OCTAVIO’S STORY
Image licensed through Adobe Stock. Edited.
The tour guide Octavio has a half-inch brown rectangle of decay between his two front teeth. Besides that, a nose delicately brutal, a mouth sensual yet squarish, and bitumen clumps for eyes. His jet-black brushy hair is tamed into a blocky cut.
“My dear,” he says, to all the tourists, but Janet feels especially singled out. “My dear, pay attention please.”
She re-crosses her legs self-consciously, wanting to keep his attention on herself despite the tender divots on her thighs about which she is also deeply self-conscious since her husband Ash regularly tells her to lay off him about exercise and get on herself to lay off the holier-than-thou-ness. He says the divots are proof that working out isn’t working out.
The tour guide Octavio’s eyes have an agile pan. Just seconds ago she was sure he was looking at her only, a special language of the eyes growing between them, though after that she sensed him taking in the whole group, his focus on her withdrawn, but now, again, she feels snared in his unblinking gaze.
Half an hour later the group is sliding and slipping in mud, the rain incessant, looking for tarantulas, pythons, rattle snakes, leopards along the creek behind the concrete cocooned resort, Octavio leading with a large flashlight, talking up a storm, making Janet wonder how on earth they’ll see Amazonian nocturnal wildlife if someone talks so much. But he must know what works and what doesn’t, being the guide.
There are tarantulas. Also a few other grotesque insects that otherwise underwhelm, and emaciated-looking spiders that Octavio declares harmless. He places one on one man’s shaven head as proof. That man has someone take a photo of it and instantly posts it on social media. That’s it for nocturnal wildlife.
“My dear, please be ready tomorrow at eight sharp. After breakfast we go to village and see how real people live in Amazon basin.”
That night something eats something outside Janet’s window on the corrugated metal roof sloping down to a gulch. The crying of the eaten and the hissing of the eater make her limbs fail, but Ash sleeps on. Next morning he says he heard nothing. Five beers at dinner will do that.
Alternately jumpy and deathly tired through breakfast, excitement surges through Janet again when Octavio shows up in his blue tour company uniform, efficient, in charge, his brown skin electrifyingly warm next to her pale, puffy hand when he gives her the disclaimer form for the boat ride to the village.
“What’s this for?” someone asks.
“Any accident,” Octavio says, his face a glib mask.
“Is it dangerous?” Janet asks.
“You’re in Amazon rain forest, dear. Everything’s dangerous.” He pauses to take in the full effect of the full effect being taken, then says, “Of course not, my dear. You’re with me.”
Janet finds this entirely reasonable. Octavio said he’s been an Amazon region tour guide for five years. Obviously, he’s very experienced. He used to do something else before this, he didn’t say what. She wonders how many groups Octavio’s taken to the village by now, and if he always tells them pretty much the same story about it. Ash said at breakfast it had to be the same “shtick” every time.
“I mean, the guy doesn’t get paid enough to be spontaneous and shit.”
“Yeah, but you assume that people don’t like their jobs and don’t want to do their best no matter what.”
“Damn right, especially when the pay’s shit.”
Janet can’t bear to bother with a response. Some people can’t change their perspective no matter how much and where they travel. Someone as obviously smart as Octavio will be able to tell who’s genuinely interested in other cultures–like herself–and who’s deadwood, and focus on the folks who really care when he tells his story.
Octavio’s English is more than serviceable, emerging crisp and crackly from behind his slightly pointy teeth. “I hope good shoes, everyone, please. We will walk.” They troop onto the wildly rocking tourist boat. Janet’s wearing her Jimmy Choo Timberlands, cost seven hundred and seventeen dollars on sale at Saks. She feels prepared, stylishly.
Whether it’s the bracing breeze slicing the noise and diesel fumes, or some other circuitry of accidental glances and touches as the group clambers on and tries to settle into hard plastic bucket seats while managing bulky life-jackets—“Compulsory please, my dear”—cameras, phones, and water-bottles, Octavio, straddling the canoe bow, an ancient amazon warrior in brown gaberdine uniform, suddenly waxes prolix.
“Good morning again my friends. We’re going to a very special and important destination, and as you know, it’s very important to keep open mind about things when you meet different cultures.” He pauses, his eyes narrowing to pan and track over the tourists who look at him like followers of a Pied Piper.
Except Ash. He’s leaning back in his bucket seat, eyes half-shut, looking bored, legs sprawled out in front of him like bent logs. She’s just begun rolling her eyes when his eyes fly open and he says, with a smirk, “I wonder what we’ve gotta be open to.” What’s more irritating is the movement of prying something open that his hands make.
Octavio goes on, whether or not he’s noticed Ash’s disgraceful behavior. “You cannot judge because other people do things differently from what you are used to.”
The boat engine guns, the boat rocks, impatient, incontinent.
“But I know all you are educated nice people, and you’ll be able to learn many new things from this experience and also show respect for cultural difference. I am myself a member also of this community we will visit today.”
Octavio’s eyes wander briefly toward the right forest-draped bank where a small flock of birds suddenly takes flight as if just born from the river. “I left and went to city where I had to learn many new things and met new people. I wasn’t used to city life, but I learned to accept.”
“What made you leave the village?” someone asks. Janet turns around to see who but can’t tell. Good question.
“My friend, there’s not much opportunity in village, you know. I went to city to get education, to study Environment Science, and I studied for two years but then University closed down program because not enough students.”
A murmur of worldly-wise, disgruntled sympathy rises and falls.
“But as I said, I met many new people and learned many new things, and also met very nice girl and we had nice relationship. So life brings opportunities even if sometimes doors close.”
A serrated voice asks, “So where’s she now, your girlfriend? Are we going to meet her?”
But Octavio seems to feel he’s set things up quite enough, and says, “Let’s go, Eduardo.”
The rickety boat leaps forward, suddenly jerking everyone back and forth, sending a few water bottles and electronics clattering along the boat tiller. The engine noise makes talking impossible except when the boat slows to let Octavio point out a splash or ripple, though Janet never catches the animals Octavio says caused them. They pass a solitary rusty trawler bobbing in the river.
“Finding gold, Eldorado,” Octavio says, his face a momentary jumble of uneven cubes.
The boat slows, steers toward the left bank, squatting women coming into view. They’re in t-shirts and skirts. They’re washing something, they laugh seeing Octavio, or at least Janet thinks so.
“Why’re they laughing?” Janet asks. No one answers. She hopes it’s not at them. She sees, when she’s clambered off the boat—getting off harder than getting on—that it’s plucked chickens they’re washing. The dead birds look like pale champagne prickly pears in soapy green river water. The women laugh broadly again, speaking in their language. Octavio doesn’t linger but the women turn on their haunches to look at his receding back. One says something that sends the group into pealing titters.
It's hot, the air buzzes with microscopic life. Ash catches up with Janet, swatting at himself. He answers her question. “Looks like the chickies are happy to see their cock come home to roost. Bet he gets around.”
Janet wonders, grudgingly, if Ash might be right. Maybe some of the local women do have a thing for Octavio. She takes longer, faster strides to outpace Ash. This is not hard; Ash is still hung over.
In a semi-clearing, Octavio is giving a cluster of the group botanical lessons. “Vegetable ivory,” he says, his finger jabbing at a fruit on a tree, “coming from seed of this, you see. To make jewelry. You will see soon the women have prepared for you, to buy. Local handmade arts and crafts.”
Janet wants to tell him she loves and collects jewelry and can’t wait to buy some, but he’s already moved on to the leaves of a tree that village women traditionally used to make a morning energy drink.
“And now?”
“Now we drink coffee,” he says. “Let’s keep moving, my dear.”
There is this adaptive un-sentimentality about him. Something makes Janet want to visualize the woman he once loved in the city—maybe it’s this pokerfaced, razor-sharp savvy.
“What happened to your girlfriend?” She whispers during a longish pause, the group straggling behind, trundling along in twos and threes, touching this, taking photos of that. A lull has fallen over the expedition, humidity and high noon colliding, lunch with the village community a beckoning event horizon.
“That is a tragedy, my dear,” he says, his eyes on their path.
Janet wants to say something, reach out, sympathize. Empathize. People are the same everywhere. If Ash could only step out of that ugly American tourist hide for a second. She glances back. There he is, red-faced and panting, a few feet behind everyone. A splinter of guilt in her gut. She once loved him. They had a nice relationship once. Maybe it has ended in tragedy.
“I loved her very much and she also me. But I had to marry woman in my village, my tribe. Because of my culture.”
Which was worse for you, Janet thinks, the closing of the Environmental Science department due to lack of students, as you say, or giving up your girlfriend to marry the woman from your village? But she only really wants to know about the girlfriend. What happened to her, this woman in the past tense. Whether she’s in the past tense. He’s married, though. She hadn’t quite seen that coming. He’d mentioned only the girlfriend on the boat. A door he opened. A passage into new things, the city, city people. Yes, she wants to know about the girlfriend because she imagines her as the door to where this Octavio, not village boy but savvy man of the world, was forged.
“I’m full Chinese, one hundred percent.” She doesn’t know why she says that, why now. She’s already felt compelled to declare at breakfast one day to the tour group that though she might not look it, she’s one hundred percent Chinese born, raised American, gilded hair, broiled tan.
“Yes, but still American, no?” Octavio’s monotone.
“Yes, but I can . . . .” Janet wants him to see her whole, for all she is, can be, has lived. Daughter of immigrant Chinese. Self-made. Hardtack for the long around-the-world voyage. She too has walked through doors her whole life, doors including Ash the all-American football player, Ash who once was nice and now feels like a door–a deadwood door–between her and new worlds and new opportunities.
Later, after the monotonous choreographed “traditional” dancing by the village women, commandeered feet thudding mockingly, it’s face painting by Octavio—Janet is “Indian Queen” while a younger woman gets “River Goddess”—and the gentle pressure of the fine quill he uses makes Janet quiver.
A rooster tries to hide in a paper bag someone’s left on the ground.
Lunch made by the village women is laid out on trestle tables. Plantain, rice and beans, chicken drumsticks, and “traditional” Amazon fish that looks ugly, alien, undercooked. Janet cannot eat anything except the rice. The fish she can’t even look at. Image and idea collide, become this godawful persistent grain of sand in the eye, making the Amazon rainforest and its cultural difference sway and wobble for moments.
Octavio makes another roistering summons.
“My friends.” He holds out a wooden bowl. In it there seem to be ringed sections of fat pinkish-white tapering fingers, about three-four inches long, nails painted dark red. The digits wriggle.
“My friends. Remember we talked about different cultures? Now, who will want to try one of our local delicacies here?”
His eyes, flecked obsidian in the early afternoon light under the thatched roof of the large square where the group stands, scan the visitors swiftly. His lips, Janet notices, are a new pale ecru, as if salted. It is salt. He’s eaten something with salt on it. His lips are ridge-thin and furled so faintly off his teeth he might simply be reacting to the salt. Of which he’s holding a second small bowl in one hand, the other holding the bowl with the softly rippling roseate digits with pointy burgundy ends.
“Chontacuro,” he says. “We eat this for snack. Delicious.”
Something feels stuck in Janet’s throat. It’s her stopped breath.
“What is that?”
“You must try, my friend. Try.” Octavio has returned to poker faced, lips pursed, eyes opaque.
Janet feels invisible strings pulling her leg muscles toward Octavio, the two bowls. Behind her she hears Ash, hissing. “Are you for real? You want to be hospitalized here, in Ecuador?”
Janet ignores him, ignores everything—the sick feeling in her stomach, her throat tightening in anticipation like a prescient goat for the slaughter stiffening every poor muscle against the pulling rope, the looks on her group’s faces.
“I want to try.” She’s stepped up to the bowls now, and Octavio looks at her, his face distant and clinical. As if ready, pad in hand, to note everything she will do now, next. As if he’s never seen anything like her. All she is, has lived, can be. Never. Nothing. No one. Not like her.
“You sure? You can also have roasted.”
His eyes on Janet are hard, piercing, maybe even interested.
“How do y’all eat it?” Janet shifts from Jimmy Choo left to Jimmy Choo right. “I mean, what’s the traditional . . . ?” She hears her own voice falter as it wafts toward her from a distance.
“Roasted or raw, but raw is delicious. We put a bit salt on it. I can show you.”
Janet has asked to open another door because she’s a traveler, an explorer, not Ash, not some ignorant, arrogant tourist. Now she wants to close it, return to the boat, the turbid, churned river, the manicured guesthouse, the delicious chef-cooked meals with normal-looking meat, normal-looking fish, the wilderness tamed and reasonably seasoned.
“Open your mouth, my friend.” Janet’s eyes search Octavio’s face as her mouth opens in an incredulous O.
Octavio dips the burgundy point of writhing tissue in the salt, then brings the weevil larva, its forked red mouth now rapidly flexing and pulsing, up to Janet’s mouth. “Now bite one time.”
Her gaze locked on his, she does, then gasps, and he pushes the whole larva inside.
“Swallow.”
She feels agonized living tissue cresting and falling inside her mouth, then gullet, then sternum, then nothing. She has tasted, sensed, nothing but pulp and salt.
Ash turns away in the back of the group, his face unreadable. A smattering of applause from the group.
She needs more back for what she just did. She really needs a little more back.
She’s got to jumpstart the payback. “Where’s your wife? Don’t we get to meet her?”
Octavio fastidiously hands the bowls of weevils and salt to a young girl wearing the same multicolor ikat-type design mid-calf skirt and loose black t-shirt as all the other women who’ve danced and pounded meal and served lunch to invisible choreography. He turns toward the group, away from Janet.
“My friends, it is a sad story. My grandfather was a shaman and he said that relationship was bad because city girls are bad, not for us. Bad for tradition. Might be a curse for me and maybe the village, so they found me another girl. So I marry this village girl and we have three kids.”
Janet cannot speak for the lump of hurt inside her throat. Three children. With a woman he was forced to marry. What is he not telling? What else has he not told? Is this about cultural difference? Must she respect if she doesn’t understand? Did the city girl understand? Or did she slam shut her door?
The others are listening but don’t say or ask anything. Suddenly she needs to find Ash. Tiptoeing, she peers beyond the group’s collected heads. At the far end of their roofed shelter, Ash is on a bench like the boy in the dugout in oversized glasses waiting for his summons to the baseball game: slumped yet angular, eyes hot and narrowed in refusal. She forces herself to look away, turn back to Octavio.
“And the city girl?”
“It did not work out, this marriage. I went back and we talked, my girlfriend and me, but she also married, had kids. But now she’s also divorced, we talk.”
“Think you’ll get back together then?” A whisper puffs out of Janet’s throat, mouth.
Octavio glances at her, his eyes dark holes in his head.
“So it’s complicated,” someone in the group, a man who’s rarely said a word, volunteers.
“That’s right. It’s complicated. I’m the black sheep of the village. You all ready to get back to boat?”
That night creatures solemnly intone in the night jungle only a few feet away from the wraparound open balcony of their room, and Janet wonders what perhaps slithers or crawls too close. She reaches for Ash. He turns, his eyes like those apertures in masks, blind wells. He parts her open gently, enters. They have sex raggedly, moaning, breathing sometimes heavily, sometimes nearly not at all.
Next morning at the airport she looks for souvenirs. In the Duty-Free store, a “Made in China” tag sticks to the same stretch bracelet sold to her as handmade by a toothless, purblind woman in Octavio’s village.
Nandini Bhattacharya's work is published or forthcoming in The Bangalore Review, The Bombay Review, Meat for Tea, Notre Dame Review, Oyster River Pages, PANK, The Rumpus, Saturday Evening Post, Sky Island Journal, and elsewhere. She has attended the Bread Loaf Writers Workshop and been accepted for residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Disquiet: Dzanc Books International Literary Program, Ragdale Artists Residency, and VONA. Her awards and honors include a Pushcart nomination for her short story “After the House Burned Down” (2021); first runner-up for the Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction contest (2017-2018); and a long-list inclusion for the Disquiet International Literary Prize (2019 and 2020). Her first novel, Love's Garden, was published in 2020. Her second novel, Something of Me in You, about love, race, caste, and colorism in India and the US as seen through an immigrant woman’s perspective, is on submission. She edits and reads for Colorado Review, Cutbank Literary Journal, and Tupelo Quarterly, a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, and a Professor of English at Texas A&M University.