Tropic of Night (17 page)

Her head popped up. A peculiar series of expressions passed across her face: first surprise, then an instant of fear, then a resettling of the features into the social persona, reserved and a little wary. She said, “Why is that, seńor? And how did you know I was here?”

Her face was covered with tiny wrinkles, but the peach-colored skin still clung closely to the fine bones. A curved, bold nose, a determined chin, the eyes still bright, though sunken into their sockets and brown-shadowed beneath. She looks older than she did on the book jacket, Paz thought, and also that she must have stopped traffic in 1940s Havana. He displayed his badge and photo identification.

“I’m a homicide detective. I want to discuss certain aspects of a recent murder with you. As for how I knew you were here, I didn’t. I thought you were out of the country. I came here to do some research and here you were. Synchronicity.”

“You mean serendipity, Detective,” said Dr. Salazar after a considering moment. “It would be synchronicity only if I sought you out before you knew you wanted to see me.”

Running around naked looking for the trick of it is perhaps as good a symbol of the relationship I had with Marcel Vierchau as anything else. In memory, now, he is always laughing and I am trying to find the joke, on the verge of feeling hurt. Yet it is difficult to stay angry with a man having so good a time, and he was never vindictive, or mean, or cruel. He just thought I was funny; and was I not? A large, somewhat overbred American girl, mad for sex and ethnography, desperate for approval, would have been funny to a man like Marcel, and especially amusing were my pathetic efforts to spy out his secrets. While we were together, I would actually hide myself and try to watch him, looking for the incredibly clever, spidery apparatus that enabled him to pull off his stunts. When he was out of the apartment, or the tent or the van, I made it a habit to poke through his things. Yes, embarrassing; and worse, I never found anything.

Marcel knew, and it amazed him, because his whole life was dedicated to teaching that real magic was a technology of the mind, not of smoke and mirrors. It’s your Catholic prejudice against witchcraft, he’d tell me, you can’t allow yourself to believe that someone you love is really a witch and so you look for wires.

We were together for seven years, continuously, almost. Based in Paris, we traveled to every continent?city, jungle, desert, steppe. The problem with a relationship like that is that the girl gets spoiled. His friends are so much more interesting than your friends. When famous people listen to you respectfully at dinner parties, do you really want to go clubbing with twenty-somethings? You don’t. They say the young woman delights in her sexual power over the older man, and that this is good for her confidence and self-esteem. Maybe so, but in exchange her real life is stolen from her, and she grows up twisted, like a pear tree espaliered against the wall of the Great Man. And what does she do when the wall crumbles? As it must.

I don’t know whether thinking about Marcel and what happened in the garden last night are connected. No, I do know?it’s all connected. For a long time I was spared the pangs of memory; post-traumatic shock, I suppose, or perverted will, but now things are loosening up, like the ice breaking in springtime on the Yei.

It’s going to be another ( another!) hot day today and here I am thinking about the Yei. I used to think about the Yei in Danolo, too, memories of coolness being especially precious there. I’m a northern girl. I love fog and mist, and crisp, cheek-pinching nights, and crunching through snow, and so I ask you why am I here and why have I spent much of my life in the fucking tropics? I don’t suffer from the heat, as some do, though. I’m adaptable to the various extreme climates where live the sort of people anthropologists dote on: steaming jungles, baking deserts, frozen steppes.

Perhaps I could show up at Medical Records in shorts and T-shirt, the same sort of outfit that Luz is now pulling on. She wishes to select her own clothes and dress herself. Muffa is merely to watch, and check the clock and worry about being late.

The Yei is a river in Siberia, one of those long, sluggish Arctic rivers that only ascend to literate consciousness as crossword clues. Six down: Siberian river, three letters: the mighty Mil. The winding Sem. The rushing Yei. The Chenka pass the winter on its banks, and one winter I did, too, with Marcel, so that I could harvest a doctoral dissertation out of the soil he had so brilliantly cultivated. I was twenty-seven and it had lately occurred to me that being Vierchau’s beautiful assistant was not a lifetime career. I was to study woman’s magic, which among the Chenka is quite different from the men’s magic that Marcel knew about.

The Chenka are pastoralists related to the Yakut, and speak a similar language, but their connection with the various Yakut tribes is obscure. The other Yakut avoid them, sometimes even deny that there are any Chenka people at all. Except when they wish to learn. The Chenka operate a kind of informal, floating sorcerer’s university and at any particular time you will find among them Yakuts, Buryats, Altais, Evenks, and peoples from even further off, Yukakirs, Nenets, Khants, and, once, an American, me.

Marcel discovered the Chenka in 1969 in the journal of a Soviet functionary named T. I. Berozhinski. This included an eyewitness report of how a group of Siberian nomads had walked through a cordon of OGPU troops who had come to arrest them. This occurred in daylight, and none of the secret policemen saw a thing. Berozhinski saw them, but when he told the commissar in charge, he got sent straight to the gulag, where he died. Other than this, the Chenka were unknown to history or anthropology.

Marcel was thunderstruck by the account. If Berozhinski was not bemused himself or a liar, the Chenka had witched their way through scores of the most brutal, unimaginative, and disciplined men on earth. This was no pathetic ethnic remnant like the jungle tribes he and his colleagues normally studied. He was instantly on fire to see them for himself.

Marcel arranged for a scientific study visa, went to Siberia, met the Chenka, was amazed. He went again and stayed for his seven years. The rest is now familiar from the pages of his book. The Chenka had real magic, whatever that means.

Another peg snagging the folds of the net of my life. Berozhinski begat Vierchau, and Vierchau begat Doe. Since the start of our connection, not more than days after that first marathon in bed, I had been bugging Marcel to take me to the Chenka. It was somehow never arranged. Always other commitments intervened or there was some hitch with the authorities, or they invaded Afghanistan, or something. But now at last I, too, was encamped upon the Yei, learning how to make mare’s milk yogurt, kvass, and women’s magic. So called. The Chenka practice a sexual egalitarianism quite remarkable among pastoral societies, which tend to be ferociously patriarchal, women being merely a sort of cattle. Among the Chenka it is otherwise, and I think it is because the women exercise substantial powers in the magical realm. The women, for example, decide who is to marry whom, and whether they will have children, and of what sex. So the Chenka and Marcel believed, and during my year with them I saw nothing to contradict it. Puniekka expressed amazement when I told her that in the lands of the Alues, the non-Chenka, there were such things as unwanted children, and people who wanted children and couldn’t have them. She was further astounded that we did not routinely determine the sex of our babies in advance.

Puniekka was the shaman in whose yurt I lodged. This was another of the disappointments of my Siberian experience. I had imagined that Marcel and I would live together, as a team. I thought he was being hyberbolic when he said that when we got to Chenka we would hardly see each other. But it was so. Sexual segregation among the Chenka during the seasonal migration is nearly total. The men are out all day moving the herds, and the women are cooking, brewing, and making things as the carts rumble across the steppe. The men all eat together, too, in their herding camp. The women bring them their morning and evening meal, packed in clay pots. Child rearing is matrilocal: women own the yurts, carts, and all the physical apparatus of the culture, except for personal clothing, harness, and magical apparatus. The men own all the animals. Paternal care is diffuse and paternal lineage obscure. The Chenka understand the association of pregnancy with sex, but they often attribute the qualities of a child to spiritual rather than earthly parenthood.

And on top of this, Chenka shamans are celibate, or to put it more accurately, they do not engage in sex with other human beings, but only with the denizens of the spirit world. Marcel had explained this to me and it’s in the book, too, but I thought … Jesus, you know, I can’t remember what I thought.

As it turned out, I hardly saw Marcel for nine months that year, and I didn’t get laid, although I did get a lot of offers from various Chenka women, several of which I accepted out of anthropological curiosity. I did not get taken on as an apprentice shaman. Marcel had warned me about that, too, but again, I failed to take it seriously. It is so hard, even for anthropologists, to take other cultures seriously.

One day, I couldn’t stand it any longer and jumped on a pony and rode out to where the men were and I confronted him and demanded he spend more time with me, let me stay with the men and herd, and he took me aside and listened to me rant, his eyes getting wider, and I have to say, that was the only time he really got mad at me, although looking back I realize I must have been a colossal pain in the butt. He said, You silly woman, don’t you understand who these people are ? What they can do ? He said, Don’t you understand my status with these people? And I didn’t really, because, to be fair, he hadn’t exactly dwelled on it in the book, but now he told me. I’m a pet, he said, a kind of superior dog. They’re teaching me a couple of tricks and it amuses them. I walk on my hind legs, I play dead, I roll over.

I didn’t get it. We?we in what we are pleased to call advanced societies?don’t have this experience. We’ve always been ahead, whatever that means. We could read and write, and they couldn’t. We have the Maxim gun and they have not. Berozhinski’s tale about the invisibility trick I took to be some kind of hallucination, probably drug-induced. The Chenka eat a lot of dope, mostly strains of fungi, hundreds of different kinds, which they grow in tubs, but also various plant and animal preparations, and I assumed that old T.I. was whacked out of his mind most of the time.

I told Marcel this. He looked at me like you look at a crazy person, pityingly. I’m sure I looked at him the same way. He walked away, and I rode back to the women’s camp.

My work there was not going well, and this was perhaps a greater cause for distress than loneliness. The Chenka ladies would talk to me politely about anything except sorcery. You won’t understand, they would say when I pressed them. Puniekka would be grinding up some foul-smelling paste. What’s that for, Puniekka? You wouldn’t understand. Tell me anyway. A sigh. Then, patiently, as to a child: It’s a griunat . What is a griunat ? Answer: when the raaiunt teno’s d’okka kiarrnkch, we spread a griunat on the doorposts. I would paw desperately through my Chenka glossary, but the critical words were never there. I asked them, What did these words mean? They would explain each, using a host of other terms that I also could not connect to the world of sensation and material. Describing color to a blind man. I don’t understand, I would cry, sometimes with actual tears. Yes, they would say, we told you that you wouldn’t understand.

There is a green parrot, a flock of green parrots in the flame trees near Providence when I drop Luz off and they are shrieking like maniacs, like demons, like oh, shit, where has this one been hiding?

This memory. Night, in the yurt. Another little mystery: nobody in the surrounding ten thousand square miles lives in yurts, but the Chenka do. They say that Chesei-Anka gave them yurts, sheep, goats, and horses when the Chenka emerged from the sea. No Chenka to anyone’s knowledge has ever seen the sea, but they know where it lies, far to the south. It was Puniekka’s yurt. I slept in the place for guests on the east side. A yurt is always pitched facing south, so that the sun streaming through the smokehole makes a clocklike passage across the floor during the day. Two of Puniekka’s other students were sleeping there, too, on the west wall, and the mistress herself was at the north. Spirits arrive from the north. I remember coming out of sleep, awakened by a sharp cry. The other students were wrapped in their blankets, long lumps, like logs reflecting the red glow from the dying fire in the center. Rhythmic gasps, the sound of a body moving against cloth. Another cry. I listened, fascinated. Ai! Oh! Ai! And heavy mouth-breathing, male and stertorous, like a horse. Puniekka was having a terrific fuck by the sound of it, and I was dying to know who the guy was. It had never happened before and I had been assured of the strict celibacy of all the shamans, male and female. I rolled on my side so I could make ethnographic observations. I recall feeling terrific, a warming intellectual smugness. This was something even Marcel didn’t know?guys sneaked into lady shamans’ tents at night. So I stared, and I could see pretty well, too: besides the glow from the fireplace, moonlight flooded down through the smokehole. She was on her back, with her knees up high. She still had her heavy woolen stockings on, but I could see her knees gleaming and moving back and forth with his thrusts. Powerful thrusts, because each one smacked the crown of her head against a large leather pillow, which creaked at the blows.

The space above her where her lover should have been was perfectly empty.

And what happens to you when you see something like that, if you’re a Western materialist, is that your mind sort of splits in two. One part is thinking, Oh, how fascinating, an example of hysterical conversion in the trance state among the primitives, she’s imagining a demon lover and sure enough her body is going through the motions just as if she were being violently had and she’s having spectacular orgasms, too, from the sound of it and the rigid arching of her back and the shuddering, and clearly she’s not manually masturbating because her hands are wrapped around the thing that isn’t there. And, How interesting, it really does look like she has sunk deeper into the sheepskin pallet, just as if she were being pressed down by a heavy man.