Blinding Light (11 page)

“He's also a shaman,” Steadman said.

Don Pablo now appeared again. He wore a smock and a crown woven of slender vines and a row of stiff feathers. His eyes were wounded too, one weepier than the other, which was bloodshot and turned inward. The ailment made him seem more of a brother. Yet the shaman had a clumsy agility, and while he was anything but deft, his gestures were the more effective for being approximate, commanding attention and asserting control through his show of clumsiness. The Secoya near him were watchful in a shy, respectful way, giving him room as the old man worked his fingers like antennae, positioning them as though he had eyes on his fingertips.

Nestor signaled for them to follow when the old man turned and shuffle-kicked toward the stamped and smooth center of the village, where there were pots and baskets. Before the smoky fire were logs arranged like benches.

“Sit down. Have a cold drink.”

Hearing this, Hernán dragged the blue plastic cooler toward the log, opened it, and passed out cans of soda. The white visitors drank, looking exhausted in their crumpled clothes, while the Secoya stared, naked, saying nothing, the children's noses dripping. Some men lying in hammocks humped and rolled over and, still horizontal, stared sideways at the strangers.

The pile of pots, the baskets of cut vine stems, the enamel bowls, on a shelved frame of lashed bamboo, suggested cooking, but nothing was on the boil. Near this paraphernalia some women knelt, grating manioc.

“This would make a super credenza,” Janey said, gripping the bamboo frame. Then with a pitying smile she said, “But I peeked inside one of those huts. You know, they don't accessorize at all.”

Irritably, Sabra said to Nestor, “Are we supposed to sleep here?”

“We're putting up hammocks, or you can find a space on that platform back there under the ceiba tree.”

“What about washing? What about eating?” Wood said.

“I was going to give you some of the background,” Nestor said. “This is a spiritual thing, like religion and medical combined. There is so many aspects. Maybe you like to know?”

“Yes, all,” Manfred said.

“Skip the background,” Hack said, lifting his elbows, creating space around him. “I'm going for a swim.”

“We have manta rays in the river,” Nestor said. “Hernán got stung by a ray and he was in his hammock for three months.”

Janey said, “What about din-dins? I'm peckish.”

Nestor leaned over and worked his mustache at her, smiling in toothy incomprehension.

“Hungry,” she said.

Nestor spoke in Secoya, and one of the woman grating manioc replied to him without looking up. Still pushing the stick of manioc against the grater, she called out. A child's voice sounded from the direction of the big tree and the smoky hut, and within a minute two young boys hurried into the clearing with a pole through the handle of a large blackened stewpot. A girl followed, carrying tin bowls and spoons.

“What is it?” Janey asked.

“Caldo
of yuca and
pavo
.”

“Any pork in it? Porco?” Sabra said.

“No
puerco
Nestor said.

Manfred said,
“Pavo
means a wild turkey. A kind of stew.”

As the soup was ladled, Janey lifted her bowl and said, “I'll have a wee scrap more. There's masses going spare.”

Hack said, “When do we get to drink the ayahuasca?”

“Don Pablo wants to speak to you,” Nestor said.

The old man adjusted his coronet of plaited vines and feathers, and he stood behind Nestor, shuffling his feet, muttering. He put on a pair of cracked and twisted glasses.

“Look, he's got super gig-lamps,” Janey said.

But the man removed his glasses and began rubbing his seeping eye with the knuckles of one hand.

“He says tonight is not good. You have just arrived. Some of you are angry. You must dissolve anger from your life. The women”—Nestor paused for Don Pablo to speak, and then he resumed—“he believes that one gringo woman here is having her moon.”

“And that gringo woman would be me,” Sabra said, and sat primly, her eyes glistening with annoyance that she had been singled out. She stared at a small dirty boy crouching in the dust near her and addressed him. “I'm unclean. I'm tainted. I've got the curse. They're worse than Hasidim!”

“Beetle, please,” Wood said, cautioning her.

“In Secoya culture, sharing in a ceremony while having your moon is taboo. It is too much purification. Too much light, Don Pablo says. It can make the shaman very ill. He will see the huts dripping blood. So”—Nestor spoke directly to Sabra—“please keep away from the kitchen area. The food. Other people's dishes.”

“Don't worry. I'll read my book instead. It's more exciting than this garbage.”

Wood put his tin bowl of stew on the ground and crept beside her and awkwardly put his arm around her. She began softly to cry. “It's okay, Beetle. Let it out.”

Manfred said, “They have rules. They must be obeyed.”

“You Germans know all about obeying rules,” Sabra said.

His face gleaming with sweat, his big teeth working, Manfred said, “That's right, I am a wicked German who started the World War and made all the camps, and you are a good person who does nossing bad.”

“Woody, tell him to stop,” Sabra said through her tears.

But Manfred was on his knees hissing at her, “I have been to Ramallah! You have seen Ramallah?”

“Oh, do belt up,” Janey said.

Then Nestor rose and gestured with his hands to quiet the squabblers. He said, “Don Pablo wants to welcome you.”

The old man was muttering behind him, shaking his head, and when he nodded some wisps swayed in his feathered coronet.

“Don Pablo has been a shaman for many years. In Secoya, the word
paje
is shaman. It means ‘the man who embodies all experience.' He says that some of the people he was treating were witches. A shaman always has enemies, because he is accused of being responsible for people's deaths.”

“Where's he from?” Hack asked.

Nestor translated the question, listened to Don Pablo, then said to the group, “He didn't understand, but his answer is interesting anyway. He believes the Secoya were descended from a certain group of monkeys in Santa Maria—downriver from here, where two rivers meet.” The fire had died down, and as the crackling had diminished the jungle sounds had increased. Though they could only have been insects, they sounded to Steadman like a chorus of crazed birds—the honks and squawks issuing from the darkness around them.

“His father was also a shaman. He taught Don Pablo and Himaro how to use ayahuasca. Don Pablo became a
paje
because he was very sick. He healed himself and became a healer. The best way to become a
paje—
maybe the only way—is to be very ill and follow that path.” Nestor listened to Don Pablo and spoke again. “Ayahuasca is like death. When you drink it you die. The soul leaves the body. But this soul is an eye to show you the future. You will see your grandchildren. When the trance is over the soul is returned.” Don Pablo was still talking. Nestor said, as though summarizing, “He talks about ‘the eye of understanding.'”

Manfred said, “Please ask Don Pablo to explain the meaning of this.”

The question was relayed to Don Pablo, who turned away and answered the question while facing the trees and the darkness and the insect chatter.

“This eye can see things that can't be seen physically. Some people have this third eye already developed. And for others the eye of understanding can be acquired through ayahuasca or some other certain jungle plants.”

Steadman sat feeling hopeful, and as he was listening another old man appeared, wearing a yellow smock, a feather coronet, and a necklace of red beads and animal teeth. He spoke to Nestor.

Nestor said, “This is Don Esteban. He is a Kofan. He wants to tell you that he learned to speak Secoya in one night from a parrot after drinking a huge amount of
yajé”

“Is
yajé
the same tipple as ayahuasca?” Janey asked Hack, who said, “I guess.”

“Don Pablo can turn into a tiger. He can visit other planets. He has been to many planets—he makes beautiful pictures of them. He can see into a diseased body.”

“Who would have known—he's a fucking astronaut,” Hack said under his breath.

In a seemingly cautionary way, Don Pablo spoke, and Nestor translated: “A flower may not talk, but there is a spirit in it that sees everything. That is the soul of the plant, which makes it alive.”

Don Esteban added a thought, then shrugged.

Nestor smiled. “And, yes, a flower may talk.”

Without another word, Don Pablo and Don Esteban signaled to Himaro and slipped away into the darkness. Nestor lit a torch from the embers of the fire and led the visitors down the path.

“Since I'm unclean, I'm going to my room,” Sabra said.

Wood hugged her. “You don't have a room, Beetle.”

Hurrying ahead, Nestor had planted his torch at the entrance to the high sleeping platform, the light whirling with small white moths. Fuzzy knuckle-sized insects buzzed and bumped the lighted posts. Watching the others approach it slowly, Steadman could see their reluctance in the way their dusty shorts were pinched between their bobbing buttocks.

F
ROM HIS ROPE HAMMOCK
strung between two trees, Steadman lay as if trussed in the rope mesh, seeing the others thrashing on the sleeping platform, the Wilmutts and the Hacklers, backlit by the lanterns and surrounded by clouds of fluttering moths; all night their muttered complaints.

Steadman said in a drawling voice, “Sure you think it's romantic at first but wait till you sit there five days on a sore ass sleeping in Indian shacks and eating hoka and some hunka nameless meat, and all night you hear them fiddle-fucking with the motor.” He paused and listened to the insect howl. “Burroughs was right. Tomorrow the river will be higher.”

Manfred had slipped away. Perhaps he knew how persistently he talked in his sleep, asking questions, making declarations, usually in German, sometimes in English. Steadman had heard the gabble, and though he could not understand any of it, there seemed a coherence in its slurring narrative, like a story that Manfred had mumbled in his sleep many times before. But Steadman also guessed that Manfred had found a more comfortable hut or a better sleeping mat, or perhaps a companion.

Just as likely he had found a candle stump somewhere so that he could study his book of medicinal plants. The man was irritating, but in his reading and his note taking and his pedantry, the tenacity of his tactless honesty with the others, he was a reproach to Steadman, who swung in his hammock, regretting that his own notebook was so neglected. He told himself that he had refrained from writing so as not to appear conspicuous to the others, who might recognize him as the author and pester him with questions.

In her own hammock next to Steadman, Ava said, “That annoying woman is still reading your book.”

Dawn came early but dimly, the tentative sun not penetrating the trees but lighting portions of sky, which were visible as tiny blue patches through the canopy of leaves. Beneath those boughs the air was pale green, gassy-looking, and filled with flitting insects and lazy filaments that swayed like the torn veils of spider webs, yet they were high up, draping the green air, where Steadman had never imagined spiders to live.

The birds had begun shrieking long before dawn, and one had a monotonous voice of objection that nagged through the jungle. Nimble, darting, unswattable flies kept returning to settle on and sting Steadman's face. Ants were everywhere, large and small, trails of them, clusters of them, black glossy ones, tiny flitting ones, some no bigger than sand grains. They gathered on Steadman's sandals, delved into his bag. The heat woke them; the heat seemed to make all the insects active: biting flies, white moths, big furry beetles, foraging wasps, and glossy cockroaches with tortoiseshell wings.

Walking toward the covered platform with Ava, Steadman picked up a fist-sized snail that was leaving a track of slime across the beaten-down earth.

“
Desayuno
he said to a small Secoya girl who was watching him, and seeing her look of wonderment, he realized she did not speak Spanish.

The others were seated cross-legged on the platform, looking fatigued and miserable in rumpled clothes.

“My hair's a rat's nest,” Janey said. She appealed to Ava. “We didn't get a wink of sleep. This whole bally place is a tip. We're so fed up we're about ready to leave.”

Ava said, “I slept like a log.”

Nestor was mounting the ramp to the platform. In great contrast to the visitors, he looked rested and bright-eyed, his thick hair combed straight back, and wore a clean T-shirt and jeans.

“I want to give you some instructions from Don Pablo,” Nestor said.

Hack said, “Enough with the lectures.”

Nestor stared at him, saying nothing, but with ironic jeering lips. Though he was a big man, his face was narrow, his black eyes set deep in his face, and he was the more intimidating for being calm and saying nothing until Hack looked away.

“I want to suggest to you,” Nestor said, “that you are not home now. You are in Succumbios province.” With his tongue between his teeth, he added, “Oriente.”

Now Manfred appeared on the ramp, looking like a commando in his jungle gear. He swung himself onto the platform. He too looked rested, another reproach to the others who had suffered in the night. He was carrying a tin cup. He sat and sipped from it and swallowed with a hearty sigh.

“Ecuador
café.
Very delicious!”

Steadman smiled to see how Manfred aroused the hatred of the others, and how Manfred enjoyed it.

“Herr Mephistos,” Hack said, gesturing at Manfred's shoes.