The Codex

20

For two days, a deep and protective cloak of mist lay on the river. Tom and Sally poled upstream, following winding side channels and keeping a strict policy of silence. They traveled day and night, taking turns sleeping. They had little to eat except Sally’s two candy bars, which they rationed, bit by bit, and some fruit Sally collected on the way. They saw no sign of the soldiers pursuing them. Tom began to hope that they had given up and gone back to Brus, or had gotten hung up somewhere. The river was riddled with sandbars, mudbanks, and sunken logs to hang up a boat. Waono had been right.

The morning of the third day the mists began to lift, exposing two dripping walls of jungle lining the blackwater river. Shortly thereafter, they spied a house on stilts built over the water, with wattle walls and a thatched roof. Beyond that a riverbank appeared, with granite boulders and a steep embankment — the first dry land they had seen in days. A dock appeared at the water’s edge like the one at Brus — a rickety platform of bamboo poles lashed to slender tree trunks sunk in the muck.

“What do you think?” Tom asked. “Should we stop?”

Sally stood up. A boy was fishing from a platform with a small bow and arrow.

“Pito Solo?”

But the boy had seen them and was already running away, abandoning his rod.

“Let’s give it a try,” said Tom. “If we don’t get something to eat, we’re finished.” He poled into the dock.

Sally and Tom jumped out, and the platform creaked and swayed alarmingly. Beyond, a rickety gangplank led to a steep dirt bank, which rose out of the flooded jungle. There was nobody to be seen. They scrambled up the slippery embankment, slipping and sliding in the mud. Everything was soaking wet. At the top was a small open hut and a fire, with an old man sitting in a hammock. An animal was roasting on a spit of wood. Tom eyed it, smelling the delicious aroma of roasting meat. His appetite was tempered only slightly when he realized it was a monkey.

“Hola,” said Sally.

“Hola,” said the man.

Sally spoke in Spanish. “Is this Pito Solo?”

There was a long silence while the man looked at her blankly.

“He doesn’t speak Spanish,” said Tom.

“Which way is the town? Donde? Where?”

The man pointed into the mist. There was the sharp cry of an animal, and Tom jumped.

“There’s a trail here,” Sally said.

They started up the trail and soon came to the town. It sat on a rise above the flooded rainforest, a motley collection of wattle-and-daub huts with roofs of tin or thatch. Chickens strutted away from them, and skinny dogs slunk along the walls of the houses, eyeing them sideways. They wandered through the village, which seemed deserted. It ended as quickly as it began in a wall of solid jungle.

Sally looked at him. “What now?”

“We knock.” Tom picked a door at random, knocked.

Silence.

Tom heard a rustle and looked around. At first he saw nothing, and then he realized that a hundred dark eyes were peering at him from the jungle foliage. They were all children.

“I wish I had my candy,” Sally said.

“Take out a dollar.”

Sally removed a dollar. “Hello? Who wants an American dollar?”

A shout went up, and a hundred children burst from the foliage, shouting and jostling, their hands extended.

“Who speaks Spanish?” asked Sally, holding up the dollar.

Everyone shouted at once in Spanish. Out of the hubbub an older girl stepped forward. “Can I help you?” she said, with great poise and dignity. She looked about thirteen and was pretty, wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt, a pair of shorts, and two gold earrings. Thick brown braids went down her back.

Sally gave her the dollar. A great ahhh of disappointment went up from the group, but they seemed to take it with good humor. The ice, at least, was broken.

“What is your name?”

“Marisol.”

“That’s a nice name.”

The girl smiled.

“We are looking for Don Orlando Ocotal. Can you take us to him?”

“He went away with the yanquis more than a week ago.”

“Which yanquis?”

“The tall angry gringo with the bites all over his face and the smiling one with the gold rings on his fingers.”

Tom swore and looked at Sally. “Sounds like Philip got our guide first.” He turned back to the girl. “Did they say where they were going?”

“No.”

“Are there any grown-ups in town? We’re going upriver and we need a guide.”

The girl said, “I will take you to my grandfather, Don Alfonso Boswas, who is the head of the village. He knows everything.”

They followed her. She had about her an air of self-possession and competence, reinforced by her straight posture. As they passed among the crooked huts, there was a smell of cooking that made Tom almost faint with hunger. The girl led them to what looked like the worst hut in the village, a leaning pile of sticks with almost no mud remaining in the cracks. It was built next to a muddy expanse that served as the town plaza. In the middle of the plaza stood a bedraggled cluster of lemon and banana trees.

The girl stood aside at the door, and they stepped inside. An old man sat in the center of the hut, on a stool too low for him, his bony knees sticking out of the great holes in his pants, a few wisps of white hair coming off his balding skull in random directions. He was smoking a corncob pipe, which had filled the hut with a tarry smell. A machete lay on the ground next to him. He was small and wore glasses that magnified his eyes, giving him a wide-eyed look of surprise. It was impossible to imagine he was the chief of the village; he looked, instead, like the village’s poorest man.

“Don Alfonso Boswas?” Tom asked.

“Who?” The old man cried, picking up the machete and waving it about. “Boswas? That scoundrel? He’s gone. They ran him out of town long ago. That good-for-nothing was living too long, and he just sat and smoked his pipe all day and looked at the girls passing his hut.”

Tom stared at the man in surprise, then turned to look for the girl. She stood in the doorway, suppressing a giggle.

The old man laid down the machete and laughed. “Come in, come in. I am Don Alfonso Boswas. Sit down. I’m just an old man who likes to tell a joke. I have twenty grandchildren and sixty great-grandchildren, and they never come to visit me, so I must tell jokes to strangers.” He spoke a curiously formal, old-fashioned Spanish, using the usted form.

Tom and Sally took two rickety stools. “I’m Tom Broadbent,” he said, “and this is Sally Colorado.”

The old man stood, bowed formally, and reseated himself.

“We’re looking for a guide to go upriver.”

“Humph,” he said. “All of a sudden these yanquis are all crazy to go upriver and get lost in the Meambar Swamp to be eaten by anacondas. Why?”

Tom hesitated, nonplussed by the unexpected question.

“We’re trying to find his father,” said Sally. “Maxwell Broadbent. He came through here about a month ago with a group of Indians in dugout canoes. They probably had a lot of boxes with them.”

The old man looked at Tom, squinting. “Come here, boy.” He reached out with a leathery hand and grasped Tom’s arm in a viselike grip, drawing him closer. He peered at him, his eyes magnified grotesquely by the glasses.

Tom felt as if the old man were peering right into his soul.

After a moment’s scrutiny, he released him. “I see that you and your wife are hungry. Marisol!” He spoke to her in an Indian language. The girl left. He turned back to Tom. “So that was your father who came through here, eh? You don’t look crazy to me. A boy with a crazy father is usually crazy, too.”

“My mother was normal,” said Tom.

Don Alfonso laughed uproariously and slapped his knee. “That is good. You are a joker, too. Yes, they stopped here to buy food. The white man was like a bear, and his voice carried half a mile. I told him he was crazy to go on into the Meambar Swamp, but he did not listen. He must be a great chief from America. We had a good evening together with many laughs, and he gave me this.”

He reached over to where some burlap sacks were folded up, fumbled about with his hands, and held something toward them in the palm of his hand. The sun struck it, and it glinted the color of pigeon’s blood, with a perfect star shining in it. He placed it in Tom’s hand.

“A star ruby,” breathed Tom. It was one of the gems in his father’s collection, worth a small, perhaps even a large, fortune. He felt a sudden rush of emotion: It was so like his father to make an extravagant gift to someone he liked. He had once given a panhandler five thousand dollars because the man amused him with a witty remark.

“Yes. A ruby. With it my grandchildren will go to America.” He carefully squirreled it away among the dirty burlap sacks. “Why is your father doing this? He was as evasive as a coati when I tried to find out.”

Tom glanced at Sally. How could he possibly explain it? “We’re trying to find my father. He’s… sick.”

At this Don Alfonso’s eyes opened wide. He removed his glasses, wiped them with a filthy rag, and put them back on, dirtier than before. “Sick? Is it infectious?”

“No. As you say, he’s just a little loco, that’s all. It’s a game he wanted to play with his sons.”

Don Alfonso thought for a while, then shook his head. “I have seen the yanquis do many strange things, but this is more than strange. There is something you’re not telling me. If I am to help you, you must tell me all.”

Tom sighed and glanced at Sally. She nodded. “He’s dying. He went upriver with all his possessions to be buried, and he issued a challenge to us that if we wanted our inheritance, we would have to find his tomb.”

Don Alfonso nodded, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. “Yes, yes, this is something we Tawahka Indians once did. We buried ourselves with our property, and it always made our sons angry. But then the missionaries came and explained to us that Jesus would give us new things in heaven so we didn’t need to bury anything with the dead. So we stopped doing it. But I believe the old way was better. And I am not sure that Jesus has all these new things for people when they die. The pictures I have seen of him show a poor man without cooking pots, pigs, chickens, shoes, or even a wife.” Don Alfonso sniffed loudly. “But then, perhaps it is better to bury yourself with your possessions than letting the sons fight over them. Even before you are dead they are fighting. That is why I already gave everything I owned to my sons and daughters and live like a wretch. This is the respectable thing to do. Now my sons have nothing to fight over, and, what is more important, they do not wish me dead.”

He finished his speech and put his pipe back in his mouth.

“Did any other white people come by?” Sally asked.

“Ten days ago two dugouts with four men, two mountain Indians and two white men, stopped. I thought the younger one might be Jesus Christ, but at the missionary school they said he was only a type of person called a hippie. They stayed a day, and they went on. Then a week ago four dugouts with army soldiers and two gringos arrived. They hired Don Orlando to guide them and left. This is why I ask myself: Why are all these crazy yanquis suddenly going into the Meambar Swamp? Are they all looking for your father’s tomb?”

“Yes. They’re my two brothers.”

“Why are you not cooperating?”

Tom didn’t answer.

Sally spoke. “You mentioned mountain Indians with the first white man. Do you know where they come from?”

“They are naked savage Indians from the highlands who paint themselves red and black. They are not Christians. We are a little bit Christian here in Pito Solo. Not much, just enough to get by when the missionaries come with North American food and medicine. Then we sing and clap for Jesus. That is how I got my new glasses.” He removed them and held them out to Tom for inspection.

Tom said, “Don Alfonso, we need a guide to take us upriver, and we need supplies and equipment. Can you help us?”

Don Alfonso puffed and puffed, then nodded. “I will take you.”

“Oh no,” Tom said, looking at the feeble old man with alarm. “That isn’t what I was asking. We couldn’t take you away from the village where you’re needed.”

“Me? Needed? The village would like nothing more than to get rid of old Don Alfonso!”

“But you’re their chief.”

“Chief? Puah!”

“It’ll be a long, hard journey,” said Tom, “not suitable for a man of your age.”

“I am still as strong as a tapir! I’m young enough to marry again. In fact, I need a sixteen-year-old who will fit right in that empty place in my hammock and bounce me to sleep every night with little sighs and kisses—”

“Don Alfonso—”

“I need a sixteen-year-old to tease me and poke her tongue in my ear to wake me up in the morning so I get up with the birds. Do not concern yourselves any longer: I, Don Alfonso Boswas, will take you through the Meambar Swamp.”

“No,” said Tom as firmly as he could. “You will not. We need a younger guide.”

“You cannot avoid it. I dreamed you would come and that I would go with you. So it is decided. I speak English and Spanish, but I prefer Spanish. English frightens me. It sounds like one is being choked.”

Tom glanced at Sally, exasperated. This old man was impossible.

At that moment Marisol returned with her mother. They were each carrying wooden trenchers laid with palm leaves, on which were piled fresh hot tortillas, fried plantains, roasted meats and nuts, and fresh fruit.

Tom had never been so hungry in his life. He and Sally tucked into the feast, joined by Don Alfonso, while the girl and her mother watched in satisfied silence. All conversation ceased while they ate. When he and Sally had finished, the woman silently took their plates and refilled them, and then refilled them a third time.

When the meal was over, Don Alfoso leaned back and wiped his mouth.

“Now look,” said Tom as firmly as he could. “Dream or no dream, you’re not coming with us. We need a younger man.”

“Or woman,” said Sally.

“I will bring two young men with me, Chori and Pingo. I’m the only one besides Don Orlando who knows the way through the Meambar Swamp. Without a guide you will die.”

“I must decline your offer, Don Alfonso.”

“You don’t have much time. The soldiers are after you.”

“They were here?” Tom asked, alarmed.

“They came this morning. They will be back.”

Tom glanced at Sally and then back to Don Alfonso. “We haven’t done anything wrong. I’ll explain—”

“You do not need to explain. The soldiers are evil men. We must start provisioning immediately. Marisol!”

“Yes, grandfather?”

“We will need tarpaulins, matches, petrol, two-cycle engine oil, tools, a frying pan, cooking pot, silverware, and water canteens.” He continued to reel off the list of supplies and food.

“Do you have medicine?” Tom asked.

“We have much North American medicine, thanks to the missionaries. We did a lot of clapping for Jesus to get those medicines. Marisol, tell the people to come with the items for sale at fair prices.”

Marisol ran off, her braids flying, and in less than ten minutes she returned, leading a file of old men, women, and children, each carrying something. Don Alfoso remained in the hut, aloof from the lowly business of buying and selling while Marisol handled the crowd.

“Buy what you want and tell the others to go away,” Marisol said. “They will tell you the price. Do not bargain; it is not our way. Just say yes or no. The prices are fair.”

She spoke sharply to the ragged line of people, and they shuffled together, standing up straighter.

“She’s going to be chief of this village,” Tom said to Sally in English, looking over the orderly row of people.

“She already is.”

“We are ready,” Marisol said. She gestured at the first man in line. He stepped forward and held out five old burlap sacks.

“Four hundred,” said the girl.

“Dollars?”

“Lempiras.”

“What’s that in dollars?” said Tom.

“Two.”

“We’ll take them.”

The next person stepped forward with a large sack of beans, a sack of loose dry corn, and an indescribably battered aluminum pot and lid. The original handle was missing, and in its place was a beautifully carved and oiled piece of hardwood. “One dollar.”

“We’ll take them.”

The man laid them down and retreated, while the next one stepped forward, holding out two T-shirts, two pairs of dirty shorts, a trucker’s hat, and a brand-new pair of Nikes.

“Here’s my change of clothes,” said Tom. He looked at the shoes. “Just my size, too. Imagine finding a brand-new pair of Air Jordans down here.”

“They make them here,” said Sally. “Remember the sweatshop scandals?”

“Oh yeah.”

The procession of goods continued: plastic tarps, sacks of beans and rice, dried and smoked meats that Tom decided not to inquire too closely about, bananas, a fifty-five-gallon drum of petrol, a box of salt. Quite a few had arrived with cans of extra-strength Raid, the insect repellent of choice, which Tom declined.

Suddenly a hush fell over the crowd. Tom could hear the faint buzz of an outboard motor. The girl spoke rapidly.

“You must follow me into the forest. Quickly.”

Instantly the crowd had dispersed, and the village fell silent, seemingly empty. The girl calmly led the way into the forest, following an almost invisible trail. A twilight mist drifted through the trees. There was swamp all around them, but the trail wound this way and that, keeping to high ground. The sounds of the village died away, and they were wrapped in the muffled cloak of the forest. After ten minutes of walking, the girl stopped.

“We wait here.”

“How long?”

“Until the soldiers leave.”

“What about our boat?” Sally asked. “Won’t they recognize our boat?”

“We already hid your boat.”

“That was a good idea. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” The self-possessed girl turned her dark eyes back down the trail and waited, as still and quiet as a deer.

“Where do you go to school?” Sally asked, after a moment.

“The Baptist school down the river.”

“A missionary school?”

“Yes.”

“Are you a Christian?”

“Oh yes,” said the girl, turning a serious face to Sally. “Aren’t you?”

Sally blushed. “Well, ah, my parents were Christians.”

“That is good,” she said, smiling. “I wouldn’t want you to go to hell.”

“Well now,” said Tom, speaking into the awkward silence. “I’m curious to know, Marisol, if there is anyone in the village besides Don Alfonso who knows the way across the Meambar Swamp.”

She shook her head gravely. “He is the only one.”

“Is it difficult to cross?”

“Very.”

“Why is he so anxious to take us?”

She simply shook her head. “I do not know. He has dreams and visions, and this was one of them.”

“He really did dream about us coming?”

“Oh yes. When the first white man came, he said the sons would soon follow. And here you are.”

“A lucky guess,” said Tom in English.

A distant shot echoed through the forest, then another. It rolled about like thunder, curiously distorted by the jungle, taking a long time to fade away. The effect on Marisol was terrible to see. She turned white, trembled, and swayed. But she said nothing and did not move. Tom was horrified. Had somebody been shot?

“They aren’t shooting people?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

Tom could see her eyes filling with tears. But she betrayed no other emotion.

Sally grabbed Tom’s arm. “They might be shooting people on account of us. We’ve got to go give ourselves up.”

“No,” said the girl sharply. “Maybe they’re shooting into the air. We can do nothing except wait.” A single tear made a track down the girl’s face.

“We never should have stopped here,” said Sally, switching into English. “We had no right to put these people in danger. Tom, we’ve got to go back to the village and face those soldiers.”

“You’re right.” Tom turned to go.

“They will shoot us if you go back,” the girl said. “With soldiers, we are powerless.”

“They’ll never get away with this,” Sally said, her voice shaking. “I’ll report this to the American Embassy. Those soldiers will be punished.”

The girl said nothing. She had fallen silent and was standing still again, like a deer, just barely trembling. Even her tears had stopped.