Under the blazing sun, bulldozers chugged and swearing mestizos sweated. Collectively, they were pushing back the jungle, like peeling the scab from a tender wound; laying open a bed of humus that had last seen the sun during the reign of T-Rex. The first things to go in were footings for the microwave towers. It took a bit of bullying—the Salidan workforce didn’t seem to understand the need for precision measurements—but the first tower was erected in less than a fortnight.
S’pense, himself, wired in the radio and dialed up Mando Centro for the first time. Four days later, the road came through; and truckload after truckload of concrete and pre-stressed steel. S’pense found himself overseeing more and more, doing less and less.
Meantime, even further up in the mountains, a queerly gray man, known variously as Carlo Shlemmer and/or Archard Venango, traced hypnotic diagrams on the suntanned back of Wanda Ases with printless fingertips.
Their time together had become a seamless eternity. They were here and Carl would talk and she would listen. Wanda would talk and he would listen. They would make love or pick herbs or pan in the streams for gold. His need for her seemed to be constant; ever-present as the thundering native drums.
She had asked him about the drums soon after her arrival; had insisted that if they did not stop, they would surely drive her mad. He smiled strangely and took her by the hand.
Let’s see if we can find the drummer,” he’d said.
They wandered for hours through the jungle, searching high and low. He would let her pick their direction, guide without leading, ramble without getting lost. After what seemed like an eternity, Wanda threw herself down by the bole of a gigantic Acacia tree three centuries old and said: “I give up. I hear them. I hear them constantly. Always just over the hill. Just around the corner. But I just can’t seem to find them.”
“Are you sure they’re really there?” he asked her.
“They’re driving me crazy!” she shouted. “Of course they’re here. Somewhere.”
“Or maybe they’re here,” he said, pointing to his head.
“Very funny,” she said, but the thought became suddenly very disquieting.
“Do you know how many people are here with us?” he asked her.
“It’s just us. You and me. And Speck, when he comes up from the city.” She wondered what he was getting at.
“No one else?” he prompted.
“Well, the drummers, I guess. But they never show themselves. Why don’t they ever come around?”
Shlemmer sat down beside her. “They do come around,” he said. “They’re here now.”
“So come out, already!” she shouted. “Show yourselves and stop that stupid drumming!”
Somehow, astonishingly, the drumming stopped. And in an instant, every sound was stilled.
“You see,” he said softly, “they do listen.”
“The people of this land are here. There are many of them; all around us. They live their lives as simple music. The drums you hear are the rhythms of their heartbeats, the rising and falling of their breathing, the changing of their emotional states.” As if on a cue, the drums began again, and Shlemmer got to his feet.
“Before the white men came here, these were the only inhabitants of Buena Salida.” He gestured broadly, indicating all the jungle around them. “Mouthless, eyeless, handless. Faceless. Before anyone came looking, there were simply no Salidans to be seen.”
Wanda Ases stared up into Carl Shlemmer’s face. She had to believe him, of course. She knew he was incapable of telling a lie. She knew she had to believe that what he was telling her had to be true, but how could it be? Creatures of music? Beings without matter or substance? A population without people? It couldn’t be true. But Carl said it, so it must be so.
“It is true, Wanda,” he assured her. “And because it’s true,” his gray eyes grew cloudy, “because it means the fate of all these people, and their brothers and sisters everywhere in the world, we’ve got to stop Project Rock’n’Roll!”
Main photo: Photo by Evan Nitschke from Pexels.
Deforestation photo: Wikimedia Commons – A. Savin (WikiCommons).
Exploring forest photo: Photo by Michelle Spencer on Unsplash.