Undergrowth by Nancy Burke

Author:Nancy Burke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gibson House Press
Published: 2017-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

LXXIX

JOAQUIM ROCHA FUMBLED on his desk in Belem through the agglomeration of bark samples and talismans and papers and books which he referred to as his library, searching in vain for his reading glasses. Giving up, he bent again over the worn red notebook, squinting at the primitive script and scribbled marginalia and strange symbols and off-kilter diagrams of circles and squares. He was not an educated man in the traditional sense, but the past nearly fifty years spent among academics, bureaucrats, garimpeiros, politicians, tribal elders, sertanistas, cowboys, bootleggers, seringais; men wielding spears, clubs, machetes, shotguns and curses straight from the mouths of the most fearsome Gods, had left him with a belief in the power of patient, consistent effort to clear up the most difficult problems. And for the ones he couldn’t cut through on his own, he had an endless file of contacts to whom he could turn for help, and an absence of the sort of pride that would prohibit him from using it them. The obvious choice in this case was Bruno Oliveira, who even in retirement possessed the scientific currency he sought, but also, and more important, the loyalty and reticence he required of those to whom he turned.

“Daniel!” Joaquim called out to his youngest son, the last at home, who at that minute was passing his open door.

“Father!” said Daniel, coming in and standing by the desk.

“Get me Professor Oliveria’s number, would you?”

Daniel, shaking his head, began digging through the piles. He pulled out his father’s leather binder of addresses. The son was perpetually amused by his father’s disorder, and aware, at some level, that his father was returning his bemusement—the same look, but with sharper edges. The look signified Joaquim’s disappointment in his son for being raised in a house, by parents, signified his disappointment in children everywhere, all of them, for having been softened by lives of ease.

“And while you’re at it, can you find me my reading glasses?” said Joaquim, as the son reached over patiently and peeled them from atop his father’s head.

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