This is not that remarkable when you consider that this little tribe for countless generations has never eaten meat or enjoyed some other fruit of the field. They depend exclusively upon the gifts from the sea and also from a certain little mussel that is very rich in phosphorous.
By the way, this practice is not determined from some religious law where other food from the land is “taboo” or forbidden. It is simply because there is nothing else growing, creeping or running in this pathetic wilderness fit to eat. The blue Indians do enjoy a little variety and were extremely grateful for the remainder of my canned provisions.
The Momoskapans are also very lazy, unintelligent and extremely peace loving. They can’t understand the use of weapons at all. Through the visit of the French doctors they have become accustomed to receiving gifts from the strangers that reside with them.
They came to me with the greatest willingness and as soon as they halfway grasped what I wanted brought all the members of the tribe that were distinguished by an especially strong memory. While this was a good start these confessionals soon became ordeals, especially because of needing to have the conversations through my two interpreters and old Kaziken of the Momoskapan tribe that only spoke a little Islapekish. My good start was not very long lasting.
Then one day a yellow one was brought that told me a most amazing tale. First he gave an account of all kinds of foolish stuff out of his earliest childhood. But then he spoke of his honeymoon, told how they captured thirty large red snappers and cooked them. Shortly after that he and his wife were in Acapulco. He described exactly how it looked. That is not at all remarkable except that the boy was scarcely thirteen years old, had never been married and had never been away from the Momohuichic River.
I asked him about it. He looked at me very stupidly and grew quiet. But the old one grinned and said, “Pala”. (It was his father)
I must say that I didn’t sleep that night and it was not mosquitoes that kept me awake. Either the youth had lied to me or I had discovered an astonishing phenomenon, a memory that went back beyond birth and pulled a memory from out of the parent’s lifetime.
Couldn’t it be possible? I have green eyes like my mother and a protruding forehead like my father. Everything can be inherited, every characteristic, talent, every disposition. Why can’t the memory be inherited?
The young kitten that is barked at by a dog arches its back and hisses. Why? Because it instinctively remembers out of the memories of thousands of generations that that is its best defense! The hedgehog curls into a ball with bristles on every side as you turn it. This action also comes from some strange custom that it has not learned on its own. Instead it comes out of the memories of an unending number of ancestors.
That is what instinct is, the memories of the ancestors. And these Indians whose brains work no differently than ours, these Indians who are only unique in the foods that their forefathers also enjoyed have evolved this wonderful memory. Why shouldn’t a higher memory as well as an ancestral memory be capable of being inherited out of the brains of the parents? The forefathers live again in their children.
Yes, but what lives on? Perhaps the features! The daughter is musical like papa and the youth left handed like mama. Coincidence? No, no. We die and our children are entirely different people. The mother was a prostitute and the son became a missionary or the father was Attorney General and his daughter sings in a casino.
Our undying souls must comfort themselves by singing Hallelujah in heavens green meadows somewhere far away from this earth we know and love. It is the only thing permitted.
We take great pains to do something so that our memory will not die. We die peacefully when we are in encyclopedias. Then we are immortal—for a second in a few centuries. Still everyone wants to live a little longer in humanities memory or at least in the memories of their friends and family. That is why the fat citizen has children, to carry on his name.
It’s true; the artist has it right. Somehow we live on in our children many generations after our death. As women with emotions and sorrow we carry and give birth under miserable torment but with each birth we rise from the dead and as men later fertilize our great-grandchildren. Then once more blossoms our first thought drawn from a chorus in a distant land and we first become aware of our groping feet and once more cast our wavering seed upon the rocks.
Something lives on and perhaps the best. Many things die—and perhaps the best. Who is to know? Everything dies and what does not die is kept safely in memory. What is forgotten is entirely dead, not that which dies. People are beginning to grasp that it is not the remembering of the past that is good but the forgetting. Remembering is foolishness, an illness, and a disgusting pestilence that chokes out the new life. We do not want to constantly look back in honor of our fathers and mothers but more deeply separate from them because we are more than they are and greater than they are!
We want to tear down yesterday because we know that today we are alive and that our today is a much better one. That is our strong belief and it is so strong that we do not even think about it. We don’t consider that our great today—tomorrow will be a pathetic yesterday only fit for the rubbish heap.
It is an eternal war with eternal defeat if we do not gain victory over our ancestral memories. We are slaves to the ideas of our forefathers. We spend our lives tormenting ourselves in their chains, suffocating in the restrictive fortress that our forefathers have created. We need to build a bigger house. When we are dead it will be worn out as well and our grandchildren will lie in the chains that we have created.
But if that is the truth then what is it that I have now discovered? Am I today at the same time my father, my forefathers and myself? If what my brain carries does not die but lives on in my children and grandchildren how can the eternal revolution ever become reconciled?
* *
*
I gave commands that everyone be brought to me whose memories extended back beyond birth. Everyday someone was brought, men, women and children. I determined that the memories of the father’s and of the mother’s both extended back but the latter prevailed by far.
In all cases tribal members could only remember portions of events out of the lifetimes of their parents. The most frequent were coincidental to the marriage celebrations in general as well as to the last year of the parent’s life before the child was born.
In one case I was able to determine that the memory was out of an episode of a life even more generations back. This was with a young girl whose mother had died at her birth. Her memories went back to the lifetime that apparently belonged to her grandmother or great-grandmother.
These confessions in themselves were all inconceivably uninteresting. They all repeated themselves in the same variations, sitting there almost sleeping and looking like grey headed sea eagles. Out of the totality of my notes I only have two points of interest that appear significant.
My blue confessors never once said:
“My father did—my mother, my grandmother did—”
They always spoke as if it were themselves. A few of the older people like Kaziken who helped interpret for me were very clear about this. Many of the remembered episodes did not relate to this life at all but were taken from a distant one and most were not particularly important or have special significance. Most of the tribal members had done the same things their parents had done.
The second point is this:
They themselves never remembered experiencing the death of their father or their mother. That is most natural because their parent’s memory that they carried never went beyond the moment of their own conception. Almost all of them later saw their parents die with their own eyes resulting perhaps in the unconscious tendency of taking these memories as their own.
This gave rise to the little paradox that was sometimes amusing enough as when the boy that has never left his sandy beach described the majesty of Acapulco or when another youth scarcely ten years old spoke with the wise mien of an anci
ent midwife of his seven births. Or when a child cried in mourning that a fish seized him and he drowned. The spirit of a little brother lived in him that his mother had given birth to before he was born and passed on to him.
In my notes it says:
16 July, Teresita, daughter of Elia Mictecacihuatil, fourteen years old. Her father brought her into my hut and declared proudly that his daughter spoke Spanish. The girl was well built, had just been married and was pregnant. She was almost entirely blue with only a handful of spots on her back of the original yellow color.
While she appeared proud enough of them, she also appeared embarassed and fearful, more fearful than any other Momoskapan that I had up to that time observed. At my requests to speak she only sat grinning, embarassed and ill at ease without speaking a word.
Her husband who had just come back from fishing threatened her with a rope and her father admonished her, pressed her to cooperate with no luck. It only turned her silly giggle into a pathetic howling.
Then I showed her a large hideous print of an oil painting of St. Francis and promised to give it to her when she finally did talk. Her features brightened up again yet she still didn’t say a word until I threw in one of St. Garibaldi—
The Remscheider company had purchased cheap somewhere a parcel of Garbaldi prints and Don Pablo sold these in place of the hard to get prints of St. Aloysius.
Teresita wanted to possess so many saints and this won her over. I began to carefully ask after the usual things and she falteringly told the same stupid childhood memories that I had already heard a dozen times before. Gradually she lost her fear and began to speak more freely. She gave accounts that were drawn from her mother and her grandmother. Then very suddenly the little Indian girl called out in a loud and clear, yet deep voice that she had not used before:
“Hail”
The word was scarcely out when she again faltered, rubbed her hands over her knees, moved her head back and forth and wouldn’t speak another word. Her father, proud that the Spanish had “finally come” told her to continue, begged and pleaded with her. I saw that there would be no more coming out of her that day, gave her the pictures and dismissed her. I had no better luck on the next day or the next or even the next. Teresita always told the same harmless little things and faltered completely at the first foreign word. It was as if she was frightened to death everytime this clear “Hail” pushed out.
With hard singular effort I got out of her father that it was not common for her to speak in a foreign tongue. She had only done it a few times in her life, on special occasions like at the dance right before her wedding when she had spoken “Spanish”. He himself had never had a Spanish word cross his lips even though his father and an older sister occasionally did as well.
Every day I gave Teresita and her relatives little things and always promised them more beautiful things, mirrors, portraits of saints, pearl beads and finally a silver linked girdle for when she finally talked in Spanish.
The greed of the entire family had grown immensely and the poor child not only tormented herself but was made to set apart from the others. Old Kaziken knew with true instinct that Teresita would only speak out of such a very heavy memory while in a state of ecstasy.
I told him that I would wait until the dance festival took place the next week and contended that the pregnant woman should be permitted to take part in it. He resisted, stared at me and said that women were not allowed. I met with only stubborn rigid resistance no matter how much I pleaded. There could be no exceptions and then he gave the counter proposal that Teresita be given a beating until the needed state of ecstasy was achieved.
That would most certainly lead straight to the goal and not do too much harm. Yes, an Indian girl could take more blows than a mule but even if Teresita gladly allowed herself to be whipped ten times for the silver girdle I was certain it would still not give me the needed memories. The memory of my jacket button, Sir Löwenstein’s strawberry mark and the thought of her back being ripped off wouldn’t leave me. I was ready to call the whole thing off. That’s when Kaziken relented and made a new proposal.
He would allow Teresita to take peyote but it would cost me, naturally. It would need to be done secretly in my hut where the other tribe members could not see. This was the favorite drug that the men experienced in their high ceremonies and was strongly forbidden to all women. I saw at once why Kaziken had been so against her participating in the dance where the entire tribe would have witnessed Teresita‘s intoxication.
His preparations were very elaborate. He came in the middle of the night and had two of my Indians lie down across the door. He placed Teresita’s father, her husband and a brother, who was in on the secret as well, in a wide circle around the hut as guards. To appease his own conscience he had the girl dress in men’s clothing. She looked quaint enough in her father’s long trousers and her husband’s blue shirt. It amused me to add my own contributions and while the bitter cactus button was brewing I put my sombrero on top of her head and gave her one of Dan Pablos highly popular bright red belts.
The girl sat on the floor and drank a huge bowl of the brew. We sat around and smoked one cigarette after another waiting for the drug to begin working. This went on for a good hour. Slowly her upper body sank and she fell back down, her eyes wide open in the waking sleep of peyote.
I had taken mescaline myself often enough and knew every stage of the working of this intoxicant. I saw how her glance eagerly devoured the wild halucinated colors but I was extremely doubtful that this passive intoxication would provide a usable condition of ecstacy. Indeed, the lips of the Indian girl remained tightly closed.
Old Kaziken could forsee the disapointing failure of this attempt as well as I could and realized the peyote was working differently on the girl than it did on himself and other men of the tribe. Perhaps it was his obstinant stubborness that drove him to it, but once he had set foot on this path he would not leave it and sought instead to go further.
He cooked a new brew and threw ten large mescal buttons into it, enough to intoxicate half a dozen strong men. Then he propped the girl up, held the hot bowl to her lips and compliant, she drank it. But the nausiating brew didn’t set well on her pallatte. She shuddered and spit it back out. The Elder grabbed her by the throat, hissed, spit on her and told her that he would strangle her if she didn’t empty the bowl. In miserable fear she reached out and with immense effort guzzled the toxic drink down and sank back onto the floor.
The result was extraordinary. Her body raised up writhing like a misshapen snake, her legs tightly pressed together, until she stood wavering in the air. Then she pressed both hands over her mouth. You could see she was trying very hard to keep the abominable stuff down but she couldn’t. A sudden spasm ripped through her as the toxin erupted and sprayed widely into the air.
The Elder trembled in rage and rushed at the girl screaming. I saw the Navaho seize him, the one that had cut the peyote buttons with him, and I grabbed his feet. He lay for a long time beating against the dirt floor trying to get at her.
The girl could see his threatening gestures completely and she stood there upright and unmoving, stuck against the straw wall, whimpering lightly like a starved dog. Then her pupils rolled back into her head and only the whites of her eyes showed in the dark hollows. The sweat on her face glowed a deep violet and the brown brew oozed out past her strong teeth.
A slight jerk started at her knees, crawled up her legs, shaking her body in violent spasms and growing stronger as it moved upward across her breast making her arms wave wildly and her neck and head began pounding faster and faster against the wall.
This did not promise a very good or desired outcome and I involuntarily murmered, “Damned mess.”
Then it rang out harsh and deep from the girl’s lips in her foreign voice, “Wine!”
It was as if this one word with a single blow destroyed all resistance and the convulsions were gone instantly. Teresita was wiping off her mouth and nose with he
r sleeve like a peasant. Her body moved away from the wall, a broad confident smile lay on her face. Her feet moved firmly forward stepping with powerful strides up to the fire. She good-naturedly, confidently and disdainfully pushed the Elder, who was trembling in deathly fear, to the side.
But I saw that it was not Teresita that did it. It was someone else. This other grabbed the full mug that stood near her on the floor, and emptied the wine in a single draught.
“Thank you brother! TheVirgin protects our General in this shit with the fat Lutheran pigs! Peace be with you!”
She took my riding whip, struck the Elder on the body, “Answer me you dog! Peace be with you!”
Kaziken spouted, “Do you see! Do you see! Now she speaks Spanish!”
But there was not a syllable of Spanish. It was a broad ancient Low German that laughed out of the blue lips of the Indian girl.
“Bah, he doesn’t speak the Christian language, the Indian hell hound.”
Then he struck himself solidly on the belly.
“By San Juan de Compostela! I am starved, starved and yet I’ve got a belly like a villain Wittenberg priest. Come brother, share your food!”
I waved at the Elder and he brought rolls and a piece of broiled fish from out of the corner. In the meantime I refilled her mug again.
Teresita looked him over, “Ah, the blue skins! These blue dogs! What will my ArchBishop in Cologne say when I tell him sometime that I preach Christianity to blue monkeys over here. I must bring one with or he will not believe me. It’s true brother. It’s true. Their skin really is blue, not just painted on. We have scrubbed them with brushes, scraped with files, cut entire patches away. The skin is blue inside and outside!”
Teresita ate, drank and filled the mug up again. Then I asked a question, carefully trying to start a conversation by imitating her speech back to her as well as I could. She spoke Rhinish with a little Dutch and Flemish mixed in here and there as well as some Spanish curses and Latin religious phrases thrown in as well. In the beginning it was very hard going and there were entire sentences that I could make no sense of at all. But gradually things got better as I got used to this old dialect.
Hanns Heinz Ewers Volume I (Collected Short Stories by Hanns Heinz Ewers) Page 14