Gringo

XXVI

THE RED HOWLER MONKEYS

THE night shrilled, immense, pulsing, like another forest beneath the forest.

Gringo was waiting, feet dangling from his hammock, chin in his hands. Green or red fireflies zigzagged in the buzzing of the mosquitoes. He listened to his pain, his old question: a man — this creature — in the high shrill tide of the night, what was it? It was naked, it had no other sound but a question — it was its own croaking, its own dull music, like this throbbing in his torn leg. It was bent over nothing, which was like a burning, which was the only something. After millions and millions of years and forests begun again, would man — this creature — still be this burning question amid the shrieking of the lechuzas and the same great night?

It takes a long time, a man. Where does it go?

He slid down from his hammock; the cold blade of a dagger pressed against his hip. No — Vrittru was nothing. But this question? If She left, he was only a pathetic, pitiful croaking in a great rolling tide, and then the little Gringos start over again — until when? Where is the end, the MOMENT, of all of this?

He advanced meter by meter, feeling each stump, each dead twig — he had to go around Vrittru's hut to reach the violet-wood. What if he planted this dagger in Vrittru's heart?... For a moment he hesitated. "What use is a man?" Rani had said. But...

There was a glow between the hut's leaves — they were keeping vigil over Shuma; tomorrow at dawn they will cremate him. And then the little Shumas start again, the little Gringos.

A serpent slithered past him. Gringo was crawling without a sound. Now he was at Ma's hut. His heart was pounding as if it would burst. Brujos the slug was sitting on the violet-wood, twenty meters away... One would never be done with killing.

He slipped behind, skirted the hut, cut a section of leaves with his dagger. A small lamp burned on the ground, illuminating the hammock like a boat in the night.

She was all white in the hammock, motionless. Her arms lay along her body; She seemed to be sailing endlessly, silently, on an immense river of night. 

She was smiling.

Gringo took out a palm heart from his belt.

— Here, eat — it's good, he whispered.

Her hand took his; he felt like weeping, all at once, stupidly. That hand was cool as the small spring.

— You'll stay, won't you? Tomorrow I'll bring you algae from the waterfall...

She watched him, smiling. He knew it was vain — he knew She had not wished to heal Vrittru's son — he knew... and yet he asked, like that vain question in his heart, because it must burn, because one must go all the way to the end. And the end was like those diamond eyes with warm gold at the bottom. One sinks in there and all is well. But life? This life that is not yet. This "not-yet" that burns?

He held that cool hand, and his question drifted away with the shrieking of the lechuzas and the strident wake of the night.

— Ma...

She shook her head gently. She closed her eyes for a moment. Her hammock seemed to sway lightly on a crest of flames. Then... far away, from the depths of the West and the endless trees, like a great swell of night, rose the clamor of the red howler monkeys — low, rumbling, growing, from tree to tree and nearer, hoarse, nearer still, rolling through the night and invading the whole clearing with a deep howling like a fantastic savage chorus bursting from the bowels of the earth and its millennia of poignant nights — like the powerful, frenzied beating of a thousand fists pounding an immense chest of revolt and letting loose all at once a cry. Then slowly the demented swell receded from tree to tree, merged, dissolved in the gorges of the serra and a still denser night, leaving a trail of murmurs and a sudden silence like an abyss: a small man alone and throbbing, naked, derisory, in the high ancient jungle.

The hammock moved slowly, as if it had slipped its moorings. 

Gringo was still holding that hand.

He sank all at once like a cormorant into smooth waters, sucked to the bottom of a burning funnel.