Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

Light was power, and in this experience of power he knew what he had to do with his life, his writing; he saw his story. He realized why he had come to this village on the riverbank, and he knew precisely why it was necessary for him to be here with all those other people who sat before him. He knew them entirely. The process was glorious, yet what he saw — the human shadows turned into plotters of flesh and blood — appalled him.

Slowly he surfaced, as though rising from the depths of the ocean, recovering as the dim light of day returned, real dusk, real shadows, clammy air, in which the world was once again its own human smell — frantic birds, ragged leaves, shabby village, smoky fire. He was back on earth, and even as his knowledge was slipping from him, he suspected that outside that trance state he would never have had a clue that anything coherent was discernible beneath the stagnant surface of the visible world. He had an instant memory that he had seen to its heart, where all was light and everything obvious. But now that he was awake he could not understand much of what seemed only a murky liquefaction of time. And the light was gone.

“I don’t think it worked.”

“You were out cold.”

“How long?”

Ava raised her wrist and showed him her watch, the stopped chronometer. “Almost four hours.”

“ Una ceguera Manfred said, and Nestor shaped his mouth in a halfsmile, as if to indicate “Who knows?”

Manfred was staring, looking greedy again, and somehow Steadman knew the man was disappointed and envious. He had inspired and facilitated the whole thing, and all he had gotten, so he kept saying, were convulsions and cramps and bouts of projectile vomiting. He wanted to know what Steadman had seen. Steadman was so groggy, so confused by the experience, he realized that he would have to take the mixture again in order to remember.

“You were blind. I shined a light into your eyes and got nothing,” Ava said. “Why are you smiling?”

How could he explain? Blindness was the opposite of what he had experienced, but that was how he must have seemed to her.

“I was seeing in the dark,” he said. Late that night he woke in his hammock. He said, “You know that line in Lévi-Strauss? ‘The scent that can be smelled at the heart of a lily and is more imbued with learning than all our books’? That.”

THE OTHERS did not sleep that night. They knew nothing about waiting, they hated to listen, they almost suffocated with impatience. All night they muttered, reassuring themselves, timidly plotting, too afraid to be truly angry. The village children — also awake, but frisky — played in the clearing by moonlight, while the Americans, hungry and uncomfortable, whispered like hostages, simply wishing to leave.

Before dawn, before the sounds of the assertive birds and the mutters of the Secoya women starting their cooking fires, when the Americans heard Nestor’s call, which was just a murmured “Okay, we go,” they were fully awake, and then noisy and eager. Hack threatened to report Nestor in Quito; Janey was tearful, still hung over from the drug; Wood and Sabra were subdued, Wood also queasy from his dose of ayahuasca. Manfred, talking loudly in his sleep, even with his hat over his face, had to be shaken awake. Steadman and Ava woke from their fitful sleep. Steadman thought, Each of us is different now.

In the hot dark morning of dripping trees and big-eared plants and powerful smells of foliage as rank as old clothes, there was no farewell. Blank-faced Secoya adults watched the visitors hurry down the plank to the big canoe while the children turned their backs on them. The Secoya women were the most curious, staring at the American women as though studying a troop of pale excitable apes unsuited to living on this riverbank.

Nestor handed out the blindfolds again in the boat, and Hack said, “You’re actually afraid that we’re going to reveal the existence of this place?”

“Do I look afraid?” Nestor asked, and waited for an answer.

The visitors put on the blindfolds and became silent, sulking like scolded children.

Steadman sat close to Ava, perspiring in the rising heat of morning, breathing the stink of the jungle, listening to the ambiguous birdcalls that sometimes sounded like teasing human squawks. He was sorry to be leaving and still felt the intensity of the village, which was for him a physical sensation, something he could taste, a tightness in his throat, a weariness, the subdued joy of having suffered through an initiation. He had no words for it and yet he felt changed. His sadness was the intimation that he would probably never see the place again, that he would have to keep going, no turning back.

The chugging of the outboard, the gurgle of the bow wave, the low voices of Hernán and Nestor, seemed to relax the others and embolden them to complain.

“I think my sponge bag was pinched,” Janey said. “Couldn’t find it anywhere.”

“My daypack’s all jumbled up,” Wood said.

“Anyone see my knife?” Hack asked.

Sabra said, “Do your blindfolds smell as bad as mine?”

“I don’t give a ruddy fuck anymore,” Janey said.

But they complained in better spirits, dismissively, knowing they were leaving. The van was waiting at Chiritza, where Nestor gathered the blindfolds. They arrived before noon at Lago Agrio and had lunch. After the simplicity of the Secoya village, the town looked especially vicious to Steadman now, for he saw — somehow knew — that the town of drug dealers and gunrunners and whorehouses had once, before the oil boom, been a sleepy village on a riverbank. They boarded the van and took the long road to Baeza, ate there in twilight, passed by Papallacta, and made the long climb to Quito in darkness. The village was not very far after all, yet it now seemed inaccessible.

Steadman wondered if he and the German had become allies in their sharing the datura.

“What did you see?” Steadman whispered as the van labored on the turns up the steep road.

Manfred shrugged and grunted and remained inert, frowning, saying nothing. Steadman smiled in a friendly way but was puzzled by the German’s lack of enthusiasm, and disappointed, too, because he wanted to talk about the drug, verify details and doubts.

The others, united in their failure and humiliation, had taken a disliking to Manfred—“Herr Mephistos,” because Manfred called attention to his sturdy shoes. Now Steadman knew the German did not share the bond of blindness — seeing with tiger’s eyes. On the journey back, Steadman replayed the experience, and his episode of blindness unspooled, returning him to the dazzle that overwhelmed the ayahuasca nausea. The drug was the route to a cave, but a lighted cave with many echoey chambers, and not darkness at all but a vision, another self, another life, another world. He had been alone there. It was like love — a consuming happiness and a careless wishing for more.

Steadman gathered that Manfred had seen nothing or very little, though Manfred was animated by the experience. Finding the drug and persuading Steadman to try it had given him status, set him apart, made him talkative. And Ava occupied a special place for Steadman, having cooperated and watched over him.

Already the Hacklers and the Wilmutts, timid and exposed, were detached from this trip and mentally on the next leg of their journey, the Galápagos. They had come for the ayahuasca and they had a story to take home, even if it was not the story they had planned. The Galápagos would be another story.

As they were climbing out of Tumbaco, ascending the pass that led them to a clouded ridgeline and the thin air of Quito, there was an incident.

Nestor had said, “Baños. Anyone need?”