State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [38]
“It isn’t a matter of want,” Mr. Fox said finally.
Marina had relaxed into the conversation and spread herself out across the bed but a bolt of incredulity forced her to sit upright again. “What?”
“There is an agreement of confidentiality—”
“I’m in Brazil,” she said. “I found a lizard in the bathtub this morning the size of a kitten. I don’t know where Dr. Swenson is or how to find her and now you’re saying you aren’t going to tell me how the Lakashi women maintain fertility? Is there something I still need to do to merit your trust?”
“Marina, Marina, it has nothing to do with you. It’s contractual. I’m not allowed to talk about it.”
“It has nothing to do with me? Then why am I here? If this
has nothing to do with me then I would very much like to come
home now.”
In truth, she did not care. She did not care that the Lakashi were having 3.7 times the number of children as compared to other indigenous Brazilians over the course of their lifetimes. She didn’t care where they lived or if they were happy or if they wanted the children they had. What she did care about, cared about very much in fact, was that her employer, who had virtually proposed marriage and then sent her off to the equator after one of Vogel’s employees had died there, now refused to share with her the basic information of the research in question. “When I find Dr. Swenson and all those pregnant Lakashi people, am I supposed to avert my eyes so I won’t figure out how they’re managing this? Do they make it a practice of killing anyone who finds out their secret?” And then she saw Anders standing ankle deep in the muddy river, holding a single blue envelope in his hand. “My God,” she said. “My God, I didn’t mean that.”
“They chew some sort of bark while it’s still on the tree,” Mr.
Fox said.
Marina did not care at all about the bark or the trees. “I didn’t mean that.”
“I know,” he said, but all the light had gone out of his voice, and in another couple of sentences they had wrapped it all up and gotten off the phone. Marina put her shoes on and went back out into the street. The rain had stopped and the sun was beating the pavement and buildings and people and dogs into a flat sameness. She didn’t want to walk to the river or the market hall and so she walked for a while around the square in the choking humidity thinking of how Anders must have walked around the square as well. Maybe he hadn’t felt hopeless when he came here. Maybe he was glad to go on day-long birding excursions into the jungle and drink pisco sours alone at the bar at night. Marina bent over to look at the carved trinkets that a group of natives were selling off a blanket. She picked up a bracelet that could have been smooth painted beads or red seeds with holes drilled through the centers. She let the woman on the blanket tie it to her wrist with a complex and permanent set of knots and then bite off the ends, her lips somehow never touching skin. One of the children, a narrow-chested boy of nine or ten, looked through the menagerie of tiny carved animals that were spread out in front of him and picked out a white heron that was two inches high, a tiny fish caught in the needle of its beak, and he handed it to her. Marina had meant to refuse it, but once she held it up she thought it was in fact very fine, better than anything else she had seen, and so she agreed to buy the heron and the bracelet for a handful of bills she thought worked out to be about three dollars U.S. She put the little bird in her pocket and walked down a series of side streets, careful to keep all her turns in mind. She wasn’t in the mood to get lost. The farther she walked the more she noticed that no one was looking at her. The small boys with stacks of T-shirts and dazzling butterflies pinned to boards inside cheap wooden frames didn’t follow her. The ice cream vendors didn’t call to her, nor did the man with the mustache and a small monkey on each shoulder who was barking at tourists in Portuguese. With her black hair caught