Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

It was dusty and very hot; we walked through the cleared path to a big hard-beaten space where four houses stood. A large black sow with baby pigs rushed off when she saw us, and there were many skinny dogs. More Indians kept coming to meet us and stare and hold our hands in their hard hot ones, and sometimes to pat us discreetly to make out whether we were men or women, since the women of the party were in slacks. All the Indians were quite naked except one old man who had on an Army shirt and two young women who wore red and white flowered cotton dresses. One of these, fourteen or fifteen years old, was far advanced in pregnancy, and the other, older one, was a dwarf or hunchback, a queer, sad little figure whom we kept seeing bustling about the village all during our visit, as if she worked more than the others, or wanted to give the impression that she was as active as anyone else.

Suddenly a white man appeared, middle-aged, thin, a week’s growth of black beard on his pale face, wearing pants and shirt but in his bare feet. It was the man in charge of the Captain Vasconcelos Post, Claudio Villas Boas, one of three brothers who have all worked for the Indian Protection Service for many years. Because of the broken radio he couldn’t have known we were coming until he heard the sound of the plane, but he showed not a trace of surprise until his eyes happened to light on Huxley. Huxley and Laura were introduced. In Portuguese, in a weak voice, Villas Boas exclaimed, “Not the Huxley? Contraponto? “and for a moment he actually seemed about to faint. He took Huxley’s hand and talked away to him in Portuguese, with his eyes filled with tears. At this moment another clothed white man in his bare feet appeared from nowhere, a tall, handsome, baby-faced boy with a bushy black beard. He, too, exclaimed, but in the accents of upper-class England, “Huxley! I certainly never expected this! ” He turned out to be a Cambridge graduate student, a historian, who had been at the post for a month. He was working on a thesis on the effects of contact between two different cultures, and also writing a book. “Or I’d better be,” he said, “since I’ve already sold it.”

With Villas Boas leading we all trooped into the shadowy interior of one of the houses; this one joined another smaller one with walls half-way up and a large table, and a third hut attached to it that served as a sort of kitchen. Huxley got into one of the hammocks and lay back (it became him very well); Villas Boas squatted Indian-style beside him, and with two or three people all helping to interpret, he began talking to Huxley in a rusty, agitated voice as if he had been wanting to talk to him for years. We gathered round to listen and it was a strained, moving little scene: the great shadowy hut, the oddly-assorted, oddly-dressed white people, the ring of naked, smiling Indians, and Huxley, swaying slightly back and forth, his long legs trailing on the ground, passive and attentive. Villas Boas told him that he had read all his books that had been translated into Portuguese, how much they had meant to him, going on to speak of Huxley’s grandfather’s books, too. Then he told about his years in the Indian service, how hard it is to help the Indians, a losing battle against disease and corruption; how even with the help of Army doctors he lives in dread of infections brought in from outside, the one case of measles, for example, that can wipe out whole villages. The Indians own no land; there are no reservations for them to retreat to if the lands where they live should ever be sold. Even if that will probably not happen for a long time, the land is subject to speculation, and the founding of Brasília has brought the possibility nearer by six hundred miles. In the whole Xingu region he thinks there are now only about thirty-five hundred of them left.

Laura Huxley had wandered outside and was setting up shop with the Polaroid camera; these Indians knew all about cameras and were happy to pose, in rows, with their arms about each other’s necks. Those inside pressed up against us, not exactly begging, but certainly eager for the presents they knew we’d have, and half-embarrassed, we handed out our miserable cigarettes, matches, and Life Savers. One woman kept pinching me gently asking Caramelo? Chocolate? Caramelo? and I was sorry I hadn’t known of this preference in sweets. The hammocks were filling up; the man with the volume labelled Plato reclined in one, a pilot was playing with a baby in another, and the gaucho-hat man was in another with another baby, who now wore the hat. I got into a hammock, too, and looked up. The high shadowy roofs are beautifully made, palm leaves folded over horizontal branches, in overlapping layers, and the big dome is braced towards the top with a framework of unpeeled branches. Pigeons roosted there, cooing, and a pair of parakeets. A gorgeous blue and yellow macaw sat on the dining-hut wall eyeing us and talking away in Nu-aruak, presumably — the language group to which the Uialapiti belong. Several mutum, a kind of turkey, black and shiny, with crests like ball-edged combs and patches of pale green on either side of their chic little heads, strolled about clucking under our legs. The gloom, the gentle voices, the pats and smiles and swaying hammocks, were restful and dreamlike, down-to-earth, even nostalgically back-to-earth, after the three hours in the plane.

I could hear an Indian questioning the Air Force man in the nearest hammock. He asked Huxley’s name, which woman was his, and how many children they had. The man answered the questions; the Indian studied Huxley, smiling, asked them all over again, and received the same answers. (Their conversation, I was told, moves rather like a glacier. A simple story can go on for hours, even for days.) As any one who has ever seen photographs of Huxley on his book-jackets knows, he is a very handsome, aristocratic-looking man, but the Indian’s final opinion, given in a tactfully lowered voice, was “Homely … homely…” And under the circumstances Huxley did appear, not homely, but exceedingly long, white, refined, and misplaced.

After a while we went outside and down to the river, where some of us went for a swim, the Indians sociably joining in. Usually the villages are as far as a mile inland from the rivers, to get away from the mosquitoes, and the whole village files through the jungle every morning, or morning and evening, to go swimming.

One young Indian was a visitor from the Caiapos, a tribe that has been in contact with white men for only two years. (New tribes are still being met, while there are some who have been known for two hundred years.) The visitor appeared in pants and a shirt, his hair flowing down his back and tied with a white hair-ribbon, and in his lower lip a smooth oval plate of wood, four inches across, the under side dyed red. He was a cheerful, talkative boy (“Nice, but rather foolish,” Callado said); when asked to pose for a photograph he politely removed his clothes. In swimming with us, doing a kind of breast-stroke, he threw water into his mouth with the wooden plate and drank like a duck. The English boy called him “Ronny,” which was fairly close to his vowel-filled Indian name.

Because it was the end of the dry season the little river was only waist deep, but the bottom was clean and sandy, and there were green hummocks, vines, and clumps of delicate palms, all rather like the wood-engravings in old books of exploration. “Ronny’s” boat was on the bank, filled with bundles of palm thatch ready to take back to his own village. It had been simply made, by slitting the bark of a tree length-wise and prying it off in one piece with wedges; the bark shell is then pried open with sticks, the ends bent upwards, it is left to dry out, and with very little trouble, you have a very nice light canoe. We dawdled about on the bank, taking more photographs. The Indians loved the Polaroid pictures (in fact a Polaroid camera and a large supply of film should see one through the jungle), almost tearing them apart to see the results; Huxley’s pocket was adroitly picked of some unsuccessful ones that Laura had stored in it. A mass of pale yellow Sulphur butterflies settled, quivering, in the wet mud at the river’s edge, like the start of a yacht race; a few magnificent ones of a variety unknown to me among them, the closed wings exactly mimicking a big silver-gray dead leaf and when open flashing two bars of pure, startling rose-red velvet. Huxley took great pleasure in these butterflies, leaning far over from his great height to examine them close to with his magnifying glass.