The Devil's Garden (13 page)

‘Sole, I want to go back to the hotel.’

‘Good. I hate talking. We still have half an hour. We can be quick. Let’s go.’

VI

Two hours later, I stood alone at the prow, bound for Machaguar. This was no minor tributary but the mighty river itself, greater in volume than the next eight of its
rivals combined. The far bank was little more than a painter’s smudge of indigo and violet and the early stars were spread across a sky so wide it seemed to vault a sea. As the current began
to whisper around the bow, I breathed in air that was truly fresh and forgot the long weeks so tightly hedged about, inching up those foetid back channels, sweating through the nether gloom of the
forest floor. I stretched out my arms and let the wind ripple through my sleeves.

There had only been a few cabins left, so we had split up. Felipe was with me. Kim, Jorge and Tord were on the second boat, which now began to draw up alongside, a twin to our own: two decks
tall and top-heavy with the crowds so that every conceivable space on the railing above and below was taken by people leaning out and struggling past, by dangled legs and waving arms. In between,
cluttering, strapped and loose, were innumerable bags and crates and boxes. A llama. Two vast black speakers. A moped. Pigs. More boxes – cardboard, plastic, wooden, mesh. Packs and sacks.
Drums of oil. Smokers. Gamblers. An old woman crouched on a stool, seemingly cooking on a tiny gas stove – a ghostly blue flame – elbowing off her crowding patrons. And above it all,
nearer the back, a crown of children sat in a line so high on a mound of bags that they must surely have slid clean over the guardrails and into the water with the slightest swell. In the trees of
the near bank, the twilight skull-monkeys screamed and raced – maddened outriders to these tottering human arks.

There were shouts from the deck above. A spotlight was switched on; it rolled and wandered across the water like a cataractous eye. People above and behind me were moving and the extra weight
was making the boat lurch. For a moment I thought that someone must have fallen in, but the chug of the engine had not changed. I stared out into the water, following the spotlight. Pink
dolphins.

The night darkened and the moon came and went behind clouds. I found a seat and drank awhile and watched my fellow passengers settle themselves to sleep: children on the floor, mothers propped
up, fathers sprawled out. The other boat had dropped behind us and all that lay ahead now was the blackness of the water, the blackness of the nearside bank, mile after mile, and beyond even that,
the pristine jungle, rising above the waterfalls and on into the upland mists. The last place on Earth where people lived who did not know what the world had become.

VII

We heard it long before we saw it. Low and deep; a deadened thudding. Sleepers twisted in their hammocks. Children fell silent. The jungle absorbed the sound, so that it
throbbed in from all sides, spread and seeped between the trees and, strangest of all, drifted up from behind us where the river disappeared into the darkness. The boat began to turn and the bend
ahead to open up, the music swelling with each degree until, at last, we rounded the corner and there it was: the great beach, curving away as far as we could see, glimmering dark in the light of a
thousand torches. Machaguar.

The scale surpassed all that I had imagined. At the near end there were twin towers of burning lights that cast gold and platinum streaks across the water, black and shiny as oil. Fireworks
arced the river and flared across the thousands of dancing arms raised as if in worship. More lights were draped through the trees of the opposite bank; necklaces, pearls; the branches
super-illuminated and ghost-white where these bulbs were set. The entrance was a banner between two giant poles and under-lit by crimson spotlights so that it reached out into the water ahead of us
like a red tongue lapping us in to some fantastical city born only of the night.

There was no pier. Somehow, our pilot manoeuvred us so that we were able to tie up alongside our twin, several boats out from the shore. Below, we could see hundreds of smaller craft but the
congestion was such that it was impossible to tell which were floating on the river and which had been hauled up onto the mud.

Felipe, who was wearing what appeared to be a luminescent pink waistcoat, had gone to find the others. Now he was waving to me as though there was a chance I might not be able to see him. I
found the break in the rail, crossed to the other boat and made my way towards where they were standing to one side of the main crush. He was not alone in wearing his party clothes: Kim was dressed
in her shorts and some kind of silver-sparkling vest top that I did not know she possessed; and Tord was wearing a T-shirt with a big white arrow pointing heavenwards on which the words
‘I’m with Him’ were inscribed in a Gothic typeface.

‘Where’s Jorge?’ I asked.

‘He says he is meeting some friends,’ Felipe replied.

‘He has friends?’ Kim widened her eyes in mock reconsideration.

‘Let’s go,’ I said.

We crossed one deck after another with the throng, the music insistent and the excitement impossible to resist. Beyond, the wide beach rose gradually up towards the tree line of the forest in
which were hung more lamps, Halloween orange and ladybird red. We reached the long wooden ramp and walked down, one at a time, the drop twenty feet either side. There were several thousand here
already. They pressed in on all sides and we stayed close as we moved towards the entrance. The music heaved and pulsed so that, when we stopped, we had to speak directly into one another’s
ears or not at all. We passed beneath the banner and paid for our stamps and our ultraviolet marks. Then we linked hands and snaked our way up the beach through the dark mass of dancers.

Crocodiles of boys pushed through in haphazard directions, brash and careless, jumping to the rhythm. I fought a rising wave of claustrophobia and felt Kim’s fingers tighten behind me.
Underfoot, there was glass and plastic and cans and I was glad of my boots.

We stopped at a blue tent that despatched only spirits and mixers – the former served in little paper thimbles that everybody tipped carefully into their cans. Over to our left below was
the giant stage. A woman with a beautiful voice had started singing.

‘Worth coming all this way for,’ Kim said. ‘We should have been here last night as well.’ She poured her rum into her can. ‘I’m blaming you for not organizing
things better.’

I smiled. ‘I’m blaming me, too.’

She looked up from behind her straw. Few people were wearing much more than she, but her lighter skin and the sparkle of her vest attracted attention. Most thought that she was with me. Passing
men glanced up for that male-to-male fraction of a second – acknowledgement, envy, challenge, then blank.

She held out her free arm and offered the cool of the can to her wrist. ‘Where did you disappear to in Laberinto?’

‘I went for a drink – with Sole.’

‘Did you?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s probably a good thing.’ She looked away and waved at Tord and Felipe, who were buying chicken. Then she handed me her can.

‘Will you look after this?’ she asked. ‘I’ve just got to go dance.’

I watched her as she walked down the incline to the top edge of the beach. There had been no animosity but there was a constriction in her voice that she could not hide – either her
feelings of sisterhood with Sole or something at odds with those feelings.

Tord came over. Without speaking, he ate his food and stood watching Kim dance. Then he drew a deep breath and eyeballed me before turning about and setting off for the sand, moving to the music
with one arm in front and the other behind in the manner of an Egyptian hieroglyphic. I felt for him and his strange and patient pursuit of Kim. Almost uniquely on the continent, he could be
trusted to face down temptation; and I admired him for that, too.

I caught Felipe’s attention. He turned, eager, and began to move his shoulders up and down alternately. I nodded to him to join the others but he kept on with his jigging and it occurred
to me that I had never seen him drink spirits before. He came and stood by me and I leant over and cupped my hand to his ear: ‘Stay with them,’ I said. ‘And rescue her if she
looks like she wants to be rescued.’

Then, before he could protest or start his shoulder dipping again, I walked away, conscious of the flask in my trouser pocket.

From the top of the beach, I looked to the shoreline where flickering fires burned between the hundred hauled-up boats. I could see the river again, just beyond, black as a
scarab’s thorax save for the liquid shard and glitter of reflected lights. Smoke was drifting between the larger riverboats and out across the water. Spotlights crisscrossed the crowd,
revealing countless black heads rising, falling, nodding, dense and tight together.

I walked on, sipping as I went. Beneath the roar of the music, I could hear the heavy drone of the generators away to my left. I stepped across the snaking cables, moving closer to the trees.
Already the mixer was thinning down and the whiskey’s edge was a strengthening wall against which I would soon be able to lean. There were fewer bulbs but I could smell paraffin and kerosene
from the lamps. I stood awhile and smoked. Groups of people were passing me on their way back down to the beach. Eyes shone and every face – beautiful, ugly, young and old – was caught
a moment in the glow of the torchlight. For the first time since I had arrived I saw tribesmen painted in earnest: red semicircles on their cheekbones, darker streaks beneath, white lines, beaded
skin, gleaming white-bone jewellery bolted through noses and tiered in hoops around ears, the flash of gold.

Further on and further in, the ground flattened out and the way narrowed. The trees began to muffle and distort the music from the river and I could hear the sound of the jungle night rising
once more. I found I was walking on a raised wooden walkway and ahead there was a clearing – the village of Machaguar itself. The path split right and left and then split again, each branch
haphazardly lit. Between and besides and beyond were scattered huts. They were tall with steeply raked liana roofs and larger than any I had yet seen; some were illuminated from within, others were
dark. The crowds had gone but everywhere there were groups gathered and people going in and out of doorways. I was walking in the trees and I could not tell any longer how far below me the forest
floor was. A man came towards me carrying a burning torch, his skin shining, black paint rising in a v from his nose, white discs hanging from his ears, a thin peccary tusk curved through his nose.
I stood aside in the entrance to a hut. The music was distant now, the air stultifying. I could not see within but I could hear breathing. One, two, three . . . I did not know how many people. I
realized with a shock that I was outlined in the lighted doorway and that they were waiting. As I turned away, a woman let out the unmistakeable moan of pleasure. I hesitated, sipping from my can
and looking back at the river of torches along the walkway. And only then did my breathing deepen and my limbs ease; I had passed beyond the jurisdiction of my better self.

‘What do you want?’

The voice came from behind me and was followed by a low murmur of laughter. Startled, I spun about. A man was standing – too close. I stepped back. But he continued to look at me with the
quick and searching frankness of a far greater intimacy – as though my entire being and history would be instantly plain to his perception. My mind had not yet left the hut’s darkness,
the woman’s sigh, and before I could speak came the low laughter again.

‘What do you want?’ he repeated.

‘I was just—’

‘Tell me what you are looking for.’ He inclined his head slowly and then held it still. ‘I might be able to help you.’

‘I was just wandering.’ I was not sure how apologetic to be. ‘I came up from the river.’

‘Wandering about. We see a lot of it in the world, Mr . . .’

I told him my name.

He considered it without reciprocation as he took out a cigarette. He was my own age, my own height, my own medium build; but he was dark featured and his hair was luxuriant and tall above his
head – a black that seemed almost to shine, though with the strange greenish tinge of a carrion crow.
Corvus corone
. He was unlike anyone I had seen on the river; but his manner was so
self-assured that I was certain he must be locally powerful – perhaps the man behind the entire carnival.

‘You should know, Mr Forle,’ he said, ‘that you do not have to be bashful. Not with me. If there was something you . . . something you might
want
.’

‘I’m OK.’

‘Are you? Good. Well . . .’ He described a circle in the air and then pressed a long finger to his own chest. ‘Merely ask,’ he said.

I took him to mean the carnival itself and assumed he hoped in some way to make money out of me. Selfconsciously, I sipped from the straw.

He fired the cigarette with a match that he sparked on his thumbnail.

‘Might as well smoke,’ he said.

To my embarrassed surprise, he now offered this same cigarette to my lips. I was too unnerved to do anything but accept.

‘Don’t concern yourself. Tobacco only. Might as well.’

He lit his own in the same manner and then flicked the match over the balcony.

‘Don’t concern yourself. There’s a stream down there – more of a river when it rains – which it no longer seems to do.’ He indicated the clearing beneath,
leant forward on the railings and looked down.

I was relieved not to be the subject of his strange intensity. Below, there were human shapes squatting in circles around a fire, which cast a dull gleam in the water.

‘It’s polluted, of course,’ he said. He smoked like he could hardly stand to do so. ‘And in the wet season it floods the entire field. It’s from the cocaine
preparations. Kerosene and sulphuric acid – among other things.’ A short murmur this time, not quite laughter. ‘The
refinement
process.’

‘I didn’t get your name.’ I looked over. I could not help but be pleased to be talking to someone new after the long weeks on the Station.