University of Miami does not have a graduate program in anthropology, but it does have a department of Caribbean and African Studies, and a special collection in Richter to go with it. This has its own room, a typical special- collection establishment: counter with a clerk, several long blond wood tables, ceiling-high shelves all around, a few display cabinets exhibiting books and photographs.
Two dark women were working quietly at one of the long tables. They glanced up when Paz came into the quiet room and went back to what they were doing. At another table, surrounded by books and papers, sat an elderly woman writing in a notebook. The hair stood up on the back of Paz’s neck as he recognized her.
He noted that her hands were ink-stained, that she used an old-fashioned fountain pen, that her white hair was thick and wiry, springing out from the sides of her head in two wedges, like pieces of angel cake. She was wearing a fawn-colored linen dress with a pointed collar and a row of closely spaced jet buttons down the front, and she had thrown a dark mohair cardigan over her shoulders against the air-conditioned chill. He stared at her; she looked up briefly and went back to her writing. He sat down opposite her and said, in Spanish, “Dr. Salazar, if you could spare me a minute or two, I very much wish to speak with you.”
Her head popped up. A peculiar series of expressions passed across her face: first surprise, then an instant of fear, then a resettling of the features into the social persona, reserved and a little wary. She said, “Why is that, senor? And how did you know I was here?”
Her face was covered with tiny wrinkles, but the peach-colored skin still clung closely to the fine bones. A curved, bold nose, a determined chin, the eyes still bright, though sunken into their sockets and brown-shadowed beneath. She looks older than she did on the book jacket, Paz thought, and also that she must have stopped traffic in 1940s Havana. He displayed his badge and photo identification.
“I’m a homicide detective. I want to discuss certain aspects of a recent murder with you. As for how I knew you were here, I didn’t. I thought you were out of the country. I came here to do some research and here you were. Synchronicity.”
“You mean serendipity, Detective,” said Dr. Salazar after a considering moment. “It would be synchronicity only if I sought you out before you knew you wanted to see me.”
TEN
Running around naked looking for the trick of it is perhaps as good a symbol of the relationship I had with Marcel Vierchau as anything else. In memory, now, he is always laughing and I am trying to find the joke, on the verge of feeling hurt. Yet it is difficult to stay angry with a man having so good a time, and he was never vindictive, or mean, or cruel. He just thought I was funny; and was I not? A large, somewhat overbred American girl, mad for sex and ethnography, desperate for approval, would have been funny to a man like Marcel, and especially amusing were my pathetic efforts to spy out his secrets. While we were together, I would actually hide myself and try to watch him, looking for the incredibly clever, spidery apparatus that enabled him to pull off his stunts. When he was out of the apartment, or the tent or the van, I made it a habit to poke through his things. Yes, embarrassing; and worse, I never found anything.
Marcel knew, and it amazed him, because his whole life was dedicated to teaching that real magic was a technology of the mind, not of smoke and mirrors. It’s your Catholic prejudice against witchcraft, he’d tell me, you can’t allow yourself to believe that someone you love is really a witch and so you look for wires.
We were together for seven years, continuously, almost. Based in Paris, we traveled to every continent?city, jungle, desert, steppe. The problem with a relationship like that is that the girl gets spoiled. His friends are so much more interesting than your friends. When famous people listen to you respectfully at dinner parties, do you really want to go clubbing with twenty-somethings? You don’t. They say the young woman delights in her sexual power over the older man, and that this is good for her confidence and self-esteem. Maybe so, but in exchange her real life is stolen from her, and she grows up twisted, like a pear tree espaliered against the wall of the Great Man. And what does she do when the wall crumbles? As it must.
I don’t know whether thinking about Marcel and what happened in the garden last night are connected. No, I do know?it’s all connected. For a long time I was spared the pangs of memory; post-traumatic shock, I suppose, or perverted will, but now things are loosening up, like the ice breaking in springtime on the Yei.
It’s going to be another (another!) hot day today and here I am thinking about the Yei. I used to think about the Yei in Danolo, too, memories of coolness being especially precious there. I’m a northern girl. I love fog and mist, and crisp, cheek-pinching nights, and crunching through snow, and so I ask you why am I here and why have I spent much of my life in the fucking tropics? I don’t suffer from the heat, as some do, though. I’m adaptable to the various extreme climates where live the sort of people anthropologists dote on: steaming jungles, baking deserts, frozen steppes.
Perhaps I could show up at Medical Records in shorts and T-shirt, the same sort of outfit that Luz is now pulling on. She wishes to select her own clothes and dress herself. Muffa is merely to watch, and check the clock and worry about being late.
The Yei is a river in Siberia, one of those long, sluggish Arctic rivers that only ascend to literate consciousness as crossword clues. Six down: Siberian river, three letters: the mighty Mil. The winding Sem. The rushing Yei. The Chenka pass the winter on its banks, and one winter I did, too, with Marcel, so that I could harvest a doctoral dissertation out of the soil he had so brilliantly cultivated. I was twenty-seven and it had lately occurred to me that being Vierchau’s beautiful assistant was not a lifetime career. I was to study woman’s magic, which among the Chenka is quite different from the men’s magic that Marcel knew about.
The Chenka are pastoralists related to the Yakut, and speak a similar language, but their connection with the various Yakut tribes is obscure. The other Yakut avoid them, sometimes even deny that there are any Chenka people at all. Except when they wish to learn. The Chenka operate a kind of informal, floating sorcerer’s university and at any particular time you will find among them Yakuts, Buryats, Altais, Evenks, and peoples from even further off, Yukakirs, Nenets, Khants, and, once, an American, me.
Marcel discovered the Chenka in 1969 in the journal of a Soviet functionary named T. I. Berozhinski. This included an eyewitness report of how a group of Siberian nomads had walked through a cordon of OGPU troops who had come to arrest them. This occurred in daylight, and none of the secret policemen saw a thing. Berozhinski saw them, but when he told the commissar in charge, he got sent straight to the gulag, where he died. Other than this, the Chenka were unknown to history or anthropology.
Marcel was thunderstruck by the account. If Berozhinski was not bemused himself or a liar, the Chenka had witched their way through scores of the most brutal, unimaginative, and disciplined men on earth. This was no pathetic ethnic remnant like the jungle tribes he and his colleagues normally studied. He was instantly on fire to see them for himself.
Marcel arranged for a scientific study visa, went to Siberia, met the Chenka, was amazed. He went again and stayed for his seven years. The rest is now familiar from the pages of his book. The Chenka had real magic, whatever that means.
Another peg snagging the folds of the net of my life. Berozhinski begat Vierchau, and Vierchau begat Doe. Since the start of our connection, not more than days after that first marathon in bed, I had been bugging Marcel to take me to the Chenka. It was somehow never arranged. Always other commitments intervened or there was some hitch with the authorities, or they invaded Afghanistan, or something. But now at last I, too, was encamped upon the Yei, learning how to make mare’s milk yogurt, kvass, and women’s magic. So called. The Chenka practice a sexual egalitarianism quite remarkable among pastoral societies, which tend to be ferociously patriarchal, women being merely a sort of cattle. Among the Chenka it is otherwise, and I think it is because the women exercise substantial powers in the magical realm. The women, for example, decide who is to marry whom, and whether they will have children, and of what sex. So the Chenka and Marcel believed, and during my year with them I saw nothing to contradict it. Puniekka expressed amazement when I told her that in the lands of the Alues, the non-Chenka, there were such things as unwanted children, and people who wanted children and couldn’t have them. She was further astounded that we did not routinely determine the sex of our babies in advance.
Puniekka was the shaman in whose yurt I lodged. This was another of the disappointments of my Siberian experience. I had imagined that Marcel and I would live together, as a team. I thought he was being hyberbolic when he said that when we got to Chenka we would hardly see each other. But it was so. Sexual segregation
