Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes (10 page)

Keren’s parents came to Porto Velho the next day from their home in Belém. Her mother stayed with us for six weeks to help as Keren began the hard road to recovery. After a couple of weeks of intensive care, the doctor assured me that Keren was going to make it, that she might even recover her full health. Sue Graham’s presence was crucial; she worked tirelessly to help Keren and to provide a more normal home environment for my children on the SIL missionary compound. Shannon’s recovery was a bit faster than Keren’s, though not without setbacks.

One afternoon when Shannon felt well enough, I let her go bicycling with some friends around the compound. Just after they started I heard a bike fall and Shannon’s voice say, “Owey,” then she started crying. She came into the house with a gouge in her forehead that required stitches, and I realized as I looked at her thin arms and legs that she was still too weak for anything beyond short walks.

After Keren’s mother left, I realized that Keren still needed her. So when Keren and Shannon were well enough, I sent them, along with Kristene and Caleb, to Belém to recover more fully with Sue and Al. I returned to the Pirahãs alone.

After nearly six months of rest and recuperation, Keren and Shannon were well enough that they and Kris and Caleb could return to the Pirahãs as well. They had gained weight and were once again in great physical shape. Keren was eager to face the challenge of the Pirahã language again.

Thus began our family’s thirty-year commitment to the Pirahãs.

4                  Sometimes You Make Mistakes

I
realized when Keren and Shannon were near death with malaria that there were important things about the Pirahãs that I was not understanding or successfully appreciating. I was hurt that the Pirahãs didn’t show more empathy for me and my situation.

It didn’t occur to me then, caught up as I was in my own crisis, that the Pirahãs went through what I was now agonizing over on a regular basis. And their lot was worse than mine. Every Pirahã has seen a close family member die. They have seen and touched the bodies of their deceased loved ones and have buried them in the forest near their home. They had no medical doctor or hospital to turn to for help in most cases. When someone gets too ill to work among the Pirahãs, no matter how easily the disease might be treatable by Western medicine, there is a significant chance that the person will die. And the neighbors and family do not bring casseroles to a Pirahã funeral. If your mother dies, if your child dies, if your husband dies—you still have to hunt, fish, and gather food. No one will do this for you. Life gives death no quarter. No Pirahã can borrow a motorboat to take his family for help. And no one is likely to offer a Pirahã family help if they do appear in the nearest town looking for assistance. But neither would most Pirahãs accept help from a stranger.

The Pirahãs have no way of knowing that Westerners expect to live nearly twice as long as they do. And we not only expect to live longer, we consider it our right to do so. Americans in particular lack the Pirahãs’ stoicism. It isn’t that the Pirahãs are indifferent to death. A Pirahã father would paddle for days for help if he thought he could save a child. I have been awakened in the middle of the night by Pirahã men with desperate looks asking me to come right away to help a sick child or a sick spouse. The pain and concern on their faces are as deep as any I have ever seen. But I have never seen a Pirahã act as though the rest of the world had a duty to help him in his need or that it was necessary to suspend normal daily activities just because someone is sick or dying. This is not callousness. This is practicality. I had not learned this yet, though.

In the rainy season, river traders used to come up the Maici from the Marmelos daily in search of Brazil nuts,
sorva
(the sweet fruit of the couma tree), rosewood, and other jungle products. The routine was always the same. In the distance I heard the
putt-putt-putt
of their diesel engine. Sometimes they would go by without stopping, but not often. I dreaded their approach because they interrupted my research. And they often took my best language teachers away to work for them for days or even weeks at a time, slowing my progress considerably. I knew they were going to stop because just as they passed our house, I would hear the
ding
of the signal bell, the pilot letting the engine operator know when to slow the boat down. Then came another couple of
ding
s to stop the boat, as they allowed their slowing momentum against the Maici’s current to bring them backward at the perfect angle and speed to dock in front of our house at the small log raft I had built as a combination quay and bathing platform.

For the arrival of most of these boats, I waited while it moored and the Pirahãs went running down to see what kind of
mercadorias
the trader might be carrying. I knew that eventually a Pirahã man would come to my house and say that the Brazilian wanted to talk to me.

I learned early on that it was considered rude to decline these invitations—never mind that three to six boats could stop on a busy day and each one took at least half an hour to tell me their business and visit. It wasn’t that I minded the conversations with these men. On the contrary, I quite enjoyed talking with them and their families, who often accompanied them on their trading trips. They were tough pioneers, hard men by any standards, with names like Silvério, Godofredo, Bernar, Machico, Chico Alecrim, Romano, Martinho, Darciel, and Armando Colário.

They liked to talk to me for several reasons. First, I was the whitest man most of them had ever seen, and I had a longish red beard. Second, I talked funny. My Portuguese was closer to the São Paulo dialect than their own Amazonense dialect, rendered even less intelligible by American vowels scattered liberally through Portuguese words. Third, I had lots of medicine, and they knew I didn’t charge for it if they were sick. Finally, they thought I was the Pirahã’s
patrão.
After all, I was white and spoke the Pirahã language. That was enough proof that I was in charge for these traders, who, in spite of being fun to talk to, were uniformly racist—they thought of the Pirahãs as subhuman.

I used to try to convince them that the Pirahãs were just as human as they were.

“These people came here before you, from Peru, maybe five hundred years ago.”

“What do you mean they came here? I thought they were just creatures of this forest, like the monkeys,” the river men might reply.

It was common for them to compare the Pirahãs with monkeys. I suppose that lowering one variety of
Homo sapiens
down the scale of primates to the status of monkeys is standard among racists worldwide. For the river men, the Pirahãs talked like chickens and acted like monkeys. I tried hard to convince them otherwise, but to no avail.

Since they thought I was the Pirahãs’ boss, it was common for the traders to ask me to have the Pirahãs work for them. But of course I was no
patrão,
and so I would tell them that they’d have to get the Pirahãs to agree on their own.

The Pirahãs communicated with them using gestures, a few stock Portuguese phrases that they had learned, and a number of words that both they and the traders knew from the
Lingua Geral—
“General Language,” also known as “Good Tongue” (
Nheengatu
), a language based on Portuguese and Tupinamba (a now extinct but formerly very widespread indigenous language spoken along almost the entire coastline of Brazil).

One night at about nine o’clock, when the kids were tucked in and Keren and I had gone to bed, a boat I had not seen before came to the village. The Pirahãs yelled into my bedroom that the owner’s name was Ronaldinho. Of course he wanted to see me, so I got up and went on board to talk to him. From the outset, his operation looked suspicious. There was not a single trade item in sight. Yet the boat was relatively large—over fifty feet long and twelve feet wide, with a board deck covering the hold.

I sat at one end of the empty vessel. Ronaldinho sat at the other end, with Pirahãs sitting around the sides of the deck.

“I want to know if I can take about eight men upriver with me to collect Brazil nuts,” he said.

“You don’t need to ask me. That is really none of my business. Ask the Pirahãs.”

He winked at me as though we both knew that I was just saying this for effect. Then I added something that the director of the Porto Velho office of the Brazilian National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), Apoena Meirelles, had asked that I tell these traders.

“The only thing that the law requires is that the Indians agree to work for you and that you pay them the going market price for their produce, or at least minimum wage for their labor.”

“But I have no money,” Ronaldinho replied.

“Money would not even be appropriate for the Pirahãs. You can pay them in trade items,” I suggested.

“OK,” he murmured, unconvinced.

I looked around again. Perhaps some trade goods were under the deck, in the storage area called the
porão
in Portuguese.

“But you cannot pay them in
cachaça
” (sugarcane rum, pronounced ka-SHA-sa), I warned him. “The FUNAI director says that if you sell them alcohol, you can be punished with as much as two years in prison.”

“Oh, I would never give them alcohol, Mr. Daniel,” Ronaldinho promised. “Other traders do this, but thank God I am not one of those dishonest guys.”

Bullshit, I thought, but I said only that I was going to bed.

“Boa noite,”
I said as I left.

“Boa noite,”
he replied.

I went up to my house and was quickly asleep, though my sleep was disturbed periodically by laughing from his boat. I was pretty sure that he was giving the Pirahãs cachaça, but I didn’t want to play policeman. I was tired, and I was feeling a bit out of my depth.

Then, about midnight, I was awakened from a deep sleep by yelling. The words that first impressed themselves on my senses were “I am not afraid to kill the Americans. The Brazilian says to kill them and he will give us a new shotgun.”

“You’re going to kill them, then?”

“Yes, I will shoot them while they are sleeping.”

This discussion was coming from the jungle darkness less than a hundred feet from my house. Most of the men of the village were drunk on Ronaldinho’s sugarcane cachaça. But Ronaldinho had done more than give them cachaça. He had urged them to kill me and my family, offering a brand-new shotgun to the man who would do the deed. I sat up in bed, Keren wide awake beside me.

This was just our second visit to the Pirahãs. We had been in the village continuously for seven months. I spoke their language well enough now to understand that they were talking about killing us. I understood that they were urging each other on. And I knew that something was likely to happen very soon if I didn’t act. My children were asleep in their hammocks. Shannon, Kristene, and Caleb had no idea what kind of danger their parents had put them in.

I pulled back my mosquito net from our bed and, very unusually, left the house in the dark, with no flashlight to attract attention, wearing only the shorts and flip-flops that were lying by my bed. I stepped carefully through the jungle to the hut where the men were working up their emotions to kill us. Adding to my tension, I was afraid of stepping on a snake in the dark, even though I was only walking a few dozen yards.

I didn’t know what to expect from the Pirahãs. I was so shocked by what they were saying that I no longer felt that I knew them. Maybe they would kill me as soon as they saw me. But I couldn’t leave my family waiting for the Pirahãs to kill us.

I saw where they were—in the small house built originally by Vicenzo. Peering from the jungle darkness through the palm board slats into the house, I saw that they were sitting by the flickering light of a
lamparina—
a small kerosene lamp, common in Amazonia, which contains a few ounces of kerosene and a cloth wick emerging from a narrow aperture, looking something like illustrations of Aladdin’s lamp in
The Arabian Nights.
These
lamparinas
give off a dull orange light in which people look eerie at night, their dully glowing faces standing out only barely from the surrounding blackness.

I caught my breath silently outside, trying to decide how to enter in the least confrontational way. Finally, I just walked inside with a big smile and said in my best Pirahã, “Hey, guys! How are you doing?”

I made small talk while I walked around the hut picking up arrows, bows, two shotguns, and a couple of machetes. The Pirahã men stared at me with dull alcohol-laden eyes, in silence. Before they could react, I was done. I walked out quickly and wordlessly into the dark, having successfully disarmed them. I was under no illusion that this made me or my family safe. But it did slightly reduce the immediate threat. I took the weapons to our house and locked them in the storeroom. The river trader who had given them the cachaça was asleep in his boat, still moored at the raft in front of my house. I decided to chase him off. First, though, I had to take care of my family.

I locked Keren and the children in our storeroom, the one room that had walls and a door. This was a dark room in which we had killed more than one snake, several rats, and lots of centipedes, cockroaches, and tarantulas. The kids had missed the entire episode so far and as we woke them up in their hammocks to move them to the storeroom they were groggy and half-conscious. They just lay down on the floor, without protest. I had Keren lock the door from the inside.

Then I walked down the riverbank toward the boat, anger building with every step. On the way, though, I was sobered by the realization that I had not seen my teacher Kóhoi or his shotgun. Almost at the exact second that I had this thought, I heard Kóhoi’s voice from the bushes on the bank just behind me. “I am going to shoot you right now and kill you.”

I turned toward the voice, fully expecting to receive the full blast of his 20-gauge shotgun in my face or torso as I did. He came toward me out of the bushes, unsteadily. But I could see with relief that he was not armed.

I asked, “Why do you want to kill me?”

“Because the Brazilian says that you do not pay us enough and he says that you told him he could not pay us if we worked for him.”

We were talking in Pirahã, though he had originally threatened me in rudimentary Portuguese—
“Eu maTA boSAY”
(I kill you).

If I had not been able to speak Pirahã, I might not have survived the night. Kóhoi and I exchanged words in the Pirahãs’ stacatto-sounding language (it sounds this way because of a consonant, the glottal stop, that Pirahã possesses and English doesn’t). I struggled and focused as never before to put each thought across clearly to Kóhoi. I said,
“Xaói xihiabaíhiaba. Piitísi xihixóíhiaagá”
(The foreigner doesn’t pay. Whiskey [he gives you] is cheap).