Crossing the River (26 page)

Finally, one card gave us enough cash. Berto had never seemed worried. For the most part, people there didn't look worried. They were patient. They were used to waiting. They didn't curse and twitch and pace, the way we did in the States. Combined with the cash we already had, we pulled together enough, but it left us with almost nothing. This made us uneasy. You never knew when you might need to buy your way out of a fix.

We finally waved good-bye to Berto and left. It was four.

It took Coelho more than two hours to suck his way through the orange gumbo of the dirt road, that orange road that creeps through jungles all over the world. Peter and I had seen them in Ghana, Mozambique, Indonesia. Another truck was installing electric poles, and despite being a fancy Volkswagen, it wasn't equipped for the job. (We stopped to tug it out of the slurping goo.) We, on the other hand, in our rattletrap blue Toyota Bandeirante, motored steadily along like an animal perfectly adapted to the climate. Back on the truck bed, the kids weathered the wind and a burst of pounding rain. Their soaked clothes had nearly dried when the truck finally jolted to a stop, swung around, and backed down a muddy landing. It was almost dark.

We were in a clearing in the Amazon forest. A small creek seeped through a gloomy tunnel of tangled vines and branches. Molly and Skyler jumped down, and Peter and I spilled out of the cab. Down in the slough, two men lounged in a thirty-foot-long aluminum canoe,
mounted with a forty-horsepower Yamaha motor. Although night was falling fast, nobody rushed.

“
Seu nome?
” Peter asked, as one of the men waded ashore and they shook hands. He had a lithe, athletic build and a soft smile.

“Anderson,” he replied, pronouncing it
Ahn-deh-sohn
.

It was not a name I'd pick for a Yanomami—for a son of the headman of one of the Amazon's most traditional and famously fierce tribes. But I'd found in Brazil first names seemed to be as easily, and randomly, imported as T-shirts. He was Berto's brother.

While I was off using the bushes, Orlando, the other boatman; Coelho, the truck driver; and Anderson somehow managed to roll the barrels of oil and gas we'd brought—one thousand and forty pounds worth—out of the truck and into the canoe. It sat unnervingly low in the water. Valdir, the two boatmen, Peter, the kids, and I climbed in carefully. We said good-bye to Coelho. I didn't envy him the trip back through the gumbo in the dark.

Anderson pulled the starter. We slipped quietly into the channel. I felt like Nancy Drew in the Florida Everglades.

As we twisted down the narrow creek, Orlando sat facing forward, straddling the bow. He swung a flashlight beam from side to side. Was he looking for caiman eyes? Sunken logs? Both?

“
Em baixa! Em baixa!
” Anderson shouted. “Get down! Get down!”

We ducked under a thick, overhanging branch just as Anderson gunned the motor and rammed the boat over a fallen tree, deftly lifting the Yamaha to clear the propeller at the last minute. Anderson did this run a lot, anytime anyone in his village wanted to go grocery shopping.

No one spoke. At every bend of the creek, the boat rocked sideways nearly to its gunnels. Lightning flickered. It was going to be miserable if it rained. But for the present, I felt totally relaxed, almost elated.

We snaked our way into larger and larger channels. By the third one, Valdir, Molly, and Skyler had wrapped themselves in a tarp on the wooden floor of the boat to sleep. Peter and I sat in back with Anderson, our hair streaming in the wind, and stared into the blackness, into the backs of our minds. It occurred to me that when you travel, you often put yourself in the hands of people you barely know. We were
in an overloaded boat—at night, on a small creek in the Amazonian jungle, going somewhere toward the Venezuelan border—with our children and two men we'd just met and one we'd known for a day. The only people who had any idea where we were, and then only in the most general terms, were Peter's and my mothers in the United States.

I've always loved that feeling of speeding in the wind in fast boats, and there, in the dark, I came the closest I ever had to flying. Peter had taught me that when white-water canoeing, I should look for the V in the water, the place where the bulk of the water squeezed through the rocks in a rapid. Here, Anderson was looking
up
for that narrow slot through towering trees, that V in the sky whose point kept bending right, then left, then right as the tangled banks twisted their distant nose, leading us farther in. In the slit of sky, furrows of cloud lighted by the moon separated, and there was Orion! Upside down. It was comforting somehow, to have one of our own up there, a constellation I recognized. Eventually, Peter and I, too, lay down, squeezed in between the gunnels and gas cans. My nose was inches from the stream of white water that split from the bow, giant catfish whiskers. It spattered like distant applause.

I think I slept, in small spurts, because the next six hours passed in surreal snapshots: a white beach, four men and a boy, peeing; a memory of cold, curling into Peter's warm side, thinking it had been a long time since it had been cold enough to want to do that; a flashlight shining up into an overhanging tree, a fleeting soft question in my mind of whether they were looking for snakes.

“
Estamos chegando
,” someone whispered. “We're arriving.”

We clambered dopily into our new yellow rubber boots, hefted our packs, and started to climb a moonlit mountain meadow to the village of Ariabu. A man stood in the doorway of a wooden house. He pointed to the “hotel,” as Valdir had called it. The hotel had no walls. It was too dark to see much else.

We rigged our hammocks and fell asleep. It was 3:00
AM
. The trip on the river had taken us eight hours, not five; as long as it would take for us to drive from our hometown in western Montana across Idaho, across Washington, to Seattle. The entire time, we'd seen two lights, both fishing canoes.

33
33

Conflicting Worlds
Conflicting Worlds

P
ETER OPENED HIS EYES
. There was an old man staring down at him.

“
Oi
,” Peter said. The man's face crinkled into a smile. Peter gazed into small, intent eyes, heavy brows, and a muzzle of a mouth with rotting teeth. This man had the textbook Yanomami haircut, short bangs cut straight across, black hair neatly sculpted around the ears. Far from fierce, he looked gentle, kindly, old.

We were not exactly being held prisoner, but it was clear that we were not free to leave our “hotel.” The tribe was being careful. Their contacts with outsiders have not gone well. Many have died from imported diseases, first the measles and flu from Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries in the 1950s, then malaria from marauding gold miners starting in the 1980s.

Our hotel consisted of an octagonal concrete pad, a central pole, and eight posts around its circumference, supporting a thatch roof. We lounged in our hammocks, awaiting further notice, wondering about things like where to go to the bathroom. We were floating in an eddy, that currentless pool in a river where fish wait and watch for passing food. We were waiting for things, people, to drift by, and they did; they were coming to look at us, the animals in the zoo.

Later in the day, that same man returned, stooped and barefoot in loose shorts and an old red shirt, walking with a staff. His feet were wide and flat, his large toes separated a little from the others. He shook our hands, one after the other, holding our hands in both of his for a minute, as if resting with each of us.

He was saying something. “
Haiamahamohwahneefaoohchoh . . . ?
”

It wasn't Portuguese, definitely not English. He was smiling and nodding. We stood. He stood. We wondered what was next. We went back to reading and writing and swinging. He stood. Eventually he squatted down by a post. When I looked up again, he began plucking
at his knees and tilting his head with his hand out. He was asking for something.

“
Remédio . . . meus pernas . . . ruim
.” That was Portuguese. “Medicine for bad legs.”

I wondered what to do. I decided to give him water and an Aleve. Later, Valdir, who'd been off visiting in the village at the time, said, “Oh don't give tem anyting. You know, if tey die, ten ter grandchildren, tey say, tat tourist gave my grandpa someting and he die, and next time I come back here, tey shoot me.”

The rest of the day passed in suspended animation. The old man, the chief of the neighboring village, a woman with a baby, and a woman selling baskets all drifted into our eddy. Eventually, we were summoned to lunch with Julio, the headman, and Adelaide, his wife (pronounced
adeh-lie-gee
), the parents of Berto and Anderson. Each Yanomami village is run by a headman, who governs by consensus, but each village is independent of all the others. There is no overarching tribal government.

Adelaide had grown up traveling with a German missionary—cooking his food, washing his clothes—and had prepared the meat we'd brought. We sat in their outdoor kitchen, on plastic stools at a long green-painted table. The floor was concrete, the roof corrugated tin. Adelaide washed dishes with funneled rainwater. Then there was the washing machine. I had another one of those double-take moments, as when I'd learned Berto was studying to be a dentist. Their grandkids tumbled underfoot with a gaggle of ducklings. Their daughter-in-law, a silent, almond-eyed beauty, flitted around the edges. It was homey. We sat. They sat. We were all feeling each other out. Why were we there?

When planning this trip, we'd had a family “meeting.” A meeting to discuss what each of us was hoping to do in the Amazon, to get out of such a trip. Peter had been clear that he was interested in finding the Yanomami.

“Do you think they have blow guns?” Skyler had asked.

“I'd like to see animals, people, it's all good. But do you think we could really go to a village? Like, an aboriginal one?” Molly had asked.

I was eager for the kids to see a way of life that was really different
from ours, even more different than that in Penedo, and it seemed the Yanomami would offer that. So basically, we were just there to watch them, but so far, they were mostly watching us.

It wasn't until four that afternoon that we were allowed to venture farther into the village. It turned out our eddy was at one end, next to Julio and Adelaide's house, which was also the only store. The village ran the length of a ridge. Through a fringe of
açai
and
pupunha
palms, one could see green, cloud-wreathed mountains in the distance, jutting out of thick jungle—just how I imagined Hawaii. The yellow dirt track running by our hammock pad widened into an expansive oval. It was ringed with a couple dozen thatched wattle-and-daub huts. Each was flanked by a small raised garden of what appeared to be solely green onions, and many had tetherball poles. The “ball” was a stuffed plastic bag.

“I wanna try it!” Skyler said (a phrase that popped out of his mouth about as often as its evil twin, “I hate Brazil, why are we here?”).

At this hour, every tetherball court was occupied. Everyone was kicking back at the end of the day—everyone except males between thirteen and forty. They had all gone hunting. The village was preparing for their return after a two-week absence, looking forward to a feast of curassow (bush turkey), tapir, boar, monkey, and maybe even black jaguar. So now, under-thirteen boys played tetherball, flew kites, pulled toy trucks; young girls hefted toddlers; women nursed babies; and the old people prepared to dance. The dress code was casual: no shirts, no shoes, loose shorts, and bras or T-shirts for women.

Many young girls had swayed backs and protruding bellies. Malnutrition? Or had they all had children? We were told they started at thirteen.

“I'd like to meet some girls my age, but I think they all have kids,” Molly said the next day.

I asked Valdir about malnutrition.

“Oh, it very good. Everybody have food,
mandioca
,
pupunha
. . .” he said with his usual good cheer.
Mandioca
is Portuguese for
cassava
, but I'd never seen a
pupunha
before. It looked rather like a persimmon.

But Julio, the village headman, said his people ran out of food.
They'd been nomadic when the missionaries arrived. The missionaries had encouraged them to settle, to become farmers. It seemed, sixty years later, farming was not in their blood.

No one seemed to take much notice of us. I guess our presence had been cleared. We saw Julio across the dirt oval. He was sitting on a long bench under a high shed roof hung with hundreds of bananas. With him were four other male elders. Their dress was surprising. They'd shed their shorts for skimpy Spandex swim trunks, and their bare bodies were painted in black, with dots, squiggling lines, and a thick black line extending from their mouths down their chests, a long tongue. White eagle down was stuck to their black hair, like fluttery 1950s bathing caps. Around their biceps were wrapped bands of black curassow skin pierced, like pincushions, with feathers, short green ones, long orange. The two-foot-long blowpipe Julio had shown us earlier lay in front of them, along with a small bottle of the special powder.

“I wanna try it!” Skyler had exclaimed when Julio had first come by our eddy and shown us the blowpipe.

We'd each snorted a pinch and instantly been sent into fits of chain sneezing. Julio grinned, delighted by the effect. Our sinuses were running, which explained why supposedly the powder was good for curing colds. However, if you put the special powder in a blowpipe and had someone else blow it up your nose, four pumps to each nostril, you'd hallucinate for an hour.

“
O mundo abri
”—The world opens. Julio smiled benignly and opened his arms wide, looking up with rheumy eyes. “You ask [the ancestors] for good things for the community, for health, for food . . . If you are stressed,
tudo é bom
”—everything is all right. He suggested one shouldn't do it more than once a day.

We joined the men on the bench. They were waiting for the women to dance.

“Can't I play tetherball?” Skyler was getting fidgety.

“I don't think so,” I said, wishing he could. “We've been specially invited to this ceremony. We're their guests.” To my relief, a few minutes later, Julio sensed Skyler's restlessness and gestured to him to join the tetherball game nearest us. Skyler peeled himself off the bench
and ambled over. The young boys scattered. Skyler looked back at us, palms out.
Now what?
he seemed to be saying. Julio and the other elders laughed but called out to the boys, who slowly trickled back. Skyler was substantially taller than all of them, though we guessed they were about the same age. Finally, one got up the courage to face him and batted the plastic bag into the air. Skyler, hesitant to take advantage of his greater size, wasn't trying very hard, but eventually he wrapped the bag around the pole, which put an end to the encounter.

Meanwhile, at the far end of the yellow dirt oval, a woman appeared, then another and another. They were celebrating the harvest of bananas and
pupunha
. That morning at dawn, we'd heard a lone voice wailing, much like a muezzin's call to prayer. That had been the beginning.

Their chests were crisscrossed with beads, and their bodies and legs were painted like the men's. The string of women loped toward us in a slow-motion jog, each bearing a long arrow or machete. They seemed to come from a great distance. The men sitting on the bench shouted out to them as they passed, causing some of the women to break out of their trancelike state and crack up, laughing.

I wondered how all this squared with going to church on Sundays. We never saw the church but were told it was there, on the next ridge, the way the army base was there, just past the dip. (We'd had to be cleared by them, too.) How were the Yanomami straddling all these worlds? It was as though they had each hand and foot on one of four islands that were slowly floating apart. Julio snorted hallucinogens, painted his body, and communed with ancestors, but he had a son studying to be a dentist, and he had a washing machine, a telephone, and a TV on which Skyler thought he'd glimpsed the NBA. He had also flown to the country's capital, to Brasilia, to lobby for his tribe and ran several businesses: oranges, cattle, and gold.

At dinner that night, at the long green table in their outdoor kitchen, Julio waved to Adelaide to pull out the scales, to bring the small plastic bottle. He carefully poured its contents onto a piece of note-paper: a small, granular, richly yellow pile. Lifting the notepaper, he funneled the grains onto the scale: thirteen and a half grams, worth $945 on the world gold market. He knew the rates. Julio had bought
it from some boys who'd panned for it in their rivers. Years before, in the 1980s, a Brazilian company from the south had wanted to bring their big equipment in, to dredge the Yanomami's rivers and mine for gold. Julio had gone to Brasilia to fight, to keep them out. He'd won—and been shot for his trouble. Twice. First by a man hired by the mining company, and a year later by another of his own tribe.

“
Ali
”—Right there. Adelaide pointed to where the second shooting had happened, in the corner of their kitchen.

It sounded familiar, shades of the trouble that follows wealth discovered anywhere: oil, diamonds, gold.

In 1992, the Brazilian government, under pressure from anthropologists and international NGOs, had delineated the boundaries of a Yanomami reserve, an area twice the size of Switzerland. This had been in response to the devastation wreaked by independent gold miners, numbering forty thousand, more than the Yanomami themselves, by the end of the 1980s. The Yanomami were dying from the malaria the miners had brought as well as from the mercury poisoning the fish in their rivers. The idea of the reserve was to keep the outsiders out, but little has been done to enforce this.

Julio didn't think much of the gold miners, but he thought things had been better since the missionaries had come. “
Muitas guerras antes
,” he said. “Before, there had been many wars among the Yanomami.”

But Valdir disagreed. “Tey don' come to convert. Tey come for da minerals. Da gold. An Indian village has gold, da missionaries are tere.”

The next day, Julio showed up at our eddy pond with a teacher of indigenous arts from the neighboring village of Maturaca.

“Marcelino can teach your son to make an arrow,” Julio said in Portuguese “and his daughter can teach your daughter to weave baskets.”

We jumped up.

“When?”

“Later.”

We sat down.

Eventually the time came. As we wound down a narrow path in our yellow rubber boots, a man and his two daughters caught up and followed us. We arrived at the river separating the two villages. There was
no boat. In seconds, the daughters enthusiastically jumped in, swam across, and dragged back a large aluminum canoe. It had, however, no motor and no paddles. Valdir was shaking his head.

“How we goin' to cross?”

The man waved at us to get in. Climbing in last, he dangled his legs into the water where the motor would be and started to kick. Valdir's eyes sparkled.

“An Indian motor,” he laughed—proudly, I thought.

Marcelino was lounging under a shed roof with his daughter and a clot of milling kids. He had a gentle, kindly smile. Hanging on his bare mahogany chest was a sky-blue beaded square in geometric designs.

“You want to make an arrow?” He asked Skyler in Portuguese.

“
Sim
,” Skyler responded.

Marcelino proceeded to walk Skyler through the meticulous steps: choosing the right wood for each of the arrow's three parts—the tip, the shaft, the tail—inserting one into the other, wrapping the joint with string dredged in glue made of tree sap and beeswax. And so it went, both quietly concentrating—Marcelino putting an arm around Skyler's shoulders to show him how to hold a knife or wrap the hard tip of a curassow feather, Skyler intently hunched over the arrow, oblivious to the naked boy at his shoulder, clutching a tattered kitten to his bare belly.