The black woman who called herself Araña was still sitting outside her cubicle. She cocked her head; her sullen look left her. She stood up and mocked them and, doing a little dance, spun slowly, wagging her bum at them, plucking at her buttocks.
“Buenos días. Que desean?” she said. And then, spittle forming on her lips, she said, “Sodomita” making the word like the name of a delicacy. She leaned toward them, but they had taken a few steps, so her head was canted wrong: her sunglasses faced in the direction of the slaughterhouse, where they had lingered and talked.
Ava said softly, “She’s blind.”
Araña beckoned. She opened her toothless mouth and stuck out her tongue and wagged the long pink thing at them. Then she laughed hard, louder than the dying animals. And she clutched herself and repeated the word: “Sodomita”
“Lo siento” Steadman said to her, and Ava murmured to Hernán, “No comprendo lo que dice.”
Araña laughed and Hernán translated her shout: “‘But why? Because you’re not interested in this culeadora?'”
She went on shouting, and when Steadman nodded, Hernán continued to translate, but slowly, softly, with reluctance, as Steadman stared at the woman. She removed her dark glasses. Her eyes were pitted and scarred, with welts like burn tissue, a pair of wounds.
“What is reflejo?” Ava asked.
But Hernán was trying to catch up with the woman’s shouts. “‘You are not looking at me, you’re looking at yourself,”’ he said. “‘Don’t be so proud. I am you! Your reflection!”’ She plucked at her flesh, her breasts, did a little dance, and she laughed again, sticking out her pink tongue. “‘Take a good look. I am your mirror. You are me — the same. You are Araña.’”
Sensing that Steadman and Ava had turned, that Hernán was following them, still talking as they walked away, the woman pursed her lips and spat at them.
“Fak yo!”
“I got that,” Ava said.
On the way out they heard metal chairs clatter to the cement floor and saw some men fighting, two big men hauling the arms of the grizzled man who had swaggered into the young girl’s cubicle earlier. The old man shouted and kicked at the bouncers as they dragged him outside. When that noise died down they heard another shouting match: Manfred arguing with a man and one of the prostitutes, as though haggling over the price.
Hernán went over to Manfred and spoke to him. The German shrugged and, seeing Ava and Steadman, spoke to them.
“They try to cheat me. I want to leave. I want to go into the chungle.”
Hernán tapped his watch. “ Vámonos.”
Over lunch at the café, Nestor said, “We eat, then we go.”
“Any pork in this?” Sabra asked, using her fork to indicate the sausage in her soup bowl, but not touching the meat with the tines.
Wood said, “Porco?”
“Puerco. Cerdo. Sí, all pork,” Nestor said. With a wink he added, “And a little bit perro”
Sabra peeled a hard-boiled egg, prying pieces of the shell with her long nails.
The rest of them ate impatiently, hardly speaking, but self-conscious in the silence, Janey said, “Oh, super. Elevenses.”
Manfred reached for the dish of hard-boiled eggs and slipped three into his jacket pocket.
“I wonder if we get afters,” Janey said. “Any pud? What about biscuits?”
Reaching again, Manfred began to tug at a covered dish, and when he got it nearer he lifted the lid with one dirty finger and exposed a bright crust.
“Crikey. There is pudding!”
“Llapingachos’’ Nestor said. “Pancakes.”
“And a cuppa char would go down an absolute treat.”
“Special Ecuador coffee,” Nestor said.
“Look, Hack,” Janey said as the coffee was served. “Just a manky little packet of instant.”
Then they were all in the van again, with the boxes of food and stacks of luggage blocking the view out the back window. They were driven very fast down a narrow road fringed by tall grass and yellowish trees. At a settlement of shacks and shops—“Chiritza,” Nestor said — they were shepherded to a riverbank and down a wooden walkway to a waiting canoe. Steadman sketched it quickly in his notebook, for it was less a canoe than an enormous tree trunk that had been hollowed out, its ends blunted, an outboard motor clamped to the stern. The travelers sat on the benches that had been lashed to it, and they watched as mud-splashed boys labored back and forth on the walkway with the luggage and food boxes.
While the lines were being unclipped from the mooring posts and coiled, Nestor knelt and reached into a bag. He took out some hanks of cloth and said, “Where we are going must remain secret. Please put these over your eyes.”
6
THESE NEW BLINDFOLDS on the river made them fearful and garrulous, seeking reassurance, their yakking a frantic signal, like bat-squeal. In places, the river made odd swallowing sounds. Birds jeered at them from high branches, insects strummed and chattered, the heat and moist air left a film of damp scum on their skin and thickened their hair. Ill at ease, trying to imagine the scenes they were passing on the jungle stream, they went on talking, interrupting the birds and insects, interrupting one another. After a while they ceased to sound like bats, but instead squawked like anxious children, praising what they could not see, as though infantilized by the blindfolds, attempting to propitiate the river’s menace.
“This is awesome,” Wood said.
“Sweet,” Hack said.
In a timid voice tinged with nausea Sabra said, “Like I’m traveling into some enchanted cave.”
“As the bishop said to the actress,” Janey said.
“Hernán is so shredding this river,” Hack said.
Keeping his head down, Steadman lifted his mask with one thumb and was briefly blinded. He saw a rusted sign on the muddy riverbank, Prohibido el Paso, and let the mask drop over his eyes once more.
Hack said uncertainly, “This isn’t that bad. Remember that smelly cave system in Mexico where we went diving? Santo something?”
“And the most awesome thing about it is the, like, smell of the darkness. Like you’re in a tunnel.”
“That is a veever bird,” Manfred said.
As though Manfred’s utterance were a cue, Janey said, “Jolly super.”
The air on this part of the upper river was clammy, intimidating, and felt full of looming shapes. Some of these shapes seemed soaked in the fetid stink of fear, the musty forest-hum of an old corpse softening to the sludge of vegetable mulch. The bad smell silenced them like an overwhelming noise. And then Sabra spoke in an earnest voice.
“I think you’re wrong — we are on a quest,” she said. When no one replied, she added, “I want a healing.”
Her seriousness seemed to silence the others. There was only the gurgly drone of the outboard motor, farting when it idled, and the mingled sounds of birds and insects, seeming to compete, their calls skimming across the river’s surface.
“For me, yah, is a kvest.”
“The longest distance on earth is from the heart to the head,” Sabra said, as if she were remembering and quoting. She started to say more when there was a snort of derision from the bow of the boat, which in a bizarre echo was repeated by a birdcall, just as derisive.
“How long we must to wear this thing?” Manfred pleaded, in a different mood.