by Joan Thomas
As with the Bible, there were many gaps. It was possible for him, in fact, to know more about what had happened than Nate did. The three Auca who visited the missionaries on the beach—no one knew how to understand it at first, but eventually they did, and one night when he asked, his mother told him. He remembers being on a top bunk in the room they now shared with their stepbrothers, and Marj, with her private new happiness, perched on a chair for a bedtime chat.
“They were from the same clan as the men who killed your dad,” she said. “The young man we call George, he took the girl into the jungle because he liked her and he wanted to be alone with her. Apparently he’d been spying on the Americans, and he offered to take her over to see.”
“Who was the older lady?”
“She was the girl’s auntie. Someone told her that the two young people had slipped away to be alone, so she followed, hoping to stop them and bring the girl back. When they got to the Curaray, George stepped out into the open because he thought it would impress Delilah. So then they had this peaceful picnic on the beach with your dad and the others. And I guess it did impress Delilah, because late in the afternoon the pair of them shook off the auntie and slipped on their own into the jungle. The next morning, members of their clan found them, and they were in big trouble.”
Benjy had been pretending he wasn’t listening, but at that point in the story his man’s voice issued from the cave of the lower bunk. “So they had sex in the jungle?”
“They probably did,” Marj said with a little frown. “Yes, I guess they did. And so they were ashamed. And they were frightened because Delilah was spoken for, she was supposed to be marrying someone else. So George made up a story that they had been taken captive by some white men. He said that the white men were cannibals, that they had already killed and eaten Delilah’s sister—Dayuma, you know?—and that he and Delilah had barely escaped with their lives and were on their way home.”
“Cannibals. Why would he say that?”
“I don’t know. But he did, and it was enough to set off a war party. The Auca got busy making spears. The old auntie arrived on the scene and tried to tell them she had been treated kindly by the missionaries, but by then their blood was up.”
David remembers the horror he felt. It was worse than the actual killing, this sordid suggestion that his father was murdered because of a stupid lie. This story in which the missionaries had only incidental roles, in which, even after enjoying their Christian hospitality, the guy they called George was only after one thing.
At times it is better to know less.
His mother must have noticed his distress. “Think about this, Davey,” she said. “Your dad and the others made peaceful contact with the Auca before God took them home. They had that satisfaction. Think how generous the Lord was, in giving them that.”
It is not an easy thing, being guardian of a story. He later learned (from Betty, who learned it in Tiwaeno) that when the visitors arrived at the camp on the Curaray, the young woman (whose name was actually Gimari) was eager to talk to outsiders, to ask whether they had seen her sister Dayuma. She kept asking the same question over and over: Have you seen Dayuma? Of course, they couldn’t understand her. They didn’t even pick up the word Dayuma. But as it happened, Jim had a photo of Dayuma with him. He had taken it at the hacienda, and he carried it in because he thought, if the people he encountered happened to know her, it might reassure them to find out that she was still alive. At one point he took that snapshot out of his pocket and showed it to them.
This seemed to thrill Betty. That in the vast jungle of eastern Ecuador, it was Dayuma’s sister who came to the beach asking about Dayuma, and that Jim—without even understanding what she was saying—pulled out a picture of Dayuma. Betty saw it as powerful evidence of God’s working. It had the opposite effect on David. In Quito he had met an anthropologist at a government reception. The guy talked about trophy collecting, about the way some Indigenous peoples shrank down the heads of their conquered enemies and hung them at the doorway of their houses. And then David found himself imagining the scene on the Curaray, Gimari asking about Dayuma, and this strange white man reaching into his pocket and taking out a flat, grey image of Dayuma’s head, shrunk down to the size of the tiny photographs they printed in those days.
His flight’s been called. People are starting to line up. He tips his head back, closing his eyes. You have an image of the men in your mind, and you have a vision of the mission, and this had the fingerprints of a screw-up all over it.
The Intangible Zone
26
THEIR NEIGHBOUR AT BIRDSONG HAD three big carp lurking in his backyard pool, and then he had two. They knew what had happened, but they couldn’t put their hands on the culprit. Betty climbed the stairs and looked out her bedroom window. A wisp of smoke rose from the secret place in the woodlot where her brother Harvey sometimes built his fire. She slipped back down and ran across the garden and up the path. The fish lay on a shingle, its belly torn open and its bones like a silvery comb. Harvey offered her a bite and she saw in his face what this meant to him: he had to sin, his life depended on it. She turned and ran back up the path to the house.
You can purge a child of evil—they forced castor oil into him. Betty lay on the floor in the upstairs hall with her face pressed to the grate while Harvey’s spasms and moans rose from the lavatory below. She could see one white foot flexed on the grey floorboards. She was years younger and she had the same hungry heart. Be perfect, Jesus whispered in Betty’s ear. Give them nothing to judge. Nothing. The breastplate of righteousness, she put it on and it melted right onto her chest.
She could feel it still, the hard ridge you might call her ribs.
She was on her back in a bamboo cage. Everything was striped in light and dark. There were no windows, but there was a doorway. Now Harvey had killed an armadillo. He got Betty up and led her to a room where its shell sat empty on the floor. This was their clan, he said, the armadillo. The room was lit like houses in the jungle, ghostly. Feather headdresses were stuck into the walls, the white jaws of peccaries, the brown skulls of monkeys. These were the relics of all the animals whose souls had enlarged his.
A corpse lay in the middle of the room, its arms at its sides. The bamboo platform it lay on was like a giant pan flute. People sat in a circle around it and tossed live coals at each other. The corpse sat up and vomited, and lay back down, and a girl with two thick braids splashed water on the mess and switched the floor clean with a leafy branch. Sometime later she sat up again and the girl handed her a gourd and she drank. Her little blond angel was perched beside her, clasping her feet with tiny hands, her fingers and toes finely etched with dirt. Blue eyes lurid in that dirty little face. Betty tried to speak to her, but she was gone.
Then a small woman, naked, stood in the doorway. She was eating something white. She had no eyebrows and no pubic hair. Her belly had a string tied around it. Her breasts lay flat on her chest, long and empty, all used up. Bits of language lay in Betty’s mind like chewed bones. She struggled to sit up. Biti miti punimupa, she said. The woman was mightily amused. She repeated the words in a mocking voice. She stepped over to where Betty lay and offered her what she was eating. It was boiled plantain, and Betty ate it, and felt herself stronger.
She was back from walking in the ucupachama. The ucupachama—she loved the word. She and Jim would muse over it and try to get Yapanqui to explain. Was it heaven or hell, was it the present or the afterlife? It was one of those terms their Quichua informants refused to define, but all the same it had drawn her in. Now she was back, in a house with two forest women. Inkasisa, Yapanqui’s mother—her impish, wrinkled face began to appear in the doorway. This chicken coop of a house was her house, and she chortled as though she had captured Betty. Possibly it was the spirit dart she’d fired one day by the playing field. Or possibly Betty was here because Inkasisa had taken in the forest women, who lay in a hammock in the same room as her, curled comfortably against each ot
her, showing no sign of moving on.
In the dark hours she would hear the two of them talking. She’d lie listening to their low voices, her daughter slumbering beside her, and they’d drift back to sleep until the roosters started up, and the dogs. Often the forest women would start chanting then, and Betty would step outside in her nightgown and look up to see a toucan gliding alone across the silvery sky. People would be stirring throughout the settlement. She heard falsetto cries, yui-yui, and the light thread of a transverse flute drifting on the mist. Woodsmoke filled the air, and the night scent of jasmine. She crouched, lifting her face to the ridge where their house stood empty. Jim was only spirit now and she was only flesh, squatting barefoot on the beaten earth, feeling the hot pee sizzle out of her.
She thought sometimes about going back to her house. But she didn’t go. She stayed with Inkasisa because Yapanqui had vanished and she had no one to look after her up on the ridge. She stayed for the sting of Inkasisa’s derision. This is the gringa who thinks she can speak our language! She stayed because she could no longer be alone, and her two forest companions were such agreeable roommates. They were warm and patient with Sharon, playing with her by the hour, carrying her on their backs without complaint. They laughed a great deal; they wanted to laugh, they looked eagerly for reasons. Mintaka was quick and chatty, Mankamu serene and beautiful, a few years younger, Betty thought, but clearly the leader of the two. There was a delicacy in the way she approached people, a natural attentiveness.
She stayed with Inkasisa because the thought of being anywhere else terrified her. She stayed because only the Indians could see her there, and they expected nothing of her. She stayed because here she was invisible to God, who for whatever reason had set her free from His gaze.
Dear Mother and Dad,
We are not in David Livingstone’s Africa and there is no need to send Charlie to look for me. You would do better to believe Eugene and Marj’s assurances, and trust in divine providence. I have not written because I was caught up in events, and then I fell ill. I am much better now.
Some time ago, I was summoned to a Quichua settlement where two Auca women had made an unexpected appearance. The Quichua were eager to send them away, afraid of attacks, so I undertook to bring them out to Shandia. It was indeed a stunning development, as one of the women is recognizable from the photos Nate Saint took on the Curaray. On the journey home I fainted and was carried to a nearby Quichua house, where I recovered and am still residing. This Quichua family has made Sharon and me and the Auca women welcome, and it does not seem prudent to take women from the forest up to my home on the ridge. They have enough to adjust to, without factoring in refrigerators and generators.
So we are currently living with eighteen others in a split bamboo house, where you can see through the walls. The home is managed with great vigour by a woman named Inkasisa. Her husband, who was killed by an anaconda several years ago, was apparently a wonderful hunter, and some rooms have animal relics stuck between the bamboo slats. The house is on stilts, and when you sweep crumbs through the cracks between the floor planks, the chickens squawk and fight below. We four are in one room, Sharon and I on a bamboo platform (caitu) and the forest women in a hammock, Jim’s hammock, which Alberto and María-Elena brought down from the house. Those two devoted children also carried down the mosquito net, extra clothing, towels, soap, notebooks and pens, Sharon’s dolly, my red fireman’s lantern, and my bible, so you see that we have everything we need.
Inkasisa tolerates me because she is so thrilled to host the two forest women. In the afternoon she stations herself in the yard, where cobs of drying maize make a golden carpet, and guests stream into the yard to see them. Inkasisa leads the women out, awkward in their cotton dresses, shy under the stares. She sits them on the broken-down canoe that serves as a sofa, and her guests drink chicha and openly discuss their strange haircuts and the plugs in their ears. Sharon always takes up the task of keeping the chickens off the drying maize. A rooster darts in, beak first, and she shrieks, “Riy kaymanta” (the Quichua phrase for “Go away”) and flaps her arms. The Auca women laugh as hard as anyone. “They laugh!” the guests cry. That’s what surprises people the most, how ordinary they are.
They are named Mintaka and Mankamu and are both, I would say, in their early forties. I know one of them is Dayuma’s auntie, and the other may be as well, although from what I can understand, they are not sisters. The four of us are a family-within-a-family. Mintaka and Mankamu help with the making of the chicha, which they make the same way the Quichua do, although they called it tepae. I carry water from the river and collect firewood. Alberto Grefa brings us vegetables from our own kitchen garden. The Catholic friar Fray Alfredo is often here, and I asked him how much I should pay Inkasisa. He said, “Is she not entitled to her acts of charity?” So we simply do what we can, but we keep a little apart because I am entirely taken up with learning the Auca language. I spend my days following the forest women, a notebook and pencil in hand, perversely refusing (as they see it) to understand their meaning, peering into their mouths to determine how sounds are made, trying to trick them into repeating themselves. They have given me a name, Gikari. It means woodpecker. Day after day I peck away.
Of course, it is never far from my mind that Mintaka met Jim, and, with two others, spent a day with him on the Curaray. One day, someone made Sharon a pointed hat out of a sheet of paper, pinning it with a couple of thorns. Mintaka spied the paper cone and picked it up and put it to her mouth like a megaphone. She stood confidently, staring boldly off into the distance—like a man, like an American. “I will give you gifts!” she shouted in her own language. She deepened her voice, mangling the words a bit. I have always been told I am a good mimic, but she is far better. “Come to the river, I will give you gifts.” I know from Jim’s diary that he called Auca phrases into the forest through a megaphone, so I felt as though a door had opened. But my language skills are not equal to such a sensitive situation, and when Mintaka dropped the cone hat and went back to sitting on the broken canoe, I did not attempt to open that door again.
Why have they come out? When will they go back? Is their clan still close to the camp on the Curaray, where the men’s bodies lie? Fray Alfredo has a high-scale map of the area, but the two forest women cannot read it. And so we wait on the Lord, eager to witness the fulfillment of His glorious purpose in this.
Your loving daughter,
Betty
Every insight she gained into Auca life was like the glint in the gravel at the bottom of Inkasisa’s pan when she stood in the river panning for gold. A secret world where a harpy eagle was tied under its tiny thatched roof, and screamed a warning if an intruder appeared. A world where couples longed for rain in the afternoon, because it offered privacy, like a curtain falling around the longhouse. Where pregnant women wove a hammock with an open midsection for the baby to drop through. Where in death, the spirit had to cross the body of a huge worm. A worm. Could Betty have gotten that right?
She lived in Inkasisa’s home for close to a year, though the progression of the months meant little. The year was marked by its thrilling moments. The moment she learned why Mintaka and Mankamu had come out of the forest: to find Dayuma, and tell her it was safe for her to come home, that a man who had been a great enemy of their clan was dead. The moment Betty was able to say, “My people know Dayuma. She is a beautiful young woman. She is travelling with a friend and will return soon.” The moment they finally understood her and were happy, and Mankamu lay in the hammock in the heat of the day, chanting in a low voice, casting a spell of tranquility over the whole house.
The year was marked especially by the afternoon they sat outside and Mankamu called Betty over and began to look through her hair. She found a tick in her scalp and cracked it with her teeth. While she worked, Betty leaned comfortably against her and Mankamu told a story. On the day she became a woman, she drank tepae from a special jar her mother had made the day she was born. Then her father to
ok her hunting. He killed a woolly monkey, a gata, and taught her how to tie its tail to its arm so as to form a carrying strap. It was a big, heavy beast, a male, but she was the one who proudly carried it home. A few nights later, her mother discovered that the monkey had given Mankamu nits! It was the work of many days to get rid of them.
Betty understood this story perfectly. She said, “You look after each other.”
Mintaka spoke up. “In the forest, we live very well. Not like here.”
“What is different?”
“Come with us and see.” Mankamu was very charming. “You will see it, Gikari, and you will love it. You will be well there.”
So Betty said, “All right, then. I will.”
When Dayuma came back, they would go in together.
ONE DAY THE pilot brought her a letter from Marj, and tucked into it was a letter from Rachel. It was long and enthusiastic. Rachel and Dayuma were still in America. They had met Billy Graham and shared their testimony with thousands in Madison Square Garden. Rachel’s mission director Cameron Townsend arranged for her to be featured on a nationwide television show called This Is Your Life, a clever ambush where, one by one, figures from her past were spirited in to be reunited with her: her father, her missionary partner from Peru, Don Carlos Sevilla flown in from Quito, and even the chief from the settlement on the Marañón River where she’d worked—they were all there, it was amazing! She was presented with gifts by the TV studio, a movie camera and projector. She was in her glory in America—she had clearly taken the place her fellow missionaries had denied her, as advance worker and spokeswoman for Operation Auca. Although, sadly, her Auca friend had been a disappointment. Dayuma wasn’t the least bit impressed with anything she saw, even the Manhattan skyline. When they were driven across the Brooklyn Bridge, she hung her head and refused to look. The only thing that caught her attention was a window washer up on a scaffold, scaling a skyscraper. She was intrigued by that.