The Second Sight, page 14
“Anyway,” Maria exclaimed to Martha, “you must go. Maybe you could adopt one of those pathetic children. Maybe you could get others to adopt them. Then when they grow up they can all go back and save the others.”
“Maybe you can set something up with the Junior League,” Patchen said. “Orphans by Peck and Peck.”
Maria ignored him. “I’ll bet plenty of American women would be willing to adopt a kid,” she said to Martha. “I’m not talking about taking these children out of their way of life. I’m talking about raising them in such a way that they’d be able to go back and rescue their culture from the ghost of that Spanish drunk. The symbolism of it—him sitting there in his chair in his breastplate and helmet! How could you bear it? Can’t you see our kids going back and heaving the bastard out the door, like Pizarro did with the Inca mummies? Do you know that story?”
Martha shook her head. Maria provided a detailed synopsis of W. H. Prescott’s The Conquest of Mexico and The Conquest of Peru, books she had read for a political science course taught by a crypto-Marxist. It was her opinion that the effigy of Maximón in the drinking hut represented the specter of imperialism; although she was a Russian major, Maria had taken courses in psychology at Vassar, and she thought that the guaro cult itself was clearly an attempt by the Indians to escape from imperialism by entering into another state of consciousness.
“I mean it has to be entirely unconscious,” she said. “But that only goes to show you how the masses have this deep need to have their natural disgust explained to them. I mean, teaching is all. In Poland, the schoolchildren sing this wonderful song, ‘Long live Uncle Stalin, whose lips are sweeter than raspberries.’ Now that’s a work of genius, to turn the natural love of kids for the man who saved their country into poetry.”
“Baloney,” Patchen said. He was mildly drunk after consuming most of the bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape that Christopher had brought as a house gift.
“The same to you,” Maria said. “In a just society, powerful men can love little children, and be loved by them, instead of proving their manhood by making war on women and children.”
“You’re saying that Stalin’s Russia is a just society?”
“Not yet, not entirely, but it is consciously trying to become one. Do you read Russian?”
“No. Do you?”
“I majored in it. At least women are equal in the Soviet Union, eligible for anything, in contrast to the capitalist states, where they are regarded as the property of men and have no function except to breed and suffer.”
“No kidding. Apart from childbirth, how do middle-class women suffer in America?”
“They suffer all right, and always have. Far more than men ever do.”
Patchen poured himself another glass of wine. “Right,” he said. “All those brave girls sleeping under the white crosses in war cemeteries all over the world. And who can forget the Titanic—the men sitting in the lifeboats in their fur coats with their jewel boxes on their laps while the band played ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ and the women went down with the ship.”
Maria took Martha’s hand and looked at her with deep sympathy. “You poor thing,” she said.
A silence fell. Martha blushed. Maria turned a look of withering superiority on Patchen. She had exceptionally pretty breasts, quite large and widely separated like her eyes; her blouse clung to their contours, suggesting nipples without actually revealing them. For some reason this symmetry of eyes and breasts was acutely erotic. Patchen’s good eye flickered from her face to her torso, and Ma ria’s glare changed into a smile of scorn. She had possessed these extraordinary breasts since she was in the seventh grade, and she knew that no normal male could look at them without wanting to hold them in his hands and whimper. She inhaled, expelled the breath through her nostrils, turned to Martha, and started talking again.
By now they had finished the food, a watery casserole of potatoes, onions, and beets that Martha called “red flannel hash.”
“Let’s go outside,” Patchen said.
On the screened porch, Patchen said, “Does she always spout that bullshit?”
“I don’t know,” Christopher said. “It’s just small talk.” “Is she someone you’re interested in?”
“No. I only have custody for the evening. She’s job-hunting in Washington.”
“She’s not going to turn up in the 0. G.’s office, is she?” Patchen asked.
“I don’t know,” Christopher replied. “But it was the 0. G. who arranged this blind date. He says she speaks fluent Russian and has a first-class mind. He knew her uncle in the Navy.”
“Good gravy.”
The two friends smiled at each other. They were sitting on a tattered wicker sofa on the screened porch, which looked out onto an alley; the house itself was a flat-roofed wooden structure resembling a very large packing crate. It was sparsely furnished with canvas butterfly chairs and an uneven table made by laying an old door on sawhorses. The night was very hot, scarcely cooler than the feverish August day that had preceded it. Radios played on neigh boring porches. A feeble breeze stirred the leaves of the old trees that had been planted to seclude these slave quarters from the big house to which they had formerly belonged.
Patchen asked a question. “What did the 0. G. mean today when he called you my rescuer?”
In the spotty light from the streetlamp, Christopher shrugged. “Who can keep up with what the 0. G. means?” he said.
“I thought he meant something different from what he was saying.”
Christopher gave him a steady look. “What would that be?”
“I don’t know,” Patchen said. “That’s what bothers me. Let me tell you something. Don’t laugh.”
“All right.”
Patchen collected his thoughts before speaking. “I’ve always thought that I knew you before the hospital, that there’s something about you that I don’t remember. Sometimes I feel I’m on the verge of remembering it, whatever it is, but I never do.”
Christopher made no reply.
“For example,” Patchen said, “when you and your father recited that poem in German I thought I remembered it.”
“The poem?”
“No, the part about German being the only language that lions understand. Had you ever told me that before?”
“It’s possible,” Christopher said. “It’s a family saying.”
4
THAT WINTER MARTHA RETURNED TO THE VILLAGE IN GUATEMALA. On her approach—she was still driving her surplus Army Jeep—the Indians fled from their village and hid in the jungle. Knowing their shy ways, Martha assumed that they did not realize that it was she who had come back to them, so she unpacked her belongings, moved back into the hut where she had formerly lived, and serenely awaited their return.
Several days passed; the Indians did not come back. It was, as she told Patchen when she returned to Washington the next spring, a mysterious experience.
“I don’t know if thee can understand,” she said, “but I felt there was some hidden or secret thing all about me in the air, trembling, as if the word of truth had been spoken in a powerful voice, but I was deaf and could not hear it.”
Martha had known that the Indians were observing her, even though she could not see them. She thought it was possible that they thought she was someone else: with their golden skin and their straight black hair, they all looked alike to her; why shouldn’t white people look alike to them? She would go outside from time to time and halloo, hoping that her friends would recognize her. She moved her hammock into the open and lay in it, feigning sleep, in case the Indians should tiptoe into camp and gaze into her face. They had taken with them the effigy of Maximón and the wooden tub they used to ferment guaro, along with the marimba. Each day, in the early morning, as Martha hoed and watered the village gardens, she noticed that corn had been plucked and beans and squash had been picked in the night.
Clearly her Indians were hidden somewhere in the jungle, gathered around Maximón, drinking. But why were they hiding? All day she heard the marimba playing in the distance, and finally she decided to walk toward the sound. But after she had sauntered under the trees for a few moments she realized that she could not locate the music accurately. She turned back, but even though she had traveled only a short distance into the forest she had trouble finding her way. Howler monkeys shrieked in the trees above her; she knew there were poisonous snakes and even jaguars in this place. Yet she felt no fear.
“None at all?” Patchen said. “That’s amazing. Why not?”
“The Inward Light was very strong—it is strongest in the village compared to any other place in the world. And, of course, I knew that my Indians would save me if I became lost. They were watching over me every minute. I could feel them all around.”
Finally she stumbled into a little clearing where a buried temple stood. For reasons of their own, the Indians had cleared a narrow path to the pinnacle, fifty or sixty feet above the ground, and Martha climbed up. The ground underfoot was free of stubble, in fact it was bare stone, and it was a pleasure to walk on a smooth surface. Nevertheless, it was a hard climb, and by the time she got to the top her body was running with sticky, thick sweat. From the summit, the deserted village was clearly visible. Martha took her bearings and regained it without difficulty.
A few days later the Indians came back. Martha woke up one morning to the notes of the marimba and found the village repopulated, Maximón back on his throne in the drinking hut, and the children playing their usual games. But as soon as she came outdoors, smiling in delight that the mistake over her identity had been corrected, the children ran away over the beaten earth between the huts, staring at the ground. This did not surprise her; the children had always stared at the ground in her presence. Even the adults were curiously shy about eye contact, preferring to stare downward or turn their backs when they conversed with her. Some even closed their eyes or covered them with their hands in her presence.
Martha did not pursue the children or try to coax them to come to her, but instead joined the women as they straggled toward the vegetable patch. They were all drunk, of course, and they staggered as they walked. About half of the women were with child; it was more difficult for drunks in the last stages of pregnancy to walk on the rough ground, and they often fell. Martha wanted to help them, but the other women kept her away by forming a screen with their bodies.
Otherwise they did not interfere with her. As before, they behaved as though she was not there. They did not speak to her, or reply when she spoke to them; she communicated with them, as she had formerly done with the children, in Spanish phrases that she was not sure they understood, and by working with them. The fact that they and she were making the same movements, performing the same tasks, seemed to soothe them; sometimes they even smiled, shyly and secretly, as they stared down into the dirt. Martha had got so used to this way of being close to the Indians during her last visit that she had very nearly lost the need for speech, but it seemed strange to her now as she resumed her old behavior.
Every day Martha went outside and waited for the children to come back, but they did not do so. To entice them, she took the Jeep apart and put it back together again and sat on a chair in the sunlight, embroidering bright flowers on a blouse. These techniques had worked before, but they produced no results now. Evidently the children had satisfied their curiosity about her the year before and had no further interest in her or her ways. If she happened to come upon them, they would scatter. They were particularly shy if she happened to meet them after she had been working in the sun.
Returning one day from the cornfield, she broke a strap on one of her sandals and the other women got far ahead of her on the winding path. She took a shortcut through an isolated patch of jungle, and when she came to the other side, she saw the children waiting on the path. They had their backs turned, and as the women approached, smiling happily at the sight of the children, they did a puzzling thing: every one of them touched every one of the children on the crown of the head. As soon as they had done so, the children turned around and gazed upward, like normal boys and girls, straight into the eyes of the adults, who picked the smaller ones up in their arms and continued on into the village.
Martha let them go, and following stealthily by darting from hut to hut, managed to leap out and surprise the children at play. She touched one, then another, then a third on the hair, and then all the others, chasing them through the village giddily as if in a game of tag. As soon as she had touched their heads, they stopped running away and even looked into her eyes. But still they did not come to visit her and work with her.
She had brought a number of new things with her this time—a phonograph and records, a portable Singer sewing machine, and two bicycles. She played the phonograph in the evening. Somewhere the children were listening, because one morning as she woke she heard them singing the songs on the records: “Amazing Grace” and “Shall We Gather by the River” and “The Old Rugged Cross.” Although they could not pronounce the English words, the children sang the music in voices of almost unbearable sweetness. Martha crept toward the sound and found them standing in rows like a choir, singing with their eyes closed. Watching from her hiding place and listening, she felt that the Inward Light was kindling in their tiny, glowing bodies.
The next morning she got out one of the bicycles and rode it through the village, looking neither to right nor left as she pumped up the gentle slopes and coasted down again with her hands clasped behind her head. This broke the spell, whatever it had been, and the children began coming to her hut again. But the Jeep no longer interested them, and they shunned the sewing machine after one of the girls sewed her index finger to a piece of material. She went about for several days with the cloth still stitched to her flesh until Martha coaxed her to let her snip the thread and sterilize the wound. They seldom sang the hymns; they did not really care about the phonograph; it interfered with the sound of the marimba. Weaving did not interest them; the Indians had their own looms and thought the one Martha had brought clumsy and inferior. Or so she thought: living in silence with her Indians, she had never learned even the rudiments of their language, and there was no possibility of learning it from anyone but them because no priest had ever been able to convert them and their speech had, consequently, never been written down.
What the children liked was the bicycles. They learned to ride with very little trouble. The village, with its clayey paths trampled smooth by generations of bare feet, was a good place to ride. Martha would line them up, stroke their hair, and send them off one by one. They rode as they had sung, like angels, bare feet on the pedals, arms outspread, inky bowl-cut hair flying, faces aglow; they could not get enough of it. At night she dreamed of them riding.
Early one morning, two of the larger boys borrowed the bicycles while Martha slept and carried them to the top of a buried temple. They tried to ride down it, pushing off from the site of the buried sacrificial altar, about sixty feet above ground level. One boy fell ‘ after only a few feet, but the other rider managed to stay upright until he was going fairly fast—fast enough so that when he went over the edge of a hidden rock shelf or step, his bicycle shot out into space. Along with all the children and the many adults who had gathered to witness the ride, Martha watched him fall. It was a beautiful sight in its way. His crown of lustrous black hair opened like some miraculous flower. This gave a breathtaking impression of liberation and elementary happiness; it really seemed to Martha that he could fly. And if she thought that, what must the Indians have been thinking?
Then, still clinging to the bicycle, the boy hit the ground and lay still. The Indians turned their backs to the child. He simply lay there in the wreckage of the bicycle, his marvelous skin seeping blood from a dozen scrapes and cuts. Martha ran to him and knelt down. He was conscious but in deep shock. His dark brown eyes looked directly into Martha’s. She touched his hair and was surprised to find that it was soaked with sweat; but then she thought, Of course it would be, thee has climbed up the pyramid in this heat.
The boy’s pulse was strong. Martha had studied advanced first aid during one of her extramural courses at college. She felt his bones and discovered that he had broken his arm, and maybe his collar bone. She rose to her feet and ran back to her hut for her first aid kit. The Indians, still utterly silent, still with their backs turned, did not interfere, but when she came back they were all gone, including the injured boy. Only the crumpled bicycle remained, and near the top of the buried temple where it had crashed, the debris of the second machine.
She tried to find the injured boy, but the Indians had taken him into the drinking hut, and when she followed and tried to go inside with her first aid kit, they formed a silent wall with their bodies, shutting her out. She could see over their heads quite easily. The boy was reclining at the feet of Maximeón, happily drinking guaro from the effigy’s own huge cup. She tried to tell them that his arm would be crooked if the broken bones were not set, but she could not make them understand. A month or two later she saw him again, walking through the village, drunk, with a deformed arm. When she tried to touch his hair, he ducked his head and ran away, limping.
In Washington, the O. G. had engaged dozens of men and women who were experts in arcane subjects. Their only duty was to know what they knew and keep abreast of their specialty, in case the knowledge was ever needed by the Outfit. Among these specialists was an anthropologist whose field was the Indians of tropical America. He had lived among them, studied them, written about them; his office was piled high with nearly every book and monograph ever published about them and some that were unpublishable. He knew their ways, their diets, their legends, their poisons, their systems of belief.
“There is,” he told Patchen, explaining the importance of an open mind, “no such thing as superstition. A belief in snakes that fly and talk is inherently no more ridiculous than the account of Jesus turning water into wine at the wedding feast. Exactly the same critical faculties are suspended in both cases.”
