Authors: Matilde Asensi
That night, we had grilled toucan for dinner (it turned out to be a very tender and flavorful meat) with iguana eggs that our hosts took from certain hollows in the trees with the same ease with which they would have picked them up, packaged, from the shelves of any supermarket. The powerless lizards froze where they were on the trunks and watched as the indigenous men calmly took their eggs, which were elongated, about an inch and a half long, and turned out to be very appetizing both raw and grilled over the hot stones of the fire. For desert, we ate great quantities of some very mature fruits the size of large apples, which, oddly, smelled and tasted like pineapple, but they weren’t, and they had many seeds and very little pulp. We ate more and better than we had on our own, with all that tasteless freeze-dried, canned, packaged, and powdered food, and when we hung the hammocks—the Indians also had their own, made of fine vegetable fibers, which fit in one hand when folded—I at last slept soundly, without worries, and dreamed that I was arriving in my car at Xiprer Street to see Daniel and his family, and that the whole street was clear for me to park where I wanted, without having to park the car over the curb. I unfortunately couldn’t tell all of this to my companions because our guards didn’t let us speak amongst ourselves until two days later, when they decided that it was no longer necessary to watch us, because we’d understood the situation.
Really, we had understood it almost immediately, and if we needed something else to make us accept it with awe and satisfaction, we discovered it that first night, after dinner, when our friendly hosts, tired of food and walking, spent a long time around the fire, telling each other funny things that made them laugh a lot, and in them, in those stories, there was a term they repeated continuously, most of the time pointing at themselves or the whole group: the word was none other than “Toromona.” In the end, I told myself after exchanging a significant glance with Marta, that guy, the author of the ethnic map of Bolivia, what was his name? Díaz Astete, yes, that was it, Díaz Astete had been right in his claims that there could still be Toromona in the Madidi region, that tribe which had supposedly disappeared during the Caucho War in the nineteenth century and which, according to history, had been the great ally of the Inca who hid in the Amazon jungle when they fled the Spanish (taking with them, according to legend, the mythical treasure known as El Dorado). But what was unknown to both history and Díaz Astete was that the Toromona hadn’t helped the Inca, precisely, but some citizens of the empire—which made them Inca, according to the Spanish chroniclers—who were the Yatiri wise men, the Capaca-priests of the Aymara people, the “people of ancient times,” who, coming from Tiwanaku-Taipikala, “the central stone,” had fled from the Spanish, from their cruelty and their contagious illnesses, taking with them not El Dorado (they had left that in the chamber of the Traveler), but the most important treasure they possessed: their sacred language, the ancient
Jaqui Aru
, the “human language,” whose sounds were consubstantial with the nature of beings and things.
The Toromona had found the magic words they had needed in the plaza of the city in ruins, but we had also found ours that night, and so a relationship was formed that was going to last much longer than we realized at the time.
During that first week, we walked without rest, following trails or rivers and penetrating deeper and deeper into a jungle that changed its character every few days. Sometimes it was
friendly and impressive, like when we reached the summit of one of the peaks in a mountain range that we had at last crossed in its entirety, and we saw at our feet, stretching as far as the eye could see, a carpet of many-hued treetops in which were tangled some still, white clouds. On other occasions, however, it was as hostile as the worst of enemies, and we had to be always on our guard to keep from suffering from the bites of army ants, mosquitoes, bees, and tarantulas, and also of snakes, bats, caimans, and piranhas, the most abundant species of fish in the Amazon. We often saw pumas and jaguars, but they never tried to attack us, and also falcons, eagles, monkeys, and anteaters (very delicious, by the way, with a flavor similar to goose). The Indians kept the anteaters’ long claws, and during the stops we made to eat or sleep, they sharpened them with rocks until they were transformed into dangerous knives. With time, Marc, Efraín, and I got used to trimming our beards with those claws. Watching the Toromona and learning from them became an obsession. If Marc and I had always said that the world was full of closed doors and that we had been born to open all of them, those Indians knew how to open the doors of the Green Hell, and I wanted to learn to break the passwords of the code of the jungle. Marc and Lola made fun of me, but Marta, like a good anthropologist, came with me whenever I discreetly joined a group of Indians who were going to carry on some odd activity. They let us wander around without giving us any trouble, with a mix of compassion and scorn very similar to what parents feel for their smallest, clumsiest children, but they quickly discovered how real our interest was, and they granted us a preferred status within the small army, coming to call us by our names whenever they found something they thought might interest us. There was one lesson, however, that I would have preferred to skip if I had been able to.
Two or three days after leaving the ruins, I noticed I had an enormous abscess on my right shin. I ignored it, thinking it was a common inflammation caused by one of the thousands of scratches and small cuts we suffered every day from plants, but soon after it began to fester and swell even more, causing such terrible pain that it made me limp. Gertrude began to really worry when another, similar boil appeared on the back of my left hand and swelled so much that there came a time when it looked more like a boxing glove than a hand. We had no antibiotics or painkillers, and poor Dr. Bigelow felt incapable of helping me. The day that Marc and Efraín had to help me walk, grabbing me below my shoulders, the Toromona noticed that something weird was going on with me. One of them—the old pyromaniac who had set fire to our possessions—made them put me back on the ground and examined my hand and shin with the eye of a village doctor who had spent his whole life seeing the same illnesses in his neighbors. He put some leaves that looked like tobacco in his mouth and chewed for a long while, allowing threads of brown saliva to fall from the corners of his mouth. I felt so bad that I couldn’t even manage the effort necessary to pull my hand away when the old man spit slowly on the very painful inflammation, then stared attentively at the abscess until it opened a small mouth, a volcano on the surface, and something that moved erupted from my hand. I think I swore, cursed, and blasphemed until I was hoarse, while Marc and Efraín held me strongly to keep me from moving. Lola got dizzy and had to step back with Marta, who also wasn’t taking it well. Only Gertrude remained intent on what was going on while I spit out a torrent of all the worst curses I knew. The old Indian used two fingers to extract from my swollen hand a white larva about an inch long, which allowed itself to be removed without offering resistance, drunk from the tobacco juice the old Indian had so kindly prepared for me. Taking out the second larva was a little harder because it was bigger and had spent much longer holding onto my flesh. The old man, who turned out to be the tribe’s shaman, explained to me with gestures that they were horsefly larvae and that, apparently, like mosquitoes looking for blood to suck, those insects felt a special
predilection for some people. Logically, the whole thing awakened the investigative passion of the doctor and amateur anthropologist that was Gertrude Bigelow, and from that moment on, the doctor stuck to the old shaman like a limpet and was continually fascinated by the new things she was learning.
After that disagreeable experience, I spent the rest of the trip shooing away like crazy all the horseflies that got close to me, and my companions also developed a strong aversion to that insect, so much so that, in the end, we helped each other in the job of keeping them away, since they were capable of biting through clothes. The only good thing was that when the old man removed the larva, the abscesses closed and healed perfectly in a couple of days, with the help of an oil that the Indians got from the bark of a tree with dark green leaves and white flowers very similar to jasmine, oil that they got just by stabbing one of the sharp anteater claws into any part of the tree. The shaman’s method for relieving my pain was another matter: He made me put my bare feet on the damp soil near puddles, and then he applied the thick heads of several electric eels to my hand and shin. It goes without saying that they produced a series of shocks that, oddly, acted as an anesthetic, making the pain disappear completely for a few hours.
Those Indians knew how to make the most of everything and find everything they needed in their environment. From a strange tree that abounded on the banks of rivers, they took a white resin that had a penetrating smell of camphor and kept the fearsome army ants and ticks away. They only had to pull off a piece of bark and let the resin flow, which they then applied all over their bodies or to the trees they were going to tie their hammocks to. With time, naturally, we ended up copying them—which is the best way of learning—and, by example, when our clothes turned to rags we decided that it would be a good idea to cut what was left of our pants off above the knees, enduring like the Indians the small cuts and bruises that we ended up not noticing.
The truth is, almost without noticing it, we were undergoing a major transformation. And not just myself, but also my civilized companions, who ended up adapting themselves perfectly to the rhythm of daily life in the jungle and the strange customs of the Toromona. Despite the humidity and the constant insect bites, we enjoyed excellent health during the course of the journey; and that was because, according to what Gertrude told us, in the Amazon, the swampy overgrown areas are generally more healthful than the dry ones because of the absence of tropical heat. We no longer felt fatigue and could walk at a good pace all day long without ending up exhausted by nighttime, and we learned to eat and drink unimaginable things—Marc, of course, was not once disgusted by any of it—and also to remain quiet and concentrated for hours, alert to the signs of the jungle. In my case, however, it was a much more spectacular metamorphosis, because, of the six, I was the least used to nature and the most squeamish and finicky. Nevertheless, in those three short weeks, I became a guy capable of shooting a blowgun, of identifying the tree with red wrinkled bark from which we extracted a very nutritious drink (which, even if it smelled like dead dog, tasted exactly the same as cow’s milk), as well as the poisonous vine that we mashed and shook in the water of rivers to kill the fish that would be happy to eat us for dinner. I also came to know, from my own experience and some late-coming Toromona advice, which leaves we could use as toilet paper and which ones had toxins that we would do well to stay away from, and, of course, to recognize the silent wake drawn on the water by caimans or anacondas when we bathed in the rivers.
Of course all that was nothing. Just the basics, just what was indispensable for survival. You can’t learn in a few days what takes a whole lifetime of practice. I was only a privileged tourist, not a traveler in the old fashion of those who spent months or even years in the place they wanted to get to know; and like a common tourist, my vision of that world was the same that the
members of an organized trip like “all of Greece in four days, cruise through the islands included” would get. I was aware of it, but just as adrenalin flowed in torrents through my veins whenever I broke through the protections of some place with prohibited information and slipped through the sewers in the Nou Camp to leave my tag painted on the walls of the press room, on that journey I couldn’t resist combating my ignorance of all that surrounded me.
One night, very near our destination, as we talked a while before sleeping, Lola looked at me and suddenly laughed.
“When you get home,” she mumbled between hiccups, “are you going to keep asking Sergi to protect you from the innocent little bugs in your garden?”
Marc, who was annoyed because the previous afternoon he had touched a moth, and later, without noticing, had wiped the sweat from his face with his hands, causing a rash that was driving him crazy, let out a laugh that made all the Toromona, who also were chatting next to the fire, turn their heads toward us.
“If only they could see you now, Root! Wait till I tell them at the company!”
“You’ll keep your mouth shut,” I told him very seriously, “if you don’t want me to throw you out on the street.”
“You’re not serious, are you?” Gertrude asked, worried. She addressed me in the informal mode. We had all begun to address each other like that shortly after being taken out of the ruined city, without really knowing why. Now we used the formal mode of address like the Bolivians, only for very personal things, and Marc and Lola, jokingly, had become accustomed to using it to address each other when they were fighting. The world in reverse.
“Of course he’s serious,” Marc told her, very carefully pushing the re d strands from his forehead with the back of his sore hands. “He’s already fired me on more than one occasion. Now he seems so calm and self-possessed, but when he gets mad, he has a wicked temper.”
“He’s fired me a couple of times, too,” Lola recalled, tugging at the loose threads of what remained of her very expensive HyVent pants. “But he does it without noticing. Deep down, he’s a good guy. Weird, but good.”
“Weird?” Marta laughed.
“They’re the weird ones,” I observed with an impassive expression. “Look at them and tell me if they’re not. They seem really weird to me.”
“We didn’t sell an internet portal to Chase Manhattan Bank for millions of dollars right after our thirtieth birthday,” Marc argued, bringing up the trivial part of my biography that got the most attention.
Quick as a flash, Marta, Efraín, and Gertrude turned to look at me.