by Lucia Ashta
Whispers of Pachamama
a novella
Lucía Ashta
Awaken to Peace Press
Contents
1. A Flickering Vision of Browns
2. The Futile Search for Confirmation
3. The Jungle Welcomes Its Own
4. A Good Way to Die
5. Death of a Way of Life
6. The Silence of a Full Heart
7. Part of the Whole
8. The Seed
9. Trust Breeds Contentment
10. A Simple Winding Truth
11. The Oblivion of Dreams
12. The Sound of a Breaking Heart
13. Hiding in Plain Sight
14. The Unwinding of the Last Bend
15. The Unthinkable
16. The Face of the Infinite
A Note to Readers
Also by Lucía Ashta
About the Author
Copyright 2016 Lucía Ashta
All rights reserved
This is a work of fiction.
Awaken to Peace Press
Sedona, Arizona
United States of America
www.awakentopeace.com
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Dedicated to Mother Earth, mother to us all
When your eyes cannot see,
your heart can guide you,
for it is always true.
1
A Flickering Vision of Browns
When the final moments of life arrived, he wondered how he had missed the signs, the clues to who she was. It was unbearable to think that he had not realized, that his blindness could have hurt her. There must have been something that he didn’t see, but could have seen, that would have revealed the true nature of the woman he loved before the bitter moments of hindsight arrived with the crystalline clarity of death.
He might not have known who she was, yet he couldn’t tear his eyes from her since the moment he first caught a glimpse of her, flashing like a fragmented picture among the thick trees of the jungle. He wasn’t usually alone in the forest. It was dangerous. Deep in the heart of the Amazon, creatures that looked like they belonged to the races of mythical beasts were everywhere. Raised in one of the small towns that edged the rainforest, he had learned long ago that just because you didn’t notice a threat, didn’t mean there wasn’t one.
Everything in the Amazon was larger than life. Creatures and plants were bigger than it seemed they should be and infinitely more colorful than appeared necessary. The forest was never silent. Sounds echoed and mimicked one another, never ceasing.
He was normally careful to take his breaks with one of his fellow workers. They too were from the neighboring town, a town built to house loggers. There was no other reason for the village to be there. It was too remote to feel like much of a village at all, removed from the rest of civilization, and dangerous because of its proximity to the jungle. Everyone from that settlement—loggers, fathers and mothers of loggers, sons and daughters of loggers—was wary of the jungle’s sprawling life.
Yet now, he didn’t know where the others had gone—strange—and he was too tired to wait for them even though he knew he should. It might have been wiser to go look for them, but he would risk getting lost. He knew the jungle as well as his companions. Still, anyone could get disoriented. The forest was dense with growth, and it looked virtually the same in all directions—except for where they had cut down the trees.
But today they weren’t cutting. They were surveying where to commence the next day. They had logged the other side of the jungle closest to Guayucuma, leaving a vast clearing around their town, which made the villagers feel safer now that they could see open ground.
It was time to expand into another section of the thick jungle, once they decided where it would be easiest to begin. In some areas of the forest, the vines and undergrowth wrapped around the trees so densely as to make their jobs several times harder. There were no parts of the forest that weren’t like this, thick with life everywhere, but there were some that were a bit less so.
They were out there searching for the a-bit-less-so today. When he stopped, tired from trampling through the forest, slashing left and right with a machete, he was the only one there to see the woman.
He didn’t know if he would have noticed her if he’d still been moving. Getting through the jungle was strenuous work. And his eyes constantly roved the forest floor and tree canopies. Things—poisonous things—hung or lingered everywhere in perfect camouflage.
It wasn’t when his eyes swung methodically down, forward, left, right, upward, and then back down again that he saw her. It was when he stilled and wasn’t really looking for or at anything in particular.
He was holding his scarred thermos to his lips when she flashed by. He sprung to standing and spilled hot yerba mate on himself. He shook the liquid off, never looking down.
With sharp eyes, he trailed her path. He couldn’t see her anymore. Yet she had been right there.
What was a woman doing in the rainforest? He took a step toward the old, gnarled trees she’d just passed, but stopped, relying on his eyes to explore instead. His path was blocked by hanging plants that clung to tree branches, as thick as the thighs of giants. He would almost certainly lose her if he tried to rip through to her. He feared he might have already lost her.
He forced himself into total stillness. He was even quieter than the plants that grew one nearly indiscernible stretch at a time. Even his heart paused in its beating while he searched the tapestry of the Amazon for what shouldn’t have been. He knew everyone from Guayucuma, which wasn’t hard when there were so few. No one would be out here alone, especially not a woman.
Once an old woman had gone crazy. She had been one of those that came from the bigger city to escape its overpopulation. She began talking of the spirits of the forest and how the villagers needed to show them respect, and took her mad ranting into the jungle to leave it there. She disappeared one day and didn’t return.
Her family didn’t find her body. Anacondas could swallow a human whole.
That had been a long time ago. When she vanished he had been a young boy, too young to realize what had happened. He heard the story later.
No one had wandered into the jungle alone since then, neither man nor woman.
Now, he did.
There she was again. His heart resumed its pumping, racing loudly in his eardrums.
She had appeared on the other side, a blur concealed by eager trees. Then she faded into the woven fabric of the Amazon, swallowed whole as if sharing the same fate of the crazy, old woman.
He took one step toward her, or where she had previously been. He hesitated. The old woman hadn’t been the only villager to die, a fate that the jungle freely handed out.
Then he spotted her again, farther away this time, whipping through the overgrowth impossibly fast, like an animal. No human could navigate the wilderness the way she did.
His feet began to move, and he didn’t stop them.
With his machete out, it took him a long time to reach the spot where he’d most recently seen her. He feared she wouldn’t be there anymore. She could be anywhere by now, even returned to wherever she had come from, and it wasn’t Guayucuma.
Like a miracle, there she was. Not where he last noticed her, but close by, within view of the river. From there she moved slowly, cautiously, as if she finally realized the dangers that encircled her. She must have sensed him there, looking at her, but she didn’t do anything to indicate that she had.
Unconcerned by her nakedness as much as she was by her surroundings, she walked toward the huge, wild river as if every place she stepped had been waiting for her to touch
it. She traversed the distance between her and the river with a gracefulness and purpose he had only witnessed in the animals of the forest. Animals had been designed perfectly—nothing was out of place; nothing was superfluous or lacking—and they moved as if they knew it.
Her body was round and voluptuous in places, strong and limber in others. Long, thick black hair trailed over the brown skin of her back, swinging with each of her movements. He thought then that he would like to follow her anywhere, and moved closer.
As he was able to make out more of her features, he forgot that he’d meant to warn her of the dangers—as if, somehow, she just didn’t know of them. He forgot about everything but this vision before him.
He offered all of himself to her even though she hadn’t asked for it—she hadn’t even looked back at him. When it became evident that she meant to enter the water, he fumbled through the last few steps to reach her, thrashing inelegantly at the plants that impeded his way, hacking at them until they relented.
“Wait.” He didn’t know if she spoke his language. The founders of Guayucuma had brought the Portuguese of the big city with them, but the natives of the area didn’t speak it. They had their own language that only they and the plants and the animals understood.
She stopped and waited, but she didn’t turn.
“You cannot go into the water.”
She extended a long, brown leg toward it. Her calf muscle arched while she dipped the tip of her big toe into the river. “Why can I not go into the water?” She spoke Portuguese to him though the rhythms of her voice were different, somehow even more lyrical than his own melodic Portuguese.
He took one more step toward her and sheathed his machete on his belt. “Because it is very dangerous. Many creatures that live in this water can hurt you.”
He didn’t dare to move closer to her; she still hadn’t faced him. His eyes trailed her body, down to the bare feet, which seemed impervious to the perils that rose from the fertile dirt of the Amazon. He would have averted his eyes to respect her modesty if she hadn’t seemed so comfortable with her nudity. And it was difficult for him to resist the allure of a body with perfect hills and valleys.
“The water will not hurt me, nor will any creature within it.” She dipped her entire foot into the river, and he became frantic. No one in his village risked entering this water. They built wells for their needs. He couldn’t bear to watch the river, with all its caimans, anacondas, and carnivorous fish, eat up this woman.
He lunged for her arm and turned her toward him. It was only then that she met his eyes. Hers were a rich brown that looked as warm as her skin, soaked with sunshine, felt to his touch.
He froze in her stare, knowing he should withdraw his hand from her, but seemingly unable to move. All his intended words that would further warn and convince her to spare herself from death by suicide—because that’s what stepping into the Amazon River was—vanished.
“You do not trust Nature.” Slowly, slower than anything he had seen her do, she lowered her eyes to the hand that still clenched her bicep. Just as slowly, he released her. “I do.”
She turned to the water, and put her muddy toe back in. She smiled, but only to herself; he could see just half of it from over her shoulder. Then, she walked into the water up to her knees. Next went her round hips. Then she waded in up to her waist, where the tips of her black hair touched the water and connected to it, urging her further in.
Another step, and her breasts floated atop the water, bobbing with the current. Down to her neck, and he couldn’t bear it any longer. It would be any moment now that the piranhas would tear her beautiful flesh from its bones. He looked away for a second—but who was he kidding, he couldn’t look away from her—and then she went completely under, a trail of black hair left floating on the surface like the veil of mourning for the loss of a life.
He waited for death to come and rip the miracle from him, a miracle whose name he had not learned. But death, usually overly punctual, didn’t come. Her hair saturated and sank, unhurriedly.
She swam across the width of the river, and yet death didn’t keep its appointment. She emerged onto the opposite shore, her calves coated in the silt of the soft riverbank. There, she did turn to look at him with those unchanged brown eyes that were of a richer color than any he had ever observed. How could he have never seen that shade of brown before? He spent most of his life in a forest full of browns.
She turned and took that deep, multi-dimensional brown with her. Then, without further acknowledgment, she walked into the jungle. Before long, the sparse foliage of the riverbank gave way to thick overgrowth.
She disappeared from whence she came, knowing that he would never follow across the river.
2
The Futile Search for Confirmation
Months passed. They were long, quiet months split between the man’s time logging and his time recovering from the effort. He had begun to wonder whether the woman in the forest was a product of his imagination. Perhaps his life was so monotonous—every day looked much the same as the one before it—that he had actually made the woman up as a diversion, his mind desperate for something different. And if it had to be something different, why not a beautiful, alluring woman? It was exactly the kind of thing his imagination would dream up.
The others believed him, the others that he’d told. There weren’t many to whom he’d confided the encounter directly, but the village was small. The story spread, causing varying reactions among the people. Some thought the woman was a mythical creature of the forest. They suggested that she was a messenger or a savior sent to help them, though all they needed saving from was themselves.
Others considered her a bad omen. Maybe she was flesh and blood, and maybe she wasn’t, but her arrival couldn’t be a good sign. What kind of naked woman would walk into the Amazon River and submerge in its waters? None they wanted to encounter. No one that didn’t have supernatural powers would swim in the Amazon like that, and the townspeople didn’t like unexplained supernatural powers.
Others still argued that she was from another village—even though there was none near—and that she was lost—although she didn’t seem lost. The fact that she was naked and swimming in the Amazon River just showed how much she needed their help. They had to save her before the jungle devoured her, if it hadn’t already.
There were even a few more theories with a lesser following that sprouted up intermittently across Guayucuma. There was little else to distract them from the humdrum of their lives. They clung to what was already becoming a legend.
The man found it interesting that everyone had a theory or a version of the story that slightly deviated from his own, yet not one of them questioned what he’d said. It was only he who wondered whether he had finally gone mad like the crone that disappeared into the jungle to her death.
He relived every moment of seeing the woman, over and again, as vividly as if each were a hallucination, each time questioning if she could have been real. She had seemed tangible then, but the more he mulled over how she looked and how she moved, the more he perceived an unreal element about her that he had been too captivated before to notice.
He longed desperately to see her again, to prove himself either sane or insane, but to know at least which of the two he was. But mostly he longed to see her again because he ached with the desire to be near her, to be close to that extraordinariness that she possessed, and to share in her trust of the rainforest. He had feared the jungle all his life, since he was old enough to understand the villagers’ warnings of the perils it shrouded, in every possible crevice.
Observing her, he had not been afraid. He wasn’t certain what he had felt for this unknown woman, but he recognized that he had experienced something new, something contrary to the usual hollow feeling of routine and survival.
With her, it was about more than survival, so much more. And he wanted desperately to ascertain what that was.
But as much as he searched for her, looking in the
same places she had been and also in others, she eluded him. There was not so much as a broken glimpse of her among stout trees. So he kept cutting them down as he was supposed to, hoping that she could still show up when all the trees that concealed and revealed her to him were gone.
3
The Jungle Welcomes Its Own
Eventually, she did reappear, but almost half a year had gone by in the world of men, time never to be recovered. The man had given up hope and concluded that he had to be crazy, even though no one else in Guayucuma believed him so.
He attempted to understand the nature of his madness, but instead, he glimpsed his first real understanding of the nature that surrounded him. Raised in fear of his environs, he had never speculated about what lay past the danger. His thoughts had always been of caution, of what could be lost, and what must be saved at all costs.
But on that particular day he noticed more about the jungle. He looked all around him and saw the abundant life for what it was instead of the many ways that it could harm him.
For the first time since he spotted the woman running amid trees, he was alone again, out in the middle of nowhere, where he spent half of his days. He was part of a team of four. Two of the other men were around his age, still young and able to withstand the wear of muscle and bone that their work demanded without much more than regular soreness that went away, or mostly went away, by the next morning.
The fourth man was quite a bit older. Although not really old, he looked worn out by the hard work of earning his living. But he was tough as their gas-driven chain saws, and often the last one going, taking down one final tree toward their monthly quota of logs for shipment to the big city before they called the day over.