by Tahir Shah
Walter swept back his hair with his hand.
“She’s six months and a few years,” he said.
*
Since the first night, when I had experienced the trauma of the Pradera’s loo, my digestive tract had seized up. We had now been on the boat for nine days, and my colon was plugged with an assortment of wretched meals. My medical kit – supplied by London’s Hospital of Tropical Medicine – didn’t contain anything to relieve constipation, only diarrhoea. At first I kept the problem to myself. After all, it’s a private matter. But Richard and the others were fascinated by my lack of bowel movements. On a close-knit river expedition, one man’s bowels are another man’s business.
Cockroach brewed me a cup of coffee, made with seventeen tablespoons of Nescafé. I slugged it back in a single gulp. The crew clustered around me. The only reaction to the coffee was a surge of adrenaline. Walter suggested I drink a pint of vegetable oil. Holding my nose, I did so. Still no result. Francisco said I was a fool for resorting to caffeine and oil as laxatives. He could, he said boastfully, cure my dysfunction with a simple two-part treatment.
First I was to drink a strong tea made from the bark of a tree. He called it mololo. Only later was I able to have the bark identified. Known in the West as “Cramp Bark”, it’s been used medicinally for centuries in North America. Tribes like the Meskwaki and the Penobscot once prescribed it to cure chronic constipation. It’s curious that Francisco used a North American plant.
The mololo tea, which was quite pleasant, warmed me to the shaman’s expertise. I was rather looking forward to the second half of the remedy. He said it would take time to prepare, but should be ready some time that afternoon. I went to my hammock to stare up at the rot.
In the early evening the shaman came down from the roof. He was holding my green mess mug. It was full to the brim with a hot liquid. Francisco said he’d just finished making the medicine and I was to drink it at once. Following his instructions, I took a deep draught of the liquid. It was very salty and had undertones of tobacco.
“¡Bébetelo! Drink it up!” said Francisco impatiently. “If it gets cold it will not work.”
I asked him what the beverage was made from.
He didn’t reply.
“Quickly, finish it,” he barked.
“Tell me what’s in it?”
Still the shaman refused to answer.
“If I tell you what it is, you won’t drink it!”
Cockroach looked up from a pot of boiling oil.
“Es su orina. It’s his urine,” he said blankly, “you’re drinking Francisco’s urine.”
TWENTY
River of Lies
After the coffee, the oil, the mololo tea, and half a cup of the shaman’s urine, I spent most of the night huddled over the Pradera’s putrid hole. It was unpleasant, but I was very pleased that the state of constipation had been reversed. Richard was on the roof lying out under the stars. He had taken an extra-strong dose of sanango, his favorite nerve-agent.
“You oughta try it,” he said cheerfully, next morning. “I’ll get Francisco to make you up a batch. It clears your head like nothing else.”
“I’ve had enough of Francisco’s medicine,” I replied, “and, after all, I’m saving myself for ayahuasca with the Birdmen.”
Richard wasn’t listening. Sliding his knife from its sheath, he poked at something in the rot above my hammock.
“That’s all we need!” he exclaimed.
“Horrendous damp rot,” I said. “Never seen anything like it.”
“Not the rot... the nest.”
“Nest?”
“Arachnid. Looks like it’s just hatched. In a day or two this boat’ll be running with wolf spiders. It wouldn’t be a problem if we had some fuckin’ rats on board!”
Some say that these hairy brown spiders get their name from their wolf-like technique of chasing and hunting their prey. Few others of the species can match their extraordinary speed. Richard showed me how to identify them by their unique arrangement of eyes. He was an arachnophile of the first degree. Wolf spiders have three rows: the lowest has four small eyes, the middle has two much larger, and the upper row has a pair of medium-sized ones.
The plague of spiders was bad news, but was just one of many problems. Our stores of food were going down fast, largely because the crew were eating five cooked meals a day. A valuable sack of flour had mysteriously fallen overboard in the night. And a bottle of bleach had ruptured, ruining most of the sugar. Meanwhile, Walter was complaining that the Johnson needed a new propeller. Without one, he said, we’d be scuppered upstream.
In the cooking area, Cockroach brought another problem to my attention. The boat was sinking. A two-foot crack had developed in the starboard side. I suspected endemic wet rot had something to do with it. I ordered the crew to take it in turns to bail water. They’d have to bail day and night. Fortunately, Richard had a roll of industrial tarred tape in his pack. He said it was “core” equipment. The bailing and the tarred tape kept us afloat. But they were a short-term solution.
Vietnam training had taught Richard the importance of core equipment. His few possessions were super-durable military issue. Army stuff was cheap and tough. He scorned anything made in the private sector, calling it “civilian shit”. All my luggage fell into that category. In his book, civilian shit was for wimps, like canned food. Everything he owned from his watch-strap to his underpants was army issue, and came in camouflage green. Camo’ mimicked nature, he said, and nature was all that mattered.
When he was digging out the tape, Richard emptied the contents of his canvas pack onto the boat’s roof. I was struck by the cleanliness and good condition of his gear. He had a US army flashlight with a Morse code button, a fork which doubled as a knife and can-opener, a US army water bottle filter system with drinking straw attached, and a pint of medical alcohol. There was a chipped tin cup as well, and an 18-inch carbon steel machete, a coil of nylon rope, a condom, and two fishing hooks.
“The condom’s for carrying water,” said Richard sternly. “That is, unless I meet a cute Señorita in the jungle.”
I asked about his boots. He rarely took them off.
“They’re standard US army Altama jungle boots,” he said. “They’ve got a valve which pushes out the water when you walk. They’re the only boots worth having out here.”
“Is US army gear the best?”
“Some of it,” he said, “but the French make the best clothing. Look at these pants I’m wearing, they’re herringbone, with reinforced knees and double-lined pockets. They’re fuckin’ handmade!”
Richard had found a last packet of cigarettes at the bottom of his pack. He tore off the cellophane wrapper and was soon inhaling the air of Marlboro country. The shaman was squatting nearby. He had been working on another batch of sanango, but now he was going through his own bag of loot.
Francisco was the Pradera’s magpie. He’d scoop up any unwanted junk he could find, and tuck it into his voluminous duffel bag. Amongst other things, he was collecting empty tin cans, dead batteries and strands of my used dental floss. When I asked why he needed such things, Walter murmured “Para la magia”, for magic. Francisco’s unconventional dress sense and his strange behaviour had made a great impression on Walter and the cook. They were terrified of him.
The Vietnam vet” had great respect for Francisco, but he didn’t fear him like the others did. They were an odd couple. The shaman would sit at Richard’s feet in his droopy Y-fronts, talking about the shamanic world. He would scowl when Richard lit up a Marlboro. To Francisco, tobacco was a sacred product. He was disgusted that such a hallowed plant could have become an icon of addiction and branding. Francisco despised Marlboros and everything they stood for. But he viewed me with even greater contempt. As far as he was concerned, a man who didn’t smoke at all had no soul.
On the thirteenth day, with the boat going slower and slower against the current, the crew begged Richard for some fresh food. They were
, they said, sick of eating canned gruel and spaghetti boiled in oil. They hated each meal more than the last, they claimed, and were only choking them down to please me. This failed to explain why they were eating so much. Richard told Cockroach to fetch an empty sack. He then instructed Walter to tether the boat on the river-bank. Taking his machete, the sack, and a bottle of drinking water, he set off into the jungle.
Cockroach abandoned bailing duty and slunk down the boat to slaughter Rosario. I managed to wrestle him to the ground just before he snapped her neck. She would remain alive as long as I was there to protect her. Francisco was sprawled out at the back of the boat on the drums of petrol. He lit his pipe and was soon lying in a fug of smoke. I kept to the other end of the Pradera, hunting for wolf spiders, which were now crawling everywhere.
Three hours after setting off, Richard marched back out from the jungle, the white nylon sack strung over his shoulder. Thanking him, the cook dragged it below. I sat on my hammock and watched as the contents were pulled out one at a time. First came a black-feathered bird. I wasn’t sure what it was. Then, a paca, a giant nocturnal rodent, with bucked front teeth and clay-colored hair. It had been gutted with Richard’s knife. Swishing away the flies, Cockroach delved again into the sack. He pulled out a pig-like peccary, then a mahasse, a rodent whose meat is a delicacy in the Upper Amazon.
That night Cockroach cooked up a rich stew made from fresh meat. Walter had six helpings of it, and Francisco ate so much that he had to throw up over the side. I’d been concerned that the meat would go to waste, but it was soon finished. Cocooned in layers of mosquito netting I resisted the stew. Instead, I boiled a pan of water and cooked up a sachet of Lancashire Hot Pot.
Walter went on and on about the propeller and the crack in the boat’s side. But I ignored him. There was nothing I could do except to commandeer Francisco’s cauldron for bailing. The shaman asserted that the pot was a magical tool. If it were used for bailing we would, he said, end up at the bottom of the river. As it was we were heading that way, so I told him to leave me alone. The village of Grande Bretagna, Great Britain, was marked on the map. With a name like that, I hoped it might have a resident mechanic. I buried my head in Flornoy’s book Jivaro: Among the Head-shrinkers of the Amazon, printed in 1953, and tried to forget about my troubles.
Before the Spanish arrived in the Americas, I learned, the Incan Empire bordered the Shuar land on its west. Just before the Conquistadors arrived, the Inca, Huayna Capac, led his armies against the Shuar. The year was 1527. The Incas were routed so fiercely that they were forced to flee back to the Andean highlands. As a way of saving face, the Inca declared the Shuar unworthy of being his subjects.
A few years later, in 1549, the Spanish commander Fernando de Benavente made the first European incursion into the Shuar territories. He had heard of the jungle’s abundance of gold, and was still eager to find El Dorado. His party is thought to have followed the Rio Upano, south from its Andean headwaters, down to the junction of the Rio Paute.
Benavente had planned to establish a town in the region, but fled when he realized that the locals were about to butcher him. However, another Spanish expedition did found two settlements nearby, in about 1552. Crazed with gold fever, they came across some gold deposits. Soon they had built mines, enslaving local tribesmen to work them.
The Spanish forced the Shuar laborers to pay a tax in gold dust which, supposedly, was to be sent as a gift for King Phillip III’s coronation. The levy grew greater and greater. Finally the Shuar could stand no more.
One night, in 1599, a group of them slunk into the Governor’s house and pulled him half-naked, from his bed. They dragged him by his hair into the courtyard, and said it was time for them to pay their taxes, as they had been told to do. Emptying the Spanish gold reserves, the Shuar leader, Chief Quirruba, ordered his warriors to melt down the gold in small crucibles.
Meanwhile the Governor was stripped naked and tied hand and foot. Once the gold was liquefied, his mouth was prized open with a bone and, one at a time, the crucibles of molten ore was poured down his throat. At first the Governor screamed, but his tongue was soon burnt away. The liquid gold passed through his body and out via his bowels, killing him in agony.
All around, the Shuar went wild with delight. They slaughtered most of the Spanish contingent and danced until dawn.
From then until the 1850s almost no white man dared to enter the Shuar lands. In 1767 a group of Spanish missionaries strayed into the region. They were presented with the skulls of their Catholic brethren, slain in a previous attack.
Francisco’s shouts drew my attention away from the book.
“¡Gran Bretaña!” he called. “We have arrived at Great Britain!”
I popped my head over the edge of the hammock. A boy was running along the river-bank. All he was wearing was a tattered tee-shirt decorated with the triumphant face of Mohammed Ali. But I could see no sign of Great Britain. The shaman pointed to three dilapidated shacks, one of which was missing its roof.
“That’s Gran Bretaña,” he said.
“But it doesn’t even have a football pitch.”
Ten minutes after mooring at Great Britain, we had established that no mechanic lived there. In fact, it was home to only two families, each with six sons. They had no work, they said.
“If only the oil mining company would come here,” said one youth, “like it has come to Trompeteros.”
“Where’s that?”
“Arriba, up river.”
“How far?”
The young man snatched at a fly.
“A day or two from here,” he said. “In Trompeteros everyone’s rich. The oil company gives them money, and the women are very sexy. They wear pink lipstick. And...” he continued, making sure his parents were out of ear’s reach,”... at Trompeteros they have a disco.”
As I thanked the young man for his information, his father came over. The man was in his forties. He had a wispy moustache, bucked teeth and an unusually flat nose.
“Life here in Gran Bretaña is very difficult,” he said softly. “We are poor people. There’s no school and no doctor. And the neighboring villages laugh at us, because we don’t have a football field.”
I sympathized with the man.
“We do not need help,” he said proudly, “but there is one problem which needs attention. We were expecting the missionaries to come, but they have forgotten us.”
I braced myself to be asked for money.
“My youngest son has a lump on his head,” said the man. “It has been growing very big, and we don’t know what to do.”
“If you would cut it off,” said his wife, “we would pay you what we can.”
We asked for the boy to be brought. Shyly, he came out of the house and into the sunshine. His name was Juan, and he was about six. Although shy, he was smiling. That is, until he saw our expressions. Nothing could hide our shock at seeing such a tremendous tumour. The skin around the growth had been shaved. Juan started crying when he saw how worried we looked. I told his father that it wasn’t anything too serious.
“Then will you cut it off?” asked the mother. “You must have a sharp knife on your boat.”
I suggested that we take Juan and her up-river, to Trompeteros, where the oil company would surely help. The boy’s mother was hesitant. She pushed her husband forward. He would come with us, she said.
Father and son stepped aboard the Pradera and we set off up the River Tigre once again.
The blurb on the back of my map said it was the crème de la crème of Amazonian maps. Richard and the others made great fun of it. They didn’t trust maps. As the days passed, I began to understand why. The few places which were plotted, were way off the mark. Most villages weren’t featured at all. I insisted that we stop regularly and get the locals to sketch us maps from their own knowledge.
Once I got back to Europe, I’d mail their drawings to the map company. The crew thought it was a crazy idea. They knew something I did not. In t
he Amazon no one has a clue what lies more than five miles in any given direction. More importantly, no one cares. The idea of mapping out an entire region or, for that matter a country, is an example of the Western mind working on overdrive.
The lack of accurate maps did not, however, prevent the art of speculation. Ask someone in the remotest village where Lima is, and they’ll give you an answer without flinching. “It’s two hours that way,” said one man motioning up stream. “Three days after Nauta,” said another, pointing the opposite way. No one would ever admit they hadn’t got the faintest idea. As in India or Central Asia, an Eastern form of hospitality was at work. To admit ignorance was considered impolite.
The end result was that this made navigation and budgeting for fuel virtually impossible. Worse still was the elasticity of truth. The goalposts never stopped moving. One minute Walter would boast he had plenty of fuel to get us back to Iquitos, and the next he’d say that we were down to the last drum. Cockroach claimed his grandmother was a Shuar chief’s daughter, then a few days later he was bragging she came from Guatemala. And Francisco was no better. At first he said he had four children, but then changed it to six.
Walter spoke for the others: “Mucho naka-naka, so many lies,” he said, running the wheel through his hands. “In Peru lying is a national hobby, it’s something to be enjoyed. Peruvian women like a man who can tell a big solid lie.”
“Why?”
Walter put his hand on his chin.
“They think it’s sexy,” he said.
Juan’s father said the lies were bringing disaster to the jungle.
“People have learned from the politicians,” he said. “They’ve learned that lies protect them... that the truth is a dangerous thing.”
I was touched by the man’s perception. He hugged an arm around his son’s shoulder, coaxing him to be brave.
“The missionaries taught us to believe in God,” he said. “They told us God will cure all our problems. Well, look at Juan, look at his head. Bibles and hymns haven’t helped him.”