Ripples patter against the hull, my hand cuts through the water like a keel. The canoe turns, crossing the current for a moment, then moves up a narrow tributary. The water soon grows shallower, the old woman calls back to Tito to warn of obstacles. This is how El Real died; the river silted up, goods and people could no longer reach the town. Transport is possible only during the rainy season, when the water is high. A pallet across a brace of pirogues, the platform on which a car, a truck or a generator can be conveyed.
The river grows ever shallower. The muddy bank is covered in a layer of algae, of a greenish hue I’ve never seen before. The old woman sounds the channel with a stick, the canoe scrapes bottom. Big white herons fly off, croaking. The woman spits into the rusty brown water. Sticking up out of the mud, close together, are straight stalks topped with a heart-shaped leaf. The sun blasts its flames in your face, my shirt is soaked, it’s like inhaling burning air. Stumps, amputated and deathly, block the way. The steaming forest on both sides, a tangle, a knot. Prismatic dragonflies chase each other above the mire. Now the women are pushing the canoe through the mud with long poles, Tito guns the motor. That is how it goes, meter by meter through the muck that belches forth its rotten breath. The jungle summons up abhorrence and enchantment, a greenhouse full of increase run amok. Ibises step calmly through the mud. The young woman climbs into the water to push. I take over her punting-pole, but soon we all have to leave the boat, all except for the child. They go barefooted, I keep my socks on. I sink deep into the mud. The Indians think that’s funny, they laugh. I’m afraid of the hard things I feel beneath my feet. Guerrilleros swallowed up by the mud? The bones of conquistadors? We push the canoe upstream in silence, slaves of the infant king. Huts on poles rise up along the shore, the shadows of human forms inside them. The thin smoke from smoldering fires. The forerunners of El Real. We guide the bow of the canoe towards the bank, where more and more dwellings huddle. Just before we leave the water I step on something sharp with my right foot, it cuts deeply into my heel. I climb onto the shore quickly, pull off my sock and see bright red blood welling up from the gash. Standing around a barrel, the Indians rinse away the mud. I hop over to it and wash my foot. A long, deep wound, I can see the meat beneath the colorless callus. They bring my suitcase ashore, I put on clean socks. Between houses on stilts and the walls of corrals I hobble into town.
A few paved pathways lined with houses, here and there a shop, an open, horizontal shutter to provide shade, on display a smattering of toilet paper, insecticide, soft soap, sweets and canned food. When evening comes the shutters are lowered and locked. People point out to me El Nazareno, a wooden hotel on the main street with rooms on the top floor. The key is with the boy in the shop next door. I have the room facing the street. Before the window hangs a little red rag.
At the edge of El Real I find a Red Cross post. A nurse looks at my foot but can’t do anything to help, it will have to heal by itself. She gives me a bottle of iodine, a roll of gauze and adhesive bandages. The prospect of delay depresses me; for the time being there is no way I can hike on through the jungle as planned. And so I go limping back to El Nazareno.
In the days that followed I tried to find out about Schultz, about where he might be holed up. It had to be somewhere in the jungle around El Real, the research I’d done back in Europe had shown me that much. It was there, after the completion of Abgrund (completion — a strange word for something that had been actually made to disappear), that he had started on Titan; he had been able to summon up enough vital hatred for yet another act of destruction. To get there, though, I needed a guide. From the travelers’ handbook to Panama I had drawn the name of one man, Edmond Solano, who was apparently the best guide around. But when I asked the rangers at the Agencia Ambiental about him, the man talking to me mimed a pistol with thumb and forefinger, held it against his temple and pulled the trigger.
I lay on my bed, tangled up in the rotations of the ceiling fan. It was dark outside, a powerful chirping rolled in over El Real from the surrounding forest. What I knew: five hundred years ago conquistadors had built an outpost here, along the banks of the Río Tuiro, to ward off the bandits who preyed on the gold kept upstream at Santa María. Even deeper into Darién, to the south, lay the Cana Valley, where the gold mines were. In Santa María the gold piled up until there was enough to warrant putting together an armada and taking it to Panama City.
The bed sagged like a hammock, a drab, membrane-thin blanket was all I had over me. The temperature had barely dropped at all.
Past the army post, a canopy under which drowsy soldiers lay on cots, was the office of the Agencia Ambiental. There I was given the cold shoulder. The rangers’ faces froze when Schultz’s name was mentioned. I limped back and forth, back and forth between the hotel and the settlement. The wooden houses stood on pilings of wood or cement, underneath them chickens pecked amid the garbage. In the shade of the palm and mango trees, men were training their roosters for the cockfights. With a rapid movement they would toss the bird to one side, to teach it to regain its footing quickly. They would lay their rooster on its back, to see how quickly it was back on its feet, again and again, dozens of times in a row. Then they staked the bird by one leg in the shade, a tin can of fresh water beside it. Sphinx-like old folks watched from porches. Screens at the windows, fans slicing the thick, hot air. I had taken the laces out of my shoe to give my foot more room. The blood pounded in my heel, I hopped along on the ball of my foot. The walking wounded.
After a few days my hands began to swell and go numb, I was worried about infection. I spent the hottest part of the afternoons lying in my room; I could see it, I would have to be airlifted out to Panama City, delirious. My right hand amputated, the left one saved only in the nick of time. The foot would have to be treated for gangrene. In the water stains on the ceiling I saw deformed babies. My eyes slid lethargically over the details, a nail in a plank, little mounds of sawdust on the floor. The beams were eaten hollow, you could see the round entrance and exit holes. Some of the beams were nothing but a tube filled with crumbly sawdust, held together by the paint. If all the other noises were to stop, the vibrating zoom of insects, the crowing of roosters, all you would hear would be a close-set, uninterrupted gnawing. One day this room, this hotel, would be devoured whole.
I dream of her, my living, sorrowful mother, she says, ‘You’re starting to look less like me all the time! Look at that. .’