Tropic of Night (12 page)

Barlow nodded calmly as Paz rapped this out, and said, “No, I was never more serious in my life.” He sighed heavily and stood up. “Well, we’ll see, won’t we? For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, He taketh the wise in their own craftiness. First Corinthians 3:19.” He patted Paz absently on the arm. “You’ll want to write up your report. Just put in the facts, for now.”

Ido not panic. I go back to Records and finish my day, alphabetical order being such a comfort in periods of tension, and it gives me time to think. Thought before action, not jumping to conclusions: aikido, anthropology, and Olo sorcery are in agreement here. I pause behind cabinet or-osh, get centered, and think. He’s in town, or he’s got a disciple in town, both possible. Who knows what he’s been up to these last years? He could have hundreds, a whole cult. The important thing, does he know where I am? Not likely. New name, low profile, not doing a lot to attract his attention. I’m supposed to be dead, anyway.

The homeboys don’t notice me on the way back to my car. It’s after school and they are being vamped by girls who are more in tune with the times. I get into my stifling junker and think about Margaret Mead, the mother of all us girl anthropologists, and about what she would think of this. Our world is changing so fast that the kids have to figure it all out for themselves, so they reject the parents’ experience as nonrelevant. A very sixties view, Margaret, and explains hippies and hip-hop but doesn’t explain me. I was thirteen when she died, and never met her, but Marcel knew her quite well, thought her a nice lady, good writer, knew zip about culture, depending as she did throughout her career on the honesty of her informants. They all lie, darling, he would say to me, all the informants lie. Wouldn’t you? What would you do if a person in a weird hat and the wrong color skin accosted you on the street and asked you, You like fuckee-fuck, eh, girlee? When you start fuckee? Who you do it with? Old men? Boys? Other girls? How many times? You likee orgasms? You let boy touch-em titties? You like suck-em willie? Would you tell this ridiculous person the truth? You would not. I once actually peed on his foot I was laughing so hard at one of these riffs. Marcel was not a great believer in mere objectivity. Objectivity is the leprosy of anthropology, one of his sayings. French intellectuals are obliged to come up with pithy, witty apothegms, and he was no exception.

The breeze from the car window is somewhat cooler than the waft from a hair dryer on low, but I am not much bothered by this. People who are excessively attached to the creature comforts would be well advised to eschew anthro as a career. The temperature in my car right now approximates the shade temperature inside my bon in Uluné’s compound at Danolo, during nearly the whole of the dry season. My sense memories are returning, I think. I attribute this to the child. Now, for example, I pick up Luz in the cool shade of the patio at Providence and I am nearly overcome by a recollection of being held by my father, on our dock. I must have been about Luz’s age, the age when you can still ride comfortably in an adult’s arms, held easily by one hand under your bottom. It’s low tide, and I can smell the tidal stink around us. We’re at the dinghy basin and we’ve just finished a ride in our tender. My father smells of tobacco, marine varnish, and wood dust.

Luz is carrying a paper sack. When we are in the car she shows me what is in it. It’s a present, she says, it’s for candoos. A great lump of baked Sculpey in the shape of a candleholder, with thick flowers stuck on and all painted primrose yellow with cobalt blue splotches. Nice Ms. Lomax must have pressed the butt of a candle into the soft clay because this part looks quite functional. I appreciate it lavishly. No one has given me anything for some time. We make a special trip down Grand to the rich folks’ Grove to buy a candle to fit in it. We stop at the thrift shop and rummage like the poor people we are and Luz finds a tattered Goodnight Moon, which I gratefully buy for fifty cents.

So we dine by candlelight. I have made a big fruit salad with cottage cheese, which she seems to like, and which helps to cool me down. After dinner, she has to blow out the candle and I have to relight it many times. When I was studying aikido, sensei used to make us douse candles with our fists, to practice speed and control. The point is to compress a column of air in front of your fist and stop your knuckles dead a few millimeters short of the flame. It’s harder than it looks, like everything in aikido. Or sorcery for that matter. Without thinking, to entertain Luz, I snap out my fist and find that I can still do it. More, demands Luz, and I light the wick again and then I recall how her mother died and feel a rush of grinding shame. While I am thus self-absorbed, Luz attempts the trick and slams her little fist into the candle and spills hot wax over her hand and forearm. Wails and a rush to the sink for cooling water. I bring her back into countenance with sleight-of-hand tricks. I take some quarters from a jar where I keep my spare change. I make them walk across my knuckles and I vanish them and produce them from her ears and hair and off my tongue, fingertip productions, toss vanishes, flick vanishes, French drops, and coins-through-table as a finale. I am good at this, I could amaze those even older than four. Marcel always said that legerdemain was the root of sorcery, and one of the field anthropologist’s most valuable tools. It is all about attention, magic. Most of the rest of life is about attention, too.

After the tricks, we lie in my hammock together in our sleeping Tshirts and I read to her, all her books, in the order she likes them, the bird book first, then Bert and Ernie, then the new Goodnight Moon, a great success, three times and she’s out. I had Goodnight Moon, too, and although I suppose my mom must have put me to bed sometimes, I can’t recall being read to by anyone but my father.

Sleep won’t come. There is a gibbous moon and a scent of jasmine. I rock slowly in the hammock. On its uproll the mesh overlays my view of the treetops and the cloud-scudded moonlit sky. Mesh or line, our lives, one of the great questions. I have been shaken by what happened in the office today, the old lady and the dulfana and the news about the slaughtered pregnant girl. Stuff is breaking loose, like rock from an eroding cliff, and poor Dolores is hanging on by her fingernails. Jane Doe is yelling from her tomb, Hey, Dolores! I’m all squashed down here, lemme out! Not yet, Jane, says Dolores. Things are still too obscure. A bird calls from the yard outside:

Whit-purr Whit-purr Whit-purr WHIT WHIT

My blood curdles, a fist presses down on my heart. It can’t be, but I know very well that it could. It is the unmistakable call of a honeyguide. I have heard it a thousand times in Africa, but there are no honeyguides in South Florida. We used to say it was calling my husband; that was before we knew what the honeyguide meant, its ways, that it was a kind of sorcerers’ mascot because of its magical powers, how it got men to do its work of busting up beehives, how it was never stung. How it eviscerated the nestlings of other birds with a special scalpel-like tooth on its beak.

I go through the door to the landing and listen. Ordinary twitters and creaks. Imagination. Funk. As sweat dries on my skin, I go back to the hammock. Not a honeyguide, not yet. An auditory hallucination. Speaking of which …

I’m thinking that it must have been just around now, a little earlier perhaps, that I first laid eyes on Marcel Vierchau. It was finals week, and I was in my Barnard room studying French and hating it, wanting to be home, out sailing, at the beach. I am quite good with languages, the speaking part at least, which put me into French lit classes over my head. This was Twentieth-Century French Prose. Colette was fine, but Sartre? Derrida? Not in balmy June. My junior year: so, fourteen years ago. I remember feeling the need to get out of the room, take a walk, get a cold one, maybe lie on the grass or join the perpetual volleyball game in front of Minor Latham for a while. The point is, I was just about to go out, I was looking for my wallet, at that very moment, that’s how close I was to not having my life changed, when Tracy O’Neill came barging in and said, Come on, we’re going to see Marcel Vierchau. And I said, Who’s Marcel Vierchau, and she said he’s the world’s greatest anthropologist, dummy, and he’s gorgeous, we’re all going to go over to Low Library and sit in the front row and masturbate. I said I wanted to get a beer and she grinned and held out the remains of a six-pack of Bud, sweaty-cold.

So we went, maybe five or six of us, all dorm rats, sick of the lamp and up for something rich and strange. Low Library rotunda is the largest venue on the Columbia campus and they needed the seats. Maybe three hundred people showed up, well over half passing for maidens. We didn’t get to sit in the very front, but we had good position, well within masturbation range, as O’Neill remarked.

The star was introduced by a dim old soul, a relic of the Mead era named Matson, or Watson. She told us that Vierchau was a rare piece of cheese, an ornament of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, French Academy, U.S. Academy of Sciences (hon.), author of Sorcerer’s Apprentice, twenty-nine weeks on the Times bestseller list, and on and on, lists of publications, editorships, adding up to the hottest French anthropologist since Lévi-Strauss (his mentor, in fact), ran the hundred in 10.1, could bench 350, and had a penis like a baguette. O’Neill, spluttering, added these, and we were all making a small spectacle of ourselves, when the lady came to the end of her dithyramb, and Vierchau walked out on the stage.

Well. He really was gorgeous to the point of absolute unfairness. I am afraid we gaped. The hair was the first thing, a huge thick flowing mop, sunset-colored, touched with silver on the sides, remarkable, threw a glow out across the audience like a baby spot. Beneath this, the necessary broad brow, deep-set sea-blues behind round wire-rims, prow of a nose, icebreaker chin, and lips, as they say, red as wine. He was wearing what he almost always wore, a dark silk turtleneck, a Harris tweed jacket, and dark, beautifully cut Italian slacks.

The applause died down, he paused, smiled, wiggled his eyebrows to show that he did not take himself that seriously, thanked Watson or Matson, reminded her that she had neglected to mention his membership in the Bicycle Club of France. Titters. “Our species,” he began, “is approximately a hundred thousand years old.” I suppose I must have heard that speech at least fifty times, and read it too; it was the basis for an article in Nature in 1986. “I must give the Speech again, Jeanne-Claire,” he would say, flourishing another invitation. He always added some new stuff, as research advanced, but basically it was the same line: his life’s work. And misleading in the extreme, he always added. Only for the goyim, he used to say. So I can easily put together the themes here in my head, swinging in the moonlight.

A hundred thousand years ago, people with the same sort of brains we all have, speaking languages no less complex, lived, worked, loved, and died. Recorded history, however, begins between eight and six thousand years ago, coincident with the development of agriculture in several regions of the Old World. Before that, a great silence, some ninety thousand years of silence. And so I wonder, what were those people doing with those so excellent brains all those endless days and nights? Not working all the time. Hunter-gatherers in benign climates do not work very hard. Their tools are simply made, as are their shelters. Most hunter-gatherer tribes work fewer hours a week than Frenchmen; far fewer than Americans. So what do they do? This, to me, is one of the great tasks of anthropological science, to penetrate the great silence, using as our informants the tiny number of people who are still making their livings that way.

So, I ask you, what would you do, with your marvelous brain, all those centuries? No books, no writing, few man-made things, little pressure from the environment, no television or radio, no newspapers, only the same hundred or so people to talk to? I think you would play with the environment, Homo ludens, after all, and you would become intimate with it. You would invent art, to symbolize this. You would develop an intimacy with your environment so deep that we children of industrial civilization can scarcely imagine it, an intimacy deeper, perhaps, than we have with our lovers or our children, perhaps even deeper than we have with our own alienated bodies. They would be participants in an environment that was alive in the same way that they themselves were alive, whereas we are merely observers of an environment that is dead. All the little particles, yes? Yes. And another thing we would play with would be the most interesting thing in our environment, which is the human mind, our own minds and those of others. And with this, very slowly, centuries and centuries, remember, a technology develops. This technology is based not on the manipulation of the objective world, as our own is, but rather on the manipulation of the subjective world. Now, you may be familiar with the statement by the British scientist and science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, in which he states: any sufficiently advanced technology will appear to be magic. Just so. And what I am proposing is that among traditional cultures there is a sufficiently advanced technology of which we know very little, and what little we do know of it we denigrate, yes? And for want of a better term, we call this magic.

Here he always paused, to let it sink in. The scientists in the crowd would look nervously at one another, the New Age types would beam and chortle. Yes, magic, he would say. Even the word itself connotes charlatanism, the phony, what is not to be taken seriously. From magi, the word the ancient Greeks contemptuously used for itinerant Persian conjurers. Today, in the West, to all sensible people, it means theatrical trickery, like this.

At this point he would take an egg out of his pocket. You have all seen this a hundred times, yes? I make the egg vanish, so. I produce it out of an empty hand, so. And out of my mouth, so. I drop it from one hand and catch it in my other hand?so?but the egg has vanished from the lower hand. You all saw it drop, but it is not where you thought it was. Ah, it is still in the hand that dropped it. But no. There is nothing in either hand. Technically, called a vanish-and-acquitment. But here is the egg again out of my ear. Technically, a production. You marvel, yes. Finally, I crack the egg on the podium and abracadabra! It turns into a pigeon which flies up to the ceiling. Do not worry, please, this pigeon is an indoor pigeon and will not make a mess.