Caixa called back the reading. Rising still. But this was not the flood season. Smiling, she plowed through the water toward him, the carpet of green parting around the smooth, plucked triangle of her sex. He recalled his first sight of her, shy and smiling, prodded forward by her girlfriends to walk beside the white man with the uncanny eyes. He had offered to bear for a while the basket she wore from a brow strap; angrily she had stepped away and had not come near him again until the evening when the Iguapá nation straggled into its first camp.
So soon had the sense of the pilgrim nation given way to silent stoicism and that determination that set foot before the other, day in, week in, to helppless anger. The Iguapá nation straggled over half a day through the varzea of the Rio Iguapará and the Rio do Ouro. The last, the oldest, the youngest, the weakest stumbled into the camp many hours after the Mair and his guard of pagés struck for the night. Some never arrived.
The Iguapá nation knew hunger. The varzea, so rich in botany, was meager in forage. Food hooted and whistled in the high branches of the ucuuba and envira; on the ground, in the damp shadows, it was guarded with barbarous spines; fruits and vines sickened or poisoned or drove mad with visions. Falcon’s manioc war flour and beans fed a people; Caixa sharing out the thin rations, making sure the old and sick were not bullied out of their portion. The Manaos gravely reported the state of the supplies; Falcon noted them down and did dismal mathematics. Even then, Zemba had set himself between Falcon and Quinn. It was only with the greatest persistence and the muscular weight of his Manaos that Falcon had been permitted through the circle of pages to the Mair.
“You must give them time to rest and hunt and regather their strength.”
“We cannot, we must go on, I have seen.”
In the end the people walked from insane desperation. There was no other choice than to swing up the hammock-pack, slip the strap over the blistered brow, and push the children before. Caixa freely permitted Falcon to share her load. The chests of war flour were emptied and cast aside. Falcon cut up instrument cases, bookbindings, shoes and laces, and satchels to boil soft enough to chew out a little sustenance. The people starved, but the frogs were fed; the sacred curupairás in their pierced ceramic jars. Old men sat down with a sudden sigh at the side of the track, unable to move or be moved, left behind, the green closing around them and the look on their faces relief, only relief. Falcon pushed one foot in front of the other, scourging himmself in intellectual guilt: his tools, his instruments, the brass and the ebony and the glass; the iron and the lead shot, the books half gone to mold without their covers, the clothes and keepsakes — he must set them down and forget them. Each time he returned the same thunderous denial. No he would not, never, for when all else was reduced to the animal, to the mechanical, they were the dumb witnesses to this indifferent vegetable empire that this was more than a march of ants.
Then Quinn — a haggard, bearded, Deuteronomical patriarch leaning on his stick — declared, This is the place.
Falcon had barely been able to frame the question.
“What have you seen?”
“Enough, my friend.” Then he had turned to his people as they filed into the small, sunlit shard where a tree had fallen, revealing the sky. “This is the Marvelous City. We shall build a church and raise crops and live in peace and plenty. No one who comes to this place shall be turned away. Now, let’s burn.”
That night, in the smoke and the embers, Caixa came to Dr. Robert Falcon and never again left.
The Mass was ended. Women, men, children with their heads bound in the wood and leather casings that forced their still-soft skulls splashed barefoot from the church through the silver twilight rain, through the narrow lanes between the malocas shin-deep in liquid mud, touching their foreheads in salutation to the Aîuba as he passed. Falcon ducked under the dripping thatch. The iâos, the brides of the saints, still danced in the foot-polished clay ring, each bearing the emblem of his or her saint: the three-bladed sword; the hunting bow; the peccary’s tusks; masks of the tinamu, the catfish, the frog. The musicians on their raised dais had worked themselves into trance; drums, clay ocarinas. They would play for the rest of the night, the iâos swirling before them, until they fell over their drums and the blood started from their palms. The great pillared hall of Nossa Senhora de Todos os Mundos reeked of incense and sweat and forest drugs. Falcon passed through the dancers like a specter, pausing to cross himself and kiss his knuckle before the crucified Christ, at his feet a woman, face upturned in marvelment, orbs in each hand and upon her brow, her own feet resting upon a golden frog: Our Lady of All Worlds. Out again into the rain and across the fenced compound to the vestibule. Pagés waited on the verandah, golden faces naked in their suspicion of Falcon, jealous of his privileges.
“I did not see you at the Mass, brother.” Quinn removed his stole, kissed it, hung it on the peg.
“You know my opinion. I see little of Christ there.” At the climax of the Mass, after hours of drum and dance, Quinn was carried around the throng of worshipers, passed overhead hand-to-hand, spewing prophecies. Not even in the grimmest privations of the Long March had Falcon seen him so drained.
“It is like there are no lids to my eyes. I see everything, everywhere. It consumes me, Falcon. The apostles were sterner men than I; the gifts of the Paraclete burn those who bear them.”
“It takes more every time, does it not? Give it up. It will destroy you, if not in body, certainly in the seat of reason,” Falcon said in French.
“I cannot,” Quinn whispered. “I must not. I must take more, and greater, if I am to be able to turn passive observation into action and join the others who walk between the worlds.”
“You talk arrant nonsense; you are deranged already. Already the quilombo suffers from want of a guiding hand on the tiller.”
“I am not the only traveler — how could I be, when on countless worlds similar to this one, Father Luis Quinn, SJ, has taken the curupairá and held in his hands the warp and weft of reality? Throughout history there have been — and will be — ones who travel between worlds and times.”
“Now this is nonsense, Luis. Travel across the ages as if stepping from one room into the next? I give you an immediate paradox: the simple effect of treading on a forest butterfly in the past might set in motion a chain of events that make it impossible for Luis Quinn, Society of Jesus, to even exist, let along gavotte merrily through time.”
Quinn pressed his hands together before his face as if in prayer.
“Of course. And where would I walk, but to the singular moment in my life that shaped it beyond all other? I have stepped through and in an instant returned to that lodge in Porto. I have looked on my own face, and seen the look on that face to find itself confronted with a spectral visitor beyond horror: his own gaunt, aged form dressed in priestly black; the ‘Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin’ that having written, moves on. It takes little more to stay the hand, to set the death-dealing mug down on the table, to reel away from friends and comfort and warmth into the street. I have seen myself go on my knees and beg my forgiveness, yet each time, when I flip back to that page that is my own time, this time, I find nothing changed. There is a law here; we may step back through time, but never to the history of our own world. We always walk backward to another world, that world where I appear to myself like a visitation and then vanish never to return, for to do so would violate that great Censor who requires that we may write the stories of others but never our own.”