Solimeos, page 21
“Two noses, Mohammed?” I challenged. “Come on.”
“I’m not shitting you, Young Baron. Snakes have two pricks. Why can’t dogs have two noses? Why do women have two breasts and not one big one? Or an extra one on their backs for dancing? And why two noses? Why two balls?”
From the bar, Helen echoed, “Two balls!”
Mohammed looked her way. “While we’re gone, Maria will have to watch my parrot. Take Helen back with you today. Axel, you know where my trunks are? Go in and get this little khaki bag. It’s got my trade stuff in it…rings and bottlecaps. And put more bottlecaps in it. Jungle people love bottlecaps. Before reaching Awa, we will have to go through the territory of another uncontacted tribe, very small. Shouldn’t be a problem. Except you need five more men beside the Kupis.”
After convincing Willi I was looking for emeralds and Mohammed would come along because he was the only one who could deal with an uncontacted tribe, Willi granted us permission. He issued me an odd handful of travel documents, all meaningless but impressively official.
We prepared to go into the forest, this time with Okok, a half-dozen Kupi warriors to protect us, and five more men to carry Mohammed.
The Kupis, teeth newly sharpened and blackened, hair long and thick with grease, bodies painted in reds and blacks, boarded our yacht. They carried baskets of meat: monkey, parrot, snake, otter wrapped in shiny banana leaves, all ritually cleansed by shaman chief Okok. They hung calabashes filled with manioc around the deck, hammocks in a spider web configuration between upright pipes in the engine room. The Kupis walked around the yacht like jaguars, with a peculiar forward roll, a bend to their shoulders, a dance in their feet, the heels hitting the ground first, that sullen, wound-up, almost four-legged gait, a lethargic stalking that might instantaneously launch into animal speed. Whatever happened, we would be safe with them.
Unless, of course, they turned on us.
Mohammed arrived at our dock, a grand potentate in his hammock, in a shimmering, white silk kaftan, clean, and, extraordinarily, the skin of a black jaguar thrown over his shoulders, its legs looped in a knot on his chest. Incandescent, a great gleaming moon god, he was larger than life. I expect he would stun Numi’s tribe. Beneath him four Kupis struggled. A fifth Kupi carried Mohammed’s olive jar and two canes.
He took a seat next to me, and I heard irregular rattling in his chest, blockage in his airways. I could only hope Mohammed survived this journey.
Okok came up from behind me and patted my back. He gave me a leaf to chew. He inhaled a pinch of something from a monkey fur bag hanging at his waist.
Maria’s son Mike was our driver, taking the yacht as far upriver as he could. When we passed the mission, Pastor Ken’s adorable, bland, blonde wife, Kathy, blew us a kiss. “Pastor Ken’s in the back,” she called out, “tending to his flock of asparagus. Stop on the way back. I’ll have plenty for you. Safe trip. God bless.”
Mohammed kept pointing and waving us on until we came to the truly decomposing trading post from the years of the rubber boom: a shack, a sinking dock, roofless storage outbuildings, a handful of Yama men smoking and watching us. Mohammed was tense, flatulent with excitement.
We offered the headman a small amount of money for three dugouts and five rowers. The steely-eyed Yama and his boys jumped into a dugout. After we lifted Mohammed into the sturdiest of dugouts, Mike tied up the yacht. He’d stay behind, with two armed Kupis guarding the boat.
Our party turned into the forest, into a dismal dawn. We removed guns from waterproof cases and laid them on our laps. The Kupis were ready with their bows, I with my dart gun. The forest was flooded to a depth of thirty feet. Hundred- and two hundred-foot trees stood knee-deep in these invasive waters. We paddled under giant, arched roots.
I sensed Okok’s suspicion. He didn’t like what he saw behind the eyes of the Yama rowers, but we had no choice. As soon as we completed a curve in the river, two Yamas in our forward dugout jumped overboard, swimming back toward the trading post. I managed to shoot two small crocodiles just before they snapped jaws on them, but other brutes soon followed in their wake. The two Yamas disappeared in a crocodilian kill roll.
“Good sacrifice,” Mohammed said with a nod. “Should be lucky for us.”
We moved further into a melancholy twilight of enormous trees, twined curtains of thick ropes. There was little light, no wind, little air, a stink of molds and sponges. Except for pinpoints of light where a giant tree had fallen, the canopy blocked the sun. The water was without movement; a terrible silence. Occasionally we heard a scream, a hard-metallic sound, a crash, the cough of a jaguar, the slap of a fish hitting the surface. Every sound seemed to mark another death somewhere in the forest.
Okok shook his head, shrugging his shoulders, and mumbled, “Spirits.” Sometimes the Yama rowers stopped, waiting, shoulders dropped low, heads hanging. They wanted to go back.
We switched from oars to poling, which meant that three Yamas had to stand for hours. I saw them shave bits of wood from the poles, mix the shavings with river water in the palms of their hands, and drink the potion. They took turns, poling or sleeping.
Okok teetered precariously on the prow, slashing at thick, twisted knots of lianas with a machete. Now and then, he tossed a length of neon-pink surveyor’s tape over a limb to mark our path. The water was dark with leaves and muck. Great snakes hung from trees. Fish leapt into the air around us, snapping fruit from trees. The rowers and the Kupis plucked fruits and nuts from low-hanging limbs. Through olive waters, we saw tree roots deep beneath the surface. We couldn’t see the forest floor, just gigantic roots, like aqueducts of ancient cities, here, there, vanished. Terrifying, dim, pathless, a shadowy netherworld of stink and splash, created over time.
Our own sounds were eerie: lonely, hollow, too human. Snakes slithered beside us on the water. A large female tapir and her baby swam past. The mother glanced shyly over her shoulder at me and swam on, breathing hard. Everything was muffled, unclear. No one dared ask if we were lost. The sun dropped. The water deepened. The rowers shifted from poles back to oars. We put up our oars, slept on the dugout floors, sandwiched between mats. Okok chanted his icaros, fast and nervous.
Chapter Twenty-Three
On the second day we set off before dawn. When the dugouts scraped shore at the still-moonlit white cliff, I knew we were in Shamburo territory. Mohammed reached his hand out for a piece of the cliff, then licked the chalk.
“Seashells,” he pronounced. “The ocean was once here. The Amazon Sea. The earth shifted. The sea became a river, and they called it the Solimeos. And this dike? Pure vitrified glass. This one horizontal layer…beneath it, fossil shells and bones. Above it? Nothing. A line of death.”
As dawn crept closer, we climbed a soft, crumbling path winding from the water up and around the limestone cliff, the Kupis laboring and groaning under the great burden of Mohammed in his hammock. Before us the forest sprang up forever.
Okok and I knelt behind trees under the canopy. Ahead we saw a fire in a clearing. The forest was quiet. Every creature listened, waiting for us. The warriors found their bows and arrows. Someone was nearby.
Okok lifted his arms up to me as a child would, asking to be put on my shoulders. Up there, while I clasped his small feet, he tasted the wind with his tongue.
We heard a girl’s melodious voice. “Come.”
Looking around, we saw no one.
“Be cautious,” she sang, “for the forest is a creature.” Words lilting, her voice got closer. “The forest, wild and rapturous, black and green, obscene as the droppings of a spider, as the placenta of a dog birth. It is the mind of the tribes, this forest.”
Spotting her in the dusky columns of early forest light, we approached. It seemed she wasn’t speaking to us as much as reciting lessons. Under the buttress of a great tree, we stood and watched as she pulled a pale young vine from the arching tree and wound it around herself in a pirouette.
Was this the girl rescued from Dr. Hermann by the cannibalistic Awa? We hadn’t seen her face then, but she’d had blonde hair and looked about the same height.
Okok slid off my back, dashed between my legs, and turned to stand in front of me, his finger pushing into my chest, into my heart. He looked at me steadily, excitement in his eyes.
A stroke of sunlight lit the girl’s face. She looked like an adolescent, blonde, blue-eyed Raven. Was this the girl in the forest who had no name?
Hand raised, her fingers long and translucent, she signaled us to follow. Bracelets of live beetles flashed on her wrists and ankles.
When she saw me looking at them, she smiled. A forest creature herself, she had Raven’s legs, too long for her body, and the high waist, the tiny cleft in her chin. And those eyes.
“Soon the arrows of day will enter the forest,” she said. “Numi waits to welcome you.”
In the opal flesh of morning light, past the black holes of garbage pits, she led us toward the village clearing but then carefully away, in a large arc, from its center—hiding us, I thought. She was so evanescent, I thought that at any moment she might disappear. I wanted to hold her, to make her real, to keep her safe.
“These are the manioc gardens of the women. As I am a twin, I am not allowed in them.” We circled the gardens. She pranced in front of us like an excited puppy.
Outside a hut, a bent and twisted old woman waited, like an eel ready to spring. “Die, twin!” she said with an upturned lip.
The girl stopped, laid her hand on my chest. “I had no name but Twin, but Pastor Ken gave me one: Rainflower. Isn’t that pretty? Still, because I’m a twin, children hide from me. Women flee to their huts. Only Numi loves and protects me. When Numi dies, I will be killed because a twin brings danger.”
There was something both hopeless and magical about her. She stopped and laid her hand on my arm. “I talk a lot. I survive by telling my story.” She turned on her heel and we followed.
“Rainflower,” I called, “if they have to kill you, why did they save you?”
She smiled at my ignorance. “For the tribe. I cannot die until Numi dies, and then the tribe will have good fortune.” With hands floating at her sides like butterfly wings, in a cadence of movement and words, she spoke from memory, rehearsed. She reminded me of my father—her father?—lecturing, wandering through his broken landscape of ideas.
“Numi said they traded a yellow diamond for me,” she said. “My baby sister died. They were going to kill me too—to bring the tribe better luck—but Pastor Ken stopped them. He would teach me and give our village rice and guns and candy but no bullets every year for the rest of my life. Numi agreed, as long as he could get cookies and Hershey bars. He promised to send me to the mission for lessons. So Kathy and the ladies at the mission made me dresses and Pastor Ken taught me words. Tura took me in the boat every day. Numi came to love me.” She held a strand of her hair next to my head. “Do I look like you? Your eyes…”
“No, you are beautiful.”
She nodded. “What is your tribe?”
Before I could stammer out an answer, drumming began behind us. It grew faster, louder, filling my chest. A brilliant pair of red-and-blue macaws flew over our heads, swooped, dipped, and called out. “Nga, nga.” A cloud of saffron forest light wove itself into the fine fog.
We followed Rainflower around the periphery of the village. I heard drunken men snoring and retching, a baby crying, a woman singing. A dog barked a thin, sickly bark.
She looked at me gravely, peering through the filigree of light as she took my hand. “I tell my stories to the birds. But they fly away and take my words with them. It is too late. Numi grows older; soon they will kill me. I speak my words to you because you have kind eyes. Maybe you will take my words away with you.” She laid a finger on her lips to quiet us and led us to a large hut. Her pain pulsed in my chest.
Okok hissed. I slipped my hand from hers.
“And here is Numi’s hut. He has four wives and many children. I sleep next to him. His feet are swollen like gourds, and his banana is the size of a grub, yellow and folded, and his voice is thin like air, like mosquitoes, and he talks all day. I am safe at his side. I clean him and stroke him and bring cool river water to him and manioc beer. He drinks and talks to me about the wind, the stone-mouthed fish, the green stones, the great mother snake at the bottom of the river. Even as he lives in this time, his head is with the Creators. I have crept behind him in his jaguar nights, quietly, softly, on my hands and knees. My hands curl under and become claws. It is true. In the morning, my knuckles are stained with the birth colors of the forest floor. Numi says we are all things. Do shamans come to you? Numi is an important chief. Many shamans come to heal him.”
“Do they ever speak of Solomao?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, of many things. Numi will tell you what you want to know.” She put her hand on mine, a spidery touch. She drew a little circle on my skin.
I was shocked by this child who had so much to teach. I asked, “Is it true that when you know how and when you will die, then nothing frightens you?”
“Yes, that’s correct.”
I thought of my experiences in the jungle with ayahuasca. “Do you drink from the vine, Rainflower? Have you seen spaceships flying above?”
“Spaceships?” She looked at me quizzically while uttering the word. “On the river?” She didn’t know what they were. “I’ve seen pink cities of coral under the river. And palaces of green stone. When I lie on the hammock beside Numi, he pulls me toward him, laughing. He wants to hear words I learn at the Mission. ‘Radio,’ I say. He wheezes with laughter, and I hear the rattle of the demon beetles that invade him.” She turned to me and placed her hand on my arm. Bracelet beetles danced on her wrists. “Do you have a name?”
“Axel.”
“Mr. Axel, do you know Mr. Charles Dickens? Does he live in your village?”
A small pig rushed past us, screaming. Dogs woke and barked high-pitched alarms. People stumbled from their huts, rubbing their eyes, scratching themselves.
“I must wake my grandfather, Numi. Sit here.” She disappeared into the hut.
There was no question who she was. I didn’t know how I could save her, but I knew I should.
An arc of thatched beehive huts circled the plaza. Overshadowing the other structures was a looming men’s house. Which meant there were many warriors, but we saw none. We sat on an apron of hard-packed soil against the side of the men’s house, our weapons across our knees. Okok gripped my arm.
“Her face is yours, Young Baron,” he said.
I could set the forest on fire, and white men up and down the river would be massacred.
Okok heard what I was thinking. He shook his head sadly and spoke slowly. “Everyone goes where he belongs. Rainflower belongs here. Leave her.” Okok squeezed my arm. “Remember why we are here. Signal Mohammed to come in.”
After they’d rolled Mohammed out of his hammock and stood him upright on his canes, the warrior Kupis moved well behind us, crouched, invisible, available. The carrier Kupis stood around Mohammed, leaning on their guns.
The plaza was empty. The world held its breath.
Mohammed stood in full view, vast, magical, breezes whipping his kaftan about, swirling, shimmering, larger than life, immense, wavering on his canes, the fur of his great cat shining on his shoulders. He called out his greeting, “Ho!” Again, “Ho!” and, bending over, managed to lean on a cane and blow the trumpet of his nose into a fire-red silk handkerchief. He swayed back and forth. His unsteadiness made him seem even more unworldly—as insubstantial as he was substantial. He acted with such abandon and titanic madness, the poor Indians, I’m certain, wouldn’t be able to identify him as enemy, victim, or a great and gleaming moon god.
He had become Mohammed again and knew how to trade and terrify.
“Ho!” he called again. “We arrive as friends, seeking answers.” It was unclear how many hidden people were watching. “We’re okay, Young Baron,” Mohammed said to me. “They would have killed us by now.”
Surrounded by his Kupi guards, Mohammed tossed bottlecaps and dime-store jewelry to the ground. Women and children peeked from their huts, found courage, and scrambled for Mohammed’s treasures, then raced back to their dwellings.
A dog sniffed, growled at me. I knew Shamburo warriors were fully armed someplace in the rear shadows of the huts, ready.
Another red-and-blue macaw swooped across the dance plaza, and when I turned to watch, four warriors appeared, stone-faced, with bow and arrow aimed at us. Asian-eyed, thick-lipped, long-eared, their faces painted in swastikas, circles, dots, stripes. Small but fierce. Their leader was the man who had saved Rainflower from Dr. Hermann.
Okok whispered, “Awa. Cannibal. Son of chief.”
He was magnificent, knotted with muscles, smooth, laden with jaguar teeth, shells, bracelets, as beautiful as a jaguar itself. He was short but so powerful he filled the space of a man twice his size.
He walked directly to me, energetic hatred flashing in his eyes, a rictus grin on his face, part greeting, part bite. He stamped his bow on the ground, dropped it at my feet, and ran counterclockwise around the dance plaza again and again. His warriors cheered. Then he stood before me, chin in the air, challenging.
