That’s why, on our second night after dinner, I plucked up the courage to remind them, ‘We were talking about the last Pacahuara, about the dreams.’
I had pronounced ‘Pacahuara’ as if I were used to it and without stumbling, certain that they would be proud of my memory and diction. But Tristán didn’t seem astonished in the slightest. Valeria wasn’t either. A few minutes later, however, my uncle once again unfolded the map awash with shades of green and Valeria began crushing garlic and seeds in a stone mortar. ‘The music will be very different today,’ she said.
She was right. But it wasn’t only the rhythm that was different. It was also Tristán’s words, his intonation and, above all, his urgency. He was strangely anxious to finish one subject as soon as possible and get on to another. He polished off the Pacahuara in four rushed sentences and did the same with the dreams. It had only been an introduction, he told us, a way of making us understand how deceptive the jungle can be and to appreciate the dangers lying in wait for anyone entering its depths. And, as if he were closing a chapter with that and had nothing else to add, he filled his pipe, nodded his head in time to Valeria’s rhythm and just like the other night traced his finger over the green expanse of Amazonia. I guessed that he was getting ready to talk about what he was really interested in, and I waited in silence.
‘Do you want to know how I met the Wahyes-Wahno?’ he suddenly asked.
Pedrito opened up his drawing book and tried out a few crayons. It was better that way. If he kept himself amused he wouldn’t fall asleep. I nodded. ‘The Wahyes-Wahno,’ I said softly.
‘All right then,’ said Tristán, and I thought I could see a glint of something I didn’t recognize in his eyes. ‘It was a few years back, twenty years ago maybe. I had got lost in the middle of the jungle. What’s more, I had lost all notion of time and there was no possibility of contacting the others in the expedition. I was alone, exhausted and injured.’
I immediately imagined him bare-chested with his trousers in tatters, wearing a cartridge belt and a rifle slung over one shoulder. I wondered if pith helmets were worn in the Amazon as they were in Africa in the films. But the question never even left my head. Definitely not, I thought, answering myself. The trees must be so tall that no sun would filter through, and, even if he had worn one at the beginning, with all the danger and exhaustion it would probably have fallen off some time ago. So I gave him a red bandanna tied around his head instead. That was the only time I stopped listening. It was the only time I let my thoughts wander from his story for even a few seconds. And once again, just like the previous day, his powerful voice worked its magic. It was as if the map spread out on the table was soaking up all the light in the kitchen and as if nothing else existed apart from the festival of green that was gradually opening up like theatre curtains. Tristán was talking, and, going into the depths of the jungle, I could see him there, with his clothes in tatters and the red bandanna tied around his head covering a small wound. He was insignificant in the face of such immensity and about to be swallowed up by the vegetation. Until suddenly I lost this picture of him in my head and I felt I was in the middle of a circle going around faster and faster and there was no way out. There was no more olive, emerald, turquoise, mint and lime. There was just green. It was a green with no differentiating shades that was threatening to devour me at any moment. Then I understood that far from having lost my uncle I was seeing everything through his eyes and that at any second Tristán, the exhausted, battered and injured Tristán in the jungle, would faint and fall to the ground flat on his face. I closed my eyes to escape from the green tornado and to save him as well. But I opened them almost straight away. Now my uncle was roaring with laughter.
‘I lost consciousness. I fainted, or perhaps I died. I’ll never know. But when I came to I thought I’d been the victim of one of those jungle dreams I was talking to you about yesterday in which the past, future and present all become confused.’
The first thing Tristán saw when he opened his eyes was a woman from an ethnic group he didn’t recognize staring at him. She was very short and almost naked, and there were strange markings on her face that he thought were geometric shapes he’d never seen before. She was carrying two very young babies in a kind of sling around her neck. One of them was on her back and the other against her breast. She bent her head down, and her lips didn’t move. But he understood what she was thinking. He understood that she was welcoming him and said to himself, I’m dreaming. I’ve fallen into one of those jungle traps. The fact is that seeing the mother and her two babies gave him such a feeling of comforting peace that he wasn’t able to explain it even now. It was as if he’d known her from way back or as if he’d been waiting for her for years and years without even realizing it. Perhaps because of all that, because of the emotion and also his dreadful state, he collapsed yet again. He took a deep breath and lost consciousness once more. ‘Or died again. Who knows?’ he said lighting his pipe. And to my surprise he burst out laughing again. ‘Sometimes life is amazingly magnanimous,’ he eventually continued, and the glint in his eyes was even brighter. ‘You may be seeking a single jewel, and, when you least expect it, you come across a whole hoard!’
He stopped for a bit, and all we could hear was Valeria’s beating and bashing. Then, still smiling, he looked back at us and continued.
‘Our expedition had other objectives, and it doesn’t matter now what they were. But, lost in the thick of the jungle, I was rescued by a Wahyes-Wahno, and she introduced me to the secrets of her tribe.’
Because back then even less was known about the Wahyes-Wahno than the little that’s known today: just their name, fleeting and unconnected pieces of news about them, mostly gleaned from explorers’ fantasies or from recurring dreams that the victims clung to when they woke up. So at the beginning Tristán could name neither his rescuer nor the tribe that welcomed him back to consciousness after he had collapsed the second time. He simply came to, and this time he saw about a dozen men and women bent over him, staring at him in amazement. They didn’t look hostile. And they weren’t. But, as he would soon find out, they knew how to defend themselves, take their revenge for insults and, most notably, melt into their environment and become almost invisible. Their mimicry and natural talent for camouflage was their main defensive weapon. That’s why they’d hardly ever been seen, and, even if they were caught out, they managed to slip away like eels, climbing up to the tops of the trees or scattering in all directions. For many people they were nothing more than a myth. They didn’t exist other than in legend, the irrational fear of different tribes or in the confused stories told by loggers, those ruthless, brutish and cruel men, destroyers of the jungle and hated by all the tribes, who make relentless advances in deforestation but who are at the same time seized by panic when attacked by the Wahyes-Wahno and are unable to fight against an enemy that never shows itself. Arrows flew out of the thick of the jungle as if they were shot by the very trees the invaders were trying to chop down – an ipe or lapacho or any other species of tree. It would be said (and more than one logger, so the story goes, would end up losing his mind) that the whole plant kingdom had united to protect itself. But it would also be said that the iron will and power of a people was behind this organized vengeance and that was why the arrows broke the silence whistling wahyessss-wahnoooo. That, at least, was what was said in the sawmills and among the loggers.
‘And I won’t say it wasn’t so.’ Now Tristán was very carefully rolling up the map as if our session were coming to an end. ‘It’s possible that my friends put their names to their arrows, but I can only talk about their attacks at one remove. I was never frightened, and long before their lips moved I knew I was safe.’
So, in the same way that the woman had said ‘Welcome’ to him without using any words, now the whole tribe made him aware of their very best intentions and welcomed him into the tribe as one more member, urging him to keep their existence secret, as if it were their most precious gift. And he f
elt the words that no one spoke within his whole being, as if they were a part of his own thoughts or as if he were still suffering the effects of his collapse. But nothing could have been further from the truth. Because at one point, and always simply using his mind, he thanked the tribe for their kindness and care, and when he did so he felt an electric current flowing from his mind and lighting up the foreheads of his benefactors. And vice versa. When they were revealing their ancestral history to him, repeating that he had nothing to fear, or when they were explaining to him the properties of certain plants they’d begun using to treat his injuries, he felt an invisible force, an energy emitted by the Wahyes-Wahno that entered his mind and stimulated conversation. As he would soon discover, this was one of their many forms of communication, and they frequently made use of it, for example, when danger loomed, when members of the tribe were scattered and also (although only very exceptionally) when they wanted to mix with people who, like Tristán, didn’t know their language. Because their language was beautiful, musical and complex. The spoken word and silence were both accorded equal value. Until then Tristán had never known a people who held silence in such high esteem and who also fully appreciated the value of the spoken word.
‘And the first word I heard from their lips’, he continued, ‘was Wahyessss, stretched out with all the stress on the final syllable. One man began, a woman joined in, followed by the whole tribe.’
Tristán – as he would soon tell us – quickly realized that these people had named themselves or used the first part of the name by which they were known. But it was only later, when he had already spent a few days in their village and his injuries had almost healed, that he understood what it really meant. Wahyes implied acceptance, welcome, a YES in capital letters; Wahno implied the opposite. He only witnessed the terrifying Wahnooooo on one occasion, when it was aimed at someone from another tribe who had approached the village alone and, according to my uncle, whose only intention was to parley, to ask for information, to propose a truce or perhaps let them know about imminent danger. But the Wahyes-Wahno didn’t see it like that, and our uncle had no option but to admit his mistake. So, Wahnooooo was etched on the atmosphere as a warning, an accusing finger, the archangel’s flaming sword banishing our forefathers from Paradise. There is no exact translation for it in any language, and ‘get lost’, ‘go away’, ‘we don’t like you’, ‘get out of here’, ‘enough’ would be weak and incomplete equivalents with no power at all. Wahnooooo expressed total rejection. It was like a shot going in through your ears and boring into your soul.
Tristán stopped talking and looked thoughtful, and no one dared break his silence. For a few seconds all you could hear was Valeria’s rhythmic pounding of that night’s earthy aromatic concoction, and I felt as though the smell of garlic was becoming even stronger and was threatening to take over the kitchen and suffocate us.
‘And, now, off to bed,’ said Tristán, suddenly tired. ‘That’s enough, Valeria. It hasn’t worked today.’
Valeria shrugged her shoulders. She gave us both a kiss, stroked my brother’s head and emptied out the mortar into the rubbish.
From then on we wouldn’t have to wait until night-time to return to the jungle. The next morning, down beside the river, Valeria started weaving branches and leaves in the style of the Wahyes-Wahno and showed us how to slide into the water on tiptoe, slipping gently in from among the trees. Slide in, she insisted, never jump or throw yourself in. The idea was to do as they did and give the river time to open its doors without breaking into it, surprising it or waking it abruptly from its slumber. Sometimes I thought that nothing I saw could be true, such as watching her climb a tree, grasping the branches and, as supple as a leopard, diving off, flying through the air and majestically entering the water. She wasn’t wearing a swimming costume, just a cotton wrap around her body. Perhaps that’s why we used to swim in a pool a fair distance from the village where no one could come across us or see us playing games they might not have understood. Because, apart from being unlike anyone in our family, Valeria was also unlike anyone in the village. And when she dived into the water, tracing a semicircle in the air, she looked more like a wild animal than a human being. That morning my brother drew her with a jaguar’s body, her long hair flying in the wind. She burst out laughing. I was dumbstruck, though. It was exactly as I had imagined her as she was diving.
At lunch we were hungry for more news about the Wahyes-Wahno. We wanted to know what they ate and drank and what plants they used as medicines when they fell ill. We soon found out that almost everything in our part of the world has an equivalent in theirs. When Valeria had been crushing heads of garlic the night before she was trying to replicate the bo’o-ho or sacha garlic, a bush whose leaves are similar to our own common garlic. It is a master plant the properties of which include illuminating the mind and which the natives sometimes use as seasoning. Tristán also explained that in order to appreciate the sheer size and importance of the jungle we shouldn’t look at it from the outside but, rather, from the inside, as if we had been born there and completely depended on it. Because the jungle was also a great workshop, a pharmacy, an inexhaustible larder in which we would always find food – the best-stocked warehouse in the world. The jungle protected us, cured our ailments, provided us with clothing, food, materials to build homes or weapons with which to defend ourselves. ‘The jungle’, he concluded ‘is our Great Mother.’
I was fascinated as I listened to him, as I had been since we’d arrived there, but there was one thing I wasn’t sure about, and this time I did feel comfortable asking. But before that I tried to sort out the facts in my head. Tristán and Valeria spent the whole day rekindling the memory of the Wahyes-Wahno. The first night Valeria managed to create a paste that reproduced the aroma of the jungle. The second night, crushing more and more garlic, she unsuccessfully tried to reproduce the smell of bo’o-ho, also known as sacha garlic, as it is similar to our own common garlic. To me that strange round trip seemed contradictory. Explorers, anthropologists or missionaries gave the name sacha garlic to a certain bush in the jungle because it reminded them of our own common garlic. And now our aunt and uncle were trying to make common garlic remind them of the leaves of a bush they’d known in the jungle. I never forgot that they were free, they didn’t have any children, they spent their time travelling, they did whatever they wanted, and that’s why people called them happy-go-lucky. So why did they shut themselves away in this village in the mountains if they wanted nothing more than to return to Amazonia? What was stopping them from going to live with the Wahyes-Wahno? Tristán burst out laughing, and, as he always did when he started laughing, he seemed even younger. And more handsome.
‘We do live there,’ he whispered in my ear. ‘They are here with us.’ Then, almost immediately, he put his hands on my shoulders, looked me in the eyes and in the most natural voice in the world added, ‘And with you, too. Or haven’t you realized it yet?’
That night in the bar in the village square it seemed like the impossible was about to happen, and everyone went mad with their bets. A draw! The last coach of the day arrived. Three people and a dog got off, and when a couple, their daughter and a cat were preparing to get on, the cat escaped and ran off, and the girl refused to board without her cat. So three passengers and a dog disembarked but no one got on. ‘Strange magic,’ said the bar owner laughing as the villagers clicked their tongues or knocked back the last brandy. Valeria and Pedrito, the only ones who had bet on the passengers getting off, collected up their winnings: a few notes and a pile of coins that my brother jingled in his pocket the whole way back home. I hadn’t placed a bet. Neither had Tristán. The two of us were lost in our own thoughts. For a few moments I liked to imagine that, through one of those strange coincidences that people put down to chance, we were both thinking the same thing. Because that afternoon my uncle had clearly included me in his world. I was still deeply moved, and more than anything I wanted him to be moved as well. But I looked at hi
s face and had to discount the idea. He seemed worried. What’s more, if I thought back to the moment I entered the bar I saw Tristán being handed a letter by the bar owner. In itself that wasn’t of any importance, as all the villagers had their correspondence sent there. But now, looking back, I thought he looked upset, ill at ease, annoyed. Perhaps he even looked frightened, although that may be overstating it. Because my uncle had ripped open the envelope and started reading. Just for a few seconds. Then, as if worried that we would spot him, he glanced over to where Valeria, Pedrito and I were, turned his back on us and tore the letter into tiny pieces. At the time I thought nothing of it, but that scene, and especially Tristán’s expression, had come back into my mind. It was just as he was looking now, opening the door to the house. Worried. Or concerned. I guessed that no map would be spread out over the table that night and that we wouldn’t be chatting into the small hours accompanied by Valeria’s percussion and the powerful aromas of garlic, earth, rotten fruit or stagnant water. ‘I’m tired’ was all he said after dinner. Pedrito yawned almost simultaneously.
‘I don’t want any milk tonight,’ he said covering his mouth with his hand. ‘Uncle Tristán, why do the Wahyes-Wahno speak the same as us if they are so different?’
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