by Tahir Shah
My great fear was that the Machiguenga had, like the Shuar, succumbed to the beguiling charm of missionaries from the Bible Belt. As far as I was concerned, a little danger of head-shrinking is a small price to pay in return for a people who have remained true to an ancient code.
On my journey to the Shuar, I had been protected by a former American army ranger from 101st Airborne Division, named Richard Fowler. He was an expert on psychotropic plants, and had lived in the jungle since enlisting for two tours of Vietnam back in 1968. I would need a security man if, as I hoped, the missionaries had not got to the Machiguenga. Richard Fowler’s name was the last on my list. He was an impossible character and I had vowed never to communicate with him again, let alone work with him. But time had tempered my resolve, and I had few options. The day after I arrived in Lima, I arranged to fly up to Iquitos, a small town in the Upper Amazon built a century ago by the rubber barons. It was there that Fowler could be found, when he wasn’t living it up in the jungle.
The night before I went in search of Richard, the desk clerk at my hotel took me aside. “Señor, I hear you want to find Paititi,” he said.
“Who told you that?”
“It is the word on the street,” he said, with sinister intonation. “Listen, if you want to find Paititi, there is a man who can help you.”
“Who?”
“El Jefe de la Policía, the Chief of Police, Señor Martín.”
Where can I find him?”
“At the cock-fight.”
The clerk scrawled an unintelligible note and handed it to the security man at the front door. He flagged a cab and, in turn, passed the note to the driver. The Swedes, the Bulgarian, the Ukranian banker and I squeezed into the car, which sped away.
The taxi ride was my first experience of “full on” documentary-making. The Bulgarian was filming the Swedes, as usual, and they were filming me. The banker was recording the sound and giving direction, too. As with most millionaire bankers, he wasn’t used to doing as he was told.
Outside the taxi, downtown Lima was closing up for the night. I have never come across a city that’s shut down as firmly as Lima. It was as if the shopkeepers were expecting street warfare to ensue. They unclipped the neon bulbs and wrapped them in newspaper. They bolted inch-thick sheets of steel to their windows, and wove strands of razor wire across them. They battened down hatches, fixed sharp spikes to anything left unprotected, chained double-locked doors, and positioned armed guards in bulletproof vests.
Previous journeys in search of treasure have taught me that a zigzag strategy is the best way to get ahead. It may seem like madness to the uninitiated, but the worst method is to head straight for the target. Do that, and you miss out on nuggets of information that can be invaluable later on. More importantly, the zigzag method sometimes reveals the trail to the goal.
At first the Swedes didn’t appreciate the detour into Lima’s cock-fighting underworld. They couldn’t grasp its connection with Paititi. I said that I had been passed a tip-off by one of my informants.
The Ukranian, Marco, tapped a thumb to his nose. “Just like in the KGB,” he said shrewdly, in his thick Ukranian voice. “There’s nothing like a good informant.”
The taxi pulled up at a large pollería, a roast-chicken restaurant. Hundreds of birds were sizzling on spits outside, reflecting the cherry-red neon lights. The air was warm, perfumed with the pungent smell of roasting meat. Peruvians adore grilled chicken. They can’t get enough of it. No Sunday evening would be complete without a roasted bird or two, washed down with a few bottles of Pilsen. Dozens of families were milling about expectantly, many with three or more generations in tow. Everyone was scrubbed clean, like potatoes ready for the pot, and decked out in their best clothes.
Marco pushed his way through the lines of families who were waiting obediently to be served. He buttonholed the manager and stuffed a hundred-dollar bill into his shirt pocket. The man clicked his fingers, like a gypsy performing a flamenco dance, then yelled a volley of orders to his waiters. The throng of honest, chicken-loving families was roped back, a moth-eaten scarlet carpet was rolled out and we were ushered to the far end of the hall.
The only thing Peruvians like more than gorging themselves on grilled chicken on Sunday night, then massaging the grease into their squeaky clean cheeks, is cock-fighting. The sport is a national obsession.
At the rear of the dining hall lay the Palacio de Gallos, the cock-fighting arena. I was stirred by the size of the place. The ring must have been sixty foot across, encircled by more than five hundred red plastic seats, with a low domed ceiling hanging above it like a Chinese parasol. Offset to one side stood a digital scoreboard. The fuchsia numbers flashed importantly from time to time, but no one took any notice. Everyone was watching the warring birds.
The audience consisted of about two hundred overweight middle-aged men. Some were scowling, others were drunk. They all had money at stake, and were clapping, screeching, roaring orders at the birds.
A man with no legs and cropped, oyster-gray hair was taking the bets. He lurched around the ring on his hands, raising his stout body up on the knuckles, a wad of betting slips and a pencil gripped in his teeth.
In the middle of the arena, the fight was a whirlwind of wings, beaks and sharpened spurs. It was hard to see which bird was winning. Both were stripped of their plumage and dignity, both drenched in blood. All of a sudden one collapsed sideways. The victor continued to attack. A few of the gamblers erupted in cheers and accosted the legless man, demanding their winnings. The dead cockerel’s owner made for the stage, moving with fast, sombre strides. He scooped up his lifeless bird and peered into its eye, flipped the head, and peered into the other. There was no question about it: his prized fighting cock was dead.
Not far from the scoreboard, an awkwardly tall man in a blood-stained medical coat was binding spurs to a bird’s ankles. His small, devious eyes were magnified by thick lenses. I watched him for a moment or two, as he fixed the spikes in position and clipped them sharp. He filled a syringe from a vial of clear liquid, which I suspected was adrenaline, and jabbed the needle into the rooster’s thigh. After that, he put the bird’s head into his mouth, and sucked it.
When the creature had been taken off to fight, I approached the medical man. He was tidying his syringes, scalpels and other implements. “I am looking for Señor Martín,” I said.
The vet didn’t look round. He could tell I had no interest in cock-fighting, that I had come on less important business.
“Go to the weighing-pit,” he replied. “He’ll be over there.” Straightening his arm and index finger in one slick motion, he pointed to the far end of the arena. I could make out a simple leather sling suspended from a set of scales. Birds were being weighed, like boxers before a title fight.
I went over. The man in charge of weighing had a dirty crepe bandage wrapped round one hand, and a patch of dry blood on the back of his shirt. He took great care in weighing each bird, then growled a number to his assistant. I moved in close, so close I could smell him. He reeked of black tobacco, the kind you get in the jungle, which they call mapacho.
“I’m looking for Martín,” I said.
“Sí, yo soy Martín.”
“Martín, the chief of police?”
“Sí. ¿Qué quieres? What do you want?”
I felt like a fool, not because the Swedes were filming me and the Bulgarian was filming them, but because it seemed daft to ask anyone about the lost city in the weighing-pit of a cock-fight. But since we were there, I dived in: “I’m looking for Paititi,” I said, with implausible confidence, “and I have heard that you may have some advice.”
Martín called out the weight of the bird, and looked at me. Then he looked at the Swedes, the Bulgarian and the banker. “Are all of you looking for Paititi?” he asked.
“It’s me, mostly,” I said. “I’m going into the jungle to search for it.”
“¿Tienes protección? Do you have protection?” snarled
Martín.
“I’m planning on taking a former soldier. He served in Vietnam.”
“No, not that kind of protection... Protección contra las brujerías, protection against witchcraft.”
Martín paused from weighing fighting cocks and looked at me. The scent of stale mapacho hung between us like a veil. We stared at each other: he observing my inexperience, and I peering into his lizard-green eyes. Those eyes. They can only be described in cliché. They were haunting, tempting, wicked, supreme. They hinted of terror on an unknown scale, the kind of terror created by fantasy.
“Las brujerías pueden matar a un hombre, the witchcraft can kill a man,” said Martín, after a long pause.
“Do you know where I should look for Paititi?” I asked. “I’ve heard that the Machiguenga know.”
“Without protection you are not prepared,” he said frostily. “And without preparation you are a fool.”
I was keen to ask Martín about his own interest in Paititi, but he was unwilling to tell me anything else. In parting, he said: “Get protection and prepare your mind. Prepare it very carefully. If you fail to do so, the jungle will make a madman out of you, and it will take your soul.”
Richard Fowler had swapped his soul for the jungle long ago, in the dark days when his home was a foxhole east of Saigon. He said he went to Vietnam because the rainforest called him, and because its foliage gave reason to the chaos of his life.
As our passenger plane descended closer and closer to the mantle of green, I reflected on Richard. I was already mad, I mused, for only a madman would employ Richard Fowler once and then again. The jungle was his only friend. It listened silently to his endless saga of war, death and high times in Indochina a generation ago. On our long voyage up the Rio Tigre in search of the Birdmen, Richard had talked non-stop about his search for reality. At regular intervals he would pause to swallow a tonic, brewed by his personal shaman, Rodrigo. The blend of flora-based hallucinogens and nerve agents kept him functional. They helped him control the pangs of enmity that welled up in the night, when the suffocating jungle air choked us as we struggled to sleep.
The Swedish director, David, was sitting beside me on the flight. As if he had read my thoughts, he asked me about Richard. Like the others, he had seen the glowing account of the Vietnam vet in my book Trail of Feathers and, like them, he was taken by the description of a real-life Rambo. As the aircraft touched down at Iquitos airport, I felt a sharp jab of anxiety in the pit of my stomach. I considered staying on the plane and going straight back to Lima, but the fact remained: I needed a security man. However impossible he was, Richard was a known entity.
Very little had altered in Iquitos, last outpost of the Upper Amazon. Wizened señoras still sat beneath their porches, tilting back on hardwood chairs, fanning their faces and dreaming of the wealthy tourists who had never come. The main street was still potholed, the café clientele still slurping aguaje juice at shaded tables, plagued by a thousand schoolboy salesmen. Even their wares were unchanged: stuffed piranha paperweights with open mouths, jaguar-tooth pendants, and pink-toed tarantulas pinned out in frames.
In 1854, a European traveler had described Iquitos as a “sparse and miserable hamlet consisting of no more than thirty houses and a straw-thatched church”. Fifty years later it was a city with twenty thousand Peruvians and four thousand Europeans, all of them involved in the rubber business. With Charles Goodyear’s invention of vulcanization in 1839, rubber became an invaluable product and was used for everything from making sidewalks to a covering for raincoats.
Along with Manaus, downstream in the Brazilian Amazon, Iquitos became a pleasure dome of decadence. The wealthy spent money like water. They imported crystal chandeliers, silk furnishings and entire cellars of vintage Champagne; they ate off the finest porcelain, gambled a fortune on the toss of a coin, and lit their cigars with five-dollar bills. But in 1912 an Englishman named Henry Wickham smuggled seventy thousand rubber seeds to Malaya. With no indigenous diseases to attack them, and arranged in neat plantations, the rubber trees thrived. Overnight Iquitos went from boom to bust.
As in many Amazonian towns, Iquitos had a mysterious surplus of women — about eight to every man. In an effort to win the female vote, and to boost municipal funds, the town’s authorities had worked ceaselessly to lure gringos there. They had promoted lavish hotels, discos with outrageous “jungle” shows, beauty pageants, gambling parlours and cut-price beer. But tour companies had struggled to sell an outpost in the middle of the Amazon as the next big nightlife destination.
I headed for the favourite haunt of the resident foreigners, the appropriately named Gringo Bar. We pushed through the bustle of seductively dressed young women, each of whom was hoping to gain the attention of a gringo man. As we entered the dim light of the bar, they swooned and pressed close to stroke the Swedes’ slick leather outfits.
Inside, a short, balding American barman was serving drinks. He was dressed in the same lilac Hawaiian shirt he had been wearing four years earlier. Behind him a display of jungle liqueurs was reflected in a tinted mirror. A middle-aged Englishman was propped up at the bar. He was sipping a cocktail through a straw that poked out from a clutch of paper parasols. On either arm hung a fifteen-year-old girl. The barman introduced him as Mad Mike. It was only later that I remembered him as a timid insurance salesman from Wigan, who had sold up everything and moved to Iquitos to reinvent himself and search for loose, easy women. I asked if he had seen Richard Fowler.
He motioned to a corner table, set back from the others. At first I couldn’t make out what Mad Mike was pointing to but, gradually, I noticed a man sitting there, his head on the dim vinyl surface. I approached cautiously, with the Swedes watching from the front of the room. The man was snoring loudly, comatose, drunk. He stank of vomit and cigarettes, and was dressed in familiar rip-stop camouflage fatigues, Altama jungle boots and a black, Ninja-style singlet.
I uttered Richard’s name once, and then again. The snoring rose in volume, reached a crescendo and died away. I prodded one arm.
No reaction. I prodded the other, and the shoulders moved back, raising the head. A pair of worn military dog-tags scraped over the surface of the table as the torso became vertical. My eyes tracked up from the tags to the face. The cheeks were puffed up, bloated by the heat and drink, and in need of a shave. The whites of the eyes were jaundiced, a pale beeswax yellow. Their enlarged pupils strained to focus on me.
“Go on, buy a drink for an old soldier,” he said.
“Don’t you recognize me, Richard?”
“A whiskey will help my memory.”
In the four years I had been away, Richard Fowler had fallen on hard times. The little work he had once secured as a guide had all but dried up. An increased dependence on mind-altering substances, gleaned from jungle plants, had made him unreliable and prone to fits of ferocity. The Swedes asked if this was the same Richard Fowler who had protected me so valiantly on the voyage to the land of the head-shrinkers. I assured them it was, and promised that he’d be back to top form in no time. He just needed a little time to detox.
A petite teenaged woman sidled over and sank her teeth into the lobe of Richard’s left ear. She was wearing a strapless pink dress, with matching pink pouting lips. A strand of brunette hair hung over one eye, as if it had been trained to do so. She slid her sharp tongue over the flamingo-colored lips and glared at me, then at the film team, anxious to be introduced.
“Meet my girlfriend,” said Richard hoarsely. “Her name is Delicious.”
The first stage of Richard’s detoxification took two days. I told him that if he could get the poisons out of his bloodstream, there might be work with a pay check at the end. Delicious took charge of the treatment, which involved Richard sitting in a tin bathtub on the fetid landing of Hotel Peru, drinking gallons of aguaje juice. As he sat there, with Delicious rubbing a poultice of red achiote seeds on his chest, I revealed details of the expedition.
Richard listened as
best as he could, pausing from time to time to vomit over the side of the bath. I lectured him on the lost wealth of the Incas, highlighting difficulties faced by previous explorers. Then I described my plan. “We will search out the Machiguenga tribe, get to know them and gain their trust,” I said. “They must know where Paititi lies, and they’ll take us. We just have to talk them into it. You’ll be there to give us protection, to cover our backs. Are you game to come along?”
Richard didn’t reply at once. A quantity of moss-green bile spewed from his mouth and ran down his chest. It was an involuntary action, but alarming all the same. I stared down at him. He was naked except for his dog-tags, his upper body tinted red with achiote balm. I cursed myself for being so stupid as to give him another chance. I opened my mouth, inhaled enough air to declare my change of mind, but he cut me short.
“I’ll join you on one condition,” he said.
“Huh?”
“It’s that Rodrigo can come along.”
Richard and Rodrigo were the odd couple of the Upper Amazon: a washed-up Vietnam veteran and his mate, a shaman who specialized in suspect preparations with hallucinatory effects. They were both out of work, largely because they were a danger to honest society. Any other expedition would have shown them the door. Perhaps it was for that reason that I changed my mind once again. I told Richard to gather his things together and find Rodrigo. We would leave for Lima on the morning flight.
In the afternoon I strolled down to the floating market of Belén, at the edge of town. The citrus-yellow light bathed the workers’ backs as they parcelled up a thousand jungle products. Spend a few minutes at an Amazonian market and you get an idea of the jungle’s wealth. There’s nothing like it anywhere on earth. You see rolls of black tobacco, live turtles with primeval shells, and triangular fruits encased in feathery barbs. There are blind blue fish with tiger stripes, slivers of medicinal tree bark oozing amber-like sap, and pens of agouti rodents, shaking with dread, waiting for the knife.