Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

Then we were called to lunch: the sausage we had brought, a pot of brown beans, and two platters of under-cooked rice. (The usual food is manioc; the rice had been a recent present.) “Ronny” put on trousers and helped wait on us, filling tin mugs with water, ladling out the runny beans, and flapping his lip-plate up and down in a friendly way. The blue and yellow macaw was prevented from jumping onto the table and the Indians stood close, watching every bite and smiling hard whenever one caught their eyes. I was wearing small gold earrings and every once in a while the lobe of my ear would be gently pinched. After the beans and rice came more little coffees; we lit cigarettes for the Indians, they painstakingly lit cigarettes for us, and langour settled over us all.

After half an hour’s siesta we were invited to see a wrestling match put on for our benefit. Two of the sleekest young men began, with the rest of the population sitting in the strips of shade along the houses to watch. The men crouch almost on all fours, grasp each other’s hands in a hard shake, and then grab for the backs of each other’s necks and hold on, still bent over and giving loud, hooting grunts — the only sounds we heard them make that could be called “savage.” The object of the match is to throw the opponent over and pin his shoulders to the ground, but as soon as one man senses he is the stronger he rarely forces it to a conclusion. He simply lets go, they stand up, smile, and walk off abruptly, in different directions. The quick, red-bedaubed, naked men, stamping and hooting in the urine-scented dust, resemble fighting-cocks more than anything else.

Then we paid a call at the largest of the houses, thirty-five or forty feet long, dark and sooty. Men were swaying in their hammocks, women messed about with manioc and clay pots on the floor. The men asked for more cigarettes and to please them I lit a cigarette apiece for them with my lighter. The one old man grinned mischievously and I saw, tucked away in the hammock between his tough black feet, four whole packages of cigarettes he had already collected, and several little blue boxes of Fiat Lux matches. Across one end of the house was a man-high fence of twigs and palm-leaves. The Cambridge student told us that behind it, in the dark, a young girl was undergoing her puberty initiation. “You can look through the fence; this isn’t the really secret part,” he said. Peering into the gloom we could make out a lean-to, perhaps two feet wide at the base, against the far wall. In it, silent and invisible, the girl is supposed to stay for three months, six months in some tribes, only coming out at night to get a little fresh air. When the initiation is over, they are very weak and many shades lighter than their normal color. The dwarf in the scarlet dress scuttled in with a pan of water and another of rice and set them down, in silence. Hanging in the rafters over our heads was an enormous polished black calabash and someone asked the Cambridge man what it was doing there. “Oh, they just happened to like it,” he informed us, and added innocently, “They’re human beings too, you know.”

In this region the nights get quite cold. The naked Indians keep warm by building small fires right under their hammocks and, too, the resulting smoke drives away the malarial mosquitoes. One woman was holding a very sick baby, the only sick, and thin, Indian we saw; all its small bones showed and its cough sounded like bronchitis. I believe we all felt the same horror and urge to do something, without being able to do anything at all. The adult Indians were all quite young, the man in the army shirt was the only one with gray hair and without teeth. They are short-lived and have few children, and also high infant mortality keeps the families down to one or two children a couple. I noticed several little vials of the kind used for injections scattered about, and every round dusky behind bore a vaccination mark (their rounded behinds and childishly smooth legs, in both sexes, are remarkably pretty).

Half a mile from the village they cultivate a manioc patch, their only attempt at agriculture, and manioc, soaked and scraped, was drying on frames outside the houses in white, sour-smelling cakes. Manioc and fish are the staple diet; they have no salt and rarely eat meat. A small wild fruit, strong and oily, called pequis, is thought to contribute something essential to the diet, but no one seems to know exactly what. Callado asked in vain for one dish for us, a kind of thin pancake of toasted manioc rolled up with fish and red pepper inside — their only food, he said, that is palatable to a white man. But that week there was to be a big funeral feast lasting several days, and they were smoking whatever fish they caught to save up for the occasion. The death, that of a head man in another village, had occurred some time ago, but the festivities had to wait until the supply of fish on hand warranted them.

We were also sorry not to see them fish with bow and arrow; they were extremely skillful at hitting the moving fish in the moving water, making allowances for refraction; they rarely miss. The children play with carelessly made bows and arrows, and their arrows are tipped with small calabashes pierced with holes, so that they make a long screaming noise in flight. The Uialapiti make no pottery nor baskets. For centuries one tribe has made one article, pots, bows and arrows, baskets, shell collars, etc., and exchanged it for the speciality of another tribe. They do no work at all, as we consider work; in fact as the Portuguese found out very early in the history of Brasil, if put at any kind of steady labor they promptly sicken and die. They are gentle with each other and with their children; so much so that when, at the edge of the river, a mother began scrubbing a little boy’s face, and he began to scream in a perfectly normal way, the unexpected, unique sound startled us all. They never strike or punish the children; in fact they have no conception of punishment. If an Indian murders another, everyone is very sorry; the murderer is very sorry, too, and perhaps gives presents to the widow, but nothing further is done about it. All property is in common and the Indian Protection Service itself follows the tactful policy of at least not appearing to keep anything locked up; they do, naturally, but the Indian is allowed to rummage through much of the Service’s belongings.

Our pilots wanted to get back to Brasília before dark if possible, the landing field there not being well lighted, so about four o’clock we reluctantly gathered ourselves together and walked back to the plane. When we got there, someone was missing; the young interpreter had disappeared with the Cambridge boy. So we sat down in the shadow of a wing and waited, we and all the village that could squeeze into the shade with us, making conversation as best we could. The man in the gaucho hat had an accumulation of bows and arrows and two spears. By now we were thirsty and tired; we looked the other way as he still pranced energetically about in a war-dance of his own invention. Our pilot appeared, naked to the waist, very pleased with himself, with a small green parrot on his shoulder; he had given his shirt for it. A little girl with black lines down her legs leaned on my knees and the man who so admired my earrings leaned on my shoulder and asked my name for the tenth time, while a brighter-looking friend repeated it correctly. “Laura” was easy for them; “Aldous” gave trouble, and they gave us their own names over and over, pointing, cooing like doves. The earring-fancier examined my wristwatch and then asked once more if I were single. He pointed to his chest and said he was a widower, then talked away in Nu-aruak to the brighter friend, who started to laugh. He had asked if I would stay behind and be his wife. This produced a great deal of tribal merriment, and although I was vain of having been singled out, I was afraid he merely did not want to be the Indian who threw away the pearl, richer than all his tribe.