell like burning effluent hung in the air. Thomas’s nose twitched and George shielded his face with a handkerchief.

‘Pooh!’ said Ernie. He pointed at the tendrils of white smoke rising above the trees.

‘It is the rubber,’ said Antonio, who had joined them. ‘The seringueiros are smoking the day’s harvest in the fire of the attalea palm. You will see it when we arrive in the camp.’

During the short walk to the camp, the smell grew stronger, but Thomas was used to it; it even excited him.

When the rubber tappers saw Antonio, who led the party, they scrambled to their feet; when they saw Santos, they fell to the ground again, bowed in supplication. Santos murmured something to Antonio, who then barked orders at the men. They were to vacate their camp for them, it seemed. Thomas couldn’t help but feel guilty. Where were they to go, with night about to fall?

These men were the seringueiros he had heard about — men of mixed race, recruited from the workforce around Amazonia, even from northern Brazil — not the Indians Santos employed in Peru.

Only the men standing over the fires stood their ground. One man, with a smooth face like a baby’s, bore a flood of tears from the smoke. The fire — more smoke than flames — was piled high with palm fronds. He turned a pole smeared with rubber that grew as the men watched into a large and heavy ball. Weeping ulcers marked his arms; intermittently he scratched at them and smeared his skin with blood and pus.

‘I promised you, didn’t I, sirs?’ said Antonio, as the men stood transfixed. ‘That you would see how the rubber is prepared. Quite a sight, no?’

Thomas looked around him. Ernie and George watched with eyes bright, while John hung around behind them. The look on his face was more pity than fascination, and he met Thomas’s eyes for a moment with a small shake of his head.

Santos stood talking to a black man. To Thomas’s wonder, they were speaking English. The man, dressed in a light long-sleeved shirt, with a handkerchief knotted at his neck and a felt hat, and a rifle slung over his shoulder, stood rigid beside Santos, nodding vigorously. Though he had an air of authority about him, he was utterly deferential in the presence of Santos. Santos commands so much respect, thought Thomas.

Clara stood by her husband, with her hand tucked into his arm. She wore her city clothes, which surprised Thomas; he had thought she was of hardier stock, and the delicate parasol she twirled absentmindedly over her shoulder looked ridiculous in the middle of the forest, where the sinking sun came in thin spikes through the canopy.

The servants bustled about with the seringueiros, loading up possessions on their backs to vacate the huts. This camp was larger than the one on the Tapajós, with more than ten huts facing in a circle and a cookhouse. Gas lamps hung from poles; when one man reached up to take one, Antonio barked at him to leave it.

Thomas’s heart sank when he entered his hut. Though it was bigger than the ones he had previously shared with John, a hammock was once again to be his bed. The room, elevated presumably to prevent flooding, and with poles for a floor, was bare, with no desk for him to work at or shelves for his books.

‘Is everything all right, sir?’ Antonio walked in behind him.

‘Yes, thank you, Antonio.’

‘We have sent for some furniture for you. It will arrive in two days.’

Thomas’s heart lifted. ‘Thank you. That is most helpful.’

The room held the most basic human smell — old sweat and perhaps waste as well — but a scan around the room told him he must be mistaken. Merely a room, with four hammocks, where four men had worked hard and slept soundly, not caring for the niceties of society, or wanting for them.

As he placed his bags in a clean spot in the corner of the room, a movement caught his eye on the wall beside him. He had startled something — an insect. No — an arachnid. He leapt back from the wall, then mocked himself for taking fright. He was supposed to be a naturalist, for pity’s sake. The spider was thickset and large, with legs like wide, fibrous cords. A tarantula.

Antonio popped his head through the door again. ‘Are you all right? I heard a cry.’

Had he cried out? He seemed to be making a habit of taking fright and being deaf to his own noises.

‘Nothing,’ said Thomas. ‘It’s just a spider. I’ll kill it.’ He reached down to remove a boot.

‘No!’ Antonio stepped through the door. ‘You mustn’t kill it, Mr Edgar. It will drop all the hairs on its legs, and these are more dangerous than the spider’s bite. They are like pins, and poisonous.’

‘Well, what will I do with it?’ He didn’t want to have to pick the thing up. He was ashamed at his squeamishness, but there — Antonio already knew he was a coward.

‘Leave it alone, sir. It will not bother you. By morning it will be gone. You’ll see.’

He supposed he should call George, but he was taken by a sudden urge to keep the tarantula from him. George didn’t seem all that interested in spiders, after all, and he would only come in and give him some lecture about it.

Everybody retired early to get a good night’s sleep before a day of collecting. Santos was unusually quiet and Clara ate her supper in her own hut. At first Thomas couldn’t see the tarantula in the black shadows cast by the lamp, but when he lay on his hammock he saw it moving around on the rafters above him. Too nervous to turn the lamp off, in case the tarantula crawled onto the ropes of his hammock, he left it on. Every time the spider moved, a wash of cold crept over his skin. It wasn’t just the spider that made him tense; only a few flimsy walls of palm leaves separated him from Clara. It was strange to hear a woman’s voice — low and husky as she talked to her husband — out here in the jungle, mixing with the trills of the crickets and the cries of the night creatures. Birds that were named for the sounds they made — the murucututú — a sort of owl — and the jacurutú — sounded at intervals throughout the night as Thomas finally fell asleep, the spider weaving a web through his dreams.

Thomas set out collecting on the first day with winged feet. Colours seemed brighter, the birds and monkeys in the trees louder. Santos accompanied them, which made things rather uncomfortable; where the men were used to hunting in silence, he seemed determined to converse with them.

‘It’s just strange to me,’ he said, ‘that you worship these creatures you collect — you in particular, Mr Edgar — and yet the first thing you do when you find them, in their wild, natural state, looking as magnificent as they ever will, the first thing you want to do is
kill
them.’

‘Well, we are scientists foremost,’ said Ernie, who didn’t at all seem to mind the distraction, despite the fact that their presence scared away birds. Flashes of brightly coloured wings sprang up in all directions, but Ernie was focused on Santos.

‘Oh, I don’t mean you, Dr Harris,’ said Santos. ‘I declare that you appear to have no feelings for these animals at all.’

‘Steady on,’ said Ernie. He stopped for a moment, and looked crestfallen at his patron’s assessment of him. ‘I do sometimes feel guilty about killing them.’

‘Then why do it?’

‘If you don’t mind my saying, Mr Santos,’ said George, ‘you have paid for all of this. Do you have no conscience about it?’

‘But I am a hypocrite, Mr Sebel, and freely admit it! And anyway, I do not love animals. I love to eat them, but I find them a nuisance at best, and insects I have even less tolerance for. But you … I have heard you profess to love your precious ants and beetles. And you, Mr Edgar, your butterflies.’

Thomas considered his answer carefully. Santos had raised an issue he had always pushed from his mind. He was going to make a mess of it, he knew. ‘I love them as an example of God’s work, sir. It is our duty, as scientists —’ At this point he thought he heard George give a kind of a snuffle. ‘— As
scientists
,’ he repeated, louder this time, ‘to study just how amazing God’s work is. I mean, the intricacy of these creatures, the minute and precise workings of them, more complex than any machine —’

‘Yes, yes, Mr Edgar, all very admirable, I’m sure, but I’m afraid you have not convinced me.’ Santos dropped back to continue the conversation with George, and Thomas, finding his heart pumping faster and his face flushing, pushed on ahead, defeated.

The hottest part of the day came, and Thomas reminded himself what Santos had said about the giant butterfly emerging in the cool of the evening. He contented himself in the afternoon with cataloguing and reading.

Clara and John had stayed close to camp, and John seemed to be concentrating on giving Clara lessons in botany rather than collecting specimens. They sat side by side in the shade with piles of leaves in front of them, which they were drawing and painting and writing notes about. Though he was still avoiding Clara, Thomas couldn’t help but feel a pinch of jealousy at the easy way they related to each other. He knew that if it wasn’t for what had happened between them — he couldn’t even bear to name it, not even to himself — he might be able to relax around her, even engage her in conversation, for she seemed a bright and intelligent woman.

As the sun began to fall, Thomas ventured once again into the forest, taking Ernie with him, as he was nervous to go on his own when he was unfamiliar with the paths. He jerked his face towards every movement in the trees, but found only monkeys leaning towards them for a closer look, or heavy-bodied birds jumping from branch to branch. No other butterflies appeared — they had gone into hiding for the coming night. Though the snatches of sky through the trees were still blue, the light on the forest floor was failing. They would have to turn back.

‘Don’t move,’ said Ernie, who was behind him. Thomas stopped, noting the serious tone of Ernie’s voice.

‘What is it?’ whispered Thomas, but he didn’t need an answer. Standing on the path ahead of them was a huge black animal, barely visible against the darkening trees. It had seen them, but its look of curiosity was giving way to suspicion. Its ears began to flatten against its head and its legs buckled as it sank to a crouch. It was getting ready to spring if it needed to.

‘I can get it from here,’ said Ernie say faintly behind him.

Thomas turned his head slowly, fearing what he would see, and sure enough, Ernie had his shotgun and was readying himself to fire. Forgetting the admonishment not to move, Thomas grabbed the barrel of the gun and pushed it upwards, just as Ernie squeezed the trigger. The sound exploded in his ears.

‘What are you doing?’ cried Ernie, but Thomas had already spun around to look back at the jaguar. Luckily, it turned and leapt away from them, making little noise in the undergrowth. Thomas heard only the buzzing in his ears from the gun.

‘Idiot,’ he said. His hands shook and, now the danger was past, he felt his cold blood flooding back through his veins. ‘Shooting at a beautiful creature like that, are you mad? And with shot.
Shot
, Ernie. You would only have wounded it and made it mad as hell. You’re lucky it didn’t tear your head off!’

Ernie stood looking at him dumbly, the gun wilting in his arms. ‘You’re right, old man,’ he said at last. ‘Crikey, what a telling off!’

He was looking at Thomas with a new respect, and Thomas realised that he had kept his head while Ernie had panicked. The jungle was becoming a part of him now.

That night, Thomas lay in his hammock and pictured the jaguar. It had looked him in the eye and Thomas felt it was staring into his very soul. Ernie had sung his praises when they returned to camp and he had felt himself walking a little taller. But, despite the excitement, he was weighed down by disappointment. No butterfly. The whole idea of its coming out at sundown seemed preposterous, and he convinced himself that Santos had been mistaken about this aspect. He must be patient. He must continue as he had been, and when the time was right, the butterfly would appear.

A week went by, and though Thomas saw nothing of his butterfly, he collected a good number of other specimens. The collecting was not as abundant as it had been in Belém, but it was slightly better than when they had stayed in Manaus. He noticed that when the men mentioned Belém, nostalgia crept into their voices, and he came to realise that they, himself included, had taken their life there for granted. Everything had been new and exciting, but they also had an abundance of food, natural life and friends. Life was as relaxed as it could get. He missed their chats on the balcony of the comfortable house, while hummingbirds and bees buzzed from flower to flower, and the local girls called out to them and waved. He even missed the young boys George had employed to collect for him, their gap-toothed smiles and their laughter. He scarcely wanted to admit it to himself, but the presence of Santos kept him always on edge. He was conscious of his manners at all times, and Santos regularly tried to engage him in intense discussions to which he felt he had not enough knowledge to contribute. And as for Clara … the effort of avoiding her was becoming a strain.