When Pedro stopped, a final chill of fire ran back down the spines of the people and returned to their loins. There was a stillness, a relief, and a sense of privilege and humility. Pedro was once more a silver-haired black hunter, now leaning on his musket, and smiling benignly. ‘Vamos, pescadores,’ he said.
The straw virgins were cast into the water, the people lit their lanterns and torches, drew their machetes from their scabbards, and waded carefully into the river, for although it was only knee deep, the current was extremely strong. The fish, confused, disorientated, and attracted by the lights, swam up near the surface and wriggled blindly amongst the fishers. Each man and woman struck one fish, for that was all that was permissible, and then they waded out to wait for the others. It is no easy matter to catch fish in this manner, for one has to allow for the displacement of light when shining through water, and more importantly, the broad blade of a machete is easily sent off course when slicing through water, so that it is alarmingly easy to wound one’s own feet and legs by mistake. This is no small thing when the blow is fierce and the blade razor-sharp; it is easy to remove a foot or sever a muscle with the suddenness of thought.
As soon as one’s fish was brought to the bank; one’s luck was set for the following year, the degree depending upon whether one had caught a gamitana, a zungaro, a chitari, or a comelon; in this way everyone had some luck, but some had more than others, an attitude which is both optimistic and realistic at the same time. When all the people had a fish the crowd processed back to the village, drinking Don Emmanuel’s guarapo on the way; Don Emmanuel himself joined the procession, his red beard glinting in the torchlight, and his crude remarks causing squeals of delight amongst the older women. For the rest there was a mood of nervousness, for by that time everybody knew that the army was once more in the area, and that there would be soldiers at the fiesta.
The soldiers were already in the village when its inhabitants arrived. Comandante Figueras wore his cap low over his eyes in his anxiety not to be recognised, and as the people drew into the single street he brought his two columns of men sharply to attention. The procession stopped, and there was an uneasy murmur. Figueras stepped forward and saluted the crowd, a gesture that would have struck them all as wildly comical if it had not also seemed so odd.
‘Citizens!’ he exclaimed in a voice that was as full of fervour as he could feign. ‘Do not be alarmed! We are on our way to another place and we join you in your celebrations before we leave, hoping to bear with us your good wishes!’
He turned about, snapped his heels together, and bawled, ‘Present arms!’ The men presented arms and in one slightly ragged movement brought the weapons to their shoulders, stepped forward with one foot, and pointed the barrels to the sky. ‘Fire!’ he yelled, and a crowd of vultures hastily left the tree nearby. ‘Fire!’ he yelled twice more, and the metallic clash of the shots receded into the night. Figueras turned once more to the perplexed and astonished crowd, and called out, ‘Vamos!’ In English, Don Emmanuel muttered to himself, ‘Twenty-one bum salute,’ and Josef tapped Hectoro on the shoulder: ‘There will be trouble tonight.’
‘Good,’ said Hectoro.
The fiesta proceeded at first better than might be expected; Profesor Luis had rigged his little windmill generator to a record player, so that people could dance to records. Every time the breeze changed the music went faster or slower, but nobody minded because it’s not difficult to dance faster or slower, after all.
A dancing area had been cordoned off in the street, and very soon so much dust had been kicked up by the dancers that it was impossible to see anything. In those days before rock music had got as far as the village everybody was crazy about Bambuco and Vallenato, two types of dance music characterised by a fascinating complexity of syncopation, and by the use of the tiple, a ten-stringed instrument that looks like a small guitar and is played rather like a mandolin or a bazouki. At that time the popular dance was ‘El Pollo Del Vallenato’ which was intended to be an imitation of the chicken. The people would scratch in the dust with one foot in imitation of looking for bugs, they would strut with the ludicrous solemnity of cockerels, they would make darting movements of the head in imitation of pecking, and they would flap their arms. At the end of the record they would let loose a startling cacophony of clucks and squawks, and then break into delighted laughter before peeling away to fetch another bottle of Aguila.
On account of the night and the fact that everyone was disinhibited by alcohol and made expansive by marijuana, nobody had recognised Figueras, who was soon lying flat on his face outside Consuelo’s whorehouse, whose small staff had been augmented by a busload of exceptionally young whores from Chiriguana. It was a cause for much pride if one had a little whore in the family, because of the excellent income, and so many girls began at twelve; however, girls who were not whores were expected to remain virgins until sixteen, and marriage. Any detected lapse of this code was dealt with by bullets. It must be said, nevertheless, that on this night the whoring was intense and arduous, and many girls came out to dance rather than get wearier and sorer.
It was drawing near to midnight and the revelry had reached such a pitch that nobody really knew what was going on any more, when a late-arriving vaquero decided to make a grand entrance in the style of the ancient cowboy films that were the staple fare of urban cinemas. He galloped into the village, whooping, and firing his revolver into the air.
The effect on the reeling soldiers was dramatic and instantaneous. They all reached the same conclusion at the same time; they had been set up for a Communist ambush. Mayhem ensued as they dropped to the ground or dodged behind buildings, firing wildly into the crowd, which dispersed as though by magic, leaving behind a horse whinnying in stricken pain, two dead infants, three dead adults, and several more wounded, who lay moaning and quivering in the dust without hope of rescue.
The gun battle that ensued lasted until each man had used up all his ammunition, which took about an hour and a half. Not knowing where the Communists were, they fired at the places where they could see the flashes of shots, which is to say that they shot at each other. This was done in a haze of intoxication and bowel-wrenching panic and so only four were slaughtered and ten wounded. The hideous finale of this melancholy episode occurred when a soldier lobbed a grenade behind a partition and a corporal emerged from behind it, staggering and clutching at his stomach. He lurched to the centre of the street, stood motionless for a second, and began to howl a long unearthly howl of terror and supplication. He raised his arms to heaven, and in that one movement his entrails burst from his stomach and slithered grotesquely to the earth. Whimpering and weeping he fell to the ground amongst them.
The soldiers, stunned into sobriety by horror, began to call out to each other, and then very cautiously began to emerge. They gathered around the body of their corporal and looked at it and at each other in silence, looking away and shrugging their shoulders with gestures of ‘I am not guilty, all of this is nothing to do with me’ whenever another caught their eye.
Figueras awoke from his stupor outside Consuelo’s whorehouse and sat up groggily, rubbing his eyes. He rose unsteadily to his feet and urinated for a very long time against the wall of the building. He belched with sonorous satisfaction and turned round. For a second he could not believe his eyes as he stared with stupid incomprehension at the carnage around him; ‘Mierda maricon’ was all he could think of to say.
He swayed as he walked over to his men, looked down at the corpse, and crossed himself. ‘Let’s go back to camp,’ he said, his face ashen-white.
The soldiers left the village in a clumsy attempt at furtiveness, and the villagers slowly began to appear from the houses. They stood in the street exactly as the soldiers had done, in bewilderment and amazement. Profesor Luis turned off the record player, which all this time had been repeating and repeating again the merry strains of ‘El Pollo Del Vallenato’, and Pedro spoke up clearly. ‘They must be repaid for this!’ Hectoro took hi
s revolver from his belt and strode off. Ten shots were heard as he despatched the wounded soldiery.
When Figueras and his men left in the truck and the jeep the next day, they passed the bodies of some of the soldiers hanging in the trees, already half-stripped by the vultures. Beneath the bodies the dogs fought for the bits which fell off. Figueras did not stop, and nor did he stop until he reached Valledupar, a town in which he later heard the news that he was to be awarded another decoration for his heroic resistance to a vastly superior guerrilla force. He was also to receive command of an enlarged force of men who were to destroy the Communists once and for all, by whatever means.
11
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AURELIO’S EDUCATION AMONGST THE NAVANTES
THE NAVANTES WERE proud that white people were scared of them and called their river ‘The River of the Dead’. They dropped hints that it had been they who had killed Colonel Fawcett, his son, and Raleigh Rimell, and they possessed a carbine said to have belonged to Winton, whom they had purportedly poisoned with adulterated chicha and set adrift in a canoe. They were hospitable to white people on condition that they never tried to leave; if they did they were clubbed to death with bordanas. They called a knife a ‘couteau’, which they had learned from a French explorer, and pronounced in the finest Parisian accent, and they knew a song called ‘Cuddle up a little closer, Baby Mine’ that they had learned by heart from a diamond and gold prospecting party of yanquis, Peruvians and Brazilians that had befriended them with gifts of salt and displays of Roman candles, but who had managed to escape in 1935, in the time when Maharon was chief. The song, a little altered by the folk process, was still sung at initiations of sub-chiefs and at weddings.
The Navantes, like the jungle Indians in general, are the most widely travelled people in the world even though they never leave the forest or the cerrado. They accomplish their cosmopolitan itineraries with the aid of ayahuasca potions, which give them unlimited powers of telepathy (hence the alternative name of ‘telepatina’), and the ability to leave their bodies and arrive at their destination without crossing the intervening space. They were particularly fond of going to New York, where there were millions of boxes that moved by themselves, and huge termite mounds where people lived like ants in vast colonies. It was those travellings through the noosphere that persuaded them that they never wanted to leave the jungle, where life was very easy, as there was no routine whatsoever and one never did anything at all unless one felt like it.
They lived in very large chozas which contained upwards of thirty people each, and also the animals that they took to bed with them for warmth at night. The husbands’ hammocks were above their wives’, which were above their children’s, and after dark they would block the low entrances to the hut and keep logs smouldering so that a homely atmosphere of impenetrable smoke was created. There was also a communal hut used for some parts of ceremonies and for councils, and the huts were always laid out in the shape of the crescent moon, which they believed to be made of oropendola feathers. When the time came to leave a village because the soil was exhausted, they sometimes left their household possessions behind in order not to have to carry them; otherwise the women carried them, as they were considered to be the owners.
The Navantes had no jobs and did no work beyond cultivating bananas, corn, maize and ground nuts. The rest of the time they amused themselves. The young women made elaborate hammocks, whilst the old women made chicha by chewing cassava and spitting it into a bowl in order to ferment it. The men spent most of their days hunting and fishing. In his time with them Aurelio came to realise that in fact food very nearly does press itself in one’s mouth in the jungle after all. Virtually every animal was edible, including the haruzam toad; there were forty-seven varieties of edible nuts, including the wonderful castanas, and they had several ingenious methods of fishing. One of these necessitated standing like a stork in the water with bow and arrow (the latter being two metres long). Another method was to erect a barrier across the river like a wickerwork hurdle. Some would wait one side of the hurdle in their piroque canoes whilst the others would thrash the water and drive the panicking fish to leap over it into the canoes. Another method was to beat the water with ushchachera branches, so that the poisoned fish simply floated to the surface to be harvested. The variety of fish was enormous; piranha was very tasty but full of irritating bones. The bufeo was considered a friend and only killed when one wanted the skin of the female genitals to make an aphrodisiac talisman. The piraruca was the largest freshwater fish in the world and took a very long time for even a whole village to eat. Cramp-fish was not eaten for fear of paralysis, candiru were nearly two metres long and made a good feast, characin had tubes in their upper jaws for the fangs of the lower to nest in, and their teeth or those of the traira were excellent for the extraction of thorns and general surgery. The mailed catfish was delicious when grilled on palm leaves, but the electric eel was to be studiously avoided; when a good catch was made the returning fisherman would whoop with joy as he approached the aldeia so that everyone could run out to admire it. To keep it fresh it would be buried in wet sand.
When it came to hunting animals the Navantes very rarely used the cerebetana blowpipe with darts tipped with curare. Instead they were very skilled archers. They had a method of holding a sheaf of arrows in the left hand that gripped the bow so that one could keep up a rapid fire. Arrows were very difficult to make, and this was probably the only reason that they expended so much effort in becoming expert. The arrival of missionaries was always greeted with enthusiasm because after they had been killed or driven out one could extract the nails from their cabins to use as arrow heads, these being much better than bones. They hunted for four reasons; for food, to get rid of dangerous predators, for tools, and for adornment. The capybara, a kind of mentally-retarded guinea pig and the largest rodent in the world, provided teeth that made perfect chisels, and they would hunt birds with blunt arrows. They did this to pull out their prettiest feathers to make acangatara headdresses. When the stunned birds felt better they were either set free or kept in captivity to become dejected feather-farms. Sooner or later they would die of incomprehension.
The Navantes were particularly fond of eating parrots, ciapu (banana soup), bushmaster snakes, turtles’ eggs dug out of praias, curassows, both tufted and razor-billed, wild honey, an obnoxious greasy soup called piquia which they gave to unwanted visitors, and monkeys of all descriptions which they shot with four-pronged arrows and which looked alarmingly like children when skinned, and were full of intestinal parasites.
They regarded animals as equals, neither inferior nor superior, and always kept large numbers of unlikely pets. Some animals they would not eat at all, such as the sun-bittern that ate lice, or the urutau bird that was the special guardian of maidens, or squirrels, which they associated with sleep. They showed no repugnance at eating vast numbers of leafcutter ants, wasp grubs and locusts, which, when toasted, tasted pleasantly of aniseed.
Hunting for ants was one of the few times when women would remove their uluri. This was a little triangle of bark with sides about three centimetres long, attached to a plaited thread worn around the waist. From the lower apex of the triangle ran another plaited thread that passed snugly between the outer labia and was attached above the buttocks at the back. The purpose of the uluri was to draw attention to the genitals, since the triangle acted like a little signpost towards them. They were considered to be the mark of the post-pubertal woman, and she was indecently undressed without one. Women always had a spare triangle, just in case. Both men and women also wore necklaces made of about a thousand tiny circles of snailshells. The women would take six months to make these, by grinding the shells on stones until they were very small and thin. Each circle would be drilled in the centre with a tooth or a piece of hardwood, and then strung on wild cotton. Boys usually wore one of these necklaces around the waist, and men usually wore nothing at all except perhaps a necklace of jaguar claws or bark ringlets ar
ound their ankles. They used to spend hours delousing and deticking each other, just like the occitan cathars of medieval times, according to pecking order, lice and ticks being the sole parasites that resisted removal during their frequent daily baths. The only sense in which they were ever clothed was when they were plastered from head to foot in the pigments they employed for celebrations. Piquia oil (as used in the soup) was mixed with anatto to make yellows and reds, white was made of wood ash, and genipapo was excellent for blues and blacks. These dyes made their naturally light skins tobacco brown and also helped to keep away the hordes of stinging insects, such as buffalo gnats, and the sandflies that caused lechmaniosis leprosy. In their anxiety to be as unclothed as possible, the people would conscientiously depilate their whole bodies, excepting their heads, with their fingers dipped in wood-ash, giving rise to the popular myth that Amazonian Indians are naturally hairless.
Aurelio, despite his plait, assimilated very quickly into the life of the tribe. He learned from them the art of living a perfectly simple life without having to do too much work; he learned how to be busy without being industrious, and to take a childish joy in simple things, such as ‘toke-toke’, their word for sexual frolics.
Aurelio acquired the art of happiness; the Navante idea of heaven was that it was exactly the same as earth, except that one would meet there those who had gone before, and also the tribal ancestor Mavutsinin. Aurelio learned from the paje the full art of medicine, and the methods of contacting and negotiating with the spirits. He learned all the myths and their most powerful esoteric meanings. He learned the names of all the stars and constellations, including the gaps between them, his personal one being the ‘tapir’ which lies just by the Southern Cross. He learned their language, and hence discovered a new way of thinking. The Navantes had no words for classes of things, so they were not prone to making generalisations. They collected in immense detail the names of specific things, however, which meant that their language tended to evolve with such startling rapidity that it was necessary to go and stay with other villages of the tribe to keep up with developments. An English anthropologist once described their language as primitive and barely usable, having once questioned a girl who had been expelled from the tribe as mentally defective. In fact their vocabulary was easily larger than Shakespeare’s and definitely larger than the hasty anthropologist’s.