Blinding Light

by Paul Theroux

  “How much farza?”

  Nestor did not answer.

  “I thought this was supposed to be a doddle,” Janey said.

  They were now deep into the afternoon, and the day was thick with a heat and humidity that clutched them, and the highly colored smells all around them became stronger and mingled with the sound of the river.

  “And it’s a fag,” Janey said. “And I have to spend a penny.”

  The colors reversed, blue river, green sky, shimmering trees, the decay in the air giving off patches of luminescence that showed through the hanging vines and stringy tails of lianas, and when they cut the engine and lifted it to paddle in the shallows between sandbanks, the shriek of insects was deafening—bright beetles and big-winged dragonflies and birds like paper kites and clouds of midges glowing in the slanting sunshine, a dream of deep Ecuadorian jungle.

  “Okay, take your masks off.”

  They did so and were silent. Now they saw how wrong they were. Nothing was green here. The daylight was almost gone. The river was muddy and narrow and there was a whirlpool just beyond the landing place; the trees were so dark as to be almost black, the air heavy and hot, almost no sky. The riverbank was covered with smashed and bruised tree roots. Yes, there was decay, and where the soil was not crumbly it was mushy.

  “Where are we?” Hack asked.

  “Remolinos,” Nestor said, “wheelpools,” and pointed at the whirlpools. In the failing light the coursing water was scattered with floating blobs and divots, like hacked-ofif scalps and bubbly blisters and clotted soap scum.

  But after they had taken their masks off they smelled nothing. Even the loudest nagging birds were invisible, but some insects looked as big as sparrows.

  Someone called out up ahead, a small coughing sound, and then an echo in the person’s sinuses, like a startled animal cooing in recognition, not a person but the incomplete ghost of a person, suggesting faulty magic. Some people stood on the bank, ragged and hopeful, like castaways amid the scabby bark of the tree trunks. Small people, some half naked, some in knee-length red smocks, whom they took to be Secoya, with damp hair in their eyes—the smaller they were, the nakeder they were—crouched in greeting, gaping at them with a passive curiosity that suggested imbecility. They were brown, elfin, laughing.

  With a yelp, one boy in torn shorts seized the bow line and secured the boat. Still laughing, others hurried down the riverbank and, placing their feet apart, straddling the gunwale and the dock, began hoisting the bags and passing them to the boys on the bank. Standing at the side of a plank, a man helped the passengers ashore.

  “Those bowl-shaped haircuts make them look like retards,” Hack said.

  Janey said, “Their hair looks frightfully nagged at.”

  Their mouths hung open, their teeth were small and worn flat, they were listening as much as watching. A naked child-mother clutched a naked baby to her breasts, and the baby, with dangling legs, looked limp and lifeless.

  “Como está? How are you doing?” Sabra asked, and when she got no reply, she said, “Why are they looking at us like we’re monkeys?”

  Seeing that the boat was tipping in the wash of the river’s eddy, one of the Secoya men, wearing tattered shorts with a Polo Sport label, scuttled down the mud bank and seized the noose of the stern line.

  I have never seen a human being move like that, Steadman thought. The man had a skipping bandy-legged stoop-shouldered roll that made him almost invisible for the seconds that he was in motion. He snatched the rope and in the same gesture looped it round a protruding tree root.

  “This man is Don Pablo,” Nestor said.

  Hearing his name, the man hesitated and looked at the passengers in the boat. He gabbled a little over his shoulder to the others crouching and staring on the bank. Some Secoya men murmured softly, their hands out. Hernán handed one of them a blue plastic cooler with a padlocked lid. The women and children said nothing.

  “They sort of hate us, I can tell by their squiffy eyes,” Janey said, fingering her cell phone. “And why do they look so stroppy?”

  “Which one?” Wood asked.

  “All of them. Him—he looks like a wet weekend.” Janey called out to the man, “Oh, do cheer up. It may never happen!”

  “But we’re giving them business, right, Nestor?” Hack called, and turned to help Sabra out of the boat while Wood zipped his duffel.

  On shore, the Secoya women gathered around Sabra, touching the stamp-sized butterfly tattoo on her shoulder, but Sabra hardly noticed.

  “There’s flies all over that kid,” Sabra said.

  “He’s got a discharge, some eye thing, maybe conjunctivitis,” Ava said. “I’ve got some cream for that.” She took a tube from her waist pouch and said, “Medicina. Crema para los ojos de su niño"

  “Let’s go!” Hack said.

  But the word medicina had excited the watching people and they clamored around Ava, plucking at her clothes, until Nestor shouted. At his shouts they stepped back and made room for the visitors.

  Without a word, Don Pablo turned and moved in his peculiar skittering way down the path. The others followed—Manfred up front, kicking leaves and striding to be first, but keeping one finger to hold his place in his big plant guide. Then Wood and Sabra, Hack and laney, Steadman and Ava, and behind them on the forest path the Secoya boys carrying their bags.

  Hack said to Ava, “I saw that medicine stuff back there. Are you in the virtue business? I hate people in the virtue business. Know what I think?”

  “Who gives a flying fuck what you think?” Ava said with a smile.

  From behind it seemed that Hack’s ears were reddening. Janey turned, her thumb pressed into her cell phone, searching for a signal, and said, “You can’t save everybody!”

  “Know what, sister? You got vomit on your lips,” Ava said.

  Steadman enjoyed seeing Ava sticking up for herself. She was above all else a doctor, and in a place like this he knew her reasoning, the doctor’s conceit: In the end you will need me. I have the medicine. Following them in single file, he wondered whether it was impatience or courage that was driving the others onward. In spite of the chattering in the boat when they had been blindfolded, they did not seem seriously daunted here. Or was it just the confidence, the indifference, of people who knew they were protected: tourists with a guide.

  He was annoyed by the way the others made him self-conscious, by their irritating mannerisms, their very presence. Alone, he could reach his own conclusions, but with them everything had to be shared and either overdramatized or ignored. He had counted on this being an important trip but knew he would find it hard to write about, because seeing it with their eyes, it was diminished for him. Just as bad, as much as he resented the others, he was grudgingly impressed. They were determined to have their experience, and so far, even with their complaints they had not mentioned turning back. They were stronger and more single-minded than he had expected them to be.

  “This thing’s useless,” Janey said, shaking her phone. “It’s a pup.”

  “We had a doctor along in Bhutan,” Hack said, tossing the words over his shoulder. He was speaking to Ava. “He got sick as a dog. He was asking me for advice!”

  There were no animals or birds near the path. Steadman was on the lookout for snakes. He heard the sounds of prowling and looked back and saw children following. Some were naked, all were barefoot. But the people on the tour wore boots and leggings and long-sleeved shirts, and the two women wide-brimmed hats with mosquito veils.

  Up ahead was the village, just a cluster of huts with thatched roofs in a clearing filled with long rags of white smoke from cooking fires.

  Janey said, “Isn’t that fun, the way they gather and finish those good strong reeds in the roofs? I could use that in my arbors and garden thatch. What would you call it? Something like ‘distressed vernacular’?”

  Nestor said, “We would call it poor people who don’t have money for metal roof.”

  A small boy
approached, running through the smoke, his hands out, gesturing, seeming to beg. Nestor muttered and waved him away while an old man came forward, also through the smoke.

  “This is Don Pablo’s brother. His name is Himaro.”

  The man nodded and glanced at the newcomers, their faces, their clothes. He wore shorts and a torn shirt, and on his head was a tiara of woven straw and upright feathers, and at his waist a belt of braided vines on which various totems dangled: a broken tooth, a yellow animal claw, a bunch of fluff, a hank of fur, a clutch of sharpened bones, which clicked as he stepped forward to greet the visitors. When he got closer, Steadman saw that the old man’s eyes were weepy from infection as well as clouded and vague, searching helplessly.

  “Himaro means tigre, the one we call yana puma” Nestor said. “That is a powerful animal here.”

  There was some palaver with Nestor in the Secoya language. The visitors stayed together, squinting at the incomprehensible quack of the words.

  “We don’t have a lot of time,” Wood said, interrupting the flow. “Can you tell him that?”

  Nestor said, “Yes, I could tell him that. But he would not understand.”

  What they could see of the village were straw roofs and glowing interiors and a smoky hut that might have been a communal kitchen. The brightest structure was a large platform beside an enormous tree, opensided with a thatched roof, chickens pecking beneath it in the cracks of light from lanterns. Clotheslines were strung from tree to tree, and like dark cutouts, backlit by the bright lanterns, were Secoya, just flat shadows staring at the newcomers.

  Janey singled out a low lashed-together hut and said, “That one’s fun. It’s a sort of Wendy house. Isn’t it a pity that banana fronds always look so tattered?”

  Hack looked around the clearing and said, “Fucking Discovery Channel bullshit,” and motioned as though with an invisible remote switch and said, “Hey, guys, I can’t shut this program off!”

  When Steadman turned to speak to Ava, he saw that she had walked a little distance to where the women and children had gathered. He joined her there, noticing how the women were touching her, appealing to her for—what? Medicine, perhaps, some sort of handout. The old man wandered over, scraping his feet in the dust, feeling his way from shoulder to shoulder.

  “They all have drizzling colds,” she said, and touched the nearest ones. “This one has a low-grade infection. Look at this kid’s shin. The sore is so deep it has eaten into the muscle. This old man could lose his eyes—he needs an antibiotic. He’s rubbing them, for Christ’s sake. No toca, no toca.”

  “The paje,” Nestor said. “Himaro. The brother.”

  “He’s also a shaman,” Steadman said.

  Don Pablo now appeared again. He wore a smock and a crown woven of slender vines and a row of stiff feathers. His eyes were wounded too, one weepier than the other, which was bloodshot and turned inward. The ailment made him seem more of a brother. Yet the shaman had a clumsy agility, and while he was anything but deft, his gestures were the more effective for being approximate, commanding attention and asserting control through his show of clumsiness. The Secoya near him were watchful in a shy, respectful way, giving him room as the old man worked his fingers like antennae, positioning them as though he had eyes on his fingertips.

  Nestor signaled for them to follow when the old man turned and shuffle-kicked toward the stamped and smooth center of the village, where there were pots and baskets. Before the smoky fire were logs arranged like benches.

  “Sit down. Have a cold drink.”

  Hearing this, Hernán dragged the blue plastic cooler toward the log, opened it, and passed out cans of soda. The white visitors drank, looking exhausted in their crumpled clothes, while the Secoya stared, naked, saying nothing, the children’s noses dripping. Some men lying in hammocks humped and rolled over and, still horizontal, stared sideways at the strangers.

  The pile of pots, the baskets of cut vine stems, the enamel bowls, on a shelved frame of lashed bamboo, suggested cooking, but nothing was on the boil. Near this paraphernalia some women knelt, grating manioc.

  “This would make a super credenza,” Janey said, gripping the bamboo frame. Then with a pitying smile she said, “But I peeked inside one of those huts. You know, they don’t accessorize at all.”

  Irritably, Sabra said to Nestor, “Are we supposed to sleep here?”

  “We’re putting up hammocks, or you can find a space on that platform back there under the ceiba tree.”

  “What about washing? What about eating?” Wood said.

  “I was going to give you some of the background,” Nestor said. “This is a spiritual thing, like religion and medical combined. There is so many aspects. Maybe you like to know?”

  “Yes, all,” Manfred said.

  “Skip the background,” Hack said, lifting his elbows, creating space around him. “I’m going for a swim.”

  “We have manta rays in the river,” Nestor said. “Hernán got stung by a ray and he was in his hammock for three months.”

  Janey said, “What about din-dins? I’m peckish.”

  Nestor leaned over and worked his mustache at her, smiling in toothy incomprehension.

  “Hungry,” she said.

  Nestor spoke in Secoya, and one of the woman grating manioc replied to him without looking up. Still pushing the stick of manioc against the grater, she called out. A child’s voice sounded from the direction of the big tree and the smoky hut, and within a minute two young boys hurried into the clearing with a pole through the handle of a large blackened stewpot. A girl followed, carrying tin bowls and spoons.

  “What is it?” Janey asked.

  “Caldo of yuca and pavo.”

  “Any pork in it? Porco?” Sabra said.

  “No puerco Nestor said.

  Manfred said, “Pavo means a wild turkey. A kind of stew.”

  As the soup was ladled, Janey lifted her bowl and said, “I’ll have a wee scrap more. There’s masses going spare.”

  Hack said, “When do we get to drink the ayahuasca?”

  “Don Pablo wants to speak to you,” Nestor said.

  The old man adjusted his coronet of plaited vines and feathers, and he stood behind Nestor, shuffling his feet, muttering. He put on a pair of cracked and twisted glasses.

  “Look, he’s got super gig-lamps,” Janey said.

  But the man removed his glasses and began rubbing his seeping eye with the knuckles of one hand.

  “He says tonight is not good. You have just arrived. Some of you are angry. You must dissolve anger from your life. The women”—Nestor paused for Don Pablo to speak, and then he resumed—“he believes that one gringo woman here is having her moon.”

  “And that gringo woman would be me,” Sabra said, and sat primly, her eyes glistening with annoyance that she had been singled out. She stared at a small dirty boy crouching in the dust near her and addressed him. “I’m unclean. I’m tainted. I’ve got the curse. They’re worse than Hasidim!”

  “Beetle, please,” Wood said, cautioning her.

  “In Secoya culture, sharing in a ceremony while having your moon is taboo. It is too much purification. Too much light, Don Pablo says. It can make the shaman very ill. He will see the huts dripping blood. So”—Nestor spoke directly to Sabra—“please keep away from the kitchen area. The food. Other people’s dishes.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll read my book instead. It’s more exciting than this garbage.”

  Wood put his tin bowl of stew on the ground and crept beside her and awkwardly put his arm around her. She began softly to cry. “It’s okay, Beetle. Let it out.”

  Manfred said, “They have rules. They must be obeyed.”

  “You Germans know all about obeying rules,” Sabra said.

  His face gleaming with sweat, his big teeth working, Manfred said, “That’s right, I am a wicked German who started the World War and made all the camps, and you are a good person who does nossing bad.”

  “Woody, tell him t
o stop,” Sabra said through her tears.

  But Manfred was on his knees hissing at her, “I have been to Ramallah! You have seen Ramallah?”

  “Oh, do belt up,” Janey said.

  Then Nestor rose and gestured with his hands to quiet the squabblers. He said, “Don Pablo wants to welcome you.”

  The old man was muttering behind him, shaking his head, and when he nodded some wisps swayed in his feathered coronet.

  “Don Pablo has been a shaman for many years. In Secoya, the word paje is shaman. It means ‘the man who embodies all experience.’ He says that some of the people he was treating were witches. A shaman always has enemies, because he is accused of being responsible for people’s deaths.”

  “Where’s he from?” Hack asked.

  Nestor translated the question, listened to Don Pablo, then said to the group, “He didn’t understand, but his answer is interesting anyway. He believes the Secoya were descended from a certain group of monkeys in Santa Maria—downriver from here, where two rivers meet.” The fire had died down, and as the crackling had diminished the jungle sounds had increased. Though they could only have been insects, they sounded to Steadman like a chorus of crazed birds—the honks and squawks issuing from the darkness around them.

  “His father was also a shaman. He taught Don Pablo and Himaro how to use ayahuasca. Don Pablo became a paje because he was very sick. He healed himself and became a healer. The best way to become a paje— maybe the only way—is to be very ill and follow that path.” Nestor listened to Don Pablo and spoke again. “Ayahuasca is like death. When you drink it you die. The soul leaves the body. But this soul is an eye to show you the future. You will see your grandchildren. When the trance is over the soul is returned.” Don Pablo was still talking. Nestor said, as though summarizing, “He talks about ‘the eye of understanding.’”

  Manfred said, “Please ask Don Pablo to explain the meaning of this.”

  The question was relayed to Don Pablo, who turned away and answered the question while facing the trees and the darkness and the insect chatter.