by Tom Robbins
At the onset of the torrent, Switters pulled a scrap of cocktail napkin from his pocket, wrote upon it, I.O.U. my bottom dollar, and handed it matter-of-factly to Potney, who blinked at the message, folded it absentmindedly in a big rosy fist, raised his voice against the downpour, and went on with his narration.
On the pretext of keeping Sailor Boy dry, Inti had joined the two white men under the roof. The Virgin crew and the Nacanacan delegation remained out in the rain, which had grown so dense it turned them into silver silhouettes, though they stood but a dozen yards away. The Indians seemed oblivious to the soaking they were getting, and Smithe, who admittedly had the more comfortable position, was virtually oblivious to the weather, as well. “Celebrate it or ignore it,” Switters had maintained, and now he found himself surprised and somewhat shamed that others so easily practiced what he preached.
That, then, was the setting for Smithe’s impartation, an unusual if not outright bizarre account, which shall be summarized in the paragraphs that follow; summarized because to re-create it, to reproduce it verbatim, isn’t merely unnecessary, it could be construed as an abuse of both the reader’s patience and posterior. That such abuse can sometimes be rewarding—consider Finnegans Wake or the church-pew ass-numbing that leads to genital excitation—is beside the point. Or ought to be.
R. Potney Smithe first came to Boquichicos in 1992. His aim had been to conduct ethnographic fieldwork among the Nacanaca, a wild tribe that had been “pacified” by Peruvian government anthropologists in the mid-1980s as a precautionary measure for the new town that authorities were about to establish, and then semi-civilized by contact with that town and its imported values. The Nacanaca were a transitional people, no longer feral but not quite tame, and were in danger of abandoning, forgetting, or being robbed of their traditional manners and ways. Christian missionaries were doing all they could, naturally, to assist in that dispossession. Smithe’s purpose was to catalogue as many of the old customs and beliefs as possible before they disappeared. It was fulfilling work.
Alas, even while he immersed himself up to his skimpy beige eyebrows in Nacanacan culture, or what was left of it, he felt the hot point of his interest slowly, unintentionally, even unhappily, shifting to another tribe, a people with whom he had no direct communication; who, indeed, he’d never glimpsed except as shadows gliding silently among other shadows in the forest, a phantom race whose magic and indomitability held a great influence over the Nacanaca and, eventually, over Potney, himself. Kandakandero.
The principal Nacanaca village was a mile east of Boquichicos, on the opposite side of the river. It was on high ground, close to good fishing holes. However, its chácara—its garden—was located across the stream on the Boquichicos side, but several miles deeper into the jungle. Oddly enough, in an environment so relentlessly profuse in vegetation, good garden plots were few and far between. The jungle topsoil was as thin as varnish, and although immense trees had learned how to utilize it to staggering advantage, cassava, gourds, peppers, and other cultivated crops were there akin to orphaned children, whose thin gruel was watered down a bit more each year until it no longer provided the sustenance necessary for life. Biological and/or geological accidents sometimes produced rare pockets of fecundity, however, and such was the case with the Nacanacan chácara. It was quite possibly the largest, most perennially fertile garden patch in the Peruvian Amazon.
Some said this chácara had once “belonged” to the Kandakandero or, at least, that they had tended it for generations, only to abandon it when oil exploration and an influx of outsiders caused them to fade ever farther into the forest: the Kandakandero had not suffered Boquichicos gladly. Others claimed that the chácara had always been cultivated by Nacanaca and that the fiercer Kandakandero simply forced the Nacanaca to share its bounty, as if exacting tribute. In any event, Smithe knew from firsthand experience that once each month, on the new moon, a delegation of Kandakandero braves would show up at the garden to have their baskets filled with produce by compliant Nacanaca.
“Whether charity or extortion, I wouldn’t know,” said Smithe, “but I do know they come only at night, when there is little moon, and that there’s a kind of ‘way station’ a few miles farther into the bush, a lodge where they remain overnight or occasionally longer in order to perform certain rituals having to do with the newly acquired produce. Nacanaca elders often participate in those ceremonies as invited guests, and finally, I, myself, after two solid years of jungle diplomacy. . . . Worth the bother? Well, it’s a show that would strike any Christian as dreadfully malodorous, to be sure; but I’d already developed a tolerance for pagan proclivities; some such immunity is required in my profession. Yes. Um. What separates these jejune jollifications from others I’ve witnessed, either in person or on film, is that they’re presided over by the Kandakandero’s witchman, their shaman: a most remarkable chap.”
“Yeah, so I’ve heard,” said Switters. “That’s the buzz. And what, pray tell, is so damned remarkable about him?”
Smithe didn’t answer right away. He stared for a while at the rippling wallpaper of rain, and when at last he spoke, he could barely be heard above its din. “It’s his head, you see.”
“Did you say ‘head’? What about his head?”
“Its shape.” The Englishman abruptly, inexplicably, beamed. “His head,” he said, louder now, almost triumphantly, “his head is a pyramid.”
Switters had been around the block. He had even, one might say, been around the block within the block within the block within the block (depending upon his or her own experience, the reader will or will not know what this suggests). Aware that the world was a very weird place, he was no more prone to automatically scoff at unusual information than he was disposed to unquestioning acceptance. (The narrow, no-nonsense skeptic is every bit as naive as the breezy-brained New Age believer.) Nevertheless, Switters’s open-mindedness was sorely tested by Potney’s report, especially when the anthropologist insisted that the head he was describing did not merely suggest some vague outline of a pyramid, that it was neither a variation of hydrocephalus nor a particularly pronounced example of Down’s syndrome, but actually was a pyramid (which was to say, a quadrilateral mass having smooth, steeply sloping sides meeting at a pointed apex), and in every other way except its shape, constituted a healthy, functioning human noggin.
“Entirely literal, old boy, I almost regret to say. Wretchedly literal.” Smithe paused to light a cigarette, sending a plump pillow of smoke off to be drilled into feathery oblivion by the numberless bullets of the rain. “Yes. But if you knew your Peruvian ethnology and whatnot, you’d know that this chap’s pyramid head is not completely without precedent. Not in the high Andes, at any rate.”
Whereupon Smithe informed Switters of the occasional practice among certain Andean Indians of strapping boards to the soft heads of infants, molding them over time into cones that mirrored the contours of the volcanos that loomed on their horizons and that they worshiped as gods. Such sculpting of the skull—literally re-creating man in gods’ image—was common enough to have been well documented, and while contemporary Kandakandero had no physical contact whatsoever with malformed Andean volcano-worshipers, one could not rule out an interchange in centuries past. Stories, moreover, had wings. Also, and Smithe would speak more of this later, the Kandakandero seemed to have the ability to access information, events, images, et cetera from great distances, a notion that failed to shock Switters because the CIA had once experimented with a similar psychic technique (under the term remote viewing), and several of the angels had become quite adept at it before opposition from irate Christian hillbillies in Congress had shut the project down.
There was doubt in Potney’s mind, however, that End of Time’s pyramid head was a copycat creation. At least, not entirely so. “I suspect DDT played a part in it. At the beginning.”
“DDT? In the Amazon?”
“Oh my, yes. You Yanks mightn’t fling your poison about at home any longer, but
that jolly well hasn’t stopped you from shipping it abroad. Especially to the unsuspecting undeveloped. Peru reeks of it. Even back here, I’m afraid.”
“Ain’t no weevils fattening they little selves on Nacanaca vegetables?”
“Wouldn’t think so, although the chácara’s entomological interlopers aren’t the primary target, nor are malarial mosquitoes. DDT arrives here from Pucallpa in five-gallon drums. The government issues it to the Nacanaca, who trade it to the Ka’daks for hides and potions, or else the Ka’daks simply bully it from them. Whatever. Both tribes use it for fishing.”
Smithe described a scene in which Indians pour five gallons of pesticide into a small river, just above a rapids or a waterfall, then stroll downstream to effortlessly scoop killed fish out of the eddies.
DDT as trade-good fish poison was finding its way into the jungle years before Boquichicos was settled, and congenital deformity was thought to have increased as a result, though there was no scientific proof of it. Smithe’s theory was that End of Time had come into the world slightly mutated, due to maternal consumption of contaminated fish. The Kandakandero had taken his affliction as a sign of divine favor and a portent of supernatural abilities, and immediately consecrated him to witchwork. Before he began his active apprenticeship, while he was still a baby, the local shaman had placed his pointy little head in a series of progressively larger mahogany presses (Switters thought of that old-fashioned pressed tennis racket of his, heavy and wooden, that Suzy, with her modern lightweight graphite number, had made such fun of), deliberately and dramatically accentuating its pyramidal tendency.
It was only a hypothesis. It could have been something altogether different, altogether unimaginable. What did seem conclusive, however, was that by the time End of Time was a teenager, he had ousted his people’s reigning shaman and assumed the man’s duties. And now, at age twenty-five or thereabouts, he was regarded (by that handful of souls aware of his existence) as either the most feared and mysterious member of the most feared and mysterious tribe in that part of South America or as an addled medical oddity cashing in on the small-change benefits of primitive superstition.
If Switters’s brow resembled the coils in an electric heater, it wasn’t so much due to lingering doubt over the veracity of Smithe’s story as to his effort to remember what his grandmother had told him about pyramid power. According to Maestra, and she had it on good authority, there was something about the configuration, the dimensional relationships of a pyramid’s angles, the way it crystallized in static form the essence of dynamic geometry, that caused it to focus, laserlike, an electromagnetic or other atmospheric force (perhaps that energy the Chinese called chi), concentrating it in a relatively small, prescribed area. Switters recalled something about razor blades being sharpened and fruit kept from spoiling by pyramid-focused rays. That, come to think of it, was the rationale behind Sailor’s customized cage. He supposed that if a pyramid really could hone steel and preserve peaches, a pyramid-shaped head might have a pretty entertaining effect on the brain inside it—and it would probably be no great exaggeration to describe as “most remarkable,” a “chap” with such a brain.
“So,” said Switters, “these Nacanaca boys believe their ferocious cousins would get a kick out of Sailor’s cage because it’s shaped like the head of their grand boohoo?”
Smithe nodded. “Something like that, yes. Far be it from me to speak for the atavistic mind.” He paused to inhale and exhale a blue-tinted wad of smoke. “There is a bit more to it. When your bird blurted out that number about people needing to relax—clever turn, that: your tutelage?—it struck a chord. This End of Time chap, he has some novel ideas. A philosophy, one might be tempted to call it. Something beyond the usual mumbo jumbo, at any rate. Relaxation, at least in the Nacanaca understanding of the concept, fits rather neatly with it, I suppose. So, you see, our blokes here have concluded that End of Time must have a supernatural connection with this cage and its occupant, and while that’s a load of bosh, I daresay he would be impressed. It’s likely he’d grant you an audience, which would provide you with scrapbook fodder of the most exotic order, and me with the possibility of riding in on your coattails.”
“You’ve socialized with him previously?”
“Yes. Three years ago. At the way station, for thirty-six hours. Bloody bugger really put me through it. Can’t imagine why I’d want to go back—except that it’s, well, haunted me ever since. And there’s the chance I might turn it into something. Original yet academically rigorous. That first encounter went rather awry, I’m afraid. Crossed the line. Um. I’m no Carlos Castaneda.”
Switters grinned. “Of course you aren’t.” You’re one of those people, he thought, who want to go to Heaven without dying. Cowardice in the name of objectivity is fairly characteristic of academics, especially in Merry Olde. But he didn’t wish to get into that. Instead, he inquired as to the nature of the living pyramid’s so-called novel ideas. Considering the young shaman’s name—an inexact translation by Smithe and Fer-de-lance, it turned out, of a virtually unpronounceable Kandakandero word—he guessed his notions must have something to do with eschatology, with apocalypticism, with time.
“Oh, there may be a bubble of that in the keg. I didn’t bung into it. Not my end of the field, you see. Not that. Nor the other, either, honestly, though it may be yours. Our chap, you see, is rather obsessed with . . . with gaiety.”
Gaiety? Potney Smithe’s explanation was a rickety trellis of sober anthropological observations, lathed in the fine mill of British understatement, but rattled by occasional gusts of alcoholic verbosity, and, of course, splintered here and there by cracks from Switters. Once again, we shall attempt summation.
Kandakandero had always referred to themselves as “the Real People.” Theirs was ethnocentrism in its unadulterated form. Other tribes, other races were not merely deemed to be inferior humans, they were relegated in the Ka’dak mind to the status of animals or ghosts. Then End of Time came along. It’s very true, he told his clan, that we are superior to other Indians because we have stronger magic and purer ways. As for white men, they are so helpless and stupid they could not survive in the forest for a single moon. Yet the white man can do wondrous things that we cannot.
Fly, for example. For decades, air traffic between Lima and Belém or to and from Europe had passed over that area of the Peruvian jungle roamed by the seminomadic Ka’daks, and more recently, small planes out of Pucallpa had been buzzing around. White men also had shiny boxes that they attached to the sterns of their canoes to make them swim faster than dolphins, and they possessed weapons so powerful and accurate they reduced hunting and warfare to child’s play. In Boquichicos they had motionless boxes that churned out more music than a tribe could make, other boxes that cooked meat and yucca without a spark of fire. (The Ka’daks were well informed about what transpired in Boquichicos, though whether they spied on the town from the forest, accessed it psychically, or simply relied on Nacanaca gossip, Smithe wasn’t prepared to say.) End of Time recognized that white men were a threat to his people’s habitat, that eventually these pale weaklings with their noisy magic would dominate the forest world and all within it, including the heretofore invincible Ka’daks. White men were the new Real People, the spirits obviously were favoring them. Why?
Over and over again, End of Time drank his potions, snorted his snuffs, entered his trances, rubbed his portable pyramid. He questioned sundry Nacanaca and once sat for five days in a treetop observing, undetected, goings-on in Boquichicos. What was it about these men (aside from a hideous complexion that no god could possibly find pleasing) that made them so different from the older and once wiser Kandakandero? (No fool, End of Time could distinguish between superficial and fundamental differences.) Roughly speaking, they ate, drank, smoked, and slept the same. They shat, pissed, and fucked the same. So what was the white man’s secret?
Finally, one day, it hit him like a blow dart. The big secret was laughter.
Am
azonian Indians, in general, tended to be somber, and the Ka’daks were especially severe. Kandakandero did not laugh. They did not even smile. Moreover, they had never laughed or smiled. The very concept was alien to them. Smithe suggested that for “the Real People,” life simply might be too “real”: too terrible, too short, too arduous, too . . . vivid. Whatever the reason, you might as realistically expect a Ka’dak to shout “E5mc2” as to chuckle. No giggle had ever, in all of history, chased its tail around one of their campfires, no smirk had ever cracked their war paint, no guffaw had ever taken up where a belch left off, no titter or tee-hee had scratched for them its crystal fleas. The roar of civilized laughter might strike them as ridiculous, but it wouldn’t strike them as funny. The Ka’daks didn’t know from funny.
In a radical break with both instinct and inclination, End of Time tried to teach himself to smile. He practiced alone, monitoring his progress in a reflecting pool. The first time he smiled for his gathered clansmen, he left them so astonished, so awestruck that half fell, trembling, to their knees, and the rest ran away and hid in the bushes. When he commenced to experiment with laughing, nobody was able to sleep for months. And when he insisted that others learn the art of grinning and chortling, the whole tribe nearly had a nervous breakdown.
The shaman persevered, however, even as it occurred to him that his glee was hollow, mechanical, and contrived. He sensed that an attitude adjustment must be required, that the perpetually piercing level of intensity that characterized the Kandakandero might need to be softened, toned down. (Real People of the world, relax!) Around the occasion of Potney Smithe’s visit, End of Time was just coming to the realization that white men didn’t laugh as a chore or on schedule or to please the gods, that the mystical hee-haw was not self-induced but had to be provoked; that some external happenstance, frequently invisible, aroused laughter in them.