Trust Me (17 page)

The chief and the two priests had witnessed the demonstration
and, observing our pleasure, arranged now for a blowpipe to be produced and for an especially proficient villager—a bow-legged elderly man with several front teeth ornamentally extracted and a chevron of welts on each cheek—to strike with its tufted darts small targets (a folded leaf, a Ping-Pong ball) dropped many paces away on the plaza. The blowpipe was at least ten feet long. Our shadows, too, had elongated remarkably, as an evening chill enwrapped our wet bodies; goosebumps, each with its own minute shadow, had appeared on Conchita’s thighs, and the fine hairs stood up on Esmeralda’s forearms like the feathery fringes of a tropical
rara avis
. Nevertheless, invited to try the blowpipe ourselves, we each obliged, amusing the crowd with our puffed cheeks and wide misses.

The whole thing, it should be stressed, was done with a tact, a fine lightness, not always present at such cultural intersections. Quickly, lightly, the crowd dispersed. Cooking smoke, both sweet and acrid, flavored the air. A translucent gibbous moon had appeared in the still-cerulean sky above us. We went to our quarters to prepare for the feast.

The feast! Anteater and coati meat swimming in a sauce peppered with bits of ground insect, plus side dishes of artichoke paste and boiled Pijiguao fruit, all served at the long plank table in the banquet hut, amid a plethora of toasts to progress, amity, and the overthrow of imperialism—the meal passed in a blur. Afterwards, we took chairs outdoors, into the moonlight; the earth of the plaza was as firm and level as the floor of a parlor. The native priest reached down and affectionately scratched the neck of a hairless dog that, like a few naked children, had come silently to join us. The chief had
disappeared. Our pilots had retired with some onyx-eyed girls met by the river. The tall pale priest, a child in arms when his parents fled Franco, outlined his vision and responded to our questions. The rapid, segmented Spanish words—
comunidad, economía, avenimiento, modos de producción
—flowed like sparkling water across my ears. A wine bottle cast its half-empty shadow on the blanched earth, in the amazing moonlight. The dog curled himself into an intense ball, like an armadillo, beside the plump priest’s shoes, whose polished tips gleamed. The hands of the other priest in their impassioned gestures appeared elegant and white, flitting like bats in a negative film, but his voice never rose above a gentle, cautious, explanatory monotone. The moon above, sunstruck, seemed to dye a great realm of the heavens around it a lavender that drowned the very stars. The fringe of jungle at a distance around us was low, and as total as the horizon of the ocean. To think that this was the only such conversation within a thousand or more square miles—the luxury of it, the calm human grandeur. “All we ask of the government,” our host proclaimed, with his soft yet urgent melody, “is to be let alone!”

When the good priests took themselves off to bed, another bottle of wine materialized. Like children let out of school, we went for a walk that became a run. The moonlit stretch of village street that doubled as an airplane runway invited speed: our footsteps pattered; our suppressed laughter became the ecstasy of breathlessness; we flew. Pepé and Ortega and Raoul, our linguistics expert, led the way. Conchita and Esmeralda, surprisingly quick and lithe, followed hand in hand, giggling. Fernando and I and Salvador, our earthbound agronomist, ploddingly brought up the rear.

Then we stopped, at the place where the jungle trees, drawing
close, grew tall. Their liana-interlaced crowns bent over us like solicitous giant heads. A clicking, whispering life could be heard behind their wall of darkness, and the soft tireless roar of the cataracts in the river far to our left. Beyond this wall the depth of forest loomed as practically infinite, like the depth of night sky above us. Looking backwards, we saw the runway as a pilot must see it in the instant before touch-down—as a cone of luminous safety framed by fatal vague shapes. Its isolation was an essential part of the plan of the ideal village. Any less far, the contaminating hand of government would reach, and the chief would not have bothered to abandon his chiropraxis and don his girdle of feathers.

Predictably, we slept badly in our
chinchorros:
each movement produced a sickening sway and there was no turning over onto one’s stomach. Early in the morning, in the silky black hour between moonset and sunrise, something or someone outside our windows repeatedly tittered. Departure proved to be a hurried, graceless process. The pilots were visibly suffering from post-coital depression as well as anxiety concerning the miles and miles of green wilderness they must droningly traverse. The chief showed up without his gray vest, which apparently had been put on out of deference to our supposed sense of decency. Conchita was given a necklace of tapir teeth; Esmeralda was allowed to purchase a carved coati at discount. We said our farewells and kept waving as our two planes banked in unison back across the plaza of baked earth and over the river and away.

It was not until weeks afterwards, collating our diaries in the course of preparing our report to the government, that we discovered how happy each of us had been to leave. Man was not meant to abide in paradise.

T
HE ACTOR
’
S TOUR
had taken him to a Midwestern city fifteen miles from the small town where he had grown up, and an interviewer called suggesting that they visit there together. “It would provide, you know,” he said, “an angle.” The newspaper the interviewer worked for was the only one left in the city, and this gave it an aura of absolute power, of final opportunity. The actor was at that awkward age almost too old for romantic leads but not old enough for character parts. Opportunity, his agent had more than once told him, doesn’t knock forever. He could use the publicity.

“I can’t stand interviews,” he said.

The prospective interviewer said nothing, just waited.

“They’re so intrinsically imprecise,” the actor went on. “So sadly prurient.” The presence on the other end of the line stuck to its silence. The female exclamations of another conversation faintly wafted into the braided wires. “O.K.,” the actor said, and they set a time to meet on the hotel parking lot.

The interviewer stood beside a little mustard-colored car; he wore dun bell-bottoms and a denim jacket cut as short as a waiter’s jacket. He was a trim, tight young man with an exceptionally small mouth and wiry black hair that had about it, without being exactly kinky, a glisten of contained energy, a kind of silent acrylic crackle that declared it would never decompose. There would be no mercy, the actor saw. He would have to watch what he said as carefully as if he were in court. Unfortunate words had a way of passing into print from a single absent-minded nod politely granted an impudent question. The actor had a number of former wives, each equipped with vigilant lawyers, and he moved through the dark skies of private life, it sometimes seemed to him, like a comet trailing stiff white envelopes of legal stationery. So: no politeness today, no ridiculous “givingness,” no charming sharing of indiscretions with this person to whom he was not a person, after all, but a name, an object to be exploited, a walking slag heap to be sifted for ore one more time.

“Would you like me to drive, so you can take notes?” the actor asked. He was a big-boned, coarse-skinned man offstage, and he took pleasure in menacing at the outset, with such extravagant coöperation, his wiry little persecutor.

“Why, yes, that might be nice, come to think of it.”

The car was a Japanese model, as cunning and tawdry as a music-box. It had four forward gears and a reverse tucked somewhere in the lower right quadrant, where New Zealand is on a map. The dashboard hummed and spelled out monosyllables of instruction and warning. The actor felt clumsy. “I don’t drive much anymore,” he explained. “I’m just dragged around by these limousines.”

“What about at your summer place in Amagansett?” the interviewer asked, having already produced a notebook.

“My last wife got that, as you probably know. The place, the Porsche, the works.”

“No, I didn’t know.” The man wrote busily.

“Don’t put that in—Christ,” the actor begged, shifting from first gear straight into fourth, with a fearful laboring of the engine.

“It’s on the record, isn’t it, elsewhere?”

“Well, let’s not put it on again. Makes it look as though I have nothing else to talk about.”

“Of course,” the interviewer said. He put the notebook away and gazed out the window.

The actor didn’t like this swift, prim docility, either; it seemed stagy. From the side, the other man’s mouth was a mere irritated nick in his profile; he resented having been ousted from the driver’s seat.

“This wasn’t meant to be so much a personal piece about you and your, uh, affairs,” the interviewer said, “as about the place. You in regard to the place you grew up in.”

“It’s not much of a place, that was its charm,” the actor said, and added, “Don’t put that in, either.”

The miles went by. Inner suburbs gave way to outer, and then there was something like countryside, behind the roadside gas stations and the old stone farmhouses with reflecting balls in their front yards. The interviewer sat silent, in what seemed to be a sulk. The strange impression grew upon the actor that this man had been a high-school athlete, a second-baseman: quick on the pivot and pesky at the plate. Determined to be entertaining, to charm away the sulk, the actor talked about the play he was in, leading actresses he had worked with, his theories of stagecraft, his philosophy of professional
ups and downs. The interviewer kept his notebook tucked away. The little automobile had become quite responsive to the actor’s touch, and began to swing along curves he knew by heart, having driven them as a child, first with his father at the wheel and then with himself in control. “Of course,” the actor explained, as they approached the town limits, “all this was trees and fields then. That mall didn’t exist. That mess of ticky-tacky houses over there was just a dairy farm with a little creek that ran through a pasture where my mother’s quainter relatives used to gather watercress. There was a dam and a pond back in there where the tough boys and the pretty girls used to go swimming. I never did. My mother thought I might drown or lose my virginity or have people think I did, which would be even worse.”

“Uh-huh,” the interviewer said, as though he had heard this before.

“Don’t put that in about my mother and virginity,” the actor asked. “She still has cousins in the area, in nursing homes mostly. There used to be a diner here,” he announced abruptly, “that stayed open all night. At two in the morning you could go there, after a date, all light-headed and your face full of lipstick, and eat a hamburger. That was my idea of the sophisticated life, eating a hamburger at two in the morning. A man called Smoky Moser ran it. He never seemed to sleep. We kids loved him. Loved him like a father, you could say. He was the father I yearned for.”

“Is that a fact?”

“I exaggerate a little. Smoky was O.K., though. Died young, of some disease nobody would ever name. Better skip that: he may have a widow.”

Grudgingly the interviewer had got out his notebook and made a few notes. The gravel lot that had surrounded the
diner was occupied now by a great cube of brown-tinted glass, the branch of a statewide bank. Yellow arrows painted on the smooth asphalt told automobiles how to proceed to the drivein windows. The actor studied the faces of the people moving in and out of the bank and recognized none of them, though there was something he did recognize—a tone, a pallor and density of flesh in their arms and faces, a way of suddenly looking behind and above them, unsmilingly, fearing the worst out of the sky, the weather of the world. “Up here, there was a feed mill, where …”

Where some of the faster girls had supposedly let it be done to them, that fabled thing, in the weedy area between two asbestos-shingled walls. The actor was surprised, after the more than a decade since he had last visited, by how sexy the town was, how saturated with love and that psychosomatic quickening which love brings. The cotton-wool sky, the heavy dusty trees, the very tone of dull red in the bricks arrived in unison at something like one’s own exact body temperature. Surrounded by farm country, it was a kind of hill town, divided in the middle by an avenue that followed the curve of an abandoned railroad bed. The town’s lower part, south of the avenue, had been built solid in the years just before the Depression in rows of brick semi-detached houses, houses with symmetrical big living-room windows and square-pillared front porches. There was a security here, in these ruddy rows, block after block, each with its little apron of terraced lawn, and two concrete steps leading up to the first terrace, and little pansy beds or barberry hedges along the walk. The rectilinear, repetitive streets were high-crowned, and the actor was made to remember the rhythm imparted to a car, the soft braking and dipping, as the intersections were cautiously traversed. Many an afternoon, many
a Sunday, he had cruised these streets in his parents’ old tan Dodge, and then in the navy-blue Chrysler with the iridescent touched-up patch on the fender, looking for the action, for a familiar car parked outside a house he knew, which might signal an afternoon of canasta or an evening of laughing at Liberace or the roller derby on that new toy called television. Any excuse for a party, a party wherever two or three got together.