Thirst (19 page)

As I crawled, I could see how unsuited an upright posture was to this climate. On all fours, my body was secure and somewhat sheltered from the storm’s power. Bipedalism was just another example of inappropriate technology transfer.

Crawling, however, would not ensure my acceptance by the jungle. The storm still beat on my back and head, and into my eyes whenever I tried to look up. I thought of Menasha and the other creatures of the bush. It was unlikely, I knew, for any of them to be about in this fierce weather, but I could not help but think of the leopard we had killed while we were on patrol a few weeks earlier. My sergeant shot it before it sensed our approach. Then, with one bullet from my revolver, I killed the antelope the leopard had been eating. The leopard preferred its prey alive, the heart still pumping blood. It had been eating the antelope from the rear, chewing into its bowels and up into its body. As I approached it, the antelope’s pain-moistened eyes watched me carefully. Shocked into sentience, it was fully conscious of its fate, and of what constituted mercy. The image of these two creatures, one’s body halfway up the
other’s—the leopard trying to slip into an antelope suit—haunted me as I crawled along the side of the road, my own ass bare and vulnerable.

And I was alone against the other demons: wild dogs, poisonous spiders, and mosquitoes that can swell to the size of your thumb while sucking your blood. Certain species of vulture will tear the eyes out of a living man. The Penta snake crawls into a man’s ear and forces him to hear every evil thought in the world. The single bite of Har the lizard puts a man to sleep for a thousand days. When he awakes, his body is entirely infested with worms. After midnight in the rainy season, Har’s victims can be seen wandering through the countryside.

And then, of course, there was the Wild Princess . . .

It was by the application of all my will that I continued my progress into the storm, and also by the invocation of certain memories. I recalled the expression of a very young girl ice-skating at Rockefeller Center a few Decembers before. I had stood alone at the railing above the rink, across from the bronze figure of Prometheus, warm in my trench coat, almost intoxicated by the dry air of a newly arrived cold front. I had never seen the girl before and she would never see me, for she danced oblivious to all but the ice and her balance. She skated backwards, she leaped, she spun, yet I hardly noticed her glittering movements, so intent was my study of her face. It showed, in its vivid, rapturous self-control, that the girl had conquered the physical. This human triumph encouraged me more than all the world’s machines. All our science, our literature, and our art—everything we had done with the gift of fire—was not as impressive as
the set of her jaw and the transparency of her eyes. Despite the pre-Christmas tumult around me, I was at ease. I was safe in the heart of the world.

But then I could not remember the girl any more than I could remember what I had dreamed before I was born. Rockefeller Center had been destroyed in the monsoon.

As I reached the hovel, I found my muddy coat and covered myself with it. Inside, the austere tableau was little changed from before. Leslie, the small children, and Sana’s mother were by the fire, Krik brooded on his haunches in another corner, and Sana, with the oldest girl in attendance, held the baby in her arms, rocking him above the pallet. The single significant difference in the setting was that the room was partitioned by a long cotton sheet. A three-stroke ideogram, whose translation would require a commentary of such length that, attending it, the reader could easily forget the scene I’m attempting to describe, was painted on charcoal on each side of the sheet.

Once inside the door and free of the storm’s weight, I feebly raised the Bufferin for display.

My wife’s look was sorrowful.

“I know,” I said before she could speak. “The sheet.”

My ankle sore, I limped to the fire and grabbed a rag to dry myself. The children and their grandmother scattered as I approached, and I was overcome by a powerful tremor. Although I stood on the short hearth, I felt no heat. I sat down heavily. Leslie did not touch me.

Sana stared into the face of the infant, seeing something visible to herself alone.

“Where’s your clothes?” my wife asked at last, confining her query to a solemn whisper.

“They weighed me down. That’s how it is with us.”

We watched the fire. The old woman placed three greasy candles on the child’s pallet.

“It’s not really your fault,” Leslie said after a while.

“‘Really’?”
I cried. “It’s not
‘really’
my fault? It’s not by any stretch of the imagination my fault. He should have sent the kid to Sempril.”

“I just mean you were away so long—”

“I made it in record time. You don’t know what it’s like out there.”

From the carton that had produced the identity papers and the hard currency, Krik now removed a Bic lighter. He handled it carefully. Not quite adept at the proper flicking motion, he stroked it several times before managing to ignite it. As the old woman moaned the traditional incantations, Krik squatted by the candles and lit them.

“All right,” Leslie said. “Just calm down.”

Calm down. It wasn’t my fault. Krik should have sent the kid to Sempril. Sana should not have used untreated water to mix the formula. The district authority should regulate the use of its rivers and wells. The central government should better organize the region’s resources. Condensed formula should not be sold in areas that are without appropriate water supplies. Our people should practice birth control. The government, my government, should assure them that it, and not their
litters of children, will support them in their old age—even though it can’t.

Our people must be educated to live like men, something they once knew as well as any other nation. My country cannot overcome the jungle. It is the jungle. But it must find a place for itself somewhere in this world and in this century of ruthless miracles.

“I’ve had enough,” I told Leslie, and I grabbed her by the arm so that she could help me up. I had already picked a spot to sleep, a dry corner on the other side of the sheet. “Let’s go to bed.”

She pulled away.

“The mourning. They explained it to me.”

“The hell with it,” I said, standing on my own.

Native tradition and belief demanded, among other things, the separation of the sexes the night after a death in the home. Hence the sheet. Man and woman were not to touch each other, not even to provide comfort. This was to prevent a defilement of the dead’s spirit, and also to prevent any undestined conception that might trap the departing soul in another miserable earthbound existence.

“Come on,” I said.

Leslie stood but shook her head, studying my bare feet. She still wore Sana’s coarse wraparound. “No.”

“Jesus,” I said, my voice raised before the grieving, uncomprehending family. “Did they explain the rest to you? The keening and the bowing and the tearing of the already well-torn clothes? How about the salt gargle and the body paint? Did they explain how the heat from the candles buoys the spirit to its final destination, which is
not quite heaven, but a jungle without fear or chaos? Do you believe this crap?”

“I don’t believe it—”

“But you respect it. You find it interesting. No, you find it colorful. My country’s colorful peasants. This death is for your benefit, to entertain you, to inform you about my people’s primitive religious beliefs and ceremonies.”

“How can you say that? How about the family’s feelings? Where’s your compassion?”

“With the kid,” I said, catching hold of one of her wrists. “I don’t respect the way he died, nor do I find it colorful.”

My weight fell on the twisted ankle but I held on to her, the pain only intensifying my grip.

“You’re hurting me,” she said, absolutely confused. I had never before used force against her; if I had done this in New York, she would have left me without giving it a second thought. Now she did not know how to respond nor how frightened to be, alone in this cruel land. I gripped her harder, slowly turning her whitened arm, mindlessly looking for the first sign of tears in her eyes, around which, I just then noticed, there were still somehow traces of black mascara.

 

I was tired but I did not sleep. Nor did Leslie, who lay next to me on a vinyl mat, covered by a thin army blanket. She made neither a sound nor a sign, but I imagined I knew every thought in her head.

The unsteady candles cast grotesque shadows onto the sheet, which was tied to an improvised second
sheet at the middle to divide the peasants’ half of the room. We were alone, on the other side. Limbs stretched the length of the sheet and then bubbled off from their torsos. Separate writhing figures suddenly became one. Penumbras joined and gave birth to tiny, unrecognizable shadows. The projections were clearly not those of the body; they belonged to the extreme postures of the spirit. Nor did the cries of my countrymen seem human. They were without design. Although the mourning songs were in my language, and I had been taught them as part of my cultural upbringing, I could not understand the words. Indeed, there were no words, just bits of noise that meant nothing alone, but when taken together meant more than words could express. It was magic. It was
my
spirit that was being mourned, that would be lifted to the wet skies by the heat of the peasants’ sorrow.

It must have been near dawn when they finally stopped, bedding down in their segregated quarters. The rain continued to assault the hovel, and the wind moaned, also mourning. Eclipsed, my country would never see the day. I reached to my wife, my hands gently finding her smooth, round belly. She flinched just once under my touch. I made love to her without pleasure, violently and audibly, as if I were not making love to her at all, but were burrowing inside her, searching for a place to live.

T
he morning opens with a song that has never been heard before. It rises from the sands like heat and descends upon the head of the column. As the song ripples back along the spine of the march, it is transformed, with added lyrics and a more complicated melody.

This is the song just before it reaches us:

Then the song washes over our section of the column, and we add to it:

Our voices rise, mix, and negotiate a harmony, reminding us that we are a people. And then the song leaves us. We close our parched lips. The song is picked up behind us, slightly altered, so that it has an extra beat in every other line, plus a refrain. The refrain is:

And then the song is gone forever, just as our footprints disappear into the sand every night.

No one can say precisely how long we have been walking or what fraction of the earth’s surface we have traversed. We have walked long enough for many of us to have married and borne children; also, enough time for others, embittered by the rigors of the march, to have divorced, even though they continue to walk on parallel tracks. Our old and sick die every night and are left behind every morning in unmarked, unrecorded graves. Once we turn our backs the ground behind us appears undisturbed. Aid workers often ask us who our leaders are, or who sets our direction, or who decides when we should bed down for the night, or who decides when we should get going once more in the morning, or, at the very least, who can sign receipts for relief supplies. We can’t reply to these questions with any certainty, or even say that we know where we’re going.

When we left our homes we told ourselves that we would return in a few hours, once the fighting died down, or by the following day, or by the end of the week. We extinguished the lights in our front rooms without taking with us the memories of these rooms, we shut our doors without looking back, and we walked through our front gates without recalling the childhoods lived in our gardens and yards. Now we can no longer recall what our homes looked like, or whether they were of clapboard or brick or built on one floor or two, or what time of day the postman made his deliveries.

We walk under a high thin sky that fades imperceptibly into the bleached terrain, so that we rarely see the
horizon, and the flatness of the land hides the column’s head, its tail, and tomorrow’s place of encampment. Some of us, especially the young men, run ahead to the front of the column, but they never return to report what they have found there. Others, such as the old, lag behind, and they too never return. Those who were ahead of us and then fell behind until they reached our section of the column speak of the head of the column with some authority, but their gossip is always stale, like the data borne by the spectra of stars hundreds of light-years away. They can’t tell us anything about the territory we’re about to enter because they haven’t been there. They aren’t actually moving back to us: we’re catching up with them.

News instead comes from our songs, which always roll back along the column from its head:

Jetliners rumble above the desert, making the twice-weekly Manila-Bombay-Almaty-Dakar-Montevideo run. Many of us pause for a moment, if only to enjoy the spectacle of something in the sky besides the sun and the stars. Children wave. Perhaps the passengers look from their windows and observe the black river snaking through the dead lands, and they may idly ask themselves the name of the country they are flying above.
Sometimes a jet will leave a vapor trail that beckons like a road sign.