The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts (12 page)

The Navantes had no jobs and did no work beyond cultivating bananas, corn, maize and ground nuts. The rest of the time they amused themselves. The young women made elaborate hammocks, whilst the old women made chicha by chewing cassava and spitting it into a bowl in order to ferment it. The men spent most of their days hunting and fishing. In his time with them Aurelio came to realise that in fact food very nearly does press itself in one’s mouth in the jungle after all. Virtually every animal was edible, including the haruzam toad; there were forty-seven varieties of edible nuts, including the wonderful castanas, and they had several ingenious methods of fishing. One of these necessitated standing like a stork in the water with bow and arrow (the latter being two metres long). Another
method was to erect a barrier across the river like a wickerwork hurdle. Some would wait one side of the hurdle in their piroque canoes whilst the others would thrash the water and drive the panicking fish to leap over it into the canoes. Another method was to beat the water with ushchachera branches, so that the poisoned fish simply floated to the surface to be harvested. The variety of fish was enormous; piranha was very tasty but full of irritating bones. The bufeo was considered a friend and only killed when one wanted the skin of the female genitals to make an aphrodisiac talisman. The piraruca was the largest freshwater fish in the world and took a very long time for even a whole village to eat. Cramp-fish was not eaten for fear of paralysis, candiru were nearly two metres long and made a good feast, characin had tubes in their upper jaws for the fangs of the lower to nest in, and their teeth or those of the traira were excellent for the extraction of thorns and general surgery. The mailed catfish was delicious when grilled on palm leaves, but the electric eel was to be studiously avoided; when a good catch was made the returning fisherman would whoop with joy as he approached the aldeia so that everyone could run out to admire it. To keep it fresh it would be buried in wet sand.

When it came to hunting animals the Navantes very rarely used the cerebetana blowpipe with darts tipped with curare. Instead they were very skilled archers. They had a method of holding a sheaf of arrows in the left hand that gripped the bow so that one could keep up a rapid fire. Arrows were very difficult to make, and this was probably the only reason that they expended so much effort in becoming expert. The arrival of missionaries was always greeted with enthusiasm because after they had been killed or driven out one could extract the nails from their cabins to use as arrow heads, these being much better than bones. They hunted for four reasons; for food, to get rid of dangerous predators, for tools, and for adornment. The capybara, a kind of mentally-retarded guinea pig and the largest rodent in the world, provided teeth that made perfect chisels, and they would hunt birds with blunt arrows. They did this to pull out their prettiest feathers to make acangatara
headdresses. When the stunned birds felt better they were either set free or kept in captivity to become dejected feather-farms. Sooner or later they would die of incomprehension.

The Navantes were particularly fond of eating parrots, ciapu (banana soup), bushmaster snakes, turtles’ eggs dug out of praias, curassows, both tufted and razor-billed, wild honey, an obnoxious greasy soup called piquia which they gave to unwanted visitors, and monkeys of all descriptions which they shot with four-pronged arrows and which looked alarmingly like children when skinned, and were full of intestinal parasites.

They regarded animals as equals, neither inferior nor superior, and always kept large numbers of unlikely pets. Some animals they would not eat at all, such as the sun-bittern that ate lice, or the urutau bird that was the special guardian of maidens, or squirrels, which they associated with sleep. They showed no repugnance at eating vast numbers of leafcutter ants, wasp grubs and locusts, which, when toasted, tasted pleasantly of aniseed.

Hunting for ants was one of the few times when women would remove their uluri. This was a little triangle of bark with sides about three centimetres long, attached to a plaited thread worn around the waist. From the lower apex of the triangle ran another plaited thread that passed snugly between the outer labia and was attached above the buttocks at the back. The purpose of the uluri was to draw attention to the genitals, since the triangle acted like a little signpost towards them. They were considered to be the mark of the post-pubertal woman, and she was indecently undressed without one. Women always had a spare triangle, just in case. Both men and women also wore necklaces made of about a thousand tiny circles of snailshells. The women would take six months to make these, by grinding the shells on stones until they were very small and thin. Each circle would be drilled in the centre with a tooth or a piece of hardwood, and then strung on wild cotton. Boys usually wore one of these necklaces around the waist, and men usually wore nothing at all except perhaps a necklace of jaguar claws or
bark ringlets around their ankles. They used to spend hours delousing and deticking each other, just like the occitan cathars of medieval times, according to pecking order, lice and ticks being the sole parasites that resisted removal during their frequent daily baths. The only sense in which they were ever clothed was when they were plastered from head to foot in the pigments they employed for celebrations. Piquia oil (as used in the soup) was mixed with anatto to make yellows and reds, white was made of wood ash, and genipapo was excellent for blues and blacks. These dyes made their naturally light skins tobacco brown and also helped to keep away the hordes of stinging insects, such as buffalo gnats, and the sandflies that caused lechmaniosis leprosy. In their anxiety to be as unclothed as possible, the people would conscientiously depilate their whole bodies, excepting their heads, with their fingers dipped in wood-ash, giving rise to the popular myth that Amazonian Indians are naturally hairless.

Aurelio, despite his plait, assimilated very quickly into the life of the tribe. He learned from them the art of living a perfectly simple life without having to do too much work; he learned how to be busy without being industrious, and to take a childish joy in simple things, such as ‘toke-toke’, their word for sexual frolics.

Aurelio acquired the art of happiness; the Navante idea of heaven was that it was exactly the same as earth, except that one would meet there those who had gone before, and also the tribal ancestor Mavutsinin. Aurelio learned from the paje the full art of medicine, and the methods of contacting and negotiating with the spirits. He learned all the myths and their most powerful esoteric meanings. He learned the names of all the stars and constellations, including the gaps between them, his personal one being the ‘tapir’ which lies just by the Southern Cross. He learned their language, and hence discovered a new way of thinking. The Navantes had no words for classes of things, so they were not prone to making generalisations. They collected in immense detail the names of specific things, however, which meant that their language tended to
evolve with such startling rapidity that it was necessary to go and stay with other villages of the tribe to keep up with developments. An English anthropologist once described their language as primitive and barely usable, having once questioned a girl who had been expelled from the tribe as mentally defective. In fact their vocabulary was easily larger than Shakespeare’s and definitely larger than the hasty anthropologist’s.

Aurelio learned of all those aspects of social life that make a people distinctive, and became popular with the children by making them toys in the traditional style. For example their rattles were made of a cicada fastened to a stick, which vibrates indignantly when shaken. He fastened balls of cotton to mutucana horseflies so that the children could watch them fly short distances, become exhausted, and then catch them again. He made them little bows and arrows, and especially the kinds of arrow that are tipped with hollow nutshells that ring in flight.

Aurelio learned the art of wrestling, which had become quite sophisticated since the captive yanqui had taught them jujitsu, and which, just like judo, finished when one contestant was pinned to the ground. He picked up the art of chest-patting, which was done as a greeting and varied according to perceptions of social status. He found out how to make animal calls to communicate in the forest, and also to lure prey. He was taught how to make knives and arrowheads out of teeth, mussel shells and split bamboo, he played music in the huts on pan-pipes, bark trumpets, and the goo. No woman was ever allowed to see the musicians play in case she should think it effeminate, and any woman who did see was obliged to allow the offended musician to prove his virility. If the woman was a little girl the musician would have to wait until she reached puberty before he could retrieve his pride.

Aurelio was married twice through the mating dance and learned what it was to have a mother-in-law to feed, to whom one was not allowed to speak except through one’s wife. Both his wives, before they died, produced children, so that he
learned to undergo the couvade. He took to his hammock for four days at each birth, groaning with the pain of the delivery, to be tended by his anxious spouse, who had given birth squatting over a hole in the ground. In this way the men took away the pain of birth and took it on themselves.

Twice he made the marriage vows:

He never had to beat his wives for infidelity, as required by law, and his wives were never raped, so he did not have to beat any rapists, who were forbidden to resist, or use the rapist’s wife in the same way. Crime was in fact unknown, except against other tribes, when it was common to attempt to abduct their women, especially the ones who were good potters. The women accepted this as normal, and settled down happily wherever they were, some of them having belonged at one time or another to several different tribes.

The women had their own rites to which the men were not a party. When a husband died the wife cut her hair off and no one could ask her hand in marriage until it was regrown. This permitted a decent period of grieving, and since the hair took about nine months to grow, it incidentally prevented any confusions about paternity. The women also believed that the period of transition during puberty was very dangerous, and there should be no shocks, surprises, undue elation or disappointments during that time. Accordingly they sat on palm shoots in a hut, behind a screen, with their hair over their faces for six months, not talking to anyone and only going out at night for a walk with their mothers. They would emerge from this chrysalis state as full-grown women who were entitled to wear the uluri and get married. The boys, less privileged, were only allowed three months to become men, and were never allowed into the special corral for menstruating women, which was like a social club for which musicianship was the counterpart for men.

How and why Aurelio lost his wives and his children, and how and why he had to leave the Navantes are part of another story that waits to be told, as is his meeting with Carmen in Chiriguana and his marriage; but in the details given here are found the reasons why Aurelio, an Aymara Indian of the Sierra, became so expert a jungle-dweller – a thing that always had puzzled Pedro – and why, since this is the only way one can proceed in the jungle, he always walked in single-file for the rest of his life.

GARCIA WAS ASSIGNED
to be Federico’s instructor and special minder; to Federico’s surprise he turned out to be one of those revolutionary priests who dispute every teaching and every command of the church and yet remain through and through a priest and a Catholic, at the same time as being a Marxist and a revolutionary.

Garcia had come from a middle-class family in Medellin, a pleasant town on the side of a mountain from where Profesor Luis also came. At the age of nineteen he had fallen in love with a young woman of better family who had been sent to live in Costa Rica with relatives in order to put an end to the socially unacceptable relationship. In San Jose she had married a stupendously wealthy Uruguayan, and Garcia, heartbroken, took instead to the arms of the Holy Mother Church. As a seminarian he was solitary, serious and studious, but he sometimes alarmed his superiors by expressing heterodox opinions. He was therefore sent far into the countryside to a little town where such things did not make any difference, and there he set about his duties conscientiously.

It often happens that certain women of the bourgeoisie conceive an hysterical and irrational passion for their parish priest, even going as far as to prostrate themselves before him, offering him the use of their charms. When this first happened
to Father Garcia he tried to be gentle and understanding, and he told the woman firmly but sympathetically that such a thing was impossible. But she continued to pester him and to follow him so persistently that soon the whole town was scandalised by the quite unfounded rumour that the priest was an adulterer. One day, in a rage of frustration, he told the woman in no uncertain terms to leave him alone. She took his rebukes more personally than Christianly, and in her wounded pride she haughtily vowed revenge – she wrote to the bishop that the priest had attempted to rape her on frequent occasions, especially in the confessional box and upon the altar.

The bishop’s investigators arrived secretly and soon found themselves listening in bars and whorehouses to all kinds of salacious gossip about Father Garcia, along with numerous ribald jokes featuring Father Garcia as protagonist. At his trial before the ecclesiastical court Father Garcia protested his innocence in vain, and was defrocked by the bishop for fornication.

The sentence weighed heavily on Father Garcia’s mind, for he was only too aware that in falsely condemning an innocent man the bishop had committed a mortal sin. Night upon night he was tormented by vile dreams in which the bishop writhed hideously amid the flames and tortures of Hell.