The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (62 page)

Those familiar with the traditions of
vegetalismo
know that it has a serious dark side. Much of the practice involves witchcraft and battles between shamans. The causes of illness and misfortune (which are viewed as aspects of the same thing) are attributed not to physical causes but to magical ones.
Brujos
and
brujas
are unscrupulous sorcerers or witches who harm their victims by introducing the magical darts called
virotes
into their bodies. As I noted earlier,
virotes
are akin to pathogens or infectious agents, but they act on the psychic plane. They are psychic darts that the shaman produces and keeps in his phlegm. But like pathogens, they can cause physical and mental illnesses as well as accidents and other misfortunes. A jealous lover, for example, might pay a
brujo
to project a
virote
into a rival for the affections of a husband or boyfriend, to harm them or make them regret their actions in some way. There is a strong element of jealousy and rivalry in mestizo society in Peru. If someone gains an advantage over another, for example, or is simply perceived to possess more wealth or social status, it’s widely understood that they achieved it through skullduggery of some kind, not through hard work or good fortune. That person then becomes a target for
brujeria
.

Most
vegetalistas
are neither all good or all bad; they are “guns for hire,” and if one wants to put a spell on another, there are other
vegetalistas
that one can pay to neutralize the spell, to grab the
virote
and send it back to the person who intended the harm. It’s very much about power play, a shamanic arms race. A shaman’s power is measured by how many teacher plants he or she has mastered, how long he or she has kept the diet, and various other criteria. If you suspect you have been hexed by an evil
brujo
or
bruja
, then you have to pay a stronger, tougher shaman to protect you and deflect the energy back.

All of this emerged in our conversation with Pablo. He had been a powerful
ayahuasquero
, he said, but had gotten into a battle with a
bruja
, a witch. It became clear to him that if he stayed in the game he faced a choice: he either had to kill her or be killed. Instead, he elected to step away. He stopped practicing. He no longer took
ayahausca
or used the power plants.

Pablo also described to us how he had gotten involved in
vegetalismo
in the first place, which was another fascinating story. In his early twenties, he said, he had been diagnosed with an intractable heart defect. The physicians told him there was nothing they could do; he had a congenital illness that would likely shorten his life by several decades. He consulted an
ayahuasquero
as a last resort. After a series of powerful sessions, he was visited during one ceremony by a number of white-coated figures he described as “American doctors.” In his trance, he seemed to be lying on a table in a domed operating room, surrounded by high-tech equipment and these spirit healers. Disembodied, he watched as they sliced open his chest and removed his heart. They held it up above his chest and did things do it, making various incisions at strategic points, then they reimplanted it and closed up his chest. After that, he claimed, his heart condition was cured and his human doctors could detect no heart murmur or other indications of a defective heart. Pablo’s tale resembled other stories in the mestizo ayahuasca tradition of “spirit doctors” performing magical surgeries. Given the remarkable reports of physical and spiritual healing that have been attributed to this medicine, perhaps there is something to it. It seems certain that we do not yet fully understand the dynamics of shamanic healing.

During our chat, Pablo brought out some of his paintings to show to us. Eduardo asked him if he’d ever tried to paint his ayahuasca visions. It was almost as if a light had gone off in his head. No, he said, that had never really occurred to him; but he was willing to give it a try. When we came to his house the next morning, he showed us two visionary ayahuasca paintings that he’d done overnight. They were somewhat primitive and crude but affecting in their simplicity. It was indicative of Pablo’s innocence and complete lack of any commercial motive that he had not even signed the paintings. A day later, he had created two more. He gave two to me, and two to Eduardo, and the paintings that Pablo gifted to me have been proudly displayed in a place of honor in every home I have lived in since then.

Those four paintings marked the beginning of an extraordinary career. Pablo went on to create hundreds of visionary paintings over the years until his death in 2009. Luis Eduardo forged an alliance with Pablo and took on the role of his agent. He found markets for his work and arranged exhibitions in Finland, Los Angeles, and Japan. Together, Pablo and Eduardo collaborated on one of the most unique books ever created in the ethnographic literature, entitled
Ayahuasca Visions: the Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman
(1991). The book consists of full-color reproductions of forty-nine painted “visions” depicting various aspects of the
ayahuasquero’s
apprenticeship and practice of
vegitalismo
. On each facing page, Luis Eduardo, writing in English, explains the various elements of the painting and their significance. These elements are not random, he notes. Every depicted plant, animal, and spirit has a symbolic significance and archetypal status in the mestizo belief system. The result is a remarkable window into the cosmology of contemporary mestizo shamanism and ayahuasca’s place in it. By studying the paintings and their interpretation, one could learn a great deal about what it takes to become an accomplished
vegetalista
. Of course, the practice cannot be learned from a book alone, since two essential elements would be missing: the master who teaches the apprentice, and the teacher plants themselves, particularly the plants used in making ayahuasca.

In 1988, Pablo and Luis Eduardo co-founded the Usko-Ayar Amazonian School of Painting, an art academy that in its early phases operated out of Pablo’s home outside Pucallpa. Admission was free to all the children of the village, and at one time some 300 students were enrolled to study painting under Pablo’s tutelage. The art of the students was not visionary, but rather focused on remarkable depictions of the plants and animals of the rainforest, astonishing in their detail and accuracy. This ability seems innate among young people who grow up surrounded by the natural environment, and whose perceptions are not “clouded” by literacy. Pablo, too, produced some hyper-realistic paintings, but his stock-in-trade continued to be his visionary work. The school appeared to be a wonderful success. It gave many students a skill and a livelihood derived from depicting the rainforest rather than exploiting it. When tourists and outside markets began to take notice, some students found they could make relatively good money from the sale of their paintings. They (and their parents) began to appreciate the virtues of protecting the environment. A number of students went on to become recognized artists. Meanwhile, the “Amaringo style” of painting would have its own lasting impact. Today, in galleries in Iquitos and Pucallpa, one can find the work of many who try to emulate that style, but few truly succeed.

Like many feel-good stories, this one ended sadly, at least for Luis Eduardo, as he explained in a recent email. Beginning in 1988, he worked tirelessly to promote the school. He helped obtain a grant from the Finnish government to support the school and organized exhibitions and found buyers for the paintings. He bought high-quality art supplies for the students, photographed the paintings for promotional purposes and archiving, and wrote articles about the school in various periodicals. He finally resigned in 1995, exhausted by internal squabbles, and by the apparent misuse of the money he had raised by an individual who was close to Pablo. He’d also grown concerned about Pablo’s use of the school as a platform to espouse his religious beliefs as he became more involved with the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The final blows were the baseless accusations leveled at him, Luis Eduardo wrote. The more money he brought to the school, the more others suspected that he was putting money into his own pocket. He’d had enough.

“The project was at the end for me completely unsustainable,” her explained. “It was totally pro bono. I did work as Pablo’s agent, but I never took any commission from selling the art from the school, which was my way of doing something for the Amazon. My idea was the creation of a series of art schools and botanical gardens associated with them along the Ucayali and Amazon rivers, but it was impossible,” he concluded. Everywhere he went in the country in pursuit of his dream, he encountered people who sought to take advantage even as they accused him personally of stealing.

In 1995, he stopped selling Pablo’s work. The two briefly reconnected in 1998, though Luis Eduardo made it clear he wanted nothing more to do with the school. He had organized an exhibition for Pablo in London and was supposed to attend another show for him in Japan. Instead, Pablo went there with someone else representing him, with unfortunate results. As Luis Eduardo put it, “he did not sell a single painting, as his work is practically unintelligible without the cultural context I was providing.”

The two men never did business again.

Pablo received world recognition for the founding of Usko-Ayar, and for its contributions to environmental awareness. At the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, he was awarded a place on the United Nations Environmental Program Global 500 Roll of Honor. Luis Eduardo was never acknowledged for his contributions. Over the years, we’ve worked together and shared numerous adventures. I regard Luis Eduardo as almost like a second brother to me, and one of the most upright and ethical people I know. Once he stopped working to promote the school, others tried to do so, but the school eventually closed after Pablo’s death.

Long before those tensions, in 1985, Luis Eduardo and I had a remarkable experience with Pablo, Don Fidel, and Francisco Montes. For me, the story perfectly captures the mestizo worldview, in which the most mundane occurrences are freighted with significance and the boundary separating ordinary and non-ordinary reality is thin indeed.

We had gone to Don Fidel’s simple dwelling a few times and undergone the ayahuasca ceremony with him. His uncle, Don Jose, also an accomplished
ayahuasquero
, had been present at one of those sessions and invited Eduardo and me, along with Don Fidel, to come to his home the next evening and take ayahuasca again. We accepted the invitation and walked a considerable distance outside of town to Don Jose’s house, a modest structure even humbler than Don Fidel’s, made of earthen bricks plastered over with adobe. There was also a small walled garden. It was a cloudless night, and the moon was full.

We gathered inside the one-room hut and drank the brew at about nine or a little later. It was a peaceful, meditative session; I didn’t have strong visions. After the effects had more or less passed, or so I thought, I went outside to have a cigarette and get some fresh air. The night was bright; the swollen moon had not yet set, and its light, falling through a small
Brugmansia
tree, cast shadows of the branches on the hut’s adobe wall. I gazed at the wall while I smoked my cigarette; then I did a double take. The shadows cast by the moonlight bore a striking resemblance to a human face! It looked like the face of a young girl, wearing a veil over her long hair and with her hands folded in prayer. I looked away and looked again; it was definitely there. The resemblance was unmistakable. I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing, and I thought I was hallucinating, though the effects had faded hours before. Finally I got up and went back into the hut, and called Eduardo outside to have a look. He agreed that it was remarkable. We both saw the same thing. We tucked that away and didn’t think much about it for the rest of the evening. Later, we started our long walk back to the El Pescador, saying goodnight to Don Fidel, who sauntered toward home in the other direction.

The next morning, after breakfast, we went over to visit Pablo, who had some bad news. Francisco’s daughter, about five years old, had come down with severe diarrhea the day before and had died about three a.m. The parents had searched for Don Fidel to get some treatment for her, but he was with us at Don Jose’s. They took the girl to the hospital, but the staff there was unable to provide any of the oral rehydration solution they needed to save her. It was very sad news, but not uncommon in the area. Many young children die from intractable diarrhea and dehydration; the condition isn’t difficult to treat, but one must have access to the remedy, and in this case, circumstances had prevented Francisco from finding help for the girl. There would be a wake, a ceremony to bless the little girl, at Francisco’s home that evening.

When we arrived at the house to pay our respects, everyone was dressed in their finest “church” clothes. We walked into the room where the little girl was laid out in a kind of crib or small bed. She was dressed in a white dress, her head was covered with a white veil, and her hands were folded in prayer over her chest. Her eyes were closed, and there was a peaceful expression on her face. The image of her there before me was an exact match to what I had seen in the shadow cast by the moon on the wall the night before. Both Eduardo and I were struck by the resemblance. The little girl had died about three or four in the morning, which corresponded closely to the hour I was sitting in the garden gazing at the image. It was just that and no more. The memory has stayed with me all these years. Nothing evokes the dreamlike nature of the magical reality that, for these people,
is
reality, as much as this incident.

Toward the middle of August, we completed our business in Pucallpa and prepared all the live plants we had collected for export. At the time, this was quite easy to do if you had the proper permits. You needed phytosanitary certificates from the Peruvian government, and USDA plant import permits, all of which we had. Peruvian permits are not so easy to obtain these days, due to concerns about biopiracy. On the Hawaiian side, importing alien species is now almost impossible, and rightly so, given that every non-native species has the potential to become invasive.