The next day James Bardawulf was discovered in Dieter’s house going up the stairs with the retrieved knobkerrie, and once again the servants disarmed him. Dieter had Charley moved to the hospital with a guard at the door. One son had tried to kill the other and it was clear he was going to keep trying until he was successful. James Bardawulf, now sexually excited, kept Caroline in bed for a week.
• • •
Dieter went to his younger son. “James Bardawulf, I know he wronged your wife, insulted your honor. If he recovers he will leave the family and live abroad. But I beg you to swallow your rage. You are young, and anger and desire to kill can sour you from the heart outward all the days of your life. I have lost one son — I cannot bear to lose you as well. I care for you deeply, James Bardawulf. And you must not blame Caroline. You must forgive.” He embraced the rigid man, tears splashing on the younger son’s shoulder. But James Bardawulf was anxious to get back to Caroline and go where his older half brother had been, and he pulled away from his father.
• • •
Remembrance began to seep in, fleet distorted images of falling, the smell of earth. Moonlight. The day came when Charley could get up and walk to the window. In early dusk he looked out. Soon, he thought, soon rather than late. The nights were chill, leafless trees disclosed their angular frames. When the bandage came off, by manipulating two mirrors he could see thick bristles of hair growing on each side of a furious dark scar.
“Father,” he said to Dieter, whom he knew again, “what happened to me?”
“Something heavy fell on you in James Bardawulf’s garden.” A glass with a residue of sleeping powder stood on the night table.
“In James Bardawulf’s garden? Why!” He turned the glass in his fingers.
“I see no point in keeping the information from you. You did something schlecht. You tried to — you ravished Caroline in the garden and James Bardawulf discovered you in the act. Your own brother’s wife! He struck you.”
“This is extremely painful to hear. I do not remember this. I think you must be mistaken.”
Dieter looked at him. Was he willfully lying or did he truly not remember? He was lying. Worse, Dieter believed Charley’s mind was unsound. And he must go.
Through intermediaries Dieter arranged the purchase of a small house for him in Lugar da Barra do Rio Negro, or Manaós, the city of the forest, where the wild tropical trees would be waiting for him. The house and a modest monthly sum of money were all he could do for this child he had long ago foretold, under the silver maple in Lavinia’s park, would be a man of the trees.
• • •
In Amazonia, Charley discovered himself as nothing. What he did was nothing. He saw the rampant growth of vine, shoot, sprout, seedling, moist and dripping, swollen and bursting with vigor. He vividly, and without regret, remembered raping Caroline. The forest sounded with the constant patter and thump as leaves, twigs, petals and fruits, branches and weak old trees succumbed to gravity. When the storm wind called friagem generated by the Antarctic came, the noise increased, a bombardment of tree parts and fruits mixed with the hissing of the wind in the canopy.
Decomposition seemed as violent — the collapse of leaf structures, cells breaking down, liquefaction of solid wood into a mold squirming with lively bacteria and animalcula seething and transforming into energy. Yes, and insects and larvae, worms and rodents and everywhere the famous ants who ruled the tropics. He almost understood how the incomprehensible richness of Amazonia made humans clutch and rend in maenadic frenzies of destruction. Such a forest was an affront, standing there smirking, aloof from its destiny of improving men’s lives.
Charley was slow in learning Portuguese. His first sentence was “Você fala inglês? — do you speak English?” But the answer was so often “I don’t understand—não compreendo” that he struggled to master some useful words. In his first week in Manaós, making long walks around and through the town, he discovered a Portuguese paper goods shop, a livraria, that sold imported notebooks with fine French paper. He bought several.
Where to begin? Perhaps it was best to make a catalog of tree species. Two weeks of this and he realized it was beyond him. There were simply too many kinds of trees. He did not know them, could only observe their habits. He followed rubber tappers’ paths, poor men in lifelong debt servitude, no better than slaves. He pitied them but it was not until he followed a smell into a small clearing and found a charred corpse that he could believe the ghastly rumor of punishment of those who tried to break free from the system; they were caught, wrapped around with ropes of flammable latex and set on fire. The forest encouraged cruelties and subjugation.
The furniture maker Senhor Davi Fagundes was the only person he knew who could identify the bark, flowers and branches he gathered. This hollow-eyed man when Charley had asked his usual “Do you speak English?” question had replied, “Yes, a little.”
Charley wrote everything down in his notebooks. There were many species of mahogany, Brazilian rosewood, teak, bloodwood, exotic zebrawood, ipe and cambara woods, anigre and bubinga, cumaru and jatoba, lacewood and makore. And hundreds more without names. He felt fortunate if he could attach a name to one tree each week, draw its general shape, list some of its epiphytes and strangler vines.
“Why you want knowing this?” Fagundes asked.
“To learn the trees that grow in this kind of forest. Where I come from there are no such forests.”
But more and more the cabinetmaker held up his hands and said “Eu não sei!” I don’t know.
At the end of his first year Charley had sent the notebook to Dieter as he would every year until he learned of Conrad. He heard nothing back and wondered if Dieter had abandoned him. In fact, Dieter had abandoned everyone.
65. legacies
Not long after Charley’s departure from Chicago, Dieter, the old pine, had gone down. “Mrs. Garfield,” he said wearily on a Monday noon, “I’m going home early. I have a headache and think I need a night’s sleep.” Mrs. Garfield, who had replaced Miss Heinrich when she retired, clucked and said, “I hope you feel better tomorrow.” But the next morning the headache was bad and he had a stiff neck. By the end of the week he was half-paralyzed, and the doctor diagnosed polio.
“I thought only children got polio,” said Sophia.
“No, no, it can attack at any age. But keep children away from the house. It’s contagious.”
“Hard to breathe,” Dieter whispered. It got harder. By Saturday pneumonia finished him.
• • •
“I don’t care what it takes, we’ve got to find him,” said James Bardawulf, striding to the grimy window and back. “He’s a major heir in the will. The situation is crazy enough. That we don’t know where the hell he is makes it worse. I’m going to get a private detective on it.”