by Paul Theroux
“This eye can see things that can’t be seen physically. Some people have this third eye already developed. And for others the eye of understanding can be acquired through ayahuasca or some other certain jungle plants.”
Steadman sat feeling hopeful, and as he was listening another old man appeared, wearing a yellow smock, a feather coronet, and a necklace of red beads and animal teeth. He spoke to Nestor.
Nestor said, “This is Don Esteban. He is a Kofan. He wants to tell you that he learned to speak Secoya in one night from a parrot after drinking a huge amount of yajé”
“Is yajé the same tipple as ayahuasca?” Janey asked Hack, who said, “I guess.”
“Don Pablo can turn into a tiger. He can visit other planets. He has been to many planets—he makes beautiful pictures of them. He can see into a diseased body.”
“Who would have known—he’s a fucking astronaut,” Hack said under his breath.
In a seemingly cautionary way, Don Pablo spoke, and Nestor translated: “A flower may not talk, but there is a spirit in it that sees everything. That is the soul of the plant, which makes it alive.”
Don Esteban added a thought, then shrugged.
Nestor smiled. “And, yes, a flower may talk.”
Without another word, Don Pablo and Don Esteban signaled to Himaro and slipped away into the darkness. Nestor lit a torch from the embers of the fire and led the visitors down the path.
“Since I’m unclean, I’m going to my room,” Sabra said.
Wood hugged her. “You don’t have a room, Beetle.”
Hurrying ahead, Nestor had planted his torch at the entrance to the high sleeping platform, the light whirling with small white moths. Fuzzy knuckle-sized insects buzzed and bumped the lighted posts. Watching the others approach it slowly, Steadman could see their reluctance in the way their dusty shorts were pinched between their bobbing buttocks.
7
FROM HIS ROPE HAMMOCK strung between two trees, Steadman lay as if trussed in the rope mesh, seeing the others thrashing on the sleeping platform, the Wilmutts and the Hacklers, backlit by the lanterns and surrounded by clouds of fluttering moths; all night their muttered complaints.
Steadman said in a drawling voice, “Sure you think it’s romantic at first but wait till you sit there five days on a sore ass sleeping in Indian shacks and eating hoka and some hunka nameless meat, and all night you hear them fiddle-fucking with the motor.” He paused and listened to the insect howl. “Burroughs was right. Tomorrow the river will be higher.”
Manfred had slipped away. Perhaps he knew how persistently he talked in his sleep, asking questions, making declarations, usually in German, sometimes in English. Steadman had heard the gabble, and though he could not understand any of it, there seemed a coherence in its slurring narrative, like a story that Manfred had mumbled in his sleep many times before. But Steadman also guessed that Manfred had found a more comfortable hut or a better sleeping mat, or perhaps a companion.
Just as likely he had found a candle stump somewhere so that he could study his book of medicinal plants. The man was irritating, but in his reading and his note taking and his pedantry, the tenacity of his tactless honesty with the others, he was a reproach to Steadman, who swung in his hammock, regretting that his own notebook was so neglected. He told himself that he had refrained from writing so as not to appear conspicuous to the others, who might recognize him as the author and pester him with questions.
In her own hammock next to Steadman, Ava said, “That annoying woman is still reading your book.”
Dawn came early but dimly, the tentative sun not penetrating the trees but lighting portions of sky, which were visible as tiny blue patches through the canopy of leaves. Beneath those boughs the air was pale green, gassy-looking, and filled with flitting insects and lazy filaments that swayed like the torn veils of spider webs, yet they were high up, draping the green air, where Steadman had never imagined spiders to live.
The birds had begun shrieking long before dawn, and one had a monotonous voice of objection that nagged through the jungle. Nimble, darting, unswattable flies kept returning to settle on and sting Steadman’s face. Ants were everywhere, large and small, trails of them, clusters of them, black glossy ones, tiny flitting ones, some no bigger than sand grains. They gathered on Steadman’s sandals, delved into his bag. The heat woke them; the heat seemed to make all the insects active: biting flies, white moths, big furry beetles, foraging wasps, and glossy cockroaches with tortoiseshell wings.
Walking toward the covered platform with Ava, Steadman picked up a fist-sized snail that was leaving a track of slime across the beaten-down earth.
“Desayuno he said to a small Secoya girl who was watching him, and seeing her look of wonderment, he realized she did not speak Spanish.
The others were seated cross-legged on the platform, looking fatigued and miserable in rumpled clothes.
“My hair’s a rat’s nest,” Janey said. She appealed to Ava. “We didn’t get a wink of sleep. This whole bally place is a tip. We’re so fed up we’re about ready to leave.”
Ava said, “I slept like a log.”
Nestor was mounting the ramp to the platform. In great contrast to the visitors, he looked rested and bright-eyed, his thick hair combed straight back, and wore a clean T-shirt and jeans.
“I want to give you some instructions from Don Pablo,” Nestor said.
Hack said, “Enough with the lectures.”
Nestor stared at him, saying nothing, but with ironic jeering lips. Though he was a big man, his face was narrow, his black eyes set deep in his face, and he was the more intimidating for being calm and saying nothing until Hack looked away.
“I want to suggest to you,” Nestor said, “that you are not home now. You are in Succumbios province.” With his tongue between his teeth, he added, “Oriente.”
Now Manfred appeared on the ramp, looking like a commando in his jungle gear. He swung himself onto the platform. He too looked rested, another reproach to the others who had suffered in the night. He was carrying a tin cup. He sat and sipped from it and swallowed with a hearty sigh.
“Ecuador café. Very delicious!”
Steadman smiled to see how Manfred aroused the hatred of the others, and how Manfred enjoyed it.
“Herr Mephistos,” Hack said, gesturing at Manfred’s shoes.
“I take from a pee-sant,” he said, sipping the coffee.
Nestor said, “Please eat some fruit for breakfast, then nothing more. No food all day. But stay busy. If you drink—just water. The ceremony will begin after sunset in the pavilion over there. Later I will tell you what things to bring. The main thing to bring is a clear mind and a pure heart. And an empty stomach.”
It was seven in the morning, sunset almost twelve hours away, and already the heat and the biting flies and the stink that rose from the sodden earth seemed unbearable.
“Why can’t we have the ceremony right now?” Wood asked.
“Night is for ceremonies. We need darkness,” Nestor said. “So you can relax.”
“I didn’t come all this way and pay serious money to relax!”
“You can maybe weed Joaquinas garden, then. She needs help.”
“Hard cheese on Joaquina,” Janey said. “She can weed her own garden. What a cheek. Imagine, faffing around on some scrubber’s allotment.”
“Or the Secoya women will show you weaving if you like. Or you can make pictures. Or Don Pablo will teach you the names of the plants.”
Wood turned aside to Hack with an incredulous glance, mouthing the sentence “Do you fucking believe this?”
“We’ll just hang out,” Hack said, as though to calm his friend.
“I’m unclean anyway,” Sabra said and, still sitting cross-legged, picked up her copy of Trespassing. “Look what this climate did to it!” The pages were thickened by the humidity, the binding curled, the whole book fattened and misshapen.
“At least you have something to read, to take the curse off
this grottsville,” Janey said.
“Are you hot?”
“Not half,” Janey said.
“I wouldn’t put that drug in my body anyway,” Sabra said. “It’s like a pact with the devil, drinking the magic potion so you can get visions. I’m glad I brought this.” She tapped the book. “None of that tricky stuff in here. I mean, the whole point of this book is that you can test your limits without putting crap like that in your system.”
Steadman stared, his lips pressed together, and felt Ava’s eyes on him.
Nestor said, “Anyone who wants to go on a jungle walk, Hernán will take you.”
“That’s us,” Ava said.
They left after breakfast, just Ava and Steadman. Seeing them approaching the path with Nestor and Hernán, Manfred smiled at Steadman and said, “I would like to come with you.” He sounded sincere, but more than that he sounded familiar, using a tone with Steadman that he never used with the others.
Ava said, “I’m sure you have something more interesting to do here.”
“Yah. I want to see the cooking, for my notes. How the ayahuasca is prepared. How it is stewed. You say ‘to stew’? The yajé”
Nestor said, “We say hervir. We also say reducir. They mix in some other plants.”
“Of course, I know. I have read. They add other species of special plants. This I would like to see. You would like to see this?”
He was speaking to Steadman, but Steadman was so puzzled by the man’s unexpected friendliness he just shrugged.
“They call the mixture changru-panga.”
“You don’t need me,” Nestor said to Manfred. “You are a perito. Hexpert!”
Hernán nodded that he was ready to go, and he turned abruptly and set off, leading with a raised machete. A barefoot Secoya boy wearing a small canvas knapsack followed with a stick. They cut through Joaquina’s maize patch and jumped a wide ditch. They were almost immediately slipping on a narrow muddy path under the tall trees, Hernán slashing at hanging head-high fronds and low thorny branches, the boy poking his stick at the dripping ferns at the track’s side.
The land was level and the path fairly straight, but deeper in the forest the air was inert, hot, sodden, dense with humidity, whirring with insects. Some sunshine, in cones of light, penetrated from torn patches of the tree canopy, yet deep green shadow predominated. The shadow was wet, and the moss on the trees was like green foam.
After half an hour—they had not gone very far on the path—Steadman’s shirt was soaked from sweat and his brushing the big, low-growing, dripping leaves. His shoes were heavy with mud. The bare skin of his forearms was scratched and dirty. Ava smiled at him but she was soaked, too.
“Where are we going?” Steadman called ahead to Hernán.
“Paseo,” he said. “Walking only.”
Perhaps feeling that he should be more informative, he pinched some leaves from a bush and showed them to Ava.
“The Secoya use this one for tea, if you have pain problem in you estomach.”
“ Tortuga the Secoya boy called out sharply, and darted past Steadman and knelt in the mud. Steadman saw nothing, but within seconds the boy was holding up a small muddy turtle, its legs twitching and dripping.
“How did he see that?” Ava said.
“He is hungry, so he see everything,” Hernán said.
Farther on, Steadman paused and said, “I always wondered where those flowers came from.”
“We have many like this,” Hernán said.
“I think that’s Heliconia,” Ava said.
The bunches of buds, red and yellow, hung on a long stalk like small brilliant bananas, little nips of color that were vivid among the gray ferns and shadowed leaves.
“You have this one?” Hernán said, and he indicated a tall bush with a profusion of white bell-like blossoms, thick and drooping from every slender branch.
Recognizing it as the mouthy blossom that Nestor had pointed out at Papallacta, Steadman said, “I saw one of those at the hot springs.”
“Is good for this,” Hernán said. He tapped his head and smiled at the Secoya boy, who was nodding eagerly, grinning and showing a broken front tooth. “See? Even he knows. He helps to gather this one.”
“Angel’s trumpet,” Ava said, remembering what Nestor had told them. “What do you call it?”
“It is toé. La venda de yana puma. The tiger’s blindfold.” He smiled and widened his eyes as he said it. “We scrape. We boil the pieces. We drink.”
They walked on for another hour, but slowly, because of the mud and the heat. Toward noon they came to an area where some trees had fallen and littered the earth around them with heaps of dead leaves and the withered trash of dead branches. Some of the trunks looked rotted and infested but one firm trunk remained, the right height for a seat. Ava approached it to sit down.
“Mira. Espera un momentito,” Hernán said, and slashed the trunk with his knife, and it came alive with large frantic ants and clumps of tumbling ant eggs like furious grains of rice.
“I think I’ll stand,” Ava said.
Hernán took the knapsack off the Secoya boy and distributed bottles of water.
“Paseo is better,” Hernán said, wiping his mouth. “If you sit in the village, you see food and you want to eat. Then, when you take the yaje tonight, you feel sick.”
But Steadman had forgotten the ceremony. He was looking around at the great vaporous hollow of the fly-specked and thick tainted air, everything greenish, soaked and slick under the rain forest roof.
Flourishing in this remote seclusion, unaided by any human hand, was an obscure and eternal thickness of garden beneath the patchy heights of the forest ceiling. In the lowest shadows of the muddy floor were soft dirt-humps marked by the grubbings of tree rats and turtles. Flowering plants grew at every level, banking to the highest tree trunks.
More angel’s trumpet, sallow and succulent, like white downcast funnels, and torch ginger with crimson flower pods, and the Heliconia that Ava had identified, its smooth curved fruit red and yellow and striped black; the labial petals of a rosy blossoming vulva on a bluish stalk; the orange beaks of Strelitzia; and the scalloped and splayed fragility of purplish orchids. Fingers of boiled pinkness pointed from a pendant vine, and on another tiny yellow bells on wing-like leaves. All of it glowed in the feeble light, and from the heights of the boughs immensely long, narrow roots, some of them hairy, trailed past gnats and flies.
He saw struggling butterflies and dangling worms, the crooked symmetry of the blue veins on big leaves, the frail luminous tissue like wadded silk of droopier flowers, the stiffer stems of wet black plants, the pale noodles of wandering tendrils, and the fuzzier knobs, like monster paws of nameless growths—all of this in a place where there was the narrowest path and no other footprints and only the dimmest daylight reached to the bottom of the forest. Here it was possible to believe that, though humans had passed nearby, none had interfered with the place, nor had ever bent a stem, nor plucked a flower. The whole world was blind to its beauty.
“Mira — cuidado,” the Secoya boy said sharply, and stepped in front of Steadman. Then the boy pointed with his stick, and Steadman saw the threads of a spider web glistening with dew. The whole thing was the size of a wagon wheel but suspended high, the center of it level with his eyes and trembling with the damp breath of the hot forest. If the boy had not spoken, he would have walked into it and wrapped the web across his face and all over his head. Just thinking of that made Steadman take a step back.
“Where’s the spider?”
“Araña,” the boy said, indicating the creature at the edge of the circle of milky filaments.
Steadman saw the spider, and even though he took another step back in fear, he could see it clearly: a big purple fruit with the dusty shine of a plum, highlights of pinky yellow, looking ripe and heavy. It was hunkered on skinny legs, each one ending with a tiny toothy foot. It stayed at the edge of the web, its jaws apart like a pair of pincers. What unnerved Ste
adman was not its large size or its lurid fruit-like color; he was alarmed by its gaze, its glowing eyes like drops of poison turned on him and fixed upon his own eyes.
“Escucha” Hernán said, tilting his head to listen and look up.
Only then did Steadman awaken from the trance state induced by the spider’s gaze. All that Steadman heard was the racket of insects. The boy and Hernán were straining to hear.
Then Ava said, “What’s that?”
There came a far-off chugging, like a motorboat plowing invisibly through the sky, and when it drew closer it became a more distinct yak-yak-yak.
“Mira! Helicóptero the boy said, his hair in his eyes, the complex word issuing from his smile and the space of his broken tooth.
Hernán said, “Is a chopper.”
A shadow like a big brown cloud passed overhead, a mammoth belching airship, the largest helicopter Steadman had ever seen.
He started down the path after it, but Hernán shouldered past him and then the boy skipped ahead, his skinny brown legs working as he leaped like a fawn. The sound of the helicopter was still loud, not far off, perhaps circling or going lower.
The enclosed interior of the forest with its dome of branches and leaves prevented them from seeing the progress of the helicopter, yet they still heard it and were able to follow its percussive sound, the drumbeat of its engine burps in the distance.
They were off the path now and chest-high in ferns and big leaves as they saw ahead a brightness, an opening in the forest, perhaps a clearing, and then the descending darkness of the helicopter settling to earth.
Hernán and the boy were hunched in stalking postures, signaling for Steadman and Ava to stay behind and keep low. The brightness led them on and dazzled them, too, for the whole morning they had been walking in the dappled shadow of the rain forest, and now sunshine poured through the trees.
They were stopped by a head-high chainlink fence that ran through the forest, razor wire coiled along the top edge and skull-and-bones signs lettered in red, Prohibido el Paso, every twenty feet or so. Sunlight scorched the clearing within the fence—sunlight and steel towers and boxy prefab structures and oil drums and the huge sputtering helicopter, its twin rotors slowing as men in yellow hard hats rushed back and forth from its open cargo bay, unloading and carrying cardboard cartons.