Michael Gruber - Night of the Jaguar

When he sputtered into silence, the priest continued. “Yes, insane, but also the truth. They want the ry’uuluan and the other big hardwoods and they will come up to the Puxto on their road and cut every tree they find, rip the forest down to bare red earth, and when the government comes and tells them they have done wrong they will say, oh, we’re sorry, and pay a fine-thirty dollars a tree and they will take the dead trees away, laughing. That is how it’s done. And if you try to stop them they will shoot you all, as they have shot me.”

Moie let these words into his ears but they had no grip on his mind, for to say that the Puxto could be destroyed was like saying the sky could be brought down or the air turned into water. The dead man seemed to read his mind (nor did this surprise him) and said, “Yes, they surely can, they have machines that cut like many hands of men at once and they will do it unless they are stopped. This is why I went to San Pedro and this is why they killed me.”

“I will go to San Pedro, too,” said Moie, “and I, too, will tell them to stop this. Perhaps they will not kill me as easily.”

“I believe they would have some trouble killing you, but even so, it will do no good. I was a fool to think it. No, the men in San Pedro are only little twigs of the thing. Even those in Bogota are only the branches. To stop it one must go to Miami in America, my homeland, where the great trunk and roots of the thing are, and let everyone there know what is happening in the Puxto. But I am dead now and there is no one else to go.”

“I will go.”

“Oh, my friend, you don’t know how far it is, and you can’t speak their language…”

“I can. I speak the language of the wai’ichuranan very well.”

“No, you speak Spanish very badly, with many words in Quechua and your own language, and it is good enough to speak with me, but they would only laugh at you at the Consuela office.”

“What is this Consuela office?” Moie was upset by these words. It had been a long, long time since anyone had laughed at him.

“It is…it is like a hunting band of the wai’ichuranan, and they hunt for dollars, and hunt and hunt and as much as they get they are never satisfied, they never say we have enough, let us sing and eat until it is all gone, as you alive people do.”

“Because they are dead.”

“Indeed. Because they are dead. Now let me tell you one more thing. Who knows, some miracle may still happen, someone from outside will take notice and will come here to help. I will say the names of the men who are in control of Consuela Holdings LLC. It is not a thing well known because such men are like anacondas, they hide in the shadows and take their prey by stealth, they grab and then they strangle. So you must remember. Can you do this?”

In answer, Moie plucked a fiber from the floor mat and held it up, and said, “Say their names!” The priest said four names, and as each one fell into the air, Moie knotted it into the fiber. When the last had passed the dead lips, a change came over Father Perrin. His eyes opened wide and he stared, as if something wonderful was about to arrive, the look of a child given a piece of salt to lick. Then he fell back into the hammock, and Moie saw his death depart in good order and felt greatly relieved.

After this, Moie had to wait for an interval before he was in a state to talk to live people again, and he passed the time in thinking about the late Father Perrin and Jaguar and cosmology. That was one of the words he had learned in his conversations with the priest. He had not known that there even was a language to talk about such things, for the ordinary speech of his people was inside their lives; they told the stories of how the world came to be, and for those things that could not be uttered there was music and dancing. Moie and his fellow jampirinan had the holy speech, yes, but that was used only to intercede with the spirit world and influence it to help the people. As far as Moie knew, no Runiya had ever stood with his mind outside of everything that there was and looked at it whole, like a woman looks at a yam. It was frightening, but exhilarating as well.

Moie had heard that in other villages, the first thing the wai’ichura missionaries did was to tell the people that everything they believed was false, and that only the story they told of Jan’ichupitaolik was true, and they gave food and things to the people so that they would see that the missionaries were right and that Jan’ichupitaolik didn’t like to see people without clothes, and also hated the things that people had always done to keep harmony with the spirit world. Father Perrin was not a missionary of that kind, not a missionary at all, as he often said, and he thought that the Runiya were mostly fine as they were. He said that Jaguar was nearly the same as Jan’ichupitaolik and that Earth was nearly the same as the Father and that Rain was nearly the same as the Holy Spirit, but that Jaguar didn’t want the Runiya to give him little girls to eat anymore, that was the one thing that made him angry. When Jaguar ate a girl, Father Perrin would take his rod and go fishing, sometimes for days, and not talk to Moie at all. Afterward, he would forgive Moie and make him promise not to do it anymore, and Moie would try to explain that he was not the master of Jaguar, that Jaguar came when he would and that nothing could stop him. Father Tim refused to accept this. It was a theological difference (another useful word).

Forgiveness also confused Moie, as did Father Perrin’s idea that love rather than power was the ruling force of the world. One had enemies, and the duty of a man was to destroy them if he could and to appease them if he could not. The idea that one should love enemies seemed insane to him and not ryuxit. Father Perrin said that the wai’ichuranan didn’t have that word, but only words for little pieces of it, like harmony, beauty, peace, and bliss. Moie knew that the world was ruled by ryuxit, the harmony of the different children of Jaguar, tree rock snake fish bird all together with humans. What was not ryuxit was siwix, those things that were disharmonious and therefore forbidden. One might love that which was ryuxit, as one loved a woman, but one could not love siwix things, that was a contradiction. A paradox. Father Perrin had taught him that word, too, meaning things that could be true and not true at the same time, like something being wet and dry or light and dark. Father Perrin said that Rain, Earth, and Jaguar were all separate but at the same time one and the same. I will make you a theologian before I die, he used to say; that was what the dead people called their jampirinan. Moie was not so sure about this, for such thoughts made his head ache, but still the idea plucked at his mind, and he could see that there was something in it beyond his power to express. According to Father Perrin, Jan’ichupitaolik could love siwix, and by loving it, he changed it into ryuxit, and not only that, but a better ryuxit than had been before.

Moie would have certainly dismissed all of this as dead people’s nonsense, if he had not visited Father Perrin’s spirit in a dream shortly after the priest had arrived at Home. There he found not the shriveled sad soul characteristic of the wai’ichuranan, but something immense and powerful, ryuxit beyond ryuxit. So he had let the man live in Home and set up his church and had taught him as much as he thought proper about the ways of the Runiya and ofaxa’jampirin, the path of the spirits, and he had learned much about the axa’jampirin of the dead people.

Now Tim was dead, and with Jaguar above the moon, or in heaven with his God, and perhaps this was really the same thing, as Father Perrin had often suggested. Moie sighed and rose and looked at the corpse. The flies and cockroaches had found the body already, they were busy laying their eggs in eyes and mouth and nibbling in dark squirming clots at the torn flesh around the three wounds. He called out and men came in and they took the body down to the river. There Moie made the ritual cuts and filled the body cavity with six large round white stones and drilled a hole into the brain to prevent a witch from reanimating it, and then they sang the funeral songs, as they would have for one of their own, and gave the body to Rain through her child, the River.