Undergrowth

Nancy Burke

Description

In this luminous novel, the all-too-human experiences of fear, love, and loss become amplified with potentially disastrous consequences.

In 1960s Brazil, an indigenous group is on the brink of a tragedy, the dimensions of which they are only beginning to grasp. A small band of disaffected government agents, academics and visionaries is determined to fight for their cause. Among them is James Ardmore who, along with his nephew Larry, travels to Pahquel, a village in the crosshairs of an environmental showdown.

When James dies en route, Larry is left to decide: Should he attempt to escape his own personal demons by immersing himself in a completely foreign culture? Or retreat and resume his disaffected life in the U.S.? What costs will he bear if he chooses to press forward?

Against a lush backdrop, the author gives voice to the complexities of social, anthropological and environmental forces. This is a page-turner of an adventure story that rests upon the deep and unsettling layers of undergrowth.

Sujets

• Cultural Heritage
• Literary
• Literature
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Gibson House Press
• Date de parution: 01 octobre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780986154188
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

G IBSON H OUSE P RESS
Flossmoor, Illinois 60422
GibsonHousePress.com
2017 Nancy Burke
All rights reserved. Published 2017.
ISBNs: 978-0-9861541-6-4 (paperback); 978-0-9861541-7-1 (Mobipocket); 978-0-9861541-8-8 (epub); 978-0-9861541-9-5 (PDF)
LCCN: 2017940163
Cover design by Christian Fuenfhausen. Text design and composition by Karen Sheets de Gracia in the Malaga typeface.
Printed in the United States of America

21 20 19 18 17 1 2 3 4 5
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper)

For Steve
PART
ONE


I
THERE WAS A stand of short, craggy trees with leaves like cupped hands that filled with water in the rain and held it, forming pools that were already teeming with life by the time the rain subsided. All the rest of the afternoon, as if the trees had burst forth into blossom, a thousand civilizations, each different from the rest, grew in those small ponds, depending upon which insect had landed where, or which spore had fallen. They flourished until the sun dried them up, and left their residues in the leaves thick palms, to be dissolved by rain the next day.
In the forest, there are plants that grow with such speed and force that they might be mistaken for animals, and others that grow so slowly they might as well be stones. Each has a heart with an audible beat-a single strand in an infinite density of sound-as well as its own form of silence. The pulse of their vibrations pushes up through the human stem, moving us toward and away from what we love.

To say that Larry was unsure as he boarded the plane for Rio would have been inaccurate. Rather, he was compelled to follow a certain course, and yet had sufficient self-awareness to understand that although compulsion seems, on the surface, the embodiment of purpose, it is also always blind. He was being thrown, or carried, or held, and thus was freed from the necessity of looking forward, as a child in its mother s arms can allow its eyes to wander. His uncle, James, who was already engrossed in a magazine, sat to his right, and beyond him sat a row of strangers with their heads bowed, each of whom struck him as distasteful. Their stillness seemed to him to convey passivity and compliance, in stark contrast to the stillness of their reflections in the window, which seemed almost holy as they spread out, translucent, over the dark carpet of the earth. His freshman roommate had jokingly called him a misanthrope, which had upset him; far from being incapable of human love, he was so deeply sensitive to it that he could be swept away by a scent, or a reflection in a window, and true human contact could easily overwhelm him. James, however, had no such sensitivities, and threw himself into the thick of one scene after another. The nephew and uncle complemented each other; they understood each other with a sort of sharp intuition, and would have looked forward to planning many future adventures together, except that the uncle was dying.
Do what you have to do, said James, looking up from his magazine with resigned amusement as Larry started to unbuckle his knapsack. When you re ready, I have something to show you.
In a minute, said Larry. He began to arrange his possessions on the floor by his shoes, on his tray table, and between his leg and the arm of his seat. He lined up his books, then pulled them into his lap and started again. When you are headed south, as they were, you cannot afford the illusion of a magical relationship to time that travelers to Europe have, in which the duration of night seems miraculously tied to the length of the trip. Rather, time is resolute, particularly when you know that the first flight will be the prelude to a series of longer and longer ones that cover progressively less ground. Larry remembered this, even though he had last made the trip to Pahquel eight years ago, when he was just eleven. He remembered endless plane rides, endless waits for planes, waits in hot, shabby offices for tickets, or visas, or permits, or directions; rides on buses, sandwiched between people and packs and goats, interminable rides in carts, on leaky boats in the pouring rain; rides in cars that broke down more often than they ran. That he had a clear sense of interminability made it all the more urgent that he arrange the space around him with deliberate economy. When he was a boy, he would fantasize about how he might set up his belongings in a smaller and smaller space, in a space the size of his bedroom, or a bathroom, or a shower stall. He would build a shelf at the very top of the stall for his guitar, which would just fit diagonally, a shelf for his clothes, a shelf for food, and two shelves for books. Were he ever to end up in a concentration camp, he knew exactly how he would arrange his things along the side of his tiny corner of sleeping space, or underneath the planks in the floor. Fluency in the language of space, invincibility in regard to it, allowed him respite from whatever impending sense of helplessness he felt in the face of time.
Just let me know when you re ready, said James again, more eager for his attention now, but also still amused. James tended to fill the space available to him with his own body, which seemed to inflate until it pushed against the confines of whatever held him. Larry had always thought, growing up, that his uncle s capacity to fill a void was simply the result of his bulky, haphazardly proportioned, six-foot-three-inch frame, but now here he was, so much diminished and yet still so physically voluble, hanging over the armrest that divided their two countries, unaware of the borders he was crossing. In fact, James possessed little that wasn t a part of his own body; his shaving kit, his bedroll, his few articles of clothing, all had become melded to him after years of use. They even came to smell like him, so that as Larry began to turn the pages of the handwritten notebook James laid out in front of him, he had the sense of being saturated by it as he read.
There it is! James said in Pahqua, nodding towards the book.
There it is! Larry repeated.
When you have that in your hands, it s like you re holding the one bird, said James, using a Pahqua figure of speech. On the first page, over pencil lines drawn with a clearly dented ruler, he had written: Pahqua: A Dictionary of Grammar and Definitions by James Lawrence Ardmore. James searched Larry s face for a sign of awe and found it, though an onlooker would have only seen the nephew wince.
Amazing to see it all together, isn t it? An entire civilization! An entire life s work!
Amazing, said Larry in English.
Larry couldn t tell his uncle that it wasn t the notebook but the sound of the words that had amazed him. When had Pahqua ceased to have a sound? Before their first trip, and during the year after it, before Larry had started junior high, and before James had left, they spoke all the time. They would sit at the dinner table at Larry s house and ask each other to pass the meat in Pahqua; they would reminisce in Pahqua. His parents never showed the slightest curiosity, or even irritation, at their exclusion. They spoke a few words to each other while Larry and James were talking, and it seemed to Larry in retrospect that their conversation was equally impenetrable and foreign.
Then James disappeared-to Alaska, as far from the Amazon as he could get-and there was no one left to talk to, and the memory of Pahqua eroded until the language itself seemed to have less and less to do with sound and more to do with a sensation, in his stomach or his head, a pure intention which he knew before he spoke it. That he would never again, he could only assume, meet another living soul who even knew of Pahqua, let alone could understand it, rendered it even more intimately suited to him. Because he was as desperate for solitude as for communion, it was enough that it made possible an internal dialogue, a sort of instantaneous translation or reinterpretation of his thoughts, and thus a sense of confirmation, simultaneously from deep inside himself and from a great distance away. To hear James s voice confused all that, and yet also stirred in him something else, an onrush of gratitude or relief, over what he couldn t say.
The notebook was divided into three sections separated by sheets of heavy red cardboard, and each section was filled with pages written in awkward capital letters on hand-ruled lines. There was something desperate, Larry knew, in the makeup of someone who would spend eight years, off and on, in a freezing cabin in Alaska, trapping squirrels to fend off starvation and painstakingly transcribing the contents of an entire duffel bag filled with scraps of paper-corners ripped from government documents and pages ripped from books, their margins filled to the edges with tiny lettering-into a cardboard binder. That it was the product of such a powerful irrational force commanded the sort of reverence one felt for nature, and that the force originated in James made the reverence personal.
It s yours now, said James in Pahqua. It s all I have.
Larry closed the notebook. He crossed his arms over it, holding it against his chest, and felt it pull him forward, as though it were a hook that held him, and the reel was hidden somewhere in Pahquel.
Up and down the aisles, lights were being switched off, like the lights in the houses on a street. By midnight, only Larry and James and a few scattered others were awake, their isolated beacons suggesting watchfulness or sleepless yearning. But Larry and James harbored reasons not to think about phantoms such as yearning, and avoided confusion by rationalizing their decision to fly together halfway around the world, at an expense neither could afford, James having pl