Jean-Marie Blas De Robles - Where Tigers Are at Home

Raypoty knew what he must do: fast, chew datura and wait there, on that rock for the ball of fire to appear. Qüyririche would speak to him once more, would tell him how to find the “Land-with-no-evil.” He would rather die than admit to the members of his tribe that his whole life had been a failure. Qüyririche, Qüriricherub! The messenger of Tupan, the Great Vulture.

Despite his experience as a shaman and his stock of magic darts, he felt as terrified as he had as a youth, He felt he had no courage, no courage at all …

IT WAS IN a soft but strained voice that Mauro told them the news: they had buried Dietlev … For a brief moment Elaine looked as if she were truly going mad, her eyes went wild, trying to cling on to objects.

“What … what have they done?” she managed to say, her throat tight with emotion.

Mauro took her in his arms. He was close to tears himself, the memory of the burial still weighing heavy on him. The fetal position of the body, crouching in the pit like an animal in its cage, the branch put through his armpits so as to bring up his hands on either side of his face, the mats, the black earth on top of them and the circle of spears, so small, so slim they looked like a trap for some terrible prey … The Indians had done it very quickly, touching the body as little as possible because of the stench and the decomposition. “It’s over, Elaine, it’s all over,” he said, rocking to and fro himself as he cradled her.

That night she came to his hammock and they made love, to comfort each other, panic-stricken at the proximity of death. Petersen was having a bad dream, they heard him groaning beside them several times.

ON THE EVENING of the third day, the shaman reappeared on the side of the mountain. He came down the slope, his arms full of stones, as the whole tribe looked on, stupefied. As soon as he reached the camp he headed straight for the little group of Palefaces and put his unusual burden down in front of them. With an imperious gesture, he invited them to examine the strange nodules from the womb of the mother of all mountains. Among the various fossil birds and fish, Elaine immediately recognized the samples Dietlev had taken. She picked up a flatter fragment and immediately fell on her knees with an exclamation of surprise; before her was an assortment of the things they had come to look for in the Mato Grosso: complete and perfectly preserved specimens of a fossil earlier than Corumbella !

“This is it, all right,” she said, her face radiant with happiness, “even with the peduncle, but a lot more secondary polyps. The chitin is different, coarser … And look at the structure of the sclerenchymas. We must learn their language and get out of here, Mauro! You realize what we’ve found?”

Already she was thinking about naming the object she held in her hand, running her fingers over the imprint. This fossil would be a stele to the memory of Dietlev. Tomorrow they’d go and have a look at the top of the mountain, there was a good chance they’d find other new species. Paleontology was going to take a leap of several thousand years back toward the beginnings of life!

“So this’s the thing that’s worth so much?” Petersen muttered, his attention suddenly gripped by this turn of events. There must be some way, he thought, of hoodwinking the Indians into carrying as many of these bits of stone as possible through the forest …

Satisfied with their reaction, Raypoty sketched something resembling a smile. He had interpreted the signs correctly, the god’s companion was satisfied. Qüyririche had appeared to him while he was handling the sacred stones on the mountain, identical to the ones one could see of the aracanóa bequeathed by his ancestors. The ball of fire had appeared as well, as it had in his childhood, and the Messenger had spoken distinctly inside his head: Maëperese-kar? What are you looking for? Marapereico? What are you asking? Ageroure omano toupan? I am asking: How is it that god can be dead? When will we too fly as high as the urubu? What must be said to the jaguar to stop him pissing on the forest? And Qüyririche had answered each of his questions clearly. The invisible armadillo would never come back. All was in order among the things, each object, each being in its respective place. That night they would fly off to the Land-with-no-evil, would finally reach that dark junction where the universe fitted together, closed on itself like the shell of an armadillo. Qüyririche had gone on ahead to prepare their mat under the great canopy of the sky. He was waiting for them. His life as a shaman would not have been in vain; his people were finally going to leave the circle of suffering and solitude in which history had enclosed them. He had invoked the god correctly, forced him to speak to him. That evening the people of the Apapoçuva would go back to the very beginning, to that moment when all things were equal because all were equally possible, and it would be, oh god! as if we had never chosen to be what we were …

“ Etegosi xalta ,” he said, turning to Elaine, “ fuera terrominia tramad mipisom! ”

Mauro raised his eyebrows as he recognized the shaman’s ecclesiastical intonation. After a moment’s reflection to separate the syllables and put them together again in their correct order, he translated, “ And I, when I am raised up from the earth, will take unto myself the whole of the world— but I’ve no idea where he got that from!”

“It’s crazy,” Elaine said as she watched the shaman walking away. “I can’t get over it. Here we are in the back of beyond with guys naked as nature intended, who’ve never seen any whites, and they speak Latin and give us the fossils we’ve come to find. It’s enough to give you a fit of the giggles!”

“It’s not really the moment for it,” said Mauro, trying to control his own mirth. Even Petersen, full of his dreams of wealth, was smiling.

The shaman came back to see them, accompanied by a few Indians this time. His frightening appearance, the black snot spattering his chest, both suggested he had just taken another dose of epena . Without hesitation he placed the ends of the pipes through which the ritual powder was insufflated in Mauro’s and Petersen’s hands. Herman tried to refuse, but the shaman seemed so unhappy at this that he immediately complied. Mauro had not even considered it; still full of the desire to laugh, he had decided to take the absurdity to its limit and go along with everything. They were given one dose in each nostril. The violence of the effect left them both stunned. Heads in their hands, they groaned, their sinuses white-hot, their brains dazzled with explosions of light.

Elaine was delighted at having been spared the honor done to her companions. The flutes had started up their shrill laments again, torches of copal resin were lit as night began to fall.

“That really clears out your head!” Mauro said, wiping away the thick mucus that was running down onto his lips. “It’s unbelievable!”

The drug had disturbed his vision. The things around him were slightly fuzzy, blurred, accentuating the effects of the chemicals in the depths of his brain cells. It was as if a pair of 3D glasses had been put inside his head, he told Elaine in an attempt to explain what was happening to him, the kind used to look at anaglyphs. He was seeing everything in red and green, with distortions, overlap-pings that he kept on describing amid gales of laughter. Petersen was similarly euphoric, though less outgoing than Mauro; he was happy to laugh to himself, in long, silent spasms.

“And it gives you a hard-on as well!” Mauro exclaimed, placing Elaine’s hand between his legs as naturally as one would get someone to feel a bruise. “You should try it, I swear you should.”