The Devil's Garden (7 page)

Though there were half a dozen other uniformed men around, I saw nothing of either Captain Lugo or the Boy. And, after a couple of days, I began to convince myself that Cordero had acted on my
insistence, that they had been disgraced and sent away to be disciplined, but that – for reasons of pride – he had decided not to tell me.

I said nothing to Kim of that first night. And she gave no indication of having heard anything. She had been thrown off balance by the Judge, I realized, but her unease and her upset had
manifest themselves in a renewed application to our field studies and a more businesslike tone to our conversations in the lab.

The Judge himself seemed to work as he pleased, coming and going at hours that did not coincide with our own or the Colonel’s. I did not see him at breakfast but he arrived most evenings
for dinner, always in his suits, always drinking from our bar, which he promised loudly to replenish. Like Kim and Lothar, I sought to avoid him and exchange only civilities, not least because I
found something disturbing about his ability to force me back on my core – so that I felt I must always be defending myself against the acuity and implication of everything he said. One
evening he surprised me, though, and I could not but talk with him.

Seeking some relief from the endless green, I had gone down to the river. The sun’s blast was fading and the perfumes of the plants were uncoiling so that the air was filled with subtle
fragrances. I had sat down at the furthest reach of the jetty with my legs dangling over the water like a boy and I was listening to the burbling song of the oropendola birds and watching their
bright tails flash across a sky streaked in peach and pale vermilion. My senses had become so subsumed in the forest itself that there was no longer a border between my body and the world. And so I
heard his voice as one might hear a deep low splash – a large caiman entering the water.

‘Another beautiful sunset, Doctor. I can’t help but think they are wasted on humanity. I would like my wife to see this.’

Startled, I turned.

He was walking towards me: ‘I have never been able to process much above pleasure, of course, but my wife is remarkable – she really enjoys beauty where she finds it, breathes it in,
lives it. There are too many people who wait for death to enlighten them about life, don’t you think? Please, don’t get up.’

He laid down the light rug that he was carrying rolled beneath his arm and sat down beside me. A pair of blue-headed macaws flew past.

‘They’re famous for their monogamy as well as their colour – is that true?’

‘I think so.’

‘Do you have a wife, Dr Forle?’

‘No.’

‘But there are strands of silver in that scruffy golden hair of yours and it is obvious you are a man who knows love.’ He looked across at me. ‘There have been women? Or is it
one woman in particular?’

I said nothing.

‘Don’t persecute yourself, Doctor. It will be no more than half your fault. And women understand men more than it suits them to pretend.’

He took out his cigarette case and I had the sudden thought that his capacity for such quick intimacy must have been honed through the long years of questioning people under oath.

‘And you – have you been married a long time?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’ He smoked with a flourish that suggested a peculiar strain of happiness. ‘We’re lucky. When we are together we are very happy.’

‘And when you are not?’

‘I mope with my mistresses.’

‘It must be difficult for you.’

‘Touché.’ He smiled. ‘I like you, Doctor, you remind me of myself before I knew who I was. But there’s something else there . . . something visceral. Sorry,
forgive me – would you like one?’

‘I’m giving up.’

‘So I’ve noticed.’ The smile became a laugh.

A green kingfisher dived into the water.

‘What are you really doing here?’ I asked.

Another flourish. ‘Bringing democracy and enlightenment.’

‘You said yourself, though: most of the Indians don’t wish to vote.’

‘But we have told ourselves a great story about our world, Doctor,and the progress of mankind. And democracy is what happens next. Surely you must know that mankind is forever
becoming
?’

It was impossible not to respond to his odd mixture of charm and challenge. ‘You don’t need to be a scientist – or an amateur anthropologist – to know that life does not
lead up to something else, something better. Life leads up to life.’

He exhaled. ‘And yet each man – in his own mind – tells himself a story, Doctor: about who he is, and what he is, and how he should be reckoned. And each man follows this story
that he tells himself: what happened before,which is why he is where he is now; what happens next, which is why – pretty soon – he won’t be where he is now. So it goes. No wonder
he cannot then resist the idea that there must be another story – that of mankind itself – of mankind’s progress. And no wonder he gets the feeling that his little story must be
part of this . . . this much bigger story.’

‘
Homo fabulans
,’ I said, ‘man the storyteller.’

He looked at me candidly again, his pale eyes shining. ‘I have not heard that phrase before.’

‘I may have just made it up.’

‘Well, it is true, Doctor: we are the only animal that is compelled to fashion narrative.’

‘It’s still a fallacy,’ I said. ‘A scientific impossibility. The individual organism cannot participate unconsciously in some great narrative of the species toward a
collective destiny.’

‘Well, then, it’s a fallacy that the evolutionary scientists share with their religious enemies – the notion of narrative, the notion of becoming.’

‘Again, no. You can have the first without the second.’

‘I’m not so sure.’ We could hear the unmistakeable sound of a powerful outboard. He began to get up. ‘And in any case the need for both springs from the same place inside
the human psyche. Although it’s true: I myself much prefer
being
to becoming. This must be them.’

I stood and asked: ‘Do you know how long your work here will go on?’

‘Why?’

‘Because you’re getting in the way.’

Dusk had stolen upon us.

‘What’s the Colonel really doing here?’ I pressed. ‘Why are there so many patrols?’

‘Doing – that’s the word.’ The Judge rolled his rug under his arm. ‘The Colonel is keeping order and fashioning the future. And what could be more admirable than
that? Ah, here she is.’

A military boat came into view. We watched it gliding in.

‘His men are his responsibility,’ I continued. ‘And they were behaving like animals the other night.’

‘You should meet Rafaela,’ he said.

I hesitated. A woman in a red floral dress was sat between two khaki soldiers. One of the men stood to reach for the jetty below.

‘You will like her, Doctor. There are those women who understand men and there are those who do not; and there is no way of accounting for this, nor explaining one to the other. A drink
later on?’

‘Not this evening. I want to work.’

‘Ah, yes: your work.’

Again, I hesitated. ‘But will your wife be staying with us a while?’

Amusement danced in his eyes. ‘Rafaela is not my wife.’

Dark-haired, she appeared at the top of the ladder and stepped towards him with all the assurance of a milonga queen. She smiled but said nothing.

‘Rafaela, this is Dr Forle. He tells everyone that he is a scientist.’

II

The following day, Felipe and I arrived back from the field earlier than had become usual. We emerged from the river path and approached the
comedor
with by now
routine circumspection, braced for the Colonel or the Judge, uncertain as to whether we would wish to stay for dinner. We were both surprised to see everyone gathered: Kim behind the bar, Lothar in
one of the lounge chairs, smoke curling from beneath his hat, Sole fixing the wire mesh in the little doors of the kitchen hatch that kept the squirrel monkeys out. Though the mood was subdued and
had nothing of its old ease, I was pleased to feel some sense of our communality at least. Estrela and Jorge were working together at the dining table again, soaking two mighty birds in steaming
hot water, a blue tarpaulin spread out to protect the wood from the feathers and innards.

I stood on the steps. ‘Where are our new friends?’ I asked, addressing nobody in particular.

To my surprise, Tord appeared from where he must have been lurking at the back beyond the bar with Kim. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘the Judge is at Tupki’s place. He has set up
for the afternoon, I think.’

‘Hello, Tord.’ I had no previous love of the missionary but our new circumstances had polarized my view of people and, as our only visitor prior to the arrivals, I saw him now as one
of us. ‘You mean he is registering people there?’

‘Apparently, yes.’ Tord had a way of loosely binding his fingers before him, even when he was walking, as if on the cusp of prayer. ‘Not that many people are going,
though.’

‘And the Colonel?’

‘Now that, I am afraid, I do not know. Good to see you, Dr Forle,’ he said.

Tord’s smile was brief and wan and never the consequence of humour – though his eyes were quick and green and intelligent. His hair, which was the colour of pale straw, was always
exactly the same length all over – serviceable, sensible – with his fringe a feathery and irritating half-centimetre above his brow. He suffered from mild eczema and his skin was pitted
and reddened here and there with the vestiges of acne. There was something disconcerting in his overall bearing, I always thought, a disjunction between the resilience that his life required and
the wispiness of his appearance. I had never seen him undo more than a single button of his shirt.

‘We’ve been missing you and the Lord, Tord,’ I said. ‘There’s been a lot of excitement and sin around here these last couple of weeks.’

‘So I understand.’ He placed a second pastoral palm over his handshake.

I addressed Lothar by way of antidote. ‘When do we expect them back?’

Lothar shrugged. ‘I have not heard anything. I came straight back here. There was nobody in the bathing huts when I went to scourge myself half an hour ago.’

‘Jorge?’

Jorge did not look up to answer me but worked his hand at the smoothness of his bald head as though trying to rub out his birthmark: ‘They went out this morning about an hour after you.
First the Judge – with a couple of them. And then the Colonel with the rest.’

I wanted to force Jorge to engage with me. ‘But they didn’t mention where they were going?’

‘No.’ He wiped at his sweating neck. ‘I made breakfast for them.’

There was a whisper of a challenge in this. We were provided with food and a cook. But I paid personally for extra provisions to make our diet less monotonous. Kim and Lothar contributed, too.
There was now a question, therefore, as to what food Jorge could cook for whom.

‘Did they say if they were coming back?’

‘No.’ Jorge continued to pluck at his bird.

‘Well, did anyone think to look at the guest huts to see if they have left anything?’

Kim came out from behind the bar, carrying the board of fruit she had been preparing. ‘Their personal things are still there. If you can call porn magazines personal. So I’m guessing
they will be back at some point. Who wants
cherimoya
?’

‘Yes, please.’ Felipe’s voice was determinedly cheerful.

‘Actually . . .’ Tord enjoyed this word as no other for it signalled that he was in the business of correction. ‘Actually, the villages all think that the Judge will be staying
here for a while longer.’

Lothar leant forward to fold out his cigarette. ‘If the tribes think he can overrule their own laws, then pretty soon the entire state will be bringing him their lives to deal with. Land
disputes. Boat crashes. Divorces. Children. It is going to get very Italian down there. The Judge will be bribing them to vote. They will be bribing him to judge.’

‘Justice.’ Kim twisted her free hand in front of her face the better to lick between her fingers.

I smiled. Then, because my hands were still in the straps of my pack, she held out a piece of her favourite fruit on the end of a fork. The gesture was obscurely intimate. The fruit tasted of
strawberries and custard.

I caught Estrela’s eye. She was pulling the intestine from the bird, wielding her favourite carcass knife – a blade so ferociously sharp that when she took their heads, her poultry
could have known nothing about it until they looked up from the earth and saw their own bodies still gripped in her thick fist above them.

‘When do we get to eat those?’ I asked.

‘They’re for the soldiers,’ Jorge said. ‘When they come back.’

III

A hundred shades of khaki were darkening along the walls of the forest by the time Felipe and I reached the lab. At the door, I put down my pack carefully, conscious of
the test-tubes I was carrying. I took out my flashlight. I was annoyed to be bothering with our flimsy padlock. Unlike the huts, the lab, which was built years later, had no key. Quinn was nothing
if not an idealist.

I left Felipe to unpack and walked through the plastic screen into the ‘dry room’, the area that Lothar and Quinn had painstakingly dry-sealed to hold its twice-daily air
conditioning and the place where we stored our meagre computer equipment, our papers, our vials, our refrigerator unit and our microscopes – anything that the inexhaustible mould would thrive
upon.

I turned on the monitor. Felipe pushed his head through the plastic to say that he was leaving. I thanked him for all his help and turned back to the screen. But he lingered a moment.

‘Shall I fill up the water bucket?’ he asked.

‘Yes, if it’s empty.’

It was a strange question. We kept a wooden pail of water for moisturizing our formicarium and squirting drops into the bottom of the test-tubes which contained various specimens we had
collected in the field. Keeping this pail full was about the least important task in the entire laboratory. I turned but did not help him out of his discomfort.