He sent bands of ruffians on forays to burn the Indian settlements and to hound the cholos off the land, even though they were officially protected by the Indian Protection Agency, and even though he had not a shred of legal justification for evicting them. Having moved their villages two or three times, the Aymaras naturally began to defend themselves, and very soon there was irregular warfare taking place all over that part of the Sierras which put an end to several centuries of peace. Don Hernandez’ bands of thugs were showing every sign of losing this war when he struck on the idea of laying mines bought on the sly from the quartermaster at Corazon Military Depot, and spraying the Aymaras and their crops with concentrated pesticides and herbicides from a crop-dusting aeroplane.
When the people found themselves not only living in a plantless wilderness, but also coughing up blood, becoming covered with blisters, going blind, and being blown up by the ‘sudden-death-by-thunder’, they moved away at last, and some of them, Aurelio included, wandered far away for ever.
Aurelio, although only a boy of fourteen, travelled southwards among the upper slopes of the foothills, staying in many pueblitos, working a little here and there. Often he was cold and hungry, shared caves with wild bulls, and risked his life following the goat-trails around the vertiginous sides of mountains. He knew neither where he was going nor what he intended to do, until one day he climbed high on an eastern slope and looked out over the jungle below.
As far as the horizon in all directions the rolling verdant forest stretched, unbroken. He had heard from his people that only Indians lived there, and others could not survive. He had heard that the jungle Indians are bad people, who kill without quarter, who collect people’s hands and heads, and who speak strange tongues. He had heard of the poisonous snakes and plants, the white and black rivers teeming with vicious fish, of the enormous floods in the rainy season that made it necessary to build homes on platforms, and of the fevers that burned a man’s body so terribly that his soul would flee to avoid being burned up with it.
But from where he stood the forest appeared enticing and secure. It seemed a place of indescribable peace, richness and anonymity, where death, when it came, would not come by aeroplane or by bombs hidden in paths. And it did not matter to him if he became lost, for he did not know where he was going.
He followed a stream down through the chasms, the quebradas, the ravines, the valleys, until at last he came within sight of the forest itself. It began gently enough, with a steady increase in the density of vegetation, and the astonishing activities of the humming-birds, those tiny creatures that jungle Indians call ‘living sunbeams’. He saw a flock of the jewelled little birds darting among some blue passion flowers beneath a magnificent aguache palm, when a hawk descended in circles, seeking prey. The humming-birds fled, with the exception of one, who uttered a tiny, shrill squeak and threw itself into the attack. Had it been able to cope with such a minute enemy that could fly in any direction at lightning speed the great hawk would have been able to kill it outright with one peck of its beak, one contraction of its talons, or one beat of its wings. But the humming-bird annoyed it so much by flitting about its head and jabbing at its eyes that the hawk suddenly soared upwards and left. The little speck of a victor settled itself on a twig and emitted a belligerent squeak of triumph, to be joined once more by its friends coming out of hiding. Aurelio always remembered this incident, and always the memory would make him smile.
Aurelio soon found that there was no way through the forest. He was obstructed at every step by giant lianas that twisted high into the trees, by swathes of fleshy orchids, by plants that oozed white poison, by plants whose stench caused migraines, by insula ants whose bite made him ill for five days, by scolopendra, whose bites nearly killed him and made him ill for weeks, by branches whose touch raised blisters on his hands, by impassable tauampas swamps, by thick clumps of cana brava bamboo, by sapoeira, by razor-sharp fucum palm that cut deep gashes in his flesh which became infected, by swarms of stinging mutuca flies, by the cuts of piassava; by the whole forest and everything in it. That is, he discovered for himself what all jungle-dwellers know, that it is best to follow the waterways, where the dangers are almost as terrible but where progress is more rapid.
By the time that he discovered this, he was already ill with fevers and with hunger, for he had not yet learned to cover himself with anatto and urucu to keep off insects, his skin was not thick like a jungle Indian’s, and he had exploded for himself the myth that in the forest food practically presses itself into one’s mouth. He did not know yet that anything eaten by toucans, macaws, and capuchin monkeys could also be eaten by humans, he had no weapons for the hunt, made fire only with great difficulty, but he caught fish and shrimps in the same way as his people had in the mountains, not yet having acquired the methods of the jungle.
Having given up the attempt to hack his way into the dense foliage, he journeyed along the stream, skirting around the falls, rapids, and cataracts, wading along the bed when it was not possible to jump the rocks or follow the banks. Then one day when the stream was joined by two others and broadened out into a river, he noticed caimans on the banks, and he trod on an arraia. The sting of the ray, so valuable as an arrowhead but so vicious in the flesh, made him fall backwards in the water and crawl to a sand bank, where he sat clutching his foot, rocking with pain and sweating with stoically suppressed terror as the caimans watched him from the fringes of the banks. When he looked into the eyes of these animals, especially when they glowed at night, he appreciated why the Indians of the forest believed them to be the origin of fire.
Aurelio decided to make himself a raft to see him safely down the waters. The jungle hung so thickly now that in places there was a deep gloom; where the sun broke through the foliage the light was so incandescent that it hurt to pass through it, and one could come up in blisters even beneath one’s clothes.
It was in cutting himself a raft and binding it with lianas that Aurelio took his first real step in the long process of metamorphosis from sierra Indian to jungle Indian. He discovered that some woods are too hard to cut and others too heavy to float, and he discovered that some creepers are good for binding and others merely break as soon as they are twisted. In drifting with the current he found that he needed a pole to prevent the craft from becoming stuck in the many fallen trees that lay across the water, to push himself away from the bank or from shoals which grounded him, and to push away the hanging creepers as he passed through them. He found too that the raft tended to revolve on the water as it drifted, so he cut himself a paddle to make it more controllable.
Aurelio was unnaturally lucky. The rapids he had to negotiate were mild, there were none of the usual whirlpools such as once sunk the steamer Ucayali on the Amazon when the Captain was drunk, and there were no falls which he did not see in advance and circumvent with a portage. He bathed in waters full of piranha fish, which were not hungry because the dry season had not yet caused overcrowding, and when he urinated while swimming no barbed sheatfish entered his urethra, so he did not suffer the fate of many a European explorer who has had to have his penis cut open to remove the fish. He was fortunate too that there were no rains to turn the rivers suddenly into cataracts and the jungle into a chain of giant lakes, and that no chushupi, ratsnake or pitviper dropped from among the overhanging drapes of orchids, and that the anaconda that watched him pass had already swallowed a peccary.
In other ways Aurelio was not lucky. He was emaciated with hunger and recurring fevers, his body was covered with sores caused by jiggers, his flesh was crawling with the writhing grubs of the warble fly, and he was suffering from jungle-madness. A relentless loneliness and self-doubt had overwhelmed him. There was nothing there at all for him to love or to like. He was stifled by the humidity which made him perspire so copiously that a wave of his arm would send an arc of sweaty droplets flying. He was stifled by the arcane forms of life, the blinding colours that possessed the surreality of nightmares, the hideous lust
for death, the brutality and loathing of all the grotesque creatures that ravenously consumed each other without thought or pity. He was oppressed and horrified by the merciless buzzing of mosquitoes, the calls of the trumpeter birds, the shrieks of the black-faced howler monkeys with their hideous goitred necks, the sound of trains mysteriously created by ducks in flight, the prehistoric grunts of caimans, the strange greetings of tapirs, sounding exactly like ‘Hi!’, the irritating cracking of fingers made by the ageronia butterflies, the ringing of bells made by some mysterious fish beneath his raft, the outraged idiotic squawks of hundreds of different kinds of parrots, the coughs of the forest fox, the chatting of the anis birds, the demonic laughter of otters, the unearthly beautiful song of the white-eared puff-birds, the unnerving nocturnal hilarity of the laughing hawk, the ‘Koro! Koro!’ of the cayenne ibis, the piping of guans, the jaguar calls of the tiger heron, the rattles of the cocoi heron, and, worst of all, the demented scrapings of armies of gigantic crickets.
Aurelio, overwhelmed by the horrifying plenitude of nature at her most sybaritic and dionysiac, was troubled by tormenting dreams in his hammock at night. By day he gibbered to himself, and gesticulated as though addressing an audience. He started at every noise, like a nervous dog, and scratched furiously at his bites until they ulcerated and suppurated. He forgot to steer his raft and drifted, revolving on the current, his sanity and Inca stoicism inexorably draining away as his imagination filled with apparitions, monsters, and nostalgia for the cold clean Sierra.
He was awoken out of his verdantly foliated stupor by the sight one day of a man struggling with a huge sucuri snake with coils as thick as a man’s thigh. The water snake had come up behind the fishing Indian, sunk its fangs into his shoulder, and wrapped him in coil after coil in order to crush his ribs, and to drown him.
Aurelio had never seen such a snake in his life and at first he thought it was a part of his tropical dream. He stood up on his raft and poled it to the scene of the unequal struggle. The Indian, a pocket Hercules of a man, was trying to slash at the snake with a bamboo knife, but was on the point of losing consciousness. Aurelio leapt from his raft, which drifted away downstream, and threw himself on the serpent. He cut gaping gashes in it with his machete, and was thrown down more than once by its lashing tail. Suddenly the animal released the Indian from its jaws and made to clamp Aurelio by the neck. The latter slashed its head and the creature immediately went into violent death throes that were as lethal as its tactics in life. Aurelio strove to unwind its quivering and contracting body, and when the thrashing reptile had floated away to feed the fishes, he and the victim of the attack struggled to the bank and collapsed side by side.
Aurelio spent the first day of his ten years with the Navantes unconscious. The reasons he was not killed immediately by them were that he had saved the life of the sub-chief, Dianari, and that the people were curious to know who this ulcered apparition with the plait in his hair actually was.
The paje of the clan took ayahuasca and yague to learn from the spirits whether or not they would give up Aurelio’s soul, and he bartered and parleyed with them for a long time before they consented. Then he blew smoke over Aurelio’s body, scoured the parasites out of it with the teeth of the traira fish, and rubbed it all over with healing mud and bark, and copaiba oil.
The paje was normally the most feared and therefore the most shortlived of all members of a clan, but this one was moved uncommonly by the spirit of compassion, and had once lain motionless for two weeks whilst a nest of mice hatched in his hair. When Aurelio recovered he was eventually to become a pupil to the paje.
Back in the Sierra, Don Hernandez Almagro Mendez lost half his fortune in mines that were long ago exhausted, and an anomalous frost ruined his coffee plantation.
9
* * *
THE TRIBULATIONS OF FEDERICO
LIFE IS NOTHING if not a random motion of coincidences and quirks of chance; it never goes as planned or as foretold; frequently one gains happiness from being obliged to follow an unchosen path, or misery from following a chosen one. How often can one refrain from wondering what portentous events may not have arisen from some trivial circumstance which thereby has acquired a significance far beyond itself?
It was coincidence that a young man of fifteen, burned dark by the sun and his eyes flashing with a zeal born of hatred was standing watch on the easternmost crag of the mountain when an athletic and middle-aged man of distinguished bearing, dressed like a peasant, passed below with a donkey. He carried a pair of binoculars, a camera, and a service revolver which was stuck in his belt. It was this weapon which attracted Federico’s interest, because guerrillas are always short of weapons, and have a habit of collecting them as others collect stamps or seashells.
Federico was much changed in the year of his absence. It was not just that he was taller, more arrogant and more articulate; it was that he had come through immense difficulty and hardship and become at last a man in his own eyes.
It had been terrible in the beginning after he had run away from the corpse, shaking with fear, horror and nausea, and yet too proud to go home, and also too ashamed. The worst thing was that he had not known what to eat, how to obtain it, or how to cook it when he had no matches, no pans, and had always eaten what his mother produced by apparent miracle, without thought as to how she had turned raw matter into good food. He had remembered that you could eat maize, and for a day or two he stole it from the fields of the minifundistas which were scattered amongst the foothills, and ate it raw. Then he remembered that you could eat the roots of the yucca, which grew wild everywhere; but these were not good raw, so instead he ate mangoes, avocadoes, and guavas, which filled his belly but did not satisfy his hunger for meat.
It had not been very difficult to steal and kill a chicken, and it was not hard to pluck it, but he had no knife to disembowel it, so he walked for hours with it amongst the rocks until he found a piece of quartz sharp enough to pierce the yielding flesh of the belly. But he could not make a fire. He struck rocks together over dead leaves and dry grass; once or twice there were sparks, but there was never a fire. He rubbed wood together as Pedro did, but did not know the right woods to use. That night he slept with the chicken beside him in his mochila, and in the morning the mochila was several metres away and the chicken gone. He wept with frustration and fury, cursing the wild beast which was so immoral as to steal his stolen chicken. Painstakingly, he dammed off a little patch of a stream and hit a fat comelon on the head with a stick; it is a fish more delicate and succulent than trout, but not without fire. He abandoned it to the enciso ants when it began to stink. He lived off fruit until he stole a box of wax matches and a machete from the barraca of some unfortunate mountain peasant, and discovered that the only way to cope without utensils was to roast on a spit or to bake in the cinders. He grew to understand later why the most prized possessions of the guerrillero, besides a weapon, are a magnifying glass for focusing the rays of the sun, and a cooking pot.
The second to worst thing was solitude, for he was not of an age when it is eagerly sought and welcomed. It is true that there were times when he felt an extraordinary euphoria, when he was overwhelmed by the joyfulness of liberty as he cavorted in rock pools, being tweaked at by those strange little fish that love to eat the scabs off mosquito bites. He often felt entirely at one with himself and the world, living wild almost without purpose in an Eden of clear water, darting humming-birds, luminous vegetation and a sky of startling angularity. But he knew he was already half-crazy for want of friendship when a sob came to his throat one day at the sight of a large, friendly-faced cavy and his heart had reached out to the creature. He became possessed of a tyrannical grief.
Tears are wept best in company, and so he bled them inwardly, missing with all his soul the life and the people he had left, and so it was that his already wild existence gradually became increasingly disordered. He stopped bothering to wash properly every day, fed himself only by starts, and talked lou
dly to himself whenever he did anything that required concentration, as though he could not have performed it without an explanation. The trouble was that he had been avoiding other people needlessly, thinking that they would be suspicious of him, as though his crime and his plans were written across his face, and as though anyone would really have cared if they had been.
This phase of his existence came to an abrupt end when he rounded a curve of the path and came face to face with an old man pulling a donkey laden with bananas. It was too late to duck into the undergrowth.
‘Buena’ dia’!’ exclaimed the old man, grinning through his lack of teeth. ‘A fine day for hunting!’ He was nodding his head vigorously towards the Lee Enfield, and his voice had in it a warm and friendly crackle, like dried leaves.
Without taking time for thought Federico raised his right hand and replied, ‘Saludes, Senor,’ as he passed by. He turned and watched the old man disappear down the stony path clucking at his donkey and exclaiming ‘Ay, burro!’ every time it felt disposed to stop. Federico realised at once that from now on he could walk unremarked and unmolested as a hunter, and he laughed at himself for behaving so fearfully hitherto. That night he set a trap as Pedro did, and in the morning he found he had a small brocket. He did not shoot it, because bullets are precious and rare, but he knocked it senseless with a rock and cut its throat with his stolen machete.
Later that morning he entered a pueblito with the deer across his shoulders and swapped it for a fine knife, a chicken, a kilo of dried fish, matches, and a pair of Indian sandals with soles made of tyre rubber. He stayed long enough to partake of a little of his deer, which was roasted that evening, and to take a small portion of its liver, the seat of its spirit, into the wood. Here he wrapped it in a dried banana leaf, and burnt it at the base of a giant brazil nut tree in order to honour the angels that watched over his fortune. He gave thanks to them and also muttered a secreto which would bind them absolutely to guide his footsteps for at least one cycle of the moon. Back in the pueblito he knew that his prayer was answered when he was warned that not much further up the Sierra were guerrilleros who would probably steal his gun.