At Play in the Fields of the Lord (35 page)

The women smoked the fish, and dug and hauled and cleaned the bulky manioc, grating it to shreds on scraping boards inset
with teeth of the piranha, then wringing the poisonous fluids from the mass by twisting it in a mesh bag hung from a tree.
Some of the manioc was baked into flat cakes, which would be dipped into a common pepper pot.
The rest was masticated by the girls and women, then spat out into wooden troughs where, mixed with water and palm fruit, the paste fermented; by the day of the feast it was strong and thick and sweet.

Off in the forest the men fashioned giant masks of bark and palm fiber.
The place was kept secret from the women, who were forbidden to suspect that the legs protruding from the Mask were human; the woman who saw a Mask before the dancing, Tukanu said, was subject to mass rape.

Meanwhile the maloca had been repaired and cleaned, though not so scrupulously as to make it appear that Boronai was giving himself airs.
The guests would already be offended that Boronai’s village claimed the presence of Kisu-Mu; they would be on the lookout for an excuse to show disgust for the whole boastful performance and go away.

Finally the men painted their faces and bodies with the greatest pains, as if one false line would undo the whole effect.
They were less careful in their decorations, choosing impulsively from the shells, trinkets, feathers and fur strips at hand; monkey-fur bands and caps of egret feathers were favored, but no two chose alike, there was no pattern.
Often the head decoration was capricious: an old animal tail, bird claws, a plume of river reed, pink petals of mimosa.
If one wanted an ornament belonging to another, the object was admired lavishly; its owner, failing to convince the admirer that the object was ugly and worthless, was obliged by courtesy to give it up and make himself another.

Only Aeore never asked for anything, nor was he asked.
His paint and dress were constant as the plumage of a bird, as if he knew exactly who he was, had always been and always would be.
His lean canoe, his falcon face bands and his bold crown of jaguar fur and yellow toucan feathers all singled him out as the man apart that he meant to be.

Moon asked the People why they were so careful to go painted.
Tukanu said, “It protects me from the heat and Insect
People.”
And Pindi said, “I wear it so that I may know Pindi in the river’s face.”
But Aeore said passionately, “We are naked and have nothing!
Therefore we must decorate ourselves, for if we did not, how are we to be told from animals?”

There it was.
The unbearable thing was not the fear that the Great Spirit had forsaken man, nor even that in granting awareness of death, He had made man’s hope ridiculous, but that from the beginning He had made no real distinction between the mindless animals and mankind.

O
NE
midafternoon the canoes of the Yuri Maha came into view, in single file under the banks; against the current they moved slowly.
They approached in silence and drew up at the landing.
Astern, the headmen of the clans steered the canoes; they stared straight ahead as their people debarked, as if struck dumb by the poor appearance of Boronai’s village, while for their part, the people of Boronai took not the slightest notice of them.

In the shallows the strangers washed themselves.
They adjusted fur-and-feather headdresses, seed necklaces and anklets, and bellybands of warm sun-reds and orange.
Their face paint, which they freshened and greased, was a dead white, encircling the cheekbone.
The men were fully armed with bows and arrows and short lances, and they carried these with them when leaving their canoes.

The procession of grim painted men moved up the bank toward the maloca; their women and children were received with merriment at a rear door.
The boy Mutu had learned the names of every headman and recited them in awe to a younger child: “The Ocelot!
This one is the fierce Ocelot!”

While waiting to be invited in, the strangers inspected Kisu-Mu, though no man stared at him—whether from politeness, pride or fear he could not tell.
Only the one known as the Ocelot, who had stepped aside to speak with Aeore, looked at him pointedly.
He was a tall Indian with a narrow restless head low on his shoulders, and he glared from beneath his crown of feathers like an animal about to come out snapping.
His whole manner was a
taunt: you may have fooled these upstream simpletons, but you are not fooling the great Ocelot of the River Tuaremi.
Yet when Moon acknowledged the taunt by stepping forward, the Ocelot turned away.

Now Boronai appeared in full array, wearing a sun crown of white egret plumes; on his chest hung his jaguar incisors and a strange cylindrical ornament of greenish stone.
The stone had been drilled from one end to the other, and the drilling had been done with bamboo points.
When Moon had doubted this, Boronai explained that the task had occupied two lifetimes.
Moon asked where it came from, and Boronai pointed north and east.
“Long, long ago,” he said, “in the time of the Ancestors.”
The trails there were now lost.

Boronai ignored his guests until they presented themselves formally at the maloca entrance.
Here the greetings exchanged took the form of speeches, shrill and ritualized, without warmth, as if host and guest were both prepared for insult.
The guests were on no better terms among themselves and were careful not to jostle one another; the feather crowns fairly shook with indignation.

This great silent procession of savages, canoe after canoe, drawn out of the vast forest to the east, stirred Moon to the heart; it filled him unaccountably with sadness.
The meager bands and the small stature of these more primitive and horseless Indians did not detract from the true dignity of the Old Ways—ways he had heard about but never seen in the poor shanties of the North American reservations—and now they were meeting in council as had their northern brethren nearly a century before.
He felt himself one of them, and proud.
This jungle would absorb big Guzmán like a sponge; here, he thought, exulting in the angry, proud, suspicious faces, the Indian can resist indefinitely.

The Yuri Maha gazed at him briefly and impassively, and passed one by one into the maloca.

At twilight the clans sat face to face, exchanging greetings, histories, and insults in the form of compliments.
They argued obliquely about fishing rights, disputing the placement of fish
dams and weirs and the length of time a dam could be maintained without causing hardship to the clan farther below.
Boronai’s clan, as the one farthest upriver, was repeatedly accused of selfishness, although the wording was kept circumspect out of courtesy to the host.
“We do not say that you keep weirs across the river pools to steal our fish.
We only say, Perhaps your fishers have forgotten.
We only say, The clans of Boronai have always been forgetful clans.
We only say, There may be a bad feeling.”

Aeore’s willingness to accommodate every grievance perplexed and irritated Boronai; it was only when the young warrior proposed his idea for the federation, and declaimed loudly that his leadership had the support of Kisu-Mu, that Boronai began to understand what was afoot.
He gazed at Moon with a wide depthless stare.
Moon had not thought that Aeore would mention him, and wished that he had taken pains to consult Boronai in advance.
But he had waited too long, and now Boronai felt himself betrayed.

The women kept off by themselves near the rear door of the maloca.
They were bored by the slow and solemn rituals, and fretted impatiently for the moment when the men’s drinking would break the feast wide open, when they could hoot and screech and pretend terror of the Masks, when they could dance and sing and flaunt themselves, when they could be fought over, and fornicate.
Meanwhile they pushed and giggled, and they screamed with dismay when a huge bark-cloth phallus, part of the dwarf Tutki, blundered into their area and tripped and fell.
The phallus lay bewildered on the ground.
This Mask had been entrusted to little Mutu, whose head fit so far inside it that he breathed out of the eyeholes; in his blindness the boy had become separated from the Tutki Mask, who was supposed to guide him from behind.

The feast began with violent gorging.
The masato was served up by calabash from the huge trough, and Moon drank enough of it to become dizzy.
The Indians gulped it in such quantity that every so often each man would vomit to make room for more.
They drank and sighed.
The anger and lust and
vomiting, the intense, excessive feelings were only expressions of life, of
being
, too great to be contained; this purge was a sacred purpose of the feast.
Yet a part of Moon was disgusted, and his disgust kept him outside of things; he felt self-conscious and impatient.
He ate crocodile and monkey, but his share of fat weevils he presented to Pindi, who received them gladly as a sign of love; for the rest of the evening, flirtatiously, she threw manioc paste into his face.

Under the moon, dancing had started, and the lines of men stamped up and down, faster and faster, slow steps, then quick ones, to the whistle and discordant rhythms of crude flutes and drums of monkey skins.

Some of the Masks sang as they danced.
I wander, forever wander
, Turtle sang,
and when I get where I yearn to go, I wander once again
.

In the middle of the night the women joined the dance; in separate lines, giggling wildly, they pranced up and down, up and down.
They paid small attention to drum or flute, and as the evening lengthened the instruments paid no attention to one another, as if the point were not rhythm but pure din.
Past, present and proposed liaisons were now under dispute, and Tukanu’s uncle pummeled one rival even as his wife crept off into the darkness with another.

The Yuri Maha also fought among themselves, and finally the discord became general; the fire shuddered and the black walls swelled with voices.
Moon, not sober himself, cursed the sprawled leadership of his federation; it did not seem possible that harmony could be drawn out of this ruin.
The Yuri Maha were doing all they could to insult their hosts, and finally a drunken headman accosted Boronai himself.
It was the Ocelot.
He fingered the strange green cylinder of stone hung on Boronai’s chest, exclaiming loudly, “What a beautiful thing!
How I wish that I could wear it!”
As the stone was unique in the region, and the greatest possession of the village, the man’s behavior was an extreme provocation, forcing Boronai to be inhospitable.
In the ritual way, Boronai cried out, “No, no, it is old and useless, you would shame yourself by wearing it!”
But the Ocelot exclaimed
again over its beauty, and again Boronai exclaimed over its ugliness.
In the firelight they faced each other, chest to chest, red and feathered like two giant birds.
The exchange was repeated over and over, with small variations, until the tension grew too much for the Yuri Maha; he snatched unsuccessfully at the stone.

The Indians sighed and crowded closer.
As loudly as possible without shouting, Boronai said, “My brother wishes this poor stone of my clan, although he knows that it came from the north rivers long ago, and that we have no other, and that for all other clans it has no meaning.
Therefore I ask my brother not to desire something which is of no use to him.”

But the Ocelot, very drunk, was not skillful enough to back off without loss of face; he glared about him, trapped.
He would have to shout something unforgivable about Boronai’s hospitality, and Boronai, anticipating this, cried quickly, “Here!
Wear it as you wish, so that you will know that it is worthless and of no use to you.
Then you may leave it here with us!”
Boldly, he placed the stone around the other’s neck.

Boronai’s people moaned, for the Yuri Maha postured foolishly, vaunting his moment, and did not return the stone.
But his companions had recognized Boronai’s wisdom and his efforts to save the drunkard’s face; they groaned loudly in disapproval, and the Ocelot removed the stone and draped its string roughly around Boronai’s neck.
As he did so, Boronai glanced at Aeore, who had run to the maloca for his weapons.
Then he gazed at Moon.
Unable to bear the headman’s contemplation, Moon retreated outside the circle of the fire.

In his great drunkenness Tukanu sat himself down beside the Great Spirit of the Rain and laughed jovially into the Great Spirit’s face.
In the firelight his eyes flickered with grotesque humors.
He told of a “thing” he had once wounded, a “thing” Moon was unable to identify because of the extreme thickness of Tukanu’s speech.
Imitating the strange creature, Tukanu crawled dazedly through the shadows, dragging one leg and braying.
Then he imitated the brave Tukanu, hauling sternly on his mighty bow—
thicnk, thicnk
, said Tukanu, to show how solidly his final
arrows had punctured the wounded flesh.
On his knees he played the thing again, bringing his forefeet up under his chin into a position like prayer and rolling his eyes heavenward, all the while emitting hollow braying groans of fear and agony.