The Cloud Forest

  April 29. Ucayali.

  César awoke just after midnight, and as the night had remained clear—the Southern Cross had climbed the sky and turned a little, and Sirius seemed to have disappeared, though this may have been my own hazy observation—we forsook the great raft and set off again on our own. It was quite cold, and I returned to my sleeping bag and lay down again in the bilges with the dead monkey. Toward three in the morning we came to the mouth of the Pachitea, where at a hacienda above the encuentro we routed out some peons in Cruz’s employ. They prepared for us the first hot meal in days, eaten by candlelight, but nevertheless I was glad to leave the bank again, for the place was a pest hole of sand flies and sancudos: I can’t get over how sharply the Ucayali differs from the whole length of the Urubamba in this respect. On we went, into a magnificent dawn of white river birds and early hawks and swift parrot silhouettes and jungle smell and the soft blowing of dolphins. Once again I had a feeling of huge well-being; life on the river, I felt, deserved every nice thing that has ever been said about it. I had given up cigarettes last month, while with missionaries in Brazil, but now I have taken them up again, I’m afraid, and am enjoying every puff.

  César came forward, and we talked all morning. He is reading simultaneously a biography of Einstein and the collected works of Gabriela Mistral—he keeps a little suitcase full of such surprises—and he remarked in an offhand manner that he did not think Boris Pasternak deserved the Nobel Prize, or not, at least, for El Doctor Zhivago. We stopped at another Chama settlement—I am looking for a carved miniature canoe for a little boy at home—and there he spent an hour working skillfully on the infected foot of an old Indian. The infection, in a huge open wound, had splayed the little toe away from the rest of the swollen foot, which looked split right down the middle. To the amusement of the other Indians, César gave the man a penicillin shot in the behind, then washed the wound not quite gently with salt and water; with his customary flourish he dumped a quantity of iodine and penicillin powder over the whole works. The old man was perfectly stoic throughout a treatment so painful that I felt dizzy even as a spectator; he had a dignity that the other Shipibo men in these camps, drunk and indolent, rarely possess. And it is no coincidence that, in a society in which the women have clung to the old ways while the men have not, the former have alone retained the traditional serenity and grace.

  By noon an infernal heat had risen from the sun and its reflection on the river, a heat which seemed to paralyze the jungle. We went on in silence, pausing only to take a photograph of the fossil in the bow of the canoe and an atmospheric shot of myself with the revolver on my hip: we have been using the revolver to annoy the crocodiles—in one narrow lead, yesterday afternoon, César, Alejandro, and myself got off thirty rounds without doing the slightest damage—and in ordinary circumstances this would probably be the sole function of a revolver on these rivers, though perhaps, as Andrés says, the possession of it tends to eliminate any more crucial need. At two o’clock the metal roofs of Pucallpa’s sheds gleamed in the misty inferno ahead, and by four the fossil was safely ashore and in the hands of a good carpenter, to be crated for the truck trip over the mountains to Lima. We had reached Pucallpa in twenty-eight hours of navigation, two less than César had promised Andrés, and I was only relieved that I had kept my own doubts from Cruz, or I would have had to eat my acrid hat. And, in fact, Cruz was still brooding about Andrés when, at my elbow, my erstwhile partner materialized: as Cruz had predicted, the plane to San Ramón had not appeared in Atalaya, and it had been only by the wildest chance, after two days of terrible chagrin, that a plane of the lingüísticos, passing through to Pucallpa, had appeared. Andrés would leave the next morning on the Lima plane, weather permitting, and arrive in time for his famous anniversary celebration in the evening.

  Andrés had been certain that we were still far upriver, and was rather put out when he learned from Fausto Lopez at the Mercedes that I had not only checked in two hours ahead of him but was even now standing in plain view in front of the carpenter shop down the street. He was a good sport about it and received our remarks with a smile: sheepishly he congratulated Cruz, and, as of this evening, the two are friends again. César was very moody when Andrés first appeared, and abruptly broke off the plan we had made earlier, that he and his wife would have drinks and dinner with me at the Mercedes. But later he turned up alone—Andrés feels that Cruz is keeping his wife away, so that the whole embarrassing business about which encuentro had been meant would not rebound to Cruz’s disadvantage—and we had a quiet celebration. Whether or not Andrés is right, I continue to like César Cruz, who has come up fast the hard way. As Johnny Mutch, a sensible Scot who directs the lumber mill in Pucallpa, remarked to me last January, “César’s all right. He’s as good a man as you’re apt to find around a place like this. Just don’t turn your back on him too long, that’s all.” Mutch, incidentally, was as astonished as Andrés that we had actually found the fossil, and indeed the whole town is crowding around to see it. The local comandante, Juan Basurco, who was originally supposed to accompany us, appeared in town later without having heard about the fossil and, getting all his facts confused, told me excitedly about a fossil he had heard of in the Inuya which we should go and find together. I took him down the street and showed it to him.

  I plan to remain here a few days to confirm certain names and other points, and to see the precious fossil safely off, with Alejandro to guard it, on one of the lumber trucks. The man I am most anxious to talk to is Wayne Snell, who is said to be out at the headquarters of the lingüísticos, some eight miles from town on the lake called Yarina Cocha.

  May 2. Pucallpa.

  On Saturday morning, just as Andrés was about to board the plane for Lima, Cruz came running up. A telegram had arrived for the police chief of Pucallpa from his confrere in Atalaya.

  “Please detain a Señor César Cruz,” it read—for I saw it myself later, and am paraphrasing only a little—“who appears to have removed a fossil mandible from property on the Mapuya River without consulting the owner, Victor Macedo.”

  Cruz’s worst fears had been realized, for clearly Macedo, upon learning from Juan Pablo what had happened, had raced downriver to Atalaya and registered—despite the nice wording of the radiogram—a charge of theft. Macedo feels entitled to a share of the loot, for there was a fast-spreading and troubling rumor in Atalaya and now in Pucallpa that the fossil is worth a fortune. Having heard Juan Pablo’s account, I don’t feel Macedo has any claim—though Macedo and the luckless Vargaray might well argue that they had at least as much right to a fee as César Cruz. In any case, the bone has now been confiscated by the police “until the matter is clarified.” In South America this phrase can usually be translated “until a satisfactory amount of money has changed hands, or more powerful influences are brought to bear.” Before boarding the plane, Andrés promised to arrange for those influences in Lima, in the form of a cable from a cabinet minister which would release the local police from further responsibility and direct them to return the bone to me, but so far there has been no word. I am scheduled to fly out tomorrow, to Tingo María in the montaña, but it looks very much as if I shall have to stay.

  Yesterday Macedo himself turned up in Pucallpa. Cruz ran into him on the street, and they greeted each other with their relentless Peruvian civilities, but Macedo walked off coldly without mentioning the small matter of the bone. This afternoon the three of us convened in the office of the chief of police, who was duly informed by Macedo that the poor unsuspecting Juan Pablo had delivered up a very valuable stone belonging to Macedo for the equivalent of eighty cents, having been brought previously to a state of total intoxication. Either Juan Pablo gave this story to Macedo to avoid handing over a share of the spoils, or Macedo gave this story to the police to strengthen his own claim. It doesn’t much matter, though I am inclined to believe the latter. As it happens, Juan Pablo received five hundred and thirty soles from my own hand before touching the single dr
aft of pisco handed around by Cruz to celebrate the transaction, and he had not touched a drop in the previous four hours, all of which had been spent with me in Quebrada Grasa.

  But Macedo’s claim as the owner of the stone was supported by the circumstance that in March he had been offered one thousand soles for it by the defendant, César Cruz, a point which Cruz had not seen fit to tell me until this afternoon: this shot a terrific hole in our position that Juan Pablo had always been recognized by all parties as the lawful owner, though I still believe this to be the case. Cruz now claims that he had dealt with Macedo only as the employer of Juan Pablo, not as the jaw’s owner (though where this maneuver would have left poor Juan Pablo is difficult to say, unless it was up Grease Creek), and that anyway, he had informed Andrés of the offer of mil soles. (Andrés subsequently denied this.) César is the very picture of a man unjustly accused and complains bitterly of his plight, though in fact he is the only person to make anything out of the whole business. Macedo is also embittered. He tells me that if we had awaited his return that day everything would have worked out, but that now he is so angry with the thieving Cruz that he will not give up the bone for any price. He has a great many unkind things to say about Cruz, and Cruz, who says that everything would have been dandy if Andrés had not made us hurry, has a great many unkind things to say about Macedo. As for myself, I am mired indefinitely in the heat and mud of Pucallpa, and I have a great many unkind things to say about them both.

  On Sunday, prior to the arrival of Macedo, I made my way out to Yarina Cocha, where I left with the base doctor’s wife our unused supply of an excellent snake anti-venin; this anti-venin, which I had obtained for the journey in Brazil, is put up by the Butantan snake farm in São Paulo and is unobtainable in Peru. On a bluff overlooking the lake, above the doctor’s house, was a cottage occupied by Wayne Snell, whose misfortune it was—considering that I took up about four hours of the poor man’s Sunday—to be at home. Snell presently runs the lingüístico station at Camisea and another some distance above the rival Dominican operation on the Picha; it is he who for three years managed the ill-fated station at Pangoa, and I was most anxious to have his impressions of our experiences both at Pangoa and in the Pongo.

  Wayne Snell is a solid, agreeable man with an attractive wife and children, and once he had brought under control an open suspicion of writers (shared with good reason, unhappily, by many honest people in the selva, where irresponsible writers rank first in the noble hierarchy of jungle liars) and a rather irritating smile of superior knowledge intended to indicate that he had my number, we got along perfectly well. The Snells were kind enough to give me lunch, and I’d like to say here how grateful I am to him for his confirmation of certain important points which would otherwise have been too hypothetical to retain in this journal.

  While at the Pangoa station, Snell passed through the Pongo de Mainique three times. This is a claim few others can make, and one which probably establishes him as the leading authority on the canyon. Like Epifanio Pereira, he was anxious to assure me that an April passage would be relatively simple. Having never passed through in the dry season, I cannot dispute him. If he is correct, however, one can’t help wondering why it is that the Machiguengas themselves travel it only in the dry season, and why no one, including Epifanio and Mr. Snell, has ever cared to try it in the “time of waters,” when the Happy Days made its voyage. The reason, I think, is that Indian and white alike are awed by the speed and force of the spring torrents, and while on theory it is true that such navigational hazards as emergent rocks would increase in the summertime, so would the chances of surviving a mistake.

  In Snell’s opinion, anyone entering the Pongo who does not have to do so is a fool, and he feels that his own luck has run out: if he can possibly avoid it, he will not travel the Pongo ever again. He has heard that the Dominicans too have given up their occasional journeys for good.

  Snell agrees with the padres that Ardiles has probably never been through the Pongo, and that Epifanio himself would not run the risk in April, though he would not hesitate to encourage others to do so, nor to order three of his Indians to go. Andrés and I had wondered from the start how Epifanio had gotten the Indians to obey, especially in the light of their subsequent terror, and I asked Snell if their fear of Pereira could account for it. Before answering, he asked who the three were. Agostino, I said, and Raul and Toribio. With the help of his wife, Snell was able to identify them in his mind. Agostino’s father, he recalled, had been a Pongo boga, and Agostino himself might well have seen the Pongo from above. But he felt certain that none of our bogas had ever been through before, and thus had no real concept of what Epifanio had ordered them to do: they were as innocent as the rest of us.

  Snell is less dogmatic about “sin” than most of the Protestant evangelists one meets in South America: the majority are fundamentalists who would speak of the padres and the Pereiras in the same breath. Though there is no love lost between the Catholics and Protestants, Snell referred to instances of cooperation with the Dominicans, and he did not feel obliged to condemn Fidel Pereira before remarking on the fine qualities of the old man. According to Snell, Fidel Pereira is intelligent and cultured and a man of honor in whose care Snell himself once felt quite confident in leaving his wife during a three-week absence. Though Señor Pereira is a Catholic, he has gotten along poorly with the Dominicans on the river, who not only disapprove of him but have attempted, not entirely unsuccessfully, to draw away his Machiguenga slaves. (Slavery has been outlawed in Peru for more than a century, and there is now in effect a fine law stating that no debt accumulated by an Indian which cannot be paid off by a week’s labor shall be considered valid. This law, of course, is of no importance in Pangoa, and of very small importance elsewhere in the selva, where laws are difficult to enforce. The Indians themselves keep slaves and are glad to sell captives, and even their own children, to the white patrones; one missionary told me that in Atalaya itself perhaps one third of the population lives in what amounts to an enslaved condition.) In any case, the essential dispute between the Pereiras and the Church concerns authority over the Machiguengas. As early as 1928 the Dominicans attempted to establish a mission at Pangoa; since they did not have Pereira’s cooperation, the mission failed almost immediately. In recent years Pereira invited the lingüísticos to establish a station, but he soon tired of the noise of children, the occasional airplanes, and his own self-imposed obligation to extend an unceasing hospitality; also, he felt too old to be bothered with an atmosphere of religious zeal. He withdrew to his present hacienda upriver, and Epifanio, who took over Pangoa, failed to cooperate sufficiently to permit Snell to continue. Since the departure of the Snells, who managed to convert one of the Pereira daughters, Epifanio has begun to see himself in a religious light, and occasionally styles himself as an “evangelist.”

  The three Pereira sons holding property on the river are very different from one another. Justo, who was eleven when Jolly passed through in 1929, “gentle and refined, with manners that many European children might well be proud of,” now considers himself a Machiguenga—like the rest, he is three-fourths Indian—and lives, eats, drinks, and dresses accordingly. He is harmless and considered a little dense. Alfredo, who occupies a hacienda hidden away from the main river, below Pangoa, is solitary and moody, but a gentleman like his father: the story is that he has never touched one of his Machiguenga women and that once, after a dispute with the old man, he took off downriver on a balsa and actually passed through the Pongo alone. Epifanio, the youngest son, has inherited his father’s brilliance and his violence; he is a notorious drunk and troublemaker.

  In a reluctant way, Wayne Snell is sympathetic with Epifanio, whom he calls “Eppy.” Epifanio is usually very pleasant—certainly this was our experience—and at one time, Snell says, he was extremely promising, but he has a streak of criminality which has grown more dominant in recent years, or ever since a disastrous liaison with a Peruvian woman much older than hims
elf who, he told Andrés, ran away from him. His sister has told Snell that after the woman’s departure Epifanio went temporarily berserk—it was in this period, apparently, that he invaded the Dominican mission at Coribene—and that since that time he has grown gradually more strange. In this regard, Snell was interested to hear my impressions of Epifanio, the curious soft smile and the feeling he gives that part of him is absent: these are new symptoms of his illness.

  Snell rejected my lingering idea that Andrés had exaggerated our plight at Pangoa. As a religious man, he believes that Pangoa is a seat of the devil, beyond redemption, and that we were in trouble from the moment we stepped ashore. He related a story of his first encounter with a dangerous tribe, and how the instinct of a veteran companion that they were in serious danger had probably saved their lives. “In the jungle,” he concluded, “you don’t survive many mistakes. From your account, you were with a man who knows the jungle and knows what he is talking about. You were lucky. A less experienced man might have taken your side in that argument and gotten you both killed. There’s no law down there, you know, and they wouldn’t hesitate to throw you in the river.”

  Epifanio not long ago hacked a Machiguenga woman to death with a machete: Snell knows all the details of the case, in which Ardiles is somehow involved, but preferred not to go into them. The murder is common knowledge among the Indians, but to date the Pereira children have managed to keep the story from the old man, who is already sadly worried about his son. As for the police, they have shown their traditional lack of interest in what goes on down in the jungles of Pangoa.