Maiden Voyages (65 page)

Once three young native boys charged in, released its trapped legs, and jumped back to the circle of people. But instantly the deer scratched up its neck with its hooves and snared its forelegs in the rope again. It was easy to imagine a third and then a fourth leg soon stuck, like Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby.

We watched the deer from the circle, and then we drifted on to lunch. Our palm-roofed shelter stood on a grassy promontory from which we could see the deer tied to the tree, pigs and hens walking under village houses, and black-and-white cattle standing in the river. There was even a breeze.

Lunch, which was the second and better lunch we had that day, was hot and fried. There was a big fish called
doncella
, a kind of catfish, dipped whole in corn flour and beaten egg, then deep fried. With our fingers we pulled soft fragments of it from its sides to our plates, and ate; it was delicate fish-flesh, fresh and mild. Someone found the roe, and I ate of that too—it was fat and stronger, like egg yolk, naturally enough, and warm.

There was also a stew of meat in shreds with rice and pale brown gravy. I had asked what kind of deer it was tied to the tree; Pepe had answered in Spanish,
“Gama.”
Now they told us this was
gama
too, stewed. I suspect the word means merely game or venison. At any rate, I heard that the village dogs had cornered another deer just yesterday, and it was this deer which we were now eating in full sight of the whole article. It was good. I was surprised at its tenderness. But it is a fact that high levels of lactic acid, which builds up in muscle tissues during exertion, tenderizes.

After the fish and meat we ate bananas fried in chunks and served on a tray; they were sweet and full of flavor. I felt terrific. My shirt was wet and cool from swimming; I had had a night’s sleep, two decent walks, three meals, and a swim—everything tasted good. From time
to time each one of us, separately, would look beyond our shaded roof to the sunny spot where the deer was still convulsing in the dust. Our meal completed, we walked around the deer and back to the boats.

That night I learned that while we were watching the deer, the others were watching me.

We four North Americans grew close in the jungle in a way that was not the usual artificial intimacy of travelers. We liked each other. We stayed up all that night talking, murmuring, as though we rocked on hammocks slung above time. The others were from big cities: New York, Washington, Boston. They all said that I had no expression on my face when I was watching the deer—or at any rate, not the expression they expected.

They had looked to see how I, the only woman, and the youngest, was taking the sight of the deer’s struggles. I looked detached, apparently, or hard, or calm, or focused, still. I don’t know. I was thinking. I remember feeling very old and energetic. I could say like Thoreau that I have traveled widely in Roanoke, Virginia. I have thought a great deal about carnivorousness; I eat meat. These things are not issues; they are mysteries.

Gentlemen of the city, what surprises you? That there is suffering here, or that I know it?

We lay in the tent and talked. “If it had been my wife,” one man said with special vigor, amazed, “she wouldn’t have cared
what
was going on; she would have dropped
everything
right at that moment and gone in the village from here to there to there, she would not have
stopped
until that animal was out of its suffering one way or another. She couldn’t
bear
to see a creature in agony like that.”

I nodded.

Now I am home. When I wake I comb my hair before the mirror above my dresser. Every morning for the past two years I have seen in that mirror, beside my sleep-softened face, the blackened face of a burnt man. It is a wire-service photograph clipped from a newspaper and taped to my mirror. The caption reads: “Alan McDonald in Miami
hospital bed.” All you can see in the photograph is a smudged triangle of face from his eyelids to his lower lip; the rest is bandages. You cannot see the expression in his eyes; the bandages shade them.

The story, headed
MAN BURNED FOR SECOND TIME
, begins:

He was in a burn ward in Miami, in serious condition. I do not even know if he lived. I wrote him a letter at the time, cringing.

He had been burned before, thirteen years previously, by flaming gasoline. For years he had been having his body restored and his face remade in dozens of operations. He had been a boy, and then a burnt boy. He had already been stunned by what could happen, by how life could veer.

Once I read that people who survive bad burns tend to go crazy; they have a very high suicide rate. Medicine cannot ease their pain; drugs just leak away, soaking the sheets, because there is no skin to hold them in. The people just lie there and weep. Later they kill themselves. They had not known, before they were burned, that the world included such suffering, that life could permit them personally such pain.

This time a bowl of gunpowder had exploded on McDonald.

His wife concludes the piece, “Man, it just isn’t fair.”

I read the whole clipping again every morning. This is the Big Time here, every minute of it. Will someone please explain to Alan McDonald
in his dignity, to the deer at Providencia in his dignity, what is going on? And mail me the carbon.

When we walked by the deer at Providencia for the last time, I said to Pepe, with a pitying glance at the deer,
“Pobrecito”
—“poor little thing.” But I was trying out Spanish. I knew at the time it was a ridiculous thing to say.

(1962–)

from
THE ROAD THROUGH MIYAMA

I walk down the path to Nagata-san’s white house on the corner. The October air smells musty and sweet, not unlike the fall scent of an orchard, but tinged with the sharp odor of distant fire and smoke. Through the tall stands of still bamboo a pale morning light filters down over spreading cinnamon leaf and scattered fern. A quick gray cat leaps across the narrow bamboo-lined pathway, a fish bone dangling from its jaws. Seven-thirty on a Sunday morning. Reiko is busy dyeing leatherwork in the yard, her wide brush leaving trails of scarlet, indigo, magenta, sunflower-yellow and brown. Just inside the glass doors to the living room–gallery Nagayoshi-san sits cross-legged before a pile of wooden boxes, signing each one with steady strokes of his cat-hair brush. Most Miyama households are still sleeping or lingering over breakfast;
tourist buses won’t start arriving until after nine. Miyama’s tailless cats scratch through garbage heaps, compost piles, yards and kitchen doorways for scattered fish bones, their quick eyes bright, watchful. As I walk I scan the fern for broken teapots, chipped plates, old black vats—over three hundred years of pottery history flung into the forest. Pieces of twig and coin-sized potsherds crunch underfoot. My footsteps echo in the still green like the steady fall of hoofbeats on gravel.

Surrounded by a well-swept yard and a low hedge of tea, Nagatasan’s house rises on the corner among thick poles of bamboo. Black vats, some of them chest-high, bulge with rainwater, wooden-handled plastic scoops, broken ends of tools, slim bamboo poles, a forgotten plastic sandal, extra gloves and lengths of rope. Others have become planters for stout miniature plum trees. One large kuromon vat leans against the house under a sheet of corrugated metal that covers a Toshiba air conditioner. Built five years ago, the modern stucco house stands on land once occupied by a small wood-firing kiln used by Nagata-san’s husband, who died many years ago. In the back, the gray tile-roofed house connects with a low wooden shed that was once his workshop. Inside, waist-high black kame, crocks that once held glaze, still line the walls. But the potter’s old kick wheel, split at the base and covered with mold, lies overturned in one corner.

When I arrive, Nagata-san is stepping down from the tiled entrance with a round bundle wrapped in a green-and-blue cloth, the size of a stuffed laundry bag. Concentrating on her load, she mumbles a rough complaining monologue—“Bad weather!”—and shuffles over to a wooden wheelbarrow piled high with similar bundles wrapped in newspaper or faded pastel cloths of red, green and blue. Several pairs of brown chopsticks poke up amid coils of rope, and a clump of bright yellow bananas crowns the precarious load. Part of the payment for laboring in the fields is food; I wonder how many obāsan will help in Nagata-san’s field today.

“Good morning, it’s Leila,” I call across the hedge as loudly as I can without rousing Nagata-san’s irritable neighbor, the obāsan with bulging black marble eyes. Nagata-san places the last bag on top with a thump and squints toward the lane. Her face relaxes, then opens into a thin smile.

“Good morning. Early, aren’t you?”

“I’ve come to help with the rice harvest,” I say. “Aren’t you going to the fields today?”

“Oh yes, but it’s hard work. You’d be of no use.”

“Look, I’ve borrowed boots for the rice paddy,” I answer quickly, holding up one leg to show off the blue rubber cloven-toe boots that fit tightly around the ankle and pull up over my lower calf, sealing in the bottoms of my baggy mompei. “I have the day off.” At the sight of my crab-claw feet Nagata-san’s narrow eyes become bright, the lines across her brow quiver, her head shakes. I realize she is laughing at my outfit. Above my mompei, the long sleeves of a black cotton shirt are tucked into white cotton gloves. Dressed for work in the rice fields, I’ve hidden my yellow hair under a maroon bandanna. Only a pale face and blue gaijin eyes show. I could almost pass for a younger Nagata-san. Her lopsided smile suddenly vanishes, the shaking stops, her whole face tarnishes like copper, twisting into a long frown.

“Come on, then, and be quick, we’re already late. Here, carry these.” A long-sleeved shirt and a loose apron of sky-blue cover her front, while a white towel tied at the corners forms a loose tentlike sunshade for her head. Her mompei are the plaid design of small blue and white checks with flecks of yellow worn by older farming and pottery women. Like mine, her feet are bound in thin-soled tight-fitting boots that stay on even in the deep gluey mud of the rice fields.

“
Yōka!
Let’s go,” she shouts, handing me a green thermos of hot water, a length of straw rope, extra pairs of white cotton gloves, and a short saw-edged sickle over the hedge. Grasping the handles of the wheelbarrow with both gloved hands, Nagata-san bends into the load, half shoving it out of the yard and down the lane. Up the path we stop at a laden persimmon tree to gather some of the soft orange fruit before heading on. Despite her crooked gait, her stride behind the heavy load is light and quick and I have to walk briskly to keep up.

By the moon-shaped mulberry fields at the corner we pass the low stone marker for Ta no kami, the guardian deity of the field, small blue-and-white cups of water or clear shōchū resting on its ledge. The front bears the grinning face of what looks like a hobo under a mushroom-shaped hood. From the back it is shaped to resemble a large
phallus. Markers like these line the fields throughout Kagoshima, and in many places a stone or wood phallus is enshrined, adding to the region’s reputation for feudal, patriarchal attitudes. While an urban women’s movement slowly grows, Kagoshima staunchly preserves its conservative ways. In Miyama, although women work in the potteries, workshop owners are all men, and there are no recognized female “master” craftsmen in the village. Reiko says that when she first moved to Miyama from Tokyo, older women scolded her for not hanging her husband’s laundry on separate lines from her own “impure” clothing.

We turn onto the main road to the coast. In the west slim rays of sun slice through the clouds, shining over the waves in streaks of shimmering gold. Across Miyama the sky is a sullen lead-gray.