The Devil's Garden (5 page)

‘I intend to write a report of everything that I witnessed last night.’ I said this to assert without subtlety my independence, but I had no idea to whom I might give such a thing or
what, if any, its effect might be. I was beginning to sound ridiculous even to myself. The daylight made the night seem unreal. The parrot dipped its head repeatedly.

Cordero sat down with the affectation of weariness. ‘Try to bear in mind, Dr Forle, that this Station is owned by my government, and that decisions as to who can and who cannot stay here
are government decisions. But please feel free to mention my name in your report. If nothing else, I am sure the mayor, the governor and even the president will be pleased to hear of our progress
this far up the river.’

All the while, the Judge had been following the exchange with an exaggerated back and forth of his head. Now his pale eyes came to rest on me.

‘I’ll be back this evening,’ I said. ‘I will ask Sole to come and speak with you.’

‘Where are you going?’ He looked up from the table.

‘ To work.’

It was his turn to detain me.

‘I mean whereabouts is your work exactly?’

‘We have twenty-four different sites,’ I said. ‘They’re all around.’

‘Where are you going today, Doctor? Which one?’

‘It’s about half an hour away. Why?’

‘Because some of the river channels will have patrols on them by now.’ He thinned his nose. ‘And you will not be able to pass. But if you let me know where this site is, we can
check that your way is clear before you go out.’

‘It changes every day. We rotate the sites.’

Again the weariness. ‘Then let us know every day where you are going – in the morning. And we will try to help you avoid wasting your time.’

‘If that’s necessary.’

‘It is.’

I hesitated. ‘What are your patrols doing, Colonel?’

‘Picking people up.’

‘For the registration?’

‘Yes. For that.’

‘I’m sorry but I don’t understand – surely we can just carry on – your men will know it’s us, won’t they? We won’t be interfering with your
work.’

I looked towards the Judge, who smiled.

‘There are also security issues,’ Cordero said. ‘Which are my responsibility.’

Jorge had brought out the coffee.

Cordero turned back to the table.

‘Please let me know what you have done about Captain Lugo when I get back,’ I said.

I walked away full of intention and, in this, like so many whose lives pass busily and who in the end do nothing.

II

Our boat chugged the sullen backwater. We were travelling upstream but this no longer felt like a journey back to the earliest beginnings of the world, rather to its end.
There was no visible sun and the matted tangle was strangely motionless – monochrome, petrified. Everywhere the roots were exposed and the brown flats suppurated. Where once there had been
tributaries, now there were pools, cut off. A slow asphyxiation: more and more seeking less and less. The season of low water had gone on too late and too long.

I was thirsty. I needed to break the spell. Tord, the missionary who sometimes visited us (and who liked in our company to be considered a linguist), said that most of the Indian languages had a
special word that described the power of the jungle to mesmerize. I could well believe him. I turned around. Felipe’s smile flew across his face to greet me.

‘Do we have anything to drink?’

‘Yes, of course, Dr Forle.’ He prised open the Styrofoam cool box with one hand and made to stand and lean toward me. I was afraid that we would swerve and that he would ground the
boat. We had been snagging the propeller a lot recently. I am skilled with a knife – anatomy, dissection – but, still, it was blind, wet, dangerous work to cut free the heavy tendrils.
And though they say the piranha only attack those with open wounds, the caiman and the anaconda are less particular.

‘Throw it,’ I said.

He did so with exaggerated care.

I sat back and cracked open the can. After the anger of the morning had come a burning urgency to work. I had left the
comedor
and gone straight to the lab to collect my pack and my
equipment. I did not know what else to do. Perhaps I had already begun to feel that my work – as a naturalist, as a scientist – was somehow against them. I had then walked back up to
Felipe’s hut, where I had found him already neatly dressed, sitting at his table, cutting pages from the lifestyle magazines he collected and drinking a glass of milk. He had been surprised
to see me at the door of his hut. We needed to make faster progress, I had explained, even if that meant working alone in the field from now on. I wanted him to take me out immediately.

Now, I sipped my drink and watched the river. We were passing an unusually reedy stretch of bank. Heavy, raven-coloured birds sat high-shouldered on a fallen trunk as if at some last council. I
swung both my legs over the bench and sat facing backwards so that I could talk with Felipe directly.

‘Did you hear anything last night?’

‘Yes.’ He rubbed at his cheeks; there was a line above which he did not shave but the bristles grew up further, towards his eyes.

‘Did you get up?’

‘I was very concerned, Dr Forle,’ he said uneasily. ‘I was very concerned.’

‘Did you come out? Did you go to the
comedor
?’

‘No.’

‘Did you see anything? Did you see Captain Lugo going into Sole’s room? Before?’

‘I saw him going back towards the
comedor
with her. Then I saw you following them and I thought to myself – oh, that’s good, the Doctor is awake – since I knew
that you would come and knock if there was a serious problem.’ He tilted his head to one side. ‘And you know, Doctor, nobody bosses Sole about. Not even captains.’

Felipe was pretending to a certain delicacy – as though the night had been about something else and he was chary of intrusion. But his hut was next along to Sole’s and he must have
been woken by her shouting, just as I was.

‘You didn’t hear Sole – when the captain went into her hut?’

‘No.’

‘You didn’t see the captain go in?’

‘No.’

‘You didn’t hear anything from the direction of the
comedor
?’

‘No – nothing.’

Now he was lying. I felt for him. In his own way, Felipe was ambitious. He liked to talk about the trip he had once made to the capital and though he was unsure as to what prospect the visitors
might present, he was eager not to let any such opportunity pass. It occurred to me that he had not left his hut because he was employed by the government – like Jorge, Estrela . . . and like
Sole. Inwardly, I cursed the Colonel and the Judge and the studious calm that their arrival had so quickly poisoned. More than ever, I wanted to work.

‘If I were going to report the captain – I mean report his actions – who would I contact, Felipe?’

‘The captain is not police. It would be impossible . . . even if he were police.’

‘What about an ambitious lawyer?’

The question dismayed him – his innocence was his armour not his nature.

‘This is politics now, Dr Forle. The mayor, the governor, even the president most likely – everybody is involved. These are matters for the government. Who knows how anything is
decided? I would say that the best thing is to wait and see, Doctor, wait and see.’ He brightened. ‘This is all part of the bigger picture – the registration. It is better not to
be involved. We stay focused on the bigger picture by staying focused on the little picture.’

It was one of the idiotic phrases that I brought with me.

‘After the registration process, they will be gone,’ he continued. ‘And then things will be back to normal. You will see. Mr Rebaque will be back and we can get on with the
science.’

He was doing his best. He had worked on enough expeditions to understand scientific vanity, too; he knew that I feared a full-scale disruption of the work.

‘All the same,’ I said. ‘I’d like there to be a note on the Colonel’s file or something. And it might be important that you corroborate my story.’

I realized that I sounded naive, and that this offended his sense of my status, my international authority. But my thoughts would not leave the white-hot pole. And it was true: I would have
liked to place a similar rod in the fire for the enemies of Cordero – something easy to hand if ever they wished to torture him.

‘What do you think Dr Quinn would do?’ I asked after a while.

‘I don’t know what Dr Quinn would do in this situation.’ Felipe crossed himself. ‘Nobody can know that.’

‘He would do something. You told me that Dr Quinn was involved in lots of things.’

‘Not like this . . . Nothing like this. He would visit the villages. That’s what I meant.’

‘Which villages?’ I was persecuting Felipe now, I knew, but I could not stop. ‘The
ribereños
or the Indians? The Matsigenka? The Yora?’

‘Dr Quinn was friends with Tupki and lots of the others. He would go and camp. Sometimes after his work. Or for a few days. With Lothar. He was interested in looking at their medicines and
how they lived. But he was not . . . He was not involved with the government or the police . . . or soldiers. Not at all.’

Something swam just beneath the surface of the water.

‘Did they find the wreckage of the plane? I hear different stories.’

‘I don’t know. But, Dr Forle, there were more than a hundred people on the plane. Not just Dr Quinn.’

‘Not just Dr Quinn.’

‘Dr Quinn is with God and all the saints and the angels,’ he said and crossed himself again.

‘And we are finishing his work.’

‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘With your help, Felipe,’ I said.

He smiled but he did not speak. We had come to a bend in the channel where the shoals narrowed our passage and he looked past me, partly to verify his way, partly to pretend an absorption not
permitting of conversation. He too was seeking refuge in his work.

III

The jungle has been compared to an ocean: the canopy is like the coral where the fruit grows and flowers bloom and the forest floor is like the seabed where all dead
things must eventually fall and rot. Man is a monster of the deep, therefore, a creature of casual atrocity and low cunning lumbering through the perpetual gloom.

We progressed steadily. After a while, we found a rhythm to our going and in this rhythm a kind of ease. We carried our machetes; we swigged from our water; we clambered fallen trunks and bent
beneath the hanging vine. The ground rose and fell. Amidst the green and brown of the trees, I began to see flashes of white and gold, red and blue – birds, flowers, epic butterflies in the
quavering grace of their flight.

I had grown fond of following Felipe – specifically I had grown accustomed to watching his white gloves dancing ahead of me. I had thought them ridiculous when I arrived, but I quickly
came to see their purpose. Only a fool would throw out a hand to steady himself in the primary forest: thorns and spines were on every side – great barbed trunk-teeth, lethal hooks, scimitars
and spikes. And all five kingdoms have their formidable defenders – their bites and stings and scratches, their toxins and poisons and venoms, their bacteria and their viruses.

In order to ensure our study was thorough and robust, Quinn had chosen twenty-four separate field sites. Roughly half were less than fifteen minutes’ boat ride from the station. But it was
difficult to try and remember the subsequent foot journey even to most of these. As for the more distant, it was impossible; and though I must have passed along the way that we were now walking a
dozen times, I recognized little and the path we followed seemed barely that – appearing to fork and fork again, merging, circling, disappearing altogether, trickery and chimera, all
directions identical, no direction at all.

It was our usual arrangement that Felipe and I went out together while Lothar worked alongside Kim. But with Lothar away, we three had been working all together at the closer sites. Up to now, I
had been strict: neither Kim nor I had gone into the jungle alone – for obvious reasons to do with the risk of accidents, but most of all because we would both have been utterly lost within
ten minutes. Anyone not thoroughly familiar with the forest is desperate within an hour of finding themselves alone. Most die after a surprisingly short amount of time; usually because they make
themselves fatally ill as they start to believe – consumed by hunger and maddened by thirst – that every berry, nut, root and leaf is edible. Even a compass bearing is useless since it
is impossible to walk in a straight line for more than two paces at a time. You cannot proceed except in the direction the forest allows. And though Kim and I both carried satellite navigation
systems in our packs, they were little better for the same reason – and, in any case, the reception beneath the understorey was notoriously unreliable.

Felipe stopped and I looked up, startled afresh each time to see the canopy broken. We had arrived without warning and the sun was poking through and the light flaring from leaf to leaf, bright
and shocking. Dead ahead, the customary riot and profusion of the forest had vanished and there were no plants in view save one species – a thin, bare and bleached-looking tree with crooked
branches that reached towards the sky like claws:
Duroia hirsuta
.

IV