Pilgrim in the Palace of Words

by Glenn Dixon

  Shakai sipped at the sloshing white gunk in his bowl. I considered mine, and a lump built in my throat. Occasionally, Naanch, as the host, turned in his conversation and spat. Even this was part of the ritual. It underlined, accentuated, what they were saying.

  At last the ritual talk began to slow, and for the first time Naanch’s eyes drifted toward us. His eyes glanced off us and darted away. His voice, finally, started to loosen up a little, the mood to lighten. Shakai began to turn toward us more often. Naanch acknowledged our presence now and even asked me a question. Did I have children? he wanted to know. When I answered no — translated through Philippe into Spanish and then through Shakai into Achuar — Naanch seemed momentarily confused. How was that possible? I must surely not be much of a man.

  We drifted back downriver in our canoe. Shakai was listening to us, though I didn’t think he was picking up many English words yet. Clearly, though, he was learning.

  Philippe was explaining some of the misunderstandings that crop up from time to time. “There’s a medical team that comes in here every few months to check on things. The last time they were here they told the Achuar to boil their water before drinking it.”

  “That sounds reasonable.”

  “Yes, but I noticed that after the team was gone, the Achuar weren’t doing what they said. They certainly weren’t boiling their water. It took me quite awhile to finally figure it out.”

  “Figure what out?”

  “Well, what was really going on was that the Achuar thought the white doctors were telling them to drink boiling water.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, that’s how they understood it. And, of course, they thought that was pretty crazy to do, so they ignored the advice and went on drinking their manioc beer.”

  That’s how it goes with misunderstandings.

  “Another time,” Philippe continued, “someone brought in a little TV and a VCR. They must have rigged it up to a car battery or something. The Achuar were entranced with the movies. Whoever it was had also brought a bunch of Jackie Chan movies.” Philippe laughed. “So here were these Achuar men huddled around a little TV screen. Jackie Chan was dubbed into Spanish, and only a few of them even understood that. They liked the fighting, though. They thought it was pretty fierce. I think they watched the first movie about a dozen times, but when they got to the second Jackie Chan movie …” He laughed again.

  “What?” I prompted.

  “Well, this one guy came up to me. He asked about one of the minor characters, some actor in the movie. Well, I guess what happened was that this character — a bad guy, I suppose — got killed off in the first movie. And then in the second movie, a whole different one, different plot, different story, well, there was that same actor again. The Achuar didn’t get that. They thought he was killed in the first movie.”

  “Wow!”

  Philippe chuckled some more.

  “Philippe?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Will you tell me the story now?”

  “What story?”

  “The story about the bird that fell in love with the moon.”

  He nodded. “Okay, tomorrow. Bright and early in the morning.”

  That night we saw the yellow eyes of caymans, a kind of crocodile, popping up from the surface in the lagoon beyond the huts. The evening sizzled with crickets and the curious plops and croaks of nocturnal frogs. It washed over the whole forest and lulled me into sleep.

  In the very early hours, long before dawn, I got up with the Achuar. In a little shelter up from where I’d been sleeping, they had already stirred the coals of a fire. They had gathered for one of their most important practices.

  This was the time for drinking wayusa tea. Each day starts like this, and the rituals around it serve many purposes. The first is medical. The Achuar served up the wayusa tea in steaming wooden bowls that they held in both hands near their faces. The air was surprisingly chilly, and we huddled around the fire. They talked as they drank.

  Shakai showed me some wayusa leaves. They smelled a little like tobacco — the kind found in good cigars. Philippe was there, too, and said something to the effect that wayusa contained traces of quinine, an age-old remedy for malaria. I might have heard that wrong, because quinine is supposed to come only from the bark of the chinchona tree. At any rate, the Achuar drink this tea in large quantities until the sun comes up, then go outside the hut and vomit it all up.

  That’s not because it makes them sick. Shakai told me, through Philippe, that their bellies get so full of the stuff that after a while they have to throw it up. And that’s the point. It’s a cleansing of the system. Shakai told me, by way of Philippe, that they actually think of it in the same way we might brush our teeth. It’s a daily ritual, a cleansing, and it’s one of their many methods to ward off the countless parasites and bacteria that infest the rain forest.

  However, that’s only one element of the wayusa ceremonies. What’s even more important is the talk that goes on in the predawn darkness. This is the time for the telling of dreams.

  The dreamtime they have just awakened from is, for the Achuar, something to pay careful attention to. A dream, a kara, can be an omen for hunting. Through an elaborate and highly creative deconstruction of dreams, the Achuar determine which species is best to hunt on a given day. They also predict from their dreams where these animals might be found and in what numbers. This, of course, is called a “hunting dream.”

  There’s another sort of dream, as well, and it’s the most important kind. These dreams are called karamprar or “true dreams.” In a karamprar dream the Achuar believe they’ve been visited by a spirit, a wakan. It could be the wakan of an animal, especially a representative from the animals they often hunt, or it could be the soul of a human who has died.

  I was told by Philippe the story of a young man who, in youthful exuberance, shot an iwianch japa, the kind of small red deer that inherits a person’s wakan if it resided in the person’s muscles upon death. The young man in this story only wounded the deer, in itself a sort of disgrace, and later had to chase it down with dogs. He was too young to realize that this animal shouldn’t be hunted because it could hold the wakan of a dead person. That night the boy was visited in his dreams by a dead man he’d known. The dead man’s head was bloody, and he complained loudly that a great injustice had been done to him. The boy, I presumed, never shot at another deer.

  The verb kajamat, “to dream,” also applies to the vision quest that all males undergo. The women of the Achuar can also go on these vision quests, though it isn’t mandatory for them. For the kajamat the Achuar ingest a variety of hallucinogenic plants. One in particular, called juunt maikiua, induces several days of intense hallucinations and is used primarily to contact a being known as an arutam. This, apparently, is a sort of ancestral spirit, an ancient “warrior soul.”

  It’s a complicated rite, but it seems that if one of the Achuar has killed another (which was, until a decade or two ago, a fairly regular occurrence), then that warrior’s wakan must be rebuilt or at least strengthened again, and this can only be done through contact with the mysterious arutam. It can only be accomplished through a vision quest.

  This kajamat, or vision quest, is often described by the Achuar as “setting off on the path,” and I can’t help but notice similar practices among many of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The vision quest, wherein a young warrior sets off on his own, starving himself, taking hallucinogens, until finally being “visited” by a spirit being is a rite found thousands of kilometres away in peoples with wildly different languages and beliefs. Why this should be isn’t clear. Was it a practice that developed spontaneously in different places, or was it a useful idea that was traded across the lands and peoples — like a new piece of technology?

  Anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, who famously worked throughout the Brazilian Amazon, tend toward the idea that such practices and ideas develop spontaneously, that they arise almost n
aturally from some deep structural hardware in our brains. There are all sorts of cultural rituals that seem strangely similar across cultures, vision quests and creation stories being two. In fact, much has been made of the presence of flood myths around the world. But whether they developed spontaneously in different cultures (being somehow hardwired into our genes), or whether they migrated across continents and centuries, is a question that’s very difficult to answer. The point is they’re everywhere … and that makes one ponder the phenomenon.

  As the first tendrils of light started to inch across the river, and even as the first bird calls tentatively peeped out of the shadows, the Achuar turned slowly from the examination of their dreams to the myth stories of their people. Another round of wayusa bowls was raised, and everyone settled in to listen.

  These stories are called yaunchu aujmatsa mu, and all of them begin with the single word yaunchu, sort of an all-purpose “Once upon a time …” On this morning the Achuar had arranged a telling just for me — the story at last of the bird that fell in love with the moon. A younger man named Wahai spoke it. He sat well back from the fire. His face was in darkness, but every once in a while the crackling fire flared up and I saw him clearly, eyes glistening with the telling.

  In the myth time the animals of the forest were all humans, and a man named Nantu was married to a woman called Aujujai. Nantu went out hunting every day, while Aujujai cultivated the crops on a little patch outside their thatch hut. She grew squash there, which was Nantu’s favourite food.

  Unfortunately, it was her favourite, too, and after she finished cooking it, inevitably, she would eat it all herself. Terrified of her gluttony being discovered, she sewed her mouth partially closed so that her husband would see she couldn’t possibly have eaten it all. To further hide her transgression, she picked some unripened squash — green squash — and cooked it up as well as she could before Nantu returned from hunting.

  When Nantu arrived, she fed him the green squash, but he knew immediately that it wasn’t ripe. “Where is the good squash?” he asked.

  “There isn’t any,” his wife lied.

  After that happened a number of times, Nantu knew something was up. So one morning, rather than go out to hunt, he hid in the forest near the hut and watched Aujujai as she cooked the good squash. She undid the stitches on her mouth and stuffed in the squash. Then she sewed her mouth shut again and set about harvesting the bad green squash for her husband.

  Nantu had trapped Aujujai in her lies and selfishness, and he decided to leave her. She pleaded with him, crying pitifully, but he wouldn’t relent. He gathered up his things and departed their house forever. Aujujai followed him, begging him not to leave, but Nantu’s mind was made up.

  He walked to the Monkey Ladder, the Auju Watairi, a giant vine attaching the earth to the sky, and began to climb it. Halfway up, he spotted his friend, the squirrel, and said that if Aujujai tried to follow him up the Monkey Ladder, the squirrel should bite through it.

  Aujujai, of course, did try to climb up behind her husband. The squirrel nibbled through the vine with his sharp teeth, and the earth and sky were forever sundered. After this Nantu became the shining moon and Aujujai, in despair, became a bird. To this day, at the full moon, one can still hear Aujujai’s plaintive call — the five-note descending scale — that she sings throughout the night to the distant moon.

  The bird (nyctibius griscus in its scientific delineation) does have a beak that looks as if it’s been stitched shut. In Achuar the bird’s name — ahjou jou jou — mirrors the sound of the bird singing. That was the same cry I’d heard Shakai imitate in the boat on my first night in the forest.

  Many Achuar myth stories are morality tales, not unlike Aesop’s fables. In fact, from this particular myth, from the name of the bird, the Achuar people take the word ujajai, which means “I warn you” or “I advise you.” The stories are meant then to instruct as much as entertain. This one tells us that deceit and gluttony can’t be allowed in the forest, nor can selfishness. The community and the family, in particular, require that everything be openly shared. It’s critical for the Achuar’s very survival.

  The rains came on the day I was to leave. The skies grew thick and exploded in a torrential downpour. Philippe came meekly into my hut to tell me that it was impossible for the plane to land. He had radioed ahead and was told that the landing strip was a slop of mud and that even if the sun came out it would take another full day for everything to dry.

  There wasn’t much to do, so Shakai took us fishing after the rain stopped. The Kapawi River actually takes its name from the hand-sized silver fish that are abundant here. The Achuar indicate directions from the Kapawi, and through this river they also mark time. It so happens that the star cluster known as the Pleiades moves across the sky throughout the year in a direction that follows the river from upstream to downstream.

  To the Achuar the Pleiades are the Musach, and that’s another one of their myth stories. The Musach were seven children, orphans, who fled from an angry stepfather downriver on a raft. It’s a tale, I suppose, that’s vaguely Cinderella-esque … at least in its portayal of an evil step-parent. The raft in the story is represented by the constellation Orion, and the father by the star Aldebaran — ever chasing them across the sky.

  The word musach is also the Achuar name for counting a year. But it’s nothing like our own sense of time. In the Achuar language there are five forms of past tense. One of them is called yáanchuik wémiaje. This is the remote past, a time that can’t be remembered. Quite often it’s the same thing as the myth time.

  Few Achuar know the names of their great-grandparents. Anyone who was alive before they were born isn’t remembered, so family lineages aren’t critical. In fact, when a person dies, there are a number of ceremonies performed to erase that person’s memory from the group. That’s not cruel. It’s actually related to the Achuar’s conceptions of the freeing of a dead person’s wakan. It’s a process in which the wakan is let loose to inhabit the form of another creature. So anything that took place more than two or three generations ago, or even as recently as thirty years, is already relegated to the remote past, to the time of the myths.

  I’d found in the Achuar a people as untouched as I was likely to find on this spinning green planet of ours. But the world was surely sneaking in on them slowly and inexorably, but not completely yet. Our own fine technology — the great silver bird to get me in and out of here — was still no match for the rain forest’s torrents. We were, for the moment, stranded in the jungle. I was a twelve-day hike from the nearest road, and there was nothing to do but sit back and enjoy myself.

  “Time,” Philippe Descola wrote in one memorable passage, “is not cumulative.” By that he meant the Achuar aren’t caught up in the idea of progress. They orient themselves in a time and space that aren’t fixed. There’s nothing here beyond the stars and the flow of the river to mark the gradual turn of their days.

  PART FOUR

  To the North

  11

  The Lost World of the Maya

  I’d flown into Belize City, a ramshackle shantytown on the edge of the ocean, and from there I’d taken a ferry to Ambergris Caye, one of the many islands sparkling across Belize’s barrier reef. Belize has the second biggest barrier reef in the world, after the Great Barrier Reef off Australia. This one extends from the Yucatán to the northern edges of South America.

  Thousands of young British soldiers did their jungle training in Belize when the place was still a British colony, and some of them came back, remembering it, I suppose, as a place of ample space and beauty. One of them was Dave, whose dive shop, painted bright blue, sat between the beach and the main street.

  Dave was a dive master, meaning he could certify people for scuba diving. He was also an ex–Royal Marine, tough as nails and sure to let everyone know it. Dave was the kind of guy who could kill with his left thumb blindfolded. He was short but was jacked up with muscles, most of which bore navy tattoos. />
  I recalled the tattoos of the Polynesian islanders, but Dave’s tattoos were different. They had no sacred connotations, though they marked a certain something. They indicated a brotherhood of the sea that said very distinctly, “Don’t fuck with me and don’t fuck with my mates.”

  Scuba diving, too, isn’t to be taken lightly. If you mess up and get the bends, you’re in serious trouble. You’ll die a horrible, excruciatingly painful death. So I was okay with Dave barking dive tables at me. Tucking my head down, I frequently said, “Yes, sir” or “No, sir.” In the end, I learned what I needed to know.

  I passed all my tests, and on our first real dive he took me down to a submerged wreck. For our second dive Dave extended his tattooed arms widely and told me we were headed for Shark-Ray Alley. That sounded ominous, and Dave explained, as we chugged through the water toward our destination, that it was a break in the reef where sharks came to feed.

  “Say what?” I blurted. “Sharks?”

  “Yeah, but they’re just big reef sharks. They won’t hurt ya.” He could have followed that with “You poncy big baby,” but he didn’t.

  When we got to the dive site, there wasn’t much to see on the surface. A couple of other boats bobbed in the surf. Dave eyed me and said I was going in first. Fine, I thought, trying to appear brave. I sat on the edge of the boat and tipped off backward, just as he’d shown me. My tanks crashed into the water, and I was sucked in behind them.

  As I splashed into the tropical waters, way out of my element, it took a moment for the bubbles to clear around me. Then, Holy Mother of God, I took a deep gulp of oxygen from my regulator and my heart missed a beat or two. Just below my feet were five or six really big sharks — most of them at least two metres long from teeth to tail. They circled slowly, not moving like fish at all. Fish flit and jerk through the water. Sharks look more like cruise missiles, slicing neatly through the water in deadly, unstoppable straight lines.