‘There is a myth which is known throughout the whole of the Americas from southern Brazil to the Bering Strait via Amazonia and Guiana and which establishes a direct equivalence between eclipses and incest.’
Claude Lévi-Strauss
‘There shall be no more novels about incest. No, not even ones in very bad taste.’
Julian Barnes
‘Beyond the equator, everything is permitted.’
Fifteenth-century Portuguese proverb
Contents
Prologue
Part One
The Banana-Fish Boy
A City Built of Space
I Cut Evelyn Waugh’s Hair
Where the Frogs Meet to Mate
Under the Eaves
Humming-Bird Sucking Honey
Part Two
Waronawa
Blue Eyes Mean Ignorance
A Blast of Heat
The Giant Grasshopper
Deer Hunt
The Long Wait
Convent Days
The Evangelist
An Affair
Rock-Stone
The Master of Fish
The Dirty Face of the Moon
The River of the Dead
Savannah Eclipse
The Great Fall
Silence
The Wedding
Kanaima
Fire-Burn
Asylum
Star-Field
The Ice Coffin
Singularity
Part Three
A Tapir for a Wife
Rainstorm
Baboons Making Coffee
Dinner at the High Commission
Love Gone a Fish
The Amerindian Hostel
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Author
Prologue
Spite impels me to relate that my biographer, the noted Brazilian Senhor Mario Andrade, got it wrong when he consigned me to the skies in such a slapdash and cavalier manner. I suppose he thought I would lie for ever amongst the stars, gossiping – as we South American Indians usually do in our hammocks at night – and spitting over the side to make the early morning dew of star spittle. Well, excuse me while I shit from a great height. Excuse me while I laugh like a parrot … which reminds me. Did he tell you the whole story of the parrot or did he just leave it flapping its wings and heading for Lisbon? He didn’t? I might have guessed. I’ll tell you. Later.
But first, I lay claim to the position of narrator in this novel. Yes, me. Rumbustious, irrepressible, adorable me. I have black hair, bronze skin and I would look wonderful in a cream suit with a silk handkerchief. Cigars? Yes. Dark glasses? Yes – except that I do not wish to be mistaken for a gangster. But dark glasses are appropriate. My name translated means ‘one who works in the dark’. You can call me Chico. It’s my brother’s name but so what. Where I come from it’s not done to give your real name too easily. A black felt fedora hat worn tipped forward? Possibly. A fast-driving BMW when I am in London? A Porsche for New York? A Range Rover to drive or a helicopter when I am flying over the endless savannah and bush of my own region? Yes. Yes. Yes. Oh and I like to smell sweet. I like to rub myself in every orifice and crevice and nook and cranny with lotions, potions, balsams and creams.
Why am I not the hero, you ask. Because these days you all have forgotten how to make heroes. Your heroes and heroines are slaves to time. They don’t excite wonder and amazement. They don’t even attempt to astonish, enchant or amuse. They’ve forgotten how to be playful and have no appetite for adventure. Sub-zero heroes. A puny bunch, embedded in history, or worse, psychology – that wrinkle in the field of knowledge that hopefully will soon be ironed out, leaving us in our proper place between the monkey and the stars.
Believe in me. I am the one who can dig time’s grave.
Besides, you choose your heroes too carelessly, without considering their antecedents. As for my ancestry, it is impeccable. I will have you know that I am descended from a group of stones in Ecuador. Where I come from people have long memories. Any one of us can recite our ancestry back for several hundred generations. I can listen to a speech for an hour and then repeat it for you verbatim or backwards without notes. Writing things down has made you forget everything.
My grandmother distrusts writing. She says all writing is fiction. Even writing that purports to be factual, that puts down the date of a man’s birth and the date of his death, is some sort of fabrication. Do you think a man’s life is slung between two dates like a hammock? Slung in the middle of history with no visible means of support? It takes more than one life to make a person.
Grandmother swears by the story of the stones in Ecuador although sometimes she might say Mexico or Venezuela for variety’s sake – variety being so much more important than truth in her opinion. More reliable, she says. Truth changes. Variety remains constant. Of course, she will offer to tell you the truth if you give her enough honey, but she will never tell you how much honey is enough. We, in this part of the world, have a special veneration for the lie and all its consequences and ramifications. We treat the lie seriously, as a form of horticulture, to be tended and nurtured, all its little tendrils to be encouraged.
Where was I? Oh yes. My grandmother. She still refers with rage to a man called Charles Darwin who wandered through the region with the slow-motion frenzy of a sloth, measuring and collecting. No one round here likes measurers, collectors or enumerators. We cannot hoard in the tropics. Use it or some other creature will eat it. Sooner or later everything falls to the glorious spirit of rot with its fanfares of colour and nose-twisting stenches. The spirit of rot and its herald angel, smell, announce most events in my part of the world. Anyway, according to my grandmother, Charles Darwin without so much as a by-your-leave parked his behind on my ancestors and wrote the first line of Origin of Species, declaring that we were descended from monkeys. If his eyes had been in his arse he would have known better.
Every night before she goes to bed, Koko, as we call Grandmother, shaves a piece off the black tobacco roll hanging from the rafters and makes herself one sweet, strong, liquorice-tasting cigarette. Then she indulges in a little prophecy before conxing out in her hammock. She learned in her youth about the sacred ball-games that predict future events. That was how she got her reputation for releasing omens from bones and football matches. You know how grandmothers are. My grandmother is full of all that crap.
However, the wrinkles on her face follow almost exactly the contours of the rivers of the Amazonas. I used to trace them as she carried me around. That’s how I got to know the geography of the region. I had to be carried. I refused to walk until I was six. I wouldn’t talk either. Senhor Andrade got that right.
All I ever said was: ‘Aw, what a fucking life!’
From the start I preferred coconut liqueurs to my mother’s milk. My grandmother explained to my parents that my heart was outside my body, hidden in the form of a parrot somewhere in the bush. She said that I was indestructible for that reason. This depressed my parents so much that they set about producing several more siblings in the hope that they would knock the shit out of me. My mother had known there was something unusual about me because, when she was pregnant with me, I used to shout directions from the womb when she got lost.
One day, I was lying in my hammock, naked and chubby, with my sexual clobber pointing wistfully towards the palmthatch roof, when one of the young girls came and peeked over the edge of the hammock.
‘I spy a nice little pigeon sitting on two eggs,’ she said and jumped in on top of me. I never stopped talking after that.
‘He must have eaten parrot-bottom,’ they used to say wearily, when they heard my non-stop
chatter. The first sign that I was to be a narrator came when I lay in my hammock, peeing in a huge arc over the side on to my mother in the hammock below, because I was too lazy to get up, and composing a poem to my parents praising the cooking utensils I saw around me.
I never apologise. We have no word for sorry.
‘Cockroach ate my conscience in the night,’ I reply, whenever someone questions my behaviour. If you want to become a saint, live to please others, if you want to become a god, live entirely to please yourself. That’s my motto.
How did I discover that I was to play the role of narrator? Public acclaim, of course.
In my part of the world there are many lakes: navy-blue lakes, blood-red lakes, pewter-coloured lakes, black lakes. I went fishing in the lake of mud, a lake which is also a dump where people throw the remains of water coconut, fish bones, crab shells, defunct bicycles, all sorts of muck. Poking around there, I dredged up from the bottom of the muddy lake a word. Yes, you heard right, a word, heavy like a stone and covered in moss. It made a ‘gluck’ sound as I recovered it from the dark mud that tried to suck it back. But there was no returning. I cradled it to my chest with a mixture of fierce excitement and possessiveness. I hosed it down. Cleansed it. Scraped the moss of centuries from it.
Then I saw that on the word were carved other words, hieroglyphics, tiny rows of them, and they were in a language I could not understand. But I became aware of the noisy and voluble existence of words, an incessant chattering from the past, and as the babble grew louder, as the throng of words grew and approached along the forest trails, the savannah tracks, the lanes and by-ways and gullies, the words, some declaiming, some whispering, were joined, firstly by laughter and ribald whistles, then by rude farting sounds and finally by an unmistakable clattering that could only be the rattling dance of bones.
They came into sight. What a throng, a jostling, shoving, awesome throng of chattering, hobbling, jigging, ramshackle bones from as far back as the eye could see, along the road from the Brazilian border, streaming down the Pan-American highway. Some were scrambling into boats, clambering into skiffs, shoving their canoes off from the river bank; some strode along jabbering, their bony arms round each other. Some were remonstrating with those who lagged behind.
Child skeletons bounced rubber balls. Adults made lewd and suggestive wiggles with their pelvic bones, others began to picnic by the wayside, cooking in pots over hastily made fires. One began to drum with his own bones, taking one from his leg, twirling it in the air and setting up rhythms on an enormous upturned calabash. As the scurrying stampede approached down the trails and pathways, clickety-clacking like a stampede of whores on a pavement, as this huge and purposeful throng, so animated, so lively and so attractive, so noisy, what with the furious conversing, the screeches of laughter, the angry accusations and scurrilous suggestions, came towards me, I felt irresistibly drawn to such a joyous assembly.
And so, from where I had been peeping them through an ear-ring bush, I took a step forward, hesitating only for a second before plunging into the bobbing, undulating crowd which received me with whoops of joy and squeals of approval as they lifted me on to their skeleton shoulders, the excited babble mounting in volume until, with one massive voice that could be heard from Mahaica Creek to Quito City, the bony crew’s chatter merged into one gigantic roar as they shouted: ‘That’s my boy.’
To which I replied, from the front of this glorious mob, punching my fist in the air, as delirious with ecstasy as if I had just scored for Brazil: ‘Kiss my backside.’
That’s how it was. I was there. I should know. I was chosen. That’s it for the moment, folks. Gone a fish.
And how did I hone my skills as a narrator? For you to understand that, I shall have to tell you a little about the art of hunting because it was through hunting that I learned to excel as a ventriloquist.
In my language, hunting means making love with the animals. The hunt is a courtship, a sexual act. It is all a matter of disguise and smell. Make yourself attractive to your prey. Paint yourself in the colours that arouse them. We know which scents attract which creature. We know which fish like to be tickled where. We know that what flies does not like to be stroked. We know how to remove our own scent so that an animal will not get wind of us. We rub ourselves with whatever scents will allure the prey. We present ourselves as a sexual partner. It is always necessary to study which animal will risk his hide for what. You have to understand the desires of your prey. The jaguar, for instance, has a fierce appetite for hot and bitter peppers, sour, salty food and puppies.
We flirt with our prey like any serial killer. And here is where my sublime talent as a ventriloquist comes in. I can reproduce perfectly the mating call of every bird and beast in the Amazonas. Sometimes I do it unaided, sometimes with the help of certain leaves or grasses curled around my fingers. It seems magical, but then magic is always related to desire. The whole purpose of magic is the fulfilment and intensification of desire. Magic is private. It deals in secrecy and disguise. Religion, by comparison, is peanuts. A social affair. The world was ordered magically before it was ordered socially. Ah, secrecy, camouflage and treachery. What blessings to us all. Where I come from, disguise is the only truth and desire the only true measure of time.
Camouflage is the other required skill. I can efface myself easily like a chameleon – merge into the background. I scrunch up bitter-cassava leaves and rub them under my arms as a deodorant in case my smell gives me away. If you were to see me fishing, in the dim green light of the forest, you would never be able to tell my legs from the twisted tree branches at the side of the creek.
My gifts as a ventriloquist were spotted as soon as I began to speak. I could reproduce the flickering hiss of the labaria snake and sing the Lilliburlero signature tune of the BBC’s World Service within seconds of hearing them. Sometimes my grandmother used me as an early form of tape-recorder.
Once, I remember, she particularly wanted to hear a programme about the cosmic noise picked up by radio telescopes – that faint echo of the Big Bang that has spread through the universe over the aeons. We have always been crazy about astronomy. When she returned from fishing, she came to where I lay in my hammock and I repeated the whole programme about Einstein and Hawking, in the voice of Alvar Liddell, a famed BBC announcer.
‘Which came first,’ I wondered out loud, ‘the equation or the story?’
‘The story, of course,’ she snapped, as she listened carefully to my perfect mimicking of those faint hissing sounds of the universe from the beginning of time, recorded by radio telescopes.
‘What people are hearing,’ she said, ‘is the final wheeze of an enormous laugh.’
The programme continued to explain how the universe expands outwards over millions of years towards infinity and then contracts back over millions of years into a singularity.
‘A very slow orgasm,’ she said thoughtfully.
To cut an endless story short, I have a genius for ventriloquism. Any diva in the Scala Opera House, Milan would kill for my vocal range. I can do any voice: jaguar, London hoodlum, bell-bird, nineteenth-century novelist, ant-eater, epic poet, a chorus of howler monkeys, urban brutalist, a tapir. The list is infinite.
But out of the blue, things turned bad between Koko and myself. She flew into a rage when she heard I was going to write the stories down. She is a stickler for tradition. All novelty or innovation is a sign of death to her and history only to be trusted when it coincides with myth. She believes we Indians should keep ourselves to ourselves, retreating from the modern world like the contracting stars. We fought. She rubbed pepper in my eyes. I knocked her out – temporarily – with a war club.
So why am I telling this story, out of so many?
All stories are told for revenge or tribute. Take your pick.
Sad though it is, in order to tell these tales of love and disaster, I must put away everything fantastical that my nature and the South American continent prescribe and become a realist
. No more men with members the size of zeppelins and women flapping off into the skies – a frequent occurrence on the other side of the continent. Why realism, you ask. Because hard-nosed, tough-minded realism is what is required these days. Facts are King. Fancy is in the dog-house. Perhaps it has something to do with protestants or puritans and the tedious desire to bear witness that makes people prefer testimony these days. Now, alas, fiction has to disguise itself as fact and I must bow to the trend and become a realist.
Ah well, as they say, monkey cut ’e tail to be in fashion.
I invite you to my homeland, the parched savannahs that belong to the Indians on either side of the Kanaku Mountains north of the Amazon, the plains where, it is said, people have so little that a poor man’s dog has to lean against the wall and brace itself in order to muster the strength to bark.
That’s all for now, folks. The narrator must appear to vanish. I gone.
Part One
The Banana-Fish Boy
The boy who brought the banana fish brought the news. The gate had long fallen down and he stood where the two gate-posts framed the empty red savannah. A hot wind blew. Stuffed in the bottom of his pocket was a catastrophe in the form of a note. The boy did not know or care much what it said. The fish was his overriding concern. He wiped the dust from it and waited. The sun scorched down. Heat bounced off the red earth. For a long time he stood with the great fish in his arms, frightened to come nearer because of the dogs. The place seemed deserted.
Eventually, an old lady with silver hair down to her shoulders came to the open door. She pushed her way past a tangle of derelict bicycles and an old rocking chair and shaded her eyes in order to see who was there. The boy knew the woman slightly. No one around those parts could guess how old Auntie Wifreda was.
When anyone asked her, she just shrugged amiably and said: ‘I don’t know. If I was a horse, they’d shoot me.’
The Ventriloquist's Tale Page 1