Omar moved quickly across the hard-packed earth—barefoot—but with as much confidence as if he were wearing sandals. Shirtless, his muscles rippled in his broad shoulders, which tapered to narrow hips under drawstring shorts; this slip of cloth—almost an afterthought—seemed to be his jungle outfit. He looked younger from behind, like a teenager about to jump into a quarry with a gang of high school friends, someone born to be outside, to frolic in an endless summer.
More stares on our way to the longhouse, but the children followed us, chattering and laughing as before, and that seemed to lighten the mood. We climbed a long set of stairs made from sturdy tree trunks into which treads had been sawn to the main room, which was enormous, maybe fifty feet long and several yards across. One long wall faced the jungle. Except for a series of storerooms at the far end, the structure was open on all sides, from waist-high split-bamboo walls to thatched roof. Along the side that abutted the jungle, banana leaves a dozen feet long, dull and sweating, dozed over the walls. A pig—no doubt the one from the day before—roasted on a spit over a stone oven on a deck that extended the length of the building.
In one corner of the main room, in a pile of sawdust, two chickens snuffled together, picking at stray corn, while several bare-chested men relaxed or slept in hammocks suspended from the ceiling. Sitting cross-legged on a pile of discarded burlap food bags, a young woman nursed a piglet who had contentedly fallen asleep at her nipple. She sang softly to it, rocking, stroking its pink ears, occasionally laughing as if it had delighted her in some way. I learned later that her baby had died in childbirth and she had become unhinged. Only the piglet had quieted her wailing grief.
Omar took my hand and led me to the far west end of the deck. Beneath us, huts dotted the ground all the way to the brown river ruffling the shore. “I’m going to give you a tour,” he said, pointing past all the huts toward where the village ended and the jungle began. “Far down that beach are the giant tortoise nesting grounds, where Benicio was taken.”
I nodded, swearing to myself I would never go there.
“Now, see that long, thin strip of wood and long, skinny roof over it? That’s the Anaconda Bar.”
“A real bar?”
“It’s real when we have booze. The anaconda skin is over ten meters long.”
“From a real anaconda?”
He looked at me like, of course, what a question. “At the beach is our little dock and three of our boats. Our river driver is out with the fourth one, he travels from San Solidad every two weeks with supplies. There are about forty huts, three community ones like this one, but this is the biggest one, where everybody hangs out. That square hut in the middle everyone calls the clinic. For doctors we have FrannyB, one of the missionaries from America, and Beya.”
I followed him as he walked the length of the longhouse to the opposite end. “The shaman?”
“Yeah, she lives past those manioc fields, a little ways into the jungle.”
“All by herself?”
He nodded. “She’s Tatinga, but a long time ago she married an Ayachero man who brought her here and left her. Just took off for La Paz. But the Tatinga think of you as dead if you leave the tribe. So she couldn’t go back, even though she was their most powerful shaman.”
“Can’t she live in the village?”
He shrugged. “The villagers are stubborn, too.” He lowered his voice. “They feel superior to the tribes. I think they’re afraid of her.”
“Are you afraid of her?”
“When she first came here, she was pretty angry about being cut off from both communities. Word was she did some nasty stuff to people, but nobody could prove it. People are suspicious, afraid, looking to blame someone for everything bad that happens. That’s the kind of thinking I didn’t miss in Cochabamba, I have to tell you.”
“But are you afraid of her?”
He shook his head no, but I wasn’t convinced. “I’d stay away from her, Lily.”
“I think I saw her this morning. Down at the beach. There was a family of people who looked like they had some bad disease.”
“She must be looking after the lepers.” He shook his head. “I know the Frannies wouldn’t do it. No one else would do it. They don’t really need that much help. They work the fields, get water, they can even fish. They just can’t hunt, so Beya helps them with their traps.”
“Son!” The middle-aged woman I’d seen embrace Panchito yesterday stepped up to Omar, hands on hips, long gray braids swinging behind her. She didn’t look at me. I expected her to throw her arms around her eldest and welcome him home, but all she said was, “Breakfast is ready.”
A corner of the main room was dedicated to cooking: ersatz pots and pans, blackened and misshapen, hung on hooks over tins of cheap cooking oil. Hovering over an oven topped by an iron grate, her face sweating with steam, she stirred a vat of long white vegetables: yucca, before sifting out a few pieces with a tin fork and sliding them on a cracked porcelain platter.
Omar took two plates and two tin forks from a wooden shelf resting on a row of nails jutting from the wall, and gestured for us to sit on a low bench.
“Lily, this is my mother, Doña Antonia.”
“It’s nice to meet you,” I said as humbly as I could manage.
She took a seat on a stool, eyes narrowing in her flat brown face, chin stubborn and set. I tried to put an age on her: forty-five, fifty, sixty? Impossible to tell. On the railing behind her, an orange-and-green toucan with a foot-long banana-colored beak flapped its wings and barked a few times. Its perfectly round black eye observed me. With a coughing sort of call, it flapped up and away, dipping with the weight of its beak before rallying skyward as it drifted over the huts.
“And what are you going to do all day, silly American girl, while your husband is hunting? Comb your pretty hair and look in the mirror?”
She cut off a slab of meat and plopped it down on my plate.
“She doesn’t eat meat,” Omar said, taking the plate from me.
Her brows furrowed. “Alérgica?” Allergic?
“Because I love animals,” I said breathily, feeling like an asshole.
Doña Antonia threw her head back in peals of cackling laughter, her few teeth on display. “Oh, that’s a funny one! You know, because we love animals, too, a lot, you see?” She took a big bite of meat, chewed as she smiled at me. “I like this girl, Omar, my boy. This one makes me laugh.”
In some distant way I was hungry, starving in fact, but I couldn’t bring myself to feel it as I had when we were in the hut. Omar got up and scooped out some of the yucca, adding from another pot what looked like cooked onions and garlic. I took a few bites, but that was all I could manage. The yucca tasted like air, badly in need of salt, but I forced myself to swallow.
Several of the men slipped off their hammocks and joined us, either cross-legged on the floor or on low benches. All wore the uniform of old gym shorts or cutoffs and nothing else. There were half a dozen swarthy teenagers—Omar’s size or smaller, muscular, quiet; a few stole shy looks at me—and two or three much older men—ropey, sunbaked, and wizened, but tough as nails; a ragtag group of hunters.
Franz and Panchito climbed the stairs, deep in conversation. His brothers joined Omar and the other men at the impromptu meeting.
“We’re grateful Omar has come,” Franz said after taking a plate of food. The men nodded, mumbling their agreement. “We need to keep Ayachero strong. Strong in provisions and strong in spirit.” His pitted face darkened. “Omar’s been hunting since we were children. He and our father used to hunt jaguar with the Tatinga, back when we traded with one another.”
One burly young man spoke up. “We’re the best hunters on the river.”
“You’re all great hunters,” Franz said, “but we all need to learn from each other. Game is scarcer now, I don’t have to tell you this. We have to go farther and farther out to hunt, stay away longer and longer. It’s been hard on all of our families. Killing the sow last night
was something we shouldn’t have had to do. The poachers are growing in number, and they’ll take anything. Now we’re in competition with the Tatinga. I don’t have to tell you how dangerous this is.”
The men mumbled, joked uncomfortably.
“We’ll need to build a platform,” Omar said. “You all know how difficult it is to hunt jaguar. They always know where you are, but only now and then do you see signs of them, or even see one.”
“I’ve never seen one,” the burly man said. “Only prints.”
“I saw one swimming once, but that was years ago,” another man said.
“I wish I had easy answers for catching the one that took Benicio,” Omar said.
Franz dropped his head as if physically hit by the sound of his son’s name.
“Of course, we can look for scat or trees they’ve marked with their claws, but the best way is to take turns on the platform, waiting and watching, agreed?” Omar continued.
The men nodded, their faces serious and drawn.
“We’re short of men as it is, so this will be difficult. Maybe some of the women with older children can help out. It’s boring work. You’re just watching, in total silence. But we all know the jaguar’s not going to show up so we can kill it. We may catch this jaguar tomorrow, or next week, or never. We have to accept this. We have to be vigilant, but we have to go on.”
I set down my plate of yucca, now cold and congealed in a pool of oil, as I mulled Doña Antonia’s words. As I listened to the men speak, I indulged in a quick fantasy: I would be the one to nail the jaguar from the top of the platform. Ridiculous, of course, but I was determined to show Omar’s mother I wasn’t some useless, vain gringa. There had to be some way I could become part of this bizarre, terrifying place.
ELEVEN
By midafternoon, most of the population of Ayachero had gathered at the foot of the longhouse in anticipation of Benicio’s funeral. All of us—Omar, Panchito, the hunters, Doña Antonia, and myself—descended the stairs and joined the milling crowd of nearly a hundred. Though it was broad daylight, many carried blazing torches that licked up into the boiling air. Paco pushed his way through the crowd and took my hand. Franz and Anna were the only ones I couldn’t spot in the swarm of mourners.
I followed Omar to the front of the procession, where two white women, one a head taller and fifty pounds heavier than her smaller, slighter companion, weaved among the crowd, the bigger one encouraging everyone in perfect though condescending Spanish to gather in some sort of a line. Nailed to a three-foot balsa cross braced against her shoulder was a crudely carved wooden Christ, mouth in an eternal droop, rusty tears burned into the grain. An actual crown of thorns circled his head. His pedestal was signed: FRANNYA, AYACHERO, 1998, in loopy letters.
The woman carrying the cross caught sight of me; waved, smiled, and bellowed out a cheerful hello from several yards away. I was struck by how American that gesture looked and felt; a wave of self-consciousness—Am I that brash and loud?—washed over me.
“Greetings,” she said, reaching out to pump my hand. “You must be Lily. We’re the Frannies. Not sure if you’ve heard of us yet. Both named Frances, so we had to, you know, differentiate.” Thin gray hair pulled back in a little bun at her neck, the gaunt woman standing next to her gazed up at me through thick, round, rimless glasses, one lens cracked but somehow still holding together. The first woman continued, “She goes by FrannyA, and I’m FrannyB. For what it’s worth.”
Permanent sweat stains scored dark semicircles in the armpits of FrannyB’s short-sleeved camo shirt. Her army pants fit snugly around generous hips and disappeared into high rubber boots. Her friend was dressed precisely the same way; on her, the clothes draped from her delicate frame, exaggerating her ethereal figure. “Sorry to meet under these circumstances,” FrannyB continued. “Just a terrible, terrible thing, this loss. But that’s the jungle for you, I’m afraid. Brutal place.”
The crowd was once again losing its form, spreading out like a lake. Tossing her buzz-cut blond head with a melodramatic gesture—FrannyA in her wake—FrannyB threw herself back into the job of herding everyone into a procession of sorts, eventually huffing her way to the front of the line.
With a nod to Omar and me, Anna, Franz, and Claudia walked past us; the crowd parted for them. The parents carried between them a small wooden box painted white. In it were a heartbreakingly small pair of shorts and shirt neatly folded, along with a few of Benicio’s possessions: a broken miniature car, a bicycle tire tube fashioned into a slingshot, some marbles, a fish hook, and a few ancient, water-warped baseball cards. Jungle flowers had been woven into a chain that graced the perimeter of the box.
Clutching a rosary to her chest, face crumpled in agony, Anna held one side of the box, Franz the other. Anna’s father, a tiny man with stick legs and white hair, played a mournful tune on a ukulele as the group made its slow trek to the shore. Omar kept a strong grip on my hand as we walked; I was grateful. I thought of the nephew he had never met—would never meet—and the decisions Omar had made for that to be the case, and suddenly felt so much older than my nineteen years, as a dawning of such a thing as consequences to life decisions formed vaguely in my mind.
Anna began to cry openly now, and so too did the other women, in sympathy and terror for the random cruelty the jungle was capable of, knowing in their hearts it could have been their child, and might be their child the next day, week, year, second. Claudia and the other children, infected by the grief all around them, began to wail as well, until just about everyone, including myself, was crying for every hurt that had ever befallen them.
Together we walked the length of the village, past every hut and oven and sleeping dog, down to the narrow strip of beach where the boy was taken. Anna’s father finished his song as we walked on the cinnamon-colored sand. Long, deep grooves had been gouged by the bodies of the giant tortoises who gathered there to mate and lay their eggs, their arms creating carved arcs on either side. I saw no jaguar tracks, but they could have been erased by the turtles’ great, sweeping flippers. In the stultifying stillness, the arms of the jungle drooping over us, we came to a stop at an open hole dug several feet deep in the muddy bank. Franz and Anna kneeled and lay the box down next to it, pushing themselves back to their feet with great effort.
FrannyB lay the cross over the box and turned to face the silent crowd. “Oh, Lord, bless this place where the boy Benicio was taken by the forest devil in the shape of a jaguar, for the souls of the righteous are in the hands of God, and no torment will ever touch them. The Lord God has tested him and found young Benicio to be worthy of Himself, like gold in the furnace. Benicio will live in peace forever at his side . . .”
Something rustled in the forest behind her. Her sweating, pale face twitched as her voice trailed off into the drone of insects. She turned, took a step back. From the wall of green emerged a mosaic of color in the form of two men, each around five feet. Bright streaks of red stain zigzagged from mouths to earlobes; six-inch porcupine quills bristled on either side of full lips; turquoise and yellow macaw feathers dashed back from stretched earlobes. Bowl-cut ebony hair just grazed the shining foliage behind them. Except for strings of twisted fiber that reached down from around their waists to the tips of their penises, wrapping the foreskin in a small knot, they were naked.
Franz and Anna took a few steps backward, tucking Claudia between them. The ranks of the villagers shifted as the men placed themselves in front of their wives and children. Omar whispered under his breath to me, “Tatinga.”
“Stay calm, everyone, stay calm.” FrannyB tucked her Bible under one arm and held out a flattened hand with the other.
The taller tribesman stepped forward, pectorals bulging under his necklace of peccary incisors, lean muscle roping hips and thighs. Twin quivers packed with blowgun darts crossed his chest. Under one arm he carried a small canoe, a child-sized version of the dugouts both the villagers and tribes used.
A wave of language rippled from
the men.
“What did they say?” Anna said.
FrannyB shifted to her other foot, took a rag from her pocket, and wiped her forehead. “They’ve brought a death canoe. They say they’re here to mourn the child.” She replied to the men in rapid-fire Tatinga. Their expressions—serious, grim mouthed—did not change.
“What did she say?” I whispered to Omar.
Not taking his eyes off the men, he said quietly, “ ‘We’re trying to bury our dead. We don’t need your presence here.’ ”
The man with the canoe took a step forward, chin high as he defiantly looked into the eyes of the villagers, one by one. He said in halting Spanish, “The boy had an enemy. This is why he died. We are here to say this boy is not our enemy. Our shaman, Splitfoot, runs with the jaguar in his dreams, but he did not call this one down to the Tortoise Beach. You need to find out who is the boy’s enemy, to avenge his death.”
“This boy had no enemy,” FrannyB answered in Spanish. “His only enemy was the jungle itself, this nest of poisons and demons and sin.”
The tribesman looked with derision at the weeping Christ on the balsa wood cross. “An angry jaguar spirit affects everyone. Your rotting God cannot protect you.”
The smaller tribesman, who stood closest to the jungle, took something out of a string bag. A bundle of palm thatch gathered in such a way as to look like a small child, like a doll. FrannyB waved him away, muttering a few words in Tatinga.
“She’s telling him to keep his heathen idol,” Omar said under his breath.
Anna took a step forward, blocking FrannyB’s bluster. Her voice was low but strong. “Benicio was my child. If these people have something of comfort for us, I want to know about it.”
Into the Jungle Page 8