The Embedding

by Ian Watson

  Ironically, they might just have made some headway with the Xemahoa by concentrating on Bethlehem and the miracle birth. But no, they would go at it opportunistically. All that nonsense about Noah's Ark! A flood is rising, O my people. Once there was a man beloved of God who built himself a great big dugout canoe. And in this canoe he floated downstream with all his family and goats and chickens and macaws till he reached a large well-appointed reception centre on a hillside — easily recognizable by its bright tin roofs — some way beyond the Great Orange Wall.

  Meddling imbeciles! I'm only just getting to the root of what is going on here, and I tell you it is delicate.

  A cautious, inbred people, these Xemahoa. Had it not been for Kayapi mediating between us, I don't know how I would have got anywhere. I might have taken it for ‘just’ another human tragedy. ‘Just’ another example of human flotsam being washed away by the tide of Progress. Like any of the other flooded-out tribes.

  Oh, but they have their plans about the Flood, these Xemahoa!

  Those priests never dreamt that they're expecting a birth as part of their answer. Even now a woman is coming to term in the taboo hut outside the village. The Bruxo visits her every day, to chant to her and give her the drug they call ‘maka-i’. I suspect it is his own child gestating in her womb — conceived in the drug trance he undertook as soon as he first divined the coming of the flood. And divine it he did, from God knows what signs. Months ago! If the Holy Fathers could have known of that pregnancy, what a field day they would have had — they would have pulled Bethlehem and Mary out of their bag of tricks then, I'll warrant.

  • • •

  When the Xemahoa laughed at the priests, those good men were offended by their reception. Hostility, martyrdom, poisoned arrows — that is acceptable, excellent. Straight off to the Pearly Gates. But laughter? They ought to have realized that there is laughter — and laughter. They should have had more experience of the moods of these people than myself. I only understood when Kayapi explained the distinction his people make between types of laughter.

  A useful man, Kayapi — but one thing he certainly isn't is ‘my faithful Kayapi’ or ‘my man Friday’ as that priest Pomar seemed to think. The secret of his devotion is presumably the tape recorder. I guess he follows me round and answers my questions mainly because of the machine. In its own crude way it apes the drugged speech of the Bruxo that Chris Sole would have called ‘embedded speech’. By leaping back and forth along the tapespool it transmutes what I call Xemahoa A into Xemahoa B — or something like it. If I didn't have longlife batteries in the machine and it was running down and wheezing to a halt, my faithful Kayapi might be off soon enough.

  Yet maybe not. I guess it's also his own curious relationship to the Xemahoa tribe that keeps him here with me. The fact that he's of the tribe and also of another. He's a bastard birth. They tolerate him here, but do not allow him into any close intimacy with them. They let him circle eternally round his ‘home’ like a moth round a candle, which he can't burn his wings on nor escape from. And how he wishes to burn his wings!

  The Bruxo has been the brightest candle drawing him here — since he was a boy old enough to travel on his own from his mother's village. I think he yearns, in his heart of hearts, to be the Bruxo's apprentice. Yet it is clearly impossible. This is one social role he can never hope to ape amongst the Xemahoa, as a half-Xemahoa himself. Anyway, the Bruxo already has an apprentice — a weedy adolescent — and Kayapi must be in his twenties now and too old to start.

  Still, it's hard to tell people's ages here. They get old swiftly in the jungle. Forty-five years is quite an achievement. The Bruxo must be much older than that. His skin as wizened as a mummy's. He's tough, this old Bruxo. All the dancing and chanting he does. And, my God, the drugs. But he's an old man nevertheless — and burning himself at both ends in these desperate days. I'd give him another few months at the present rate, that's all.

  Kayapi, on the other hand, has smoother sleeker skin than the apprentice boy's — milk chocolate skin like a young woman's. Good flashing teeth, too — though that isn't so odd in tribes that haven't been ‘civilized’ yet. Soft almond eyes with a shade of the sadness of the exile in them. The bulging well-fleshed bum of the Indian male, which looks more like our idea of a woman's. He's in his prime — but soon he will be past it. Not that this stops him from longing — or from plotting.

  So much for Pomar's ‘Man Friday’ notion, however. A blend of obsession and self-interest is more like it.

  “You know why the Xemahoa laugh at the Caraiba?”

  “Tell me, Kayapi.”

  “There are two Laughters, Pee-air.”

  “And what are they?”

  “There is the Soul Laugh. And there is Profane Gaiety. Profane Gaiety is stupid. Profane Gaiety is children's. And old men's whose minds are rotted. And women's. Xemahoa despise that laughter.”

  “So that was why they laughed at the priests? Because they despised them?”

  “No!”

  “What then, Kayapi? Tell me — I'm a Caraiba too. I do not know.”

  “But there is much you do know, Pee-air. Your box that talks words within words, tells you.”

  “Tell me so I may know some more, Kayapi.”

  “All right. That was Soul Laughter, not Profane Gaiety, we Xemahoa pointed at the Caraiba. There is much to understand about laughter, Pee-air. When a man opens his mouth, he must take care not only what goes out, but what comes in. Something bad might creep in past Profane Gaiety. Profane Gaiety is weak. Nothing dares creep in past Soul Laughter. Soul Laughter is strong-as-strong. That's why Man does not laugh idly.”

  “What exactly is this Soul Laughter?”

  However Kayapi lost interest. It all seemed obvious to him, I guess. So off he wandered to paddle through the floodwater. I would say splash ‘like a child’. The priests certainly would. If I hadn't learnt a little of the subtlety these Indians are capable of.

  A note on social relations among the Xemahoa. As far as kinship rules are concerned, there is a total lack of incest prohibition. Quite the opposite in fact. They are incestuous — in the widest cultural sense. The Xemahoa always marry within the tribe, and the husband moves into the wife's hut upon getting married. If he marries two wives, the second wife generally moves in with the first. They are really one great extended family, with most marriages being incestuous to some degree or another. Presumably they have some social machinery — raiding and capture? — for bringing outside blood into the tribe from time to time.

  Unfortunately for Kayapi, he is the product of an exogamous union — a mating outside the incestuous kinship group of the Xemahoa — and, just as in some other cultures a child of incest would be a child of shame, so here the child of exogamy comes in for stigma. And this is what really buggers up his ambitions.

  I wonder which of the Xemahoa was Kayapi's father, though. Must ask him.

  And I wonder what relation, if any, there is between this inbred social structure — and the ‘embedded’ speech of Xemahoa B, the language of the drug ritual?

  • • •

  . . . Day by day I learn more about this remarkable doomed people. When I wrote that letter to England in rage and anguish, I knew so little of the true situation here!

  Each day there are more clues as to the nature of this unique language, Xemahoa B. Only a drug-tranced Bruxo can fully articulate it. Only a drug-tranced people dancing through the firelight can grasp the gist of it.

  Their myths are coded in this language and left in safekeeping with the Bruxo. The Deep Speech and the Drug-Dance free these myths as living realities for all the people in a great euphoric act of tribal celebration — to such a degree that they are all firmly convinced that the flood is only a detail in the fulfilment of their own myth cycle, and that the Bruxo, and the child embedded in the woman's womb in the taboo hut, will in some as yet inexplicable way be the Answer.

  Kayapi is pretty well convinced that the Bruxo has the answer too.


  “Why are you staying here despite the water?”

  He shrugs. He spits moisture at the flooded soil with a show of bravado — or indifference.

  “See, I wet it some more. I give water to the already-wet. Shall I piss on it? That is how much I care for this water.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “I've heard Bruxo's words, haven't you heard them? You keep them in that box. Don't you think them in your head?”

  “I haven't joined the Drug-Dance. Maybe that's why I don't think them yet. Could I join it? Could I take the drug?”

  “I don't know. You have to talk Xemahoa, and be Xemahoa. Otherwise it is a flight of birds bursting out of your brain, flying to all four directions, getting lost, never finding their way back.”

  We are still talking Portuguese, Kayapi and me. (Alone amongst the Xemahoa — because of his bastard birth — Kayapi has been outside, has travelled and speaks a foreign language.) Nevertheless, more and more Xemahoa words and phrases are creeping into our conversation.

  • • •

  . . . So ‘maka-i’ — as the Bruxo's drug is called — is a kind of fungus that grows down on the jungle floor amongst the roots of a certain tree. Kayapi will not say which (or doesn't know). The Bruxo and his assistant collect it ritually once a year, dry it, pound it to dust.

  The Xemahoa take it like another vegetable drug I heard about among the Indians north of Manaus, called ‘abana’. ‘Abana’ makes the body feel like a machine, a suit of armour, but with precise long-range vision and a vivid recollection of past events that present themselves to the imagination in cartoon film clips. Like ‘abana’ — or like cocaine for that matter — maka-i is snorted through the nostrils. The Bruxo taps out a tiny measure of the fungus dust into a length of hollow cane, then puffs it up the nose of the recipient.

  Women apparently don't take it. (But I thought the woman in the taboo hut was taking it — I must have been wrong.)

  “Why don't women take maka-i, Kayapi?”

  “Because women laugh the wrong way, Pee-air.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I told you there are two sorts of laughter.”

  He looked at me as if I was stupid, to forget. I guess social anthropologists are professional idiots, asking the questions any child should know the answer to. The trouble is, these are frequently the vital questions.

  “Women do not laugh the Soul Laugh, you mean?”

  “Consider, Pee-air, what is a woman, and what is a man. When the man opens his mouth to laugh, if he fails to laugh a strong soul laugh, it may be bad for him. Something evil may rush in past his tongue while his tongue is busy laughing, not speaking words. But what does a woman open, I ask you? Besides her mouth? Her legs. That's where she keeps her soul word, so that no badness will rush in there. She does not keep it in her mouth. So she can afford to giggle.”

  Could it be that this maka-i fungus would cause deformed births? Or acted as some kind of contraceptive? Or maybe caused abortions? With their depleted numbers, small need they have of contraceptives or abortions!

  “Do you mean that maka-i makes bad babies?”

  He shook his head.

  “That baby — the maka-i child — is not needed.”

  “Not needed? You mean maka-i stops babies from coming?”

  “I tell you — that baby is not needed. What that is needed, it will come. Then the woman will give birth, laughing.”

  But I didn't understand. Kayapi wandered off, shaking his head at my stupidity, leaving me as bewildered as before. He paddled his feet. I played back some Xemahoa speech, the A and the B varieties — the daily vernacular and the knotty embeddings of the drug speech in which the myths are told — myths which they trust, as Man has always hoped throughout history, will somehow reconcile the irreconcilable realities around them.

  • • •

  “Where's this tree the fungus grows on, Kayapi?”

  He seems to be drawing closer and closer to the Xemahoa, more remote from his mother's people and all outside concerns. He's stopping using Portuguese — speaking more and more Xemahoa to me, forcing me to pick it up.

  The growing possibility of communion with the tribe — of acceptance, at last — as the water rises, is drawing him deeper into Xemahoa thoughts and ways. Increasingly he finds it unnecessary and undesirable to stay outside the circle like a jackal snatching scraps.

  Fortunately I'm picking up almost enough of the ordinary brand of Xemahoa for us to conduct simple conversations in the tongue.

  At times I'm afraid — scared to my marrow.

  The Makonde tribespeople in Mozambique thought right along my own wavelength compared with these Xemahoa. It's a different universe of concepts here. A different dimension. A political crime is being committed against them by American capitalism and Brazilian chauvinism and the likelihood of their ever rising up with AK-47s and grenade launchers like the men of Mozambique — of their ever conceiving the political dimension — is zero, nil, less than nil. Yet my feelings of rage and impotence are almost swallowed up in the sense of intoxication about me: the sense of excited anticipation among the Xemahoa. Surely, says my rational mind, this must be an illusion. Surely!

  “What is the tree, Kayapi?” I asked in halting Xemahoa.

  He shrugged, turned his face away.

  “Will the water kill the maka-i plant?”

  “It lives in a small place. This much space.”

  The space between his outstretched hands.

  “Here — and here — this many places.”

  He held up his hand in the sign for ‘many’ among his mother's people — five fingers spread out.

  Five seems like many to some people in some cultures. Not to the Xemahoa however — which was what was frustrating about Kayapi making this sign.

  Xemahoa, uniquely among Indian tribal languages, has a rich vocabulary for numbers. They are the names of things that contain these numbers in some way or other: for instance a certain macaw's wing contains so many feathers in it. A different bird has a different number of feathers. Or perhaps I should say, so many feathers that the Xemahoa themselves consider significant.

  They hunt these birds for food, and feathers for decoration for the Drug Dance, so that this feather-number system strikes a special chord in their lives. Not in mine, alas. Kayapi looked at his hand making the sign for ‘many’ in disgust, struck it angrily against his side, pronounced the number-word in Xemahoa.

  But it was a bird I didn't know. And anyway I would have had no idea how many wing or tail feathers it had, never mind which of them were significant. I tried asking him in Portuguese, got no response.

  “It will die though?”

  “Floods come, floods go, it sleeps.”

  “This flood won't go away. This flood is forever.”

  “Maybe.”

  “How about if the Bruxo took a knife and dug up maka-i and took it somewhere else and put it in the ground again?”

  “Dig up a tree? Dig up the jungle? I tell you, you must treat maka-i with courtesy, politeness. You can't bully him, push him round. He goes away then. He only lives where he chooses — so many places.”

  He flashed his hand again. Then said the bird-number. Maybe this bird only had five feathers that counted as significant. Maybe the fungus could only colonize five peculiarly specialized places in this tangled jungle? But how was I to know!

  “Show me.” And I said the bird's name. “Show me that number here in the village. Show me the huts that make up so many.”

  I hoped that the circle of the village wasn't divided up into totem segments, and that this bird didn't also stand for one of these totem units. If that was the case, Kayapi might point out this bit of the village represented by the bird instead of the number of feather ‘counters’ the bird itself possessed. He gestured vaguely at the village, shook his head.

  “Where the Xemahoa live, maka-i lives nearby,” Kayapi said after thinking a while. “We eat the same soil that he eats
. And he eats our soil too.”

  ‘And he eats our soil too.’ Kayapi must he talking about two different sorts of soil — earth, and excrement.

  The Xemahoa are among the tribes that eat soil. A special kind of soil, that is. A speckled clay containing some necessary dietary minerals, I suppose. I had tasted some of the clay when Kayapi showed me it. He ate a handful himself. It tasted like cold condensed Campbells corn soup — if you didn't think of it as ‘dirt’. But did he mean right now that the Xemahoa not only ate the clay where the fungus grew, but also manured the fungus with their own nightsoil? — with their own shit? That seemed to be what he was saying: they were living in a symbiotic relationship with this fungus, just as it was living in a state of ecological symbiosis with its own neighbourhood — with the clay, with the tree roots.

  “Kayapi, you feed maka-i your own body soil?”

  He nodded, smiling. I'd been intelligent this time, not stupid.

  “Bruxo or his boy feeds it. They know the rules of courtesy for offering the food. But it's the body soil of all the Xemahoa.”

  “Including yours too?”

  It was a stupid remark. I'd touched a sore nerve there. It made him break off the discussion.

  • • •

  And so to another firelit dance.

  The men danced but didn't actually snort any maka-i this time. Only the Bruxo was high on the fungus powder, chanting the legends. As he chanted I followed him round, recording the singsong jumble of words. Later on, I'd try and organize them into a ‘sensible’ form.

  Kayapi was dancing round, but he paid no attention to me.

  Firelight flickered on the water — they'd built platforms for the bonfires. Gleams of red and yellow snaked across the ripples their stamping feet set in motion.

  After the first hour the Bruxo led them away from the village proper, out to the totem hut where the woman was hidden away making her baby.

  Kayapi forgave me today. Maybe he felt closer to thc tribe and less insecure after last night's dance.