The Economy of Light Read online

  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.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  MACHETEIRO DREAMS

  That night I dreamed about the macheteiro. But in my dream the man was transformed into David, my brother.

  I was back in Auschwitz, which was like a park filled with great trees in tended rows, and birds were screeing all around me as animals crashed through nearby bushes. Yet I wasn’t afraid, for this place was a concentration of life rather than death. I walked toward a building that looked like my house on the ranch, except this one was made of red brick and had a huge chimney. I opened the door and saw David strapped into an electrical apparatus of the kind Mengele used to use on us in Auschwitz. Then I saw Mengele. He was older and looked grandfatherly.

  As soon as he saw me, he nodded and gave the order to send electrical shocks through David until he died.

  I ran across the room to my brother and tried to unfasten the leather bands that held him against the machine, but as I touched him his skin turned black under my hands, his flesh became like parchment and broke off in pieces, and his eyes that were watching me, imploring, exploded, washing me with tears and membrane.

  I screamed, and Mengele consoled me, shushing me like a baby, and I could smell the odor of cigarettes on his breath and the strong soap he used. Then he ordered the experiment to be reversed, and as if I had been watching a film being rewound, my brother came back to life, his skin healed, and his eyes, which were as intelligent and questioning as they had ever been, were welling with tears as he said my name. I turned to thank Uncle Pepi, Mengele. He accepted my thanks and then ordered one of his men to tie me to the machine. I begged him not to do this, and just as he was about to lower his hand—the signal to turn on the electricity—I begged him to take my brother instead of me.

  He smiled, and brought his hand down smartly.

  I could hear the thrum of the generator, and I knew I was going to die. But it wasn’t me who felt the heartstopping shock of electricity.

  It was David.

  It was the macheteiro.

  His skin turned black and then to ash.

  * * * *

  I woke up in the darkness of my bedroom and called Onca, as if I were a child who had had a bad dream and needed his mother. The pain in my stomach was a throbbing; I imagined it as a bright light inside me; I imagined it as electrical wires touching, sending electrical jolts of pain through me, frying me from the inside out. But the pain, and the dream, had sensitized me. I had questions and wanted answers instead of herbs.

  And I remembered the dreams I had been having for the past week.

  I had had this dream of David and Mengele, over and over.

  It was as if I had dreamed the reality of the macheteiro. As if I had murdered him. Just as I had murdered David. Just as I was murdering myself.

  But I had also had another recurring dream...Onca’s dream of being on the river with Genaro.

  * * * *

  “Yes, Meester,” Onca said as she stood in the darkness of my room. She was like a shadow, a disembodied voice. I reached over to the bedstead and switched on the lamp. “Ouch,” she said, shielding her eyes. She wore a flower-patterned housedress that she held tightly around herself, as if I had somehow called her in here to catch a glimpse of her naked flesh.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, embarrassed. “I had a bad dream,” but as I looked into her face I remembered something that I had blocked out of my memory for all these years. I saw her brown eyes, wide as a child’s, and remembered being sent on an errand when I was a child in the camp—the nature of the errand, I could not remember. I had gotten lost. I was frightened, for if I were found walking about by the wrong person, I might be turned to smoke in the crematorium the next day. (Hadn’t hundreds of children, most of them my own age, been sent to the crematoriums just because they weren’t tall enough? I remembered when that happened: It was Yom Kippur, and I had to put stones in my shoes in order to gain a centimeter.) I passed by a door and opened it, hoping it was the office where I had been sent. But the room was empty, nothing but two long tables and high-backed wooden chairs. A high window covered with mesh let in a wan gray light. None of the ceiling lamps were turned on. But the far wall was covered with a taut white canvass, and attached to it with pins were eyes of every color. It was as if they were all staring at me. Condemning me for having arms and legs and a head, while they were dead. Forever staring outward onto one of Mengele’s bare walls.

  “Do you wish me to get you something?” Onca asked.

  “No,” I said, “but I want to know about your dream.” She looked uncomfortable, for she turned her head away; it was a subtle movement, but I had come to know her enough to understand her body language. “I’ve been dreaming about being on a boat with Genaro, too. What do you know about this doctor?”

  She shrugged and sat down in a chair near the bed, her back to the window. I had pulled the mosquito netting away, draping it behind the head post. “This you must ask Genaro.”

  “But I’m asking you first. Then if I decide to pursue it further, I can talk to Genaro. But he can be difficult to talk to, and there are some things I need to know.”

  “Okay, if I know something I will tell you.” She pulled her housedress around her, a nervous habit.

  “In this dream you had about me, you said you knew about a doctor who could make me well. Was that your dream or is it true that you know about a doctor?”

  “It is both. I had the dream, and I know about a doctor.”

  “Who is he?” I asked. “Where is he from?”

  She shook her head. “Genaro met this man a long time ago. He only told me so after my dream.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “Genaro does not talk so easily, as you know that. But Genaro was very sick. The man helped him.”

  “Any doctor might have been able to do that?” I said.

  “He had febre. It had killed everyone where he was.”

  “Where was that?”

  She shrugged. “He says above Manaus in Aika territory.”

  The Aika were an Indian tribe, part of the Yąnomamö, the largest primitive group in the Amazon. Onca was Yąnomamö. Perhaps Genaro was too.

  “Were you with him then?” I asked.”

  “I told you, no. It happened before I knew him. What I know is from him and from the dream, that’s all, Meester, I swear that.”

  “How did Genaro get out to see this doctor when the others didn’t, when the others died.”

  “You have to ask him these things,” she said impatiently. She looked tired. Her eyes were swollen, but I had noticed that they’ve been like that for the past few days. “Genaro says this man is powerful like a sorcerer.”

  “And what makes you think I would know this man?” I asked.

  “I had the dream, which told me that. That’s how I know. I had the dream before Genaro told me about what happened to him. That’s how I know. The dream said this man could save you. Some of that was told to me by your own dream, I think.” As she talked, she became more agitated and upset. “You don’t want to try it, that’s okay, too. Everybody dies anyway, and if you go you’ll pay for it anyway. So will Genaro.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that. I don’t know. The fuck if I know,” and she turned her head away again, this time not so subtly.

  “The whole thing is crazy,” I said. “It’s crazy that I would even consider talking about it.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Crazy. Now I think I should be sleeping.” She stood up and walked to the door.

  “Onca?”

  “Yes, Meester?” Her bulk filled up the doorway, part of her in deep shadow like some great ship about to break away from its moorings.

  “A few nights ago I heard you scream.”

  She stared at me.

  “Why did you scream? Do you remember?”

  “I remember.”
>
  I didn’t say anything more, but waited for her to go on, if she would.

  “The scream was for Genaro, but for you too,” Onca said. “I will tell you,” and she walked back in the room, but kept her distance from me. “I dreamed about what happened to Genaro when he was cured by this doctor. I saw in this dream what Genaro was like before he saw this man. He was not so quiet, he had more life. And then he became like you....”

  I felt her words, as if I had been kicked and the wind had gone out of me, but I said nothing.

  “In the dream I saw my husband as he really is, I felt his thoughts, and I felt a sadness that took the life out of Genaro, that took his words and laughter and juice. I can’t describe this sadness, but it was as if he felt he had done something terrible, even though he didn’t, as if he carried terrible things that weren’t his. Like you, Misteer. The same as you. And I feel afraid for both of you, because I know you are going back to meet this sorcerer, and I want to stop you. But I don’t want you to die. But I don’t want you to carry weight, and Genaro, he cannot carry any more. So I don’t know. But if you go, Meester, you must take care of Genaro, no matter what. You must promise me this.”

  I nodded and saw that she was crying, although her voice never wavered, just increased in strength.

  She left and I realized that she was right. I was going to go. I would only become bedridden if I stayed. If I was going to die, it might as well be in the open, on the Amazon, than here. And as I turned off the light, I thought about David and my mother—I had never known my father, for he had died in an automobile accident before I was born. I remembered snatches of childhood before the camp, and I felt the old anger and hatred for Mengele. I had spent the better part of my life tracking him, to balance the scales, and in those years I had lost the focus of anger; finding him had become my raison d’être, but it was a choir I had become resigned to. My passion was gone, walled deep inside, its only escape dreams and nightmares. But now, perhaps my fear of death rekindled it. If there was a doctor living in the jungle, I would find him. If, impossibly, he was Mengele, I would kill him.

  I would kill him for David.

  For my mother.

  For me, for the life he had taken.

  And if he were just a doctor, a missionary treating the Indians, perhaps he would help me to die well.

  As I sank through layers of gray thought to sleep, I felt a strength leaching into my old bones. I dreamed that I held the knife to Mengele. I dreamed that Mengele never was, that I had a life, a family instead of a few ugly affairs. A family instead of an empty apartment. A family instead of a fazenda Indian woman who treated me as an child—perhaps out of love, perhaps because it was her character to mother.

  But as I slept I found my anger and hatred once again. I seethed with it, I was overjoyed with it, and even in the deepest of dreams, I knew that if I were going to die, I would have a purpose. Even if Mengele was dead, even if he was the hollow-socketed skull held up by the coroner in Embu, I would find him, in life or in death. For in my dream, I could see into Onca’s dreams, into Genaro’s dreams; and in deep sleep I believed in sorcery, for now I too was a sorcerer, a demon, and if it took a dream-journey for me to reach and exorcise my past, then so be it.

  * * * *

  The next day I talked with Genaro. We were in my dining room and Onca had prepared the table with silver and crystal as if this was to be my last supper. It was dusk, and the room took on a smoky appearance; the oriental rug that covered the rough plank hardwood floor gave a cozy warmth to the room, as did the hearth, for there were nights here when a fire was in order. “I can’t just make plans to go into the jungle,” I said. “I must know exactly where we’re going.”

  Genaro nodded; he stood beside me and fidgeted while Onca brought a bottle of wine to the table. I had asked him to stay to supper, but he had awkwardly and politely declined. Under normal circumstances, he would have made himself comfortable in one of the plush chairs by the fireplace, as if it was he who owned the ranch and not me. But tonight he was different, taut, as if he were a soldier out on a dangerous maneuver. “We must get to Manaus,” he said, “and then we’ll go up Rio Branco. We can rent a ‘motor.’ Then we go north, right up river, almost to Venezuela, I think. Maybe in Venezuela. I don’t know that. Wakatauteri country, not much on the maps. Dangerous.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Some tribes still eating people. The Inambu and the Casao. I saw Inambu once.” He shook his head slightly, which for Genaro connoted real disgust. And there is disease like black river febre, which kills you in a day. I know of this, too.”

  I nodded; we would be well armed; and I, at least, had little to lose as far as diseases went.

  “But more than that, something hard to put into words.”

  “Try, Genaro.”

  He looked even more uncomfortable and kept glancing at Onca, giving her nasty looks, as if it were her fault entirely that he was called in to talk to me. “It’s different up there from other jungle places,” he said after a time. “More dreams.”

  “What?”

  “Dreams, they are real, like us. You can see them. They are dangerous. They can look like animals, but they aren’t. You will see them if you go. You think not, but you will. Your dreams, too, will be real.”

  I glanced at Onca, who would not make eye contact with me. She seemed to be hearing these things for the first time. This whole thing was crazy. I should lay down in my bed and die in my house, not be planning my last adventure, this field trip into superstition. But somehow I was committed, as if indeed the dreams were in some sense real.

  “How long will it take us to get there?” I asked.

  “From Manaus?”

  I nodded.

  “With a motor?”

  I nodded again.

  “Maybe three days, including the walking.”

  I groaned just thinking about that, for I was in constant pain now. It was a dull ache, even with Onca’s herbs and the prescription drugs. But I continued on as if nothing was wrong, by sheer determination, for I knew that once I allowed myself to become bedridden, I would be finished. The pemphigus, which I had been treating with the methotrexate prescribed by my doctor, had responded somewhat to treatment; it did not clear up, but did not seem to get much worse. Onca, of course, firmly believed it was the soap she had given me; and when I stopped using the foul smelling stuff, I did, indeed, begin to break out. But I also broke out when I stopped using the prescription.

  “Will you make me a list of what we’ll need to take?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “I’ll take care of the plane and the motor,” I said.

  “The boat it’s easier to work out when we get to Manaus. I know someone who will let us use his motor for fifty thousand cruzeiros.”

  That was about a hundred dollars.

  “Do you really believe that this...doctor can help me?” I asked as he turned to leave.

  “If he’s still there,” he said. “That is the chance you will take.”

  “Are you afraid?” I asked him.

  But Genaro just looked at me, his face tight, his eyes hard and glittering. I was reminded of the musselmanner in the camp—those internees who had given up life, but were still alive. The walking dead. But in that instant when our eyes met, everything seemed to change.

  I felt his fear like a spider crawling under my shirt.

  I felt a connection with him.

  I believed him.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE MAGIC OF DARKNESS

  We left a week later and traveled light. I bought comfortable sneakers, much better in rain forest than combat or jungle boots, and stocked our first aid kit with extra medicine. I took cloroquine and Fansidar tablets, which would take care of all but the deadly strains of malaria, insect repellents, and various other medicines, including tablets to purify water, which was often tainted with feces. We also brought a few gifts to trade: cigarette lighters, two powerful flashlights, nails and
needles, combs, a small tape recorder, cheap plastic watches, a few pairs of shorts and dresses, and a hammock. I took several wads of paper money, just to be safe, which I carried inside my shoe, in a money belt, and in my wallet.

  And I also took a thirty-eight-caliber revolver.

  We would fly first to Itaituba in an old Brazilian Bandeirante, which could hold fifteen passengers, and then on to Manaus. I had called an old friend who lived in Belém and ran a one-man commuter airline of sorts—actually, he was a glorified bush pilot. He made most of his money smuggling. He was an expert on gemstones, and he showed me three clearwater diamonds and a fist-sized amethyst crystal he was planning to sell. He had picked them up in Roraima from the garimpeiros, a rough lot, many with forged passports, who risked everything they owned to dig for the stones and perhaps become rich. The stones he bought from them were brute, or uncut, and he cut each one himself. He boasted that he was the finest lapidary in Brazil. Perhaps he was, for the stones, especially the diamonds, were beautiful, almost transparent, with a touch of blue; it was like holding cold pieces of the Brazilian sky. His name was Bob Pizor, and he was an American. He holstered a pistol on his hip and claimed that in Roraima and Porto Velho, where he did a lot of business, you needed a gun if you were going to survive. Yet Bob looked like the antitheses of an adventurer. He was tall and very thin. His shoulders were always hunched, as if he found being tall an embarrassment. He was balding, yet his hair seemed a patchwork flecked with gray. He wore black thick-framed plastic glasses and had uneven teeth that were so white they might have been caps. His full mustache exaggerated his thin face, which was an expanse of forehead, gaunt cheeks, and a cleft chin. He had been a salesman in Long Island. Airplanes were his hobby. He had a family, three children. And here he was in Brazil, enjoying himself hugely and complaining constantly of how guilty he felt about his misspent life. He was the most nervous and intense man I had ever met. He smoked four packs of cigarettes a day, drank too much, and never seemed to sleep. He also made a fetish of wearing a black suit and tie, as if he were still living in suburbia. But commuters in Sea Cliff, Long Island didn’t wear revolvers.