Crab Orchard Review, Vol. 15, No. 1

Tabaré Alvarezat least eleven successive generations of bamboo; if the specieswere indeed altinprem or melvillepapa, with roughly seventy yearsbetween one generation and the next, then the oldest plant wouldpredate Columbus’s arrival. This would disprove one of botany’s basicassumptions concerning the Americas, that all pre-Columbian flora isautochthonous.The old man wasn’t dying, not particularly, but he knew that hehadn’t much time: in a few years, in five or six or even ten, he wouldbe unable to trek through the valley in the cold. He felt he was close:it gave him hope that the alderman remembered no flowers. It wasincredible, the old man thought, how much he relied on that singlefact. He had been a botanist all his life; he had traveled (more thanany of his colleagues, most of whom had married, and had childrenand grandchildren, and had still managed to get their names into thebooks) across temperate zones and along the tropical and subtropicalbelt: Asia, Africa, the Americas.He placed the green shoots in his mouth. The girl made a weaknoise. He closed his eyes and chewed. Bamboo plants often had severallocal common names, and the same name would often refer to severaldistinct species. The old man suspected that even some of the scientificnames were duplicates, where two scientists had independentlydiscovered the same plant growing in different places. Verificationwas made difficult by the long intervals between flowerings, by theseclusion of the locales, and by the number of names. In her backpackthe girl carried a list of all the names the old man had collected overthe years, and he could now turn to her and, in his fluent but heavilyaccented Spanish, ask her for the list. But there was no need: he had thenames memorized. Bamboo shoots are edible, as are the seeds, and inhis travels, at every opportunity he had had, he had tasted them. Heused the standard methods of field identification, based on the flower,the leaf, the root structure, and the color, thickness, and node spacingof the culm, but he also kept a mental log of the taste of the shoots. Hehad described the tastes in writing, too, but many of these descriptionsread like one another: there are variations in nature that the senses canperceive but for which language does not yet have a name. So the oldman could trust only the memory of the taste, and daily, as he walkedthrough the valley inspecting the bamboo, he spoke out the list, in hismind calling up the taste of each name.The girl still stood there with the heavy backpack on. He knew shedidn’t like it, his eating the shoots: the villagers did not use bamboo2 u Crab Orchard Review