“Remember saying something about being happy to bathe in the Amazon? About washing your clothes in the river?”
She nodded.
“You never want to go into this river. You don’t even want to stick the tip of your finger in that water. Watch what happens, now. Our native friends came out to see this, you should, too.”
“The Indians knew you were going to put on this demonstration? How could they?”
“Don’t ask me, ask them. I don’t know how they do it.”
Ballard leaned over the railing and used his knife to scrape the few things on the plate into the river. Even before the little knuckles of meat and gristle, the shreds of vegetables, and liquid strings of gravy landed in the water, a six-inch circle of turbulence boiled up on the slow-moving surface. When the bits of food hit the water, the boiling circle widened out into a three-foot, thrashing chaos of violent little fish tails and violent little green shiny fish backs with violent tiny green fins, all in furious motion. The fury lasted about thirty seconds, then disappeared back under the river’s sluggish brown face.
“Like Christmas dinner with my husband’s family,” Sandrine said.
“When we were talking about throwing Tono-Bungay and Little Dorrit into the river to see what would happen—”
“The fish ate the books?”
“They’ll eat anything that isn’t metal.”
“So our little friends don’t go swimming all that often, do they?”
“They never learn how. Swimming is death, it’s for people like us. Let’s go back in, okay?”
She whirled around and struck his chest, hard, with a pointed fist. “I want to go back to the room with the table in it. Our table. And this time, you can get as hard as you like.”
“Don’t I always?” he asked.
“Oh,” Sandrine said, “I like that ‘always.’”
“And yet, it’s always different.”
“I bet I’m always different,” said Sandrine. “You, you’d stay pretty much the same.”
“I’m not as boring as all that, you know, ” Ballard said, and went on, over the course of the long afternoon and sultry evening, to prove it.
After breakfast the next morning, Sandrine, hissing with pain, her skin clouded with bruises, turned on him with such fury that he gasped in joy and anticipation.
1976
End of November, hot sticky muggy, a vegetal stink in the air. Motionless tribesmen four feet tall stared out from the overgrown bank over twenty yards of torpid river. They held, seemed to hold, bows without arrows, though the details swam backward into the layers of folded green.
“Look at those little savages,” said Sandrine Loy, nineteen years old and already contemplating marriage to handsome, absurdly wealthy Antonio Barban, who had proposed to her after a chaotic Christmas dinner at his family’s vulgar pile in Greenwich, Connecticut. That she knew marriage to Antonio would prove to be an error of sublime proportions gave the idea most of its appeal. “We’re putting on a traveling circus for their benefit. Doesn’t that sort of make you detest them?”
“I don’t detest them at all,” Ballard said. “Actually, I have a lot of respect for those people. I think they’re mysterious. So much gravity. So much silence. They understand a million things we don’t, and what we do manage to get they know about in another way, a more profound way.”
“You’re wrong. They’re too stupid to understand anything. They have mud for dinner. They have mud for brains.”
“And yet.…” Ballard said, smiling at her.
As if they knew they had been insulted and seemingly without moving out of position, the river people had begun to fade back into the network of dark, rubbery leaves in which they had for a long moment been framed.
“And yet what?”
“They knew what we were going to do. They wanted to see us throwing those books into the river. So out of the bushes they popped, right at the time we walked out on deck.”
Her conspicuous black eyebrows slid nearer each other, creating a furrow. She shook her beautiful head and opened her mouth to disagree.
“Anyway, Sandrine, what did you think of what happened just now? Any responses, reflections?”
“What do I think of what happened to the books? What do I think of the fish?”
“Of course,” Ballard said. “It’s not all about us.”
He leaned back against the rail, communicating utter ease and confidence. He was forty-four, attired daily in dark tailored suits and white shirts that gleamed like a movie star’s smile, the repository of a thousand feral secrets, at home everywhere in the world, the possessor of an understanding it would take him a lifetime to absorb. Sandrine often seemed to him the center of his life. He knew exactly what she was going to say.
“I think the fish are astonishing,” she said. “I mean it. Astonishing. Such concentration, such power, such complete hunger. It was breathtaking. Those books didn’t last more than five or six seconds. All that thrashing! My book lasted longer than yours, but not by much.”
“Little Dorrit is a lot longer than Tono-Bungay. More paper, more thread, more glue. I think they’re especially hot for glue.”
“Maybe they’re just hot for Dickens.”
“Maybe they’re speed readers,” said Sandrine. “What do we do now?”
“What we came here to do,” Ballard said, and moved back to swing open the dining room door, then froze in mid-step.
“Forget something?”
“I was having the oddest feeling, and I just now realized what it was. You read about it all the time, so you think it must be pretty common, but until a second ago I don’t think I’d ever before had the feeling that I was being watched. Not really.”
“But now you did.”
“Yes.” He strode up to the door and swung it open. The table was bare, and the room was empty.
Sandrine approached and peeked over his shoulder. He had both amused and dismayed her. “The great Ballard exhibits a moment of paranoia. I think I’ve been wrong about you all this time. You’re just another boring old creep who wants to fuck me.”
“I’d admit to being a lot of things, but paranoid isn’t one of them.” He gestured her back through the door. That Sandrine obeyed him seemed to take both of them by surprise.
“How about being a boring old creep? I’m not really so sure I want to stay here with you. For one thing, and I know this is not related, the birds keep waking me up. If they are birds.”
He cocked his head, interested. “What else could they be? Please tell me. Indulge a boring old creep.”
“The maids and the waiters and the sailor guys. The cook. The woman who arranges the flowers.”
“You think they belong to that tribe that speaks in bird calls? Actually, how did you ever hear about them?”
“My anthropology professor was one of the people who first discovered that tribe. The Piranhas. Know what they call themselves? The tall people. Not very observant, are they? According to the professor, they worshipped a much older tribe that had disappeared many generations back — miracle people, healers, shamans, warriors. The Old Ones, they called them, but the Old Ones called themselves We, you always have to put it in boldface. My professor couldn’t stop talking about these tribes — he was so full of himself. Sooo vain. Kept staring at me. Vain, ugly, and lecherous, my favorite trifecta!”