by Devon Code
The Maestro then asked James what is there before there is a basement?
“Nothing,” said James. “A hole made by men.” The Maestro closed his eyes as he considered James’s answer, and when he opened his eyes again, he snuffed out the butt of his cigar and spoke directly to the interpreter, who rose and told James she would return shortly. As she left the hut, James turned in the direction of its opening. He saw three small illustrations that had been affixed to the wall, so that they were directly in the Maestro’s line of view. The first image was of the Virgin Mary in the style of a Russian icon; the second was an ornate depiction Buddha; and the third was a line drawing of a large serpent that carried many smaller serpents on its back. This struck James as a peculiar trinity, and when he turned to ask the Maestro about the three images, he saw that he’d once again placed the headphones over his ears and had lain down on the floor. James too lay down, his eyelids heavy in the absence of conversation, the near-darkness of the hut and the heat of the afternoon having a soporific effect upon him. The only sounds were the tinny, rhythmic noises emanating from the headphones of the Maestro’s Walkman and the omnipresent chirping of cicadas, which seemed to grow louder as that period of relative silence continued.
It was not until he became aware of a stirring at the mouth of the hut that he realized he’d drifted off. When he opened his eyes, he discovered the interpreter had returned bearing three plastic cups filled with fizzy golden liquid, and it occurred to him that the Maestro had seen fit for him to take ayahuasca before the evening’s proceedings. The Maestro took up one of the cups and drank from it without any ceremony whatsoever. The interpreter drank from the second as the Maestro motioned for James to take up the third. James watched the interpreter lower the cup from her lips and wipe them with her hand, noticing the displeasure she attempted to conceal.
“What is it?” James asked the interpreter.
“Diet Inca Kola,” she said, and the Maestro nodded. Seeing James’s hesitation, the Maestro, through the interpreter, said that it was acceptable for James to drink, that Diet Inca Kola did not violate the prohibition against sugar because it was artificially sweetened. The Maestro belched loudly as James brought the cup to his lips and drank of the warm, syrupy beverage, which tasted like bubble gum. While the Maestro waited for the interpreter to finish her cup of Diet Inca Kola, he took a fresh cigar from his breast pocket and lit it with a match. Seemingly refreshed, the Maestro spoke again, at length this time, obliging the interpreter to signal for him to pause every so often so that she did not fall behind. He said he realized that James might be wondering about his cigar. Like the Diet Inca Kola, he explained, it did not violate the . The cigars he smoked consisted of pure tobacco without commercial additives. Their smoke was purifying and he often used it in his healing practices. Then he said that Inca Kola was his favourite beverage and that it is as sweet as ayahuasca is bitter. His brother-in-law, he said, had told him what next year’s Inca Kola slogan was going to be and he would share it with James, provided James kept it a secret. When James indicated his assent, the Maestro said that next year’s slogan was “The Taste of Creativity” and he asked James what he thought about that. James said he thought it was a good slogan and the Maestro agreed. The Maestro said he’d loved the taste of Inca Kola since he was a child, but that in recent years he drank it only in moderation—a single cup of the diet variety every afternoon when his craving began to disrupt his purity of mind. It was for him a necessary indulgence, he said.
After he’d gotten out of the army, he’d worked for a while delivering Inca Kola. He soon realized that he was ill-suited to the work; he didn’t enjoy driving from one place to another day after day, hauling cases of Inca Kola in and out of shops, even though he considered Inca Kola to be the best soft drink in all of Peru and possibly the world. He’d always had the habit of coming up with unusual songs and drumming along with his fingers, he said, and one of his friends suggested he become a , because to his friend’s ears his singing resembled , the chants that would perform during healing purges. His friend had only been making a joke, said the Maestro, but his suggestion had made sense to him. Eventually he’d quit his job in order to become an apprentice . Three years later he became the Maestro. Whenever he visited his sister’s family, the conversation always turned to American music, or else, the Peruvian soft drink industry. At some point, his brother-in-law would remind the Maestro that he’d never been a particularly good delivery truck driver, which was true. Also his brother-in-law refused to drink ayahuasca, even though he was the one who’d sponsored him to be a .
Ayahuasca is a purgative, he said, which helps people overcome psychic barriers and can also cure addictions, even to Inca Kola. Since he’d started drinking ayahuasca, he’d switched from regular to Diet Inca Kola and had managed to limit his consumption to a single cup a day, which was a considerable improvement. The sugar in Inca Kola makes people fat, while the purging caused by ayahuasca makes people lose weight. The two beverages could not be more different from one another, but both were very important in his life. Most people assume Inca Kola is flavoured with lemon juice or lemon grass, but it is flavoured with lemon verbena, an herb that is native to South America. His interests in the ingredients in Inca Kola had led to his interest in indigenous plants, which was the foundation of the vocation. His addiction to Inca Kola had thus led to a positive change in his life. Before he’d become a , he never would have thought such a thing to be possible. But he had come to see that the relation of cause and effect was far more complex than most people understood. As a , he must know the native plants and their properties well. Basic ayahuasca is composed of two plants, he explained, the vine of one and the leaf of the other. The rhizomatic vine will not grow without the tree, which by its nature is arborescent, so there are three necessary plants, he said, but only the two that are used in the tea.
In addition to the plants themselves, a must also know how they will affect those who drink them. Ayahuasca is very powerful and people react in different ways. He must watch the initiates closely and come to their aid with appropriate as needed. When people drink ayahuasca, even when it causes them suffering, they always learn something. This doesn’t always happen right away, but after they drink it several times, or later on in life, they will have a revelation that they will trace back to ayahuasca. He himself had had many different experiences drinking ayahuasca. He’d convened with the dead, including his ancestors and people he’d known personally who had passed away. He’d also encountered people he hadn’t yet met, but who he ended up meeting later on. He’d received warnings and advice, which he always heeded, and in some cases he’d avoided bad situations as a result. Then he asked James if he’d heard of the legendary tribe of Amazon women who cut off one of their breasts in order to become more effective warriors.
“Yes,” said James, and the Maestro said that the Amazon river was named after them, a Spanish explorer having claimed to have come across such a tribe along the river’s shores. He’d often wondered about this tribe, he said, since no one else had ever confirmed their existence. Ayahuasca had helped him to understand that they’d existed only in the strange imagination of the Spanish explorer, who he suspected of harbouring fantasies about being captured by a tribe of single-breasted women. Ayahuasca can allow people to see beautiful visions, but it can also induce great mental anguish. It can alter one’s perception of space and time. Often people encounter various spirits or animals. Sometimes people encounter a jaguar, but most commonly they encounter a serpent. It was difficult to describe these kinds of experiences in words, the Maestr0 said, especially through an interpreter.
A friend of the Maestro’s who’d drunk ayahuasca many times was a painter. He painted pictures based on his ayahuasca experiences, but the paintings weren’t very good because they were too literal. His friend painted exactly what he saw in his mind’s eye, he said, and this did not capture the feeling of the experience. His friend’s p
aintings were full of very detailed and vivid palaces, gardens, animals and visions of the cosmos, but when he looked at them, he felt nothing. In his opinion, abstract expressionism was a style that was better suited to the ayahuasca experience. He would like to see some paintings of ayahuasca experiences by artists who were working in New York City in the 1950s and 1960s, he said. Many of those painters died tragic deaths, just like Jim Morrison. They were trying to understand the horrors of the modern age, to express them in their work. It was very hard for them, he said. Ayahuasca might have helped some of them, although it couldn’t prevent the inevitable. Plants could not cure human suffering, he said, though sometimes they can help people to heal themselves. The Incans had the wisdom of the plants, but they didn’t survive. They had problems that the plants couldn’t help them overcome, he said, beginning with the Spanish. Before the Spanish went to war against the Incan Empire, they brought smallpox. Then came typhus, then influenza and smallpox together, then smallpox again, then diphtheria and then measles, he said. When the Spanish conquered the Incans, each family was forced to send a member for mandatory service, he explained. The workers would labour in the silver mines, where eventually they would be worked to death. The dying thought of each worker would be of the family member that would be sent as his replacement. Each worker would perish thinking that he had failed his family and that another was bound to suffer and die without purpose, until there was no one left. He had first-hand knowledge of this painful truth because of ayahuasca. After all that suffering and death, what was left of the Incan Empire? Machu Picchu and Inca Kola, he said.
Then James asked him about the Incan calendar and its suggestion that the end of the world was imminent. The Maestro replied that though the Incans had been highly advanced in science, their calculation about the end of the world was inaccurate, as was a similar prediction by the Mayan people. The prediction, he was almost certain, was a miscalculation, or else it was meant to scare those who would kill them off. Either way, said the Maestro, the prediction was not important to him. Even if it were true, it would not change how he lived his life, for he already lived it in accordance with his wishes. Being a did not afford him many luxuries, but it gave him the opportunity to help people and allowed him to purchase batteries for his Walkman, which was all he wanted. There was much suffering in Peru, even in his own lifetime, centuries after the Spanish had crushed the ancient empire. There was injustice and inequality, and those who wished to do away with poverty caused the most suffering of all.
Years after the military coup in the 1960s, he said, there’d been armed uprisings in the agrarian districts. Insurgents came out of the mountains who called themselves revolutionaries and who were committed to Marxist principles. It was rumoured that the insurgents wished to reinstate Incan rule. The insurgents drew great strategic strength from the mountains, just as he, as a , derived spiritual strength from the mountains. The insurgents were known as “the Shining Path,” and they were committed to violence. At first, no one in the cities took them seriously. Everyone thought that the insurgency would stay out in the provinces, in the mountains, where it had started.
Then one day, during the Christmas season, the citizens of Lima woke up to find a curious sight, he said. During the night, the insurgents had hung dead dogs from the lampposts in the capital. No one could believe it, the sight of the dogs hanging, their bodies dripping fluids onto the streets. No one knew what to do or how to react. The dogs were wrapped in cloth and there were rumours that there were bombs attached to them. Who’d given the order to hang them from the lampposts, he’d wondered. What kind of people would carry out such an order? He’d also wondered if each animal had died of hanging, or if the dogs had been executed in advance. The ropes were tied around their necks like leashes, but the dogs were mostly strays that had never worn a leash while living. Eventually the police cut them down and then they saw the dogs were wrapped in rags with slogans about Chinese politics that no one understood. If the insurgents had meant to communicate their intentions, they’d managed only to cause sadness and confusion. That was the beginning of more than a decade when many died. Some people supported the insurgents, although there was great uncertainty about their aims. After years of massacres and executions, there came a time when many thought the insurgents would be successful in overthrowing the government. The Maestro had served in the Peruvian National Army during this period, assigned to a squad in the mountains. He was given time to acclimatize to the altitude before he was trained in mountain warfare and placed on active duty. When he’d first arrived, he saw the mountains as sublimely beautiful. He was fascinated with how they protruded so deliberately from the ground below toward the heavens. But as soon as he went on patrol, the mountains become nothing more than hostile terrain, the heights providing shelter that protected the enemy and put his life in danger. He was ordered to patrol a path that encircled a particularly isolated peak. During this patrol, he’d imagined his own death many times. The insurgents were merciless, and would not hesitate to ambush soldiers on patrol. He seldom spoke to the other members of his squad, for they feared that their conversation would give them away, or else distract from the task at hand. This gave him far too much time to think, he said, time in which he repeatedly envisioned his death in his mind’s eye. As he walked the trail, he would imagine a hail of bullets or explosives raining down on him from above. He would imagine the insurgents approaching his maimed body with caution, salvaging whatever supplies or weapons were of value to them, and leaving the rest behind. He imagined that they would then throw him from the heights. When his body came to rest, it would not take long for scavengers to come across him and devour his remains. The trail around the mountain took seven days to complete, he said, during which time he remained constantly vigilant. When they would return to their command post, having encountered no sign of insurgents, they were given two days to rest. He expected to be reassigned, he said, but at the end of their period of rest he was ordered to circumnavigate the mountain once again. Again, images of his own death were constant in his mind’s eye. Again he was vigilant, his every waking moment occupied with awareness, with the intention of detecting the presence of the insurgents before the insurgents detected them. On his third trek around the mountain, said the guide, his vigilance began to relax. During their training, they’d been taught that this would happen and he began to know that it was true. Vigilance always relaxes with the passage of time, the sergeant had said. The longer one goes without encountering a threat, the more inclined one is to let down one’s guard. Each instant that one does not encounter danger, the prospect of that danger grows more remote. This is an illusion, his sergeant had explained. In war, the danger is ever imminent. The uneventful passage of time allies itself with the enemy, reducing the soldier to a docile state. The soldier becomes like a small child, or like a lamb, never before harmed by the hand of man, led placidly to slaughter.
This change became complete within him on the fourth trek. Boredom had set in. He went from an active state of awareness to a passive state of being. By the fifth trek around the mountain, he began to resent the enemy for not attacking. How many times would he be ordered to complete the same patrol, he wondered. He began to have paranoid delusions. He began to think that the insurgents had infiltrated the military and seized the reins of power. Rather than confront them in battle, he said, they had divided the Peruvian National Army into squads like his own, assigned each squad to patrol an Andean peak, while unbeknownst to the soldiers, the insurgents gained control of the towns and cities below. It was a masterful plan that he imagined, said the Maestro, by which the insurgents achieved their ends. He spent the entirety of his service patrolling that remote peak. It was only after the insurgency had died down, he said, and he was discharged from the army that he’d learned that his brother-in-law had used his influence in the military to have him assigned to a remote region where there was little chance of encountering the enemy. Eventually the leader of the in
surgents was captured. He was found hiding in a secret apartment, behind a ballet studio in one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods of Lima, and many of his lieutenants were also captured and imprisoned.
When he, the Maestro, returned to civilian life and he visited his sister, he would inevitably drink in the evenings with his brother-in-law, who would share with him information he’d learned from his contacts in the military. His brother-in-law was acquainted with one of the state’s chief interrogators. From this acquaintance, the Maestro explained, his brother-in-law had learned of the unusual method that the authorities used to extract information from captured insurgents. Aware of his brother-in-law’s knowledge of music, his acquaintance had approached him and asked for certain recommendations. The interrogator had asked his brother-in-law if he knew of songs that were difficult to listen to. When his brother-in-law asked him what he meant by this, he said he wanted music that would become unbearable if repeated many times in succession at high volume. After thinking about the question, his brother-in-law replied that any song would become unbearable if it was repeated too often. But the interrogator insisted that he needed the most unbearable music of all, and that he’d come to ask for his opinion because it was very important to his work. Eventually his brother-in-law had decided upon precisely the kind of music the man had in mind. His brother-in-law had been forced to dub the music on the cassette tape for the interrogator. His refusal would have been interpreted as showing sympathy for the insurgents, he said, which would ruin his brother-in-law’s reputation in business and make him suspicious in the eyes of the state. On several occasions he’d asked his brother-in-law what songs he’d recorded for the interrogator’s purposes, said the Maestro. But his brother-in-law, who opposed the insurgency as much as anyone, had been ashamed of what he understood to be his complicity in the torture of the insurgents and would not disclose his choices. When his brother-in-law told the story, it was not out of boastfulness, but as if he was making a confession.