The Codex

24

The dugout pushed through the thick black water, the engine whining with the effort. The river had divided and divided until it had become a labyrinth of channels and stagnant pools, with acres of exposed, black, stinking, shivery muck. Everywhere Tom could see whirling clouds of insects. Pingo stayed in the bow, shirtless, wielding a huge machete with which he took an occasional swipe at a vine hanging in the water. The channels were often too shallow to use the engine, and Chori would raise it and pole. Don Alfonso remained on his usual perch atop the canvas-covered heap of supplies and sat there cross-legged, like a wise man, puffing furiously on his pipe and peering ahead. On several occasions Pingo had to get out and chop a notch through a half-sunken log to allow the boat to pass.

“What are these hellish insects?” Sally cried, slapping furiously.

“Tapir-fly,” said Don Alfonso. He reached into his pocket and extended a blackened corncob pipe toward her. “Señorita, you should take up smoking, which discourages the insects.”

“No, thank you. Smoking causes cancer.”

“On the contrary, smoking is very healthful and it leads to good digestion and a long life.”

“Right.”

As they proceeded deeper into the swamp, the vegetation seemed to press in from all sides, forming layered walls of glossy leaves, ferns, and vines. The air was dead and thick and smelled of methane. The boat pushed through it as if it were hot soup.

“How do you know this is the way my father went?” Tom asked.

“There are many pathways in the Meambar Swamp,” Don Alfonso said, “but there is only one way through. I, Don Alfonso, know that way, and so did your father. I can read the signs.”

“What do you read?”

“There have been three groups of voyagers before us. The first group came through a month ago. The second and third groups were only a few days apart, and they came through about a week ago.”

“How can you tell all this?” Sally asked.

“I read the water. I see a notch chopped in a sunken log. I see a cut vine. I see a pole mark on a sunken sandbar or a groove made in the muddy shallows by a keel. Those marks, in this dead water, last for weeks.”

Sally pointed to a tree. “Look, over there is a gumbo-limbo tree, Bursera simaruba. The Maya use the sap for bug bites.” She turned to Don Alfonso. “Let’s head over there and collect some.”

Don Alfonso took his pipe out of his mouth. “My grandfather used to collect this plant. We call it lucawa.” He gazed at Sally with a newfound respect. “I did not know you were a curandera.”

“I’m not really,” said Sally. “I spent some time in the north living with the Maya while I was in college. I was studying their medicine. I’m an ethnopharmacologist.”

“Ethnopharmacologist? That sounds like a very big profession for a woman.”

Sally frowned. “In our culture, women can do anything a man can. And vice versa.”

Don Alfonso’s eyebrows shot up. “I do not believe it.”

“It’s true,” Sally said defiantly.

“In America, the women hunt while the men have babies?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Don Alfonso, with a smile of triumph on his face, placed the stem of the pipe back in his mouth, argument won. He gave an exaggerated wink to Tom. Sally shot Tom a look.

And here I didn’t say a thing, Tom thought, annoyed.

Chori brought the boat up alongside the tree. Sally gave the bark a chop with her machete and then peeled off a vertical strip of bark. The sap immediately began oozing out in reddish droplets. She scraped some off, rolled up her pants, and smeared it on her bug bites, then rubbed it into her neck, wrists, and the backs of her hands.

“You look a fright,” said Tom.

She scraped some more of the gooey sap off the bark with the machete and held it out to him. “Tom?”

“You’re not putting that stuff on me.”

“Get over here.”

Tom took a step over, and she rubbed it into the back of his badly bitten neck. The itching, burning sensation ebbed away.

“How does it feel?”

Tom moved his neck. “Sticky, but good.” He liked the feeling of her cool hands on his neck.

Sally handed him the machete with its dollop of sap. “You can do your own legs and arms.”

“Thanks.” He smeared it on, surprised at how effective it was.

Don Alfonso also helped himself to the sap. “This is truly remarkable, a yanqui who knows the medicinal secrets of plants, a real curandera. I have lived one hundred and twenty-one years and still there are things I have not seen.”

That afternoon they passed the first rock Tom had seen in days. Beyond, sunlight filtered down into an overgrown clearing made in an island of high ground.

“Here is where we will camp,” announced Don Alfonso.

They brought the dugout alongside the rock and tied it up. Pingo and Chori leapt out with their machetes in hand, scrambled up and over the rocks, and began mowing down the new growth. Don Alfonso strolled around and examined the ground, scuffing it with a foot, picking up a vine or a leaf.

“This is amazing,” Sally said, looking around. “There is some zorillo. Skunk root, one of the most important plants used by the Maya. They make an herbal bath from the leaves and use the root for pain and ulcers. They call it payche. And here is some suprecayo.” She began plucking leaves from a bush, rolling them, and smelling. “And over there is a Sweetia panamensis tree. This is amazing. It’s a unique little ecosystem here. Anyone mind if I go collecting?”

“Be our guest,” said Tom.

Sally went into the forest to collect more plants.

“It looks like someone camped here before us,” Tom said to Don Alfonso.

“Yes. This large area was first cleared about a month ago. I see a fire ring and the remains of a hut. The last people were here perhaps a week ago.”

“All this grew up in a week?”

Don Alfonso nodded. “The forest does not like a hole.” He poked around the remains of the fire and then picked up something, handing it to Tom. It was a cigar ring from a Cuba Libre, moldy and half dissolved.

“My father’s brand,” said Tom, looking at it. It gave him a strange feeling. His father had come here, camped in this very spot, smoked a cigar, and left this tiny clue. He put it in his pocket and began collecting wood for the fire.

“Before you pick up a branch,” Don Alfonso advised him, “you must beat on it with a stick to knock off the ants, snakes, and veinte cuatros.”

“Veinte cuatros?”

“It is an insect that looks like a termite. We call them veinte cuatros, twenty-fours, because after their bite you are unable to move for twenty-four hours.”

“That’s nice.”

An hour later he saw Sally tramping out of the jungle with a long pole slung over her shoulder on which were tied bundles of plants, bark, and roots. Don Alfonso looked up from the parrot he was boiling in a pot to watch her arrive.

“Curandera, you remind me of my grandfather Don Cali, who used to return just like that from the forest every day, except you are prettier than he was. He was old and wrinkled while you are firm and ripe.”

Sally busied herself with her plants, stringing the herbs and roots on a stick to dry near the fire. “There’s an incredible variety of plants here,” she said excitedly to Tom. “Julian’s going to be really pleased.”

“Wonderful.”

Tom turned his attention to Chori and Pingo, who were building a hut while Don Alfonso shouted directions and heaped criticism on them. They started by driving six stout poles into the earth, making a framework of flexible sticks, over which they tied the plastic tarps. The hammocks were strung between the poles, each with its own mosquito netting, and a final piece of plastic tarp was hung vertically, making a private room for Sally.

When they were done, Pingo and Chori stepped back while Don Alfonso examined the hut with a squinty eye, then nodded and turned. “There, I offer you a house as good as any in America.”

“Next time,” Tom said, “I’m going to help Chori and Pingo.”

“As you wish. The curandera has her own private sleeping quarters, which can be enlarged for an additional guest, should she need company.” The old man gave Tom another exaggerated wink. He found himself reddening.

“I am quite content to sleep alone,” said Sally coldly.

Don Alfonso looked disappointed. He leaned over toward Tom as if to speak to him in private. His voice, however, was perfectly audible to everyone in the camp. “She is a very beautiful woman, Tomás, even if she is old.”

“Excuse me, I’m twenty-nine.”

“Ehi, señorita, you are even older than I thought. Tomás, you must hurry. She is almost too old to marry now.”

“In our culture,” Sally said, “twenty-nine is considered young.”

Don Alfonso continued to shake his head sadly. Tom couldn’t suppress a laugh any longer.

Sally rounded on him. “What’s so funny?”

“The little culture clash here,” he said, catching his breath.

Sally switched into English. “I don’t appreciate this sexist little tête-à-tête between you and that dirty old man.” She turned to Don Alfonso. “For a supposedly hundred-and-twenty-one-year-old man, you certainly spend a lot of your time thinking about sex.”

“A man never stops thinking about love, señorita. Even when he grows old and his member shrivels like a yuco fruit left to dry in the sun. I may be one hundred and twenty-one, but I have as much blood as a teenager. Tomás, I would like to marry a woman like Sally, only she will be sixteen with firm, upturned breasts—”

“Don Alfonso,” said Sally, interrupting, “don’t you think you could make this girl of your dreams eighteen?”

“Then she might not be a virgin.”

“In our country,” said Sally, “most women don’t marry until they’re at least eighteen. It’s offensive to speak of a sixteen-year-old girl getting married.”

“I am sorry! I should have known that girls develop more slowly in the cold climate of North America. But here, a sixteen-year-old—”

“Stop it!” Sally cried, clapping her hands over her ears. “No more! Don Alfonso, I’ve had it with your comments about sex!”

The old man shrugged. “I am an old man, Curandera, which means I can talk and joke as I please. Do you not have this tradition in America?”

“In America old people do not talk constantly about sex.”

“What do they talk about?”

“They talk about their grandchildren, the weather, Florida, that sort of thing.”

Don Alfonso shook his head. “How boring it must be to get old in America.”

Sally walked off and flipped back the door to the hut, flashing Tom an angry glance just before she disappeared. Tom watched her go, irritated. What had he done or said? He was being unjustly tarred with the brush of sexism.

Don Alfonso shrugged and relit his pipe and continued speaking in a loud voice. “I do not understand. Here she is twenty-nine and unmarried. Her father will have to pay an enormous dowry to get rid of her. And here you are, almost an old man, and you do not have a wife either. Why do you two not marry? Perhaps you are homosexual?”

“No, Don Alfonso.”

“It is all right if you are, Tomás. Chori will accommodate you. He is not particular.”

“No, thank you.”

Don Alfonso shook his head in wonder. “Then I do not understand. Tomás, you must not let your opportunities slip by.”

“Sally,” said Tom, “is engaged to marry another man.”

Don Alfonso’s eyebrows shot up. “Ah. And where is this man now?”

“Back in America.”

“He cannot love her!”

Tom winced, glancing toward the hut. Don Alfonso’s voice had a peculiar carrying quality.

Sally’s voice came from the hut. “He loves me and I love him, and I’ll thank you both to shut up.”

There was the sound of a rifle shot in the forest, and Don Alfonso rose. “That is our second course.” He picked up his machete and went off toward the sound.

Tom rose and took his hammock into the hut to hang it up. He found Sally hanging some of the herbs from one of the poles inside.

“That Don Alfonso is a lecherous old man and a sexist pig,” she said hotly. “And you’re just as bad.”

“He’s getting us through the Meambar Swamp.”

“I don’t appreciate his little comments. Or you, smirking your agreement.”

“You can’t expect him to be up on the latest feminist PC.”

“I didn’t hear any talk about you being too old to marry — and you’re older than I am by a good four years. It’s only the woman who’s too old to marry.”

“Lighten up, Sally.”

“I will not lighten up.”

Don Alfonso’s voice interrupted Tom’s reply. “The first course is ready to eat! Boiled parrot and manioc stew. Tapir steaks to follow. It is all healthy and delicious. Stop arguing and come and eat!”