The Abundance of the Infinite (6 page)

16

Yelena and Annabelle are in my apartment. Not simply my visual impression of them but their voices, their bodies, their souls. This is the first time I've ever seen them sleeping together on my bed, making the same outline as Karen had as I painted her on the couch.

Yelena is solemn and sweet in her sleep. Annabelle is a symphony of silence.

Yelena has changed. She is an adventurer, and has followed me here. She has never been far from her homes in Canada and Russia before—except for when I finally convinced her to go to Spain with me. She lived in Russia until she was six, when her family moved to Canada. She described the Russian wheat fields in the region near Moscow where she lived, golden and flowing, with the wind beneath wide expanses of sky, that have produced themselves to me in my sleeping moments.

She is comfortable in her loneliness, she has told me before. What does this mean? Am I as comfortable in my own as I profess to be?

My paint brush flicks along the lines of Yelena's body from the nape of her neck to the small of her back, down to the extent of her polished toenails. After creating a single portrait of Yelena I go on to paint a multitude of different views of Annabelle.
She is exquisite,
a baby Greek goddess. Look at those tiny, as yet unformed fingers. She is baby Aphrodite, singing amidst the foaming waves of the sea. She is born in, and will rise from, the sea.

Annabelle stirs. The form is blurred, inconstant, changing. My brush moves with her, caresses her, forms her outline anew once again. Her form is the sincerity and the reliability of change.

Annabelle rises to sit vertically on the bed and rubs her eyes. She yawns, and stretches a baby feline stretch. Looking over at the sky outside, I see that it is overcast for the first time that I've been here. I have a difficult time accepting that Annabelle and Yelena, who is still sleeping, are here in front of me.

I imagine with fear that they are sadly strangers with similar features to those I have known, who upon closer inspection are revealed to be unfamiliar to me....

17

“Have you been to
the mountains, to the rainforest? You have? To the mountains, but not the rainforest. We can go together, I know of a place where you get a guide to take you through … we can see termite nests in the trees, swing from vine roots high above the forest floor … we can trek by the trails and eat fish straight from the Amazon … we can kayak and white water raft …you've thought about this, have you? You've seen this in your dreams?”

I recall Yelena's words as I set out with Karen for the bus station. The man with the dusty taxicab, who welcomed me to Manta, inquires, with a grin, whether I'll be back.

“Wet season will soon be here,” he says in Spanish, looking skyward. “Still, many places of this country remain flooded from El Niño.”

“I will be back to see the wet season,” I reply, boarding the bus with Karen. Yelena and Annabelle, sadly, are gone. My copy of Boccaccio's
Decameron
, which I hold beneath my arm, plunks with a cloud of dust onto the street. Quickly retrieving it, I place the worn volume in my backpack.

I will go to Peru some day, I say to Karen as we find our seats on the bus bound for Quito. I don't explain to her how my father never had such intense dreams as he had there. It was because of the thin mountain air, my father said, a lack of oxygen combined with what he called the spiritual energy of the place. He dreamed of oversized condors with supernatural energies laced with gemstones and jewels, of the beginning and the end of the world, the end coming with fire-breathing dragons flying over barren landscapes. He dreamed of angels allowing him access to a telephone which he could use to talk with anyone, living or dead, which he used to talk at length with a friend of his who had died in a motorcycle accident. I told my father something he didn't like because he said it was something my mother would say, and in fact my mother had taught me once that speaking to the dead is abhorrent to God and that the reason for King Saul's death was his consultation first with the witch of Endor and then with the spirit of Samuel.

Karen says nothing for a long time. I know what she is thinking. We've had the conversation only hours before. We couldn't go to Peru now, even if we had the time, as we wouldn't get past the Ecuadorian-Peruvian border. They're at war, those two countries. It's too dangerous to leave to go anywhere, the Señora told us, adding that we should stay very close to home and try not to leave our apartments for at least a week or two.

“The protests against the government will happen soon,” the Señora said. “I have seen them before many times. The police fighting against the military, both fighting the people. You wait, it will happen.”

“I've seen it too,” Karen added, “the tear gas and the tire fires lining the streets and the highways, the guns, the police with their plastic shields.” She explained further, detailing the looting and mass protests, this government only having been in power for a few months of a four-year term, armoured military vehicles bouncing down the roadways looking for aggressive protestors and perhaps hoping they find none.

We had to beat these protests, and get away before they began, I said....

We pass through the mountains, our ears plugging and then crackling clear as we go up and up, past the side of cliffs again, past their sheer edges. We suddenly stop. We are stuck in mud. The wet season is not here, just the weather leading up to it, the remnants of another storm that must have brought gusting winds and torrents of rain.

After the bus driver's lengthy struggle through the saturated earth, we are moving again. We pass by mountains of mud, sheer cliffs of it, and drive beside homes buried by landslides. We see children and their parents with buckets, emptying the dirty water from their once-proud residences. The roof of a home and the top of a palm tree protrude out of a small lake. This place has been hit hard. Someone aboard the bus says the words “
El Niño
.”

We move toward the mountains. We walk from the muddy bus station, both of us cold, and Karen dons a sweater. Removing my wrinkled and dusty rain jacket which is stuffed into my backpack, I put the jacket on and watch as the mountains fade into the evening.

The sounds of celebration, perhaps made by conspiring protestors, keep me awake throughout the night.…

18

We move from the streets on the town's west side, to the countryside, by bus. We pass by a bank with people lined up outside who, as I read in this morning's newspaper, must be the patrons attempting to withdraw their savings from a bankrupt bank. The newspaper reported this to be the first in a series of events which might lead to the president being ousted. A military coup, a popular uprising, or both.

We pass by Papallacta, said to contain natural hot springs with the unique characteristic that they do not smell of sulphur. We drive throughout the night. Again, I am unable to sleep. The loud music on the bus and the occasional howling of children keep me awake during the day, and at night we are stuck in mud, either in actuality or in my dreams, which now seem so closely linked as to be the same.

Your memory is now becoming insipid and worthless
, I say to myself. I barely remember the bus stopping, the planks placed beneath the wheels, the bus struggling forward on two wheels while the other tires spin in the mud. I can only recollect the flashlights, and then the heat increasing as the rising sun escalated the temperature inside the bus, which had only a few opening windows for ventilation.

Karen, still sleeping, abruptly awakens in the heat of the mid-morning air.

We drive through the sumptuous greenery of a jungle town. Abandoned muddy streets with two lampposts carry electrical power cables to the few grey buildings that need it. Tin-roofed huts are in the distance, huts with signs indicating they are for rent. There are other signs, not written in English, advertising kayaks for rent and jungle guides. I am falling into and out of sleep as, from my half-open, drowsy eyes, I see Karen rushing to the front of the bus and speaking with the driver, who slows the vehicle in the middle of this tiny town.

“We're getting off, here,” she says to me after returning to her seat.

“Where is here?” I ask, sleepily.

The driver turns back toward us. “
Aqu
í
?
”

“Here.
Aqu
í
,” she says to the driver, gathering up our bags.

Yelena did this same thing once before, years ago, on our trip to Spain. We were in Girona, north of Barcelona along the Mediterranean coast, when she told the driver to stop. At that time, Yelena had a specific destination in mind. It was the one time I saw that she could be impulsive and adventurous, and I thought for a moment that this might be the start of a change in her. But later, after we arrived home, we discussed other locales to which we could travel. She said she did not want to go anywhere else. But at the moment when she surprised me, her sudden resolution to depart that bus seemed like a sensible idea. There was a way back, and another bus would be by within a few hours. We hiked for two miles along desolate paved roads, to reach the last workplace of Salvador Dalí,
Grafista
,
Graphic Artist. The spiraling foliage, the deep blue of a Mediterranean sky, and the surreal images inside the small castle he had built for his wife still fuel my dreams.

“Why here?” I ask Karen, aware now that everyone who is awake aboard the bus is watching us inquisitively. “I know you're trying to prove something to me,” I continue, “that you've changed, but you don't have to.”

“Changed?” Karen asks quizzically. “Why do you say that?”

“Let's just stay on the bus until we get somewhere less remote. This town doesn't even look like a normal stop on the bus route.”

“You don't think this is a normal stop, with all these signs for tourists?” she asks. And I think I can hear, at that moment, but just faintly, the words, rolling into my head in a whisper: “But anyway, neither was Girona.”

We descend the stairs of the bus and arrive at the edge of a muddy street.

This place seems familiar. I pull one of my father's photographs out of my backpack and see him smiling in front of an overgrown town square, the fountain at its centre no longer functional but instead a cascade of dense foliage, the backdrop appearing to be the same as what is now before us.

“I recognize this place,” I say. “At least, it looks like a town my father visited. But why are we here?”

“The Señora says this is where your father spent much of his time,” she replies.

“Why?”

“He owned some huts here in Archidona, and we'll rent them from the new owner.”

“I don't care to stay here, and we need to get to Quito.”

“We need to rest in a bed. And don't you want to know why your father spent so much time here?”

“No, I don't.”

As I try to climb the stairs to get back on the bus, its door closed now, the vehicle speeds off with a cloud of pollution. I stare for a while at the water rushing nearby, the mud-brown water of the Amazon.

After a few minutes we find ourselves unexpectedly alone in the middle of this place, without a bus in sight and without knowing when another will be coming through. I have the sudden frightening thought that the protests in the country might delay the buses, or even temporarily stop service altogether.

My anger at her, and at myself for listening to her, turns into wonderment at discovering a place that was so dear to my father. A small black monkey hops down from one of the trees within the square, noticing us, moving very cautiously at first, then scuttling away, and then returning. The animal becomes more and more emboldened after each incremental determination to discover whether or not we intend to hurt it. Staring at my backpack, which I set down, the small black-faced beast scampers toward me and grabs the pack as though it is an offering and, dragging it, unable to carry the weight, begins to examine the outside closely. It tries the zipper, slides it open, and removes a bottle of water. The monkey runs away with its newfound prize, its tail curled in anticipation as it hops up to the base of the tree, the bottle thumping to the ground heavily as it darts quickly upward.

As the sun moves behind the clouds, the image of this black monkey, who sits in the dark tree staring at us, starts to blend in to become at first dark colours, and then an absence of light.

This then transforms into the dim shade of the evening, sporadic shadows drunkenly attacking the fog of oversized insects around the two streetlights that are now illuminated. Bats are penetrating through the mist in search of their prey, before vanishing again into the blackness … we look up for stars, which should be the most incredible array of stars we've ever seen outside our dreams. The moon is absent, and the only light for miles around seems to be from these two lamps before us, yet we can see no stars.

We step away from the lights and into a darker and more immense cloud of insects that buzz about our heads. The bugs are repulsed as we saturate our clothes and skin with a spray repellent … the stars above remain unseen, masked by invisible clouds bringing warm rain to the already moist ground.… We have rented individual huts, to which we promptly return. The familiar sight of mosquito netting, the recognizable humming of insects, and reading several of Boccaccio's stories from
The Decameron
lulls me into sleep. I fall into a restless sleep, one devoid of dreams.…

∞

The next nights are spent in the same huts, perched on stilts above the forest floor. I remember in these days and nights, as we await another bus that still has not come, what originally brought Yelena and me together. I remember our illogical conversations by having more of them, these ones with Karen. I revel with Karen in our absurdity, participating in native ceremonies by night, cleansing away any evil spirits by having a shaman breathe out healing properties through
chicha
, masticated and fermented corn juice spit at us from all angles, the shaman exhaling tobacco smoke over our aching joints and sucking and spitting out bad air, smoking unfiltered cigarettes ourselves while imagining the dark leaves to be the same tobacco as that prepared by the shaman, inventing this in our minds as we drink our own
chicha
,
the natives dancing ritualistically around us in the warm rain and covered torch lights of the evening.

We marvel that we have no one to answer to here. Not each other, not even ourselves.

We are uninhibited, emancipated, free. And it is on that evening that I have the most vivid dream of my life, after I fall asleep reading
The Decameron
. It is a dream I transcribe for my therapist that, unlike Coleridge's recording of his opium-induced "Kubla Khan" dream, is not interrupted and is therefore fully articulated, in its entirety, in narrative script as the Tenth Day, Eleventh Story, as told by myself, outside of Florence in the cloudy light of day. Yelena, Karen, the Señora, Inés, Yolanda and I have all come to a hillside to escape the bubonic, pneumonic and septicemic variations of the plague which have descended upon fourteenth century Florence and taken the lives of almost half the European population.

King Gianni, ruler of Cyprus, having secretly murdered his own daughter for taking many lovers and thereby bringing shame upon him, accuses his wife's father, among others, of having played a key role in the murder. The King sentences him to death. After his execution the Queen, discovering her husband's culpability in the death not only of her father but also of their daughter, becomes committed to ending the King's life. A prognosticating witch, after declaring her allegiance to the Queen, appears to the King as an unusual black cat and prophesies that he will be destroyed. His daughter's real murderer is uncovered publicly, a war with neighbouring Armenia is lost, and the witch ensures that the prophecy comes true.