Light at the Edge of the World (8 page)

In murky sloughs dwell stingrays and piranha. By night, the riverbanks gleam with caiman. Amidst the reeds
and thickets lurk bushmasters, snakes as thick as your arm, all burnished copper with dark markings and the sinister beauty of a creature known to hunt children. In this world of rivers and forest, where anaconda swallow deer and sleep it off in the shallows, peoples of a hundred origins have made a home. Among them are three societies that I came to know: the Bora, botanical wizards of the Río Ampiyacu in Peru, a resurgent culture recovering still from the unimaginable atrocities of the rubber era; the Barasana, descendants of the primordial Anaconda, inhabitants of the most remote reaches of the Colombian Amazon; and the Winikina-Warao, canoe builders of the Orinoco, the largest indigenous society to have survived in Venezuela. Like all of the lowland peoples encountered during my travels, each had a story to tell.

 

ON AN EXPOSED riverbank in the flood forests of the Orinoco delta, I once watched a young woman of the Winikina-Warao dig to the bottom of the world. Her name was Lucia. It only took a few minutes, and she came back with her prize, raw clay to be moulded into a fire pad that would allow her to cook for her family on the wood floor of a thatch house that hovered above the ebb and flow of brackish Caribbean tides. A ground fire was out of the question, for the homeland of the Warao is inundated
much of the time, and the only permanently dry land runs along distant levees that mark the banks of ancient channels, now overgrown with moriche and manaca, temiche and other wild palms that sustain the people.

The Warao once lived exclusively in the
morichal
, the palm swamps, away from the rivers, having been displaced from the floodplain thousands of years ago by the Caribs, fearsome cannibals, allies of the werejaguar and the grim lord of the underworld, who swept down the Orinoco and out to the islands beyond the Serpent Mouth of the river. With the arrival of Europeans came disease, which the Warao viewed as the revenge of the spirits, pathogenic arrows unleashed by the gods. Hidden away in a land no one wanted, behind a seawall of red mangrove, the Warao survived the onslaught of El Dorado and remain one of the largest indigenous groups in South America. Today, they live for the most part along the banks of backwater channels, in riverine communities accessible only by boat.

Winikina, where I visited, was a typical settlement, little more than a string of stilt houses without walls, each with its own landing, all linked by a wooden walkway running the length of the village. In the first hours after arriving, I had felt somewhat trapped, confined to a platform with three generations of Warao, a noisy parrot, several monkeys and a dog, with the river on one side, the flooded
ground below, the route to the outhouse a slippery log laid upon the swamp, the outhouse the swamp itself. With me was a good friend, Werner Wilbert, a Venezuelan anthropologist who had lived in the village for well over a year, in the very hut in which we were staying. His father, Johannes, an extraordinary scholar, had studied among the Warao for more than three decades. Both described the delta as the most beautiful world they had known. They were right, but it took several days for me to adjust and understand.

In part, it was a simple matter of the Warao becoming used to our presence, even as we adapted to the transparent privacy that always exists in villages where people live closely together. With Werner's prodding, I surrendered to the reality of the place, dropping any expectation, for example, that I could walk anywhere, anytime. Our routine literally flowed with the river. By morning, we paddled upstream with the tide, filled the dugout with specimens gathered in the flood forest, then drifted back amidst floating islands of purple hyacinth to the village, where we joined the children on the landing as they frolicked and swam in the stream. Every evening, we sat over the river and watched as clouds billowed in the red sky. It felt like being at sea, though the dark brow of the forest rose just behind us.

One day, we visited the grave of Don Antonio Lorenzano, a shaman with whom Werner's father had worked
for many years. He was buried, like all Warao, in a protective canoe, which rested on a raised platform, sheltered by palm thatch and surrounded by the forest. It was from this man that Johannes had learned of the role of tobacco in healing ritual, and how the shaman, hyperventilating smoke from enormous ceremonial cigars, brings himself to the edge of nicotine narcosis in his quest for visions and inspiration. Also from Don Antonio had come knowledge of the Lords of the Rain, the House of the Swallow-Tailed Kite, the heraldic raptor and the dancing jaguar. In a lifetime of study, Antonio had taught Johannes that realms of the spirit could never be extracted from the mundane, that the world of faith and belief was ever constant, like a companion whose shadowy presence is felt even in the darkest night, the most remote backwater, where fish are ever waiting. There was no separation between the spirit and the crude proximity of everyday life. The physical landscape, the material objects of culture, the power of the wind and the lightness of the clouds were all part of the mystic endowment of the Warao.

“Antonio,” Werner explained simply, “revealed to my father the world beneath the surface of things.”

That world, according to Johannes, begins with the land itself. In the delta, topography is measured by the inch. The Warao know nothing of mountains, save for
the remnants of two petrified world trees, the abodes of earth gods that mark the northern and southern extremes of the universe. One, the Father of Waves, a hillock less than 650 feet (200 m) high, is located in Trinidad. The other, Karoshimo, rises to less than 500 feet (150 m) in the piedmont well to the south of the delta. Few Warao have visited these sacred sites. They have never climbed a hill or felt the ragged edge of granite. There are no stones in their homeland. All their perceptions occur at sea level, and the horizon is but a narrow band of dark earth, a sliver separating the black surging waters of the Orinoco from the limitless sky.

The Warao view the Earth as a disk scarred by rivers and floating in a sea. Water saturates everything, and the Earth floats only because it is supported by a serpentine monster whose four-horned head points to the cardinal directions. Anyone who doubts that the Earth disk is delicate and thin needs but to dig a hole or watch as the water seeps into the ground at the base of a tree uprooted by the wind. The disk itself is made of clay, and thus, in order to construct a hearth as Lucia had been doing or to make ceremonial ceramics as her mother might have done in her youth before the traders and missionaries came, the Warao must scrape away a small fraction of the foundation of the world.

From Antonio's teachings, Johannes came to see that symbols of the metaphysical realm are ubiquitous in Warao life, inseparable from the physical experience of the people and inextricably enmeshed in the fibre of their being. The shamanic view of the world is manifest in every aspect of the material culture, not merely in a symbolic sense but because the very construction of the object demands mindfulness and fidelity to ancient religious and customary laws. A sacred rattle, the Calabash of Ruffled Feathers, both protects the community and serves as the
axis mundi
that allows the shaman in death to ascend to a celestial abode, where from the zenith, he travels as a shooting star, a bolt of lightning, or a comet to the house of his patron deity, one of the gods of the north, east or south. A musical instrument, a simple fiddle, provides the music for the dancers, whose grace in movement recalls the sweeping winds of change that have blown so fiercely over the delta in the history of the Warao. Everything thus resonates with the possibilities of another domain, another point in time, another dimension.

The most sacred object of all, Werner explained, was also the most utilitarian, the very canoes that had carried us for days now into the forests. Warao means “owners of canoes,” and in a world of water, the people not only travel by canoe, they virtually live in them: sleeping, playing,
cooking, trading. To be a builder of canoes is to become a man. Not to possess a canoe is to be relegated among the undistinguished souls of the dead, impoverished, unfed, the lowest of the low. An infant's first canoe is the flat root of a sangrito tree, a plank laid down on the floor of the hut, a surface to practise upon. Before a child can walk, he or she can paddle, and after a week at Winikina, I grew used to the sight of three-year-old boys and girls, alone, fearlessly manoeuvring small dugouts across the wide expanse of the river.

Canoes, in addition to providing an essential means of transportation, moving goods and people throughout the delta, are, more profoundly, the vessels of Warao culture. The toy-like dugout of the child, the discarded hull slowly rotting beneath the landing, the massive seagoing craft that once journeyed to Trinidad and beyond—all represent the mystical knowledge transmitted by the master builder and acquired by the apprentice during their construction, every step of which is dominated by shamanic insight and regulation.

No tree can be felled without the permission of the ancients, the ancestral carpenters who receive offerings of sago starch and tobacco. The spirit of the trees lives on in the canoes, which are carved from the embodiment of Dauarani, the Mother of the Forest, whose womb is both
birth canal and coffin. The master builder, who must abstain from sex with his wife until the canoe is consecrated, is visited daily by the spirit of the tree; and as the canoe takes shape as the vulva of the goddess, the very act of carving becomes a mystical act of love, intercourse with the divine.

Seeking what lies beneath the surface of things, as Werner had put it, was the metaphor that had inspired all of his father's life. I had managed over the course of days at Winikina to overcome my ignorance and to sense the beauty and completeness of life in the delta, but Johannes Wilbert had over the course of decades completed the incomparably more arduous task of seeing through to the very essence of Warao identity. The more he learned, the less he knew, or so he would say. What he uncovered beneath the veneer of quotidian life in the delta was an invaluable treasure, a profound insight into another way of being. As a young anthropologist, Werner had the choice of working anywhere he pleased. He chose the Warao, because there was so much more to discover.

Illuminating a world within a world, detecting the underlying symbols of a culture and making sense of what they mean, is a visionary gift of great ethnographers like Johannes Wilbert and Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff. I once spent a weekend with Johannes in his cabin high above the
Los Angeles hills and for three days listened as he outlined with quiet intensity a totally new paradigm for ethnobotanical research, a way of thinking about plants, people and landscapes that would allow a true understanding of the relationship between a society and the soil from whence it came, between the cult of the seed and the power of the hunt, the poetry of the shaman and the prose of the priesthood. I left those sessions exhausted yet dazzled.

Reichel-Dolmatoff and Wilbert were good friends, and Reichel-Dolmatoff often came to visit him. Together, they would walk in the botanical garden at UCLA, sometimes joined by Claude Lévi-Strauss, who would fly over from Paris. The thought is beguiling: these three eminent scholars, veterans of a thousand strange cultural encounters, sitting together on a park bench, their imaginations sweeping over the Americas, comparing notes, sharing insights, making plans.

I had met Reichel-Dolmatoff once, but it was a fleeting encounter in the early days of the coca research, and I knew him only through his writings. Each of his many publications is a celebration of wonder. As travellers turn to guidebooks to negotiate the labyrinth of a new city or region, I depended on Reichel-Dolmatoff to reveal the deeper rhythms of a culture, the ebb and flow of nuance and gesture, the actual pulse and essence of the invisible
forces encountered while moving through new lands and across unknown frontiers of the spirit. His monograph on the Kogi had been our lens in the Sierra Nevada, but the book I best remember is
Desana: Simbolismo de los Indios Tukano del Vaupés
(published in English as
Amazonian Cosmos
). In the spring of 1975 , on the eve of my first visit to the forests of the Vaupés, I was given the book by an old colleague of Richard Evans Schultes's, who put me up in Villavicencio, the lowland Colombian town that serves as a gateway to the Northwest Amazon.

Within days of reading about spiritual battles fought by shaman perched on hexagonal shields, all encased in quartz crystals which were themselves the generative organs of Father Sun, I found myself in comparatively mundane circumstances, lost in the Amazon forest not a mile from the Barasana longhouse where I was staying on the banks of the Río Piraparaná near the old Catholic mission of San Miguel. With me, and equally disoriented, was the headman of the village, Rufino Vendaño, who was my guide. Rufino had lived in the immediate vicinity of the longhouse, or
maloca
, all of his life, and to watch him for even a few hours struggle to find his bearings was a revelation. Though there was no panic, his eyes revealed true concern, and when late in the day we stumbled upon a game trail that led us back to the river, he was visibly
relieved. He clearly had no more desire to spend a night in the forest than I did.

That evening, at the men's circle, he recounted our misadventure in a charming, self-deprecating manner, which prompted a flurry of similar tales from the Tatuyo and other Barasana living in the maloca. Beneath the easy laughter, however, there was an edge of fear. The forest rose on all sides, the light of a half moon filtered through the thatch, and from the darkness came the sounds of cicadas and tree frogs, the piercing note of a screech owl, the caw-caw-caw of bamboo rats. The clearing around the maloca was the size of a village square, but beyond was a river that flowed to the Amazon, and a forest that stretched to the Atlantic. To reach this place, I had crossed the Andes by truck to Villavicencio, flown three hours in a military transport, and then hired a missionary plane, which had soared into the clouds and burst over the canopy like a wasp, minuscule and insignificant. The forest below was endless, and there was nothing on a human scale. The mission of San Miguel, broken down and long abandoned, was but a minor tear in a formidable tapestry of life. The sense of isolation could not have been more complete.