Читать книгу The Economy of Light - Jack Dann - Страница 7

CHAPTER THREE

DRY STORM

In the days that followed, I would get out of bed early and wander around the ranch. I couldn’t stand to sleep. I would wake up screaming and sweaty, but I would be unable to remember my nightmares. I hated the onset of darkness, and when I finally retired to my room, I would read until I couldn’t stay awake any longer. I ate what Onca gave me and, although my mouth was continually numb, I had stopped taking the pills. I was living day to day, and the days seemed interminably long, as if I was a child and once again had time to be bored. But I wasn’t impatient. I didn’t think about dying hardly at all, and the lesions on my body had begun to clear up with the medicine. Onca also insisted I wash with a putrid smelling brown herb she placed in a glass by my washbasin every day. It looked like a turd and was as slippery and hard as a wet stone.

But I felt safe for the time being, as if I could live in this eternal present until I was ready to face what was happening to me...until I could face dying. I became an ice-cream junkie, mildly high all day, buzzing with cool, inconsequential thoughts, slurring my words as if I had just left the dentist’s chair, and feeling as if my insides were cold as a refrigerator, even while I was sweating in the tropical humidity.

Genaro introduced me to the new men, who weren’t happy to discover that their empreteiro was going to be here permanently. Genaro had unusual luck keeping fieldhands, for most macheteiros won’t work longer than thirty days before moving on. It was obvious that they respected him and considered him their boss; I was simply an intruder. I wondered if my presence would make them insecure enough to leave.

He asked my advice on various things, such as what to do with the grass we’d been experimenting with: a type of grass that could be planted again and again without depleting the soil of nutrients. But the grass would often turn brown and die, even when there was sufficient rain. Some years ago I had also had the idea of trying to crossbreed the indigenous humpback zebu with American stock. The zebu is perfectly adapted to the Amazonian climate and is extraordinarily hardy, but its meat, unfortunately, tastes like old shoes. One afternoon I watched Genaro artificially inseminate several cows with large syringes of bull’s sperm. He wore a long green plastic glove and grimaced every time he did it. But so far we had had no luck in producing a viable crossbreed.

Genaro was patient and dutifully showed me all work that was being done on the ranch. But more often than not my concentration would wander, and I would go off by myself. I suspect Genaro was happy to be on his own.

I began to lose weight. Every day I shed a few pounds; every day Onca would insist I eat more. But I had no appetite, except for ice cream. I began staying in my room more often, as the pain in my stomach became harder to muffle.

And then it stopped raining.

Days on end without even a drizzle, an eerie phenomenon in a rain-forest. Genaro told me that he had known of this happening before; once, when he had been a macheteiro in the Araguaia Valley, it did not rain for two hundred days. If this occurred here, we would be out of business. Although I knew it was wrong thinking, for I had responsibilities to the others on the ranch, I could not help but think that it would be a fitting end to it all. It was as if nature was in league with my death to have my world fall with me. I remembered a quote from the Talmud, something to the effect that every man is a whole universe to himself, which is irrevocably lost when he dies. This seemed like an omen, a physical extension of my death.

But although there was no rain, dry storms occurred several times a day. The sky would turn black, clouds would boil, thunder would crash like cars on a freeway after explosions of lightning, yet no rain. It was disconcerting. I would pace the room during the storms, agitated, listening to the wind breathing around the house, until finally I would have to go outside, for I felt trapped, as if the thick stucco walls were imperceptibly getting closer, as if the electricity of the storm was depleting my room of oxygen and leaving only a hint of ozone to burn in my nose.

It was an odd sensation walking through the fields in the stormy darkness, in the chill of imminent downpour; and yet during those times the air would be as dry as a fall day in upstate New York. The storms seemed to bring out the insects, clouds of them buzzing around my face, a constant annoyance. In a grove of huge Brazil nut trees a green parrot screamed, as if frightened. I could smell the moulds and sweet damp aroma of decay that I associated with forest floor as I passed the grove. But my mind was still blank, emptied, and I seemed to float above the jagged teeth of reflection and memory.

And then I found one of Genaro’s macheteiros dead in the south pasture. Thirty head of steer had fallen around him, their tongues black and hanging out of their mouths, their eyes bulging. I stopped and stood there, realizing an instant later that I had been holding my breath. I could hear the roll of thunder and the buzzing of hundreds of flies.

The ranch hand had fallen face down on the ground. I pulled him over, grasping his arm, and shuddered when I discovered that he was covered with maggots. They were crawling all over his face, in and out of his mouth, and over his eyes, which were wide open, as if he were surprised to find himself in such a state.

It looked as if someone had tossed a grenade into the area. The macheteiro and the cattle he was tending must have been hit by lightning.