Read Online Children of Paradise: A Novel by Fred D'Aguiar - Free Book Online Page B

with verses interspersed by one-liners shouted by a teacher or rotated between the children so that the songs last for hours of head-spinning enchantment. A class moves outside and sits under a tree. Adam hears these alphabets and numerals, and he absorbs the stories of sinners redeemed and the lost found by the Holy Scripture, and he somersaults and claps his hands as the children clap theirs to a hymn. As they recite a psalm, so Adam listens with parted lips. This is the glory of heaven made on earth, of watching the day begin with putting back into place the trees and the birds hurled from limbs into flight and the animals erased by the dark, now redrawn with morning light and released from the traps of sleep: set free to buck, scamper, and roam.
    Daylight brings peddlers to the compound in defiance of the hand-painted signs warning that Trespassers May Be Shot and listing pork knockers and speculators and encyclopedia sellers as examples of subjects who qualify for target practice and listing indigenous tribes such as the Akawaio, Mawakwa, Warrau, and the Wapishana as the only exceptions because of their wood carvings that decorate the private dwelling of the preacher, and their medicines kept in leather pouches and gourds carved from calabash, and refrigerated in the commune pharmacy for emergencies in case supplies of the Western remedies run out. The indigenous natural therapies bear neat labels handwritten in ink bled from berries, and the remedies—some of which smell as if taken from fish guts or pig feces, others like peppermint or rosewater—stave off fevers, cure snakebites, spider bites, water ague, sun poisoning, berry and mushroom poisoning, foot and stomach worms, crotch-eating mites, and nightmares. The preacher breaks his own rules and, from time to time, entertains jewelers from the capital whose handmade bangles are famous as far away as Australia and whose amulets are worn by babies from Berbice to Bangladesh to protect against night raids by witches out to rob babies of their spirits. The preacher believes in the enduring value of gold and diamonds, but he instructs his guards to aim their rifles at the speculators because they offer the world nothing but bad ideas and appear at the gates of the compound only to contaminate this great community devoted to redeeming a lost humanity.
    The preacher allows encyclopedias into the grounds to update the school library or to add to his small collection, but only those handpicked by him. Books on the history of capitalism and communism and the making of the industrial revolution and the rise, rise, rise of Cuba and the demise of kings and queens and stories about the elevation of the downtrodden status throughout history of the poor and powerless and the heroes who fight for them from John the Baptist to Robin Hood to Che Guevara. Many of these books arrive in multiple volumes, hardbound with gold leaf painted into the covers. The commune library remains as well stocked as the food storeroom, for without feeding the mind and spirit, the preacher reminds them at nightly sermons, without exercising the mind with a strident and stringent vocabulary and facts about history and a Euclidean numeracy, the body can never feel satisfied, no matter how lavish the dining tables or how heaped the enamel plates. For the cup that runneth over is not physical but spiritual.
    The long loud blast of the horn of the captain’s boat with its weekly delivery climbs up from the river, floats over the trees to the commune, and lands in the ears of Trina and Joyce. Trina lowers her flute from her parted lips and looks in the direction of the preacher’s house, where her mother helps to keep the commune’s accounts straight, not quite the commune’s bookkeeper but one of the people the preacher credits with keeping his books in order. Trina thinks of the boat with her mother, their first time, before Eric and Kevin accompanied them and the captain introduced her to his tall tales