The Kingdom of Speech (12 page)

Racist
…out of that came the modern equivalent of the Roman Inquisition's declaring Galileo “vehemently suspect of heresy” and placing him under house arrest for the last eight years of his life, making it impossible for him to continue his study of the universe. But the Inquisition was at least wide open about what it was doing. In Everett's case, putting an end to his life's work was a clandestine operation. Not long after Colapinto's
New Yorker
article appeared, Everett was in the United States teaching at Illinois State University when he got a call from a canary with a PhD informing him that a Brazilian government agency known as FUNAI, the Portuguese acronym for the National Indian Foundation, was denying him permission to return to the Pirahã…on the grounds that what he had written about them was…
racist
. He was dumbfounded.

Now he was convinced that the truth squad was waging outright war. He began writing a counterattack faster than he had ever written anything in his life. He didn't know, but wouldn't have been surprised to learn, that Nevins, Pesetsky, and Rodrigues were already at work, converting their online carpet bomb on LingBuzz into a veritable hecatomb to run in
Language
and snuff out Everett's heresy once and for all.

There was no rushing
Language
's editors, however. They  found the piece too long. By the time the squad rewrote the piece…and
Language,
never in a hurry, edited it…and the article, bearing the old LingBuzz title, “Pirahã Exceptionality: A Reassessment,” seemed far enough along to make
Language
's May 2009 issue
144
—

—Everett executed a
coup de scoop
.

In November of 2008,
a full seven months before the truth squad's scheduled hecatomb time for Everett, he, the scheduled mark, did a stunning thing. He maintained his mad pace and beat them into print—with one of the handful of popular books ever written on linguistics:
Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes,
an account of his and his family's thirty years with the Pirahã.
147
It was dead serious in an academic sense. He loaded it with scholarly linguistic and anthropological reports of his findings in the Amazon. He left academics blinking…and nonacademics with eyes wide open, staring. The book broke free of its scholarly binding right away.

Margaret Mead had her adventures among the Samoans, and Bronislaw Malinowski had his among the Trobriand Islanders. But Everett's adventures among the Pirahã kept blowing up into situations too deadly to be written off as “adventures.”

There were more immediate ways to die in the rainforests than anyone who had never lived there could possibly imagine. The constant threat of death gave even Everett's scholarly observations a grisly edge…especially compared to those of linguists who never left their aerated offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In the rainforests, mosquitoes transmitting dengue fever, yellow fever, chikungunya, and malaria rose up by the cloudful from dusk to dawn, as numerous as the oxygen atoms they flew through, or so it felt. No matter what precautions you took, if you lived there for three months or more, you were guaranteed infection by mosquitoes penetrating your skin with their proboscises' forty-seven cutting edges, first injecting their saliva to prevent the puncture from clotting and then drinking your blood at their leisure. The saliva causes the itching that follows.

In 1979, barely a year into the Everetts' thirty years with the Pirahã, Keren and their older daughter, Shannon, came down with high fevers, the shakes, the chills, the itches, the whole checklist from back when Everett once had typhoid fever. So for five days he treated them with antibiotics from his missionary medicine kit, as instructed. The fevers did not abate. Keren's temperature rose to the very tip of the thermometer. Their only hope was to head for the hospital at the provincial capital, Porto Velho, the nearest outpost of civilization, four hundred miles inland on another river, the Madeira.

They set out on the Maici, the entire family—Everett, Keren, Shannon, Kristene, who was four, and Caleb, only two—crammed together in an aluminum canoe Everett had borrowed from a visiting Catholic missionary. All it had was a 6.5-horsepower outboard motor. In a tinny, tiny, tippy canoe overloaded like this, every moment felt like the last moment before capsizing into a jungle river fifty feet deep. Keren was already delirious. She slapped at both Shannon and Everett. It took ten hours to reach the point where they had to cross overland from the Maici to the Madeira. Then, a miracle—the kindness of strangers—four young Brazilians appeared from out of nowhere and put Keren and Shannon in hammocks and hung the hammocks from logs they slung over their shoulders fore and aft and hauled them over to the Madeira.

A day and a night had gone by. On the Madeira, as muddy as the Mississippi and as wide at the mouth, they caught a ship with three decks, one above the other. It went up and down the river like a public bus. They had a three-day trip ahead of them…with no cabins or any other form of privacy except for a single bathroom on the first deck (for about two hundred passengers on a boat designed for ninety-nine, maximum) and no seats; instead, grossly overcrowded ranks of hammocks bearing a jam-up of people hanging shank to flank from the ceilings with their hummocky hips choking the air…

By now, Keren and Shannon were both suffering from severe diarrhea in addition to the fever and pain. Fortunately, Everett had brought along a chamber pot. Right there in the midst of the other passengers' hammock-swaddled bottoms, Keren and Shannon took turns sitting on the pot. Everett wrapped a blanket around each one like a tent with a head popping out at the top. The Brazilians couldn't keep their eyes off the gringos who were gushing gringo misery out of their hindsides. They were disgusted and riveted. They twisted over sideways in their hammocks so as not to miss a moment of the spectacle. The redheaded, red-bearded gringo kept taking the pot of sloshing diarrheic rot through crowds of passengers, constantly bending way down with his reeking pot to pass under the hammocks or standing up with his reeking pot and leaning this way and that to hog-wrestle his way through the midair clutter of human haunches to reach the railing and dump the contents into the Madeira and weave his way back through the crowd with the chamber pot, knowing it would be no time before he had to slosh through them again with a potful of humiliation.

The spectators talked about them constantly, out loud and in full voice, apparently assuming that the gringos couldn't understand Portuguese. But Everett could.

“She's going to die, isn't she,” one would cry, nodding toward Keren, who was down from 105 pounds to about 70, if that, and looked like the Red Death with a raging fever. “Of course she is,” another would say. “Malaria does quick work with a skinnybones like that one.”

Everett would experience a very small, rueful lift of superiority. These smug Brazilians obviously couldn't recognize typhoid fever when it was right in their faces.

People could already tell that Keren was dying!
One look
and they knew
that
much! Everett implored the captain, a one-armed Brazilian who was also the owner, to go faster, straight to Porto Velho. Skip the stops in between! My wife is
dying!

“Look, comrade,” said the one-armed Brazilian, without so much as a trace of fellow feeling, “if your wife is supposed to die, that's that. I won't speed up for you.”

In what seemed like barely an hour the ship pulled into shore in the middle of nowhere and stopped. No passengers were getting on or off. There was no platform and barely a dock. Unaccountably, the entire crew had slipped on red jerseys, even the one-armed captain. With a
whoop
they all left the ship and climbed up a steep embankment. They looked like a lot of little ladybugs on the way up. At the top, men in green jerseys awaited them.

Godalmighty—they were stopping to play soccer!—and obviously they had arranged it well in advance.

Keren, her face a fiery red, slipped in and out of consciousness. It was two hours before the one-armed captain and his crew returned to the ship, still togged out in soccer gear, in high spirits, laughing, making jokes, jolly jolly jolly flirting with pretty girls among the passengers.

An eternity it took, but they finally reached the hospital in Porto Velho.

“My wife and my daughter have typhoid fever,” Everett announced.

The doctor took a good look at Keren and Shannon and said, “Looks like malaria to me.” He took drops of blood from Keren's and Shannon's fingers and put them on slides and examined them with a microscope…and began chuckling.

Indignant, Everett said, “What are you laughing at?”

“They have malaria, all right,” he said, “and not just a little.”

He laughed some more, apparently at Everett's ignorance. What made it even funnier was that Keren's and Shannon's bloodstreams had the highest levels of malaria he had ever come across in his whole career, and he treated malaria patients every day
hahahaaaa!

Every doctor, every nurse, every AD (Almost a Doctor), told Everett that Shannon might make it, but it was too late for Keren. He had wasted so much time with his own AD diagnosis of typhoid fever, she would never survive.

But after two weeks of intensive care, she did—and would probably recover entirely…in time…which turned out to be six months' recuperation in her parents' home. Then she headed right back to the Pirahã and Everett.

Everett tells that story early in the book…then doesn't hesitate to turn to such matters as experiments on Pirahã numerosity, i.e., linguistic and psychological expression and control of numerical concepts. He weaves these dissertations throughout
Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes
…and it is hard to come away from the book without feeling they were just as important to him as the story of his life. And they probably were. They gave his saga some very necessary gravity…even as the story became more intense. The most intense was the night of the cachaça madness. This was three years into the Everetts' life among the Pirahã.

Cachaça is a liquor distilled from sugarcane. Brazilians had warned Everett about cachaça, but he had never actually had to deal with the problem before. Everett and his entire family—Keren, Shannon, Kristene, and Caleb—lived in one of the very few structures that rated the designation
house
in the Pirahã area of the jungles along the Maici River. It was built atop a four-foot-high platform. In the middle of the house was a storeroom. One night about nine o'clock the whole family was asleep when Everett heard loud talk and laughter on the riverbank.
Drunken
talk and laughter, if he knew anything about it. So he got up and went down to check it out. A boat such as Brazilian river traders use, a big one, had pulled into shore, and ten or twelve Pirahã were on the deck laughing and carrying on. They fell silent when they saw Everett approaching. There was no visual evidence of anybody drinking. So Everett settled for giving the captain, a Brazilian, a little lecture in Portuguese about how selling alcohol in this part of the Amazon was illegal and punishable by heavy fines and two years in jail. It occurred to him later that he must have sounded terribly officious, since technically he was nothing but a nosy American with a visa, commander of nothing. By the time he went back to bed, the noise had resumed; but he managed to fall asleep, only to be awakened an hour or so later by two men speaking in Pirahã inside a small house the Catholic missionary, by then departed, had built no more than a hundred feet away.

One Pirahã said, “I am not afraid. I kill the Americans. We kill them, the Brazilian gives us a new shotgun. He told me that.”

“You kill them, then?” said the other.

“Yes. They go to sleep. I shoot them.”

A bolt of panic through the solar plexus. Everett can tell they're merely waiting to work up the nerve or the cachaça blood level to do it. What earthly chance do he and Keren and the three children have? Exactly one, Everett concludes. He leaves the house immediately, as is, in his shorts and flip-flops. God, it's dark out here, blacker than black, and he didn't dare bring a flashlight because they might see him coming. Very odd!—no campfires such as the Pirahã keep lit out in front of their huts and lean-tos at night. (He would learn later that all the Pirahã women had put out the fires and fled deep into the jungle the moment they heard the word “cachaça.”) Everett bursts into the drunk Pirahã's little hideaway next door with a big grin and, in Pirahã, gives them the merriest, liveliest “Hey guys! What's up!” any walking dead man ever exclaimed to his executioners. Without any pause at all he continues drenching them with the most hyperexuberant happy patter-blather imaginable, as if there had never been any closer comrades on this earth.
Oh, the times we've had together!
The drunk Pirahã stare at him without a word, utterly, boozily stupefied…as he gathers up all the weapons, two shotguns, two machetes, bows and arrows, and leaves chundering still more ebullient, chummy-honey-rummy talk all over them, flashing still more inexplicably ecstatic grins, even warbling bird words so sublimely that the most lyrical nightingale would exhale with hopeless envy—and once out the door and into the dark, cradling the cache of weaponry in his arms, he runs, actually
runs,
hobbledy, staggerly, stumbly, jackleggedly, back to his own house, where he stashes the cache in the storeroom, save for one shotgun. He removes the gun's shells. Then he has Keren and the children go into the storeroom and lock it from within. He remains on the platform just outside the door to the house and sits on a bench with the shotgun in his lap. Not even the most schnockered, hopelessly cachaça'd Pirahã can miss it.

He can hear Pirahã running toward him in the dark, ululating devastation. Other voices keep warning them, “Watch out! Dan's got weapons!”…weapons—
plural
—as if he's a one-Crooked-Head army. He's conscious of an arrow whizzing by, but not aimed at him. They don't dare shoot arrows at the one-Crooked-Head army. By 4:00 a.m. the Pirahã yahoos have headed down the riverbank, judging by the noise. Everett, exhausted, a nervous wreck, goes into the storeroom with everybody else, collapses asleep—

—
thump crash arrggggh
more
thuds groans
agonized
grunts
…on all sides of the storeroom only
one inch
away—that being the thickness of the storeroom wall right behind them, right before them, on both sides of them—
one inch
away—when
splat hock jaaaggh thump yaaak groan eeeowww
the whole storeroom shakes, shudders, trampolines on the platform…the bastards could break into this little room
just like that
if they knew we were in here, but now they're bent only upon beating each other senseless
thump crack groan ooof ummmph.
Everett has the shotgun with no shells to—what?—scare them with? There are so many Everetts young and old crammed in here, how can he possibly—

Gradually the fighting subsides…the house grows silent…they must have beaten each other into jelly by now…not a sound in the village, either…light visible through the storeroom's minute joined apertures…Everett dares open the hatchway…broad daylight…everywhere, an unnatural quiet…the whole village has sunk into a cachaça'd hangover.

Everett and Keren go through the house, expecting the worst. It was and it wasn't. There wasn't a whole lot of physical damage. Most of the damage the Pirahã had inflicted upon each other's cachaça'd selves. There were smears of blood everywhere—on the walls, on the beds…pools of blood on the floors…cachaça had turned their happy, laughing selves into blithering maniacs out for blood.