Trail of Feathers (28 page)

Despite the lack of medical evidence and basic hygiene, I have not suffered from asthma since gulping down that innocent fish. Perhaps, I thought to myself as I left the hotel, there might be something in Francisco’s miracle cure as well!

*

An old woman moved between the rows of chairs, wiping each one with a rag. Her hands were trembling, her brow beaded with sweat. Nearby, her granddaughter was skipping with a home-made condom rope. Last minute preparations for the beauty pageant were underway. A great banner was suspended over the stage, coloured lights and a crude sound system had been rigged up. A thousand condoms were strung in clusters, as balloons, adorning the stage. And, now that the audience’s chairs were clean, the woman hurried home to change into her best clothes.

A hard-boiled egg seller could hardly contain his eagerness.

‘The women of Trompeteros are the most beautiful in Peru,’ he imparted with a toothless smirk. ‘But beware! You may go mad when you see their soft skin, or when they seduce you with their eyes.’

My informer displayed his eggs in a wicker basket, putting the freshest ones at the bottom. Licking his broad tongue over his palm, he mimicked the local beauties’ seductive skill.

‘After tonight you’ll forget your wife and your country,’ he disclosed, ‘you’ll want to live here forever. That’s
el embrujo
, the spell … the spell of Trompeteros.’

As the blood-red riot of dusk defused over the Rio Corrientes, the audience slipped from the shadows and took their seats. So familiar were they with the ritual, I suspected beauty shows to be a common feature of Trompeteros life. Gone were the wild costumes of the parade, replaced by respectable clothing and wetted-down hair. In my grubby, half-rotting shirt I felt distinctly under-dressed.

The hard-boiled egg man edged up and handed me a free egg. He asked me to advertise its good taste loudly. If a foreigner was seen enjoying his wares, he said under his breath, everyone would want one. I sunk my front teeth into the egg and groaned with pleasure. Then the show began.

An officious man swept up onto the stage and grabbed the microphone. He went through an elaborate routine of testing the acoustics. This involved pressing his lips to the microphone and making bird calls. When the technical tests were at an end, the official announced the evening’s programme. The most beautiful women from the state of Loreto had been gathered, he said, and were waiting on the other side of the banana leaf screen. They would show off two costumes -formal wear and natural. But first, as a warm-up, members of the audience were invited to take part in an amateur talent show.

Thirty gold-toothed women pushed their offspring up towards the podium. Even in the jungle the glare of the limelight is strong. The compère selected a dozen children at random and lined them up. Before they demonstrated their talents, he introduced the pageant’s sponsors. A luscious woman in a scarlet sequinned top swaggered onto the stage. She held up a tomato-coloured sachet, and announced the benefits of Inca-brand condoms. When it came to protection, she said, Inca-brand was the only name to remember. Tossing a handful of the sachets to the crowd, she made way for the young actors.

Were they not starved of even amateur entertainment, the audience might have protested at the performances which followed. There were a series of gawky song and dance routines, three mimes, two Michael Jackson impersonators, and a boy of about six attempting to walk on his hands. Instead of hissing the performers from the stage, the spectators applauded with great verve. They voted the Michael Jacksons as the winners.

After another word from the sponsors, the insect-loaded light-bulbs were dimmed. A backing track of savage, techno’ music echoed around us, as the first of the beauty queens stepped from behind the screen. In Trompeteros formal wear meant swimsuits. The first belle was wearing a striped gold bikini, her slender legs ending in a pair of white stilettos. Across her chest was a sash bearing the name of her village,
Cuchara
, which means ‘spoon’ and from her wrist dangled tag number one. As soon as they saw her, the audience went wild. The men whistled, and the women whooped.

The second girl prowled like a panther onto the stage, blowing kisses to her admiring fans. Her leopard-skin print swimsuit was complemented by a cowry shell necklace, and a pair of dangerously high-heeled white shoes. Behind her, contestant number three emerged. Unlike the others, she was thick-built and bulky, with a tremendous neck, and hands the size of pudding bowls. The hard-boiled egg man tapped me on the knee and pointed. She was one of his best customers, he said. The audience appreciated the display of obesity. They applauded furiously.

The contestants kept coming, ever more seductive in their swim-suits and white high-heels. When all nine beauties were on the stage, they marched in a circle pouting, and blowing kisses to the swooning men below. Every few minutes, the compère would lower the music and proclaim the high quality of Inca-brand condoms. The beauties on the stage, he declared, were examples of clean-living girls who always used an Inca condom.

After the formal wear, the girls slipped away to change into something a little more casual. Contestant number one reappeared a moment later dressed in a real leopard skin, with red face paint and a spear. Gone were the white high-heels, replaced by bare feet. The next contestant modelled a fibre skirt, her hair embellished with a simple feather crown. As they paraded round the stage, each one would mime out a jungle scene - gathering water, carrying bananas on her head, or hauling in a fishing net. The formal costumes had been a big hit, but nothing like the natural wear.

To the audience, every girl was a sensation. But the routine of contestant number six mesmerised them beyond words. First, she danced across the stage, wriggling her hips and stroking her thighs. Then, dropping to her knees, while still dancing, she pulled a leaf pouch from her back and emptied its contents - a smattering of white specks - onto the stage. I craned my neck to catch sight of what was going on. The others knew the routine. It was their favourite. Clasping her arms behind her back, the girl writhed forward like a limbo dancer, lowering her face until her lips touched the boards. As I watched entranced, she sucked up the white specks and swallowed them. The spectators were ecstatic. Unsure of what she was eating, I asked the man sitting beside me.

‘
¡
Gusanos vivos!’
he exclaimed. ‘She’s eating
gusanos.’

I made him explain what a
gusano
was exactly.

He scrunched up his face, disturbed at my lack of basic Spanish.

‘Gusanos vivos’,
he repeated, ‘live tree grubs.’

Seven days after disappearing into the undergrowth, Richard arrived back at the
Pradera
. His fatigues were caked in mud, as when I had first met him. On his walk in the woods he had, he said, tasted the scent of nature on his lips. He had drunk water from the
cipó d’agua
vine, had eaten fresh brazil nuts, and had spotted a young ocelot prowling through the trees.

‘A man who has trod softly on the jungle floor’ he said with uncharacteristic poetry, ‘has the blinkers pulled from his eyes. His lungs breathe purity, and his mind is honed to right and wrong’

So surprised was I that Richard had uttered such a sentence, that I jotted it down. As I scribbled in my notebook, Cockroach handed the veteran a boiled
mahasse’s
leg. The dish was one of Richard’s favourites. He clambered back into position in the rocking chair, and chewed at the wild pig’s hoof.

The week-long sojourn at Trompeteros had given me time to dry my clothes and regroup. I was ready for another bout of tortuous river travel. With the beetles stowed in the medicine chest, Richard on the roof, and Cockroach frying
tsampunta
, grasshoppers, in a pan of oil, things were getting back to normal. Only Walter and the shaman were missing, unable no doubt, to prise themselves away from the Hotel of Miracles. I sent Cockroach to hunt down his shipmates.

When Walter finally slunk back onto the
Pradera
, he was boasting of his philanthropic work to rid Trompeteros of venereal disease. I dreaded to ask how many women he had ravaged in the process. The oil workers’ liaisons with the gold-toothed girls were, he said, responsible for the spread of great disease. Similar claims had been made against the rubber barons and their labourers, a century ago.

But thoughts of the girls were now far from Walter’s mind. He was more interested in getting me to foot the repairman’s exorbitant bill. I let him inspect my empty wallet. In the Amazon, a journey’s financier is responsible for covering every cost.

‘No one keeps money in their wallet,’ Walter said knowingly. ‘In Peru everyone puts their cash in their shoes.’

I tugged off my rat-gnawed shoes. He and the others poked about under the insoles. Nothing. They searched the bottom of my sleeping bag. All they found was mildewed underwear.

Reluctantly, Walter called for Francisco to fire up the engine. On the tenth jerk of the starting-cord, the Johnson 65 lurched into life. The river-bank was soon masked in dense, oily blue smoke. As it dispersed, I made out three figures standing at the water’s edge. They were each holding laundry bags. All three were young women. The youngest one, who couldn’t have been older than fifteen, was asking for Walter.

She and the others begged the
motorista
to take them on the journey. They would work aboard the boat, they said, and would tolerate any discomfort as long as they could be with him, the man they loved. I wondered if I was hearing right. Walter was hardly a fine example of manhood. Cockroach nudged me in the ribs.

‘See what I was telling you,’ he said, ‘the most ugly men in Peru get all the women.’

Walter told the girls that he would return. He didn’t know when, or how, but he would come back to Trompeteros. Nothing would stand between them. It was a poignant moment. I was almost touched by Walter’s promises. I asked Cockroach to give the girls a couple of
mahasse
legs each. It was one way of disposing of the vile-smelling meat.

Without pausing any further for pleasantries, Walter pulled back the throttle and steered the
Pradera
towards the left bank of the river. Three black vultures circled above us, a grim omen of things to come. Cockroach and the others had no interest in such signs. They waved back to the gold-toothed girls, and wished them luck. I sensed that the disco’s depraved atmosphere would soon erase their memories of Walter.

The boat was now so infested with wolf spiders that you had to check every spoonful of food before putting it in your mouth. The cockroaches tended to keep back, but the wolf spiders -
wolfies
as we called them - would jump suicidally onto your spoon when it was raised to the lips. The rafters were swarming with them. There were so many that the shaman suggested reintroducing rats back onto the boat to curb their numbers.

Two days after pushing off from Trompeteros, Francisco jumped from his string hammock and ran up and down the roof, squealing. I supposed he was just having a bad reaction to the food. But Richard recognised the outburst.

‘He’s seen something,’ said the vet’. ‘He’s had a premonition.’

‘About what?’

The shaman froze and plunged his fingers into the front of his underpants. ‘The Shuars,’ he said. ‘We are near them. There’s danger The Shuar have sent a dart to harm us.’

I would have ignored the warning, that is if I hadn’t already read about the Shuar’s bewitching techniques. In their society, bewitching shamans are called
wawek
. The reference books said they were usually the richest people in the village, as everyone gave them gifts. You can’t do too much to stay on the good side of a
wawek
. Usually, a Shuar shaman could swallow a little tobacco water, then regurgitate a
t s ent sak
, a magical dart. Part live and part dead, such darts are the most feared of all shamanic tools. If hurled at someone, they can pass right through his body. Oblivious that he’s been bewitched, the victim drops dead soon afterwards.

When a shaman wants to bewitch someone from a distance, he can use the help of the
wakani
bird. Acting as a spirit-helper, it will carry the dart and toss it at the victim on the shaman’s behalf.

Most shamans in the Upper Amazon conserve one aspect of their power as a thick white phlegm. Kept in the upper part of their stomachs, the phlegm is said to contain magic darts and spirit-helpers, used in curing or bewitching. It can be regurgitated at will, and can even be drunk by a shaman’s pupil, when a master wants to transfer power to the apprentice. Francisco boasted that his phlegm was more powerful than any other; he could create limitless supplies of it. Given the amount he smoked, this seemed hardly surprising.

He said that he’d seen the Shuar’s darts pierce our bodies. To us they were invisible, but he - with his special shamanic perception -could see them lodged in our chests. The darts were in all of us. When I asked him what he could do, he stuffed a pipe with
mapacho
and filled his lungs with its sable-coloured smoke.

‘Hell smoke the darts out of us’ said Richard. ‘And later, when the boat is lost in the darkness, we’ll take
sanango.’

The thought that we were at last entering the country of the Shuar, boosted my own morale. I kept thinking back to Dr Cabieses’ office, with its fine shrunken head, and the talk of allegorical flight. Had the doctor not coaxed me to continue, to seek out the Birdmen, I would not have been sailing up the Corrientes in a rotting, spider-infested boat. Nor would I have been duped by César, or have crossed paths with a Vietnam vet.

I lay out on the roof. On a long journey, I mused, the line between resounding success and unimagined failure is no broader than a hair’s breadth. I prayed that the Shuar, my beloved Birdmen, would welcome us, and initiate me with a flight on
ayahuasca
. I prayed, too, that the crew would stick by me. Their loyalty was always in question. But my greatest fear was of offending the proud warrior tribe. For this reason, I read and re-read the two books about the Shuar, and memorised as many points of etiquette as I could. The list of don’ts was long: don’t mix with the Shuar if you are sick; don’t refuse to eat their food, however grotesque; don’t ask too many questions, touch a child’s head, discuss the river, or show the soles of your feet.