Honorable Mention. The Eye of the Needle. GLENN SHEPARD. Department of Anthropology. Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi. Av. Perimetral, 1901âTerra Firme.
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Honorable Mention The Eye of the Needle GLENN SHEPARD Department of Anthropology Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi Av. Perimetral, 1901—Terra Firme Belém do Para, PA 66077-830 BRAZIL The pale light of a half moon filtered through the forest canopy and dappled the path where she tracked a maddening stench. Hunger tore at her belly like a blunt spear of boar tusk, like the tusk that had ripped into her eye during a stampede long ago and left her watching the world half in shadow. From her blind side hidden obstacles now loomed blurry, out of perspective: far, then near. She had roamed in vain through the clawing blackness that night, exhausted and famished and betrayed by her waning strength and failing senses. But she caught wind of the familiar odor and crawled along its trace until she found the moonlit path cutting through the forest. She was in haste to sate her hunger but she had to go softly because the enemy was about. From her blind side there came a fearful snap, an ominous grunt. She turned her head and froze at the sweep of a smoldering yellow eye that glared in her direction and then blinked shut in the close darkness. *
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“God damn!” His cry was answered by nothing but the hypnotic hum of frogs and cicadas: a vast orchestra that was forever tuning up but never played the overture. He switched his headlamp to full power and looked down toward the throbbing pain: blood was welling up from under a broken toenail. Just this afternoon, Jaime at the health post had admonished him yet again to wear boots. “Pucha! You and your sandals. You could at least wear tennis shoes. They make such nice tennis shoes in your country. Do you know how many snake bites I’ve treated in the past six months? And all on the feet. Besides, these people have walked barefoot since they were babies. The skin on their feet is like cowhide.” Alec had started out walking around barefoot. They did, after all. But their feet really were like cowhide: thick and brown, more like gnarled tree roots than any human appendage. His were handsomely arched, pale, soft. Three days in his tent with a swollen foot full of palm spines had convinced him that Tevas were the next best thing to barefoot. He was still holding off on the insect Anthropology and Humanism, Vol. 39, Issue 1, pp 67–79, ISSN 1559-9167, online ISSN 1548-1409. © 2014 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/anhu.12038.
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repellant: his ankles were pocked with constellations of tiny red gnat bites. If you let them bite you enough, your skin must eventually stopped reacting. Theirs does, right? He daubed blood from his toe with a piece of toilet paper ripped from the flattened roll he always carried in a ziplock bag: there was one civilized luxury about which he had no qualms. This path always seemed to take twice as long at night. The sun set so quickly here, like someone turning off a switch at 6:00 p.m., and the forest was dark even sooner. His headlamp cast long shadows on the winding path littered with tree trunks and small shrubs that the villagers hacked down with their machetes to oblique points as treacherous as punji sticks. But the old man had invited him. Maybe after drinking a couple of gourds full he might loosen up and tell some stories. Alec had only been here a month. He was working hard at the language. The older men knew a little Spanish. Some of the teenagers had been away at the Catholic boarding school in Esperanza and could speak Spanish fairly well: they proved to be apt if not always eager translators. People in different parts of the village had told him that Baltazar was the one who knew the most about the old ways. So far, he had been elusive. But the tape recorder was in the ziplock, along with the toilet paper and a small note pad, just in case. How old was Baltazar, anyway? You really couldn’t tell sometimes, with them. His youngest son, Lorenzo, couldn’t be much over 14 or 15, while his oldest daughter looked like she was close to 40. What was her name? That would make, him, what? 60? He looked a little older, at least his face. His wife was dead, wasn’t she? “Damn!” Another stump. The cicadas kept to their tuning, and he limped down the forest path a little more slowly, hunching forward and aiming his headlamp directly at the ground. *
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“Tataka ogogeta?!” laughed Tito, “What does it think it’s doing?!” Tito sat on a dingy cane mat in the dim moonlight, already raucous on his fourth gourd of strongly fermented masato beer. A skinny dog tied to a house post began barking furiously. The dog yelped and went silent as someone swatted it with a cane. Tito watched the headlamp’s bobbing approach down the forest path before it emerged into the clearing. He turned again to Baltazar and repeated, merrily, “Father-in-law, what does it think it’s doing? El gringo, coming at this time of night!” The other guests laughed and shouted out in Spanish, “What is it doing?! Salud por eso!” downing more masato. “I invited him, and he said he would come,” replied Baltazar smoothly. “These gringos, they are not like you, son-in-law. They keep their promises.” Tito scowled, finished off his gourd with a grimace, and shouted, “Wife! More masato!” The gringo approached the circle of men and enunciated a stiff salutation in their native tongue, “Chapinitanae!” Tito burst out laughing, “What does it think it’s doing! ‘Chapinitanae!’ It’s not a gringo, it’s a parrot: ‘Chapinitanae! Chapinitanae!’ ”
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The other men laughed, but Baltazar looked at Tito and said in a low voice, “If only my son-in-law were such a clever parrot, it would have learned English, and it could have the bad manners to insult my guest in his own native tongue.” The other men roared now in drunken laughter at Tito’s consternation, “Clever parrot! Learn English!,” one of them shouted. Tito scowled and stood up, turning his back to the circle of men. He called again for masato and plunged into the smoky hut where the women laughed, nursed their babies, and strained out copious gourds. Baltazar turned to his guest, squinting, and shielded his eyes from the bright halo of the headlamp. Alec switched off the headlamp. He didn’t know what the men were laughing about: his limp, maybe? They did have a rather dark sense of humor, he had noticed. “Chapinitanae, Señor Alejandro. Mapuinaenka pipokake,” Baltazar spoke quickly, but the words were familiar. Alec paused, trying to remember. Baltazar switched to broken Spanish, “Good evening, Señor Alejandro. You come late. Sit. You learn my language. Good. Kameti!” “Kameti! Kameti!” repeated Alec as Tito emerged from the hut with a full gourd and sat down by Baltazar without speaking. “You come late Señor Alejandro. Very dangerous. Jaguar close by. Want my chicken. Bad days. Drink masato, my daughter will serve you.” “Noshinto!” Baltazar cried and a woman emerged from the hut with a foamy gourd. “Salud, Señor Alejandro.” As Alec sipped the sour white liquid, a shrill eerie call cut through the night. The murmur of laughter and conversation stopped. Baltazar whistled and spat and called out in the direction of the sound and began talking in a low voice in his native tongue to Tito. Alec turned to Baltazar’s youngest son Lorenzo and asked in Spanish, “What was that? What happened?” “Old stories, Señor Alejandro. No one listens anymore.” “Lorenzo, I want to listen to the stories. That’s why I’m here. So help me. Tell me what happened. What is your father is saying?” Lorenzo looked down, hesitated, and then said, “Old stories. Our culture before we were civilized. The old people they say. . . How you say? Jeroroni, jeroroni. . . Owl! A kind of owl. This jeroroni is the watch dog for our enemy: when it calls, it means the enemy is close. The enemy has brujería. Bad magic. Makes the people sick, turns us like them. Kills the people, turns them into bad animals like snake, or jaguar. But these are old stories. No one listens anymore.” Alec set down the gourd and reached into his pocket for the notebook. Turning on his headlamp, he scribbled a few lines. “Lorenzo,” he looked up, “What was the name of that owl?” *
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Jaime’s eyes snapped open to the cool night, the darkness, the giddy orchestral hum of the forest. He heard the knock again, then the soft, insistent voice, “Doctor? Doctor Jaime?” It was never good when they woke him up in the middle of the night.
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“Pucha, otra vez,” he thought. They always wait until it’s too late. “Noata,” he called out from his mosquito net, intoning one of a half dozen words in the native dialect that he had learned so far in his rural service. “Ya voy! Ya voy!” As he dressed in haste in the yellow cone of his flashlight, he remembered the last time they had woken him up this late. The baby’s fragile chest had fluttered like the breast of a frightened bird rattling its cage. A thick gurgling in the stethoscope spoke to him in the precise inhuman poetry of medicine: pleural effusion. Lord Jesus! How long had this child had pneumonia, anyway? The posters were plastered all over the clinic, showing the buxom cumbia star, the smiling blue-eyed rubia, the quaint brown peasant woman, all exhorting the jingly Health Ministry slogan: “If your baby’s breathing is rushed, then Rush! Quick to the nearest health center!” If only they could read. He needed an intensive care unit, and all he had was a near-empty pharmacy cabinet infested with cockroaches. He had injected the biggest dose of pentavalent penicillin the fragile pale baby could withstand. And then almost on cue, the frantic breathing had hacked, exhaled in a weary sigh, and stopped. The mother uttered a falsetto syllable of defeat and cried softly, but Jaime had ripped the lifeless bundle from her floppy naked breasts and resuscitated the child with a single gentle round of CPR. The child’s parents watched, frozen. The baby breathed on its own for two minutes more and sighed again into arrest. And again he resuscitated the baby with gentle mouth-to-mouth. He’d stay up the whole night if that’s what it took; just keep that baby breathing until the penicillin took effect. He’d have to be his own ICU. But after the third resuscitation, and the third wheezing arrest, the mother cried out something in her native tongue and seized the child back, singing a lullaby to the lifeless form at her breast. Jaime reached back for the baby, but the child’s father held him back. “What is she doing? I can revive him! Didn’t you see me revive him? I’ve just got to keep him breathing until the penicillin takes effect. You went to school, you understand Spanish, tell her, tell her in your dialect!” But the man had looked at him and said in broken Spanish, “All gone. Good night.” When was that? Had it been two months already? He could never keep track of the date here. One day followed another in repetitive tropical monotony: the scorching hot days, the cool damp nights, the mud. The bugs! Lord Jesus, so many bugs. He had radioed in the fatality report. That was his second and he hadn’t even finished the six month probationary period. With this small service population, one more fatality registered under the “preventable” disease category and the Ministry would automatically open an investigation. He could lose the six months’ service credit. They might even send him some place worse than this. Just the paper work it would involve! But these were the rules under the new Minister, a whole new cabal of acronyms: it all revolved around QPMs: quantitative performance metrics. As he headed to the door, the pale yellow cone of light flickered across a postcard of the Virgin of Santa Rosa his mother had sent him, tacked to the wooden slats. He was no devotee like his mother, but he crossed himself all the
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same and began reciting the familiar rosary to himself. “Not again, not tonight. Virgin Mary! Not again.” * * * She was in the dark forest with only feeble moonlight to silhouette the treetops high above. The path was too dangerous: she might encounter the enemy. She crawled through a maze of roots and vines and branches that clawed and grappled from her blind side like an invisible foe. She turned her head from side to side, seeking a way with her good eye. Her nostrils flared and she found the familiar odor: she was close now. She trailed the scent toward a faint glow and emerged at the edge of a circle of huts. The moon raked low over the ragged shadows of treetops. She found meat smoking in a small hut and devoured it, barely chewing with what remained of her rotten teeth. She emerged from the smokehouse calling to her daughters to strain fresh masato to quench her thirst. But instead the men burst from the huts clutching bows and arrows, looked at her with panic and called her that horrible name. “Kinsmen, what has come over you? Why do you greet me so rudely? It’s me! I was lost all night in the forest. I’m hungry. Now I have found my way home!” She spoke to them but they didn’t understand. Their voices too were fearsome, wild, incomprehensible. Bowstrings cracked and arrows began to whistle past her ears and pelt the mud around her. She heard a grim metallic creaking as one of them loaded an old rifle. She fled into the black tangle as the voices dwindled behind her and were lost to the giddy buzzing of the forest. Forgetting fatigue and her barely sated hunger, she raced far and deep into the shadows until she splashed into a small clearing where the moon reflected off the surface of a shallow rainwater pond. The panicky, concentric halos of light and shadow subsided, and she looked down. A multitude of quivering yellow crescents resolved into a single glowing feline eye. She should be afraid, and yet she wanted to laugh: the jaguar seemed to be winking at her. She stared, fascinated by the incongruous gaze as the jaguar crouched closer. It reached toward her with a huge paw, and by no will of her own she extended her hand toward it. She looked down from the bewitching eye and saw her forearm disappearing into the dark mirror of the pond. The two limbs, human and beast, were joined at an obtuse angle across the shuddering membrane. She looked up again and the creature stared back with its single eye into her own. Panic filled her again. She turned to run, to wrench herself from the transmogrifying clutch and fly across the rippling black surface to some safe place. But the grip on her arm tightened and a talon punctured her flesh. The yellow eye swam again before her and she fell into the refractive darkness. * * * “Ina?” Roberta lifted the mosquito net and then turned to Jaime, “Mi mamá.” Jaime shone the flashlight into the tumble of mosquito net and musty blankets, finally focusing on the skeletal face of an ancient woman. “Lucha?” said Jaime softly. She had gotten so much worse. When he first arrived she could still shuffle around clutching a stick and knocking her knobby knees. He remembered watching her roast bananas on the fire and cradle flat river stones to pound tiny fish into a pulp she could mash with her gums.
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Her toothless smile and bad eye, lost to some untreated accident years before, set her face into an eternal, spry wink that Jaime had first thought was endearing, but now found unnerving. The arthritis finally defeated her, and for the past month she had been entirely bedridden, tended by her gentle and patient daughter Roberta. At least they had brought her to a relative’s house close to the health post: the path down to Baltazar’s was long and treacherous especially at night. How old was she, anyway? You could never tell, especially with the women. Probably too old to have a birth certificate. The padre only civilized these selváticos, what, 15 or 20 years ago? How did the Ministry define “preventable” for seniors? Have to read up on the new regulations. When was the 180 day probation up? Just have to count it out on the calendar. At least there were plenty of I.V. bags. He might not get her out of the coma, but he could keep her alive for another week, maybe more. He didn’t know how much Spanish Roberta actually understood. Every time he spoke, she would answer by repeating his last word and adding a tentative, “Sí.” Then again, he had been here almost six months and hadn’t moved much beyond, “hello,” “woman,” “drunk,” “my name is Jaime,” and the usual picaresque anatomical references in their language. It had been fine until that gringo came, now everyone was asking him why the gringo had learned so much in so much less time. But just as well, the gringo would get him motivated: he’d have to learn at least a few funny phrases in selvático dialect in his year in the jungle to tell his friends back home. Jaime pointed at the needle, pointed at the bag, and then at Lucha’s frail arm. “Medicine,” he said slowly, “Like the suero oral for the babies. But to her blood. Entiende?” Roberta repeated, “Entiende. Sí.” Jaime shrugged and put in the I.V. drip. Lucha’s good eye twitched open and shut, and she mumbled as the needle went in. Roberta watched without expression as he hung the translucent bag from a rafter in the low smoky hut. *
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Alec opened his eyes as the early morning light entered his damp tent. His toe was throbbing. He looked up and saw children’s faces pressed against the mesh window at either end. They giggled. He sat up suddenly and roared. The voyeurs screamed and ran off in all directions. It was their morning ritual. He winced as he put on first the sock and then the shoe over his bruised, bloodied big toe. He was doing it not so much to please Doctor Jaime as to hide the stubbed toe: he didn’t want to listen to another of Jaime’s lectures about snakebites. And he also needed to use the radio. He crossed a dew-soaked field where the ragged kids were now kicking a deflated ball and laughing. “Alejandro! Alejandro! Alejandro!” The children screamed when they saw him, then laughed and ran down a muddy path into a scrubby garden, abandoning the limp ball to the weeds. “Buenos días, Doctor,” said Alec as the warped door scraped along the plank floor. The walls of the health clinic were crowded with didactic posters, diagrams, maps, and community service advisories. This densely medical wallpaper contrasted with the sparse equipment: a desk, a bench, a rusty birthing
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chair hung with wet towels, and glass cabinets hanging slackly open, mostly empty. He walked deliberately across the creaking planks. Jaime turned down the static blare of the radio, “Buenos días Señor Alejandro. Stub your toe again? You and your sandals. When will you learn? Here, let me have a look.” “No, no Doctor. It’s nothing really. I put on triple antiobiotic cream and, how do you call them in Spanish? Steri-strips?” “Ah, the butterfly bandage. That bad? At least you’re better supplied than we are.” Jaime made a mute sweep with his arm around the clinic. A knock came from the outside wall of the clinic by the door. “One minute please.” Alec watched Jaime open the door to a familiar-looking woman on the porch. Alec recognized her, hadn’t he seen her last night at Baltazar’s? A baby hung in a sling on her nude breast, and she said to Jaime, “Mi mamá. Water. All gone.” “Señor Alejandro, please excuse me. I need to go change an I.V. You know how the radio works, help yourself!” “Oh,” Jaime turned back as he was leaving, “I forgot to tell you the news. They radioed from Esperanza last night. Padre Pascual will be arriving before noon.” Jaime set off across the weedy field with the woman. Alec sat down in front of the squealing radio and turned it off. “Today?” he thought. “Damn. And I was supposed to spend the afternoon with Baltazar. I better go talk to him before the Padre gets here.” *
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For three days, Padre Pascual had heard only the deafening clatter of the engine that rattled the vast forest on either side of the boat as it crept up the lazy snaking river. On the final half-day stretch below the village, great eroding cliffs rose on either bank. The multitude of tangled trees seemed to crowd toward the edge of the embankment like a terrified herd running off a precipice in slow motion. At last they arrived. He sighed. At least it hadn’t rained. A mission among pagan savages: how noble and adventurous it had all once seemed. But after the initial years, salvation had reduced itself to a simple, crass exchange, repeated endlessly: he visited the far-flung villages twice a year to baptize and give Mass, and they stood patiently in line to ransom their inconstant souls for clothes, axes, machetes, knives, fishhooks, and salt. But in the end, everything had its price, even the immortal soul. And those pervasive Evangelicals had to be kept at bay, what with their cunning transcriptions of the local dialects and Bible-translating mania. And yet, he knew this mercantile arrangement, so convenient for Indian and Church alike, had changed so little underneath. Their souls did not truly belong to his God, they belonged to that infernal forest, to the demons that lurked it its shadows: to Satan himself, the Great Enemy, disguised among the animals, the trees, the demons, the charlatans, and their pagan rites. Didn’t those blasted Evangelical linguists realize this? That translating the Bible into these tongues was a sacrilege? That as long as the natives’ names for all those things persisted, that His work was not done, may never be done? But who was he to judge God’s work? “With men it is impossible, but not with God: for with God all things are possible.” He recalled
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the rest of the passage. The irony of it: bartering possessions, the things of this world, to coax their souls toward the Lord. He raised the brown frock of his order as he climbed the embankment, sinking his white tennis shoes with each step into a layer of slick black silt. Barefooted native boys ran past him to the boat, simian toes gripping the black mud, and returned laughing and shouting up the slope carrying bulky sacks and soggy cardboard boxes. *
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Baltazar and Lorenzo surveyed the wreckage of the chicken coop. The dingy brown palm thatch was scattered as if by a wind storm, the mauled bodies of chickens strewn carelessly. His roosters were all gone. The surviving hens pecked greedily at their companions’ carcasses. Baltazar shooed them and began counting out loud in Spanish. Only two carcasses were missing: the beast had killed the others just for fun. He should have let the dog loose last night when the drunken guests finally went home. That dog was fearless: weaned on pungent herbs, wasp stings, boar musk. The dog began yelping again fiercely from the post and Baltazar looked up to see the gringo approaching. He greeted them, “Kuitagitetanae.” Baltazar repeated the greeting to his guest while Lorenzo returned a cheerful, “Buenos días Señor Alejandro.” Alec continued with a halting phrase, “What happened? Jaguar?” “Yes,” answered Baltazar in the staccato tones of his language, “Jaguar.” The three of them looked at the wreckage as Alec tried to form a more complex question. He pulled out his notebook and began flipping pages until he came to the phrase. “Last night. Owl. Warning. This?” Baltazar smiled, nodded his head and answered in Spanish, “You listen my dialect!” Lorenzo picked up two lifeless carcasses and looked up at his father. Baltazar turned to him and spoke softly in their tongue. Alec picked out that word again. “Enemy?” Alec enunciated. “Jaguar enemy?” Baltazar walked toward his hut and disappeared inside. Lorenzo began tossing the bloody chickens off the steep embankment that fell down to the river. As Alec helped toss the remaining carcasses, he asked Lorenzo, “What did he say?” “He says can’t eat chicken jaguar kill. Make us turn like jaguar. Too bad, I like chicken.” “Really?” said Alec, lifting his pencil, “you can’t you eat the chicken even if it’s—” A hollow whistle echoed from the distance. Baltazar emerged from the hut, fastening the only remaining button on a stained white shirt worn inside out. “Mass. We go.” *
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“The body and blood of Christ.” Jaime received a stiff broken wafer and a sip of cheap warm wine in the dilapidated school house.
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Padre Pascual spoke with the thick accent of Andalusia. As a boy, Jaime had heard something noble in the exotic accent of the expatriate Spanish priests and friars. Many had lived longer in these tropical lands than in the Spanish motherland, but they clung to their accent as to a buoy in a ripping tide. Sometimes even the local priests began to lisp their sermons, emulating the dramatic effect of the Padres’ regal pronunciation. But as a medical intern on government scholarship, Jaime had traveled last year in Spain. In the streets of Seville he had heard the same liturgical Franciscan brogue on the lips of barbers, stevedores, even bums on the street. He smiled, remembering one bum’s drunken blasphemies, enunciated in the same labored, lisping tones as Padre Pascual’s pious incantation. The natives had come from hamlets and campsites far and near: word had spread quickly. Some were clothed only in dingy cotton tunics or tube skirts woven from native cotton. Others wore strikingly mismatched T-shirts, soccer shorts, nylon slacks, vests, or sweaters, sometimes piled on in layers with older, faded, and ragged items buried under newer, brighter, gaudier additions. The midmorning sun was already stifling: the layers were meant not to insulate but to impress. Overall, the impression was of rag dolls, dirty and scattered. The men perched uncomfortably on benches or tiny school desks. A few women sat cross-legged on the plank floor with babies nursing at their breasts. Outside the cramped school house, more women peeked in through the ripped screen windows. Children cried, laughed, and murmured from all sides. Percussive slaps of hand on flesh sounded at regular intervals as gnats swarmed in clouds. Alec was sitting toward the back on a school desk, thumbing a notepad. Padre Pascual was uneasy about this gringo: the Evangelicals had begun to make inroads, there was talk of translating the Bible into yet another local dialect. As Padre Pascual concluded his prayer, a dozen boys who had spent time at the boarding school crossed themselves clumsily and mouthed an invocation of the Trinity. The rest seemed not to notice. Padre Pascual opened a weary black Bible and announced a reading from the book of Mark. He turned to Lorenzo, sitting on a bench along the crowded side wall, and said, “Lorenzo, my son! You have just completed your fifth year at Esperanza. Will you translate for me into your dialect. Yes?” Lorenzo looked down and began fiddling with the frayed hem of his shirt. Padre Pascual raised his black eyebrows and repeated, “Yes?” Without looking up, Lorenzo stood and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Padre Pascual read in slow, deliberate tones. “And Jesus looked round about, and saith unto his disciples, ‘How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God!’ ” “And the disciples were astonished at his words. But Jesus answereth again, and saith unto them, ‘Children, how hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.’ ” Padre Pascual looked up and glared at the gringo, but Alec glanced down to study his notepad. “And they were astonished out of measure, saying among themselves, ‘Who then can be saved? And Jesus looking upon them saith, ‘With men it is impossible, but not with God: for with God all things are possible.’ ”
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“Lorenzo?” Padre Pascual turned to the boy, smiling. Lorenzo stared at the floor. “Go on Lorenzo, please translate for me. Or shall I ask Pedro, over there?” Lorenzo shifted his weight again and looked up at the Padre before turning his gaze back to the floor. “Camel?” he asked. “Camel?” said Padre Pascual, “Oh. It’s a large animal, like a horse. Like, like a tapir!” Lorenzo turned toward the center of the crowded school room, still looking down, and after a pause spoke in nervous, staccato tones. A murmur spread among the ragged figures sprawled about the school house. Something caught their attention, thought Padre Pascual. Tito, with wild hair and clothes flecked with mud and crusty white masato, stood up unsteadily at the back and spoke a few words in a drunken voice. “What did he say?” Padre Pascual asked Lorenzo. “Please translate.” Pascual silently remembered another verse, “This salvation has also been sent to the Gentiles; they too will listen.” Lorenzo looked at Tito, then at Padre Pascual, then back at the floor. “Well?” said the Padre, “What did he say?” The cramped room had grown quiet. “It won’t fit,” said Lorenzo, still looking down. “Excuse me?” said the Padre. “He says it won’t fit. A tapir won’t fit through the eye of a needle.” Padre Pascual looked perplexed for an instant, but then smiled as he remembered the inspirational phrase. “Precisely, my son!” he answered, raising his arms, “ ‘With men it is impossible, but not with God: for with God all things are possible.’ ” “Amen?” asked Lorenzo, looking up at the Padre. “Amen!” said the Padre, still smiling. A collective exhalation and a few mumbled “Amens” arose from the sprawling figures as they awoke as if from sleep, yawning and stretching. Others began crowding in from outside, forming three lines: men, women, and children. The padre withdrew a pocket knife from the folds of his frock and began slashing open the swollen burlap sacks and sagging boxes. *
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Jaime had prepared a fragrant dinner of rice, beans, and tuna drenched in garlic and onions. Padre Pascual and Alec sat on opposite sides of the small table, smacking occasional mosquitoes. “Doctor Jaime tells me you’re American,” said Padre Pascual, raising his bushy black eyebrows. “But you speak nice castellano. And you seem to be learning some words in this dialect. You are a lingüísta, yes?” “You mean a missionary? No, not a missionary. I’m studying cultural anthropology.” “Ah yes. But a Protestant, yes?” “I’m just here during vacation,” Alec continued, “doing some summer research.”
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“Summer vacation! How fortunate,” said the Padre, “A private university, perhaps?” “Padre,” Jaime interrupted, swallowing, “The Ministry didn’t send any medicines with you? The ones I ordered?” “We live in a poor country, you see,” said the Padre, still looking at Alec. “Did they send the medicines? “ Jaime repeated, “It’s bad enough even when the stocks are full. I lost another one last month. A newborn. Pneumonia.” “Coños!” the Padre exclaimed. Jaime remembered the face of the Andalusian drunk. “Pardon me,” said the Padre, “But can’t you keep these souls alive at least until I can baptize them?” “Padre, please, I do what I can,” said Jaime. “But I have hardly any decent supplies and not even running water in the post. And what do I do about them?” Jaime gestured at the tattered mesh window, which was empty. “They always wait until it’s too late. So you tell me,” Jaime turned to Alec. “Explain it to us,” he continued. “You’re supposed to understand them, to be studying their culture. Why don’t they come sooner? Why do they always wait until the last minute? When the situation is really bad?” “Well,” answered Alec, “I haven’t been here long. And I really respect what you’re doing. But maybe you need to be out more in the community, visiting people in their houses, at all the distant settlements. Learning the language.” Padre Pascual snorted but Alec continued, “I almost never see you out in the village. You spend most of the day in the post.” “Do you have any idea of the paperwork?” said Jaime, “Besides, radio report is twice a day. If we miss more than three we have to give a written justification on the monthly report. And for all your wandering around barefoot you haven’t even learned their names yet. Keep coming here to copy off my census.” “I’m bad with names,” Alec sighed. “And the kinship system is really complex. Look, I mean no offense. I just got here. But I get the sense the people are holding something back when they’re around you, like they’re afraid of being ridiculed. From what I hear the last doctor here was a real . . .,” he paused and looked at the Padre. “Anyway,” Alec continued, “I know you’re working very hard in very difficult conditions. But I don’t think you’re visiting people enough socially for them to trust you about certain things.” “Certain things?” asked Jaime. “I mean, they have their own way of understanding sickness, of treating it. I think they have their own healers.” “Healers?!” Padre Pascual exhaled sharply as if he had just smelled something foul. “You mean those pipe-smoking, nonsense-mumbling charlatans?!” Jaime saw the conversation was about to take a nasty turn and paused, thinking how he might steer it back to neutral territory. The silence was interrupted by a hollow, ringing note in the distance: a hunter, calling a night bird perhaps. Then came a soft knock on the wall beside the door. Jaime crossed the room and raked the door open across the rough slats. Roberta stood outside. “Doctor Jaime. Mi mamá.”
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Anthropology and Humanism
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Volume 39, Number 1
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Her hunger had abated. The pain faded to a grey shadow. She had slept through most of the day, but as night fell again the buzzing frogs and cicadas stirred her toward a dim awareness. The buzzing grew louder and made her giddy. The sound filled her ears, hammered at her bad eye, throbbed in rhythm with the biting pain at her wrist. Then she heard soft steps. She turned her good eye toward the sound and blinked. A pale ember was pulsing and hovering and growing larger. She looked into the smoldering lone eye but no longer feared. She was weary of the chase. It spoke to her, and now she understood its soothing words, its dark celestial poetry. And as it spoke, it stroked her and blew its hot reeking breath over her breast, her face, the crown of her head. The ember burned brighter as dank smoke poured from its wide mouth. It lapped her with its rough smoky tongue. It kissed her, sucking her own failing breath into its own, and in that surrender she recognized it at last, shockingly familiar and yet all the more alien. It was not the enemy, it was a man. And not just any man. But if he, of all people, now took the enemy’s form in her eye, then it was she who had crossed some dark threshold and become lost beyond even his saving. And then the eye-ember extinguished in hot tears, and the air was heavy with smoke, and she shut out the pale glow of the setting moon. *
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The three followed Roberta in silence across the damp field, three cones of light focused on a long, three-petaled shadow. Jaime’s boots made a rhythmic suck-plop, Pascual’s frock scraped up bristly seed pods from the weeds, and the straps of Alec’s sandals strained at each step. Only Roberta’s feet fell silently, feline. She led them across a muddy patio and into the low hut. A kerosene lamp burned and the air was heavy with smoke. Baltazar sat on the platform where Lucha’s mosquito net hung, cradling a stained tobacco pipe. Tito stood, sober, in the far corner. Lorenzo held the netting up, revealing Lucha’s wasted body. Jaime removed a fresh I.V. from his pack. He kneeled beside her, seeing if the needle was still in place. Her arm was cool. He sighed and removed the needle. He coiled the empty tubing around the limp translucent bag and shoved it, together with the fresh I.V., back into the pack. Jaime held Roberta’s limp hand, said quietly, “Mis pesames,” and left: he was of no use here, he might as well get started on the report. Padre Pascual took a few steps closer, clutched his worn black Bible, and began intoning a prayer. Something caught in his throat and he stopped suddenly to cough. “Coños, the smoke will suffocate us all,” he mumbled into his fist. He finished the prayer and finally made the sign of the cross. He began coughing again and crossed himself once more before stooping through the low doorway. Alec stayed another minute, gripping the ziploc bag containing notebook, recorder, and toilet paper to his chest. He looked from Roberta to Tito to Lorenzo to Baltazar, and finally at Lucha’s still body. He came to a mute
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realization, “My God, is that his wife?” Ashamed as much by his ignorance as by his curiosity, he slid the plastic bag into his pocket. “Buenas noches,” he said, and ducked through the doorway. *
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Lorenzo gripped the heavy bow and followed his father along the path, lighting the way with a flashlight’s feeble beam. Tito was behind, guided only by their shadows. Baltazar took rhythmic puffs on a jet black pipe worn smooth with use. The stem, clenched between his stained teeth, was made from the hollow ulna of a monkey: it could almost be that of a human child. He stopped often to hack, whistling as he spat black wads of saliva into the forest. The jaguar lay dead on the path, cool but not yet stiff, pierced in the neck by Baltazar’s arrow. The old man watched, sucking at the waning ember of his pipe, as Tito stretched the beast’s gums into a mute snarl. He probed the wound and extracted the arrow by its blood-stained tip. Tito handed the arrow to Lorenzo and then lifted the carcass onto his back. It was late. Tomorrow he would skin it. He would send the hide to Esperanza with Lorenzo to find a buyer. Maybe even the padre. He would make necklaces of its brown, broken canines. They were too old and worn to sell. He would give one to Doctor Jaime. Maybe he’d give one to the gringo.
