Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

mush.”

“Euryphagous, are we?” asked the man, instantly winning Switters’s friendship on the strength of his vocabulary. “And a Yank, into the bargain! Last night I took you for Italian. Your suit was a frightful mess, but it was a suit. Then, just now, I thought you might be a fellow subject of the Queen. Never expected to run across a Yank in a suit in bloody Boquichicos.”

“Yeah, well, as for Yanks, the old colony’s a variety pack, I’m afraid. You never know which or what is gonna show up when or where.” Switters settled onto the next barstool. “Tell me something: Is it cool—is it acceptable— to ask for papaya around here?”

The man raised a pair of sandy eyebrows. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Well, uh, in the dialect of Spanish spoken in Cuba, they refer to that particular fruit as a bombita. ‘Little bomb.’ Which makes sense, considering its shape and everything. But in Cuban Spanish, the word papaya means ‘vagina.’ Which has a certain logic, as well, I guess. However . . .”

“Oh, yes, I see,” said the Englishman. “If one asks for a jugo de papaya in Havana, one gets a rather funny look.”

“Or a glass of juice that’ll put hair on your chest. So to speak.” When the Englishman slightly grimaced, Switters added, “Gives a whole new meaning to ‘bottoms up.’ “

“Rather. And afterward, I suppose, a chap would want a cigarette.” The man spoke dryly and without overt levity.

“Personally, I only got the funny look.”

“I see. Well. Have no fear. Unless I’m much mistaken, papaya in these parts will give offense to none.”

At that moment a disturbingly pretty mestizo girl, not much older than Suzy, emerged from the gloom with a tray of cornbread and tropical jams, which she set before the Brit. When she looked questioningly at Switters, he became flustered and blurted, “Bombita,” simply lacking the nerve to ask for papaya in the unlikely event that here, too, it might possibly mean . . .

“You’re wanting bombita, you better go see Sendero Luminoso,” she said, giving him the kind of wary, patronizing smile one might give a known lunatic. He blushed and quickly ordered eggs. Sailor would have to wait for his breakfast fruit.

Apparently too well-mannered to commence eating before the other was served, the Englishman retrieved from somewhere on his person a fine leather case. Embossed in gold upon its lid was a coat of arms and the legend, Royal Anthropological Society. “Oh, bugger!” he swore, after opening the case. “I seem not to have a one of my bloody cards. A chap gets lax in a place like this.” He wiped his large pink hand on his shirt and then extended it. “R. Potney Smithe,” he said. “Ethnographer.”

“Switters. Errand boy.”

They shook hands. The hand of Smithe (it rhymed with knife) was neither as damp nor as soft as Switters had feared.

“I see. I see. And are you running an errand in Boquichicos, Mr. Switters?”

“Most assuredly.”

“Contemplating a lengthy, um . . . errand run?”

“Au contraire.” Switters checked his watch. It was 6:13. “In about an hour, I’m scheduled to take a little nature walk. Then, provided I’m not overwhelmed by some aspect of the local fauna . . .”

“As well you might be. From this outpost to the Bolivian border, there exist twelve hundred species of birds, two hundred species of mammals, ninety or more frog species, thirty-two different venomous snakes—”

“. . . or flora . . .”

“A most immoderate vegetative display, you may be sure.”

“. . . I expect to depart here in midafternoon. Tomorrow morning at the very latest.”

“Pity,” said R. Potney Smithe, though he didn’t say why.

The girl reappeared with a plastic plate of fried eggs and beans. Switters worked his smile on her. If there was any reason to tarry in Boquichicos . . .

After they had eaten, Smithe lit a cork-tipped cigarette, inhaled deeply, and said, “No offense, mind you, and I hope you won’t think me cheeky, but isn’t it, um, difficult finding yourself an ‘errand boy’? I mean, a chap of your age and with your taste in attire.”

“Ain’t no shame in honest labor, pal. You must have had the occasion to observe honest labor, even if you’ve never actively participated.”

“And why wouldn’t I have done?”

“Well, no offense to you, either, Mr. Smithe . . .”

“Oh, do call me Potney.”

“. . . but, first, your accent reveals that you probably spent your formative years knocking croquet balls about the manicured lawns of Conway-on-the-Twitty or some such pretty acreage, where the servants did all the heavy lifting; and, second, you’re a professional in a branch of science that ought to be the most enlightening and intriguing and flexible and instructive of any branch of science—outside of, maybe, particle physics—and would be if the anthropologists had a shred of imagination or the dimmest sense of wonder, or the cojones, the bollocks, to look at the big picture, to help focus and enlarge the big picture; but instead, it’s a timid, dull, overspecialized exercise in nit-picking, shit-sifting, and knothole-peeking. There’s work to be done in anthropology, Potney ol’ man, if anthropologists will get off their campstools—or barstools—and widen their vision enough to do it.”

Smithe expelled a globe of smoke, and it bobbed just above them for a while like an air-feeding jellyfish or a rickety umbrella, slow to disperse in the cloying humidity. “Your accusation suffers, I daresay, not from lack of zeal but fact. Well spoken for an ‘errand boy’ but frightfully old-fashioned, I’m afraid, and from my point of view, more than a bit narrow in its own right. We ethnographers have a long history of direct participation in the everyday life of the cultures we study. We eat their food, speak their language, experience firsthand their habits and customs —”

“Yeah, and then you go back to your nice university and publish a ten-thousand-word monograph on the size of their water jars or their various ceremonial names for grandmother (maestra not being among them, I guarantee) or the way they peel their yams. Hey, the way they peel yams—clockwise or counterclockwise?—could be significant if it reflected some deeper aspect of their existence. Like, for example, if they use the same cutting motion in peeling a sweet potato that they use in circumcising a pecker, and that pattern consciously, deliberately replicates the spiral of the Milky Way or—and stranger things have happened—the double helix of DNA. As it is, you won’t or can’t make those connections, so all you end up producing is a lot of academic twaddle.”

“All right, let me have a go at that.”

“Hold on. I’m not finished. Surely, your knowledge of natural history is not so puny that you’re unaware that extinction is a consequence of overspecialization. It’s a cardinal law of evolution, and many a species has paid the price. Human beings are by nature comprehensive. That’s been the secret of our success, at least in evolutionary terms. The more civilized we’ve become, however, the further we’ve moved away from comprehensiveness, and in direct ratio we’ve been losing our adaptability. Now, isn’t it just a wee bit ironic, Potney, that you guys in anthropology—the study of man—are contributing to the eventual extinction of man by your blind devotion to this suicidal binge of overspecialization? Who’re you gonna write papers on when we’re gone?”

The girl returned to clear their dishes. Trotting out another of his seraphic smiles, Switters asked for papaya by its rightful name and was almost disappointed when she wasn’t embarrassed or insulted or coy but, instead, inquired matter-of-factly if he wanted mitad or totalidad: half or whole. (Even Switters’s nimble mind couldn’t picture half a vagina.)

Potney Smithe, who had remained nonplussed throughout the Switters tirade, coughed a couple of times and said, “If you’re talking about the need for more interdisciplinary activity in the academic community, I quite agree. Yes. Um. However, if you’re advocating speculation, or a breach of scientific detachment . . .”

“Detachment, my ass. Objectivity’s as big a hoax in science as it is in journalism. Well, not quite