The Encounter
Page 8
CAMBIO.
Essas coisas morrem aqui, para podermos retornar.
LOREN. ‘These things die here, so we can return.’
What do you mean? You’re going back in time?
CAMBIO.
Não, não voltando no tempo. Retornando. Como…
uma passagem de volta, cambio.
LOREN. ‘No, not going back. Returning. Like… return ticket,
over.’
So let me get this straight, you’re going to destroy
everything the tribe needs?
CAMBIO.
Os espíritos deles estão impedindo a gente de voltar.
Eles estão com ciúmes.
LOREN. ‘Their spirits are stopping us, over. They are jealous.’
CAMBIO.
Eles seguram a gente no tempo. Cambio.
LOREN. ‘They hold us still. Still in time. Over.’
Just as Barnacle had said, the same words.
Listen, Cambio… I don’t speak Mayoruna but the headman
of this tribe, with the boy on his shoulders, he told me about
your return to the beginning…
Cambio looked shocked. He cleared his throat.
CAMBIO.
Talvez ele te falou na outra língua, a língua velha,
cambio.
LOREN. ‘Maybe he spoke to you in the other language, the old
language, over.’
No, no, I think he talked to me without words.
CAMBIO.
Sim, essa é a outra língua, a antiga, cambio.
LOREN. ‘Yes. That’s the other language, the old language,
over.’
What do you mean, the old language? Does it come from
another time? How do they learn it?
CAMBIO.
Não, eles nunca aprenderam. Eles simplesmente
lembrem, cambio.
LOREN. ‘No, they never learned it. The old ones simply
remember, over.’
I feel Barnacle’s gaze upon me. I look to where he stands. He
takes in his hands the most beautiful arrow, the one he gave
me. He wants me to witness all of this. He snaps it in two.
This action signals a frenzy of destruction, the tribe
breaking, crushing the piled-up objects under their feet.
What they can’t break with their hands, they crush with their
feet. They grind the pots into pieces, crack the trophy skulls,
snap the bows and arrows. They shatter the whole pile into
bits of wood and bone, feather, husks and loose human teeth
strung on necklaces. Everything that was beautiful and
useful. Onto the fire, without hesitation or a look of regret.
CAMBIO.
Estamos afrouxando os nossos laços. Ficando mais
livre e mais livre. Vela no tempo, cambio.
LOREN. ‘We are loosening our bonds. Getting freer and freer.
Sailing in time, over.’
And what will happen when the tribe arrive at their
destination? And where will you be then?
CAMBIO.
A merda com tudo isso, cambio.
LOREN. ‘To hell with all this, over.’
I stare at the fire and I imagine us in the west, burning our
possessions so as not to remain still in time!
I picture bonfires, like this one, along some affluent
American street. People dragging out their paid-for
belongings; furniture, appliances, toys. Dragged out. Sprayed
with gasoline, bursting in flames. All of a culture, the most
materialistic and leisure-minded in the world, up in flames. I
saw flames spring up in a front yard, and another, and
another. All along the street, all through the neighbourhood
and the next and the next.
The sound of the fire is roaring. Music.
Washington. Pennsylvania Avenue, the White House, on fire.
The Library of Congress, on fire! Freeing itself, taking off,
soaring, carried by the vehicle of the sacrificial, purifying
flames. Carried where? Carried where? Doesn’t matter!
Burning the past! Burning it all. Maybe I’ll live to find the
answer.
During the following, the
ACTOR
exhorts the audience to
get rid of the past. The
ACTOR
tries to destroy the plastic
bottles, but they won’t break. They smash a glass water
bottle to pieces, try to destroy the speakers, the endless box
of tape, the work desk: they grab a hammer and manically
destroy the desk. A frenzy of destruction builds to a climax.
ACTOR. Come on! Burning the past. This is the past! Let’s
destroy it, let’s burn it all up! Can we destroy this? Fucking
plastic… Let’s smash this. Get rid of the past. The whole
fucking thing. Fuck it…
And then the
ACTOR
sees their phone. They hold it out to
the audience.
Okay, the big one… let’s get rid of this. That’s got all the
fucking past in it.
The
ACTOR
places it on the broken desk and lifts the
hammer.
SFX: ring.
The following voices are a recording from the past. Onstage,
the
ACTOR
remains, hammer in hand, staring at the phone
on the desk. They are poised to hit it, but never do.
Hello?
NOMA.
Dada, I had a bad dream.
ACTOR.
Listen, go back to bed, sweetie.
NOMA.
Dada, why are you always speaking on your phone?
ACTOR.
I’m just working, sweetie.
NOMA.
It’s so boring.
ACTOR.
I know. I’m just working. Who is this? They’ve hung
up.
NOMA.
Can I play on your phone then?
ACTOR.
Well, I’m not playing, sweetie. Now, do you want some
water?
NOMA.
No, fizzy water!
ACTOR.
Well, we don’t have any fizzy water, come on, let’s get
some from the tap.
NOMA.
Thank you.
ACTOR.
There you are. Drink it up.
NOMA.
How long has I been asleep?
ACTOR.
Oh my sweetie, I don’t know, maybe half an hour or
something. But you’ve got to go to sleep now.
Noma drinks the water, breathing heavily. She breathes
deeper and deeper. It modifies and slows, distorts.
15. The Ritual
The voice of Cambio is pre-recorded. The
ACTOR
speaks live.
CAMBIO.
Lowen. Lowen. Vem, Lowen, cambio.
LOREN. I wake up. I open my eyes and see Cambio’s face.
CAMBIO.
Agora, Lowen. Cambio.
LOREN. ‘Now, Loren. Over.’
What do you mean? I’ve only been asleep two minutes. We
were just in Barnacle’s hut. We’d been in there for hours. I
swing out of my hammock. It’s cold.
Cambio! What’s happening?
CAMBIO.
O começo, cambio.
LOREN. ‘The beginning, Loren, over.’
Wait. We’ve just been discussing this in Barnacle’s hut. This
thing isn’t supposed to happen for days yet. And if it does
happen now, what if there is nothing at the beginning? What
if the old one is crazy? What if we’re all going to die?
Cambio is silent. He looks away, then says: ‘No. No, there is
no other way out. The old belief has to be proven true.’
CAMBIO.
Agora, Lowen. Cambio.
LOREN. ‘Now, Loren. Over.’
He pulls me by the arm. The clearing is full of tribesmen.
Each wears his cat whiskers.
CAMBIO.
Agora, Lowen. Cambio.
LOREN. The community are forming a long line, which
stretches across the village. They’ve painted their bodies
with black genipap paint. I know what it means. It’s begun.
The
ACTOR
dances. They create the rhythm again and
again, and the pattern builds and loops until a whole village
of men can be heard.
We watch them. They’re beginning to dance.
One step to the left. Three small. Two to the right and two
more back, then back to the start and everyone claps his
hands once, hard. Cambio takes me by the arm. We throw
ourselves in.
LOREN
dances
.
We repeat, repeat and repeat and repeat. It’s hypnotic. My
mind starts to travel over the last three weeks, four weeks?
How long?
Music.
SFX: Loren’s journey. Fragments of text are heard:
Where’s the village? If this is the area where you saw the
village…
SFX: plane overhead.
PETRU.
He was towards the age…
BARNACLE (LOREN
voice-over
).
They were holding us
still…
During the fragments of
LOREN
’s journey, the
ACTOR
moves out of the line of dancing men and into the hut.
LOREN. Suddenly I’m in Barnacle’s hut the previous evening.
It’s filled with men, sitting, smoking green cigars. He invites
me to sit. Finally I can talk to him. Cambio can translate.
The
ACTOR
delivers the following text, but alongside it and
overlapping with it, we hear Barnacle, speaking to
LOREN
in Mayoruna.
We just look at each other. And through Cambio, he asks:
‘You have come here. Why?’
There’s silence.
Cambio translates and I say: ‘I heard about your people. I
wanted to photograph your tribe, to show others that you
exist.’
He replies: ‘Why have you not left us? Why have you not
fled?’
I choose my words carefully. I say: ‘I want to see… I want to
witness your beginning.’
And then a thought is planted in my mind; Barnacle beams
to me that my staying makes the ritual good.
And then he speaks again, through Cambio, and tells me that
the tribe in all its forms has been moving for some time. This
ritual, he tells me, will bring one life to an end and begin
another. What does he mean? I panic.
‘Cambio, tell him, there’s another way. There’s enough space
in the forest, there’s enough wilderness, nobody’s ever going
to find you here. I can speak to the Brazilian government, to
FUNAI.’
Cambio translates and Barnacle looks at me. He replies: ‘No,
there is no other way. They will come. They will always come,
looking for their oil, with planes and guns and alcohol.’
‘So, when will we be in the beginning?’ I ask.
‘Haven’t you noticed?’ he replies. ‘Time is already falling off.’
‘What if we were to hear a plane, right now?’
‘We won’t.’
And I realise I can’t remember the last time I did hear a plane,
or see the vapour trails in the sky. I ask: ‘Are we close?’
‘Very close. You can already feel the signs. And you will see
more.’
He passes me a cigar and I drag deeply on it. Barnacle and
the other men continue to talk about the beginning, having a
philosophical discussion of time, on which they don’t seem
to agree.
The
ACTOR
begins to slowly be drawn towards the dancing.
I close my eyes. There is a feeling inside me.
‘Why am I here?’ I ask Barnacle this without words. ‘Why
am I here?’
And then a thought blooms in my mind, and words cluster
to it…
BARNACLE (LOREN
voice-over
).
You will prove that it is
real.
LOREN. Is that why I’m here? You will prove that it is real…
The
ACTOR
is dancing. The sound of dancing, pounding
feet rises. The sound of voices chanting.
The heat is overbearing. We are here, thudding with our feet,
like a giant hand knocking on a door. The door to the
beginning. We shall step through that door.
The drums and pounding feet rise with the claps, and
shadows of dancing men fill the floor.
As the
ACTOR
dances, we hear voices from recorded
interviews, mixed with the live dancing and dialogue.
REBECCA SPOONER.
The Mayoruna describe the oil
underneath the ground as the blood of the earth and they’re
concerned, like many other indigenous people, that if you
suck out that blood, the oil, the life source, then the earth
will cease to exist.
LOREN. We dance all night.
IAIN McGILCHRIST. Earlier you talked about your child. And
watching this little consciousness grow…
JESS WORTH
. They’re in Latin America, they’re in North
America, they’ve recently gone into tar sands, which is
probably the most destructive source of fossil fuels in the
world…
LOREN. The sun explodes above the horizon. A cycle has
ended; another is beginning. Two thousand miles away to the
east it is already midday, but here it is morning. A morning
loaded with events as yet un-happened. One of those events
might be our death.
SFX and music all stop dead. Silence.
We stop. Our bodies cry with exhaustion.
Barnacle appears, a diadem of egret feathers on his head. He
passes down the file of men, asking a standard question, to
which each man responds.
I need a drink. What’s happening?
The sound of Barnacle naming the tribe runs alongside the
ACTOR
’s live text.
BARNACLE.
Kiatoo. Axi. Sava.
LOREN. They’re getting new names, they’re choosing new
names for the beginning.
BARNACLE.
Ekke. Nutushi. Upopai.
LOREN. There’s a bowl of masato beer being passed around. I
haven’t drunk all night. I take a huge gulp. It tastes of herbs.
The
ACTOR
grabs a large bottle of water and gulps
throughout the following.
Here it comes again. I drink some more.
Barnacle repeats the names seriously, and with a thumb so
red it looks bloodied, he puts a print of red urucu on each
forehead he passes.
Give me that. I need it. I’m going to hold on to this beer.
/>
Barnacle stops before Cambio. ‘Cambio’, my friend
christens himself. And he winks at me. I don’t want to lose
my name, even if it is just a memory. I wet my lips and
mutter ‘McIntyre.’
BARNACLE.
Mackin-tayah. Tayah, aha.
LOREN. The bright-red thumb stamps my forehead. And the
chief steps past me.
As he passes I start to drink, desperately. That’s better. I hope
there’s no drug in that drink.
There is.
I feel a numbing of my limbs. It feels like my bones are
liquefying, a liquefaction suggesting a kind of birth. Very
slowly, from skeleton hard, they’re growing mellower, and
sort of coming alive. The air seems to separate into tiny,
flexible rivulets of oxygen. I take the bowl as it passes and
gulp again. I feel like I could expand and contract distances
at will.
I try to stop thinking, try to open myself completely to the
present moment. Then I feel like there’s two of me. I get a
taste of something… I’m now in triplicate… I get an
awareness that’s frighteningly immediate and overfilled with
sensorial stimuli. I try not to censor it, but I tense up as I’m
trying and it vanishes.
16. The Frog Ceremony
Through the following, Cambio’s voice is pre-recorded and the
ACTOR
is live, speaking as
LOREN
.
LOREN. Cambio motions me to follow him behind the huts. A
mighty croaking of frogs. A group of shamen are reaching
with leaves to touch the frogs and spoon off their backs a
teary semi-transparent secretion, which they collect, drop by
drop, in wooden bowls.
Cambio pulls a frog out, shoots out his tongue, and licks it.
CAMBIO.
Para ver o começo, cambio.
LOREN. ‘To see the beginning, over.’
See the beginning?
CAMBIO.
Ver os animais lá dentro. E conversar com eles. Ver
as onças e conversar com elas. Cambio.
LOREN. ‘See the animals in it. Talk to them. See the jaguars
and talk to them. Over.’
That’s interesting. Okay.
Men sip from the wooden bowls, others hold frogs and put
their mouths directly on those bumps and pimples, which
keep weeping quietly, like so many ulcers.
One of the shamen raises a knife of chonta palm, like this…
The
ACTOR
finds a shard of the broken bottle glass on the
floor.
…and I think he’s going to cut open a frog. I turn away but