A Tranquil Star (11 page)

Wilkins and Goldbaum had been away from their base camp for two days: they had been trying, in vain, to record the dialect of the Siriono
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of the east village, on the other side of the river, ten kilometers from the camp and from West Siriono. They saw the smoke and immediately started back: it was a dense black smoke, and it rose slowly into the evening sky, in the very direction where, with the help of the natives, they had built their wood-and-straw huts. They reached the riverbank in less than an hour, forded the muddy stream, and saw the disaster. The camp was no longer there: only smoking embers and scraps of metal, ashes and unidentifiable charred remains.

The village of West Siriono, five hundred meters away, was
on a bend in the river; the Siriono were waiting for them, in great excitement: they had tried to put out the fire, drawing water from the river using their crude pots and some buckets, a gift of the two Englishmen, but hadn't managed to salvage anything. Sabotage was unlikely: their relations with the Siriono were good, and, besides, the Siriono weren't that familiar with fire. Probably the generator had backfired—they had left it on during their absence to keep the refrigerator going—or perhaps had had a short circuit. Anyway, the situation was serious: the radio no longer functioned, and the nearest town was a twenty-day walk through the forest.

Up to that point the two ethnographers' contacts with the Siriono had been limited. Only through hard work, and by corrupting him with two cans of corned beef, had they managed to overcome the distrust of Achtiti, who was the most intelligent and curious man in the village; he had consented to answer their questions, speaking into the microphone of the tape recorder. But it had been, rather than a necessity or a job, an academic game: Achtiti, too, had taken it that way, and had obviously found it entertaining to teach the two the names of the colors, of the trees that surrounded the camp, of his friends, and of his women. Achtiti had learned a few words of English, and they a hundred-odd words with a harsh, indistinct sound, and when they tried to reproduce them, Achtiti beat his stomach with both hands in delight.

It was no longer a game. They did not feel capable of following a Siriono guide on a twenty-day march through a forest saturated with putrid water. They would have to
explain to Achtiti that he must send a messenger to Candelaria with a letter from them, in which they asked for a motorboat to come up the river to get them, and bring the messenger back to the tribe. It would not be easy to explain to Achtiti even what a letter was. In the meantime, there was nothing to do but ask the Siriono for their hospitality for three or four weeks.

As for hospitality, there were no problems: Achtiti immediately understood the situation, and offered the men a straw pallet, and two of the peculiar Siriono blankets, painstakingly woven from palm fibers and magpie feathers. They put off the explanations till the next day and slept deeply.

The following day, Wilkins prepared the letter for Suarez in Candelaria. He had the idea of drafting it in two versions, one written in Spanish for Suarez and one ideographic, so that both Achtiti and the messenger could get an idea of the purpose of the mission and put aside their evident suspicion. The second version showed the messenger himself walking southwest, along the river; twenty suns were intended to represent the length of the journey. Then came the city: tall huts, and among them many men and women in trousers and skirts and with hats on their heads. Finally, there was a bigger man, pushing the motorboat into the river, with three men on board and sacks of provisions, and the boat going back up the river; in this last image, the messenger was on board, stretched out and eating from a bowl.

Uiuna, the messenger chosen by Achtiti, examined the drawings carefully, asking for explanations with gestures. Was
it in the direction that he was pointing to on the horizon? And the distance? Finally he loaded a knapsack of dried meat on his back, took his bow and arrows, and set off barefoot, rapid and silent, with the undulating gait of the Siriono. Achtiti made solemn gestures with his head, as if to say that they could have confidence in Uiuna: Goldbaum and Wilkins looked at one another in bewilderment. It was the first time that a Siriono had traveled so far from the village and gone to a city, in so far as Candelaria, with its five thousand inhabitants, could be considered a city.

Achtiti had food brought to them: shrimp from the river, raw, four each, two japara nuts, and a big fruit with watery, tasteless juice.

Goldbaum said, “Maybe they'll be hospitable, and take care of us even if we don't work. In that case, which would be the most fortunate, they will give us the same ration as theirs, in quality and quantity, and it won't be easy. Or they may ask us to work with them, and we don't know how to hunt or plow. We have almost nothing left to give them. If Uiuna returns without the boat, or doesn't return at all, things will go badly. They'll throw us out, and then we'll die in the swamp; or they'll kill us themselves, as they do with their old people.”

“Without warning?”

“I don't think so, and they won't be violent. They'll ask us to follow their custom.”

Wilkins was silent for a few minutes, and then he said, “We have two days' worth of provisions, two watches, two ball
point pens, a lot of useless money, and the tape recorder. Everything in the camp has been destroyed, but we might be able to retemper the knife blades. Ah, yes, we also have two boxes of matches—maybe that's the item that will interest them most. We ought to pay our keep, right?”

The negotiations with Achtiti were laborious. He paid scant attention to the watches, was interested in neither the pens nor the money, and was frightened when he heard his voice come out of the tape recorder. He was fascinated by the matches: after a few failed attempts he was able to light one, but he wasn't convinced that it was a real flame until he held a finger over it and got burned. He lighted another, and declared with evident satisfaction that if he brought it close to the straw it would catch fire. Then he stretched out one hand with a questioning air: could he take all the matches? Goldbaum quickly retrieved them: he showed Achtiti that the box was already partly used up and that the other, though full, was small. He made a gesture that indicated the two of them. He showed Achtiti a match, and then the sun, and the sun's path through the sky: he would give him a match for every day of sustenance. For a long time Achtiti remained in doubt, squatting on his heels, humming in a nasal singsong; then he went into a hut, and came out holding an earthenware bowl and a bow. He placed the bowl on the ground; he picked up some claylike earth, mixed it with water, showed the two men that the paste could be modeled into the shape of the bowl, and, finally, pointed to himself. Then he took the bow and caressed it affectionately along its length: it was
smooth, symmetrical, strong. He showed the two a bundle of long, straight branches that were lying a little distance away, and had them observe that the quality and the fiber of the wood were the same. He returned to the hut, and this time came out with two obsidian scrapers, one big and one small, and a rough block of obsidian.

The two observed him with curiosity and bewilderment. Achtiti picked up a flint stone, and showed them that, if he struck with precisely aimed small blows along particular contours of the block, it flaked cleanly, without breaking; in a few minutes of work, he had made a scraper, maybe still needing to be refined, but already usable. Then Achtiti took two branches, each a little less than a meter long, and began to scrape one of them. He worked with purpose and skill, in silence or humming, his mouth closed: after half an hour the branch was tapered at one end, and periodically Achtiti checked it, bending it over one knee to feel if it was flexible enough. Perhaps he perceived a trace of impatience in the attitude or comments of the two men, because he interrupted his work, went off among the huts, and returned accompanied by a boy. He entrusted the second branch and another scraper to him, and from then on they worked together. Indeed, the boy was as skillful as Achtiti; it was evident that for him, too, making a bow was not a new job. When the two branches were reduced to the right size and shape, Achtiti began to smooth them with a rough stone that to Wilkins appeared to be a fragment of a whetstone.

“He doesn't seem to be in a hurry,” said Goldbaum.

“The Siriono are never in a hurry. Hurry is a sickness of ours,” Wilkins answered.

“They have other sicknesses, however.”

“Of course. But nowhere is it said that a civilization without sickness is possible.”

“What do you suppose he wants from us?”

“I think I understand,” Wilkins said. Achtiti continued to scrape the wood diligently, working around all sides and testing the surface with his fingers and his eyes, squinting, because he was a little farsighted. Finally, he tied the two untapered ends together, overlapping them for a short distance, and between the pointed ends he stretched a string of twisted gut: he had a certain air of pride, and showed the two that, if you pinched the string, it resonated for a long time, like a harp. He sent the boy to get an arrow, took aim, and shot: the arrow stuck quivering in the trunk of a palm fifty meters away. Then, with an emphatic gesture, he offered the bow to Wilkins, indicating with a nod that it was his: he should hold it, try it out. Then he took two matches from the open box, offered one to Wilkins and one to Goldbaum, squatted on the ground, wrapped his arms around his knees, and waited, but without impatience.

Goldbaum, with the match in his hand, was speechless. Then he said, “I think I understand, too.”

“Yes,” Wilkins answered. “As a lecture, it's clear enough: we wretched Siriono, if we don't have a scraper, we make one; and if we are without a bow, with the scraper we make the bow, and maybe we also make it smooth, because then it's a
pleasure to look at and hold in your hand. You foreign sorcerers, who steal men's voices and put them in a box, you were left without matches: come on, make some.”

“So?”

“We'll have to explain our limits.” With two voices, or, rather, with four hands, they tried to convince Achtiti that although it's true that a match is small, much smaller than a bow (this was a point that Achtiti seemed to consider important), the head of the match contained an ingredient (how to explain it?) that dwelt far away, in the sun, in the depths of the earth, beyond the rivers and the forest. They were painfully conscious of the inadequacy of their defense: Achtiti stuck out his lips at them, shook his head, and said things to the boy that made him laugh.

“He must be telling him that we are bad sorcerers, scoundrels who only know how to talk big,” said Goldbaum. Achtiti was a methodical man: he said something else to the boy, who grabbed the bow and some arrows and stood at a distance of twenty paces with a resolute air; he himself went off and returned with one of the knives found at the site of the base camp, which the fire had warped and severely oxidized. He picked up one of the watches off the ground and held it out to Wilkins. Wilkins, with the pale face of one who shows up unprepared for an important exam, made a sign of impotence. He opened the watchcase and showed Achtiti the minute gears, the thin balance wheel that never stopped, the tiny rubies, and then his own fingers: impossible! The same, or almost, happened with the tape recorder, which,
however, Achtiti didn't want to touch: he made Wilkins pick it up himself, and stopped up his ears for fear of hearing his voice. And the knife? Achtiti seemed to want them to understand that it was a sort of makeup exam, that is, an elementary test, basic enough for any simpleton, sorcerer or no: go ahead, make a knife. A knife, look, isn't a kind of little beast with a beating heart, which is easy to kill but very difficult to bring back to life: it doesn't move, it doesn't make noise, and it's got only two parts—the Siriono themselves had three or four of them, which they had bought ten years earlier and had paid very little for, just an armful of papayas and two caiman skins.

“You answer—I've had enough.” Goldbaum displayed less talent for mimickry and diplomacy than his colleague. He waved his arms vainly, in a gesture that not even Wilkins understood, and Achtiti, for the first time, burst into laughter; but it was not a reassuring laugh.

“What are you trying to tell him?”

“That perhaps we would manage to make a knife, but that we need some special rocks, rocks that burn and that aren't found in this country, plus time and a hot fire.”

“I didn't understand, but he probably did. He was right to laugh: he must have thought that we just wanted to gain time until they come to get us. It's the number-one trick of all sorcerers and prophets.”

Achtiti called out, and seven or eight robust warriors appeared. They seized the two men and shut them up in a hut of solid tree trunks. There were no openings; light entered
only through the chinks in the roof. Goldbaum asked, “Do you think we'll be here long?” Wilkins answered, “I fear no; I hope yes.”