A small bamboo door opens into the shack: an immense room with seven mattresses, seven mosquito nets around them, and five small windows that look out onto a yard where a dirty dog harasses flapping chickens. A wooden table and a wooden floor. And a small, seemingly magical electric light hanging from the ceiling.
Since the pilgrimage began, they’ve encountered almost no electricity in the villages. They remember with amazement the life they’ve left behind. That terribly normal life, full of mundane dangers, reemerges with the insistence of the radio murmuring in a nearby lean-to. In that hum of voices they think they distinguish the weather report, sporting results, the most recent changes in the Catholic Church. They remember that they’re only fifteen days away from the bus that left them at the brink of the jungle, just two weeks in a sleep from which they now begin to awake, hollow-eyed and stinking. They are tired, no doubt about it. But within the exhaustion, like a hornet, buzzes the feeling—which no one dares to articulate—that they have been ushered into a conspiracy.
A Polish girl, skinny and careworn, with tattooed arms and a light spirit, cuts the tension by telling a story. It’s the first time they’ve heard her voice, airy and shy. She tells of how Alexander von Humboldt came upon a singular man while crossing Venezuela in search of electric eels. In the middle of the plain, he discovered a magnificent electrical machine with cylindrical disks, electrometers, and batteries, all well assembled, a machine as complex as those he’d seen in Europe, or maybe more. Humboldt asked after the gadget’s owner, and some lounging plainsmen pointed him toward a simple cabin where a fat man with an impressive mustache was drinking coffee. His name was Carlos del Pozo, and he claimed to have built the machine based on what he’d read in Traité by Sigaud de la Fond and Benjamin Franklin’s Memoirs. A plainsman all his life, he had never left that vast territory, never traveled to Europe or the north. Humboldt spent the afternoon with that marvelous man, fascinated by the fact that in those vast solitudes, where the names of Volta and Galvani seemed to be unknown, a common man had built an exact version of the Electric Machine that had set the Europeans dreaming. The next day, Humboldt left at dusk and a twilight settled once more over the southern plain and over that lonely genius named Carlos del Pozo.
After the Polish girl’s story, the atmosphere in the shack is left heavy with half-formed dreams and impossible conjectures. Lying on their seaweed mattresses, protected by mosquito nets, the pilgrims feel that this isolated town is a reminder of their own old world. Better, they tell themselves, to give in to their exhaustion and leave off all these stories.
And the little girl has been watching as they all collapse into bed. For her, the Polish girl’s story has brought on a peculiar anxiety. She remembers the greasy face of the fat man who received them, and in a brief flash she imagines that he must be the very same Carlos del Pozo. Caught by curiosity, concentrating her remaining energy, she pulls away from her sleeping mother, passes by her snoring father, and when she opens the door she again hears the murmur of the village. She hears a labored muttering, the vulgar shouts of a foreman disciplining a group of natives. Farther on, surrounded by five mestiza women passing around half a dozen bottles of beer, she sees the fat man talking with the apostle. A fist of blue iron hits her body when she sees the scene, and she runs through the village in search of an escape. She feels fear and happiness all at once as she loses herself in the jungle, dodging mahogany trees and ferns, muddy rocks and thorny plants, in search of the river, the hiss of which seems to grow until it’s everywhere. She passes men and women who look at her pale skin in surprise, she hears voices she doesn’t understand, but nothing stops her. She chases that whisper of river and only stops when she’s right next to it. She sees its furious waters and then, sensing that it marks an invisible border, a white line like sleep, she hears a voice behind her. When she turns, she’s looking right into the face of that man she thought she’d left behind.
The face of the man before her holds tenderness and compassion, a rocky hardness over which a subtle kindness grows like a wild vine. Now that she is finally seeing him from close up, far away from the nightly rituals, she thinks she sees his real face for the first time. Seen up close, the apostle’s face takes on a provincial sweetness, a touch of childhood and innocence. He seems like someone else: a younger man, simpler, closer, far removed from the apocalyptic figure of his sermons, from the figure that drove her to flee.
“Where are you going, my dear?” he asks her in English.
And in his voice she briefly finds a home.
Then the apostle gestures to a branch and says, “Do you see him? Do you see the little animal?”
And she looks at the branch without seeing anything but that: a jungle branch. But after a while, the girl thinks she can distinguish an animal movement among the leaves. Then she sees it: a little creature playing an imitation game, an animal made of sticks camouflaged among the branches, halfway between death and life. She immediately feels that she herself is like a little creature playing hide-and-seek in the middle of the jungle, playing a game of masks. A sick animal whiling away the hours. She feels this but doesn’t understand it, and then she hears the apostle’s voice.
“Es la mantis religiosa,” he tells her, returning to that language she is just starting to intuit. And she sits looking at the animal with the peculiar name. After a few minutes, a small insect lands on a nearby branch, and the mantis, in a sudden leap, devours it greedily. Startled, she turns in fear, expecting to find the apostle’s embrace, but she finds only her worried mother, weeping, scolding her for running away. She is left thinking then about the disappearance of that man, whom she will see with different eyes from now on.
That night she doesn’t sleep. Again and again, she’s assaulted by images of the creature that appeared among the branches, the awful scene of depredation, the apostle’s voice behind her, her mother’s sudden appearance. She relives what she’s seen, growing convinced that the whole matter has been nothing but a hallucination and that tomorrow, reality will go back to what it’s always been: the visible backdrop. She thinks about that little creature with the prayerful name, and in her mind it all mixes together and grows confused: the apostle’s voice, his sincere face, her mother’s arms, the mantis’s leap. And suddenly the girl senses that the world is more than the visible, that small animals lie in wait for their moment to leap out, that there are asymmetrical and invisible worlds. She’s reached ten years of age without fears, without ghosts and spirits, but a brief scene in the jungle has been enough to resuscitate an unconscious dread. Behind everything there is something else, she tells herself, the possibility of a world behind the world. She is learning a fundamental lesson: there is nothing more treacherous than peace.