“If they go, no need for you to go yourself,” replied Kayapi in Xemahoa. “They are your shadows. You, the substance. Maka-i is being born soon. You must be present. These men will work for you.”
“Why is the opinion of this Indian so important?” demanded Joam angrily. “Is this savage to decide what you do, for you?”
Pierre stared at Joam in revulsion. ‘This savage!’ Pierre could have wept—to swell the flood.
“I’m sorry,” Joam apologized. “Naturally Socialism is for all. What I mean is, the Indian isn’t yet qualified to decide.”
You pay your money and you take your choice. Of Marx or Christ. What did the choice matter to the Xemahoa! Whichever gained control over them, they would be destroyed. The birds of their thoughts scattered. Trapped with birdlime in tin huts.
“I’ll wish you luck,” said Pierre, making up his mind abruptly, arriving at the impossible choice. “I love you as comrades, as deeply as I hate the dam. I want you to destroy it. So much. I want you to empty out that yanqui fire extinguisher.”
“Besides,” interrupted Kayapi, “you never hit anything with your gun, Pee-áir. You are the listener and learner, not the warrior. Bruxo knows. Why do you think he let you meet maka-i the other night? Why do you think the girl comes to your hammock? Why do you think I show you how to eat the earth? Your box-that-speaks is your weapon, Pee-áir, not the gun. I do not say you lack courage. You met maka-i. But you are a different man. Your life has a different shape. Consider wisely. Do not let the birds of your thought fly the wrong way.”
‘You let me come this far towards the dam, Kayapi!’
“Your birds had to fly this way. Now they need to return. These people will do your work.”
“Why do you talk two different languages to each other?” demanded Iza. “He understands your Portuguese perfectly well. Can’t he reply in Portuguese?”
“It’s important that he speaks in his native language. A great thing is happening in the minds of the tribe. He wishes to belong.”
Kayapi looked sullen.
“Maka-i will be born, Pee-áir. Hurry up.”
“You said there was time!”
“I was wrong. There’s no time. It happens soon.”
“He says we have to go back,” Pierre told the guerrillas.
The woman gazed disbelievingly at Pierre.
“Why?”
Pierre chose his words carefully.
“What is happening in his village is very important, as a human event. If I’m not present to see what happens, something amazing might be lost. I can’t risk it. Not just on my own account. But, well—for Man.”
“How can you say so, when you have been with Frelimo and seen what they do for Mankind?”
“This tears me apart. Half of me wants to go on with you. Half has to return. I need to be two people at once.”
“An amoeba,” Raimundo sneered. “A shapeless amoeba wants to split in half.”
“When you meet maka-i,” Kayapi whispered, “you are two men, three men, many men. Your mind is great with words. You speak the full language of man.” But was Kayapi his evil genius or true guide?
“Dear people. Comrades. Iza, Joam, Raimundo. I’m going back with him to the village.”
“What made your mind up?” Raimundo jibed. “The sight of guns? The reality of a point-four-five INA sub-machinegun? The thought of it going bang bang? You despicable bourgeois intellectual. No doubt Ford or Rockefeller is paying you to visit this jungle to dredge up this mystification. Who knows who is paying?”
“Shadow and substance, Pee-áir,” hissed Kayapi. “Is it not strange to meet your shadows in the jungle? They meet you to show you how they will go on for you. Do you imagine it is an accident we meet them?”
“I’ll do what you say, Kayapi. You’ve been right before. In my own terms, it’s wrong. But they can’t be my terms if I’m to understand Xemahoa. If I’m wrong then I shall let everyone know it. I promise.”
“Fair promises,” snapped the woman. “We’ve wasted time and energy on you. I suppose we should shoot you both, for security. But we’re not going to. You can have the opportunity to feel like a worm. Perhaps then you may keep your promise! Such as it is. I guess that is public relations if not exactly revolution. Fuck off then, Frenchman.”
Pierre and Kayapi set off southwards again through the flooded creeks and lagoons. To Pierre’s eyes the water already seemed centimetres higher than on their journey north, and it still rained.
As evening fell, Pierre finally asked the Indian.
“Which of the Xemahoa was your father, Kayapi? Is he still alive?”
“Can’t you guess that, Pee-áir?”
“The Bruxo?”
Kayapi nodded.
“He visited my mother’s village. They said they wanted to honour him because of his power and his knowledge. Wanted to steal some of it maybe. But my father was cunning. He insisted on a bleeding girl. The same as for you, Pee-áir. So that there will be no baby from him, and the Xemahoa can stay together. But something happened anyway, he was so powerful a man. The girl made a baby. I am his halfson. It is my grief—and my glory.
You know about being half, Pee-áir. Half of you went north with those men.”
“True, Kayapi.”
Kayapi abruptly swung the dugout towards the bank, drove it deep into the branches, killed the engine…
“You hear?”
Pierre strained against the rainfall of water on leaves. At last he caught the deepening beat of a motor. Kayapi was pointing upwards through the branches at the sky.
Some minutes later, a helicopter passed through the rainmist, following the line of the watercourse—a dark ugly whale lumbering through the wet air.
It shone a spotlight on the waters below, Kayapi pressed Pierre down into the bottom of the dugout, so that his white face and arms wouldn’t show.
NINE
The jet began its landing approach over mountains which moonlight cut out harsh and rutted with shadows. These rapidly dipped into foothills as the plane fell keeping pace with the falling ground. Hard to be sure they were descending except for the gut sense of changing inertia. Then the jet touched and was rolling along a level barren valley between landing lights towards a bright-lit cluster of buildings. A droop-nosed SST with cyrillic letters on its side dwarfed the other jets parked there.
Despite the presence of these brightly lit buildings and jets, the whole area struck Sole as empty and meaningless. These artefacts existed in a limbo like a flat concrete zone hidden away in the subconscious of a catatonic. They represented wealth, surely. Investment. Expertise. But investment in nothing; expertise for no apparent motive; a bankrupt wealth. This meeting place between Man and Alien might have been set down prepacked in this desert valley, clipped off the back of a cereal carton.
An armed military policeman in a white helmet met them outside the terminal, checked their names off a clipboard and waved them upstairs.
Here they found forty or fifty people gathered in a long room, one wall of which was glass, giving a view of the airstrip illuminated by its landing lights and the dark moon-silhouetted hills.
The crowd formed local eddies of three or four people each. Zwingler acknowledged a few nods, but made no move to join any of the sub-groups. He stood with Sole looking out at the night while the last few arrivals filtered into the room. Sole heard Russian voices as well as American. After ten minutes the soldier stepped inside and flashed a brief, subdued salute at a man in his late forties with short-cropped wiry black hair highlighted by a few grey strands, lending him a certain maestro-like presence.