Doctor Mario and señora Tosca were select members of the community; he was in charge of everyone’s health, and she was responsible for their cultural life and news of changes in fashion. The couple lived in a cool, pleasant house, half of which was occupied by his consulting room. In their patio they kept a blue and yellow macaw that flew overhead when they went out for a stroll in the plaza. You could always tell where the doctor or his wife were, because the bird accompanied them, gliding silently some two meters above their heads on large brightly colored wings. The couple lived in Agua Santa many years, well respected by the citizenry, who pointed to them as exemplars of perfect love.
During one of his attacks, the doctor lost his way among the byways of fever, and did not return. The town was moved by his death. They feared that his wife might do herself harm, as she had in the roles she played, and they arranged to keep her company day and night in the following weeks. Maurizia Rugieri dressed in mourning from head to toe, painted all her furniture black, and carried her sorrow around like a tenacious shadow that incised two deep furrows at the corners of her mouth. She did not, nevertheless, attempt to put an end to her life. Perhaps in the privacy of her room, when she lay alone in her bed, she felt a profound relief; now she would not have to bear the heavy load of her dreams; it was no longer necessary to keep alive the character she had invented to represent herself, nor constantly juggle facts to mask the weakness of a lover who had never lived up to her illusions. But the habit of theater was too deeply ingrained. With the same infinite patience with which she had created for herself an image of the romantic heroine, in her widowhood she constructed the legend of her despair. She remained in Agua Santa, always in black—although mourning had been out of mode for many years—and refused to sing again, despite the pleas of her friends who believed that the opera would be a consolation. The town closed about her in a circle, like a strong embrace, to make her life bearable and help her retain her dreams. With the town’s complicity, Doctor Gómez’s memory grew in popular imagination. After two years, people took up a collection and commissioned a bronze bust to be installed on a column in the plaza facing the stone statue of the Liberator.
That was the year the main highway came through Agua Santa, which altered forever the look and spirit of the town. At first, people had opposed the project; they believed it would mean that the inmates of Santa María Prison would be brought in shackles to cut down trees and crush stone; that was how their grandfathers said the road had been built during the time of El Benefactor’s dictatorship. Soon, however, engineers arrived from the city with the news that modern machines, not prisoners, would do the work. Behind the engineers came surveyors, followed by crews of workers in orange helmets and jackets that glowed in the dark. The machines turned out to be enormous steel beasts that the schoolteacher calculated to be roughly the size of dinosaurs; on their flanks they bore the name of their owners, Ezio Longo and Son. That very Friday, the father and son came to Agua Santa to inspect the work and pay the workmen.
When Maurizia Rugieri saw the signs and machines bearing the name of her former husband, she hid in her house with doors and shutters locked, in the unrealistic hope that she could somehow escape the past. But for twenty-eight years the recollection of her son had been a pain buried deep in her heart, and when she heard that the owners of the construction company were in Agua Santa having lunch in the tavern, she could not help yielding to her instinct. She examined herself in the mirror. She was fifty-one years old, aged by the tropical sun and the effort of feigning a chimerical happiness, but her features still bore the nobility of pride. She brushed her hair and combed it into a high bun, not attempting to hide the gray; she put on her best black dress and her wedding pearls, saved through her many adventures, and with a gesture of timid coquetry drew a line of black on her eyelids and touched crimson to cheeks and lips. She left her house under the protection of Leonardo Gómez’s umbrella. Sweat ran down her back, but she did not tremble.
At that hour the tavern shutters were closed against the midday heat, so Maurizia had to stand a moment while her eyes adjusted to the darkness before she recognized Ezio Longo and the young man who must be her son at one of the rear tables. Her husband had changed much less than she, probably because he had always seemed ageless. The same leonine neck and shoulders, the same solid build, the same rather coarse features and deep-set eyes—softened now by a fan of good-humored laugh lines. Bent over his plate, he chewed enthusiastically, listening to his son’s conversation. Maurizia observed them from a distance. Her son must be nearly thirty. Although he had her long bones and delicate skin, his gestures were those of his father; he ate with the same pleasure, pounded the table to emphasize his words, and laughed heartily. He was a vital and energetic man with an uncompromising sense of his own worth, a man ready for any struggle. Maurizia looked at Ezio Longo through new eyes, and for the first time appreciated his solid masculine virtues. She stepped forward, touched, breathless, seeing herself from a new dimension, as if she were on a stage playing out the most dramatic moment of the long theater of her life, with the names of her husband and her son on her lips, and with warm hopes of being forgiven for all her years of neglect. But in those few instants, too, she saw the minute gears of the trap in which she had enmeshed herself for thirty hallucinatory years. She realized that the true hero of the drama was Ezio Longo, and she wanted to believe that he had continued to desire her and wait for her during all that time, with the persistent and impassioned love that Leonardo Gómez could never give because it was not in his nature.
At that moment, when she was only inches from stepping from the shadow and being exposed, the young man leaned forward, grasped his father’s wrist, and said something with a sympathetic wink. Both burst out laughing, clapped each other on the shoulder, and ruffled each other’s hair with a virile tenderness and staunch complicity that excluded Maurizia Rugieri and the rest of the world. She hesitated for an infinite moment on the borderline between reality and dream, then stepped back, left the tavern, opened her black umbrella, and walked home with the macaw flying above her head like a bizarre archangel from a book of days.
WALIMAI
The name given me by my father is Walimai, which in the tongue of our brothers in the north means “wind.” I can tell it to you, since now you are like my own daughter and you have my permission to call my name, although only when we are among family. The names of persons and living creatures demand respect, because when we speak them we touch their heart and become a part of their life force. This is how we blood kinsmen greet each other. I cannot understand the ease with which the white ones call each others’ names, with no fear; not only does it show a lack of respect, it can also lead to grave danger. I have noted that these persons speak unthinkingly, not realizing that to speak is also to be. Word and gesture are man’s thought. We should not speak without reason; this I have taught my sons and daughters, but they do not always listen to my counsel. Long ago, taboos and traditions were respected. My grandfathers, and the grandfathers of my grandfathers, received all necessary knowledge from their grandfathers. Nothing changed. A man with a good memory could recall every teaching he had received and thus knew what to do in any situation. But then came the white ones speaking against the wisdom of the grandfathers, and pushing us off our land. We move always deeper into the jungle, but always they overtake us; sometimes years pass, but finally they come again, and we must destroy our planted fields, put our children on our back, bind our animals, and depart. So it has been as long as I have memory: leave everything, and run away like mice—not like the mighty warriors and gods who inhabited these lands in days of old. Some of our young are curious about the whites, and while we travel deeper into the forest to continue to live as our ancestors did, others undertake a different path. We think of those who leave as if they were dead, because very few return, and those who do have changed so that we cannot recognize them as kinsmen.
They tell that in the year
s before I came into the world not enough women were born to our people, and thus my father had to travel long roads to seek a wife from a different tribe. He journeyed through the forests, following the marks of others who had traveled that route before him and for the same purpose and returned with women not of our blood. After much traveling, when my father had begun to lose hope of finding a life companion, he saw a girl standing by a tall waterfall, a river that fell from the sky. Staying some distance away, in order not to frighten her, he spoke to her in the tone that hunters use to calm their prey, and explained his need to marry her. She made signs that he might come near, studied him openly, and must have been pleased by the face of the traveler, because she decided that the idea of marriage was not a rash one. My father had to work for his father-in-law until he paid for the woman’s value. After they had fulfilled the rituals of marriage, they made the return journey to our village.
I grew up with my brothers and sisters beneath the canopies of tall trees, never seeing the sun. Sometimes a wounded tree would fall, leaving an opening in the thick dome of the forest; at those times we saw the blue eye of the sky. My father and mother told me stories; they sang songs to me, and taught me what a man must know to survive alone, with nothing but his bow and his arrows. I was free. We, the Children of the Moon, cannot live unless we are free. When we are closed inside walls or bars we collapse inward; we become blind and deaf, and in a few days our spirit detaches itself from the bones of our chest and abandons us. At those times we become like miserable beasts and, almost always, we prefer to die. That is why our houses have no walls, only a sloped roof to stop the wind and shed the rain; beneath it we hang our hammocks close together, because we like to listen to the dreams of the women and the children and feel the breath of the monkeys and dogs and pigs that sleep beneath the same shelter. In the earliest times we lived in the jungles without knowing that there was a world beyond the cliffs and rivers. Friends came to visit from other tribes, and told us rumors of Boa Vista and El Plantanal, of the white ones and their customs, but we believed these were only stories to make us laugh. I reached manhood, and my turn came to find a wife, but I decided to wait, because I liked being with the bachelors; we were happy, and lived well. Even so, I could not devote myself solely to games and resting as the others did, because my family is very large: brothers and sisters, cousins, nieces and nephews, many mouths to feed, and much work for a hunter.
One day a group of the pale men came to our village. They hunted with powder, from far away, without skill or courage; they could not climb a tree or spear a fish in the water; they moved clumsily through the jungle, they were always getting tangled in their packs, their weapons, even their own feet. They did not clothe themselves in air, as we do, but wore wet and stinking clothing; they were dirty and they did not know the laws of decency, but they insisted on telling us of their knowledge and their gods. We compared them with what we had been told about the white men, and we verified the truth of that gossip. Soon we realized that these men were not missionaries, or soldiers or rubber collectors: they were mad. They wanted the land; they wanted to carry away the wood; they were also searching for stones. We explained that the jungle is not something to be tossed over your shoulder and transported like a dead bird, but they did not want to hear our arguments. They made camp near our village. Each one of them was like a wind of catastrophe; he destroyed everything he touched; he left a trail of waste behind him; he disturbed animals and people. At first we obeyed the laws of courtesy, and pleased them, because they were our guests; but they were never satisfied, they wanted always more, until, weary of their games, we declared war with all traditional ceremonies. They are not good warriors; they are easily frightened and their fragile skullbones could not withstand the clubbing we gave them. Afterward we abandoned our village and we journeyed to the east where the forest is impenetrable, traveling for long stretches through the tops of the trees so their companions could not find us. We had been told that they are vengeful, and that for each one of them who dies, even in fair battle, they are capable of eliminating an entire tribe, including the children. We discovered a place to establish a new village. It was not as good—the women had to walk hours to find clean water—but we stayed there because we believed that no one would come so far to search for us. A year later I was far from our village following the track of a puma, when I approached too near a camp of soldiers. I was tired, and had not eaten in several days; for this reason, I used poor judgment. Instead of turning back when I glimpsed the strangers, I lay down to rest. The soldiers caught me. They did not mention the men we had clubbed to death. In fact, they asked me nothing; perhaps they did not know those men or did not know that I am Walimai. They pressed me into work with the rubber collectors, with many men from other tribes, men they had dressed in trousers and driven to work with no thought for their wishes. The rubber demands much care, and there were not enough people to do the work; that was why they forced us. That was a time without freedom, and I do not want to speak of it. I stayed only to see whether I could learn anything, but from the beginning I knew I would return to my people. Nothing can long hold a warrior against his will.
We worked from sun to sun, some bleeding the trees to drain their life drop by drop, others cooking the liquid to thicken it and form it into great balls. The air outdoors was sick with the stench of the burned sap, and the air indoors in the sleeping quarters foul with the sweat of the men. No one could draw a deep breath in that place. They gave us maize to eat, and bananas, and the strange contents of some cans, which I never tasted, because nothing good for humans can grow in tins. At one end of the camp they had built a large hut where they kept the women. After two weeks of working with the raw rubber, the boss handed me a slip of paper and sent me where the women were. He also gave me a cup of liquor, which I turned out on the ground, because I have seen how that water destroys a man’s good sense. I stood in line with the others. I was the last, and when it came my turn to enter the hut, the sun had gone down and night begun, with its clamor of frogs and parrots.
She was of the tribe of the Ila, the people of gentle heart, from which the most delicate girls come. Some men travel months on end to find the Ila; they take them gifts and hunt for them in the hope of obtaining one of their women. She looked like a lizard lying there, but I recognized her because my mother, too, was an Ila woman. She lay naked on her straw mat, tied by one ankle to a chain staked in the ground, sluggish, as if she had breathed in the yopo of the acacia; she had the smell of sick dogs, and she was wet with the dew of all the men who had covered her before me. She was the size of a young boy, and her bones clicked like small stones in the river. The Ila women remove all their bodily hair, even their eyelashes; they adorn their ears with feathers and flowers; they thrust polished sticks through their cheeks and nose; they paint designs over all their body in the reds of the annatto, the deep purple of the palm, and the black of carbon. But she had none of that. I placed my machete on the ground, and greeted her as a sister, imitating some songbirds and the sound of rivers. She did not respond. I pounded her chest, to see whether her spirit still resonated in her rib cage, but there was no echo; her soul was very weak and could not answer me. Kneeling beside her, I gave her water to drink and spoke to her in my mother’s tongue. She opened her eyes, and stared at me a long time. I understood.
First of all, I washed myself without wasting the clean water. I took a good draft into my mouth and sprinkled it in small streams onto my hands, which I rubbed carefully and then wet to clean my face. I did the same with her, to cleanse the men’s dew from her body. I removed the trousers the boss had given me. From a cord at my waist hung my sticks for making fire, the tips of arrows, my roll of tobacco, my wooden knife with a rat’s tooth in the point, and a bag of strong leather in which I carried a small amount of curare. I spread a bit of that paste on the point of my knife, bent over the woman and, with the poisoned instrument, opened a small cut in her neck. Life is a gift from the go
ds. The hunter kills to feed his family; he tries not to eat the flesh of his prey but prefers to eat what another hunter offers him. At times, tragically, a man kills another in war, but he never harms a woman or a child. She looked at me with large eyes yellow as honey, and I thought she tried to smile, gratefully. For her I had violated the first taboo of the Children of the Moon, and I would have to pay for my shame with many labors of expiation. I held my ear to her mouth, and she murmured her name. I repeated it twice in my mind to be very sure, but did not speak it aloud; it is not good to mention the dead or disturb their peace, and she was already dead even though her heart still beat. Soon I saw the muscles of her belly, her chest, her arms stiffen with paralysis; she stopped breathing, and changed color. A sigh escaped her, and her body died without a struggle, as small creatures die.
Immediately, I felt her spirit leave through her nostrils and enter mine, anchoring itself to my breastbone. All her weight fell upon me, and I had to struggle to get to my feet. I moved very slowly, as if I were under water. I arranged her body in the position of the last rest, with her knees touching her chin. I bound her with fibers from the mat, then made a mound with the rest of the straw and used my sticks to make fire. When I saw that the fire was blazing intensely, I left the hut slowly, laboriously climbed the camp fence—because she kept dragging me down—and walked into the forest. I had reached the first trees when I heard the alarm bells.