Ann Patchett - State of Wonder

“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 else she would have been certain the whole report was an ambitious fraud, but Dr. Swenson had always exhibited a relentless energy that defied all human understanding. If someone had told Marina that while she was stumbling through her rounds half asleep in Baltimore, Dr. Swenson was taking the red-eye to Brazil to collect data, she would have been impressed but not amazed. In fact, the very paper she was reading included research from a dissertation for which she had been awarded a doctorate in ethnobotany from Harvard. It seemed there was a great deal about Dr. Swenson she didn’t know.

When the rains came hard and caught her out too far to run back to the hotel, Marina would go to the Internet café and pay five dollars to look up information about Dr. Swenson or her tribe, but as she sat there trying not to let her hair drip on the keyboard she found there was remarkably little information to be had. Google Annick Swenson and there were course descriptions, appearances at medical conferences, papers — mostly related to gynecological surgery — some tedious postings from medical students who complained that Dr. Swenson’s classes, and probably all of their classes, were unfairly difficult. Most of the mentions of Lakashi linked back to the New England Journal of Medicine article, although the name also came up in relation to the famous Harvard ethnobotanist Martin Rapp, who had first interacted with the tribe while taking plant samples in 1960. His interest in them as a people appeared nominal, as his writing about their habits was limited to which species of fungi they did and did not consume. There was a single picture of him, an extremely thin sunburnt man with light hair and a straight English nose who stood a head above the natives on either side of him. They were all holding up mushrooms. Marina read everything she could find about Dr. Rapp and the Lakashi in hopes that there might be some clues as to their location, but the most specific directive she found was “central Amazon basin.” Leave it to Dr. Swenson to somehow manage to keep the Internet out of her business.

“Tell me they’ve found the suitcase,” Mr. Fox said as soon as he answered the phone. Mr. Fox had somehow become more focused on whether or not she had made successful contact with her luggage than with either Dr. Swenson or the mythical Bovenders.

“Apparently the airport code for Manaus is MAO. Madrid is MAD. The theory is that an O starts to look like a D after a certain number of suitcases and so they start sending bags to Spain.”

“I’m going to mail you another phone,” he said. “I’ll get it programmed and shipped down there tomorrow. You’re going to need more Lariam soon anyway. Make a list of what you want.”

“Nothing,” she said, looking at the rings of insect bites that braceleted her wrists and ankles, hard red bumps that she longed to dig out with her fingernails. “I don’t need anything. The second you send another phone my suitcase will show up and then I’ll have two.”

“So then you’ll have two. You can give one to Dr. Swenson. There may be someone she wants to call.”

In fact, Marina enjoyed not having a telephone. She had started out as an intern with a pager and then added to that a cell phone that later turned into a BlackBerry. In Manaus, there was an almost indescribable sense of freedom that came from wandering around in a strange city knowing that she was unreachable. “Speaking of Dr. Swenson, I’ve been reading about the Lakashi.”

“It’s always good to read up on people before you meet them,” Mr. Fox replied.

“It’s an interesting article but she doesn’t exactly give anything away.”

“Dr. Swenson doesn’t mean to give things away.”

“So what’s the secret ingredient? Does she even know? Certainly the Lakashi don’t know. I don’t care how primitive these women are, if they understood what they were doing that was causing them to remain fertile unto death they’d stop doing it.”

Mr. Fox fell silent on his end and Marina waited.

“You know and you don’t want to tell me?” Marina said, laughing. Surely his secretary, the very serious Mrs. Dunaway, had walked into his office at that moment and forced him to wait on his reply.

“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.”