Papillon (22 page)

I helped open the oysters. This work was generally done by the oldest of the women. Each young pearl diver had her own sack. The pearls they found were shared: one portion went to the chief who represented the community, one to the fisherman, a half share to the woman who opened the oysters and a share and a half to the diver. When the diver lived with her family, she gave her pearls to her uncle, her father’s brother. I never did understand the role of the uncle. He was also the first person to go into the house of the betrothed; he would take the arm of the woman and draw it around the man’s waist and place the man’s right arm around the woman, placing his index finger in her navel. Once this was done, he went his way.

So I helped with the opening of the oysters. I didn’t fish, for I had not yet been invited into the canoe. The fishing was done quite far out, about a quarter of a mile from shore. Some days Lali came back with her thighs and ribs covered with scratches from the coral. Sometimes, if her cuts were bloody, she would crush some seaweed and rub it into the wounds. I did nothing unless invited. I never entered the chief’s house unless someone led me in by the hand. Lali suspected that there were three young Indian girls sleeping in the grass near our door to see or hear what we did when we were alone.

Yesterday I met the Indian who acted as intermediary between our village and the first Colombian hamlet a mile beyond the border station. The hamlet was called La Vela. The Indian had two donkeys and a Winchester repeating rifle. He carried the pearls separated according to size in a cigar box. Like everyone else, he wore only a loincloth. He was small and dried up. He had an ugly scar that ran from under his chest on the left side across his body to his right shoulder. It formed a welt as thick as your finger.

The chief had asked me to tattoo him, so, with the help of the dictionary, I made out a list: needles, blue and red India ink and thread. But since the intermediary didn’t speak a word of Spanish, I wondered how on earth he was able to do his business.

When the Indian was about to leave, the chief gave me permission to go along with him for a bit. To make sure I came back, the chief lent me a shotgun with six rounds of ammunition. He was convinced that I would feel obligated to return since naturally I would never take anything that didn’t belong to me. The Indian got on one donkey and I on the other. We rode the whole day over the same path I’d used coming to the village; then when we were about two miles from the border station, we turned away from the sea and headed inland.

About five o’clock we came to the edge of a stream where there were five Indian houses. Everybody came and looked at me. The Indians talked on and on among themselves until a weird character appeared: his eyes, hair, nose and everything else were those of an Indian, except his color. He was the palest white and had the red eyes of an albino. He wore khaki pants. It was then that I understood that our intermediary never went farther than this.

The white Indian said in Spanish, “Hello. You are the killer who escaped with Antonio? Antonio is a relative of mine; we are bound by the pact of blood.” (In order to become “bound,” two men gash each other’s arm with their knives, rub the two wounds together, then coat their hands with the blood and lick them.) “What you need?”

“Needles, red and black India ink, thread. That’s all.”

“I’ll have it here at the beginning of the next quarter-moon.”

His Spanish was better than mine and I had the feeling he knew how to strike a bargain that would benefit his people. As we were leaving, he gave me a necklace made of Colombian coins set in very white silver. He said it was for Lali.

“Come see me again.” And to make sure I returned, he gave me a bow.

I started the trip back alone, but I hadn’t gone more than halfway when Lali appeared with one of her sisters—a girl of about twelve or thirteen. Lali herself must have been somewhere between sixteen and eighteen. She pounced on me like a mad woman, clawed my chest—I was protecting my face—and bit my neck. Using all my strength, I was barely able to control her. Then she suddenly calmed down. I put the younger girl on the donkey, and Lali and I walked slowly back, our arms around each other. On the way I killed an owl. I shot it without knowing what it was; all I saw were two eyes gleaming in the shade. Lali was determined to have it and hung it from the saddle. We arrived at dusk. I was tired and wanted to wash. Lali washed me; then, right in front of me, she removed her sister’s loincloth, washed her, and finally washed herself.

When they returned to the house, I was sitting waiting for water to boil to make some lemonade. Then a thing happened that I only understood much later: Lali pushed her sister between my legs, took my arms and placed them around the girl’s waist—I noticed she wasn’t wearing her loincloth and had the necklace I’d given Lali around her neck. I didn’t really know what to make of this. I removed her gently from between my legs, took her in my arms and laid her down in the hammock. I took off the necklace and put it back on Lali. Then Lali lay down next to her sister, and I lay next to Lali. Long afterward, I learned that Lali had thought I was making inquiries about leaving because I wasn’t happy with her and that she was hoping her sister might be able to hold me better. I woke up with Lali’s hands shading my eyes. It was very late—eleven in the morning. The younger one had left. Lali looked at me, her large gray eyes full of desire, and bit me gently on the corner of my mouth. She wanted me to know how happy she was that I loved her and that I hadn’t gone away because she had failed me.

The Indian who usually paddled Lali’s canoe was sitting in front of the house, waiting for her. He smiled at me charmingly and closed his eyes to indicate that he knew Lali was still asleep. I sat down next to him and he started a conversation which, of course, I couldn’t understand. He was young and had the powerful muscles of an athlete. He looked longingly at my tattoos and I gathered he wanted to be tattooed too. I nodded in agreement, but he seemed to get the idea that I didn’t know how. Lali appeared. She had covered her body with oil. She knew I didn’t like it, but she explained that with the cloudy weather the water would be very cold. Her mimicking—half laughing, half serious—was so engaging that I made her repeat it several times, each time pretending I didn’t understand. When I asked her to do it yet again, she pouted as if to say, “Either you’re stupid, or I’m no good at explaining.”

The chief passed by with two Indian women. They were carrying a green lizard weighing at least twelve pounds. He had just caught it with his bow and arrow and invited me to come and help eat it later on. Lali spoke to him, then he touched my shoulder and pointed to the sea. I gathered that it meant I could now go with Lali if I wanted to. The three of us left together, Lali, her usual fishing companion and I. The boat was made of cork and was therefore very light. Carrying it on their shoulders, they walked into the water. The Indian got in the back, holding a huge paddle. Up to her chest in water, Lali held the canoe to keep it steady and prevent it from floating back to shore. I got in and sat in the middle; then with one bound Lali landed in the canoe, and the Indian gave a powerful shove with his paddle. The waves were rolling in and getting bigger and bigger the farther out we went. About fifteen hundred feet from shore there was a kind of channel where two boats were already fishing. Lali had tied her hair on top of her head with red leather laces. The Indian dropped the big iron bar that served as anchor and Lali followed the rope down into the water, a heavy knife in her hand. The boat was very unsteady and bobbed up and down with each roller.

For over three hours Lali dived and surfaced, dived and surfaced. You couldn’t see the bottom—it must have been all of fifty feet down. She came up with oysters every time and the Indian emptied her sack into the canoe. During the whole three hours Lali never once got into the canoe. Her only rest was hanging onto the side for five or ten minutes. We changed our location twice. In the second spot the oysters were bigger and more plentiful. Then we went back to shore. Lali had got into the canoe and a wave rolled us in. An old Indian woman was waiting. She and Lali’s fishing partner carried the oysters across the sand. When all the oysters had been gathered there, Lali pushed the old woman aside and started to open them herself. Using the point of her knife, she opened a good thirty before she found a pearl. (I had eaten at least two dozen by that time.) She gently pried it loose; it was in the largest category—as big as a chickpea. And how it gleamed! Nature had given it a great variety of subtle colors. Lali picked up the pearl, put it in her mouth, left it there a moment, then took it out and put it in mine. Then she went through some motions with her jaw, indicating she wanted me to crush it between my teeth and swallow it. I refused, but her pleading was so persuasive that I finally did what she asked. She opened four or five more oysters and gave them to me to swallow so that the crushed pearl would be washed down well inside me. Then, like a child, she opened my mouth to see if there were any fragments left between my teeth. After that we went off, leaving the other two to go on with the work.

I had now been here a month. The reason I knew was that I had marked each day and its date on a piece of paper. The needles and inks had arrived long ago. I discovered that Zato, the chief, had three razors. He didn’t use them for shaving, the Indians being beardless, but for cutting his hair. Lali had removed all the hair on my body. The minute she saw one, she pulled it out and rubbed me with a paste made of seaweed mixed with ashes. This seemed to discourage growth. I tattooed the chief on the arm with an Indian crowned by a headdress of many colored feathers. He was ecstatic and gave me to understand that I was to tattoo nobody else until I’d done a larger tattoo on his chest. He wanted the same tiger I had, with its huge teeth. I laughed, for I didn’t have the talent to do justice to the splendid head.

The Indians of Guajira lived on the coast and the inland plain up to the foothills of the mountains. There were other communities in the mountains called Motilones. Years later I was to have dealings with them. As I explained earlier, the Guajiros dealt with civilized people only through the medium of barter. The coastal Indians delivered their pearls and live turtles to the albino Indian. Some of the turtles weighed as much as four hundred pounds. They never reached the size or weight of those in the Orinoco or the Maroni—these sometimes weighed a thousand pounds and had shells six or seven feet long and over three feet wide. Once on their backs, turtles can’t turn over. I’ve seen them stay on their backs three weeks without food or drink and still be alive. As for the big green lizards, they were very good to eat. Their flesh is deliciously tender, and when their eggs have been cooked in the sand by the sun’s heat, they, too, have a fine flavor. Only their appearance makes them unappetizing.

Every time Lali went fishing, she brought her portion of pearls home to me. I put them in a wooden bowl, all sizes mixed together. The only ones I kept aside—in an empty matchbox—were two pink pearls, three black ones and seven of an extraordinarily beautiful metallic gray. There was also an unusual pearl the shape and size of our kidney beans. It had three colors superimposed one on the other and, depending on the weather, the dominant color was either black, a polished stainless steel, or silver with a pink cast. Thanks to the pearls and the occasional turtles, the tribe lacked for nothing. It’s true they had some useless things and lacked some they could have used. For instance, there wasn’t a single mirror in the village. I had to salvage one from a shipwreck—a nickel-plated board about fifteen inches square—so that I could see to shave or look at myself.

My manner with my friends was very simple: I never did anything that might diminish the authority of the chief or, even less, that of the old Indian who lived alone three miles inland surrounded by snakes, two goats, a dozen sheep and twenty chickens. He was the sorcerer for all the villages in Guajira. This way I kept their good opinion of me. By the end of the second month I had been completely accepted by everyone.

The two hamlets I was acquainted with had no goats, chickens, or sheep; having domestic animals seemed to be the privilege of the sorcerer. Each morning a different Indian woman set off to his house with freshly caught fish and shellfish in a basket on her head, together with corn cakes freshly grilled on hot stones. Sometimes, but not always, she returned with eggs and curdled milk. When the sorcerer wanted me to come and see him, he sent me three eggs and a highly polished wooden knife. Lali would accompany me halfway, then wait in the shade of a huge cactus. The first time I was summoned, she put the wooden knife in my hand and indicated with her arm the direction I should take.

The old Indian lived in revolting filth in a tent made of cowhide, hairy side in. Three stones in the middle stood around a fire that was always burning. He didn’t sleep in a hammock but on a bed made of branches that stood at least three feet above the ground. The tent was quite large and without walls except for a few branches on the windward side. I saw the snakes: one was nearly ten feet long and as thick as your arm, the other about three feet with a yellow V on its head. “How those beasts must pack away the chickens and eggs!” I said to myself. It was beyond me how goats, chickens, sheep and a donkey could all live together in one tent. The old Indian looked me over, then made me take off my pants, which Lali had converted into shorts. When I was entirely naked, he had me sit on one of the stones. He threw some green leaves on the fire which made a thick smoke that smelled of mint. For the next ten minutes I thought I’d suffocate. Then he burned my pants and gave me two Indian loincloths, one of sheepskin and the other of snakeskin as supple as a glove. Around my arm he placed a bracelet made of goat-, sheep- and snakeskin laces braided together. It was four inches wide and held in place by a snakeskin lace which could be loosened or tightened at will.