ECCLESIASTES

            I lifted my eyes from the garden and gazed at the Sun, almost stationary and only several degrees above the horizon.  It shone with a bright yellow light, through a sky that ranged from pinkish orange near the horizon to dark blue overhead.  I breathed the thin air and wrapped my gray, threadbare jacket more closely about me.  There will be a frost tonight.  It’s a good thing potatoes can tolerate freezing weather.  Again, and despite a bit of arthritis in my shoulder, I used a rusty hoe to weed the potato plants.

            In the swamp below our house were thousands of blackbirds, constantly chattering and cawing as they perched on the cattails and the willow saplings.  Yes, those birds are doing just fine.  They migrate to wherever the pickings are good, and when it gets too hot or too cold, they simply take off.  Once, many years ago, I had contemplated building some traps and snares so we could eat the birds.  Mahla had wisely vetoed any such idea.  “Neither one of us will ever eat those birds.  God alone knows what they have been eating!”

            I gazed at the house where Mahla and I lived.  Many years ago, this cottage had been a servant’s quarters on a grandee’s estate.  The mansion was a ruin, but the smaller house and its plain furniture had survived.  We had even dragged in a wood burning stove that Mahla had found in a battered storage shed.  But it was time to check on my fishing net.

            About a mile south of our house, the river cuts through the swamp and reaches the base of the higher, flat terrace where we live.  As I walked along the path, the sole of my left boot started to flap.  As I had done many times before, I tied a cord of twisted stalks about my foot.  The boots, like everything else we had, were twenty years old, and there were no replacements.

            We were in luck.  Several catfish had snared themselves in the net’s nylon webbing.  After I placed them in an old, rusty bucket, I climbed back up the steep, short slope.  I was out of breath when I reached the summit, more from the thin air than from my older age.  After a moment’s rest, I walked back to the grandee’s former estate.

            The Sun had hardly moved at all.  It cast my long shadow well ahead of me, as I trudged back home.  For a time, I thought of how Mahla and I had met.  A fierce windstorm had flattened the village where she lived, and she alone survived.  I found her beneath some collapsed timbers, barely alive.  I set her broken leg, nursed her back to health, and became her companion.  She spoke only Portuguese, but my Spanish was sufficiently good for her to understand me.  At the time, I was in my forties, and Mahla was about ten years younger.  Although we slept together, she never became pregnant.  In fact, I had undergone a vasectomy and was sterile.  Now, she was too old to bear children.

            The long shadow from the ruined mansion stretched ahead of me, as I walked into the grandee’s courtyard.  Next to a well with a cast iron, hand operated pump stood our house, a pale tan cabin with formerly white trim.  A few pieces of stucco had flaked off, and the front window’s frame and shutters had rotted a bit.  But the terra-cotta roof was still sound.  When I opened the door, Mahla turned away from the wood burning stove and gazed at the bucket.

            “I saw you coming with the bucket, so I started the stove.”

            “Yes, there were three catfish in the net.”

            “If you’ll watch the stove and build up the fire, I’ll clean them.”

            Mahla took a sharp knife that I had recently honed with a whetstone and went outside.  Her broken leg had never healed completely, and she walked with a slight limp.  I reflected that she was the sort of woman who, under more natural circumstances, would have become rather stout.  Even so, her broad face, dark eyes, light brown skin and curly, black hair marked her as a typical peasant.  Her faded blue dress and long, gray coat were as threadbare as my own clothes.

            As I put a few sticks of broken lumber and dry willow wood in the stove, a sharp pain shot through my shoulder.  Yes, my arthritis is getting steadily worse.  I must be sixty-five years old by now.  But there’s nothing we can do about it.  In fact, I frequently worried about what the future would bring, and these concerns had led to the one serious argument that Mahla and I had endured.  One evening, I told her that the time would eventually come when I was no longer able.  She would have to do everything, and she was already overworked.  I said that I was not about to inflict taking care of a useless old man on top of everything else.  Instead, I would jump in the river and drown.  Mahla lit into me.  “If you do something like that, God will not forgive you.  He will also hold me guilty of the same mortal sin, for I will surely follow you into the water.  Why would I want to live?”

            Mahla came back inside with three gutted catfish and a battered aluminum pot, filled with water from the pump.  I took the pot from her and placed it on the stove, as she pulled a frying pan out of a plain, wooden cupboard.  After a short time, she placed some of our recently harvested green peas in the boiling water and began to fry the fish.  Later, we dined on catfish, peas and cabbage. 

            As we ate, Mahla reminisced.  “We used to grow such corn in our village!  It even became the talk of Brazil!  Once, some scientists came to our house and asked for samples of our corn.  And they talked on and on to Papa!  Later, Papa told me that they wanted to know if we grew the corn in any sort of special way.  But we didn’t, although we did irrigate it.  But all that is in the past, now.”  All that was certainly in the past.  Since cold weather always arrives in the middle of the growing season, only frost resistant vegetables can be grown.

            After supper, Mahla cleared the old, chipped dishes off the wooden plank table and carried them outside, to a large pail filled with water.  I retrieved a hand-powered generator and a short-wave radio set from our battered wardrobe and placed them on the stout table.  My shoulder winced a bit from cranking the generator, and I knew that the labor was probably pointless.  But I would not give up hope.  Sometimes, I dreamed that we would actually hear a voice on the radio.  But the ether was as empty of human activity as it has been on every other night.

            When Mahla came back in the house, she commented, “You should not waste your strength.  Even if some people were out there, you could not answer them.  And what if they were evil people?”  All the same, I kept turning the dial and listened.  After a time, I did hear a voice - Mahla was humming an old tune.  When I looked at her, she said, “We had a transistor radio.  But I couldn’t be bothered with the news.  I listened to the popular songs.”

            My woman’s face grew increasingly somber and a bit tense.  When her dark eyes stared at me, I returned her gaze and waited.  She said, “Last night, I dreamed we saw a llama.”

            Since Mahla held a peasant’s attitude toward dreams, I listened carefully.  She continued, “We were together, down by the river where you keep the net.  The llama was on the other side of the river.  It was eating the willow leaves and some grass.  Then, it looked straight at us.  Then, it jumped into the river and started swimming toward us.  That was when I woke up.”

            “What color was the llama?” I asked.

            “It was white, just like in the picture book Mama had.  I’ve never seen a real llama before.”

            “Well, llamas could live here.  It would be a lot like the Altiplano used to be.  And after the first winter, when everything died here, the river brought the seeds that gave us the grass and willow trees.  Maybe your dream will come true.”

            “That would be good.”

            In fact, neither of us had eaten meat in almost twenty years.  We never locked the house, because we were the only land animals left in this part of Brazil.  After the cans in Belem’s shattered grocery stores turned to rust, we had only the fish from the river and what we could grow.

            The Moon is gone, and the ecliptic passes through the Earth’s poles.  On 21 December, the Sun will be stationary, just above our horizon.  Then, as the days pass, the noonday Sun will climb in the southern sky, and dark nights will return.  In late March, the Sun will rise in the east, reach our zenith, and set in the west, just as it used to do.  But in late June, it will rest on the northern horizon.  That is winter, when cold waves from the frozen mass of South America cover our small, inhabitable stretch of equatorial land.

            I thought of the Earth’s wretched state, unbearably hot or bitterly cold, swept with immense windstorms, and bereft of a good portion of its atmosphere.  I considered the calamities that Mahla and I had escaped, the hydrogen bombs and the manufactured plagues.  In fact, both of us understood her dream about the llama.  I reached for a Portuguese Bible that she had found in the grandee’s ruined house, and I read aloud.

            “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under Heaven.  A time to be born, and a time to die.  A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.  A time to kill, and a time to heal.  A time to break down, and a time to build up…  A time to love, and a time to hate.  A time of war, and a time of peace.”

            Mahla looked intently at me.  “It was a war, wasn’t it.”

            I nodded my head.  “I didn’t want to tell you this, because it wouldn’t have done any good.  But it was war.”

            “I wonder if God has condemned all of us to Hell.”

            “Mahla, He didn’t do that.  We condemned ourselves.”

            Three months passed.  Once again, the Sun rose in the east, passed overhead, and set in the west.  The temperature was mild, and the grass and willow saplings flourished.

            The llama came from the south.  She was pregnant, and she was looking for a sheltered place to give birth.  She gazed at a small structure, a cave that stood above the ground.  She wondered what this was, and she trotted toward it.

            The cave had an opening.  The llama cautiously poked her nose inside and listened carefully.  The cave was quiet, but a strange pair of odors registered on her mind.  Although the two smells were obviously male and female, everything else about them was beyond the llama’s experience.  She listened again but heard nothing.  Then, she investigated the cave.  Although it was a good shelter, nothing within it held her interest.

            When the llama walked outside, she discovered that the two strange odors led toward the river, along a worn path.  Her curiosity aroused, she tracked the unfamiliar beasts.

            She found them next to the river, down a short, steep slope.  The male lay on his back with his arms splayed on the ground.  The female lay across him, her arms around his chest.  Neither animal moved, and the strange odors were accompanied by the familiar stench of death.

            Since there was nothing here that the llama could use, she walked back to the cave.  When she looked around, she spotted some unusual vegetation, growing in neat rows.  Again, her curiosity was aroused.  One set of plants, dark green leaves and stems, tasted wrong.  But the other set, green and white leaves in thick, juicy clumps, was delicious.