by Will Forest
Clevina sat apart, with her healthy baby girl at her breast and both of her men at her sides. On her right stood the baby’s adopted father, Sérgio, stoic and protective. He was a kind widower, Zé told me later, who had married the much younger and already visibly pregnant Clevina for compassion and for company. On Clevina’s left sat the baby’s biological father, Jaime, his little finger already enclosed by his daughter’s tiny grasp, his wide eyes taking in the wonder of it all, the grace and the beauty and the power of mother and child in our little international armistice in the middle of the rainforest. Looking back now, I think Clevina must have been so insistent about going to the lake because she had already set up the rendezvous with Jaime.
Dora was keeping watch over the new mother and her baby, giving breastfeeding advice, calling out for water from the packs that some had been carrying. It was already dark; Sérgio needed to decide how best to get his wife and daughter back to the lodge, but he understood the need to prolong Clevina’s time with Jaime.
I saw that Clevina was no longer wearing the marvelous necklace, and for a long minute I was concerned it had been lost, even though I consoled myself it was just a replica. I stepped out of the dance, and just then Nelson approached me, with Bill, who was carrying the necklace.
“Marisol, we broke it!” said Bill, much happier than what I could understand to be appropriate from his words.
“What? Where?” I asked, looking anxiously at the little nudes.
“He means we broke the code,” said Nelson. “Something I’ve gotten to know about Bill—he’s great at teasing out meanings.”
Bill sported a wide grin. “I only followed up on what Nelson told me that you had figured out, that the figurines’ eyes represent pitches.”
“That’s great! How does it work?” I wanted to know.
“It goes counterclockwise,” said Nelson, “and we guessed that from the dance. See?”
I looked just as Jônatas and some of the other actors danced past, following from left to right around the lake.
“The bizco is first,” said Bill, shining a flashlight on the necklace. “Our hypothesis is that crossed eyes crazed eels. Those eyes represent the dissonant pitches.”
I nodded, looking at the necklace. “Makes sense! Then the next would be this one with eyes at six o’clock.”
“That would be do,” said Bill. “The note we started on after we, uh… prepared the lake.”
“I see,” I said, “so then these next two with their eyes at about four o’clock and three o’clock—they would be the mi and sol that we started building harmonies with—the pitches that the scribe wrote down at the end of Natupari’s testimony.”
“Exactly,” said Nelson. “And the last two, with their eyes at one o’clock and twelve o’clock, well… they’re the ti and do that we kept alternating at the end.”
“Which explains,” added Bill, “now that we know how it all works out… it explains why the ti figure has an erection, and the do figure, of course, is the one giving birth.”
“Caballeros,” I said with deliberate emphasis to myself on that word, “this is utterly convincing. In fact, this is terrific! And it makes me think of the naked layer of the codex. The eye sequence, the childbirth – maybe it was some kind of secret knowledge that Sun Prince wanted to be documented, but Bark Shield had to hide it even as he did.”
Nelson suddenly put his hand on my upper arm—it was like he was overcome with emotion and needed to ground himself by touching someone. He was looking me deep in the eyes. “Marisol, this knowledge… this is it. This is the moradia, the meaning of home… How can I say it?”
I nodded at him patiently, matching his gaze. I gripped his upper arm opposite mine. “Keep trying…”
His eyes were leaking tears. “It’s the being born into the world, the homecoming into the world, into sound and light… an extension from womb to womb… being born this way is… an identity in the land, with the land… a recognition of unity, of all being one: the world, the family, the individual… ai Marisol não acho mais palavras…”
By that point I was crying, too, and I was so thankful for it, grateful that after so much high emotion, the wave of relief washed through me and shook me hard. Nelson and I leaned against each other and just wept. At first Bill tried awkwardly to pat us on our shoulders, but he soon gave up. He put the necklace over his own shoulders, wandered away, and just let us be.
After a few minutes, we ended with a strong embrace, and Nelson went running and hopping back into the still-spinning circle of dancers. I looked for Zé without being able to find him. Moments later I felt a tap on my shoulder, and turned to see him with a finger to his lips. He had been hiding behind a tree, watching his brother with Lisbeth and Pedrinho. Like everyone else, they had stayed naked. Except, I noticed, Lisbeth had her fifty-thousand-dollar gold necklace back.
“It was amazing,” Zé told me. “Somehow the man who was wearing it…’
“El Dorado,” I interrupted.
“You’re right! Sim, we should call him El Dorado. He somehow found out whose it was. He brought it to her, and she told him to keep it. Even Pedro told him to keep it! But he insisted on giving it back to her. So Lisbeth turned to Pedro and said, ‘You will not flood these wonderful people. I won’t let you!’”
And, Zé told me, he had observed something very interesting that finally put to rest some doubts about his family relationships. Pedrinho, as everyone knew who had seen him grow up, had an oval birthmark near the top of his right thigh, in the groin area. Well… Pedro did too, exactly the same shape and size. Zé said it was the first time he could remember that he had ever seen his brother fully naked.
“This means that Pedro can no longer try to make you think you’re really Pedrinho’s father. It would be way too much of a coincidence for him not to be.”
“Exato,” said Zé, slowly and firmly. “Não sou mais o Boto daquela estória.”
“You are not the Boto…” I ventured in translation, “of that story anymore.”
“Excelente! When will you add Portuguese to your list of languages?”
“Oh, I’m just getting started,” I said with a wink. “And is your nephew okay?”
“He loved all of it. For him, it was like his cereal bowl routine every morning, but on a human scale. I think he was as astonished as we all were by the humming, the eels, the baby’s birth, El Dorado’s gold bodypaint… but I think from so much stimulation he suddenly got really tired.”
We looked to see him leaning up against his mom, ready to fall asleep.
“I feel exhausted, too. Hey, where’s Jota? Is he doing alright after all that?”
“Jota… I have so much respect for him. Look at him! I think he’s just fine.”
Zé pointed him out to me in the crowd. I saw him talking with three other men, who—it was hard to tell—might have been scientists, or insurgents, or grounds crew workers, or one of each. It’s one of the great lessons of social nudism, this shedding of profession and social status that corresponds with the shedding of our clothes. But Jota had singularly revealed more than any of us, and yet he was still nude, and comfortably so.
While we watched the men talking, Zé told me more about Jota’s background. “When I met him, he was living on the streets in Rio. His very traditional family in São Paulo had kicked him out of the house when he told them he was transitioning. But he was upfront about it with me from the beginning, and I gladly hired him and paid for his pilot training. He already knew how to cook like a chef. I paid his bodyguard training, too.”
I gave Zé a big hug, and told him to stop spying and start dancing with me.
He did.
Jônatas, dancing too, shouted out to us, his face ecstatic, “Gente! Isto é maravilhoso! Surreal! Plenitude inesquecível!” And then his words escaped from recognizable Portuguese, giving way to pure vocalizations, unsettling yet beautiful—the presence of his voice freed from the strictures of grammar, semantics, and pronunciation.
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What it sounded like was a release, a liberation—and I wanted to try it, too. Zé and I both undressed our voices as we danced on, letting out trills and moans and shrieks and whoops as naked as our fantastic bodies that birthed them.
I don’t know how much longer the dance went on. It was hypnotic. I don’t think I had ever felt more ‘in’ my body, inhabiting it so thoroughly and confidently, and yet the whole evening could easily be described as an ‘out-of-body’ experience.
And at the end of the dance, the FUNAI folks helped negotiate a photo before El Dorado and his group left. We pulled the torches together and used the flash, but the image didn’t turn out very well. It’s no matter—it could never come close to representing the holistic memory we treasure, those lucky seventy-or-so of us who shared the joyful experience of bringing new life into the world together… naturally, musically, united.
Eventually we put our clothes on, which was immensely sad, but it had to happen. We didn’t want to leave them there in the rainforest, and it was easier to wear them on our bodies than hold them in our hands, which we needed for carrying other things. It was curious, though, how everybody seemed to be wearing less on the way out than they had on the way in. I think some people’s clothes—trampled, dirty, invaded by little critters—simply got lost in the dance, never to be found again. Other people just didn’t bother to put their tops back on. Or their bottoms, maybe. And people were sharing outfits, too. That Norwegian scientist—I know for sure that the neon blue t-shirt she was wearing that night had covered, earlier that afternoon, the back of the actor who played the Pope. It was a new world.
Jaime and three of his men carried Clevina and the baby, on an improvised litter they made from the large box lid of one of the surveying instruments. They received special permission from the Amazonas State police to make the trip to the lodge, given the circumstances, and afterward—with extraordinary solidarity—the policemen escorted them back to the border. The rest of us carried packs and boxes and torches, and a few flashlights that some had thought to bring. From time to time we would hear, from far ahead, the clang of Sérgio’s machete knocking against the buttressed root of a kapok, an ancient mode of communication in the tropical forest.
It was very slow going. I think we all walked along as if in a trance—some state between exhaustion and exhilaration—but at least it was only a mile back to the lodge. Many staying at the Eco-Pousada went to their bungalows and straight to bed—or rather, to hammock—but I stayed on to chat a few moments with Filo under the stars.
“¡Qué maravilla, maestra! I’m so glad you were here to experience it, because you wouldn’t have believed it if you hadn’t lived it, would you? Besides, it wouldn’t have happened without that replica you commissioned.” I held out the necklace that Bill had returned to me on the way back.
She took it from me with great caution. “Te cuento un secreto, Marisol. No one knows this but me, and now you—that’s no replica.”
“¡Maestra!”
“No grites. Keep your voice down. The artisan I commissioned started to work on a copy, but I was worried that the composition of the clay and the quality of the firing just would not be the same. It was a big risk to bring the original, so I made up a letter on museum letterhead that I brought with me just in case—a letter giving permission for the necklace to travel with me. And I was so mad at myself for doing it! But I thought of Friar Francisco, and even Palafox… and how we needed to know what the necklace was all about. I just… ¡nunca me imaginaba con qué fin! I never imagined what its purpose could actually be! Pero, gracias a Dios, I think Clevina and her baby are just fine. Maybe more than fine, no? I am still awestruck. I think we can assume that this might have been a relatively widespread use of ceramics technology for… pues, básicamente for obstetrics!”
My eyes lit up. “Remember in Palafox’s letter,” I said, “that part about a record number of births after the worker stole the necklace.”
“¡Sí! It makes sense! And the governor general in Brazil, what was his name…”
“Mascarenhas.”
“Sí, él, that he had written something to the previous viceroy about a necklace that could ‘control the elements’… Marisol, ¡eso vimos! We saw that happen—that control of the elements!”
“We saw it, maestra… and we lived it! And you, and Bill—you haven’t even read the other side of the story yet, the story of Amana as told by her daughter to a Jesuit priest.”
“Nelson told some of it to Bill and me while we ate our lunch at the lake. Yes, I am very curious to read it. There are so many ways of knowing, and of understanding the world, of understanding our bodies, that have been lost... What a magnificent, intimate engagement with the physical properties of sound and skin and water! What a deep conocimiento of childbirth, and of orgasmic response! And just think what all this has shown us, also, about the creation of codices, about opposition to the Aztec dogma of blood sacrifice, about travel among the populations of the Americas.”
I looked at her with a big smile, and decided to go ahead and ask what I was curious to know. “Maestra, ¿te dio miedo desnudarte?”
“I was very afraid, yes. Why would I have ever imagined taking my clothes off in a situation like that? Ay Marisol, but I was more afraid of the guns.”
“I was, too.” A chill went down my spine as I remembered it, as the shock of the inherent violence was beginning to wear off. “And yet without the guns, people might not have cooperated, ¿no?”
“Creo que tienes razón,” Filo sighed. “I think you’re right. It was an unfortunate means to an end, but that end… was absolutely extraordinary.”
“But, now that we all saw how it can work, I don’t think weapons will be necessary anymore.”
“Weapons,” Filo repeated. “Armas… so much destruction. So much ignorance. I don’t think that what we just saw—what we just lived, as you say—had anything to do with the gold lust of the Europeans, those… alien invaders.”
“De acuerdo,” I nodded. “I agree. I like this version of the El Dorado legend so much more. Beyond compare!”
“El Dorado was certainly there with us, guiding you… right there at the Fountain of Youth.”
I laughed. “¡Sí! Both legends together! Or maybe something altogether different and unique.”
“Es verdad. Truly there is so much to think about, so much to analyze here, Marisol. We will be busy for a long time! But, please excuse me. I am so tired. And I am looking forward to the hammock again tonight. It reminds me of summers at my abuelita’s house in Veracruz when I was growing up, sleeping en la hamaca like a baby rocking in a cradle… like crawling into a cocoon and waking up a butterfly.”
“Buenas noches, maestra.”
“Buenas noches, mi querida Marisol, buenas y milagrosas noches.”
And it had been, indeed, a night of wonders.
Zé was waiting for me in our bungalow. He held me in his arms, and the only sounds to be heard as we rocked to sleep were the cry of a baby, and a mother’s hum, in the rainforest night.
Epilogue
June 22, 2013
Costa Esmeralda, Mexico
Nude wedding! On the beach!
We chose the spot where Sun Prince left his homeland to travel to South America. Zé’s family rented out the entire Hotel Tecolutla so that we could accommodate everyone and, also, so that we could have our wedding ceremony under our conditions.
The nude ceremony happened first. Nelson officiated, and Dora and Jota and Pedrinho and a few of my more daring cousins attended naked, and even Filo and Bill. Zé had paid for Sérgio and Clevina to attend, with their fourteen-month-old Amana. It was a Mexican vacation from their continued management of the cautiously expanding Eco-Pousada da Floresta. Jônatas came with Eneida, one of the actresses we had met in his troupe—they had since married. It was terrific for them all to be there! I wore only a veil, and Zé, only a bow tie. If, dear reader, you have followed all of my story so far, I don’t suspect you
would have any trouble imagining our wedding!
Then we had a large, clothed ceremony for all our guests. Pedro and Lisbeth came—and behaved themselves—and my mamá, and my brother, and my sister with her family, and all the rest of our extended families and friends. At the reception, the strumming of the harp and the ringing of the marimba carried out over the hotel pool into the night as the musicians played sones and huapangos, followed by the inevitable mariachis at midnight. It was magical.
Before returning to Austin for my second year in the graduate history program, before returning to edit with Bill, Filo, and Zé the comprehensive translation and facsimile version of the life of Sun Prince, before even turning our attention to the legal breakthrough that the University of Texas Press had made into the issues behind editing Nelson’s translation of Natupari’s stolen testimony, before finalizing the paperwork on the new, grant-funded joint project between the Colleges of Medicine of the Universidad Veracruzana, University of Texas, and Universidade do Estado do Amazonas for official obstetric trials with replica necklaces that had been made to the most exacting degree possible… before all that, we had our honeymoon to enjoy.
Waving goodbye, we sailed out from Tecolutla into the waves, Zé and I, on our own privately contracted nude cruise to the Caribbean. We felt so free, so open to the wet, warm wind, so open to ourselves and to the future.
Looking back now, I cannot avoid contrasting how we felt at that moment of plenitude in our lives, with the lives of those who had touched us from their long-ago stories.
Sun Prince was persecuted by the Mexica, and Bark Shield, Jade Flower, and others from among his followers were imprisoned. Amana was jailed by the Inca, and by the Muisca she was shunned and almost exiled along with Yari, Zahua and her other apprentices. Adán Atenco and Natupari endured corporal punishment at the hands of the European “men of the cloth.” Even their stories were incarcerated in hidden trunks and in the bowels of archives.