by Will Forest
“¿¡De qué rayos están hablando!?” Jaime yelled, wanting to know what the hell they were talking about. I looked around at him again and saw that now there was an entire camo-wearing contingent lining the Colombian side, a dozen men aiming their rifles at us. The Amazonas state policemen had pulled their pistols as well, but they were outgunned. I guessed the Colombians were narcos, or one of those insurgency groups like the FARC, or maybe both. That detail didn’t matter at the moment.
What did matter was that we were in the middle of an armed showdown that seemed to have to do with Clevina’s baby. Sérgio had obviously been told something about the necklace, or, at least, he had gleaned something about what we thought the necklace might have to do with giving birth. I caught Zé’s eye, and he called to me. “Tell them how we think it works!”
Okay, I thought to myself, I can do this. It doesn’t matter that I don’t even know if this is the same lake, I told myself. It could still work. I took a deep breath.
“Look, everybody, listen up! Clevina is having her baby right now, and we’re going to help her! We’re going to make her labor as easy as possible! It’s going to take all of us! Spread out along the lakeshore and hold hands!”
Filo gave me the replica of the Huastec necklace, and I held it up for Sérgio and everyone else to see.
“That’s not even gold,” Pedro scoffed. “How’s that going to help?”
I ignored him and put it on, but my sincerity and enthusiasm were met with widespread indifference. Most people were just too fearful of the weapons. A few folks looked curious. The scientists kept looking at their equipment while nervously keeping an eye on the rifles.
“¡Oigan todos!” It was Jaime. “Van a ayudar a mi mujer a dar a luz, o los empiezo a fusilar, ¡se lo juro!”
Not everyone understood what he threatened, but the message was clear: they had been ordered, by men with guns, to help me help Clevina. I still felt disgust for the rifles, but I realized I also felt gratitude for their help, which in turn made me feel even more disgusted. I was trembling, and I looked around to see that one of the Italian women, and the actress who had played the Iara, were crying.
“What we have to do,” I yelled, finding my voice, “is hold hands around the lake! We have to hold hands, and hum!” Then I turned to Sérgio: “Here, I’ve got her left hand—you take her right. Hurry up!”
Zé took my other hand, and Pedro grabbed Sérgio’s other hand, then Lisbeth placed Pedrinho between her and Pedro, and gradually everybody at the lake joined in, closing around until even the Colombians put down their weapons to hold hands, forming a complete ring around the lake.
Clevina, in the throes of labor, continued to cry out with the contractions and squeeze our hands. I told Sérgio he needed to squeeze back, with both hands, whenever Clevina squeezed, and I did too, so that both of us would be sending the force of the squeeze around the circle.
Some people were already starting to hum. “Match my pitch!” I called out, and I hummed a low note loudly. I was choosing a pitch completely at random, because I realized that even if I was right about the eyes representing pitches, I didn’t know which pitch was do. I didn’t even know where to begin on the circle, or which way to go from there, or what the cross-eyes meant… The humming picked up, more or less around my pitch. I stopped humming to yell, “Louder!”
But nothing was happening, really, except humming. There seemed to be no effect on Clevina. Something wasn’t right.
“Marisol,” Zé said. “Remember the necklace figurines. What are they wearing?”
And I knew that was it. “You’re right! Wait, everybody stop! We have to… We have to get naked!”
People dropped hands and stopped humming. Some were shaking their heads, others were smiling.
“That’s right! You heard me—take off your clothes!”
Zé and I were already undressing. Nelson, Dora and Pedrinho joined us, plus all of the actors in the naturist troupe from Manaus, and also the French couple. It was a good number—about a third of us—but no one else moved.
“I’m serious! Naked!” I shouted, once my own clothes were off. The only things I kept on were the Huastec replica necklace and my frog amulet. “And put your clothes and shoes a good three meters behind you!” I yelled to the other eco-lodge guests, the scientists, the policemen, the FUNAI workers, the grounds crew, the rifle-toting insurgents. Sérgio, too, began to undress.
I watched Jaime, who was observing the newly naked in disbelief. I sensed he was going to be the key to whether this naked circle was going to happen. He shook his head, reached for his rifle, and again aimed it across the lake.
“¡Háganlo, cabrones!” He began spinning around, randomly choosing targets, but somehow even this was not a sufficient threat, and I remembered how some people say ‘I’d rather die than be seen naked.’ It was bizarre, and I began to harbor the terrible fear that Jaime might actually shoot someone, until he leaned back, pointed his rifle to the sky, and fired a warning shot.
The blast shook the supersaturated air, pregnant with humidity, and broke its water. It began to rain.
In wet and sweaty frustration and fear, Pedro, Lisbeth, Filo, Bill, the engineers, the government employees, the policemen, the grounds crew—all the remaining people at the lake removed their clothes. Some made an attempt to pile their shirts or shorts or blouses or pants or what-have-you neatly on top of their shoes, while others just flung everything to the ground. Even the insurgents were laying down their clothes alongside their weapons. I helped Clevina get out of her clothes, and she instantly sighed and smiled through her tears.
The last person to finish undressing was Jota, just beyond Zé on my left. I wondered what was taking him so long. Jota was comfortable with nudity, I thought, as I remembered having seen him naked plenty of times. Jaime trained his rifle on him, and my heart started racing. Zé was whispering to him, something that sounded like he was urging him to hurry up and just do it. I was worried there was some problem, so I looked over, and saw him in the act of removing his pants. He had female genitals.
Looking straight across the lake, Zé whispered to me. “Ele nasceu mulher. He’s transitioning. Obviously he hadn’t planned on this public reveal.”
Immediately I recalled that I had never seen Jota full-frontal naked. I had seen him nude from behind, but the times I had seen him from the other side, he had always had an apron or a robe covering his front. Testosterone treatment, breast removal—these would have accounted for his lower voice and flat, hairy chest. In the middle of so much high emotion, I felt a surge of protective pride for Jota, even as I tried to imagine the shock of exposed vulnerability he had just been forced to overcome.
Finally Jaime put down his rifle, and then his clothes. Newly naked, we all joined hands again. Some people looked stunned, but I don’t know that it was from having seen or even noticed Jota—it was because of the threat of violence, and also just from the raw act of undressing in front of so many people. But others seemed calm, and still others looked joyous. All the colors of our collective skin and hair and eyes formed a human rainbow around the strand.
“Close your eyes if you feel more comfortable that way, but whatever you do, hum with me!” I tried to feel some kind of sunlight energy through the shiny ceramic necklace, to help me find the right pitch. I gave them a new note, and they joined the hum in fits and starts. Meanwhile Clevina’s clutching at our hands was growing stronger and faster.
But still there seemed to be no noticeable effect, other than the fact I was starting to feel dizzy from so much humming.
Then there was a sound behind me—a different note, a different voice. I turned my head and saw an older man, indigenous, naked, painted head to toe… in gold dust, like… El Dorado. And he was wearing the gold necklace, the very one I had seen fall from Lisbeth’s chest into the lake. He held my gaze of wonder for a moment, impassively, and then before I knew what was happening he had placed his mouth right on my skin, in the middle of my back, and was humming s
traight into me. It was a tone considerably lower than what I had been humming. It seemed obvious that he knew what he was doing, so I matched his new pitch. A few folks around me quickly did so too.
But most others around the lake, from what I could tell, did not change their note. I was tempted to slide back up but El Dorado kept humming his lower note into me. Squatting behind me, he had grabbed my upper arms and was humming through me, as if he were playing me like an instrument, and my humming was like an overtone of his pitch. But there was a slightly different note coming from across the lake, the sound carrying easily over the surface of the water. The result was a disconcert, a dissonance of two loud pitches very close to each other but slightly off, grating against each other. It was a visceral affront, like a swell of static pushing against the drum of my abdomen as much as the drums of my ears.
El Dorado hummed louder. I hummed louder. Those around me hummed louder. The entire lake chorus was throbbing and surging in this jarringly off-tune battle of sound waves.
And that was what did it—suddenly there was a thrashing, flashing mass that rose, zapping and popping, to the middle of the lake. It was a seething writhing of lightning that took my breath away, but El Dorado kept humming into my back. What was it?
And then I knew. Somehow our chafing dissonance had driven them crazy—these electric eels—and they were discharging their voltage in a frenzy. There was a sharp, clean smell released upon us, of distilled water and ionized air.
Then, as if on cue, there was a sudden exodus into the rushes and reeds, an upsurge of fauna escaping the waters. Startled cries punctuated our chorus as people shouted and squirmed in reaction to the heads of anacondas and caimans surfacing right in front of them, followed by long, scaly bodies hastily slithering around the obstacles that were our feet and legs. The actress who had played the Queen of Spain screamed and bolted from the group, but the Uncle Sam actor grabbed her and quickly lifted her off the ground, keeping her safe from potentially stepping on a scared saurian and getting bit. These ancient creatures wanted nothing more than to put great distance behind them, was what we quickly perceived to our relief, and they were accompanied by clouds of mosquitos and who knows what else—little winged pests that also took their leave as the lightning ball in the middle of the lake slowly crackled and fizzled to a stop.
Pedrinho was as fascinated as he was terrified. He was probably not the only one to empty his bladder, but he did it while trying to wriggle loose from his parents’ hands, peeing all over their legs, and he kept repeating “mãe, minha tigela, a tigela de cereal, mamãe.”
There was a collective deep breath to focus the intensity of the moment. The reptiles had fled and the spent eels had disappeared to the depths. The rain had stopped. Those of us who had dropped hands and jumped back from fright were motioned back into the circle.
Then I felt El Dorado move his mouth up my back a bit, and he began spiraling another new note thrumming through my ribcage, higher this time. I matched the new pitch, and watched as some half-dozen newly arrived nude indigenous men and women stepped out from behind the backs of others around the circle. None were painted gold like the man behind me, but they seemed to be from his same group, and I understood that they had been humming into the backs of several of us around the lake, controlling the dissonance that cleaned the water and chased away the predators. These newcomers stepped into our circle, and were welcomed, obviously, because now this little experiment held us all in awe. Everybody present at the lake must have felt like much more of a participant now, newly and wholly invested in the short-circuiting of electric eels and the driving forth of anacondas and mosquitos.
El Dorado did not clasp hands into the ring as the others did. Instead, he continued humming the new pitch into me until all those around me had matched it. Then he gently lifted the Huastec necklace from my shoulders. He undid Clevina’s hands from ours and eased her to the edge of the water, right at the opening to the womb-shape, guiding her into a seated position with her legs up, so that her lower body was submerged. Moving into the water himself, he stood in front of her.
The rest of us were, I imagine, enthralled. Maybe we were resigned to continue humming, but also we were oddly enthusiastic to be taking part in this massive and marvelous nude oratorio. Our new guides were giving us pitches that were beginning to build harmonies layering and shifting around the lake.
El Dorado took a hollow reed from the shoreline and submerged with it in front of Clevina. I could see him placing one end of the reed to his mouth and the other to Clevina’s abdomen above her navel. It looked like he was humming through it, so that the sound was directed into her womb. He would come up for air, then submerge again, and each time he would move the reed down as he hummed, from above her navel to below it. He must have done this a dozen times until Clevina gasped, suddenly relieved. “Virou! Senti! Agora está de cabeça para baixo!”
Zé told me what that meant, and it confirmed what I had suspected—the baby had been breech, but El Dorado had turned it by enticing it to follow the sound of his humming. The baby had flipped head-down.
El Dorado held the Huastec necklace up to the setting sun while intoning a sort of incantation. Then he placed it over Clevina’s shoulders. I’m not sure if everybody could see what he was doing, but what I saw was that he spread his fingers and ran his hands down her breasts, around the necklace, several times, and then started pinching her nipples, pulling them to tautness. Clevina was so lost in the throes of labor that she didn’t even seem to react. Maybe she made a face at him, I couldn’t tell. Once her nipples were erect, he fit two of the figurines over them. That was what the holes were for! The nipples were inserted through the holes into the backs of the figurines. But why?
He leaned forward, placing his mouth at Clevina’s neck, and began to blow into the ocarina: breathy long-lasting notes followed by pauses of the same duration. Clevina instantly stopped thrashing her head back and forth. El Dorado checked the necklace—one of the nipple covers had slipped. He teased the nipple to firmness again, replaced the figurine over it, and resumed blowing long notes into the ocarina. Clevina’s breathing began to match the length of the notes, and she was actually smiling. In fact, she looked to have been transported from pain to something else entirely, something more like ecstasy.
El Dorado passed the ocarina to her lips, indicating she should play it, and she did, her notes varying more in length than his… and rising in pitch… and I learned even as Clevina was learning that with this flute she was beginning to control her contractions: their timing, their intensity. And I kept humming, assuming my part in the chorus of chords as I realized that we were all one huge sound box vibrating over the lake, shaking it like the snare on a drum, snapping up a mist of droplets hazing just above its surface. Light and sound embraced us in a flux of frequencies that we could not have conjured had we still been clothed.
We were our upright, linked bodies like one huge pipe organ that engulfed Clevina, her body throbbing from our music but also from her own… the ocarina was vibrating the ceramic beads between the figures, vibrating the nudes, sending their energies pleasantly through her nipples, erect like the terminals on a battery to receive the current, and this whole flow of energy was enveloping her labor in orgasmic undulations… she was weeping now while still blowing into the flute, tears streaming down her cheeks and splashing onto her breasts.
We were the unclothed, unmuted instruments of an orchestra bringing new life into the world, in an overture with the world, and all of us in our shape and age and voice—large or small, tall or short, old or young, high or low, and everything in between—continued to play our part in the concert as we progressed toward the grand finale. I think even those on the opposite shore could tell that Clevina’s labor had changed. And then the pitch markers—the bearers of the ancient repertoire who had appeared from the forest to guide us—began humming even stronger, at greater volume, pushing out thirds and fifths and goosebumps until we were all repeati
ng the half-tone slide from ti to do, swaying while sustaining the ti unbearably until the release to do was signaled. This we repeated, a little faster each time, and I found myself, too, sliding unbelievably, irresistibly awash into orgasm. With the minimal control over my person that I could still muster, I glanced around the lake that was also a womb and confirmed the throbbing erections and buckling hips and radiant faces of many of the others. How we continued to hum I still don’t quite understand; it was something to do with the fact that it was so pleasurable, and we knew the pleasure depended on all of our voices and vibrations together—our organs, our orgasms, our organisms. And we didn’t feel like stopping. And until that moment I had never felt more completely, more convincingly, that my eye was part of my hand which was part of my leg and part of my heart, my breast, my ear, my skin, my teeth, my lungs—all of me thrumming together even as those around me thrummed the same.
Chapter 25: Night of Wonders
The baby swam easily out of one womb and into another, into the shallows by the shore, into warm waters and waiting hands. Just as the sun was dropping, El Dorado held the newborn up to the sky, and then at his chest he patted her until she brought in her first breath. Clevina reached for her; he passed her to her arms, and she cradled the crying baby at her breast.
Moments later, the shiny placenta was offered to the sun-dappled golden waters of the lake. Then, our humming gave way to shouts and ululations as the locked circle wheeled into motion—we released our hands and, following the lead of El Dorado, began to dance in one big ring around the lake. It was such a joyous movement, punctuated by chest-thumping and thigh-slapping and shouts from the rainforest people of the word Iberaba!, which one of the FUNAI workers said means ‘glowing water’ in Tupi. Some of the indigenous men had stopped dancing to light torches, which quickly illuminated our spinning ring along with the fireflies we could see flitting about just beyond our orbit. We were exhausted—well, I know I was—but even so, the experience was so rapturous that we were all swept up in the dizzying motion, all of us—locals and visitors, scientists and bureaucrats, law enforcers and law breakers, actors and audience, feuding brothers and loving couples—all circling over international boundaries in one huge rollicking naked dance of celebration.