The Devil's Garden (10 page)

IV

The trip to Tupki’s was twenty minutes downstream and there were no other major channels in which we might lose ourselves. So I was piloting and Kim was sitting in
her T-shirt facing me. The fierceness of the sun had given place to a kinder glow that flattered our complexions and lightened her curls. Like myself, she had grown leaner and fitter since we
arrived; it was impossible not to do so – we were covering a minimum of four difficult foot-miles a day and in sauna conditions.

On a bend in the river, amidst the exposed roots of some giant overhanging tree, we sighted an unusually large family of capybara on the bank. I cut the engine and lifted the propeller so that
we were gliding. Kim swung round, eager with her camera. They were red-brown and the size of pigs or sheep though with larger hind legs than fore – the largest living rodents. As ever, this
family seemed to know little fear but simply paused to watch us as we passed by. There was, I thought, a certain dignity in their indifference.

‘They get sunburn.’ Kim spoke from behind her viewfinder.

‘They remind me a bit of hippos,’ I said.

‘Isn’t there a pygmy hippo?’ she asked.

‘
Liberiensis
,’ I replied.

‘Very impressive.’ She lowered her camera and smiled her tomboy’s smile in my direction. ‘Especially for an entomologist.’

‘I live with the ants.’ I shrugged. ‘But my heart is full of even-toed ungulates.’

She grinned and swung back round. ‘Ever wish that you’d done something other than insects?’

‘No. I’d miss the money and the respect and the VIP tables wherever I go.’

‘I guess the danger is you start to take it for granted.’ She pointed the lens at me.

‘Plus you can’t do sinister experiments on the mammals – or take them home and watch them mating in your bedroom.’

‘Which we would all feel as a loss.’

‘We would,’ I said. ‘Nor do they hold the key to a counter-theory of evolution.’

We tied up the boat. Over the rise of the riverbank, we could see his house standing alone – oblong, wooden, built on stilts and set back a hundred metres or so from the
river in a natural glade. Lashed lianas covered the roof and there were four unglazed holes cut into the walls. The forest’s edge was thinner here and round about there were fruit trees, some
cultivated, others wild.

Lothar had once explained to me that it was best to think of the indigenous peoples and their lands as circles in a Venn diagram. Each circle interacted with the others around its boundaries
– sometimes deeply, sometimes hardly at all. In the heart of the forest there remained the few un-contacted peoples. Then there were a good number of tribes (or parts of tribes) who had been
contacted but who had very circumscribed dealings with the outside world – they lived (or tried to live) as they had always lived. Then there were the tribes – like the Ashaninkas,
Sole’s people, and some of the Matsigenka – who stayed on their own homelands (or sought to do so), but who were politically organized and had regular, overt and more or less modernized
relations with the incomers. And then there were those that had dissipated and now pursued lives in the towns and the cities of the river much like the
ribereños
and the
mestizos
. ‘Like everything about everything,’ Lothar had said, ‘it is an unhelpful simplification but you can start with this idea and maybe you will understand more in a
few weeks.’

Tupki was Matsigenka. They had always been a notoriously difficult tribe for the missionaries and the anthropologists to understand. They were non-hierarchical and disinclined even to the
customary rituals and cooperations of village life. They disliked school, they disliked leaders and they disliked war. Through most of the conflicts that had swept through their territories –
with the old civilizations, the conquistadors, and more recently, the communist guerrillas, the military fascists and the narcotic barons – they had always preferred to vanish into the forest
unlike their neighbours, the more warlike Yora. Often, the Matsigenka solved their disputes simply by leaving the conflicted village and starting a new one. And perhaps this had once been
Tupki’s intention. If so, nobody had followed him.

He greeted us by the great fixed black iron skillet, which sat in an open-sided construction adjacent to his house. His wife stood with two of his daughters – her eyes shy, her hair still
black, her arms muscled from carrying children. She was throwing in the manioc to roast. A flame flickered beneath. Beyond, in a little clearing, there was a wide grill on which was cooking the
giant fish.

Something I could neither place nor articulate hung in the atmosphere. At first, we sat together with Tupki and various sons in a slightly awkward line on the only seating – a long bench.
This made it difficult to talk together so we swigged the beers that I had bought and watched the women work. Their refusals of help were so adamant and severe that even Kim gave up after a
while.

Mubb and José saved us. Sometimes they whispered under the table, sometimes they skulked behind a tree, sometimes they peeped up from behind the nearby cart, until, after about ten
minutes of this, we heard a sudden series of piercing squeals and they broke cover. José sprinted past first in his red shorts, twisting and turning, clearly desperate with trying not to
laugh. Mubb was ten paces behind him, wearing nothing save a patch of sand on his bare behind, bowing down his head in an effort not to burst apart as he went pounding by . . . with a tiny startled
kitten jolting in his arms.

Tupki stood up, shaking his head. His wife was smiling, while behind her back another of her daughters made a just-playful slapping motion with her hand as if to suggest that her youngest
brother might benefit from some gentle corrective.

We ate in appreciative silence – stared at by the younger children while those in the middle sought to avoid eye contact altogether and the older ones continually offered
us more. The
tambaqui
meat was plump and white and firm and succulent and tasted more like veal or pork than anything else. I had noticed a couple of plates being carried off in the first
serving but it was only towards the end of our feast, when I rose to rinse my hands with the cup from the water bucket, that I heard the banging and looked up to see two of the elder boys spread
carefully across the roof of the main house fixing up a satellite dish.

When Kim enquired, Tupki’s eyes went a moment towards his wife before he said: ‘From the Colonel.’

‘What for?’

Tupki pinched a bone from the end of his tongue. ‘We helped him.’

‘With what?’ she asked.

‘They used here.’ Tupki indicated the area in which we were sat by holding the neck of his bottle out in front of him and describing a lazy circle. ‘For the
registration.’

Kim nodded. ‘So they gave you a satellite dish?’

‘Yes.’ Tupki gave his wincing narrow-eyed version of a grin. ‘Nobody came.’

He obviously thought this amusing, or at least a deal well struck; and yet, without doing anything beyond collecting our bowls, his wife emanated a powerful sense of . . . what? Anger, hurt,
something I could not read.

Tupki seemed to assimilate this censure. ‘It was my son – the oldest – Kanari,’ he said uneasily, raising a thumb in the direction of the banging. ‘He was the one
who suggested this. He liked the idea.’

‘Did
you
like the idea?’ Kim pressed.

Tupki finished his beer. ‘It’s the same with the soldiers as it is with the
narcóticas
. Once one person is in, then everybody is in – the whole family. They come
for sons, they come for daughters. You must choose.’ Again the sweep of the bottle to indicate the area, the buildings, his homestead. ‘Perhaps I would not have said anything myself.
But Kanari . . . he’s at the age where I cannot tell him what to do. Or, if I do, he does the opposite.’ He sighed. ‘So now we are a military family and we have a satellite dish.
The problem is we need a new television to work with it. And that is a lot of fishing.’ He spat.

I do not know if we would have ever been asked to look at Yolanda had it not been for Kim inveigling her way into the washing-up circle with two of Tupki’s daughters.
Their mother had just set down the fruit when one of these girls came over, holding both her arms in front of her and trying to shake the soapy water from her hands. She must have been eleven or
twelve and she stood before us with that same mixture of defiance and solicitation that I had noted in her father.

‘The lady says the Mister will look at Yolanda,’ she said, simply, in her broken Spanish, addressing her parents. ‘The lady says he medicine.’

Beneath the brim of his hat, Tupki’s eyes registered anger but they were caught and held by those of his wife with such a silent intensity that within a second he was swigging from his
bottle and looking away. I exchanged glances with Kim who had quietly followed the girl over after eliciting the information.

‘Yolanda is your sister?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’

‘And Yolanda is sick?’

‘Yes.’

This, then, was the real reason for our invitation. And now, at last, there was an expression of relief and alertness on the face of the girl’s mother. I looked across at Tupki again. But
he was picking at the label of his bottle. Neither spoke. Perhaps there was too much anger, too long tended between them; perhaps they had arrived at a place where their children were not merely
their unique physical enterprise but also their sole remaining conversation. It struck me that the girl was articulating exactly what they would have wished to say – if only they could have
communed again and somehow spoken with one voice.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

‘Virima,’ she said. ‘Yolanda is bad sick. Mister is a doctor?’

‘I am not a medical doctor.’ Now it was my turn to feel uneasy and embarrassed. Her face began to fall. ‘But . . . but let’s go and look. Maybe it’s something
we’ve got medicine for.’

Closely attended by wife, daughters, sons, a chastened José and a sister-restrained Mubb, we followed Tupki up the stairs inside the main house.

The rooms were interconnected by open door frames that ran the length of the building. The first was a kitchen of sorts, no more than six paces long by three wide – dark, crowded and
cramped with cracked crockery and a makeshift freestanding cupboard. Unknowable pots and jars and vessels were arranged side by side with cheap branded tins of cooking oil or salt or beans. I had
the sense that Kim was trying to shrink herself out of politeness. Diptera skittered every surface.

We passed through into what I assumed was the room Tupki shared with his wife – a giant bed and little else save for two crooked shelves resting on a row of huge nails hammered into the
wall and a series of wicker baskets containing clothes.

The third room seemed at first to be similarly a huge bed, though as we edged along the wall in the semi-darkness, I saw that it was in fact broken up into little areas – each presumably
given to a different child. Brightly coloured rugs and tattered blankets lay in faded piles and twists as if the night’s inhabitants had been required to kick their way free. There was no
wind and some mighty tree outside shadowed the window. The room smelled of must and sickness. We crowded in and the heat seemed to close about our shoulders and press forward with us. In the
corner, turned away, a motionless figure was lying.

Tupki knelt. I did the same but hung back. Kim dropped beside me. The light was dim but I could see that Tupki’s expression was too hard – as though he wished his daughter would make
more of an effort. I shuffled forward quickly and motioned with my hand to still him.

I realized with surprise that the girl was not asleep. Rather, as I was about to lay my hand on her arm, her head moved a slow quarter-turn and two deep green eyes gradually came round to hold
my own. I clasped her hand. The room behind me seemed to retreat and her shallow breathing became the only count of time. Her lips parted but she made no effort to talk. Instead, with neither anger
nor sorrow, something I can only call her spirit began to well up in her eyes and speak to me of one thing and one thing only: the terrifying certainty of its own death.

In the very corner of the hut above her head, I saw threads of light, cracks in the wooden slats where ants were moving – appearing, disappearing. I turned to face her family.

‘I don’t know what is wrong. But we must take Yolanda to a doctor.’

Their eyes were all on me. Mubb’s face was buried against his sister and now he shifted his head deeper into her chest. José was holding his mother’s hand and was on a level
with me where I knelt; his expression contained enough intensity for the entire family over again. Tupki stood leaning against the wall, holding his empty bottle of beer.

I stood. ‘It’s serious. We need to get help.’

‘Before she said where it hurts,’ the older sister who was holding Mubb spoke. ‘Now, she does not know. Everything hurts and she does not speak.’

‘I am not a medical doctor,’ I repeated. ‘But I may have something. It will not make her well but it will ease her pain.’ I could feel the tension in Kim’s stance.
‘Then we must take her to the capital.’

Tupki cleared his throat like he was about to spit. ‘This is a white man’s sickness,’ he said.

Kanari came noisily in through the door and pushed forward past his brothers and sisters. He was strong and taller than the rest and still in the first rage of his masculinity.

‘Do you work for the Colonel?’ he asked, his shoulders thrown back and his Spanish more fluent than his siblings.

The older sister turned on him sharply and said something I could not understand.

‘Then he’s with the Colonel and Lugo,’ Kanari said to her in Spanish. He put his fist to his chest. ‘Any friend of the Colonel is a friend of mine.’

Tupki’s wife shifted.

‘I am a scientist,’ I said, caught out, my eyes moving between them. ‘I don’t work for anyone. We need to help your sister.’

Virima moved next to her older sister to block Kanari, then glared up at me: ‘When you come here again?’