• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 869 0

her suitcase was simply not a full time job, even though Tomo, the young man at the front desk of her hotel, was kind enough to call the airport twice a day and inquire as to its status. There were also the Bovenders to wait for. Marina had the address of Dr. Swenson’s apartment and so every day she had written to them, putting both the names Bovender and Swenson on the envelope and neatly printing her request for contact along with her hotel information. From what Marina could tell from the building’s architecture and neighborhood, and from the well-appointed lobby where she left off her letters at the desk every morning, it was one of the city’s better residences. She wondered what it was costing Vogel to keep a pied-à-terre in Brazil that was mainly inhabited by bohemians who didn’t seem to be home much themselves. Of course, it was possible that the bohemians had gone on. They had been described as travelers after all, and this was clearly a city where people who had somewhere else to go would not be inclined to stay. She nodded again to the concierge who as always took her envelope with an enormous grin and great, energetic nodding.

“Bovenders,” she said pointedly.

“Bonvenders!” he replied.

She decided that her project for the afternoon would be to cobble together a note in Portuguese to hand him tomorrow. It would be better if she could explain to the concierge, as well as to the mythical Bovenders, what she was after.

All of Marina’s activities—waiting at the river, waiting outside the apartment building, wandering through the city in hopes that she might be struck by some piece of inspiration that could lead her in the direction of Dr. Swenson—were punctuated by rain, blinding, torrential downpours that seemed to rise out of clear skies and turn the streets into wild rivers that ran ankle deep. People moved calmly from the open spaces and pressed their backs against buildings, sharing whatever room there was beneath various overhangs while they waited for the storms to pass. Several times a day she had the opportunity to be grateful to Rodrigo for pushing the rubberized poncho on her.

Of course there were times when neither the poncho nor the awnings were enough and the rain drove Marina to run in her flip-flops back to the hotel, every drop pricking her skin like a hornet. The chemicals in her sunscreen mixed with the DEET in her insect repellent and when she tried to wipe the water from her face it burned her eyes until she was half blind. Back at the hotel she showered and napped and did her best with the James novel, and when she’d had enough of that she read about the reproductive endocrinology in the Lakashi people.

As Anders had tried to explain to her when she had been so disinclined to listen, the Lakashi were an isolated tribe in the Amazon whose women appeared to continue to give birth to healthy infants well into their seventies. Securing accurate ages on the women was of course an inaccurate science. Still, it did not undermine the point: old women were having babies. The Lakashi were reproducing for up to thirty years beyond the women in the neighboring tribes. Families containing five generations were commonplace, and aside from what could perhaps be called a heightened exhaustion, they all appeared to enjoy a state of health commensurate to that of their indigenous peers. Birth defects, mental retardation, problems with bones, teeth, vision, height, weight, everything came out as average in both mothers and children as compared to members in neighboring tribes over a thirty-five-year period of study.

Marina rolled over onto her back and held the journal above her. A thirty-five-year period of study? That would mean that while Dr. Swenson was, to the best of her knowledge, teaching a full load at Hopkins she was also studying the Lakashi in Brazil? Of course, who knew what she did on the weekends, spring breaks, Thanksgiving vacations. It was possible she had been flying to Manaus all those years and hiring a boat to take her down the splitting tributaries of the Rio Negro. Had it been anyone