“The nahab are like the dead; their souls have escaped their breasts,” he said. “The nahab have no knowledge, they know nothing; they cannot spear a fish with a lance or fell a monkey with a dart, or climb a tree. They do not go dressed in air and light, as we do, but wear stinking cloth. They do not bathe in the river, they do not know the rules of decency or courtesy, they do not share their house, their food, their children, or their women. They have soft bones and their skulls split at the least blow. They kill animals and do not eat them, leaving them on the ground to rot. Wherever they pass they leave a trail of filth and poison, even in water. The nahab are so crazed that they try to take with them the stones of the earth, the sand of the rivers, and the trees of the forest. Some want the earth itself. We tell them that the jungle cannot be carried away on their backs like a dead tapir, but they do not listen. They speak to us of their gods but they do not want to hear of ours. Their appetites are unbounded, like the caimans’s. These terrible things I have seen with my own eyes, and I have heard with my own ears, and touched with my own hands.”
“We will never allow these demons to come to the Eye of the World; we will kill them with our darts and arrows as they climb the waterfall, as we have done to all foreigners who have tried since the times of the grandfathers of our grandfathers,” Tahama proclaimed.
“But they will come no matter,” Alex said. “The nahab have birds of noise and wind; they can fly above the mountains. They will come because they want the stones and the trees and the earth.”
“True,” Walimai admitted.
“The nahab can also kill with sickness,” said Nadia. “Many tribes have died in this way, but the People of the Mist can be saved.”
“This honey-colored girl knows what she is saying; we must listen to her. The Rahakanariwa can adopt the form of deadly sickness,” Walimai assured them.
“She is more powerful than the Rahakanariwa?” asked Tahama, dumbfounded.
“I am not, but there is another woman who is very powerful. She has serums that can prevent epidemics,” said Nadia.
Nadia and Alex spent an hour trying to convince the Indians that not all nahab were evil demons, that some were friends, like Dr. Omayra Torres. The limitations of language were difficult enough, but added to that were cultural differences. How could they explain to these Indians what a serum was? They themselves did not completely understand, which is why they chose to say that it was very strong magic.
“The only way to save the tribe is for this woman to come and use her needle on the People of the Mist,” Nadia argued. “That way, even if the nahab or the Rahakanariwa should come, thirsty for blood, they cannot do harm with sickness.”
“They can threaten us in other ways. Then we will go to war,” Tahama swore.
“War against the nahab is not a good idea . . . ,” Nadia tried to say.
“The new chief must decide,” Tahama concluded.
Walimai took charge of conducting Mokarita’s funeral rites in accordance with the ancient traditions. Despite the danger of being seen from the air, the Indians built a huge bonfire to cremate the body, and for hours the chief’s remains were consumed by fire as the inhabitants of the village mourned his parting. Walimai prepared a magic potion, the powerful ayahuasca, to help the men of the tribe see deep into their hearts. The young foreigners were invited as well because they had a heroic mission to fulfill, the most important of their lives, and for that they would not only need the help of the gods, they would need to know their own strength. They did not dare refuse, although the taste of the potion was nauseating and they had to make a great effort to swallow it and keep it down. They did not feel its effects until sometime later, when suddenly the ground gave way beneath their feet and the sky filled with geometric figures and brilliant colors and their bodies began to whirl and dissolve, and panic invaded their every cell. Just when they believed they were dead, they felt themselves propelled at dizzying speed through countless chambers of light, and soon the doors of the kingdom of the totemic gods opened, and they were bidden to enter.
Alex felt his limbs grow longer, and burning heat spread inside him. He looked at his hands and saw two paws ending with sharp claws. He opened his mouth to call out and a terrible roar rumbled from his belly. He was transformed into a large, black, sleek cat, the magnificent male jaguar he had seen in the courtyard of Mauro Carías. The animal was not in him, or he in it; the two of them had blended into a single being, simultaneously animal and youth. Alex took a few steps, stretching, and testing his muscles, and realized that he was endowed with the lightness, the speed, and the strength of the jaguar. He made a few great leaps through the forest, possessed with supernatural energy. With a bound, he sprang up to the limb of a tree and from there observed the jungle around him through golden eyes, slowly switching his coal-black tail. He knew he was powerful, feared, solitary, invincible; the king of the South American jungle. No other animal was as fierce as he was.
Nadia soared upward and in a few instants’ time lost the fear of heights that had always plagued her. Her powerful eagle wings barely stroked; the cold air held her and the slightest movement was enough to change the direction or speed of her course. She was flying at a great height, calm, unworried, detached, observing the earth beneath her without curiosity. From above, she saw the jungle and the flat peaks of the tepuis, many covered with clouds like crowns of foam; she also saw the faint column of smoke from the bonfire where the remains of chief Mokarita were burning. Borne by the wind, the eagle was as invincible as the jaguar was on land: nothing could reach her. The girl-bird swooped in Olympian fashion above the Eye of the World, observing from on high the lives of the Indians. Her head feathers stood up like hundreds of antennae, capturing the warmth of the sun, the vastness of the wind, the dramatic emotion of height. She knew that she was the protector of these Indians, the mother-eagle of the People of the Mist. She flew over the village of Tapirawa-teri and the shadow of her magnificent wings, like a mantle, covered the nearly invisible roofs of the small dwellings hidden in the forest. Finally the great bird flew to the summit of the highest tepui, where in her nest, exposed to the winds, shone three crystal eggs.
The next morning, when the two foreigners had returned from the world of totemic animals, they told each other their experiences.
“What is the meaning of those three eggs?” Alex asked.
“I don’t know, but they are very important. Those eggs are not mine, Jaguar, but I must find them in order to save the People of the Mist.”
“I don’t understand. What do eggs have to do with Indians?”
“I don’t really know, but I think they have everything to do with them,” Nadia replied.
When the coals of the funeral pyre cooled, Iyomi, Mokarita’s wife, pulled out the residue from his bones, ground it until it was a fine powder, and mixed that with water and plantains to make a soup. The gourd with this gray liquid passed from hand to hand, and everyone, even Alex and Nadia, drank a sip. Then they buried the gourd and the name of the chief was to be forgotten, so that no one would ever speak it again. The memory of the man, like the particles of courage and wisdom left in his ashes, passed on to his descendants and friends. A part of him would always remain among the living. Nadia and Alex had been asked to drink the soup of his bones as a form of baptism: now they belonged to the tribe. When Alex held the gourd to his lips, he remembered that he had read about an illness caused by “eating the brain of one’s ancestors.” He closed his eyes and drank with respect.
Once the funeral ceremony was concluded, Walimai directed the tribe to elect its new chief. According to tradition, only men could aspire to that position, but Walimai explained that this time they must choose with extreme care because they were living in very strange times and they would need a chief capable of understanding the mysteries of other worlds, of communicating with the gods, and of holding the Rahakanariwa at bay. He said that these were the times of a sky with six moons, times when the gods had seen it necess
ary to abandon their dwelling. At the mention of the gods, the Indians put their hands to their heads and began to rock back and forth, chanting something that to Nadia and Alex sounded like a prayer.
“Everyone in Tapirawa-teri, including children, must participate in the election of a new chief,” Walimai instructed.
The tribe spent one whole day in proposing candidates and negotiating. By dusk, Nadia and Alex fell asleep, tired, hungry, and bored. The American had tried in vain to explain the method of choosing by vote, as in a democracy, but the Indians did not know how to count, and the idea of voting seemed as incomprehensible as the function of the serum. They elected through “visions.”
Late that night, the young people were wakened by Walimai with the news that the strongest vision had been of Iyomi, which meant that Mokarita’s widow was now chief in Tapirawa-teri. It was the first time in memory that a woman had acted in that position.
The first order the ancient Iyomi gave when she put on the crown of yellow feathers her husband had worn for so many years was for food to be prepared. That was acted upon immediately because the People of the Mist had gone two days with nothing more to eat than a sip of the soup made from the bones. Tahama and the other hunters went off into the jungle with their weapons and a few hours later returned with a giant anteater and a deer, which they cut up and roasted over coals. In the meantime, the women had made cassava bread and cooked plantains. When her people’s stomachs were full, Iyomi invited them to sit in a circle; she then issued her second edict.
“I am going to name other chiefs. A chief for war and hunting: Tahama. A chief for soothing the Rahakanariwa: the honey-colored girl called Eagle. A chief for negotiating with the nahab and their birds of noise and wind: the foreigner named Jaguar. A chief for visiting the gods: Walimai. A chief for the chiefs: Iyomi.”
This was how the wise woman distributed power and organized the People of the Mist for confronting the terrible times drawing near. And that was how Nadia and Alex found themselves saddled with a responsibility that neither felt capable of fulfilling.
And then came Iyomi’s third order. She said that the girl Eagle must conserve her “pure soul” to face the Rahakanariwa, the only way to keep from being devoured by the cannibal-bird, but that the young foreigner Jaguar must become a man and receive his warrior’s weapons. Every young male, before taking up weapons or considering marriage, had to die as a boy and be born as a man. There was not enough time for the traditional ceremony, which lasted three days and normally included all the males of the tribe who had reached puberty. In Jaguar’s case, they would have to improvise something much briefer, Iyomi explained, because he was to accompany Eagle on her journey to the mountain of the gods. The People of the Mist were in danger; only these two outsiders could save them, and it was their duty to leave quickly.
Walimai and Tahama were chosen to organize Alex’s rite of initiation, in which only adult males participated. Afterward, Alex told Nadia that if he had known what the ceremony held in store, the experience might have been less terrifying. Under Iyomi’s direction, the women shaved the crown of Alex’s head with a sharpened stone, a rather painful process since he still had the unhealed cut from being clubbed when he and Nadia had been kidnapped. As they shaved that place, the stone reopened the wound, but the women dabbed on a little clay and soon the bleeding stopped. Then they painted him from head to toe with a paste of wax and charcoal. At that point, Alex had to tell his friend and Iyomi good-bye because the women could not be present during the ceremony and went off to spend the day in the forest with the children. They would not return to the village until night, when the warriors had taken him to undergo the trials of initiation.
Tahama and his men went to the river and from the mud unearthed the sacred musical instruments used only in ceremonies of virility. These were large hollow tubes about five feet long that produced a low, hoarse sound when blown, like the bellowing of a bull. The women, and the boys as yet to be initiated, were not allowed to see them, lest through magic they would fall ill and die. The instruments represented male power in the tribe, the bond between fathers and sons. Without those horns, all the power would be vested in the women, who already possessed the divine ability to have children, or “make people,” as they called it.
The rite began in the morning and would last all that day and that night. Alex was given some bitter berries to eat, and was left curled up on the ground in the fetal position. The warriors, directed by Walimai and decorated with the symbols of demons, formed a tight circle around him and beat the ground with their feet and smoked cigars made of leaves. Among the bitter berries, his fear, and the smoke, Alex soon began to feel rather ill.
For a long time, the warriors danced and chanted around him, blowing the large sacred horns, which were so long they dragged on the ground. The sound echoed through Alex’s confused brain. For hours he heard the chants repeating the story of the Sun Father, who dwelled beyond the everyday sun that lighted the sky; he was invisible fire, the origin of Creation; he listened about the drop of blood that had dripped from the moon to give life to the first man. They sang about the River of Milk, which contained all the seeds of life—but also of decay and death; they told of how this river led to the kingdom where shamans like Walimai met with the spirits and other supernatural beings to receive wisdom and the power of healing. They told of how everything that exists is dreamed by Mother Earth, how each star dreams its inhabitants, and how all that happens in the universe is an illusion, dreams within dreams. Even in his confusion, Alexander felt that those words described concepts that he himself had sensed, then he ceased to reason and gave himself to the strange experience of thinking with his heart.
As the hours went by, Alex was losing his sense of time, space, and his own reality, and sinking into a state of terror and profound fatigue. At some point, he felt himself being lifted to his feet and forced to walk; that was when he realized that night had fallen. They walked in a long line toward the river, playing their instruments and brandishing their weapons; there he was submerged several times, until he thought he was drowning. They rubbed him with rough leaves to remove the black paint and then dusted pepper on his burning skin. With earsplitting yells, they beat his legs, arms, chest, and stomach with twigs, but not to inflict injury; they threatened him with their spears, sometimes touching him with the tips but not wounding him. They tried in every possible way to frighten him, and they succeeded, because the American did not understand what was happening and was afraid that at any moment his attackers would go too far and actually kill him. He tried to defend himself from the pounding and pushing of the warriors of Tapirawateri, but instinct told him not to try to escape; it would be futile, there was nowhere to go in that unfamiliar and hostile terrain. That was a wise decision; had he tried, he would have looked like a coward, the unpardonable flaw for a warrior.
When he was close to losing control and yelling hysterically, Alex suddenly remembered his totemic animal. He did not have to do anything extraordinary to enter the body of the black jaguar, the transformation happened quickly and easily; the sound that burst from his throat was the same he had roared before, the slash of his claws he already knew, the leap over the heads of his enemies was a natural act. The Indians celebrated the arrival of the jaguar with a deafening clamor, and soon they led him in a solemn procession to the sacred tree, where Tahama was waiting with the final test.
It was nearly dawn. Fire ants were trapped in a kind of tube or sieve of woven straw, like those used to press the prussic acid from cassava. Tahama was holding the tube with two sticks to avoid contact with the insects. It took Alex, exhausted after that long and frightening night, a moment to understand what was expected of him. He took a deep, deep breath, filling his lungs with the cold air, called on the courage of his father, the mountain climber, the endurance of his mother, who never gave up, and the strength of his totemic animal, and plunged his left arm, to the elbow, into the tube.
The fire ants crawled
over his skin for a few seconds before biting him. When they did, he felt as if acid had eaten his flesh to the bone. Horrific pain stunned him for several instants, but through a brutal effort of will, he kept from pulling his arm from the sieve. He remembered Nadia’s words when she was trying to teach him to live with mosquitoes: Don’t try to defend yourself; ignore them. It was impossible to ignore fire ants, but after a few moments of absolute desperation, in which it was all he could do not to run and jump in the river, he realized it was possible to control the impulse to flee, to choke back his howls, to open himself to suffering without resisting, to allow the pain to penetrate his body and his consciousness. And then the searing pain went through him like a sword, emerged from his back, and, miraculously, he was able to bear it. Alex would never be able to explain the sense of power he felt during that torture. He felt as strong and invincible as he had in the form of the black jaguar, after drinking Walimai’s magic potion. That was his reward for having survived the test. He knew that, in truth, he had left his childhood behind and that from that night on he would be able to look after himself.
“Welcome among men,” said Tahama, removing the sieve from Alex’s arm.
The warriors led the semiconscious young man back to the village.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Sacred Mountain
BATHED IN SWEAT, battered, and burning with fever, Alexander—Jaguar—walked down a long green corridor, stepped across an aluminum threshold, and saw his mother. Lisa was lying back among pillows in a large chair with a sheet pulled across her body, in a room where the light was as clear as moonlight. She was wearing a blue wool cap over her bald head and headphones on her ears. She was very pale and thin, with dark shadows around her eyes. Yellow liquid dripped from a plastic bag into the IV inserted into a vein beneath her collarbone. Each drop penetrated, like the fire of the ants, directly into the bloodstream to his mother’s heart.